The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (story read aloud TXT) 📕

>“Tomorrow—” Archer heard himself repeating,

though there had been no engagement, and during their

talk she had given him no hint that she wished to see

him again.

 

As he moved away he saw Lawrence Lefferts, tall

and resplendent, leading his wife up to be introduced;

and heard Gertrude Lefferts say, as she beamed on the

Countess with her large unperceiving smile: “But I

think we used to go to dancing-school together when

we were children—.” Behind her, waiting their turn to

name themselves to the Countess, Archer noticed a

number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined to

meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s. As Mrs. Archer

remarked: when the van der Luydens chose, they knew

how to give a lesson. The wonder was that they chose

so seldom.

 

The young man felt a touch on his arm and saw Mrs.

van der Luyden looking down on him from the pure

eminence of black velvet and the family diamonds. “It

was good of you, dear Newland, to devote yourself so

unselfishly to Madame Olenska. I told your cousin

Henry he must really come to the rescue.”

 

He was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she

added, as if condescending to his natural shyness: “I’ve

never seen May looking lovelier. The Duke thinks her

the handsomest girl in the room.”

 

IX.

 

The Countess Olenska had said “after five”; and at

half after the hour Newland Archer rang the bell

of the peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria throttling

its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired,

far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond

Medora.

 

It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in.

Small dressmakers, bird-stuffers and “people who

wrote” were her nearest neighbours; and further down

the dishevelled street Archer recognised a dilapidated

wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a

writer and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to

come across now and then, had mentioned that he

lived. Winsett did not invite people to his house; but he

had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a

nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with

a little shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed

in other capitals.

 

Madame Olenska’s own dwelling was redeemed from

the same appearance only by a little more paint about

the window-frames; and as Archer mustered its modest

front he said to himself that the Polish Count must

have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.

 

The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day. He

had lunched with the Wellands, hoping afterward to

carry off May for a walk in the Park. He wanted to

have her to himself, to tell her how enchanting she had

looked the night before, and how proud he was of her,

and to press her to hasten their marriage. But Mrs.

Welland had firmly reminded him that the round of

family visits was not half over, and, when he hinted at

advancing the date of the wedding, had raised reproachful

eyebrows and sighed out: “Twelve dozen of

everything—hand-embroidered—”

 

Packed in the family landau they rolled from one

tribal doorstep to another, and Archer, when the afternoon’s

round was over, parted from his betrothed with

the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild

animal cunningly trapped. He supposed that his readings

in anthropology caused him to take such a coarse

view of what was after all a simple and natural

demonstration of family feeling; but when he remembered

that the Wellands did not expect the wedding to take

place till the following autumn, and pictured what his

life would be till then, a dampness fell upon his spirit.

 

“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Welland called after him, “we’ll

do the Chiverses and the Dallases”; and he perceived

that she was going through their two families alphabetically,

and that they were only in the first quarter of the

alphabet.

 

He had meant to tell May of the Countess Olenska’s

request—her command, rather—that he should call on

her that afternoon; but in the brief moments when they

were alone he had had more pressing things to say.

Besides, it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the

matter. He knew that May most particularly wanted

him to be kind to her cousin; was it not that wish

which had hastened the announcement of their engagement?

It gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but

for the Countess’s arrival, he might have been, if not

still a free man, at least a man less irrevocably pledged.

But May had willed it so, and he felt himself somehow

relieved of further responsibility—and therefore at liberty,

if he chose, to call on her cousin without telling

her.

 

As he stood on Madame Olenska’s threshold curiosity

was his uppermost feeling. He was puzzled by the

tone in which she had summoned him; he concluded

that she was less simple than she seemed.

 

The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking

maid, with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief,

whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian. She

welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering

his enquiries by a head-shake of incomprehension led

him through the narrow hall into a low firelit drawing-room. The room was empty, and she left him, for an

appreciable time, to wonder whether she had gone to

find her mistress, or whether she had not understood

what he was there for, and thought it might be to wind

the clock—of which he perceived that the only visible

specimen had stopped. He knew that the southern races

communicated with each other in the language of

pantomime, and was mortified to find her shrugs and

smiles so unintelligible. At length she returned with a

lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together a

phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer:

“La signora e fuori; ma verra subito”; which he took

to mean: “She’s out—but you’ll soon see.”

 

What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp,

was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any

room he had known. He knew that the Countess Olenska

had brought some of her possessions with her—bits of

wreckage, she called them—and these, he supposed,

were represented by some small slender tables of dark

wood, a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the

discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking

pictures in old frames.

 

Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of

Italian art. His boyhood had been saturated with

Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books: John Addington

Symonds, Vernon Lee’s “Euphorion,” the essays of P.

G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called

“The Renaissance” by Walter Pater. He talked easily of

Botticelli, and spoke of Fra Angelico with a faint

condescension. But these pictures bewildered him, for they

were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at

(and therefore able to see) when he travelled in Italy;

and perhaps, also, his powers of observation were

impaired by the oddness of finding himself in this strange

empty house, where apparently no one expected him.

He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of

Countess Olenska’s request, and a little disturbed by

the thought that his betrothed might come in to see her

cousin. What would she think if she found him sitting

there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone

in the dusk at a lady’s fireside?

 

But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank

into a chair and stretched his feet to the logs.

 

It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and

then forgotten him; but Archer felt more curious than

mortified. The atmosphere of the room was so different

from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness

vanished in the sense of adventure. He had been before

in drawing-rooms hung with red damask, with pictures

“of the Italian school”; what struck him was the way

in which Medora Manson’s shabby hired house, with

its blighted background of pampas grass and Rogers

statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful

use of a few properties, been transformed into something

intimate, “foreign,” subtly suggestive of old

romantic scenes and sentiments. He tried to analyse the

trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and

tables were grouped, in the fact that only two Jacqueminot

roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a

dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow,

and in the vague pervading perfume that was not

what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the

scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish

coffee and ambergris and dried roses.

 

His mind wandered away to the question of what

May’s drawing-room would look like. He knew that

Mr. Welland, who was behaving “very handsomely,”

already had his eye on a newly built house in East

Thirty-ninth Street. The neighbourhood was thought

remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning

to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which

the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate

sauce; but the plumbing was perfect. Archer would

have liked to travel, to put off the housing question;

but, though the Wellands approved of an extended

European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt),

they were firm as to the need of a house for the

returning couple. The young man felt that his fate was

sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every

evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule

into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow

wood. But beyond that his imagination could not travel.

He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window,

but he could not fancy how May would deal with it.

She submitted cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow

tuftings of the Welland drawing-room, to its sham Buhl

tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe. He saw no

reason to suppose that she would want anything different

in her own house; and his only comfort was to

reflect that she would probably let him arrange his

library as he pleased—which would be, of course, with

“sincere” Eastlake furniture, and the plain new bookcases

without glass doors.

 

The round-bosomed maid came in, drew the

curtains, pushed back a log, and said consolingly:

“Verra—verra.” When she had gone Archer stood up

and began to wander about. Should he wait any longer?

His position was becoming rather foolish. Perhaps he

had misunderstood Madame Olenska—perhaps she had

not invited him after all.

 

Down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the

ring of a stepper’s hoofs; they stopped before the house,

and he caught the opening of a carriage door. Parting

the curtains he looked out into the early dusk. A street-lamp faced him, and in its light he saw Julius Beaufort’s

compact English brougham, drawn by a big roan,

and the banker descending from it, and helping out

Madame Olenska.

 

Beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which

his companion seemed to negative; then they shook

hands, and he jumped into his carriage while she

mounted the steps.

 

When she entered the room she showed no surprise

at seeing Archer there; surprise seemed the emotion

that she was least addicted to.

 

“How do you like my funny house?” she asked. “To

me it’s like heaven.”

 

As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and

tossing it away with her long cloak stood looking at

him with meditative eyes.

 

“You’ve arranged it delightfully,” he rejoined, alive

to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the

conventional by