The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (page 4)

But I was called away by our dear great friend here, Dr. Carver. You don’t know Dr. Agathon Carver, founder of the Valley of Love Community?”

Dr. Carver inclined his leonine head, and the Marchioness continued: “Ah, New York–New York–how little the life of the spirit has reached it! But I see you do know Mr. Winsett.”

“Oh, yes–I reached him some time ago; but not by that route,” Winsett said with his dry smile.

The Marchioness shook her head reprovingly. “How do you know, Mr. Winsett? The spirit bloweth where it listeth.”

“List–oh, list!” interjected Dr. Carver in a stentorian murmur.

“But do sit down, Mr. Archer. We four have been having a delightful little dinner together, and my child has gone up to dress. She expects you; she will be down in a moment. We were just admiring these marvellous flowers, which will surprise her when she reappears.”

Winsett remained on his feet. “I’m afraid I must be off. Please tell Madame Olenska that we shall all feel lost when she abandons our street. This house has been an oasis.”

“Ah, but she won’t abandon YOU. Poetry and art are the breath of life to her. It IS poetry you write, Mr. Winsett?”

“Well, no; but I sometimes read it,” said Winsett, including the group in a general nod and slipping out of the room.

“A caustic spirit–un peu sauvage. But so witty; Dr. Carver, you DO think him witty?”

“I never think of wit,” said Dr. Carver severely.

“Ah–ah–you never think of wit! How merciless he is to us weak mortals, Mr. Archer! But he lives only in the life of the spirit; and tonight he is mentally preparing the lecture he is to deliver presently at Mrs. Blenker’s. Dr. Carver, would there be time, before you start for the Blenkers’ to explain to Mr. Archer your illuminating discovery of the Direct Contact? But no; I see it is nearly nine o’clock, and we have no right to detain you while so many are waiting for your message.”

Dr. Carver looked slightly disappointed at this conclusion, but, having compared his ponderous gold time- piece with Madame Olenska’s little travelling-clock, he reluctantly gathered up his mighty limbs for departure.

“I shall see you later, dear friend?” he suggested to the Marchioness, who replied with a smile: “As soon as Ellen’s carriage comes I will join you; I do hope the lecture won’t have begun.”

Dr. Carver looked thoughtfully at Archer. “Perhaps, if this young gentleman is interested in my experiences, Mrs. Blenker might allow you to bring him with you?”

“Oh, dear friend, if it were possible–I am sure she would be too happy. But I fear my Ellen counts on Mr. Archer herself.”

“That,” said Dr. Carver, “is unfortunate–but here is my card.” He handed it to Archer, who read on it, in Gothic characters:

|—————————|
| Agathon Carter |
| The Valley of Love |
| Kittasquattamy, N. Y. |
|—————————|

Dr. Carver bowed himself out, and Mrs. Manson, with a sigh that might have been either of regret or relief, again waved Archer to a seat.

“Ellen will be down in a moment; and before she comes, I am so glad of this quiet moment with you.”

Archer murmured his pleasure at their meeting, and the Marchioness continued, in her low sighing accents: “I know everything, dear Mr. Archer–my child has told me all you have done for her. Your wise advice: your courageous firmness–thank heaven it was not too late!”

The young man listened with considerable embarrassment. Was there any one, he wondered, to whom Madame Olenska had not proclaimed his intervention in her private affairs?

“Madame Olenska exaggerates; I simply gave her a legal opinion, as she asked me to.”

“Ah, but in doing it–in doing it you were the unconscious instrument of–of–what word have we moderns for Providence, Mr. Archer?” cried the lady, tilting her head on one side and drooping her lids mysteriously. “Little did you know that at that very moment I was being appealed to: being approached, in fact–from the other side of the Atlantic!”

She glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard, and then, drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her lips, breathed behind it: “By the Count himself–my poor, mad, foolish Olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms.”

“Good God!” Archer exclaimed, springing up.

“You are horrified? Yes, of course; I understand. I don’t defend poor Stanislas, though he has always called me his best friend. He does not defend himself–he casts himself at her feet: in my person.” She tapped her emaciated bosom. “I have his letter here.”

“A letter?–Has Madame Olenska seen it?” Archer stammered, his brain whirling with the shock of the announcement.

The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly. “Time–time; I must have time. I know my Ellen– haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade unforgiving?”

“But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that hell–“

“Ah, yes,” the Marchioness acquiesced. “So she describes it–my sensitive child! But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up? Those roses there on the sofa–acres like them, under glass and in the open, in his matchless terraced gardens at Nice! Jewels– historic pearls: the Sobieski emeralds–sables,–but she cares nothing for all these! Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I always have; and those also surrounded her. Pictures, priceless furniture, music, brilliant conversation–ah, that, my dear young man, if you’ll excuse me, is what you’ve no conception of here! And she had it all; and the homage of the greatest. She tells me she is not thought handsome in New York–good heavens! Her portrait has been painted nine times; the greatest artists in Europe have begged for the privilege. Are these things nothing? And the remorse of an adoring husband?”

As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer’s mirth had he not been numb with amazement.

He would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first sight of poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger of Satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to him to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just escaped.

“She knows nothing yet–of all this?” he asked abruptly.

Mrs. Manson laid a purple finger on her lips. “Nothing directly–but does she suspect? Who can tell? The truth is, Mr. Archer, I have been waiting to see you. From the moment I heard of the firm stand you had taken, and of your influence over her, I hoped it might be possible to count on your support–to convince you . . .”

“That she ought to go back? I would rather see her dead!” cried the young man violently.

“Ah,” the Marchioness murmured, without visible resentment. For a while she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory fan between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and listened.

“Here she comes,” she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to the bouquet on the sofa: “Am I to understand that you prefer THAT, Mr. Archer? After all, marriage is marriage . . . and my niece is still a wife. . .

XVIII.

What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?” Madame Olenska cried as she came into the room.

She was dressed as if for a ball. Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams; and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a roomful of rivals.

“We were saying, my dear, that here was something beautiful to surprise you with,” Mrs. Manson rejoined, rising to her feet and pointing archly to the flowers.

Madame Olenska stopped short and looked at the bouquet. Her colour did not change, but a sort of white radiance of anger ran over her like summer lightning. “Ah,” she exclaimed, in a shrill voice that the young man had never heard, “who is ridiculous enough to send me a bouquet? Why a bouquet? And why tonight of all nights? I am not going to a ball; I am not a girl engaged to be married. But some people are always ridiculous.”

She turned back to the door, opened it, and called out: “Nastasia!”

The ubiquitous handmaiden promptly appeared, and Archer heard Madame Olenska say, in an Italian that she seemed to pronounce with intentional deliberateness in order that he might follow it: “Here–throw this into the dustbin!” and then, as Nastasia stared protestingly: “But no–it’s not the fault of the poor flowers. Tell the boy to carry them to the house three doors away, the house of Mr. Winsett, the dark gentleman who dined here. His wife is ill–they may give her pleasure . . . The boy is out, you say? Then, my dear one, run yourself; here, put my cloak over you and fly. I want the thing out of the house immediately! And, as you live, don’t say they come from me!”

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 you 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 returned to the drawing-room, where Archer, on re-entering 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 parlour-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 on 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– splendours 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 some one 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 some one 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 any one else?”

“Because I don’t mean to marry any one 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 colour, 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 a 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 one’s self 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 shrivelling 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 every one 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.

She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze.

“Ah, don’t let us undo what you’ve done!” she cried. “I can’t go back now to that other way of thinking. I can’t love you unless I give you up.”

His arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained facing each other, divided by the distance that her words had created. Then, abruptly, his anger overflowed.

“And Beaufort? Is he to replace me?”

As the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of anger; and he would have welcomed it as fuel for his own. But Madame Olenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging down before her, and her head slightly bent, as her way was when she pondered a question.

“He’s waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers’s; why don’t you go to him?” Archer sneered.

She turned to ring the bell. “I shall not go out this evening; tell the carriage to go and fetch the Signora Marchesa,” she said when the maid came.

After the door had closed again Archer continued to look at her with bitter eyes. “Why this sacrifice? Since you tell me that you’re lonely I’ve no right to keep you from your friends.”

She smiled a little under her wet lashes. “I shan’t be lonely now. I WAS lonely; I WAS afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I’m like a child going at night into a room where there’s always a light.”

Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility, and Archer groaned out again: “I don’t understand you!”

“Yet you understand May!”

He reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her. “May is ready to give me up.”

“What! Three days after you’ve entreated her on your knees to hasten your marriage?”

“She’s refused; that gives me the right–“

“Ah, you’ve taught me what an ugly word that is,” she said.

He turned away with a sense of utter weariness. He felt as though he had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice, and now, just as he had fought his way to the top, his hold had given way and he was pitching down headlong into darkness.

If he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away her arguments; but she still held him at a distance by something inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude, and by his own awed sense of her sincerity. At length he began to plead again.

“If we do this now it will be worse afterward–worse for every one–“

“No–no–no!” she almost screamed, as if he frightened her.

At that moment the bell sent a long tinkle through the house. They had heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless, looking at each other with startled eyes.

Outside, Nastasia’s step crossed the hall, the outer door opened, and a moment later she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the Countess Olenska.

“The lady was very happy at the flowers,” Nastasia said, smoothing her apron. “She thought it was her signor marito who had sent them, and she cried a little and said it was a folly.”

Her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope. She tore it open and carried it to the lamp; then, when the door had closed again, she handed the telegram to Archer.

It was dated from St. Augustine, and addressed to the Countess Olenska. In it he read: “Granny’s telegram successful. Papa and Mamma agree marriage after Easter. Am telegraphing Newland. Am too happy for words and love you dearly. Your grateful May.”

Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front-door, he found a similar envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and letters. The message inside the envelope was also from May Welland, and ran as follows: “Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May.”

Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate the news it contained. Then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and turned over the pages with trembling fingers; but he did not find what he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his pocket he mounted the stairs.

A light was shining through the door of the little hall-room which served Janey as a dressing-room and boudoir, and her brother rapped impatiently on the panel. The door opened, and his sister stood before him in her immemorial purple flannel dressing-gown, with her hair “on pins.” Her face looked pale and apprehensive.

“Newland! I hope there’s no bad news in that telegram? I waited on purpose, in case–” (No item of his correspondence was safe from Janey.)

He took no notice of her question. “Look here– what day is Easter this year?”

She looked shocked at such unchristian ignorance. “Easter? Newland! Why, of course, the first week in April. Why?”

“The first week?” He turned again to the pages of his diary, calculating rapidly under his breath. “The first week, did you say?” He threw back his head with a long laugh.

“For mercy’s sake what’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter, except that I’m going to be married in a month.”

Janey fell upon his neck and pressed him to her purple flannel breast. “Oh Newland, how wonderful! I’m so glad! But, dearest, why do you keep on laughing? Do hush, or you’ll wake Mamma.”

Book II

XIX.

The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust. All the old ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the altar.

Newland Archer, at a signal from the sexton, had come out of the vestry and placed himself with his best man on the chancel step of Grace Church.

The signal meant that the brougham bearing the bride and her father was in sight; but there was sure to be a considerable interval of adjustment and consultation in the lobby, where the bridesmaids were already hovering like a cluster of Easter blossoms. During this unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness, was expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled company; and Archer had gone through this formality as resignedly as through all the others which made of a nineteenth century New York wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history. Everything was equally easy–or equally painful, as one chose to put it–in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the same labyrinth.

So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations. The bridesmaids’ eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies-of-the-valley had been sent in due time, as well as the gold and sapphire sleeve-links of the eight ushers and the best man’s cat’s-eye scarf-pin; Archer had sat up half the night trying to vary the wording of his thanks for the last batch of presents from men friends and ex-lady-loves; the fees for the Bishop and the Rector were safely in the pocket of his best man; his own luggage was already at Mrs. Manson Mingott’s, where the wedding-breakfast was to take place, and so were the travelling clothes into which he was to change; and a private compartment had been engaged in the train that was to carry the young couple to their unknown destination–concealment of the spot in which the bridal night was to be spent being one of the most sacred taboos of the prehistoric ritual.

“Got the ring all right?” whispered young van der Luyden Newland, who was inexperienced in the duties of a best man, and awed by the weight of his responsibility.

Archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make: with his ungloved right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark grey waistcoat, and assured himself that the little gold circlet (engraved inside: Newland to May, April —, 187-) was in its place; then, resuming his former attitude, his tall hat and pearl-grey gloves with black stitchings grasped in his left hand, he stood looking at the door of the church.

Overhead, Handel’s March swelled pompously through the imitation stone vaulting, carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at which, with cheerful indifference, he had stood on the same chancel step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms.

“How like a first night at the Opera!” he thought, recognising all the same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the Last Trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Merry would be there with the same towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and Mrs. Beaufort with the same diamond earrings and the same smile–and whether suitable proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world.

After that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar countenances in the first rows; the women’s sharp with curiosity and excitement, the men’s sulky with the obligation of having to put on their frock-coats before luncheon, and fight for food at the wedding-breakfast.

“Too bad the breakfast is at old Catherine’s,” the bridegroom could fancy Reggie Chivers saying. “But I’m told that Lovell Mingott insisted on its being cooked by his own chef, so it ought to be good if one can only get at it.” And he could imagine Sillerton Jackson adding with authority: “My dear fellow, haven’t you heard? It’s to be served at small tables, in the new English fashion.”

Archer’s eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother, who had entered the church on Mr. Henry van der Luyden’s arm, sat weeping softly under her Chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother’s ermine muff.

“Poor Janey!” he thought, looking at his sister, “even by screwing her head around she can see only the people in the few front pews; and they’re mostly dowdy Newlands and Dagonets.”

On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved for the families he saw Beaufort, tall and redfaced, scrutinising the women with his arrogant stare. Beside him sat his wife, all silvery chinchilla and violets; and on the far side of the ribbon, Lawrence Lefferts’s sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the invisible deity of “Good Form” who presided at the ceremony.

Archer wondered how many flaws Lefferts’s keen eyes would discover in the ritual of his divinity; then he suddenly recalled that he too had once thought such questions important. The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood. A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents should be “shown” had darkened the last hours before the wedding; and it seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown-up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles, and that the matter should have been decided (in the negative) by Mrs. Welland’s saying, with indignant tears: “I should as soon turn the reporters loose in my house.” Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.

“And all the while, I suppose,” he thought, “real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them . . .”

“THERE THEY COME!” breathed the best man excitedly; but the bridegroom knew better.

The cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that Mr. Brown the livery-stable keeper (gowned in black in his intermittent character of sexton) was taking a preliminary survey of the scene before marshalling his forces. The door was softly shut again; then after another interval it swung majestically open, and a murmur ran through the church: “The family!”

Mrs. Welland came first, on the arm of her eldest son. Her large pink face was appropriately solemn, and her plum-coloured satin with pale blue side-panels, and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met with general approval; but before she had settled herself with a stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs. Archer’s the spectators were craning their necks to see who was coming after her. Wild rumours had been abroad the day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott, in spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at the ceremony; and the idea was so much in keeping with her sporting character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk up the nave and squeeze into a seat. It was known that she had insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the possibility of taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space between the seat and the front; but the result had been discouraging, and for one anxious day her family had watched her dallying with the plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous Bath chair and sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel.

The idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her relations that they could have covered with gold the ingenious person who suddenly discovered that the chair was too wide to pass between the iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the curbstone. The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine’s courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. “Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!” Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother’s last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. The ancestress had had to give in; but her concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding- breakfast should take place under her roof, though (as the Washington Square connection said) with the Wellands’ house in easy reach it was hard to have to make a special price with Brown to drive one to the other end of nowhere.

Though all these transactions had been widely reported by the Jacksons a sporting minority still clung to the belief that old Catherine would appear in church, and there was a distinct lowering of the temperature when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law. Mrs. Lovell Mingott had the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress; but once the disappointment occasioned by her mother-in-law’s non-appearance had subsided, it was agreed that her black Chantilly over lilac satin, with a bonnet of Parma violets, formed the happiest contrast to Mrs. Welland’s blue and plum-colour. Far different was the impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed on Mr. Mingott’s arm, in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and floating scarves; and as this last apparition glided into view Archer’s heart contracted and stopped beating.

He had taken it for granted that the Marchioness Manson was still in Washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her niece, Madame Olenska. It was generally understood that their abrupt departure was due to Madame Olenska’s desire to remove her aunt from the baleful eloquence of Dr. Agathon Carver, who had nearly succeeded in enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love; and in the circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for the wedding. For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Medora’s fantastic figure, straining to see who came behind her; but the little procession was at an end, for all the lesser members of the family had taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre, were already slipping through the side doors into the lobby.

“Newland–I say: SHE’S HERE!” the best man whispered.

Archer roused himself with a start.

A long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating, for the white and rosy procession was in fact half way up the nave, the Bishop, the Rector and two white-winged assistants were hovering about the flower-banked altar, and the first chords of the Spohr symphony were strewing their flower-like notes before the bride.

Archer opened his eyes (but could they really have been shut, as he imagined?), and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task. The music, the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of tulle and orange-blossoms floating nearer and nearer, the sight of Mrs. Archer’s face suddenly convulsed with happy sobs, the low benedictory murmur of the Rector’s voice, the ordered evolutions of the eight pink bridesmaids and the eight black ushers: all these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain.

“My God,” he thought, “HAVE I got the ring?”–and once more he went through the bridegroom’s convulsive gesture.

Then, in a moment, May was beside him, such radiance streaming from her that it sent a faint warmth through his numbness, and he straightened himself and smiled into her eyes.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here,” the Rector began . . .

The ring was on her hand, the Bishop’s benediction had been given, the bridesmaids were a-poise to resume their place in the procession, and the organ was showing preliminary symptoms of breaking out into the Mendelssohn March, without which no newly-wedded couple had ever emerged upon New York.

“Your arm–I SAY, GIVE HER YOUR ARM!” young Newland nervously hissed; and once more Archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the unknown. What was it that had sent him there, he
wondered? Perhaps the glimpse, among the anonymous spectators in the transept, of a dark coil of hair under a hat which, a moment later, revealed itself as belonging to an unknown lady with a long nose, so laughably unlike the person whose image she had evoked that he asked himself if he were becoming subject to hallucinations.

And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave, carried forward on the light Mendelssohn ripples, the spring day beckoning to them through widely opened doors, and Mrs. Welland’s chestnuts, with big white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing off at the far end of the canvas tunnel.

The footman, who had a still bigger white favour on his lapel, wrapped May’s white cloak about her, and Archer jumped into the brougham at her side. She turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands clasped under her veil.

“Darling!” Archer said–and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before him and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his voice rambled on smoothly and cheerfully: “Yes, of course I thought I’d lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a bridegroom didn’t go through that. But you DID keep me waiting, you know! I had time to think of every horror that might possibly happen.”

She surprised him by turning, in full Fifth Avenue, and flinging her arms about his neck. “But none ever CAN happen now, can it, Newland, as long as we two are together?”

Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the young couple, after the wedding-breakfast, had ample time to put on their travelling-clothes, descend the wide Mingott stairs between laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brougham under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers; and there was still half an hour left in which to drive to the station, buy the last weeklies at the bookstall with the air of seasoned travellers, and settle themselves in the reserved compartment in which May’s maid had already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new dressing-bag from London.

The old du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal of the bridal couple, with a readiness inspired by the prospect of spending a week in New York with Mrs. Archer; and Archer, glad to escape the usual “bridal suite” in a Philadelphia or Baltimore hotel, had accepted with an equal alacrity.

May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where their mysterious retreat was situated. It was thought “very English” to have a country-house lent to one, and the fact gave a last touch of distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most brilliant wedding of the year; but where the house was no one was permitted to know, except the parents of bride and groom, who, when taxed with the knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously: “Ah, they didn’t tell us–” which was manifestly true, since there was no need to.

Once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of spring, talk became easier than Archer had expected. May was still, in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes with him as to the incidents of the wedding, and discussing them as impartially as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher. At first Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an inward tremor; but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil unawareness. She was alone for the first time with her husband; but her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday. There was no one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely, and the culminating “lark” of the whole delightful adventure of engagement and marriage was to be off with him alone on a journey, like a grownup person, like a “married woman,” in fact.

It was wonderful that–as he had learned in the Mission garden at St. Augustine–such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of imagination. But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience had been eased of its burden; and he saw that she would probably go through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came, but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance.

Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure. In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-breakfast and of Granny Mingott’s immense and triumphant pervasion of it.

May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject. “I was surprised, though–weren’t you?–that aunt Medora came after all. Ellen wrote that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey; I do wish it had been she who had recovered! Did you see the exquisite old lace she sent me?”

He had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay.

“Yes–I–no: yes, it was beautiful,” he said, looking at her blindly, and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards.

“Aren’t you tired? It will be good to have some tea when we arrive–I’m sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready,” he rattled on, taking her hand in his; and her mind rushed away instantly to the magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver which the Beauforts had sent, and which “went” so perfectly with uncle Lovell Mingott’s trays and sidedishes.

In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station, and they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage.

“Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens– they’ve sent their man over from Skuytercliff to meet us,” Archer exclaimed, as a sedate person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.

“I’m extremely sorry, sir,” said this emissary, “that a little accident has occurred at the Miss du Lacs’: a leak in the water-tank. It happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this morning, sent a housemaid up by the early train to get the Patroon’s house ready. It will be quite comfortable, I think you’ll find, sir; and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook over, so that it will be exactly the same as if you’d been at Rhinebeck.”

Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more apologetic accents: “It’ll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure you–” and May’s eager voice broke out, covering the embarrassed silence: “The same as Rhinebeck? The Patroon’s house? But it will be a hundred thousand times better–won’t it, Newland? It’s too dear and kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it.”

And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly: “Only fancy, I’ve never been inside it–have you? The van der Luydens show it to so few people. But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and she told me what a darling little place it was: she says it’s the only house she’s seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly happy in.”

“Well–that’s what we’re going to be, isn’t it?” cried her husband gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile: “Ah, it’s just our luck beginning–the wonderful luck we’re always going to have together!”

XX.

Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest,” Archer said; and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.

In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not “dignified” to force one’s self on the notice of one’s acquaintances in foreign countries.

Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve, that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a word with a “foreigner” other than those employed in hotels and railway-stations. Their own compatriots– save those previously known or properly accredited– they treated with an even more pronounced disdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete. But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage (whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle of liniment. The other lady–the intruder’s sister, Mrs. Carfry–had been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately able to produce the required remedy.

Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were travelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies, who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid helped to nurse the invalid back to health.

When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle again. Nothing, to Mrs. Archer’s mind, would have been more “undignified” than to force one’s self on the notice of a “foreigner” to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the “delightful Americans” who had been so kind at Botzen. With touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the States. The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey, whenever they alighted at Brown’s Hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness Bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits. As Mrs. Archer said, it made “another thing of London” to know Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought “only right” to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies, who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under glass. And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England, Mrs. Archer’s last word had been: “You must take May to see Mrs. Carfry.”

Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them an invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archer was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.

“It’s all very well for you, Newland; you KNOW them. But I shall feel so shy among a lot of people I’ve never met. And what shall I wear?”

Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. She looked handsomer and more Diana-like than ever. The moist English air seemed to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glow of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.

“Wear, dearest? I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris last week.”

“Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan’t know WHICH to wear.” She pouted a little. “I’ve never dined out in London; and I don’t want to be ridiculous.”

He tried to enter into her perplexity. “But don’t Englishwomen dress just like everybody else in the evening?”

“Newland! How can you ask such funny questions? When they go to the theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads.”

“Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle won’t. They’ll wear caps like my mother’s–and shawls; very soft shawls.”

“Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?”

“Not as well as you, dear,” he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly developed in her Janey’s morbid interest in clothes.

She pushed back her chair with a sigh. “That’s dear of you, Newland; but it doesn’t help me much.”

He had an inspiration. “Why not wear your wedding- dress? That can’t be wrong, can it?”

“Oh, dearest! If I only had it here! But it’s gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth hasn’t sent it back.”

“Oh, well–” said Archer, getting up. “Look here– the fog’s lifting. If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a glimpse of the pictures.”

The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months’ wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely summarised as “blissful.”

They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had not been able to picture his wife in that particular setting. Her own inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for mountaineering in July and swimming in August. This plan they punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which some one had recommended as quaint and quiet. Once or twice, in the mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: “There’s Italy”; and May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied: “It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn’t have to be in New York.”

But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had expected. She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered HIS clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she looked forward to sailing.

In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantants where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant terrace on an audience of “cocottes,” and having her husband interpret to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May’s only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.

All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. If her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences.

Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel, though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within it there would be nothing small and stifling–coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open. And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled.

All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister lived. Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends’ hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow- beings. Once only, just after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of queer Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun in the world, as unreal as a carnival. These queer cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination long. To introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.

Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had said: “Look me up, won’t you?”–but no proper-spirited American would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was without a sequel. They had even managed to avoid May’s English aunt, the banker’s wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives.

“Probably there’ll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry’s–London’s a desert at this season, and you’ve made yourself much too beautiful,” Archer said to May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her to the London grime.

“I don’t want them to think that we dress like savages,” she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.

“It’s their armour,” he thought, “their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.” And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry’s to be a small one. Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long chilly drawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor, pronouncing a French name as she did so.

Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme and infantile shyness.

“What on earth will they expect me to talk about?” her helpless eyes implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms. But beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their desire to put her at her ease.

In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing affair. Archer noticed that his wife’s way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee. The Vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the drawing-room.

The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed off to bed. But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine, and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake Leman. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added with simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.

It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a man of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation.

His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism, then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length–after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener–into tutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that, however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother’s house. He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation, in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned Winsett’s; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty.

“You see, Monsieur, it’s worth everything, isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves one’s moral freedom, what we call in French one’s quant a soi. And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one’s own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation–there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism–two different forms of the same self-abdication.” He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. “Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it? But, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor–or a `private’ anything–is almost as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America– in New York?”

Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York, for a young man who had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living! He continued to stare at M. Riviere perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.

“New York–New York–but must it be especially New York?” he stammered, utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only necessity.

A sudden flush rose under M. Riviere’s sallow skin. “I–I thought it your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?” he rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of having asked a favour, he went on hastily: “One throws out random suggestions–more to one’s self than to others. In reality, I see no immediate prospect–” and rising from his seat he added, without a trace of constraint: “But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be taking you upstairs.”

During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode. His hour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day; but he was beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately yield to their first impulses.

“That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good talk after dinner about books and things,” he threw out tentatively in the hansom.

May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the key to them.

“The little Frenchman? Wasn’t he dreadfully common?” she questioned coldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French tutor. The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old New York’s sense of what was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands. If May’s parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have offered them something more substantial than a parson and a schoolmaster.

But Archer was on edge, and took her up.

“Common–common WHERE?” he queried; and she returned with unusual readiness: “Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room. Those people are always awkward in society. But then,” she added disarmingly, “I suppose I shouldn’t have known if he was clever.”

Archer disliked her use of the word “clever” almost as much as her use of the word “common”; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had never known a “nice” woman who looked at life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice.

“Ah–then I won’t ask him to dine!” he concluded with a laugh; and May echoed, bewildered: “Goodness– ask the Carfrys’ tutor?”

“Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn’t. But I did rather want another talk with him. He’s looking for a job in New York.”

Her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied that she suspected him of being tainted with “foreignness.”

“A job in New York? What sort of a job? People don’t have French tutors: what does he want to do?”

“Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand,” her husband retorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh. “Oh, Newland, how funny! Isn’t that FRENCH?”

On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her refusing to take seriously his wish to invite M. Riviere. Another after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of New York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit M. Riviere into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.

He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife’s long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. “After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,” he reflected; but the worst of it was that May’s pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

XXI.

The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.

The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.

Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house (which was also chocolate-coloured, but with the tin roof of the verandah striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning) two large targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery. On the other side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent, with benches and garden-seats about it. A number of ladies in summer dresses and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the lawn or sat upon the benches; and every now and then a slender girl in starched muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand, and speed her shaft at one of the targets, while the spectators interrupted their talk to watch the result.

Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously down upon this scene. On each side of the shiny painted steps was a large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand. A spiky green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums. Behind him, the French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors islanded with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs, and velvet tables covered with trifles in silver.

The Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the Beauforts’. The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet, was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions, and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow held their own.

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed. It was Newport that had first brought home to him the extent of the change. In New York, during the previous winter, after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had dropped back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal of this daily activity had served as a link with his former self. Then there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey stepper for May’s brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage), and the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library, which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and “sincere” arm-chairs and tables. At the Century he had found Winsett again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business.

But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of unmitigated holiday-making. Archer had tried to persuade May to spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called, appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and Philadelphians were camping in “native” cottages, and whence came reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence amid woods and waters.

But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good reason why he and May should not join them there. As Mrs. Welland rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer had as yet found no answer.

May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer. She reminded him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going to like it better than ever now that they were to be there together. But as he stood on the Beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly peopled lawn it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to like it at all.

It was not May’s fault, poor dear. If, now and then, during their travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to. He had always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had been right. He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

He could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had fulfilled all that he had expected. It was undoubtedly gratifying to be the husband of one of the handsomest and most popular young married women in New York, especially when she was also one of the sweetest-tempered and most reasonable of wives; and Archer had never been insensible to such advantages. As for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.

But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been children playing in a grave-yard.

He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson fluttered out of the drawing-room window. As usual, she was extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp Leghorn hat anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little black velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over her much larger hatbrim.

“My dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had arrived! You yourself came only yesterday, you say? Ah, business–business–professional duties . . . I understand. Many husbands, I know, find it impossible to join their wives here except for the week-end.” She cocked her head on one side and languished at him through screwed-up eyes. “But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I used often to remind my Ellen–“

Archer’s heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and the outer world; but this break of continuity must have been of the briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had apparently found voice to put.

“No, I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious solitude at Portsmouth. Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous trotters for me this morning, so that I might have at least a glimpse of one of Regina’s garden-parties; but this evening I go back to rural life. The Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old farm-house at Portsmouth where they gather about them representative people . . .” She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and added with a faint blush: “This week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a series of Inner Thought meetings there. A contrast indeed to this gay scene of worldly pleasure– but then I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins. But my poor child is going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world. You know, I suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at Newport, even with her grandmother Mingott? I could hardly persuade her to come with me to the Blenkers’, if you will believe it! The life she leads is morbid, unnatural. Ah, if she had only listened to me when it was still possible . . . When the door was still open . . . But shall we go down and watch this absorbing match? I hear your May is one of the competitors.”

Strolling toward them from the tent Beaufort advanced over the lawn, tall, heavy, too tightly buttoned into a London frock-coat, with one of his own orchids in its buttonhole. Archer, who had not seen him for two or three months, was struck by the change in his appearance. In the hot summer light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but for his erect square- shouldered walk he would have looked like an over-fed and over-dressed old man.

There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort. In the spring he had gone off on a long cruise to the West Indies in his new steam-yacht, and it was reported that, at various points where he had touched, a lady resembling Miss Fanny Ring had been seen in his company. The steam-yacht, built in the Clyde, and fitted with tiled bath-rooms and other unheard-of luxuries, was said to have cost him half a million; and the pearl necklace which he had presented to his wife on his return was as magnificent as such expiatory offerings are apt to be. Beaufort’s fortune was substantial enough to stand the strain; and yet the disquieting rumours persisted, not only in Fifth Avenue but in Wall Street. Some people said he had speculated unfortunately in railways, others that he was being bled by one of the most insatiable members of her profession; and to every report of threatened insolvency Beaufort replied by a fresh extravagance: the building of a new row of orchid-houses, the purchase of a new string of race-horses, or the addition of a new Meissonnier or Cabanel to his picture-gallery.

He advanced toward the Marchioness and Newland with his usual half-sneering smile. “Hullo, Medora! Did the trotters do their business? Forty minutes, eh? . . . Well, that’s not so bad, considering your nerves had to be spared.” He shook hands with Archer, and then, turning back with them, placed himself on Mrs. Manson’s other side, and said, in a low voice, a few words which their companion did not catch.

The Marchioness replied by one of her queer foreign jerks, and a “Que voulez-vous?” which deepened Beaufort’s frown; but he produced a good semblance of a congratulatory smile as he glanced at Archer to say: “You know May’s going to carry off the first prize.”

“Ah, then it remains in the family,” Medora rippled; and at that moment they reached the tent and Mrs. Beaufort met them in a girlish cloud of mauve muslin and floating veils.

May Welland was just coming out of the tent. In her white dress, with a pale green ribbon about the waist and a wreath of ivy on her hat, she had the same Diana-like aloofness as when she had entered the Beaufort ball-room on the night of her engagement. In the interval not a thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling through her heart; and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both he marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped away from her.

She had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the chalk-mark traced on the turf she lifted the bow to her shoulder and took aim. The attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur of appreciation followed her appearance, and Archer felt the glow of proprietorship that so often cheated him into