The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [93]
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 favorite 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 systematized 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.
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 25 August 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—nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an archaeologist, 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