CHAPTER XXVI.FLOSSIE ENJOYS HERSELF.

CHAPTER XXVI.FLOSSIE ENJOYS HERSELF.

FLOSSIE GOWER lay idly upon her couch; it was her reception-day. She was waiting for the monotonous round of callers; and, while she waited, she gave herself to reminiscences. It was not usual for her to ply her memory so hard; but to-day, thinking of her whole life, and planning her campaign to Russia, all the events of her career passed in review before her. Her dainty morning dress curled away from the throat, and rippled gracefully, in a cascade of laces, over to the ground; simple and pure as any Endymion might clothe his dream in. The neck was white as ever; but the face had a wearied look the world had never seen, a pout of unheroic discontent, like any other woman’s who was old and out of humor. And yet our heroine was telling to herself her triumphs, like beads.

She had early learned that she was rich, and thus had quickly found that riches were, alone, unsatisfying. No pedant moralist was more sure of this than she. But there they parted; while the moralist might prate of other worlds, or the love of humanity, Flossie was a positivist. No unknown world should drag her,Saturn-like, from her chosen orbit, and bid her leave her balls, her troops of male admirers, for nunneries or the domestic fireside. Unknowables might be disregarded: she knew no other world than this; and as for the love of humanity, she sought it for herself.

Of course we men do not understand the keen delight that Flossie took in swaying from his balance every man she met. We are not pleased when a pretty woman shows her sensibility to us. It may even rather shock us; we do not expect that sort of thing; moreover, if obvious to us, it is perhaps seen by others and that cheapens the conquest.

But it is a woman’scarrièreto work her will and worth through men. And what else is her whole training, her education, the lessons we read to her of history? You may talk, and raise statues, in your female colleges, of Princess Idas and Corinnes; but it is Helen, Cleopatra, Heloise, who have left their woman’s mark upon the world; and they are women enough, yet, these Vassar girls, to know it.

Still, it was some years before Flossie took her natural course and found in men’s admiration her own highest reward. She had seen so much of men, her brother and his friends, in her early youth, that perhaps she had a little contempt for an animal so easily tamed, so soon domesticated. Whether she had yet found the king of the forest in her Boston Paris, we must leave to the reader. He was the only lion she had.

Perhaps the earlier battles and campaigns, the Italys and Marengos, were the best, after all. Yet they were so easy! Poor Lucie had been such easyprey, even to a Nantucket neophyte! And to conquer the world of New York scarce justified a Corsican lieutenant’s triumph. To trample on the patrician matron, and dazzle the jewels from Cornelia herself, was hardly harder. Then she even, in her wealthy way, had tried to serve the Lord; but found that fruitless, too. A fashionable ritual was all she had retained.

Then she had led, and they had followed. Thorough ditch, thorough briar, from fad to folly. Was she not the high-priestess of that circledebonair, known as well in Boston or in Philadelphia as in New York, as the “married women’s set?” They pretended to be in love with one another’s husbands, and they dazzled young girls; and led their Pauls away from such Virginias as were “coming out.”

But all this was not the tithe of her triumph. Some had tumbled in the ditches, or been torn and spotted in the briars. Surely the glory of these was hers also? She set the pace; and some had failed, and some had fled, and some had forged, and some had fallen through. But she had always stayed at the head, indifferent, frivolous, successful. Then was she not a patroness of art and literature? She dabbled in politics, too, and went to Washington, and corrupted simple Congressmen, and made herself a model to their wives.

Mrs. Gower was at home, this afternoon; and she rose and swept her robes to the adjoining dressing-room for another gown; in this one she was visible only to her maids, her maker, and her husband. It was five or ten minutes when she came back; her pout wasgone, and in its place a smile—herpas de fascinationas it were. She graciously beamed upon the two young girls who had come to make their dinner-call upon her, and was graciously pleased even to apologize for keeping them waiting. And their hearts were won by her at once—they were the very poor descendants of one of the very oldest pre-revolutionary families—and they talked enthusiastically about her, going home, and wondered if it could really be true what the world said about her and that Mr. Wemyss from Boston. They were stylishly dressed and poor, and waiting to be married too.

Then came in Mrs. James De Witt,néeDuval, just made a matron and fresh from a wedding-journey which had proved somewhat slow to her; Strephon and Chloe did not go on wedding journeys, I suppose; it was Helen and Paris began the fashion. Then Mrs. Malgam came in; and Flossie had her usual velvet battle with her dear enemy and rival friend. Mrs. Gower envied her her stupid youth, and silly round cheeks. Shall I go and leave the field with her? she thought. But the field would be hers, anyhow, in a few years.

Then there came in two prying matrons, of those whom Flossie had defeated in the world’s esteem, so many years ago. They had lived to see their fiats disregarded, and their reception-rooms depleted, and their daughters put out and their sons dazzled, all by this little Flossie Starbuck; and they loved her accordingly. Would their hour of triumph never come again? Flossie wondered why they came to-day;they had not been to see her, save in the most symbolical of paste-board calls, since three months after her marriage. But they had never, since that first triumphant season, dared to question her divine right, by wit and beauty and style, to rule. Could it be that they really meant to bury the hatchet and surrender unconditionally? Or did they scent, like envious ravens, her coming overthrow? She was indifferently polite to them; but made little effort to conceal that she was bored.

Dear me, will a man never come? Mrs. Gower rose, when they had gone, and pressed her feverish brow against the mirror. How marked the wrinkles were beneath the eyes! Men’s voices were heard at last, and Flossie turned her back to the window. It was only a silly fellow, an artist, whom Mrs. Gower had made, and who now presumed upon it; and with him a dancing boy. The boy was nice enough at germans; and was at least a gentleman, but the other was only a swell, which even Flossie Gower realized to be a different thing. Genius soars above birth, so Van Smeer disowned his mother; but he preferred to be known as a gentleman rather than as an artist, and only painted the portraits of his fair friends carelessly, à la Congreve, and by way of flirtation, as it were.

It was fun for Flossie to snub this man, and see his color change. Mrs. Wilton Hay had come in, the woman to whom Flossie had suspected Van Smeer of transferring his incense. “I have been thinking for some time of setting up an establishment in England,”said he to Mrs. Hay, who was going back. “My friend Lord Footlight is by way of having a sort of historical pageant in his theatre at his place in Surrey, and is very keen to have me come.” To which Mrs. Hay made no reply, but Mrs. Gower did. “Do, Mr. Van Smeer,” she said; “I should think her native air would do your poor mother so much good.”

Van Smeer turned livid and ugly, but had to turn and smile to Kitty Farnum, who entered then, for Kitty was said to be that season’s card. “Who was his mother?” whispered Mrs. Hay. “An English ballet-girl,” said Flossie in reply, and Van Smeer knew she did, and had to leave her unavenged. But I know not what he said to Mrs. Hay, when those two left together.

Mahlon Blewitt came in. He represented yet another period in Mrs. Gower’s life, and she had been his Beatrice. But this Dante had been born in Western Ohio, and she had taught him a profound disbelief in all divine comedies, the Inferno even with the rest. He had come from his father’s vast wheat-fields and the infinite prairies, to New York, full of dreams of Shelley and of Chatterton; and Mrs. Gower had taken him up. Then he had gone back from her to his dreams. But he had really fancied him in love with her, and somehow her presence had remained with him and made his dreams absurd. Now he was a man of fashion, and turned his white ties more carefully than the sonnets he still peddled in large quantities to all the magazines; and he cynically talked about his country’s decadence like any Caryl Wemyss,whom he chiefly envied, and of whose verses he wrote bitter reviews upon the sly. Had he really loved his clever patroness, the Inferno at least might have been left him to do; but he knew now that he had not loved her—only his dreams had seemed a poorer thing since Flossie Gower had shared them. The Polish minister came in; he knew his Flossie well and liked her much; he had seen women something like her in continental courts, but known none so bright, so good-natured, or half so free from danger. With him was young Harvey Washburn, a civil-service-reformer who had been sent to Congress to reform the world, and whom Von Hillersdorf was forming for it. Flossie would have liked to go to Washington, and have political power, and vulgarize that too; but there the mighty middle class control, who did not understand her; by the time they do, perhaps, the myriads who make no play of life will have their say, and break her, with other butterflies. Poor Flossie! she does amount to much, after all, in all America; and is angrily conscious of it.

And now comes in our hero, Arthur Holyoke; no one, even Von Hillersdorf, is more perfect a man of the world than he. Well he places his bow and smile, his outspoken compliment here, his whispered word of adoration there; his coat is as well cut as Jimmy De Witt’s, who has also come, some time later than his bride. But no one of these is earnest, thinks Flossie, and is bored again, and glad when they all go, and Mr. Killian Van Kull appears. Here at last is her peer, one who can understand her. Van Kull is afrank libertine; and she likes him for it; he does not play with foils; he is aviveur, like the puissant Guy Livingstone who was the hero that her youth adored. Mamie Livingstone, by the way, has come in too, and gone out with Charlie Townley. Charlie has come to present to Flossie his partner’s lady, Mrs. Tamms, and her marriageable daughters; and Mrs. Gower will have a new pleasure to-morrow, when she meets and cuts them, driving in the Park.

Killian stays some time; there is a dark devil in his eye to-day, and Mrs. Gower thinks his pale face never looked so handsome. When Mr. Wemyss is announced, he rises with a slight smile, and he too goes away.

Mrs. Gower is rude to Wemyss; she throws herself upon a sofa, and has the migraine; he assumes his devotional manner and makes bold to take her hand. She draws it away impatiently.

“Have you a headache?” says he. “I hoped you would let me go to drive with you.”

The carriage is ordered; the pony-carriage that Mrs. Gower drives herself. He gets into it, and she after him and takes the reins. It is her whim to have no footman behind them; and Caryl does not dare remonstrate, though he thinks of it. He supposes she is going to the Park; but she turns down Thirty-fourth Street and drives toward the East River. They come to the ferry; and she sends Wemyss out to get the ticket. “Wherever are you going?” says he, returning.

“Why? Do you think I am going to elope withyou?” She says it with a slight contemptuous smile; and he is silent.

They come to the Long Island shore; and she rattles up the hill and drives familiarly through some narrow, squalid streets, where the air is not pleasant to breathe and the dank entries of the close brick houses swarm with half-naked children.

Ahead of them now is the group of high chimneys and great tanks of rusty iron; the scorching sky is a veil of brick-red smoke, chemical, unnatural in color. The stench of oil is almost overpowering; but Flossie drives rapidly into the gate as if it were her own park avenue atLa Lisière.

“Why have you come in here?” says Caryl Wemyss at last, looking, for the once, surprised. Mrs. Gower has dropped the reins, and seems suddenly listless.

“It was my favorite playground when I was a girl,” she answers, finally. “It was a whim of mine to see the place again. Perhaps you did not know that here we made our money?”

Wemyss struggles with some speech about his indifference to the birthplace of the rose he wears; but Flossie is not hearing him; her eyes wander over the arid, unsightly factory-yard, the blue pyramids of barrels, and up to the tramways high in the air, and the masts of the iron ships.

“Come,” she says; “give the reins to that man there.”

Wemyss does as he is bid, and leaves the man with a silver dollar, wondering; and, wondering no lesshimself, he follows Flossie through the iron maze she seems to know so well.

They go up the foul ladder to the summit of the great storage-tank, Wemyss caring for his fine overcoat, and almost sickened with the heavy smell of the crude petroleum, while Flossie’s delicate nostrils dilate as she breathes it in once more. She guides him to the “tail-house,” where the first run of naphtha has just begun, mobile, metallic, with its evil shine. Flossie looks at it closely, and notes, with an adept’s eye, the hour of the run. A few hours more and it will be standard, water-white, as she has made herself; but she with gold, not tested yet with fire. Then she takes him to the spraying-house, where the tested oil lies lazily, girdled by the sun with brilliant rings, fair to look upon as any sylvan spring. This finest oil shall burn in quiet household lamps; it is the naphtha, surface oil, that flies to gas and fire.

Mrs. Gower was obstinately silent, going home, while Mr. Wemyss still wondered. They dined together and went to the play; and it was after midnight when he got to his rooms.

He had his valet pull his boots off and bring his smoking-jacket; and then, dismissing him, began to cut the pages of the last French novel.

“She is capable of anything,” he said to himself, before he had read the first page of his book.

“She is a devil,” he added, under his breath, somewhat flattered, somewhat frightened at the thought.

Back to IndexNext