The Age of Innocence
she had spent the previous summer at Newport, where she appeared to
have gone a great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had
suddenly sub-let the "perfect house" which Beaufort had been at such
pains to find for her, and decided to establish herself in Washington.
There, during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always heard of
pretty women in Washington) as shining in the "brilliant diplomatic
society" that was supposed to make up for the social short-comings of
the Administration. He had listened to these accounts, and to various
contradictory reports on her appearance, her conversation, her point
of view and her choice of friends, with the detachment with which one
listens to reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till Medora
suddenly spoke her name at the archery match had Ellen Olenska become a
living presence to him again. The Marchioness's foolish lisp had called
up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of the
carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street. He thought of a
story he had read, of some peasant children in Tuscany lighting a bunch
of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in their
painted tomb ...
The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was
perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows.
Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its
white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house
keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years. Beyond it lay
the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay
spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island with its
low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the sunset
haze.
From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort
of pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning
against the rail, her back to the shore. Archer stopped at the sight as
if he had waked from sleep. That vision of the past was a dream, and
the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead:
was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval
at the door, was May sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing
with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at the far end of Bellevue
Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for dinner, and pacing the
drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience--for
it was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is
happening at a given hour.
"What am I? A son-in-law--" Archer thought.
The figure at the end of the pier had not moved. For a long moment the
young man stood half way down the bank, gazing at the bay furrowed
with the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft
and the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs. The lady in
the summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight. Beyond the grey
bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into
a thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as
it beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock and the shore.
Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and
Montague lifting Ada Dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that
he was in the room.
"She doesn't know--she hasn't guessed. Shouldn't I know if she came up
behind me, I wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he said to himself: "If
she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go
back."
The boat was gliding out on the receding tide. It slid before the Lime
Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house, and passed across the
turret in which the light was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of
water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the
boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not move.
He turned and walked up the hill.
"I'm sorry you didn't find Ellen--I should have liked to see her
again," May said as they drove home through the dusk. "But perhaps she
wouldn't have cared--she seems so changed."
"Changed?" echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on
the ponies' twitching ears.
"So indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New York and her
house, and spending her time with such queer people. Fancy how
hideously uncomfortable she must be at the Blenkers'! She says she
does it to keep cousin Medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying
dreadful people. But I sometimes think we've always bored her."
Archer made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that
he had never before noticed in her frank fresh voice: "After all, I
wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband."
He burst into a laugh. "_Sancta simplicitas!_" he exclaimed; and as she
turned a puzzled frown on him he added: "I don't think I ever heard you
say a cruel thing before."
"Cruel?"
"Well--watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a
favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think
people happier in hell."
"It's a pity she ever married abroad then," said May, in the placid
tone with which her mother met Mr. Welland's vagaries; and Archer felt
himself gently relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands.
They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chamfered
wooden gate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the
approach to the Welland villa. Lights were already shining through its
windows, and Archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a glimpse of his
father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured him, pacing the drawing-room,
watch in hand and wearing the pained expression that he had long since
found to be much more efficacious than anger.
The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious
of a curious reversal of mood. There was something about the luxury
of the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so
charged with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into
his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants,
the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually
renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole
chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each
member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised
and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the
Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had
become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he
had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the
blood in his veins.
All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side,
watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen
Olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's
trotters.
XXII.
"A party for the Blenkers--the Blenkers?"
Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and
incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her
gold eye-glasses, read aloud, in the tone of high comedy:
"Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and
Mrs. Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club
on August 25th at 3 o'clock punctually. To meet Mrs. and the Misses
Blenker.
"Red Gables, Catherine Street. R. S. V. P."
"Good gracious--" Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been
necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.
"Poor Amy Sillerton--you never can tell what her husband will do next,"
Mrs. Welland sighed. "I suppose he's just discovered the Blenkers."
Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport
society; and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a
venerable and venerated family tree. He was, as people said, a man
who had had "every advantage." His father was Sillerton Jackson's
uncle, his mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth
and position, and mutual suitability. Nothing--as Mrs. Welland had
often remarked--nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an
archæologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport
in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did. But
at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society in
the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right to
expect "something different," and money enough to keep her own carriage.
No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had
submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled
the house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he
travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to
Paris or Italy. But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently
unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave
one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the Cliffs,
because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots
and send an unwilling representative.
"It's a wonder," Mrs. Welland remarked, "that they didn't choose the
Cup Race day! Do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for
a black man on the day of Julia Mingott's _thé dansant_? Luckily this
time there's nothing else going on that I know of--for of course some
of us will have to go."
Mr. Welland sighed nervously. "'Some of us,' my dear--more than one?
Three o'clock is such a very awkward hour. I have to be here at
half-past three to take my drops: it's really no use trying to follow
Bencomb's new treatment if I don't do it systematically; and if I join
you later, of course I shall miss my drive." At the thought he laid
down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to his
finely-wrinkled cheek.
"There's no reason why you should go at all, my dear," his wife
answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic. "I have some
cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I'll drop in at
about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that
she hasn't been slighted." She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter.
"And if Newland's afternoon is provided for perhaps May can drive you
out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness."
It was a principle in the Welland family that people's days and hours
should be what Mrs. Welland called "provided for." The melancholy
possibility of having to "kill time" (especially for those who did
not care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the
spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist. Another of her
principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere
with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of
adjusting this respect for May's independence with the exigency of Mr.
Welland's claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity
which left not a second of Mrs. Welland's own time unprovided for.
"Of course I'll drive with Papa--I'm sure Newland will find something
to do," May said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his
lack of response. It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland
that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days.
Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her
roof, when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had
answered paradoxically: "Oh, I think for a change I'll just save it
instead of spending it--" and once, when she and May had had to go on
a long-postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having
lain all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the house.
"Newland never seems to look ahead," Mrs. Welland once ventured to