[Illustration: EMILY.]
A WOMAN
VENTURES
_A NOVEL_
BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
AUTHOR OF
THE FASHIONABLE ADVENTURES OF
JOSHUA CRAIG, THE HUSBAND’S STORY, ETC.
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
WILLIAM JAMES HURLBUT
[Illustration]
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS : : NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1902,
BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SHIPWRECK 1
II. THE DESERT ISLAND 8
III. SAIL--HO! 16
IV. A BLACK FLAG 23
V. THE PENITENT PIRATE 31
VI. A CHANGED CRUSOE 39
VII. BACK TO THE MAINLAND 45
VIII. AMONG A STRANGE PEOPLE 57
IX. AN ORCHID HUNTER 67
X. FURTHER EXPLORATION 79
XI. SEEN FROM A BARRICADED WINDOW 93
XII. A RISE AND A FALL 101
XIII. A COMPROMISE WITH CONVENTIONALITY 112
XIV. “EVERYTHING AWAITS MADAME” 120
XV. A FLICKERING FIRE 126
XVI. EMBERS 138
XVII. ASHES 152
XVIII. “THE REAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE” 167
XIX. EMILY REFUSES CONSOLATION 176
XX. BACHELOR GIRLS 185
XXI. A “MARRIED MAN” 199
XXII. A PRECIPICE 213
XXIII. A “BETTER SELF” 225
XXIV. TO THE TEST 238
XXV. MR. GAMMELL PRESUMES 248
XXVI. THE TRUTH ABOUT A ROMANCE 257
XXVII. “IN MANY MOODS” 269
XXVIII. A FORCED ADVANCE 278
XXIX. A MAN AND A “PAST” 288
XXX. TWO AND A TRIUMPH 299
XXXI. WHERE PAIN IS PLEASURE 308
XXXII. THE HIGHWAY OF HAPPINESS 313
XXXIII. LIGHT 324
A Woman Ventures.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHIPWRECK.
WENTWORTH Bromfield was mourned by his widow and daughter with a depth
that would have amazed him.
For twenty-one years he had been an assistant secretary in the
Department of State at Washington--a rather conspicuous position, with
a salary of four thousand a year. Influential relatives representing
Massachusetts in the House or in the Senate, and often in both, had
enabled him to persist through changes of administration and of party
control, and to prevail against the “pull” of many an unplaced patriot.
Perhaps he might have been a person of consequence had he exercised his
talents in some less insidiously lazy occupation. He had begun well at
the law; but in return for valuable local services to the party, he got
the offer of this political office, and, in what he came to regard as a
fatal moment, he accepted it. His wife--he had just married--said that
he was “going in for a diplomatic career.” He faintly hoped so himself,
but the warnings of his common sense were soon verified. “Diplomatic
career” proved to be a sonorous name for a decent burial of energy and
prospects.
He had drawn his salary year after year. He had gone languidly through
his brief daily routine at the Department. He had been mildly fluttered
at each Presidential election, and again after each inauguration. He
had indulged in futile impulses to self-resurrection, in severe attacks
of despondency. Then, at thirty-seven, he had grasped the truth--that
he would remain an assistant secretary to the end of his days.
Thenceforth aspirations and depressions had ceased, and his life had
set to a cynical sourness. He read, he sneered, he ate, and slept.
The Bromfields had a small additional income--Mrs. Bromfield’s twelve
hundred a year from her father’s estate. This was most important, as it
represented a margin above comfort and necessity, a margin for luxury
and for temptation to extravagance. Mr. Bromfield was fond of good
dinners and good wines, and he could not enjoy them at the expense of
his friends without an occasional return. Mrs. Bromfield had been an
invalid after the birth of Emily, long enough to form the habit of
invalidism. After Emily passed the period when dress is not a serious
item, they went ever more deeply into debt.
While Mrs. Bromfield’s craze for doctors and drugs was in one view as
much an extravagance as Mr. Bromfield’s club, in another view it was a
valuable economy. It made entertaining impossible; it enabled Emily
to go everywhere without the necessity for return hospitalities, and
to “keep up appearances” generally. Many of their friends gave Mrs.
Bromfield undeserved credit for shrewdness and calculation in her
hypochondria.
Emily had admirers, and, in her first season, one fairly good chance to
marry. The matchmakers who were interested in her--“for her mother’s
sake,” they said, but in fact from the matchmaking mania,--were
exasperated by her refusal. They remonstrated with her mother in vain.
“I know, I know,” sighed Mrs. Bromfield. “But what can I do? Emily
is so headstrong and I am in such feeble health. I am forbidden the
agitation of a discussion. I’ve told Emily that a girl without money,
and with nothing but family, must be careful. But she won’t listen to
me.”
Mrs. Ainslie, the most genuinely friendly of all the women who insured
their own welcome by chaperoning a clever, pretty, popular girl,
pressed the matter upon Emily with what seemed to her an impertinence
to be resented.
“Don’t be offended, child,” said Mrs. Ainslie, replying to Emily’s
haughty coldness. “You ought to thank me. I only hope you will never
regret it. A girl without a dot can’t afford to trifle. A second season
is dangerous, especially here in Washington, where they bring the
babies out of the nursery to marry them off.”
“Why, you yourself used to call Bob Fulton one of nature’s poor jokes,”
Emily retorted. “You overlooked these wonderful good qualities in him
until he began to annoy me.”
“Sarcasm does not change the facts.” Mrs. Ainslie was irritated in
her even-tempered, indifferent fashion. “You think you’ll wait and
look about you. But let me tell you, my dear, precious few girls, even
the most eligible of them, have more than one really good chance to
marry. Oh, I know what they say. But they exaggerate flirtations into
proposals. This business--yes, _business_--of marrying isn’t so serious
a matter with the men as it is with us. And we can’t hunt; we must
sit and wait. In this day the stupidest men are crafty enough to see
through the subtlest kind of stalking.”
Emily had no reply. She could think of no arguments except those of the
heart. And she felt that it would be ridiculous to bring them into the
battering and bruising of this discussion.
It was in May that she refused her “good chance.” In June her father
fell sick. In mid-July they buried him and drove back from the cemetery
to face ruin.
Ruin, in domestic finance, has meanings that range from the borderland
of comedy to the blackness beyond tragedy.
The tenement family, thrust into the street and stripped of their goods
for non-payment of rent, find in ruin an old acquaintance. They take
a certain pleasure in the noise and confusion which their uproarious
bewailing and beratings create throughout the neighbourhood. They enjoy
the passers-by pausing to pity them, a ragged and squalid group,
homeless on the curb. They have been ruined many times, will be ruined
many times. They are sustained by the knowledge that there are other
tenements, other “easy-payment” merchants. A few hours, a day or two
at most, and they are completely reëstablished and are busy making
new friends among their new neighbours, exchanging reminiscences of
misfortune and rumours of ideal “steady jobs.”
The rich family suddenly ruined has greater shock and sorrow. But
usually there are breaks in the fall. A son or a daughter has married
well; the head of the family gets business opportunities through rich
friends; there is wreckage enough to build up a certain comfort, to
make the descent into poverty gradual, almost gentle.
But to such people as the Bromfields the word _ruin_ meant--ruin. They
had not had enough to lose to make their catastrophe seem important to
others; indeed, the fact that a little was saved made their friends
feel like congratulating them. But the ruin was none the less thorough.
They were shorn of all their best belongings--all the luxury that
was through habit necessity. They must give up the comfortable house
in Connecticut Avenue, where they had lived for twenty years. They
must leave their associations, their friends. They must go to a New
England factory village. And there they would have a tiny income,
to be increased only by the exertions of two women, one a helpless
hypochondriac, both ignorant of anything for which any one would give
pay. And this cataclysm was wrought within a week.
“Fate will surely strike the finishing blow,” thought Emily, as she
wandered drearily through the dismantling house. “We shall certainly
lose the little we have left.” And this spectre haunted her wakeful
nights for weeks.
Mr. Bromfield was not a “family man.” He had left his wife and home
first to the neglect of servants, and afterward to the care of his
daughter. As Emily grew older and able to judge his life-failure,
his vanity, his selfishness--the weaknesses of which he was keenly
conscious, he saw or fancied he saw in her clear eyes a look that
irritated him against himself, against her, and against his home. He
was there so rarely that the women never took him into account. Yet
instead of bearing his death with that resigned fortitude which usually
characterises the practical, self-absorbed human race in its dealings
with the inevitable, they mourned him day and night.
After one of his visits of business and consolation, General Ainslie
returned home with tears in his eyes.
“It is wonderful, wonderful!” he said in his “sentimental” voice--a
tone which his wife understood and prepared to combat. She liked his
sentimental side, but she had only too good reason to deplore its
influence upon his judgment.
“What now?” she inquired.
“I’ve been to see Wentworth’s widow and daughter. It was most touching,
Abigail. He always neglected them, yet they mourn him in a way that a
better man might envy.”
“Mourn him? Why, he was never at home. They hardly knew him.”
“Yet I have never seen such grief.”
“Grief? Of course. But not for him. They don’t miss him; they miss his
salary--his four thousand a year. And that’s the kind of grief you
can’t soothe. The real house of mourning is the house that’s lost its
breadwinner.”
General Ainslie looked uncomfortable.
“Do you remember that Chinese funeral we saw at Pekin, George?” his
wife continued. “Do you remember the widows in covered cages dragging
along behind the corpse--and the big fellow with the prod walking
behind each cage? And whenever the widows stopped howling, don’t you
remember how those prods were worked until the response from inside was
satisfactory?”
“Yes, but--really, I must say, Abbie----”
“Well, George--poverty is the prod. No wonder they mourn Wentworth.”
General Ainslie looked foolish. “I guess I won’t confess,” he said to
himself, “that it was this afternoon I told the Bromfields they had
only five hundred a year and the house in Stoughton. It would encourage
her in her cynicism.”