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The
Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the Beauforts'.
The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet, was
beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter game was
still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions, and as an
opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and
arrow held their own.
Archer
looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way
when his own reactions to it had so completely changed. It was Newport that had first brought home to him the extent
of the change. In New York,
during the previous winter, after he and May had settled down in the new
greenish-yellow house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had
dropped back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal
of this daily activity had served as a link with his former self. Then there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a
showy grey stepper for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage),
and the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library, which,
in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out as he had
dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and
"sincere" arm-chairs and tables.
At the Century he had found Winsett again, and at the Knickerbocker
the fashionable young men of his own set; and what with the hours dedicated
to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home,
with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play, the life he was living
had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business.
But
Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of unmitigated
holiday-making. Archer had
tried to persuade May to spend the summer on a remote island off the coast
of Maine (called, appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy
Bostonians and Philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages,
and whence came reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost
trapper-like existence amid woods and waters.
But
the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the square
boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good reason why he
and May should not join them there. As
Mrs. Welland rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to
have worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be
allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer had as
yet found no answer.
May
herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with so
reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer. She reminded him that he had always liked Newport in his
bachelor days, and as this was indisputable he could only profess that he
was sure he was going to like it better than ever now that they were to be
there together. But as he stood
on the Beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly peopled lawn it came
home to him with a shiver that he was not going to like it at all.
It
was not May's fault, poor dear. If,
now and then, during their travels, they had fallen slightly out of step,
harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.
He had always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had
been right. He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a
perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless
sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had
represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an
unescapable duty.
He
could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had fulfilled
all that he had expected. It
was undoubtedly gratifying to be the husband of one of the handsomest and
most popular young married women in New York, especially when she was also
one of the sweetest-tempered and most reasonable of wives; and Archer had
never been insensible to such advantages. As for the momentary madness which
had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to
regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. The idea that he could
ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had
become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most
plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.
But
all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and
echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy
animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been
children playing in a grave-yard.
He
heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson fluttered
out of the drawing-room window. As
usual, she was extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp Leghorn
hat anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little black
velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over her much
larger hatbrim.
"My
dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had arrived!
You yourself came only yesterday, you say?
Ah, business--business--professional duties . . . I understand.
Many husbands, I know, find it impossible to join their wives here
except for the week-end." She cocked her head on one side and languished at him through
screwed-up eyes. "But
marriage is one long sacrifice, as I used often to remind my Ellen--"
Archer's
heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once before, and which
seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and the outer world; but this
break of continuity must have been of the briefest, for he presently heard
Medora answering a question he had apparently found voice to put.
"No,
I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious solitude at
Portsmouth. Beaufort was kind
enough to send his famous trotters for me this morning, so that I might have
at least a glimpse of one of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I go
back to rural life. The
Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old farm-house at
Portsmouth where they gather about them representative people . . ."
She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and added with a
faint blush: "This week
Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a series of Inner Thought meetings there.
A contrast indeed to this gay scene of worldly pleasure-- but then I
have always lived on contrasts! To
me the only death is monotony. I
always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly
sins. But my poor child is
going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world.
You know, I suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at
Newport, even with her grandmother Mingott?
I could hardly persuade her to come with me to the Blenkers', if you
will believe it! The life she
leads is morbid, unnatural. Ah, if she had only listened to me when it was
still possible . . . When the door was still open . . . But shall we go down
and watch this absorbing match? I
hear your May is one of the competitors."
Strolling
toward them from the tent Beaufort advanced over the lawn, tall, heavy, too
tightly buttoned into a London frock-coat, with one of his own orchids in
its buttonhole. Archer, who had
not seen him for two or three months, was struck by the change in his
appearance. In the hot summer
light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but for his erect square-
shouldered walk he would have looked like an over-fed and over-dressed old
man.
There
were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort. In the spring he had gone off on a long cruise to the West
Indies in his new steam-yacht, and it was reported that, at various points
where he had touched, a lady resembling Miss Fanny Ring had been seen in his
company. The steam-yacht, built
in the Clyde, and fitted with tiled bath-rooms and other unheard-of
luxuries, was said to have cost him half a million; and the pearl necklace
which he had presented to his wife on his return was as magnificent as such
expiatory offerings are apt to be. Beaufort's
fortune was substantial enough to stand the strain; and yet the disquieting
rumours persisted, not only in Fifth Avenue but in Wall Street.
Some people said he had speculated unfortunately in railways, others
that he was being bled by one of the most insatiable members of her
profession; and to every report of threatened insolvency Beaufort replied by
a fresh extravagance: the building of a new row of orchid-houses, the
purchase of a new string of race-horses, or the addition of a new
Meissonnier or Cabanel to his picture-gallery.
He
advanced toward the Marchioness and Newland with his usual half-sneering
smile. "Hullo, Medora! Did
the trotters do their business? Forty
minutes, eh? . . . Well, that's
not so bad, considering your nerves had to be spared." He shook hands with Archer, and then, turning back with them,
placed himself on Mrs. Manson's other side, and said, in a low voice, a few
words which their companion did not catch.
The
Marchioness replied by one of her queer foreign jerks, and a "Que
voulez-vous?" which deepened Beaufort's frown; but he produced a good
semblance of a congratulatory smile as he glanced at Archer to say:
"You know May's going to carry off the first prize."
"Ah,
then it remains in the family," Medora rippled; and at that moment they
reached the tent and Mrs. Beaufort met them in a girlish cloud of mauve
muslin and floating veils.
May
Welland was just coming out of the tent.
In her white dress, with a pale green ribbon about the waist and a
wreath of ivy on her hat, she had the same Diana-like aloofness as when she
had entered the Beaufort ball-room on the night of her engagement.
In the interval not a thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes
or a feeling through her heart; and though her husband knew that she had the
capacity for both he marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped
away from her.
She
had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the chalk-mark
traced on the turf she lifted the bow to her shoulder and took aim.
The attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur of
appreciation followed her appearance, and Archer felt the glow of
proprietorship that so often cheated him into momentary well-being.
Her rivals--Mrs. Reggie Chivers, the Merry girls, and divers rosy
Thorleys, Dagonets and Mingotts, stood behind her in a lovely anxious group,
brown heads and golden bent above the scores, and pale muslins and
flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow.
All were young and pretty, and bathed in summer bloom; but not one
had the nymph- like ease of his wife, when, with tense muscles and happy
frown, she bent her soul upon some feat of strength.
"Gad,"
Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, "not one of the lot holds the bow
as she does"; and Beaufort retorted:
"Yes; but that's the only kind of target she'll ever hit."
Archer
felt irrationally angry. His
host's contemptuous tribute to May's "niceness" was just what a
husband should have wished to hear said of his wife.
The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was
simply another proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver
through his heart. What if
"niceness" carried to that supreme degree were only a negation,
the curtain dropped before an emptiness?
As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final
bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain.
She
took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the company with
the simplicity that was her crowning grace.
No one could ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to
give the feeling that she would have been just as serene if she had missed
them. But when her eyes met her
husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she saw in his.
Mrs.
Welland's basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them, and they drove off
among the dispersing carriages, May handling the reins and Archer sitting at
her side.
The
afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and shrubberies, and
up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of victorias, dog-carts,
landaus and "vis-a-vis," carrying well-dressed ladies and
gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward from their daily
afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive.
"Shall
we go to see Granny?" May suddenly proposed. "I should like to tell her myself that I've won the
prize. There's lots of time
before dinner."
Archer
acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue, crossed
Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond.
In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent
to precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a
many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage- orne on a bit of cheap land
overlooking the bay. Here, in a
thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs spread themselves above the
island-dotted waters. A winding
drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of
geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped
verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow
star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms with
heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian house-painter had
lavished all the divinities of Olympus.
One of these rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott
when the burden of flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she
spent her days, enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and
window, and perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious
projection of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air
it set in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the
chair-arms.
Since
she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine had shown to
Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites toward the person
served. She was persuaded that
irrepressible passion was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent
admirer of impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she
always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of
allusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious.
She
examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow which had
been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the match, remarking that in
her day a filigree brooch would have been thought enough, but that there was
no denying that Beaufort did things handsomely.
"Quite
an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled.
"You must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." She pinched
May's white arm and watched the colour flood her face.
"Well, well, what have I said to make you shake out the red
flag? Ain't there going to be
any daughters--only boys, eh? Good
gracious, look at her blushing again all over her blushes!
What--can't I say that either? Mercy
me--when my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out
overhead I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that
NOTHING can shock!"
Archer
burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes.
"Well,
now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall never get a
straight word about it out of that silly Medora," the ancestress
continued; and, as May exclaimed: "Cousin
Medora? But I thought she was
going back to Portsmouth?" she answered placidly: "So she is--but
she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen.
Ah--you didn't know Ellen had come to spend the day with me?
Such fol-de-rol, her not coming for the summer; but I gave up arguing
with young people about fifty years ago.
Ellen--ELLEN!" she cried in her shrill old voice, trying to bend
forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn beyond the verandah.
There
was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick on the
shiny floor. A mulatto
maid-servant in a bright turban, replying to the summons, informed her
mistress that she had seen "Miss Ellen" going down the path to the
shore; and Mrs. Mingott turned to Archer.
"Run
down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will describe the
party to me," she said; and Archer stood up as if in a dream.
He
had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during the
year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with the main
incidents of her life in the interval.
He knew that she had spent the previous summer at Newport, where she
appeared to have gone a great deal into society, but that in the autumn she
had suddenly sub-let the "perfect house" which Beaufort had been
at such pains to find for her, and decided to establish herself in
Washington. There, during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always
heard of pretty women in Washington) as shining in the "brilliant
diplomatic society" that was supposed to make up for the social
short-comings of the Administration. He
had listened to these accounts, and to various contradictory reports on her
appearance, her conversation, her point of view and her choice of friends,
with the detachment with which one listens to reminiscences of some one long
since dead; not till Medora suddenly spoke her name at the archery match had
Ellen Olenska become a living presence to him again.
The Marchioness's foolish lisp had called up a vision of the little
fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of the carriage-wheels returning down
the deserted street. He thought of a story he had read, of some peasant
children in Tuscany lighting a bunch of straw in a wayside cavern, and
revealing old silent images in their painted tomb . . .
The
way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was perched to a
walk above the water planted with weeping willows.
Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its
white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house
keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years. Beyond it lay the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys
of Goat Island, the bay spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence
Island with its low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the
sunset haze.
From
the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of
pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning against
the rail, her back to the shore. Archer
stopped at the sight as if he had waked from sleep.
That vision of the past was a dream, and the reality was what awaited
him in the house on the bank overhead: was Mrs. Welland's pony- carriage
circling around and around the oval at the door, was May sitting under the
shameless Olympians and glowing with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at
the far end of Bellevue Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for dinner,
and pacing the drawing- room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic
impatience-- for it was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly
what is happening at a given hour.
"What
am I? A son-in-law--"
Archer thought.
The
figure at the end of the pier had not moved.
For a long moment the young man stood half way down the bank, gazing
at the bay furrowed with the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches,
fishing-craft and the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs.
The lady in the summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight.
Beyond the grey bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was
splintering up into a thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a
catboat as it beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock and the
shore. Archer, as he watched,
remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and Montague lifting Ada Dyas's
ribbon to his lips without her knowing that he was in the room.
"She
doesn't know--she hasn't guessed. Shouldn't
I know if she came up behind me, I wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he
said to himself: "If she
doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go
back."
The
boat was gliding out on the receding tide.
It slid before the Lime Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house,
and passed across the turret in which the light was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of water sparkled between the
last reef of the island and the stern of the boat; but still the figure in
the summer- house did not move.
He
turned and walked up the hill.
"I'm
sorry you didn't find Ellen--I should have liked to see her again," May
said as they drove home through the dusk.
"But perhaps she wouldn't have cared--she seems so
changed."
"Changed?"
echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on the ponies'
twitching ears.
"So
indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New York and her house, and
spending her time with such queer people.
Fancy how hideously uncomfortable she must be at the Blenkers'!
She says she does it to keep cousin Medora out of mischief: to
prevent her marrying dreadful people. But
I sometimes think we've always bored her."
Archer
made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that he had
never before noticed in her frank fresh voice:
"After all, I wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her
husband."
He
burst into a laugh. "Sancta
simplicitas!" he exclaimed; and as she turned a puzzled frown on him he
added: "I don't think I
ever heard you say a cruel thing before."
"Cruel?"
"Well--watching
the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the
angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell."
"It's
a pity she ever married abroad then," said May, in the placid tone with
which her mother met Mr. Welland's vagaries; and Archer felt himself gently
relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands.
They
drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chamfered wooden
gate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the approach to the
Welland villa. Lights were
already shining through its windows, and Archer, as the carriage stopped,
caught a glimpse of his father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured him,
pacing the drawing-room, watch in hand and wearing the pained expression
that he had long since found to be much more efficacious than anger.
The
young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of a curious
reversal of mood. There was
something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the
Welland atmosphere, so charged with minute observances and exactions, that
always stole into his system like a narcotic.
The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding
tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and
invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding
one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others,
made any less systematised and affluent existence seem unreal and
precarious. But now it was the
Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become
unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood
irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his
veins.
All
night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side, watching the
moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen Olenska driving home
across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's trotters.
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