Now, as he reviewed his past,he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and wondered....
What was left of the little world he had grown up in,and whose standards had bent and bound him?He remembered a sneering prophecy of poor Lawrence Lefferts's,uttered years ago in that very room:"If things go on at this rate,our children will be marrying Beaufort's bastards."
It was just what Archer's eldest son,the pride of his life, was doing;and nobody wondered or reproved.Even the boy's Aunt Janey,who still looked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth,had taken her mother's emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool,and carried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride;and Fanny Beaufort,instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a"set" from a Paris jeweller,had exclaimed at their old-fashioned beauty,and declared that when she wore them she should feel like an Isabey miniature.
Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen,after the death of her parents,had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won it thirty years earlier;only instead of being distrustful and afraid of her,society took her joyfully for granted. She was pretty,amusing and accomplished: what more did any one want?Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's past and her own origin. Only the older people remembered so obscure an incident in the business life of New York as Beaufort's failure, or the fact that after his wife's death he had been quietly married to the notorious Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new wife, and a little girl who inherited her beauty. He was subsequently heard of in Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where he represented a large insurance agency. He and his wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had appeared in New York in charge of May Archer's sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland, whose husband had been appointed the girl's guardian. The fact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer's children, and nobody was surprised when Dallas's engagement was announced.
Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays were too busy--busy with reforms and "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?
Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth.
It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening waistcoat,leaving him, the next minute,with an empty breast and hot temples.He wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself in the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort--and decided that it was not."It functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different," he reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would approve.
"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder--the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"
It was the day after their arrival in Paris,and the spring sunshine held Archer in his open window,above the wide silvery prospect of the Place Vendôme.One of the things he had stipulated--almost the only one--when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris, he shouldn't be made to go to one of the newfangled "palaces."
"Oh, all right--of course," Dallas good-naturedly agreed."I'll take you to some jolly old-fashioned place--the Bristol say--" leaving his father speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings and emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went for its quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour.
Archer had pictured often enough,in the first impatient years,the scene of his return to Paris;then the personal vision had faded,and he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's life. Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....
Dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder."Hullo, father: this is something like, isn't it?" They stood for a while looking out in silence,and then the young man continued: "By the way,I've got a message for you:the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past five. "
He said it lightly, carelessly,as he might have imparted any casual item of information,such as the hour at which their train was to leave for Florence the next evening. Archer looked at him, and thought he saw in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott's malice.