The Age of Innocence
drummed and clanged furiously in his ears; he could not tell if it were
the blood in his veins, or the tick of the clock on the mantel.
May sat without moving or speaking while the clock slowly measured out
five minutes. A lump of coal fell forward in the grate, and hearing her
rise to push it back, Archer at length turned and faced her.
"It's impossible," he exclaimed.
"Impossible--?"
"How do you know--what you've just told me?"
"I saw Ellen yesterday--I told you I'd seen her at Granny's."
"It wasn't then that she told you?"
"No; I had a note from her this afternoon.--Do you want to see it?"
He could not find his voice, and she went out of the room, and came
back almost immediately.
"I thought you knew," she said simply.
She laid a sheet of paper on the table, and Archer put out his hand and
took it up. The letter contained only a few lines.
"May dear, I have at last made Granny understand that my visit to her
could be no more than a visit; and she has been as kind and generous as
ever. She sees now that if I return to Europe I must live by myself, or
rather with poor Aunt Medora, who is coming with me. I am hurrying back
to Washington to pack up, and we sail next week. You must be very good
to Granny when I'm gone--as good as you've always been to me. Ellen.
"If any of my friends wish to urge me to change my mind, please tell
them it would be utterly useless."
Archer read the letter over two or three times; then he flung it down
and burst out laughing.
The sound of his laugh startled him. It recalled Janey's midnight
fright when she had caught him rocking with incomprehensible mirth over
May's telegram announcing that the date of their marriage had been
advanced.
"Why did she write this?" he asked, checking his laugh with a supreme
effort.
May met the question with her unshaken candour. "I suppose because we
talked things over yesterday--"
"What things?"
"I told her I was afraid I hadn't been fair to her--hadn't always
understood how hard it must have been for her here, alone among so many
people who were relations and yet strangers; who felt the right to
criticise, and yet didn't always know the circumstances." She paused.
"I knew you'd been the one friend she could always count on; and I
wanted her to know that you and I were the same--in all our feelings."
She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and then added slowly:
"She understood my wishing to tell her this. I think she understands
everything."
She went up to Archer, and taking one of his cold hands pressed it
quickly against her cheek.
"My head aches too; good-night, dear," she said, and turned to the
door, her torn and muddy wedding-dress dragging after her across the
room.
XXXIII.
It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event
for a young couple to give their first big dinner.
The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household, had
received a good deal of company in an informal way. Archer was fond
of having three or four friends to dine, and May welcomed them with
the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example
in conjugal affairs. Her husband questioned whether, if left to
herself, she would ever have asked any one to the house; but he had
long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into
which tradition and training had moulded her. It was expected that
well-off young couples in New York should do a good deal of informal
entertaining, and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to
the tradition.
But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with
Roman punch, roses from Henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was
a different affair, and not to be lightly undertaken. As Mrs. Archer
remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference; not in itself but
by its manifold implications--since it signified either canvas-backs
or terrapin, two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full decolletage with
short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance.
It was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their
first invitations in the third person, and their summons was seldom
refused even by the seasoned and sought-after. Still, it was admittedly
a triumph that the van der Luydens, at May's request, should have
stayed over in order to be present at her farewell dinner for the
Countess Olenska.
The two mothers-in-law sat in May's drawing-room on the afternoon of
the great day, Mrs. Archer writing out the menus on Tiffany's thickest
gilt-edged bristol, while Mrs. Welland superintended the placing of the
palms and standard lamps.
Archer, arriving late from his office, found them still there. Mrs.
Archer had turned her attention to the name-cards for the table, and
Mrs. Welland was considering the effect of bringing forward the large
gilt sofa, so that another "corner" might be created between the piano
and the window.
May, they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting the mound of
Jacqueminot roses and maidenhair in the centre of the long table, and
the placing of the Maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between
the candelabra. On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which
Mr. van der Luyden had had sent from Skuytercliff. Everything was, in
short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event.
Mrs. Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with
her sharp gold pen.
"Henry van der Luyden--Louisa--the Lovell Mingotts--the Reggie
Chiverses--Lawrence Lefferts and Gertrude--(yes, I suppose May was
right to have them)--the Selfridge Merrys, Sillerton Jackson, Van
Newland and his wife. (How time passes! It seems only yesterday that he
was your best man, Newland)--and Countess Olenska--yes, I think that's
all...."
Mrs. Welland surveyed her son-in-law affectionately. "No one can say,
Newland, that you and May are not giving Ellen a handsome send-off."
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Archer, "I understand May's wanting her cousin to
tell people abroad that we're not quite barbarians."
"I'm sure Ellen will appreciate it. She was to arrive this morning,
I believe. It will make a most charming last impression. The evening
before sailing is usually so dreary," Mrs. Welland cheerfully continued.
Archer turned toward the door, and his mother-in-law called to him:
"Do go in and have a peep at the table. And don't let May tire herself
too much." But he affected not to hear, and sprang up the stairs to
his library. The room looked at him like an alien countenance composed
into a polite grimace; and he perceived that it had been ruthlessly
"tidied," and prepared, by a judicious distribution of ash-trays and
cedar-wood boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in.
"Ah, well," he thought, "it's not for long--" and he went on to his
dressing-room.
Ten days had passed since Madame Olenska's departure from New York.
During those ten days Archer had had no sign from her but that conveyed
by the return of a key wrapped in tissue paper, and sent to his office
in a sealed envelope addressed in her hand. This retort to his last
appeal might have been interpreted as a classic move in a familiar
game; but the young man chose to give it a different meaning. She was
still fighting against her fate; but she was going to Europe, and she
was not returning to her husband. Nothing, therefore, was to prevent
his following her; and once he had taken the irrevocable step, and had
proved to her that it was irrevocable, he believed she would not send
him away.
This confidence in the future had steadied him to play his part in the
present. It had kept him from writing to her, or betraying, by any sign
or act, his misery and mortification. It seemed to him that in the
deadly silent game between them the trumps were still in his hands; and
he waited.
There had been, nevertheless, moments sufficiently difficult to pass;
as when Mr. Letterblair, the day after Madame Olenska's departure, had
sent for him to go over the details of the trust which Mrs. Manson
Mingott wished to create for her granddaughter. For a couple of hours
Archer had examined the terms of the deed with his senior, all the
while obscurely feeling that if he had been consulted it was for some
reason other than the obvious one of his cousinship; and that the close
of the conference would reveal it.
"Well, the lady can't deny that it's a handsome arrangement," Mr.
Letterblair had summed up, after mumbling over a summary of the
settlement. "In fact I'm bound to say she's been treated pretty
handsomely all round."
"All round?" Archer echoed with a touch of derision. "Do you refer to
her husband's proposal to give her back her own money?"
Mr. Letterblair's bushy eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "My
dear sir, the law's the law; and your wife's cousin was married under
the French law. It's to be presumed she knew what that meant."
"Even if she did, what happened subsequently--." But Archer paused. Mr.
Letterblair had laid his pen-handle against his big corrugated nose,
and was looking down it with the expression assumed by virtuous elderly
gentlemen when they wish their youngers to understand that virtue is
not synonymous with ignorance.
"My dear sir, I've no wish to extenuate the Count's transgressions;
but--but on the other side ... I wouldn't put my hand in the fire
... well, that there hadn't been tit for tat ... with the young
champion...." Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and pushed a folded
paper toward Archer. "This report, the result of discreet enquiries
..." And then, as Archer made no effort to glance at the paper or to
repudiate the suggestion, the lawyer somewhat flatly continued: "I
don't say it's conclusive, you observe; far from it. But straws show
... and on the whole it's eminently satisfactory for all parties that
this dignified solution has been reached."
"Oh, eminently," Archer assented, pushing back the paper.
A day or two later, on responding to a summons from Mrs. Manson
Mingott, his soul had been more deeply tried.
He had found the old lady depressed and querulous.
"You know she's deserted me?" she began at once; and without waiting
for his reply: "Oh, don't ask me why! She gave so many reasons that
I've forgotten them all. My private belief is that she couldn't face
the boredom. At any rate that's what Augusta and my daughters-in-law
think. And I don't know that I altogether blame her. Olenski's a
finished scoundrel; but life with him must have been a good deal gayer
than it is in Fifth Avenue. Not that the family would admit that: they
think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de la Paix thrown in. And
poor Ellen, of course, has no idea of going back to her husband. She
held out as firmly as ever against that. So she's to settle down in
Paris with that fool Medora.... Well, Paris is Paris; and you can keep
a carriage there on next to nothing. But she was as gay as a bird, and
I shall miss her." Two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down
her puffy cheeks and vanished in the abysses of her bosom.
"All I ask is," she concluded, "that they shouldn't bother me any more.
I must really be allowed to digest my gruel...." And she twinkled a
little wistfully at Archer.
It was that evening, on his return home, that May announced her
intention of giving a farewell dinner to her cousin. Madame Olenska's
name had not been pronounced between them since the night of her flight
to Washington; and Archer looked at his wife with surprise.
"A dinner--why?" he interrogated.
Her colour rose. "But you like Ellen--I thought you'd be pleased."
"It's awfully nice--your putting it in that way. But I really don't
see--"
"I mean to do it, Newland," she said, quietly rising and going to her