The orchestra had not yet recommenced, and the curtain would not
reascend for at least ten good minutes. A vigorous babble of many voices
rose from the many upstairs boxes. In some of these Kindelon's
appearance might not have created the least comment. Here it was a
veritable bombshell.
The "Poughkeepsie set" was famed for its rigid exclusiveness. Wherever
Miss Sallie and her mother went, a little train of courtiers invariably
followed them. They always represented an ultra-select circle inside of
the larger and still decidedly aristocratic one. Only certain young men
ever presumed to approach Sallie at all, and these were truly the
darlings of fortune and fashion--young gentlemen of admitted ascendency,
whose attentions would have made an obscure girl rapidly prominent, and
who, while often distinguished for admirable manners, always contrived
to hover near those who were the sovereign reverse of obscure. They
would carry only her bouquets, or those of other girls who belonged to
the same special and envied clique; they would "take out in the German"
only Sallie and her particular intimates. Bitter jealousies among the
contemplating dowagers were often a result of this determined
eclecticism. "Why _is_ it that my Kate has to put up with so many
second-rate men?" would pass with tormenting persistence through the
mind of this matron. "Why can't my Caroline get any of the great swells
to notice her?" would drearily haunt another. And between these two
distressed ladies there might meanwhile be seated a third, whose
daughter, for reasons of overwhelming wealth or particular
attractiveness, always moved clad in a nimbus of sanctity.
Pauline was perfectly well aware that the coming of her friend had
seemed an audacity, and that his unconventionally garrulous tongue was
now regarded as a greater one. Courtlandt may have told her that the
rival factions had cemented their differences and that all society
in New York was more democratic than formerly. Still, it was
unimaginable that her aunt Cynthia could ever really change her spots.
Where she trod, there, too, must float the aroma of an individual
self-glorification. Pauline was as much delighted by Kindelon's easy
daring as by the almost glacial answer of her stately kinswoman; and she
at once hastened to say, while looking with a smile at the unembarrassed
Kindelon himself,--
"I have scarcely had a chance to tell either my aunt or my cousin how
good you were to me on the 'Bothnia.'" Then she lifted her fan, and
waved it prettily toward Sallie. "This _is_ my cousin, Miss
Poughkeepsie," she went on; she did not wait for the slow accomplishment
of Sallie's forced and freezing bow, but at once added: "and here is
Lord Glenartney, here Mr. Fyshkille, here Mr. Van Arsdale, here Mr.
Hackensack. Now, I think you know us all, Mr. Kindelon."
As she ended her little speech she met Mrs. Poughkeepsie's eyes fixed
upon her in placid consternation. Of course this wholesale introduction,
among the chance occupants of an opera box, was a most unprecedented
violation of usage. But that was precisely Pauline's wish--to violate
usage, if she could do it without recourse to any merely vulgar rupture.
They had all stared at Ralph Kindelon, had treated him as if he were
some curious animal instead of a fellow-creature greatly their own
superior, and they should have a chance now of discovering just how well
he could hold his own in their little self-satisfied assemblage.
Kindelon bowed and smiled in every direction. He appeared unconscious
that everybody did not bow and smile with just the same reciprocal
warmth.
"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 pronounced
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 assumed 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 association, 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 butt.
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 assumed that office of general spokesman which he nearly always
assumed 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.
Nobody 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 basement-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 Japanese 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 asseverated. 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 assumption 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 anticipation, 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 principal 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 classics 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.
They are not 'select;' I don't claim that grace for them. And yet they
are very interesting, very typical. Some shabby people meet
there--shabby, I mean, in mental ways no less than in character and
costume. But the prevailing element is of a higher order than they.
Anyone whom Mrs. Dares believes to be an earnest worker in the field of
letters will have no difficulty about gaining her favor. I think she
would rather greet in her rooms some threadbare young poet who had
published at his own expense a slim little volume of poems possessing
distinct merit and having received the snubs of both critics and public,
than welcome some rich and successful writer whose real claim upon
recognition she honestly doubted. And for this reason she makes
mistakes. I have no doubt she is aware of making them. When we search
the highways and hedges for cases of deserving charity, we cannot but
light upon at least an occasional impostor--to put the matter as
optimistically as possible. And now let me tell you that if my mighty
explanatory outburst has roused your desire to meet Mrs. Dares, the
opportunity to do so lies well within your reach."
"How?" said Pauline. And then, as if abashed by the brusque abruptness
of her own question, she added, with a little penitent nod: "Oh, yes;
you mean that she has kindly consented to let you bring her here."
"Not at all," said Kindelon. "It is true that she goes about a good
deal. Her position as a journalist gives her, of course, the _entree_ to
many theatres, and as she is passionately fond of the drama, her face is
seldom missed on a _premiere_ at any reputable house--Daly's, the Union
Square, the Madison Square, or Wallack's. She takes delight, too, in
appearing at the entertainments of her various friends, and she always
does so clad elegantly, richly, but without a shadow of ostentatious
display. On these occasions her society is eagerly sought. I have
sometimes wondered why; for her conversation, though invariably full of
sound sense and pithy acumen, lacks the cheerful play of humor which is
so widely demanded to generate anything like popularity wherever men and
women are socially met. But she is very popular, and I suppose it is her
striking simplicity, her gift of always being sincerely and unaffectedly
_herself_, which has made her so. Still, for all this gregarious
impulse, if I may thus name it, I do not believe she would take the
first step, where you are concerned, to establish an acquaintance."
"And for what reason?" asked Pauline. Her tones, while she put this
query, were full of a hurt bewilderment. Kindelon seemed to muse for a
brief space; and any such unconversational mood was rare, as we know,
with his mercurial lightsomeness of manner. "She would be sensitive," he
presently said, "about making an advance of this sort."
"Of this sort?" repeated Pauline, with a somewhat irritated inflection.
"Of what sort?"
Her companion watched her with fixity for a moment. Then he raised his
large forefinger, and slowly shook it, with admonitory comedy of
gesture. "You must not tell me that you don't understand," he said.
"Put yourself in this lady's place. Suppose that you, in spite of fine
brains and noble character, lacked the social standing"--
Pauline broke in quite hotly at this. Her eyes had taken a quick
sparkle, and the color was flying rosy and pure into her fair face.
"Pshaw!" she exclaimed. "It is not any question of social standing. I
want to know these people"--She suddenly paused, as though her tongue
had betrayed her into some regrettable and unseemly phrase. "I want to
pass," she continued more slowly, "from an aimless world into one of
thought and sense. Mrs. Dares is prominent in this other world. From
what you say I should judge that she is a very representative and
influential spirit there. Why should she not be benign and gracious
enough to seek me here? Why should she require that I shall emphatically
pay her my court? Your description makes me glad and happy to know her.
If she learned this, would she hold aloof from any absurd scruples about
a disparity in social standing?--Well, if she did," declared Pauline,
who by this time was quite excitedly flushed and fluttered, "then I
should say that you had over-painted her virtues and too flatteringly
concealed her faults!"
Kindelon threw back his head, as she finished, and laughed with such
heartiness that more of his strong white teeth were transiently visible
than would have pleased a strict judge of decorum.
"Oh, how amusing you are!" he cried. "You are really superb and don't
perceive it!--Well," he proceeded, growing graver, "I suppose you would
be far less so if you had the vaguest inkling of it. Now, pray listen.
Does it enter your conscience at all that you are disguising a kind of
royal patronage and condescension behind a gentle and saint-like
humility? No--of course it doesn't. But, my dear lady, this is
unequivocally true. You scoff at social standing, and yet you
complacently base yourself upon it. You want to desert all your old
tenets, and yet you keep a kind of surreptitious clasp about them. You
would not for the world be considered a person who cared for the
aristocratic purple, and yet you wrap it round you in the most illogical
fashion. Mrs. Dares has her evenings; to-night is one of them. You, as
yet, have no evenings; your _salon_ is still in embryo. You want to
affiliate with her, to be one of her set, her surroundings, her _monde_.
And yet you quietly bid her to your house, as though she were proposing
your co-operation, your support, your intimacy, and not you hers!"
Pauline, with perhaps a deepened tinge of color in her cheeks, was
staring at the floor when Kindelon ended. And from beneath her gown came
the impatient little tap of a nervous foot. After an interval of
silence, during which her friend's gaze watched her with a merry
vivacity of expression, she slowly lifted her shapely blond head, and
answered in grave, even saddened tones,--
"Then my _salon_ is to be a failure?--an unrealizable castle in Spain?"
"Oh, no," promptly said Kindelon, with one of those sympathetic laughs
which belonged among his elusive fascinations. "By no means--unless you
so will it."
"But I don't will it," said Pauline.
"Very well. Then it will be a castle in--in New York. That sounds
tangible enough, surely. It is the first step that counts, and you have
only to take your first step. It will certainly look much better to know
some of your courtiers before you ascend your throne. And meanwhile it
would be far more discreet to cultivate an acquaintance with your
probable prime minister."
"All of which means--?" she said.
"That you had best let me accompany you to Mrs. Dares's house this
evening."
"But I am not invited!" exclaimed Pauline.
"Oh yes, you are," said Kindelon, with easy security in the jocund
contradiction. "Miss Cora, the youngest daughter of Mrs. Dares, told me
last night that she and her mother would both be very glad to have you
come."
There was a momentary intonation in Kindelon's voice that struck his
listener as oddly unexpected. "So you have already spoken of me?" she
said lingeringly, and looking at him with more intentness than she
herself knew of.
"Yes," he replied, with a certain speed, and with tones that were not
just set in an unembarrassed key. "I go there now and then."
"And you have mentioned me to Mrs. Dares?"
"Yes--more than once, I think. She knows that you may be induced to come
this evening."
His glance, usually so direct, had managed to avoid Pauline's, which was
then very direct indeed.
"Tell me," Pauline said, after another silence had somehow made itself
felt between them. "Are you a very good friend of this girl--Miss Cora?"
He returned her look then, but with an unwonted vacillation of his
own--or so she chose to think.
"Yes," he responded, fluently frank, as it seemed. "We are very good
friends--excellent friends, I may say. You will find her quite as
charming, in a different way, as her mother. I mean, of course, if you
will go with me this evening--or any future evening."
Pauline put forth her hand, and laid it for an instant on his
full-moulded arm.
"I will go with you this evening," she said.