An Ambitious Woman: A Novel

Just then a clock on the opposite mantel gave one little silver note that told it was half-past twelve. Claire rose as she heard the sound. "I must leave you now," she pursued. "I have only an hour left for my toilette, and I shall need it all." She threw back her head, and a dreary smile gleamed and fled along her lips. "I mean to meet all these grand ladies without one sign of defeat. I shan't wear my heart on my sleeve. This lunch was to have been my crowning triumph. It proves a funeral-feast, in its way, but they shan't find me playing chief-mourner. I intend to die game, as the phrase is." She gave a slight shudder, drooping her eyes. "It will be as though I stood in a house whose walls might crumble all about me at any moment – as if I could hear the crack of plaster and the creak of beams. But I shan't run away; I shall stand my ground very firmly, depend on it, until the bitter end. When the crash comes nobody will be buried in the ruins but myself – that is certain, is it not?"

Here her joyless laugh again sounded, and Thurston, swayed by an irresistible mood, caught one of her hands, pressing it hard within his own.

"You shall not be buried in the ruins!" he exclaimed. "Take my word for it, you shall not! It will all only be the beginning of a new and better life. You shall have learned a hard yet salutary lesson – that, and nothing more."

She shook her head, meeting his earnest eyes. "You are my good genius," she said. "It is too bad you have not had more power over me."

"Who is your evil genius?" he asked, with slower tones, while she drew her hand from his.

"Myself," she answered. "I am quite willing to concede it." … She appeared to muse for a little while. "I shall have one true friend here to-day," she soon continued. "I mean Mrs. Diggs. She is very loyal to me; she would do almost anything I should ask. You don't like her, or so she tells me, but I hope you will like her better than your other cousin, Mrs. Lee."

"I respect her far more. I have never doubted her goodness. But she gives me nerves, as the French say. She is at such a perpetual gallop; if she would only break into a trot, sometimes, it would be like anybody else's walk… You think you can trust her as an ally to-day?"

"Implicitly. She has promised to come early, too – before the others, you know." … Claire locked the fingers of both hands together, and held them so that the palms were bent downward. The weary smile again touched her lips and vanished. "What a day it is to be! And what a day it might have been!" She held out her hand to him, after that. "Good-by. With all my heart I thank you! You have done all that you could do."

He did not promptly reply. He was thinking whether he had really done all that he could do… And this thought followed him hauntingly as he left Claire to meet whatever catastrophe fate had in store for her.

Mrs. Diggs kept her promise, and was shown into Claire's dressing room a good quarter of an hour before the other guests were due. The lady started on seeing her friend, whose toilette was now completed, and whose robe, worn for the first time, was of a regal and unique beauty. It was chiefly of white velvet, whose trailing heaviness blent with purple lengths of the same lustreless and sculpturesque fabric. The white prevailed, but the purple was richly manifest. In her hair she wore aigrettes of sapphires and amethysts shaped to resemble pansies, and while the sleeves were cut short enough to show either arm from wrist almost to elbow, and permit of bracelets that were two circles of jewels wrought in semblance of the same flower and with the same blue and lilac gems, her bust and throat were clad in one cloud of rare, filmy laces, from which her delicate head rose with a stately yet aerial grace. Excitement had put rosy tints in either cheek; the jewels that she wore had no sweeter splendor than her eyes, and yet both by color and glow in a certain way aptly matched them. A gear of velvet is dangerous to women in whom exuberance of figure has the least assertive rule. Velvet is the sworn enemy of embonpoint. But Claire's figure was of such supple and flexile slenderness that the weight and volume of this apparel made her light step and airy contour win a new charm and a new vivacity.

"It is all perfect – quite perfect," said Mrs. Diggs, after taking a rapid survey of Claire's attire. "But, my dear, are you perfectly sure that" …

"Sure of what?" Claire asked, as her friend hesitated.

"Well … that it is just in good taste, don't you know? I mean, under the circumstances."

"What circumstances?" she exclaimed, putting the question as though she did not wish it answered, and moving a few paces away with an air of great pride. "I intend to fall gloriously. The end has come, the fight is lost; but I shan't make a tame surrender – not I! They shall see me at my best to-day, in looks, in speech, in manner. I'm glad you like my dress; I want it to be something memorable."

"You say that with a kind of bravado, Claire. There's a bitter ring to your mirth. Oh, I'm so sorry for you! That lovely dress hides an aching heart. You will suffer, poor child. This lunch will be a positive torture to you."

A moment after these words were spoken, Claire was close at Mrs. Diggs's side, holding one of her hands with firm pressure.

"You don't know how much of a torture it must be," she said, "and for what reason." She immediately repeated all that Thurston had told her. When she had finished, Mrs. Diggs was in a high state of perturbation.

"I haven't a doubt that Beverley is right!" she exclaimed. "If there was any plot, Cornelia Van Horn was in it, too, and her brother has made her throw away her weapons. But Sylvia Lee intends to deal the blow alone… What can it be? I'm at my wit's end to guess. There's but one thing to do – keep a continual watch upon her. Claire, can you be, by any chance, in that woman's power?"

"Her power?" faltered Claire… "I hope not," she added… "I know not," she then said, as the full sense of Mrs. Diggs's question struck her, and using a tone that was one of surprised affront.

"Now, don't be offended, my dear. I merely meant that Sylvia isn't a bit too good to magnify some slight imprudence, or twist and turn it until she has got it dangerously like an actual crime… But nous verrons. After all, Beverley's fears may be groundless. With all my heart I hope they are!"

Not long afterward Claire was receiving her guests. All the great ladies came, except, of course, Mrs. Van Horn. The last arrival was that of Mrs. Lee. She contrived to make her entrance a very conspicuous one. She was dressed with even more fantastic oddity than usual, and she spoke in so shrill and peculiar a voice that she had not been in the drawing-room more than five minutes before marked and universal attention was directed upon her.

"Sylvia is in a very singular state of excitement," Mrs. Diggs murmured to Claire. "I know her well. That slow drawl of hers has entirely gone. She acts to me as if she were on the verge of hysteria. I don't know whether you felt her hand tremble as it shook yours, but I thought that I plainly saw it tremble. Just watch her, now, while she talks with Mrs. Vanvelsor. She has a little crimson dot in each of her cheeks, and she is usually quite pale, you know. There's something in the wind – Beverley was right."

"Her place at the table is rather distant from mine," said Claire, with a scornful, transitory curl of the lip. "So there is no danger of her putting a pinch of arsenic into my wine-glass."

"You're not nervous, then? I am. I don't know just why, but I am."

"Nervous?" Claire softly echoed. "No, not at all, now. I've other more important things to think of. What could she do, after all? Let her attempt any folly; it would only recoil on herself… Ah, my friend, I am afraid I'm past being injured. This is my finale. I want it to prove a grand one."

"It will, Claire. They have all come, as you see. They have met you with perfect cordiality, and you have received them with every bit of your accustomed grace. I dare say that some of them are stunned with amazement; they no doubt expected to find you shivering and colorless."

The repast was magnificent. There were more than thirty ladies present, and these, all brilliantly attired and some of striking personal beauty, made the prodigal array of flowers, the admirable service of many delicious viands, and the soft music pealing from the near hall just loudly enough not to drown conversation while it filled pauses, produce an effect where the most unrestrained hospitality was mingled with a faultless refinement.

Claire's spirits seemed to rise as the decorous yet lavish banquet proceeded. Her laugh now and then rang out clear and sweet, while she addressed this or that lady, at various distances from where she herself sat. Mrs. Diggs, whose place was next her own, observed it all with secret wonder. She alone knew the bleeding pride, the balked aspiration, the thwarted yearning, which this pathetic and fictitious buoyancy hid. It was a defiance, and yet how skilled and radiant a one! Could you blame the woman who knew how to bloom and sparkle like this, for loving the world where such dainty eminence was envied and prized? Was there not a touch of genius in her pitiable yet dauntless masquerade? Who else could have played the same part with the same deft security, and in the very teeth of failure and dethronement?

Claire's gayety and self-possession made more than one of her guests lose faith in the tale of her husband's ruin. They were all women of the world, and they all had the tact and breeding to perceive that their hostess, now if ever, merited their best courtesy. They could all have staid away at the last moment; Mrs. Van Horn held no exclusive claim to the possession of her headache; its right of appropriation belonged elsewhere. But they had not availed themselves of it; they had chosen to sit at Claire's board, to break her delicate bread. Hence they owed her their allegiance to-day, even if to-morrow they should find expediency in its harshest opposite. But it now appeared to them as if she were refuting the widespread rumor of her husband's misfortunes; her own equipoise and scintillance bespoke this no less than the irreproachable chic of the entertainment to which she had bidden them.

Mrs. Lee was not very far away from Claire, and yet the latter never addressed or seemed to notice her. But Mrs. Diggs noticed her; she indeed maintained a vigilant, though repressed, watchfulness.

"You have quieted her," she found a chance to murmur in Claire's ear, sure that the indefinite nature of the pronoun would not be misunderstood. "She is still looking excited and queer, but she has almost relapsed into silence. Perhaps she really wanted to poison you, and feels hurt at the lost opportunity." Mrs. Diggs had had several sips of good wine, and felt her anxiety lessened; her jocose ebullition was the result of steadied nerves. "I never saw you so spirituelle, Claire," she went on. "You have said at least eight delicious things. I have them all mentally booked, my dear. When we are next alone together I will remind you of them."

"Pray don't," Claire answered, putting the words into a still lower aside than her friend's. "I shall have hard enough work to forget, then. I shall want only to forget, too."

She had just finished this faint-spoken sentence when one of the servants handed her a note. As she glanced at its superscription the thought passed through her mind that it might be some dire and alarming message from her husband. But the next instant a flash of recollection assailed her. She remembered the handwriting – or, at least, in this festive and distracting environment, she more than half believed that she did so.

Her hands, while she swiftly tore open the envelope, were dropped upon her lap. She read several lines of a note, and then crushed it, quickly and covertly. As her eyes met those of Mrs. Diggs she had a sense that she was becoming ghastly pale.

"What is it?" whispered her friend.

"Oh, nothing," she afterward remembered saying. The servant was still close at her elbow. She turned her head toward him.

"Let her wait," she said. "Tell her that I will see her quite soon."

The whole affair had been very rapid of occurrence. No one present had given a sign of having observed it.

'If I had only not grown so pale,' she thought.

The paper was still clutched in her left hand, and she had thrust this half-way beneath the table-cover. With her right hand she began to make a play of eating something from the plate before her, as she addressed the lady on her other side. What she said must have been something very gracious and pleasant, for the lady smiled and answered affably, while the servants glided, the music sounded, the delightful feast progressed. Everything had grown dim and whirling to Claire. And yet she had already realized perfectly that Mrs. Lee was striking her blow. It had come, sudden, cruel, direct. Her blurred mind, her weakened and chilling body, did not leave that one fact any the less clear. She understood just what it was, why it was, and whence it was.

The note had been from her mother. It was half illiterate invective, half threatening rebuke. Its writer waited outside and demanded to see her. "If you don't come," the ill-shaped writing ran, "I will come to you." Claire knew that this thing had been Mrs. Lee's work as well as if a thousand witnesses had averred it. The missive contained no mention of Mrs. Lee, but she nevertheless had her certainty.

'I must go,' she told herself. 'I must go and meet her. Can I go? Can I walk, feeling as I do? Should I not fall if I tried?'

She always afterward remembered the food that her fork now touched and trifled with. It was a sweetbread croquette, with little black specks of chopped truffle in its creamy yielding oval, and the air that they were playing out in the hall was from a light, valueless opera, then much in vogue. She always afterward remembered that, too. So do slight events often press themselves in upon the dazed and dilated vision of a great distress.

'Can I rise and walk?' she kept thinking. 'Should I not fall if I tried?'

XXI

It is doubtful if any guest save Mrs. Diggs and one other had seen Claire either receive, open, or read her note. The constant movements of servants hither and thither, and the little conversational cliques formed among the ladies at this central stage of the entertainment, would have made such an escape from general notice both natural and probable. But Mrs. Diggs, who had thus far kept a furtive though incessant watch upon Mrs. Lee, soon felt certain that her cousin had not merely seen what had passed; she was visibly affected by it as well; she could not help regarding Claire across the considerable space which intervened between them. Her expression was a most imprudent betrayal; it clearly told, by its acerbity and exultance, that she held the present occasion to be one of prodigious and triumphant import. No one except Mrs. Diggs was watching her, and she was unaware of even that sidelong but intent gaze. The natural mobility of her odd face, which repelled some and attracted others, needed at all times a certain check; but chagrins or satisfactions were both readily imprinted there. It corresponded to the pliability of her body; it would have been a face in which some clever actress might have found a fortune. She usually restrained it with discretion, but just now the force of a malign joy swept aside prudent control. Before Mrs. Diggs's exploring search of it ended, her last doubt had fled.

'I never saw her look more like the snake that she is,' Claire's friend had thought. 'The mischief – the deviltry, it may be – lies in that letter. Claire has grown as white as its paper; but nobody notices, thank Heaven! She won't faint – she isn't of the fainting sort.'

"Claire," she now said aloud, yet in tones which the most adroit of eavesdroppers could not have more than just vaguely overheard, "did you get any bad news a minute ago?"

Claire was no longer addressing the lady at her side. "Why do you ask?" she responded. "Do I look pale?"

"Not at all; not the least in the world; I've never seen you more composed," returned Mrs. Diggs, with enormous mendacity, hoping that her charitable lie would bear reassuring and tranquilizing results.

It did, as soon became apparent. Claire's condition was that in which we grasp at straws. Perhaps she grew several shades less pale on hearing that she was not so.

"I must leave the room," she said, pronouncing the words with the edges of her lips. "I must leave immediately."

"Are you unwell?"

"No – yes – it isn't that. I must go. Could I do it without – without – ?" She paused here; she had not enough clearness of thought, just then, to finish her sentence coherently.

"Without causing remark?" gently broke in Mrs. Diggs. "Why, of course you could, my dear. Are you not hostess? A hundred things might call you away for a little while. No one would dream of thinking it in the least strange. Why on earth should one?"

There was a light nonchalance about this answer that Mrs. Diggs by no means felt. She knew that something had gone terribly wrong. Her rejoinder had been a stroke of impromptu tact, just as her recent glib falsehood had been.

Its effect upon Claire was immediate. Her friend was doing her thinking for her, so to speak, and was doing it with a rapid, unhesitating aplomb.

"You don't know what has happened, do you?" she now said.

Mrs. Diggs at once felt the helpless disability of mind and nerves which this last faltered question implied.

"Give me your note," she said. "Slip it under the table. You will not be seen."

Claire obeyed. Mrs. Diggs had long ago learned how and why her friend had left home, before that episode began of her residence with the Bergemanns. She read the note like lightning, and digested its contents with an almost equal speed. The sprawl of its writing was uncouth enough, but not illegible.

For a slight space horrified sympathy kept her silent. Then she said, with a coolness and placidity that did her fine credit, considering the cause in which she employed them: —

"I would go at once. You can keep everything quiet. Of course you can. I will follow you shortly. I will make a perfect excuse for you. You are feeling a little unwell – that is all. No one has noticed; take my word for that; I am simply certain of it. When you return – which I promise you that you shall do quite soon – scarcely a comment will have been made on your absence. Go, by all means. Go at once, as I said."

'Some of her color has come back,' at the same time passed through poor Mrs. Diggs's anxious and agitated thoughts. 'I knew she wouldn't faint; it isn't in her. She will see that I'm right, in a minute. Her wits will begin to work. She will go.'

Claire did go. She had no after-recollection of how she left the great dining-room. But she had indeed moved from it in so silent and yet so swift a way that her chair had been vacant several seconds, and her skirts were sweeping one of the thresholds of exit, before the fact of her departure became even half perceived among the guests.

Once in the large, empty drawing-room immediately beyond that which she had quitted, she felt her leaping heart grow quiet, and her bewildered brain clear. It took only seconds, now, to restore in a great measure her self-possession and her courage.

She passed into the further drawing-room. Both were as void of human occupant as they were rich and stately in their countless beauties of adornment. Her visitor was evidently not here. Then she remembered the smaller reception-room which opened off from the main hall. She directed her steps thither. They were firm steps; she had grown sensible of this, and of her newly acquired composure as well.

Two breadths of Turkish tapestry hung down over the doorway of the reception-room, thus obscuring its interior. As Claire softly parted them and entered, she saw her mother.

Mrs. Twining stood near a white-and-gilt table that was loaded with choice ornaments. The chamber was one of great elegance and charm. It was all white and gilt and pink; there were cherubs on its ceiling throwing roses at each other; its hangings were of rose-color, and its two or three mirrors were framed in porcelain of rare design. A connoisseur who was among Claire's admirers had once assured her that this little room was exquisite enough to stir the dust of Pompadour.

Mrs. Twining did not at all look as though she might have been any such famous ghost. Not that she did not present a ghostly appearance. Her black eyes seemed to be of twice their former size, so lean and haggard was her altered face. Its cheek-bones stood out with a sharp prominence. You saw at once that some serious illness had wrought this wan havoc. Her garments were dark and decent; she did not seem to be a beggar; no rusty and shabby poverty was manifest on her person. She had refused stoutly to wait in the hall, and the servant who had admitted her, being hurried with other matters, had yielded to her insistence, yet deputed an underling to keep watch on the reception-room after showing her thither. Claire had not seen the sentinel, who was stationed at a little distance up the hall, and who joined his fellows when sure that the lady of the house had condescended to meet this troublesome intruder.

Mrs. Twining looked boldly and severely at her daughter. The drapery had fallen behind Claire's advancing figure. The two faced each other in silence for a lapse of time that both no doubt thought longer than it really was. Each, in her different way, had an acute change to confront. Claire scarcely recognized her mother at first. Mrs. Twining, on her own side, had good reasons to be prepared for a difference, and the superb house had in a way told her, too, what she might expect. But still, for all that, this was Claire! This was her Claire, whom she had last seen not far removed from slums and gutters – who had gone forth from the little Greenpoint home, not two years since, to follow her father's charity-buried corpse! And here she stood, clad in her white-and-purple vestments, a shape of more lovely and high-bred elegance than any she had ever looked upon. The face was the same – there could be no doubt of that. But everything else – the figure, the attire, the jewels, the velvets, the laces, the movement, the posture, the mien … it was all like some fabulous, incredible enchantment.

Forewarned and forearmed as she had been, Mrs. Twining stood wonder-stricken and confused. The soft strains of the near music seemed to speak to her instead of Claire's own voice, and with a disdain in their melody. She saw no disdain on Claire's face, however, as her eyes scanned it. But it was quite inflexible, though very pale.

Claire broke the silence – if that could be called mere silence which was for both so electric and pregnant an interval.

"You have come at a strange time. And your note shows me that you chose it purposely."

Mrs. Twining gave a sombre laugh. What associations the sound woke in its hearer!

"I was all ready for just this kind of a welcome," she said, knitting her brows. She began to stare about the room. "It's very fine. It's mighty splendid. But I wonder the walls of this house don't fall and crush you, Claire Twining! I wonder I ain't got the power, myself, to strike you dead with a look!" Her voice now became a growl of menace; there was something very genuine in her wrath, which she had persuaded herself to believe an outgrowth of hideous ingratitude. "But I didn't come to show you your own badness," she went on. "You know all about that a ready. What I've come for is quite another kind of a thing – oh, yes, quite." Here she laughed again, with her mouth curving downward grimly at each corner.

"What have you come for?" inquired Claire.

"To get my rights! —that's what I've come for! To let people see who I am, and how you've cast me off – me, your mother. I d'clare I don't believe there ever was so horrible a case before. Perhaps some o' the folks in yonder can tell me if they ever knew one."

Claire kept silent for a moment. Her face was white to the lips, but there was no sign of flinching in it.

"I did not cast you off," she said. "I left you because you outraged and insulted the dead body of my father. I have never regretted the step I took, nor do I regret it now. You say you've come here to get your rights. What rights? Shelter and food? You shall receive these if you want them. I will ring and give orders at once that you shall be taken to a comfortable room and be treated with every care that it is in my power to bestow. In spite of what I said to you on the day when you shocked and tortured me into saying it, I would still have sought you out and rendered you my best aid, if I had known that you were ill. For I see that you have been ill – your appearance makes that very plain. But I had no knowledge of any such fact. You were stronger than I when we parted – stronger, indeed, and better able to work. This is all that I am willing to say at present. In an hour or two I will join you, and hear anything you may choose to tell me."