An Ambitious Woman Part 34

After your exultant conclusion that we had far better fix the stigma of ingrat.i.tude and desertion upon her shameless daughter with as much publicity as possible! After our talks, our arrangements, our antic.i.p.ations! After all this, you are _not going to-morrow_! I don't understand. I am sure that I must be dreaming!"

"Let me explain, then," said Mrs. Van Horn, with a quiver in her usually serene tones that was a residue of last evening's dramatic defeat and surrender. "For once in my life, Sylvia, I--I have found my match, I have failed to hold my own, I have been ignominiously beaten. And the victor is my own brother, Beverley."

She went on speaking for some time longer, with no actual interruption on the part of her companion, though with very decided signs of consternation and disapproval.

"Oh, Cornelia, it is too bad!" exclaimed Mrs. Lee, when the recital was finished. "He couldn't have meant that he would cut his own sister! What _is_ to be done? Well, I suppose it must all be given up. And it would have been such a triumph! And she deserves it so--running away from her own mother whom she had always hated and disobeyed! We have that poor, horrid, common, but pitiable Mrs. Twining's own word for it, you know.

And she would have been such a magnificent spectre at the banquet! She would have risen up like Banquo, ill-dressed, haggard, rheumatic, pathetic. Everybody would have denounced this unnatural daughter when they saw the meeting. I can't realize that you, _you_ could let it all be nipped in the bud!"

"It isn't all nipped in the bud, Sylvia," said Mrs. Van Horn, sharply.

"But it _is_! Why isn't it? You certainly don't expect me to carry it out alone?"

Mrs. Van Horn decisively nodded. "Yes, Sylvia," she answered, "that is just the point. I do expect you to carry it out alone. You are clever enough, quite clever enough, and" ... Here the speaker paused for a moment, and then crisply, emphatically added: "And after all is said, remember one thing. It is this: You have a much larger debt to pay her than I have."

A malign look stole into Mrs. Lee's black eyes. She was thinking of Stuart Goldwin. She was thinking of the man whom she had pa.s.sionately loved--whom she pa.s.sionately loved still.

"I believe you are right, Cornelia," she at length replied, in her usual protracted and lingering style. She had got herself, as she spoke, into one of her most involved and tortuous att.i.tudes; she had never looked more serpentine than now.

XIX.

Claire felt, on this same day, like casting about in her mind for some pretext by which she might postpone her grand luncheon on the morrow.

She had pa.s.sed a sleepless night, having gone to bed without seeing Hollister. In the morning she had avoided meeting him. She had no comfort to administer, no reparation to offer. The mask had been stripped from her face; the comedy had been played to its end. She had a sense of worthlessness, depravity, sin. At the same time she recklessly told herself that no atonement was in her power. A woful weakness, which took the form of a woful strength, over-mastered her as the hours grew older. Her thirst for new excitements deepened with her misery and anxiety. But she sat in her dressing-room or paced the floor till past three in the afternoon. There were numberless people whom she might have visited; there were several receptions that afternoon at which her presence would have been held important by their respective givers. Even the known jeopardy of her husband's position would have heightened the value of her appearance, adding to her popularity the spice of curiosity as well.

More than once she said to herself: 'I will go to one of these places. I will show them how quietly I bear the strain. If by to-morrow no crash has come, they will admire my nerve and courage. For if I once went, they should never discover a trace of worriment or suspense. I think the fact of my being closely watched would even make me talk better and smile brighter. The wear and tear of the whole thing might make me forget a little, too. And I want so to forget, if I can!'

But she did not go. The morning papers lay on a near table. She had read every word that they had to tell her of the fierce financial turmoil.

Some of the stern figures they quoted made her heart flutter with affright; some of their ominous and snarling editorials wrought an added discomfort.

If Hollister weathered the storm, she decided, all would remain as it had been before. Or, if not precisely that, the general outward effect would continue quite the same. She would shine among her courtiers; she would dazzle and rule. He would feel his wound, now that he knew the pitiless truth of her indifference, but he would make the engrossing ventures of his business-life drown its pain until this had perhaps ceased forever. They would drift further apart than they had ever done in recent months, but to the eye of the world there would be no severance. It was possible that he would vex her with no more reproaches. It was probable that as time pa.s.sed he would forget that he had ever had any reproaches to offer.

While Claire's reflections, nervous and fitful, took by degrees some such shape as this, she found a desperate, yearning pleasure in the hope that she might still drink the _vin capiteux_ of worldly success. She almost felt like flinging herself on her knees and praying that the delicious cup might not forever be dashed from her lips. To this stage had her triumphs brought her. She was the same woman who had made those resolves of abstinence and reformation which her biographer has already duly chronicled. She was the same woman whose conscience had smitten her with a sense of higher and purer things when the farewell of Thurston warned her by such appalling remonstrance, and when she found herself confronting her father's placid tomb amid the solemnities of Greenwood.

And yet how abysmal was the difference between then and now! The chance of radical change in heart, aim, and ideal had then been given her; but now all thought of such change woke only a willful, imperious dissent.

Her vision turned upon her own soul to-day, and showed her its mighty lapse from grace, its supine and incapable droop. The debasing spell had been woven; what counterspell was potent enough to break it? Occasional flashes of regret and aspiration might well a.s.sail her spirit, or of recognition that she had lost a high contentment in gaining a low one.

This was natural enough. It has been aptly put into metaphor that the saddest place in Purgatory is that from which the walls of Paradise are visible.

By four o'clock Hollister had not returned. But Mrs. Diggs had made her appearance instead, and Claire welcomed it as a happy relief from the torment of her own thoughts. "My dear," said this lady, "there has been nothing so dreadful in Wall Street since the crisis of the famed Black Friday. My poor Manhattan came home at about three o'clock, utterly jaded out. I made him go to bed. He could scarcely speak to me. I asked him about your husband's affairs, but he gave me only mumbling answers; excitement had put him into a kind of stupor, don't you know?"

"Yes," a.s.sented Claire, understanding the nature of the collapse perfectly. "So he told you nothing of Herbert's affairs? Nothing whatever?"

"Nothing that I could really make out. I should be in a wild state, and have a feeling about the soles of my feet as if I were already going barefoot, don't you know, if I hadn't long ago insisted upon Manhattan's putting a very large and comfortable sum safely away in my name."

Claire thought of the house that had been a.s.signed to her, of her jewels, of her costly apparel. But to remember these merely aggravated her distress. What a meagre wreck they would leave from the largess of her past prosperity!

"I wouldn't be awfully worried, if I were you," continued Mrs. Diggs.

"If the worst _should_ come, your husband will be sure to save something handsome. These great speculators always do. Some odd thousands always turn up after the storm has blown over. Perhaps he will begin again, and do grander things than ever before."

"That is cold consolation," said Claire, with a bitter smile.

"I know it is for _you_, Claire, dear, who have been tossing away hundreds to my dimes. I might say horrid things, but I won't. I might talk of retribution for your extravagances, and all that. But I so detest the _je vous l'avais bien dit_ style of rebuke. And I don't want to rebuke you a bit. You have your faults, of course. But you're always my sweet, beautiful Claire. My heart will ache for you if anything frightful _should_ happen. I say it to your face, dear, as I would say it behind your back, that you are the one woman of all others whom money perfectly adorns. You spent it like a queen, and you looked like a queen while you spent it. You remember how I used to gush over Cornelia Van Horn's grand manner? It could never hold a candle to yours. I'm afraid I abused you like a regular pickpocket the other night. Oh, yes, I pitched into you just as hard as I could. But at the same time I was thinking how well you carried your worldliness--what a kind of a _beau role_ you made of it, don't you know? And whatever _should_ come, Claire, always recollect that I'll stick to you, my dear, through thick and thin!"

The vernacular turn taken by Mrs. Diggs during this eager outburst gave it a spontaneity and naturalness that more than once brought the mist to Claire's eyes. She felt the true ring of friendly sympathy in every word that was spoken; the touches of slang pleased her; they were like the angularities of the lady's physical shape, severe and yet not ungraceful. She was sorry when her visitor rose to go, and had a sense of dreary loneliness after she had departed.

It would soon be the hour for dinner. But she could not dine. She knew that the decorous butler who waited on her would perceive her efforts to choke down the proffered food. Perhaps he would tingle with secret dread regarding his next wages. He read the newspapers, of course; everybody read them nowadays; and her husband's impending ruin had been their chief and hideous topic.

As the chill winter light in the room turned blue before it wholly died, she sat and thought of how many people would be glad to hear the very worst. They seemed to her a pitiless legion. Then, as she thought of how many would be sorry, three names rose uppermost in her mind: Mrs.

Diggs, Thurston, and Stuart Goldwin. Yes, Goldwin surely would have no exultant feeling. He was full of arts and falsities, but he could not fail to regret any calamity that brought with it her own sharp discomfiture.

'He has lately been Herbert's rival in finance,' she told her own thoughts. 'Circ.u.mstance has in a manner pitted them against each other.

Herbert rose so quickly. They have not been enemies, but they have stood on opposite sides in not a few matters of speculation. Still, I am sure he will lament the downfall, if it really comes. He will do so for my sake, if for no other reason. I should have questioned him more closely last night at the opera. I am sure he wanted me to speak with more freedom of the threatening disaster. I should have asked him'--

And then Claire's distressed ruminations were cut short by the quiet entrance of her husband. The door of the chamber had been ajar.

Hollister simply pushed it a little further open, and crossed the threshold.

The dusk had begun, but it was still far from making his face in any way obscure to her. As she looked at it, while slowly rising from her chair, she saw that it had never, to her knowledge, been so wan and worn as now. He paused before her, and at once spoke.

"Have you heard?" he said.

She felt herself grow cold. "What?" she asked.

"I'm cleaned out. Everything has gone. I thought you might have seen the evening papers. They are full of it. Of course they don't know the real truth. Some of them say that I have five millions hidden away." He laughed here, and the laugh was bleak though low. "But I tell you the plain truth, Claire--there's nothing left. The truth is best; don't you think so?"

He was steadily watching her, as he thus spoke, and the detected irony of his words pierced her like a knife. A wistful distress was in the frank blue of his eyes; they seemed to reflect from her own spirit the wrong that she had done him.

"Yes, Herbert," she answered, still keeping her seat, "I think that the truth is always best."

A great sigh left his lips. He put both hands behind him, and began slowly pacing the floor, with lowered head. While thus engaged, he went on speaking.

"I can't think how I ever shot up as I did. I never was a very bright fellow at Dartmouth. I always had pluck enough, but I never showed any great nerve. Wall Street brought out a new set of faculties, somehow.

And then everybody liked me; I was popular; that had a great deal to do with it, I suppose--that and a wonderful run of luck at the start. And then there was one thing more--one very important thing, too. I see now what a tremendous incentive it really was. I mean your wish to rise and rule people. If it hadn't been for that, I'd have let many a big chance slip."

He paused now, standing close beside his wife's chair. "I was always weak where you were concerned," he said, regarding her very intently, and with a cloud on his usually clear brow that bespoke suffering rather than sternness. "You know that, Claire. I yielded always; I let you wind me round your finger--I was so fond of the finger. If you had said, 'Herbert, do this or that folly,' I'd have done it, and it wouldn't have seemed half so much a folly because of your loved command. Is not this true?"

He came still closer to her after he had uttered the last sentence. He was so close that his person grazed her dress.

Claire was very pale, and her eyes were shining. "It is perfectly true,"

she answered him.

Hollister's tones instantly changed. They were broken, hoa.r.s.e, and of fervid melancholy. "Perfectly true. Yes, you admit it. You know that I am right. I gave you everything--love, interest, energy, respect, obedience. And what did you give me? Your marriage-vows, Claire!--were those falsehoods? Speak and tell me! I never thought so till yesterday.

Good G.o.d, woman! I never thought about it at all. You were my wife; you were my Claire. You were stronger in nature than I, and I loved your strength. I loved to have you lead, and to follow where you led. But your love--oh, I counted on that as securely as we count on the sun in heaven! And yesterday the truth burst on me! It wasn't I that you had cared for. It was the high place I could put you in, the dresses and diamonds I could buy for you, the"--

He suddenly broke off. A great excitement was now in his visage, his voice, his whole manner. Whether from pain or wrath, it seemed to her that his eyes had taken a much darker tint, and that an unwonted spark, chill and keen, lit them.

"If it all _is_ true," he went on, speaking much more slowly, and like a man who breathes hard without openly showing it, "then I thank G.o.d that no child has been born of you and me!"

She sat quite still. She was utterly conscience-stricken. From all the facile vocabulary of feminine self-excuse her bewildered and shamed soul could shape no sentence either of propitiation or denial. At such a time she felt the infamy, even the farce of lying to him. And how could she respond with any sufficiency, any gleam of comforting a.s.surance, unless she did lie?