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It
was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their first
invitations in the third person, and their summons was seldom refused even
by the seasoned and sought-after. Still,
it was admittedly a triumph that the van der Luydens, at May's request,
should have stayed over in order to be present at her farewell dinner for
the Countess Olenska.
The
two mothers-in-law sat in May's drawing-room on the afternoon of the great
day, Mrs. Archer writing out the menus on Tiffany's thickest gilt-edged
bristol, while Mrs. Welland superintended the placing of the palms and
standard lamps. Archer,
arriving late from his office, found them still there.
Mrs. Archer had turned her attention to the name-cards for the table,
and Mrs. Welland was considering the effect of bringing forward the large
gilt sofa, so that another "corner" might be created between the
piano and the window.
May,
they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting the mound of Jacqueminot
roses and maidenhair in the centre of the long table, and the placing of the
Maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between the candelabra.
On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which Mr. van der Luyden
had had sent from Skuytercliff. Everything
was, in short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event.
Mrs.
Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with her sharp
gold pen.
"Henry
van der Luyden--Louisa--the Lovell Mingotts --the Reggie Chiverses--Lawrence
Lefferts and Gertrude--(yes, I suppose May was right to have them)--the
Selfridge Merrys, Sillerton Jackson, Van Newland and his wife. (How time
passes! It seems only yesterday
that he was your best man, Newland)--and Countess Olenska--yes, I think
that's all. . . ."
Mrs.
Welland surveyed her son-in-law affectionately. "No one can say,
Newland, that you and May are not giving Ellen a handsome send-off."
"Ah,
well," said Mrs. Archer, "I understand May's wanting her cousin to
tell people abroad that we're not quite barbarians."
"I'm
sure Ellen will appreciate it. She
was to arrive this morning, I believe.
It will make a most charming last impression.
The evening before sailing is usually so dreary," Mrs. Welland
cheerfully continued.
Archer
turned toward the door, and his mother-in- law called to him:
"Do go in and have a peep at the table.
And don't let May tire herself too much."
But he affected not to hear, and sprang up the stairs to his library.
The room looked at him like an alien countenance composed into a
polite grimace; and he perceived that it had been ruthlessly
"tidied," and prepared, by a judicious distribution of ash-trays
and cedar-wood boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in.
"Ah,
well," he thought, "it's not for long--" and he went on to
his dressing-room.
Ten
days had passed since Madame Olenska's departure from New York.
During those ten days Archer had had no sign from her but that
conveyed by the return of a key wrapped in tissue paper, and sent to his
office in a sealed envelope addressed in her hand.
This retort to his last appeal might have been interpreted as a
classic move in a familiar game; but the young man chose to give it a
different meaning. She was
still fighting against her fate; but she was going to Europe, and she was
not returning to her husband. Nothing,
therefore, was to prevent his following her; and once he had taken the
irrevocable step, and had proved to her that it was irrevocable, he believed
she would not send him away.
This
confidence in the future had steadied him to play his part in the present.
It had kept him from writing to her, or betraying, by any sign or
act, his misery and mortification. It
seemed to him that in the deadly silent game between them the trumps were
still in his hands; and he waited.
There
had been, nevertheless, moments sufficiently difficult to pass; as when Mr.
Letterblair, the day after Madame Olenska's departure, had sent for him to
go over the details of the trust which Mrs. Manson Mingott wished to create
for her granddaughter. For a
couple of hours Archer had examined the terms of the deed with his senior,
all the while obscurely feeling that if he had been consulted it was for
some reason other than the obvious one of his cousinship; and that the close
of the conference would reveal it.
"Well,
the lady can't deny that it's a handsome arrangement," Mr. Letterblair
had summed up, after mumbling over a summary of the settlement.
"In fact I'm bound to say she's been treated pretty handsomely
all round."
"All
round?" Archer echoed with a touch of derision. "Do you refer to her husband's proposal to give her back
her own money?"
Mr.
Letterblair's bushy eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch.
"My dear sir, the law's the law; and your wife's cousin was
married under the French law. It's to be presumed she knew what that meant."
"Even
if she did, what happened subsequently--." But Archer paused.
Mr. Letterblair had laid his pen- handle against his big corrugated
nose, and was looking down it with the expression assumed by virtuous
elderly gentlemen when they wish their youngers to understand that virtue is
not synonymous with ignorance.
"My
dear sir, I've no wish to extenuate the Count's transgressions; but--but on
the other side . . . I wouldn't put my hand in the fire . . . well, that
there hadn't been tit for tat . . . with the young champion. . . ."
Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and pushed a folded paper toward
Archer. "This report, the
result of discreet enquiries . . ."
And then, as Archer made no effort to glance at the paper or to
repudiate the suggestion, the lawyer somewhat flatly continued:
"I don't say it's conclusive, you observe; far from it.
But straws show . . . and on the whole it's eminently satisfactory
for all parties that this dignified solution has been reached."
"Oh,
eminently," Archer assented, pushing back the paper.
A
day or two later, on responding to a summons from Mrs. Manson Mingott, his
soul had been more deeply tried.
He
had found the old lady depressed and querulous.
"You
know she's deserted me?" she began at once; and without waiting for his
reply: "Oh, don't ask me
why! She gave so many reasons
that I've forgotten them all. My
private belief is that she couldn't face the boredom.
At any rate that's what Augusta and my daughters-in-law think. And I don't know that I altogether blame her.
Olenski's a finished scoundrel; but life with him must have been a
good deal gayer than it is in Fifth Avenue.
Not that the family would admit that: they think Fifth Avenue is
Heaven with the rue de la Paix thrown in.
And poor Ellen, of course, has no idea of going back to her husband.
She held out as firmly as ever against that.
So she's to settle down in Paris with that fool Medora. . . . Well, Paris is Paris; and you can keep a carriage there on
next to nothing. But she was as gay as a bird, and I shall miss her."
Two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down her puffy cheeks and
vanished in the abysses of her bosom.
"All
I ask is," she concluded, "that they shouldn't bother me any more.
I must really be allowed to digest my gruel. . . ."
And she twinkled a little wistfully at Archer.
It
was that evening, on his return home, that May announced her intention of
giving a farewell dinner to her cousin.
Madame Olenska's name had not been pronounced between them since the
night of her flight to Washington; and Archer looked at his wife with
surprise.
"A
dinner--why?" he interrogated.
Her
colour rose. "But you like
Ellen--I thought you'd be pleased."
"It's
awfully nice--your putting it in that way.
But I really don't see--"
"I
mean to do it, Newland," she said, quietly rising and going to her
desk. "Here are the
invitations all written. Mother
helped me--she agrees that we ought to."
She paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and Archer suddenly saw
before him the embodied image of the Family.
"Oh,
all right," he said, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of guests
that she had put in his hand.
When
he entered the drawing-room before dinner May was stooping over the fire and
trying to coax the logs to burn in their unaccustomed setting of immaculate
tiles.
The
tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden's orchids had been
conspicuously disposed in various receptacles of modern porcelain and knobby
silver. Mrs. Newland Archer's
drawing-room was generally thought a great success. A gilt bamboo jardiniere, in which the primulas and
cinerarias were punctually renewed, blocked the access to the bay window
(where the old- fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction of the
Venus of Milo); the sofas and arm-chairs of pale brocade were cleverly
grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys,
porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames; and tall rosy-shaded
lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.
"I
don't think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted up," said May, rising
flushed from her struggle, and sending about her a glance of pardonable
pride. The brass tongs which
she had propped against the side of the chimney fell with a crash that
drowned her husband's answer; and before he could restore them Mr. and Mrs.
van der Luyden were announced.
The
other guests quickly followed, for it was known that the van der Luydens
liked to dine punctually. The
room was nearly full, and Archer was engaged in showing to Mrs. Selfridge
Merry a small highly-varnished Verbeckhoven "Study of Sheep,"
which Mr. Welland had given May for Christmas, when he found Madame Olenska
at his side.
She
was excessively pale, and her pallor made her dark hair seem denser and
heavier than ever. Perhaps
that, or the fact that she had wound several rows of amber beads about her
neck, reminded him suddenly of the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with
at children's parties, when Medora Manson had first brought her to New York.
The
amber beads were trying to her complexion, or her dress was perhaps
unbecoming: her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never
loved it as he did at that minute. Their
hands met, and he thought he heard her say:
"Yes, we're sailing tomorrow in the Russia--"; then there
was an unmeaning noise of opening doors, and after an interval May's voice: "Newland! Dinner's been announced. Won't you please take Ellen in?"
Madame
Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand was ungloved,
and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he had
sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street drawing- room.
All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have taken refuge
in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he
said to himself: "If it were only to see her hand again I
should have
to follow her--."
It
was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign
visitor" that Mrs. van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being
placed on her host's left. The fact of Madame Olenska's
"foreignness" could hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than
by this farewell tribute; and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted her displacement
with an affability which left no doubt as to her approval.
There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all,
done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code,
was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the
tribe. There was nothing on
earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their
unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for
Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat marvelling at
the silent untiring activity with which her popularity had been retrieved,
grievances against her silenced, her past countenanced, and her present
irradiated by the family approval. Mrs.
van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her nearest
approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from his seat at May's
right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify all the
carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.
Archer,
who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability,
as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at
nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance travelled
from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking
people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and
himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy.
And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken
gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the
extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies.
He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless
silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by
means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner
of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied
about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had
ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was
simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her
friend and cousin.
It
was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of
blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who
placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more
ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave
rise to them.
As
these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner
in the centre of an armed camp. He
looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors
from the tone in which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing
with Beaufort and his wife. "It's
to show me," he thought, "what would happen to ME--" and a
deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct
action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of
the family vault.
He
laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden's startled eyes.
"You
think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile.
"Of course poor Regina's idea of remaining in New York has its
ridiculous side, I suppose;" and Archer muttered:
"Of course."
At
this point, he became conscious that Madame Olenska's other neighbour had
been engaged for some time with the lady on his right. At the same moment he saw that May, serenely enthroned
between Mr. van der Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick glance
down the table. It was evident
that the host and the lady on his right could not sit through the whole meal
in silence. He turned to Madame
Olenska, and her pale smile met him. "Oh,
do let's see it through," it seemed to say.
"Did
you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised him by
its naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary, she had seldom
travelled with fewer discomforts.
"Except,
you know, the dreadful heat in the train," she added; and he remarked
that she would not suffer from that particular hardship in the country she
was going to.
"I
never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than
once, in April, in the train between Calais and Paris."
She said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could
always carry an extra rug, and that every form of travel had its hardships;
to which he abruptly returned that he thought them all of no account
compared with the blessedness of getting away. She changed colour, and he
added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch:
"I mean to do a lot of travelling myself before long."
A tremor crossed her face, and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he
cried out: "I say, Reggie,
what do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, I mean?
I'm game if you are--" at which Mrs. Reggie piped up that she
could not think of letting Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball
she was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week; and her husband
placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for the
International Polo match.
But
Mr. Selfridge Merry had caught the phrase "round the world," and
having once circled the globe in his steam-yacht, he seized the opportunity
to send down the table several striking items concerning the shallowness of
the Mediterranean ports. Though,
after all, he added, it didn't matter; for when you'd seen Athens and Smyrna
and Constantinople, what else was there? And Mrs. Merry said she could never
be too grateful to Dr. Bencomb for having made them promise not to go to
Naples on account of the fever.
"But
you must have three weeks to do India properly," her husband conceded,
anxious to have it understood that he was no frivolous globe-trotter.
And
at this point the ladies went up to the drawing- room.
In
the library, in spite of weightier presences, Lawrence Lefferts
predominated.
The
talk, as usual, had veered around to the Beauforts, and even Mr. van der
Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, installed in the honorary arm-chairs tacitly
reserved for them, paused to listen to the younger man's philippic.
Never
had Lefferts so abounded in the sentiments that adorn Christian manhood and
exalt the sanctity of the home. Indignation
lent him a scathing eloquence, and it was clear that if others had followed
his example, and acted as he talked, society would never have been weak
enough to receive a foreign upstart like Beaufort--no, sir, not even if he'd
married a van der Luyden or a Lanning instead of a Dallas. And what chance would there have been, Lefferts wrathfully
questioned, of his marrying into such a family as the Dallases, if he had
not already wormed his way into certain houses, as people like Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers had managed to worm theirs in his wake? If society chose to open its doors to vulgar women the harm
was not great, though the gain was doubtful; but once it got in the way of
tolerating men of obscure origin and tainted wealth the end was total
disintegration--and at no distant date.
"If
things go on at this pace," Lefferts thundered, looking like a young
prophet dressed by Poole, and who had not yet been stoned, "we shall
see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers' houses, and marrying
Beaufort's bastards."
"Oh,
I say--draw it mild!" Reggie Chivers and young Newland protested, while
Mr. Selfridge Merry looked genuinely alarmed, and an expression of pain and
disgust settled on Mr. van der Luyden's sensitive face.
"Has
he got any?" cried Mr. Sillerton Jackson, pricking up his ears; and
while Lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh, the old gentleman
twittered into Archer's ear: "Queer,
those fellows who are always wanting to set things right. The people who have the worst cooks are always telling you
they're poisoned when they dine out. But
I hear there are pressing reasons for our friend Lawrence's
diatribe:--typewriter this time, I understand. . . ."
The
talk swept past Archer like some senseless river running and running because
it did not know enough to stop. He
saw, on the faces about him, expressions of interest, amusement and even
mirth. He listened to the
younger men's laughter, and to the praise of the Archer Madeira, which Mr.
van der Luyden and Mr. Merry were thoughtfully celebrating.
Through it all he was dimly aware of a general attitude of
friendliness toward himself, as if the guard of the prisoner he felt himself
to be were trying to soften his captivity; and the perception increased his
passionate determination to be free.
In
the drawing-room, where they presently joined the ladies, he met May's
triumphant eyes, and read in them the conviction that everything had
"gone off" beautifully. She rose from Madame Olenska's side, and
immediately Mrs. van der Luyden beckoned the latter to a seat on the gilt
sofa where she throned. Mrs.
Selfridge Merry bore across the room to join them, and it became clear to
Archer that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was
going on. The silent
organisation which held his little world together was determined to put
itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of
Madame Olenska's conduct, or the completeness of Archer's domestic felicity.
All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in
pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even
conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary; and from this tissue of
elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that New
York believed him to be Madame Olenska's lover.
He caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for the
first time understood that she shared the belief.
The discovery roused a laughter of inner devils that reverberated
through all his efforts to discuss the Martha Washington ball with Mrs.
Reggie Chivers and little Mrs. Newland; and so the evening swept on, running
and running like a senseless river that did not know how to stop.
At
length he saw that Madame Olenska had risen and was saying good-bye.
He understood that in a moment she would be gone, and tried to
remember what he had said to her at dinner; but he could not recall a single
word they had exchanged.
She
went up to May, the rest of the company making a circle about her as she
advanced. The two young women
clasped hands; then May bent forward and kissed her cousin.
"Certainly
our hostess is much the handsomer of the two," Archer heard Reggie
Chivers say in an undertone to young Mrs. Newland; and he remembered
Beaufort's coarse sneer at May's ineffectual beauty.
A
moment later he was in the hall, putting Madame Olenska's cloak about her
shoulders.
Through
all his confusion of mind he had held fast to the resolve to say nothing
that might startle or disturb her. Convinced
that no power could now turn him from his purpose he had found strength to
let events shape themselves as they would.
But as he followed Madame Olenska into the hall he thought with a
sudden hunger of being for a moment alone with her at the door of her
carriage.
"Is
your carriage here?" he asked; and at that moment Mrs. van der Luyden,
who was being majestically inserted into her sables, said gently:
"We are driving dear Ellen home."
Archer's
heart gave a jerk, and Madame Olenska, clasping her cloak and fan with one
hand, held out the other to him. "Good-bye,"
she said.
"Good-bye--but
I shall see you soon in Paris," he answered aloud--it seemed to him
that he had shouted it.
"Oh,"
she murmured, "if you and May could come--!"
Mr.
van der Luyden advanced to give her his arm, and Archer turned to Mrs. van
der Luyden. For a moment, in
the billowy darkness inside the big landau, he caught the dim oval of a
face, eyes shining steadily-- and she was gone.
As
he went up the steps he crossed Lawrence Lefferts coming down with his wife.
Lefferts caught his host by the sleeve, drawing back to let Gertrude
pass.
"I
say, old chap: do you mind just letting it be understood that I'm dining
with you at the club tomorrow night? Thanks
so much, you old brick! Good-night."
"It
DID go off beautifully, didn't it?" May questioned from the threshold
of the library.
Archer
roused himself with a start. As
soon as the last carriage had driven away, he had come up to the library and
shut himself in, with the hope that his wife, who still lingered below,
would go straight to her room. But there she stood, pale and drawn, yet
radiating the factitious energy of one who has passed beyond fatigue.
"May
I come and talk it over?" she asked.
"Of
course, if you like. But you
must be awfully sleepy--"
"No,
I'm not sleepy. I should like
to sit with you a little."
"Very
well," he said, pushing her chair near the fire.
She
sat down and he resumed his seat; but neither spoke for a long time.
At length Archer began abruptly: "Since you're not tired, and
want to talk, there's something I must tell you.
I tried to the other night--."
She
looked at him quickly. "Yes,
dear. Something about
yourself?"
"About
myself. You say you're not
tired: well, I am. Horribly tired . . ."
In
an instant she was all tender anxiety.
"Oh, I've seen it coming on, Newland! You've been so wickedly overworked--"
"Perhaps
it's that. Anyhow, I want to
make a break--"
"A
break? To give up the
law?"
"To
go away, at any rate--at once. On
a long trip, ever so far off--away from everything--"
He
paused, conscious that he had failed in his attempt to speak with the
indifference of a man who longs for a change, and is yet too weary to
welcome it. Do what he would, the chord of eagerness vibrated. "Away
from everything--" he repeated.
"Ever
so far? Where, for
instance?" she asked.
"Oh,
I don't know. India--or
Japan."
She
stood up, and as he sat with bent head, his chin propped on his hands, he
felt her warmly and fragrantly hovering over him.
"As
far as that? But I'm afraid you
can't, dear . . ." she said in an unsteady voice. "Not unless you'll take me with you."
And then, as he was silent, she went on, in tones so clear and
evenly-pitched that each separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on
his brain: "That is, if
the doctors will let me go . . . but I'm afraid they won't.
For you see, Newland, I've been sure since this morning of something
I've been so longing and hoping for--"
He
looked up at her with a sick stare, and she sank down, all dew and roses,
and hid her face against his knee.
"Oh,
my dear," he said, holding her to him while his cold hand stroked her
hair.
There
was a long pause, which the inner devils filled with strident laughter; then
May freed herself from his arms and stood up.
"You
didn't guess--?"
"Yes--I;
no. That is, of course I
hoped--"
They
looked at each other for an instant and again fell silent; then, turning his
eyes from hers, he asked abruptly: "Have
you told any one else?"
"Only
Mamma and your mother." She
paused, and then added hurriedly, the blood flushing up to her forehead:
"That is--and Ellen. You
know I told you we'd had a long talk one afternoon--and how dear she was to
me."
"Ah--"
said Archer, his heart stopping.
He
felt that his wife was watching him intently.
"Did you MIND my telling her first, Newland?"
"Mind?
Why should I?" He
made a last effort to collect himself.
"But that was a fortnight ago, wasn't it?
I thought you said you weren't sure till today."
Her
colour burned deeper, but she held his gaze. "No; I wasn't sure
then--but I told her I was. And
you see I was right!" she exclaimed, her blue eyes wet with victory.
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