The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [122]
He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain. Then he groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders to the coachman. He remembered that May rang twice when she wished to stop. He pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the curbstone.
‘‘Why are you stopping? This is not Granny’s,’’ Madame Olenska exclaimed.
‘‘No: I shall get out here,’’ he stammered, opening the door and jumping to the pavement. By the light of a streetlamp he saw her startled face and the instinctive motion she made to detain him. He closed the door and leaned for a moment in the window.
‘‘You’re right: I ought not to have come today,’’ he said, lowering his voice so that the coachman should not hear. She bent forward and seemed about to speak, but he had already called out the order to drive on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner. The snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing. Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears.
He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked at a sharp pace down Fifth Avenue to his own house.
30
THAT EVENING when Archer came down before dinner he found the drawing room empty.
He and May were dining alone, all the family engagements having been postponed since Mrs. Manson Mingott’s illness; and as May was the more punctual of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded him. He knew that she was at home, for while he dressed he had heard her moving about in her room; and he wondered what had delayed her.
He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such conjectures as a means of tying his thoughts fast to reality. Sometimes he felt as if he had found the clue to his father-in-law’s absorption in trifles; perhaps even Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions and had conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them.
When May appeared he thought she looked tired. She had put on the low-necked and tightly laced dinner dress which the Mingott ceremonial exacted on the most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in contrast, was wan and almost faded. But she shone on him with her usual tenderness, and her eyes had kept the blue dazzle of the day before.
‘‘What became of you, dear?’’ she asked. ‘‘I was waiting at Granny’s, and Ellen came alone and said she had dropped you on the way because you had to rush off on business. There’s nothing wrong?’’
‘‘Only some letters I’d forgotten and wanted to get off before dinner.’’
‘‘Ah—’’ she said; and a moment afterward: ‘‘I’m sorry you didn’t come to Granny’s—unless the letters were urgent.’’
‘‘They were,’’ he rejoined, surprised at her insistence. ‘‘Besides, I don’t see why I should have gone to your grandmother’s. I didn’t know you were there.’’
She turned and moved to the looking glass above the mantelpiece. As she stood there, lifting her long arm to fasten a puff that had slipped from its place in her intricate hair, Archer was struck by something languid and inelastic in her attitude, and wondered if the deadly monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also. Then he remembered that, as he had left the house that morning, she had called over the stairs that she would meet him at her grandmother’s so that they might drive home together. He had called back a cheery ‘‘Yes!’’ and then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his promise. Now he was smitten with compunction, yet irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored up against him after nearly two years of marriage. He was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions. If May had spoken out her grievances (he suspected her of many) he might have laughed them away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds under a Spartan smile.
To disguise his own annoyance he asked how her grandmother was, and she answered that Mrs. Mingott was