May continued to stroke his rampant member in beat with the gentle movement of her hips. “Husband, I do not think your shaft has ever been this hard. I do believe you enjoy being my bride.” Soon the toy was thrusting its length inside him, sliding freely with the magical gel, and Newland was grunting with unbridled passion. Whenever she sensed he was on the edge of climaxing, she would release his member. However, she would continue her thrusts, taunting him, enflaming him. And like riding her stallion, she rode Newland until he could sustain no longer.
“Oh, May. I cannot bear it,” he said. “Please let me …”
She beat his member a few more strokes as she glided the faux member in and out of his nether region, and then in a tumultuous explosion, he released his seed into her hand, shuddering as though the world had crumbled. She slowed the thrusting in his back cavity, and when he finished shuddering, she removed the toy.
Some moments later, Newland finally stood erect, and faced his wife, his powers of speech gone.
“There now,” she said. “I thought perhaps you needed some of my guidance.”
He leaned forward, took her into his arms, and kissed her. When the kiss ended, he said, “How might I pleasure you, dearest?”
“We have guests. I think I can wait until this evening when we are quite alone. But rest assured that you will have to pleasure my forbidden door as I pleasured yours.”
They dressed and soon parted company. She joined the women in the drawing room, while Newland retired to the library to join Mr. Jackson. Indeed, May had proven herself to be a person of equal stature to Newland. But Newland also knew that May was desperate to show him that she was an equal to her cousin Ellen—no, a better woman than Ellen.
Once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, Mr. Jackson became portentous and communicable. The subject of Beaufort was upon them again, and Newland surmised that Sillerton would work his way toward disparaging the reputation of not only Beaufort, but also of the Countess, a pastime he so often enjoyed.
Sillerton sat contentedly as though seated upon his throne. “If the Beaufort smash comes,” he announced, “there are going to be disclosures.”
Archer raised his head quickly: he could never hear the name without the sharp vision of Beaufort’s heavy figure, opulently furred and shod, advancing through the snow at Skuytercliff.
“There’s bound to be,” Mr. Jackson continued, “the nastiest kind of a cleaning up. He hasn’t spent all his money on Regina.”
“Oh, well—that’s discounted, isn’t it? My belief is he’ll pull out yet,” said the young man, wanting to change the subject.
“Perhaps—perhaps. I know he was to see some of the influential people today. Of course,” Mr. Jackson reluctantly conceded, “it’s to be hoped they can tide him over—this time anyhow. I shouldn’t like to think of poor Regina’s spending the rest of her life in some shabby foreign watering-place for bankrupts.”
Archer said nothing. It seemed to him so natural—however tragic—that money ill-gotten should be cruelly expiated, that his mind, hardly lingering over Mrs. Beaufort’s doom, wandered back to closer questions. What was the meaning of May’s blush when the Countess Olenska had been mentioned?
Four months had passed since the midsummer day that he and Madame Olenska had spent together; and since then he had not seen her. He knew that she had returned to Washington, to the little house which she and Medora Manson had taken there: he had written to her once—a few words, asking when they were to meet again—and she had even more briefly replied: “Not yet.”
Since then there had been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
He became aware that Mr. Jackson was clearing his throat preparatory to farther revelations.
“I don’t know, of course, how far your wife’s family are aware of what people say about—well, about Madame Olenska’s refusal to accept her husband’s latest offer.”
Archer was silent, and Mr. Jackson obliquely continued: “It’s a pity—it’s certainly a pity—that she refused it.”
“A pity? In God’s name, why?”
Mr. Jackson looked down his leg to the unwrinkled sock that joined it to a glossy pump.
“Well—to put it on the lowest ground—what’s she going to live on now?”
“Now—?”
“If Beaufort—”
Archer sprang up, his fist banging down on the black walnut-edge of the writing-table. The wells of the brass double-inkstand danced in their sockets.
“What the devil do you mean, sir?”
Mr. Jackson, shifting himself slightly in his chair, turned a tranquil gaze on the young man’s burning face.
“Well—I have it on pretty good authority—in fact, on old Catherine’s herself—that the family reduced Countess Olenska’s allowance considerably when she definitely refused to go back to her husband; and as, by this refusal, she also forfeits the money settled on her when she married—which Olenska was ready to make over to her if she returned—why, what the devil do YOU mean, my dear boy, by asking me what I mean?” Mr. Jackson good-humouredly retorted.
Archer moved toward the mantelpiece and bent over to knock his ashes into the grate.
“I don’t know anything of Madame Olenska’s private affairs; but I don’t need to, to be certain that what you insinuate—”
“Oh, I don’t: it’s Lefferts, for one,” Mr. Jackson interposed.
“Lefferts—who made love to her and got snubbed for it!” Archer broke out contemptuously.
“Ah—DID he?” snapped the other, as if this were exactly the fact he had been laying a trap for. He still sat sideways from the fire, so that his hard old gaze held Archer’s face as if in a spring of steel.
“Well, well: it’s a pity she didn’t go back before Beaufort’s cropper,” he repeated. “If she goes NOW, and if he fails, it will only confirm the general impression: which isn’t by any means peculiar to Lefferts, by the way.”
“Oh, she won’t go back now: less than ever!” Archer had no sooner said it than he had once more the feeling that it was exactly what Mr. Jackson had been waiting for.
The old gentleman considered him attentively. “That’s your opinion, eh? Well, no doubt you know. But everybody will tell you that the few pennies Medora Manson has left are all in Beaufort’s hands; and how the two women are to keep their heads above water unless he does, I can’t imagine. Of course, Madame Olenska may still soften old Catherine, who’s been the most inexorably opposed to her staying; and old Catherine could make her any allowance she chooses. But we all know that she hates parting with good money; and the rest of the family have no particular interest in keeping Madame Olenska here.”
Archer was burning with unavailing wrath: he was exactly in the state when a man is sure to do something stupid, knowing all the while that he is doing it.
He saw that Mr. Jackson had been instantly struck by the fact that Madame Olenska’s differences with her grandmother and her other relations were not known to him, and that the old gentleman had drawn his own conclusions as to the reasons for Archer’s exclusion from the family councils. This fact warned Archer to go warily; but the insinuations about Beaufort made him reckless. He was mindful, however, if not of his own danger, at least of the fact that Mr. Jackson was under h
is mother’s roof, and consequently his guest. Old New York scrupulously observed the etiquette of hospitality, and no discussion with a guest was ever allowed to degenerate into a disagreement.
“Shall we go up and join my mother?” he suggested curtly, as Mr. Jackson’s last cone of ashes dropped into the brass ashtray at his elbow.
On the drive homeward May remained oddly silent; through the darkness, he still felt her enveloped in her menacing blush. What its menace meant he could not guess: but he was sufficiently warned by the fact that Madame Olenska’s name had evoked it.
They went upstairs, and he turned into the library. She usually followed him; but he heard her passing down the passage to her bedroom.
“May!” he called out impatiently; and she came back, with a slight glance of surprise at his tone.
“This lamp is smoking again; I should think the servants might see that it’s kept properly trimmed,” he grumbled nervously.
“I’m so sorry: it shan’t happen again,” she answered, in the firm bright tone she had learned from her mother; and it exasperated Archer to feel that she was already beginning to humour him like a younger Mr. Welland. She bent over to lower the wick, and as the light struck up on her white shoulders and the clear curves of her face he thought: “How young she is! For what endless years this life will have to go on!”
He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins. “Look here,” he said suddenly, “I may have to go to Washington for a few days—soon; next week perhaps.”
Her hand remained on the key of the lamp as she turned to him slowly. The heat from its flame had brought back a glow to her face, but it paled as she looked up.
“On business?” she asked, in a tone which implied that there could be no other conceivable reason, and that she had put the question automatically, as if merely to finish his own sentence.
“On business, naturally. There’s a patent case coming up before the Supreme Court—” He gave the name of the inventor, and went on furnishing details with all Lawrence Lefferts’s practised glibness, while she listened attentively, saying at intervals: “Yes, I see.”
“The change will do you good,” she said simply, when he had finished; “and you must be sure to go and see Ellen,” she added, looking him straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty.
It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: “Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. I also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you, this evening, the hint that has made you so irritable… . Hints have indeed not been wanting; but since you appear unwilling to take them from others, I offer you this one myself, in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose; and that, since you are sure to see her, I wish you to do so with my full and explicit approval—and to take the opportunity of letting her know what the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to.”
Her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this mute message reached him. She turned the wick down, lifted off the globe, and breathed on the sulky flame.
“They smell less if one blows them out,” she explained, with her bright housekeeping air. On the threshold she turned and paused for his kiss.
Chapter 9
Wall Street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of Beaufort’s situation. They were not definite, but they were hopeful. It was generally understood that he could call on powerful influences in case of emergency, and that he had done so with success; and that evening, when Mrs. Beaufort appeared at the Opera wearing her old smile and a new emerald necklace, society drew a breath of relief.
New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort’s wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle. But to be obliged to offer them up would be not only painful but inconvenient. The disappearance of the Beauforts would leave a considerable void in their compact little circle; and those who were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the moral catastrophe bewailed in advance the loss of the best ballroom in New York.
Archer had definitely made up his mind to go to Washington. He was waiting only for the opening of the law-suit of which he had spoken to May, so that its date might coincide with that of his visit; but on the following Tuesday he learned from Mr. Letterblair that the case might be postponed for several weeks. Nevertheless, he went home that afternoon determined in any event to leave the next evening. The chances were that May, who knew nothing of his professional life, and had never shown any interest in it, would not learn of the postponement, should it take place, nor remember the names of the litigants if they were mentioned before her; and at any rate he could no longer put off seeing Madame Olenska. There were too many things that he must say to her.
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 rumour 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 manoeuvre, 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 any one 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. Recognising 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 any one 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 this 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 unnatura
l 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 portieres 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 doorbell had rung, and a lady so thickly veiled that the servants did not immediately recognise 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.
Literary Love Page 120
