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

had done so with success;

and that evening, when Mrs. Beaufort appeared at the

Opera wearing her old smile and a new emerald necklace,

society drew a breath of relief.

 

New York was inexorable in its condemnation of

business irregularities. So far there had been no exception

to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of

probity must pay; and every one was aware that even

Beaufort and Beaufort’s wife would be offered up

unflinchingly to this principle. But to be obliged to offer

them up would be not only painful but inconvenient.

The disappearance of the Beauforts would leave a

considerable void in their compact little circle; and those

who were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the

moral catastrophe bewailed in advance the loss of the

best ball-room in New York.

 

Archer had definitely made up his mind to go to

Washington. He was waiting only for the opening of

the law-suit of which he had spoken to May, so that its

date might coincide with that of his visit; but on the

following Tuesday he learned from Mr. Letterblair that

the case might be postponed for several weeks. Nevertheless,

he went home that afternoon determined in any

event to leave the next evening. The chances were that

May, who knew nothing of his professional life, and

had never shown any interest in it, would not learn of

the postponement, should it take place, nor remember

the names of the litigants if they were mentioned before

her; and at any rate he could no longer put off seeing

Madame Olenska. There were too many things that he

must say to her.

 

On the Wednesday morning, when he reached his

office, Mr. Letterblair met him with a troubled face.

Beaufort, after all, had not managed to “tide over”;

but by setting afloat the rumour that he had done so he

had reassured his depositors, and heavy payments had

poured into the bank till the previous evening, when

disturbing reports again began to predominate. In

consequence, a run on the bank had begun, and its doors

were likely to close before the day was over. The ugliest

things were being said of Beaufort’s dastardly

manoeuvre, and his failure promised to be one of the

most discreditable in the history of Wall Street.

 

The extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white

and incapacitated. “I’ve seen bad things in my time;

but nothing as bad as this. Everybody we know will be

hit, one way or another. And what will be done about

Mrs. Beaufort? What CAN be done about her? I pity

Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody: coming at

her age, there’s no knowing what effect this affair may

have on her. She always believed in Beaufort—she made

a friend of him! And there’s the whole Dallas connection:

poor Mrs. Beaufort is related to every one of you.

Her only chance would be to leave her husband—yet

how can any one tell her so? Her duty is at his side;

and luckily she seems always to have been blind to his

private weaknesses.”

 

There was a knock, and Mr. Letterblair turned his

head sharply. “What is it? I can’t be disturbed.”

 

A clerk brought in a letter for Archer and withdrew.

Recognising his wife’s hand, the young man opened

the envelope and read: “Won’t you please come up

town as early as you can? Granny had a slight stroke

last night. In some mysterious way she found out before

any one else this awful news about the bank.

Uncle Lovell is away shooting, and the idea of the

disgrace has made poor Papa so nervous that he has a

temperature and can’t leave his room. Mamma needs

you dreadfully, and I do hope you can get away at once

and go straight to Granny’s.”

 

Archer handed the note to his senior partner, and a

few minutes later was crawling northward in a crowded

horse-car, which he exchanged at Fourteenth Street for

one of the high staggering omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue

line. It was after twelve o’clock when this laborious

vehicle dropped him at old Catherine’s. The

sitting-room window on the ground floor, where she

usually throned, was tenanted by the inadequate figure

of her daughter, Mrs. Welland, who signed a haggard

welcome as she caught sight of Archer; and at the door

he was met by May. The hall wore the unnatural

appearance peculiar to well-kept houses suddenly

invaded by illness: wraps and furs lay in heaps on the

chairs, a doctor’s bag and overcoat were on the table,

and beside them letters and cards had already piled up

unheeded.

 

May looked pale but smiling: Dr. Bencomb, who

had just come for the second time, took a more hopeful

view, and Mrs. Mingott’s dauntless determination to

live and get well was already having an effect on her

family. May led Archer into the old lady’s sitting-room,

where the sliding doors opening into the bedroom had

been drawn shut, and the heavy yellow damask portieres

dropped over them; and here Mrs. Welland communicated

to him in horrified undertones the details of

the catastrophe. It appeared that the evening before

something dreadful and mysterious had happened. At

about eight o’clock, just after Mrs. Mingott had finished

the game of solitaire that she always played after

dinner, the door-bell had rung, and a lady so thickly

veiled that the servants did not immediately recognise

her had asked to be received.

 

The butler, hearing a familiar voice, had thrown

open the sitting-room door, announcing: “Mrs. Julius

Beaufort”—and had then closed it again on the two

ladies. They must have been together, he thought, about

an hour. When Mrs. Mingott’s bell rang Mrs. Beaufort

had already slipped away unseen, and the old lady,

white and vast and terrible, sat alone in her great chair,

and signed to the butler to help her into her room. She

seemed, at that time, though obviously distressed, in

complete control of her body and brain. The mulatto

maid put her to bed, brought her a cup of tea as usual,

laid everything straight in the room, and went away;

but at three in the morning the bell rang again, and the

two servants, hastening in at this unwonted summons

(for old Catherine usually slept like a baby), had found

their mistress sitting up against her pillows with a

crooked smile on her face and one little hand hanging

limp from its huge arm.

 

The stroke had clearly been a slight one, for she was

able to articulate and to make her wishes known; and

soon after the doctor’s first visit she had begun to

regain control of her facial muscles. But the alarm had

been great; and proportionately great was the indignation

when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott’s fragmentary

phrases that Regina Beaufort had come to ask

her—incredible effrontery!—to back up her husband,

see them through—not to “desert” them, as she called

it—in fact to induce the whole family to cover and

condone their monstrous dishonour.

 

“I said to her: “Honour’s always been honour, and

honesty honesty, in Manson Mingott’s house, and will

be till I’m carried out of it feet first,’” the old woman

had stammered into her daughter’s ear, in the thick

voice of the partly paralysed. “And when she said: `But

my name, Auntie—my name’s Regina Dallas,’ I said: `It

was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it’s

got to stay Beaufort now that he’s covered you with

shame.’”

 

So much, with tears and gasps of horror, Mrs. Welland

imparted, blanched and demolished by the unwonted

obligation of having at last to fix her eyes on

the unpleasant and the discreditable. “If only I could

keep it from your father-in-law: he always says:

`Augusta, for pity’s sake, don’t destroy my last illusions’

—and how am I to prevent his knowing these horrors?”

the poor lady wailed.

 

“After all, Mamma, he won’t have SEEN them,” her

daughter suggested; and Mrs. Welland sighed: “Ah,

no; thank heaven he’s safe in bed. And Dr. Bencomb

has promised to keep him there till poor Mamma is

better, and Regina has been got away somewhere.”

 

Archer had seated himself near the window and was

gazing out blankly at the deserted thoroughfare. It was

evident that he had been summoned rather for the

moral support of the stricken ladies than because of

any specific aid that he could render. Mr. Lovell Mingott

had been telegraphed for, and messages were being

despatched by hand to the members of the family living

in New York; and meanwhile there was nothing to do

but to discuss in hushed tones the consequences of

Beaufort’s dishonour and of his wife’s unjustifiable

action.

 

Mrs. Lovell Mingott, who had been in another room

writing notes, presently reappeared, and added her voice

to the discussion. In THEIR day, the elder ladies agreed,

the wife of a man who had done anything disgraceful

in business had only one idea: to efface herself, to

disappear with him. “There was the case of poor Grandmamma

Spicer; your great-grandmother, May. Of

course,” Mrs. Welland hastened to add, “your great-grandfather’s money difficulties were private—losses

at cards, or signing a note for somebody—I never quite

knew, because Mamma would never speak of it. But

she was brought up in the country because her mother

had to leave New York after the disgrace, whatever it

was: they lived up the Hudson alone, winter and summer,

till Mamma was sixteen. It would never have

occurred to Grandmamma Spicer to ask the family to

`countenance’ her, as I understand Regina calls it; though

a private disgrace is nothing compared to the scandal

of ruining hundreds of innocent people.”

 

“Yes, it would be more becoming in Regina to hide

her own countenance than to talk about other people’s,”

Mrs. Lovell Mingott agreed. “I understand that

the emerald necklace she wore at the Opera last Friday

had been sent on approval from Ball and Black’s in the

afternoon. I wonder if they’ll ever get it back?”

 

Archer listened unmoved to the relentless chorus.

The idea of absolute financial probity as the first law of

a gentleman’s code was too deeply ingrained in him for

sentimental considerations to weaken it. An adventurer

like Lemuel Struthers might build up the millions of his

Shoe Polish on any number of shady dealings; but

unblemished honesty was the noblesse oblige of old

financial New York. Nor did Mrs. Beaufort’s fate greatly

move Archer. He felt, no doubt, more sorry for her

than her indignant relatives; but it seemed to him that

the tie between husband and wife, even if breakable in

prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune. As

Mr. Letterblair had said, a wife’s place was at her

husband’s side when he was in trouble; but society’s

place was not at his side, and Mrs. Beaufort’s cool

assumption that it was seemed almost to make her his

accomplice. The mere idea of a woman’s appealing to

her family to screen her husband’s business dishonour

was inadmissible, since it was the one thing that the

Family, as an institution, could not do.

 

The mulatto maid called Mrs. Lovell Mingott into

the hall, and the latter came back in a moment with a

frowning brow.

 

“She wants me to telegraph for Ellen Olenska. I had

written to Ellen, of course, and to Medora; but now it

seems that’s not enough. I’m to telegraph to her

immediately, and to tell her that she’s to come alone.”

 

The announcement was received in silence. Mrs.

Welland sighed resignedly, and May rose from her seat and

went to gather up some newspapers that had been

scattered on the floor.

 

“I suppose it must be done,” Mrs. Lovell Mingott

continued, as if hoping to be contradicted; and May

turned back toward the middle of the room.

 

“Of course it must