An Ambitious Woman: A Novel

While Claire was in the midst of this rather prolonged reply, Mrs. Diggs quietly entered the room. The speaker saw her, and did not pause for an instant, but put forth her hand, which Mrs. Diggs took, while she steadily watched the large, gaunt, hollow-cheeked woman whom her friend addressed.

If anything could have intensified the vast sense of accumulated wrong in Mrs. Twining's breast, it was this placid appearance of one who so promptly indicated that she stood toward Claire in a supporting and accessory attitude.

"So, you'll make terms, will you?" said the parent of Claire. "You'll browbeat me —me, your mother – with your fine clothes and fine house and fine servants? And where's my satisfaction, if you please, Miss? Hey? Oh, I ain't any saint – you know that, by this time. I ain't going to forget how I laid eight months in Bellevue Hospital, crippled and nearly dying. First it was the typhoid fever, 'n then it was the pneumonia, 'n then it was the inflammatory rheumatism. And where was you, all that time? Spending your thousands as fast as the Wall Street stock-gambler you'd married could scrape 'em together. Who's this friend that steps in and looks as if she was going to protect you? Hey? You're both afraid I'll go in among those grand folks you've got eating and drinking somewheres, and speak my mind. You'll send me up to a comf'table room, will you? You'll give orders to your servants about me, will you? And s'pose I object to being treated like a troublesome tenth or 'leventh cousin? S'pose I go straight into where they all are, and just tell 'em the square, plain truth?" The scowl on her wasted face was very black, now. She had made several quick steps nearer to Claire and Mrs. Diggs. Once or twice during this acrid tirade she had waved one hand in front of her, and made its finger and thumb give a contemptuous audible click. But her voice had not noticeably lowered.

Claire had been watching her with great keenness. She had been reading her mood. By the light of the past – the retrospective light flung from weary years lived out at this mother's side, did this daughter now swiftly see and as swiftly understand.

"Claire," said Mrs. Diggs, spurred by an impulse of heroic interference no less than an alarmed one, "let me speak a few words; let me" —

"No," interrupted Claire. Her simple veto seemed to cut the air of the room. She turned and met Mrs. Diggs's gaze for a moment, while dropping her hand. "I thank you, Kate; but please leave all to me."

Then she faced her mother's irate glare. She was still decidedly pale, but in her clear voice there was no hint of tremor.

"Very well," she said, "suppose you do go in and find my friends. Suppose you do tell them everything. I do not merely invite you to go; I challenge you to go. I will even show you the way myself."

"Claire!" faltered Mrs. Diggs, below her breath.

Claire walked toward the curtained doorway and slightly parted its draperies. She was looking at her mother across one shoulder.

"Will you come?" she asked. "I am quite ready."

The enraged look began to die from Mrs. Twining's face. She receded a little. "I can go myself when I choose," she muttered. "I can find the way myself, when I'm ready. I ain't ready yet."

Claire let the draperies fall. She resumed her former position. "You will never be ready," she said, with a melancholy scorn, "and you know it as well as I. You thought to come here and make me cringe with terror before you, while you threatened and stormed. But you had no intention of bringing matters to any crisis. You think me very prosperous, very powerful, and very rich. You are secretly glad that I am. You would not on any account harm me as a person of importance; but you wanted to keep me, as one, in a state of rule, a state of subjection. By that means you could climb up to a place something like my own … so you have argued. You would share what I have secured. You were always a very ambitious woman. Your sickness (which Heaven knows I am sorry enough to hear about) hasn't changed you a particle. I thought at first that it might have turned or clouded your brain – have made you reckless of consequences. But it has done nothing of the sort. You are precisely the same as ever."

Here Claire paused. Her mother had sunk into a chair. In her working lips and the uneasy roll of her eyes a great, abrupt dismay was evident.

"I think I can guess just what has occurred to send you here," Claire soon proceeded. "You became sick; you got into the hospital. While you were there a certain lady now and then visited your bedside. You told this lady who you were. Perhaps she asked you questions, and drew out all your history – perhaps you gave her all of it voluntarily. The lady was an enemy of mine. She put this and that together. She began by suspecting; she finished by being certain. We will say that you described me to her with great accuracy; or we will say that she knew I had once lived with the Bergemann family, and that you easily recalled the fact of Sophia Bergemann having been my friend long ago at Mrs. Arcularius's school. It is of no consequence how the real truth transpired; it did transpire. As you grew better, the lady formed a little plot. I think you perceived this; it is like you to have perceived it. You saw that the lady wanted to make you her tool, her cat's-paw."

Here Mrs. Twining rose, and put out both hands. "She didn't do it, though," was her flurried exclamation. "She thought she'd have me come here and get up a scene. I was 'cute enough to see that. I was reading her just like a book, all the time."

"I have no doubt of it," said Claire, with the same melancholy scorn. "But you chose this time at which to come. You were willing to be her accomplice that far."

"She wouldn't tell me where you lived nor what was your name," protested Mrs. Twining. "She kept putting me off whenever I asked her. She fixed things at the hospital so's I only left it to-day; she made 'em keep me there, though I was well enough to quit more 'n a week ago."

"She told you to-day, then, of this entertainment? She told you that if you came to-day, at a certain hour, you would find me surrounded by friends?"

Mrs. Twining set her eyes on the floor. She had begun to tremble a little. "Well, yes, she said something of that sort. And I knew what she was up to, just as clear as if she'd told me she had a grudge against you and was crazy to pay it. I was going to stay away till the party was all over – but I … well, I" …

Here the speaker raised her eyes and flashed them confusedly at her daughter. That glance was like the expiring glow of her conquered, treacherous wrath.

"Look here, Claire, I'm weak, and I can't stand this kind of thing much longer. Let me go up to that room and lay down. I'll wait till you come up. We can talk more when all your big friends have gone."

"I will send a woman to you," said Claire. "You can give her what orders you please." …

"Do you feel strong enough to go back at once?" asked Mrs. Diggs, when she and Claire stood, presently, in the front drawing-room.

"Oh, yes, perfectly," was Claire's answer.

Mrs. Diggs kissed her. "Claire," she said, "the more I see of you, the more you astonish me. I thought everything was lost, and how splendidly you turned the tables! Ah, my dear, you were born for great things. You ought to have been on a throne. I hate thrones. I'm a Red Republican, as I told you the first time we met. But I'd change my politics in a minute if you represented an absolute monarchy."

Claire smiled. The color was coming back to her cheeks. "I am on a kind of throne now," she said. "Only it is going to pieces. Kate, you have seen that woman. She is my mother. I wish you had seen and known my father. Whatever strength there is in me comes from her. But what little good there is in me comes from him."

They went back into the dining-room immediately afterward, and Claire spoke with lightness to a few of the ladies about having felt a temporary indisposition which had now entirely ceased. She at once changed the subject, and throughout the remainder of the repast betrayed not a sign by which the most alert watcher could have detected the least mental disturbance.

A watcher of this sort was Mrs. Lee, and both Claire and Mrs. Diggs were certain of it. "She hasn't tasted a morsel for three courses," soon whispered the latter. "Upon my word, I don't think I could be restrained from throwing a glass or a plate at her, if I were sure it wouldn't hit somebody else. I was always a wretched shot."

But Mrs. Diggs delivered another kind of missile after the banquet had broken up and the ladies had all passed once again into the drawing-rooms.

"I want to speak with you, Sylvia, if you don't object," she said dryly to Mrs. Lee. The latter had opportunely strayed away from her companions; she was pretending to scrutinize a certain painting in the front apartment. This gave Mrs. Diggs precisely her desired chance.

"You know I've never liked you, Sylvia, and I don't think you've ever liked me," her cousin began. She showed no anger; her voice was so ordinary in tone that she might have been discussing the most commonplace of matters.

Mrs. Lee started, and twisted herself, as usual, into a fresh pose. "I really don't see the occasion, Kate," she murmured, "for this vast amount of candor." She had got back her old drawl. She was concerned with a knot of roses at her bosom, which had or had not become partially unfastened; her gaze was drooped toward the roses, and thus avoided that of her kinswoman.

"You don't see the occasion for candor, Sylvia? I do. You know just what you have tried to do this morning. There is no use of denying."

"Tried to do?" she repeated, raising her eyes.

"Yes," sped Mrs. Diggs, with a kind of snap in every word. "We've never liked each other, as I said, and I preluded my remarks with this statement because I want to show you why, from to-day henceforward, we are open foes. You would have had Claire Hollister's mother rush like a mad woman into that dining-room. You wanted it. You planned, you plotted it. There's no use of asserting that you didn't."

Mrs. Lee quietly threw back her head. "Oh, very well, since the poor woman," she began, "has really betrayed me, I" —

"Betrayed you?" broke in Mrs. Diggs. "She has done nothing of the sort. If you exacted any promise from her, I know nothing of that – nor does Claire. We both understood that you were behind the whole affair, and when Mrs. Twining was taxed with your complicity she did not presume to disavow it."

Mrs. Lee looked at her roses again, and touched some of their petals with a caressing hand.

"If you think me culpable to have told a poor wretch in a hospital the address of the daughter who had deserted her," she said, "I am only sorry that your code of morals should so materially differ from mine."

"Morals?" replied Mrs. Diggs, with a quick laugh that seemed to crackle. "It's amusing, truly, to hear such a word as that from you to me, Sylvia!"

Mrs. Lee again lifted her eyes. She was smiling, and her small, dark head, garnished with a tiny crimson bonnet, was set very much sideways. "My dear Kate," she said, "did it ever occur to you how enormously vulgar you can be at a pinch?"

"I'd answer that question if I didn't see through the trick of it. We're not talking of manners, if you please; we're talking of morals. Do you consider that there is anything moral in a mean, underhand revenge? That is exactly what you resorted to. To serve a spiteful hatred, you would have had Mrs. Twining dart like a Fury into yonder dining-room."

"If it were not unladylike, I should tell you that you are uttering a falsehood."

"Bah! You can tell me so a thousand times, if you want. Why did you never let Claire's mother know her marriage-name or her address until to-day? Why did you keep her in the hospital until to-day? Why, unless you wanted to unloose her, like a raging lioness?"

"Really, Kate, you have passed the bounds of impertinence. You are now simply diverting."

Mrs. Diggs laughed a second time. "I intend to divert you still further, Sylvia, before I have done with you."

Mrs. Lee took a step or two in an oblique direction. The lids of her dark eyes had begun to move rapidly. "I have the option of declining to be bored," she answered, in a muffled voice, "unless you intend personal violence. In that case, you know, there are always the footmen."

"Answer me one question, please, if you have a spark of honesty left. What right had you to believe that Claire Hollister ever wronged her mother?"

"You haven't yet become violent. You are still diverting. So I will answer. She left her alone in poverty, neglect, and misery."

"She left her after a life of tyranny and persecution. She left her a strong, hale, able woman. She left her with ten, twenty times as much money in her pocket as Claire herself had – for Claire had scarcely anything, and this persecuted heroine of a mother had enough money to give her dead husband decent Christian burial, yet refused it. Did she tell you that, Sylvia, when you found her sick in the hospital? Did she tell you how her daughter cried out in grief, beside the very body of a dead and beloved father, that if only he were not laid in Potter's Field – if only he might receive holy rites of interment, she would work, even slave, for her mother's support? Did she tell you – this model and deeply wronged parent – that her child got from her nothing but a surly refusal? Did she tell you that Claire then, and only then, resolved to leave her forever? Did she tell you how Claire, faithful till the last, followed her father, on foot or by street-car, to his pauper grave, and saw the clods heaped over him as if he had been a dead dog, while she, his lawful wife, stayed shamelessly at home? No, Sylvia; I will warrant that she made another plausible story, nearly all false, with just a grain of truth. And you readily accepted it, because it suited your malicious ends to do so!"

By this time Mrs. Lee had produced an exquisite fan of dark satin, painted with charming figures of birds and flowers. While she used the fan, slowly and gracefully, she answered: "And is it possible that you credit this theatrical improbability, Kate?"

Mrs. Diggs looked stern. "I don't merely believe it – I know it," she said. "I have seen the woman. To see her – to hear her speak, was enough. You, too, have had both experiences."

Mrs. Lee still slowly fanned herself. "That is quite true. I have. The charity-burial story is the purest nonsense, the most preposterous invention, on your dear friend's part. That is my confident belief; I assure you it is. Do you want me any more, Kate? Or are you going to keep me here with your wild tales an hour or two longer?"

Mrs. Diggs never in her life, with all her personal deficiencies, looked so simply and calmly dignified as when she responded: —

"I shall keep you only a very little while longer, Sylvia. You may or may not have wanted Claire's mother to enter that dining-room. But you had your hour for her coming neatly timed, and any mortification, any distress that you could have inflicted would have been a pleasure to you. But I think that in all this wily and clever performance you quite failed to remember me. I'm very staunch, very loyal to Claire. And I give you my word that your share in the event of to-day shall not go unpunished."

Mrs. Lee stopped fanning herself. "Unpunished?" she repeated, haughtily enough.

"Oh, yes. Are you surprised at the word? Let me explain it. I merely mean that in as short a time as I can possibly command Stuart Goldwin shall know every detail of your recent behavior. And pray don't have the least fear that he will disbelieve me. He knows how devoted I am to Claire Hollister. You know just how devoted to her he is. I wonder in what kind of estimation he will hold you after I have narrated my little story, not missing a single particular … not one, Sylvia – rest certain of that!"

Mrs. Lee began to fan herself again, and at the same time moved away. Mrs. Diggs's eyes followed the slim, retreating figure. She had already seen that her cousin's face wore an expression of pained affright. Claire's guests had begun to make their farewells. Mrs. Lee did not join them in this civility. She slipped from the drawing-room, instead, unnoticed by any one, except her late antagonist, and perhaps Claire herself.

'She will try to meet Goldwin before I do,' thought Mrs. Diggs. 'But she will not succeed. I, too, will leave without saying good-by to Claire, who might not approve my scheme of chastisement if she learned it. But it is no affair of hers. I am doing it entirely on my own account. I propose to make Sylvia Lee remember this day as long as she lives.'

Among the carriages of the departing guests, that of Mrs. Lee was the first one to roll away. The carriage of Mrs. Diggs soon followed it. Both were driven at a rapid rate, and for a certain time in the same direction. But ultimately the courses of the two vehicles diverged.

Each lady sent a telegram to the same destination, less than ten minutes afterward. And each lady, after so doing, employed the same formula of reflection: 'He will come as soon as he receives it.'

But Mrs. Diggs's summons was the more potent; it contained the name of Claire.

XXII

Goldwin was the recipient of the two telegrams. He went first (being driven rapidly in a cab from his Wall Street place of business) to the house of Mrs. Diggs.

He remained with her for at least two hours. It was now somewhat late in the afternoon. He dined at his club, and by eight o'clock in the evening was ringing the bell of Mrs. Lee's residence.

She was alone, and received him with a freezing manner. "At last you are here," she said.

"At last," he replied, with careless ambiguity, throwing himself into an arm-chair, and looking straight at a very comfortable wood-fire that blazed not far off.

"Did you receive my telegram?"

"I did."

"In time to come to me when it entreated you to come?"

"I received it this afternoon. I have been prevented from making my appearance until now."

His voice was quite as cold and distant as her own. She went up to his chair and laid her hand upon its arm.

"Your manner is very abrupt and strange," she said, in greatly softened tones. "Has anything occurred?"

He turned and met her look. He nodded significantly once or twice before answering. "Yes, something has occurred, most decidedly. Can't you guess what it is? If so, you will save me the distress of explaining."

For several moments she was silent. "I suppose you mean that you have seen Kate Diggs," she then hazarded.

He nodded again. "I have," he replied.

"Ah!" said Mrs. Lee, with an airy satire. "Then she must have made a very strong case against me, as the lawyers phrase it."

"Undoubtedly she has," he answered, rising. "I have heard the prosecution; do you want me to hear the defense?"

"Of course I demand that you shall do so," she exclaimed, "although I don't at all like the word you describe it by! I have no need whatever of defending myself."

Goldwin gave one of his rich, mellow laughs. The twinkle had come back to his eye; all his wonted geniality seemed to reclothe him. And yet his companion rather felt than saw that it was worn as an ironical disguise.

"Upon my word, I think you have been very hardly treated," he declared. The sting of the real sarcasm pierced her, then, and she sensibly recoiled. "You ought to have been allowed the privilege of witnessing your little scandalous comedy, after you had planned it so cleverly. How you must have suffered when it all went off in so tame and quiet a way!"

Mrs. Lee, pale and with kindling eyes, slightly stamped one small foot. The sound wrought by this action was faint, though quite audible.

"You believe all that Kate Diggs has told you!" she exclaimed. "You think I wanted a public scene. It is not true. I wanted her to be humiliated by her own conscience at a time when she thought herself most enviable, most lofty. I had no other motive. It was not revenge. It never was anything like revenge."

Goldwin's face had sobered, but he made a little shrug of the shoulders, which was like him at his brisk, mercurial best. He had plainly seen her falsehood. "Why on earth do you use the word?" he asked.

She recoiled once more. "Use the word?" she half stammered, as if thrown off her guard by this unexpected thrust. A moment afterward she went on, with renewed vehemence, all her native drawl flurriedly quickened by excitement. "I used it because Kate Diggs used it – because she presumed to say that I brought that poor, suffering, deserted, outraged mother face to face with her daughter for this reason. I don't doubt that Kate has invented the same nonsense for you that she tried to foist upon me. She is very loyal to her friend. She has most probably told you that Mrs. Twining was always a monster to her daughter, and that she insisted on having her dead husband buried by charity, in spite of prayers, supplications, adjurations from the bereaved offspring. For my own part, I choose utterly to discredit this trumped-up tale. I never heard anything that resembled it from the feeble lips of the wretched woman who had lain for weeks in the hospital. I only heard" —

Goldwin here broke in with a voice more hard and stern than any which Mrs. Lee had known to leave his lips.

"If you will pardon me for saying so, I do not wish to continue as your listener. If you think my interruption outrageously rude, then let me admit with frankness that I can not – yes, literally can not – endure what you now choose to state."

She gave her small, dark head a passionate toss. "You can't endure it," she cried, "because you think that woman perfection! You can hear nothing that is not in her praise. You used to tell me that you thought Kate Diggs ridiculous; you used to laugh at her as a wild, eccentric creature. And now you are willing to credit her fictions."

"They are not fictions," said Goldwin. "All she told me to-day was pure truth. Don't try any longer to shake my credence of it. Your efforts will not avail, I assure you."

Mrs. Lee shivered. She put both hands up to her face, pressing them there for a moment, and then suddenly removed them. She set her dark eyes on Goldwin's face; they were glittering moistly.

"You think I edged that woman on, to serve purposes of revenge," she faltered. "Well, Stuart, if I did so, what was my real reason?"

Goldwin was drawing something from an inner side-pocket of his evening-coat. "Truly," he said, in dry, tepid tones, "I have no idea." He fidgeted with the required something while he thus spoke. The next moment he had produced it. It was a slim packet of letters.

"I want to give you these," he said, with a brief, formal bow.

He handed her the packet. She examined it for several minutes.

"My letters," she murmured.

"Your letters," he answered, with a slight repetition of his recent bow.

She thrust the packet into her bosom. "You … you have kept all these?" she questioned, after hiding them.

"Yes," he said.

"And you give them back to me now," she pursued, "with a meaning? Well, with what meaning?"

Goldwin walked quietly toward the doorway that led into the adjacent hall. "Oh, if you want the meaning put brutally," he said, using a tone and demeanor of much suavity, "I … I – well, I am tired."

"Tired?" she repeated. Her next sentence was a sort of gasp. "You – you hate me for what I have done!"

"I did not say that." His foot was almost on the threshold of the door while he spoke.

"Stuart!" she exclaimed, hurrying toward him. The lithe symmetry of her shape was very beautiful now; her worst detractor could not have said otherwise. She felt that the man whom she loved was leaving her forever. She put a hand on either of his shoulders. She tried to look into his eyes while he averted his own.

"Will you leave me like this?" she went on. "You knew me long before you knew her! Don't let us quarrel. I – I confess everything. I – I have been very foolish. But you won't be too harsh with me – you will forgive, will you not?"

He did not answer her. He removed her hands. Then he receded from her.

"Stuart!" she still appealed.