It is not long ago that the last conservative resident of Bond Street,
proud of his ancient possessorship and no doubt loving the big brick
structure with arched doorway and dormer windows in which he first saw
the light, felt himself relentlessly swept from that interesting quarter
by the stout besom of commerce. Interesting the street really is for all
to whom old things appeal with any charm. It is characteristic of our
brilliant New York, however, that few antiquarian feet tread her
pavements, and that she is too busy with her bustling and thrifty
present to reflect that she has ever reached it through a noteworthy
past. Some day it will perhaps be recorded of her that among all cities
she has been the least preservative of tradition and memorial. The hoary
antiquity of her transatlantic sisters would seem to have made her
unduly conscious of her own youth. She has so long looked over seas for
all her history and romance, that now, when she can safely boast two
solid centuries of age, the habit yet firmly clings, and she cares as
little for the annals of her fine and stately growth as though, like
Troy, she had risen, roof and spire, to the strains of magic melody.
It might be of profit, and surely it would be of pleasure, were she to
care more for the echoes of those harsh and sometimes tragic sounds that
have actually blent their serious music with her rise. As it is, she is
rich in neglected memories; she has tombs that dumbly reproach her
ignoring eye; she has nooks and purlieus that teem with reminiscence and
are silent testimonials of her indifference. Her Battery and her Bowling
Green, each bathed in the tender glamour of Colonial association, lie
frowned upon by the grim scorn of recent warehouses and jeered at by the
sarcastic shriek of the neighboring steam-tug. She can easily guide you
to the modern clamors of her Stock-Exchange; but if you asked her to
show you the graves of Stuyvesant and Montgomery she might find the task
a hard one, though thousands of her citizens daily pass and re-pass
these hallowed spots. Boston, with its gentle ancestral pride, might
well teach her a lesson in retrospective self-esteem. Her own harbor,
like that of Boston, has had its "tea-party," and yet one whose
anniversary now remains a shadow. On Golden Hill, in her own streets,
the first battle of our Revolution was fought, the first blood in the
cause of our freedom was spilled; yet while Boston stanchly commemorates
its later "massacre," what tribute of oratory, essay or song has that
other momentous contest received? This metropolitan disdain of local
souvenir can ill excuse itself on the plea of intolerance toward
provincialism; for if the great cities of Europe are not ashamed to
admit themselves once barbaric, Hudson in fray or traffic with the
swarthy Manhattans, or old Van Twiller scowling at the anathemas of
Bogardus, holds at least a pictorial value and significance.
Bond Street has always been but a brief strip of thoroughfare, running
at right angles between the Bowery and Broadway. Scarcely more than
thirty years ago it possessed the quietude and dignity of a patrician
domain; it was beloved of our Knickerbocker social element; it was the
tranquil stronghold of caste and exclusiveness. Its births, marriages
and deaths were all touched with a modest distinction. Extravagance was
its horror and ostentation its antipathy. The cheer of its
entertainments would often descend to lemonade and sponge-cake, and
rarely rise above the luxury of claret-punch and ice-cream. Its belles
were of demurer type than the brisk-paced ladies of this period, and its
beaux paid as close heed to the straight line in morals as many of their
successors now bestow upon it in the matter of hair-parting. Bond Street
was by no means the sole haunt of the aristocracy, but it was very
representative, very important, very select. There was even a time when
to live there at all conferred a certain patent of respectability. It
was forgiven you that your daughter had married an obscure Smith, or
that your son had linked his lot with an undesirable Jones, if you had
once come permanently to dwell there. The whole short, broad street was
superlatively genteel. Nothing quite describes it like that pregnant
little word. It dined at two o'clock; it had "tea" at six; its parties
were held as dissipated if they broke up after midnight; its young men
"called" on its young women of an evening with ceremonious regularity,
never at such times donning the evening-coat and the white neck-tie
which now so widely obtain, but infallibly wearing these on all
occasions of afternoon festivity with an unconcern of English usage that
would keenly shock many of their descendants.
But by degrees the old order changed. Commerce pushed northward with
relentless energy. Its advance still left Bond Street uninvaded, but
here and there the roomy brick dwellings received distinctly plebeian
inmates. One night, in this street formerly so dedicated to the calm of
refinement, a frightful murder occurred. No one who lived in New York at
that time can fail to remember the Burdell assassination. It was
surrounded by all the most melodramatic luridness of commission. Its
victim was a dentist, slaughtered at midnight with many wounds from an
unknown hand. The mysterious deed shook our whole city with dismay. For
weeks it was a topic that superseded all others. To search through old
newspapers of the excited days that followed is to imagine oneself on
the threshold of a thrilling tale, in which the wrong culprits are
arraigned and the real offender hides himself behind so impregnable an
ambush that nothing but a final chapter can overthrow it. Yet in this
ghastly affair of the stabbed dentist a protracted trial resulted in a
tame acquittal and no more. The story ended abruptly and midway. It lies
to-day as alluring material for the writer of harrowing fiction. It
still retains all the ghastly piquancy of an undiscovered crime.
The vast surrounding populace of New York have long ago learned to
forget it, but there would be truth in the assertion that Bond Street
recalls it still. Its garish publicity scared away the last of her
fine-bred denizens. The retreat was haughty and gradual, but it is now
absolute. Where Ten Eyck and Van Horn had engraved their names in burly
letters on sheeny door-plates, you may see at present the flaunting
signs of a hair-dresser, a beer-seller, a third-rate French
_restaurateur_, a furrier, a flower-maker, and an intercessor between
despairing authors and obdurate publishers. The glory of Bond Street has
departed. Its region has become lamentably "down town." The spoilers
possess it with undisputed rule. It is in one sense a melancholy ruin,
in another a sprightly transformation.
But several years before its decadence turned unargued fact (and now we
near a time that almost verges upon the present), Mr. Hamilton Varick, a
gentleman well past fifty, brought into perhaps the most spacious
mansion of the street a bride scarcely eighteen. Mr. Varick had lived
abroad for many years, chiefly in Paris. He was a tall, spare man, with
a white jaunty mustache and a black eye full of fire. He was extremely
rich, and unless remote relations were considered, heirless. It was
generally held that he had come home to end his days after a life of
foreign folly and gallantry. This may at first have seemed wholly true,
but it also occurred that he had chosen to end them in the society of a
blooming young wife.
His Bond Street house, vacant for years, suddenly felt the embellishing
spell of the upholsterer. Mr. Varick had meanwhile dropped into the
abodes of old friends not seen in twenty years, had shaken hands, with a
characteristic lightsome cordiality, right and left, had beamingly taken
upon his lap the children of mothers and fathers who were once his
youthful comrades in dance and rout, had reminded numerous altered
acquaintances who he was, had been reminded in turn by numerous other
altered acquaintances who they were, had twisted his white mustache, had
talked with airy patriotism about getting back to die in one's native
land, had deplored his long absence from the dear scenes of youth, had
regretted secretly his transpontine Paris, had murmured his bad, witty
French _mots_ to whatever matron would hear them, had got himself
re-made a member of the big, smart Metropolitan Club which he thought a
mere tiresome sort of parochial tavern when he last left it, and had
finally amazed everyone by marrying the young and lovely Miss Pauline
Van Corlear.
Pauline herself had very little to do with the whole arrangement. She
was the only child of a widowed mother who had long ago designed to
marry her notably. Mrs. Van Corlear lived upon a very meagre income, and
had been an invalid since Pauline was eight. But she had educated her
daughter with a good deal of patient care, and had ultimately, at the
proper age, relegated her to the chaperonage of a more prosperous
sister, who had launched her forth into society with due _elan_. Pauline
was not a good match in the mercenary sense; she was perfectly well
aware of the fact; she had been brought up to understand it. But she was
fair to see, and perhaps she understood this a little too well.
New York was then what so many will remember it to have been about
twelve years ago. The civil war had left few traces of disaster; it was
the winter of seventy-one. Wall Street was in a hey-day of hazardous
prosperity; sumptuous balls were given by cliques of the most careful
entertainers; a number of ladies who had long remained unfashionable,
yet who had preserved an inherited right to assert social claim when
they chose, now came to the front. These matrons proved a strong force,
and resisted in sturdy confederacy all efforts of outsiders to break
their dainty ranks. They shielded under maternal wings a delightful bevy
of blooming young maidens, among whom was Pauline Van Corlear.
It was a season of amusing conflict. Journalism had not yet learned to
fling its lime-light of notoriety upon the doings and mis-doings of
private individuals. Young girls did not wake then, as now, on the
morning after a ball, to read (or with jealous heart-burning _not_ to
read) minute descriptions of their toilets on the previous night. The
"society column" of the New York newspaper was still an unborn
abomination. Had this not been the case, a great deal of pungent scandal
might easily have found its way into print. The phalanx of assertive
matrons roundly declared that they had found society in a deplorable
condition. The balls, receptions and dinners were all being given by a
horde of persons without grandfathers. The reigning belles were mostly a
set of loud, rompish girls, with names that rang unfamiliarly. The good
old people had nearly all been drowsing inactive during several winters;
one could hardly discover an Amsterdam, a Spuytenduyvil, a Van
Schuylkill, among this unpleasant rabble. There had been quite too many
of these spurious pretenders. Legitimacy must uplift its debased
standards.
Legitimacy did so, and with a will. Some very fine and spacious mansions
in districts bordering or approximate to Washington Square were
hospitably thrown open, besides others of a smarter but less
time-honored elegance in "up-town" environments. The new set, as it was
called, carried things by storm. They were for the most part very rich
people, and they spent their wealth with a lavish freedom that their
lineage saved from the least charge of vulgarity. No display of money is
ever considered vulgar when lineage is behind it. If you are unblessed
with good descent you must air your silver dishes cautiously and heed
well the multiplicity of your viands; for though your cook possess an
Olympian palate and your butler be the ex-adherent of a king, the
accusation of bad taste hangs like a sword of threat in your banquet
hall.
Among all the winsome _debutantes_ of that season, Pauline Van Corlear
was the most comely. She had a sparkling wit, too, that was at times
mercilessly acute. Most of the young friends with whom she had
simultaneously "come out" were heiresses of no mean consideration; but
Pauline was so poor that an aunt would present her with a few dozens of
gloves, a cousin would donate to her five or six fresh gowns, or perhaps
one still more distant in kinship would supply her with boots and
bonnets. The girl sensitively shrank, at first, from receiving these
gifts; but her plaintive, faded mother, with her cough and querulous
temper, would always eagerly insist upon their acceptance.
"Of course, my dear," Mrs. Van Corlear would say, in her treble pipe of
a voice, while she rocked to and fro the great chair that bore her
wasted, shawl-wrapped body--"of course it is quite right that your
blood-relations should come forward. They all have plenty of money, and
it would be dreadful if they let you go out looking shabby and forlorn.
For my part, I'm only surprised that they don't do more."
"I expect nothing from them, mamma," Pauline would say, a little sadly.
"_Expect_, my dear? Of course you don't. But that doesn't alter the
_obligation_ on their part. Now please do not be obstinate; you know my
neuralgia always gets worse when you're obstinate. You are very
pretty--yes, a good deal prettier than Gertie Van Horn or Sallie
Poughkeepsie, with all their millions--and I haven't a doubt that before
the winter is over you'll have done something really handsome for
yourself. If you haven't, it will be your own fault."
Pauline clearly understood that to do something handsome for herself
meant to marry a rich man. From a tender age she had been brought up to
believe that this achievement was the goal of all hopes, desires and
aims. Everybody expected it of her, as she grew prettier and prettier;
everybody hinted or prophesied it to her long before she "came out." The
little contracted and conventional world in which it was her misfortune
to breathe and move, had forever dinned it into her ears until she had
got to credit it as an article of necessitous faith. There are customs
of the Orient that shock our Western intelligences when we read of women
placidly accepting their tyrannies; but no almond-eyed daughter of pasha
or vizier ever yielded more complaisantly to harem-discipline than
Pauline now yielded to the cold, commercial spirit of the marriage
decreed for her.
She was popular in society, notwithstanding her satiric turn. She always
had a nosegay for the German, and a partner who had pre-engaged her. It
was not seldom that she went to a ball quite laden with the floral boons
of male admirers. Among these latter was her third cousin, then a
gentleman of thirty, named Courtlandt Beekman. Courtlandt had been
Pauline's friend from childhood. She had always been so fond of him that
it had never occurred to her to analyze her fondness now, when they met
under the festal glare of chandeliers instead of in her mother's plain,
dull sitting-room. Nor had it ever occurred to any of her relations to
matrimonially warn her against Courtlandt. He was such a nice, quiet
fellow; naturally he was good to his little cousin; he was good to
everybody, and now that Pauline had grown up and begun to go to places,
his devotion took a brotherly form. Of course he was poor, and, if
sensible, would marry rich. He had been going about for an age in "that
other set." He knew the Briggs girls and the Snowe girls, and all the
_parvenu_ people who had been ruling at assemblies and dancing-classes
during the dark interregnum. Perhaps he would marry a Briggs or a Snowe.
If he did, it would be quite proper. He was Courtlandt Beekman, and his
name would sanctify nearly any sort of Philistine bride. But no one ever
dreamed of suspecting that he might want to marry the cousin, twelve
years his junior, who had sat on his knee as a school-girl, munching the
candies he used to bring her and often pelting him with childish
railleries at the same ungrateful moment.
In person Courtlandt was by no means prepossessing. He had a tall,
brawny figure, and a long, sallow face, whose unclassic irregularities
might have seemed dull and heavy but for the brown eyes, lucid and
variant, that enlivened it. He was a man of few words, but his silences,
though sometimes important, were never awkward. No one accused him of
stupidity, but no one had often connected him with the idea of
cleverness. He produced the impression of being a very close observer,
you scarcely knew why. Possibly it was because you felt confident that
his silences were not mentally vacuous. He had gone among the gay
throngs almost since boyhood; if he had not so persistently mingled with
ladies (and in the main very sweet and cultured ones, notwithstanding
the denunciations hurled against "that other set") it is probable that
he would continuously have merited the title of ungainly and graceless.
But ease and polish had come to him unavoidably; he was like some
rough-shapen vessel that has fallen into the hands of the gilder and
decorator. It would have been hard to pick a flaw in his manners, and
yet his manners were the last thing that he made you think about. He was
in constant social demand; his hosts and hostesses forgot how valuable
to them he really was; he almost stood for that human miracle, a man
without enemies. He made a kind of becoming background for nearly
everybody; he had no axe to grind, no ladder to climb, no prize to win;
he stood neither as debtor nor creditor toward society; he was, in a
way, society itself. There were very few women who did not enjoy a chat
with him _a deux_; and in all general conversation, though his attitude
was chiefly that of listener, the talkers themselves were unaware how
often they sought the response of his peculiar serious smile, or the
intelligent gleam of his look.
Pauline had not been greatly troubled, on her advent among the
merry-makers, with that timidity which is so keen a distress to so many
callow maids. Bashfulness was not one of her weak points; she had borne
the complex stare levelled at her in drawing-rooms with excellent
_aplomb_. Still, she could not help feeling that her kinsman,
Courtlandt, had comfortably smoothed her path toward an individual and
secure foothold. Those early intervals, dire to the soul of every novice
like herself, when male adherence and escort failed through meagreness
of acquaintanceship, Courtlandt had filled with the supporting relief of
his presence and his attentions. There had been no _mauvais quart
d'heure_ in Pauline's evenings; her cousin had loyally saved her from
even the momentary chagrin of being left without a courtier. Later on,
his kindly vigilance had become needless; but he was always to be
trusted, nevertheless, as a safeguard against possible desertion.
The occasion on which Mr. Hamilton Varick first saw Pauline was at a
ball given in the February of her first season, two full months after
she had modestly emerged with her little sisterhood of rosebud damsels.
It was a very beautiful ball, given in a stately and lovely house
adjacent to the Park, and by a lady now old and wrinkled, who had held
her own, forty years ago, as a star in our then limited firmament of
fashion. The dancers, among whom was her fair and smiling granddaughter
of eighteen, chased the jolly hours in a spacious apartment, brilliant
with prismatic candelabra and a lustrous floor of waxed wood. The
rosy-and-white frescoes on the ceiling, the silver-fretted delicacy of
frieze and cornice, the light, pure blues and pinks of tapestries, the
airy and buoyant effects in tint and symmetry, made the whole
quick-moving throng of revellers appear as if the past had let them live
again out of some long-vanished French court-festival.
"These young people only need powdered heads to make it look as if Louis
Quinze were entertaining us in dead earnest," said Mr. Varick, with his
high-keyed, nonchalant voice. He addressed an elderly matron as he
spoke, but he gave a covert glance at Pauline, to whom he had just
received, through request, the honor of a presentation.
"I think it would be in very dead earnest if he did," said Pauline,
speaking up with a gay laugh; and Mr. Varick laughed, too, relishing her
pert joke. He paid her some gallant compliments as he stood at her side,
though she thought them stiff and antique in sound, notwithstanding the
foreign word or phrase that was so apt to tinge them. She found Mr.
Varick pleasantest when he was asking after her sick mother, and telling
her what New York gayeties used to be before the beginning of his long
European absence. He had a tripping, lightsome mode of speech, that
somehow suited the jaunty upward sweep of his white mustache. He would
oscillate both hands in a graceful style as he talked. Elegant
superficiality flowed from him without an effort. It needed no keenness
to tell that he had been floating buoyantly on the top crest of the
wave, and well amid its froth, all his life. He made no pretense to
youth; he would, indeed, poke fun at his own seniority, with a
relentless and breezy sort of melancholy.
"Did you ever hear of a French poet named Francois Villon," he said to
Pauline, dropping into a seat at her side that some departure had just
left vacant. "No, I dare say you've not. He was a dreadful chap--a kind
of _polisson_, as we say, but he wrote the most charming ballads; I
believe he was hanged afterward, or ought to have been--I forget which.
One of his songs had a sad little refrain that ran thus: '_Ou sont les
neiges d'antan?_'--'Where are the snows of last year?' you know. Well,
mademoiselle--no, Miss Pauline, I mean--that line runs in my head
to-night. _Ca me gene_--it bothers me. I want to have the good things of
youth back again. I come home to New York, and find my snow all melted.
Everything is changed. I feel like a ghost--a merry old ghost, however.
_Tenez_--just wait a bit. Do you think those nice young gentlemen will
have anything to say to you after they have seen you a little longer in
my company? I'm sure I have frightened four or five of them away.
They're asking each other, now, who is that old _epouvantail_--what is
the word?--scarecrow. Ah! _voila_--here comes one much bolder than the
rest. I will have mercy on him--and retire. But before my _depart_ I
have a favor to request of you. You will give mamma my compliments? You
will tell her that I shall do myself the honor of calling upon her?
Thanks, very much. We shall be ghosts together, poor mamma and I; you
need not be _chez vous_ when I call, unless you are quite willing--that
is, if you are afraid of ghosts."
"Oh, I'm not," laughed Pauline. "I don't believe in them, Mr. Varick."
"That is delightful for you to say!" her companion exclaimed. "It means
that you will listen for a little while to our spectral conversation and
not find it too _ennuyeuse_. How very kind of you! Ah! we old fellows
are sometimes very grateful for a few crumbs of kindness!"
"You can have a whole loaf from me, if you want," said Pauline, with an
air of girlish diversion.
Not long afterward she declared to her cousin, Courtlandt: "I like the
old gentleman ever so much, Court. He's a refreshing change. You New
York men are all cut after the same pattern."
"I'm afraid he's cut with a rather crooked scissors," said Courtlandt,
who indulged in a sly epigram oftener than he got either credit or
discredit for doing.
"Oh," said Pauline, as if slowly understanding. "You mean he is
_French_, I suppose."
"Quite French, they report."
Mr. Varick made his promised visit upon Pauline and her mother sooner
than either of them expected. Mrs. Van Corlear was rather more ill than
usual, on the day he appeared, and almost the full burden of the ensuing
conversation fell upon her daughter.
The next evening, at the opera, he dropped into a certain box where
Pauline was seated with her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie. On the following
day Pauline received, anonymously, an immense basket of exquisite
flowers. Twice again Mr. Varick called upon her mother, in the charmless
upstairs sitting-room of their boarding house. As it chanced, Pauline
was not at home either time.
An evening or two afterward she returned at about eleven o'clock from a
theatre party, to find that her mother had not yet retired. Mrs. Van
Corlear's usual bed-time was a very exact ten o'clock.
The mother and daughter talked for a little while together in low tones.
When Pauline went into her own chamber that night, her face was pale and
her heart was beating.
At a great afternoon reception which took place two days later,
Courtlandt, who made his appearance after five o'clock, coming up town
from the law-office in which he managed by hard work to clear a yearly
two thousand dollars or so, said to his cousin, with a sharpened and
rather inquisitive look:
"What's the matter? You don't seem to be in good spirits."
Pauline looked at him steadily for a moment. It was a great crush, and
people were babbling all about them. "There's something I want to speak
of," the girl presently said, in a lingering way.
A kind of chill stole through Courtlandt's veins at this,--he did not
know why; he always afterward had a lurking credence in the truth of
presentments.
"What is it?" he asked.
Pauline told him what it was. He grew white as he listened, and a
glitter crept into his eyes, and brightened there.
"You're not going to _do_ it?" he said, when she had finished.
She made no answer. She had some flowers knotted in the bosom of her
walking dress, and she now looked down at them. They were not the
flowers Mr. Varick had sent; they were a bunch bestowed by Courtlandt
himself at a little informal dance of the previous evening, where the
cotillon had had one pretty floral figure. She regarded their petals
through a mist of unshed tears, now, though her cousin did not know it.
He repeated his question, bending nearer. It seemed to him as if the sun
in heaven must have stopped moving until she made her answer.
"You know what mamma is, Court," she faltered.
"Yes, I do. She has very false views of many things. But you have not.
You can't be sold without your own consent."
"Let us go away from here together," she murmured. "These rooms are so
hot and crowded that I can hardly breathe in them."
He gave her his arm, and they pushed their way forth into a neighboring
hall through one of the broad yet choked doorways.
Outside, in Fifth Avenue, the February twilight had just begun to
deepen. The air was mild though damp; a sudden spell of clemency had
enthralled the weather, and the snow, banked in crisp pallor along the
edge of either sidewalk, would soon shrink and turn sodden. At the far
terminus of every western street burned a haze of dreamy gold light
where the sun had just dropped from view, but overhead the sky had that
treacherous tint of vernal amethyst which is so often a delusive snare
to the imprudent truster of our mutable winters. Against this vapory
mildness of color the house-tops loomed sharp and dark; a humid wind
blew straight from the south; big and small sleighs were darting along,
with the high, sweet carillons of their bells now loud and now low;
through the pavements that Courtlandt and Pauline were treading, great
black spots of dampness had slipped their cold ooze, to tell of the thaw
that lay beneath. Yesterday the sky had been a livid and frosty azure,
and the sweep of the arctic blast had had the cut of a blade in it;
to-day the city was steeped in a languor of so abrupt a coming that you
felt its peril while you owned its charm. Courtlandt broke the silence
that had followed their exit. He spoke as if the words forced themselves
between his shut teeth.
"I can't believe that you really mean to do it," he said, watching
Pauline's face as she moved onward, looking neither to right nor left.
"It would be horrible of you! He is over sixty if he's a day, besides
having been mixed up in more than one scandal with women over there in
Paris. I think it must be all a joke on your part. If it is, I wish for
God's sake that you'd tell me so, Pauline!"
"It isn't," she said. She turned her face to his, then, letting him see
how pale and sad it was. "I must do it, Court," she went on. "It's like
a sort of fate, forcing and dragging me. I had no business to mention
mamma in the matter, I suppose. She couldn't _make_ me consent, of
course, although, if I did not, her lamentations would take a most
distracting form for the next year or two. No; it's not she; it's
myself. I don't live in a world where people hold very high views of
matrimony. And I hate the life I'm living now. The other would be
independence, even if bought at a dear price. And how many girls would
envy me my chance? What am I at present but a mere pensioner on my
wealthy relatives? I can't stay in; I've started with the whirl, and I
can't stop. Everybody whom I know is dancing along at the same pace. If
I declined invitations; if I didn't do as all the other girls are doing;
if I said 'No, I'm poor and can't afford it,'--then mamma would begin
tuning her harp and sending up her wail. And I should be bored to death,
besides." Here Pauline gave a hollow laugh, and slightly threw back her
head. "Good Heavens!" she continued, "there's nothing strange in it.
I've been brought up to expect it; I knew it would probably come, and I
was taught, prepared, warned, to regard it when it did come in only one
way. If he hadn't been old he might have been shocking. What a piercing
pertinence there is to my case in that little proverb, 'Beggars mustn't
be choosers!' I'm a beggar, you know: ask Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie if
she doesn't think I am. And _he's_ quite the reverse of shocking, truly.
His hair may be rather white, but his teeth are extremely so, and I
think they're indigenous, aboriginal; I hope if they're not he will
never tell me, anyway."
She gave another laugh, as mirthless as if the spectre of herself had
framed it. She had turned her face away from him again, and slightly
quickened her walk.
"You mean, then, that your mind is really made up!" said Courtlandt,
with an ire, a fierceness, that she had never seen in him before. "You
mean that for a little riches, a little power, you'll turn marriage,
that should be a holy usage, into this wicked mockery?"
Pauline bit her lip. Such a speech as this from her equanimous cousin
was literally without precedent. She felt stung and guilty as she said,
with cool defiance,--
"Who holds marriage as a holy usage? I've never seen anyone who did."
"I do!" he asseverated, with clouding face. "You do, too, Pauline in
your heart."
"I haven't any heart. They're not worn nowadays. They're out of
fashion. We carry purses instead--when we can."
"I think I will tell Mr. Varick you said that," he answered, measuring
each word grimly.
"Oh, do!" Pauline exclaimed. A weary and mournful bravado filled her
tones. "How he would laugh! Do you fancy he thinks I care a button for
him? Why, nearly the first sentence he spoke to mamma on this weighty
subject concerned the number of yearly thousands he was willing to
settle upon me."
"So, it is all arranged?"
"It only awaits your approval."
"It can only get my contempt!"
"That is too bad. I thought you would anticipate some of the charming
little dinners I intend to give. He has dreadful attacks of the gout, I
have learned, and sometimes I'll ask you to preside with me in his
vacant chair. That is, if you"--
But he would hear no more. He turned on his heel and left her. He
bitterly told himself that her heart was ice, and not worth wasting a
thought upon. But he wasted a good many that night, and days afterward.
Whether ice or not, it was a very heavy heart as Pauline went homeward.
Just in proportion as the excuses for her conduct were ready on her
lips, so they were futile to appease her conscience.
And yet she exulted in one justifying circumstance, as she herself named
it. "If I _loved_ anybody--Court, or anybody else," she reflected, "I
never _could_ do it! But I don't. It's going to make a great personage
of me. I want to find out how it feels to be a great personage. I want
to try the new sensation of not wearing charity gloves...." She had
almost a paroxysm of nervous tears, alone in her own room, a little
later. That evening Mr. Varick once more presented himself....
At about eleven o'clock he jumped into a cab which he had kept waiting
an interminable time, and lighted a very fragrant cigar as he was being
driven off.
"_Elle est belle a faire peur_," he muttered aloud. And the next moment
a thought passed through his mind which would resemble this, if put into
English, though he always thought in French:--
"I will write to Madeleine to-morrow, and send her ten thousand francs.
That will end everything--and if the gout spares me five years longer I
shan't see Paris while it does."
He had not by any means come home to die. He had said so because it had
a neat sound, throwing a perfume of sentiment about his return. And he
was always fond of the perfume of sentiment. In reality he had come home
to look after his affairs, which had grown burdensomely prosperous, and
then sail back with all the decorous haste allowable.
Perhaps he had come home with a few other trifling motives. But of every
conceivable motive, he had _not_ come with one. That one was--to marry.
And yet he had to-night arranged his alliance (satisfactorily on both
sides, it was to be hoped) with Miss Pauline Van Corlear.
He leaned back in the dimness of the speeding cab, and reflected upon
it. His reflections made him laugh, and as he laughed his lip curled up
below his white mustache and showed his white teeth, with the good, dark
cigar between them--the teeth of which Pauline had said that if they
were false she did not wish to know it.