The Age of Innocence
straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly
proved by her laughing at _his_ jokes); and he suspected, in the depths
of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a
joy to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned
discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were
only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and
innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive
guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious
purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts
and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed
to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might
exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those
habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day. But they
were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement
of which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (as
Thackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a
blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she
was to give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if he had
been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find
their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his
anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected
with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity)
why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of
experience as himself.
Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his
mind; but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and
precision were due to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska.
Here he was, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure
thoughts and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which
raised all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie.
"Hang Ellen Olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began to
undress. He could not really see why her fate should have the least
bearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun to
measure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forced
upon him.
A few days later the bolt fell.
The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as "a formal
dinner" (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and
a Roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with the
words "To meet the Countess Olenska," in accordance with the hospitable
American fashion, which treats strangers as if they were royalties, or
at least as their ambassadors.
The guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination in
which the initiated recognised the firm hand of Catherine the Great.
Associated with such immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys, who
were asked everywhere because they always had been, the Beauforts,
on whom there was a claim of relationship, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson
and his sister Sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to),
were some of the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the
dominant "young married" set; the Lawrence Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts
Rushworth (the lovely widow), the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses
and young Morris Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der Luyden). The
company indeed was perfectly assorted, since all the members belonged
to the little inner group of people who, during the long New York
season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently
undiminished zest.
Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had
refused the Mingotts' invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr.
Jackson and his sister. The intended slight was emphasised by the fact
that even the Reggie Chiverses, who were of the Mingott clan, were
among those inflicting it; and by the uniform wording of the notes, in
all of which the writers "regretted that they were unable to accept,"
without the mitigating plea of a "previous engagement" that ordinary
courtesy prescribed.
New York society was, in those days, far too small, and too scant in
its resources, for every one in it (including livery-stable-keepers,
butlers and cooks) not to know exactly on which evenings people were
free; and it was thus possible for the recipients of Mrs. Lovell
Mingott's invitations to make cruelly clear their determination not to
meet the Countess Olenska.
The blow was unexpected; but the Mingotts, as their way was, met it
gallantly. Mrs. Lovell Mingott confided the case to Mrs. Welland, who
confided it to Newland Archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealed
passionately and authoritatively to his mother; who, after a painful
period of inward resistance and outward temporising, succumbed to his
instances (as she always did), and immediately embracing his cause with
an energy redoubled by her previous hesitations, put on her grey velvet
bonnet and said: "I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."
The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid,
in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.
At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called "plain
people"; an honourable but obscure majority of respectable families who
(as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the Jacksons) had
been raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans.
People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular as they used to
be; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth Avenue, and
Julius Beaufort the other, you couldn't expect the old traditions to
last much longer.
Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum
was the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands,
Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented. Most people imagined
them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at least
those of Mrs. Archer's generation) were aware that, in the eyes of the
professional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families could
lay claim to that eminence.
"Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this
modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one,
neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands
or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were
just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies
to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One
of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a
general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword
after the battle of Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but
they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a
commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it
who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word."
Mrs. Archer and her son and daughter, like every one else in New York,
knew who these privileged beings were: the Dagonets of Washington
Square, who came of an old English county family allied with the Pitts
and Foxes; the Lannings, who had intermarried with the descendants of
Count de Grasse, and the van der Luydens, direct descendants of the
first Dutch governor of Manhattan, and related by pre-revolutionary
marriages to several members of the French and British aristocracy.
The Lannings survived only in the person of two very old but lively
Miss Lannings, who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family
portraits and Chippendale; the Dagonets were a considerable clan,
allied to the best names in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but the van
der Luydens, who stood above all of them, had faded into a kind of
super-terrestrial twilight, from which only two figures impressively
emerged; those of Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.
Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet, and her mother had
been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Island
family, who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland,
after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter
of the Earl of St. Austrey. The tie between the Dagonets, the du Lacs
of Maryland, and their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas,
had always remained close and cordial. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden
had more than once paid long visits to the present head of the house
of Trevenna, the Duke of St. Austrey, at his country-seat in Cornwall
and at St. Austrey in Gloucestershire; and his Grace had frequently
announced his intention of some day returning their visit (without the
Duchess, who feared the Atlantic).
Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time between Trevenna, their
place in Maryland, and Skuytercliff, the great estate on the Hudson
which had been one of the colonial grants of the Dutch government to
the famous first Governor, and of which Mr. van der Luyden was still
"Patroon." Their large solemn house in Madison Avenue was seldom
opened, and when they came to town they received in it only their most
intimate friends.
"I wish you would go with me, Newland," his mother said, suddenly
pausing at the door of the Brown coupe. "Louisa is fond of you; and of
course it's on account of dear May that I'm taking this step--and also
because, if we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as
Society left."
VII.
Mrs. Henry van der Luyden listened in silence to her cousin Mrs.
Archer's narrative.
It was all very well to tell yourself in advance that Mrs. van der
Luyden was always silent, and that, though non-committal by nature
and training, she was very kind to the people she really liked. Even
personal experience of these facts was not always a protection from the
chill that descended on one in the high-ceilinged white-walled Madison
Avenue drawing-room, with the pale brocaded armchairs so obviously
uncovered for the occasion, and the gauze still veiling the ormolu
mantel ornaments and the beautiful old carved frame of Gainsborough's
"Lady Angelica du Lac."
Mrs. van der Luyden's portrait by Huntington (in black velvet and
Venetian point) faced that of her lovely ancestress. It was generally
considered "as fine as a Cabanel," and, though twenty years had elapsed
since its execution, was still "a perfect likeness." Indeed the Mrs.
van der Luyden who sat beneath it listening to Mrs. Archer might have
been the twin-sister of the fair and still youngish woman drooping
against a gilt armchair before a green rep curtain. Mrs. van der
Luyden still wore black velvet and Venetian point when she went into
society--or rather (since she never dined out) when she threw open her
own doors to receive it. Her fair hair, which had faded without turning
grey, was still parted in flat overlapping points on her forehead,
and the straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a
little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been
painted. She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been
rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly
irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a
rosy life-in-death.
Like all his family, he esteemed and admired Mrs. van der Luyden;
but he found her gentle bending sweetness less approachable than the
grimness of some of his mother's old aunts, fierce spinsters who said
"No" on principle before they knew what they were going to be asked.
Mrs. van der Luyden's attitude said neither yes nor no, but always
appeared to incline to clemency till her thin lips, wavering into the