The Age of Innocence
M. Rivière gazed back at him with anguish. "You do, then, agree with
the rest of the family that, in face of the new proposals I have
brought, it is hardly possible for Madame Olenska not to return to her
husband?"
"Good God!" Archer exclaimed; and his visitor gave out a low murmur of
confirmation.
"Before seeing her, I saw--at Count Olenski's request--Mr. Lovell
Mingott, with whom I had several talks before going to Boston. I
understand that he represents his mother's view; and that Mrs. Manson
Mingott's influence is great throughout her family."
Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding
precipice. The discovery that he had been excluded from a share in
these negotiations, and even from the knowledge that they were on foot,
caused him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of what he was
learning. He saw in a flash that if the family had ceased to consult
him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no
longer on their side; and he recalled, with a start of comprehension,
a remark of May's during their drive home from Mrs. Manson Mingott's
on the day of the Archery Meeting: "Perhaps, after all, Ellen would be
happier with her husband."
Even in the tumult of new discoveries Archer remembered his indignant
exclamation, and the fact that since then his wife had never named
Madame Olenska to him. Her careless allusion had no doubt been the
straw held up to see which way the wind blew; the result had been
reported to the family, and thereafter Archer had been tacitly omitted
from their counsels. He admired the tribal discipline which made
May bow to this decision. She would not have done so, he knew, had
her conscience protested; but she probably shared the family view
that Madame Olenska would be better off as an unhappy wife than as a
separated one, and that there was no use in discussing the case with
Newland, who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming to take the
most fundamental things for granted.
Archer looked up and met his visitor's anxious gaze. "Don't you know,
Monsieur--is it possible you don't know--that the family begin to doubt
if they have the right to advise the Countess to refuse her husband's
last proposals?"
"The proposals you brought?"
"The proposals I brought."
It was on Archer's lips to exclaim that whatever he knew or did not
know was no concern of M. Rivière's; but something in the humble and
yet courageous tenacity of M. Rivière's gaze made him reject this
conclusion, and he met the young man's question with another. "What is
your object in speaking to me of this?"
He had not to wait a moment for the answer. "To beg you, Monsieur--to
beg you with all the force I'm capable of--not to let her go back.--Oh,
don't let her!" M. Rivière exclaimed.
Archer looked at him with increasing astonishment. There was no
mistaking the sincerity of his distress or the strength of his
determination: he had evidently resolved to let everything go by the
board but the supreme need of thus putting himself on record. Archer
considered.
"May I ask," he said at length, "if this is the line you took with the
Countess Olenska?"
M. Rivière reddened, but his eyes did not falter. "No, Monsieur: I
accepted my mission in good faith. I really believed--for reasons I
need not trouble you with--that it would be better for Madame Olenska
to recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration that
her husband's standing gives her."
"So I supposed: you could hardly have accepted such a mission
otherwise."
"I should not have accepted it."
"Well, then--?" Archer paused again, and their eyes met in another
protracted scrutiny.
"Ah, Monsieur, after I had seen her, after I had listened to her, I
knew she was better off here."
"You knew--?"
"Monsieur, I discharged my mission faithfully: I put the Count's
arguments, I stated his offers, without adding any comment of my own.
The Countess was good enough to listen patiently; she carried her
goodness so far as to see me twice; she considered impartially all I
had come to say. And it was in the course of these two talks that I
changed my mind, that I came to see things differently."
"May I ask what led to this change?"
"Simply seeing the change in _her_," M. Rivière replied.
"The change in her? Then you knew her before?"
The young man's colour again rose. "I used to see her in her husband's
house. I have known Count Olenski for many years. You can imagine that
he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission."
Archer's gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of the office,
rested on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the
President of the United States. That such a conversation should be
going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject to his
rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent.
"The change--what sort of a change?"
"Ah, Monsieur, if I could tell you!" M. Rivière paused. "_Tenez_--the
discovery, I suppose, of what I'd never thought of before: that she's
an American. And that if you're an American of _her_ kind--of your
kind--things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least
put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take--become
unthinkable, simply unthinkable. If Madame Olenska's relations
understood what these things were, their opposition to her returning
would no doubt be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to regard
her husband's wish to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing
for domestic life." M. Rivière paused, and then added: "Whereas it's
far from being as simple as that."
Archer looked back to the President of the United States, and then
down at his desk and at the papers scattered on it. For a second or
two he could not trust himself to speak. During this interval he heard
M. Rivière's chair pushed back, and was aware that the young man had
risen. When he glanced up again he saw that his visitor was as moved as
himself.
"Thank you," Archer said simply.
"There's nothing to thank me for, Monsieur: it is I, rather--" M.
Rivière broke off, as if speech for him too were difficult. "I should
like, though," he continued in a firmer voice, "to add one thing. You
asked me if I was in Count Olenski's employ. I am at this moment: I
returned to him, a few months ago, for reasons of private necessity
such as may happen to any one who has persons, ill and older persons,
dependent on him. But from the moment that I have taken the step of
coming here to say these things to you I consider myself discharged,
and I shall tell him so on my return, and give him the reasons. That's
all, Monsieur."
M. Rivière bowed and drew back a step.
"Thank you," Archer said again, as their hands met.
XXVI.
Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue opened its
shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of
window-curtains.
By the first of November this household ritual was over, and society
had begun to look about and take stock of itself. By the fifteenth
the season was in full blast, Opera and theatres were putting forth
their new attractions, dinner-engagements were accumulating, and dates
for dances being fixed. And punctually at about this time Mrs. Archer
always said that New York was very much changed.
Observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non-participant, she was
able, with the help of Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Miss Sophy, to trace
each new crack in its surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up
between the ordered rows of social vegetables. It had been one of the
amusements of Archer's youth to wait for this annual pronouncement
of his mother's, and to hear her enumerate the minute signs of
disintegration that his careless gaze had overlooked. For New York, to
Mrs. Archer's mind, never changed without changing for the worse; and
in this view Miss Sophy Jackson heartily concurred.
Mr. Sillerton Jackson, as became a man of the world, suspended his
judgment and listened with an amused impartiality to the lamentations
of the ladies. But even he never denied that New York had changed; and
Newland Archer, in the winter of the second year of his marriage, was
himself obliged to admit that if it had not actually changed it was
certainly changing.
These points had been raised, as usual, at Mrs. Archer's Thanksgiving
dinner. At the date when she was officially enjoined to give thanks for
the blessings of the year it was her habit to take a mournful though
not embittered stock of her world, and wonder what there was to be
thankful for. At any rate, not the state of society; society, if it
could be said to exist, was rather a spectacle on which to call down
Biblical imprecations--and in fact, every one knew what the Reverend
Dr. Ashmore meant when he chose a text from Jeremiah (chap. ii.,
verse 25) for his Thanksgiving sermon. Dr. Ashmore, the new Rector of
St. Matthew's, had been chosen because he was very "advanced": his
sermons were considered bold in thought and novel in language. When he
fulminated against fashionable society he always spoke of its "trend";
and to Mrs. Archer it was terrifying and yet fascinating to feel
herself part of a community that was trending.
"There's no doubt that Dr. Ashmore is right: there _is_ a marked trend,"
she said, as if it were something visible and measurable, like a crack
in a house.
"It was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving," Miss Jackson
opined; and her hostess drily rejoined: "Oh, he means us to give thanks
for what's left."
Archer had been wont to smile at these annual vaticinations of his
mother's; but this year even he was obliged to acknowledge, as he
listened to an enumeration of the changes, that the "trend" was visible.
"The extravagance in dress--" Miss Jackson began. "Sillerton took me to
the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry's
dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had
had the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from Worth only
two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her
Paris dresses before she wears them."
"Ah, Jane Merry is one of _us_," said Mrs. Archer sighing, as if it were
not such an enviable thing to be in an age when ladies were beginning
to flaunt abroad their Paris dresses as soon as they were out of the
Custom House, instead of letting them mellow under lock and key, in the
manner of Mrs. Archer's contemporaries.
"Yes; she's one of the few. In my youth," Miss Jackson rejoined,
"it was considered vulgar to dress in the newest fashions; and Amy
Sillerton has always told me that in Boston the rule was to put away
one's Paris dresses for two years. Old Mrs. Baxter Pennilow, who did
everything handsomely, used to import twelve a year, two velvet, two
satin, two silk, and the other six of poplin and the finest cashmere.
It was a standing order, and as she was ill for two years before she
died they found forty-eight Worth dresses that had never been taken out
of tissue paper; and when the girls left off their mourning they were
able to wear the first lot at the Symphony concerts without looking in
advance of the fashion."
"Ah, well, Boston is more conservative than New York; but I always
think it's a safe rule for a lady to lay aside her French dresses for
one season," Mrs. Archer conceded.
"It was Beaufort who started the new fashion by making his wife clap
her new clothes on her back as soon as they arrived: I must say at
times it takes all Regina's distinction not to look like ... like ..."
Miss Jackson glanced around the table, caught Janey's bulging gaze, and
took refuge in an unintelligible murmur.
"Like her rivals," said Mr. Sillerton Jackson, with the air of
producing an epigram.