The Age of Innocence
The dance over, the two, as became an affianced couple, wandered into
the conservatory; and sitting behind a tall screen of tree-ferns and
camellias Newland pressed her gloved hand to his lips.
"You see I did as you asked me to," she said.
"Yes: I couldn't wait," he answered smiling. After a moment he added:
"Only I wish it hadn't had to be at a ball."
"Yes, I know." She met his glance comprehendingly. "But after all--even
here we're alone together, aren't we?"
"Oh, dearest--always!" Archer cried.
Evidently she was always going to understand; she was always going
to say the right thing. The discovery made the cup of his bliss
overflow, and he went on gaily: "The worst of it is that I want to
kiss you and I can't." As he spoke he took a swift glance about the
conservatory, assured himself of their momentary privacy, and catching
her to him laid a fugitive pressure on her lips. To counteract the
audacity of this proceeding he led her to a bamboo sofa in a less
secluded part of the conservatory, and sitting down beside her broke a
lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet. She sat silent, and the world lay
like a sunlit valley at their feet.
"Did you tell my cousin Ellen?" she asked presently, as if she spoke
through a dream.
He roused himself, and remembered that he had not done so. Some
invincible repugnance to speak of such things to the strange foreign
woman had checked the words on his lips.
"No--I hadn't the chance after all," he said, fibbing hastily.
"Ah." She looked disappointed, but gently resolved on gaining her
point. "You must, then, for I didn't either; and I shouldn't like her
to think--"
"Of course not. But aren't you, after all, the person to do it?"
She pondered on this. "If I'd done it at the right time, yes: but
now that there's been a delay I think you must explain that I'd
asked you to tell her at the Opera, before our speaking about it to
everybody here. Otherwise she might think I had forgotten her. You
see, she's one of the family, and she's been away so long that she's
rather--sensitive."
Archer looked at her glowingly. "Dear and great angel! Of course I'll
tell her." He glanced a trifle apprehensively toward the crowded
ball-room. "But I haven't seen her yet. Has she come?"
"No; at the last minute she decided not to."
"At the last minute?" he echoed, betraying his surprise that she should
ever have considered the alternative possible.
"Yes. She's awfully fond of dancing," the young girl answered simply.
"But suddenly she made up her mind that her dress wasn't smart enough
for a ball, though we thought it so lovely; and so my aunt had to take
her home."
"Oh, well--" said Archer with happy indifference. Nothing about his
betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to
its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the "unpleasant" in which they
had both been brought up.
"She knows as well as I do," he reflected, "the real reason of her
cousin's staying away; but I shall never let her see by the least sign
that I am conscious of there being a shadow of a shade on poor Ellen
Olenska's reputation."
IV.
In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits
were exchanged. The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such
matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his
mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which he and Mrs.
Welland and May drove out to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's to receive that
venerable ancestress's blessing.
A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the
young man. The house in itself was already an historic document,
though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses
in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest
1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood
consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and
immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who
had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture
of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous
upholstery of the Second Empire. It was her habit to sit in a window
of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for
life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. She seemed
in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her
confidence. She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries,
the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and
the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before
the advance of residences as stately as her own--perhaps (for she was
an impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobble-stones over
which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth
asphalt, such as people reported having seen in Paris. Meanwhile, as
every one she cared to see came to _her_ (and she could fill her rooms
as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the
menu of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle
life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a
plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into
something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted
this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now,
in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost
unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which
the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight
of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy
bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature
portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave
of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with
two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott's flesh had long since made it
impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic
independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established
herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the
ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting-room
window with her, you caught (through a door that was always open, and a
looped-back yellow damask portière) the unexpected vista of a bedroom
with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with
frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.
Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this
arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural
incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed
of. That was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies,
in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent
propinquities that their novels described. It amused Newland Archer
(who had secretly situated the love-scenes of "Monsieur de Camors"
in Mrs. Mingott's bedroom) to picture her blameless life led in the
stage-setting of adultery; but he said to himself, with considerable
admiration, that if a lover had been what she wanted, the intrepid
woman would have had him too.
To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not present in her
grandmother's drawing-room during the visit of the betrothed couple.
Mrs. Mingott said she had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring
sunlight, and at the "shopping hour," seemed in itself an indelicate
thing for a compromised woman to do. But at any rate it spared them the
embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her unhappy
past might seem to shed on their radiant future. The visit went off
successfully, as was to have been expected. Old Mrs. Mingott was
delighted with the engagement, which, being long foreseen by watchful
relatives, had been carefully passed upon in family council; and the
engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws, met
with her unqualified admiration.
"It's the new setting: of course it shows the stone beautifully, but it
looks a little bare to old-fashioned eyes," Mrs. Welland had explained,
with a conciliatory side-glance at her future son-in-law.
"Old-fashioned eyes? I hope you don't mean mine, my dear? I like all
the novelties," said the ancestress, lifting the stone to her small
bright orbs, which no glasses had ever disfigured. "Very handsome,"
she added, returning the jewel; "very liberal. In my time a cameo set
in pearls was thought sufficient. But it's the hand that sets off the
ring, isn't it, my dear Mr. Archer?" and she waved one of her tiny
hands, with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the
wrist like ivory bracelets. "Mine was modelled in Rome by the great
Ferrigiani. You should have May's done: no doubt he'll have it done,
my child. Her hand is large--it's these modern sports that spread the
joints--but the skin is white.--And when's the wedding to be?" she
broke off, fixing her eyes on Archer's face.
"Oh--" Mrs. Welland murmured, while the young man, smiling at his
betrothed, replied: "As soon as ever it can, if only you'll back me up,
Mrs. Mingott."
"We must give them time to get to know each other a little better,
mamma," Mrs. Welland interposed, with the proper affectation of
reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined: "Know each other?
Fiddlesticks! Everybody in New York has always known everybody. Let the
young man have his way, my dear; don't wait till the bubble's off the
wine. Marry them before Lent; I may catch pneumonia any winter now, and
I want to give the wedding-breakfast."
These successive statements were received with the proper expressions
of amusement, incredulity and gratitude; and the visit was breaking up
in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened to admit the Countess
Olenska, who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected
figure of Julius Beaufort.
There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the ladies, and Mrs.
Mingott held out Ferrigiani's model to the banker. "Ha! Beaufort, this
is a rare favour!" (She had an odd foreign way of addressing men by
their surnames.)
"Thanks. I wish it might happen oftener," said the visitor in his easy
arrogant way. "I'm generally so tied down; but I met the Countess Ellen
in Madison Square, and she was good enough to let me walk home with
her."
"Ah--I hope the house will be gayer, now that Ellen's here!" cried Mrs.
Mingott with a glorious effrontery. "Sit down--sit down, Beaufort: push
up the yellow armchair; now I've got you I want a good gossip. I hear
your ball was magnificent; and I understand you invited Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers? Well--I've a curiosity to see the woman myself."
She had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting out into the hall
under Ellen Olenska's guidance. Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed
a great admiration for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of
kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the
conventions. Now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the
Beauforts to invite (for the first time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the
widow of Struthers's Shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year
from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the tight
little citadel of New York. "Of course if you and Regina invite her the
thing is settled. Well, we need new blood and new money--and I hear
she's still very good-looking," the carnivorous old lady declared.
In the hall, while Mrs. Welland and May drew on their furs, Archer saw
that the Countess Olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning
smile.