"It's my business, you know," he went on,"to help you to see these things as the people who are fondest of you see them. The Mingotts,the Wellands, the van der Luydens, all your friends and relations:if I didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn't be fair of me, would it?" He spoke insistently, almost pleading with her in his eagerness to cover up that yawning silence.
She said slowly: "No; it wouldn't be fair."
The fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of the lamps made a gurgling appeal for attention.Madame Olenska rose, wound it up and returned to the fire, but without resuming her seat.
Her remaining on her feet seemed to signify that there was nothing more for either of them to say, and Archer stood up also.
"Very well; I will do what you wish," she said abruptly. The blood rushed to his forehead; and,taken aback by the suddenness of her surrender, he caught her two hands awkwardly in his.
"I--I do want to help you," he said.
"You do help me. Good night, my cousin."
He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away,and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall,and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
XIII.
It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.
The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers.The popularity of the admirable English company was at its height,and the Shaughraun always packed the house. In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved;in the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations,and enjoyed the play as much as the galleries did.
There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to ceiling.It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad,almost monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and turned to go.The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire,wore a gray cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings,moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long lines about her feet.Around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.
When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands.On the threshold he paused to look at her; then he stole back,lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon, kissed it,and left the room without her hearing him or changing her attitude.And on this silent parting the curtain fell.
It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer went to see "The Shaughraun." He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in Paris,or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in its reticence, its dumb sorrow,it moved him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.
On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him--he could not have said why--of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.
It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned.Newland Archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young English actor's romantic good looks,and Miss Dyas was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly face was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance.Nor were Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence;they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case.Wherein, then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a kind of retrospective excitement?It seemed to be in Madame Olenska's mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience.She had hardly ever said a word to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her,either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something inherently dramatic,passionate and unusual in herself. Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them. This tendency he had felt from the first in Madame Olenska. The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them. The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived. It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.
Archer had left her with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation was not unfounded.The mysterious person who figured in his wife's past as "the secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share in her escape.The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable, past speaking of, past believing:she was young, she was frightened, she was desperate--what more natural than that she should be grateful to her rescuer?The pity was that her gratitude put her, in the law's eyes and the world's,on a par with her abominable husband. Archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do;he had also made her understand that simple-hearted kindly New York,on whose larger charity she had apparently counted,was precisely the place where she could least hope for indulgence.
To have to make this fact plain to her--and to witness her resigned acceptance of it--had been intolerably painful to him.He felt himself drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity,as if her dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing her.He was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather than to the cold scrutiny of Mr.Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze of her family.He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce,basing her decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the proceeding;and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the"unpleasantness" she had spared them.
"I was sure Newland would manage it," Mrs. Welland had said proudly of her future son-in-law;and old Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for a confidential interview,had congratulated him on his cleverness, and added impatiently: "Silly goose!I told her myself what nonsense it was. Wanting to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid,when she has the luck to be a married woman and a Countess!"
These incidents had made the memory of his last talk with Madame Olenska so vivid to the young man that as the curtain fell on the parting of the two actors his eyes filled with tears, and he stood up to leave the theatre.
In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him,and saw the lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box with the Beauforts,Lawrence Lefferts and one or two other men.He had not spoken with her alone since their evening together,and had tried to avoid being with her in company; but now their eyes met, and as Mrs.Beaufort recognised him at the same time, and made her languid little gesture of invitation,it was impossible not to go into the box.
Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with Mrs. Beaufort,who always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk,Archer seated himself behind Madame Olenska. There was no one else in the box but Mr.Sillerton Jackson, who was telling Mrs. Beaufort in a confidential undertone about Mrs.Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing).Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which Mrs.Beaufort listened with her perfect smile,and her head at just the right angle to be seen in profile from the stalls,Madame Olenska turned and spoke in a low voice.
"Do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage,"he will send her a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"
Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise. He had called only twice on Madame Olenska,and each time he had sent her a box of yellow roses, and each time without a card.She had never before made any allusion to the flowers,and he supposed she had never thought of him as the sender. Now her sudden recognition of the gift,and her associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him with an agitated pleasure.
"I was thinking of that too--I was going to leave the theatre in order to take the picture away with me, " he said.
To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily.She looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands, and said,after a pause: "What do you do while May is away?"
"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.
In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the previous week for St. Augustine,where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes,they always spent the latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man,with no opinions but with many habits. With these habits none might interfere;and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should always go with him on his annual journey to the south.To preserve an unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind;he would not have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for his letters,if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.
As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr.Welland was the central object of their idolatry,it never occurred to his wife and May to let him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons,who were both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter,always joined him for Easter and travelled back with him.
It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity of May's accompanying her father.The reputation of the Mingotts' family physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr.Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was therefore inflexible. Originally,it had been intended that May's engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida,and the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected to alter Mr. Welland's plans.Archer would have liked to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his betrothed;but he too was bound by custom and conventions. Little arduous as his professional duties were,he would have been convicted of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a holiday in mid-winter;and he accepted May's departure with the resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal constituents of married life.
He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered lids."I have done what you wished--what you advised," she said abruptly.
"Ah--I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject at such a moment.
"I understand--that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly;"but sometimes life is difficult ... perplexing..."
"I know."
"And I wanted to tell you that I _do_ feel you were right; and that I'm grateful to you," she ended,lifting her opera-glass quickly to her eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke in on them.
Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.
Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which, with characteristic candour,she had asked him to "be kind to Ellen" in their absence."She likes you and admires you so much--and you know, though she doesn't show it,she's still very lonely and unhappy. I don't think Granny understands her,or uncle Lovell Mingott either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is.And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her, though the family won't admit it.I think she's been used to lots of things we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows,and celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you admire.Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and clothes--but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York who can talk to her about what she really cares for."
His wise May--how he had loved her for that letter!But he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not care,as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska's champion.He had an idea that she knew how to take care of herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined.She had Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a protecting deity,and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance.Yet he never saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all,May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination.Ellen Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.
XIV.
As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett,the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of club and chop-house banter.
He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby round-shouldered back,and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the Beaufort box. The two men shook hands,and Winsett proposed a bock at a little German restaurant around the corner. Archer,who was not in the mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there,declined on the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh,well so have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too."
They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here,what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of yours--with the Beauforts, wasn't she?The one your friend Lefferts seems so smitten by."
Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed.What the devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name?And above all, why did he couple it with Lefferts's?It was unlike Winsett to manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a journalist.
"It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.
"Well--not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined."The fact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter for such a beauty to settle in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy,who fell down her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushed in bareheaded,carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully bandaged,and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled to ask her name."
A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothing extraordinary in the tale:any woman would have done as much for a neighbour's child. But it was just like Ellen, he felt,to have rushed in bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor Mrs.Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.
"That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."
"Whew--a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know Countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain't."
"They would be, if you'd let them."
"Ah, well--" It was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the fashionable,and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.
"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our slum?"
"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her.
"H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented. "Well, here's my corner."
He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and musing on his last words.
Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most interesting thing about him,and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling.
Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them.The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical people,such as the restaurant where Winsett had proposed to go for a bock.He had given Archer to understand that his wife was an invalid;which might be true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes,or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: Archer,who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so,and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget,regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring"Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people,who changed their clothes without talking about it,and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept,seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless,he was always stimulated by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off for a long talk.
Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters,untimely born in a world that had no need of letters;but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations,of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away,and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material,he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly,where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining;but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up.His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life,and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less,and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating,their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once said. "I'm down and out;nothing to be done about it. I've got only one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here,and won't be in my time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't _you_ get into touch?There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."
Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the others--Archer's kind.Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But,since he could hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively:"Look at the career of the honest man in American politics!They don't want us."
"Who's 'they'?Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"
Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.It was useless to prolong the discussion:everybody knew the melancholy fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in New York.The day was past when that sort of thing was possible:the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant,and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.
"Culture!Yes--if we had it!But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well,hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them.But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience.You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you,till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God!If I could emigrate ..."
Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back to books, where Winsett,if uncertain, was always interesting. Emigrate!As if a gentleman could abandon his own country!One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the muck.A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you couldn't make a man like Winsett see that;and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants,though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end,to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.
The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses.In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office,perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one,and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St. Augustine with May Welland?No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity.In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head,and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and "conservative" investments,there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who,for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks,or simply reading the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation,the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession,was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business.But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession,or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading.
It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too. He had, to be sure,other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations in European travel,cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, and generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to Madame Olenska. But once he was married,what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived?He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though perhaps less ardently,and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders.
From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska,asking if he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a reply at his club;but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive any letter the following day.This unexpected silence mortified him beyond reason,and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane,he left it there. It was only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the Countess Olenska.To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff,whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his steamer.
"I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual preliminaries),"the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind friends have taken me in.I wanted to be quiet, and think things over. You were right in telling me how kind they were;I feel myself so safe here. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional"Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.
The tone of the note surprised the young man. What was Madame Olenska running away from,and why did she feel the need to be safe?His first thought was of some dark menace from abroad;then he reflected that he did not know her epistolary style,and that it might run to picturesque exaggeration. Women always exaggerated;and moreover she was not wholly at her ease in English,which she often spoke as if she were translating from the French."Je me suis évadée--" put in that way, the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was very likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.
It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off to Skuytercliff on a second visit,and this time for an indefinite period.The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to visitors,and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few thus privileged. But Archer had seen,on his last visit to Paris, the delicious play of Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he remembered M. Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to the young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier.The van der Luydens had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy;and though there were many other reasons for being attracted to her,Archer knew that beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on rescuing her.
He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away;and almost immediately remembered that, only the day before,he had refused an invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.
He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank, with coasting, ice-boating,sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes.He had just received a box of new books from his London book-seller,and had preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils.But he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram,and told the servant to send it immediately. He knew that Mrs.Reggie didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds,and that there was always a room to spare in her elastic house.
XV.
Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening,and on Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a week-end at Highbank.
In the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat with his hostess and a few of the hardier guests;in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with Reggie, and listened,in the elaborately appointed stables, to long and impressive disquisitions on the horse;after tea he talked in a corner of the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his engagement was announced,but was now eager to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight,he assisted in putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed,dressed up a burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt,and saw in the small hours by joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the basement.But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove over to Skuytercliff.
People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa.Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr.van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet.It was a large square wooden structure,with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico,and fluted pilasters between the windows.From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with"specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612.
Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly;even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.Now, as Archer rang the bell, the long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum;and the surprise of the butler who at length responded to the call was as great as though he had been summoned from his final sleep.
Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his arrival was,entitled to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out,having driven to afternoon service with Mrs.van der Luyden exactly three quarters of an hour earlier.
"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir;but my impression is that he is either finishing his nap or else reading yesterday's Evening Post.I heard him say, sir, on his return from church this morning,that he intended to look through the Evening Post after luncheon; if you like, sir,I might go to the library door and listen--"
But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies; and the butler,obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically.