The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [73]
At that he broke into a laugh.
“Just imagine,” she said, “how stupid and unobservant I was! I knew nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day. New York simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home. And I was so happy at being among my own people that everyone I met seemed kind and good, and glad to see me. But from the very beginning,” she continued, “I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and—unnecessary. The very good people didn’t convince me; I felt they’d never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands—and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I’d never known before—and it’s better than anything I’ve known.”
She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and each word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning lead. He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearthrug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress. Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.
She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze.
“Ah, don’t let us undo what you’ve done!” she cried. “I can’t go back now to that other way of thinking. I can’t love you unless I give you up. »
His arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained facing each other, divided by the distance that her words had created. Then, abruptly, his anger overflowed.
“And Beaufort? Is he to replace me?”
As the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of anger; and he would have welcomed it as fuel for his own. But Madame Olenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging down before her, her head slightly bent, as her way was when she pondered a question.
“He’s waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers’s; why don’t you go to him?” Archer sneered.
She turned to ring the bell. “I shall not go out this evening; tell the carriage to go and fetch the Signora Marchesa,” she said when the maid came.
After the door had closed again Archer continued to look at her with bitter eyes. “Why this sacrifice? Since you tell me that you’re lonely I’ve no right to keep you from your friends.”
She smiled a little under her wet lashes. “I shan’t be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I’m like a child going at night into a room where there’s always a light.”
Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility, and Archer groaned out again: “I don’t understand you!”
“Yet you understand May!”
He reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her. “May is ready to give me up.”
“What! Three days after you’ve entreated her on your knees to hasten your marriage?”
“She’s refused; that gives me the right—”
“Ah, you’ve taught me what an ugly word that is,” she said. He turned away with a sense of utter weariness. He felt as though he had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice, and now, just as he had fought his way to the top, his hold had given way and he was pitching down headlong into darkness.
If he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away her arguments; but she still held him at a distance by something inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude, and by his own awed sense of her sincerity. At length he began to plead again.
“If we do this now it will be worse afterward—worse for every one—”
“No—no—no!” she almost screamed, as if he frightened her.
At that moment the bell sent a long tinkle through the house. They had heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless, looking at each other with startled eyes.