The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (the speed reading book TXT) 📗
- Author: Edith Wharton
- Performer: 0375753206
Book online «The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (the speed reading book TXT) 📗». Author Edith Wharton
himself if he were becoming subject to hallucinations.
And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down
the nave, carried forward on the light Mendelssohn
ripples, the spring day beckoning to them through widely
opened doors, and Mrs. Welland’s chestnuts, with big
white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing
off at the far end of the canvas tunnel.
The footman, who had a still bigger white favour on
his lapel, wrapped May’s white cloak about her, and
Archer jumped into the brougham at her side. She
turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands
clasped under her veil.
“Darling!” Archer said—and suddenly the same black
abyss yawned before him and he felt himself sinking
into it, deeper and deeper, while his voice rambled on
smoothly and cheerfully: “Yes, of course I thought I’d
lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the
poor devil of a bridegroom didn’t go through that. But
you DID keep me waiting, you know! I had time to
think of every horror that might possibly happen.”
She surprised him by turning, in full Fifth Avenue,
and flinging her arms about his neck. “But none ever
CAN happen now, can it, Newland, as long as we two
are together?”
Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought
out that the young couple, after the wedding-breakfast,
had ample time to put on their travelling-clothes,
descend the wide Mingott stairs between laughing bridesmaids
and weeping parents, and get into the brougham
under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers;
and there was still half an hour left in which to drive to
the station, buy the last weeklies at the bookstall with
the air of seasoned travellers, and settle themselves in
the reserved compartment in which May’s maid had
already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and
glaringly new dressing-bag from London.
The old du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their
house at the disposal of the bridal couple, with a readiness
inspired by the prospect of spending a week in
New York with Mrs. Archer; and Archer, glad to escape
the usual “bridal suite” in a Philadelphia or Baltimore
hotel, had accepted with an equal alacrity.
May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country,
and childishly amused at the vain efforts of the
eight bridesmaids to discover where their mysterious
retreat was situated. It was thought “very English” to
have a country-house lent to one, and the fact gave a
last touch of distinction to what was generally
conceded to be the most brilliant wedding of the year; but
where the house was no one was permitted to know,
except the parents of bride and groom, who, when
taxed with the knowledge, pursed their lips and said
mysteriously: “Ah, they didn’t tell us—” which was
manifestly true, since there was no need to.
Once they were settled in their compartment, and the
train, shaking off the endless wooden suburbs, had
pushed out into the pale landscape of spring, talk
became easier than Archer had expected. May was still,
in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to
compare notes with him as to the incidents of the
wedding, and discussing them as impartially as a bridesmaid
talking it all over with an usher. At first Archer
had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an
inward tremor; but her clear eyes revealed only the
most tranquil unawareness. She was alone for the first
time with her husband; but her husband was only the
charming comrade of yesterday. There was no one
whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as
completely, and the culminating “lark” of the whole
delightful adventure of engagement and marriage was
to be off with him alone on a journey, like a grownup
person, like a “married woman,” in fact.
It was wonderful that—as he had learned in the
Mission garden at St. Augustine—such depths of feeling
could coexist with such absence of imagination. But
he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him
by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as
her conscience had been eased of its burden; and he
saw that she would probably go through life dealing to
the best of her ability with each experience as it came,
but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen
glance.
Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave
her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of
representing a type rather than a person; as if she
might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a
Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair
skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a
ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible
youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only
primitive and pure. In the thick of this meditation
Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the
startled gaze of a stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence
of the wedding-breakfast and of Granny Mingott’s
immense and triumphant pervasion of it.
May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject.
“I was surprised, though—weren’t you?—that aunt
Medora came after all. Ellen wrote that they were
neither of them well enough to take the journey; I do
wish it had been she who had recovered! Did you see
the exquisite old lace she sent me?”
He had known that the moment must come sooner
or later, but he had somewhat imagined that by force
of willing he might hold it at bay.
“Yes—I—no: yes, it was beautiful,” he said, looking
at her blindly, and wondering if, whenever he heard
those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world
would tumble about him like a house of cards.
“Aren’t you tired? It will be good to have some tea
when we arrive—I’m sure the aunts have got everything
beautifully ready,” he rattled on, taking her hand
in his; and her mind rushed away instantly to the
magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver
which the Beauforts had sent, and which “went” so
perfectly with uncle Lovell Mingott’s trays and sidedishes.
In the spring twilight the train stopped at the
Rhinebeck station, and they walked along the platform
to the waiting carriage.
“Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens—
they’ve sent their man over from Skuytercliff to meet
us,” Archer exclaimed, as a sedate person out of livery
approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.
“I’m extremely sorry, sir,” said this emissary, “that a
little accident has occurred at the Miss du Lacs’: a leak
in the water-tank. It happened yesterday, and Mr. van
der Luyden, who heard of it this morning, sent a housemaid
up by the early train to get the Patroon’s house
ready. It will be quite comfortable, I think you’ll find,
sir; and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook over, so
that it will be exactly the same as if you’d been at
Rhinebeck.”
Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he
repeated in still more apologetic accents: “It’ll be exactly
the same, sir, I do assure you—” and May’s eager voice
broke out, covering the embarrassed silence: “The same
as Rhinebeck? The Patroon’s house? But it will be a
hundred thousand times better—won’t it, Newland?
It’s too dear and kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have
thought of it.”
And as they drove off, with the maid beside the
coachman, and their shining bridal bags on the seat
before them, she went on excitedly: “Only fancy, I’ve
never been inside it—have you? The van der Luydens
show it to so few people. But they opened it for Ellen,
it seems, and she told me what a darling little place it
was: she says it’s the only house she’s seen in America
that she could imagine being perfectly happy in.”
“Well—that’s what we’re going to be, isn’t it?” cried
her husband gaily; and she answered with her boyish
smile: “Ah, it’s just our luck beginning—the wonderful
luck we’re always going to have together!”
XX.
Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest,”
Archer said; and his wife looked at him with an
anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of
their lodging house breakfast-table.
In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there
were only two people whom the Newland Archers
knew; and these two they had sedulously avoided, in
conformity with the old New York tradition that it was
not “dignified” to force one’s self on the notice of one’s
acquaintances in foreign countries.
Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to
Europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle,
and met the friendly advances of their fellow-travellers
with an air of such impenetrable reserve, that they had
almost achieved the record of never having exchanged
a word with a “foreigner” other than those employed
in hotels and railway-stations. Their own compatriots—
save those previously known or properly accredited—
they treated with an even more pronounced disdain; so
that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a
Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken
tete-a-tete. But the utmost precautions are sometimes
unavailing; and one night at Botzen one of the
two English ladies in the room across the passage (whose
names, dress and social situation were already intimately
known to Janey) had knocked on the door and
asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle of liniment. The
other lady—the intruder’s sister, Mrs. Carfry—had been
seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs.
Archer, who never travelled without a complete family
pharmacy, was fortunately able to produce the required
remedy.
Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister
Miss Harle were travelling alone they were profoundly
grateful to the Archer ladies, who supplied them with
ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid helped to
nurse the invalid back to health.
When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of
ever seeing Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle again. Nothing,
to Mrs. Archer’s mind, would have been more
“undignified” than to force one’s self on the notice of a
“foreigner” to whom one had happened to render an
accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to
whom this point of view was unknown, and who would
have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves
linked by an eternal gratitude to the “delightful Americans”
who had been so kind at Botzen. With touching
fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer
and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and
displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when
they were to pass through London on their way to or
from the States. The intimacy became indissoluble, and
Mrs. Archer and Janey, whenever they alighted at
Brown’s Hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate
friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in
Wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs
of the Baroness Bunsen and had views about the
occupants of the leading London pulpits. As Mrs. Archer
said, it made “another thing of London” to know Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland
became engaged the tie between the families was so
firmly established that it was thought “only right” to
send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies,
who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine
flowers under glass. And on the dock, when Newland
and his wife sailed for England, Mrs. Archer’s last
word had been: “You must take May to see Mrs.
Carfry.”
Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying
this injunction; but Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness,
had run them down and sent them an invitation
to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archer
was wrinkling her brows
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