The Age of Innocence | Page 6

family trees, Mr. Sillerton Jackson carried
between his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch of silver
hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had
smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the
last fifty years. So far indeed did his information extend, and so acutely
retentive was his memory, that he was supposed to be the only man
who could have told you who Julius Beaufort, the banker, really was,
and what had become of handsome Bob Spicer, old Mrs. Manson
Mingott's father, who had disappeared so mysteriously (with a large
sum of trust money) less than a year after his marriage, on the very day
that a beautiful Spanish dancer who had been delighting thronged
audiences in the old Opera-house on the Battery had taken ship for
Cuba. But these mysteries, and many others, were closely locked in Mr.
Jackson's breast; for not only did his keen sense of honour forbid his
repeating anything privately imparted, but he was fully aware that his
reputation for discretion increased his opportunities of finding out what
he wanted to know.

The club box, therefore, waited in visible suspense while Mr. Sillerton
Jackson handed back Lawrence Lefferts's opera-glass. For a moment he
silently scrutinised the attentive group out of his filmy blue eyes
overhung by old veined lids; then he gave his moustache a thoughtful
twist, and said simply: "I didn't think the Mingotts would have tried it
on."

II.
Newland Archer, during this brief episode, had been thrown into a
strange state of embarrassment.
It was annoying that the box which was thus attracting the undivided
attention of masculine New York should be that in which his betrothed
was seated between her mother and aunt; and for a moment he could
not identify the lady in the Empire dress, nor imagine why her presence
created such excitement among the initiated. Then light dawned on him,
and with it came a momentary rush of indignation. No, indeed; no one
would have thought the Mingotts would have tried it on!
But they had; they undoubtedly had; for the low- toned comments
behind him left no doubt in Archer's mind that the young woman was
May Welland's cousin, the cousin always referred to in the family as
"poor Ellen Olenska." Archer knew that she had suddenly arrived from
Europe a day or two previously; he had even heard from Miss Welland
(not disapprovingly) that she had been to see poor Ellen, who was
staying with old Mrs. Mingott. Archer entirely approved of family
solidarity, and one of the qualities he most admired in the Mingotts was
their resolute championship of the few black sheep that their blameless
stock had produced. There was nothing mean or ungenerous in the
young man's heart, and he was glad that his future wife should not be
restrained by false prudery from being kind (in private) to her unhappy
cousin; but to receive Countess Olenska in the family circle was a
different thing from producing her in public, at the Opera of all places,
and in the very box with the young girl whose engagement to him,
Newland Archer, was to be announced within a few weeks. No, he felt
as old Sillerton Jackson felt; he did not think the Mingotts would have
tried it on!
He knew, of course, that whatever man dared (within Fifth Avenue's
limits) that old Mrs. Manson Mingott, the Matriarch of the line, would

dare. He had always admired the high and mighty old lady, who, in
spite of having been only Catherine Spicer of Staten Island, with a
father mysteriously discredited, and neither money nor position enough
to make people forget it, had allied herself with the head of the wealthy
Mingott line, married two of her daughters to "foreigners" (an Italian
marquis and an English banker), and put the crowning touch to her
audacities by building a large house of pale cream-coloured stone
(when brown sandstone seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat
in the afternoon) in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.
Old Mrs. Mingott's foreign daughters had become a legend. They never
came back to see their mother, and the latter being, like many persons
of active mind and dominating will, sedentary and corpulent in her
habit, had philosophically remained at home. But the cream- coloured
house (supposed to be modelled on the private hotels of the Parisian
aristocracy) was there as a visible proof of her moral courage; and she
throned in it, among pre-Revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of the
Tuileries of Louis Napoleon (where she had shone in her middle age),
as placidly as if there were nothing peculiar in living above
Thirty-fourth Street, or in having French windows that opened like
doors instead of sashes that pushed