The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel
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"You don't think I was unjustifiably rude?" she asked.
"No; indeed I do not. I don't think you were rude at all."
She was silent for a brief interval. Then she said, without taking her eyes in the least from her companion's face, —
"Do you believe that most women would have acted the same?"
"No," he said, with a quick, slight laugh, "because most women have neither your brains nor your independence."
"And you like both in a woman?"
"I like both in you," he said, lowering his handsome head a little as he uttered the words.
"Do you think Cora Dares would have acted as I have done?" Pauline asked.
He made an impatient gesture; he appeared for a moment distressed and embarrassed.
"You and Cora Dares are – are not the same," he said, almost stammeringly.
"Oh, I know that very well," answered Pauline. "I have had very good reason to know that we are not the same. We are extremely different. By the way, she is not here to-night."
"Not here?" he repeated interrogatively, but with a suggestion of drolly helpless duplicity.
Pauline raised one finger, shaking it at him for an instant and no more. The gesture, transient as it was, seemed to convey a world of significance. No doubt Kindelon tacitly admitted this, though his face preserved both its ordinary color and composure.
"You are well aware that she is not here," Pauline said.
"Why do you say that?" he asked.
"I think so."
"But perhaps you may be mistaken. Perhaps you have merely fancied that I have noticed Miss Cora's non-appearance."
"Perhaps," Pauline repeated. She seemed to be saying the word to her own thoughts. But suddenly her manner became far less absent. "Mrs. Dares told me that Miss Cora had a headache to-night," she said, with brisk activity. "We can all have headaches, you know," she went on, "when we choose."
Kindelon nodded slowly. "I have heard that it is an accommodating malady," he said, in tones that were singularly lifeless and neutral.
Pauline put forth her hand, and let it rest on his broad, strong arm for a second or two.
"Did Miss Cora have a headache?" she asked.
He threw back his head, and shook it with a sudden sound of his breath which resembled a sigh of irritation, and yet was not quite that.
"Upon my word, I don't know!" he cried softly.
Just then Pauline found herself confronted by Mr. Howe, the novelist. His stoop was very apparent; it seemed even more consumptive than usual; his slim hand was incessantly touching and retouching his blue spectacles, which gleamed opaque and with a goblin suggestion from the smooth-shaven, scholarly pallor of his visage.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Varick," he began, "but I – I wish to speak a word with you."
Pauline smiled and assumed an affable demeanor. It cost her an effort to do so, for certain acute reasons; but she nevertheless achieved good results.
"A great many words, Mr. Howe," she answered, "if you wish."
Mr. Howe gave a sickly smile. "Oh, I don't ask a great many," he faltered; and it at once became evident that he was for some reason ill at ease, disconsolate, abysmally depressed.
"You are annoyed," said Pauline, chiefly because she found nothing else, as a would-be courteous hostess, to say.
"Annoyed?" came the hesitant reply, while Mr. Howe rearranged his blue spectacles with a hand that seemed to assume a new momentary decisiveness. "I am grieved, Mrs. Varick. I am grieved because a friend of mine has received a slight from you, and I hope that it is an unintentional slight. I – I want to ask you whether it cannot be corrected. I allude to Mr. Bedlowe."
"Mr. Bedlowe!" repeated Pauline amazedly. She turned to Kindelon as she spoke.
"Oh, yes," came Kindelon's ready answer; "you remember Bedlowe, of course."
"I remember Mr. Bedlowe," said Pauline, sedately.
"Ah! you seem to have forgotten him!" exclaimed Mr. Howe, with a great deal of gentlemanly distress. He had discontinued all manual connection with his blue glasses; he had even pressed both hands together, in a rotatory, nervous way, while he went on speaking. "I hope you did not mean to leave poor Bedlowe out," he proceeded, with quite a funereal pathos. "The poor fellow feels it dreadfully. I promised him I would say nothing about the matter, and yet (as you see) I have broken my promise."
"I think Mrs. Varick is sorry to see that you have broken your promise," said Kindelon, shortly and tepidly.
Mr. Howe glanced at Kindelon through his glasses. He was obliged to raise his head as he did so, on account of their differing statures.
"Kindelon!" he cried, in reproach, "I thought you were one of my friends."
"So I am," came Kindelon's reply, "and that is why I don't like the pietistic novelist, Bedlowe, who wrote 'The Christian Knight in Armor' and the 'Doubtful Soul Satisfied.'"
If there could be the ghost of a cough, Mr. Howe gave it. He again lifted his wan, lank hand toward his spectacles.
"Oh, Kindelon," he remonstrated, "you must not be as uncharitable as that. Bedlowe does the best he can – and really, between ourselves, his best is remarkably good. Think of his great popularity. Think of the way he appeals to the large masses. Think" —
But here Pauline broke in, with the merriest laugh that had left her lips that night.
"My dear Mr. Howe!" she exclaimed, "you forget that I heard a bitter wrangle between you and Mr. Bedlowe only a few days ago. You had a great many hard things to say of him then. I hope you have not so easily altered your convictions."
"I – I haven't altered my convictions at all," stammered Mr. Howe, quite miserably. "But between Bedlowe as a literary man, and – and Bedlowe as a social companion – I draw a very marked line."
Kindelon here put his big hand on Mr. Howe's slight shoulder, jovially and amicably, while he said, —
"Come, now, my dear Howe, you mean that the analytical and agnostic novelist wants the romantic and pietistic novelist, only for the purpose of breaking a lance with him. You want him for that reason and no other."
Mr. Howe removed his spectacles, and while he performed this act it was evident that he was extremely agitated. The removal of his spectacles revealed two very red-rimmed eyes, whose color escaped all note because of their smallness.
"I – I want Mr. Bedlowe for no such reason," he asserted. "But I – I do not want to attend a – so-called salon at which mere fashionable fancy takes the place of solid hospitality."
"You forget," said Pauline, with rapid coolness, "that you are speaking in the presence of your hostess."
"He remembers only," came the fleet words of Kindelon, "that he speaks at the prompting of Barrowe."
Pauline tossed her head; she was angry again. "I don't care anything about Mr. Barrowe," she asserted, with a very positive glance at the unspectacled Mr. Howe. "I should prefer to believe that Mr. Howe expresses his own opinions. Even if they are very rude ones, I should prefer having them original."
"They are original," said Mr. Howe feebly, but somehow with the manner of a man who possesses a reserve of strength which he is unable to readily command. "I do not borrow my opinions. I – I think nearly all people must know this."
"I know it," said Pauline very tranquilly, and with an accent suave yet sincere. "I have read your novels, Mr. Howe, and I have liked them very much. I don't say that this is the reason why I have asked you here to-night, and I don't say that my dislike of Mr. Bedlowe's novels is the reason why I have not asked Mr. Bedlowe here to-night. But I hope you will let my admiration of your talent cover all delinquencies, and permit me to be the judge of whom I shall choose and whom I shall not choose for my guests."
Mr. Howe put on his spectacles. While he was putting them on, he said in a voice that had a choked and also mournfully reproachful sound, —
"I have no social gifts, Mrs. Varick. I can't measure swords with you. I can only measure pens. That is the trouble with so many of us writers. We can only write; we can't talk. I – I think it grows worse with us, in these days when one has to write with the most careful selection of words, so as to escape what is now called commonplace diction. We get into the habit of striving after novelty of expression – we have to use our 'Thesaurus,' and search for synonyms – we have to smoke excessively (a good many of us) in order to keep our nerves at the proper literary pitch – we have to take stimulants (a good many of us – though I don't understand that, for I never touch wine) in order to drag up the words and ideas from an underlying stagnancy. Frankly, for myself, I talk quite ill. But I don't want to have you think that I am talking in another voice than my own. I don't want, in spite of my failure as a man of words, that you should suppose" —
"I suppose nothing, Mr. Howe," broke in Pauline, while she caught the speaker's hand in hers, gloved modishly up to the elbow with soft, tawny kid. "I insist upon supposing nothing except that you are glad to come here and will be glad to come again. I know three or four of your novels very well, and I know them so well that I love them, and have read them twice or thrice, which is a great deal to say of a novel, as even you, a novelist, will admit. But I don't like Mr. Bedlowe's novels any more than you do; and if Mr. Barrowe has tried to set you on fire with his incendiary feelings, I shall be excessively sorry. You have written lovely and brilliant things; you know the human soul, and you have shown that you know it. You may not have sold seventy thousand copies, as the commercial phrase goes, but I don't care whether you have sold seventy thousand or only a plain seventy; you are a true artist, all the same… And now I am going to leave you, for my other guests claim me. But I hope you will not care for anything severe and bitter which that dyspeptic Mr. Barrowe may say; for, depend upon it, he only wins your adherence because he is a clever man on paper, and not because he is even tolerable in the stern operations of real life. Frankly, between ourselves, I am sure that he makes a very bad husband, though he is always talking of being handicapped by autograph-bores and interviewers who keep him away from Mrs. Barrowe. I suspect that Mrs. Barrowe must be a very unhappy lady. And I'm sure, on the other hand, that Mrs. Howe is very happy – for I know there is a Mrs. Howe, or you couldn't describe the American women as ably as you do…" Pauline passed onward as she ended her final sentence. Kindelon, still at her side, soon said to her, —
"What a clever farewell you made: you have won Howe. You flattered him very adroitly. It's an open secret that his wife helps him in those exquisite novels of his. She is his one type of woman. I think that is why Howe will never be great; he will always be exquisite instead. He adores his wife, who hates society and always stays at home. If Howe had once committed a genuine fault it might have served posterity as a crystallized masterpiece."
Pauline shook her head with negative emphasis. "I like him just as he is," she murmured. She was silent for a moment, and then added, almost plaintively: "My entertainment looks pleasant enough, but I fear that it is all a disastrous failure."
"A failure?" echoed Kindelon, with no sympathy in the interrogation.
"Yes, everybody is grumbling. I distinctly feel it. It is not only that Barrowe has infected everybody; it is that everybody has a latent hostility towards anything like harmonious reunion."
"Isn't there a bit of pure imagination in your verdict?" Kindelon asked.
"Premonition," answered Pauline, "if you choose to call it by that name." She stood, while she thus spoke, under an effulgent chandelier, whose jets, wrought in the semblance of candles, dispersed from ornate metallic sconces a truly splendid glow.
"We have a new arrival," he said. He was glancing toward a near doorway while he spoke. Pauline's eyes had followed his own.
"My aunt!" she exclaimed. "And Sallie – and Courtlandt, too!"
"Yes, Courtlandt, too – my friend, Courtlandt," said Kindelon oddly.
"I told Aunt Cynthia she had best not come," murmured Pauline.
"And your cousin, Courtlandt?" said Kindelon. "Did you tell him not to come?"
"I am sorry that they came – I somehow can't help but be sorry!" exclaimed Pauline, while she moved towards the door by which she had seen her kindred enter.
"Sorry? So am I," said Kindelon. He spoke below his breath, but Pauline heard him.
XI
"I am very glad to see you," Pauline was telling her aunt, a little later. She felt, while she spoke them, that her words were the merest polite falsehood. "I did not suppose you would care to honor me this evening – I mean all three of you," she added, with a rather mechanical smile in the direction of Miss Sallie and Courtlandt.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie promptly spoke. She was looking about her through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses while she did so. Her portliness was not without a modish majesty; folds of a black, close-clinging, lace-like fabric fell about her large person with much grace of effect; her severe nose appeared to describe an even more definite arc than usual.
"Sallie and I had nothing for to-night," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie. "Lent began to-day, you know, and there wasn't even a dinner to go to."
"I am pleased to afford you a refuge in your social distress," returned Pauline. It flashed through her mind that circumstance was drawing upon her, to-night, for a good deal of bitter feeling. What subtle thunder was in the air, ready to sour the milk of human kindness to its last drop?
"My dear," murmured her aunt, temporarily discontinuing her stares, and speaking more in reproach than conciliation, "you must not be so very quick to take offence when none is intended."
Pauline gave a laugh which she tried to make amiable. "It pleases me to think that no offence was intended," she declared.
"Your little party was by no means a pis-aller with me, dear Pauline," here stated Sallie, "whatever it may have been in mamma's case. I really wanted so much, don't you know, to see these – a – persons." The peculiar pause which Sallie managed to make before she pronounced the word "persons," and the gentle yet assertive accent which she managed to place upon the word itself, were both, in their way, beyond description. Not that either was of the import which would render description requisite, except from the point of view which considers all weightless trifles valuable.
Pauline bit her lip. She had long ago thought Sallie disqualified for contest by her native silliness. The girl had not a tithe of her mother's brains; she possessed all the servitude of an echo and all the imitativeness of a reflection. But like most weak things she had the power to wound, though her little sting was no doubt quite unintentional at present.
Courtlandt here spoke. He was perfectly his ordinary sober self as he said, —
"I happened to drop in upon Aunt Cynthia to-night, and she brought me here. I believe that I come without an invitation. Don't I? I've forgotten."
"You haven't forgotten," contradicted Pauline, though not at all unpleasantly. "You know I didn't invite you, because I didn't think you would care to come. You gave me every reason to think so."
"That was very rude," commented Sallie, with a rebuking look at Courtlandt. She had a great idea of manners, but her reverence was quite theoretical, as more than one ineligible and undesirable young gentleman knew, when she had chosen to freeze him at parties with the blank, indifferent regard of a sphinx. "It is so odd, really, Pauline," she went on, with her supercilious drawl, which produced a more irritating effect upon her cousin because apparently so spontaneous and unaffected – "it is so odd to meet people whom one does not know. I have always been accustomed to go to places where I knew everybody, and bowed, and had them come up and speak."
Pauline busied herself for an instant in smoothing the creases of her long gloves between wrist and elbow. "Don't you find it rather pleasant, Sallie," she said, "to procure an occasional change?"
"It ought to be refreshing," struck in Courtlandt, neutrally.
"You can have people to talk to you this evening, if you wish," pursued Pauline, while a certain sense that she was being persecuted by her relatives waged war with a decorous recognition of who and where she was.
Before Sallie could answer, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, who had ceased her determined survey, said in her naturally high, cool, suave tones, —
"Oh, of course we want you to present some of them to us, Pauline, dear. We came for that, Sallie and I. We want to see what has made you so fond of them. They are all immensely clever, of course. But one can listen and be instructed, if one does not talk. Do they expect you to talk, by the way? Will they not be quite willing to do all the talking themselves? I have heard – I don't just remember when or how – that they usually are willing."
"My dear Aunt Cynthia," said Pauline, in a low but not wholly composed voice, "you speak of my guests as if they were the inmates of a menagerie."
Mrs. Poughkeepsie threw back her head a very little. The motion made a jewel of great price and fine lustre shoot sparks of pale fire from the black lace shrouding her ample bosom. She laughed at the same moment, and by no means ill-naturedly. "I am sure they wouldn't like to have you suggest anything so dreadful," she said, "you, their protectress and patroness."
"I am neither," affirmed Pauline stoutly.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted her brow in surprise. She almost lifted her august shoulders as well. "Then pray what are you, my dear?" she asked.
"Their hostess – and their equal," asserted Pauline. She spoke with momentary seriousness, but immediately afterward she chose to assume an air of careless raillery.
"Ah, Aunt Cynthia," she went on, "you don't know how you make me envy you!"
"Envy me, Pauline?"
"Oh, yes; you have settled matters so absolutely. You have no misgivings, no distrusts. You are so magnificently secure."
"I don't understand," politely faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. She looked inquiringly at Courtlandt.
"It is metaphysics," Courtlandt at once said. "They are a branch of study in which Pauline has made great progress." His face remained so completely placid and controlled that he might have been giving the number of a residence or recording the last quotation in stocks.
Sallie had become absorbed in staring here and there, just as her mother had been a brief while ago; Mrs. Poughkeepsie was at a little distance from her niece; Courtlandt stood close at Pauline's side, so that the latter could ask him, in an undertone full of curt, covert imperiousness, —
"Did you come here to say and do rude things?"
"I never say nor do rude things if I can help it," he answered, with a leaden stolidity in his own undertone.
"Why did they come?" continued Pauline, lowering her voice still more.
"You invited them, I believe. That is, at least, my impression."
"I mentioned the affair. I never imagined they would wish to come."
"You see that you were mistaken. If I had been you I wouldn't have given them the awful opportunity."
"What awful opportunity?" queried Pauline, furtively bristling.
"Of coming," said Courtlandt.
"My dear Pauline," here broke in Mrs. Poughkeepsie, "shall you not present anybody to us?"
"Anyone whom you please to meet, Aunt," responded Pauline.
"But, my dear, we please to meet anyone. We have no preferences. How can we have?"
"This is torment," thought poor Pauline. She glanced toward Courtlandt, but she might as well have appealed to one of her chairs. "What shall I do?" her thoughts sped fleetly on. "This woman and this girl would shock and repel whomever I should bring to them. It would be like introducing the North Pole and the South."
But her face revealed no sign of her perplexity. She quietly put her hand within Courtlandt's arm. "Come, Court," she said, with a very creditable counterfeit of gay sociality, "let us find a few devotees for Aunt Cynthia and Sallie."
"We shall find a good many," said Courtlandt, as they moved away. "Have no fear of that."
"I am by no means sure that we shall find any," protested Pauline, both with dismay and antagonism.
"Pshaw," retorted Courtlandt. "Mention the name. It will work like magic."
"The name? What name?"
"Poughkeepsie. Do you suppose these haphazard Bohemians wouldn't like to better themselves if they could?"
Pauline took her hand from his arm, though he made a slight muscular movement of detention.
"They are not haphazard Bohemians," she said. "You know, too, that they are not. They are mostly people of intellect, of culture, of high and large views. I don't know what you mean by saying that they would 'like to better themselves.' Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia? Her name would be simply a dead letter to them."
Courtlandt gave a low laugh, that was almost gruff, and was certainly harsh. "Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia?" he repeated. "Why, she never dines out that the society column of half-a-dozen newspapers does not record it, and her name would be very far from a dead letter. It would be a decidedly living letter."
"But you don't understand," insisted Pauline, exasperatedly. "These people have no aims to know the so-called higher classes."
"Excuse me," said Courtlandt, with superb calm. "Everybody has aims to know the so-called higher classes – if he or she possibly can. Especially 'she'," he added in his colorless monotone.
Just then Pauline found herself confronted by Miss Upton. The moon-like face of this diminutive lady wore a flushed eagerness as she began to speak.
"Oh, Mrs. Varick," she said, "I've a great, great favor to ask of you! I want you to introduce me to your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie."
"With pleasure," answered Pauline, feeling as if the request had been a sort of jeer. "You know my aunt by sight, then, Miss Upton?"
"Oh, yes, I've known her for some time by sight, Mrs. Varick. Miss Cragge pointed her out to me one night at Wallack's. She had a box, with her daughter and several other people. One of them was an English lord – or so Miss Cragge said… But excuse my mentioning my friend's name, as you don't like her."
"Who told you that I did not like Miss Cragge?" asked Pauline, with abrupt crispness.
"Oh, nobody, nobody," hurried Miss Upton. "But you haven't invited her here to-night – you left her out, you know. That was all. And I thought…"
"Are you a friend of Miss Cragge's?" asked Pauline.
"Oh, yes … that is, I know her quite well. She writes dramatic criticisms, you know, and she has seen me in amateur theatricals. She's kind enough to tell me that she doesn't think that I have a tragic soul in a comic body." Here Miss Upton gave a formidably resonant laugh. "But I'm convinced that I have, and so I've never gone on the stage. But if I could get a few of the very aristocratic people, Mrs. Varick, – like yourself, and your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie – to hear me give a private reading or two, from 'Romeo and Juliet' or 'The Hunchback' or 'Parthenia', why, I should be prepared to receive a new opinion, don't you understand, with regard to my abilities. There is nothing like being endorsed at the start by people who belong to the real upper circles of society."
"Of course there isn't," said Courtlandt, speaking too low for Miss Upton to catch his words, and almost in the ear of Pauline. "Introduce me," he went swiftly on. "I will save you the bore of further introductions. You will soon see how they will all flock about the great nabob, though she may be ignorant of æsthetics, philosophy, Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, and anybody you please."
Pauline turned and looked at him. There was the shadow of a sparkle in the familiar brown eyes – the eyes that she never regarded closely without being reminded of her girlhood, even of her childhood as well.
"It is a challenge then?" she asked softly.
For a second he seemed not to understand her. Then he nodded his head. "Yes – a challenge," he answered.
She gave an inward sigh… A little later she had made the desired introduction… Presently, as Miss Upton moved away on Courtlandt's arm in the direction of her aunt and Sallie, she burst into a laugh, of whose loudness and acerbity she was equally unconscious.