The Age of Innocence, Chapter 79

歌手： Edith Wharton • 专辑：The Age of Innocence (unabridged) • 发布时间：2017-01-27 
The AGE of INNOCENCE

BY EDITH WHARTON

BOOK II

Chapter 31

Archer had been stunned by old Catherine’s news.
It was only natural that Madame Olenksa should have hastened from Washington
in response to her grandmother’s summons;
but that she should have decided to remain under her roof—
especially now that Mrs. Mingott had almost regained her health—
was less easy to explain.

Archer was sure that Madame Olenska’s decision
had not been influenced by the change in her financial situation.
He knew the exact figure of the small income which her husband had allowed her at their separation.
Without the addition of her grandmother’s allowance it was hardly enough to live on,
in any sense known to the Mingott vocabulary;
and now that Medora Manson, who shared her life,
had been ruined,
such a pittance would barely
keep the two women clothed and fed.
Yet Archer was convinced that Madame Olenska
had not accepted her grandmother’s offer
from interested motives.

She had the heedless generosity and the spasmodic extravagance
of persons used to large fortunes, and indifferent to money;
but she could go without many things which her relations considered indispensable,
and Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Welland
had often been heard to deplore
that any one who had enjoyed the cosmopolitan luxuries of Count Olenski’s establishments
should care so little about “how things were done.”
Moreover, as Archer knew,
several months had passed since her allowance had been cut off;
yet in the interval she had made no effort
to regain her grandmother’s favour.
Therefore if she had changed her course
it must be for a different reason.

He did not have far to seek for that reason.
On the way from the ferry
she had told him that he and she must remain apart;
but she had said it with her head on his breast.
He knew that there was no calculated coquetry in her words;
she was fighting her fate as he had fought his,
and clinging desperately to her resolve
that they should not break faith with the people who trusted them.
But during the ten days which had elapsed since her return to New York
she had perhaps guessed from his silence,
and from the fact of his making no attempt to see her,
that he was meditating a decisive step,
a step from which there was no turning back.
At the thought,
a sudden fear of her own weakness might have seized her,
and she might have felt that, after all, it was better
to accept the compromise usual in such cases,
and follow the line of least resistance.

An hour earlier,
when he had rung Mrs. Mingott’s bell,
Archer had fancied that his path was clear before him.
He had meant to have a word alone with Madame Olenska,
and failing that,
to learn from her grandmother on what day,
and by which train, she was returning to Washington.
In that train he intended to join her,
and travel with her to Washington,
or as much farther as she was willing to go.
His own fancy inclined to Japan.
At any rate she would understand at once that,
wherever she went, he was going.
He meant to leave a note for May
that should cut off any other alternative.

He had fancied himself not only nerved
for this plunge but eager to take it;
yet his first feeling on hearing that the course of events was changed
had been one of relief.
Now, however,
as he walked home from Mrs. Mingott’s,
he was conscious of a growing distaste for what lay before him.
There was nothing unknown or unfamiliar in the path he was presumably to tread;
but when he had trodden it before
it was as a free man,
who was accountable to no one for his actions,
and could lend himself with an amused detachment
to the game of precautions and prevarications, concealments and compliances, that the part required.
This procedure was called
“protecting a woman’s honour”;
and the best fiction,
combined with the after-dinner talk of his elders,
had long since initiated him into every detail of its code.

Now he saw the matter in a new light,
and his part in it seemed singularly diminished.
It was, in fact,
that which, with a secret fatuity,
he had watched Mrs. Thorley Rushworth
play toward a fond and unperceiving husband:
a smiling, bantering, humouring,
watchful and incessant lie.
A lie by day, a lie by night,
a lie in every touch and every look;
a lie in every caress and every quarrel;
a lie in every word and in every silence.

It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole,
for a wife to play such a part toward her husband.
A woman’s standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower:
she was the subject creature,
and versed in the arts of the enslaved.
Then she could always plead moods and nerves,
and the right not to be held too strictly to account;
and even in the most strait-laced societies
the laugh was always against the husband.

But in Archer’s little world
no one laughed at a wife deceived,
and a certain measure of contempt was attached to men
who continued their philandering after marriage.
In the rotation of crops
there was a recognised season for wild oats;
but they were not to be sown more than once.

Archer had always shared this view:
in his heart he thought Lefferts despicable.
But to love Ellen Olenska
was not to become a man like Lefferts:
for the first time
Archer found himself face to face
with the dread argument of the individual case.
Ellen Olenska was like no other woman,
he was like no other man:
their situation, therefore, resembled no one else’s,
and they were answerable to no tribunal
but that of their own judgment.

Yes, but in ten minutes more
he would be mounting his own doorstep;
and there were May, and habit, and honour,
and all the old decencies that he and his people had always believed in . . .

At his corner he hesitated,
and then walked on down Fifth Avenue.


Ahead of him, in the winter night,
loomed a big unlit house.
As he drew near he thought
how often he had seen it blazing with lights,
its steps awninged and carpeted,
and carriages waiting in double line to draw up at the curbstone.
It was in the conservatory that stretched its dead-black bulk down the side street
that he had taken his first kiss from May;
it was under the myriad candles of the ball-room
that he had seen her appear,
tall and silver-shining as a young Diana.

Now the house was as dark as the grave,
except for a faint flare of gas in the basement,
and a light in one upstairs room where the blind had not been lowered.
As Archer reached the corner
he saw that the carriage standing at the door
was Mrs. Manson Mingott’s.
What an opportunity for Sillerton Jackson,
if he should chance to pass!
Archer had been greatly moved
by old Catherine’s account of Madame Olenska’s attitude toward Mrs. Beaufort;
it made the righteous reprobation of New York
seem like a passing by on the other side.
But he knew well enough
what construction the clubs and drawing-rooms
would put on Ellen Olenska’s visits to her cousin.
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