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

bent down and pressed his lips on the little

hand that still lay on his.

 

“Eh—eh—eh! Whose hand did you think you were

kissing, young man—your wife’s, I hope?” the old lady

snapped out with her mocking cackle; and as he rose to

go she called out after him: “Give her her Granny’s

love; but you’d better not say anything about our talk.”

 

XXXI.

 

Archer had been stunned by old Catherine’s news.

It was only natural that Madame Olenska should

have hastened from Washington in response to her

grandmother’s summons; but that she should have decided

to remain under her roof—especially now that

Mrs. Mingott had almost regained her health—was less

easy to explain.

 

Archer was sure that Madame Olenska’s decision

had not been influenced by the change in her financial

situation. He knew the exact figure of the small income

which her husband had allowed her at their separation.

Without the addition of her grandmother’s allowance it

was hardly enough to live on, in any sense known to

the Mingott vocabulary; and now that Medora Manson,

who shared her life, had been ruined, such a

pittance would barely keep the two women clothed and

fed. Yet Archer was convinced that Madame Olenska

had not accepted her grandmother’s offer from interested

motives.

 

She had the heedless generosity and the spasmodic

extravagance of persons used to large fortunes, and

indifferent to money; but she could go without many

things which her relations considered indispensable,

and Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Welland had often

been heard to deplore that any one who had enjoyed

the cosmopolitan luxuries of Count Olenski’s establishments

should care so little about “how things were

done.” Moreover, as Archer knew, several months had

passed since her allowance had been cut off; yet in the

interval she had made no effort to regain her grandmother’s favour. Therefore if she had changed her course

it must be for a different reason.

 

He did not have far to seek for that reason. On the

way from the ferry she had told him that he and she

must remain apart; but she had said it with her head

on his breast. He knew that there was no calculated

coquetry in her words; she was fighting her fate as he

had fought his, and clinging desperately to her resolve

that they should not break faith with the people who

trusted them. But during the ten days which had elapsed

since her return to New York she had perhaps guessed

from his silence, and from the fact of his making no

attempt to see her, that he was meditating a decisive

step, a step from which there was no turning back. At

the thought, a sudden fear of her own weakness might

have seized her, and she might have felt that, after all,

it was better to accept the compromise usual in such

cases, and follow the line of least resistance.

 

An hour earlier, when he had rung Mrs. Mingott’s

bell, Archer had fancied that his path was clear before

him. He had meant to have a word alone with Madame

Olenska, and failing that, to learn from her

grandmother on what day, and by which train, she was

returning to Washington. In that train he intended to

join her, and travel with her to Washington, or as

much farther as she was willing to go. His own fancy

inclined to Japan. At any rate she would understand at

once that, wherever she went, he was going. He meant

to leave a note for May that should cut off any other

alternative.

 

He had fancied himself not only nerved for this

plunge but eager to take it; yet his first feeling on

hearing that the course of events was changed had been

one of relief. Now, however, as he walked home from

Mrs. Mingott’s, he was conscious of a growing distaste

for what lay before him. There was nothing unknown

or unfamiliar in the path he was presumably to tread;

but when he had trodden it before it was as a free man,

who was accountable to no one for his actions, and

could lend himself with an amused detachment to the

game of precautions and prevarications, concealments

and compliances, that the part required. This procedure

was called “protecting a woman’s honour”; and

the best fiction, combined with the after-dinner talk of

his elders, had long since initiated him into every detail

of its code.

 

Now he saw the matter in a new light, and his part

in it seemed singularly diminished. It was, in fact, that

which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched Mrs.

Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving

husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful

and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in

every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and

every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.

 

It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a

wife to play such a part toward her husband. A woman’s

standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be

lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the

arts of the enslaved. Then she could always plead moods

and nerves, and the right not to be held too strictly to

account; and even in the most strait-laced societies the

laugh was always against the husband.

 

But in Archer’s little world no one laughed at a wife

deceived, and a certain measure of contempt was

attached to men who continued their philandering after

marriage. In the rotation of crops there was a recognised

season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown

more than once.

 

Archer had always shared this view: in his heart he

thought Lefferts despicable. But to love Ellen Olenska

was not to become a man like Lefferts: for the first

time Archer found himself face to face with the dread

argument of the individual case. Ellen Olenska was like

no other woman, he was like no other man: their

situation, therefore, resembled no one else’s, and they

were answerable to no tribunal but that of their own

judgment.

 

Yes, but in ten minutes more he would be mounting

his own doorstep; and there were May, and habit, and

honour, and all the old decencies that he and his people

had always believed in …

 

At his corner he hesitated, and then walked on down

Fifth Avenue.

 

Ahead of him, in the winter night, loomed a big unlit

house. As he drew near he thought how often he had

seen it blazing with lights, its steps awninged and carpeted,

and carriages waiting in double line to draw up

at the curbstone. It was in the conservatory that stretched

its dead-black bulk down the side street that he had

taken his first kiss from May; it was under the myriad

candles of the ball-room that he had seen her appear,

tall and silver-shining as a young Diana.

 

Now the house was as dark as the grave, except for a

faint flare of gas in the basement, and a light in one

upstairs room where the blind had not been lowered.

As Archer reached the corner he saw that the carriage

standing at the door was Mrs. Manson Mingott’s. What

an opportunity for Sillerton Jackson, if he should chance

to pass! Archer had been greatly moved by old Catherine’s

account of Madame Olenska’s attitude toward

Mrs. Beaufort; it made the righteous reprobation of

New York seem like a passing by on the other side. But

he knew well enough what construction the clubs and

drawing-rooms would put on Ellen Olenska’s visits to

her cousin.

 

He paused and looked up at the lighted window. No

doubt the two women were sitting together in that

room: Beaufort had probably sought consolation elsewhere.

There were even rumours that he had left New

York with Fanny Ring; but Mrs. Beaufort’s attitude

made the report seem improbable.

 

Archer had the nocturnal perspective of Fifth Avenue

almost to himself. At that hour most people were

indoors, dressing for dinner; and he was secretly glad

that Ellen’s exit was likely to be unobserved. As the

thought passed through his mind the door opened, and

she came out. Behind her was a faint light, such as

might have been carried down the stairs to show her

the way. She turned to say a word to some one; then

the door closed, and she came down the steps.

 

“Ellen,” he said in a low voice, as she reached the

pavement.

 

She stopped with a slight start, and just then he saw

two young men of fashionable cut approaching. There

was a familiar air about their overcoats and the way

their smart silk mufflers were folded over their white

ties; and he wondered how youths of their quality

happened to be dining out so early. Then he remembered

that the Reggie Chiverses, whose house was a

few doors above, were taking a large party that evening

to see Adelaide Neilson in Romeo and Juliet, and guessed

that the two were of the number. They passed under a

lamp, and he recognised Lawrence Lefferts and a young

Chivers.

 

A mean desire not to have Madame Olenska seen at

the Beauforts’ door vanished as he felt the penetrating

warmth of her hand.

 

“I shall see you now—we shall be together,” he

broke out, hardly knowing what he said.

 

“Ah,” she answered, “Granny has told you?”

 

While he watched her he was aware that Lefferts and

Chivers, on reaching the farther side of the street corner,

had discreetly struck away across Fifth Avenue. It

was the kind of masculine solidarity that he himself

often practised; now he sickened at their connivance.

Did she really imagine that he and she could live like

this? And if not, what else did she imagine?

 

“Tomorrow I must see you—somewhere where we

can be alone,” he said, in a voice that sounded almost

angry to his own ears.

 

She wavered, and moved toward the carriage.

 

“But I shall be at Granny’s—for the present that is,”

she added, as if conscious that her change of plans

required some explanation.

 

“Somewhere where we can be alone,” he insisted.

 

She gave a faint laugh that grated on him.

 

“In New York? But there are no churches … no

monuments.”

 

“There’s the Art Museum—in the Park,” he explained,

as she looked puzzled. “At half-past two. I shall be at

the door …”

 

She turned away without answering and got quickly

into the carriage. As it drove off she leaned forward,

and he thought she waved her hand in the obscurity.

He stared after her in a turmoil of contradictory feelings.

It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to

the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was

indebted to for pleasures already wearied of: it was

hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed

vocabulary.

 

“She’ll come!” he said to himself, almost contemptuously.

 

Avoiding the popular “Wolfe collection,” whose anecdotic

canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer

wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the

Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered down a

passage to the room where the “Cesnola antiquities”

mouldered in unvisited loneliness.

 

They had this melancholy retreat to themselves, and

seated on the divan enclosing the central steam-radiator,

they were staring silently at the glass cabinets mounted

in ebonised wood which contained the recovered fragments

of Ilium.

 

“It’s odd,” Madame Olenska said, “I never came

here before.”

 

“Ah, well—. Some day, I suppose, it will be a great

Museum.”

 

“Yes,” she assented absently.

 

She stood up and wandered across the room. Archer,

remaining seated, watched the light movements of her

figure, so girlish even