The Adventures of a Widow Part 2

The conclave on these sh.o.r.es heard and sympathetically shuddered. The "new set" had now healed all its old feuds. New York society was in a condition of amicably cemented factions. The Briggs girls and the Snowe girls had married more or less loftily, and had proved to the Amsterdams and others that they were worthy of peaceable affiliation. "Poor Pauline Varick" began to be a phrase, though a somewhat rare one, for without anybody actually wakening to the fact, she had been living abroad four whole years. And then, without the least warning, came the news that she was a widow.

She was universally expected home, then, after the tidings that her husband was positively dead had been confirmed beyond the slightest doubt. But perhaps for this reason Pauline chose to remain abroad another year. When she did return her widowhood was an established fact.

Her New York _clientele_ had grown used to it. Mr. Varick had left her all his fortune; she was a very wealthy young widow. Aggressive queries respecting his death, or his deportment during the foreign sojourn that preceded his death, were now quite out of order. She had buried him, as she had married him, decently and legally. He slept in Pere la Chaise, by his own _ante mortem_ request. No matter what sort of a life he had led her; it was n.o.body's business. She returned home, two years later, to take a high place and hold a high head. Those merciful intervening years shielded her from a mult.i.tude of stealthy interrogatories. She did not care to be questioned much regarding her European past as the wife of Mr. Varick, and she soon contrived to make it plain that she did not.

There was no dissentient voice in the verdict that she had greatly changed. And in a physical sense no one could deny that she had changed for the better.

Her figure, which had before been quite too thin despite its pliant grace, was now rounded into soft and charming curves. Her gray eyes sparkled less often, but they glowed with a steadier light for perhaps this reason; they looked as if more of life's earnest actualities had been reflected in them. Her face, with its chiselled features all blending to produce so high-bred and refined an expression, rarely broke into a smile now, but some unexplained fascination lay in its acquired seriousness, that made the smile of brighter quality and deeper import when it really came. She wore her copious and shining hair in a heavy knot behind, and let it ripple naturally toward either pure temple, instead of having it bush low down over her forehead in a misty turmoil, as previously. Her movements, her walk, her gestures, all retained the volatile briskness and freedom they had possessed of old; there was not even the first matronly hint about her air, and yet it was more self-poised, more emphatic, more womanly.

"I really must move out of this dreadful Bond Street," she said to Courtlandt, rather early in the conversation which took place between them on the day of their first meeting. "I think I could endure it for some time longer if that immense tailor-shop had not gone up there at the Broadway corner, where such a lovely, drowsy old mansion used to stand. Yes, I must let myself be compliantly swept further up town.

There is a kind of Franco-German tavern just across the way that advertises a 'regular dinner'--whatever that is--from twelve o'clock till three, every day, at twenty-five cents."

"I see you haven't forgotten our national currency," said Courtlandt, with one of his inscrutable dispositions of countenance.

Pauline tossed her head in a somewhat French way. "I have forgotten very little about my own country," she said.

"You are glad to get back to it, then?"

"Yes, very. I want to take a new view of it with my new eyes."

"You got a new pair of eyes in Europe?"

"I got an older pair." She looked at him earnestly for a moment. "Tell me, Court," she went on, "how is it that I find you still unmarried?"

He shifted in his chair, crossing his legs. "Oh," he said, "no nice girl has made me an offer."

Pauline laughed. "As if she'd be nice if she had! Do you remember how they used to say you would marry in the other set? Is there another set now?"

"There is a number of fresh ones. New York is getting bigger every day, you know. Young men are being graduated from college, young girls from seminaries. I forget just what special set you mean that you expected me to marry into."

"No, you don't!" cried Pauline, with soft positiveness. She somehow felt herself getting quietly back into the old easy terms with Courtlandt.

His sobriety, that never echoed her gay moods, yet always seemed to follow and enjoy them, had re-addressed her like a familiar though alienated friend. "You recollect perfectly how Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie used to lift that Roman nose of hers and declare that she would never allow her Sallie to know those fast Briggs and Snowe girls, who had got out because society had been neglected by all the real gentry in town for a s.p.a.ce of at least five years?"

Courtlandt gave one of his slow nods. "Oh, yes, I recollect. Aunt Cynthia was quite wrong. She's pulled in her horns since then. The Briggses and the Snowes were much too clever for her. They were always awfully well-mannered girls, too, besides being so jolly. They needed her, and they coolly made use of her, and of a good many revived leaders like her, besides. Most of the good men like them; that was their strong point. It was all very well to say they hadn't had ancestors who knew Ca.n.a.l Street when it was a ca.n.a.l, and shot deer on Twenty-Third Street; but that wouldn't do at all. No matter how their parents had made their money, they knew how to spend it like swells, and they had pushed themselves into power and were not to be elbowed out. The whole fight soon died a natural death. They and their supporters are nearly all married now and married pretty well."

"And you didn't marry one of them, Court?"

Courtlandt gave a slight, dry cough. "I'm under the impression, Pauline," he said, "that I did not."

"How long ago it all seems!" she murmured, drooping her blond head and fingering with one hand at a b.u.t.ton on the front of her black dress.

"It's only four years, and yet I fancy it to be a century." She raised her head. "Then the Knickerbockers, as we used to call them, no longer rule?"

Courtlandt laughed gravely. "I don't know that they ever did," he answered.

"Well, they used to give those dancing-cla.s.ses, you know, where n.o.body was ever admitted unless he or she had some sort of patrician claim.

Don't you recollect how Mrs. Schenectady, when she gave Lily a Delmonico Blue-Room party (do they have Delmonico Blue-Room parties, now?), instructed old Grace Church Brown to challenge at the Fourteenth Street entrance (where he would always wait as a stern horror for the coachmen of the arriving and departing carriages) anybody who did not present a certain mysterious little card at the sacred threshold?"

"Oh, yes," returned Courtlandt ruminatively.

"And how," continued Pauline, "that democratic Mrs. Vanderhoff happened to bring, on this same evening, some foreign gentleman who had dined with her, and whom she meant to present with an apologetic flourish to the Schenectadys, when suddenly the corpulent sentinel, Brown, desired from her escort the mysterious card, and finding it not to be forthcoming sent a messenger upstairs? And how Mr. Schenectady presently appeared and informed Mrs. Vanderhoff, with a cool sn.o.bbery which had something sublime about it, that he was exceedingly sorry, but the rule had been pa.s.sed regarding the admission of any non-invited guest to his entertainment?"

"Oh, yes; I remember it all," said Courtlandt. "Schenectady behaved like a cad. n.o.body is half so strict, nowadays, nor half so grossly uncivil.

You'll find society very much changed, if you go out. You'll see people whose names you never heard before. I sometimes think there's nothing required to make one's self a great swell nowadays except three possessions, all metallic--gold, silver, and bra.s.s."

"How amusing!" said Pauline. "And yet," she suddenly added, with a swift shake of the head, "I'm sure it will never amuse _me_! No, Court, I have grown a very different person from the ignorant girl you once saw me!"

She lowered her voice here, and regarded him with a tender yet impressive fixity. "When I look back upon it all now, and think how I used to hold the code of living which those people adopt as something that I must respect and even reverence, I can scarcely believe that the whole absurd comedy did not happen in some other planet. You don't know how much I've been through since you met me last. I'm not referring to my husband. It isn't pleasant for me to talk about _that_ part of the past. I wouldn't say even this much to any one except you; but now that I have said it, I'll say more, and tell you that I endured a good deal of solid trial, solid humiliation, solid heart-burning.... There, let us turn that page over, you and myself, and never exchange another word on the subject. You were perfectly right; the thing I did _was_ horrible, and I've bought my yards of sackcloth, my bushels of ashes. If it were to do over again, I'd rather beg, starve, die in the very gutter.

There's no exaggeration, here; I have grown to look on this human destiny of ours with such utterly changed vision--I've so broadened in a mental and moral sense, that my very ident.i.ty of the past seems as if it were something I'd moulted, like the old feathers of a bird. Feathers make a happy simile; I was lighter than a feather, then--as light as thistledown. I had no principles; I merely had caprices. I had no opinions of my own; other people's were handed to me and I blindly accepted them. My chief vice, which was vanity, I mistook for the virtue of self-respect, and kept it carefully polished, like a little pocket-mirror to look at one's face in. I was goaded by an actually sordid avarice, and I flattered myself that it was a healthy matrimonial ambition. I swung round in a petty orbit no larger than a saucer's rim, and imagined it to have the scope of a star's. I chattered gossip with fops of both s.e.xes, and called it conversation. I bounced and panted through the German for two hours of a night, and declared it to be enjoyment. I climbed up to the summit of a glaring yellow-wheeled drag and sat beside some man whose limited wit was entirely engrossed by the feat of driving four horses at once; and because poor people stopped to sigh, and silly ones to envy, and sensible ones to pity, as we rumbled up the Avenue in brazen ostentation, I considered myself an elect and exceptional being. Of course I must have had some kind of a better nature lying comatose behind all this placid tolerance of frivolity.

Otherwise the change never would have come; for the finest seed will fail if the soil is entirely barren."

"You have taken a new departure, with a vengeance," said Courtlandt. He spoke in his usual tranquil style. He considered the sketch Pauline had just drawn of her former self very exaggerated and prejudiced. He had his own idea of what she used to be. He was observing her with an excessive keenness of scrutiny, now, underneath his reposeful demeanor.

But he aired none of his contradictory beliefs. It is possible that he had never had a downright argument with any fellow-creature in his life.

Somehow the brief sentence which he had just spoken produced the impression of his having said a great deal more than this. It was always thus with the man; by reason of some unique value in his silence any terse variation of it took a reflected worth.

Pauline's hands were folded in her lap; she was looking down at them with a musing air. She continued to speak without lifting her gaze.

"Yes," she went on, "the reformatory impulse must have been latent all that time. I can't tell just what quickened it into its present activity. But I am sure, now, that it will last as long as I do."

"What are the wonders it is going to accomplish?"

"Don't satirize it," she exclaimed, looking up at him with a start. "It is a power for good."

"I hope so," he said.

"_I_ know so! Courtlandt, I've come back home to live after my own fashion. I've come back with an idea, a theory. Of course a good many people will laugh at me. I expect a certain amount of ridicule. But I shall despise it so heartily that it will not make me swerve a single inch. I intend to be very social--yes, enormously so. My drawing-rooms shall be the resort of as many friends as I can bring together--but all of a certain kind."

"Pray, of what kind?"

"You shall soon see. They are to be men and women of intellectual calibre; they are to be workers and not drones; they are to be thinkers, writers, artists, poets, scholars. They can come, if they please, in abnormal coats and unconventional gowns; I sha'n't care for that. They can be as poor as church mice, as unsuccessful as talent nearly always is, as quaint in manner as genius incessantly shows itself." Here Pauline rose, and made a few eloquent little gestures with both hands, while she moved about the room in a way that suggested the hostess receiving imaginary guests. "I mean to organize a _salon_," she continued--"a veritable _salon_. I mean to wage a vigorous crusade against the aimless flippancy of modern society. I've an enthusiasm for my new undertaking. Wait till you see how valiantly I shall carry it out."

"Am I to understand," said Courtlandt, without the vestige of a smile, "that you mean to begin by cutting all your former friends?"

She glanced at him as if with a suspicion of further satire. But his sedate mien appeared to rea.s.sure her. "Cutting them?" she repeated. "No; of course not."

"But you will not invite them to your _salon_?"

She tossed her head again. "They would be quite out of place there. They are not in earnest about anything. Everybody whom I shall have must be in earnest. I intend to lay great stress upon that one requirement. It is to be a pa.s.sport of admission. My apartments are to be at once easy and difficult of entrance. I shall not object to the so-called aristocratic cla.s.s, although if any applicant shall solicit my notice who is undoubtedly a member of this cla.s.s, I shall in a certain way hold the fact as disqualifying; it shall be remembered against him; if I admit him at all I shall do so in spite of it and not because of it.--Is my meaning quite clear on this point?"

"Oh, excessively," said Courtlandt; "you could not have made it more so.

All ladies and gentlemen are to be received under protest."

He let one of his odd, rare laughs go with the last sentence, and for this reason Pauline merely gave him a magnificent frown instead of visiting upon him more wrathful reprimand. At the same time she said: "It's a subject, Court, on which I am unprepared for trivial levity. If you can't treat it with respect I prefer that you should warn me in time, and I will reserve all further explanations of my project."

He gave a slight, ambiguous cough. "If I seem disrespectful you must lay it to my ignorance."

"I should be inclined to do that without your previous instructions."

Here she regarded him with a commiseration that he thought delicious; it was so palpably genuine; she so grandly overlooked the solemn roguery that ambuscaded itself behind his humility.

"You see," he went on, "I haven't learned the vocabulary of radicalism, so to speak. I think I know the fellows you propose to have; they wear long hair, quite often, and big cloaks instead of top-coats, and collars low enough in the neck to show a good deal of wind-pipe. As for the women, they"--

"It is perfectly immaterial to me how any of them may dress!" she interrupted, with majestic disapproval. "I ought to be very sorry for you, Courtlandt, and I am. You're clever enough not to let yourself rust, like this, all your days. I don't believe you've ever read one of the works of the great modern English thinkers. You're sluggishly satisfied to go jogging along in the same old ruts that humanity has worn deep for centuries. Of course you never had, and never will have, the least spark of enthusiasm. You're naturally lethargic; if a person stuck a pin into you I don't believe you would jump. But all this is no reason why you shouldn't try and live up to the splendid advancements of your age. When my const.i.tuents are gathered about me--when I have fairly begun my good work of centralizing and inspiriting my little band of sympathizers--when I have defined in a practical way my intended opposition to the vanities and falsities of existing creeds and tenets, why, then, I will let you mingle with my a.s.semblages and learn for yourself how you've been wasting both time and opportunity."

"That is extremely good of you," murmured Courtlandt imperturbably. "I supposed your doors were to be closed upon me for good and all."