Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Edith Wharton

  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.

  Mr. 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-à-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 Narra- gansett 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-orné 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 antimacassars 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 ir repressible 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 color 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 notbing 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: “Aunt 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 don’t know Ellen has 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 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 Tus cany 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 lighthouse 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 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 gray bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a cat-boat 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. Should 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 colorless 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 Aunt 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 favorite 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 systematized 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.

  22

  “A PARTY FOR THE Blenkers—the Blenkers?”

  Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses, read aloud in the tone of high comedy:

  Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and Mrs. Welland’s company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club on 25 August at 3 o‘clock punctually. To meet Mrs. and the Misses Blenker.

  Red Gables, Catherine Street.

  R.S.V.P

  “Good gracious—” Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.

  “Poor Amy Sillerton—you never can tell what her husband will do next,” Mrs. Welland sighed. “I suppose he’s just discovered the Blenkers.”

  Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society; and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated family tree. He was, as people said, a man who had had “every advantage.” His father was Sillerton Jackson’s uncle, his mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth and position, and mutual suitability. Nothing—nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did. But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society in the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right to expect “something different,” and money enough to keep her own carriage.

  No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he traveled, took her to explore tombs in Yu catan instead of going to Paris or Italy. But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the Cliffs, because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots and sent an unwilling representative.

  “It’s a wonder,” Mrs. Welland remarked, “that they didn’t choose the Cup Race day! Do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for a black man on the day of Julia Mingott’s thé dansant? Luckily this time there’s nothing else going on that I know of—for of course some of us will have to go.”

  Mr. Welland sighed nervously. “‘Some of us,’ my dear—more than one? Three o‘clock is such a very awkward hour. I have to be here at half-past three to take my drops: it’s really no use trying to follow Bencomb’s new treatment if I don’t do it systematically; and if I join you later, of course I shall miss my drive.” At the thought he laid down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to his finely-wrinkled cheek.

  “There’s no reason why you should go at all, my dear,” his wife answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic. “I have some cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I’ll drop in at about half past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that she hasn’t been slighted.” She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter. “And if Newland’s afternoon is provided for perhaps May can drive you out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness.”

  It was a principle in the Welland family that people’s days and hours should be what Mrs. Welland called “provided for.” The melancholy possibility of having to “kill time” (especially for those who did not care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the specter of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist. Another of her principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of adjusting this respect for May’s independence with the exigency of Mr. Welland’s claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity which left not a second of Mrs. Welland’s own time unprovided for.

  “Of course I’ll drive with Papa—I’m sure Newland will find something to do,” May said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his lack of response. It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days. Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof, when she inquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered paradoxically: “Oh, I think for a change I’ll just save it instead of spending it—” and once, when she and May had had to go on a long-postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having lain all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the house.

  “Newland never seems to look ahead,” Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: “No; but you see it doesn’t matter, because when there’s nothing particular to do he reads a book.”

  “Ah, yes—like his father!” Mrs. Welland agre
ed, as if allowing for an inherited oddity; and after that the question of Newland’s unemployment was tacitly dropped.

  Nevertheless, as the day for the Sillerton reception approached, May began to show a natural solicitude for his welfare, and to suggest a tennis match at the Chiverses, or a sail on Julius Beaufort’s cutter, as a means of atoning for her temporary desertion. “I shall be back by six, you know, dear: Papa never drives later than that—” and she was not reassured till Archer said that he thought of hiring a run-about and driving up the island to a stud-farm to look at a second horse for her brougham. They had been looking for this horse for some time, and the suggestion was so acceptable that May glanced at her mother as if to say: “You see he knows how to plan out his time as well as any of us.”

  The idea of the stud-farm and the brougham horse had germinated in Archer’s mind on the very day when the Emerson Sillerton invitation had first been mentioned; but he had kept it to himself as if there were something clandestine in the plan, and discovery might prevent its execution. He had, however, taken the precaution to engage in advance a run-about with a pair of old livery-stable trotters that could still do their eighteen miles on level roads; and at two o‘clock, hastily deserting the luncheon-table, he sprang into the light carriage and drove off.

  The day was perfect. A breeze from the north drove little puffs of white cloud across an ultramarine sky, with a bright sea running under it. Bellevue Avenue was empty at that hour, and after dropping the stable-lad at the corner of Mills Street Archer turned down the Old Beach Road and drove across Eastman’s Beach.