The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel

But Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie left their kinswoman at her Bond Street residence that night with very agreeable adieus. True, Lord Glenartney occupied a seat in their carriage, but even if this had not been the case, neither mother nor daughter would have vented upon Pauline any of the disapproval she had provoked in them. She was now a power in the world, and besides being near to them in blood, even her follies merited the leniency of a Poughkeepsie.

But after Sallie and her mother had said good-night to his lordship and were alone at home together, the young lady spoke with querulous disgust of her cousin's behavior.

"She will lose caste horribly, mamma, if she goes on in this way. It's perfectly preposterous! If there is one thing on earth that is really low, it's for a woman to become strong-minded!"

Mrs. Poughkeepsie nodded. "You are quite right. But she's her own mistress, and there is no restraining her."

"People ought to be restrained," grumbled Sallie, loosening her opera cloak, "when they want to throw away their positions like that."

"Oh, Pauline can't throw hers away so easily," affirmed Mrs. Poughkeepsie with sapient composure. "No, not with her name and her big income. She will merely get herself laughed at, you know —encanailler herself most ludicrously; that is all. We must let her have her head, as one says of a horse. Her father was always full of caprices; he wouldn't have died a poor man if he had not been. She merely has a caprice now. Of course she will come to terms again with society sooner or later, and repent having made such a goose of herself. That is, unless" – And here Mrs. Poughkeepsie paused, while a slight but distinct shudder ended her sentence.

Sallie gave a faint, harsh laugh. "Oh, I understand you thoroughly, mamma," she exclaimed. "You mean unless some common man like that Mr. Kindelon should induce her to marry him. How awful such a thing would be! I declare, the very thought of it is sickening! With that superb fortune, too! I shouldn't be surprised if he had proposed already! Perhaps she has only been preparing us gradually for the frightful news that she has accepted him!"

But no such frightful news reached the Poughkeepsies, as day succeeded day. Pauline went little into the fashionable throngs, which were at the height of their winter gayeties. She soon quitted her Bond Street residence for good, and secured a small basement-house on a side street near Fifth Avenue, furnishing it with that speed in the way of luxurious appointment which a plethoric purse so readily commands.

"I am quite prepared now," she said to Kindelon one morning, after having received him in her new and lovely sitting-room, where everything was unique and choice, from the charming chandelier of twisted silver to the silken Japanese screen, rich with bird and flower in gold and crimson. "Of course you understand what I mean."

He affected not to do so. "Prepared?" he repeated, with the gay gleam slipping into his eyes. "For what?"

"My salon, of course."

"Oh," he said. "I confess that I suspected what you meant, though I was not quite sure. I almost feared lest your resolution might have undergone a change of late."

"And pray, why?" asked Pauline, raising her brows, with a little imperious smile.

"You have not mentioned the project for surely a good fortnight," he returned. "I had wondered whether or no it had weakened with you."

"It is stronger than ever," Pauline asseverated. She folded her hands in her lap and tried to look excessively firm and resolute. She was always particularly handsome when she tried to look thus; she was just slender and feminine enough in type to make the assumption of strength, of determination, especially becoming.

"Ah, very well," replied Kindelon, with one of his richly expressive smiles. "Then I have a proposition to make you. It concerns an immediate course of action on your part. Have you ever heard of Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares?"

Pauline burst into a laugh. "No. It sounds more like an affirmation than a name – 'Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares.' One feels like saying, 'Does she?' Don't think me irredeemably trifling, and please continue. Please tell me, I mean, what remarkable things has this remarkably-named lady done?"

"Nothing."

Pauline's face, full of a pleased anticipation, fell. "Nothing! How tiresome!"

"I mean nothing remarkable," Kindelon went on, "in the luminously intellectual sense. And yet she is a very extraordinary woman. At twenty-five she was divorced from her husband."

Pauline shook her head troubledly. "That does not sound at all promising."

"He was a dissolute wretch. The courts easily granted her a release from him. At this time she was almost penniless. The question, as she had two little children, naturally arose: 'How are we three to live?' She had been reared in a New England home; her dead father had been a man of extensive learning, and at one time the principal of a successful school. Hagar had always had 'a taste for writing,' as we call it. She began by doing criticisms for a New York journal of rather scholarly tendency, whose editor had combined pity for her almost starving condition with appreciation of her undoubted talents. But the prices that the poor struggling young mother received were necessarily very meagre. She became practical. She asked herself if there was no other way of earning money by her pen. She soon discovered a way; it did not require her to know about Diderot and Strauss and Spinoza, with all of whose writings (and with many classics more of equal fame) she was finely familiar; it simply required that she should lay aside every vestige of literary pride and write practically. Good Heavens! what a word that word 'practical' is in literature! You must tell the people how to bake a pie, to cure a headache, to bleach a shirt, to speak the truth, to clean silverware, to make a proposal of marriage. Mrs. Dares did it in country letters, in city letters, in newspaper editorials, in anonymous fine-print columns, in the back parts of fashion and household magazines – and she does it still. For a number of years past she has superintended a periodical of the popular sort, which I dare say you have never heard of. The amount of work that she accomplishes is enormous. A strong man would stagger under it, but this frail woman (you'll think her frail when you see her) bears it with wondrous endurance. Her life has been a terrible failure, looked at from one point of view – for it is scarcely exaggeration to say that had she not been handicapped by poverty in the beginning she might have swayed and charmed her generation with great books. But from another point of view her life has been a sublime success; she has trampled all aspiration under foot, forsworn every impulse of honorable egotism, and toiled for the maintenance of a home, for the education of her two daughters. They are both grown up, now – girls who are themselves bread-winners like their mother, and bearing their yoke of labor as cheerfully, though not with the same splendid strength, as she. One is a school-teacher in a well-known kindergarten here, and one has become an artist of no contemptible ability. Meanwhile Mrs. Dares has not merely established a pleasant and refined household; she has caused to be diffused from it, as a social centre, the warm radiations of a sweet, wholesome hospitality. Like some of the high-born Fifth Avenue leaders of fashion, she has her 'evenings.' But they are of a totally different character. They are not 'select;' I don't claim that grace for them. And yet they are very interesting, very typical. Some shabby people meet there – shabby, I mean, in mental ways no less than in character and costume. But the prevailing element is of a higher order than they. Anyone whom Mrs. Dares believes to be an earnest worker in the field of letters will have no difficulty about gaining her favor. I think she would rather greet in her rooms some threadbare young poet who had published at his own expense a slim little volume of poems possessing distinct merit and having received the snubs of both critics and public, than welcome some rich and successful writer whose real claim upon recognition she honestly doubted. And for this reason she makes mistakes. I have no doubt she is aware of making them. When we search the highways and hedges for cases of deserving charity, we cannot but light upon at least an occasional impostor – to put the matter as optimistically as possible. And now let me tell you that if my mighty explanatory outburst has roused your desire to meet Mrs. Dares, the opportunity to do so lies well within your reach."

"How?" said Pauline. And then, as if abashed by the brusque abruptness of her own question, she added, with a little penitent nod: "Oh, yes; you mean that she has kindly consented to let you bring her here."

"Not at all," said Kindelon. "It is true that she goes about a good deal. Her position as a journalist gives her, of course, the entrée to many theatres, and as she is passionately fond of the drama, her face is seldom missed on a première at any reputable house – Daly's, the Union Square, the Madison Square, or Wallack's. She takes delight, too, in appearing at the entertainments of her various friends, and she always does so clad elegantly, richly, but without a shadow of ostentatious display. On these occasions her society is eagerly sought. I have sometimes wondered why; for her conversation, though invariably full of sound sense and pithy acumen, lacks the cheerful play of humor which is so widely demanded to generate anything like popularity wherever men and women are socially met. But she is very popular, and I suppose it is her striking simplicity, her gift of always being sincerely and unaffectedly herself, which has made her so. Still, for all this gregarious impulse, if I may thus name it, I do not believe she would take the first step, where you are concerned, to establish an acquaintance."

"And for what reason?" asked Pauline. Her tones, while she put this query, were full of a hurt bewilderment. Kindelon seemed to muse for a brief space; and any such unconversational mood was rare, as we know, with his mercurial lightsomeness of manner. "She would be sensitive," he presently said, "about making an advance of this sort."

"Of this sort?" repeated Pauline, with a somewhat irritated inflection. "Of what sort?"

Her companion watched her with fixity for a moment. Then he raised his large forefinger, and slowly shook it, with admonitory comedy of gesture. "You must not tell me that you don't understand," he said. "Put yourself in this lady's place. Suppose that you, in spite of fine brains and noble character, lacked the social standing" —

Pauline broke in quite hotly at this. Her eyes had taken a quick sparkle, and the color was flying rosy and pure into her fair face. "Pshaw!" she exclaimed. "It is not any question of social standing. I want to know these people" – She suddenly paused, as though her tongue had betrayed her into some regrettable and unseemly phrase. "I want to pass," she continued more slowly, "from an aimless world into one of thought and sense. Mrs. Dares is prominent in this other world. From what you say I should judge that she is a very representative and influential spirit there. Why should she not be benign and gracious enough to seek me here? Why should she require that I shall emphatically pay her my court? Your description makes me glad and happy to know her. If she learned this, would she hold aloof from any absurd scruples about a disparity in social standing? – Well, if she did," declared Pauline, who by this time was quite excitedly flushed and fluttered, "then I should say that you had over-painted her virtues and too flatteringly concealed her faults!"

Kindelon threw back his head, as she finished, and laughed with such heartiness that more of his strong white teeth were transiently visible than would have pleased a strict judge of decorum.

"Oh, how amusing you are!" he cried. "You are really superb and don't perceive it! – Well," he proceeded, growing graver, "I suppose you would be far less so if you had the vaguest inkling of it. Now, pray listen. Does it enter your conscience at all that you are disguising a kind of royal patronage and condescension behind a gentle and saint-like humility? No – of course it doesn't. But, my dear lady, this is unequivocally true. You scoff at social standing, and yet you complacently base yourself upon it. You want to desert all your old tenets, and yet you keep a kind of surreptitious clasp about them. You would not for the world be considered a person who cared for the aristocratic purple, and yet you wrap it round you in the most illogical fashion. Mrs. Dares has her evenings; to-night is one of them. You, as yet, have no evenings; your salon is still in embryo. You want to affiliate with her, to be one of her set, her surroundings, her monde. And yet you quietly bid her to your house, as though she were proposing your co-operation, your support, your intimacy, and not you hers!"

Pauline, with perhaps a deepened tinge of color in her cheeks, was staring at the floor when Kindelon ended. And from beneath her gown came the impatient little tap of a nervous foot. After an interval of silence, during which her friend's gaze watched her with a merry vivacity of expression, she slowly lifted her shapely blond head, and answered in grave, even saddened tones, —

"Then my salon is to be a failure? – an unrealizable castle in Spain?"

"Oh, no," promptly said Kindelon, with one of those sympathetic laughs which belonged among his elusive fascinations. "By no means – unless you so will it."

"But I don't will it," said Pauline.

"Very well. Then it will be a castle in – in New York. That sounds tangible enough, surely. It is the first step that counts, and you have only to take your first step. It will certainly look much better to know some of your courtiers before you ascend your throne. And meanwhile it would be far more discreet to cultivate an acquaintance with your probable prime minister."

"All of which means – ?" she said.

"That you had best let me accompany you to Mrs. Dares's house this evening."

"But I am not invited!" exclaimed Pauline.

"Oh yes, you are," said Kindelon, with easy security in the jocund contradiction. "Miss Cora, the youngest daughter of Mrs. Dares, told me last night that she and her mother would both be very glad to have you come."

There was a momentary intonation in Kindelon's voice that struck his listener as oddly unexpected. "So you have already spoken of me?" she said lingeringly, and looking at him with more intentness than she herself knew of.

"Yes," he replied, with a certain speed, and with tones that were not just set in an unembarrassed key. "I go there now and then."

"And you have mentioned me to Mrs. Dares?"

"Yes – more than once, I think. She knows that you may be induced to come this evening."

His glance, usually so direct, had managed to avoid Pauline's, which was then very direct indeed.

"Tell me," Pauline said, after another silence had somehow made itself felt between them. "Are you a very good friend of this girl – Miss Cora?"

He returned her look then, but with an unwonted vacillation of his own – or so she chose to think.

"Yes," he responded, fluently frank, as it seemed. "We are very good friends – excellent friends, I may say. You will find her quite as charming, in a different way, as her mother. I mean, of course, if you will go with me this evening – or any future evening."

Pauline put forth her hand, and laid it for an instant on his full-moulded arm.

"I will go with you this evening," she said.

V

Kindelon found Pauline in a very lightsome and animated state of mind when he called at her house that evening. She had a touch of positive excitement in her way of referring to the proposed visit. He thought he had never seen her look more attractive than when she received him, already wrapped in a fleecy white over-garment and drawing on her gloves, while a piquant smile played at the corners of her mouth and a vivacious glitter filled her gray eyes.

"You are here before the carriage," she said to him, "though we shan't have to wait long for that. – Hark – there is the bell, now; my men would not presume to be a minute late this evening. The footman must have detected in my manner a great seriousness when I gave him my order; I felt very serious, I can assure you, as I did so. It meant the first step in a totally new career."

"Upon my word, you look fluttered," said Kindelon, in his mellow, jocose voice.

"Naturally I do!" exclaimed Pauline, as she nodded to the servant who now announced that the carriage was in readiness. "I am going to have a fresh, genuine sensation. I am going to emancipate myself – to break my tether, as it were. I've been a prisoner for life; I don't know how the sunshine looks, or how it feels to take a gulp of good, free air."

He watched her puzzledly until the outer darkness obscured her face, and they entered the carriage together. She mystified him while she talked on, buoyant enough, yet always in the same key. He was not sure whether or no her sparkling manner had a certain sincere trepidation behind it. Now and then it seemed to him as if her voluble professions of anxiety rang false – as if she were making sport of herself, of him, or of the projected diversion.

"Do you really take the whole matter so much to heart," he presently said, while the vehicle rolled them along the wintry, lamplit streets, "or is this only some bit of dainty and graceful masquerading?"

"Masquerading?" she echoed, with a shocked accent.

"Oh, well, you are accustomed to meeting all sorts of people. You can't think that any human classes are so sharply divided that to cross a new threshold means to enter a new world."

She was silent, and he could see her face only vaguely for some little time; but when a passing light cast an evanescent gleam upon it he thought that he detected something like a look of delicate mischief there. Her next words, rather promptly spoken, bore with them an explanatory bluntness.

"I am convinced that if everybody else disappoints me Miss Dares will not."

"Miss Dares?" he almost faltered, in the tone of one thrown off his guard.

"Miss Cora Dares," Pauline continued, with a self-correcting precision. "The younger of the two daughters, the one who paints. Oh, you see," she continued, after a little laugh that was merry, though faint, "I have forgotten nothing. I've a great curiosity to see this young artist. You had not half so much to tell me about her as about her mother, and yet you have somehow contrived to make her quite as interesting."

"Why?" Kindelon asked, with a soft abruptness to which the fact of his almost invisible face lent a greater force. "Is it because you think that I like Cora Dares? I should like to think that was your reason for being interested in her."

Another brief silence on Pauline's part followed his words, and then she suddenly responded, with the most non-committal innocence of tone:

"Why, what other reason could I possibly have? Of course I suppose that you like her. And of course that is why I am anxious to meet her."

There was a repelling pleasantry in these three short sentences. If Kindelon had been inclined to slip any further into the realm of sentiment, the very reverse of encouragement had now met him. Pauline's matter-of-course complacency had a distinct chill under its superficial warmth. "Don't misunderstand me, please," she went on, with so altered a voice that her listener felt as if she had indeed been masquerading through some caprice best known to herself, and now chose once and for all to drop masque and cloak. "I really expect a most novel and entertaining experience to-night. You say that I have met all sorts of people. I have by no means done so. It strikes me that our acquaintance is not so young that I should tell you this. It is true that I made a few pleasant and even valuable friendships in Europe; but these have been exceptional in my life, and I now return to my native city to disapprove everybody whom I once approved."

"And you expect to approve all the people whom you shall meet to-night?"

"You ask that in a tone of positive alarm."

"I can't help betraying some nervous fear. Your expectations are so exorbitant."

Pauline tossed her head in the dimness. "Oh, you will find me more easily suited than you suppose."

Kindelon gave a kind of dubious laugh. "I'm not so sure that you will be easily suited," he said. "You are very pessimistic in your judgments of the fashionable throng. It strikes me that you are a rigid critic of nearly everybody. How can I tell that you will not denounce me, in an hour or so, as the worst of impostors, for having presumed to introduce you among a lot of objectionable bores?"

"I think you will admit," said Pauline, in offended reply, "that most of Mrs. Dares's friends have brains."

"Brains? Oh, yes, all sorts of brains."

"That is just what I want to meet," she rapidly exclaimed – "all sorts of brains. I am accustomed, at present, to only two or three sorts. – Oh, you need not be afraid that I shall become bored. No, indeed! On the contrary, I expect to be exhilarated. I shall fraternize with most of them – I shall be one of them almost immediately. Wait until you see!"

"I shan't see that," said Kindelon, with an amused brusquerie.

"What do you mean?" she questioned, once more offendedly.

He began to speak, with his old glib fleetness. "Why, my dear lady, because you are not one of them, and never can be. You are a patrician, reared differently, and you will carry your stamp with you wherever you go. Your very voice will betray you in ten seconds. You may show them that you want to be their good friend, but you can't convince them that you and they are of the same stock. Some of them will envy you, others may secretly presume to despise you, and still others may very cordially like you. I don't think it has ever dawned upon me until lately how different you are from these persons whom you wish to make your allies and supporters. That night, when I went into your aunt's opera-box, I had a very slight understanding of the matter. I've always scoffed at the idea of a New York aristocracy. It seemed so absurd, so self-contradictory. And if it existed at all, I've always told myself, it must be the merest nonsensical sham. But now I begin to recognize it as an undeniable fact. There's a sort of irony, too, in my finding it out so late – after I have knocked about as a journalist in a city which I believed to be democratic if it was anything. However, you've made the whole matter plain to me. You didn't intend to open my plebeian eyes, but you have done so. It is really wonderful how you have set me thinking. I've often told myself that America was a political failure as a republic, but I never realized that it was a social one."

Just then the carriage stopped. "I am sorry," said Pauline, "to have unconsciously made you think ill of the literary society of New York." She paused for a moment, and there was a rebuking solemnity in her voice as she added: "I believe – I insist upon believing till I see otherwise – that it does not deserve to be condemned."

VI

The footman was now heard, as he sprang from the box. "Good gracious!" exclaimed Kindelon; "I haven't condemned it! It condemns itself."

Pauline gave a laugh full of accusative satire. "Oh!" she burst forth. "I should like to hear you speak against it before Mrs. Dares – and your friend Miss Cora, too – as you have just done before me!"

The footman had by this time opened the carriage door. He kept one white-gloved hand on the knob, standing, with his cockaded hat and his long-skirted coat, motionless and respectful in the outer gloom.

Kindelon threw up both hands, and waved them in a burlesque of despair. "There is no literary society in New York," he murmured, as if the admission had been wrung from him. "Don't go inside there with any idea of meeting it, for it is not to be found! Mrs. Dares herself will tell you so!"

Pauline shook her head vigorously. "I'm sure you can't mean that," she exclaimed, in grieved reproach.

Kindelon gave one of his laughs, and jumped out of the carriage. Pauline took the hand which he offered her, while the displaced footman decorously receded.