Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (41 page)

It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a wife to play such a part toward her husband. A woman’s standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved. Then she could always plead moods and nerves, and the right not to be held too strictly to account; and even in the most strait-laced societies the laugh was always against the husband.

But in Archer’s little world no one laughed at a wife deceived, and a certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their philandering after marriage. In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once.

Archer had always shared this view: in his heart he thought Lefferts despicable. But to love Ellen Olenska was not to become a man like Lefferts: for the first time Archer found himself face to face with the dread argument of the individual case. Ellen Olenska was like no other woman, he was like no other man: their situation, therefore, resembled no one else‘s, and they were answerable to no tribunal but that of their own judgment.

Yes, but in ten minutes more he would be mounting his own doorstep; and there were May, and habit, and honor, and all the old decencies that he and his people had always believed in ...

At his corner he hesitated, and then walked on down Fifth Avenue.

Ahead of him, in the winter night, loomed a big unlit house. As he drew near he thought how often he had seen it blazing with lights, its steps awninged and carpeted, and carriages waiting in double line to draw up at the curb-stone. It was in the conservatory that stretched its dead-black bulk down the side street that he had taken his first kiss from May; it was under the myriad candles of the ball-room that he had seen her appear, tall and silver-shining as a young Diana.

Now the house was as dark as the grave, except for a faint flare of gas in the basement, and a light in one upstairs room where the blind had not been lowered. As Archer reached the corner he saw that the carriage standing at the door was Mrs. Manson Mingott’s. What an opportunity for Sillerton Jackson, if he should chance to pass! Archer had been greatly moved by old Catherine’s account of Madame Olenska’s attitude toward Mrs. Beaufort; it made the righteous reprobation of New York seem like a passing by on the other side. But he knew well enough what construction the clubs and drawing rooms would put on Ellen Olenska’s visits to her cousin.

He paused and looked up at the lighted window. No doubt the two women were sitting together in that room: Beaufort had probably sought consolation elsewhere. There were even rumors that he had left New York with Fanny Ring; but Mrs. Beaufort’s attitude made the report seem improbable.

Archer had the nocturnal perspective of Fifth Avenue almost to himself. At that hour most people were indoors, dressing for dinner; and he was secretly glad that Ellen’s exit was likely to be unobserved. As the thought passed through his mind the door opened, and she came out. Behind her was a faint light, such as might have been carried down the stairs to show her the way. She turned to say a word to someone; then the door closed, and she came down the steps.

“Ellen,” he said in a low voice, as she reached the pavement.

She stopped with a slight start, and just then he saw two young men of fashionable cut approaching. There was a familiar air about their overcoats and the way their smart silk mufflers were folded over their white ties; and he wondered how youths of their quality happened to be dining out so early. Then he remembered that the Reggie Chiverses, whose house was a few doors above, were taking a large party that evening to see Adelaide Neilson
^ap
in
Romeo and Juliet,
and guessed that the two were of the number. They passed under a lamp, and he recognized Lawrence Lefferts and a young Chivers.

A mean desire not to have Madame Olenska seen at the Beauforts’ door vanished as he felt the penetrating warmth of her hand.

“I shall see you now—we shall be together,” he broke out, hardly knowing what he said.

“Ah,” she answered, “Granny has told you?”

While he watched her he was aware that Lefferts and Chivers, on reaching the farther side of the street corner, had discreetly struck away across Fifth Avenue. It was the kind of masculine solidarity that he himself often practiced; now he sickened at their connivance. Did she really imagine that he and she could live like this? And if not, what else did she imagine?

“Tomorrow I must see you—somewhere where we can be alone,” he said, in a voice that sounded almost angry to his own ears.

She wavered, and moved toward the carriage.

“But I shall be at Granny‘s—for the present that is,” she added, as if conscious that her change of plans required some explanation.

“Somewhere where we can be alone,” he insisted.

She gave a faint laugh that grated on him.

“In New York? But there are no churches ... no monuments.”

“There’s the Art Museum—in the Park,” he explained, as she looked puzzled. “At half-past two. I shall be at the door ...”

She turned away without answering and got quickly into the carriage. As it drove off she leaned forward, and he thought she waved her hand in the obscurity. He started after her in a turmoil of contradictory feelings. It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of: it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary.

“She’ll come!” he said to himself almost contemptuously.

Avoiding the popular “Wolfe collection,” whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum,
¹⁴
they had wandered down a passage to the room where the “Cesnola antiquities” moldered in unvisited loneliness.

They had this melancholy retreat to themselves, and seated on the divan enclosing the central steam-radiator, they were staring silently at the glass cabinets mounted in ebonized wood which contained the recovered fragments of Ilium.

“It’s odd,” Madame Olenska said, “I never came here before.”

“Ah, well—Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum.”

“Yes,” she assented absently.

She stood up and wandered across the room. Archer, remaining seated, watched the light movements of her figure, so girlish even under its heavy furs, the cleverly planted heron-wing in her fur cap, and the way a dark curl lay like a flattened vine-spiral on each cheek above the ear. His mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other. Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects—hardly recognizable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles—made of glass, of clay, of discolored bronze and other time-blurred substances.

“It seems cruel,” she said, “that after a while nothing matters ... any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: ‘Use unknown.”’

“Yes; but meanwhile—”

“Ah, meanwhile—”

As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and color should ever suffer the stupid law of change.

“Meanwhile everything matters—that concerns you,” he said.

She looked at him thoughtfully, and turned back to the divan. He sat down beside her and waited; but suddenly he heard a step echoing far off down the empty rooms, and felt the pressure of the minutes.

“What is it you wanted to tell me?” she asked, as if she had received the same warning.

“What I wanted to tell you?” he rejoined. “Why, that I believe you came to New York because you were afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Of my coming to Washington.”

She looked down at her muff, and he saw her hands stir in it uneasily.

“Well—?”

“Well—yes,” she said.

“You
were
afraid? You knew—?”

“Yes: I knew . . .”

“Well, then?” he insisted.

“Well, then: this is better, isn’t it?” she returned with a long questioning sigh.

“Better—?”

“We shall hurt others less. Isn’t it, after all, what you always wanted?”

“To have you here, you mean—in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It’s the very reverse of what I want. I told you the other day what I wanted.”

She hesitated. “And you still think this—worse?”

“A thousand times!” He paused. “It would be easy to lie to you; but the truth is I think it detestable.”

“Oh, so do I!” she cried with a deep breath of relief.

He sprang up impatiently. “Well, then—it’s my turn to ask: what is it, in God’s name, that you think better?”

She hung her head and continued to clasp and unclasp her hands in her muff. The step drew nearer, and a guardian in a braided cap walked listlessly through the room like a ghost stalking through a necropolis. They fixed their eyes simultaneously on the case opposite them, and when the official figure had vanished down a vista of mummies and sarcophagi Archer spoke again.

“What do you think better?”

Instead of answering she murmured: “I promised Granny to stay with her because it seemed to me that here I should be safer.”

“From me?”

She bent her head slightly, without looking at him.

“Safer from loving me?”

Her profile did not stir, but he saw a tear overflow on her lashes and hang on a mesh of her veil.

“Safer from doing irreparable harm. Don’t let us be like all the others!” she protested.

“What others? I don’t profess to be different from my kind. I’m consumed by the same wants and the same longings.”

She glanced at him with a kind of terror, and he saw a faint color steal into her cheeks.

Shall I—once come to you; and then go nome!“ she suddenly hazarded in a low clear voice.

The blood rushed to the young man’s forehead. “Dearest!” he said, without moving. It seemed as if he held his heart in his hands, like a full cup that the least motion might overbrim.

Then her last phrase struck his ear and his face clouded. “Go home? What do you mean by going home?”

“Home to my husband.”

“And you expect me to say yes to that?”

She raised her troubled eyes to his. “What else is there? I can’t stay here and lie to the people who’ve been good to me.”

“But that’s the very reason why I ask you to come away!”

“And destroy their lives, when they’ve helped me to remake mine?”

Archer sprang to his feet and stood looking down on her in inarticulate despair. It would have been easy to say: “Yes, come; come once.” He knew the power she would put in his hands if she consented; there would be no difficulty then in persuading her not to go back to her husband.

But something silenced the word on his lips. A sort of passionate honesty in her made it inconceivable that he should try to draw her into that familiar trap. “If I were to let her come,” he said to himself, “I should have to let her go again.” And that was not to be imagined.

But he saw the shadow of the lashes on her wet cheek, and wavered.

“After all,” he began again, “we have lives of our own . . . There’s no use attempting the impossible. You’re so unprejudiced about some things, so used, as you say, to looking at the Gorgon, that I don’t know why you’re afraid to face our case, and see it as it really is—unless you think the sacrifice is not worth making.”

She stood up also, her lips tightening under a rapid frown.