Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him,must make her give him the rest of her evening. Ignoring her question,he continued to lean against the chimney-piece,his eyes fixed on the hand in which she held her gloves and fan,as if watching to see if he had the power to make her drop them.
"May guessed the truth," he said. "There is another woman--but not the one she thinks."
Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not move. After a moment he sat down beside her, and,taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them.
She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the hearth. "Ah, don't make love to me!Too many people have done that," she said, frowning.
Archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she could have given him."I have never made love to you," he said, "and I never shall.But you are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us."
"Possible for either of us?" She looked at him with unfeigned astonishment."And you say that--when it's you who've made it impossible?"
He stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow of light tore its blinding way.
"_I've_ made it impossible--?"
"You, you, _you_!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's on the verge of tears."Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing--give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was,how one must sacrifice one's self to preserve the dignity of marriage ...and to spare one's family the publicity, the scandal?And because my family was going to be your family--for May's sake and for yours--I did what you told me,what you proved to me that I ought to do. Ah," she broke out with a sudden laugh,"I've made no secret of having done it for you!"
She sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of her dress like a stricken masquerader;and the young man stood by the fireplace and continued to gaze at her without moving.
"Good God," he groaned. "When I thought--"
"You thought?"
"Ah, don't ask me what I thought!"
Still looking at her, he saw the same burning flush creep up her neck to her face. She sat upright, facing him with a rigid dignity.
"I do ask you."
"Well, then: there were things in that letter you asked me to read--"
"My husband's letter?"
"Yes."
"I had nothing to fear from that letter: absolutely nothing!All I feared was to bring notoriety, scandal, on the family--on you and May."
"Good God," he groaned again, bowing his face in his hands.
The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable.It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his own grave-stone;in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever lift that load from his heart.He did not move from his place, or raise his head from his hands;his hidden eyeballs went on staring into utter darkness.
"At least I loved you--" he brought out.
On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed that she still crouched,he heard a faint stifled crying like a child's. He started up and came to her side.
"Ellen!What madness!Why are you crying?Nothing's done that can't be undone. I'm still free, and you're going to be." He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips,and all their vain terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise.The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room,when just touching her made everything so simple.
She gave him back all his kiss, but after a moment he felt her stiffening in his arms, and she put him aside and stood up.
"Ah, my poor Newland--I suppose this had to be. But it doesn't in the least alter things," she said,looking down at him in her turn from the hearth.
"It alters the whole of life for me."
"No, no--it mustn't, it can't. You're engaged to May Welland; and I'm married."
He stood up too, flushed and resolute. "Nonsense!It's too late for that sort of thing. We've no right to lie to other people or to ourselves.We won't talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying May after this?"
She stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece,her profile reflected in the glass behind her.One of the locks of her chignon had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked haggard and almost old.
"I don't see you," she said at length, "putting that question to May. Do you?"
He gave a reckless shrug. "It's too late to do anything else."
"You say that because it's the easiest thing to say at this moment--not because it's true.In reality it's too late to do anything but what we'd both decided on."
"Ah, I don't understand you!"
She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing it."You don't understand because you haven't yet guessed how you've changed things for me: oh,from the first--long before I knew all you'd done."
"All I'd done?"
"Yes. I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy of me--that they thought I was a dreadful sort of person.It seems they had even refused to meet me at dinner. I found that out afterward;and how you'd made your mother go with you to the van der Luydens';and how you'd insisted on announcing your engagement at the Beaufort ball,so that I might have two families to stand by me instead of one--"
At that he broke into a laugh.
"Just imagine," she said, "how stupid and unobservant I was!I knew nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day.New York simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home.And I was so happy at being among my own people that every one I met seemed kind and good,and glad to see me. But from the very beginning," she continued,"I felt there was no one as kind as you;no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary.The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew;you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one;you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.That was what I'd never known before--and it's better than anything I've known."
She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and each word,as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning lead. He sat bowed over,his head between his hands, staring at the hearth rug,and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress.Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.
She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders,and looking at him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze.
"Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!" she cried. "I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up."
His arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained facing each other,divided by the distance that her words had created. Then, abruptly, his anger overflowed.
"And Beaufort?Is he to replace me?"
As the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of anger;and he would have welcomed it as fuel for his own. But Madame Olenska only grew a shade paler,and stood with her arms hanging down before her, and her head slightly bent,as her way was when she pondered a question.
"He's waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers's; why don't you go to him?" Archer sneered.
She turned to ring the bell. "I shall not go out this evening;tell the carriage to go and fetch the Signora Marchesa," she said when the maid came.
After the door had closed again Archer continued to look at her with bitter eyes. "Why this sacrifice?Since you tell me that you're lonely I've no right to keep you from your friends."
She smiled a little under her wet lashes. "I shan't be lonely now. I _was_ lonely; I _was_ afraid.But the emptiness and the darkness are gone;when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light. "
Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility, and Archer groaned out again: "I don't understand you!"
"Yet you understand May!"
He reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her. "May is ready to give me up."
"What!Three days after you've entreated her on your knees to hasten your marriage?"
"She's refused; that gives me the right--"
"Ah, you've taught me what an ugly word that is," she said.
He turned away with a sense of utter weariness.He felt as though he had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice, and now,just as he had fought his way to the top,his hold had given way and he was pitching down headlong into darkness.
If he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away her arguments;but she still held him at a distance by something inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude,and by his own awed sense of her sincerity. At length he began to plead again.
"If we do this now it will be worse afterward--worse for every one--"
"No--no--no!" she almost screamed, as if he frightened her.
At that moment the bell sent a long tinkle through the house.They had heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless,looking at each other with startled eyes.
Outside, Nastasia's step crossed the hall, the outer door opened,and a moment later she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the Countess Olenska.
"The lady was very happy at the flowers," Nastasia said, smoothing her apron."She thought it was her signor marito who had sent them,and she cried a little and said it was a folly."
Her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope. She tore it open and carried it to the lamp; then,when the door had closed again, she handed the telegram to Archer.
It was dated from St. Augustine, and addressed to the Countess Olenska. In it he read:"Granny's telegram successful. Papa and Mamma agree marriage after Easter. Am telegraphing Newland.Am too happy for words and love you dearly. Your grateful May."
Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front-door,he found a similar envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and letters.The message inside the envelope was also from May Welland, and ran as follows:"Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May. "
Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate the news it contained.Then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and turned over the pages with trembling fingers;but he did not find what he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his pocket he mounted the stairs.
A light was shining through the door of the little hall-room which served Janey as a dressing-room and boudoir,and her brother rapped impatiently on the panel. The door opened,and his sister stood before him in her immemorial purple flannel dressing-gown,with her hair "on pins." Her face looked pale and apprehensive.
"Newland!I hope there's no bad news in that telegram?I waited on purpose, in case--" (No item of his correspondence was safe from Janey.)
He took no notice of her question. "Look here--what day is Easter this year?"
She looked shocked at such unchristian ignorance. "Easter?Newland!Why, of course, the first week in April. Why?"
"The first week?" He turned again to the pages of his diary, calculating rapidly under his breath. "The first week, did you say?" He threw back his head with a long laugh.
"For mercy's sake what's the matter?"
"Nothing's the matter, except that I'm going to be married in a month."
Janey fell upon his neck and pressed him to her purple flannel breast."Oh Newland, how wonderful!I'm so glad!But, dearest, why do you keep on laughing?Do hush, or you'll wake Mamma."
Book II
XIX.
The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust.All the old ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing ermines,and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the altar.
Newland Archer, at a signal from the sexton,had come out of the vestry and placed himself with his best man on the chancel step of Grace Church.
The signal meant that the brougham bearing the bride and her father was in sight;but there was sure to be a considerable interval of adjustment and consultation in the lobby,where the bridesmaids were already hovering like a cluster of Easter blossoms.During this unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness,was expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled company;and Archer had gone through this formality as resignedly as through all the others which made of a nineteenth century New York wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history. Everything was equally easy--or equally painful, as one chose to put it--in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the same labyrinth.
So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations.The bridesmaids' eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies-of-the-valley had been sent in due time,as well as the gold and sapphire sleeve-links of the eight ushers and the best man's cat's-eye scarf-pin;Archer had sat up half the night trying to vary the wording of his thanks for the last batch of presents from men friends and ex-lady-loves;the fees for the Bishop and the Rector were safely in the pocket of his best man;his own luggage was already at Mrs. Manson Mingott's,where the wedding-breakfast was to take place,and so were the travelling clothes into which he was to change;and a private compartment had been engaged in the train that was to carry the young couple to their unknown destination--concealment of the spot in which the bridal night was to be spent being one of the most sacred taboos of the prehistoric ritual.
"Got the ring all right?" whispered young van der Luyden Newland, who was inexperienced in the duties of a best man,and awed by the weight of his responsibility.
Archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make:with his ungloved right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark grey waistcoat,and assured himself that the little gold circlet (engraved inside: _Newland to May, April ——, 187—_) was in its place; then, resuming his former attitude,his tall hat and pearl-grey gloves with black stitchings grasped in his left hand,he stood looking at the door of the church.
Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through the imitation stone vaulting,carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at which, with cheerful indifference,he had stood on the same chancel step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms.
"How like a first night at the Opera!" he thought, recognising all the same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if,when the Last Trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Merry would be there with the same towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet,and Mrs. Beaufort with the same diamond earrings and the same smile--and whether suitable proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world.
After that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar countenances in the first rows;the women's sharp with curiosity and excitement,the men's sulky with the obligation of having to put on their frock-coats before luncheon,and fight for food at the wedding-breakfast.
"Too bad the breakfast is at old Catherine's," the bridegroom could fancy Reggie Chivers saying."But I'm told that Lovell Mingott insisted on its being cooked by his own chef,so it ought to be good if one can only get at it." And he could imagine Sillerton Jackson adding with authority: "My dear fellow, haven't you heard?It's to be served at small tables, in the new English fashion."
Archer's eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother,who had entered the church on Mr. Henry van der Luyden's arm,sat weeping softly under her Chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother's ermine muff.
"Poor Janey!" he thought, looking at his sister, "even by screwing her head around she can see only the people in the few front pews;and they're mostly dowdy Newlands and Dagonets."
On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved for the families he saw Beaufort,tall and redfaced, scrutinising the women with his arrogant stare. Beside him sat his wife,all silvery chinchilla and violets; and on the far side of the ribbon,Lawrence Lefferts's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the invisible deity of "Good Form" who presided at the ceremony.
Archer wondered how many flaws Lefferts's keen eyes would discover in the ritual of his divinity;then he suddenly recalled that he too had once thought such questions important.The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life,or like the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents should be "shown" had darkened the last hours before the wedding;and it seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown-up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles,and that the matter should have been decided (in the negative) by Mrs. Welland's saying,with indignant tears: "I should as soon turn the reporters loose in my house." Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems,and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.
"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..."
"_There they come!_" breathed the best man excitedly; but the bridegroom knew better.
The cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that Mr.Brown the livery-stable keeper (gowned in black in his intermittent character of sexton) was taking a preliminary survey of the scene before marshalling his forces. The door was softly shut again; then after another interval it swung majestically open, and a murmur ran through the church: "The family!"
Mrs. Welland came first, on the arm of her eldest son. Her large pink face was appropriately solemn,and her plum-coloured satin with pale blue side-panels,and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met with general approval;but before she had settled herself with a stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs.Archer's the spectators were craning their necks to see who was coming after her.Wild rumours had been abroad the day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott,in spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at the ceremony;and the idea was so much in keeping with her sporting character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk up the nave and squeeze into a seat. It was known that she had insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the possibility of taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space between the seat and the front; but the result had been discouraging, and for one anxious day her family had watched her dallying with the plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous Bath chair and sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel.
The idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her relations that they could have covered with gold the ingenious person who suddenly discovered that the chair was too wide to pass between the iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the curbstone. The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child and _put it in the papers_!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her;and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder.The ancestress had had to give in; but her concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding-breakfast should take place under her roof,though (as the Washington Square connection said) with the Wellands' house in easy reach it was hard to have to make a special price with Brown to drive one to the other end of nowhere.
Though all these transactions had been widely reported by the Jacksons a sporting minority still clung to the belief that old Catherine would appear in church,and there was a distinct lowering of the temperature when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law.Mrs. Lovell Mingott had the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress;but once the disappointment occasioned by her mother-in-law's non-appearance had subsided,it was agreed that her black Chantilly over lilac satin, with a bonnet of Parma violets,formed the happiest contrast to Mrs. Welland's blue and plum-colour.Far different was the impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed on Mr.Mingott's arm, in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and floating scarves;and as this last apparition glided into view Archer's heart contracted and stopped beating.
He had taken it for granted that the Marchioness Manson was still in Washington,where she had gone some four weeks previously with her niece, Madame Olenska.It was generally understood that their abrupt departure was due to Madame Olenska's desire to remove her aunt from the baleful eloquence of Dr.Agathon Carver, who had nearly succeeded in enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love;and in the circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for the wedding.For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Medora's fantastic figure,straining to see who came behind her; but the little procession was at an end,for all the lesser members of the family had taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers,gathering themselves together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manœuvre,were already slipping through the side doors into the lobby.
"Newland--I say: _she's here!_" the best man whispered.
Archer roused himself with a start.
A long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating,for the white and rosy procession was in fact half way up the nave, the Bishop,the Rector and two white-winged assistants were hovering about the flower-banked altar,and the first chords of the Spohr symphony were strewing their flower-like notes before the bride.
Archer opened his eyes (but could they really have been shut, as he imagined?), and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task. The music,the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of tulle and orange-blossoms floating nearer and nearer,the sight of Mrs. Archer's face suddenly convulsed with happy sobs,the low benedictory murmur of the Rector's voice,the ordered evolutions of the eight pink bridesmaids and the eight black ushers: all these sights,sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves,so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain.
"My God," he thought, "_have_ I got the ring?"--and once more he went through the bridegroom's convulsive gesture.
Then, in a moment, May was beside him, such radiance streaming from her that it sent a faint warmth through his numbness,and he straightened himself and smiled into her eyes.
"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here," the Rector began ...
The ring was on her hand, the Bishop's benediction had been given,the bridesmaids were a-poise to resume their place in the procession,and the organ was showing preliminary symptoms of breaking out into the Mendelssohn March,without which no newly-wedded couple had ever emerged upon New York.
"Your arm--_I say, give her your arm!_" young Newland nervously hissed; and once more Archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the unknown.What was it that had sent him there, he wondered?Perhaps the glimpse, among the anonymous spectators in the transept,of a dark coil of hair under a hat which, a moment later,revealed itself as belonging to an unknown lady with a long nose,so laughably unlike the person whose image she had evoked that he asked himself if he were becoming subject to hallucinations.
And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave,carried forward on the light Mendelssohn ripples,the spring day beckoning to them through widely opened doors, and Mrs. Welland's chestnuts,with big white favours on their frontlets,curvetting and showing off at the far end of the canvas tunnel.
The footman, who had a still bigger white favour on his lapel, wrapped May's white cloak about her,and Archer jumped into the brougham at her side.She turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands clasped under her veil.
"Darling!" Archer said--and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before him and he felt himself sinking into it,deeper and deeper, while his voice rambled on smoothly and cheerfully: "Yes,of course I thought I'd lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a bridegroom didn't go through that.But you _did_ keep me waiting, you know!I had time to think of every horror that might possibly happen."
She surprised him by turning, in full Fifth Avenue, and flinging her arms about his neck."But none ever can__ happen now, can it, Newland, as long as we two are together?"
Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the young couple,after the wedding-breakfast, had ample time to put on their travelling-clothes,descend the wide Mingott stairs between laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents,and get into the brougham under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers;and there was still half an hour left in which to drive to the station,buy the last weeklies at the bookstall with the air of seasoned travellers,and settle themselves in the reserved compartment in which May's maid had already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new dressing-bag from London.
The old du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal of the bridal couple,with a readiness inspired by the prospect of spending a week in New York with Mrs. Archer;and Archer, glad to escape the usual "bridal suite" in a Philadelphia or Baltimore hotel, had accepted with an equal alacrity.
May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country,and childishly amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where their mysterious retreat was situated.It was thought "very English" to have a country-house lent to one,and the fact gave a last touch of distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most brilliant wedding of the year;but where the house was no one was permitted to know, except the parents of bride and groom, who,when taxed with the knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously: "Ah,they didn't tell us--" which was manifestly true, since there was no need to.
Once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off the endless wooden suburbs,had pushed out into the pale landscape of spring, talk became easier than Archer had expected.May was still, in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday,eager to compare notes with him as to the incidents of the wedding,and discussing them as impartially as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher.At first Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an inward tremor;but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil unawareness.She was alone for the first time with her husband;but her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday.There was no one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely,and the culminating"lark" of the whole delightful adventure of engagement and marriage was to be off with him alone on a journey,like a grownup person, like a"married woman," in fact.
It was wonderful that--as he had learned in the Mission garden at St.Augustine--such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of imagination.But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience had been eased of its burden;and he saw that she would probably go through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came,but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance.
Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency,and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person;as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess.The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element;yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull,but only primitive and pure. In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger,and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-breakfast and of Granny Mingott's immense and triumphant pervasion of it.
May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject. "I was surprised, though--weren't you?--that aunt Medora came after all. Ellen wrote that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey;I do wish it had been she who had recovered!Did you see the exquisite old lace she sent me?"