The Adventures of a Widow Part 5

"This is the most luxurious way of enjoying the opera," he exclaimed, with an upward gesture of both hands to indicate the walls of the commodious box. "But, ah! I am afraid that it possesses its drawbacks as well! One would be tempted to talk too much here--to discountenance the performance. Now, I am an irreclaimable talker, as Mrs. Varick can testify; she has hardly done anything but listen since the beginning of our acquaintance. And yet I should like to feel that I had my tribute of silence always ready for the great musical masters. Among these I rank the Italian composers, whom it has now become fashionable to despise.

Pray, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, are you--or is your daughter?--a convert to what they term the new school?"

There was no ignoring the felicitous, rhythmic voice that p.r.o.nounced these hurried and yet clearly enunciated sentences, unless by means of an insolence so direct and cruel that it would transgress all bounds of civil decency. Mrs. Poughkeepsie was capable of not a little insolence at a pinch; her ramparts were spiked, and could deal no gentle hurts to those who sought anything like the scaling of them. But here the overtures made were alike too suave and too bold. She felt herself in the presence of a novel civility--one that a.s.sumed her rebuff to be impossible.

"I have always preferred the Italian music," she now said. "But then my knowledge of the German is limited."

"Oh, German music is the most dreadful baw!" here struck in Lord Glenartney. He had taken an immediate fancy to Kindelon; he liked people who were in a different sphere from himself; he usually went with jockeys and prize-fighters, whenever the demands of his great position permitted such a.s.sociation, in his native country. Here in America he knew only the Poughkeepsie set, which had seized upon him and kept close watch over him ever since he had landed in New York.

"No, I don't at all agree with you there," said Kindelon. "Undoubtedly German music is based upon a grand idea. I should be sorry not to believe so."

"Bless my soul!" laughed his lordship; "I don't know anything about grand ideahs. The small ones are quite as much as I can manage comfortably."

"Mr. Kindelon will be shocked by such a confession, I'm sure," said the gentleman named Fyshkille, who was strikingly slim, who gazed at people condescendingly over a pale parapet of very stiff shirt-collar, and who considered himself to have a natural turn for satire. "He appears to be a person of such grand ideas himself."

This airy bit of impudence caused Mr. Van Arsdale to twirl one end of a dim, downy mustache and perpetrate a rather ambiguous giggle. But Mr.

Hackensack, who was stout, with a pair of large black eyes set in a fat, colorless, mindless face, whipped forth a silk pocket-handkerchief and gave an explosive burst of merriment within its soft folds.

"You seem to be very much amused at something," drawled Sallie, while she looked in her languid way toward her trio of admirers.

"We are," said the satirical Mr. Fyshkille, who prided himself on always keeping his countenance. His two friends, who thought him a devilish clever fellow, both produced another laugh, this time suppressed on the part of each.

Pauline felt keenly annoyed. She glanced at Kindelon, telling herself that he must surely see the pitiable ridicule of which he was being made the b.u.t.t.

She had, however, quite miscalculated. The self-esteem of Kindelon as utterly failed to realize that he was an object of the slightest banter, whether overt or covert, as though he had been both near-sighted and deaf. He knew nothing of the idle autocracy with which accident had now brought him into contact. He was opposed to it on principle, but he had had no experience of its trivial methods of arrogance. He had come into the box to see Pauline, and he took it broadly for granted that he would be treated with politeness by her surrounders, and listened to (provided he a.s.sumed that office of general spokesman which he nearly always a.s.sumed wherever chance placed him) with admiring attention.

A few minutes later he had stripped his would-be foes of all sting by effectively and solidly manifesting unconsciousness that they had intended to be hostile. He talked of Wagner and his followers with a brilliant force that did not solicit heed and yet compelled it. He discoursed upon the patent absurdities of Italian opera with a nimble wit and an incisive severity. Then he justified his preference for Donizetti and Rossini with a readiness that made his past sarcasm on their modes quickly forgotten. And finally he delivered a eulogy upon the German motive and ideal in music which showed the fine liberality of a mind that recognizes the shortcomings in its own predilection, and foresees the inevitable popularity of a more advanced and complicated system.

He had silenced everybody before he finished, but with the silence of respect. He had forced even these petty triflers who dwelt on the mere skirts of all actual life, to recognize him as not simply the comer from a world which they did not care to know about, but from a world greater and higher than any which they were capable of knowing about. And finally, in the flush of this handsome little triumph, he made his exit, just as the curtain was again rising, after a few murmured words to Pauline regarding certain night-work on the New York "Asteroid," which must prevent him from seeing the remainder of the performance.

n.o.body heeded the opera for at least five minutes after his departure.

He had left his spell behind him. Pauline at first marked its cogency, and then observed this gradually dissolve. The flimsiness of their thinking and living returned to them again in all its paltry reality.

"Of course," murmured Mrs. Poughkeepsie to Pauline, "he is a person who writes books, of one sort or another."

"If they're novels," said Lord Glenartney, "I'd like awfully to know abaout 'em. I'm fond of readin' a good novel. It's so jolly if one's lyin' daown and carn't sleep, but feels a bit seedy, ye know."

"I fancy they must be rather long novels," said Sallie, with a drowsy scorn that suited her big, placid anatomy.

"I wish he'd not run off so; I wanted the address of his hatter,"

declared the envenomed Mr. Fyshkille.

"Or his tailor," amended Mr. Van Arsdale, with the auxiliary giggle.

"I guess you'd find both somewhere in the Bowery," pursued the fleshy Mr. Hackensack, who always said "I guess," for "I fancy," and had a nasal voice, and an incorrigible American soul inside his correct foreign garments.

Pauline now swept a haughty look at Mr. Fyshkille and his two allies, and said, with open displeasure,--

"I suppose you think it an unpardonable sin for any gentleman to suit his own taste in dress, and not copy that of some English model. But your uncivil comments on Mr. Kindelon before myself, his admitted friend, show me that he might easily teach you a lesson in good manners."

All three of the offenders were now forced to utter words of apology, while Lord Glenartney looked as if he thought Mrs. Varick's wrath great fun, and Sallie exchanged a look of ironical distress with her mother, that seemed to inquire: "What uncomfortable absurdity will Pauline next be guilty of?"

But Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie left their kinswoman at her Bond Street residence that night with very agreeable adieus. True, Lord Glenartney occupied a seat in their carriage, but even if this had not been the case, neither mother nor daughter would have vented upon Pauline any of the disapproval she had provoked in them. She was now a power in the world, and besides being near to them in blood, even her follies merited the leniency of a Poughkeepsie.

But after Sallie and her mother had said good-night to his lordship and were alone at home together, the young lady spoke with querulous disgust of her cousin's behavior.

"She will lose caste horribly, mamma, if she goes on in this way. It's perfectly preposterous! If there is one thing on earth that is really _low_, it's for a woman to become strong-minded!"

Mrs. Poughkeepsie nodded. "You are quite right. But she's her own mistress, and there is no restraining her."

"People _ought_ to be restrained," grumbled Sallie, loosening her opera cloak, "when they want to throw away their positions like that."

"Oh, Pauline can't throw hers away so easily," affirmed Mrs.

Poughkeepsie with sapient composure. "No, not with her name and her big income. She will merely get herself laughed at, you know--_encanailler_ herself most ludicrously; that is all. We must let her have her head, as one says of a horse. Her father was always full of caprices; he wouldn't have died a poor man if he had not been. She merely has a caprice now.

Of course she will come to terms again with society sooner or later, and repent having made such a goose of herself. That is, unless"--And here Mrs. Poughkeepsie paused, while a slight but distinct shudder ended her sentence.

Sallie gave a faint, harsh laugh. "Oh, I understand you thoroughly, mamma," she exclaimed. "You mean unless some common man like that Mr.

Kindelon should induce her to marry him. How awful such a thing would be! I declare, the very thought of it is sickening! With that superb fortune, too! I shouldn't be surprised if he had proposed already!

Perhaps she has only been preparing us gradually for the frightful news that she has accepted him!"

But no such frightful news reached the Poughkeepsies, as day succeeded day. Pauline went little into the fashionable throngs, which were at the height of their winter gayeties. She soon quitted her Bond Street residence for good, and secured a small bas.e.m.e.nt-house on a side street near Fifth Avenue, furnishing it with that speed in the way of luxurious appointment which a plethoric purse so readily commands.

"I am quite prepared now," she said to Kindelon one morning, after having received him in her new and lovely sitting-room, where everything was unique and choice, from the charming chandelier of twisted silver to the silken j.a.panese screen, rich with bird and flower in gold and crimson. "Of course you understand what I mean."

He affected not to do so. "Prepared?" he repeated, with the gay gleam slipping into his eyes. "For what?"

"My _salon_, of course."

"Oh," he said. "I confess that I suspected what you meant, though I was not quite sure. I almost feared lest your resolution might have undergone a change of late."

"And pray, why?" asked Pauline, raising her brows, with a little imperious smile.

"You have not mentioned the project for surely a good fortnight," he returned. "I had wondered whether or no it had weakened with you."

"It is stronger than ever," Pauline a.s.severated. She folded her hands in her lap and tried to look excessively firm and resolute. She was always particularly handsome when she tried to look thus; she was just slender and feminine enough in type to make the a.s.sumption of strength, of determination, especially becoming.

"Ah, very well," replied Kindelon, with one of his richly expressive smiles. "Then I have a proposition to make you. It concerns an immediate course of action on your part. Have you ever heard of Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares?"

Pauline burst into a laugh. "No. It sounds more like an affirmation than a name--'Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares.' One feels like saying, 'Does she?' Don't think me irredeemably trifling, and please continue. Please tell me, I mean, what remarkable things has this remarkably-named lady done?"

"Nothing."

Pauline's face, full of a pleased antic.i.p.ation, fell. "Nothing! How tiresome!"

"I mean nothing remarkable," Kindelon went on, "in the luminously intellectual sense. And yet she is a very extraordinary woman. At twenty-five she was divorced from her husband."

Pauline shook her head troubledly. "That does not sound at all promising."

"He was a dissolute wretch. The courts easily granted her a release from him. At this time she was almost penniless. The question, as she had two little children, naturally arose: 'How are we three to live?' She had been reared in a New England home; her dead father had been a man of extensive learning, and at one time the princ.i.p.al of a successful school. Hagar had always had 'a taste for writing,' as we call it. She began by doing criticisms for a New York journal of rather scholarly tendency, whose editor had combined pity for her almost starving condition with appreciation of her undoubted talents. But the prices that the poor struggling young mother received were necessarily very meagre. She became practical. She asked herself if there was no other way of earning money by her pen. She soon discovered a way; it did not require her to know about Diderot and Strauss and Spinoza, with all of whose writings (and with many cla.s.sics more of equal fame) she was finely familiar; it simply required that she should lay aside every vestige of literary pride and write _practically_. Good Heavens! what a word that word 'practical' is in literature! You must tell the people how to bake a pie, to cure a headache, to bleach a shirt, to speak the truth, to clean silverware, to make a proposal of marriage. Mrs. Dares did it in country letters, in city letters, in newspaper editorials, in anonymous fine-print columns, in the back parts of fashion and household magazines--and she does it still. For a number of years past she has superintended a periodical of the popular sort, which I dare say you have never heard of. The amount of work that she accomplishes is enormous. A strong man would stagger under it, but this frail woman (you'll think her frail when you see her) bears it with wondrous endurance. Her life has been a terrible failure, looked at from one point of view--for it is scarcely exaggeration to say that had she not been handicapped by poverty in the beginning she might have swayed and charmed her generation with great books. But from another point of view her life has been a sublime success; she has trampled all aspiration under foot, forsworn every impulse of honorable egotism, and toiled for the maintenance of a home, for the education of her two daughters. They are both grown up, now--girls who are themselves bread-winners like their mother, and bearing their yoke of labor as cheerfully, though not with the same splendid strength, as she. One is a school-teacher in a well-known _kindergarten_ here, and one has become an artist of no contemptible ability. Meanwhile Mrs. Dares has not merely established a pleasant and refined household; she has caused to be diffused from it, as a social centre, the warm radiations of a sweet, wholesome hospitality. Like some of the high-born Fifth Avenue leaders of fashion, she has her 'evenings.' But they are of a totally different character.