Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (24 page)

She flung her velvet opera-cloak over the maid’s shoulders and turned back into the drawing room, shutting the door sharply. Her bosom was rising high under its lace, and for a moment Archer thought she was about to cry; but she burst into a laugh instead, and looking from the Marchioness to Archer, asked abruptly: “And you two—have made friends!”

“It’s for Mr. Archer to say, darling: he has waited patiently while you were dressing.”

“Yes—I gave you time enough: my hair wouldn’t go,” Madame Olenska said, raising her hand to the heaped-up curls of her
chignon.
“But that reminds me: I see Dr. Carver is gone, and you’ll be late at the Blenkers. Mr. Archer, will you put my aunt in the carriage?”

She followed the Marchioness into the hall, saw her fitted into a miscellaneous heap of overshoes, shawls and tippets, and called from the doorstep: “Mind, the carriage is to be back for me at ten!” Then she turned to the drawing room, where Archer, on reentering it, found her standing by the mantelpiece, examining herself in the mirror. It was not usual, in New York society, for a lady to address her parlor-maid as “my dear one,” and send her out on an errand wrapped in her own opera-cloak; and Archer, through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed an emotion with such Olympian speed.

Madame Olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a second their eyes met in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself into her sofa-corner and sighed out: “There’s time for a cigarette.”

He handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed up into her face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said: “What do you think of me in a temper?”

Archer paused a moment; then he answered with sudden resolution: “It makes me understand what your aunt has been saying about you.”

“I knew she’d been talking about me. Well?”

“She said you were used to all kinds of things—splendors and amusements and excitements—that we could never hope to give you here.”

Madame Olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips.

“Medora is incorrigibly romantic. It has made up to her for so many things!”

Archer hesitated again, and again took his risk. “Is your aunt’s romanticism always consistent with accuracy?”

“You mean: does she speak the truth?” Her niece considered. “Well, I’ll tell you: in almost everything she says, there’s something true and something untrue. But why do you ask? What has she been telling you?”

He looked away into the fire, and then back at her shining presence. His heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening by that fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry her away.

“She says—she pretends that Count Olenski has asked her to persuade you to go back to him.”

Madame Olenska made no answer. She sat motionless, holding her cigarette in her half-lifted hand. The expression of her face had not changed; and Archer remembered that he had before noticed her apparent incapacity for surprise.

“You knew, then?” he broke out.

She was silent for so long that the ash dropped from her cigarette. She brushed it to the floor. “She has hinted about a letter: poor darling! Medora’s hints—”

“Is it at your husband’s request that she has arrived here suddenly?”

Madame Olenska seemed to consider this question also. “There again: one can’t tell. She told me she had had a ‘spiritual summons,’ whatever that is, from Dr. Carver. I’m afraid she’s going to marry Dr. Carver ... poor Medora, there’s always someone she wants to marry. But perhaps the people in Cuba just got tired of her! I think she was with them as a sort of paid companion. Really, I don’t know why she came.”

“But you do believe she has a letter from your husband?”

Again Madame Olenska brooded silently; then she said: “After all, it was to be expected.”

The young man rose and went to lean against the fireplace. A sudden restlessness possessed him, and he was tongue-tied by the sense that their minutes were numbered, and that at any moment he might hear the wheels of the returning carriage.

“You know that your aunt believes you will go back?”

Madame Olenska raised her head quickly. A deep blush rose to her face and spread over her neck and shoulders. She blushed seldom and painfully, as if it hurt her like a burn.

“Many cruel things have been believed of me,” she said.

“Oh, Ellen—forgive me; I’m a fool and a brute!”

She smiled a little. “You are horribly nervous; you have your own troubles. I know you think the Wellands are unreasonable about your marriage, and of course I agree with you. In Europe people don’t understand our long American engagements; I suppose they are not as calm as we are.” She pronounced the “we” with a faint emphasis that gave it an ironic sound.

Archer felt the irony but did not dare to take it up. After all, she had perhaps purposely deflected the conversation from her own affairs, and after the pain his last words had evidently caused her he felt that all he could do was to follow her lead. But the sense of the waning hour made him desperate: he could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again.

“Yes,” he said abruptly; “I went south to ask May to marry me after Easter. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be married then.”

“And May adores you—and yet you couldn’t convince her? I thought her too intelligent to be the slave of such absurd superstitions.”

“She
is
too intelligent—she’s not their slave.”

Madame Olenska looked at him. “Well, then—I don’t understand.”

Archer reddened, and hurried on with a rush. “We had a frank talk—almost the first. She thinks my impatience a bad sign.”

“Merciful heavens—a bad sign?”

“She thinks it means that I can’t trust myself to go on caring for her. She thinks, in short, I want to marry her at once to get away from someone that I—care for more.”

Madame Olenska examined this curiously. “But if she thinks that—why isn’t she in a hurry too?”

“Because she’s not like that: she’s so much nobler. She insists all the more on the long engagement, to give me time—”

“Time to give her up for the other woman?”

“If I want to.”

Madame Olenska leaned toward the fire and gazed into it with fixed eyes. Down the quiet street Archer heard the approaching trot of her horses.

“That is noble,” she said, with a slight break in her voice.

“Yes. But it’s ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous? Because you don’t care for anyone else.”

“Because I don’t mean to marry anyone else.”

“Ah.” There was another long interval. At length she looked up at him and asked: “This other woman—does she love you?”

“Oh, there’s no other woman; I mean, the person that May was thinking of is—was never—”

“Then, why, after all, are you in such haste?”

“There’s your carriage,” said Archer.

She half-rose and looked about her with absent eyes. Her fan and gloves lay on the sofa beside her and she picked them up mechanically.

“Yes; I suppose I must be going.”

“You’re going to Mrs. Struthers’s?”

“Yes.” She smiled and added: “I must go where I am invited, or I should be too lonely. Why not come with me?”

Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her give him the rest of her evening. Ignoring her question, he continued to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on the hand in which she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had the power to make her drop them.

“May guessed the truth,” he said. “There is another woman—but not the one she thinks.”

Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not move. After a moment he sat down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them.

She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the hearth. “Ah, don’t make love to me! Too many people have done that,” she said, frowning.

Archer, changing color, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she could have given him. “I have never made love to you,” he said, “and I never shall. But you are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us.”

“Possible for either of us?” She looked at him with unfeigned astonishment. “And you say that—when it’s you who’ve made it impossible?”

He stared at her, groping in blackness through which a single arrow of light tore its blinding way.

“I’ve
made it impossible—?”

“You, you,
you!”
she cried, her lip trembling like a child’s on the verge of tears. “Isn’t it you who made me give up divorcing—give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice oneself to preserve the dignity of marriage ... and to spare one’s family the publicity, the scandal? And because my family was going to be your family—for May’s sake and for yours-I did what you told me, what you proved to me that I ought to do. Ah,” she broke out with a sudden laugh, “I’ve made no secret of having done it for you!”

She sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of her dress like a stricken masquerader; and the young man stood by the fireplace and continued to gaze at her without moving.

“Good God,” he groaned. “When I thought—”

“You thought?”

“Ah, don’t ask me what I thought!”

Still looking at her, he saw the same burning flush creep up her neck to her face. She sat upright, facing him with a rigid dignity.

“I do ask you.”

“Well, then: there were things in that letter you asked me to read—”

“My husband’s letter?”

“Yes.”

“I had nothing to fear from that letter: absolutely nothing! All I feared was to bring notoriety, scandal, on the family—on you and May.”

“Good God,” he groaned again, bowing his face in his hands.

The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable. It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his own grave-stone; in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever lift that load from his heart. He did not move from his place, or raise his head from his hands; his hidden eyeballs went on staring into utter darkness.

“At least I loved you—” he brought out.

On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed that she still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a child’s. He started up and came to her side.

“Ellen! What madness! Why are you crying? Nothing’s done that can’t be undone. I’m still free, and you’re going to be.” He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise. The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.

She gave him back all his kiss, but after a moment he felt her stiffening in his arms, and she put him aside and stood up.

“Ah, my poor Newland—I suppose this had to be. But it doesn’t in the least alter things,” she said, looking down at him in her turn from the hearth.

“It alters the whole of life for me.”

“No, no—it mustn‘t, it can’t. You’re engaged to May Welland; and I’m married.”

He stood up, too, flushed and resolute. “Nonsense! It’s too late for that sort of thing. We’ve no right to lie to other people or to ourselves. We won’t talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying May after this?”

She stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece, her profile reflected in the glass behind her. One of the locks of her
chignon
had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked haggard and almost old.

“I don’t see you,” she said at length, “putting that question to May. Do you?”

He gave a reckless shrug. “It’s too late to do anything else.”

“You say that because it’s the easiest thing to say at this moment—not because it’s true. In reality it’s too late to do anything but what we’d both decided on.”

“Ah, I don’t understand you!”

She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing it. “You don’t understand because you haven’t yet guessed how you’ve changed things for me: oh, from the first—long before I knew all you’d done.”

“All I’d done?”

“Yes. I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy of me—that they thought I was a dreadful sort of person. It seems they had even refused to meet me at dinner. I found that out afterward; and how you’d made your mother go with you to the van der Luydens‘; and how you’d insisted on announcing your engagement at the Beaufort ball, so that I might have two families to stand by me instead of one—”

At that he broke into a laugh.

“Just imagine,” she said, “how stupid and unobservant I was! I knew nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day. New York simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home. And I was so happy at being among my own people that everyone I met seemed kind and good, and glad to see me. But from the very beginning,” she continued, “I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and—unnecessary. The very good people didn’t convince me; I felt they’d never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands—and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I’d never known before—and it’s better than anything I’ve known.”

She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and each word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning lead. He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearthrug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress. Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.