“Very well,” she said. “I see you need encouragement today.”
The man’s face flushed red.
“Turn around,” she said.
The man smiled rather sheepishly, though the ancestress knew that he could hardly wait for what was to come next. Without delay, he turned clumsily, and as always bent over without request, practically taking himself down to the floor.
She grasped a riding crop resting alongside her massive mounds of thighs, a region of her body that was no longer distinct, but rather existed as a vast, conjoined mountain range of delicacies and hidden delights. “Grasp your knees,” she said forcefully, as though she might actually rise from the comfort of her armchair if he even thought to hesitate. She lifted the whip and with great force and precision lashed the footman’s backside. The poor man took a hop from the whip’s sting and belted out an animalistic whimper.
“Come back, you devil,” she demanded, and then she proceeded to spank the young man mercilessly. The man’s whimpers soon turned to combined moans of pleasure and pain, and before long, his cock stood on end to great soaring heights. The ancestress laughed hysterically because she so enjoyed watching her subject and his member dance.
And once they had had their preliminary fun, she licked her lips slowly and said, “Now lift my skirts. In the manner I prefer.”
The young man bent down and yanked up his mistress’s skirts to reveal the creamy skin of her legs. Then he rose and stretched himself across her immense and pillowed accretion of flesh to reach the cloth of her lace undergarment. There, he tugged and struggled to free the garment from her mass, but finally gave up and ripped the cloth from her loins.
“Ah, you devil,” she said, and began to laugh heartily.
The footman gave her a lascivious smile. As old and as corpulent as the ancestress was, she was quite a woman, and he made no secret of the fact that he enjoyed this game. “Shall I pleasure you, Madame?” Not waiting her reply, he went to work to separate the mountain range of her flesh to find her vast valley of lust.
The ancestress shivered, feeling an electricity surge through her loins, as the young man worked her thighs apart to reveal her dense forest of pleasure. “Do hurry, Footie,” she said, lavishing him with words of endearment.
The footman stood before her and squeezed his thin body between her delectable, titanic thighs, and then ran his fingers through her heavenly passion, stroking tenderly. She moaned softly at first, but soon uttered impassioned symphonic cries, not unlike the Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 that was played on the gramophone.
“Now, Footie, now!” she commanded, grinding her hips to him, urging him to enter her sheath.
However, he did not enter her with his massive and rampant member, no, not yet. Instead, he slowly filled her sheath with one of his long slender fingers, and then added another, and another, slowly dipping in and out, as he circled her pearl with the thumb of his other hand.
The ancestress moaned loudly. “Now, Footie, do it!” she cried, her voice desperate with desire, begging him to enter. But she was his prisoner now and he held her captive until he choose to enter. When she began to pant relentlessly, he finally drove his member through the opening of her sheath. He slowly negotiated her vessel, teasing the crown of his staff in and out of it, while she painstakingly urged him to enter more fully.
She was nearly undone and moaned incessantly, emitting loud shrieks that sounded more animalistic than human. Footie continued to tease her at some length. She rolled her head from side to side, but there was nothing she could do until he chose to enter. Then finally, Footie was overcome and thrust his member deep inside her well. In a gallop, he began pumping in and out of her as though he were a wild horse set free to roam across the untamed fields of passion.
And somewhere along the way, their voices united in a harmonious choir of fervent symphonic cries. Not a nook, crook, or cranny of the ground floor of the stately house was devoid of their performance. And before they finished their lovemaking, the ancestress, more than once, raised her whip and gently lashed the backside of her stud, and he responded to her urging. He went from a gallop to a sprint, performed enthusiastically, squealed with delight, and thrust ever harder.
Rounding the bend, the finish line was in sight. The ancestress thrust her hips forward with such violence that when she climaxed, she brought Footie right along with her, and together they crested with the utmost of pleasure …
Newland Archer gave his head a stout jerk to clear his mind, and then gazed at the old Mrs. Mingott perched in one of her frivolous Second Empire upholstered chairs. She had quite a peculiar look in her eyes. It was as if Newland Archer had magically unveiled one of her secrets; more truth than the matronly woman had ever cared to reveal. And at that moment in time, Newland decided he was clairvoyant.
“Are you quite all right, young man?” Mrs. Mingott said to Newland, forcing him to return his attention to the present conversation.
When he nodded respectfully, brief pleasantries were exchanged among the parties, and then the ancestress explained the absence of her granddaughter, Countess Olenska. To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not present in her grandmother’s drawing-room during the visit of the betrothed couple. Mrs. Mingott said she had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring sunlight, and at the “shopping hour,” seemed in itself an indelicate thing for a compromised woman to do. But at any rate it spared them the embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her unhappy past might seem to shed on their radiant future. The visit went off successfully, as was to have been expected. Old Mrs. Mingott was delighted with the engagement, which, being long foreseen by watchful relatives, had been carefully passed upon in family council; and the engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws, met with her unqualified admiration.
“It’s the new setting: of course it shows the stone beautifully, but it looks a little bare to old-fashioned eyes,” Mrs. Welland had explained, with a conciliatory side-glance at her future son-in-law.
“Old-fashioned eyes? I hope you don’t mean mine, my dear? I like all the novelties,” said the ancestress, lifting the stone to her small bright orbs, which no glasses had ever disfigured. “Very handsome,” she added, returning the jewel; “very liberal. In my time a cameo set in pearls was thought sufficient. But it’s the hand that sets off the ring, isn’t it, my dear Mr. Archer?” and she waved one of her tiny hands, with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the wrist like ivory bracelets. “Mine was modelled in Rome by the great Ferrigiani. You should have May’s done: no doubt he’ll have it done, my child. Her hand is large—it’s these modern sports that spread the joints—but the skin is white.—And when’s the wedding to be?” she broke off, fixing her eyes on Archer’s face.
“Oh—” Mrs. Welland murmured, while the young man, smiling at his betrothed, replied: “As soon as ever it can, if only you’ll back me up, Mrs. Mingott.”
“We must give them time to get to know each other a little better, mamma,” Mrs. Welland interposed, with the proper affectation of reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined: “Know each other? Fiddlesticks! Everybody in New York has always known everybody. Let the young man have his way, my dear; don’t wait till the bubble’s off the wine. Marry them before Lent; I may catch pneumonia any winter now, and I want to give the wedding-breakfast.”
These successive statements were received with the proper expressions of amusement, incredulity and gratitude; and the visit was breaking up in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened to admit the Countess Olenska, who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected figure of Julius Beaufort.
There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the ladies, and Mrs. Mingott held out Ferrigiani’s model to the banker. “Ha! Beaufort, this is a rare favour!” (She had an odd foreign way of addressing men by their surnames.)
“Thanks. I wish it might happen oftener,” said the visitor in his easy arrogant way. “I’m
generally so tied down; but I met the Countess Ellen in Madison Square, and she was good enough to let me walk home with her.”
“Ah—I hope the house will be gayer, now that Ellen’s here!” cried Mrs. Mingott with a glorious effrontery. “Sit down—sit down, Beaufort: push up the yellow armchair; now I’ve got you I want a good gossip. I hear your ball was magnificent; and I understand you invited Mrs. Lemuel Struthers? Well—I’ve a curiosity to see the woman myself.”
She had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting out into the hall under Ellen Olenska’s guidance. Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed a great admiration for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the conventions. Now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the Beauforts to invite (for the first time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the widow of Struthers’s Shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the tight little citadel of New York. “Of course if you and Regina invite her the thing is settled. Well, we need new blood and new money—and I hear she’s still very good-looking,” the carnivorous old lady declared.
In the hall, while Mrs. Welland and May drew on their furs, Archer saw that the Countess Olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning smile.
“Of course you know already—about May and me,” he said, answering her look with a shy laugh. “She scolded me for not giving you the news last night at the Opera: I had her orders to tell you that we were engaged—but I couldn’t, in that crowd.”
The smile passed from Countess Olenska’s eyes to her lips: she looked younger, more like the bold brown Ellen Mingott of his boyhood. “Of course I know; yes. And I’m so glad. But one doesn’t tell such things first in a crowd.” The ladies were on the threshold and she held out her hand.
“Goodbye; come and see me some day,” she said, still looking at Archer.
In the carriage, on the way down Fifth Avenue, they talked pointedly of Mrs. Mingott, of her age, her spirit, and all her wonderful attributes. No one alluded to Ellen Olenska; but Archer knew that Mrs. Welland was thinking: “It’s a mistake for Ellen to be seen, the very day after her arrival, parading up Fifth Avenue at the crowded hour with Julius Beaufort—” and the young man himself mentally added: “And she ought to know that a man who’s just engaged doesn’t spend his time calling on married women. But I daresay in the set she’s lived in they do—they never do anything else.” And, in spite of the cosmopolitan views on which he prided himself, he thanked heaven that he was a New Yorker, and about to ally himself with one of his own kind.
Chapter 5
The next evening old Mr. Sillerton Jackson came to dine with the Archers.
Mrs. Archer was a shy woman and shrank from society; but she liked to be well-informed as to its doings. Her old friend Mr. Sillerton Jackson applied to the investigation of his friends’ affairs the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist; and his sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, who lived with him, and was entertained by all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother, brought home bits of minor gossip that filled out usefully the gaps in his picture.
Therefore, whenever anything happened that Mrs. Archer wanted to know about, she asked Mr. Jackson to dine; and as she honoured few people with her invitations, and as she and her daughter Janey were an excellent audience, Mr. Jackson usually came himself instead of sending his sister. If he could have dictated all the conditions, he would have chosen the evenings when Newland was out; not because the young man was uncongenial to him (the two got on capitally at their club) but because the old anecdotist sometimes felt, on Newland’s part, a tendency to weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never showed.
Mr. Jackson, if perfection had been attainable on earth, would also have asked that Mrs. Archer’s food should be a little better. But then New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer-Newland- van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure.
You couldn’t have everything, after all. If you dined with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvasback and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline Archer’s you could talk about Alpine scenery and “The Marble Faun”; and luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape. Therefore when a friendly summons came from Mrs. Archer, Mr. Jackson, who was a true eclectic, would usually say to his sister: “I’ve been a little gouty since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts’—it will do me good to diet at Adeline’s.”
Mrs. Archer, who had long been a widow, lived with her son and daughter in West Twenty-eighth Street. An upper floor was dedicated to Newland, and the two women squeezed themselves into narrower quarters below. In an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macrame lace and wool embroidery on linen, collected American revolutionary glazed ware, subscribed to “Good Words,” and read Ouida’s novels for the sake of the Italian atmosphere. (They preferred those about peasant life, because of the descriptions of scenery and the pleasanter sentiments, though in general they liked novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more comprehensible, spoke severely of Dickens, who “had never drawn a gentleman,” and considered Thackeray less at home in the great world than Bulwer—who, however, was beginning to be thought old-fashioned.) Mrs. and Miss Archer were both great lovers of scenery. It was what they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad; considering architecture and painting as subjects for men, and chiefly for learned persons who read Ruskin. Mrs. Archer had been born a Newland, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters, were both, as people said, “true Newlands”; tall, pale, and slightly round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping distinction like that in certain faded Reynolds portraits. Their physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly embonpoint had not stretched Mrs. Archer’s black brocade, while Miss Archer’s brown and purple poplins hung, as the years went on, more and more slackly on her virgin frame.
Mentally, the likeness between them, as Newland was aware, was less complete than their identical mannerisms often made it appear. The long habit of living together in mutually dependent intimacy had given them the same vocabulary, and the same habit of beginning their phrases “Mother thinks” or “Janey thinks,” according as one or the other wished to advance an opinion of her own; but in reality, while Mrs. Archer’s serene unimaginativeness rested easily in the accepted and familiar, Janey was subject to starts and aberrations of fancy welling up from springs of suppressed romance.
Mother and daughter adored each other and revered their son and brother; and Archer loved them with a tenderness made compunctious and uncritical by the sense of their exaggerated admiration, and by his secret satisfaction in it. After all, he thought it a good thing for a man to have his authority respected in his own house, even if his sense of humour sometimes made him question the force of his mandate.
On this occasion the young man was very sure that Mr. Jackson would rather have had him dine out; but he had his own reasons for not doing so.
Of course old Jackson wanted to talk about Ellen Olenska, and of course Mrs. Archer and Janey wanted to hear what he had to tell. All three would be slightly embarrassed by Newland’s presence, now that his prospective relation to the Mingott clan had been made known; and the young man waited with an amused curiosity to see how they would turn the difficulty.
They began, obliquely, by talking about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers.
“It’s a pity the Beauforts asked her,” Mrs. Archer said gently. “But then Regina always does what he tells her; and BEAUFORT—”
“Certain nuances escape Beaufort,” said Mr. Jackson, cautiously inspecting the broiled shad, and wondering for the thousandth time why Mrs. Archer’s coo
k always burnt the roe to a cinder. (Newland, who had long shared his wonder, could always detect it in the older man’s expression of melancholy disapproval.)
“Oh, necessarily; Beaufort is a vulgar man,” said Mrs. Archer. “My grandfather Newland always used to say to my mother: ‘Whatever you do, don’t let that fellow Beaufort be introduced to the girls.’ But at least he’s had the advantage of associating with gentlemen; in England too, they say. It’s all very mysterious—” She glanced at Janey and paused. She and Janey knew every fold of the Beaufort mystery, but in public Mrs. Archer continued to assume that the subject was not one for the unmarried.
“But this Mrs. Struthers,” Mrs. Archer continued; “what did you say SHE was, Sillerton?”
“Out of a mine: or rather out of the saloon at the head of the pit. Then with Living Wax-Works, touring New England. After the police broke THAT up, they say she lived—” Mr. Jackson in his turn glanced at Janey, whose eyes began to bulge from under her prominent lids. There were still hiatuses for her in Mrs. Struthers’s past.
“Then,” Mr. Jackson continued (and Archer saw he was wondering why no one had told the butler never to slice cucumbers with a steel knife), “then Lemuel Struthers came along. They say his advertiser used the girl’s head for the shoe-polish posters; her hair’s intensely black, you know—the Egyptian style. Anyhow, he—eventually—married her.” There were volumes of innuendo in the way the “eventually” was spaced, and each syllable given its due stress.
“Oh, well—at the pass we’ve come to nowadays, it doesn’t matter,” said Mrs. Archer indifferently. The ladies were not really interested in Mrs. Struthers just then; the subject of Ellen Olenska was too fresh and too absorbing to them. Indeed, Mrs. Struthers’s name had been introduced by Mrs. Archer only that she might presently be able to say: “And Newland’s new cousin—Countess Olenska? Was SHE at the ball too?”
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