The Age of Innocence
himself to be were trying to soften his captivity; and the perception
increased his passionate determination to be free.
In the drawing-room, where they presently joined the ladies, he met
May's triumphant eyes, and read in them the conviction that everything
had "gone off" beautifully. She rose from Madame Olenska's side, and
immediately Mrs. van der Luyden beckoned the latter to a seat on the
gilt sofa where she throned. Mrs. Selfridge Merry bore across the
room to join them, and it became clear to Archer that here also a
conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on. The silent
organisation which held his little world together was determined to put
itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety
of Madame Olenska's conduct, or the completeness of Archer's domestic
felicity. All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely
engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of,
suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary;
and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more
disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska's
lover. He caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for the
first time understood that she shared the belief. The discovery roused
a laughter of inner devils that reverberated through all his efforts to
discuss the Martha Washington ball with Mrs. Reggie Chivers and little
Mrs. Newland; and so the evening swept on, running and running like a
senseless river that did not know how to stop.
At length he saw that Madame Olenska had risen and was saying good-bye.
He understood that in a moment she would be gone, and tried to remember
what he had said to her at dinner; but he could not recall a single
word they had exchanged.
She went up to May, the rest of the company making a circle about her
as she advanced. The two young women clasped hands; then May bent
forward and kissed her cousin.
"Certainly our hostess is much the handsomer of the two," Archer heard
Reggie Chivers say in an undertone to young Mrs. Newland; and he
remembered Beaufort's coarse sneer at May's ineffectual beauty.
A moment later he was in the hall, putting Madame Olenska's cloak about
her shoulders.
Through all his confusion of mind he had held fast to the resolve to
say nothing that might startle or disturb her. Convinced that no power
could now turn him from his purpose he had found strength to let events
shape themselves as they would. But as he followed Madame Olenska into
the hall he thought with a sudden hunger of being for a moment alone
with her at the door of her carriage.
"Is your carriage here?" he asked; and at that moment Mrs. van der
Luyden, who was being majestically inserted into her sables, said
gently: "We are driving dear Ellen home."
Archer's heart gave a jerk, and Madame Olenska, clasping her cloak and
fan with one hand, held out the other to him. "Good-bye," she said.
"Good-bye--but I shall see you soon in Paris," he answered aloud--it
seemed to him that he had shouted it.
"Oh," she murmured, "if you and May could come--!"
Mr. van der Luyden advanced to give her his arm, and Archer turned
to Mrs. van der Luyden. For a moment, in the billowy darkness inside
the big landau, he caught the dim oval of a face, eyes shining
steadily--and she was gone.
As he went up the steps he crossed Lawrence Lefferts coming down with
his wife. Lefferts caught his host by the sleeve, drawing back to let
Gertrude pass.
"I say, old chap: do you mind just letting it be understood that I'm
dining with you at the club tomorrow night? Thanks so much, you old
brick! Good-night."
"It _did_ go off beautifully, didn't it?" May questioned from the
threshold of the library.
Archer roused himself with a start. As soon as the last carriage had
driven away, he had come up to the library and shut himself in, with
the hope that his wife, who still lingered below, would go straight
to her room. But there she stood, pale and drawn, yet radiating the
factitious energy of one who has passed beyond fatigue.
"May I come and talk it over?" she asked.
"Of course, if you like. But you must be awfully sleepy--"
"No, I'm not sleepy. I should like to sit with you a little."
"Very well," he said, pushing her chair near the fire.
She sat down and he resumed his seat; but neither spoke for a long
time. At length Archer began abruptly: "Since you're not tired, and
want to talk, there's something I must tell you. I tried to the other
night--."
She looked at him quickly. "Yes, dear. Something about yourself?"
"About myself. You say you're not tired: well, I am. Horribly tired ..."
In an instant she was all tender anxiety. "Oh, I've seen it coming on,
Newland! You've been so wickedly overworked--"
"Perhaps it's that. Anyhow, I want to make a break--"
"A break? To give up the law?"
"To go away, at any rate--at once. On a long trip, ever so far
off--away from everything--"
He paused, conscious that he had failed in his attempt to speak with
the indifference of a man who longs for a change, and is yet too weary
to welcome it. Do what he would, the chord of eagerness vibrated. "Away
from everything--" he repeated.
"Ever so far? Where, for instance?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know. India--or Japan."
She stood up, and as he sat with bent head, his chin propped on his
hands, he felt her warmly and fragrantly hovering over him.
"As far as that? But I'm afraid you can't, dear ..." she said in an
unsteady voice. "Not unless you'll take me with you." And then, as he
was silent, she went on, in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each
separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain: "That is,
if the doctors will let me go ... but I'm afraid they won't. For you
see, Newland, I've been sure since this morning of something I've been
so longing and hoping for--"
He looked up at her with a sick stare, and she sank down, all dew and
roses, and hid her face against his knee.
"Oh, my dear," he said, holding her to him while his cold hand stroked
her hair.
There was a long pause, which the inner devils filled with strident
laughter; then May freed herself from his arms and stood up.
"You didn't guess--?"
"Yes--I; no. That is, of course I hoped--"
They looked at each other for an instant and again fell silent; then,
turning his eyes from hers, he asked abruptly: "Have you told any one
else?"
"Only Mamma and your mother." She paused, and then added hurriedly, the
blood flushing up to her forehead: "That is--and Ellen. You know I told
you we'd had a long talk one afternoon--and how dear she was to me."
"Ah--" said Archer, his heart stopping.
He felt that his wife was watching him intently. "Did you _mind_ my
telling her first, Newland?"
"Mind? Why should I?" He made a last effort to collect himself. "But
that was a fortnight ago, wasn't it? I thought you said you weren't
sure till today."
Her colour burned deeper, but she held his gaze. "No; I wasn't sure
then--but I told her I was. And you see I was right!" she exclaimed,
her blue eyes wet with victory.
XXXIV.
Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East
Thirty-ninth Street.
He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration
of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle
of those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where
the throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically
catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.
"Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms," he heard some one
say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting
alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure
in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista of
the old Museum.
The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking
with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the
scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.
It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had
happened. There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to
him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young
women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a
child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken
to church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the
Bishop of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so
long the pride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had first
staggered across the floor shouting "Dad," while May and the nurse
laughed behind the door; there their second child, Mary (who was so
like her mother), had announced her engagement to the dullest and most
reliable of Reggie Chivers's many sons; and there Archer had kissed her
through her wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was
to carry them to Grace Church--for in a world where all else had reeled
on its foundations the "Grace Church wedding" remained an unchanged
institution.
It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future
of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill,
Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for
sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had
finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a
rising New York architect.
The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and
business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not
absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that
they were going in for Central American archæology, for architecture
or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in
the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and
adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the
word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the
millionaire grocers of the suburbs.
But above all--sometimes Archer put it above all--it was in that
library that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one
evening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host, and said,
banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses:
"Hang the professional politician! You're the kind of man the country
wants, Archer. If the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like you
have got to lend a hand in the cleaning."
"Men like you--" how Archer had glowed at the phrase! How eagerly he
had risen up at the call! It was an echo of Ned Winsett's old appeal
to roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man
who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him was
irresistible.
Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself _were_ what
his country needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore
Roosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not,
for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, and
had dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and
from that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of the
reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its
apathy. It was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered
to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked
forward--the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which
their vision had been limited--even his small contribution to the new
state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built
wall. He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature