"Oh, nobody, nobody," hurried Miss Upton. "But you haven't invited her here to-night—you left her out, you know. That was all. And I thought...."
"Are you a friend of Miss Cragge's?" asked Pauline.
"Oh, yes ... that is, I know her quite well. She writes dramatic criticisms, you know, and she has seen me in amateur theatricals. She's kind enough to tell me that shedoesn'tthink that I have a tragic soul in a comic body." Here Miss Upton gave a formidably resonant laugh. "But I'm convinced that I have, and so I've never gone on the stage. But if I could get a few of theveryaristocratic people, Mrs. Varick,—like yourself, and your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie—to hear me give a private reading or two, from 'Romeo and Juliet' or 'The Hunchback' or 'Parthenia', why, I should be prepared to receive anew opinion, don't you understand, with regard to my abilities. There is nothing like being endorsed at the start by people who belong to the real upper circles of society."
"Of course there isn't," said Courtlandt, speaking too low for Miss Upton to catch his words, and almost in the ear of Pauline. "Introduce me," he went swiftly on. "I will save you the bore of further introductions. You will soon see how they will all flock about the great nabob, though she may be ignorant of æsthetics, philosophy, Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, and anybody you please."
Pauline turned and looked at him. There was the shadow of a sparkle in the familiar brown eyes—the eyes that she never regarded closely without being reminded of her girlhood, even of her childhood as well.
"It is a challenge then?" she asked softly.
For a second he seemed not to understand her. Then he nodded his head. "Yes—a challenge," he answered.
She gave an inward sigh.... A little later she had made the desired introduction.... Presently, as Miss Upton moved away on Courtlandt's arm in the direction of her aunt and Sallie, she burst into a laugh, of whose loudness and acerbity she was equally unconscious.
Martha Dares, appearing at her side, arrested the laugh. Pauline grew promptly serious as she looked into Martha's homely face, with its little black eyes beaming above the fat cheeks and the unclassic nose, but not beaming by any means so merrily as when she had last given all its features her full heed.
"You don't laugh a bit as if you were pleased," said Martha, in her short, alert way. "I hope nothing has gone wrong."
"It seems to me as if everything were going wrong," returned Pauline, with a momentary burst of frankness which she at once regretted.
"Good gracious!" said Martha. "I'm astonished to hear you tell me so."
"Forget that I have told you so," said Pauline, throwing a little delicate repulsion into voice and mien. "By the way, your sister is not here to-night, Miss Dares."
Martha's plump figure receded a step or two.
"No," she replied, in the tone of one somewhat puzzled for a reply. "I came with my mother."
"And your sister had a headache."
"A headache," repeated Martha, showing what strongly resembled involuntary surprise.
"Yes. So your mother told me."
"Well, it's true," said Martha. Pauline was watching her more closely than she perhaps detected. "Cora's been working very hard, of late. She works altogether too hard. I often tell her so—Here comes Mr. Kindelon," Martha pursued, very abruptly changing the subject, while her gaze seemed to fix itself on some point behind her companion. "He wants to speak with you, I suppose. I'll move along—you see, I go about just as I choose. What's the use of my waiting for an escort? I'm not accustomed to attentions from the other sex, so I just behave as if it didn't exist. That's the wisest plan."
"But you surely need not be afraid of Mr. Kindelon," said Pauline.
"Oh, we're not the best of friends just now," returned Martha.... She had passed quite fleetly away in another instant. And while Pauline was wondering at the oddity of her departure, Kindelon presented himself.
"You and Martha Dares are not good friends?" she quickly asked. She did not stop to consider whether or no her curiosity was unwarrantable, but she felt it to be a very distinct and cogent curiosity.
Kindelon frowned. "I don't want to talk of Martha Dares," he said, "and I hope that you do not, either. She is a very unattractive topic."
"Isn't that a rather recent discovery?"
"Oh, no—Shall we speak of something else? Your aunt's arrival, for instance. I see that she is quite surrounded."
"Surrounded?" replied Pauline falteringly. Her eyes turned in the direction of Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie.
It was true. Seven or eight ladies and gentlemen were gathered about the stately lady and her daughter. Both appeared to be holding a little separate and exclusive reception of their own.
"Courtlandt was right!" exclaimed Pauline ruefully, and with a stab of mortification. She turned to meet the inquiring look of Kindelon. "I thought Aunt Cynthia would be unpopular here," she continued. "I supposed that no one in my rooms to-night would care to seek her acquaintance."
"This is a grandee," said Kindelon, "and so they are glad enough to know her. If your cousin, Mr. Beekman, prophesied anything of that sort, he was indeed perfectly right."
Pauline shook her head musingly. "Good heavens!" she murmured, "are there any people in the world who can stand tests? I begin to think not." Her speech grew more animated, her eyes began to brighten indignantly and with an almost tearful light. "Here am I," she went on, "determined to encourage certain individuals in what I believed was their contempt of social frivolity and the void delusion which has been misnamed position and birth. With a sort of polite irony Aunt Cynthia appears and shows me that I am egregiously wrong—that she can hold her court here as well as at the most giddily fashionable assemblage.... Look; my cousin has just presented Mr. Whitcomb, the 'coming historian' with the pensive face, and Mr. Paiseley, the great American dramatist with the abnormal head. How pleased they both seem! They appear to tingle with deference. Aunt Cynthia is patronizing them, I am sure, as she now addresses them. She thinks them entirely her inferiors; she considers them out of her world, which is the correct world to be in, and there's an end of it. You can lay the Atlantic cable, you can build the Brooklyn Bridge, but you can't budge the granitic prejudices of Aunt Cynthia.... Yet why do they consent to be patronized by her? Do they not know and feel that she represents a mere sham? Do they value her for what she is, or misvalue her for something that she is not?"
Kindelon laughed a little gravely as he answered: "I am afraid they do the former. And in being what she is, she is a great deal."
"Surely not in the estimate of those who are at all serious on the subject of living—those whom superficialities in all conduct or thought weary and even disgust."
"But these," said Kindelon, with one of his hand-sweeps, "are not that sort of people."
"I supposed a great many of them were."
"You supposed wrongly."
Pauline gave a momentary frown, whose gloom meant pain. And before her face had re-brightened she had begun to speak. "But they cannot care to do as Aunt Cynthia does—to trifle, to idle."
"I fancy that a good many of them would trifle and idle if they had your aunt's facilities for that employment—or lack of it."
"But they paint, they read, they write, they think; they make poems, novels, dramas. They are people with an occupation, an ideal. How can they be interested in a fellow-creature who does nothing with her time except waste it?"
"She wastes it very picturesquely," replied Kindelon. "She is Mrs. Poughkeepsie; she represents great prosperity, aristocratic ease, lofty security above need. They read about her; they should not do so, but that they do is more the fault of modern journalism than theirs. Theoretically they may consider that she deserves their hardest feelings; but this has no concern whatever with their curiosity, their interest, their hope of advancement."
"Their hope of advancement!" echoed Pauline, forlornly, almost aghast. "What possible hope of advancement couldtheyhave from such a source?"
Her querulous question had scarcely ended when she perceived that Arthur Trevor had presented himself at her side. The young poet was exceedingly smart to-night. His tawny hair was rolled off his wide brow with a sort of precise negligence; it looked as if a deliberative brush and not a careless hand had so rolled it. He fixed his dreamy blue eyes with steadfastness upon Pauline's face before speaking.
"I am so sorry, Mrs. Varick," he began, giving a distinct sigh and slowly shaking his head from side to side. "I wonder if you know what I am sorry about."
"Oh, yes," returned Pauline, with a nervous trill of laughter. "You have come to me with a complaint on the subject of Mr. Rufus Corson. You see, Mr. Trevor, rumor has forestalled you. I heard that you were furious because I omitted to ask your intimate enemy."
Arthur Trevor gave an exaggerated start; it was a very French start; he lifted his blond eyebrows as much as his shoulders. And he looked at Kindelon while he responded:
"Ah! I see! Kindelon has been telling you horrid things. Kindelon hates us poets. These men of the newspapers always do. But there is a wide gulf between the poetry of to-day and the newspapers of to-day."
"Of course there is," quickly struck in Kindelon. "That is why the modern newspaper is read so much and the modern poetry so little."
Arthur Trevor chose to ignore this barbed rejoinder. His dreamy eyes and general air of placid reverie made such an attitude singularly easy of assumption.
"Poor Rufus feels your slight," he said, addressing Pauline solely. "Why do you call him my intimate enemy? We are the dearest of friends. He adores decay, and sings of it. I do not sing of it, but I adore it for its color. There is always color in decay."
"Discolor," said Kindelon, with better wit than grammar.
"Decay," pursued Arthur Trevor, "is the untried realm of the future poet. Scarcely anything else is left him. He is driven to find a beauty in ugliness, and there is an immense beauty in ugliness, if one can only perceive it. The province of the future poet shall be to make one perceive it."
"That is like saying," declared Kindelon, "that the province of the future gentleman shall be to make one perceive the courtesy in discourtesy or the refinement in vulgarity."
Again Mr. Trevor ignored Kindelon. "Poor Rufus was so much less to blame than Leander Prawle," he continued. "And yet you invited Leander Prawle. Prawle is so absurdly optimistic. Prawle has absolutely no color. Prawle is irretrievably statuesque and sculpturesque. It is so nonsensical to be that in poetry. Sculpture is the only art that gives an imperiousrien ne va plusto the imagination. Prawle should have been a sculptor. He would have made a very bad one, because his ideas are too cold even for marble. But his poetry would not have been such an icy failure if it had been carved instead of written."
"You need not put up with this kind of thing any longer than you want," whispered Kindelon to Pauline. "Hostship, like Mr. Prawle's poetry, remember, has its limitations."
Pauline pretended not to hear this audacious aside. "Mr. Trevor," she said, making her voice very even and collected, "I regret that I could not quite bring myself to ask your friend. The Egyptians, you recollect, used to have a death's-head at their banquets. But that was a good many years ago, and New York isn't Thebes.... Please pardon me if I tell you that I must leave you for a little while."
As Pauline was passing him, Trevor lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. He did so without a hint of rhapsody, but in a sort of solemn exaltation. "New York is surely not Thebes!" he exclaimed. "Ah, if it only were! To have lived in Thebes for one day, to have got its real and actual color, would be worth ten years of dull existence here!"
"How I wish fate had treated him more to his taste!" said Kindelon, when Pauline and himself were a little distance off. "He meant to make an appeal for that mortuary Corson. He might better have tried to perpetuate his own welcome at your nextsalon."
"My nextsalon!" echoed Pauline, with a laugh full of fatigue and derision.
"What do you mean?" he asked shortly.
"I mean that I had best give no othersalon," she replied. "I mean that this is a failure and a mockery."
She looked full up into his eyes as she spoke. They both paused. "So soon?" questioned Kindelon, as if in soft amazement.
"Yes—so soon," she answered, with a quiver in her voice and a slight upward movement of both hands. "What is it all amounting to?"
"What did I tell you?" he said.
"Oh, confirm your prophecy?" she broke forth, somewhat excitedly. "I know you warned me against disappointment. Enjoy your satisfaction—Look at Aunt Cynthia now. She is holding a perfect court. How theydoflock round Sallie and herself, just as Courtlandt said that they would! I feel that this is the beginning and the end. I have misjudged, miscalculated, misinterpreted. And I am miserably dejected!"
Just then Martha Dares approached Pauline. "Will you please introduce me to your aunt?" said Martha.
"With the greatest pleasure, Miss Dares," returned Pauline.
"Et tu Brute?" said Kindelon, under his breath. Pauline heard him, but Martha did not....
A little later Courtlandt had joined her, and Kindelon had glided away.
"Are you convinced?" said Courtlandt.
"Convinced of what?" she retorted, with an almost fierce defiance.
"Oh, of nothing, since you take it so ferociously." She saw that his calm brown eyes were coolly watching her face.
"When is your nextsalon?" he asked. "Is it to be a week from to-night?"
"It is never to be again," she answered.
She meant the words, precisely as she spoke them. She longed for the entertainment to end, and when it had ended she felt relieved, as if from a painful tension and strain. Musing a little later in her bed-chamber, before retiring, she began to feel a slight change of mood. Had she not, after all, expected, demanded, exacted, too much? Was she justified in giving way to this depression and disappointment? Was she not more blamable in deceiving herself than these people were in surprising her? She had been warned by Kindelon; she had, in a certain way, been warned by Mrs. Dares. But these were not her desired band of plain livers and high thinkers. They were very far below any such elevated standard. They had seemed to make a sort of selfish rush into her drawing-rooms for the purpose of getting there, and afterward boasting that they had got there. She was by no means sure if the very quality and liberality of her refreshments had not made for them the prospect of another Thursday evening offer increased allurements. Many of them were full of the most distressing trivialities. The conduct of Mr. Barrowe had seemed to her atrociously unpleasant. His action with regard to the excluded Miss Cragge struck her as a superlative bit of impudence. If she went on giving more receptions she would doubtless only accumulate more annoyances of a similar sort.
No; the intellectual life of the country was young, like the country itself. It was not only young; it was raw and crude. To continue in her task would be to fail hopelessly. She had best not continue in it. She might be wrong in abandoning it so soon; there might be hope yet. But, after all, she was undertaking no holy crusade; conscience made no demands upon her for the perpetuation and triumph of her project. Let it pass into the limbo of abortive efforts. Let it go to make another stone in that infernal pathway proverbially paved by good intentions....
She slept ill that night, and breakfasted later than usual. And she had scarcely finished breakfasting when a card was handed her, which it heightened her color a little to peruse.
The card bore Miss Cragge's name, and one portion of its rather imposing square was filled with the names of many Eastern and Western journals besides, of which the owner evidently desired to record that she was a special correspondent. It seemed to Pauline, while she gazed at the scrap of pasteboard, that this was exactly the sort of card which a person like Miss Cragge would be apt to use for presentation. She was at a loss to understand why Miss Cragge could have visited her at all, and perhaps the acquiescing answer which she presently gave her servant was given because curiosity surpassed and conquered repulsion.
But after the servant had departed, Pauline regretted that she had agreed to see Miss Cragge. "What can the woman want of me?" she now reflected, "except to abuse and possibly insult me?"
Still, the word had been sent. She must hold to it.
Pauline gave Miss Cragge a cool yet perfectly courteous bow, as they met a little later.
"You are Miss Cragge, I believe," she said, very quietly and amiably.
"Oh, I didn't suppose you'd forgotten me so soon!" came the reproachful and rather unsteady answer. Miss Cragge had risen some time before Pauline entered the room, and her gaunt shape, clad in scant gear, looked notably awkward. Her street costume was untidy, shabby, and even bedraggled. She held a bundle of newspapers, which she shifted nervously from hand to hand.
"You wish to speak with me, then?" said Pauline, still courteously.
"Yes," returned Miss Cragge. It was evident that she underwent a certain distinct agitation. "I have called upon you, Mrs. Varick, because I felt that I ought to do so."
"It is, then, a matter of duty, Miss Cragge?"
"Yes—a matter of duty. A matter of duty toward myself. Toward myself as a woman, you know—I think that I have been wronged—greatly wronged."
"Not wronged by me, I hope."
"Through you, by someone else."
"I do not understand you."
"I—I shall try to make myself plain."
"I trust you will succeed."
"Oh, I shall succeed," declared Miss Cragge, gasping a little for breath as she now continued. "I have an enemy, Mrs. Varick, and that enemy is your friend. Yes, I mean Mr. Kindelon, of course. He has set you against me. He has made you shut your doors upon me. Oh, you need not deny that this is true. I am perfectly certain of its truth. I am always received by Hagar Williamson Dares. She is a noble, true woman, and she lets me come to her house because she knows I have my battle to fight, just as she has always had her own, and that I deserve her sympathy and her friendship. I don't maintain that I've been always blameless. A newspaper woman can't always be that. She gives wounds, just as she gets wounds. But I never did Ralph Kindelon any harm in my life. He hates me, but he has no business to hate me. I never cared much about his hatred till now. But now he has shown me that he is an active and dangerous enemy. I mean, of course, about this affair of yours. I wanted to be invited to your house last evening; I expected to be invited. I was on the Dareses' list. I'm going to be perfectly candid. It would have been a feather in my cap to have come here. I know exactly what your position in society is, and I appreciate the value of your acquaintance. If you had snubbed me of your own accord, I would have pocketed the snub without a murmur. I'm used to snubbings; I have to be, for I get a good many. Nobody can go abroad picking up society-items as I do, and not receive the cold shoulder. But in this case it was no spontaneous rebuff on your part; it was the malicious interference of a third party; it was Kindelon's mean-spirited persuasion used against me behind my back. And it has been an injury to me. It's going to hurt me more than you think. It has been found out and talked over that I was dropped by you.... Now, I don't want to be dropped. I want to claim my rights—to ask if you will not do me justice—if you will not waive any personal concern with a private quarrel and allow me to have the same chance that you have given so many others. To put it plainly and frankly, Mrs. Varick, I have come here this morning for the purpose of asking you if you will not give me an invitation to your next entertainment."
All the time she had thus spoken, Miss Cragge had remained standing. Pauline, who also stood, had shown no desire that her visitor should sit. She was biting her lip as Miss Cragge ended, and her tones were full of a haughty repulsion as she now said,—
"Really, I am unprepared to give you any answer whatever. But you seem to demand an answer, and therefore I shall give you one. You are very straightforward with me, and so I do not see why I should not be equally straightforward with you."
Miss Cragge gave a bitter, crisp little laugh. "I see what is coming," she said. "You think me abominable, and you are going to tell me so."
"I should not tell you if I thought it," replied Pauline. "But I must tell you that I think you unwarrantably bold."
"And you refuse me any other explanation?" now almost panted Miss Cragge. "You will not give me even the satisfaction of knowing why you have dropped me?"
Pauline shook her head. "I do not recognize your right to question me on that point," she returned. "You assume to know my reason for not having asked you here. I object to the form and the quality of your question. I deny that I have dropped you, as you choose to term it. I think your present course a presumptuous one, and I am ignorant of having violated any rights of your own by not having sent you a card to my reception. There are a great many other people in New York besides yourself to whom I did not send a card. Any quarrel between you and Mr. Kindelon is a matter of no concern to me. And as for my having dealt you an injury, that assertion is quite preposterous. I do not for an instant admit it, and since your attitude toward me is painfully unpleasant, I beg that this conversation may be terminated at once."
"Oh, you show me the door, do you?" exclaimed Miss Cragge. She looked very angry as she now spoke, and her anger was almost repulsively unbecoming. Her next words had the effect of a harsh snarl. "I might have expected just this sort of treatment," she proceeded, with both her dingy-gloved hands manipulating the bundle of newspapers at still brisker speed. "But I'm a very good hater, Mrs. Varick, and I'm not stamped on quite so easily as you may suppose. I usually die pretty hard in such cases, and perhaps you'll find that your outrageous behavior will get the punishment it merits. Oh, you needn't throw back your proud head like that, as if I were the dirt under your feet! I guess you'll be sorry before very long. I intend to make you so if I can!"
Pauline felt herself turn pale. "You are insolent," she said, "and I desire you to leave my house immediately."
Miss Cragge walked to the door, but paused as she reached its threshold, looking back across one of her square shoulders with a most malevolent scowl.
"You've got no more heart than a block of wood," she broke forth. "You never had any. I know all about you. You married an old man for his money a few years ago. He was old enough to be your grandfather, and a wretched libertine at that. You knew it, too, when you married him. So now that you've got his money you're going to play the literary patron with it. And like the cold-blooded coquette that you are, you've made Ralph Kindelon leave poor Cora Dares, who's madly in love with him, and dance attendance on yourself. I suppose you think Kindelon really cares for you. Well, you're mightily mistaken if you do think so, and if he ever marries you I guess it won't be long before he makes you find it out!"
Miss Cragge disappeared after the delivery of this tirade, and as she closed the outer hall-door with a loud slam Pauline had sank into a chair. She sat thus for a longer time than she knew, with hands knotted in her lap, and with breast and lips quivering.
The vulgarity, the brutality of those parting words had literally stunned her. It is no exaggeration to state that Miss Cragge's reference to her marriage had inflicted a positive agony of shame. But the allusion to Cora Dares's love for Kindelon, and to Kindelon's merely mercenary regard for herself, had also stabbed with depth and suffering. Was it then true that this man's feelings toward her were only the hypocritical sham of an aim at worldly advancement? "How shall I act to him when we again meet?" Pauline asked herself. "If I really thought this charge true, I should treat him with entire contempt. And have I the right to believe it true? This Cragge creature has a viperish nature. Should I credit such information from such a source?"
That was a day of days with poor Pauline. She seemed to look upon Ralph Kindelon in a totally new light. She realized that the man's brilliant personality had made his society very dear to her. She told herself that she cared for him as she had cared for none other in her life. But the thought that personal ambition was solely at the root of his devotion affected her with something not far from horror.
By degrees the memory of Miss Cragge's final outburst stung her less and less. The whole speech had been so despicable, the intention to wantonly insult had been so evident. After a few hours had passed, Pauline found that she had regained nearly all her customary composure. She felt that if Kindelon should come that evening she could discuss with him calmly and rationally the almost hideous occurrence of the morning.
He did come, and she told him a great deal, but she did not tell him all. No mention of Cora Dares left her lips, nor of the acrid slur at his own relations toward herself. He listened to the recital with a face that wrath paled, while it lit a keener spark in his eyes. But he at length answered in tones thoroughly controlled, if a little husky and roughened:
"I can scarcely express to you my disgust for that woman's conduct. I did not think her capable of it. She represents one of the most baleful forces of modern times—the nearly unbridled license of the newspaper. She has dipped her pen for years into poisonous ink; she is one of our American monstrosities and abominations. Her threat of punishment to you would be ridiculous if it were not so serious."
"You think that she will carry it out?" asked Pauline.
"I should not be at all surprised if she did so."
"Do you mean that she may write some slanderous article about me?"
"It is quite possible."
Pauline gave a plaintive sigh. "Oh, have I no means of preventing her?" she exclaimed.
Kindelon shook his head negatively. "She attacks from an ambuscade, nearly always," he answered. "There is no such thing as spiking her guns, for they are kept so hidden. Still, let us hope for the best."
Pauline burst into tears. "What a wretched failure I have made of it all!" she cried. "Ah, if I had only known sooner that my project would bring such disaster upon me!"
"It has brought no disaster as yet," said Kindelon, with a voice full of the most earnest sympathy.
"It has brought distress, regret, torment!" asseverated Pauline, still struggling with her tears.
"Have you told me all?" he suddenly asked, with an acute, anxious look.
"All?" murmured Pauline.
"Yes. Did that woman say anything more?"
"Yes," Pauline answered, after a little silence, with lowered eyes.
"Ah!" sounded Kindelon's exasperated sigh. "I can almost guess what it was," he went on. "She was not content, then, with saying atrocious things of your marriage; she must couple our names together—yours and mine."
"She mentioned another name still," said Pauline, who continued to gaze at the floor. "It was the name of Cora Dares." Pauline lifted her eyes, now; they wore a determined, glittering look. "She said that Cora Dares was madly in love with you. 'Madly' struck me as an odd enough word to apply to that gentle, dignified girl."
"It might well do so!" burst from Kindelon, in a smothered voice. He rose and began to pace the floor. She had never seen him show such an excited manner; all his past volatility was as nothing to it. And yet he was plainly endeavoring to repress his excitement. "However," he proceeded, in a swift undertone, "this absurd slander need not concern you."
"You call it slander, as if you did not really think it so," she said.
He paused, facing her. "Are you going to let the venomous spite of an inferior win your respectful credence?" he questioned.
"We can't help believing certain things," said Pauline, measuredly, "no matter who utters them. I believed that Cora Dares was in love with you before I heard Miss Cragge say it. Or, at least, I seriously suspected as much. But of course this could not be a matter of the least concern to myself, until"—And here she paused very suddenly.
"Well?" he queried. "Until?"—
She appeared to reflect, for an instant, on the advisability of saying more. Then she lifted both hands, with a tossing, reckless motion. "Oh," she declared, "not until that woman had the audacity to accuse me of heartlessly standing in the path of Cora Dares's happiness—of alienating your regard from her—of using, moreover, a hatefully treacherous means toward this end—a means which I should despise myself if I ever dreamed of using!..." Pauline's voice had begun to tremble while she pronounced the latter word.
"I understand," he said. His own voice was unsteady, though the anger had in great measure left it. To her surprise, he drew quite near her, and then seated himself close at her side. "If you did truly care for me," came his next sentence, "how little I should care what false witness that woman bore against the attachment! But since that day down at the Battery, when I wore my heart on my sleeve so daringly, I have made a resolve. It will be your fault, too, if I fail to keep it. And if I do fail, I shall fail most wretchedly. I—I shall make a sort of desperate leap at the barrier which now separates you and me."
"You say it will be my fault," was Pauline's response. The color had stolen into her cheeks before she framed her next sentence, and with a most clear glow. "How will it be my fault?"
"You must have given me encouragement," he said, "or at least something that I shall take for encouragement."
A silence followed. She was looking straight at the opposite wall; her cheeks were almost roseate now; a tearful light shone in her eyes as his sidelong look watched them. "Perhaps," she faltered, "you might take for encouragement what I did not mean as such."
"Ah, that is cruel!" he retorted.
She turned quickly; she put one hand on his arm. "I did not wish to be cruel!" she affirmed, gently and very feelingly.
It seemed to her, then, that the strong arm on which her hand rested underwent a faint tremor.
"It is easy for you to be cruel, where I am concerned."
"Easy!" she repeated, rapidly withdrawing her hand, and using a hurt intonation.
He leaned closer to her, then. "Yes," he said. "And you know why. I have told you of the difference between us. I have told you, because I am incessantly feeling it."
"There is a great difference," she answered, with a brisk little nod, as though of relief and gratification. "You have more intellect than I—far more. You are exceptional, capable, important. I am simply usual, strenuous, and quite of the general herd. That is the only difference which I will admit, although you have reproached me for practising a certain kind of masquerade—for secretly respecting the shadow and vanity called caste, birth, place. Yes," she went on, with a soft fervor that partook of exultation, while she turned her eyes upon his face and thought how extraordinary a face it was in its look of power and manliness, "I will accede to no other difference than this. You are above me, and I will not let you place yourself on my level!"
She felt his breath touch her cheek, then, as he replied: "You are so fine and high and pure that I think you could love only one whom you set above yourself—however mistakenly."
"My love must go with respect—always," she said.
"I am not worthy of your respect."
"Do you want me to credit Miss Cragge?"
"Didshesay that I was unworthy of it?"
"I—I cannot tell you what she said on that point. I would not tell you, though you begged me to do so."
She saw a bitter smile cross his face, but it lingered there merely an instant. "I can guess," he avowed, "that she tried to make you believe I do not really love you! It is so like her to do that."
"I—I will say nothing," stammered Pauline, once more averting her eyes.
Immediately afterward he had taken her hand in his own. She resisted neither its clasp nor its pressure.
"You know that I love you," she now heard him say, though the leap of her heart made his words sound far off, confused, unreal. "You must have known it days ago! There—my resolve is broken! But what can I do? You have stooped downward from your high state by telling me that I am better than you. I am not better than you, Pauline! I am below you—all the world would say so except yourself. But you don't care for the world. Well, then I will despise it, too, because you bid me. I never respected what you represent until you made me respect it by making me love you. Now I respect and love it, both, because you are a part of it. This is what your project, your ambition, has come to. Ah! how pitiful a failure! you're disgusted with yoursalon—you have been ill-treated, rebuffed, deceived! The little comedy is played to the end—and what remains? Only a poor newspaper-fellow, a sort of Irish adventuring journalist, who offers you his worthless heart to do what you choose with it! Whatwillyou choose to do with it? I don't presume to advise, to demand—not even to ask! If you said you would marry Ralph Kindelon you would be making a horrible match! Don't let us forget that. Don't let us forget how Mrs. Poughkeepsie would storm and scold!"
He had both her hands in both his own, now. She looked at him with eyes that sparkled and swam in tears. But though she did not withdraw her hands, she receded from him while brokenly saying:
"I—I don't care anything about Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie. But there—there is something else that I do care about. It—it seems to steal almost like a ghost between us—I can't tell why—I have no real reason to be troubled as I am—it is like a last and most severe distress wrought by this failure of mine with all those new people.... It is the thought that you have made Cora Dares believe that you meant to marry her."
Pauline's voice died away wretchedly, and she drooped her head as the final faint word was spoken. But she still let Kindelon hold her hands. And his grasp tightened about them as she heard him answer:
"I suppose Cora Daresmayhave believed that.... But, good God! am I so much to blame? I had never metyou, Pauline. It was before I went to Ireland the last time—I never asked her to marry me—It was what they call a flirtation. Am I to be held to account for it? Hundreds of men have been foolish in this way before myself—Have you raised me so high only to dash me down?—Won't you speak? Won't you tell me that you forgive a dead fancy for the sake of a living love? Are you so cruel?—so exacting?"
"I am not cruel," she denied, lifting her eyes....
It was a good many minutes later that she said to him, with the tears standing on her flushed cheeks, and her fluttered voice in truly sad case,
"I—I am going to accept the Irish adventuring journalist (as—as he calls himself) for my husband, though he—he has never really asked me yet."
"He could not ask you," affirmed Kindelon, with by no means his first kiss. "Like every subject who wishes to marry a princess, he was forced to recognize a new matrimonial code!"
Pauline was surprised, during the several ensuing days, to find how greatly her indignation toward Miss Cragge had diminished. The new happiness which had come to her looked in a way resultant, as she reflected upon it, from that most trying and oppressive interview.
"I could almost find it in my heart to forgive her completely," she told Kindelon, with a beaming look.
"I wish that my forgiveness were to be secured as easily," replied Kindelon.
"Your forgiveness from whom?" asked Pauline, with a pretty start of amazement.
"Oh, you know. From your aunt, the vastly conservative Mrs. Poughkeepsie, and her equally conservative daughter."
Pauline gave a laugh of mock irritation. She could not be really irritated; she was too drenched with the wholesome sunshine of good spirits. "It is so ridiculous, Ralph," she said, "for you to speak of my relations as if they were my custodians or my patrons. I am completely removed from them as regards all responsibility, all independence. I wish to keep friends with them, of course; we are of the same blood, and quarrels between kinspeople are always in odious taste. But any very insolent opposition would make me break with them to-morrow."
"And also with your cousin, Courtlandt Beekman?" asked Kindelon, smiling, though not very mirthfully.
Pauline put her head on one side. "I draw a sharp line between him and the Poughkeepsies," she said, either seeming to deliberate or else doing so in good earnest. "We were friends since children, Court and I," she proceeded. "I should hate not to keep friends with Court always."
"You must make up your mind to break with him," said Kindelon, with undoubted gravity.
"And why?" she quickly questioned.
"He abominates me."
"Oh, nonsense! And even if he does, he will change in time ... I thought of writing him to-day," Pauline slowly proceeded. "But I did not. I have put off all that sort of thing shamefully."
"All that sort of thing?"
"Yes—writing to people that I am engaged, you know. That is the invariable custom. You must announce your intended matrimonial step in due form."
He looked at her with a pitying smile which she thought became him most charmingly. "And you have procrastinated from sheer dread, my poor Pauline!" he murmured, lifting her hand to his lips and letting it rest against them. "Dread of an explosion—of a distressing nervous ordeal. How I read your adroit little deceits!"
She withdrew her hand, momentarily counterfeiting annoyance. "You absurd would-be seer!" she exclaimed. "No, I'll call you a raven. But you can't depress me by your ominous wing-flapping! I thought Aunt Cynthia would drop in yesterday; I thought mostcertainlythat she would drop in to-day. That is my reason for not making our engagement transpire through letter."
"I see," said Kindelon, with a comic, quizzical sombreness. "You didn't want to open your guns on the enemy; you were waiting for at least a show of offensive attack...."
But, as it chanced, Mrs. Poughkeepsie did drop in upon Pauline at about two o'clock the next day. She came unattended by Sallie, but she had important and indeed momentous news to impart concerning Sallie. As regarded Pauline's engagement, she was, of course, in total ignorance of it. But she chose to deliver her own supreme tidings with no suggestion of impulsive haste.
"You are looking very well," she said to Pauline, as they sat on a yielding cachemire lounge together, in the little daintily-decked lower reception-room. "And, my dear niece," she continued, "you must let me tell you that I am full of congratulations at your not being made ill by what happened here the other evening. Sallie and I felt for you deeply. It was so apparent to us that you would never have done it if you had known how dreadfully it would turn out.... But there is no use of raking up old by-gones. You have seen the folly of the whole thing, of course. My dear, it has naturally got abroad. The Hackensacks know it, and the Tremaines, and those irrepressible gossips, the Desbrosses girls. But Sallie and I have silenced all stupid scandals as best we could, and merely represented the affair as a capricious little pleasantry on your part. You haven't lost caste a particle by it—don't fancy that you have. You were a Van Corlear, and you're now Mrs. Varick, with a great fortune; and such a whim is to be pardoned accordingly."
Pauline was biting her lips, now. "I don't want it to be pardoned, Aunt Cynthia," she said, "and I don't hold it either as a capricious pleasantry or a whim. It was very serious with me. I told you that before."
"Truly you did, my dear," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie. She laughed a mellow laugh of amusement, and laid one gloved hand upon Pauline's arm. "But you saw those horrible people in your drawing-rooms, and I am sure that this must have satisfied you that the whole project was impossible ...en l'air, my dear, as it unquestionably was. Why, I assure you that Sallie and I laughed together for a whole hour after we got home. They were nearly all such droll creatures! It was like a fancy-ball without the mask, you know. Upon my word, I enjoyed it after a fashion, Pauline; so did Sallie. One woman always addressed me as 'ma'am.' Another asked me if I 'residedontheFifth Avenue.' Still another ... (no, by the way, that wasn't a woman; it was a man) ... inquired of Sallie whether she danced the Lancers much in fashionable circles.... Oh, how funny it all was! And they didn't talk of books in the least. I supposed that we were to be pelted with quotations from living and dead authors, and asked all kinds of radical questions as to what we had read. But they simply talked to us of the most ordinary matters, and in averyextraordinary way.... However, let us not concern ourselves with them any more, my dear. They were horrid, and you know they were horrid, and it goes without saying that you will have no more to do with them."
"I thought some of them horrid," said Pauline, with an ambiguous coolness, "though perhaps I found them so in a different way from yourself."
Mrs. Poughkeepsie repeated her mellow laugh, and majestically nodded once or twice as she did so.
"Well, well, my dear," she recommenced, "let us dismiss them and forget them.... I hope you are going out again. You have only to signify a wish, you know. There will not be the slightest feeling in society—not the slightest."
"Really?" said Pauline, with an involuntary sarcasm which she could not repress.
But her aunt received the sarcasm in impervious good faith. "Oh, not the slightest feeling," she repeated. "And I do hope, Pauline," she went on, with a certain distinct yet unexplained alteration of manner, "that you will make yourrentrée, as it were, at a little dinner I shall give Sallie next Thursday. It celebrates an event." Here Mrs. Poughkeepsie paused and looked full at her niece. "I mean Sallie's engagement."
"Sallie's engagement?" quickly murmured Pauline. The latter word had carried an instant personal force of reminder.
"Yes—to Lord Glenartney. You met him once or twice, I believe."
"Lord Glenartney!" softly iterated Pauline. She was thinking what a gulf of difference lay, for the august social intelligence of her aunt, between the separate bits of tidings which she and Mrs. Poughkeepsie had been waiting to impart, each to each.
"Yes, Glenartney has proposed to dear Sallie," began the lady, waxing promptly and magnificently confidential. "Of course it is a great match, even for Sallie. There can be no doubt of that. I don't deny it; I don't for an instant shut my eyes to it; I consider that it would justly subject me to ridicule if I did. Lord Glenartney was not expected to marry in this country; there was no reason why he should do so. He is immensely rich; he has three seats, in England and Scotland. He is twice a Baron, besides being once an Earl, and is first cousin to the Duke of Devergoil. Sallie has done well; I wish everybody to clearly understand, my dear Pauline, that IthinkSallie has done brilliantly and wonderfully well. A mother always has ambitious dreams for her child ... can a mother's heart help having them? But in my very wildest dreams I never calculated upon such a marriage for my darling child as this!"
Pauline sat silent before her aunt's final outburst of maternal fervor. She was thinking of the silly caricature upon all manly worthiness that the Scotch peer just named had seemed to her. She was thinking of her own doleful, mundane marriage in the past. She was wondering what malign power had so crooked and twisted human wisdom and human sense of fitness, that a woman endowed with brains, education, knowledge of right and wrong, should thus exult (and in the sacred name of maternity as well!) over a union of this wofully sordid nature.
"I—I hope Sallie will be happy," she said, feeling that any real doubt on the point might strike her aunt as a piece of personal envy. "Curiously enough," she continued, "I, also have to tell you of an engagement, Aunt Cynthia."
Mrs. Poughkeepsie raised her brows in surprise. "Oh, you mean poor dear Lily Schenectady. I've heard of it. It has come at last, my dear, and he is only a clerk on about two thousand a year, besides not being of thedirectline of the Auchinclosses, as one might say, but merely a sort of obscure relation. Still, it is said that he has fair expectations; and then you know that poor dear Lily's frecklesarea drawback, and that she has been called aspottedlily by some witty persons, and that it has really become a nickname in society, and"—
"I did not refer to Lily Schenectady," here interrupted Pauline. "I spoke of myself."
The mine had been exploded. Pauline and Mrs. Poughkeepsie looked at each other.
"Pauline!" presently came the faltered answer.
"Yes, Aunt Cynthia, I spoke of myself. I am engaged to Mr. Kindelon."
"Mr. Kindelon!"
"Yes. I am sure you know who he is."
"Oh, I know who he is." Mrs. Poughkeepsie spoke these words with a ruminative yet astonished drawl.
"Well, I am engaged to him," said Pauline, stoutly but not over-assertively. She had never looked more composed, more simply womanly than now.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie rose. It always meant something when this lady rose. It meant a flutter of raiment, a deliberation of readjustment, a kind of superb, massive dislocation.
"I am horrified!" exclaimed the mother of the future Countess Glenartney.
Pauline rose, then, with a dry, chill gleam in her eyes. "I think that there is nothing to horrify you," she said.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie gave a kind of sigh that in equine phrase we might call a snort. Her large body visibly trembled. She rapidly drew forth a handkerchief from some receptacle in her ample-flowing costume, and placed it at her lips. Pauline steadily watched her, with hands crossed a little below the waist.
"I do so hope that you are not going to faint, Aunt Cynthia," she said, with a satire that partook of strong belligerence.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with her applied handkerchief, did not look at all like fainting as she glanced above the snowy cambric folds toward her niece.
"I—I never faint, Pauline ... it is not my way. I—I know how to bear calamities. But this is quite horrible ... it agitates me accordingly. I—I have nothing to say and yet I—I have a great deal to say."
"Then don't say it!" now sharply rang Pauline's retort.
"Ah! you lose your temper? It is just what I might have thought—under the circumstances!"
Pauline clenched her teeth together for a short space, to keep from any futile disclosure of anger. And presently she said, with a shrill yet even directness,—
"What, pray,arethe circumstances? I tell you that I am to marry the man whom I choose to marry. You advised me—you nearlyforcedme, once—to marry the man whom it was an outrage to make my husband!"
"Pauline!"
"What I tell you is true! He whom I select is not of your world! And, by the way, what is your world? A little throng of mannerists, snobs, and triflers! I care nothing for such a world! I want a larger and a better. You say that I have failed in my effort to break down this barrier of conservatism which hedged me about from my birth.... Well, allow that Ihavefailed in that! I have not failed in finding some true gold from all that you sneer at as tawdry dross!... Tawdry! I did well to chance upon the word! What was that gentlemanly bit of vice whom you were so willing I should marry a few years ago? You've just aired your tenets to me; I'll air a few of mine to you now. We live in New York, you and I. Do you know what New York means? It means what America means—or what Americaoughtto mean, from Canada to the Gulf! And that is—exemption from the hateful bonds of self-glorifying snobbery which have disgraced Europe for centuries! You call yourself an aristocrat. How dare you do so? You dwell in a land which was washed with the blood, less than a century ago, of men who died to kill just what you boast of and exalt! Look more to your breeding and your brains, and less to your so-called caste! I come of your own race, and can speak with right about it. What was it, less than four generations ago? You call it Dutch, and with a grand air. It flowed in the veins of immigrant Dutchmen, who would have opened their eyes with wonder to see the mansion you dwell in, the silver forks you eat with!Theydwelt in wooden shanties and ate with pewter forks.... Your objection to my marriage with Ralph Kindelon is horrible—that and nothing more! He towers above the idiot whom you are glad to have Sallie marry! What do I care for the little 'lord'? You bow before it; I despise it. You call my project, my dream, my desire, a failure ... I grant that it is. But it is immeasurably above that petty worship of the Golden Calf, whichyouname respectability and whichIdenounce as only a pitiful sham! The world is growing older, but you don't grow old with it. You close your eyes to all progress. You get a modish milliner, you keep your pew in Grace Church, you drop a big coin into the plate when a millionaire hands it to you, and you are content. Your contentment is a pitiful fraud. Your purse could do untold good, and yet you keep it clasped—or, if you loose the clasp, you do it with a flourish, a vogue, anéclat.... Mrs. Amsterdam has done the same for this or that asylum or hospital, and so you, with fashionable acquiescence, do likewise. And you—you, Cynthia Poughkeepsie, who tried to wreck my girlish life and almost succeeded—you, who read nothing of what great modern minds in their grandly helpful impulse toward humanity are trying to make humanity hear—you, who think the fit set of a patrician's gown above the big struggle of men and women to live—you, who immerse yourself in idle vanities and talk of everyone outside your paltry pale as you would talk of dogs—youdare to upbraid me because I announce to you that I will marry a man whom power of mind makes your superior, and whom natural gifts of courtesy make far more than your equal!"
As Pauline hotly finished she saw her aunt recede many steps from her.
"Oh, this—this is frightful!" gasped Mrs. Poughkeepsie. "It—it is thetheatre! You will go on the stage, I suppose. It seems to me you have done everything but go on the stage, already! That would be the crowning insult to yourself—to your family!"
"I shan't go on the stage," shot Pauline, "because I have no talent for it. If I had talent, perhaps I would go. I think it a far better life for an American woman than to prate triumphantly about marrying her daughter to a titled English fool!"
Mrs. Poughkeepsie uttered a cry, at this point. She passed from the room, and Pauline, overcome with the excess of her disclaimer, soon afterward sank upon a chair....
An almost hysterical fit of weeping at once followed.... It must have been a half-hour later when she felt Kindelon's face lowered to her own. He had nearly always come, since their engagement, at more or less unexpected hours.
"Some hateful thing has happened," he said very tenderly; "whom have you seen? Why do you sob so, Pauline? Have you seenher? Has Cora Dares been here?"
Pauline almost sprang from her chair, facing him. "Cora Dares," she cried, plaintively and with passion. "Why do you mention her name now?"
Kindelon folded her in his strong arms. "Pauline," he expostulated, "be quiet! I merely thought of what you yourself had told me, and of what I myself had toldyou? What is it, then, since it is not she? Tell me, and I will listen as best I can."
She soon began to tell him, leaning her head upon his broad breast, falteringly and with occasional severe effort.
"I—I was wrong," she at length finished. "I should not have spoken so rashly, so madly.... But it was all because of you, Ralph—because of my love for you!"
He pressed her more closely within the arms that held her.
"I don't blame you!" he exclaimed. "You were wrong, as you admit that you were wrong ... but I don't blame you!"
That night was an almost sleepless one for Pauline, and during the next morning she was in straits of keen contrition. Theoretically she despised her aunt, but in reality she despised far more her own loss of control. Her self-humiliation was so pungent, indeed, that when, at twelve o'clock on this same day, Courtlandt's card was handed to her, she felt a strong desire to escape seeing him, through the facile little falsehood of a "not at home." But she concluded, presently, that it would be best to face the situation at once, since avoidance would be simply postponement. Courtlandt was as inevitable as death; he must be met sooner or later.
She met him. She did not expect that he would offer her his hand, and she made no sign of offering her own. He was standing near a small table, as she entered, and his attention seemed much occupied with some exquisitely lovely roses in a vase of aerial porcelain. He somehow contrived not wholly to disregard the roses while he regarded Pauline. It was very cleverly done, and with that unconscious quiet which stamped all his clever doings.
"These are very nice," he said, referring to the roses. He had a pair of tawny gloves grasped in one hand, and he made an indolent, whipping gesture toward the vase while Pauline seated herself. But he still remained standing.
"Yes," she replied, as we speak words automatically. "They are rare here, but I know that kind of rose in Paris."
"Did your future husband send them?" asked Courtlandt. His composure was superb. He did not look at Pauline, but with apparent carelessness at the flowers.
"Yes," she said; and then, after a slight pause, she added: "Mr. Kindelon sent them."
Courtlandt fixed his eyes upon her face, here. "Wasn't it rather sudden?" he questioned.
"My engagement?"
"Your engagement."
"Sudden? Well, I suppose so."
"I didn't expect it quite yet."
She gave a little laugh which sounded thin and paltry to her own ears. "That means you were prepared for it, then?"
"Oh, I saw it coming."
"And Aunt Cynthia has told you, no doubt."
"Yes. Aunt Cynthia has told me. I felt that I ought to drop in with my congratulations."
Pauline rose now; her lips were trembling, and her voice likewise, as she said:—
"I do hope that you give them sincerely, Court."
"Oh, if you put it in that way, I don't give them at all."
"Then you came here to mock me?"
"I don't know why I came here. I think it would have been best for me not to come. I thought so when I decided to come. Probably you do not understand this. I can't help you, in that case, for I don't understand it myself."
"I choose to draw my own conclusions, and they are kindly and friendly ones. Never mind how or what I understand. You are here, and you have said nothing rude yet. I hope you are not going to say anything rude, for I haven't the heart to pick a quarrel with you—one of our old, funny, soon-healed quarrels, you know. I am too happy, in one way, and too repentant in another."
"Repentant?"
"Yes. I said frightful things yesterday to Aunt Cynthia. I dare say she has repeated them."
"Oh, yes, she repeated every one of them."
"And no doubt with a good deal of wrathful embellishment!" here exclaimed Pauline, bristling.
"Do you think they would bear decoration? Wouldn't it be like putting a cupola on the apex of the Trinity Church steeple?"
"Not at all!" cried Pauline. "I might have said a great deal worse! Oceans and continents lie between Aunt Cynthia and myself! And I told her so!"
"Really? I thought you were at prettyclosequarters with each other, judging from her account of the row."
"There was norow!" declared Pauline, drawing herself up very finely. "What did she accuse me of saying, please?"
"Oh, I forget. She said you abused her like a pickpocket for not liking the man you're engaged to."
Pauline shrugged her shoulders, in the manner of one who thinks better of the angry mood, and handsomely abjures it. "Positively, Courtlandt," she said, "I begin to think you had no purpose whatever in coming here to-day."
His sombre brown eyes began to sparkle, though quite faintly, as he now fixed them upon her. "I certainly had one purpose," he said. She saw that his right hand had thrust itself into the breast of his coat, as though it searched there for something. "I wanted to show you this, as I imagined that you don't see the horrid little sheet called 'The Morning Monitor,'" he proceeded.
"'The Morning Monitor'!" faltered Pauline, with a sudden grievous premonition, as she watched her cousin draw forth a folded newspaper. "No, I never heard of it."
"It has evidently heard of you," he answered. "I never read the vilely personal little affair. But a kind friend showed me this issue of to-day. Just glance at the second column on the second page—the one which is headed 'The Adventures of a Widow'—and tell me what you think of it."
Pauline took the newspaper with unsteady hand. She sank into her chair again, and began to read the column indicated. The journal which she now held was one of recent origin in New York, and it marked the lowest ebb of scandalous newspaper license. It had secured an enormous circulation; it was already threatening to make its editor a Crœsus. It traded, in the most unblushing way, upon the curiosity of its subscribers for a knowledge of the peccadilloes, imprudences, and general private histories of prominent or wealthy citizens. It was a ferret that prowled, prodded, bored, insinuated. It was utterly lawless, utterly libellous. It left not even Launcelot brave nor Galahad pure. It was one of those detestable opportunities which this nineteenth century, notwithstanding a thousand evidences of progress, thrusts into the hands of cynics and pessimists to rail against the human nature of which they themselves are the most melancholy product. It had had suits brought against it, but the noble sale of its copies rendered its heroic continuation possible. Truth, crushed to earth, may rise again, but scurrilous slander, in the shape of "The Morning Monitor," remained capably erect. It fed and throve on its own dire poison.
Pauline soon found herself reading, with misty eyes and indignant heart-beats, a kind of baleful biography of herself, in which her career, from her rash early marriage until her recent entertainment of certain guests, was mercilessly parodied, ridiculed, vilified. These pages will not chronicle in any unsavory details what she read. It was an article of luridly intemperate style, dissolute grammar, and gaudy rhetoric. It bit as a brute bites, and stung as a wasp stings, without other reason that that of low, dull spleen. It mentioned no other name than Kindelon's, but it shot from that one name a hundred petty shafts of malign innuendo.
"Oh, this is horrible!" at length moaned Pauline. She flung the paper down; the tears had begun to stream from her eyes. "What shall I do against so hideous an attack?"
Courtlandt was at her side in an instant. He caught her hand, and the heat of his own was like that of fever.
"Do but one thing!" he said, with a vehemence all the more startling because of his usual unvaried composure. "Break away from this folly once and forever! You know that I love you—that I have loved you for years! Don't tell me that you don't know it, for at the best you've only taught yourself to forget it! I've neversaidthat I loved you before, but what of that? You have seen the truth a hundred times—in my sober way of showing it! I've never thought that you returned the feeling; I don't even fancy so now. But I'm so fond of you, Pauline, that I want you to be my wife, merely liking and respecting me. I hate to shame myself by even speaking of your money, but you can sign that all away to some hospital to-morrow, if you please—you can get it all together and throw it into the North River, as far as I am concerned! Send Kindelon adrift—jilt him! On my soul I beg this of you for your own future happiness more than anything else! I don't say that it will be a square or right thing to do. But it will save you from the second horrible mistake of your life! You made one, that death saved you from. But this will be worse. It will last your lifetime. Kindelon isn't of yourmonde, and never can be. There is so much in that. I am not speaking like a snob. But he has no more sense of the proprieties, the nice externals, the way of doing all those thousand trifling things, which, trifling as they are, make up three-quarters of actual existence, than if he were an Indian, a Bedouin, or a gypsy! Before Heaven, Pauline, if I thought such a marriage could bring you happiness, I'd give you up without a murmur! I'm not fool enough to die, or pine, or even mope because of any woman on the globe not caring for me! But now, by giving me the right to guard you—by making me so grateful to you that only the rest of my life can fitly show my gratitude, you will escape calamity, distress, and years of remorse!"
It had hardly seemed to her, at first, as if Courtlandt were really speaking; this intensity was so entirely uncharacteristic of him; these rapid tones and spirited glances were so remote from his accustomed personality. Yet by degrees she recognized not alone the quality of the change, but its motive and source. She could not but feel tenderly toward him then. She was a woman, and he had told her that he loved her; this bore its inevitable condoning results.
And yet her voice was almost stern as she now said to him, rising, and repelling the hand by which he still strove to clasp her own,—
"I think you admitted that if I broke my engagement with Ralph Kindelon it would not be—I use your own words, Court—the square or right thing to do.... Well, I shall not do it! There, I hope you are satisfied."
He looked at her with a surpassing pain. His hands, while they hung at his sides, knotted themselves. "Oh, Pauline," he exclaimed, "I amnotsatisfied!"
She met his look steadily. The tears in her eyes had vanished, though those already shed glistened on her cheeks. "Very well. I am sorry. I love Ralph Kindelon. I mean to be his wife."
"You meant to be Varick's wife."
"It is horrible for you to bring that up!" she cried. "Here I commit no mistake. He is a man of men! He loves me, and I love him. Do you know anything against him—outside of the codes and creeds that would exclude him from one of Aunt Cynthia's dancing-classes?"
"I know this against him; he is not true. He is not to be trusted. He rings wrong. He is not a gentleman—in the sense quite outside of Aunt Cynthia's definition."
"It is false!" exclaimed Pauline, crimsoning. "Prove to me," she went on, with fleet fire, "that he is not true—not to be trusted. I dare you to prove it."
He walked slowly toward the door. "It is an intuition," he said. "I can't prove it. I could as soon tell you who wrote that villainous thing in the newspaper there."
Pauline gave a laugh of coldest contempt. "Oh," she cried, "in a moment more you will be saying thathewrote it!"
Courtlandt shook his head. The gesture conveyed, in some way, an excessive and signal sadness.
"In a moment more," he answered, "I shall be saying nothing to you. And I don't know that I shall ever willingly come into your presence again. Good-by."
Pauline gave no answer, sinking back into her seat as he disappeared.
Her eye lighted upon the fallen newspaper while she did so. Its half-crumpled folds made her forget that her cousin was departing. She suddenly sprang up again, and caught the sheet from the floor. A fire was blazing near by. She hurried toward the grate, intending to destroy the printed abomination.
But, pausing half-way, she once more burst into tears. A recollection cut her to the heart of how futile would be any attempt, now, to destroy the atrocious wrong itself. That must live and work its unmerited ill.
"And to this dark ending," she thought, with untold dejection, "has come my perfectly honest ambition—my fair and proper and wholesome plan!" And then, abruptly, her tearful eyes began to sparkle, while a bright, mirthless smile touched her lips.
"But I can at least have my retort," she decided. "Hewill help me—stand by me in this miserable emergency. I will send for him,—yes, I will send for Ralph at once! He will do just as I dictate, and I know what Ishalldictate! Miss Cragge wrote that base screed, and Miss Cragge shall suffer accordingly!"