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

which had been pinned on May’s

bosom at the conclusion of the match, remarking that

in her day a filigree brooch would have been thought

enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort

did things handsomely.

 

“Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear,” the old lady

chuckled. “You must leave it in fee to your eldest girl.”

She pinched May’s white arm and watched the colour

flood her face. “Well, well, what have I said to make

you shake out the red flag? Ain’t there going to be any

daughters—only boys, eh? Good gracious, look at her

blushing again all over her blushes! What—can’t I say

that either? Mercy me—when my children beg me to

have all those gods and goddesses painted out overhead

I always say I’m too thankful to have somebody about

me that NOTHING can shock!”

 

Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson

to the eyes.

 

“Well, now tell me all about the party, please, my

dears, for I shall never get a straight word about it out

of that silly Medora,” the ancestress continued; and, as

May exclaimed: “Cousin Medora? But I thought she

was going back to Portsmouth?” she answered placidly:

“So she is—but she’s got to come here first to pick

up Ellen. Ah—you didn’t know Ellen had come to

spend the day with me? Such fol-de-rol, her not coming

for the summer; but I gave up arguing with young

people about fifty years ago. Ellen—ELLEN!” she cried in

her shrill old voice, trying to bend forward far enough

to catch a glimpse of the lawn beyond the verandah.

 

There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped

impatiently with her stick on the shiny floor. A mulatto

maid-servant in a bright turban, replying to the summons,

informed her mistress that she had seen “Miss

Ellen” going down the path to the shore; and Mrs.

Mingott turned to Archer.

 

“Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this

pretty lady will describe the party to me,” she said; and

Archer stood up as if in a dream.

 

He had heard the Countess Olenska’s name pronounced

often enough during the year and a half since

they had last met, and was even familiar with the main

incidents of her life in the interval. He knew that she

had spent the previous summer at Newport, where she

appeared to have gone a great deal into society, but

that in the autumn she had suddenly sub-let the “perfect

house” which Beaufort had been at such pains to

find for her, and decided to establish herself in

Washington. There, during the winter, he had heard of her

(as one always heard of pretty women in Washington)

as shining in the “brilliant diplomatic society” that was

supposed to make up for the social short-comings of

the Administration. He had listened to these accounts,

and to various contradictory reports on her appearance,

her conversation, her point of view and her choice

of friends, with the detachment with which one listens

to reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till

Medora suddenly spoke her name at the archery match

had Ellen Olenska become a living presence to him

again. The Marchioness’s foolish lisp had called up a

vision of the little firelit drawing-room and the sound

of the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street.

He thought of a story he had read, of some peasant

children in Tuscany lighting a bunch of straw in a

wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in their

painted tomb …

 

The way to the shore descended from the bank on

which the house was perched to a walk above the

water planted with weeping willows. Through their veil

Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its

white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the

heroic light-house keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last

venerable years. Beyond it lay the flat reaches and ugly

government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay spreading

northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island

with its low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut

faint in the sunset haze.

 

From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier

ending in a sort of pagoda-like summer-house; and in

the pagoda a lady stood, leaning against the rail, her

back to the shore. Archer stopped at the sight as if he

had waked from sleep. That vision of the past was a

dream, and the reality was what awaited him in the

house on the bank overhead: was Mrs. Welland’s pony-carriage circling around and around the oval at the

door, was May sitting under the shameless Olympians

and glowing with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at

the far end of Bellevue Avenue, and Mr. Welland,

already dressed for dinner, and pacing the drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience—

for it was one of the houses in which one always knew

exactly what is happening at a given hour.

 

“What am I? A son-in-law—” Archer thought.

 

The figure at the end of the pier had not moved. For

a long moment the young man stood half way down

the bank, gazing at the bay furrowed with the coming

and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft and

the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs. The

lady in the summer-house seemed to be held by the

same sight. Beyond the grey bastions of Fort Adams a

long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a thousand

fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as it

beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock

and the shore. Archer, as he watched, remembered the

scene in the Shaughraun, and Montague lifting Ada

Dyas’s ribbon to his lips without her knowing that he

was in the room.

 

“She doesn’t know—she hasn’t guessed. Shouldn’t I

know if she came up behind me, I wonder?” he mused;

and suddenly he said to himself: “If she doesn’t turn

before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I’ll go

back.”

 

The boat was gliding out on the receding tide. It slid

before the Lime Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis’s little

house, and passed across the turret in which the light

was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of water

sparkled between the last reef of the island and the

stern of the boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not move.

 

He turned and walked up the hill.

 

“I’m sorry you didn’t find Ellen—I should have liked

to see her again,” May said as they drove home through

the dusk. “But perhaps she wouldn’t have cared—she

seems so changed.”

 

“Changed?” echoed her husband in a colourless voice,

his eyes fixed on the ponies’ twitching ears.

 

“So indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New

York and her house, and spending her time with such

queer people. Fancy how hideously uncomfortable she

must be at the Blenkers’! She says she does it to keep

cousin Medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying

dreadful people. But I sometimes think we’ve always

bored her.”

 

Archer made no answer, and she continued, with a

tinge of hardness that he had never before noticed in

her frank fresh voice: “After all, I wonder if she wouldn’t

be happier with her husband.”

 

He burst into a laugh. “Sancta simplicitas!” he

exclaimed; and as she turned a puzzled frown on him he

added: “I don’t think I ever heard you say a cruel thing

before.”

 

“Cruel?”

 

“Well—watching the contortions of the damned is

supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I

believe even they don’t think people happier in hell.”

 

“It’s a pity she ever married abroad then,” said May,

in the placid tone with which her mother met Mr.

Welland’s vagaries; and Archer felt himself gently relegated

to the category of unreasonable husbands.

 

They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in

between the chamfered wooden gate-posts surmounted

by cast-iron lamps which marked the approach to the

Welland villa. Lights were already shining through its

windows, and Archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a

glimpse of his father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured

him, pacing the drawing-room, watch in hand and

wearing the pained expression that he had long since

found to be much more efficacious than anger.

 

The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall,

was conscious of a curious reversal of mood. There

was something about the luxury of the Welland house

and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged

with minute observances and exactions, that always

stole into his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets,

the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of

disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of

cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain

of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and

each member of the household to all the others, made

any less systematised and affluent existence seem unreal

and precarious. But now it was the Welland house,

and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had

become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on

the shore, when he had stood irresolute, halfway down

the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins.

 

All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at

May’s side, watching the moonlight slant along the

carpet, and thinking of Ellen Olenska driving home

across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort’s trotters.

 

XXII.

 

A party for the Blenkers—the Blenkers?”

 

Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and

looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses,

read aloud, in the tone of high comedy: “Professor and

Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and

Mrs. Welland’s company at the meeting of the Wednesday

Afternoon Club on August 25th at 3 o’clock

punctually. To meet Mrs. and the Misses Blenker.

“Red Gables, Catherine Street. R. S. V. P.”

 

“Good gracious—” Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second

reading had been necessary to bring the monstrous

absurdity of the thing home to him.

 

“Poor Amy Sillerton—you never can tell what her

husband will do next,” Mrs. Welland sighed. “I suppose

he’s just discovered the Blenkers.”

 

Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side

of Newport society; and a thorn that could not be

plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated

family tree. He was, as people said, a man who had

had “every advantage.” His father was Sillerton Jackson’s

uncle, his mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each

side there was wealth and position, and mutual

suitability. Nothing—as Mrs. Welland had often remarked—

nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an

archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to

live in Newport in winter, or do any of the other

revolutionary things that he did. But at least, if he was

going to break with tradition and flout society in the

face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet,

who had a right to expect “something different,” and

money enough to keep her own carriage.

 

No one in the Mingott set could understand why

Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities

of a husband who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he

travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead

of going to Paris or Italy. But there they were, set in

their ways, and apparently unaware that they were

different from other people; and when they gave one of

their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the

Cliffs, because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet

connection, had to draw lots and send an unwilling

representative.

 

“It’s a wonder,” Mrs. Welland remarked, “that they

didn’t choose the Cup Race day! Do you remember,

two