The marriage was a quiet one, and took place in the early following
spring. Pauline made a very lovely bride, but as this comment is
delivered upon a most ample percentage of all the brides in Christendom,
it is scarcely worth being recorded. The whole important constituency of
her kindred were graciously pleased at the match, with a single
exception. This was Courtlandt Beekman, who managed to be absent in
Washington at the time of the wedding. Pauline's presents were superb;
the Poughkeepsies, Amsterdams, and all the rest, came forth in expensive
sanction of the nuptials. After a brief Southern tour the wedded pair
took up their abode in the newly appointed Bond Street mansion. Mrs. Van
Corlear, already ensconced there, welcomed them with as beaming a smile
as her invalid state would permit. Pauline, as she kissed her, wondered
if those same bloodless lips would ever have any further excuse for
querulous complaint. It was pathetic to note the old lady's gratified
quiver while her thin hand was gallantly imprinted, as well, by the
kiss of her new son-in-law. She had surely reached the goal of all her
earthly hopes. She had a silken chair to rock in, and a maid as her
special attendant, and a doctor to be as devoted and exorbitant as he
chose. Her neuralgia, her asthma, her rheumatism, her thousand and one
ailments, were henceforth to wreak their dolorous inflictions among the
most comfortable and sumptuous surroundings. And yet, as if in mockery
of her new facilities for being the truly aristocratic invalid, this
poor lady, after a few weeks of the most encouraging opportunity,
forsook all its commodious temptations and quietly died in her bed of a
sudden heart-seizure.
On the occasion of her death Pauline's husband, who had thus far been
scrupulously polite, made a remark which struck his wife as brutal, and
roused her resentment. He was a good deal more brutal, in a glacial,
exasperating way, as Pauline's anger manifested itself. But shortly
after the funeral he was prostrated by a sharp attack of his gout,
during which Pauline nursed him with forgiving assiduity.
The young wife was now in deep mourning. Her husband's attack had been
almost fatal. His recovery was slow, and a voyage to Europe was urgently
recommended by his physicians. They sailed in latter June. Courtlandt
was among those who saw Pauline off in the steamer. He looked, while
taking her hand in farewell, as if he felt very sorry for her. Pauline
seemed in excellent spirits; her black dress became her; she was so
blonde that you saw the gold hair before you marked the funereal garb;
and then she had her smile very ready, which had always won nearly
everybody. Perhaps only Courtlandt, in his wise, grave taciturnity, saw
just how factitious the smile was.
Mr. Varick quite recovered from this attack. Pauline's letters said so.
They had soon left London, near which the Cunarder had brought them, and
gone to Paris; Mr. Varick was feeling so much better from the voyage,
and had always felt so at home in Paris. For several months afterward
Pauline's letters were sent over-sea in the most desultory and irregular
fashion. And what they contained by no means pleased their recipients.
She appeared to tell nothing about herself; she was always writing of
the city. As if one couldn't read of the Tuileries and Notre Dame in a
thousand books! As if one hadn't been there oneself! Why did she not
write _how they were getting on together_? That was the one imperative
stimulus for curiosity among all Pauline's friends and kindred--how
they were getting on together. All, we should add, except Courtlandt,
who seemed to manifest no curiosity of whatever sort. Of course one
could not write and ask her, point blank! What was one to do? Did
rambling essays upon the pleasures of a trip to Versailles, or the
recreation of a glimpse of Fontainebleau, mean that Mr. Varick had or
had not broken loose in a mettlesome manner from his latter-day
matrimonial traces?
"We are prepared for anything, you know," Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Pauline's
aunt and former patron, had once rather effusively said to Courtlandt.
"Now that Hamilton Varick is well, he might be larking over there to any
dreadful extent. And Pauline, from sheer pride, mightn't be willing to
tell us."
"Very cruel of her, certainly," Courtlandt had responded, laconic and
not a little sarcastic as well.
But as months went by, Pauline's correspondents forgot, in the
absorption engendered by more national incentives for gossip, the
unsatisfactory tone of her letters. Once, however, Pauline wrote that
she wished very much to return, but that her husband preferred remaining
in Paris.
"He won't come back!" immediately rose the cry on this side of the
water. "He's keeping her over there against her will! How perfectly
horrible! Well, she deserves it for marrying a _vieux galant_ like that!
Poor Pauline! With her looks she might have married somebody of
respectable age. But she wouldn't wait. She was so crazy to make her
market, poor girl! It's to be hoped that he doesn't beat her, or
anything of that frightful sort!"
One auditor of these friendly allusions would smile at them with furtive
but pardonable scorn. This auditor was Courtlandt; and he remembered how
the same compassionate declaimers had been the first to applaud
Pauline's astounding betrothal.
After two years of absence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Varick, certain
rumors drifted to America. This or that person had seen them in Paris.
Pauline was still pretty as ever, but living quite retired. It was said
she had taken to books and general mental improvement. No one ever saw
her with her husband. She never alluded to him in any way. There were
queer stories about his goings on. It was hard to verify them; Paris was
so big, and so many men were always doing such funny things there.
The conclave on these shores 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 nobody'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 multitude 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 space 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
Canal Street when it was a canal, 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 button 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-classes, you know, where nobody
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 snobbery which had
something sublime about it, that he was exceedingly sorry, but the rule
had been passed regarding the admission of any non-invited guest to his
entertainment?"
"Oh, yes; I remember it all," said Courtlandt. "Schenectady behaved like
a cad. Nobody 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 brass."
"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 identity 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 sexes, 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 reassure 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 passport of admission. My apartments are to be at once easy
and difficult of entrance. I shall not object to the so-called
aristocratic class, although if any applicant shall solicit my notice
who is undoubtedly a member of this class, 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 constituents 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 assemblages 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."
"Oh, no. I shall insist, indeed, that you drop in upon us very often. I
shall need your presence. You are to be my connecting link, as it were."
"How very pleasant! You have just told me that I was benighted. Now I
find myself a connecting link."
"Between culture and the absence of it. I have no objection to your
letting the giddy and whimsical folk perceive what a vast deal they are
deprived of. Besides, I should like you to be my first conversion--a
sort of bridge by which other converts may cross over into the happy
land."
"You are still most kind. I believe that bridges are usually wooden. No
doubt you feel that you have made a wise selection of your material. May
I be allowed to venture another question?"
"Yes--if it is not too impudent."
She was watching him with her head a little on one side, now, and a
smile struggling forth from her would-be serious lips. She was
recollecting how much she had always liked him, and considering how much
she would surely like him hereafter, in this renewal of their old
half-cousinly and half-flirtatious intimacy. She was thinking what deeps
of characteristic drollery slept in him--with what a quiet, funny sort
of martyrdom he had borne her little girlish despotisms, before that
sudden marriage had wrought so sharp a rupture of their relations, and
how often he had forced her into unwilling laughter by the slow and
almost sleepy humor with which he had successfully parried some of her
most vigorous attacks.
"I merely wanted to ask you," he now said, "where all these
extraordinary individuals are to be found."
"Ah, that is an important question, certainly," she said, with a solemn
inclination--or at least the semblance of one. "I intend to collect
them."
"Good gracious! You speak of them as if they were minerals or mummies
that you were going to get together for a museum. I have no doubt that
they will be curiosities, by the bye."
"I am afraid _you_ will find them so."
"Are they to be imported?"
"Oh, no. That will not be necessary."
"I see; they're domestic products."
"Quite so. In this great city--filled with so much energy, so much
re-action against the narrow feudalisms of Europe--I am very certain of
finding them." She paused for a moment, and seemed to employ a tacit
interval for the accumulation of what she next said. "I shall not be
entirely unassisted in my search, either."
A cunning twinkle became manifest in the brown eyes of her listener. He
drew a long breath. "Ah! now we get at the root of the matter. There's a
confederate--an accomplice, so to speak."
"I prefer that you should not allude to my assistant in so rude a style.
Especially as, in the first place, you have never met him, and, in the
second, he is a person of the most remarkable gifts."
"Is there any objection to my asking his name? Or is it still a dark
mystery?"
She laughed at this, as if she thought it highly diverting. "My dear
cousin," she exclaimed, "how absurd you can be at a pinch! What on earth
should make the name of Mr. Kindelon a dark mystery?"
"Um-m-m. Somebody you met abroad, then?"
"Somebody I met on the steamer, while returning."
"I see. An Englishman?"
"A gentleman of Irish birth. He has lived in New York for a number of
years. He knows a great many of the intellectual people here. He has
promised to help me in my efforts. He will be of great value."
Courtlandt rose. "So are your spoons, Pauline," he said rather gruffly,
not at all liking the present drift of the information. "Take my advice,
and lock them up when you give your first _salon_."