She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the company with the simplicity that was her crowning grace. No one could ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them. But when her eyes met her husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she saw in his.
Mrs. Welland's basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them,and they drove off among the dispersing carriages,May handling the reins and Archer sitting at her side.
The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and shrubberies,and up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of victorias,dog-carts, landaus and "vis-à-vis," carrying well-dressed ladies and gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive.
"Shall we go to see Granny?" May suddenly proposed."I should like to tell her myself that I've won the prize.There's lots of time before dinner."
Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue,crossed Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond.In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great,always indifferent to precedent and thrifty of purse,had built herself in her youth a many-peaked and cross-beamed _cottage-orné_ on a bit of cheap land overlooking the bay. Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs spread themselves above the island-dotted waters. A winding drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian house-painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus. One of these rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days, enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the chair-arms.
Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine had shown to Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites toward the person served. She was persuaded that irrepressible passion was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent admirer of impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of allusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious.
She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow which had been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the match, remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been thought enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things handsomely.
"Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled."You must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." She pinched May's white arm and watched the colour flood her face."Well, well, what have I said to make you shake out the red flag?Ain't there going to be any daughters--only boys, eh?Good gracious, look at her blushing again all over her blushes!What--can't I say that either?Mercy me--when my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out overhead I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that _nothing_ can shock!"
Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it,crimson to the eyes.
"Well, now tell me all about the party, please,my dears, for I shall never get a straight word about it out of that silly Medora," the ancestress continued; and, as May exclaimed: "Cousin Medora?But I thought she was going back to Portsmouth?" she answered placidly:"So she is--but she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen.Ah--you didn't know Ellen had come to spend the day with me?Such fol-de-rol, her not coming for the summer;but I gave up arguing with young people about fifty years ago. Ellen--_Ellen_!" she cried in her shrill old voice,trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn beyond the verandah.
There was no answer, and Mrs.Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick on the shiny floor.A mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban,replying to the summons,informed her mistress that she had seen "Miss Ellen" going down the path to the shore; and Mrs. Mingott turned to Archer.
"Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson;this pretty lady will describe the party to me," she said; and Archer stood up as if in a dream.
He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during the year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with the main incidents of her life in the interval. He knew that she had spent the previous summer at Newport, where she appeared to have gone a great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had suddenly sub-let the "perfect house" which Beaufort had been at such pains to find for her, and decided to establish herself in Washington. There, during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always heard of pretty women in Washington) as shining in the "brilliant diplomatic society" that was supposed to make up for the social short-comings of the Administration. He had listened to these accounts, and to various contradictory reports on her appearance, her conversation, her point of view and her choice of friends, with the detachment with which one listens to reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till Medora suddenly spoke her name at the archery match had Ellen Olenska become a living presence to him again. The Marchioness's foolish lisp had called up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street. He thought of a story he had read, of some peasant children in Tuscany lighting a bunch of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in their painted tomb ...
The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows. Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years. Beyond it lay the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island with its low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the sunset haze.
From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning against the rail, her back to the shore. Archer stopped at the sight as if he had waked from sleep. That vision of the past was a dream, and the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead: was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval at the door, was May sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at the far end of Bellevue Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for dinner, and pacing the drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience--for it was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is happening at a given hour.
"What am I?A son-in-law--" Archer thought.