An Ambitious Woman: A Novel

His mirthful sidelong look made Claire echo his laugh. "I will tell Herbert how much you like it," she said; "he will be so pleased to know."

"Pray do nothing of the sort!" he expostulated, with a good deal of comic seriousness. "I should never forgive you if you did. Husbands are such oddly jealous fellows. There is no telling what innocent little outburst of esteem may sometimes offend them."

Claire thought the time had come for a decisive parry, in the parlance of fencers. "Oh, Herbert is not at all jealous," she said, measuring the words just enough not to make them seem out of accord with her bright smile. "He has never had the least occasion to be, I assure you."

He fixed his eyes with soft intentness on her sweet, blooming face. "Never?" he questioned, quite low of tone.

"Never," she answered, gently laconic.

"But he might take some stupid pretext … who knows?"

"Oh, if he did I would soon show him the stupidity of it. We understand each other excellently."

They talked on for at least a half hour. The other gentlemen remained below. Goldwin made no more daring complimentary hazards. He listened quite as much as he talked. Their converse turned upon social matters – upon what sort of a season it would be – upon the coming opera – upon the nature of New York entertainments – upon the men and women who were to give them. Claire made it very plain to him that she wanted to enter the gay lists. She at length said: —

"Do you know Mrs. Van Horn?"

Goldwin laughed. "Why don't you ask me if I know the City Hall," he said, "or the Stock Exchange? Of course I know her."

"Do you like her?"

"Nobody ever likes her. Who likes statues?"

"People sometimes worship them."

"Oh, she is a good deal worshiped, if you mean that."

Hollister and his two remaining guests now appeared. Claire re-welcomed both the latter gentlemen with beaming suavity. They were both important personages, as it has been recorded. They both had important wives, to whom they repaired, a little later, and to whom they loudly sang praises of Claire's loveliness. The remarks of each took substantially the same form, and the following might be given as their connubial and somewhat florid average: —

"That fellow Hollister's wife, you know. The man I dined with to-night. Didn't know he had a wife? Well, you'd have known it if you'd been there. She's a splendid young creature. Handsome as a picture, and good style, too. By the way, Stuart Goldwin was there; you know how hard it is to get him. I shouldn't wonder if these Hollisters were going to make a dash for society, soon. Now, don't repeat it, my dear, but the fact is, this Hollister can be of considerable service to me in a business way. There's no use of going into particulars, for women never understand business. But … if anything should occur – any card be left, I mean, you may be sure what my wishes are… Oh, of course; look sour, and refuse point blank. Bless my soul, when did you ever do anything to help along my interests? You'll spend the money fast enough, but you won't turn a hand to help me make it. All right; do as you please. Hollister is to-day the most rising young man on the Street. There's a regular boom on him. He's got Goldwin for a friend. You must know what that means."

Both ladies did know what it meant. Both ladies had looked sour, but both in due time entertained their afterthoughts. They were ladies of high fashion, each prominent within an exclusive clique. They were not powerful enough to indorse any new struggler for position; their own right of tenure was not unassailable. They dreaded this Mrs. Hollister, as it were, but they secretly resolved that it would be folly to ignore her. Meanwhile a certain interview, held by Stuart Goldwin with a certain lady of his acquaintance, was of quite different character. Goldwin did not reach the house of Mrs. Ridgeway Lee until some time after ten o'clock. It was an exceedingly pretty house. Its drawing-room, though as small as Claire's, must by comparison have put the latter completely into the shade. It was an exquisite artistic commingling of all that was rare and fine in upholstery and general embellishment. Mrs. Ridgeway Lee, too, was in a manner rare and fine. She rose from a deep cachemire lounge to receive Goldwin. She was dressed in crimson, with a great cluster of white and crimson roses at her breast. She pretended to be annoyed that he should have presumed to come so late. She had the last French novel in her hand, pressed against her heart, as though she loved its allurements and disliked being thus drawn from them. Goldwin knew perfectly well that she had expected him, that she was very glad he had come. He often wondered to himself why he did not ask her to be his wife. She was passionately in love with him; she had been a widow almost since girlhood. She had a great deal of money, for which he cared nothing, and a great deal of beauty, for which he could not help but care. She had almost seriously compromised herself by permitting him to show her attentions whose intimacy, in the judgment of the world, should long ago either have ceased entirely or else have assumed matrimonial permanence.

Yet she was a woman who could, to a certain degree, compromise herself with impunity. Her connections were all people of high place. She was distantly related to Mrs. Diggs and nearly related to Mrs. Van Horn, who felt toward her that fondness which may exist between a queen and a lady-in-waiting. Apart from this, she was a social dignitary. Her artificiality was more plainly manifest than that of Goldwin, and it had become a commonplace among her friends to say that she was affected. But she had made her affectation a kind of fashion; other women had so liked the peculiar flutter of her lids, the drawl of her voice, the erratic movements and extraordinary poses of her body, that they had imitated these with disastrous fidelity. She said clever, daring, insolent, or amiable things all in the same slow, measured way, and generally managed to leave an impression that a fund of unuttered experience or observation lay behind them. She was prodigiously pious for one of her pleasure-loving nature. Her charity was liberal and incessant. She trailed her Parisian robes through the wards of hospitals, or lifted them in the ill-smelling haunts of dying paupers. Her religion and her charity went hand in hand. For some people they were both shams; for others they were ostentation, half founded upon sincerity; for others they implied a feverish craving to drown the remorse born of persistent indiscretions; and still for others they were an intoxication, indulged in by one who did nothing half-way, and resorted to as some women drug themselves with opium, chloral, or alcohol. She denounced the new intellectual tendency among social equals of her own sex, as something wholly terrible; she frowned upon it no less darkly than her kinswoman, Mrs. Van Horn, but for a different reason. Its occasional lapses into rationalistic and unorthodox thought roused her dismay and ire.

"Science," she would say, in her grave, loitering manner, "is perfectly splendid. I adore it. I read books about it all the time." (There were those who roundly asserted that she did not know protoplasm from evolution.) "But this confusing it with religion is simply blasphemous and awful. I have the profoundest pity for all who do not believe devoutly. I wish I could build asylums for them, and visit them, as I do my sick and my poor!"

Goldwin always listened to these melancholy outbursts with a twinkling eye. She had long since ceased to try and convert him to her High Church ritualisms. He would never go to church with her and witness, in the edifice which she attended, the Episcopal ceremonial imitate, as he said, the Roman Catholic ceremonial just as far as it dared and no further. But he would never have gone to any church with her, and she knew it, and mourned him as ungodly. That was the way, some of her foes asserted, in which she made love to him: she mourned him as ungodly.

But she showed no signs of making love to him to-night. She received him, as was already stated, with a shocked air.

"It is dreadfully late," she said, giving him her hand. "You ought not to do it. You know that you ought not to do it."

He kept her hand until she had again seated herself on the cachemire lounge. Then he sat down beside her.

Her type of beauty had been called that of a serpent. It was true that her present posture on the lounge oddly resembled a sort of coil. Her face wore at nearly all times a warm paleness; its color, or rather its lack of color, had little variation. Her hair was black as night; her eyes luminous, large, and very dark; her head small, her figure lissome and extremely slender, her shoulders narrow and falling. She could not be ungraceful, and her grace was always what in another woman would have been called unique awkwardness. She appeared, now, to be gazing at Goldwin across one shoulder. Her crimson dress was in a tight whorl about her feet. She had a twisted look, which in any one else would have suggested an imperiled anatomy. But you somehow accepted her at first sight as capable of a picturesque elasticity denied to commoner physiques.

"I dropped in only for a minute," said Goldwin. "I wanted to tell you about the dinner."

"Well? Was it nice?"

"Immensely. There was only one woman, but a marvelous woman. She is Hollister's wife. I feel as if I'd been hearing a new opera by Gounod. Don't ask me to describe her."

Mrs. Lee was watching the speaker's face with great intentness. It was a face that she knew very well; she had given it several years of close study.

"She is handsome, then?"

"She's exquisite. She is going to take things by storm this winter. She wants to do it, too. And I mean to help her."

"Who was she?"

"I don't know. And I don't care. I'm her devoted friend. I hope you will be. I want you to call on her."

"Are you crazy?" said Mrs. Lee. She said it so quietly and slowly, as was her wont to say all things, that she might have been making the most ordinary of queries.

"Yes," laughed Goldwin, "quite out of my head."

"Do you think I will go and see a woman I don't know, merely because you ask me to do it?"

He let his eyes dwell steadily upon her pale, small, piquant face, lifted above the long, rounded throat, on which sparkled a slim gorget of rubies, to match her dress.

"You've done things that I wanted you to do before now," he said softly. "You'll do this, I am sure."

She put one hand on his arm. The hand was so tiny and white that it seemed to rest there as lightly as a drifted blossom. "Will you tell me all about her?" she said, in her measured way.

"I told you that I couldn't describe her. She's like flowers that I've seen; she's like music that I've heard; she is like perfumes that I have smelt. There's poetry for you. You're fond of poetry, you say."

She still kept her hand on his arm. He had very rarely praised a woman in her hearing. He had never before praised one in this fashion.

"Will you tell me one thing more?" she said. "Have you fallen in love with her?"

Goldwin threw back his head and laughed. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "she is a married woman, and her husband worships her."

"Will you answer my question?" persisted Mrs. Lee.

"Yes," said Goldwin, suddenly jumping up from the lounge. "She is tremendously fond of her husband. There … your question is answered."

XVI

Rather early the next morning, Mrs. Diggs dropped in upon Claire, "to hear all about it," as she said, alluding to the dinner-party.

She dismissed two of the gentlemen with two little contemptuous nods. "They are both well enough in point of respectability," she affirmed. "So are their wives. All four are so swathed in dull convention that you even forget to criticise them; they're like animals which resemble the haunts they inhabit to such a degree that you can tell them from the surrounding foliage or furrows only when they move or show life. Whom else did you have?"

"There was Mr. Stuart Goldwin," said Claire.

"Goldwin? Yon don't mean it, really? Did you have Goldwin?" Here Mrs. Diggs looked hard at Claire, and slowly shook her head. "My dear," she went on, "it must indeed be true that your husband is achieving great financial distinction. Pardon my saying it, Claire, but Goldwin wouldn't have put his limbs under your mahogany if this had not been true. He's an enormous personage. Other Wall Street grandees have been very small pygmies in the social estimate. But Goldwin carries everything before him. You needn't tell me that you like him. It would be something abnormal if you didn't. He is really the most charming of men. You can't trust him, don't you know, further than you can see him; he bristles with all sorts of humbug. And yet you accept him, because it is such well-bred, engaging humbug. He has hosts of adherents, and he deserves them. He gives the most enchanting entertainments. They are never vulgar, and yet they cost vast sums. For example, he will give a Delmonico dinner, at which every lady finds a diamond-studded locket hid modestly in the heart of her bouquet. I need not add that in a matrimonial way he is simply groveled to. But beware of him, my dear Claire; he is dangerous."

"Dangerous?" repeated Claire.

"Well, not so much in himself. Goldwin, in himself, is a shallow yet clever man, a forcible yet weak man, a man whose pluck has aided him a good deal, and whose luck has aided him still more. He has caught the trick of looking like a prince, and hence of giving his princely amassment of money a superb glamour. He will fade, some day, and leave not a rack behind. Of course he will. They all do. I don't know that he would if he married. And now I come to my previous point. He doesn't marry; therefore, he is dangerous."

"I don't follow you," Claire said.

"He doesn't marry Mrs. Ridgeway Lee. That is what I mean. As it is, she guards his approaches. She is a woman of high position, considerable queer, uncanny beauty, monstrous affectation, and a fondness for him that amounts to idolatry. She's the most intense of pietists; she riots in all sorts of religious charities. She has other idolatries besides Goldwin, but he is her foremost. I have never been just able to make her out. She is a sort of cousin of mine. She's wonderfully handsome, but it's the lean, cold beauty of a snake. As I said, she guards Goldwin's approaches. She's a widow, and a rich one, and she wants Goldwin to ask her to marry him. He doesn't, however, and hence she coils herself, so to speak, at the threshold of his acquaintance. If any other woman draws near – I mean, too near – she hisses and bites… Oh, don't look incredulous. I've known her to positively do both. She'll do it to you, if Goldwin is too attentive. That is why I warn you; that is why I call that nice, brilliant, headlong, gentlemanly Goldwin a dangerous man."

In a few more days Hollister, of his own accord, proposed to Claire that she should engage a maid. He also told her that he had made purchase of two carriages, a span of horses, and an extra horse for single harness besides.

"You will be able to drive out, either in your coupé or your larger carriage, my dear," he said, "by Wednesday next." Then he broke into one of his most genial laughs, and added: "I hope that is not too long to wait."

Claire took this prophecy of coming splendor with serious quietude. She had talked with her husband regarding his recent plethoric influx of thousands.

"I've an idea, Herbert," she said, using a slow, wise-seeming deliberation. "It is this: why do you not buy our house? We both like it; it is comfortable and agreeable; it fills all our wants. And it is for sale, you know."

Hollister looked grave, then smiled, then affirmatively nodded.

"I'll do it, Claire," he answered. "I'll do it to-morrow, if you wish."

"I do wish, Herbert. And when you have bought the house, I want you to put it in my name. I want you to give it to me."

He started, and stared at her. A gleam of distrust appeared to slip coldly into his frank eyes. Claire saw this, but answered his look with firm calm. "Why do you say that?" he murmured.

She went nearer to him, and laid one hand on his shoulder. "Why do I say it?" she softly iterated. "Because I know something of the risks and perils you are daily forced to meet."

He watched her intently and soberly, for a few seconds, after she had thus spoken. Then his characteristic smile broke forth like a burst of sun. He kissed her on the lips. "It shall be just as you say!" he exclaimed, drawing her nearer to him, with a look which they of bids and sales and stock-traffic had never seen on his manly yet winsome face. "You are right. You are always right, Claire. There's a lot of money drifting in; it seems as if the money would never stop drifting in."

"I hope it never will," said Claire, showing her pure teeth in a laugh, as he again kissed her. At the same time she drew back from him while his encircling arm still retained her, in a way to which he had grown wholly familiar, and which, in an unwedded woman, would have readily seemed like the reserve of absolute maidenhood.

A slight further lapse of days brought grand results for Claire. She was legally the owner of the charming little house in which she dwelt; she had her maid, obsequiously attendant on her least wants; she possessed her coupé, drawn by a large, silver-trapped horse; she possessed, also, a glossy, dark-appointed carriage, drawn by two horses of equally smart gear, and supervised by coachman and footman in approved and modish livery.

Mrs. Diggs was in ecstasies at the prosperous change. "Now you're indeed lancée, don't you know?" she said. "By the way, has Cornelia Van Horn left a card on you, my dear?"

"No," said Claire.

"Can she really mean open warfare?"

"Let her wage it," Claire answered. "That is better than to have it concealed."

The opera-season began the next evening. Hollister had engaged a box, permanently. It was a season that opened with much auspicious brilliancy. Claire appeared in her first really notable toilette. One of the reigning modistes had made it, and for the first time in her life she was called upon to stand the test of surpassingly beautiful dressing. It is a test that some very fair women stand ill. They show to best advantage, in garments which have no atmosphere of festival; it becomes them to be clad with domesticity or at least moderation. This was by no means true, however, of Claire. The diamond necklace which Hollister had spread on her dressing-table but a few minutes before the hour of departure glittered round her smooth, slender neck with telling saliency. Her gown was of a pale, pink brocaded stuff, and she carried its full-flowing train with a light-stepping and perfect repose. Before she had unclasped her cloak and seated herself in the box at Hollister's side, numerous lorgnettes were leveled upon the lovely, dignified picture that she made. When she had seated herself, the spell continued. The large pink roses in her bosom were not deep or sweet enough of tint to do more than heighten the fresh, chaste flush in either cheek. She bore herself with a fine and delicate majesty. Her dark-blue eyes told of the quicker pulse that stirred her veins only by a more humid and dreamy sparkle. She was inwardly glad to be where she sat, and to be robed as she was robed, but her pleasure softly exulted in its own outward repression; she was wonderfully self-poised and tranquil, considering her strong secret excitement. Nearly everybody who looked upon her pronounced her to be very beautiful, and a good many people, before an hour had passed, had looked at her with the closest kind of scrutiny.

The opera was a favorite one; a famed and favorite prima-donna sang in it. Below, where the real lovers of music mostly thronged, Claire's presence produced neither comment nor criticism. But up in the region sacred to fashion, inattention, gossip, and flirtation, she rapidly became an event which even the most melodious cavatina was powerless to supersede.

It was not all done by her beauty and novel charm. Hollister, sitting at her side, nonchalant, handsome, of excellent conventional style in garb and posture, materially helped to increase the notability which surrounded her. His success had publicly transpired; a few of those newspapers which are little save glaring personal placards had of late proclaimed with graphic zeal his speculative triumphs. He had leapt into notoriety in a day, almost in an hour. There was but one man in the house besides her husband whom Claire knew. This man was Stuart Goldwin, and he soon dropped into her box, remaining there through the two final acts. Hollister, meanwhile, chose to be absent. He had found some friends who were solicitous of presenting him to certain ladies. He spent nearly the whole of these two acts in chatting with these same ladies. They were all gracious; one or two of them had strong claims to beauty. It was no less an important evening with himself than with Claire. Perhaps with him it was even more so, since he obtained his social acceptance, as it were, by great dames whom he pleased with his handsome face, happy manners, and growing repute as a potential millionaire.

His wife, on the other hand, had gained a different victory. She was pronounced to be charming and remarkable; she had acquired the prestige of Goldwin's open attentions. But she was a woman, and she had not yet received the endorsement of her own sex. It might possibly soon arrive, or it might be withheld: there was still no actual certainty.

Claire loved the music, but she would have heard its cadences in discontent if fate had decreed that she should sit, this evening, with no attendant devotee. She knew well that Goldwin's company distinguished her. Mrs. Diggs had given her points, as the phrase goes. She was quite aware that the horse-shoe of boxes in our metropolitan opera-house, and the other more commodious proscenium boxes which flank its stage, are at nearly all times occupied by just the kind of people among whom she wished to win her coveted lofty place. She understood that they would note, comment, gauge, admire, or condemn; and while her manner bespoke a sweet and placid unconsciousness of their observation, she was alive to the exact amount of observation which she attracted.

"I am so glad that you came," Goldwin told her. "For very selfish reasons, I mean. You appear, and you corroborate my statements. Now people can at last see and judge for themselves. The verdict is sure."

He said many more things in this vein, all uttered low, and all accompanied by his smile, that seemed either to mean volumes or to leave his true meaning adroitly ambiguous.

Mrs. Ridgeway Lee was in a somewhat near box. When Goldwin returned to her side, just as the curtain was falling on the last act, she accepted his escort to her carriage with a fine composure. He met Mrs. Van Horn, a little later, in the crush that always occurs along the Fourteenth Street lobby of our Academy when a full house disgorges its throng.

The two ladies talked together. Not far away from them stood Mrs. Diggs and Claire, each waiting for an absent husband to secure her carriage.

"What a contrast there is between them," Claire murmured to her companion. "One is so blonde and peaceful, the other so dark and restless."

"Yes, my dear Claire. Have you caught Cornelia's eye?"

"No. She does not appear to see me."

"She sees you perfectly. She has not yet made up her mind just how to act."

"I think that she means to cut me," said Claire, under her breath.

"Never," came the emphatic answer, so bass and gruff because of its vocal suppression that it produced odd contrast with Mrs. Diggs's bodily thinness. "To cut you would be to burn her ships. She has an object in knowing you. I'm afraid it's a dark one. But be sure that she is only making up her mind just how to know you. She will soon decide; she has already delayed too long, and she feels it. Be ready for a prompt change."

If the behavior of Mrs. Van Horn was really to be explained on the theory of her prophetic cousin, then she made up her mind very soon after the delivery of these oracular sentences. A chance turn of the neck seemed to render her conscious of Claire's neighboring presence. She bowed with soft decision the instant that their eyes met; and Claire returned the bow.