The Age of Innocence
his hand, as was the custom on being introduced to a lady; and Ellen
Olenska bent her head slightly, keeping her own pale-gloved hands
clasped on her huge fan of eagle feathers. Having greeted Mrs. Lovell
Mingott, a large blonde lady in creaking satin, he sat down beside his
betrothed, and said in a low tone: "I hope you've told Madame Olenska
that we're engaged? I want everybody to know--I want you to let me
announce it this evening at the ball."
Miss Welland's face grew rosy as the dawn, and she looked at him with
radiant eyes. "If you can persuade Mamma," she said; "but why should we
change what is already settled?" He made no answer but that which his
eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently smiling: "Tell my
cousin yourself: I give you leave. She says she used to play with you
when you were children."
She made way for him by pushing back her chair, and promptly, and a
little ostentatiously, with the desire that the whole house should see
what he was doing, Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska's side.
"We _did_ use to play together, didn't we?" she asked, turning her
grave eyes to his. "You were a horrid boy, and kissed me once behind a
door; but it was your cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me,
that I was in love with." Her glance swept the horse-shoe curve of
boxes. "Ah, how this brings it all back to me--I see everybody here in
knickerbockers and pantalettes," she said, with her trailing slightly
foreign accent, her eyes returning to his face.
Agreeable as their expression was, the young man was shocked that they
should reflect so unseemly a picture of the august tribunal before
which, at that very moment, her case was being tried. Nothing could
be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat
stiffly: "Yes, you have been away a very long time."
"Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that I'm sure
I'm dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;" which, for
reasons he could not define, struck Newland Archer as an even more
disrespectful way of describing New York society.
III.
It invariably happened in the same way.
Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to
appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night
in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares,
and her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every
detail of the entertainment in her absence.
The Beauforts' house was one of the few in New York that possessed
a ball-room (it antedated even Mrs. Manson Mingott's and the Headly
Chiverses'); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought
"provincial" to put a "crash" over the drawing-room floor and move the
furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no
other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the
year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner
and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to
compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past.
Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms,
had once said: "We all have our pet common people--" and though the
phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an
exclusive bosom. But the Beauforts were not exactly common; some people
said they were even worse. Mrs. Beaufort belonged indeed to one of
America's most honoured families; she had been the lovely Regina Dallas
(of the South Carolina branch), a penniless beauty introduced to New
York society by her cousin, the imprudent Medora Manson, who was always
doing the wrong thing from the right motive. When one was related
to the Mansons and the Rushworths one had a "_droit de cité_" (as Mr.
Sillerton Jackson, who had frequented the Tuileries, called it) in New
York society; but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius Beaufort?
The question was: who was Beaufort? He passed for an Englishman,
was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty. He had
come to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson
Mingott's English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself
an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were
dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and
when Medora Manson announced her cousin's engagement to him it was felt
to be one more act of folly in poor Medora's long record of imprudences.
But folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom, and two
years after young Mrs. Beaufort's marriage it was admitted that she
had the most distinguished house in New York. No one knew exactly how
the miracle was accomplished. She was indolent, passive, the caustic
even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls,
growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned
in Mr. Beaufort's heavy brown-stone palace, and drew all the world
there without lifting her jewelled little finger. The knowing people
said it was Beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the chef
new dishes, told the gardeners what hot-house flowers to grow for
the dinner-table and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed
the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote
to her friends. If he did, these domestic activities were privately
performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless
and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room with the
detachment of an invited guest, and saying: "My wife's gloxinias are a
marvel, aren't they? I believe she gets them out from Kew."
Mr. Beaufort's secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried
things off. It was all very well to whisper that he had been "helped"
to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had
been employed; he carried off that rumour as easily as the rest--though
New York's business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral
standard--he carried everything before him, and all New York into his
drawing-rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said they
were "going to the Beauforts'" with the same tone of security as if
they had said they were going to Mrs. Manson Mingott's, and with the
added satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks
and vintage wines, instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and
warmed-up croquettes from Philadelphia.
Mrs. Beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the
Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third
act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared,
New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin.
The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to
foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball. The Beauforts
had been among the first people in New York to own their own red
velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen,
under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the
ball-room chairs. They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the
ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to
the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the
gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all
his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly
_coiffées_ when they left home.
Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that,
instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at
the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed
drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing
from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry,
and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and
tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold
bamboo.
Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in
somewhat late. He had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged
footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had
dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished
with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting
on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests
whom Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson
drawing-room.
Archer was distinctly nervous. He had not gone back to his club after
the Opera (as the young bloods usually did), but, the night being fine,
had walked for some distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the
direction of the Beauforts' house. He was definitely afraid that the
Mingotts might be going too far; that, in fact, they might have Granny
Mingott's orders to bring the Countess Olenska to the ball.
From the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake
that would be; and, though he was more than ever determined to "see
the thing through," he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his
betrothed's cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera.
Wandering on to the bouton d'or drawing-room (where Beaufort had had
the audacity to hang "Love Victorious," the much-discussed nude of
Bouguereau) Archer found Mrs. Welland and her daughter standing near
the ball-room door. Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond:
the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish
heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and
ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on the glitter of
highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh _glacé_ gloves.
Miss Welland, evidently about to join the dancers, hung on the
threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand (she carried no other
bouquet), her face a little pale, her eyes burning with a candid
excitement. A group of young men and girls were gathered about her,
and there was much hand-clasping, laughing and pleasantry on which
Mrs. Welland, standing slightly apart, shed the beam of a qualified
approval. It was evident that Miss Welland was in the act of announcing
her engagement, while her mother affected the air of parental
reluctance considered suitable to the occasion.
Archer paused a moment. It was at his express wish that the
announcement had been made, and yet it was not thus that he would have
wished to have his happiness known. To proclaim it in the heat and
noise of a crowded ball-room was to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy
which should belong to things nearest the heart. His joy was so deep
that this blurring of the surface left its essence untouched; but he
would have liked to keep the surface pure too. It was something of a
satisfaction to find that May Welland shared this feeling. Her eyes
fled to his beseechingly, and their look said: "Remember, we're doing
this because it's right."
No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer's
breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been
represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor Ellen Olenska.
The group about Miss Welland made way for him with significant smiles,
and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed
into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist.
"Now we shan't have to talk," he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as
they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube.
She made no answer. Her lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes
remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision.
"Dear," Archer whispered, pressing her to him: it was borne in on him
that the first hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ball-room,
had in them something grave and sacramental. What a new life it was
going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one's side!