Mr. van der Luyden turned to Mrs. Archer."If Louisa's health allowed her to dine out--I wish you would say to Mrs.Lovell Mingott--she and I would have been happy to--er--fill the places of the Lawrence Leffertses at her dinner." He paused to let the irony of this sink in."As you know, this is impossible." Mrs.Archer sounded a sympathetic assent. "But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times;therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative, the Duke of St. Austrey,arrives next week on the Russia. He is coming to enter his new sloop, the Guinevere,in next summer's International Cup Race; and also to have a little canvasback shooting at Trevenna." Mr. van der Luyden paused again, and continued with increasing benevolence:"Before taking him down to Maryland we are inviting a few friends to meet him here--only a little dinner--with a reception afterward.I am sure Louisa will be as glad as I am if Countess Olenska will let us include her among our guests." He got up, bent his long body with a stiff friendliness toward his cousin, and added:"I think I have Louisa's authority for saying that she will herself leave the invitation to dine when she drives out presently:with our cards--of course with our cards."
Mrs. Archer, who knew this to be a hint that the seventeen-hand chestnuts which were never kept waiting were at the door,rose with a hurried murmur of thanks. Mrs.van der Luyden beamed on her with the smile of Esther interceding with Ahasuerus;but her husband raised a protesting hand.
"There is nothing to thank me for, dear Adeline; nothing whatever.This kind of thing must not happen in New York; it shall not, as long as I can help it," he pronounced with sovereign gentleness as he steered his cousins to the door.
Two hours later, every one knew that the great C-spring barouche in which Mrs.van der Luyden took the air at all seasons had been seen at old Mrs. Mingott's door,where a large square envelope was handed in; and that evening at the Opera Mr.Sillerton Jackson was able to state that the envelope contained a card inviting the Countess Olenska to the dinner which the van der Luydens were giving the following week for their cousin, the Duke of St. Austrey.
Some of the younger men in the club box exchanged a smile at this announcement,and glanced sideways at Lawrence Lefferts, who sat carelessly in the front of the box,pulling his long fair moustache, and who remarked with authority, as the soprano paused:"No one but Patti ought to attempt the Sonnambula."
VIII.
It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had "lost her looks."
She had appeared there first, in Newland Archer's boyhood,as a brilliantly pretty little girl of nine or ten,of whom people said that she "ought to be painted." Her parents had been continental wanderers,and after a roaming babyhood she had lost them both, and been taken in charge by her aunt,Medora Manson, also a wanderer, who was herself returning to New York to "settle down."
Poor Medora, repeatedly widowed, was always coming home to settle down (each time in a less expensive house),and bringing with her a new husband or an adopted child;but after a few months she invariably parted from her husband or quarrelled with her ward, and,having got rid of her house at a loss, set out again on her wanderings.As her mother had been a Rushworth, and her last unhappy marriage had linked her to one of the crazy Chiverses,New York looked indulgently on her eccentricities;but when she returned with her little orphaned niece,whose parents had been popular in spite of their regrettable taste for travel,people thought it a pity that the pretty child should be in such hands.
Every one was disposed to be kind to little Ellen Mingott,though her dusky red cheeks and tight curls gave her an air of gaiety that seemed unsuitable in a child who should still have been in black for her parents.It was one of the misguided Medora's many peculiarities to flout the unalterable rules that regulated American mourning,and when she stepped from the steamer her family were scandalised to see that the crape veil she wore for her own brother was seven inches shorter than those of her sisters-in-law, while little Ellen was in crimson merino and amber beads, like a gipsy foundling.
But New York had so long resigned itself to Medora that only a few old ladies shook their heads over Ellen's gaudy clothes,while her other relations fell under the charm of her high colour and high spirits.She was a fearless and familiar little thing, who asked disconcerting questions,made precocious comments, and possessed outlandish arts,such as dancing a Spanish shawl dance and singing Neapolitan love-songs to a guitar.Under the direction of her aunt (whose real name was Mrs. Thorley Chivers, but who,having received a Papal title, had resumed her first husband's patronymic,and called herself the Marchioness Manson,because in Italy she could turn it into Manzoni) the little girl received an expensive but incoherent education,which included"drawing from the model," a thing never dreamed of before,and playing the piano in quintets with professional musicians.
Of course no good could come of this; and when, a few years later,poor Chivers finally died in a madhouse,his widow (draped in strange weeds) again pulled up stakes and departed with Ellen,who had grown into a tall bony girl with conspicuous eyes. For some time no more was heard of them;then news came of Ellen's marriage to an immensely rich Polish nobleman of legendary fame,whom she had met at a ball at the Tuileries,and who was said to have princely establishments in Paris, Nice and Florence, a yacht at Cowes,and many square miles of shooting in Transylvania.She disappeared in a kind of sulphurous apotheosis,and when a few years later Medora again came back to New York, subdued, impoverished,mourning a third husband, and in quest of a still smaller house,people wondered that her rich niece had not been able to do something for her.Then came the news that Ellen's own marriage had ended in disaster,and that she was herself returning home to seek rest and oblivion among her kinsfolk.
These things passed through Newland Archer's mind a week later as he watched the Countess Olenska enter the van der Luyden drawing-room on the evening of the momentous dinner. The occasion was a solemn one, and he wondered a little nervously how she would carry it off. She came rather late, one hand still ungloved, and fastening a bracelet about her wrist; yet she entered without any appearance of haste or embarrassment the drawing-room in which New York's most chosen company was somewhat awfully assembled.
In the middle of the room she paused, looking about her with a grave mouth and smiling eyes;and in that instant Newland Archer rejected the general verdict on her looks.It was true that her early radiance was gone. The red cheeks had paled; she was thin, worn,a little older-looking than her age, which must have been nearly thirty.But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head,the movement of the eyes, which, without being in the least theatrical,struck him as highly trained and full of a conscious power.At the same time she was simpler in manner than most of the ladies present,and many people (as he heard afterward from Janey) were disappointed that her appearance was not more"stylish"--for stylishness was what New York most valued.It was, perhaps, Archer reflected, because her early vivacity had disappeared;because she was so quiet--quiet in her movements, her voice,and the tones of her low-pitched voice.New York had expected something a good deal more resonant in a young woman with such a history.
The dinner was a somewhat formidable business.Dining with the van der Luydens was at best no light matter,and dining there with a Duke who was their cousin was almost a religious solemnity.It pleased Archer to think that only an old New Yorker could perceive the shade of difference (to New York) between being merely a Duke and being the van der Luydens' Duke. New York took stray noblemen calmly, and even (except in the Struthers set) with a certain distrustful hauteur; but when they presented such credentials as these they were received with an old-fashioned cordiality that they would have been greatly mistaken in ascribing solely to their standing in Debrett. It was for just such distinctions that the young man cherished his old New York even while he smiled at it.
The van der Luydens had done their best to emphasise the importance of the occasion.The du Lac Sevres and the Trevenna George II plate were out;so was the van der Luyden "Lowestoft" (East India Company) and the Dagonet Crown Derby. Mrs.van der Luyden looked more than ever like a Cabanel, and Mrs. Archer,in her grandmother's seed-pearls and emeralds, reminded her son of an Isabey miniature.All the ladies had on their handsomest jewels,but it was characteristic of the house and the occasion that these were mostly in rather heavy old-fashioned settings;and old Miss Lanning, who had been persuaded to come,actually wore her mother's cameos and a Spanish blonde shawl.
The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet,as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers,they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers.It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
The Duke of St. Austrey, who sat at his hostess's right,was naturally the chief figure of the evening.But if the Countess Olenska was less conspicuous than had been hoped,the Duke was almost invisible. Being a well-bred man he had not (like another recent ducal visitor) come to the dinner in a shooting-jacket;but his evening clothes were so shabby and baggy,and he wore them with such an air of their being homespun, that (with his stooping way of sitting,and the vast beard spreading over his shirt-front) he hardly gave the appearance of being in dinner attire.He was short, round-shouldered, sunburnt, with a thick nose, small eyes and a sociable smile;but he seldom spoke, and when he did it was in such low tones that,despite the frequent silences of expectation about the table,his remarks were lost to all but his neighbours.
When the men joined the ladies after dinner the Duke went straight up to the Countess Olenska,and they sat down in a corner and plunged into animated talk.Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first have paid his respects to Mrs.Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers,and the Countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, Mr.Urban Dagonet of Washington Square, who, in order to have the pleasure of meeting her,had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out between January and April.The two chatted together for nearly twenty minutes; then the Countess rose and,walking alone across the wide drawing-room, sat down at Newland Archer's side.
It was not the custom in New York drawing-rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another.Etiquette required that she should wait, immovable as an idol,while the men who wished to converse with her succeeded each other at her side.But the Countess was apparently unaware of having broken any rule;she sat at perfect ease in a corner of the sofa beside Archer,and looked at him with the kindest eyes.
"I want you to talk to me about May," she said.
Instead of answering her he asked: "You knew the Duke before?"
"Oh, yes--we used to see him every winter at Nice.He's very fond of gambling--he used to come to the house a great deal." She said it in the simplest manner, as if she had said: "He's fond of wild-flowers";and after a moment she added candidly: "I think he's the dullest man I ever met."
This pleased her companion so much that he forgot the slight shock her previous remark had caused him.It was undeniably exciting to meet a lady who found the van der Luydens' Duke dull,and dared to utter the opinion. He longed to question her,to hear more about the life of which her careless words had given him so illuminating a glimpse;but he feared to touch on distressing memories,and before he could think of anything to say she had strayed back to her original subject.
"May is a darling; I've seen no young girl in New York so handsome and so intelligent. Are you very much in love with her?"
Newland Archer reddened and laughed. "As much as a man can be."
She continued to consider him thoughtfully, as if not to miss any shade of meaning in what he said, "Do you think, then, there is a limit?"
"To being in love?If there is, I haven't found it!"
She glowed with sympathy. "Ah--it's really and truly a romance?"
"The most romantic of romances!"
"How delightful!And you found it all out for yourselves--it was not in the least arranged for you?"
Archer looked at her incredulously. "Have you forgotten," he asked with a smile,"that in our country we don't allow our marriages to be arranged for us?"
A dusky blush rose to her cheek, and he instantly regretted his words.
"Yes," she answered, "I'd forgotten. You must forgive me if I sometimes make these mistakes.I don't always remember that everything here is good that was--that was bad where I've come from." She looked down at her Viennese fan of eagle feathers, and he saw that her lips trembled.
"I'm so sorry," he said impulsively; "but you _are_ among friends here, you know."
"Yes--I know. Wherever I go I have that feeling. That's why I came home.I want to forget everything else, to become a complete American again,like the Mingotts and Wellands, and you and your delightful mother,and all the other good people here tonight. Ah, here's May arriving,and you will want to hurry away to her," she added, but without moving;and her eyes turned back from the door to rest on the young man's face.
The drawing-rooms were beginning to fill up with after-dinner guests,and following Madame Olenska's glance Archer saw May Welland entering with her mother.In her dress of white and silver, with a wreath of silver blossoms in her hair,the tall girl looked like a Diana just alight from the chase.
"Oh," said Archer, "I have so many rivals; you see she's already surrounded. There's the Duke being introduced."
"Then stay with me a little longer," Madame Olenska said in a low tone,just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.
"Yes, let me stay," he answered in the same tone, hardly knowing what he said; but just then Mr.van der Luyden came up, followed by old Mr. Urban Dagonet.The Countess greeted them with her grave smile, and Archer,feeling his host's admonitory glance on him, rose and surrendered his seat.
Madame Olenska held out her hand as if to bid him goodbye.
"Tomorrow, then, after five--I shall expect you," she said;and then turned back to make room for Mr. Dagonet.
"Tomorrow--" Archer heard himself repeating, though there had been no engagement,and during their talk she had given him no hint that she wished to see him again.
As he moved away he saw Lawrence Lefferts, tall and resplendent,leading his wife up to be introduced; and heard Gertrude Lefferts say,as she beamed on the Countess with her large unperceiving smile:"But I think we used to go to dancing-school together when we were children--." Behind her,waiting their turn to name themselves to the Countess,Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined to meet her at Mrs.Lovell Mingott's. As Mrs. Archer remarked: when the van der Luydens chose,they knew how to give a lesson. The wonder was that they chose so seldom.
The young man felt a touch on his arm and saw Mrs.van der Luyden looking down on him from the pure eminence of black velvet and the family diamonds."It was good of you, dear Newland, to devote yourself so unselfishly to Madame Olenska.I told your cousin Henry he must really come to the rescue."
He was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she added, as if condescending to his natural shyness:"I've never seen May looking lovelier. The Duke thinks her the handsomest girl in the room."
IX.
The Countess Olenska had said "after five";and at half after the hour Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony,which she had hired, far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond Medora.
It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in. Small dress-makers,bird-stuffers and "people who wrote" were her nearest neighbours;and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a dilapidated wooden house,at the end of a paved path, in which a writer and journalist called Winsett,whom he used to come across now and then, had mentioned that he lived.Winsett did not invite people to his house;but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll,and the latter had asked himself, with a little shiver,if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.
Madame Olenska's own dwelling was redeemed from the same appearance only by a little more paint about the window-frames;and as Archer mustered its modest front he said to himself that the Polish Count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.
The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day. He had lunched with the Wellands,hoping afterward to carry off May for a walk in the Park. He wanted to have her to himself,to tell her how enchanting she had looked the night before, and how proud he was of her,and to press her to hasten their marriage. But Mrs.Welland had firmly reminded him that the round of family visits was not half over, and,when he hinted at advancing the date of the wedding,had raised reproachful eye-brows and sighed out: "Twelve dozen of everything--hand-embroidered--"
Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to another, and Archer,when the afternoon's round was over, parted from his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped.He supposed that his readings in anthropology caused him to take such a coarse view of what was after all a simple and natural demonstration of family feeling;but when he remembered that the Wellands did not expect the wedding to take place till the following autumn,and pictured what his life would be till then, a dampness fell upon his spirit.
"Tomorrow," Mrs. Welland called after him, "we'll do the Chiverses and the Dallases";and he perceived that she was going through their two families alphabetically,and that they were only in the first quarter of the alphabet.
He had meant to tell May of the Countess Olenska's request--her command,rather--that he should call on her that afternoon;but in the brief moments when they were alone he had had more pressing things to say. Besides,it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the matter.He knew that May most particularly wanted him to be kind to her cousin;was it not that wish which had hastened the announcement of their engagement?It gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but for the Countess's arrival, he might have been,if not still a free man, at least a man less irrevocably pledged. But May had willed it so,and he felt himself somehow relieved of further responsibility--and therefore at liberty,if he chose, to call on her cousin without telling her.
As he stood on Madame Olenska's threshold curiosity was his uppermost feeling.He was puzzled by the tone in which she had summoned him;he concluded that she was less simple than she seemed.
The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid,with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief, whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian.She welcomed him with all her white teeth,and answering his enquiries by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall into a low firelit drawing-room.The room was empty, and she left him, for an appreciable time,to wonder whether she had gone to find her mistress,or whether she had not understood what he was there for,and thought it might be to wind the clock--of which he perceived that the only visible specimen had stopped.He knew that the southern races communicated with each other in the language of pantomime,and was mortified to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible.At length she returned with a lamp; and Archer,having meanwhile put together a phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer:"La signora e fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took to mean: "She's out--but you'll soon see."
What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp,was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known.He knew that the Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her--bits of wreckage,she called them--and these, he supposed,were represented by some small slender tables of dark wood,a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney-piece,and a stretch of red damask nailed on the discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in old frames.
Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art.His boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books:John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee's "Euphorion," the essays of P. G. Hamerton,and a wonderful new volume called "The Renaissance" by Walter Pater.He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra Angelico with a faint condescension.But these pictures bewildered him, for they were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and therefore able to see) when he travelled in Italy;and perhaps, also, his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding himself in this strange empty house,where apparently no one expected him. He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of Countess Olenska's request,and a little disturbed by the thought that his betrothed might come in to see her cousin.What would she think if she found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady's fireside?
But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and stretched his feet to the logs.
It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him;but Archer felt more curious than mortified.The atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure.He had been before in drawing-rooms hung with red damask, with pictures "of the Italian school";what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's shabby hired house,with its blighted background of pampas grass and Rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand,and the skilful use of a few properties, been transformed into something intimate, "foreign," subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments. He tried to analyse the trick,to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped,in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow,and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs,but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar,a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.
His mind wandered away to the question of what May's drawing-room would look like. He knew that Mr.Welland, who was behaving "very handsomely," already had his eye on a newly built house in East Thirty-ninth Street.The neighbourhood was thought remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect. Archer would have liked to travel, to put off the housing question; but, though the Wellands approved of an extended European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt), they were firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple. The young man felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. But beyond that his imagination could not travel. He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window, but he could not fancy how May would deal with it. She submitted cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland drawing-room, to its sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe. He saw no reason to suppose that she would want anything different in her own house; and his only comfort was to reflect that she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased--which would be, of course, with"sincere" Eastlake furniture, and the plain new bookcases without glass doors.
The round-bosomed maid came in, drew the curtains, pushed back a log, and said consolingly:"Verra--verra." When she had gone Archer stood up and began to wander about. Should he wait any longer?His position was becoming rather foolish.Perhaps he had misunderstood Madame Olenska--perhaps she had not invited him after all.
Down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the ring of a stepper's hoofs;they stopped before the house, and he caught the opening of a carriage door.Parting the curtains he looked out into the early dusk. A street-lamp faced him,and in its light he saw Julius Beaufort's compact English brougham, drawn by a big roan,and the banker descending from it, and helping out Madame Olenska.
Beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which his companion seemed to negative;then they shook hands, and he jumped into his carriage while she mounted the steps.
When she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing Archer there;surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to.
"How do you like my funny house?" she asked. "To me it's like heaven."
As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes.
"You've arranged it delightfully," he rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words,but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking.
"Oh, it's a poor little place. My relations despise it.But at any rate it's less gloomy than the van der Luydens'."
The words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy.Those privileged to enter it shivered there, and spoke of it as "handsome." But suddenly he was glad that she had given voice to the general shiver.
"It's delicious--what you've done here," he repeated.
"I like the little house," she admitted;"but I suppose what I like is the blessedness of its being here, in my own country and my own town;and then, of being alone in it." She spoke so low that he hardly heard the last phrase; but in his awkwardness he took it up.
"You like so much to be alone?"
"Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely." She sat down near the fire, said:"Nastasia will bring the tea presently," and signed to him to return to his armchair, adding:"I see you've already chosen your corner."
Leaning back, she folded her arms behind her head, and looked at the fire under drooping lids.
"This is the hour I like best--don't you?"
A proper sense of his dignity caused him to answer: "I was afraid you'd forgotten the hour.Beaufort must have been very engrossing."
She looked amused. "Why--have you waited long?Mr. Beaufort took me to see a number of houses--since it seems I'm not to be allowed to stay in this one." She appeared to dismiss both Beaufort and himself from her mind, and went on:"I've never been in a city where there seems to be such a feeling against living in _des quartiers excentriques_. What does it matter where one lives?I'm told this street is respectable."
"It's not fashionable."
"Fashionable!Do you all think so much of that?Why not make one's own fashions?But I suppose I've lived too independently; at any rate,I want to do what you all do--I want to feel cared for and safe."
He was touched, as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her need of guidance.
"That's what your friends want you to feel. New York's an awfully safe place, " he added with a flash of sarcasm.
"Yes, isn't it?One feels that," she cried, missing the mockery."Being here is like--like--being taken on a holiday when one has been a good little girl and done all one's lessons. "
The analogy was well meant, but did not altogether please him.He did not mind being flippant about New York,but disliked to hear any one else take the same tone.He wondered if she did not begin to see what a powerful engine it was,and how nearly it had crushed her. The Lovell Mingotts' dinner,patched up in extremis out of all sorts of social odds and ends,ought to have taught her the narrowness of her escape;but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted disaster,or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van der Luyden evening.Archer inclined to the former theory; he fancied that her New York was still completely undifferentiated, and the conjecture nettled him.
"Last night," he said, "New York laid itself out for you. The van der Luydens do nothing by halves."
"No: how kind they are!It was such a nice party. Every one seems to have such an esteem for them."
The terms were hardly adequate; she might have spoken in that way of a tea-party at the dear old Miss Lannings'.