Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (18 page)

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 theater.

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 recognized 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 theater in order to take the picture away with me,” he said.

To his surprise her color 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 hairbrushes 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 traveled 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 travelers 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, and left the box and the theater.

Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which, with characteristic candor, 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.

14

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
^x
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 neighbor 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 neighbor’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 neighborly. 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 the 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 subeditorial job on a women’s weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.