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

Madame Olenska’s mysterious faculty of

suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily

run of experience. She had hardly ever said a word to

him to produce this impression, but it was a part of

her, either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish

background or of something inherently dramatic,

passionate and unusual in herself. Archer had always

been inclined to think that chance and circumstance

played a small part in shaping people’s lots compared

with their innate tendency to have things happen to

them. This tendency he had felt from the first in

Madame Olenska. The quiet, almost passive young woman

struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom

things were bound to happen, no matter how much she

shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid

them. The exciting fact was her having lived in an

atmosphere so thick with drama that her own tendency

to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived. It

was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that

gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a

very maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave

the measure of those she had rebelled against.

 

Archer had left her with the conviction that Count

Olenski’s accusation was not unfounded. The mysterious

person who figured in his wife’s past as “the secretary”

had probably not been unrewarded for his share

in her escape. The conditions from which she had fled

were intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she

was young, she was frightened, she was desperate—

what more natural than that she should be grateful to

her rescuer? The pity was that her gratitude put her, in

the law’s eyes and the world’s, on a par with her

abominable husband. Archer had made her understand

this, as he was bound to do; he had also made her

understand that simplehearted kindly New York, on

whose larger charity she had apparently counted, was

precisely the place where she could least hope for

indulgence.

 

To have to make this fact plain to her—and to

witness her resigned acceptance of it—had been intolerably

painful to him. He felt himself drawn to her by

obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet

endearing her. He was glad it was to him she had

revealed her secret, rather than to the cold scrutiny of

Mr. Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze of her family.

He immediately took it upon himself to assure them

both that she had given up her idea of seeking a

divorce, basing her decision on the fact that she had

understood the uselessness of the proceeding; and with

infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the

“unpleasantness” she had spared them.

 

“I was sure Newland would manage it,” Mrs. Welland

had said proudly of her future son-in-law; and old

Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for a confidential

interview, had congratulated him on his cleverness,

and added impatiently: “Silly goose! I told her myself

what nonsense it was. Wanting to pass herself off as

Ellen Mingott and an old maid, when she has the luck

to be a married woman and a Countess!”

 

These incidents had made the memory of his last talk

with Madame Olenska so vivid to the young man that

as the curtain fell on the parting of the two actors his

eyes filled with tears, and he stood up to leave the

theatre.

 

In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind

him, and saw the lady of whom he was thinking seated

in a box with the Beauforts, Lawrence Lefferts and one

or two other men. He had not spoken with her alone

since their evening together, and had tried to avoid

being with her in company; but now their eyes met,

and as Mrs. Beaufort recognised him at the same time,

and made her languid little gesture of invitation, it was

impossible not to go into the box.

 

Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a

few words with Mrs. Beaufort, who always preferred

to look beautiful and not have to talk, Archer seated

himself behind Madame Olenska. There was no one

else in the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who was

telling Mrs. Beaufort in a confidential undertone about

Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s last Sunday reception (where

some people reported that there had been dancing).

Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which

Mrs. Beaufort listened with her perfect smile, and her

head at just the right angle to be seen in profile from

the stalls, Madame Olenska turned and spoke in a low

voice.

 

“Do you think,” she asked, glancing toward the

stage, “he will send her a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow

morning?”

 

Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of

surprise. He had called only twice on Madame Olenska,

and each time he had sent her a box of yellow roses,

and each time without a card. She had never before

made any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she

had never thought of him as the sender. Now her

sudden recognition of the gift, and her associating it

with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him

with an agitated pleasure.

 

“I was thinking of that too—I was going to leave the

theatre in order to take the picture away with me,” he

said.

 

To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily.

She looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass

in her smoothly gloved hands, and said, after a pause:

“What do you do while May is away?”

 

“I stick to my work,” he answered, faintly annoyed

by the question.

 

In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands

had left the previous week for St. Augustine,

where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of

Mr. Welland’s bronchial tubes, they always spent the

latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and

silent man, with no opinions but with many habits.

With these habits none might interfere; and one of

them demanded that his wife and daughter should always

go with him on his annual journey to the south.

To preserve an unbroken domesticity was essential to

his peace of mind; he would not have known where his

hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for his

letters, if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.

 

As all the members of the family adored each other,

and as Mr. Welland was the central object of their

idolatry, it never occurred to his wife and May to let

him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who were

both in the law, and could not leave New York during

the winter, always joined him for Easter and travelled

back with him.

 

It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity

of May’s accompanying her father. The reputation of

the Mingotts’ family physician was largely based on the

attack of pneumonia which Mr. Welland had never

had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was therefore

inflexible. Originally, it had been intended that May’s

engagement should not be announced till her return

from Florida, and the fact that it had been made known

sooner could not be expected to alter Mr. Welland’s

plans. Archer would have liked to join the travellers

and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his

betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and

conventions. Little arduous as his professional duties were,

he would have been convicted of frivolity by the whole

Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a holiday

in midwinter; and he accepted May’s departure with

the resignation which he perceived would have to be

one of the principal constituents of married life.

 

He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking

at him under lowered lids. “I have done what you

wished—what you advised,” she said abruptly.

 

“Ah—I’m glad,” he returned, embarrassed by her

broaching the subject at such a moment.

 

“I understand—that you were right,” she went on a

little breathlessly; “but sometimes life is difficult …

perplexing…”

 

“I know.”

 

“And I wanted to tell you that I DO feel you were

right; and that I’m grateful to you,” she ended, lifting

her opera-glass quickly to her eyes as the door of the

box opened and Beaufort’s resonant voice broke in on

them.

 

Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.

 

Only the day before he had received a letter from

May Welland in which, with characteristic candour,

she had asked him to “be kind to Ellen” in their

absence. “She likes you and admires you so much—and

you know, though she doesn’t show it, she’s still very

lonely and unhappy. I don’t think Granny understands

her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either; they really think

she’s much worldlier and fonder of society than she is.

And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to

her, though the family won’t admit it. I think she’s

been used to lots of things we haven’t got; wonderful

music, and picture shows, and celebrities—artists and

authors and all the clever people you admire. Granny

can’t understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners

and clothes—but I can see that you’re almost the

only person in New York who can talk to her about

what she really cares for.”

 

His wise May—how he had loved her for that letter!

But he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to

begin with, and he did not care, as an engaged man, to

play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska’s

champion. He had an idea that she knew how to take

care of herself a good deal better than the ingenuous

May imagined. She had Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van

der Luyden hovering above her like a protecting deity,

and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among

them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance.

Yet he never saw her, or exchanged a word with her,

without feeling that, after all, May’s ingenuousness

almost amounted to a gift of divination. Ellen Olenska

was lonely and she was unhappy.

 

XIV.

 

As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his

friend Ned Winsett, the only one among what

Janey called his “clever people” with whom he cared to

probe into things a little deeper than the average level

of club and chop-house banter.

 

He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett’s

shabby round-shouldered back, and had once noticed

his eyes turned toward the Beaufort box. The two men

shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at a little

German restaurant around the corner. Archer, who

was not in the mood for the kind of talk they were

likely to get there, declined on the plea that he had

work to do at home; and Winsett said: “Oh, well so

have I for that matter, and I’ll be the Industrious

Apprentice too.”

 

They strolled along together, and presently Winsett

said: “Look here, what I’m really after is the name of

the dark lady in that swell box of yours—with the

Beauforts, wasn’t she? The one your friend Lefferts

seems so smitten by.”

 

Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly

annoyed. What the devil did Ned Winsett want with

Ellen Olenska’s name? And above all, why did he couple

it with Lefferts’s? It was unlike Winsett to manifest

such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he

was a journalist.

 

“It’s not for an interview, I hope?” he laughed.

 

“Well—not for the press; just for myself,” Winsett

rejoined. “The fact is she’s a neighbour of mine—queer

quarter for such a beauty to settle in—and she’s been

awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down her area

chasing his kitten, and gave