In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck
station, and they walked along the platform to the
waiting carriage.
“Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens—
they’ve sent their man over from Skuytercliff
to meet us,” Archer exclaimed, as a sedate person
out of livery approached them and relieved the maid
of her bags.
“I’m extremely sorry, sir,” said
this emissary, “that a little accident has occurred
at the Miss du Lacs’: a leak in the water-tank.
It happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who
heard of it this morning, sent a housemaid up by the
early train to get the Patroon’s house ready.
It will be quite comfortable, I think you’ll
find, sir; and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook
over, so that it will be exactly the same as if you’d
been at Rhinebeck.”
Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated
in still more apologetic accents: “It’ll
be exactly the same, sir, I do assure you—”
and May’s eager voice broke out, covering the
embarrassed silence: “The same as Rhinebeck?
The Patroon’s house? But it will be a
hundred thousand times better—won’t
it, Newland? It’s too dear and kind of
Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it.”
And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman,
and their shining bridal bags on the seat before them,
she went on excitedly: “Only fancy, I’ve
never been inside it—have you? The
van der Luydens show it to so few people. But
they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and she told me
what a darling little place it was: she says
it’s the only house she’s seen in America
that she could imagine being perfectly happy in.”
“Well—that’s what we’re
going to be, isn’t it?” cried her husband
gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile:
“Ah, it’s just our luck beginning—the
wonderful luck we’re always going to have together!”
“Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest,”
Archer said; and his wife looked at him with an anxious
frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their
lodging house breakfast-table.
In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there
were only two people whom the Newland Archers knew;
and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity
with the old New York tradition that it was not “dignified”
to force one’s self on the notice of one’s
acquaintances in foreign countries.
Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits
to Europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle,
and met the friendly advances of their fellow-travellers
with an air of such impenetrable reserve, that they
had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged
a word with a “foreigner” other than those
employed in hotels and railway-stations. Their
own compatriots— save those previously
known or properly accredited— they treated
with an even more pronounced disdain; so that, unless
they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a Mingott,
