Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (13 page)

Suddenly Nastasia put her head in to say something in her rich Italian.

Madame Olenska, again with a hand at her hair, uttered an exclamation of assent—a flashing
“Già—già”—and
the Duke of St. Austrey entered, piloting a tremendous black-wigged and red-plumed lady in overflowing furs.

“My dear Countess, I’ve brought an old friend of mine to see you—Mrs. Struthers. She wasn’t asked to the party last night, and she wants to know you.”

The Duke beamed on the group, and Madame Olenska advanced with a murmur of welcome toward the queer couple. She seemed to have no idea how oddly matched they were, or what a liberty the Duke had taken in bringing his companion—and to do him justice, as Archer perceived, the Duke seemed as unaware of it himself.

“Of course I want to know you, my dear,” cried Mrs. Struthers in a round rolling voice that matched her bold feathers and her brazen wig. “I want to know everybody who’s young and interesting and charming. And the Duke tells me you like music—didn’t you, Duke? You’re a pianist yourself, I believe? Well, do you want to hear Sarasate play tomorrow evening at my house? You know I’ve something going on every Sunday evening—it’s the day when New York doesn’t know what to do with itself, and so I say to it: ‘Come and be amused.”’ And the Duke thought you’d be tempted by Sarasate. You’ll find a number of your friends.“

Madame Olenska’s face grew brilliant with pleasure. “How kind! How good of the Duke to think of me!” She pushed a chair up to the tea-table and Mrs. Struthers sank into it delectably. “Of course I shall be too happy to come.”

“That’s all right, my dear. And bring your young gentleman with you.” Mrs. Struthers extended a hail-fellow hand to Archer. “I can’t put a name to you-but I’m sure I’ve met you—I’ve met everybody, here, or in Paris or London. Aren’t you in diplomacy? All the diplomatists come to me. You like music too? Duke, you must be sure to bring him.”

The Duke said “Rather” from the depths of his beard, and Archer withdrew with a stiffly circular bow that made him feel as full of spine as a self-conscious school-boy among careless and un-noticing elders.

He was not sorry for the
dénouement
of his visit: he only wished it had come sooner, and spared him a certain waste of emotion. As he went out into the wintry night, New York again became vast and imminent, and May Welland the loveliest woman in it. He turned into his florist’s to send her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley which, to his confusion, he found he had forgotten that morning.

As he wrote a word on his card and waited for an envelope he glanced about the embowered shop, and his eye lit on a cluster of yellow roses. He had never seen any as sun-golden before, and his first impulse was to send them to May instead of the lilies. But they did not look like her—there was something too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty. In a sudden revulsion of mood, and almost without knowing what he did, he signed to the florist to lay the roses in another long box, and slipped his card into a second envelope, on which he wrote the name of the Countess Olenska; then, just as he was turning away, he drew the card out again, and left the empty envelope on the box.

“They’ll go at once?” he inquired, pointing to the roses.

The florist assured him that they would.

10

THE NEXT DAY HE persuaded May to escape for a walk in the Park after luncheon. As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York, she usually accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons; but Mrs. Welland condoned her truancy, having that very morning won her over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.

The day was delectable. The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall was ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched above snow that shone like splintered crystals. It was the weather to call out May’s radiance, and she burned like a young maple in the frost. Archer was proud of the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities.

“It’s so delicious—waking every morning to smell lilies-of-the-valley in one’s room!” she said.

“Yesterday they came late. I hadn’t time in the morning—”

“But your remembering each day to send them makes me love them so much more than if you’d given a standing order, and they came every morning on the minute, like one’s music-teacher—as I know Gertrude Lefferts’s did, for instance, when she and Lawrence were engaged.”

“Ah—they would!” Laughed Archer, amused at her keenness. He looked sideways at her fruit-like cheek and felt rich and secure enough to add: “When I sent your lilies yesterday afternoon I saw some rather gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off to Madame Olenska. Was that right?”

“How dear of you! Anything of that kind delights her. It’s odd she didn’t mention it: she lunched with us today, spoke of Mr. Beaufort’s having sent her wonderful orchids, and cousin Henry van der Luyden a whole hamper of carnations from Skuytercliff. She seems so surprised to receive flowers. Don’t people send them in Europe? She thinks it such a pretty custom.”

“Oh, well, no wonder mine were overshadowed by Beaufort‘s,” said Archer irritably. Then he remembered that he had not put a card with the roses, and was vexed at having spoken of them. He wanted to say: “I called on your cousin yesterday,” but hesitated. If Madame Olenska had not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should. Yet not to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked. To shake off the question he began to talk of their own plans, their future, and Mrs. Welland’s insistence on a long engagement.

“If you call it long! Isabel Chivers and Reggie were engaged for two years: Grace and Thorley for nearly a year and a half Why aren’t we very well off as we are?”

It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of himself for finding it singularly childish. No doubt she simply echoed what was said to her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday, and he wondered at what age “nice” women began to speak for themselves.

“Never, if we won’t let them, I suppose,” he mused, and recalled his mad outburst to Mr. Sillerton Jackson: “Women ought to be as free as we are—”

It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?

“We might be much better off. We might be altogether together—we might travel.”

Her face lit up. “That would be lovely,” she owned: she would love to travel. But her mother would not understand their wanting to do things so differently.

“As if the mere ‘differently’ didn’t account for it!” The wooer insisted.

“Newland! You’re so original!” she exulted.

His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to the point of calling him original.

“Original! We’re all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We’re like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can’t you and I strike out for ourselves, May?”

He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.

“Mercy—shall we elope?” she laughed.

“If you would—”

“You
do
love me, Newland! I’m so happy.”

“But then—why not be happier?”

“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”

“Why not—why not—why not?”

She looked a little bored by his insistence. She knew very well that they couldn‘t, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason. “I’m not clever enough to argue with you. But that kind of thing is rather—vulgar, isn’t it?” she suggested, relieved to have hit on a word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.

“Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?”

She was evidently staggered by this. “Of course I should hate it—so would you,” she rejoined, a trifle irritably.

He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against his boot-top; and, feeling that she had indeed found the right way of closing the discussion, she went on light-heartedly: “Oh, did I tell you that I showed Ellen my ring? She thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever saw. There’s nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she said. I do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!”

The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in his study, Janey wandered in on him. He had failed to stop at his club on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of his class. He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.

“Sameness—sameness!” he muttered, the word running through his head like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in at the club at that hour he had gone home instead. He knew not only what they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would take in the discussion. The Duke of course would be their principal theme; though the appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a small canary-colored brougham with a pair of black cobs (for which Beaufort was generally thought responsible) would also doubtless be thoroughly gone into. Such “women” (as they were called) were few in New York, those driving their own carriages still fewer, and the appearance of Miss Fanny Ring in Fifth Avenue at the fashionable hour had profoundly agitated society. Only the day before, her carriage had passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott‘s, and the latter had instantly rung the little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to drive her home. “What if it had happened to Mrs. van der Luyden?” people asked each other with a shudder. Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that very hour, holding forth on the disintegration of society.

He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey entered, and then quickly bent over his book (Swinburne’s “Chastelard”—just out) as if he had not seen her. She glanced at the writing-table heaped with books, opened a volume of the “Contes Drolatiques,”
⁶
made a wry face over the archaic French, and sighed: “What learned things you read!”

“Well—?” he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like
^t
before him.

“Mother’s very angry.”

“Angry? With whom? About what?”

“Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here. She brought word that her brother would come in after dinner: she couldn’t say very much, because he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself He’s with cousin Louisa van der Luyden now.”

“For heaven’s sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start. It would take an omniscient Deity to know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s not a time to be profane, Newland ... Mother feels badly enough about your not going to church ...”

With a groan he plunged back into his book.

“Newland!
Do listen. Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s party last night: she went there with the Duke and Mr. Beaufort.”

At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the young man’s breast. To smother it he laughed. “Well, what of it? I knew she meant to.”

Janey paled and her eyes began to project. “You knew she meant to—and you didn’t try to stop her? To warn her?”

“Stop her? Warn her?” he laughed again. “I’m not engaged to be married to the Countess Olenska!” The words had a fantastic sound in his own ears.