Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (36 page)

On the Wednesday morning, when he reached his office, Mr. Letterblair met him with a troubled face. Beaufort, after all, had not managed to “tide over”; but by setting afloat the rumor that he had done so he had reassured his depositors, and heavy payments had poured into the bank till the previous evening, when disturbing reports again began to predominate. In consequence, a run on the bank had begun, and its doors were likely to close before the day was over. The ugliest things were being said of Beaufort’s dastardly maneuver, and his failure promised to be one of the most discreditable in the history of Wall Street.

The extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white and incapacitated. “I’ve seen bad things in my time; but nothing as bad as this. Everybody we know will be hit, one way or another. And what will be done about Mrs. Beaufort? What can be done about her? I pity Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody: coming at her age, there’s no knowing what effect this affair may have on her. She always believed in Beaufort—she made a friend of him! And there’s the whole Dallas connection: poor Mrs. Beaufort is related to every one of you. Her only chance would be to leave her husband—yet how can anyone tell her so? Her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been blind to his private weaknesses.”

There was a knock, and Mr. Letterblair turned his head sharply. “What is it? I can’t be disturbed.”

A clerk brought in a letter for Archer and withdrew. Recognizing his wife’s hand, the young man opened the envelope and read:

“Won’t you please come up town as early as you can? Granny had a slight stroke last night. In some mysterious way she found out before anyone else this awful news about the bank. Uncle Lovell is away shooting, and the idea of the disgrace has made poor Papa so nervous that he has a temperature and can’t leave his room. Mamma needs you dreadfully, and I do hope you can get away at once and go straight to Granny’s.”

Archer handed the note to his senior partner and a few minutes later was crawling northward in a crowded horse-car which he exchanged at Fourteenth Street for one of the high staggering omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line. It was after twelve o‘clock when his laborious vehicle dropped him at old Catherine’s. The sitting room window on the ground floor, where she usually throned, was tenanted by the inadequate figure of her daughter, Mrs. Welland, who signed a haggard welcome as she caught sight of Archer; and at the door he was met by May. The hall wore the unnatural appearance peculiar to well-kept houses suddenly invaded by illness: wraps and furs lay in heaps on the chairs, a doctor’s bag and overcoat were on the table, and beside them letters and cards had already piled up unheeded.

May looked pale but smiling: Dr. Bencomb, who had just come for the second time, took a more hopeful view, and Mrs. Mingott’s dauntless determination to live and get well was already having an effect on her family. May led Archer into the old lady’s sitting room, where the sliding doors opening into the bedroom had been drawn shut, and the heavy yellow damask portières dropped over them; and here Mrs. Welland communicated to him in horrified undertones the details of the catastrophe. It appeared that the evening before something dreadful and mysterious had happened. At about eight o‘clock, just after Mrs. Mingott had finished the game of solitaire that she always played after dinner, the door-bell had rung, and a lady so thickly veiled that the servants did not immediately recognize her had asked to be received.

The butler, hearing a familiar voice, had thrown open the sitting room door, announcing: “Mrs. Julius Beaufort”—and had then closed it again on the two ladies. They must have been together, he thought, about an hour. When Mrs. Mingott’s bell rang Mrs. Beaufort had already slipped away unseen, and the old lady, white and vast and terrible, sat alone in her great chair, and signed to the butler to help her into her room. She seemed, at that time, though obviously distressed, in complete control of her body and brain. The mulatto maid put her to bed, brought her a cup of tea as usual, laid everything straight in the room, and went away; but at three in the morning the bell rang again, and the two servants, hastening in at this unwonted summons (for old Catherine usually slept like a baby), had found their mistress sitting up against her pillows with a crooked smile on her face and one little hand hanging limp from its huge arm.

The stroke had clearly been a slight one, for she was able to articulate and to make her wishes known; and soon after the doctor’s first visit she had begun to regain control of her facial muscles. But the alarm had been great; and proportionately great was the indignation when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott’s fragmentary phrases that Regina Beaufort had come to ask her—incredible effrontery! —to back up her husband, see them through—not to “desert” them, as she called it—in fact to induce the whole family to cover and condone their monstrous dishonor.

“I said to her: ‘Honor’s always been honor, and honesty honesty, in Manson Mingott’s house, and will be till I’m carried out of it feet first,”’ the old woman had stammered into her daughter’s ear, in the thick voice of the partly paralyzed. “And when she said: ‘But my name, Auntie—my name’s Regina Dallas,’ I said: ‘It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it’s got to stay Beaufort now that he’s covered you with shame.’”

So much, with tears and gasps of horror, Mrs. Welland imparted, blanched and demolished by the unwonted obligation of having at last to fix her eyes on the unpleasant and the discreditable. “If only I could keep it from your father-in-law: he always says: ‘Augusta, for pity’s sake, don’t destroy my last illusions’—and how am I to prevent his knowing these horrors?” the poor lady wailed.

“After all, Mamma, he won’t have
seen
them,” her daughter suggested; and Mrs. Welland sighed: “Ah, no; thank heaven he’s safe in bed. And Dr. Bencomb has promised to keep him there till poor Mamma is better, and Regina has been got away somewhere.”

Archer had seated himself near the window and was gazing out blankly at the deserted thoroughfare. It was evident that he had been summoned rather for the moral support of the stricken ladies than because of any specific aid that he could render. Mr. Lovell Mingott had been telegraphed for, and messages were being dispatched by hand to the members of the family living in New York; and meanwhile there was nothing to do but to discuss in hushed tones the consequences of Beaufort’s dishonor and of his wife’s unjustifiable action.

Mrs. Lovell Mingott, who had been in another room writing notes, presently reappeared, and added her voice to the discussion. In
their
day, the elder ladies agreed, the wife of a man who had done anything disgraceful in business had only one idea: to efface herself, to disappear with him. “There was the cause of poor Grandmamma Spicer; your great-grandmother, May. Of course,” Mrs. Welland hastened to add, “your great-grandfather’s money difficulties were private—losses at cards, or signing a note for somebody—I never quite knew, because Mamma would never speak of it. But she was brought up in the country because her mother had to leave New York after the disgrace, whatever it was: they lived up the Hudson alone, winter and summer, till Mamma was sixteen. It would never have occurred to Grandmamma Spicer to ask the family to ‘countenance’ her, as I understand Regina calls it; though a private disgrace is nothing compared to the scandal of ruining hundreds of innocent people.”

“Yes, it would be more becoming in Regina to hide her own countenance than to talk about other people‘s,” Mrs. Lovell Mingott agreed. “I understand that the emerald necklace she wore at the Opera last Friday had been sent on approval from Ball and Black’s in the afternoon. I wonder if they’ll ever get it back?”

Archer listened unmoved to the relentless chorus. The idea of absolute financial probity as the first law of a gentleman’s code was too deeply ingrained in him for sentimental considerations to weaken it. An adventurer like Lemuel Struthers might build up the millions of his shoe polish on any number of shady dealings; but unblemished honesty was the
noblesse oblige
of old financial New York. Nor did Mrs. Beaufort’s fate greatly move Archer. He felt, no doubt, more sorry for her than her indignant relatives; but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, even if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune. As Mr. Letterblair had said, a wife’s place was at her husband’s side when he was in trouble; but society’s place was not at his side, and Mrs. Beaufort’s cool assumption that it was seemed almost to make her his accomplice. The mere idea of a woman’s appealing to her family to screen her husband’s business dishonor was inadmissible, since it was the one thing that the Family, as an institution, could not do.

The mulatto maid called Mrs. Lovell Mingott into the hall, and the latter came back in a moment with a frowning brow.

“She wants me to telegraph for Ellen Olenska. I had written to Ellen, of course, and to Medora; but now it seems that’s not enough. I’m to telegraph to her immediately, and to tell her that she’s to come alone.”

The announcement was received in silence. Mrs. Welland sighed resignedly, and May rose from her seat and went to gather up some newspapers that had been scattered on the floor.

“I suppose it must be done,” Mrs. Lovell Mingott continued, as if hoping to be contradicted; and May turned back toward the middle of the room.

“Of course it must be done,” she said. “Granny knows what she wants, and we must carry out all her wishes. Shall I write the telegram for you, Auntie? If it goes at once Ellen can probably catch tomorrow morning’s train.” She pronounced the syllables of the name with a peculiar clearness, as if she had tapped on two silver bells.

“Well, it can’t go at once. Jasper and the pantry-boy are both out with notes and telegrams.”

May turned to her husband with a smile. “But here’s Newland, ready to do anything. Will you take the telegram, Newland? There’ll be just time before luncheon.”

Archer rose with a murmur of readiness, and she seated herself at old Catherine’s rosewood “Bonheur du Jour,”
^am
and wrote out the message in her large immature hand. When it was written she blotted it neatly and handed it to Archer.

“What a pity,” she said, “that you and Ellen will cross each other on the way!—Newland,” she added, turning to her mother and aunt, “is obliged to go to Washington about a patent-law-suit that is coming up before the Supreme Court. I suppose Uncle Lovell will be back by tomorrow night, and with Granny improving so much it doesn’t seem right to ask Newland to give up an important engagement for the firm—does it?”

She paused, as if for an answer, and Mrs. Welland hastily declared: “Oh, of course not, darling. Your Granny would be the last person to wish it.” As Archer left the room with the telegram, he heard his mother-in-law add, presumably to Mrs. Lovell Mingott: “But why on earth she should make you telegraph for Ellen Olenska—” and May’s clear voice rejoin: “Perhaps it’s to urge on her again that after all her duty is with her husband.”

The outer door closed on Archer and he walked hastily away toward the telegraph office.

28

“OL—OL—HOWJER SPELL it, anyhow?” asked the tart young lady to whom Archer had pushed his wife’s telegram across the brass ledge of the Western Union office.

“Olenska—0-len-ska,” he repeated, drawing back the message in order to print out the foreign syllables above May’s rambling script.

“It’s an unlikely name for a New York telegraph office; at least in this quarter,” an unexpected voice observed; and turning around Archer saw Lawrence Lefferts at his elbow, pulling an imperturbable moustache and affecting not to glance at the message.

“Hallo, Newland: thought I’d catch you here. I’ve just heard of old Mrs. Mingott’s stroke; and as I was on my way to the house I saw you turning down this street and nipped after you. I suppose you’ve come from there?”

Archer nodded, and pushed his telegram under the lattice.

“Very bad, eh?” Lefferts continued. “Wiring to the family, I suppose. I gather it is bad, if you’re including Countess Olenska.”

Archer’s lips stiffened; he felt a savage impulse to dash his fist into the long vain handsome face at his side.

“Why?” he questioned.

Lefferts, who was known to shrink from discussion, raised his eyebrows with an ironic grimace that warned the other of the watching damsel behind the lattice. Nothing could be worse “form,” the look reminded Archer, than any display of temper in a public place.

Archer had never been more indifferent to the requirements of form; but his impulse to do Lawrence Lefferts a physical injury was only momentary. The idea of bandying Ellen Olenska’s name with him at such a time, and on whatsoever provocation, was unthinkable. He paid for his telegram, and the two young men went out together into the street. There Archer, having regained his self-control, went on: “Mrs. Mingott is much better: the doctor feels no anxiety whatever”; and Lefferts, with profuse expressions of relief, asked him if he had heard that there were beastly bad rumors again about Beaufort ...