Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (6 page)

“You know my niece, Countess Olenska?” Mrs. Welland inquired as she shook hands with her future son-in-law. Archer bowed without extending his hand, as was the custom on being introduced to a lady; and Ellen Olenska bent her head slightly, keeping her own pale-gloved hands clasped on her huge fan of eagle feathers. Having greeted Mrs. Lovell Mingott, a large blonde lady in creaking satin, he sat down beside his betrothed, and said in a low tone: “I hope you’ve told Madame Olenska that we’re engaged? I want everybody to know—I want you to let me announce it this evening at the ball.”

Miss Welland’s face grew rosy as the dawn, and she looked at him with radiant eyes. “If you can persuade Mamma,” she said; “but why should we change what is already settled?” He made no answer but that which his eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently smiling: “Tell my cousin yourself: I give you leave. She says she used to play with you when you were children.”

She made way for him by pushing back her chair, and promptly, and a little ostentatiously, with the desire that the whole house should see what he was doing, Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska’s side.

“We did used to play together, didn’t we?” she asked, turning her grave eyes to his. “You were a horrid boy, and kissed me once behind a door; but it was your cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me, that I was in love with.” Her glance swept the horseshoe curve of boxes. “Ah, how this brings it all back to me—I see everybody here in knickerbockers and pantalettes,” she said, with her trailing, slightly foreign accent, her eyes returning to his face.

Agreeable as their expression was, the young man was shocked that they should reflect so unseemly a picture of the august tribunal before which, at that very moment, her case was being tried. Nothing could be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat stiffly: “Yes, you have been away a very long time.”

“Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,” she said, “that I’m sure I’m dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;” which, for reasons he could not define, struck Newland Archer as an even more disrespectful way of describing New York society.

3

IT INVARIABLY HAPPENED IN the same way.

Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night in order to emphasize her complete superiority to household cares, and her possession of a staff of servants competent to organize every detail of the entertainment in her absence.

The Beauforts’ house was one of the few in New York that possessed a ball room (it antedated even Mrs. Manson Mingott’s and the Headly Chiverses); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought “provincial” to put a “crash” over the drawing-room floor and move the furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball room that was used for no other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag—this undoubted superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past.

Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms, had once said: “We all have our pet common people—” and though the phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an exclusive bosom. But the Beauforts were not exactly common; some people said they were even worse. Mrs. Beaufort belonged indeed to one of America’s most honored families; she had been the lovely Regina Dallas (of the South Carolina branch), a penniless beauty introduced to New York society by her cousin, the imprudent Medora Manson, who was always doing the wrong thing from the right motive. When one was related to the Mansons and Rushworths, one had a
“droit de cité”
(as Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who had frequented the Tuileries, called it) in New York society; but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius Beaufort?

The question was: who
was
Beaufort? He passed for an En glishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty. He had come to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson Mingott’s English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and when Medora Manson announced her cousin’s engagement to him, it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor Medora’s long record of imprudences.

But folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom, and two years after young Mrs. Beaufort’s marriage it was admitted that she had the most distinguished house in New York. No one knew exactly how the miracle was accomplished. She was indolent, passive, the caustic even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls, growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned in Mr. Beaufort’s heavy brown stone palace, and drew all the world there without lifting her jeweled little finger. The knowing people said it was Beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the
chef
new dishes, told the gardeners what hothouse flowers to grow for the dinner-table and the drawing rooms, selected the guests, brewed the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote to her friends. If he did, these domestic activities were privately performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing room with the detachment of an invited guest, and saying: “My wife’s gloxinias are a marvel, aren’t they? I believe she gets them out from Kew.”

Mr. Beaufort’s secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried things off. It was all very well to whisper that he had been “helped” to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had been employed; he carried off that rumor as easily as the rest, though New York’s business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral standard; he carried everything before him, and all New York into his drawing rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said they were “going to the Beauforts” with the same tone of security as if they had said they were going to Mrs. Manson Mingott‘s, and with the added satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks and vintage wines, instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and warmed-up croquettes from Philadelphia.

Mrs. Beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third act, drew her opera-cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared, New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin.

The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball. The Beauforts had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball room chairs. They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to the hostess’s bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all his wife’s friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly
coiffées
when they left home.

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses‘) one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the
bouton d’or),
seeing from afar the many-candled lusters reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foilage over seats of black and gold bamboo.

Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in somewhat late. He had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort’s new fatuities), had dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing room.

Archer was distinctly nervous. He had not gone back to his club after the Opera (as the young bloods usually did), but the night being fine, had walked for some distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the direction of the Beauforts’ house. He was definitely afraid that the Mingotts might be going too far; that, in fact, they might have Granny Mingott’s orders to bring the Countess Olenska to the ball.

From the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake that would be; and, though he was more than ever determined to “see the thing through,” he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his betrothed’s cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera.

Wandering on to the
bouton d‘or
drawing room (where Beaufort had had the audacity to hang “Love Victorious,” the much-discussed nude of Bouguereau)
^f
Archer found Mrs. Welland and her daughter standing near the ball-room door. Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women’s
coiffures,
and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves.

Miss Welland, evidently about to join the dancers, hung on the threshold, her lilies-of the-valley in her hand (she carried no other bouquet), her face a little pale, her eyes burning with a candid excitement. A group of young men and girls were gathered about her, and there was much handclasping, laughing and pleasantry, on which Mrs. Welland, standing slightly apart, shed the beam of a qualified approval. It was evident that Miss Welland was in the act of announcing her engagement, while her mother affected the air of parental reluctance considered suitable to the occasion.

Archer paused a moment. It was at his express wish that the announcement had been made, and yet it was not thus that he would have wished to have his happiness known. To proclaim it in the heat and noise of a crowded ball room was to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy which should belong to things nearest the heart. His joy was so deep that his blurring of the surface left its essence untouched; but he would have liked to keep the surface pure too. It was something of a satisfaction to find that May Welland shared this feeling. Her eyes fled to his beseechingly, and their look said: “Remember, we’re doing this because it’s right.”

No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer’s breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor Ellen Olenska. The group about Miss Welland made way for him with significant smiles, and after taking his share of the felicita tions he drew his betrothed into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist.

“Now we shan’t have to talk,” he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube.

She made no answer. Her lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision. “Dear” Archer whispered, pressing her to him: it was borne in on him that the first hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ball room, had in them something grave and sacramental. What a new life it was going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one’s side!

The dance over, the two, as became an affianced couple, wandered into the conservatory; and sitting behind a tall screen of tree-ferns and camellias Newland pressed her gloved hand to his lips.

“You see I did as you asked me to,” she said.

“Yes: I couldn’t wait,” he answered, smiling. After a moment he added: “Only I wish it hadn’t had to be at a ball.”

“Yes, I know.” She met his glance comprehendingly. “But after all—even here we’re alone together, aren’t we?”

“Oh, dearest—always!” Archer cried.

Evidently she was always going to understand; she was always going to say the right thing. The discovery made the cup of his bliss overflow, and he went on gaily: “The worst of it is that I want to kiss you and I can’t.” As he spoke he took a swift glance about the conservatory, assured himself of their momentary privacy, and catching her to him laid a fugitive pressure on her lips. To counteract the audacity of this proceeding he led her to a bamboo sofa in a less secluded part of the conservatory, and sitting down beside her broke a lily-of the-valley from her bouquet. She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.

“Did you tell my cousin Ellen?” she asked presently, as if she spoke through a dream.

He roused himself, and remembered that he had not done so. Some invincible repugnance to speak of such things to the strange foreign woman had checked the words on his lips.

“No—I hadn’t the chance after all,” he said, fibbing hastily.