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

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 overfed

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 bathrooms 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

momentary well-being. Her rivals—Mrs. Reggie Chivers,

the Merry girls, and divers rosy Thorleys, Dagonets

and Mingotts, stood behind her in a lovely anxious

group, brown heads and golden bent above the scores,

and pale muslins and flower-wreathed hats mingled in

a tender rainbow. All were young and pretty, and

bathed in summer bloom; but not one had the nymph-like ease of his wife, when, with tense muscles and

happy frown, she bent her soul upon some feat of

strength.

 

“Gad,” Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, “not

one of the lot holds the bow as she does”; and Beaufort

retorted: “Yes; but that’s the only kind of target she’ll

ever hit.”

 

Archer felt irrationally angry. His host’s contemptuous

tribute to May’s “niceness” was just what a husband

should have wished to hear said of his wife. The

fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in

attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet

the words sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if

“niceness” carried to that supreme degree were only a

negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? As

he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her

final bull’s-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet

lifted that curtain.

 

She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the

rest of the company with the simplicity that was her

crowning grace. No one could ever be jealous of her

triumphs because she managed to give the feeling that

she would have been just as serene if she had missed

them. But when her eyes met her husband’s her face

glowed with the pleasure she saw in his.

 

Mrs. Welland’s basket-work pony-carriage was waiting

for them, and they drove off among the dispersing

carriages, May handling the reins and Archer sitting at

her side.

 

The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright

lawns and shrubberies, and up and down Bellevue Avenue

rolled a double line of victorias, dog-carts, landaus

and “vis-a-vis,” carrying well-dressed ladies and

gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward

from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean

Drive.

 

“Shall we go to see Granny?” May suddenly

proposed. “I should like to tell her myself that I’ve won

the prize. There’s lots of time before dinner.”

 

Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down

Narragansett Avenue, crossed Spring Street and drove

out toward the rocky moorland beyond. In this unfashionable

region Catherine the Great, always indifferent

to precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in

her youth a many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage-orne on a bit of cheap land overlooking the bay. Here,

in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs spread

themselves above the island-dotted waters. A winding

drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls

embedded in mounds of geraniums to a front door of

highly-varnished walnut under a striped verandah-roof;

and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and

yellow star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened

four small square rooms with heavy flock-papers under

ceilings on which an Italian house-painter had lavished

all the divinities of Olympus. One of these rooms had

been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the

burden of flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining

one she spent her days, enthroned in a large armchair

between the open door and window, and perpetually

waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection

of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person

that the air it set in motion stirred only the fringe of the

anti-macassars on the chair-arms.

 

Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage

old Catherine had shown to Archer the cordiality

which a service rendered excites toward the person

served. She was persuaded that irrepressible passion

was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent

admirer of impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the

spending of money) she always received him with a

genial twinkle of complicity and a play of allusion to

which May seemed fortunately impervious.

 

She examined and appraised with much interest the

diamond-tipped arrow