Claire was in a very interrogative mood to-night. "I should like to have Mr. Brady explained a little more fully," she said, when Thurston and herself were again seated side by side.
Her companion gave a soft laugh. "I thought that we had exhausted that subject," he said. "It's not a very rich one, you know."
"I don't want you to tell me anything about his character as a man," Claire quickly replied. "But I want to find out his standing in society."
"He has no standing in society," said Thurston, with instant decisiveness.
"Do the people of whom you have spoken repeatedly—those whom you term the best class, I mean—entirely refuse to know him?"
"Not at all. They have never been called upon to know or not to know him. The best class is in a different world altogether. Perhaps Brady is aware of their existence; he may have read of their entertainments in the newspapers, or he may have seen them occasionally at watering-places. But that is all. His self-importance prevents him from realizing that they are above him. He is essentially and utterly common. He is surrounded by a little horde of sycophants who worship him for his money, and who are, in nearly all respects, as common as himself."
"You mean the set of people with whom Sophia associates?"
"Yes. I mean the rich, vulgar set of which you have so frequently seen specimens in this very room."
Claire seemed to muse for a short while. "But the others?" she soon asked. "Those people who hold themselves above the Bergemanns—are they all refined and cultured? That is, are there any Bradys among them? Are there any Mrs. Bergemanns or Sophias?"
"I should emphatically say not. One may meet people among them who are by no means models of propriety or of high-breeding, but only as exceptional cases. They are generally found to be ladies and gentlemen; I don't know two more comprehensive words than those for just what I desire to express. Of course I have no large moral meaning, now. I would merely imply that in outward actions, at least, they preserve the niceties. Their occasional deeds of darkness may be as solidly bad as anything of the kind elsewhere. I should be very loth to describe them as saintly. But they are usually polished. Quite often they are rank snobs. Still oftener they are stupid. Their virtues might best be explained negatively, perhaps. They don't shock you; they are not crude; they haven't forgotten that a verb agrees with its nominative in number and person; they don't overdress themselves; they very rarely shout instead of talking, and ... well, for a final negative, they never tell the truth when its utterance might wound or annoy."
Claire had seemed to be listening very earnestly. She did not respond with her usual promptness. Her tones were slow and thoughtful when she at length said: "And they are what you would call an aristocracy?"
"I don't know why they are not. They are incessantly being compared, to their own disadvantage, with the aristocracies of foreign lands. But I have traveled considerably, in my time, and on the whole I prefer them to all similar bodies. There is less sham about them, and quite as much reason for existence. They point a very sad moral, perhaps; they illustrate what certain austere critics like to call the failure of republican ideas. But I've had so many good friends among them that I can't consider any institution a failure which is responsible for their development."
"And it is very hard to become one of their number," Claire said, after another little pause. She did not put the words as a question.
"You seem to think it hard," Thurston answered. Rare as was any impulsive order of speech with him, this slight yet meaning sentence had nevertheless found utterance, almost against his will.
It was his first reference to the episode which both vividly remembered, though in far different ways, and which had cast round their subsequent intercourse, even when directed upon the most mundane topics, a delicate glamour of sentiment plainly perceptible to each. Claire dropped her eyes, for a moment, then suddenly lifted them, while the pink was yet deepening in her cheeks.
"Let us suppose that I am not speaking of myself," she said. "Indeed," she went on, with a soft, peculiar smile that had hardly lighted her lips before it fled, "you have told me thatmygate into the kingdom of the elect is through—well, through matrimony." She now looked at her companion with so subtle a blending of the arch and the gravethat Thurston, in all the solidity of his veteran experience, was baffled how to explain it. "Suppose," she suddenly announced to him, "that I should marry Mr. Brady. He is your abhorrence, I know. But if he put his millions at my disposal, could I become the great lady you and I have talked about?"
Thurston was stroking his mustache, and he now seemed to speak under it, a trifle gruffly, as he answered her.
"Yes," he said, "I think you could—provided Brady quitted the world after marrying you."
Claire gave a little rippling laugh. "They would never allow him to be one of them?" she asked, in tones whose precise import her hearer still failed to define, and which impressed him as midway between raillery and seriousness.
"No, never. If he has proposed to you, my poor child, don't for an instant flatter yourself that you could use him as a ladder by which to climb up into your coveted distinction."
These words were spoken with a commiserating ridicule. Tried a man of the world as he was, Thurston had of late been so deeply wounded that he now felt his wound bleed afresh, at an instant's notice, and deal him a severe pang as well. But Claire, quite forgetting to make allowances, flushed hotly, and at once said:—
"I never told you that Mr. Brady had proposed to me. And I do not think it proper or civil for you to throw in my face what I have put to you in the shape of a confidence."
"Marry Brady. By all means marry him," said Thurston. He had not been so bitterly affronted in years.
Claire felt conscience-stricken by the recollection of her own thoughts just previous to Brady's offer. She had permitted herself to weigh the question of whether or not marriage with such a man might be possible. Then had come the sharp sense that it would be degrading. For this reason she was now humiliated beyond measure, and hence keenly angry.
"I shall not marry him," she said, her lip faintly quivering. "Why do you speak to me like this?" Tears of shame now gathered to her eyes, and her voice notably faltered. She found no more words to utter. She felt that she was in a false, miserable position. She felt that she deserved Thurston's contempt, too, since she had given him, stupidly and rashly, a hint of what had passed between herself and the man whom they both despised.
Thurston rose and placidly faced her. He was so angry that he had just enough control left to preserve tranquillity.
"I don't know that I have said anything very hard to you," he began.
"Yes, you have," retorted Claire, her voice in wretched case. She knotted both hands together while she spoke. She was still seated.
Thurston went on as if there had been no interruption. "But if I tell you the plain truth, I don't doubt you will think me hard. I will tell it because you need it. You are still a mere girl, and very foolish. I am profoundly sorry for you. You have no possible regard for that frightful young millionaire, and yet you have permitted yourself to think of marrying him. Such a marriage would be madness. You would not accept me because you thoughtme old, but it would be better if you married a decent man of ninety than a gross cad and ruffian of twenty-three. But whether you do sell yourself in this horrid way or no, it is a plain fact that you are in danger of committing some terrible folly. I see by your face that you do not mean to heed my words. But perhaps if you listen to them now, you will recall them and heed them hereafter."
"No," cried Claire, tingling with mortification, and seizing on satire as a last defensive resort against this deserved rebuke, whose very justice revealed her own culpability in a clearer light; "no, if you please, I won't listen! I shall ask, instead, that you will kindly grant me the liberty of purchasing my own sackcloth and of collecting my own ashes."
She half turned away from him, with glowing face, as she spoke; it was her intent to beat a prompt retreat; but Thurston's firm, even tones detained her.
"I warn you against yourself," he went on. His anger had cooled now, and melancholy had replaced it. "You have some fine traits, but there is an actual curse hanging over you, and as a curse it will surely fall, unless by the act of your own will you change it into a blessing. It is more than half the consequence of your land and your time, but it is due in part, also, to your special nature. In other countries the women whom fate has placed as it has placed you, are never stung by ambition like yours. They are bornbourgeoises, and such they are contented to remain. If they possess any ambition, it is to adorn the sphere in which their destinies have set them, and this alone. They long for no new worlds to conquer; their small world is enough, but it is not too small to hold a large store of honest pride. All over Europeone finds it thus. But in America the affair is quite different. Here, both women and men have what is called 'push.' Not seldom it is a really noble discontent; I am not finding fault with it in all cases. But in yours, Claire Twining, I maintain that it will turn out a dowry of bitter risk if not woful disaster. I exhort you to be careful, to be very careful, lest it prove the latter. Don't let your American 'push' impel you into swamps and quicksands. Don't let it thrust you away from what is true and sterling in yourself. Be loyal to it as a good impulse, and it will not betray and confound you like a bad one. You can do something so much better than to wreck your life; you can make it a force, a guidance, a standard, a leadership. You can keep conscience and self-respect clean, and yet shine with a far surer and more lasting brilliancy on this account.... Think of my counsel; I shall not besiege you with any more; no doubt I have given you too much, and with too slight a warrant, already.... Good-by. If I should never see you again, I shall always hope for you until I hear ill news of you. And if bright news reaches me, I shall be vain enough to tell myself that we have not met, talked, argued—even quarreled, perhaps—without the gain on your own side of happy and valued results." ...
Thurston passed from the room, swiftly, and yet not seeming to use the least haste, before Claire, strongly impressed and with her wrath at a vanishing point, could collect herself for the effort of any coherent sort of reply.
She had caught one very clear glimpse of his face just as he disappeared. His hazel eyes, troubled, yet quiet, had momentarily dwelt with great fixity onher own. As she afterward recalled this parting vision of a face grown so familiar through recent weeks, it appeared to her solely in imaginative terms. It ceased to be a face; it became a reproach, a remonstrance, an advice, an entreaty.
Immediately after his exit she sank into a chair, feeling his late words ring through mind and heart. She had never liked him so much as at that moment.
She had a sense that he meant to avoid seeing her again. But she did not realize through how much vivid novelty of experience she must pass before they once more met. If any such prescience had reached her, she would have gone out into the hall and plucked him by the sleeve, begging him to return, filled with conciliatory designs, eager that he should abandon all thought of permanent farewell.
But as it was, she let the hall-door close behind him, and sat staring at the floor and saying within her own thoughts: "He is right. I am in danger. I can save myself if I choose. And Iwillsave myself in time!"
She clenched both hands as they drooped at either side, and her eyes flashed softly below their shading lids.
Shewas wholly unprepared for the intelligence, a few days later, that Thurston had gone, in the most sudden manner, to Europe. The Bergemanns, mother and daughter, were both amazed by the departure of their legal adviser, without a premonitory word from him on the subject and apparently at such brief notice. Claire, in the midst of her own consternation, sharply dreaded lest some suspicion should dawn upon them that she was concerned in this precipitate change. But if Mrs. Bergemann let fall any hint that such was her belief, it was made in the hearing of Sophia alone; and the latter had scouted from the first, as we know, all idea that Thurston's regard for her friend could partake of lover-like tenderness. The letter which he had written to his client, announcing that he had sailed, gave no reason for this abrupt course. It was a letter somewhat copious in other respects, however, and made thoroughly plain the fact that the partner of him who wrote it would in every way defend and supervise the interests of Mrs. Bergemann. "I shall probably be abroad a number of months," ran Thurston's written words, "but during that time rest sure that all details of the slightest importance with respect to your affairs shall be safely communicated through Mr. Chadwick."
Mr. Chadwick soon afterward presented himself. He was a lank man, of bloodless complexion and irreproachable manners. "I think he's a reg'lar wet blanket," said Mrs. Bergemann, with critical cruelty, "after dear, high-toned Mr. Thurston. Hewashigh-toned, Claire, wasn't he, now?" she persevered, with a sidelong, timorous look toward Sophia, who chanced, besides Claire, to be present at the time.
"Now, Ma!" broke in Sophia, accompanying this vocative with a tart gesture of remonstrance, "Claire doesn't know a bit better than you or I do whether he was high-toned or not.Doyou, Claire?"
"I think almost everybody who ever met him," said Claire, answering the appeal, "must have seen it very clearly."
She spoke this with nice composure. But she was inwardly dismayed, wounded, almost tortured. For many succeeding days she contrived to absent herself from all Sophia's guests. Brady had totally disappeared from her experience; he no longer presented himself at the house. He was secretly fearful lest Claire might publish the fact of his proposal broadcast among the adherents with whom he stood supreme as their moneyed and autocratic leader. He suffered those torments of humiliation which only a small soul, with small views of things and an immoderate vanity, has learned the petty trick of suffering. It is by no means hyperbole to state that he inwardly cursed Claire for being the girl within whose power he had put it to say that she had actually repelled his superb matrimonial advances. Longer concern with so unwholesome a creature would be idle for the chronicler, especially since henceforth he drops out of our record somewhat asSlocumb did, and with a scarcely more chivalrous exit.
Claire now passed through a period of extreme repentance. Her old longings had vanished; she silently planned for herself, with ascetic enthusiasm, a future of humility and obscurity. She was a zealot in a totally new way; she had abandoned all thought of marrying, and had conceived the idea of mentally fitting herself to become a governess. With this end, she spent hours in the library. Incapable of doing anything by halves, she now bent the full force of her strong will and capable intellect toward obtaining a proper educational competence. She swam far out, so to speak, into the blue waters of knowledge, and breasted them with good, vigorous strokes. She was, for the time at least, passionately in earnest. Thurston's farewell words rang incessantly through her memory. She would crush down all that American "push," once and forever. She would steer from the perils against which he had warned her, by one broad, divergent swerve. Her remorse and her resignation held a poetic ardor of kinship. Her past longings had indeed been a folly, and as such she would unvaryingly treat them. She would be consistent henceforward, and seek only what lay within her lawful scope of action. She was like the convert to a new faith, and she had all a convert's intensity of fervor.
From her two friends, however, she chose to guard with caution the secret of this change. It was now the early portion of June, and the fierce heat of summer had literally leapt down on the city after several weeks of raw, inclement May weather. The judgment long ago passed upon our climate, that it hasa summer, an autumn, a winter, but no spring, had never been more fully confirmed. The city was wrapt all day in a torrid drowse; the pavements lay either in bleak glare or breathless shadow. On the benches of the parks, where spots of dusk were wrought by overbrowing branches, groups of jaded citizens huddled together in moist discomfort. The cars tinkled sleepily; the omnibuses lagged in rumbling sloth; foul smells beset the nostrils, even from genteel gutters or thedoorwaysof high-priced restaurants. People looked up at the wool-like pallor of the sky, and wished that it would darken into the cooling gloom of a thunderstorm.
But Claire scarcely minded the heat. She had known the fetid miseries of a Greenpoint summer. Those spacious chambers and halls of the Bergemanns' solid-built mansion were delicious indeed by contrast. Striped awnings had been affixed to each window, whose scalloped edges would flap in chance waftures of breeze, while the stout bunting above them changed the sunny rigors outside to a continual soothing gloom. It was true that she had no sympathy with hot weather; she liked an atmosphere in which quick movement was pleasantly possible. But she was nevertheless very much at her ease here and now. She read; she studied; the library, bathed in a tender dimness, pleased her with its vague rows of books, its rough rich carpeting, its dark massive wood-work. She had, for a time, that exquisite feeling of the scholar who clothes himself with silence, solitude, and repose, and who lets the outer world touch him through soft, impersonal yet cogent mediums. During this interval she was completely happy. It was the old self-surrender of thedévote.Literature was henceforth to be her cult, her idolatry. The mere process of reading had always been one of ease and speed with her. Past training helped her now in the way of method and system. She had learned how to learn. Her French readings were frequent. Sophia had a French maid with whom she often conversed. Her proficiency in the language soon became marked and thorough.
But suddenly her new contentment was shattered, and by a rude stroke. Mrs. Bergemann began to talk of leaving town. Claire almost felt, at first, as if the ground were giving way beneath her feet. She could only accompany her friends to a watering-place in the position of a dependent and pensioner. Her salary must stop, because her relations with Sophia must of necessity lose all their instructive character. "You would never continue our readings, Sophia," she said, "in a crowded hotel, where you would have countless distractions."
"Oh, yes, I would, Claire," was the alert reply. "We'll keep it up just the same. You'll pack a few books in one of the trunks, and I'll promise to be a good girl; you needn't feel a bit afraid. Ma's decided on Coney Island. Now, don't look so glum, as if you didn't have a friend in all the world. You've been sort of queer, lately; you talk slower, somehow, and you stick up there in the library nearly all the time. But you're still my own nice Claire. I swear by you, dear girl, just as I always did. If there's anything on your mind I won't ask you what it is."
"There is something on my mind, Sophia," Claire said. "But you must not ask me what it is, just yet. I will tell you soon. Yes, I hope to tell you quite soon."
She went with them to Coney Island. They engaged rooms at the Manhattan Beach Hotel. The books had been packed and brought, but very few of them were ever opened.
"It's not a bit of use, Claire!" Sophia affirmed, after the lapse of about five days. "We can't manage it. There's always something happening, as you see. Besides, nobody works here. Everybody idles. It's in the air. Let's take a vacation."
"Why, yes, girls," said Mrs. Bergemann, at this point, with motherly persuasion. "You better just lay up some health for next winter, and quit the books till we get home. Or p'raps we may get tired of this place 'fore the summer's through, an' go somewheres where it ain't so lively—I mean some lazy place like Lake George or the White Mountains. Then books and reading will fit in kinder natural. But I don't thinkI'llcare to leave here for a good big while. I ain't ever seen anything like it before. If we could only go driving here, now, and them horses wasn't eating their heads off over in the city, why 'twould be a reg'lar paradise. Sophia, I've just rec'lected that I came to this very spot twenty years ago if it's a day, with poor Pa! We was quite a young couple, then ... that girl wasn't more'n a baby, Claire. We took her along. Pa carried you, Sophia. The Brewery wasn't started in them times, an' ... well, I guess we got along with about five hundred dollars a year, over at the small saloon at Hoboken."
"Now, Ma, you needn't go into such very close particulars, please!" chided Sophia, whose large, warm heart was not democratic enough always to stand the intense humility of certain maternal reminiscences.
"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Bergemann, with a good-humored laugh; "we don't mind Claire. She's one of us. Besides, we're up here in the bedroom, not down on that crowded piazzer. Well, girls, as I was saying, Pa and me came here that day, an' I declare to goodness, the place was only a bare strip o' sand with a few little shanties here and there, that they called hotels. And just look at it now! Three monstrous palaces, and all New York streaming down every decent afternoon. It's like enchantment. I can't believe I'm where I was twenty years ago. I'm afraid I must be dreaming. But if I am, I don't want to wake up; I want to keep right on till the first o' September."
"Only a few years ago the island was very much the same as you describe it twenty years ago," said Claire, who had dipped into a small descriptive handbook telling about the marvelous growth of this unique and phenomenal watering-place.
"I s'pose I ought to find it a little bit toogay," pursued Mrs. Bergemann, presently, in reflective afterthought. "Poor Pa's been gone such a short time." Here the lady heaved an imposing sigh which her massive bust made no less visible than audible. "But I can grieve just as well by mixing in with folks as if I was hung round with crape an' stuck off alone somewheres. Everybody's got their own ways o' grieving, an' I ain't goin' to forget poor Pa merely 'cause I look about a little and make my second-mourning kinder stylish. Not a bit of it!"
Mrs. Bergemann certainly showed the courage of her opinions, as regarded the sort of grief due her departed spouse. Her laugh was loud in hall, indining-room, or on piazza. Her costumes tinkled with black bugles, or rustled and crackled in sombre yet ornamented grandeur. It is probable that grief may have dealt her real pangs, and yet that the irrepressible glow and warmth of her spirits kept always at bay the gloom and chill of grief. Her nature was not a shallow one; she could feel with depth and force, but she could not mope or even muse; solitude was hateful to her; she was gregarious; she wanted to hear the voices and look into the faces of her kind. In spite of her German origin she was excessively representative, from a purely American stand-point. Her very vulgarities—and they were certainly profuse—possessed a wide, healthful sincerity. Her enormous benevolence stood for her in the place of refinement; it was indeed a certain code of manners by itself; she was always so good to you that you might pardonably forget to remark the unconventionalism of her goodness. She was precisely the sort of person whom Coney Island must have pleased.
But it pleased Claire in a totally different way. The immense concourse of people who flocked thither, by such easy modes of travel, from New York and Brooklyn and elsewhere, were an incessant source of interest. Their numbers, their activities, their enjoyments, kept her blood in a soft tingle. This brilliant and picturesque city by the sea appeared to her in the light of a delicious reparation. It was a long, splendid festivity, compensating her for those years of dire dullness passed but a few miles away. All her recent resolutions to spend a life of lowly quietude, had melted into thin air. The ambition to climb, to shine, and to rule was once more a dominantforce within her being. It seemed to her as if she had flung away some sort of irksome disguise, and now beheld it lie like an ugly heap near at hand, while wondering, in the exhilaration of regained freedom, how she had ever chosen to shroud herself with its clogging folds.
She bathed every day in the ocean, and acquired a richer fund of health on this account. Either with Sophia or alone, though more often the latter, she explored the whole wondrous little life-crowded island, in which every grade of human society, from lowest to highest, held for her its distinct representation. The two huge Iron Piers, jutting out into the surf and assailed by continual salty breezes, charmed her with their streams of coming and departing people, with their noonday lunchers, with theirtable d'hôtediners, seated over cigarettes or coffee in the sweet marine dusk. She loved West Brighton, with its beer-bibbers, its gaudy booths, its preposterous exhibited fat woman, its amazing Irish giant, its games of strength or skill, and its whirlingcarrousels, where delighted children span round on wooden horses, cows, lions, or dragons, to the clamors of a shameless brass band. But Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, and the Oriental each afforded a steadier satisfaction. The delicate and lightsome architecture of these three hotels, with their myriads of windows, theirchâlet-like patterns of roof, gable, and chimney, and their noble outlooks upon the sea, grew dearer to her as the structures themselves became more familiar. She loved the fine sonorous music that pealed forth from the big deft-built pavilions, where troups of well-trained minstrels set many a brazen instrument to their capable lips, and would often find assembled thousands for their listeners, either in the long, salubrious afternoons, or in the breezy starlight and moonlight of those exquisite seaside evenings. Her observant eyes were never weary of watching, and they forever found something to watch. She soon acquired an extraordinary keenness in the matter of "placing" people at sight. Few points of manner, costume, or visage escaped her. She found herself classifying and arranging the vast crowds that she daily encountered. She became familiar with the faces of many who frequently disembarked from the loaded cars. Nor was her own face in turn unnoticed. Augmented health had freshened its tender tints, and lent to its lines a choicer symmetry. Many an eye dwelt upon her with admiration. Almost instinctively she had learned the art of disposing her black garments to dainty advantage, and of heightening their effect with little subdued touches of maidenly tastefulness.
Sophia's diversions increased with each fresh day. Many of the male devotees with whom she had romped during "sociables" of the previous winter, sought her in these new surroundings. Claire was compelled to acknowledge former introductions, and sometimes to assume a conversational attitude with the friends of her friend. But they all seemed to her alike; they all reminded her of Brady, though in a mercifully moderated way. She was invariably civil to them, though they wearied and tried her. They made her recall Thurston, whose remembered comments fleeted through her mind, while his grave, manly image appealed to it in retrospective vision. She was on the verge of a novel and important experience; but, of this unborn fact her longing forbetter companionship alone gave monition, and addressed her by the imaginative stimulus which we sometimes carelessly term presentiment.
One evening, as she joined Mrs. Bergemann and Sophia upon that portion of the hotel piazza which was usually set aside for its regular patrons, she found the two ladies in conversation with two gentlemen, of whom she knew only one, ranking him as not by any means the most ill-bred of Sophia's friends. He was a young man named Trask, of canary-colored eyebrows and a cloudy complexion, who had made himself a favorite with both sexes of his particular set through rousing no jealousies by superior personal and mental gifts, yet winning golden repute as one whose complaisant good-will would wince under nothing short of positive imposition. The second gentleman was presented to Claire as Mr. Hollister, and her look had scarcely lit on his face before she felt convinced that he was quite of another world from his companions. Even while he was seated she could see that he was tall and of shapely build. His head was small, and covered with glossy blond curls; his blond mustache fringed a lip of sensitive cut, though the smooth chin beneath it fell away a little, leaving his large, frank blue eyes, broad forehead, and well-formed nose to fail of implying the strength they would otherwise have easily told. He wore a suit of some thin, dark stuff that clung tightly about his athletic arms and chest, and contrasted with the light silken tie knotted at his wide, solid throat. Every detail of his dress was what Claire soon decided to be in the best fashion; she had already learned a good deal about the correct reigning mode in men's dress. The extraordinary nicety and comprehensiveness of her observation had made this one of the sure results of her present sojourn.
She liked Mr. Hollister at sight, and she liked him more after she had heard him speak. His voice was full and rich, like the voice of a man used to the shout that often goes with the out-door game; he could not be more than five-and-twenty, at the most, she decided; he seemed a trifle bashful, too, but bashful with a virile grace that pleased her better, in so robust and engaging a person, than the most trained self-possession could have done.
Sophia had always felt a liking for the yellow-eyebrowed young gentleman; they were the firmest of friends. The coming of Claire appeared to relieve her from the responsibility of "entertaining" Mr. Hollister, whom she had never met till this evening. She soon drifted away arm-in-arm with her preferred companion, among the dark throngs beyond the huge bright-lit piazza. Mrs. Bergemann, perhaps from an instinctive perception of how matters lay with Claire, presently rose and sought the society of a matronly friend, seated not many yards distant, whom she had known in anterior Hoboken days, and who had reached nearly as fat a prosperity as her own, from possibly similar causes.
Claire was glad to be alone with her new acquaintance. He had roused her curiosity; she wanted to find out about him, to account for him. Thus far they had said the most impersonal and ordinary things to each other. She remembered afterward that they had used the old meteorological method which has so often served as the plain, dull path into fervent friendships or still warmer human relations; they had talked of the weather.
"I'm really surprised to hear that it has been so very hot in the city," Claire said, breaking the pause that followed Mrs. Bergemann's departure.
"Oh, it has been dreadful, I assure you," said Mr. Hollister. "Ninety in the shade at four o'clock."
"Why, we have had a lovely breeze here, all day, straight from the ocean," Claire resumed, with a pretty little proprietary wave of one hand seaward, as though she were commending the atmospheric virtues of her own special domain. "Once or twice I have felt actually chilly." He looked incredulous at this, then broke into a soft, bass laugh; laughter was frequent with him, and made his blue eyes sparkle whenever it came.
"I've forgotten how it feels to be chilly," he said. "I wonder if I could stand any chance of reviving the sensation down on the shore yonder."
He spoke the words in the manner of an invitation, and doubtless seeing prompt acquiescence in Claire's face, at once leaned forward to ask "Will you go?" Claire straightway rose, answering "With pleasure." She took his offered arm, and thought while she did so how strong and firm it was, as if bronze or stone were beneath its flimsy vestment, instead of muscular mortality. The band in the illuminated pavilion near by had lately paused, but it now struck up a waltz rich in long mellow-pealing cadences. "Is this your first visit here?" said Claire, as they descended the broad piazza steps, down toward the smooth, trim levels of grass and the massive, rounded beds of geranium, whose scarlets and greens now looked vague in the starlight. "Or have you been here many times before," she went on, "during past seasons, and so lost all your enthusiasm for this charming place?"
"I've been here about six times in all," he answered, "but my enthusiasm is still in fine order. It's ready to break forth at any minute. If you want, Miss Twining, we can have a combined eruption this evening."
Claire thought this clever; it had so fresh a sound after the blunt fun she had long heard; it made her think a little of the way Beverley Thurston phrased his ideas, though any resemblance between the two men could only exist for her in the large generic sense that they were both gentlemen. She laughed, with a note of real glee among the liquid trebles of her mirth. It seemed to her that she had already got to know Mr. Hollister quite well. And yet they were still such strangers! She had still so much to learn regarding him!
"I'm glad you've nothing to say against this delightful island," she declared, as if mildly jubilant over the discovery. "I heard a man on the sands talking about it to a friend only a few mornings ago. He was a shabby man who wanted shaving, and I'm not sure that he had on any collar. I think he must have been a kind of philosopher. He said that Coney Island was an immense fact. There is just my opinion—that it is an immense fact." They were now but a slight distance from the foamy, rolling plash of the dark sea-waves. The music came to them in bursts of softer richness. With her arm still in that of her companion, Claire half turned toward the hotel, starred with countless lights, and looking, as it rose above the vague throngs beneath it, like some palace of dreamy legend, lit for festival.
"I often think that this mere strip of sand must be so surprised," she continued, "to find itself grownsuddenly important and famous after it has lain here lonely, almost unnoticed, for long centuries. I sometimes fancy that I can hear the waves talk to it as they break on its shore, and ask it what is meant by this wonderful change."
"That's a very pretty way of looking at the matter," replied Hollister, while he gazed down into her face from his considerably taller height with a keener expression of interest and charm than he himself guessed. "Perhaps the waves congratulate Coney Island on its final success in life, and gently quote to it the old proverb about everything coming to those who know how to wait."
Claire started. "Do you believe that?" she said. "Doeseverything come to those who know how to wait?"
Hollister laughed again. "You talk as ifyouhad been waiting. But I'm sure it can't have been for very long."
This last sentence was put at least half in the form of a question. But she evaded it, saying with a light little toss of the head: "Hasn't everybody always something to wait for, between youth and old age?"
"Tell me something about your expectations, won't you?" he asked, with the non-committal tenderness of a man whose acquaintanceship has been too brief for any serious depth to accompany his words. "You can't think how much I wish that I was one of them."
"One of my expectations? You?"
"Decidedly."
"But how could I answer you on that point?" she returned, letting him catch in the gloom a glimpse of her sly smile. "You're only a name tome. If you'll not think my candor rude, I haven't an idea who you are."
"I don't believe I should think you rude if you really were so," he said, smiling, and yet seeming to mean with much quiet force each word that he spoke. "So you want me to give an account of myself? Well, I'm a rather obscure fellow. That is, I don't believe I know more than ten people in New York at all well. I lead a quiet life; I'm what they call a Wall Street man, but I mingle with the big throng there only in a sort of business way. I was graduated at Dartmouth two years ago, and spent a year in Europe afterward. Then I came back, and began hard work. There were reasons why I should do so—I mean financial reasons. I'm not a New Yorker; I was born and reared in Providence. Do you know Providence?"
"No," said Claire. "I know only New York."
She was looking at him interestedly at short intervals; they had resumed their stroll again; her arm was still within his; he had continued to please her, though she felt no thrill of warm attraction toward him, however mild in degree. She had a sense of friendship, of easy familiarity. But apart from this, she was conscious, as a woman sometimes not merely will but must be, that she had won him to like her by a very easy and rapid victory. Already she was not sure but that she had won him to like her strongly as well. Her few recent words of reply had carried with them a subtle persuasion of which Hollister himself was oddly and most pleasurably conscious. He yielded to their effect, and became somewhat more free in his personal confidences.
"My father had been a Dartmouth man," he wenton. "That was the reason of my going there. Father and Mother have both passed away, now. It's a lovely old college, and it gained me some strong friendships. But I find that all my favorite classmates have drifted into other cities. They sometimes write to me, even yet, after my year in Europe. But, of course, the old good feeling will shortly cease ... how can it fail to cease?... I'm a good deal alone, just now. I know a number of men there in Wall Street, but I feel a little afraid of making friends with them. I don't just know why, but I do. Perhaps it's because of getting into bad habits. Some of them, I've noticed have very bad habits. And I've made up my mind ... that is, I—I half promised my poor dear mother just before she.... Well, Miss Twining, the plain truth is that I keep regular hours and live straight, as they say. I like to take a sail down here while the weather is hot, but I nearly always take it quite by myself. To-night I happened to meet Trask on the boat. I'd nearly forgotten Trask. He was in my Freshman year with me, but he dropped off after that. It was he who introduced me to—to the Miss—excuse me, but I really forget your friend's name."
"Miss Bergemann," said Claire.
"Oh, yes—Miss Bergemann." He paused, at this point, gently forcing Claire to pause also. They were still beside the sea; the music still came to them in its modulated sweetness. Hollister bent his head quite low, looking straight down into her upturned face.
"I've told you ever so much about myself," he said. "I wish, now, that you'd give me a little knowledge also. Will you?"
"Aboutmyself?" asked Claire. "About just who I am?"
"Well, yes, if you don't mind."
She reflected for a short space. Then she began to speak. She told him, as she went on, more than she had at first intended to tell. He listened intently while they slowly walked on, beside the dark, harmonious billows.
Before she had ended, he had realized that he was in love with her. He had never known anything of such love till now. His heart was fluttering in a new, wild way; he could scarcely find voice to answer her when she at length ceased to speak. But she had not told him all her past life. She had reserved certain facts. And her own feelings were entirely tranquil. Not the least responsive tremor disturbed her.
Hollisternearly missed the last boat back to the city, that evening. His night was partially sleepless, and morning brought with it a mental preoccupation that was surely perilous to what tasks lay before him. Like most men who have escaped the stress of any important sentiment until the age of five-and-twenty, he was in excellent condition for just such a leveling seizure as that to which he had now made complete surrender. He was what we call a weak nature, judged by those small and ordinary affairs of life which so largely predominate in almost every human career. If some great event were ever fated to rouse within him an especial strength, this summons had not yet sounded, and he still remained, for those who had found cause to test the fibre of his general traits, a person in whom conciliating kindliness laid soft spell upon them all. His friends at college had been mostly of tough calibre, of unyielding will; he seemed unconsciously to have selected them in order that they might receive his concessions. But they were never encouraged in fostering the least contempt for him. The spark of his anger always leapt out with the true fire, prompt to resent any definite disrespect. Yet the anger sometimes cooled too quickly toward those whom he liked; there had been cases where he would waive his own claimsto be indignant, with too humble a repentance of past heat. Necessarily such qualities made him popular, and this result was not lessened by the fact of his being almost rashly generous besides. His mental gifts had never been called powerful, but he had cut no sorry sort of figure as a student; and he possessed an airy humor that seldom deserted for a long time either his language or thought.
During the week that followed his introduction to Claire, he visited the hotel where she was a guest on every evening but two. One of those evenings chanced to be fiercely rainy; he could not have come to Coney Island without having his appearance there savor markedly of the ludicrous. The other evening was the last of the week. He had asked Claire to marry him the night before. She had not consented, neither had she refused: she had demurred. He was piqued by her hesitation, and affrighted by the thought of her possible coming refusal. He passed a night and a day of simple torture. Then, his suspense becoming insupportable, he appeared once more within her presence. His aspect shocked her; a few hours had made him actually haggard. His hand trembled so when she placed her own within it that she feared the perturbation might be noticed by others besides herself, there on the crowded piazza where they met.
"I've come to get your answer," he began, doggedly, under his breath. "You said last night that you were not sure if you—you cared enough for me. Have you found out, by this time, whether you do or no?"
"There are two empty seats, yonder, near the railing of the piazza. Shall we sit there?" She said this almost in a whisper.
"If you choose. But I—I'd rather be down on the sands. I'd rather listen to it there, whatever it is."
But Claire feigned not to hear him. It was her caprice to remain among the throng. She moved toward the empty seats that she had indicated, he following. In all such minor matters she had already become the one who dictated and he the one who acquiesced.
The night, lying beyond them, was cool but beautifully calm. An immature moon hung in the heavens, and tinged the smooth sea with vapory silver, so that its outward spaces took an unspeakable softness, as though Nature were putting the idea of infinity in her very tenderest terms.
There was no music to-night, for some reason. The buzz of voices all about them soon produced for each a sense of privacy in the midst of publicity.
"You asked me to be your wife last night," Claire began, looking at him steadily a little while after they were both seated, and not using any special moderation of tone because certain of her own vantage in the prompt detection of a would-be listener. "Before I give you any final answer to that request—which I, of course, feel to be a great honor—it is only just and fair that I should make you know one or two facts of my past life, hitherto left untold."
This was not the language of passion. Perhaps he saw but too plainly its entire lack of fervor. Yet it seemed to point toward future consent, and he felt his bosom swell with hope.
"If it is anything you would rather leave untold," he said, with a magnanimity not wholly born of his deep love, "I have not the least desire to learn it."
Claire shook her head. "You must know it," she returned. "I prefer, I demand that you shall know it."
He felt too choked for any answer to leave him. If she imposed this condition, what was meant by its sweet imperiousness except the happy future truce for which he so strongly yearned? On some men might have flashed the dread suspicion that her words carried portent of an unpardonable fault, about to be confessed there and then. But Hollister's love clad its object in a sanctifying purity. Apart from this, moreover, his mind could give none of that grim welcome which certain dark fears easily gain elsewhere. The sun had long ago knit so many wholesome gleams into his being that he had no morbid hospitality for the entertainment of shadows.
"I want to tell you of how my father died," Claire went on, with her face so grave in every line that it won a new, unwonted beauty from the change. "And I want to tell you, also, of something that was done to me after his death, and of something that I myself did, not in personal revenge for my own sense of injury, but with the desire to assert my great respect for his loved memory, and to deal justice where I thought justice was deserved."
Then in somewhat faltering tones, because she had deliberately pressed backward among recollections so holy that she seemed to herself like one treading on a place filled with sacred tombs, she recounted the whole bitter story of her mother's avarice, of her father's ignoble burial, and of her own resultant flight. The tears stood in her eyes before she had ended, though they did not fall. As her voice ceased she saw that Hollister had grown very pale, and thathis brows met in a stern frown. At the same moment his lip trembled; and as he leaned forward, took her hand into his own, pressed it once, briefly but forcibly, and then released it, she caught within his gaze a light of profound and unmistakable sympathy.
"I think your mother's course was infamous," he said. "Did you suppose that I could possibly blame you for leaving her?"
Claire had dropped her head, now, so that he could see only the white curve of her forehead beneath its floss of waved and gold-tinted hair. And she spoke so low that he could just hear her, and no more.
"Yes, I thought you might blame me.... I was not sure.... Or, if not this, I feared that the way in which poor Father was buried might ... might make you feel as if I bore a stain—or at least that the disgrace of such a burial, and of having a mother who could commit so hard and bad an act, must reflect in shame upon myself."
If they had been alone together, Hollister would have answered this faint-voiced, hesitant speech by simply clasping Claire within his arms. But the place forbade any such fondly demonstrative course. He was forced to keep his glad impetuosity within conventional bounds; yet the glow on his face and the tremulous ardor of his tones betrayed how cogent a surge of feeling was threatening to sweep him, poor fellow, past all barriers of propriety.
As it was, he spoke some words which he afterward failed to remember, except in the sense that they were filled with fond, precipitate denial of all that Claire had said. He felt so dazed by the bliss that had rushed upon him as to fail, also, of recalling just how he and Claire left the populous piazza, and just how they reached the lonelier dusk of the shore. But the waves brought him rare music as he paced the sands a little later. His was the divine intoxication that may drug the warder, memory, but that wakes to no remorseful morrow....
Claire wondered to herself when she was alone, that night, at the suddenness of the whole rapid event. She had given her pledge to become Herbert Hollister's wife in the autumn. While she viewed her promise in every sort of light, it seemed to her sensible, discreet, even creditable. He was a gentleman, and she liked him very much. She had no belief, no premonition that she would ever like any one else better. She was far from telling herself that she did not love him. We have heard her call herself cold, and it had grown a fixed creed with her that she was exempted by some difference of temperament from the usual throes and fervors. He suited her admirably, in person, in disposition, in manners. She need never be ashamed of him; she might indeed be well proud of so gallant and handsome a husband. Her influence over him was great; she could doubtless sway, even mould him, just as she desired. And she would bear clearly in mind those warning words of Beverley Thurston's: she would use her power to good ends, though they might be ambitious ones. From a worldly stand-point, he was comfortably well off; his income was several thousands a year; he had told her so. With his youth and energy he might gain much more. She would stimulate, abet, encourage him toward the accomplishment of this purpose. He should always be glad of having chosen her. She would hold itconstantly to heart that he should find in her a guide, a help, a devoted friend. And he, on his side, should aid her to win the place that she coveted, loving her all the better because she had achieved it.
When these rather curious meditations had ceased, she fell into a placid sleep. She had been wholly unconscious of the selfish pivot on which they turned. It had quite escaped her realization that they were singularly unsuited to the night of her betrothal. She had no conception of how little she was giving and how much she was demanding. She fell asleep with a perfectly good conscience, and a secret amused expectancy on the subject of Sophia's and Mrs. Bergemann's surprise when to-morrow should bring them the momentous tidings of her engagement.
But they were not so much surprised as she had anticipated. The attentions of Hollister had been brief, yet of telling earnestness. Sophia hugged her friend, and cried a little. "You mean old thing," she exclaimed, "to go and get engaged! Now, of course, you'll be getting married and leaving us."
"I'm afraid that's the natural consequence," said Claire, with a smile. Mrs. Bergemann pressed her to the portly bosom, and whispered confidentially, just after the kiss of congratulation: "He's a real ellergant gentleman. I think I know one when I see one, Claire. And don't you let Sophia set you against him. She better try and do half as well herself.She'llmarry some adventuring pauper, if she ain't careful, I just do believe."
Claire felt a great inward amusement at the thought of Hollister being depreciated in her eyes by any light value which Sophia might set upon him. As it proved, however, Sophia soon learned toforgive him for the engagement, and to treat him very graciously. Before the summer had grown much older Claire and her lover began to be pointed out by the few other permanent boarders of the hotel, with that interest which clings like a rosy nimbus about the doings of all betrothed young people. They certainly made a very handsome couple, as they strolled hither and thither. But Claire's interest, on her own side, had been roused by certain little côteries that would often group at one end of the monster piazza. The ladies of these small assemblages were mostly very refined-looking persons, and many of the gentlemen reminded her of Hollister, though their coats, trousers, boots, and neck-ties not seldom bore an elaborated smartness unpossessed by his. They looked, in current idiom, as though they had come out of band-boxes, with their high, stiff collars, their silver-topped walking sticks, and their general air of polite indolence. The ladies, clad in lace-trimmed muslins and wearing long gloves that reached above their elbows, would hold chats with their gallants under the shade of big, cool-colored parasols. Claire was often pierced by a sense of their remarkable exclusiveness when she watched their dainty gatherings; and she watched them with a good deal of covert concern. Hollister could not even tell her any of the gentlemen's names. This caused her a sting of regret. She wanted him to be at least important enough for that. His ignorance argued him too unknown, too unnoted. One day, to her surprise, Claire perceived Mrs. Arcularius, her former august schoolmistress, seated amid a group of this select description. Mrs. Arcularius had lost none of her old majesty. It was still there, and it was an older majesty, by many new gray hairs,many acquired wrinkles. She was a stouter person, but the stoutness did not impair her dignity; she bore her flesh well.
Claire determined to address her. She waited the chance, and carried out her project. Mrs. Arcularius was just rising, with two or three other ladies, for the purpose of going inside to luncheon, when Claire decided to make the approach.
She looked very charming as she did so. Hollister had brought her a bunch of roses the evening before, and she had kept them fresh with good care until now. They were fixed, at present, in the bosom of her simple white muslin dress, and they became her perfectly. She went quite close to Mrs. Arcularius, and boldly held out her hand.
"I am very glad to meet you again," she said, "and I hope you have not forgotten me."
Mrs. Arcularius took her hand. Under the circumstances she could not have done otherwise without committing a harsh rudeness. And she was a woman whose rudenesses were never harsh.
With her disengaged hand she put up a pair of gold eye-glasses. "Oh, yes, surely yes," she said, while softly dropping Claire's hand; "you were one of my pupils?"
Claire did not like this at all. But she would not have shown a trace of chagrin, just then, for a heavy reward. She smiled, knowing how sweet her smile was, and promptly answered:
"I'm sorry that you only remember me as one of your pupils. I should like you to remember my name also. Are you quite certain that it has escaped you? Does not my face recall it?"
"Your face is a very pretty one, my dear," saidMrs. Arcularius. She looked, while speaking, toward her recent companions, who were moving away, with light touches of their disarranged draperies andsidelongglances at Claire. Her tones were impenetrably civil, but her wandering eye, and the slight averted turn of her large frame, made their civility bear the value, no less, of an impromptu veneer.
Claire divined all this, with rapid insight. Her wit began to work, in a sudden defensive way. She preserved her smile, looking straight at Mrs. Arcularius while she said, in a voice pitched so that the other ladies must of necessity hear it:
"I was so obscure a little girl among all the grand little girls who went to your school in my time, that I don't at all blame you for finding it inconvenient to recall me. I fear I have been mistaken in addressing you as the woman of business, my dear madam, when you find the great lady alone to your humor. But you have played both parts with so much success that perhaps you will pardon me for alluding to one at the expense of the other."
There was nothing pert in Claire's little speech. The few seconds that it took her to make it were epical in her life; they showed her the quality of her own powers to strike back with a sure aim and a calm nerve; she was trying those powers as we try the temper of a new blade.
She moved away at once, with tranquil grace, and not a hint of added color or disconcerted demeanor. It was really very well done, in the sense that we call things well done which depend upon their manner, their felicity, theirchicof method. The ladies looked at each other and smiled, as though they would rather have kept their lips grave through politeness to Mrs.Arcularius; and she, on her own side, did not smile at all, but revealed that disarray of manner which we can best express in the case of some large fluttered bird by noting its ruffled plumage.
Nothing in Claire's past had qualified her for this deft nicety of rebuke. Those stands made against her mother's coarse onsets had surely offered but a clumsy training-school for such delicate defiance. And yet her history has thus far been followed ill if what she said and did on a certain day in Mrs. Arcularius's school-room has not foreshadowed in some measure the line of her present action. Perhaps it was all purely instinctive, and there had been, back in the gentility of her father's ancestry, some dame of nimble repartee and impregnable self-possession, who had won antique repute as dangerous to bandy speech with.
But Claire's tranquillity soon fled. She was scarcely out of Mrs. Arcularius's sight before an angry agitation assailed her. When, a little later, she met Sophia in one of the halls, it was with sharp difficulty that she hid her distress.
Still, however, she did hide it, sure of no sympathy, in this quarter, of a sort that could help to heal her fresh wound. That evening, however, a little after the arrival of Hollister, and while they walked the sea-fronting lawns and listened to the distant band, as had now grown a nightly and accepted event with them, she narrated the whole circumstance of the morning.
"Do you think I did right, Herbert?" she finished, sure of his answer before it came.
"Perfectly, my darling," he said, looking down into her dim, uplifted face. "I wouldn't have hadyou do anything else. You must cut that old Gorgon if you ever meet her again. You must cut her dead, before she has a chance to serve the same trick on you."
"I don't know about that," returned Claire, as if his words had set her thoughts into a new groove. "Perhaps she may be of use to me afterward. I may need her if we ever meet in ... society." She slightly paused before speaking the last word. "If she hasn't left by to-morrow I shan't see her, you know. I won't cut her; I simply shan't see her. It will be better."
Hollister laughed. What he would have disliked in another woman fascinated him in Claire. "You little ambitious vixen," he said, in his mellow undertone. "I suppose you will lead me a fine dance, after we are married. I suppose you will make me strain and struggle to put you high up, on the top rung of the ladder."
"I should like to be on the top rung of the ladder," said Claire, with that supreme frankness a woman sometimes employs when sure that the man who listens to her will clothe each word she speaks in an ideal halo.
At the same time, she had an honest impulse toward Hollister which should be recorded to her credit. She had not planned for him any thrilling discoveries of her worldliness after their marriage; she candidly saved him all peril of disappointment. But he, on the other hand, could see neither rock nor shoal ahead. If she pointed toward them, he looked only at the hand which pointed, and not at the object it so gracefully signaled.
She did not see Mrs. Arcularius again. Thatlady's visit had doubtless been for a day only. The dainty groups still assembled, mornings and afternoons, just as before. Now and then she thought that some of their members—those who had witnessed the little scene with her former schoolmistress—gave her a look of placid attention which seemed to say: "There you are. We remember you. You are the young person who asserted yourself."
She wanted them to address her, to strike an acquaintance with her. But they never did. This piqued her, as they were all permanent residents at the hotel. She made no concealment of her wish to Hollister.
"It is too bad you do not know some of their male friends," she said. "If you did, I should get you to introduce them."
He fired a little at this, mildly jealous. "Do you really mean it?" he asked, with doleful reproach.
Claire did not understand his jealousy, at first; then it flashed upon her, through a sudden realization of his great fondness.
"Oh, I should merely like to know them for one reason," she said, laughing. "They would introduce me in turn, perhaps, to those charming looking ladies, who belong to another world. I like their world—that is, the little I have seen of it. I want to see more. I want to have them find out that I am quite suited to be one of them."
His jealousy was appeased. He softened in a moment. It was only her pretty little foible, after all—her delightfully droll longing to be ranked among the lofty aristocrats.
"I wish I did know some of the men you mean," he said, with apologetic concern, as though she hadasked him for some gift which he could not manage to secure. "I think that I have seen two or three of them in Wall Street; but we have never met on speaking-terms."
More than once he pointed out to her a gentleman in the throng whom he did know, or told her the name of such an acquaintance, after transiently bowing to him. But Claire, with a fleet glance that was decisively critical, never expressed a desire to meet the individuals thus designated. Something in their mien or attire always displeased her. She dismissed them from her consciousness with the speed born of total indifference.
And now a most unforeseen thing happened. Mr. Trask, of the yellow eyebrows, had made repeated visits to Sophia, but Claire, because of the novel change in her own life, had failed to observe what to Mrs. Bergemann had become glaringly evident. One day, in the middle of August, Claire entered the latter's room, and found Sophia weeping and her mother briskly loquacious.
"I don't know what she's crying about, Claire," Mrs. Bergemann at once proceeded to explain, with an aggrieved look toward her tearful daughter. "She don't want to go with me home to Germany; I s'pose that's it. And there's my own flesh and blood, Katrina Hoffmann, who's written me a letter, and begged me in it to come and pay her a visit before she dies. And because I want to go across in September—after you're married, Claire, of course—Sophia behaves like a baby."
"Katrina Hoffmann!" now exclaimed Sophia, with plaintive contempt. "She's Ma's second-cousin, Claire. And what does Ma care about Germany?She was a child of ten when she left it. I don't want to go, and I won't go, and there's all about it!"
But Sophia, for the first time in her life, had found a master in the mother who had so incessantly yielded to her least whim. The letter from Germany, as Claire soon discovered, was a mere pretext for flight. And Trask, of the yellow eyebrows, had caused this fugitive impulse in Mrs. Bergemann. She had learned about Trask; he was a clerk in an insurance company, on seven hundred a year. Sophia was the heiress of three millions. It would never do. All Mrs. Bergemann's rich fund of good nature shrank into arid disapproval of so one-sided a match. She developed a monstrous obstinacy. It was the old maternal instinct; she was protecting her young. They went to Germany in spite of all Sophia's lamentations. They went in the middle of September, and poor Trask was left to mourn his lost opportunities. Certain threats or entreaties, declaimed in private to Sophia by her affrighted parent, may have laid a veto upon the maiden's possible elopement. Or it may have been Trask's own timid fault that she did not fly with him. For she was very fond of Trask, and might have lent a thrilled ear to any ardent proposition from so beloved a source. But Trask had not a romantic soul; he accepted his fate with prosaic resignation. Moreover, his tendency to be obliging, to grant favors, to make himself of high value in an emergency, may have come forth in heroic brilliancy at the private request of Mrs. Bergemann herself.
Wherever the real truth of the matter may have lain, Mrs. Bergemann and Sophia, as a plain fact, went to Europe in September, leaving the bereavedTrask behind them. But both, before their departure, were present at the marriage of Claire and Herbert Hollister.
It was a very quiet wedding. It occurred on an exceedingly hot day. Sophia and her mother were to sail the day after. They both gave effusive good-byes to Claire as she left the Fifth Avenue mansion in her traveling-dress at Hollister's side.
"I feel as if I should never, never see you again!" Sophia said, in a sort of pathetic gurgle, with both arms round Claire's neck.
It was indeed true that they never met again. Sophia afterward forgot Trask, and married in Europe. Her husband, as a few ill-spelled letters would from time to time inform Claire, was a Baron. Up to the period when these letters ceased, Sophia had repeatedly declared herself to be very happy. Claire occasionally wondered whether Mrs. Bergemann had approved of the Baron. But Mrs. Bergemann did not come back to tell, which, after all, seemed like a good omen.
On that sultry September day of their marriage, Claire and Hollister started for Niagara, where they remained but a brief while. They then returned to Manhattan Beach by mutual consent. The weather still remained very hot. It was what we call a late season.
They found at the hotel a moderate number of guests, who were waiting for the first sharp gust of autumn to make them scurry in droves from the seaside.
Hollister resumed his business. He went and came every day in the train or boat.
Claire did not feel at all like a bride. But she and her husband had talked together about their future, and she had the sense of a great, vital, prosperous change. She felt like a wife.