The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [128]
“At the Tuileries,” he repeated, seeing the eyes of the company expectantly turned on him, “the standard was excessively lax in some respects, and if you’d asked where Morny‘saq money came from—! Or who paid the debts of some of the Court beauties . . .”
“I hope, dear Sillerton,” said Mrs. Archer, “you are not suggesting that we should adopt such standards?”
“I never suggest,” returned Mr. Jackson imperturbably. “But Madame Olenska’s foreign bringing-up may make her less particular—”
“Ah,” the two elder ladies sighed.
“Still, to have kept her grandmother’s carriage at a defaulter’s door!” Mr. van der Luyden protested; and Archer guessed that he was remembering, and resenting, the hampers of carnations he had sent to the little house in Twenty-third Street.
“Of course I’ve always said that she looks at things quite differently,” Mrs. Archer summed up.
A flush rose to May’s forehead. She looked across the table at her husband, and said precipitately: “I’m sure Ellen meant it kindly.”
“Imprudent people are often kind,” said Mrs. Archer, as if the fact were scarcely an extenuation; and Mrs. van der Luyden murmured: “If only she had consulted someone—”
“Ah, that she never did!” Mrs. Archer rejoined.
At this point Mr. van der Luyden glanced at his wife, who bent her head slightly in the direction of Mrs. Archer; and the glimmering trains of the three ladies swept out of the door while the gentlemen settled down to their cigars. Mr. van der Luyden supplied short ones on Opera nights; but they were so good that they made his guests deplore his inexorable punctuality.
Archer, after the first act, had detached himself from the party and made his way to the back of the club box. From there he watched, over various Chivers, Mingott and Rushworth shoulders, the same scene that he had looked at, two years previously, on the night of his first meeting with Ellen Olenska. He had half-expected her to appear again in old Mrs. Mingott’s box, but it remained empty; and he sat motionless, his eyes fastened on it, till suddenly Madame Nilsson’s pure soprano broke out into “M‘ama, non m’ama ...”
Archer turned to the stage, where, in the familiar setting of giant roses and pen-wiper pansies, the same large blonde victim was succumbing to the same small brown seducer.
From the stage his eyes wandered to the point of the horseshoe where May sat between two older ladies, just as, on that former evening, she had sat between Mrs. Lovell Mingott and her newly-arrived “foreign” cousin. As on that evening, she was all in white; and Archer, who had not noticed what she wore, recognized the blue-white satin and old lace of her wedding-dress.
It was the custom, in old New York, for brides to appear in this costly garment during the first year or two of marriage: his mother, he knew, kept hers in tissue-paper in the hope that Janey might some day wear it, though poor Janey was reaching the age when pearl-gray poplin and no bridesmaids would be thought more “appropriate.”
It struck Archer that May, since their return from Europe, had seldom worn her bridal satin, and the surprise of seeing her in it made him compare her appearance with that of the young girl he had watched with such blissful anticipations two years earlier.
Though May’s outline was slightly heavier, as her goddess-like build had foretold, her athletic erectness of carriage, and the girlish transparency of her expression, remained unchanged: but for the slight languor that Archer had lately noticed in her she would have been the exact image of the girl playing with the bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her betrothal evening. The fact seemed an additional appeal to his pity: such innocence was as moving as the trustful clasp of a child. Then he remembered the passionate generosity latent under that incurious calm. He recalled her glance of understanding when he had urged that their engagement should be announced at the Beaufort ball; he heard the voice in which she had said, in the Mission garden: “I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—a wrong to someone else,” and an uncontrollable longing seized him to tell her the truth, to throw himself on her generosity, and ask for the freedom he had once refused.