Kitabı oku: «The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel», sayfa 14

XVI

By a little after nine o'clock, this same evening, Pauline was driven in a carriage to her own residence.

She alighted with excellent composure, rang the bell and was promptly admitted.

But she had no sooner entered the hall than she found herself face to face with Courtlandt.

He was in evening dress; he looked thoroughly his old self-contained self. Pauline passed at once into the little reception-room just off the hall. Courtlandt followed her. She sank into a chair, slowly untying the strings of her bonnet. A brisk fire crackled on the hearth; she stared into it.

"So you came to me," she said, with a kind of measured apathy.

"Yes," said Courtlandt. "I obeyed the message that you sent me."

Pauline impetuously turned and looked at him. The fire-light struck her face as she did so, and he saw that her gray eyes were swimming in tears.

She made no attempt to master her broken voice. "O Court," she said, "it was ever so good of you to come! I almost doubted if you would! I should have remembered that you – well, that you cared for me in another than a merely cousinly way. But there was no one else – that is, no one near me in blood. It is wonderful how we think of that blood-kinship when something dreadful happens to us. We may not recall it for years, until the blow comes. Then we feel its force, its bond, its claim… I want you to sit down beside me, Court, and quietly listen. You were always good at listening. Besides, you will have an immense satisfaction, presently; you will learn that your prophecies regarding him were correct. My eyes are open – and in time. I shall never marry him. I shall never marry any one again. And now, listen…"

For a long time, after this, Courtlandt showed himself the most patient of auditors. But he was silent for a good space after his cousin had at length ended, while the fire sputtered and fumed behind the silver filigrees that bordered its hearth, as though it were delivering some adverse, exasperated commentary upon poor Pauline's late disclosures.

But presently Courtlandt spoke. "I think you have had a very fortunate escape," he said. "And I hope you mean, now, to come back and be one of us, again."

"What a way of putting it!" she exclaimed, with a great quivering sigh.

"There's no other way to put it. Theory's one thing and practice another. As long as the world lasts there will be a lot of people in every land who are better and hold themselves better than a huge lot of other people. One can argue about this matter till he or she is black in the face; it's no use, though; the best way to get along is to take things as you find them. You and I didn't make society, so we'd better not try to alter it."

Pauline gave a weary little smile. Her tears had ceased; she was staring into the fire with hard, dry, bright eyes.

"O Court," she said, with a pathetic little touch of her old cruelty, "I'm afraid you don't shine as a philosopher. You are better as a prophet; what do you say of Cora Dares and him? Will they marry?"

"Yes," returned Courtlandt unhesitatingly. "And I dare say he will make her an excellent husband. Didn't you tell me that she was an artist?.. Well, he's an editor, a sort of general scribbler, so they will be on a delightful equality. They'll marry. You say I'm a prophet; depend upon it, they'll marry sooner or later."

"You make me recall that you are Aunt Cynthia's nephew," said Pauline, with another weary smile. She was in a very miserable mood. Her wound still bled, and would bleed, as she knew, for many a day.

Courtlandt's preposterously trite and commonplace little axiom had already begun to echo itself in a kind of rhythmical mockery through her distressed brain: "The best way to get along is to take things as you find them."

Was it the best way, after all? Was thinking for one's self and living after one's own chosen fashion nothing but a forlorn folly? Was passivity wisdom, and individualism a snare?

The fire crackled on. There was more silence between the two cousins. The hour was growing late; outside, in the streets, you heard only the occasional rolling of carriage-wheels.

"By the way, speaking of Aunt Cynthia, Court, – will she ever notice me again?"

"Certainly she will."

"Isn't she furious?"

"That newspaper article has repressed her fury. She's enormously sorry for you. Aunt Cynthia would never find it hard, you know, to be enormously sorry for a Van Corlear; she came so near to being one herself; a Schenectady is next door to it."

"Yes, I understand," mused Pauline. She was still staring into the fire. "There is that clannish feeling that comes out strong at such a time … Court, I will write to her."

"Do, by all means."

"Not an apology, you know, but a … well, a sort of pacific proposal."

"Do, you'll find it will be all right, then. Aunt Cynthia would never put on any grand airs to one of her own race; she has too much respect for it…"

The longest silence of all now ensued. The fire had ceased to crackle; its block of crumbled coal looked like the fragments of a huge crushed ruby. Pauline did not know that Courtlandt was watching her when she suddenly heard him say, —

"You're going to have a hard fight, Pauline, but you'll come out of it all sound – never fear. I suppose he was the sort of chap to play the mischief with a woman, if she once gave him a chance."

"O Court," came the melancholy answer, "I wasn't thinking of him, just then. I was thinking of what my life has meant! It seems to me, now, like a broken staircase, leading nowhere. Such a strange, unsatisfactory life, thus far!"

"All lives are that, if we choose to look on them so," returned Courtlandt. "It is the choosing or not choosing to look on them so that makes all the difference… Besides, you are young yet."

"Oh, I am seventy years old!" she cried, with a little fatigued moan.

"In a year from now you will have lapsed back into your normal age."

"I can't believe it!"

"Wait and see."

"Ah, I shall have to do a good deal of waiting – for nothing whatever!"

"I too shall wait," said Courtlandt grimly.

She suddenly turned and scanned his face. "For what?" she sharply questioned.

"For you."

Pauline threw back her head, with a brief, bitter laugh. "Then you will have to wait a long time!" she exclaimed, with sorrowful irony.

"I expect to do that," answered Courtlandt, more grimly still. "And I am a good prophet. You told me so."