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"There's
no doubt that Dr. Ashmore is right: there IS a marked trend," she said,
as if it were something visible and measurable, like a crack in a house.
"It
was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving," Miss Jackson
opined; and her hostess drily rejoined:
"Oh, he means us to give thanks for what's left."
Archer
had been wont to smile at these annual vaticinations of his mother's; but
this year even he was obliged to acknowledge, as he listened to an
enumeration of the changes, that the "trend" was visible.
"The
extravagance in dress--" Miss Jackson began. "Sillerton took me to
the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry's
dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had had
the front panel changed. Yet I
know she got it out from Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress
always goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she wears them."
"Ah,
Jane Merry is one of US," said Mrs. Archer sighing, as if it were not
such an enviable thing to be in an age when ladies were beginning to flaunt
abroad their Paris dresses as soon as they were out of the Custom House,
instead of letting them mellow under lock and key, in the manner of Mrs.
Archer's contemporaries.
"Yes;
she's one of the few. In my
youth," Miss Jackson rejoined, "it was considered vulgar to dress
in the newest fashions; and Amy Sillerton has always told me that in Boston
the rule was to put away one's Paris dresses for two years.
Old Mrs. Baxter Pennilow, who did everything handsomely, used to
import twelve a year, two velvet, two satin, two silk, and the other six of
poplin and the finest cashmere. It was a standing order, and as she was ill for two years
before she died they found forty-eight Worth dresses that had never been
taken out of tissue paper; and when the girls left off their mourning they
were able to wear the first lot at the Symphony concerts without looking in
advance of the fashion."
"Ah,
well, Boston is more conservative than New York; but I always think it's a
safe rule for a lady to lay aside her French dresses for one season,"
Mrs. Archer conceded.
"It
was Beaufort who started the new fashion by making his wife clap her new
clothes on her back as soon as they arrived: I must say at times it takes
all Regina's distinction not to look like . . . like . . ."
Miss Jackson glanced around the table, caught Janey's bulging gaze,
and took refuge in an unintelligible murmur.
"Like
her rivals," said Mr. Sillerton Jackson, with the air of producing an
epigram.
"Oh,--"
the ladies murmured; and Mrs. Archer added, partly to distract her
daughter's attention from forbidden topics:
"Poor Regina! Her
Thanksgiving hasn't been a very cheerful one, I'm afraid.
Have you heard the rumours about Beaufort's speculations, Sillerton?"
Mr.
Jackson nodded carelessly. Every
one had heard the rumours in question, and he scorned to confirm a tale that
was already common property.
A
gloomy silence fell upon the party. No
one really liked Beaufort, and it was not wholly unpleasant to think the
worst of his private life; but the idea of his having brought financial
dishonour on his wife's family was too shocking to be enjoyed even by his
enemies. Archer's New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in
business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty.
It was a long time since any well- known banker had failed
discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the
heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened.
It would be the same with the Beauforts, in spite of his power and
her popularity; not all the leagued strength of the Dallas connection would
save poor Regina if there were any truth in the reports of her husband's
unlawful speculations.
The
talk took refuge in less ominous topics; but everything they touched on
seemed to confirm Mrs. Archer's sense of an accelerated trend.
"Of
course, Newland, I know you let dear May go to Mrs. Struthers's Sunday
evenings--" she began; and May interposed gaily:
"Oh, you know, everybody goes to Mrs. Struthers's now; and she
was invited to Granny's last reception."
It
was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions:
conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good
faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.
There was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally
she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was
impregnable? Once people had
tasted of Mrs. Struthers's easy Sunday hospitality they were not likely to
sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish.
"I
know, dear, I know," Mrs. Archer sighed.
"Such things have to be, I suppose, as long as AMUSEMENT is what
people go out for; but I've never quite forgiven your cousin Madame Olenska
for being the first person to countenance Mrs. Struthers."
A
sudden blush rose to young Mrs. Archer's face; it surprised her husband as
much as the other guests about the table.
"Oh, ELLEN--" she murmured, much in the same accusing and
yet deprecating tone in which her parents might have said:
"Oh, THE BLENKERS--."
It
was the note which the family had taken to sounding on the mention of the
Countess Olenska's name, since she had surprised and inconvenienced them by
remaining obdurate to her husband's advances; but on May's lips it gave food
for thought, and Archer looked at her with the sense of strangeness that
sometimes came over him when she was most in the tone of her environment.
His
mother, with less than her usual sensitiveness to atmosphere, still
insisted: "I've always
thought that people like the Countess Olenska, who have lived in
aristocratic societies, ought to help us to keep up our social distinctions,
instead of ignoring them."
May's
blush remained permanently vivid: it seemed to have a significance beyond
that implied by the recognition of Madame Olenska's social bad faith.
"I've
no doubt we all seem alike to foreigners," said Miss Jackson tartly.
"I
don't think Ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what she does
care for," May continued, as if she had been groping for something
noncommittal.
"Ah,
well--" Mrs. Archer sighed again.
Everybody
knew that the Countess Olenska was no longer in the good graces of her
family. Even her devoted
champion, old Mrs. Manson Mingott, had been unable to defend her refusal to
return to her husband. The Mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval
aloud: their sense of solidarity was too strong.
They had simply, as Mrs. Welland said, "let poor Ellen find her
own level"--and that, mortifyingly and incomprehensibly, was in the dim
depths where the Blenkers prevailed, and "people who wrote"
celebrated their untidy rites. It
was incredible, but it was a fact, that Ellen, in spite of all her
opportunities and her privileges, had become simply "Bohemian."
The fact enforced the contention that she had made a fatal mistake in
not returning to Count Olenski. After
all, a young woman's place was under her husband's roof, especially when she
had left it in circumstances that . . . well . . . if one had cared to look
into them . . .
"Madame
Olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen," said Miss Sophy, with
her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that
she was planting a dart.
"Ah,
that's the danger that a young woman like Madame Olenska is always exposed
to," Mrs. Archer mournfully agreed; and the ladies, on this conclusion,
gathered up their trains to seek the carcel globes of the drawing-room,
while Archer and Mr. Sillerton Jackson withdrew to the Gothic library.
Once
established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of
the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, Mr. Jackson became portentous and
communicable.
"If
the Beaufort smash comes," he announced, "there are going to be
disclosures."
Archer
raised his head quickly: he could never hear the name without the sharp
vision of Beaufort's heavy figure, opulently furred and shod, advancing
through the snow at Skuytercliff.
"There's
bound to be," Mr. Jackson continued, "the nastiest kind of a
cleaning up. He hasn't spent
all his money on Regina."
"Oh,
well--that's discounted, isn't it? My
belief is he'll pull out yet," said the young man, wanting to change
the subject.
"Perhaps--perhaps.
I know he was to see some of the influential people today.
Of course," Mr. Jackson reluctantly conceded, "it's to be
hoped they can tide him over--this time anyhow.
I shouldn't like to think of poor Regina's spending the rest of her
life in some shabby foreign watering-place for bankrupts."
Archer
said nothing. It seemed to him
so natural-- however tragic--that money ill-gotten should be cruelly
expiated, that his mind, hardly lingering over Mrs. Beaufort's doom,
wandered back to closer questions. What was the meaning of May's blush when
the Countess Olenska had been mentioned?
Four
months had passed since the midsummer day that he and Madame Olenska had
spent together; and since then he had not seen her.
He knew that she had returned to Washington, to the little house
which she and Medora Manson had taken there: he had written to her once--a
few words, asking when they were to meet again--and she had even more
briefly replied: "Not yet."
Since
then there had been no farther communication between them, and he had built
up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret
thoughts and longings. Little
by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational
activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings
which nourished him, his judgments and his visions.
Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing
sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices
and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into
the furniture of his own room. Absent--that was what he was: so absent from
everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes
startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
He
became aware that Mr. Jackson was clearing his throat preparatory to farther
revelations.
"I
don't know, of course, how far your wife's family are aware of what people
say about--well, about Madame Olenska's refusal to accept her husband's
latest offer."
Archer
was silent, and Mr. Jackson obliquely continued: "It's a pity--it's
certainly a pity--that she refused it."
"A
pity? In God's name, why?"
Mr.
Jackson looked down his leg to the unwrinkled sock that joined it to a
glossy pump.
"Well--to
put it on the lowest ground--what's she going to live on now?"
"Now--?"
"If
Beaufort--"
Archer
sprang up, his fist banging down on the black walnut-edge of the
writing-table. The wells of the
brass double-inkstand danced in their sockets.
"What
the devil do you mean, sir?"
Mr.
Jackson, shifting himself slightly in his chair, turned a tranquil gaze on
the young man's burning face.
"Well--I
have it on pretty good authority--in fact, on old Catherine's herself--that
the family reduced Countess Olenska's allowance considerably when she
definitely refused to go back to her husband; and as, by this refusal, she
also forfeits the money settled on her when she married--which Olenski was
ready to make over to her if she returned--why, what the devil do YOU mean,
my dear boy, by asking me what I mean?" Mr. Jackson good-humouredly
retorted.
Archer
moved toward the mantelpiece and bent over to knock his ashes into the
grate.
"I
don't know anything of Madame Olenska's private affairs; but I don't need
to, to be certain that what you insinuate--"
"Oh,
I don't: it's Lefferts, for one," Mr. Jackson interposed.
"Lefferts--who
made love to her and got snubbed for it!" Archer broke out
contemptuously.
"Ah--DID
he?" snapped the other, as if this were exactly the fact he had been
laying a trap for. He still sat
sideways from the fire, so that his hard old gaze held Archer's face as if
in a spring of steel.
"Well,
well: it's a pity she didn't go back before Beaufort's cropper," he
repeated. "If she goes
NOW, and if he fails, it will only confirm the general impression: which
isn't by any means peculiar to Lefferts, by the way.
"Oh,
she won't go back now: less than ever!"
Archer had no sooner said it than he had once more the feeling that
it was exactly what Mr. Jackson had been waiting for.
The
old gentleman considered him attentively.
"That's your opinion, eh? Well,
no doubt you know. But
everybody will tell you that the few pennies Medora Manson has left are all
in Beaufort's hands; and how the two women are to keep their heads above
water unless he does, I can't imagine.
Of course, Madame Olenska may still soften old Catherine, who's been
the most inexorably opposed to her staying; and old Catherine could make her
any allowance she chooses. But
we all know that she hates parting with good money; and the rest of the
family have no particular interest in keeping Madame Olenska here."
Archer
was burning with unavailing wrath: he was exactly in the state when a man is
sure to do something stupid, knowing all the while that he is doing it.
He
saw that Mr. Jackson had been instantly struck by the fact that Madame
Olenska's differences with her grandmother and her other relations were not
known to him, and that the old gentleman had drawn his own conclusions as to
the reasons for Archer's exclusion from the family councils.
This fact warned Archer to go warily; but the insinuations about
Beaufort made him reckless. He
was mindful, however, if not of his own danger, at least of the fact that
Mr. Jackson was under his mother's roof, and consequently his guest. Old New
York scrupulously observed the etiquette of hospitality, and no discussion
with a guest was ever allowed to degenerate into a disagreement.
"Shall
we go up and join my mother?" he suggested curtly, as Mr. Jackson's
last cone of ashes dropped into the brass ashtray at his elbow.
On
the drive homeward May remained oddly silent; through the darkness, he still
felt her enveloped in her menacing blush.
What its menace meant he could not guess: but he was sufficiently
warned by the fact that Madame Olenska's name had evoked it.
They
went upstairs, and he turned into the library. She usually followed him; but
he heard her passing down the passage to her bedroom.
"May!"
he called out impatiently; and she came back, with a slight glance of
surprise at his tone.
"This
lamp is smoking again; I should think the servants might see that it's kept
properly trimmed," he grumbled nervously.
"I'm
so sorry: it shan't happen again," she answered, in the firm bright
tone she had learned from her mother; and it exasperated Archer to feel that
she was already beginning to humour him like a younger Mr. Welland. She bent
over to lower the wick, and as the light struck up on her white shoulders
and the clear curves of her face he thought:
"How young she is! For
what endless years this life will have to go on!"
He
felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in
his veins. "Look
here," he said suddenly, "I may have to go to Washington for a few
days--soon; next week perhaps."
Her
hand remained on the key of the lamp as she turned to him slowly.
The heat from its flame had brought back a glow to her face, but it
paled as she looked up.
"On
business?" she asked, in a tone which implied that there could be no
other conceivable reason, and that she had put the question automatically,
as if merely to finish his own sentence.
"On
business, naturally. There's a
patent case coming up before the Supreme Court--" He gave the name of the inventor, and went on furnishing
details with all Lawrence Lefferts's practised glibness, while she listened
attentively, saying at intervals: "Yes,
I see."
"The
change will do you good," she said simply, when he had finished;
"and you must be sure to go and see Ellen," she added, looking him
straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she
might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty.
It
was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code
in which they had both been trained it meant:
"Of course you understand that I know all that people have been
saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort
to get her to return to her husband. I
also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have
advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as
well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your
encouragement that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of
criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you, this evening,
the hint that has made you so irritable. . . .
Hints have indeed not been wanting; but since you appear unwilling to
take them from others, I offer you this one myself, in the only form in
which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things to each
other: by letting you understand that I know you mean to see Ellen when you
are in Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose;
and that, since you are sure to see her, I wish you to do so with my full
and explicit approval-- and to take the opportunity of letting her know what
the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to."
Her
hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this mute
message reached him. She turned
the wick down, lifted off the globe, and breathed on the sulky flame.
"They
smell less if one blows them out," she explained, with her bright
housekeeping air. On the
threshold she turned and paused for his kiss.
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