Mr. Jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible Madeira. "Mrs.Beaufort may not--but Beaufort certainly does,for she was seen walking up Fifth Avenue this afternoon with him by the whole of New York."
"Mercy--" moaned Mrs. Archer, evidently perceiving the uselessness of trying to ascribe the actions of foreigners to a sense of delicacy.
"I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon," Janey speculated."At the Opera I know she had on dark blue velvet, perfectly plain and flat--like a night-gown."
"Janey!" said her mother; and Miss Archer blushed and tried to look audacious.
"It was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the ball," Mrs. Archer continued.
A spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoin: "I don't think it was a question of taste with her.May said she meant to go, and then decided that the dress in question wasn't smart enough."
Mrs. Archer smiled at this confirmation of her inference. "Poor Ellen," she simply remarked;adding compassionately: "We must always bear in mind what an eccentric bringing-up Medora Manson gave her.What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?"
"Ah--don't I remember her in it!" said Mr. Jackson; adding: "Poor girl!" in the tone of one who, while enjoying the memory,had fully understood at the time what the sight portended.
"It's odd," Janey remarked, "that she should have kept such an ugly name as Ellen.I should have changed it to Elaine." She glanced about the table to see the effect of this.
Her brother laughed. "Why Elaine?"
"I don't know; it sounds more--more Polish," said Janey, blushing.
"It sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be what she wishes," said Mrs. Archer distantly.
"Why not?" broke in her son, growing suddenly argumentative."Why shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses?Why should she slink about as if it were she who had disgraced herself?She's 'poor Ellen' certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage;but I don't see that that's a reason for hiding her head as if she were the culprit."
"That, I suppose," said Mr. Jackson, speculatively, "is the line the Mingotts mean to take."
The young man reddened. "I didn't have to wait for their cue, if that's what you mean, sir.Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life: that doesn't make her an outcast."
"There are rumours," began Mr. Jackson, glancing at Janey.
"Oh, I know: the secretary," the young man took him up. "Nonsense, mother; Janey's grown-up.They say, don't they," he went on, "that the secretary helped her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept her practically a prisoner?Well, what if he did?I hope there isn't a man among us who wouldn't have done the same in such a case."
Mr. Jackson glanced over his shoulder to say to the sad butler:"Perhaps ... that sauce ...just a little, after all--"; then, having helped himself, he remarked:"I'm told she's looking for a house. She means to live here."
"I hear she means to get a divorce," said Janey boldly.
"I hope she will!" Archer exclaimed.
The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining-room.Mrs. Archer raised her delicate eye-brows in the particular curve that signified:"The butler--" and the young man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such intimate matters in public,hastily branched off into an account of his visit to old Mrs. Mingott.
After dinner, according to immemorial custom, Mrs.Archer and Janey trailed their long silk draperies up to the drawing-room, where,while the gentlemen smoked below stairs, they sat beside a Carcel lamp with an engraved globe,facing each other across a rosewood work-table with a green silk bag under it,and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry band of field-flowers destined to adorn an "occasional" chair in the drawing-room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.
While this rite was in progress in the drawing-room, Archer settled Mr.Jackson in an armchair near the fire in the Gothic library and handed him a cigar. Mr.Jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction,lit his cigar with perfect confidence (it was Newland who bought them),and stretching his thin old ankles to the coals, said:"You say the secretary merely helped her to get away, my dear fellow?Well, he was still helping her a year later, then; for somebody met 'em living at Lausanne together. "
Newland reddened. "Living together?Well, why not?Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn't?I'm sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots. "
He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. "Women ought to be free--as free as we are," he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
Mr. Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted a sardonic whistle.
"Well," he said after a pause, "apparently Count Olenski takes your view;for I never heard of his having lifted a finger to get his wife back."
VI.
That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away,and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom,Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual,kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books,its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures,looked singularly home-like and welcoming.
As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a large photograph of May Welland,which the young girl had given him in the first days of their romance,and which had now displaced all the other portraits on the table.With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead,serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul's custodian he was to be.That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in,the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything,looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features;and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind.His own exclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent."Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant,and generous-minded men like himself were therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them.Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that, on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her all the thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was purely hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he _were_. But Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable. What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them,they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other?He reviewed his friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that answered,even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland.He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility,the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess;and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were:a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.Lawrence Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most completely realised this enviable ideal.As became the high-priest of form, he had formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that,in the most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men's wives,she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "Lawrence was so frightfully strict";and had been known to blush indignantly, and avert her gaze,when some one alluded in her presence to the fact that Julius Beaufort (as became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) had what was known in New York as "another establishment."
Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts,nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude;but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards.In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world,where the real thing was never said or done or even thought,but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland,who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no less),yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having had her hand forced, quite as,in the books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning to read,the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.
The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the facts of life."
The young man was sincerely but placidly in love.He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship,her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance.(She had advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was 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 shadow of a smile,made the almost invariable reply: "I shall first have to talk this over with my husband."
She and Mr. van der Luyden were so exactly alike that Archer often wondered how,after forty years of the closest conjugality,two such merged identities ever separated themselves enough for anything as controversial as a talking-over.But as neither had ever reached a decision without prefacing it by this mysterious conclave, Mrs.Archer and her son, having set forth their case, waited resignedly for the familiar phrase.
Mrs. van der Luyden, however, who had seldom surprised any one,now surprised them by reaching her long hand toward the bell-rope.
"I think," she said, "I should like Henry to hear what you have told me."
A footman appeared, to whom she gravely added: "If Mr.van der Luyden has finished reading the newspaper, please ask him to be kind enough to come."
She said "reading the newspaper" in the tone in which a Minister's wife might have said:"Presiding at a Cabinet meeting"--not from any arrogance of mind,but because the habit of a life-time, and the attitude of her friends and relations,had led her to consider Mr. van der Luyden's least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.
Her promptness of action showed that she considered the case as pressing as Mrs. Archer; but,lest she should be thought to have committed herself in advance, she added, with the sweetest look:"Henry always enjoys seeing you, dear Adeline; and he will wish to congratulate Newland."
The double doors had solemnly reopened and between them appeared Mr. Henry van der Luyden, tall,spare and frock-coated, with faded fair hair,a straight nose like his wife's and the same look of frozen gentleness in eyes that were merely pale grey instead of pale blue.
Mr. van der Luyden greeted Mrs. Archer with cousinly affability,proffered to Newland low-voiced congratulations couched in the same language as his wife's,and seated himself in one of the brocade armchairs with the simplicity of a reigning sovereign.
"I had just finished reading the Times," he said, laying his long finger-tips together."In town my mornings are so much occupied that I find it more convenient to read the newspapers after luncheon. "
"Ah, there's a great deal to be said for that plan--indeed I think my uncle Egmont used to say he found it less agitating not to read the morning papers till after dinner," said Mrs. Archer responsively.
"Yes: my good father abhorred hurry. But now we live in a constant rush," said Mr.van der Luyden in measured tones, looking with pleasant deliberation about the large shrouded room which to Archer was so complete an image of its owners.
"But I hope you _had_ finished your reading, Henry?" his wife interposed.
"Quite--quite," he reassured her.
"Then I should like Adeline to tell you--"
"Oh, it's really Newland's story," said his mother smiling;and proceeded to rehearse once more the monstrous tale of the affront inflicted on Mrs. Lovell Mingott.
"Of course," she ended, "Augusta Welland and Mary Mingott both felt that,especially in view of Newland's engagement, you and Henry _ought to know_."
"Ah--" said Mr. van der Luyden, drawing a deep breath.
There was a silence during which the tick of the monumental ormolu clock on the white marble mantelpiece grew as loud as the boom of a minute-gun.Archer contemplated with awe the two slender faded figures,seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity,mouthpieces of some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled them to wield,when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity and seclusion,digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of Skuytercliff,and playing Patience together in the evenings.
Mr. van der Luyden was the first to speak.
"You really think this is due to some--some intentional interference of Lawrence Lefferts's?" he enquired, turning to Archer.
"I'm certain of it, sir. Larry has been going it rather harder than usual lately--if cousin Louisa won't mind my mentioning it--having rather a stiff affair with the postmaster's wife in their village, or some one of that sort; and whenever poor Gertrude Lefferts begins to suspect anything, and he's afraid of trouble, he gets up a fuss of this kind, to show how awfully moral he is, and talks at the top of his voice about the impertinence of inviting his wife to meet people he doesn't wish her to know. He's simply using Madame Olenska as a lightning-rod; I've seen him try the same thing often before."
"The _Leffertses_!--" said Mrs. van der Luyden.
"The _Leffertses_!--" echoed Mrs. Archer. "What would uncle Egmont have said of Lawrence Lefferts's pronouncing on anybody's social position?It shows what Society has come to."
"We'll hope it has not quite come to that," said Mr. van der Luyden firmly.
"Ah, if only you and Louisa went out more!" sighed Mrs. Archer.
But instantly she became aware of her mistake.The van der Luydens were morbidly sensitive to any criticism of their secluded existence.They were the arbiters of fashion, the Court of last Appeal, and they knew it,and bowed to their fate. But being shy and retiring persons,with no natural inclination for their part,they lived as much as possible in the sylvan solitude of Skuytercliff, and when they came to town,declined all invitations on the plea of Mrs. van der Luyden's health.
Newland Archer came to his mother's rescue."Everybody in New York knows what you and cousin Louisa represent. That's why Mrs.Mingott felt she ought not to allow this slight on Countess Olenska to pass without consulting you. "
Mrs. van der Luyden glanced at her husband, who glanced back at her.
"It is the principle that I dislike," said Mr. van der Luyden."As long as a member of a well-known family is backed up by that family it should be considered--final. "
"It seems so to me," said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.
"I had no idea," Mr. van der Luyden continued, "that things had come to such a pass." He paused,and looked at his wife again. "It occurs to me, my dear,that the Countess Olenska is already a sort of relation--through Medora Manson's first husband.At any rate, she will be when Newland marries." He turned toward the young man."Have you read this morning's Times, Newland?"
"Why, yes, sir," said Archer, who usually tossed off half a dozen papers with his morning coffee.
Husband and wife looked at each other again.Their pale eyes clung together in prolonged and serious consultation;then a faint smile fluttered over Mrs. van der Luyden's face. She had evidently guessed and approved.