The Age of Innocence
desk. "Here are the invitations all written. Mother helped me--she
agrees that we ought to." She paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and
Archer suddenly saw before him the embodied image of the Family.
"Oh, all right," he said, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of
guests that she had put in his hand.
When he entered the drawing-room before dinner May was stooping over
the fire and trying to coax the logs to burn in their unaccustomed
setting of immaculate tiles.
The tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden's orchids had been
conspicuously disposed in various receptacles of modern porcelain and
knobby silver. Mrs. Newland Archer's drawing-room was generally thought
a great success. A gilt bamboo _jardinière_, in which the primulas and
cinerarias were punctually renewed, blocked the access to the bay
window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction
of the Venus of Milo); the sofas and arm-chairs of pale brocade were
cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver
toys, porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames; and tall
rosy-shaded lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.
"I don't think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted up," said May,
rising flushed from her struggle, and sending about her a glance of
pardonable pride. The brass tongs which she had propped against the
side of the chimney fell with a crash that drowned her husband's
answer; and before he could restore them Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden
were announced.
The other guests quickly followed, for it was known that the van der
Luydens liked to dine punctually. The room was nearly full, and Archer
was engaged in showing to Mrs. Selfridge Merry a small highly-varnished
Verbeckhoven "Study of Sheep," which Mr. Welland had given May for
Christmas, when he found Madame Olenska at his side.
She was excessively pale, and her pallor made her dark hair seem denser
and heavier than ever. Perhaps that, or the fact that she had wound
several rows of amber beads about her neck, reminded him suddenly of
the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at children's parties, when
Medora Manson had first brought her to New York.
The amber beads were trying to her complexion, or her dress was
perhaps unbecoming: her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and
he had never loved it as he did at that minute. Their hands met, and
he thought he heard her say: "Yes, we're sailing tomorrow in the
Russia--"; then there was an unmeaning noise of opening doors, and
after an interval May's voice: "Newland! Dinner's been announced. Won't
you please take Ellen in?"
Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand
was ungloved, and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the
evening that he had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street
drawing-room. All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have
taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on
his sleeve, and he said to himself: "If it were only to see her hand
again I should have to follow her--."
It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign
visitor" that Mrs. van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being
placed on her host's left. The fact of Madame Olenska's "foreignness"
could hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by this farewell
tribute; and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted her displacement with an
affability which left no doubt as to her approval. There were certain
things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and
thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal
rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. There
was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done
to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now
that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his
table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her
popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her
past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval.
Mrs. van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her
nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from his seat
at May's right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify
all the carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.
Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd
imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier
and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the
proceedings. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face
to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's
canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale
woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it
came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to
all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme
sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He guessed himself to have
been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and
patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown
to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had
been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife
on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined
anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May
Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and
cousin.
It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of
blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who
placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more
ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to
them.
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a
prisoner in the centre of an armed camp. He looked about the table, and
guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which,
over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and
his wife. "It's to show me," he thought, "what would happen to _me_--"
and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over
direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like
the doors of the family vault.
He laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden's startled eyes.
"You think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile. "Of course
poor Regina's idea of remaining in New York has its ridiculous side, I
suppose;" and Archer muttered: "Of course."
At this point, he became conscious that Madame Olenska's other
neighbour had been engaged for some time with the lady on his right. At
the same moment he saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van der
Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick glance down the table.
It was evident that the host and the lady on his right could not sit
through the whole meal in silence. He turned to Madame Olenska, and her
pale smile met him. "Oh, do let's see it through," it seemed to say.
"Did you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised
him by its naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary, she had
seldom travelled with fewer discomforts.
"Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train," she added; and he
remarked that she would not suffer from that particular hardship in the
country she was going to.
"I never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than
once, in April, in the train between Calais and Paris."
She said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could
always carry an extra rug, and that every form of travel had its
hardships; to which he abruptly returned that he thought them all of
no account compared with the blessedness of getting away. She changed
colour, and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch: "I mean to
do a lot of travelling myself before long." A tremor crossed her face,
and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out: "I say, Reggie, what
do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, I mean? I'm
game if you are--" at which Mrs. Reggie piped up that she could not
think of letting Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she
was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week; and her husband
placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for
the International Polo match.
But Mr. Selfridge Merry had caught the phrase "round the world,"
and having once circled the globe in his steam-yacht, he seized the
opportunity to send down the table several striking items concerning
the shallowness of the Mediterranean ports. Though, after all, he
added, it didn't matter; for when you'd seen Athens and Smyrna and
Constantinople, what else was there? And Mrs. Merry said she could
never be too grateful to Dr. Bencomb for having made them promise not
to go to Naples on account of the fever.
"But you must have three weeks to do India properly," her husband
conceded, anxious to have it understood that he was no frivolous
globe-trotter.
And at this point the ladies went up to the drawing-room.
In the library, in spite of weightier presences, Lawrence Lefferts
predominated.
The talk, as usual, had veered around to the Beauforts, and even Mr.
van der Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, installed in the honorary
arm-chairs tacitly reserved for them, paused to listen to the younger
man's philippic.
Never had Lefferts so abounded in the sentiments that adorn Christian
manhood and exalt the sanctity of the home. Indignation lent him a
scathing eloquence, and it was clear that if others had followed his
example, and acted as he talked, society would never have been weak
enough to receive a foreign upstart like Beaufort--no, sir, not even
if he'd married a van der Luyden or a Lanning instead of a Dallas. And
what chance would there have been, Lefferts wrathfully questioned,
of his marrying into such a family as the Dallases, if he had not
already wormed his way into certain houses, as people like Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers had managed to worm theirs in his wake? If society chose to
open its doors to vulgar women the harm was not great, though the gain
was doubtful; but once it got in the way of tolerating men of obscure
origin and tainted wealth the end was total disintegration--and at no
distant date.
"If things go on at this pace," Lefferts thundered, looking like a
young prophet dressed by Poole, and who had not yet been stoned, "we
shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers' houses,
and marrying Beaufort's bastards."
"Oh, I say--draw it mild!" Reggie Chivers and young Newland protested,
while Mr. Selfridge Merry looked genuinely alarmed, and an expression
of pain and disgust settled on Mr. van der Luyden's sensitive face.
"Has he got any?" cried Mr. Sillerton Jackson, pricking up his ears;
and while Lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh, the old
gentleman twittered into Archer's ear: "Queer, those fellows who are
always wanting to set things right. The people who have the worst
cooks are always telling you they're poisoned when they dine out.
But I hear there are pressing reasons for our friend Lawrence's
diatribe:--typewriter this time, I understand...."
The talk swept past Archer like some senseless river running and
running because it did not know enough to stop. He saw, on the faces
about him, expressions of interest, amusement and even mirth. He
listened to the younger men's laughter, and to the praise of the Archer
Madeira, which Mr. van der Luyden and Mr. Merry were thoughtfully
celebrating. Through it all he was dimly aware of a general attitude of
friendliness toward himself, as if the guard of the prisoner he felt