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

of the little satin boot

that peeped from her long draperies.

 

“I used to care immensely too: my life was full of

such things. But now I want to try not to.”

 

“You want to try not to?”

 

“Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become

just like everybody else here.”

 

Archer reddened. “You’ll never be like everybody

else,” he said.

 

She raised her straight eyebrows a little. “Ah, don’t

say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!”

 

Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask. She

leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands,

and looking away from him into remote dark distances.

 

“I want to get away from it all,” she insisted.

 

He waited a moment and cleared his throat. “I know.

Mr. Letterblair has told me.”

 

“Ah?”

 

“That’s the reason I’ve come. He asked me to—you

see I’m in the firm.”

 

She looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened.

“You mean you can manage it for me? I can talk

to you instead of Mr. Letterblair? Oh, that will be so

much easier!”

 

Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with

his self-satisfaction. He perceived that she had spoken

of business to Beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to

have routed Beaufort was something of a triumph.

 

“I am here to talk about it,” he repeated.

 

She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that

rested on the back of the sofa. Her face looked pale

and extinguished, as if dimmed by the rich red of her

dress. She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a pathetic and

even pitiful figure.

 

“Now we’re coming to hard facts,” he thought,

conscious in himself of the same instinctive recoil that he

had so often criticised in his mother and her contemporaries.

How little practice he had had in dealing with

unusual situations! Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar

to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the

stage. In face of what was coming he felt as awkward

and embarrassed as a boy.

 

After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with

unexpected vehemence: “I want to be free; I want to wipe

out all the past.”

 

“I understand that.”

 

Her face warmed. “Then you’ll help me?”

 

“First—” he hesitated—“perhaps I ought to know a

little more.”

 

She seemed surprised. “You know about my husband—

my life with him?”

 

He made a sign of assent.

 

“Well—then—what more is there? In this country

are such things tolerated? I’m a Protestant—our church

does not forbid divorce in such cases.”

 

“Certainly not.”

 

They were both silent again, and Archer felt the

spectre of Count Olenski’s letter grimacing hideously

between them. The letter filled only half a page, and

was just what he had described it to be in speaking of it

to Mr. Letterblair: the vague charge of an angry

blackguard. But how much truth was behind it? Only Count

Olenski’s wife could tell.

 

“I’ve looked through the papers you gave to Mr.

Letterblair,” he said at length.

 

“Well—can there be anything more abominable?”

 

“No.”

 

She changed her position slightly, screening her eyes

with her lifted hand.

 

“Of course you know,” Archer continued, “that if

your husband chooses to fight the case—as he threatens to—”

 

“Yes—?”

 

“He can say things—things that might be unpl—might

be disagreeable to you: say them publicly, so that they

would get about, and harm you even if—”

 

“If—?”

 

“I mean: no matter how unfounded they were.”

 

She paused for a long interval; so long that, not

wishing to keep his eyes on her shaded face, he had

time to imprint on his mind the exact shape of her

other hand, the one on her knee, and every detail of the

three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers; among which,

he noticed, a wedding ring did not appear.

 

“What harm could such accusations, even if he made

them publicly, do me here?”

 

It was on his lips to exclaim: “My poor child—far

more harm than anywhere else!” Instead, he answered,

in a voice that sounded in his ears like Mr. Letterblair’s:

“New York society is a very small world compared

with the one you’ve lived in. And it’s ruled, in spite of

appearances, by a few people with—well, rather old-fashioned ideas.”

 

She said nothing, and he continued: “Our ideas about

marriage and divorce are particularly old-fashioned.

Our legislation favours divorce—our social customs

don’t.”

 

“Never?”

 

“Well—not if the woman, however injured, however

irreproachable, has appearances in the least degree

against her, has exposed herself by any unconventional

action to—to offensive insinuations—”

 

She drooped her head a little lower, and he waited

again, intensely hoping for a flash of indignation, or at

least a brief cry of denial. None came.

 

A little travelling clock ticked purringly at her elbow,

and a log broke in two and sent up a shower of sparks.

The whole hushed and brooding room seemed to be

waiting silently with Archer.

 

“Yes,” she murmured at length, “that’s what my

family tell me.”

 

He winced a little. “It’s not unnatural—”

 

“OUR family,” she corrected herself; and Archer

coloured. “For you’ll be my cousin soon,” she continued

gently.

 

“I hope so.”

 

“And you take their view?”

 

He stood up at this, wandered across the room,

stared with void eyes at one of the pictures against the

old red damask, and came back irresolutely to her side.

How could he say: “Yes, if what your husband hints is

true, or if you’ve no way of disproving it?”

 

“Sincerely—” she interjected, as he was about to

speak.

 

He looked down into the fire. “Sincerely, then—what

should you gain that would compensate for the possibility—

the certainty—of a lot of beastly talk?”

 

“But my freedom—is that nothing?”

 

It flashed across him at that instant that the charge

in the letter was true, and that she hoped to marry the

partner of her guilt. How was he to tell her that, if she

really cherished such a plan, the laws of the State were

inexorably opposed to it? The mere suspicion that the

thought was in her mind made him feel harshly and

impatiently toward her. “But aren’t you as free as air

as it is?” he returned. “Who can touch you? Mr.

Letterblair tells me the financial question has been

settled—”

 

“Oh, yes,” she said indifferently.

 

“Well, then: is it worth while to risk what may be

infinitely disagreeable and painful? Think of the

newspapers—their vileness! It’s all stupid and narrow and

unjust—but one can’t make over society.”

 

“No,” she acquiesced; and her tone was so faint and

desolate that he felt a sudden remorse for his own hard

thoughts.

 

“The individual, in such cases, is nearly always

sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest:

people cling to any convention that keeps the family

together—protects the children, if there are any,” he

rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose

to his lips in his intense desire to cover over the ugly

reality which her silence seemed to have laid bare.

Since she would not or could not say the one word that

would have cleared the air, his wish was not to let her

feel that he was trying to probe into her secret. Better

keep on the surface, in the prudent old New York way,

than risk uncovering a wound he could not heal.

 

“It’s my business, you know,” he went on, “to help

you to see these things as the people who are fondest of

you see them. The Mingotts, the Wellands, the van der

Luydens, all your friends and relations: if I didn’t show

you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn’t

be fair of me, would it?” He spoke insistently, almost

pleading with her in his eagerness to cover up that

yawning silence.

 

She said slowly: “No; it wouldn’t be fair.”

 

The fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of

the lamps made a gurgling appeal for attention. Madame

Olenska rose, wound it up and returned to the

fire, but without resuming her seat.

 

Her remaining on her feet seemed to signify that

there was nothing more for either of them to say, and

Archer stood up also.

 

“Very well; I will do what you wish,” she said

abruptly. The blood rushed to his forehead; and, taken

aback by the suddenness of her surrender, he caught

her two hands awkwardly in his.

 

“I—I do want to help you,” he said.

 

“You do help me. Good night, my cousin.”

 

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were

cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned

to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint

gaslight of the hall, and plunged out into the winter

night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

 

XIII.

 

It was a crowded night at Wallack’s theatre.

 

The play was “The Shaughraun,” with Dion

Boucicault in the title role and Harry Montague and

Ada Dyas as the lovers. The popularity of the admirable

English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun

always packed the house. In the galleries the enthusiasm

was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people

smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as the

galleries did.

 

There was one episode, in particular, that held the

house from floor to ceiling. It was that in which Harry

Montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of

parting with Miss Dyas, bade her goodbye, and turned

to go. The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece

and looking down into the fire, wore a gray

cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings,

moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long

lines about her feet. Around her neck was a narrow

black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her

back.

 

When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms

against the mantelshelf and bowed her face in her

hands. On the threshold he paused to look at her; then

he stole back, lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon,

kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or

changing her attitude. And on this silent parting the

curtain fell.

 

It was always for the sake of that particular scene

that Newland Archer went to see “The Shaughraun.”

He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as

fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant

do in Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London;

in its reticence, its dumb sorrow, it moved him

more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.

 

On the evening in question the little scene acquired

an added poignancy by reminding him—he could not

have said why—of his leave-taking from Madame

Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days

earlier.

 

It would have been as difficult to discover any

resemblance between the two situations as between the

appearance of the persons concerned. Newland Archer

could not pretend to anything approaching the young

English actor’s romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas

was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build

whose pale and pleasantly ugly face was utterly unlike

Ellen Olenska’s vivid countenance. Nor were Archer

and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken

silence; they were client and lawyer separating

after a talk which had given the lawyer the worst

possible impression of the client’s case. Wherein, then,

lay the resemblance that made the young man’s heart

beat with a kind of retrospective excitement? It seemed

to be in