The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (8 ebook reader .txt) 📗

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 anyone 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.

Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East Thirty-ninth Street.

He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle of those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where the throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.

“Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms,” he heard someone say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista of the old Museum.

The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.

It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened. There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken to church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishop of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long the pride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had first staggered across the floor shouting “Dad,” while May and the nurse laughed behind the door; there their second child, Mary (who was so like her mother), had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of Reggie Chivers’s many sons; and there Archer had kissed her through her wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was to carry them to Grace Church⁠—for in a world where all else had reeled on its foundations the “Grace Church wedding” remained an unchanged institution.

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary’s incurable indifference to “accomplishments,” and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward “art” which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect.

The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word “Colonial.” Nobody nowadays had “Colonial” houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

But above all⁠—sometimes Archer put it above all⁠—it was in that library that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one evening