The Greatest Works of Edith Wharton - 31 Books in One Edition. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ stood up too, flushed and resolute. “Nonsense! It’s too late for that sort of thing. We’ve no right to lie to other people or to ourselves. We won’t talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying May after this?”

      She stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece, her profile reflected in the glass behind her. One of the locks of her chignon had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked haggard and almost old.

      “I don’t see you,” she said at length, “putting that question to May. Do you?”

      He gave a reckless shrug. “It’s too late to do anything else.”

      “You say that because it’s the easiest thing to say at this moment—not because it’s true. In reality it’s too late to do anything but what we’d both decided on.”

      “Ah, I don’t understand you!”

      She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing it. “You don’t understand because you haven’t yet guessed how you’ve changed things for me: oh, from the first—long before I knew all you’d done.”

      “All I’d done?”

      “Yes. I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy of me—that they thought I was a dreadful sort of person. It seems they had even refused to meet me at dinner. I found that out afterward; and how you’d made your mother go with you to the van der Luydens’; and how you’d insisted on announcing your engagement at the Beaufort ball, so that I might have two families to stand by me instead of one—”

      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 every one 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, and 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.

      Outside, Nastasia’s step crossed the hall, the outer door opened, and a moment later she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the Countess Olenska.

      “The lady was very happy at the flowers,” Nastasia said, smoothing her apron. “She thought it was her signor marito who had sent them, and she cried a little and said it was a folly.”

      Her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope. She tore it open and carried it to the lamp; then, when the door had closed again, she handed the telegram to Archer.

      It was dated from St. Augustine, and addressed to the Countess Olenska. In it he read: “Granny’s telegram successful. Papa and Mamma agree marriage after Easter. Am telegraphing Newland. Am too happy for words and love you dearly. Your grateful May.”

      Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front-door, he found a similar envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and letters. The message inside the envelope was also from May Welland, and ran as follows: “Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May.”

      Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate the news it contained. Then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and turned over the pages with trembling fingers; but he did not find what he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his pocket he mounted the stairs.

      A light was shining through the door of the little СКАЧАТЬ