The Age of Innocence, Chapter 57

歌手： Edith Wharton • 专辑：The Age of Innocence (unabridged) • 发布时间：2017-01-27 
作词 : Edith Wharton
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 cat-boat 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, half-way 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.

End of Chapter 21

The AGE of INNOCENCE

BY EDITH WHARTON

BOOK II

Chapter 22

“A party for the Blenkers—the Blenkers?”

Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork
and looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife,
who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses,
read aloud, in the tone of high comedy:
“Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton
request the pleasure of Mr. and Mrs. Welland’s company
at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club on August 25th at 3 o’clock punctually.
To meet Mrs. and the Misses Blenker.

“Red Gables, Catherine Street.

R. S. V. P.”

“Good gracious—”
Mr. Welland gasped,
as if a second reading had been necessary
to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.

“Poor Amy Sillerton—
you never can tell what her husband will do next,”
Mrs. Welland sighed.
“I suppose he’s just discovered the Blenkers.”

Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society;
and a thorn that could not be plucked out,
for it grew on a venerable and venerated family tree.
He was, as people said,
a man who had had “every advantage.”
His father was Sillerton Jackson’s uncle,
his mother a Pennilow of Boston;
on each side there was wealth and position,
and mutual suitability.
Nothing—as Mrs. Welland had often remarked—
nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an archæologist,
or indeed a Professor of any sort,
or to live in Newport in winter,
or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did.
But at least, if he was going to break with tradition
and flout society in the face,
he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet,
who had a right to expect “something different,”
and money enough to keep her own carriage.

No one in the Mingott set could understand
why Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband
who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women,
and, when he travelled,
took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to Paris or Italy.
But there they were, set in their ways,
and apparently unaware that they were different from other people;
and when they gave one of their dreary annual garden-parties
every family on the Cliffs,
because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection,
had to draw lots and send an unwilling representative.
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