“If any of my friends wish to urge me to change my mind, please tell them it would be utterly useless.”
Archer read the letter over two or three times; then he flung it down and burst out laughing.
The sound of his laugh startled him. It recalled Janey’s midnight fright when she had caught him rocking with incomprehensible mirth over May’s telegram announcing that the date of their marriage had been advanced.
“Why did she write this?” he asked, checking his laugh with a supreme effort.
May met the question with her unshaken candour. “I suppose because we talked things over yesterday–”
“What things?”
“I told her I was afraid I hadn’t been fair to her– hadn’t always understood how hard it must have been for her here, alone among so many people who were relations and yet strangers; who felt the right to criticise, and yet didn’t always know the circumstances.” She paused. “I knew you’d been the one friend she could always count on; and I wanted her to know that you and I were the same–in all our feelings.”
She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and then added slowly: “She understood my wishing to tell her this. I think she understands everything.”
She went up to Archer, and taking one of his cold hands pressed it quickly against her cheek.
“My head aches too; good-night, dear,” she said, and turned to the door, her torn and muddy wedding- dress dragging after her across the room.
XXXIII.
It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event for a young couple to give their first big dinner.
The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household, had received a good deal of company in an informal way. Archer was fond of having three or four friends to dine, and May welcomed them with the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in conjugal affairs. Her husband questioned whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked any one to the house; but he had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had moulded her. It was expected that well-off young couples in New York should do a good deal of informal entertaining, and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to the tradition.
But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with Roman punch, roses from Henderson’s, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair, and not to be lightly undertaken. As Mrs. Archer remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference; not in itself but by its manifold implications–since it signified either canvas-backs or terrapin, two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full decolletage with short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance.
It was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their first invitations in the third person, and their summons was seldom refused even by the seasoned and sought-after. Still, it was admittedly a triumph that the van der Luydens, at May’s request, should have stayed over in order to be present at her farewell dinner for the Countess Olenska.
The two mothers-in-law sat in May’s drawing-room on the afternoon of the great day, Mrs. Archer writing out the menus on Tiffany’s thickest gilt-edged bristol, while Mrs. Welland superintended the placing of the palms and standard lamps.
Archer, arriving late from his office, found them still there. Mrs. Archer had turned her attention to the name-cards for the table, and Mrs. Welland was considering the effect of bringing forward the large gilt sofa, so that another “corner” might be created between the piano and the window.
May, they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting the mound of Jacqueminot roses and maidenhair in the centre of the long table, and the placing of the Maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between the candelabra. On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which Mr. van der Luyden had had sent from Skuytercliff. Everything was, in short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event.
Mrs. Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with her sharp gold pen.