By a little after nine o'clock, this same evening, Pauline was driven in
a carriage to her own residence.
She alighted with excellent composure, rang the bell and was promptly
admitted.
But she had no sooner entered the hall than she found herself face to
face with Courtlandt.
He was in evening dress; he looked thoroughly his old self-contained
self. Pauline passed at once into the little reception-room just off the
hall. Courtlandt followed her. She sank into a chair, slowly untying the
strings of her bonnet. A brisk fire crackled on the hearth; she stared
into it.
"So you came to me," she said, with a kind of measured apathy.
"Yes," said Courtlandt. "I obeyed the message that you sent me."
Pauline impetuously turned and looked at him. The fire-light struck her
face as she did so, and he saw that her gray eyes were swimming in
tears.
She made no attempt to master her broken voice. "O Court," she said, "it
was ever so good of you to come! I almost doubted if you would! I should
have remembered that you--well, that you cared for me in another than a
merely cousinly way. But there was no one else--that is, no one near me
in blood. It is wonderful how we think of that blood-kinship when
something dreadful happens to us. We may not recall it for years, until
the blow comes. Then we feel its force, its bond, its claim.... I want
you to sit down beside me, Court, and quietly listen. You were always
good at listening. Besides, you will have an immense satisfaction,
presently; you will learn that your prophecies regarding _him_ were
correct. My eyes are open--and in time. I shall never marry him. I shall
never marry any one again. And now, listen...."
For a long time, after this, Courtlandt showed himself the most patient
of auditors. But he was silent for a good space after his cousin had at
length ended, while the fire sputtered and fumed behind the silver
filigrees that bordered its hearth, as though it were delivering some
adverse, exasperated commentary upon poor Pauline's late disclosures.
But presently Courtlandt spoke. "I think you have had a very fortunate
escape," he said. "And I hope you mean, now, to come back and be one of
us, again."
"What a way of putting it!" she exclaimed, with a great quivering sigh.
"There's no other way to put it. Theory's one thing and practice
another. As long as the world lasts there will be a lot of people in
every land who are better and hold themselves better than a huge lot of
other people. One can argue about this matter till he or she is black in
the face; it's no use, though; the best way to get along is to take
things as you find them. You and I didn't make society, so we'd better
not try to alter it."
Pauline gave a weary little smile. Her tears had ceased; she was staring
into the fire with hard, dry, bright eyes.
"O Court," she said, with a pathetic little touch of her old cruelty,
"I'm afraid you don't shine as a philosopher. You are better as a
prophet; what do you say of Cora Dares and _him_? Will they marry?"
"Yes," returned Courtlandt unhesitatingly. "And I dare say he will make
her an excellent husband. Didn't you tell me that she was an artist?...
Well, he's an editor, a sort of general scribbler, so they will be on a
delightful equality. They'll marry. You say I'm a prophet; depend upon
it, they'll marry sooner or later."
"You make me recall that you are Aunt Cynthia's nephew," said Pauline,
with another weary smile. She was in a very miserable mood. Her wound
still bled, and would bleed, as she knew, for many a day.
Courtlandt's preposterously trite and commonplace little axiom had
already begun to echo itself in a kind of rhythmical mockery through her
distressed brain: "The best way to get along is to take things as you
find them."
_Was_ it the best way, after all? Was thinking for one's self and living
after one's own chosen fashion nothing but a forlorn folly? Was
passivity wisdom, and individualism a snare?
The fire crackled on. There was more silence between the two cousins.
The hour was growing late; outside, in the streets, you heard only the
occasional rolling of carriage-wheels.
"By the way, speaking of Aunt Cynthia, Court,--will she ever notice me
again?"
"Certainly she will."
"Isn't she furious?"
"That newspaper article has repressed her fury. She's enormously sorry
for you. Aunt Cynthia would never find it hard, you know, to be
enormously sorry for a Van Corlear; she came so near to being one
herself; a Schenectady is next door to it."
"Yes, I understand," mused Pauline. She was still staring into the fire.
"There is that clannish feeling that comes out strong at such a time ...
Court, I will write to her."
"Do, by all means."
"Not an apology, you know, but a ... well, a sort of pacific proposal."
"Do, you'll find it will be all right, then. Aunt Cynthia would never
put on any grand airs to one of her own race; she has too much respect
for it...."
The longest silence of all now ensued. The fire had ceased to crackle;
its block of crumbled coal looked like the fragments of a huge crushed
ruby. Pauline did not know that Courtlandt was watching her when she
suddenly heard him say,--
"You're going to have a hard fight, Pauline, but you'll come out of it
all sound--never fear. I suppose he _was_ the sort of chap to play the
mischief with a woman, if she once gave him a chance."
"O Court," came the melancholy answer, "I wasn't thinking of _him_, just
then. I was thinking of what my life has meant! It seems to me, now,
like a broken staircase, leading nowhere. Such a strange, unsatisfactory
life, thus far!"
"All lives are that, if we choose to look on them so," returned
Courtlandt. "It is the choosing or not choosing to look on them so that
makes all the difference.... Besides, you are young yet."
"Oh, I am seventy years old!" she cried, with a little fatigued moan.
"In a year from now you will have lapsed back into your normal age."
"I can't believe it!"
"Wait and see."
"Ah, I shall have to do a good deal of waiting--for nothing whatever!"
"I too shall wait," said Courtlandt grimly.
She suddenly turned and scanned his face. "For what?" she sharply
questioned.
"For you."
Pauline threw back her head, with a brief, bitter laugh. "Then you will
have to wait a long time!" she exclaimed, with sorrowful irony.
"I expect to do that," answered Courtlandt, more grimly still. "And I am
a good prophet. You told me so."
* * * * *