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

gave him the

ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.

 

Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual

easy assurance; but he could not smile away the vertical

line between his eyes. It was fairly clear that Madame

Olenska had not known that he was coming,

though her words to Archer had hinted at the possibility;

at any rate, she had evidently not told him where

she was going when she left New York, and her unexplained

departure had exasperated him. The ostensible

reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very

night before, of a “perfect little house,” not in the

market, which was really just the thing for her, but

would be snapped up instantly if she didn’t take it; and

he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she had

led him in running away just as he had found it.

 

“If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had

been a little bit nearer perfection I might have told you

all this from town, and been toasting my toes before

the club fire at this minute, instead of tramping after

you through the snow,” he grumbled, disguising a real

irritation under the pretence of it; and at this opening

Madame Olenska twisted the talk away to the fantastic

possibility that they might one day actually converse

with each other from street to street, or even—

incredible dream!—from one town to another. This struck

from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne,

and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the

most intelligent when they are talking against time, and

dealing with a new invention in which it would seem

ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the

telephone carried them safely back to the big house.

 

Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and

Archer took his leave and walked off to fetch the

cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess Olenska

indoors. It was probable that, little as the van der

Luydens encouraged unannounced visits, he could count

on being asked to dine, and sent back to the station to

catch the nine o’clock train; but more than that he

would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable

to his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage

should wish to spend the night, and distasteful to them

to propose it to a person with whom they were on

terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.

 

Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it;

and his taking the long journey for so small a reward

gave the measure of his impatience. He was undeniably

in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had

only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.

His dull and childless home had long since palled on

him; and in addition to more permanent consolations

he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his

own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska

was avowedly flying: the question was whether she had

fled because his importunities displeased her, or

because she did not wholly trust herself to resist them;

unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind,

and her departure no more than a manoeuvre.

 

Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had

actually seen of Madame Olenska, he was beginning to

think that he could read her face, and if not her face,

her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and even

dismay, at Beaufort’s sudden appearance. But, after all,

if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had

left New York for the express purpose of meeting him?

If she had done that, she ceased to be an object of

interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of

dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with

Beaufort “classed” herself irretrievably.

 

No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging

Beaufort, and probably despising him, she was yet drawn to

him by all that gave him an advantage over the other

men about her: his habit of two continents and two

societies, his familiar association with artists and actors

and people generally in the world’s eye, and his careless

contempt for local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he

was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances

of his life, and a certain native shrewdness,

made him better worth talking to than many men,

morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was

bounded by the Battery and the Central Park. How

should any one coming from a wider world not feel the

difference and be attracted by it?

 

Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to

Archer that he and she did not talk the same language;

and the young man knew that in some respects this was

true. But Beaufort understood every turn of her dialect,

and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his

attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those

revealed in Count Olenski’s letter. This might seem to be

to his disadvantage with Count Olenski’s wife; but

Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman

like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything

that reminded her of her past. She might believe

herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed

her in it would still charm her, even though it were

against her will.

 

Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man

make out the case for Beaufort, and for Beaufort’s

victim. A longing to enlighten her was strong in him;

and there were moments when he imagined that all she

asked was to be enlightened.

 

That evening he unpacked his books from London.

The box was full of things he had been waiting for

impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another

collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant

tales, and a novel called “Middlemarch,” as to which

there had lately been interesting things said in the

reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in

favour of this feast; but though he turned the pages with

the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know

what he was reading, and one book after another

dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit

on a small volume of verse which he had ordered

because the name had attracted him: “The House of

Life.” He took it up, and found himself plunged in an

atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books;

so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it

gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary

of human passions. All through the night he pursued

through those enchanted pages the vision of a

woman who had the face of Ellen Olenska; but when

he woke the next morning, and looked out at the

brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his

desk in Mr. Letterblair’s office, and the family pew in

Grace Church, his hour in the park of Skuytercliff

became as far outside the pale of probability as the

visions of the night.

 

“Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!” Janey

commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother

added: “Newland, dear, I’ve noticed lately that you’ve

been coughing; I do hope you’re not letting yourself be

overworked?” For it was the conviction of both ladies

that, under the iron despotism of his senior partners,

the young man’s life was spent in the most exhausting

professional labours—and he had never thought it

necessary to undeceive them.

 

The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The

taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and

there were moments when he felt as if he were being

buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of the

Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and

though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded

at each other across the whist-tables. It was not till the

fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on

his return home. “Come late tomorrow: I must explain

to you. Ellen.” These were the only words it contained.

 

The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note

into his pocket, smiling a little at the Frenchness of the

“to you.” After dinner he went to a play; and it was

not until his return home, after midnight, that he drew

Madame Olenska’s missive out again and re-read it

slowly a number of times. There were several ways of

answering it, and he gave considerable thought to each

one during the watches of an agitated night. That on

which, when morning came, he finally decided was to

pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on

board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for

St. Augustine.

 

XVI.

 

When Archer walked down the sandy main street

of St. Augustine to the house which had been

pointed out to him as Mr. Welland’s, and saw May

Welland standing under a magnolia with the sun in her

hair, he wondered why he had waited so long to come.

 

Here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life

that belonged to him; and he, who fancied himself so

scornful of arbitrary restraints, had been afraid to break

away from his desk because of what people might

think of his stealing a holiday!

 

Her first exclamation was: “Newland—has anything

happened?” and it occurred to him that it would have

been more “feminine” if she had instantly read in his

eyes why he had come. But when he answered: “Yes—I

found I had to see you,” her happy blushes took the

chill from her surprise, and he saw how easily he

would be forgiven, and how soon even Mr. Letterblair’s

mild disapproval would be smiled away by a tolerant

family.

 

Early as it was, the main street was no place for any

but formal greetings, and Archer longed to be alone

with May, and to pour out all his tenderness and his

impatience. It still lacked an hour to the late Welland

breakfast-time, and instead of asking him to come in

she proposed that they should walk out to an old

orange-garden beyond the town. She had just been for

a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little

waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its

meshes. Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown

hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked

lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity. As she

walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her

face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.

 

To Archer’s strained nerves the vision was as soothing

as the sight of the blue sky and the lazy river. They

sat down on a bench under the orange-trees and he put

his arm about her and kissed her. It was like drinking

at a cold spring with the sun on it; but his pressure

may have been more vehement than he had intended,

for the blood rose to her face and she drew back as if

he had startled her.

 

“What is it?” he asked, smiling; and she looked at

him with surprise, and answered: “Nothing.”

 

A slight embarrassment fell on them, and her hand

slipped out of his. It was the only time that he had

kissed her on the lips except for their fugitive embrace

in the Beaufort conservatory, and he saw that she was

disturbed, and shaken out of her cool boyish composure.

 

“Tell me what you do all day,” he said, crossing his

arms under his tilted-back head, and pushing his hat

forward to screen the sun-dazzle. To let her talk about

familiar and simple things was the easiest way of carrying

on his own independent train of thought; and he

sat listening to her simple chronicle of swimming,