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Archer
felt the blood in his temples. He
had seen the Countess Olenska only once since his visit to her, and then at
the Opera, in the Mingott box. During
this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate image, receding
from his foreground as May Welland resumed her rightful place in it.
He had not heard her divorce spoken of since Janey's first random
allusion to it, and had dismissed the tale as unfounded gossip.
Theoretically, the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful to him as to
his mother; and he was annoyed that Mr. Letterblair (no doubt prompted by
old Catherine Mingott) should be so evidently planning to draw him into the
affair. After all, there were
plenty of Mingott men for such jobs, and as yet he was not even a Mingott by
marriage.
He
waited for the senior partner to continue.
Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and drew out a packet. "If you
will run your eye over these papers--"
Archer
frowned. "I beg your
pardon, sir; but just because of the prospective relationship, I should
prefer your consulting Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."
Mr.
Letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended. It was unusual for a
junior to reject such an opening.
He
bowed. "I respect your
scruple, sir; but in this case I believe true delicacy requires you to do as
I ask. Indeed, the suggestion is not mine but Mrs. Manson Mingott's and her
son's. I have seen Lovell
Mingott; and also Mr. Welland. They
all named you."
Archer
felt his temper rising. He had
been somewhat languidly drifting with events for the last fortnight, and
letting May's fair looks and radiant nature obliterate the rather
importunate pressure of the Mingott claims. But this behest of old Mrs.
Mingott's roused him to a sense of what the clan thought they had the right
to exact from a prospective son-in-law; and he chafed at the role.
"Her
uncles ought to deal with this," he said.
"They
have. The matter has been gone
into by the family. They are
opposed to the Countess's idea; but she is firm, and insists on a legal
opinion."
The
young man was silent: he had not opened the packet in his hand.
"Does
she want to marry again?"
"I
believe it is suggested; but she denies it."
"Then--"
"Will
you oblige me, Mr. Archer, by first looking through these papers?
Afterward, when we have talked the case over, I will give you my
opinion."
Archer
withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents. Since their last meeting he had half-unconsciously
collaborated with events in ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska.
His hour alone with her by the
firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which the Duke of St.
Austrey's intrusion with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and the Countess's joyous
greeting of them, had rather providentially broken.
Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement
in the van der Luydens' favour, and had said to himself, with a touch of
tartness, that a lady who knew how to thank all-powerful elderly gentlemen
to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did not need either the private
consolations or the public championship of a young man of his small compass.
To look at the matter in this light simplified his own case and
surprisingly furbished up all the dim domestic virtues. He could not picture
May Welland, in whatever conceivable emergency, hawking about her private
difficulties and lavishing her confidences on strange men; and she had never
seemed to him finer or fairer than in the week that followed.
He had even yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had
found the one disarming answer to his plea for haste.
"You
know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you have your
way ever since you were a little girl," he argued; and she had
answered, with her clearest look: "Yes;
and that's what makes it so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever
ask of me as a little girl."
That
was the old New York note; that was the kind of answer he would like always
to be sure of his wife's making. If
one had habitually breathed the New York air there were times when anything
less crystalline seemed stifling.
The
papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but they
plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered.
They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count
Olenski's solicitors and a French legal firm to whom the Countess had
applied for the settlement of her financial situation.
There was also a short letter from the Count to his wife: after
reading it, Newland Archer rose, jammed the papers back into their envelope,
and reentered Mr. Letterblair's office.
"Here
are the letters, sir. If you
wish, I'll see Madame Olenska," he said in a constrained voice.
"Thank
you--thank you, Mr. Archer. Come
and dine with me tonight if you're free, and we'll go into the matter
afterward: in case you wish to call on our client tomorrow."
Newland
Archer walked straight home again that afternoon. It was a winter evening of transparent clearness, with an
innocent young moon above the house- tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's
lungs with the pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he
and Mr. Letterblair were closeted together after dinner. It was impossible to decide otherwise than he had done: he
must see Madame Olenska himself rather than let her secrets be bared to
other eyes. A great wave of
compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood before
him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs from farther
wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.
He
remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland's request to be spared
whatever was "unpleasant" in her history, and winced at the
thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the New York
air so pure. "Are we only
Pharisees after all?" he wondered, puzzled by the effort to reconcile
his instinctive disgust at human vileness with his equally instinctive pity
for human frailty.
For
the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had always
been. He passed for a young man
who had not been afraid of risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair
with poor silly Mrs. Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret to invest him
with a becoming air of adventure. But
Mrs. Rushworth was "that kind of woman"; foolish, vain,
clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the secrecy and peril of
the affair than by such charms and qualities as he possessed.
When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart, but now it
seemed the redeeming feature of the case.
The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men
of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an
undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved
and respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied.
In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and
other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that
when "such things happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man,
but somehow always criminal of the woman.
All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved
imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-
minded man as powerless in her clutches.
The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to
marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him.
In
the complicated old European communities, Archer began to guess,
love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified. Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more
such situations; and there might even be one in which a woman naturally
sensitive and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from sheer
defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable by
conventional standards.
On
reaching home he wrote a line to the Countess Olenska, asking at what hour
of the next day she could receive him, and despatched it by a messenger-boy,
who returned presently with a word to the effect that she was going to
Skuytercliff the next morning to stay over Sunday with the van der Luydens,
but that he would find her alone that evening after dinner. The note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet, without
date or address, but her hand was firm and free.
He was amused at the idea of her week-ending in the stately solitude
of Skuytercliff, but immediately afterward felt that there, of all places,
she would most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the
"unpleasant."
He
was at Mr. Letterblair's punctually at seven, glad of the pretext for
excusing himself soon after dinner. He had formed his own opinion from the
papers entrusted to him, and did not especially want to go into the matter
with his senior partner. Mr. Letterblair was a widower, and they dined alone,
copiously and slowly, in a dark shabby room hung with yellowing prints of
"The Death of Chatham" and "The Coronation of Napoleon."
On the sideboard, between fluted Sheraton knife-cases, stood a
decanter of Haut Brion, and another of the old Lanning port (the gift of a
client), which the wastrel Tom Lanning had sold off a year or two before his
mysterious and discreditable death in San Francisco--an incident less
publicly humiliating to the family than the sale of the cellar.
After
a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young broiled turkey
with corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with currant jelly and a
celery mayonnaise. Mr.
Letterblair, who lunched on a sandwich and tea, dined deliberately and
deeply, and insisted on his guest's doing the same.
Finally, when the closing rites had been accomplished, the cloth was
removed, cigars were lit, and Mr. Letterblair, leaning back in his chair and
pushing the port westward, said, spreading his back agreeably to the coal
fire behind him: "The
whole family are against a divorce. And
I think rightly."
Archer
instantly felt himself on the other side of the argument.
"But why, sir? If
there ever was a case--"
"Well--what's
the use? SHE'S here--he's
there; the Atlantic's between them. She'll
never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's voluntarily
returned to her: their damned heathen marriage settlements take precious
good care of that. As things go
over there, Olenski's acted generously: he might have turned her out without
a penny."
The
young man knew this and was silent.
"I
understand, though," Mr. Letterblair continued, "that she attaches
no importance to the money. Therefore,
as the family say, why not let well enough alone?"
Archer
had gone to the house an hour earlier in full agreement with Mr.
Letterblair's view; but put into words by this selfish, well-fed and
supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a
society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.
"I
think that's for her to decide."
"H'm--have
you considered the consequences if she decides for divorce?"
"You
mean the threat in her husband's letter?
What weight would that carry? It's
no more than the vague charge of an angry blackguard."
"Yes;
but it might make some unpleasant talk if he really defends the suit."
"Unpleasant--!"
said Archer explosively.
Mr.
Letterblair looked at him from under enquiring eyebrows, and the young man,
aware of the uselessness of trying to explain what was in his mind, bowed
acquiescently while his senior continued:
"Divorce is always unpleasant."
"You
agree with me?" Mr. Letterblair resumed, after a waiting silence.
"Naturally,"
said Archer.
"Well,
then, I may count on you; the Mingotts may count on you; to use your
influence against the idea?"
Archer
hesitated. "I can't pledge
myself till I've seen the Countess Olenska," he said at length.
"Mr.
Archer, I don't understand you. Do
you want to marry into a family with a scandalous divorce-suit hanging over
it?"
"I
don't think that has anything to do with the case."
Mr.
Letterblair put down his glass of port and fixed on his young partner a
cautious and apprehensive gaze.
Archer
understood that he ran the risk of having his mandate withdrawn, and for
some obscure reason he disliked the prospect.
Now that the job had been thrust on him he did not propose to
relinquish it; and, to guard against the possibility, he saw that he must
reassure the unimaginative old man who was the legal conscience of the
Mingotts.
"You
may be sure, sir, that I shan't commit myself till I've reported to you;
what I meant was that I'd rather not give an opinion till I've heard what
Madame Olenska has to say."
Mr.
Letterblair nodded approvingly at an excess of caution worthy of the best
New York tradition, and the young man, glancing at his watch, pleaded an
engagement and took leave.
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