"At the Tuileries," he repeated, seeing the eyes of the company expectantly turned on him,"the standard was excessively lax in some respects;and if you'd asked where Morny's money came from--!Or who paid the debts of some of the Court beauties ..."
"I hope, dear Sillerton," said Mrs. Archer,"you are not suggesting that we should adopt such standards?"
"I never suggest," returned Mr. Jackson imperturbably."But Madame Olenska's foreign bringing-up may make her less particular--"
"Ah," the two elder ladies sighed.
"Still, to have kept her grandmother's carriage at a defaulter's door!" Mr. van der Luyden protested; and Archer guessed that he was remembering, and resenting,the hampers of carnations he had sent to the little house in Twenty-third Street.
"Of course I've always said that she looks at things quite differently," Mrs. Archer summed up.
A flush rose to May's forehead. She looked across the table at her husband, and said precipitately: "I'm sure Ellen meant it kindly."
"Imprudent people are often kind," said Mrs. Archer, as if the fact were scarcely an extenuation;and Mrs. van der Luyden murmured: "If only she had consulted some one--"
"Ah, that she never did!" Mrs. Archer rejoined.
At this point Mr. van der Luyden glanced at his wife,who bent her head slightly in the direction of Mrs. Archer;and the glimmering trains of the three ladies swept out of the door while the gentlemen settled down to their cigars.Mr. van der Luyden supplied short ones on Opera nights;but they were so good that they made his guests deplore his inexorable punctuality.
Archer, after the first act, had detached himself from the party and made his way to the back of the club box.From there he watched, over various Chivers, Mingott and Rushworth shoulders,the same scene that he had looked at, two years previously,on the night of his first meeting with Ellen Olenska.He had half-expected her to appear again in old Mrs. Mingott's box, but it remained empty;and he sat motionless, his eyes fastened on it,till suddenly Madame Nilsson's pure soprano broke out into "_M'ama, non m'ama ..._"
Archer turned to the stage, where, in the familiar setting of giant roses and pen-wiper pansies,the same large blonde victim was succumbing to the same small brown seducer.
From the stage his eyes wandered to the point of the horseshoe where May sat between two older ladies,just as, on that former evening, she had sat between Mrs.Lovell Mingott and her newly-arrived "foreign" cousin. As on that evening, she was all in white;and Archer, who had not noticed what she wore,recognised the blue-white satin and old lace of her wedding dress.
It was the custom, in old New York, for brides to appear in this costly garment during the first year or two of marriage:his mother, he knew, kept hers in tissue paper in the hope that Janey might some day wear it,though poor Janey was reaching the age when pearl grey poplin and no bridesmaids would be thought more "appropriate. "
It struck Archer that May, since their return from Europe, had seldom worn her bridal satin,and the surprise of seeing her in it made him compare her appearance with that of the young girl he had watched with such blissful anticipations two years earlier.
Though May's outline was slightly heavier, as her goddesslike build had foretold,her athletic erectness of carriage, and the girlish transparency of her expression,remained unchanged: but for the slight languor that Archer had lately noticed in her she would have been the exact image of the girl playing with the bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her betrothal evening. The fact seemed an additional appeal to his pity: such innocence was as moving as the trustful clasp of a child. Then he remembered the passionate generosity latent under that incurious calm. He recalled her glance of understanding when he had urged that their engagement should be announced at the Beaufort ball; he heard the voice in which she had said, in the Mission garden: "I couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--a wrong to some one else;" and an uncontrollable longing seized him to tell her the truth, to throw himself on her generosity, and ask for the freedom he had once refused.
Newland Archer was a quiet and self-controlled young man.Conformity to the discipline of a small society had become almost his second nature.It was deeply distasteful to him to do anything melodramatic and conspicuous, anything Mr.van der Luyden would have deprecated and the club box condemned as bad form.But he had become suddenly unconscious of the club box, of Mr. van der Luyden,of all that had so long enclosed him in the warm shelter of habit.He walked along the semi-circular passage at the back of the house, and opened the door of Mrs.van der Luyden's box as if it had been a gate into the unknown.
"_M'ama_!" thrilled out the triumphant Marguerite;and the occupants of the box looked up in surprise at Archer's entrance.He had already broken one of the rules of his world,which forbade the entering of a box during a solo.
Slipping between Mr. van der Luyden and Sillerton Jackson, he leaned over his wife.
"I've got a beastly headache; don't tell any one, but come home, won't you?" he whispered.
May gave him a glance of comprehension, and he saw her whisper to his mother,who nodded sympathetically; then she murmured an excuse to Mrs. van der Luyden,and rose from her seat just as Marguerite fell into Faust's arms. Archer,while he helped her on with her Opera cloak,noticed the exchange of a significant smile between the older ladies.
As they drove away May laid her hand shyly on his. "I'm so sorry you don't feel well.I'm afraid they've been overworking you again at the office."
"No--it's not that: do you mind if I open the window?" he returned confusedly, letting down the pane on his side. He sat staring out into the street,feeling his wife beside him as a silent watchful interrogation,and keeping his eyes steadily fixed on the passing houses.At their door she caught her skirt in the step of the carriage, and fell against him.
"Did you hurt yourself?" he asked, steadying her with his arm.
"No; but my poor dress--see how I've torn it!" she exclaimed. She bent to gather up a mud-stained breadth,and followed him up the steps into the hall. The servants had not expected them so early,and there was only a glimmer of gas on the upper landing.
Archer mounted the stairs, turned up the light,and put a match to the brackets on each side of the library mantelpiece. The curtains were drawn,and the warm friendly aspect of the room smote him like that of a familiar face met during an unavowable errand.
He noticed that his wife was very pale, and asked if he should get her some brandy.
"Oh, no," she exclaimed with a momentary flush, as she took off her cloak."But hadn't you better go to bed at once?" she added, as he opened a silver box on the table and took out a cigarette.
Archer threw down the cigarette and walked to his usual place by the fire.
"No; my head is not as bad as that." He paused. "And there's something I want to say;something important--that I must tell you at once."
She had dropped into an armchair, and raised her head as he spoke."Yes, dear?" she rejoined, so gently that he wondered at the lack of wonder with which she received this preamble.
"May--" he began, standing a few feet from her chair,and looking over at her as if the slight distance between them were an unbridgeable abyss.The sound of his voice echoed uncannily through the homelike hush, and he repeated:"There is something I've got to tell you ... about myself ..."
She sat silent, without a movement or a tremor of her lashes. She was still extremely pale,but her face had a curious tranquillity of expression that seemed drawn from some secret inner source.
Archer checked the conventional phrases of self-accusal that were crowding to his lips.He was determined to put the case baldly, without vain recrimination or excuse.
"Madame Olenska--" he said; but at the name his wife raised her hand as if to silence him.As she did so the gaslight struck on the gold of her wedding-ring.
"Oh, why should we talk about Ellen tonight?" she asked, with a slight pout of impatience.
"Because I ought to have spoken before."
Her face remained calm. "Is it really worth while, dear?I know I've been unfair to her at times--perhaps we all have. You've understood her, no doubt,better than we did: you've always been kind to her. But what does it matter, now it's all over?"
Archer looked at her blankly. Could it be possible that the sense of unreality in which he felt himself imprisoned had communicated itself to his wife?
"All over--what do you mean?" he asked in an indistinct stammer.
May still looked at him with transparent eyes. "Why--since she's going back to Europe so soon;since Granny approves and understands, and has arranged to make her independent of her husband--"
She broke off, and Archer, grasping the corner of the mantelpiece in one convulsed hand,and steadying himself against it, made a vain effort to extend the same control to his reeling thoughts.
"I supposed," he heard his wife's even voice go on,"that you had been kept at the office this evening about the business arrangements.It was settled this morning, I believe." She lowered her eyes under his unseeing stare,and another fugitive flush passed over her face.
He understood that his own eyes must be unbearable, and turning away,rested his elbows on the mantel-shelf and covered his face.Something drummed and clanged furiously in his ears;he could not tell if it were the blood in his veins, or the tick of the clock on the mantel.
May sat without moving or speaking while the clock slowly measured out five minutes.A lump of coal fell forward in the grate, and hearing her rise to push it back, Archer at length turned and faced her.
"It's impossible," he exclaimed.
"Impossible--?"
"How do you know--what you've just told me?"
"I saw Ellen yesterday--I told you I'd seen her at Granny's."
"It wasn't then that she told you?"
"No; I had a note from her this afternoon.--Do you want to see it?"
He could not find his voice, and she went out of the room, and came back almost immediately.
"I thought you knew," she said simply.
She laid a sheet of paper on the table, and Archer put out his hand and took it up. The letter contained only a few lines.
"May dear, I have at last made Granny understand that my visit to her could be no more than a visit;and she has been as kind and generous as ever.She sees now that if I return to Europe I must live by myself, or rather with poor Aunt Medora,who is coming with me. I am hurrying back to Washington to pack up, and we sail next week.You must be very good to Granny when I'm gone--as good as you've always been to me. Ellen.
"If any of my friends wish to urge me to change my mind,please tell them it would be utterly useless."
Archer read the letter over two or three times; then he flung it down and burst out laughing.
The sound of his laugh startled him. It recalled Janey's midnight fright when she had caught him rocking with incomprehensible mirth over May's telegram announcing that the date of their marriage had been advanced.
"Why did she write this?" he asked, checking his laugh with a supreme effort.
May met the question with her unshaken candour."I suppose because we talked things over yesterday--"
"What things?"
"I told her I was afraid I hadn't been fair to her--hadn't always understood how hard it must have been for her here,alone among so many people who were relations and yet strangers; who felt the right to criticise,and yet didn't always know the circumstances." She paused."I knew you'd been the one friend she could always count on;and I wanted her to know that you and I were the same--in all our feelings."
She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and then added slowly:"She understood my wishing to tell her this. I think she understands everything."
She went up to Archer, and taking one of his cold hands pressed it quickly against her cheek.
"My head aches too; good-night, dear," she said, and turned to the door,her torn and muddy wedding-dress dragging after her across the room.
XXXIII.
It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland,a great event for a young couple to give their first big dinner.
The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household,had received a good deal of company in an informal way.Archer was fond of having three or four friends to dine,and May welcomed them with the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in conjugal affairs.Her husband questioned whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked any one to the house;but he had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had moulded her.It was expected that well-off young couples in New York should do a good deal of informal entertaining,and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to the tradition.
But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with Roman punch,roses from Henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair,and not to be lightly undertaken. As Mrs. Archer remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference;not in itself but by its manifold implications--since it signified either canvas-backs or terrapin,two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full decolletage with short sleeves,and guests of a proportionate importance.
It was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their first invitations in the third person,and their summons was seldom refused even by the seasoned and sought-after. Still,it was admittedly a triumph that the van der Luydens, at May's request,should have stayed over in order to be present at her farewell dinner for the Countess Olenska.
The two mothers-in-law sat in May's drawing-room on the afternoon of the great day, Mrs.Archer writing out the menus on Tiffany's thickest gilt-edged bristol, while Mrs.Welland superintended the placing of the palms and standard lamps.
Archer, arriving late from his office, found them still there. Mrs.Archer had turned her attention to the name-cards for the table, and Mrs.Welland was considering the effect of bringing forward the large gilt sofa,so that another "corner" might be created between the piano and the window.
May, they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting the mound of Jacqueminot roses and maidenhair in the centre of the long table,and the placing of the Maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between the candelabra.On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which Mr.van der Luyden had had sent from Skuytercliff. Everything was, in short,as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event.
Mrs. Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with her sharp gold pen.
"Henry van der Luyden--Louisa--the Lovell Mingotts--the Reggie Chiverses--Lawrence Lefferts and Gertrude--(yes,I suppose May was right to have them)--the Selfridge Merrys, Sillerton Jackson,Van Newland and his wife. (How time passes!It seems only yesterday that he was your best man, Newland)--and Countess Olenska--yes, I think that's all...."
Mrs. Welland surveyed her son-in-law affectionately. "No one can say, Newland,that you and May are not giving Ellen a handsome send-off."
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Archer, "I understand May's wanting her cousin to tell people abroad that we're not quite barbarians. "
"I'm sure Ellen will appreciate it. She was to arrive this morning, I believe.It will make a most charming last impression. The evening before sailing is usually so dreary, " Mrs. Welland cheerfully continued.
Archer turned toward the door, and his mother-in-law called to him:"Do go in and have a peep at the table. And don't let May tire herself too much." But he affected not to hear, and sprang up the stairs to his library.The room looked at him like an alien countenance composed into a polite grimace;and he perceived that it had been ruthlessly"tidied," and prepared,by a judicious distribution of ash-trays and cedar-wood boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in.
"Ah, well," he thought, "it's not for long--" and he went on to his dressing-room.
Ten days had passed since Madame Olenska's departure from New York.During those ten days Archer had had no sign from her but that conveyed by the return of a key wrapped in tissue paper,and sent to his office in a sealed envelope addressed in her hand.This retort to his last appeal might have been interpreted as a classic move in a familiar game;but the young man chose to give it a different meaning. She was still fighting against her fate;but she was going to Europe, and she was not returning to her husband. Nothing, therefore,was to prevent his following her; and once he had taken the irrevocable step,and had proved to her that it was irrevocable, he believed she would not send him away.
This confidence in the future had steadied him to play his part in the present.It had kept him from writing to her, or betraying, by any sign or act,his misery and mortification. It seemed to him that in the deadly silent game between them the trumps were still in his hands; and he waited.
There had been, nevertheless, moments sufficiently difficult to pass; as when Mr. Letterblair,the day after Madame Olenska's departure,had sent for him to go over the details of the trust which Mrs.Manson Mingott wished to create for her granddaughter.For a couple of hours Archer had examined the terms of the deed with his senior,all the while obscurely feeling that if he had been consulted it was for some reason other than the obvious one of his cousinship;and that the close of the conference would reveal it.
"Well, the lady can't deny that it's a handsome arrangement," Mr. Letterblair had summed up,after mumbling over a summary of the settlement."In fact I'm bound to say she's been treated pretty handsomely all round."
"All round?" Archer echoed with a touch of derision."Do you refer to her husband's proposal to give her back her own money?"
Mr. Letterblair's bushy eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "My dear sir, the law's the law;and your wife's cousin was married under the French law.It's to be presumed she knew what that meant."
"Even if she did, what happened subsequently--." But Archer paused. Mr.Letterblair had laid his pen-handle against his big corrugated nose,and was looking down it with the expression assumed by virtuous elderly gentlemen when they wish their youngers to understand that virtue is not synonymous with ignorance.
"My dear sir, I've no wish to extenuate the Count's transgressions; but--but on the other side ...I wouldn't put my hand in the fire... well, that there hadn't been tit for tat ...with the young champion...." Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and pushed a folded paper toward Archer."This report, the result of discreet enquiries..." And then,as Archer made no effort to glance at the paper or to repudiate the suggestion,the lawyer somewhat flatly continued: "I don't say it's conclusive, you observe; far from it.But straws show... and on the whole it's eminently satisfactory for all parties that this dignified solution has been reached. "
"Oh, eminently," Archer assented, pushing back the paper.
A day or two later, on responding to a summons from Mrs. Manson Mingott, his soul had been more deeply tried.
He had found the old lady depressed and querulous.
"You know she's deserted me?" she began at once; and without waiting for his reply: "Oh, don't ask me why!She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.My private belief is that she couldn't face the boredom.At any rate that's what Augusta and my daughters-in-law think.And I don't know that I altogether blame her. Olenski's a finished scoundrel;but life with him must have been a good deal gayer than it is in Fifth Avenue.Not that the family would admit that: they think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de la Paix thrown in.And poor Ellen, of course, has no idea of going back to her husband.She held out as firmly as ever against that.So she's to settle down in Paris with that fool Medora.... Well, Paris is Paris;and you can keep a carriage there on next to nothing. But she was as gay as a bird,and I shall miss her." Two tears, the parched tears of the old,rolled down her puffy cheeks and vanished in the abysses of her bosom.
"All I ask is," she concluded, "that they shouldn't bother me any more.I must really be allowed to digest my gruel...." And she twinkled a little wistfully at Archer.
It was that evening, on his return home,that May announced her intention of giving a farewell dinner to her cousin.Madame Olenska's name had not been pronounced between them since the night of her flight to Washington;and Archer looked at his wife with surprise.
"A dinner--why?" he interrogated.
Her colour rose. "But you like Ellen--I thought you'd be pleased."
"It's awfully nice--your putting it in that way. But I really don't see--"
"I mean to do it, Newland," she said, quietly rising and going to her desk."Here are the invitations all written. Mother helped me--she agrees that we ought to." She paused,embarrassed and yet smiling, and Archer suddenly saw before him the embodied image of the Family.
"Oh, all right," he said, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of guests that she had put in his hand.
When he entered the drawing-room before dinner May was stooping over the fire and trying to coax the logs to burn in their unaccustomed setting of immaculate tiles.
The tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden's orchids had been conspicuously disposed in various receptacles of modern porcelain and knobby silver.Mrs. Newland Archer's drawing-room was generally thought a great success.A gilt bamboo _jardinière_, in which the primulas and cinerarias were punctually renewed,blocked the access to the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction of the Venus of Milo);the sofas and arm-chairs of pale brocade were cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys,porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames;and tall rosy-shaded lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.
"I don't think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted up," said May,rising flushed from her struggle, and sending about her a glance of pardonable pride.The brass tongs which she had propped against the side of the chimney fell with a crash that drowned her husband's answer;and before he could restore them Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden were announced.
The other guests quickly followed, for it was known that the van der Luydens liked to dine punctually.The room was nearly full, and Archer was engaged in showing to Mrs.Selfridge Merry a small highly-varnished Verbeckhoven "Study of Sheep," which Mr.Welland had given May for Christmas, when he found Madame Olenska at his side.
She was excessively pale, and her pallor made her dark hair seem denser and heavier than ever.Perhaps that, or the fact that she had wound several rows of amber beads about her neck,reminded him suddenly of the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at children's parties,when Medora Manson had first brought her to New York.
The amber beads were trying to her complexion, or her dress was perhaps unbecoming:her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never loved it as he did at that minute.Their hands met, and he thought he heard her say: "Yes, we're sailing tomorrow in the Russia--";then there was an unmeaning noise of opening doors, and after an interval May's voice: "Newland!Dinner's been announced. Won't you please take Ellen in?"
Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand was ungloved,and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street drawing-room.All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on his sleeve,and he said to himself: "If it were only to see her hand again I should have to follow her--."
It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign visitor" that Mrs.van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being placed on her host's left.The fact of Madame Olenska's "foreignness" could hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by this farewell tribute;and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted her displacement with an affability which left no doubt as to her approval.There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly;and one of these, in the old New York code,was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval. Mrs. van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from his seat at May's right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify all the carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.
Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability,as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling,wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings.As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.
It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood":the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage,and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed camp.He looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which,over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife. "It's to show me," he thought, "what would happen to _me_--" and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action,and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.
He laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden's startled eyes.
"You think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile. "Of course poor Regina's idea of remaining in New York has its ridiculous side,I suppose;" and Archer muttered: "Of course."
At this point, he became conscious that Madame Olenska's other neighbour had been engaged for some time with the lady on his right.At the same moment he saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van der Luyden and Mr.Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick glance down the table.It was evident that the host and the lady on his right could not sit through the whole meal in silence.He turned to Madame Olenska, and her pale smile met him. "Oh, do let's see it through, " it seemed to say.
"Did you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised him by its naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary,she had seldom travelled with fewer discomforts.
"Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train," she added;and he remarked that she would not suffer from that particular hardship in the country she was going to.
"I never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than once, in April, in the train between Calais and Paris."
She said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could always carry an extra rug,and that every form of travel had its hardships;to which he abruptly returned that he thought them all of no account compared with the blessedness of getting away.She changed colour, and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch:"I mean to do a lot of travelling myself before long." A tremor crossed her face,and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out: "I say, Reggie,what do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, I mean?I'm game if you are--" at which Mrs. Reggie piped up that she could not think of letting Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week; and her husband placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for the International Polo match.