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
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 overfed
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 bathrooms 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
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