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

>to know—I want you to let me announce it this

evening at the ball.”

 

Miss Welland’s face grew rosy as the dawn, and she

looked at him with radiant eyes. “If you can persuade

Mamma,” she said; “but why should we change what

is already settled?” He made no answer but that which

his eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently

smiling: “Tell my cousin yourself: I give you leave. She

says she used to play with you when you were children.”

 

She made way for him by pushing back her chair,

and promptly, and a little ostentatiously, with the

desire that the whole house should see what he was

doing, Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska’s

side.

 

“We DID use to play together, didn’t we?” she asked,

turning her grave eyes to his. “You were a horrid boy,

and kissed me once behind a door; but it was your

cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me, that

I was in love with.” Her glance swept the horseshoe

curve of boxes. “Ah, how this brings it all back to

me—I see everybody here in knickerbockers and pantalettes,”

she said, with her trailing slightly foreign accent,

her eyes returning to his face.

 

Agreeable as their expression was, the young man

was shocked that they should reflect so unseemly a

picture of the august tribunal before which, at that very

moment, her case was being tried. Nothing could be in

worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered

somewhat stiffly: “Yes, you have been away a very

long time.”

 

“Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,” she said,

“that I’m sure I’m dead and buried, and this dear old

place is heaven;” which, for reasons he could not

define, struck Newland Archer as an even more

disrespectful way of describing New York society.

 

III.

 

It invariably happened in the same way.

 

Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual

ball, never failed to appear at the Opera; indeed, she

always gave her ball on an Opera night in order to

emphasise her complete superiority to household cares,

and her possession of a staff of servants competent to

organise every detail of the entertainment in her absence.

 

The Beauforts’ house was one of the few in New

York that possessed a ball-room (it antedated even

Mrs. Manson Mingott’s and the Headly Chiverses’);

and at a time when it was beginning to be thought

“provincial” to put a “crash” over the drawing-room

floor and move the furniture upstairs, the possession of

a ball-room that was used for no other purpose, and left

for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year to

shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a

corner and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted

superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was

regrettable in the Beaufort past.

 

Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social

philosophy into axioms, had once said: “We all have

our pet common people—” and though the phrase was

a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many

an exclusive bosom. But the Beauforts were not exactly

common; some people said they were even worse. Mrs.

Beaufort belonged indeed to one of America’s most

honoured families; she had been the lovely Regina Dallas

(of the South Carolina branch), a penniless beauty

introduced to New York society by her cousin, the

imprudent Medora Manson, who was always doing the

wrong thing from the right motive. When one was

related to the Mansons and the Rushworths one had a

“droit de cite” (as Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who had

frequented the Tuileries, called it) in New York society;

but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius Beaufort?

 

The question was: who was Beaufort? He passed for

an Englishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered,

hospitable and witty. He had come to America with

letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson

Mingott’s English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily

made himself an important position in the world of

affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was

bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and when

Medora Manson announced her cousin’s engagement

to him it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor

Medora’s long record of imprudences.

 

But folly is as often justified of her children as

wisdom, and two years after young Mrs. Beaufort’s marriage

it was admitted that she had the most distinguished

house in New York. No one knew exactly how the

miracle was accomplished. She was indolent, passive,

the caustic even called her dull; but dressed like an

idol, hung with pearls, growing younger and blonder

and more beautiful each year, she throned in Mr. Beaufort’s

heavy brownstone palace, and drew all the world

there without lifting her jewelled little finger. The knowing

people said it was Beaufort himself who trained the

servants, taught the chef new dishes, told the gardeners

what hot-house flowers to grow for the dinner-table

and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed the

after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife

wrote to her friends. If he did, these domestic activities

were privately performed, and he presented to the world

the appearance of a careless and hospitable millionaire

strolling into his own drawing-room with the detachment

of an invited guest, and saying: “My wife’s gloxinias

are a marvel, aren’t they? I believe she gets them

out from Kew.”

 

Mr. Beaufort’s secret, people were agreed, was the

way he carried things off. It was all very well to whisper

that he had been “helped” to leave England by the

international banking-house in which he had been

employed; he carried off that rumour as easily as the

rest—though New York’s business conscience was no

less sensitive than its moral standard—he carried

everything before him, and all New York into his drawing-rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said

they were “going to the Beauforts’” with the same

tone of security as if they had said they were going to

Mrs. Manson Mingott’s, and with the added satisfaction

of knowing they would get hot canvasback ducks

and vintage wines, instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot

without a year and warmed-up croquettes from Philadelphia.

 

Mrs. Beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her

box just before the Jewel Song; and when, again as

usual, she rose at the end of the third act, drew her

opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared,

New York knew that meant that half an hour

later the ball would begin.

 

The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were

proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of

the annual ball. The Beauforts had been among the

first people in New York to own their own red velvet

carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own

footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it

with the supper and the ball-room chairs. They had

also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take

their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to

the hostess’s bedroom and recurling their hair with the

aid of the gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have

said that he supposed all his wife’s friends had maids

who saw to it that they were properly coiffees when

they left home.

 

Then the house had been boldly planned with a

ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow

passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses’) one

marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d’or),

seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in

the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a

conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their

costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.

 

Newland Archer, as became a young man of his

position, strolled in somewhat late. He had left his

overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings

were one of Beaufort’s few fatuities), had dawdled

a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and

furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men

were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and

had finally joined the line of guests whom Mrs. Beaufort

was receiving on the threshold of the crimson

drawing-room.

 

Archer was distinctly nervous. He had not gone back

to his club after the Opera (as the young bloods usually

did), but, the night being fine, had walked for some

distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the

direction of the Beauforts’ house. He was definitely

afraid that the Mingotts might be going too far; that,

in fact, they might have Granny Mingott’s orders to

bring the Countess Olenska to the ball.

 

From the tone of the club box he had perceived how

grave a mistake that would be; and, though he was

more than ever determined to “see the thing through,”

he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his betrothed’s

cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera.

 

Wandering on to the bouton d’or drawing-room

(where Beaufort had had the audacity to hang “Love

Victorious,” the much-discussed nude of Bouguereau)

Archer found Mrs. Welland and her daughter standing

near the ball-room door. Couples were already gliding

over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell

on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with

modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments

of the young married women’s coiffures, and on

the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace

gloves.

 

Miss Welland, evidently about to join the dancers,

hung on the threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her

hand (she carried no other bouquet), her face a little

pale, her eyes burning with a candid excitement. A

group of young men and girls were gathered about her,

and there was much hand-clasping, laughing and pleasantry

on which Mrs. Welland, standing slightly apart,

shed the beam of a qualified approval. It was evident

that Miss Welland was in the act of announcing her

engagement, while her mother affected the air of parental

reluctance considered suitable to the occasion.

 

Archer paused a moment. It was at his express wish

that the announcement had been made, and yet it was

not thus that he would have wished to have his happiness

known. To proclaim it in the heat and noise of a

crowded ball-room was to rob it of the fine bloom of

privacy which should belong to things nearest the heart.

His joy was so deep that this blurring of the surface left

its essence untouched; but he would have liked to keep

the surface pure too. It was something of a satisfaction

to find that May Welland shared this feeling. Her eyes

fled to his beseechingly, and their look said: “Remember,

we’re doing this because it’s right.”

 

No appeal could have found a more immediate response

in Archer’s breast; but he wished that the necessity

of their action had been represented by some ideal

reason, and not simply by poor Ellen Olenska. The

group about Miss Welland made way for him with

significant smiles, and after taking his share of the

felicitations he drew his betrothed into the middle of

the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist.

 

“Now we shan’t have to talk,” he said, smiling into

her candid eyes, as they floated away on the soft waves

of the Blue Danube.

 

She made no answer. Her lips trembled into a smile,

but the eyes remained distant and serious, as if bent on

some ineffable vision. “Dear,” Archer whispered, pressing

her to him: it was borne in on him that the first

hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ball-room,

had in them something grave and sacramental. What a

new life it was going to be, with this whiteness,

radiance, goodness at one’s side!

 

The dance over, the two, as became an affianced

couple, wandered into the conservatory; and sitting

behind a tall