Pauline had not been long in her native city again before she made the
discovery that a great deal was now socially expected of her. The news
of her return spread abroad with a rapidity more suggestive of bad than
of good tidings; her old acquaintances, male and female, flocked to the
Bond Street house with a most loyal promptitude. The ladies came in
glossy _coupes_ and dignified coaches, not seldom looking about them
with _dilletante_ surprise at the mercantile glare and tarnish of this
once neat and seemly crossway, as they mounted Mrs. Varick's antiquated
stoop. Most of them were now married; they had made their market, as
Pauline's deceased mother would have said, and it is written of them
with no wanton harshness that they had in very few cases permitted
sentiment to enact the part of salesman. There is something about the
fineness of our republican ideals (however practice may have
determinedly lowered and soiled them) that makes the mere worldly view
of marriage a special provocation to the moralist. Regarded as a
convenient mutual barter in Europe, there it somehow shocks far less;
the wrong of the grizzled bridegroom winning the young, loveless, but
acquiescent bride bears a historic stamp; we recall, perhaps, that they
have always believed in that kind of savagery over there; it is as old
as their weird turrets and their grim torture-chambers. But with
ourselves, who broke loose, in theory at least, from a good many tough
bigotries, the sacredness of the marriage state presents a much more
meagre excuse for violation. It was not that the husbands of Pauline's
wedded friends were in any remembered instance grizzled, however; they
were indeed, with few exceptions, by many years the juniors of her own
dead veteran spouse; but the influences attendant upon their unions with
this or that maiden had first concerned the question of money as a
primary and sovereign force, and next that of name, prestige, or
prospective elevation. These young brides had for the most part sworn a
much more sincere fidelity to the carriages in which they now rode, and
the pretty or imposing houses in which they dwelt, than to the
important, though not indispensable, human attachments of such prized
commodities.
Pauline found them all strongly monotonous; she could ill realize that
their educated simpers and their regimental sort of commonplace had ever
been potent to interest her. One had to pay out such a small bit of line
in order to sound them; one's plummet so soon struck bottom, as it were.
She found herself silently marvelling at the serenity of their
contentment; no matter how gilded were the cages in which they made
their decorous little trills, what elegance of filigree could atone for
the absence of space and the paucity of perches?
The men whom she had once known and now re-met pleased her better. They
had, in this respect, the advantage of their sex. Even when she
condemned them most heartily as shallow and fatuous, their detected
admiration of her beauty or of their pleasure in her company won for
them the grace of a pardoning afterthought. They were still bachelors,
and some of them more maturely handsome bachelors than when she had last
looked upon them. They had niceties and felicities of attitude, of
intonation, of tailoring, of boot or glove, to which, without confessing
it, she was still in a degree susceptible.
But she did not encourage them. They were not of her new world; she had
got quite beyond them. She flattered herself that she always affected
them as being gazed down upon from rather chilly heights. She insisted
on telling herself that they were much more difficult to talk with than
she really found them. This was one of the necessities of her
conversion; they must not prove agreeable any longer; it was
inconsequent, untenable, that they should receive from her anything but
a merely hypocritic courtesy. She wanted her contempt for the class of
which they were members to be in every way logical, and so manufactured
premises to suit its desired integrity. Meanwhile she was much more
entertaining than she knew, and treated Courtlandt, one day, with quite
a shocked sternness for having informed her that these male visitors had
passed upon her some very admiring criticisms.
"I have done my best to behave civilly," she declared. "I was in my own
house, you know, when they called. But I cannot understand how they can
possibly _like_ me as they no doubt used to do! I would much rather have
you bring me quite a contrary opinion, in fact."
"If you say so," returned Courtlandt, with his inimitable repose, "I
will assure them of their mistake and request that they correct it."
Pauline employed no self-deception whatever in the acknowledgment of
her real feelings toward Courtlandt. She cherished for him what she
liked to tell herself was an inimical friendliness. In the old days he
had never asked her to marry him, and yet it had been plain to her that
under favoring conditions he might have made her this proposal. She was
nearly certain that he no longer regarded her with a trace of the former
tenderness. On her own side she liked him so heartily, notwithstanding
frequent antagonisms, that the purely amicable nature of this fondness
blurred any conception of him in the potential light of a lover.
But, indeed, Pauline had resolutely closed her eyes against the
possibility of ever again receiving amorous declaration or devotion. She
had had quite enough of marriage. Her days of sentiment were past. True,
they had never actually been, but the phantasmal equivalent for them had
been, and she now determined upon not replacing this by a more
accentuated experience. Her path toward middle life was very clearly
mapped out in her imagination; it was to be strewn with nicely sifted
gravel and bordered by formally clipped foliage. And it was to be very
straight, very direct; there should be no bend in it that came upon a
grove with sculptured Cupid and rustic lounge. The "marble muses,
looking peace" might gleam now and then through its enskirting boskage,
but that should be all. Pauline had read and studied with a good deal of
fidelity, both during her marriage and after her widowhood. She had gone
into the acquisition of knowledge and the development of thought as some
women go into the intoxication of a nervine. Her methods had been
amateurish and desultory; she had not been taught, she had learned, and
hence learned ill. "The modern thinkers," as she called them, delighted
her with their liberality, their iconoclasm. She was in just that
receptive mood to be made an extremist by their doctrines, the best of
which so sensibly warn us against extremes. Her husband's memory, for
the sake of decency if for no other reason, deserved the reticence which
she had shown concerning it. He had revealed to her a hollow nature
whose void was choked with vice, like some of those declivities in
neglected fields, where the weed and the brier run riot. The pathos of
her position, in a foreign land, with a lord whose daily routine of
misconduct left her solitary for hours, while inviting her, had she so
chosen, to imitate a course of almost parallel license, was finally a
cogent incentive toward that change which ensued. The whole falsity of
the educational system which had resulted in her detested marriage was
slowly laid bare to her eyes by this shocking and salient example of it.
There was something piteous, and yet humorous as well, in her present
intellectual state. She was a young leader in the cause of culture,
without a following. She believed firmly in herself, and yet deceived
herself. Much in the world that it was now her fixed principle to shun
and reprobate, she liked and clung to. These points of attraction were
mostly superficialities, it is true, like the fashion of clothes or the
conventionalism of accepted social customs. But even these she had more
than half persuaded herself that she despised, and when she observed
them in others they too often blinded her to attractions of a less
flimsy sort. She had verged upon a sanguine and florid fanaticism, and
was wholly unconscious of her peril. Some of Courtlandt's sober comments
might effectually have warned her, if it had not been for a marked
contrary influence. This was represented by the gentleman whom we have
already heard her name as Mr. Kindelon.
She had been presented to him on the steamer during her recent homeward
voyage, by an acquaintance who knew little enough regarding his
antecedents. But Ralph Kindelon had been at once very frank with her.
This was the most prominent trait that usually disclosed itself in him
on a first acquaintance; he always managed to impress you by his
frankness. He had a large head set on a large frame of splendid, virile
proportions. His muscular limbs were moulded superbly; his big hands and
feet had the same harmony of contour, despite their size; his grace of
movement was extraordinary, considering his height and weight; the noble
girth and solidity of chest struck you as you stood close to him--men
found it so substantially, women so protectively, human. A kind of
warmth seemed to diffuse itself from his bodily nearness, as if the
pulse of his blood must be on some exceptionally liberal scale. But for
those whom he really fascinated his real fascinations lay elsewhere. You
met them in the pair of facile dimples that gave genial emphasis to his
sunny smile; in the crisp, coarse curl of his blue-black hair, which
receded at either temple, and drooped centrally over a broad, full brow;
in the sensuous, ample, ruddy mouth, which so often showed teeth of
perfect shape and unflawed purity, and was shaded by a mustache tending
to chestnut in shade, with each strong crinkled hair of it rippling away
to the smooth-sloping cheeks; and lastly in the violet-tinted Irish
eyes, whose deep-black lashes had a beautiful length and gloss.
Kindelon spoke with a decided brogue. It was no mere Celtic accent; it
was the pure and original parlance of his native island, though shorn of
those ungrammatical horrors with which we are prone by habit to
associate it. His English was Irish, as one of his own countrymen might
have said, but it was very choice and true English, nevertheless. Well
as he spoke it, he spoke it immoderately, even exorbitantly, when the
mood was upon him, and the mood was upon him, in a loquacious sense,
with considerable pertinacity. He was the sort of man concerning whom
you might have said, after hearing him talk three minutes or so, that he
talked too much; but if you had listened to him five minutes longer,
your modified opinion would probably have been that he scarcely talked
too much for so good a talker.
It has been chronicled of him that he was extremely frank. Before he had
enlivened during more than an hour, for Pauline, the awful tedium of an
Atlantic voyage in winter, she discovered herself to be in a measure
posted concerning his personal biography. His parents had been farmers
in his native Ireland, and he was the fourth of a family of eleven
children. At the age of twelve years a certain benevolent baronet, whose
tenant his father was, had sent him to school in Dublin with a view
toward training and encouraging a natural and already renowned
precocity. At school he had done well until seventeen, and at seventeen
he had suddenly found himself thrown on the world, through the death of
his patron. After that he had revisited his somewhat distant home for a
brief term, and soon afterward had taken passage for America, aided by
the funds of an admiring kinsman. He had even then developed evidence of
what we call a knack for writing. After severe hardships on these
shores, he had drifted into an editorial office in the capacity of
printer. This had been a godsend to him, and it had fallen from the
skies of Chicago, not New York. But New York had ultimately proved the
theatre of those triumphs which were brilliant indeed compared with the
humdrum humility of his more Western pursuits. Here he had written
articles on many different subjects for the local journals; he had
served in almost every drudging department of reportorial work; he had
risen, fallen, risen, and at last risen once and for all, durably and
honorably, as an associate-editor in a popular and prominent New York
journal. He told Pauline the name of his journal--the New York
"Asteroid"--and she remembered having heard of it. He laughed his
affluent, mellow laugh at this statement, as though it were the most
amusing thing in the world to find an American who had only "heard of"
the New York "Asteroid."
In a political sense, and moreover in all senses, he was a zealous
liberal. How he had managed to scrape together so remarkable an amount
of knowledge was a mystery to himself. Everything that he knew had been
literally "scraped together;" the phrase could not be apter than when
applied to his mental store of facts. He read with an almost phenomenal
swiftness, and his exquisite memory retained whatever touched it with a
perfection like that of some marvellously sensitive photographic agent.
He never forgot a face, a book, a conversation. He hardly forgot a
single one of his newspaper articles, and their name was legion. His
powers just stopped short of genius, but they distinctly stopped there.
He did many things well--many things, in truth, which for a man so
hazardously educated it was surprising that he did at all. But he did
nothing superlatively well. It was the old story of that fatal facility
possessed by numbers of his own countrymen who have migrated to these
shores. Perhaps the one quality that he lacked was a reflective
patience--and this is declared of his brains alone, having no reference
to his moral parts. He leaped upon subjects, and devoured them, so to
speak. It never occurred to him that there is a cerebral digestion,
which, if we neglect its demands, inevitably entails upon us a sort of
dyspeptic vengeance. In crushing the fruit with too greedy a speed we
get to have a blunted taste for its finer flavor.
Within certain very decided limits he had thus far made an easy conquest
of Pauline. She had never before met any one whom he remotely resembled.
In the old days she would have shrank from him as being unpatrician;
now, his fleet speech, his entire lack of repose, his careless,
unmodish, though scrupulously clean dress, all had for her an appealing
and individual charm. After parting on the arrival in New York, she and
Kindelon had soon re-met. He bore the change from oceanic surroundings
admirably in Pauline's eyes. With characteristic candor he told her that
he had come back from the recent visit to his old parents in Ireland
(Pauline knowing all about this visit, of course) to find himself
wofully poor. She was wondering whether he would resent the offer of a
loan if she made him one, when he suddenly surprised her by a statement
with regard to "present funds," that certainly bore no suggestion of
poverty. The truth was, he lacked all proper appreciation of the value
of money. Economy was an unknown virtue with him; to have was to spend;
he was incapable of saving; no financial to-morrow existed for him, and
by his careless and often profuse charities he showed the same absence
of caution as that which marked all other daily expenditures.
In her immediate purchase of a new residence she consulted with him, and
allowed herself to be guided by his counsels. This event brought them
more closely together for many days than they would otherwise have been.
His artistic feeling and his excellent taste were soon a fresh surprise
to her. "I begin to think," she said to him one day, "that there is
nothing you do not know."
He laughed his blithe, bass laugh. "Oh," he said, "I know a lot of
things in a loose, haphazard way. We newspaper men can't escape general
information, Mrs. Varick. We breathe it in, naturally, and in spite of
ourselves."
"But tell me," Pauline now asked, "are these other people to whom I
shall soon be presented as clever as you are?"
He looked at her with merriment twinkling in his light-tinted eyes.
"They're a good deal cleverer--some of them," he replied. "They could
give me points and beat me, as we say in billiards."
"You make me very anxious to know them."
"When you talk like that I feel as if I might be tempted to postpone all
introductions indefinitely," he responded. He spoke with sudden
seriousness, and she felt that mere gallantry had not lain at the root
of this answer.
As a matter of course, Kindelon and Courtlandt soon met each other in
Pauline's drawing-room. Courtlandt was quite as quiet as usual, and the
Irishman perhaps rather unwontedly voluble. Pauline thought she had
never heard her new friend talk better. He made his departure before her
cousin, and when he had gone Pauline said, with candid enthusiasm:
"Isn't he a wonderful man?"
"Wonderful?" repeated Courtlandt, a trifle drowsily.
She gave him a keen look, and bristled visibly while she did so.
"Certainly!" she declared. "No other word just expresses him. I didn't
observe you very closely, Court," she went on, "but I took it for
granted that you were being highly interested. I can't imagine your
_not_ being."
"He gave me a kind of singing in the ears," said Courtlandt. "I've got
it yet. He makes me think of one of those factories where there's a
violent hubbub all the time, so that you have to speak loud if you want
to be heard."
Pauline was up in arms, then. "I never listened to a more scandalously
unjust criticism!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me, unblushingly,
that you do not think him a _very_ extraordinary person?"
"Oh, very," said her cousin.
Pauline gave an exasperated sigh. "I am so used to you," she said, "that
I should never even be surprised by you. But you need not pretend that
you can have any except one _truthful_ opinion about Mr. Kindelon."
"I haven't," was the reply. "He's what they call a smart newspaper man.
A Bohemian chap, you know. They're nearly all of them just like that.
They can talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, if you only give them a
chance."
"I don't think the dumbness required any great effort, as far as _you_
were concerned!" declared Pauline, with sarcastic belligerence.
She never really quarrelled with Courtlandt, because his impregnable
stolidity made such a result next to impossible. But she was now so
annoyed by her cousin's slighting comments upon Kindelon that her
treatment was touched with a decided coolness for days afterward.
Meanwhile her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, had undergone considerable
discomforting surprise. Mrs. Poughkeepsie had been prepared to find
Pauline changed, but by no means changed in her present way. On hearing
her niece express certain very downright opinions with regard to the
life which she was bent upon hereafter living, this lady at first
revealed amazement and afterward positive alarm.
"But my dear Pauline," she said, "you cannot possibly mean that you
intend to get yourself talked about?"
"Talked about, Aunt Cynthia? I don't quite catch your drift, really."
"Let me be plainer, then. If you remain out of society, that is one
thing. I scarcely went anywhere, as you know, for ten years after my
husband's death--not, indeed, until Sallie had grown up and was ready to
come out. There is no objection, surely, against closing one's doors
upon the world, provided one desires to do so--although I should say
that such a step, Pauline, at your age, and after two full years of
widowhood, was decidedly a mistake. Still"--
"Pardon me, Aunt Cynthia," Pauline here broke in. "Nothing is further
from my wish than to close my doors upon the world. On the contrary, I
want to open them very wide indeed."
Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted in shocked manner both her fair, plump, dimpled
hands. She was a stout lady, with that imposing, dowager-like effect of
_embonpoint_ which accompanies a naturally tall and majestic stature.
Her type had never in girlhood been a very feminine one, and it now
bordered upon masculinity. Her eyes were hard, calm and dark; her
arching nose expressed the most serene self-reliance. She was indeed a
person with no doubts; she had, in her way, settled the universe. All
her creeds were crystallized, and each, metaphorically, was kept in
cotton, as though it were a sort of family diamond. She had been a Miss
Schenectady, of the elder, wealthy and more conspicuous branch; it was a
most notable thing to have been such a Miss Schenectady. She had married
a millionaire, and also a Poughkeepsie; this, moreover, was something
very important and fine. She had so distinct a "position" that her
remaining out of active participation in social pursuits made no
difference whatever as regarded her right to appear and rule whenever
she so chose; it had only been necessary for her to lift her spear,
when Miss Sallie required her chaperonage, and the Snowes and Briggses
had perforce to tremble. And this fact, too, she held as a precious,
delectable prerogative.
In not a few other respects she was satisfied regarding herself. There
was nothing, for that matter, which concerned herself in any real way,
about which she did not feel wholly satisfied. Her environment in her
own opinion was of the best, and doubtless in the opinion of a good many
of her adherents also. From the necklace of ancestral brilliants which
she now wore, sparkling at ball or dinner, on her generous and creamy
neck, to the comfortably-cushioned pew in Grace Church, where two good
generations of Poughkeepsies had devoutly sat through many years of
Sundays, she silently valued and eulogized the gifts which fate had
bestowed upon her.
Pauline's present attitude seemed to her something monstrous. It had not
seemed monstrous that her niece should give the bloom and vital purity
of a sweet maidenhood to a man weighted with years and almost decrepid
from past excesses. But that she should seek any other circle of
acquaintance except one sanctioned by the immitigable laws of caste,
struck her as a bewildering misdemeanor.
"My dear Pauline," she now exclaimed, "you fill me with a positive fear!
Of course, if you shut your doors to the right people you open them to
the wrong ones. You have got some strange idea abroad, which you are now
determined to carry out--to _exploiter_, my dear! With your very large
income there is hardly any dreadful imprudence which you may not commit.
There is no use in telling me that the people whom one knows are not
worth knowing. If you have got into that curious vein of thought you
have no remedy for it except to refrain from all entertaining and all
acceptance of courtesies. But I beg, Pauline, that you will hesitate
before you store up for yourself the material of ugly future repentance.
Sallie and I have accepted the Effinghams' box at the opera to-night.
Those poor Effinghams have been stricken by the death of their father;
it was so sudden--he was sitting in his library and literally fell
dead--he must certainly have left two millions, but of course that has
nothing to do with their bereavement, and it was so kind of them to
remember us. They know that I have always wanted a proscenium, and that
there are no prosceniums, now, to be had for love or money. I have sent
our box in the horse-shoe to cousin Kate Ten Eyck; she is so wretchedly
cramped in her purse, you know, and still has Lulu on her hands, and
will be so grateful--as indeed she wrote me quite gushingly that she
_was_, this very afternoon. Now, Pauline, won't you go with us, my
dear?"
Pauline went. A noted _prima donna_ sang, lured by an immense nightly
reward to disclose her vocal splendors before American audiences. But
her encompassment, as is so apt to be the case here, was pitiably
mediocre. She sang with a presentable contralto, a passable baritone, an
effete basso, and an almost despicable tenor. The chorus was
anachronistic in costume, sorry in voice, and mournfully undrilled. But
the _diva_ was so comprehensively talented that she carried the whole
performance. At the same time there were those among her hearers who
lamented that her transcendent ability should be burlesqued by so shabby
and impotent a surrounding. The engagement of this famous lady was
meanwhile one of those sad operatic facts for which the American people
have found, during years past, no remedy and no preventive. The fault,
of course, lies with themselves. When they are sufficiently numerous as
true lovers of music they will refuse their countenance to even a great
singer except with creditable artistic and scenic support.
Pauline sat in the Effinghams' spacious proscenium-box, between Mrs.
Poughkeepsie and her daughter. Sallie Poughkeepsie was a large girl,
with her mother's nose, her mother's serenity, her mother's promise of
corpulent matronhood. She had immense prospects; it was reported that
she had refused at least twenty eligible matrimonial offers while
waiting for the parental nod of approval, which had not yet come.
During the first _entr'acte_ a little throng of admirers entered the
box. Some of these Pauline knew; others had appeared, as it were, after
her time. One was an Englishman, and she presently became presented to
him as the Earl of Glenartney. The title struck her as beautiful,
appealing to her sense of the romantic and picturesque; but she wondered
that it had done so when she subsequently bent a closer gaze upon the
receding forehead, flaccid mouth and lank frame of the Earl himself. He
had certainly as much hard prose about his appearance as poetry in his
name. Mrs. Poughkeepsie beamed upon him in a sort of sidelong way all
the time that he conversed with Sallie. A magnate of bountiful
shirt-bosom and haughty profile claimed her full heed, but she failed to
bestow it entirely; the presence of this unmarried Scotch peer at her
child's elbow was too stirring an incident; her usual equanimity was in
a delightful flutter; ambition had already begun its insidious whispers,
for the Earl was known to be still a bachelor.
Pauline, who read her aunt so thoroughly, felt the mockery of this
maternal deference. She told herself that there was something dreary and
horrible about a state of human worldliness which could thus idolize
mere rank and place. She knew well enough that so long as Lord
Glenartney were not a complete idiot, and so long as his moral character
escaped the worst depravity, he would be esteemed a magnificent match
for her cousin.
The Earl remained at Sallie's side all through the succeeding act. When
the curtain again fell he still remained, while other gentlemen took the
places of those now departing. And among these, to her surprise and
pleasure, was Ralph Kindelon.
She almost rose as she extended her hand to her friend. A defiant
satisfaction had suddenly thrilled her. She pronounced Kindelon's name
quite loudly as she presented him to her aunt. Instead of merely bowing
to Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Kindelon, with effusive cordiality, put forth his
hand. Pauline saw a startled look creep across her aunt's face. The
handsome massive-framed Irishman was not clad in evening dress. He
towered above all the other gentlemen; he seemed, as indeed he almost
was, like a creature of another species. His advent made an instant
sensation; a universal stare was levelled upon him by these sleek
devotees of fashion, among whom he had the air of pushing his way with a
presumptuous geniality. He carried a soft "wide-awake" hat in one hand;
his clothes were of some dark gray stuff; his neatly but heavily booted
feet made dull sounds upon the floor as he now moved backward in search
of a chair. There was no possible doubt regarding his perfect
self-possession; he had evidently come to remain and to assert himself.
"Who on earth is he?" Mrs. Poughkeepsie found a chance to swiftly
whisper in the ear of her niece. There was an absolutely dramatic touch
in the agitation which went with her questioning sentence.
Pauline looked steadily at her aunt as she responded: "A very valued
friend of mine."
"But, my dear!" faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. The fragmentary little
vocative conveyed a volume of patrician dismay.
By this time Kindelon had found a chair. He placed it close to Pauline.
"I am so very glad that you discovered me," said Pauline. She spoke in
quite loud tones, while everybody listened. Her words had the effect of
a distinct challenge, and as such she intended them.
"I am flinging down a gauntlet," she thought, "to snobbery and
conservatism. This slight event marks a positive era in my life."
"I saw you from the orchestra," now said Kindelon, in his heartiest
tones. "The distance revealed you to me, though I cannot say it lent the
least enchantment, for that would surely be impossible." He now looked
towards Mrs. Poughkeepsie, without a trace of awe in his mirthful
expression. "You must pardon my gallantry, madam," he proceeded. "Your
niece and I, though recent friends, are yet old ones. We have crossed
the Atlantic together, and that, in the winter season, is a wondrous
promoter of intimacy, as you perhaps know. Perhaps Mrs. Varick has
already done me the honor of mentioning our acquaintance."
"Not until now," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with a smile that had the
glitter of ice in it.