An Ambitious Woman Part 24

Hollister and his two remaining guests now appeared. Claire re-welcomed both the latter gentlemen with beaming suavity. They were both important personages, as it has been recorded. They both had important wives, to whom they repaired, a little later, and to whom they loudly sang praises of Claire's loveliness. The remarks of each took substantially the same form, and the following might be given as their connubial and somewhat florid average:--

"That fellow Hollister's wife, you know. The man I dined with to-night.

Didn't know he had a wife? Well, you'd have known it if you'd been there. She's a splendid young creature. Handsome as a picture, and good style, too. By the way, Stuart Goldwin was there; you know how hard it is to get _him_. I shouldn't wonder if these Hollisters were going to make a dash for society, soon. Now, don't repeat it, my dear, but the fact is, this Hollister can be of considerable service to me in a business way. There's no use of going into particulars, for women never understand business. But ... if anything _should_ occur--any card be left, I mean, you may be sure what my wishes are.... Oh, of course; look sour, and refuse point blank. Bless my soul, when did you ever do anything to help along _my_ interests? You'll spend the money fast enough, but you won't turn a hand to help me make it. All right; do as you please. Hollister is to-day the most rising young man on the Street.

There's a regular boom on him. He's got Goldwin for a friend. You must know what _that_ means."

Both ladies did know what it meant. Both ladies had looked sour, but both in due time entertained their afterthoughts. They were ladies of high fashion, each prominent within an exclusive clique. They were not powerful enough to indorse any new struggler for position; their own right of tenure was not una.s.sailable. They dreaded this Mrs. Hollister, as it were, but they secretly resolved that it would be folly to ignore her. Meanwhile a certain interview, held by Stuart Goldwin with a certain lady of his acquaintance, was of quite different character.

Goldwin did not reach the house of Mrs. Ridgeway Lee until some time after ten o'clock. It was an exceedingly pretty house. Its drawing-room, though as small as Claire's, must by comparison have put the latter completely into the shade. It was an exquisite artistic commingling of all that was rare and fine in upholstery and general embellishment. Mrs.

Ridgeway Lee, too, was in a manner rare and fine. She rose from a deep cachemire lounge to receive Goldwin. She was dressed in crimson, with a great cl.u.s.ter of white and crimson roses at her breast. She pretended to be annoyed that he should have presumed to come so late. She had the last French novel in her hand, pressed against her heart, as though she loved its allurements and disliked being thus drawn from them. Goldwin knew perfectly well that she had expected him, that she was very glad he had come. He often wondered to himself why he did not ask her to be his wife. She was pa.s.sionately in love with him; she had been a widow almost since girlhood. She had a great deal of money, for which he cared nothing, and a great deal of beauty, for which he could not help but care. She had almost seriously compromised herself by permitting him to show her attentions whose intimacy, in the judgment of the world, should long ago either have ceased entirely or else have a.s.sumed matrimonial permanence.

Yet she was a woman who could, to a certain degree, compromise herself with impunity. Her connections were all people of high place. She was distantly related to Mrs. Diggs and nearly related to Mrs. Van Horn, who felt toward her that fondness which may exist between a queen and a lady-in-waiting. Apart from this, she was a social dignitary. Her artificiality was more plainly manifest than that of Goldwin, and it had become a commonplace among her friends to say that she was affected.

But she had made her affectation a kind of fashion; other women had so liked the peculiar flutter of her lids, the drawl of her voice, the erratic movements and extraordinary poses of her body, that they had imitated these with disastrous fidelity. She said clever, daring, insolent, or amiable things all in the same slow, measured way, and generally managed to leave an impression that a fund of unuttered experience or observation lay behind them. She was prodigiously pious for one of her pleasure-loving nature. Her charity was liberal and incessant. She trailed her Parisian robes through the wards of hospitals, or lifted them in the ill-smelling haunts of dying paupers.

Her religion and her charity went hand in hand. For some people they were both shams; for others they were ostentation, half founded upon sincerity; for others they implied a feverish craving to drown the remorse born of persistent indiscretions; and still for others they were an intoxication, indulged in by one who did nothing half-way, and resorted to as some women drug themselves with opium, chloral, or alcohol. She denounced the new intellectual tendency among social equals of her own s.e.x, as something wholly terrible; she frowned upon it no less darkly than her kinswoman, Mrs. Van Horn, but for a different reason. Its occasional lapses into rationalistic and unorthodox thought roused her dismay and ire.

"Science," she would say, in her grave, loitering manner, "is perfectly splendid. I adore it. I read books about it all the time." (There were those who roundly a.s.serted that she did not know protoplasm from evolution.) "But this confusing it with religion is simply blasphemous and awful. I have the profoundest pity for all who do not believe devoutly. I wish I could build asylums for them, and visit them, as I do my sick and my poor!"

Goldwin always listened to these melancholy outbursts with a twinkling eye. She had long since ceased to try and convert him to her High Church ritualisms. He would never go to church with her and witness, in the edifice which she attended, the Episcopal ceremonial imitate, as he said, the Roman Catholic ceremonial just as far as it dared and no further. But he would never have gone to any church with her, and she knew it, and mourned him as unG.o.dly. That was the way, some of her foes a.s.serted, in which she made love to him: she mourned him as unG.o.dly.

But she showed no signs of making love to him to-night. She received him, as was already stated, with a shocked air.

"It is dreadfully late," she said, giving him her hand. "You ought not to do it. You know that you ought not to do it."

He kept her hand until she had again seated herself on the cachemire lounge. Then he sat down beside her.

Her type of beauty had been called that of a serpent. It was true that her present posture on the lounge oddly resembled a sort of coil. Her face wore at nearly all times a warm paleness; its color, or rather its lack of color, had little variation. Her hair was black as night; her eyes luminous, large, and very dark; her head small, her figure lissome and extremely slender, her shoulders narrow and falling. She could not be ungraceful, and her grace was always what in another woman would have been called unique awkwardness. She appeared, now, to be gazing at Goldwin across one shoulder. Her crimson dress was in a tight whorl about her feet. She had a twisted look, which in any one else would have suggested an imperiled anatomy. But you somehow accepted her at first sight as capable of a picturesque elasticity denied to commoner _physiques_.

"I dropped in only for a minute," said Goldwin. "I wanted to tell you about the dinner."

"Well? Was it nice?"

"Immensely. There was only one woman, but a marvelous woman. She is Hollister's wife. I feel as if I'd been hearing a new opera by Gounod.

Don't ask me to describe her."

Mrs. Lee was watching the speaker's face with great intentness. It was a face that she knew very well; she had given it several years of close study.

"She is handsome, then?"

"She's exquisite. She is going to take things by storm this winter. She wants to do it, too. And I mean to help her."

"Who was she?"

"I don't know. And I don't care. I'm her devoted friend. I hope you will be. I want you to call on her."

"Are you crazy?" said Mrs. Lee. She said it so quietly and slowly, as was her wont to say all things, that she might have been making the most ordinary of queries.

"Yes," laughed Goldwin, "quite out of my head."

"Do you think I will go and see a woman I don't know, merely because you ask me to do it?"

He let his eyes dwell steadily upon her pale, small, piquant face, lifted above the long, rounded throat, on which sparkled a slim gorget of rubies, to match her dress.

"You've done things that I wanted you to do before now," he said softly.

"You'll do this, I am sure."

She put one hand on his arm. The hand was so tiny and white that it seemed to rest there as lightly as a drifted blossom. "Will you tell me all about her?" she said, in her measured way.

"I told you that I couldn't describe her. She's like flowers that I've seen; she's like music that I've heard; she is like perfumes that I have smelt. There's poetry for you. You're fond of poetry, you say."

She still kept her hand on his arm. He had very rarely praised a woman in her hearing. He had never before praised one in this fashion.

"Will you tell me one thing more?" she said. "Have you fallen in love with her?"

Goldwin threw back his head and laughed. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "she is a married woman, and her husband worships her."

"Will you answer my question?" persisted Mrs. Lee.

"Yes," said Goldwin, suddenly jumping up from the lounge. "She is tremendously fond of her husband. There ... your question is answered."

XVI.

Rather early the next morning, Mrs. Diggs dropped in upon Claire, "to hear all about it," as she said, alluding to the dinner-party.

She dismissed two of the gentlemen with two little contemptuous nods.

"They are both well enough in point of respectability," she affirmed.

"So are their wives. All four are so swathed in dull convention that you even forget to criticise them; they're like animals which resemble the haunts they inhabit to such a degree that you can tell them from the surrounding foliage or furrows only when they move or show life. Whom else did you have?"

"There was Mr. Stuart Goldwin," said Claire.

"Goldwin? Yon don't mean it, really? _Did_ you have Goldwin?" Here Mrs.

Diggs looked hard at Claire, and slowly shook her head. "My dear," she went on, "it must indeed be true that your husband is achieving great financial distinction. Pardon my saying it, Claire, but Goldwin wouldn't have put his limbs under your mahogany if this had not been true. He's an enormous personage. Other Wall Street grandees have been very small pygmies in the social estimate. But Goldwin carries everything before him. You needn't tell me that you like him. It would be something abnormal if you didn't. He is really the most charming of men. You can't trust him, don't you know, further than you can see him; he bristles with all sorts of humbug. And yet you accept him, because it is such well-bred, engaging humbug. He has hosts of adherents, and he deserves them. He gives the most enchanting entertainments. They are never vulgar, and yet they cost vast sums. For example, he will give a Delmonico dinner, at which every lady finds a diamond-studded locket hid modestly in the heart of her bouquet. I need not add that in a matrimonial way he is simply groveled to. But beware of him, my dear Claire; he is dangerous."

"Dangerous?" repeated Claire.

"Well, not so much in himself. Goldwin, in himself, is a shallow yet clever man, a forcible yet weak man, a man whose pluck has aided him a good deal, and whose luck has aided him still more. He has caught the trick of looking like a prince, and hence of giving his princely ama.s.sment of money a superb glamour. He will fade, some day, and leave not a rack behind. Of course he will. They all do. I don't know that he would if he married. And now I come to my previous point. He doesn't marry; therefore, he is dangerous."

"I don't follow you," Claire said.

"He doesn't marry Mrs. Ridgeway Lee. That is what I mean. As it is, she guards his approaches. She is a woman of high position, considerable queer, uncanny beauty, monstrous affectation, and a fondness for _him_ that amounts to idolatry. She's the most intense of pietists; she riots in all sorts of religious charities. She has other idolatries besides Goldwin, but he is her foremost. I have never been just able to make her out. She is a sort of cousin of mine. She's wonderfully handsome, but it's the lean, cold beauty of a snake. As I said, she guards Goldwin's approaches. She's a widow, and a rich one, and she wants Goldwin to ask her to marry him. He doesn't, however, and hence she coils herself, so to speak, at the threshold of his acquaintance. If any other woman draws near--I mean, too near--she hisses and bites.... Oh, don't look incredulous. I've known her to positively do both. She'll do it to you, if Goldwin is too attentive. That is why I warn you; that is why I call that nice, brilliant, headlong, gentlemanly Goldwin a dangerous man."

In a few more days Hollister, of his own accord, proposed to Claire that she should engage a maid. He also told her that he had made purchase of two carriages, a span of horses, and an extra horse for single harness besides.

"You will be able to drive out, either in your coupe or your larger carriage, my dear," he said, "by Wednesday next." Then he broke into one of his most genial laughs, and added: "I hope that is not too long to wait."

Claire took this prophecy of coming splendor with serious quietude. She had talked with her husband regarding his recent plethoric influx of thousands.

"I've an idea, Herbert," she said, using a slow, wise-seeming deliberation. "It is this: why do you not buy our house? We both like it; it is comfortable and agreeable; it fills all our wants. And it is for sale, you know."