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

elaborate system of mystification

remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness

and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because

she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew

of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no

better preparation than this, she was to be plunged

overnight into what people evasively called “the facts

of life.”

 

The young man was sincerely but placidly in love.

He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed,

in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness

at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas

that she was beginning to develop under his guidance.

(She had advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing

the Idyls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of

Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was straightforward,

loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly

proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected,

in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of

feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he

had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged

by the thought that all this frankness and innocence

were only an artificial product. Untrained human

nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the

twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt

himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity,

so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers

and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses,

because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what

he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his

lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of

snow.

 

There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they

were those habitual to young men on the approach of

their wedding day. But they were generally accompanied

by a sense of compunction and self-abasement of

which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not

deplore (as Thackeray’s heroes so often exasperated

him by doing) that he had not a blank page to offer his

bride in exchange for the unblemished one she was to

give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if

he had been brought up as she had they would have

been no more fit to find their way about than the Babes

in the Wood; nor could he, for all his anxious cogitations,

see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected

with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of

masculine vanity) why his bride should not have been

allowed the same freedom of experience as himself.

 

Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift

through his mind; but he was conscious that their

uncomfortable persistence and precision were due to

the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska. Here

he was, at the very moment of his betrothal—a moment

for pure thoughts and cloudless hopes—pitchforked

into a coil of scandal which raised all the special problems

he would have preferred to let lie. “Hang Ellen

Olenska!” he grumbled, as he covered his fire and

began to undress. He could not really see why her fate

should have the least bearing on his; yet he dimly felt

that he had only just begun to measure the risks of the

championship which his engagement had forced upon

him.

 

A few days later the bolt fell.

 

The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was

known as “a formal dinner” (that is, three extra footmen,

two dishes for each course, and a Roman punch

in the middle), and had headed their invitations with

the words “To meet the Countess Olenska,” in accordance

with the hospitable American fashion, which

treats strangers as if they were royalties, or at least as

their ambassadors.

 

The guests had been selected with a boldness and

discrimination in which the initiated recognised the

firm hand of Catherine the Great. Associated with such

immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys, who were

asked everywhere because they always had been, the

Beauforts, on whom there was a claim of relationship,

and Mr. Sillerton Jackson and his sister Sophy (who

went wherever her brother told her to), were some of

the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of

the dominant “young married” set; the Lawrence

Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts Rushworth (the lovely widow),

the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses and young

Morris Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der

Luyden). The company indeed was perfectly assorted,

since all the members belonged to the little inner group

of people who, during the long New York season,

disported themselves together daily and nightly with

apparently undiminished zest.

 

Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had

happened; every one had refused the Mingotts’ invitation

except the Beauforts and old Mr. Jackson and his sister.

The intended slight was emphasised by the fact that

even the Reggie Chiverses, who were of the Mingott

clan, were among those inflicting it; and by the

uniform wording of the notes, in all of which the writers

“regretted that they were unable to accept,” without

the mitigating plea of a “previous engagement” that

ordinary courtesy prescribed.

 

New York society was, in those days, far too small,

and too scant in its resources, for every one in it

(including livery-stable-keepers, butlers and cooks) not

to know exactly on which evenings people were free;

and it was thus possible for the recipients of Mrs.

Lovell Mingott’s invitations to make cruelly clear their

determination not to meet the Countess Olenska.

 

The blow was unexpected; but the Mingotts, as their

way was, met it gallantly. Mrs. Lovell Mingott

confided the case to Mrs. Welland, who confided it to

Newland Archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealed

passionately and authoritatively to his mother; who,

after a painful period of inward resistance and outward

temporising, succumbed to his instances (as she always

did), and immediately embracing his cause with an

energy redoubled by her previous hesitations, put on

her grey velvet bonnet and said: “I’ll go and see Louisa

van der Luyden.”

 

The New York of Newland Archer’s day was a small

and slippery pyramid, in which, as yet, hardly a fissure

had been made or a foothold gained. At its base was a

firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called “plain

people”; an honourable but obscure majority of

respectable families who (as in the case of the Spicers or

the Leffertses or the Jacksons) had been raised above

their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans.

People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular

as they used to be; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling

one end of Fifth Avenue, and Julius Beaufort the other,

you couldn’t expect the old traditions to last much

longer.

 

Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but

inconspicuous substratum was the compact and dominant

group which the Mingotts, Newlands, Chiverses

and Mansons so actively represented. Most people imagined

them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they

themselves (at least those of Mrs. Archer’s generation)

were aware that, in the eyes of the professional genealogist,

only a still smaller number of families could lay

claim to that eminence.

 

“Don’t tell me,” Mrs. Archer would say to her

children, “all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New

York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts

nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands or

the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch

merchants, who came to the colonies to make their

fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One

of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and

another was a general on Washington’s staff, and

received General Burgoyne’s sword after the battle of

Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but they

have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has

always been a commercial community, and there are

not more than three families in it who can claim an

aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word.”

 

Mrs. Archer and her son and daughter, like every

one else in New York, knew who these privileged beings

were: the Dagonets of Washington Square, who came

of an old English county family allied with the Pitts

and Foxes; the Lannings, who had intermarried with

the descendants of Count de Grasse, and the van der

Luydens, direct descendants of the first Dutch governor

of Manhattan, and related by prerevolutionary

marriages to several members of the French and British

aristocracy.

 

The Lannings survived only in the person of two

very old but lively Miss Lannings, who lived cheerfully

and reminiscently among family portraits and Chippendale;

the Dagonets were a considerable clan, allied to

the best names in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but the

van der Luydens, who stood above all of them, had

faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight, from

which only two figures impressively emerged; those of

Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.

 

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet,

and her mother had been the granddaughter of Colonel

du Lac, of an old Channel Island family, who had

fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland,

after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna,

fifth daughter of the Earl of St. Austrey. The tie

between the Dagonets, the du Lacs of Maryland, and

their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas, had

always remained close and cordial. Mr. and Mrs. van

der Luyden had more than once paid long visits to the

present head of the house of Trevenna, the Duke of St.

Austrey, at his country-seat in Cornwall and at St.

Austrey in Gloucestershire; and his Grace had frequently

announced his intention of some day returning their

visit (without the Duchess, who feared the Atlantic).

 

Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time

between Trevenna, their place in Maryland, and Skuytercliff,

the great estate on the Hudson which had been one

of the colonial grants of the Dutch government to the

famous first Governor, and of which Mr. van der Luyden

was still “Patroon.” Their large solemn house in Madison

Avenue was seldom opened, and when they came to town

they received in it only their most intimate friends.

 

“I wish you would go with me, Newland,” his mother

said, suddenly pausing at the door of the Brown

coupe. “Louisa is fond of you; and of course it’s on

account of dear May that I’m taking this step—and

also because, if we don’t all stand together, there’ll be

no such thing as Society left.”

 

VII.

 

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden listened in silence to

her cousin Mrs. Archer’s narrative.

 

It was all very well to tell yourself in advance that

Mrs. van der Luyden was always silent, and that, though

noncommittal by nature and training, she was very

kind to the people she really liked. Even personal

experience of these facts was not always a protection from

the chill that descended on one in the high-ceilinged

white-walled Madison Avenue drawing-room, with the

pale brocaded armchairs so obviously uncovered for

the occasion, and the gauze still veiling the ormolu

mantel ornaments and the beautiful old carved frame

of Gainsborough’s “Lady Angelica du Lac.”

 

Mrs. van der Luyden’s portrait by Huntington (in

black velvet and Venetian point) faced that of her

lovely ancestress. It was generally considered “as fine

as a Cabanel,” and, though twenty years had elapsed

since its execution, was still “a perfect likeness.”

Indeed the Mrs. van der Luyden who sat beneath it

listening to Mrs. Archer might have been the twin-sister

of the fair and still youngish woman drooping against a

gilt armchair before a green rep curtain. Mrs. van der

Luyden still wore black velvet and Venetian point when

she went into society—or rather (since she never dined

out) when she threw open her own doors to receive it.

Her fair hair, which had faded without