The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.
The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and
cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals
along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of
petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.
Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house
(which was also chocolate-coloured, but with the tin roof of the
verandah striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning) two large
targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery. On the other
side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent, with
benches and garden-seats about it. A number of ladies in summer dresses
and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the lawn or
sat upon the benches; and every now and then a slender girl in starched
muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand, and speed her shaft at
one of the targets, while the spectators interrupted their talk to
watch the result.
Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously
down upon this scene. On each side of the shiny painted steps was a
large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand. A spiky
green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border
of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums. Behind him, the
French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave
glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors
islanded with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs, and velvet tables covered
with trifles in silver.
The Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the
Beauforts'. The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet,
was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter
game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions,
and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes
the bow and arrow held their own.
Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised
him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions
to it had so completely changed. It was Newport that had first brought
home to him the extent of the change. In New York, during the previous
winter, after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow
house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had dropped
back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal
of this daily activity had served as a link with his former self. Then
there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey
stepper for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage), and
the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library,
which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out
as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and
"sincere" arm-chairs and tables. At the Century he had found Winsett
again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own
set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to
dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening
at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a
fairly real and inevitable sort of business.
But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of
unmitigated holiday-making. Archer had tried to persuade May to
spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called,
appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and
Philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages, and whence came
reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence
amid woods and waters.
But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the
square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good
reason why he and May should not join them there. As Mrs. Welland
rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have
worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be
allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer
had as yet found no answer.
May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with
so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer. She reminded
him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this
was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going
to like it better than ever now that they were to be there together.
But as he stood on the 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 over-fed 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
bath-rooms 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 coarse-minded 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-à-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-orné_ 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 which had been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the
match, remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been
thought enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things
handsomely.
"Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled. "You
must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." She pinched May's white
arm and watched the colour flood her face. "Well, well, what have I
said to make you shake out the red flag? Ain't there going to be any
daughters--only boys, eh? Good gracious, look at her blushing again
all over her blushes! What--can't I say that either? Mercy me--when
my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out
overhead I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that
_nothing_ can shock!"
Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes.
"Well, now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall
never get a straight word about it out of that silly Medora," the
ancestress continued; and, as May exclaimed: "Cousin Medora? But I
thought she was going back to Portsmouth?" she answered placidly: "So
she is--but she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen. Ah--you
didn't know Ellen had come to spend the day with me? Such fol-de-rol,
her not coming for the summer; but I gave up arguing with young people
about fifty years ago. Ellen--_Ellen_!" she cried in her shrill old
voice, trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn
beyond the verandah.
There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick
on the shiny floor. A mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban, replying
to the summons, informed her mistress that she had seen "Miss Ellen"
going down the path to the shore; and Mrs. Mingott turned to Archer.
"Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will
describe the party to me," she said; and Archer stood up as if in a
dream.
He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during
the year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar
with the main incidents of her life in the interval. He knew that
she had spent the previous summer at Newport, where she appeared to
have gone a great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had
suddenly sub-let the "perfect house" which Beaufort had been at such
pains to find for her, and decided to establish herself in Washington.
There, during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always heard of
pretty women in Washington) as shining in the "brilliant diplomatic
society" that was supposed to make up for the social short-comings of
the Administration. He had listened to these accounts, and to various
contradictory reports on her appearance, her conversation, her point
of view and her choice of friends, with the detachment with which one
listens to reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till Medora
suddenly spoke her name at the archery match had Ellen Olenska become a
living presence to him again. The Marchioness's foolish lisp had called
up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of the
carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street. He thought of a
story he had read, of some peasant children in Tuscany lighting a bunch
of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in their
painted tomb ...
The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was
perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows.
Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its
white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house
keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years. Beyond it lay
the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay
spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island with its
low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the sunset
haze.
From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort
of pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning
against the rail, her back to the shore. Archer stopped at the sight as
if he had waked from sleep. That vision of the past was a dream, and
the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead:
was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval
at the door, was May sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing
with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at the far end of Bellevue
Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for dinner, and pacing the
drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience--for
it was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is
happening at a given hour.
"What am I? A son-in-law--" Archer thought.
The figure at the end of the pier had not moved. For a long moment the
young man stood half way down the bank, gazing at the bay furrowed
with the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft
and the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs. The lady in
the summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight. Beyond the grey
bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into
a thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as
it beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock and the shore.
Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and
Montague lifting Ada Dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that
he was in the room.
"She doesn't know--she hasn't guessed. Shouldn't I know if she came up
behind me, I wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he said to himself: "If
she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go
back."
The boat was gliding out on the receding tide. It slid before the Lime
Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house, and passed across the
turret in which the light was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of
water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the
boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not move.
He turned and walked up the hill.
"I'm sorry you didn't find Ellen--I should have liked to see her
again," May said as they drove home through the dusk. "But perhaps she
wouldn't have cared--she seems so changed."
"Changed?" echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on
the ponies' twitching ears.
"So indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New York and her
house, and spending her time with such queer people. Fancy how
hideously uncomfortable she must be at the Blenkers'! She says she
does it to keep cousin Medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying
dreadful people. But I sometimes think we've always bored her."
Archer made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that
he had never before noticed in her frank fresh voice: "After all, I
wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband."
He burst into a laugh. "_Sancta simplicitas!_" he exclaimed; and as she
turned a puzzled frown on him he added: "I don't think I ever heard you
say a cruel thing before."
"Cruel?"
"Well--watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a
favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think
people happier in hell."
"It's a pity she ever married abroad then," said May, in the placid
tone with which her mother met Mr. Welland's vagaries; and Archer felt
himself gently relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands.
They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chamfered
wooden gate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the
approach to the Welland villa. Lights were already shining through its
windows, and Archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a glimpse of his
father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured him, pacing the drawing-room,
watch in hand and wearing the pained expression that he had long since
found to be much more efficacious than anger.
The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious
of a curious reversal of mood. There was something about the luxury
of the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so
charged with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into
his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants,
the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually
renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole
chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each
member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised
and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the
Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had
become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he
had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the
blood in his veins.
All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side,
watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen
Olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's
trotters.