The Age of Innocence
the delicious details that made her herself and no other. Presently he
rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves
were crowded with small broken objects--hardly recognisable domestic
utensils, ornaments and personal trifles--made of glass, of clay, of
discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.
"It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters ... any
more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important
to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying
glass and labelled: 'Use unknown.'"
"Yes; but meanwhile--"
"Ah, meanwhile--"
As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a
small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the
tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring
with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure
harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.
"Meanwhile everything matters--that concerns you," he said.
She looked at him thoughtfully, and turned back to the divan. He sat
down beside her and waited; but suddenly he heard a step echoing far
off down the empty rooms, and felt the pressure of the minutes.
"What is it you wanted to tell me?" she asked, as if she had received
the same warning.
"What I wanted to tell you?" he rejoined. "Why, that I believe you came
to New York because you were afraid."
"Afraid?"
"Of my coming to Washington."
She looked down at her muff, and he saw her hands stir in it uneasily.
"Well--?"
"Well--yes," she said.
"You _were_ afraid? You knew--?"
"Yes: I knew ..."
"Well, then?" he insisted.
"Well, then: this is better, isn't it?" she returned with a long
questioning sigh.
"Better--?"
"We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always
wanted?"
"To have you here, you mean--in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you
in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want. I told
you the other day what I wanted."
She hesitated. "And you still think this--worse?"
"A thousand times!" He paused. "It would be easy to lie to you; but the
truth is I think it detestable."
"Oh, so do I!" she cried with a deep breath of relief.
He sprang up impatiently. "Well, then--it's my turn to ask: what is it,
in God's name, that you think better?"
She hung her head and continued to clasp and unclasp her hands in her
muff. The step drew nearer, and a guardian in a braided cap walked
listlessly through the room like a ghost stalking through a necropolis.
They fixed their eyes simultaneously on the case opposite them, and
when the official figure had vanished down a vista of mummies and
sarcophagi Archer spoke again.
"What do you think better?"
Instead of answering she murmured: "I promised Granny to stay with her
because it seemed to me that here I should be safer."
"From me?"
She bent her head slightly, without looking at him.
"Safer from loving me?"
Her profile did not stir, but he saw a tear overflow on her lashes and
hang in a mesh of her veil.
"Safer from doing irreparable harm. Don't let us be like all the
others!" she protested.
"What others? I don't profess to be different from my kind. I'm
consumed by the same wants and the same longings."
She glanced at him with a kind of terror, and he saw a faint colour
steal into her cheeks.
"Shall I--once come to you; and then go home?" she suddenly hazarded in
a low clear voice.
The blood rushed to the young man's forehead. "Dearest!" he said,
without moving. It seemed as if he held his heart in his hands, like a
full cup that the least motion might overbrim.
Then her last phrase struck his ear and his face clouded. "Go home?
What do you mean by going home?"
"Home to my husband."
"And you expect me to say yes to that?"
She raised her troubled eyes to his. "What else is there? I can't stay
here and lie to the people who've been good to me."
"But that's the very reason why I ask you to come away!"
"And destroy their lives, when they've helped me to remake mine?"
Archer sprang to his feet and stood looking down on her in inarticulate
despair. It would have been easy to say: "Yes, come; come once." He
knew the power she would put in his hands if she consented; there would
be no difficulty then in persuading her not to go back to her husband.
But something silenced the word on his lips. A sort of passionate
honesty in her made it inconceivable that he should try to draw her
into that familiar trap. "If I were to let her come," he said to
himself, "I should have to let her go again." And that was not to be
imagined.
But he saw the shadow of the lashes on her wet cheek, and wavered.
"After all," he began again, "we have lives of our own.... There's
no use attempting the impossible. You're so unprejudiced about some
things, so used, as you say, to looking at the Gorgon, that I don't
know why you're afraid to face our case, and see it as it really
is--unless you think the sacrifice is not worth making."
She stood up also, her lips tightening under a rapid frown.
"Call it that, then--I must go," she said, drawing her little watch
from her bosom.
She turned away, and he followed and caught her by the wrist. "Well,
then: come to me once," he said, his head turning suddenly at the
thought of losing her; and for a second or two they looked at each
other almost like enemies.
"When?" he insisted. "Tomorrow?"
She hesitated. "The day after."
"Dearest--!" he said again.
She had disengaged her wrist; but for a moment they continued to hold
each other's eyes, and he saw that her face, which had grown very pale,
was flooded with a deep inner radiance. His heart beat with awe: he
felt that he had never before beheld love visible.
"Oh, I shall be late--good-bye. No, don't come any farther than this,"
she cried, walking hurriedly away down the long room, as if the
reflected radiance in his eyes had frightened her. When she reached the
door she turned for a moment to wave a quick farewell.
Archer walked home alone. Darkness was falling when he let himself into
his house, and he looked about at the familiar objects in the hall as
if he viewed them from the other side of the grave.
The parlour-maid, hearing his step, ran up the stairs to light the gas
on the upper landing.
"Is Mrs. Archer in?"
"No, sir; Mrs. Archer went out in the carriage after luncheon, and
hasn't come back."
With a sense of relief he entered the library and flung himself down in
his armchair. The parlour-maid followed, bringing the student lamp and
shaking some coals onto the dying fire. When she left he continued to
sit motionless, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his clasped hands,
his eyes fixed on the red grate.
He sat there without conscious thoughts, without sense of the lapse of
time, in a deep and grave amazement that seemed to suspend life rather
than quicken it. "This was what had to be, then ... this was what had
to be," he kept repeating to himself, as if he hung in the clutch of
doom. What he had dreamed of had been so different that there was a
mortal chill in his rapture.
The door opened and May came in.
"I'm dreadfully late--you weren't worried, were you?" she asked, laying
her hand on his shoulder with one of her rare caresses.
He looked up astonished. "Is it late?"
"After seven. I believe you've been asleep!" She laughed, and drawing
out her hat pins tossed her velvet hat on the sofa. She looked paler
than usual, but sparkling with an unwonted animation.
"I went to see Granny, and just as I was going away Ellen came in from
a walk; so I stayed and had a long talk with her. It was ages since
we'd had a real talk...." She had dropped into her usual armchair,
facing his, and was running her fingers through her rumpled hair. He
fancied she expected him to speak.
"A really good talk," she went on, smiling with what seemed to Archer
an unnatural vividness. "She was so dear--just like the old Ellen. I'm
afraid I haven't been fair to her lately. I've sometimes thought--"
Archer stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, out of the radius
of the lamp.
"Yes, you've thought--?" he echoed as she paused.
"Well, perhaps I haven't judged her fairly. She's so different--at
least on the surface. She takes up such odd people--she seems to like
to make herself conspicuous. I suppose it's the life she's led in that
fast European society; no doubt we seem dreadfully dull to her. But I
don't want to judge her unfairly."
She paused again, a little breathless with the unwonted length of her
speech, and sat with her lips slightly parted and a deep blush on her
cheeks.
Archer, as he looked at her, was reminded of the glow which had
suffused her face in the Mission Garden at St. Augustine. He became
aware of the same obscure effort in her, the same reaching out toward
something beyond the usual range of her vision.
"She hates Ellen," he thought, "and she's trying to overcome the
feeling, and to get me to help her to overcome it."
The thought moved him, and for a moment he was on the point of breaking
the silence between them, and throwing himself on her mercy.
"You understand, don't you," she went on, "why the family have
sometimes been annoyed? We all did what we could for her at first; but
she never seemed to understand. And now this idea of going to see Mrs.
Beaufort, of going there in Granny's carriage! I'm afraid she's quite
alienated the van der Luydens ..."
"Ah," said Archer with an impatient laugh. The open door had closed
between them again.
"It's time to dress; we're dining out, aren't we?" he asked, moving
from the fire.
She rose also, but lingered near the hearth. As he walked past her she
moved forward impulsively, as though to detain him: their eyes met, and
he saw that hers were of the same swimming blue as when he had left her
to drive to Jersey City.
She flung her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek to his.
"You haven't kissed me today," she said in a whisper; and he felt her
tremble in his arms.
XXXII.
"At the court of the Tuileries," said Mr. Sillerton Jackson with his
reminiscent smile, "such things were pretty openly tolerated."
The scene was the van der Luydens' black walnut dining-room in Madison
Avenue, and the time the evening after Newland Archer's visit to the
Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had come to town for a few
days from Skuytercliff, whither they had precipitately fled at the
announcement of Beaufort's failure. It had been represented to them
that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable
affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever. It was one
of the occasions when, as Mrs. Archer put it, they "owed it to society"
to show themselves at the Opera, and even to open their own doors.
"It will never do, my dear Louisa, to let people like Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers think they can step into Regina's shoes. It is just at such
times that new people push in and get a footing. It was owing to the
epidemic of chicken-pox in New York the winter Mrs. Struthers first
appeared that the married men slipped away to her house while their
wives were in the nursery. You and dear Henry, Louisa, must stand in
the breach as you always have."
Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden could not remain deaf to such a call, and
reluctantly but heroically they had come to town, unmuffled the house,
and sent out invitations for two dinners and an evening reception.
On this particular evening they had invited Sillerton Jackson, Mrs.
Archer and Newland and his wife to go with them to the Opera, where
Faust was being sung for the first time that winter. Nothing was done