Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (12 page)

What he saw meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known. He knew that the Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her—bits of wreckage, she called them—and these, he supposed, were represented by some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the discolored wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in old frames.

Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art. His boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books: John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee’s “Eu phorion,” the essays of P. G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called “The Renaissance” by Walter Pater. He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra Angelico
^r
with a faint condescension. But these pictures bewildered him, for they were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and therefore able to see) when he traveled in Italy; and perhaps, also, his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding himself in this strange empty house, where apparently no one expected him. He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of Countess Olenska’s request, and a little disturbed by the thought that his betrothed might come in to see her cousin. What would she think if she found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady’s fireside?

But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and stretched his feet to the logs.

It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him; but Archer felt more curious than mortified. The atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adven ture. He had been before in drawing rooms hung with red damask, with pictures “of the Italian school”; what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson’s shabby hired house, with its blighted background of pampas grass and Rogers
^s
statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skillful use of a few properties, been transformed into something intimate, “foreign,” subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments. He tried to analyze the trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped, in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow, and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.

His mind wandered away to the question of what May’s drawing room would look like. He knew that Mr. Welland, who was behaving “very handsomely,” already had his eye on a newly built house in East Thirty-ninth Street. The neighborhood was thought remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect. Archer would have liked to travel, to put off the housing question; but, though the Wellands approved of an extended European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt), they were firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple. The young man felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. But beyond that his imagination could not travel. He knew the drawing room above had a bay window, but he could not fancy how May would deal with it. She submitted cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland drawing room, to its sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe. He saw no reason to suppose that she would want anything different in her own house; and his only comfort was to reflect that she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased—which would be, of course, with “sincere” Eastlake furniture, and the plain new book-cases without glass doors.

The round-bosomed maid came in, drew the curtains, pushed back a log, and said consolingly:
“Verrà—verrà.”
“ When she had gone Archer stood up and began to wander about. Should he wait any longer? His position was becoming rather foolish. Perhaps he had misunderstood Madame Olenska—perhaps she had not invited him after all.

Down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the ring of a stepper’s hoofs; they stopped before the house, and he caught the opening of a carriage door. Parting the curtains he looked out into the early dusk. A street-lamp faced him, and in its light he saw Julius Beaufort’s compact English brougham, drawn by a big roan, and the banker descending from it, and helping out Madame Olenska.

Beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which his companion seemed to negative; then they shook hands, and he jumped into his carriage while she mounted the steps.

When she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing Archer there; surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to.

“How do you like my funny house?” she asked. “To me it’s like heaven.”

As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes.

“You’ve arranged it delightfully,” he rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking.

“Oh, it’s a poor little place. My relations despise it. But at any rate it’s less gloomy than the van der Luydens‘.”

The words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy. Those privileged to enter it shivered there, and spoke of it as “handsome.” But suddenly he was glad that she had given voice to the general shiver.

“It’s delicious—what you’ve done here,” he repeated.

“I like the little house,” she admitted; “but I suppose what I like is the blessedness of its being here, in my own country and my own town; and then, of being alone in it.” She spoke so low that he hardly heard the last phrase; but in his awkwardness he took it up.

“You like so much to be alone?”

“Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.” She sat down near the fire, said, “Nastasia will bring the tea presently,” and signed to him to return to his armchair, adding: “I see you’ve already chosen your corner.”

Leaning back, she folded her arms behind her head, and looked at the fire under drooping lids.

“This is the hour I like best—don’t you?”

A proper sense of his dignity caused him to answer: “I was afraid you’d forgotten the hour. Beaufort must have been very engrossing.”

She looked amused. “Why—have you waited long? Mr. Beaufort took me to see a number of houses—since it seems I’m not to be allowed to stay in this one.” She appeared to dismiss both Beaufort and himself from her mind, and went on: “I’ve never been in a city where there seems to be such a feeling against living in
des quartiers excentriques.
What does it matter where one lives? I’m told this street is respectable.”

“It’s not fashionable.”

“Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one’s own fashions? But I suppose I’ve lived too independently; at any rate, I want to do what you all do—I want to feel cared for and safe.”

He was touched, as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her need of guidance.

“That’s what your friends want to feel. New York’s an awfully safe place,” he added with a flash of sarcasm.

“Yes, isn’t it? One feels that,” she cried, missing the mockery. “Being here is like—like—being taken on a holiday when one has been a good little girl and done all one’s lessons.”

The analogy was well meant, but did not altogether please him. He did not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one else take the same tone. He wondered if she did not begin to see what a powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed her. The Lovell Mingotts’ dinner, patched up
in extremis
out of all sorts of social odds and ends, ought to have taught her the narrowness of her escape; but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted disaster, or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van der Luyden evening. Archer inclined to the former theory; he fancied that her New York was still completely undifferentiated, and the conjecture nettled him.

“Last night,” he said, “New York laid itself out for you. The van der Luydens do nothing by halves.”

“No: how kind they are! It was such a nice party. Every one seems to have such an esteem for them.”

The terms were hardly adequate; she might have spoken in that way of a tea-party at the dear old Miss Lannings‘.

“The van der Luydens,” said Archer, feeling himself pompous as he spoke, “are the most powerful influence in New York society. Unfortunately—owing to her health—they receive very seldom.”

She unclasped her hands from behind her head, and looked at him meditatively.

“Isn’t that perhaps the reason?”

“The reason—?”

“For their great influence; that they make themselves so rare.”

He colored a little, stared at her—and suddenly felt the penetration of the remark. At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they collapsed. He laughed, and sacrificed them.

Nastasia brought the tea, with handleless Japanese cups and little covered dishes, placing the tray on a low table.

“But you’ll explain these things to me—you’ll tell me all I ought to know,” Madame Olenska continued, leaning forward to hand him his cup.

“It’s you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I’d looked at so long that I’d ceased to see them.”

She detached a small gold cigarette-case from one of her bracelets, held it out to him, and took a cigarette herself. On the chimney were long spills for lighting them.

“Ah, then we can both help each other. But I want help so much more. You must tell me just what to do.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to reply: “Don’t be seen driving about the streets with Beaufort—” but he was being too deeply drawn into the atmosphere of the room, which was her atmosphere, and to give advice of that sort would have been like telling someone who was bargaining for attar-of-roses in Samarkand that one should always be provided with arctics for a New York winter. New York seemed much farther off than Samarkand, and if they were indeed to help each other she was rendering what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look at his native city objectively. Viewed thus, as through the wrong end of a telescope, it looked disconcertingly small and distant; but then from Samarkand it would.

A flame darted from the logs and she bent over the fire, stretching her thin hands so close to it that a faint halo shone about the oval nails. The light touched to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her braids, and made her pale face paler.

“There are plenty of people to tell you what to do,” Archer rejoined, obscurely envious of them.

“Oh—all my aunts? And my dear old Granny?” She considered the idea impartially. “They’re all a little vexed with me for setting up for myself—poor Granny especially. She wanted to keep me with her; but I had to be free—” He was impressed by this light way of speaking of the formidable Catherine, and moved by the thought of what must have given Madame Olenska this thirst for even the loneliest kind of freedom. But the idea of Beaufort gnawed him.

“I think I understand how you feel,” he said. “Still, your family can advise you; explain differences; show you the way.”

She lifted her thin black eyebrows. “Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it so straight up and down—like Fifth Avenue. And with all the cross streets numbered!” She seemed to guess his faint disapproval of this, and added with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face: “If you knew how I like it for just
that—
the straight-up-and-downness, and the big honest labels on everything!”

He saw his chance. “Everything may be labeled—but everybody is not.”

“Perhaps. I may simplify too much—but you’ll warn me if I do.” She turned from the fire to look at him. “There are only two people here who make me feel as if they understood what I mean and could explain things to me: you and Mr. Beaufort.”

Archer winced at the joining of the names, and then, with a quick readjustment, understood, sympathized and pitied. So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air. But since she felt that he understood her also, his business would be to make her see Beaufort as he really was, with all he represented—and abhor it.

He answered gently: “I understand. But just at first don’t let go of your old friends’ hands: I mean the older women, your Granny Mingott, Mrs. Welland, Mrs. van der Luyden. They like and admire you—they want to help you.”

She shook her head and sighed. “Oh, I know—I know! But on condition that they don’t hear anything unpleasant. Aunt Welland put it in those very words when I tried ... Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” She lifted her hands to her face, and he saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob.

“Madame Olenska!—Oh, don‘t, Ellen,” he cried, starting up and bending over her. He drew down one of her hands, clasping and chafing it like a child’s while he murmured reassuring words; but in a moment she freed herself, and looked up at him with wet lashes.

“Does no one cry here, either? I suppose there’s no need to, in heaven,” she said, straightening her loosened braids with a laugh, and bending over the tea-kettle. It was burned into his consciousness that he had called her “Ellen”—called her so twice; and that she had not noticed it. Far down the inverted telescope he saw the faint white figure of May Welland—in New York.