An Ambitious Woman: A Novel

"My name is Mrs. Hollister," said Claire. "Mrs. Herbert Hollister. I have been married only a few weeks."

"A bride! Really? How delightful! Do you actually mean it? I dote on brides. I'm sure we shall be friends."

They rapidly became so. Claire was by no means averse to the arrangement. Mrs. Diggs was violent, explosive, precipitate, but she was not vulgar. Besides, her roots, so to speak, were in the soil that Claire liked. They lunched together that day at one of the little tables in the vast, airy dining-room. While they were seated at the meal, several of the elegant ladies passed on their way toward other tables. Mrs. Diggs nodded to each of them familiarly, and her nods were distinctly returned. Claire took special note of this latter point.

"Your relations will think you have deserted them," she said.

Mrs. Diggs laughed. "They think I'm always deserting them," she exclaimed. "I don't believe my absence is a great affliction; they manage to endure it… Oh, by the way, here comes Cousin Cornelia Van Horn. She must have arrived to-day. Excuse me for a moment. I'll have to go and speak to her."

Mrs. Diggs hastily rose and went toward a lady who was herself in act of crossing the room, but who paused on seeing her approach. The meeting took place not far from where Claire was seated. She saw Mrs. Diggs give her kinswoman a kiss on each cheek like the quick peck of a bird. They were cheeks that time had faded a little, but the face to which they belonged had a haughty loveliness all its own. At least five-and-thirty years had rounded her figure into soft exuberance, mellowing but scarcely marring its past harmonies. She was very blonde; her eyebrows, each a perfect arch, and the plenteous hair worn in a dry, crisp matwork low over her white forehead, were just saved from too pale a flaxen by the least yellow tinge. Her features were cut like those of a cameo, but they were too small and too near together for positive beauty, while her eyelids had too deep a droop, and her nose, by nature lifted too high at the extreme tip, lost nothing of the pride, even the arrogance it bespoke, from the exquisite poise of her head above a long throat and sloping shoulders. Claire decided that she had never seen a woman so stately and yet so lightsome, or one who could so clearly suggest the serenity and repose of great self-esteem without thrusting its offensive scorn into harsh evidence.

Mrs. Diggs remained with her new companion several minutes. Her severe back, in all its rather trying outlines, was presented to Claire during this interval, though once she slightly turned, making a little gesture with her bony hand that seemed to indicate either the table she had just quitted or the figure still seated there. And soon afterward Claire saw that the person whom she had heard named by Mrs. Diggs was looking steadily at her with a pair of cold, light-blue eyes. While she returned this look it struck her that a change of color touched the placid face of her observer, though the flush from faint pink into pink only by a shade less dim might easily have passed for a trick of deceptive fancy.

Mrs. Diggs presently came trotting back to the table, with her odd combination of graceful movement and bodily sharpness.

"My dear Mrs. Hollister," she began, while seating herself, "do you know that Cousin Cornelia knows all about you? I happened to mention your name before you were married – Miss Twining, wasn't it?"

"Yes," replied Claire.

"Well, the name seemed to strike her, and she at once asked if you had not stayed quite a long time with Mrs… Mrs… Oh, you mentioned her when you spoke of being here several weeks before your marriage."

"Mrs. Bergemann," said Claire, and immediately added, in tones full of quiet interest: "Well, Mrs. Diggs?"

"Why, that was what placed you, don't you know, with Cousin Cornelia. Yes, Mrs. Bergemann; that was the name."

"Did your cousin know Mrs. Bergemann?" inquired Claire.

"She didn't say so. But she appeared to know just who you were. I think she's going to make me present you. There seems to be some queer mystery. She acted rather strangely. Are you sure you've never met before?"

"Yes, I am perfectly sure," answered Claire. "Did you not say that the lady's name was Van Horn?"

"Cousin Cornelia's? Why, yes; of course it is. She's my second cousin. She's related on the Van Kortlandt side. She was a Miss Thurston."

"Thurston," repeated Claire, not interrogatively, but as though she had caught the sound with recognition the instant it left the speaker's lips. She broke into a smile, now. "That explains everything. She is a sister of Mr. Beverley Thurston, is she not?"

"Cousin Beverley? Of course she is. Do you know him?"

"Oh, yes," said Claire. "I knew him very well."

"Why, you don't tell me so!" blithely exclaimed Mrs. Diggs. "I dote on Beverley. I suppose he thinks me dreadful, but I dote on him, just the same. He is so broad, don't you know? He's seen so much, and read so much, and lived so much, generally. And with it all he's so conventional. That is the way I like conventionality – when you find it in some one who makes it a sort of fatigue-dress for liberal views, and not the uniform of narrow ones."

"I approve your description of Mr. Thurston," said Claire, slowly. "It tells me how well you know him."

Mrs. Diggs creased her forehead in puzzled style, and bent her face closer toward Claire's. "What on earth do you suppose it was that made him dart off so suddenly to Europe?" she asked.

Claire stooped, as though to discover some kind of objectionable speck in the cup of chocolate that she was stirring, and then removed what she had found, with much apparent care. "He did go quite unexpectedly, did he not?" she said, lowering her head still more as she put the speck on her saucer and examined it with an excellent counterfeit of the way we regard such things when uncertain if their origin be animal or vegetable. She wondered to herself, at the same time, whether Mrs. Diggs would notice her increased color, or whether she herself had merely imagined that her color had undergone any sort of change. "At some other time," she went on, letting the words loiter in utterance, with a very neat simulation of preoccupied attention … "at some other time, Mrs. Diggs, I should like to talk more with you about Mrs. Van Horn's brother. But just now I want to ask you about Mrs. Van Horn herself."

Here Claire briskly raised her head. The problem of the aggressive speck had seemingly been solved. "I have heard Mr. Thurston mention that he had a sister of that name," she continued, now speaking with speed, "but he told me almost nothing regarding her. She appears to be a very important person."

Mrs. Diggs glanced toward a distant table at which she had already seen her cousin seat herself. Then she turned to Claire again, as though confident of how safely remote was the lady whom she at once proceeded to discuss.

"Cornelia is a very important person, Mrs. Hollister. As I told you, she's my second cousin. I used to see a good deal of her before I was married. She's at least ten years older than I am. She brought me out into society. I was an orphan, don't you know, and there was nobody else to bring me out. I had to be brought out, for I was eighteen, and all the rest of the family were either in mourning, or were too old, or else had gone to Europe, or … well, something of that sort. So Cornelia gave me a great ball. It was splendidly civil of her. But I don't think she did it from the least benevolence. No, not at all. She had ended her term of widowhood, and wanted to appear again, don't you know? The ball was magnificent, and it gathered all her old clientèle about her. I remember it so well; it is only eight years ago. I stood at her side, behind a towering burden of bouquets which it made my wrist ache to hold. Cornelia was in white satin, with knots of violets all over her dress. I shall never forget that dress. She wore amethysts round her throat, and in her hair, and on her arms. It was a kind of jubilant second-mourning, don't you know? She looked superb; she was eight years younger than she is now. People gathered about her and paid their court. She resumed old acquaintances; she received open or whispered compliments; she was the event of the evening. I was nearly ignored. And yet it was my ball; it had been given for me, to celebrate my début in society. But as the evening progressed I began to discover that I had been made a mere pretext. Cornelia herself was the real reason of the ball. She had simply used me as an excuse for reëmerging. She reëmerged, by the way, with seventy thousand a year, and a reputation for having been one of the reigning belles of New York before she married Winthrop Van Horn. She was poor when she married Winthrop, and he lived only a few years afterward. He left her every penny of his money; there were no children. Cornelia was a devoted wife; at least, I never heard it contradicted, and I've somehow always accepted it. I think everybody has always accepted it, too. He died of consumption in Bermuda, and it is usually taken for granted, don't you know, that he died in Cornelia's arms. For my part, I can't imagine anybody dying in Cornelia's arms… But that's neither here nor there. She kept herself as quiet as a mouse for five years. But mice are nomadic, and they gnaw everything. And Cornelia, during those five years of bereaved woe, to my certain knowledge, took a peep at every capital in Europe. After the ball – the ball that she gave me, please understand – she became a great leader. She's a great leader still. Didn't Beverley tell you that, Mrs. Hollister?"

"No," stated Claire, keenly interested by this nimble monologue. "As I said, Mr. Thurston scarcely did more than mention his sister's name."

Mrs. Diggs applied herself actively to a fragment of cold chicken, which she had left neglected through all these elucidating items. Claire watched her, thinking how clever she was and yet how uncircumspect. With what slight incentive had been roused this actual whirlwind of family confidences!

"She perfectly adores Beverley," Mrs. Diggs presently continued. "I have an idea that she does so because he's a Thurston – or rather because she's one. She has contrived to make it appear very exceptional to be a Thurston. The Thurstons have never been anything whatever. Her mother married into the family, and cast a spell of aristocracy over them. But Cornelia never alludes to the Van Kortlandt connection. She knows that can take care of itself. I believe her grandfather, on the other side, was a saddler. But she has managed to have it seriously disputed whether he was a saddler or a landed Knickerbocker grandee. The panels of her carriage bear a Thurston crest. It is a very pretty one; I am quite sure she invented it. I once told Beverley so, and he laughed. He has never used it, though he has never denounced it as spurious. The joke is that she ignores the Van Horn crest entirely, which is the only one she has any right to air. Cornelia is a great leader, as I said. She has Thursday evenings in the big old house on Washington Square which her late husband left her. Lots of people have struggled to go to Cornelia's Thursdays, and not gone, after all. It's absolutely funny to observe what a vogue she has got. She could make anybody whom she chose to take up a social somebody by merely lifting her finger. But she never lifts her finger. That is why she is so run after. You can't get her to use the power she possesses. It yearly grows more of a power, don't you know, on this very account. It's like a big deposit in a bank, that gets bigger through lying there untouched. She won't spend a penny; she lets it grow. The women of New York are becoming a good deal less flippant, some of them, than they used to be. Clubs and receptions have come into fashion, where intellectual matters are seriously, even capably discussed. Somebody will read a paper on something sensible and literary, and a little debate will follow. At one of these clubs – composed strictly of women – it is forbidden to mention the last ball, though this may have occurred on the preceding night and everybody may have seen everybody else there, talking the usual gay nonsense. The whole thing is a kind of 'movement,' don't you know? It's very picturesque and it's extremely in earnest. It makes one think a little of the old historical French salons. It has laid bare some charming and surprising discoveries. It has shown how many women have been reading and thinking in secret, during those long intervals of leisure that have occurred between their opportunities for being publicly silly, inane, flirtatious, and hence of correct form. On the other hand it has led certain women to cultivate their minds as they would a new style of dressing their hair. All that we used to satirize in former entertainments of this kind fails to exist in those I am describing. Pipe-stem curls and blue spectacles are replaced by the most Parisian felicities of costume. A delightful-looking creature in a Worth dress that fits her like a glove will give us her 'views' on the Irish land-question or the persecution of the Jews in Russia… And now I come to the real object of my digression, as the long-winded orators say. Cornelia Van Horn frowns upon all this. She has gathered about her a little faction, too, which frowns obediently in her defense. You must not fancy for a moment that Cornelia could not shine in these assemblies if she chose to favor them. She has brains enough to outshine nearly all their supporters. But she condemns the intellectual tendency in women when thus openly exhibited. If they want to read and think, they should do it in the quiet of their closets, and in the same way that they write their letters, or glance over their accounts, or distribute their household orders. There is no objection to philosophy, science, belles-lettres, so long as these are not made to interfere with the general dignified commonplace of the higher social life. To be individual, argumentative, reformatory, is to be professional. To be professional is not to be 'good form.' The moment that a drawing-room is made to resemble a lecture-room or a seminary it becomes odious from a patrician stand-point. Only queens and duchesses can afford to paint pictures or to write books, without loss of caste. A consistent aristocracy never discovers new ideas; it accepts old ones. Agitators are the enemies of repose, and repose is the soul of refinement."

Here Mrs. Diggs gave a gleeful trill of laughter that made Claire compare it to her mind as well as her person; it was so clear and sharp. "Oh, you can't imagine," she went on, "how radical Cornelia is in her positively feudal conservatisms. I'm so liberal, don't you know, that I can appreciate her narrowness. I relish it as one does a delicious joke. But it's a very curious sort of bigotry. There's nothing in the least spontaneous about it. I've a conviction that she sweeps her eye more widely over this fine Nineteenth Century than any of the ladies I've been telling you about. She has seen that she can only reign on one kind of a throne, and she sticks there. And I assure you, there isn't the least doubt that she reigns in good earnest… I'm surprised that Beverley Thurston didn't tell you about her. Beverley has got her measure so exactly. He thinks me dreadful, as I said, but he's fond of me. I'm sure we always amuse each other."

"No," said Claire, shaking her head slowly, "he was very reticent on that subject. Perhaps he thought I might want to know her if he painted her portrait as you have done. That would have been awkward for him, provided his sister had declined my acquaintance. And I dare say she would have declined it, as I was not in her exclusive circle."

Mrs. Diggs put her head a little on one side. She was looking at Claire intently. A smile played like a faint flicker of light on her thin lips, whose two bluish lines always kept the same tinge.

"Why are you so candid with me?" she asked.

"Candid?" repeated Claire.

"Yes. Why do you show me that you would like to know Cornelia Van Horn?"

"Why?" still repeated Claire. "Did I show you that?"

"Not openly – not in so many words, don't you know? But I imagine it."

"You are very quick at imagining," said Claire, with a little playful toss of the head. "Well, if you choose, I should like to know her. I should like to know any one who ranks herself high, like that, and has a recognized claim. I have a fellow-feeling for ambitious people. I'm ambitious myself."

Mrs. Diggs seemed deeply amused. She lifted a forefinger, and shook it at Claire.

"I'm afraid you're very ambitious," she said.

"Well, I am," admitted Claire, not knowing how much rosy and dimpled charm her face had got while she spoke the words. "I am quite willing to concede that I have aims, projects, intentions."

Mrs. Diggs threw back her head, and laughed noisily. But she lowered her voice to a key much graver than her laugh, as she said: —

"You're as clever as Cornelia, in your way. Yes, you are. I shouldn't be surprised if you were a good deal cleverer, too. I suspect there's a nice stock of discreet reserve under your candor."

Claire creased her brows in a slightly piqued manner. "That is not very pleasant to hear," she said.

Mrs. Diggs stretched out her hand across the table so pointedly and cordially that Claire felt forced to take it.

"I like you. You interest me. Forgive me if I've annoyed you."

"You haven't annoyed me," was Claire's reply.

"I want to see those aims, projects, intentions," Mrs. Diggs continued, still holding her hand, and warmly pressing it besides. "Yes, I want to see you exploiter them – carry them out. You shall do it, if I can help you. And you will let me help you, I hope? You won't think me disagreeably patronizing, will you? I only speak in this way because I've taken a desperate fancy to you."

"Thanks," said Claire. Her eyes were sparkling; her heart was beating quickly.

XIV

When Hollister returned that evening, almost the first words that Claire spoke to him were: "Congratulate me, Herbert. I have taken a fine forward step at last."

"What do you mean, my dear?"

"I have got to know somebody of importance. I have launched my ship."

"Oho," laughed Hollister, understanding. "I hope the ship will prove seaworthy, little captain. You must steer with a prudent eye, remember. All sorts of squalls will lie in wait for your canvas, no matter how well you trim it."

"That is just the kind of sailing I like," said Claire. "I've been becalmed long enough."

He laughed at this, in his hearty way, as though it were quite a marvel of wit. "Come and tell me," he proposed, "about the important somebody who has been sensible enough to discover you."

They were alone together, in their wide, cheerful apartment, overlooking the ocean. They were about to go down and dine, and Hollister had just finished a few preparatory details of toilet. Lights had been lit, for the rapid autumn dusk had already thickened into nightfall; but though they could not see the starlit level of waters just beyond their windows, they had a sense of its nearness in the moist, salty breeze, whose tender rush made the drawn shades bulge, and set the loose lawn curtains fluttering buoyantly.

Hollister sank into a chair as he spoke the last sentence, and at the same time put an arm about his wife's waist, drawing her downward until she rested upon his knee. The roses at her bosom brushed his face, and he thrust his head forward with a sigh of comic infatuation, as though rapturously inhaling their perfume. But his free hand soon wandered up along the chestnut ripples of her hair, and he began to smooth them, with a touch creditably dainty for his heavy masculine fingers.

Claire permitted his caresses. She always permitted, and never returned them. He had slight sense that this was a coldly unreciprocal course; it appeared to fit in neatly enough with the general plan of creation that she should receive homage of any sort without further response than its mute recognition. That was the way he had constantly known her to act, or rather not to act; a change would have surprised, perhaps even shocked him; she would have ceased to be his peculiar, accustomed Claire; his revered statue would have lost her pedestal, and he had grown to like the pedestal for no wiser reason than that he had always seen it enthrone her.

"I will tell you all about my discoverer," Claire said, with matter-of-fact directness; and she at once began a swift and succinct little narration.

"Diggs," Hollister suddenly broke in, with one of his fresh laughs. "Oh, look here, now; you've made some big mistake. She can't be one of your adored swells, with such a name. It's – it's … cacophonous, positively!"

"Wait, if you please," said Claire, with demure toleration, as though a bulwark of proof made this skeptic assault endurable. "Her husband's name, in the first place, is not simply Diggs; it's Manhattan Diggs." She made this announcement with an air of tranquil triumph; but Hollister at once gave another irreverent laugh.

"Oh, of course!" he cried. "I remember, now. I know him. That is, I nod to him on the street, now and then. Is he here? Why, he's nearly always tipsy, you know."

"Tipsy!" repeated Claire, rising with an incredulous look. "Oh, Herbert, you must be mistaken. She worships him. She says that he treats her charmingly, and that they get on together with perfect accord."

"It would be rather strange to find two of that name even in such a great place as New York," said Hollister, with a slight shrug of the shoulders. "I don't believe I am mistaken a bit, Claire. He's a tall man, with fat yellow side-whiskers and a face as red as your roses. He's got a lot of money, I'm told. He goes down into the street, and dawdles an hour or so a day at his broker's. But I've never seen him thoroughly sober yet. Upon my word, I haven't."

Claire soon met the husband of Mrs. Diggs. It was after dinner, in one of the spacious, modern-appointed sitting-rooms, now so often half-vacant of occupants, or sometimes wholly vacant, through these lengthened September evenings.

"I want to present my husband," said Mrs. Diggs, preceding a tall man with fat yellow side-whiskers, whom Hollister had before this recognized across the dining-room as his own particular, chronically tipsy Mr. Diggs, beyond all possibility of mistake.

Claire had a little chat with Mr. Diggs, while Hollister, who had claimed acquaintance and shaken hands with him, seated himself at the side of his volatile spouse.

Claire soon became bored. Mr. Diggs was plainly tipsy; Herbert had been right. But he was most uninterestingly tipsy. He had sense enough remaining to conduct himself with a sort of haphazard propriety. He incessantly stroked either one or the other whisker, and kept up a perpetual covert struggle not to appear incoherent. He was at times considerably incoherent; a few of his sentences made the nominative seem as if it were swaggering toward its verb. But he was vastly polite. He told Claire that his wife had fallen in love with her. A little later, however, he spoke of his wife with a certain jolly disparagement.

"Kate is full of a lot of new things. I don't know what I'm going to do with her – really, I don't. She'll be a regular free-thinker before I know it. And I don't like free-thinkers; I think they're a sad lot. Now, don't you?"

Claire gave short, evasive answers to these and a number of similar appeals. Mr. Diggs distressed her; he was not at all the sort of person whom she desired to meet. She soon made herself so intentionally distraite that he rose and told her he was going to smoke a cigar, which he would bring into the sitting-room after he had obtained it, provided she did not object. She professed herself wholly sympathetic with this arrangement, and tried not to let her lip curl as she watched the unsteady pace of its proposer across the long sitting-room.

But he had scarcely retired before Mrs. Diggs broke off her converse with Hollister and exclaimed to Claire: —

"Where on earth has dear Manhattan gone? You don't mean that he has left you? How shameful of him!"

"I believe he has gone to get a cigar," Claire said.