Kitabı oku: «The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel», sayfa 8

Kindelon had grown quite pale. His voice trembled as he replied. "I dare do anything that needs the courage of a man," he said. "I thought you knew me well enough to be sure of this."

"Our acquaintance is a recent one," responded Pauline. She felt nearly certain that she had shot a wounding shaft in those few words, but she chose to keep her eyes averted and not see whether wrath or pain had followed its delivery.

A long silence followed. They had nearly reached her carriage when Kindelon spoke.

"You are in love with your cousin," he said.

She threw back her head, laughing ironically. "What a seer you are!" she exclaimed. "How did you guess that?"

"Ah," he answered her, with a melancholy gravity, "you will not deny it!"

She repeated her laugh, though it rang less bitterly than before. She had expected him to meet her irony in a much more rebellious spirit.

"I don't like to have my blood-relations abused in my hearing," she said. "I am in love with all of them, that way, if that is the way you mean."

"That is not the way I mean."

They were now but a few yards from the waiting carriage. The footman, seeing them, descended from his box, and stood beside the opened door.

"I shall not return with you," continued Kindelon, "since I perceive you do not wish my company longer. But I offer you my apologies for having spoken disparagingly of your cousin. I was wrong, and I beg your pardon."

With the last words he extended his hand. Pauline took it.

"I have not said that I did not wish your company," she answered, "but if you choose to infer so, it is your own affair."

"I do infer so, and I infer more… It is best that I – I should not see you often, like this. There is a great difference between you and me. That cousin of yours hated me at sight. Your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, hated me at sight as well. Perhaps their worldly wisdom was by no means to blame, either… Oh, I understand more than you imagine!"

There was not only real grief in Kindelon's voice, but an under-throb of real passion.

"Understand?" Pauline murmured. "What do you understand?"

"That you are as stanch and loyal as ever to your old traditions. That this idea of change, of amelioration, of casting aside your so-called patrician bondage, has only the meaning of a dainty gentlewoman's dainty caprice … that" —

His voice broke. It almost seemed to her as if his large frame was shaken by some visible tremor. She had no thought of being angry at him now.

She pitied him, and yet with an irresistible impulse her thought flew to Cora Dares, the sweet-faced young painter, and what she herself had of late grown to surmise, to suspect. A sort of involuntary triumph blent itself with her pity, on this account.

She spoke in a kind voice, but also in a firm one. She slightly waved her hand toward the adjacent carriage. "Will you accompany me, then?" she asked.

He looked at her fixedly for an instant. Then he shook his head. "No," he answered. "Good-by." He lifted his hat, and walked swiftly away.

She had seen his eyes just before he went. Their look haunted her. She entered the carriage, and was driven up town. She told herself that he had behaved very badly to her. But she did not really think this. She was inwardly thrilled by a strange, new pleasure, and she had shed many tears before reaching home.

IX

The excitement of Pauline had by no means passed when she regained her home. Kindelon's last words still rang in her ears.

She declared to herself that it was something horrible to have been called a dainty gentlewoman. At the same time, she remembered the impetuosity of his address, and instinctively forgave even while she condemned. Still, there remained with her a certain severe resentful sense. "What right," she asked herself, "has this man to undervalue and contemn my purpose? Is it not based upon a proper and worthy impulse? Is egotism at its root? Is not a wholesome disgust there, instead? Have I not seen, with a radical survey, the aimless folly of the life led by men and women who presume to call themselves social leaders and social grandees? Has Kindelon any shred of excuse for telling me to my face that I am a mere politic trimmer?"

She had scarcely been home an hour before she received a note from Cora Dares. The note was brief, but very accurate in meaning. It informed Pauline that Mrs. Dares had just sent a message to her daughter's studio, and that Cora would be glad to receive Mrs. Varick on that or any succeeding afternoon, with the view of a consultation regarding the proposed list of guests.

Pauline promptly resolved to visit Cora that same day. She ordered her carriage, and then countermanded the order. Not solely because of the pleasant weather, and not solely because she was in a mood for walking, did she thus alter her first design. She reflected that there might be a touch of apparent ostentation in the use of a carriage to call upon this young self-supporting artist. She even made a change of toilet, and robed herself in a street costume much plainer than that which she had previously worn.

Cora Dares's studio was on Fourth Avenue, and one of many others in a large building which artists principally peopled. It was in the top floor of this structure, and was reached, like her mother's sanctum, by that most simplifying of modern conveniences, the elevator. Pauline's knock at a certain rather shadowy door in an obscure passage was at once answered by Cora herself.

The studio was extremely pretty; you saw this at a glance. Its one ample window let in a flood of unrestricted sunlight. Its space was small, and doubtless for this reason a few brilliant draperies and effective though uncostly embellishments had made its interior bloom and glow picturesquely enough. But it contained no ornament of a more alluring pattern than Cora herself, as Pauline soon decided.

"Pray don't let me disturb you in your painting," said the latter, after an exchange of greetings had occurred. "I see that you were busily engaged at your easel. I hope you can talk and paint at the same time."

"Oh, yes," said Cora, with her bright, winsome smile. She was dressed in some dark, soft stuff, whose sombre hue brought into lovely relief the chestnut ripples of her hair and the placid refinement of her clear-chiselled face. "But if I am to give you a list of names," she went on, "that will be quite another matter."

"Oh, never mind the list of names," replied Pauline, who had just seated herself. "I mean, not for the present. It will be more convenient for you, no doubt, to send me this list to-morrow or next day. Meanwhile I shall be willing to wait very patiently. I am in no great hurry, Miss Dares. It was exceedingly kind of you to communicate with me in this expeditious way. And now, if you will only extend your benevolence a little further and give an hour or two of future leisure toward the development of my little plan, I shall feel myself still more in your debt."

Cora nodded amiably. "Perhaps that would be the better arrangement," she said. Her profile was now turned toward Pauline, as she stood in front of her canvas and began to make little touches upon it with her long, slim brush. "I think, Mrs. Varick, that I can easily send you the list to-morrow. I will make it out to-night; I shall not forget anybody; at least I am nearly sure that I shall not."

"You are more than kind," said Pauline. She paused for a slight while, and then added: "You spend all day here, Miss Dares?"

"All day," was Cora's answer; and the face momentarily turned in Pauline's direction, with its glimpse of charming, dimpled chin, with the transitory light from its sweet, blue, lustrous eyes, affected her as a rarity of feminine beauty. "But I often have my hours of stupidity," Cora continued. "It is not so with me to-day. I have somehow seized my idea and mastered it, such as it is. You can see nothing on the canvas as yet. It is all obscure and sketchy."

"It is still very vague," said Pauline. "But have you no finished pictures?"

"Oh, yes, five or six. They are some yonder, if you choose to look at them."

"I do choose," Pauline replied, rising. She went toward the wall which Cora had indicated by a slight wave of her brush.

The pictures were four in number. They were without frames. Pauline examined each attentively. She knew nothing of Art in a technical and professional way; but she had seen scores of good pictures abroad; she knew what she liked without being able to tell why she liked it, and not seldom it befell that she liked what was intrinsically and solidly good.

"You paint figures as if you had studied in foreign schools," she said, quite suddenly, turning toward her hostess.

"I studied in Paris for a year," Cora replied. "That was all mamma could afford for me." And she gave a sad though by no means despondent little laugh.

"You surely studied to advantage," declared Pauline. "Your color makes me think of Henner … and your flesh-tints, too. And as for these two landscapes, they remind me of Daubigny. It is a proof of your remarkable talent that you should paint both landscapes and figure-pieces with so much positive success."

Cora's face was glowing, now. "You have just named two artists," she exclaimed, "whose work I have always specially admired and loved. If I resemble either of them in the least, I am only too happy and thankful!"

Pauline was silent for several minutes. She was watching Cora with great intentness. "Ah! how I envy you!" she at length murmured, and as she thus spoke her voice betrayed excessive feeling.

"I thought you envied nobody," answered Cora, somewhat wonderingly.

Pauline gave a little soft cry. "You mean because I am rich, no doubt!" she said, a kind of melancholy sarcasm tinging her words.

"Riches mean a great deal," said Cora.

"But if you have no special endowment that separates you from the rest of the world, you are still a woman."

"I am not sorry to be a woman."

"No! because you are a living protest against the inferiority of our sex. You can do something; you need not forever have men doing something for you, like the great majority of us!" Pauline's gray eyes had kindled, and her lips were slightly tremulous as they began to shape her next sentence. "Most of us are sorry to be women," she went on, "but I think a great many of us are sorry to be the sort of women fate or circumstance makes us. There is the galling trouble. If we have no gift, like yours, that can compel men's recognition and respect, we must content ourselves with being merged into the big commonplace multitude. And to be merged into the big commonplace multitude is to be more or less despised. This may sound like the worst kind of cynicism, but I assure you, Miss Dares, that it is by no means as flippant as that. I have seen more of life than you … why not? You perhaps have heard a fact or two about my past. I have had a past – and not a pleasant one, either. And experience (which is the name we give our disappointments, very often) has taught me that if we could see down to the innermost depth of any good man's liking for any good woman, we would find there an undercurrent of real contempt."

"Contempt!" echoed Cora. She had slightly thrown back her head, either in dismay or denial.

"Yes – contempt," asseverated Pauline. "I believe, in all honesty, at this hour, that if the charm which our sex exerts over the other – the physical fascination, and the fascination of sentiment, tenderness, idealization – had never existed, we would have been literally crushed out of being long ago. Men have permitted us to live thus far through the centuries, not because we are weaker than they, but because some extraordinary and undiscoverable law has made them bow to our weakness instead of destroying it outright. They always destroy every other thing weaker than themselves, except woman. They have no compunction, no hesitation. History will show you this, if you accept its annals in an unbiased spirit. They either eat the lower animals, or else put them into usages of the most severe labor. They leave woman unharmed because Nature has so commanded them. But here they are the slaves of an edict which they obey more blindly, more instinctively, than even the best of them know."

"I can't believe that these are your actual views!" now exclaimed Cora. "I can't believe that you rate the sacred emotion of love as something to be discussed like a mere scientific problem!"

Pauline went up to the speaker and stood close beside her while she responded, —

"Ah! my dear Miss Dares, the love between man and woman is entitled to no more respect than the law of gravitation. Both belong to the great unknown scheme. We may shake our heads in transcendental disapprobation, but it is quite useless. The loftiest affection of the human heart is no more important and no more mysterious than the question of why Newton's apple fell from the tree or why a plant buds in spring. All causes are unknown, and to seek their solution is to idly grope."

Cora was regarding Pauline, as the latter finished, with a look full of sad interest. "You speak like … like some one whom we both know," she said hesitatingly. "You speak as if you did not believe in God."

"I do not disbelieve in God," quickly answered Pauline. "The carelessly-applied term of 'atheist' is to my thinking a name fit only for some pitiable braggart. He who denies the existence of a God is of no account among people of sense; but he who says, 'I am ignorant of all that concerns the conceivability of a God' has full right to express such ignorance."

Cora slowly inclined her head. "That is the way I have heard him talk," she said, almost musingly. Then she gave a quick glance straight into Pauline's watchful eyes. "I – I mean," she added, confusedly, as if she had betrayed herself into avowing some secret reflection, "that Mr. Kindelon has more than once spoken in a similar way."

"Mr. Kindelon?" replied Pauline, with a gentle, peculiar, interrogative emphasis. "And did you agree with him?"

"No," swiftly answered Cora. "I have a faith that he cannot shake – that no one can shake! But he has not tried to do so; I must render him that justice."

Pauline turned away, with a faint laugh. "The wise men, who have thought and therefore doubted," she returned, "are often fond of orthodoxy in the women whom they like. They think it picturesque."

She laughed again, and Cora's eyes followed her as she moved toward the pictures which she had previously been examining. "Let us change the subject," she went on, with a note of cold composure in her voice. "I see that you don't like rationalism… Well, you are a poet, as your pictures tell me, and few poets like to do more than feel first and think afterward… Are these pictures for sale, Miss Dares?"

Cora's answer came a trifle tardily. "Three of them," she said.

"Which three?" Pauline asked, somewhat carelessly, as it seemed.

"All but that study of a head. As you see, it is scarcely finished."

"It is the one I should like to purchase. You say it is not for sale?"

"No, Mrs. Varick."

"It is very clever," commented Pauline, almost as though she addressed her own thoughts. She turned her face toward Cora's; it wore an indefinite flickering sort of smile. "Has it any name?"

"Oh, no; it is a mere study."

"I like it extremely… By the way, is it a portrait?"

Cora did not reply for several seconds. She had begun to put little touches upon her canvas again – or to seem as if she were so putting them.

"It's not good enough to be called anything," she presently replied.

"I want it," said Pauline. She was looking straight at the picture – a small square of rather recklessly rich color. "I want it very much indeed. I … I will give you a considerable sum for it."

She named the sum that she was willing to give, and in an admirably cool, loitering voice. It was something that surpassed any price ever proposed to Cora Dares for one of her paintings, by several hundreds of dollars.

Cora kept silent. She was touching her canvas. Pauline waited. Suddenly she turned and regarded her companion.

"Well?" she said.

Cora flung aside her brush. The two women faced each other.

"I think you are cruel!" cried Cora. It was evident that she was nearly in straits for speech, and her very lovely blue eyes seemed to sparkle through unshed tears. "I – I told you that I did not wish to sell the picture," she hurried on. "I – I don't call it a picture at all, as I also told you. It – it is far from being worth the price that you have offered me. It … it … And," here Cora paused. Her last words had a choked sound.

Pauline was looking at her fixedly but quite courteously.

"It is Ralph Kindelon's portrait," she said.

Cora started. "Well! and if it is!" she exclaimed.

Instantly, after that, Pauline went over to her and took one of her hands.

"My dear Miss Dares," she said, with that singular sweetness which she could always throw into her voice, "I beg you to forgive me. If you really wish to retain that picture – and I see that you do – why, then I would not take it from you even as a voluntary gift. Let us speak no more on the subject."

Cora gave a pained, difficult smile, now. She looked full into Pauline's steady eyes for a brief space, and then withdrew her own.

"Very well," she almost faltered, "let us speak no more on the subject…"

"I have been horribly merciless," Pauline told herself, when she had quitted Cora Dares's studio about ten minutes later. "I have made that poor girl confess to me that she loves Ralph Kindelon. And how suited they are to each other! She has actual genius – he is brimming with intellectual power. I have made a sad failure in my visit to Cora Dares… I hope all my vain exploits among these people, who are so different from the people with whom my surroundings of fortune and destiny have thus far brought me into natural contact, will not result so disastrously."

Her thoughts returned to Kindelon, as she walked homeward, and to the hostile terms on which they had parted but a few hours ago.

"My project begins badly," she again mused. "Everything about it seems to promise ill. But it is too late to draw back. Besides, I am very far from wishing to draw back. I am like an enthusiastic explorer; I want to face new discoveries in the very teeth of disaster."

On reaching home she had scarcely time to take off her bonnet before the name of her cousin Courtlandt was brought to her by a servant. She went down into the little reception-room to meet him, with rather lively anticipations of being forced to put herself on the defensive. Her sensations had not been unlike those with which we regard the lowering of the mercury in a thermometer, while ordering extra fuel so as to be on guard against a sudden chill.

Courtlandt was standing before the silver-grated hearth-place; he watched the black, tumbled blocks of coal with eyes bent down upon their snapping and crackling flames as Pauline appeared. He did not immediately raise his eyes as her entering step sounded. But when he did raise them, she saw that he was clad in his old impregnable calm.

She sank into a chair, not far from the fire. "Well," she said, with an amused smile playing about her lips, "I suppose you have come to scold me dreadfully."

"What makes you suppose so?" he asked.

"You darted away, there at the Battery, as if you were fearfully shocked."

"I don't think I darted away."

"Oh, well, we won't split hairs. You wouldn't stay, and you might easily have stayed. You pleaded stress of business, and you hadn't any, or this appearance up-town at so early an hour couldn't have taken place."

"It is remarkable," said Courtlandt, with his gravest serenity, "how you pierce through people's pitiful disguises. You make me feel conscience-stricken by a realization of my own deceit."

"That is fortunate," said Pauline, with a slight, curt laugh. "For then you will, perhaps, express your disapprobation less impudently."

"I might speak pretty plainly to you and yet not be at all impudent."

Pauline threw back her head with a defiant stolidity. "Oh, speak as plainly as you please," she said. "I shall have my own views of just how impudent you are. I generally have."

"You did something that was a good deal off color for a woman who wants herself always regarded as careful of the proprieties. I found you doing it, and I was shocked, as you say."

Pauline straightened herself in her chair. "I don't know what you mean," she replied, a little crisply, "by 'off color.' I suppose it is slang, and I choose, with a good reason, to believe that it conveys an unjustly contemptuous estimate of my very harmless act. I took a stroll along that beautiful Battery with a friend."

"With an adventuring newspaper fellow, you mean," said Courtlandt, cool as always, but a little more sombre.

Pauline rose. "I will stand a certain amount of rudeness toward myself," she declared, "but I will not stand sneers at Mr. Kindelon. No doubt if you had met me walking with some empty-headed fop, like Fyshkille, or Van Arsdale, you would have thought my conduct perfectly proper."

"I'd have thought it devilish odd," said Courtlandt, "and rather bad form. I've no more respect for those fellows than you have. But if you got engaged to one of them I shouldn't call it a horrible disaster."

Pauline smiled, with a threat of rising ire in the smile. "Who thought of my becoming 'engaged' to anybody?" she asked. And her accentuation of the word which Courtlandt had just employed produced the effect of its being scornfully quoted.

He was toying with the links of his watch-chain, and he kept his eyes lowered while he said: "Are you in love with this Kindelon chap?"

She flushed to the roots of her hair. "I – I shall leave the room," she said unsteadily, "if you presume to talk any further in this strain."

"You are a very rich woman," pursued Courtlandt. What he said had somehow the effect of a man exploding something with a hand of admirable firmness.

Pauline bit her lips excitedly. She made a movement as if about to quit the chamber. Then some new decision seemed to actuate her. "Oh, Court!" she exclaimed reproachfully, "how can you treat me in this unhandsome way?"

He had lifted his eyes, now. "I am trying to save you from making a ridiculous marriage," he said. "I tried once before – a good while ago – to save you from making a frightful one. My attempt was useless then. I suppose it will be equally useless now."

Pauline gave an agitated moan, and covered her face with both hands… Hideous memories had been evoked by the words to which she had just listened. But immediately afterward a knock sounded at the partly closed door which led into the hall. She started, uncovered her face, and moved toward this door. Courtlandt watched her while she exchanged certain low words with a servant. Then, a little later, she approached him, and he saw that her agitation had vanished, and that it appeared to have so vanished because of a strong controlling effort.

"Mr. Kindelon is here," she said, in abrupt undertone. "If you do not wish to meet him you can go back into the dining-room." She made a gesture toward a portière not far away. "That leads to the dining-room," she went on. "Act just as you choose, but be civil, be courteous, or do not remain."

"I will not remain," said Courtlandt.

He had passed from the room some little time before Kindelon entered it.

"You did not expect to see me," said the latter, facing Pauline. His big frame had a certain droop that suggested humility and even contrition. He held his soft hat crushed in one hand, and he made no sign of greeting with the other.

"No," said Pauline softly, "I did not expect to see you." She was waiting for the sound of the hall-door outside; she soon heard it, and knew that it meant the exit of Courtlandt. Then she went on: "but since you are here, will you not be seated?"

"Not until you have forgiven me!" Kindelon murmured. Between the rich, fervent, emotional voice which now addressed her and the even regularity of the tones she had just heard, what a world of difference lay!

"You were certainly rude," she said, thinking how chivalrously his repentance became him, and how strong a creature he looked in this weaker submissive phase. "You know that I had only the most friendly feelings toward you. You accused me of actual hypocrisy. But I will choose to believe that you did not mean to lose your temper in that positively wild way. Yes, I forgive you, and, in token of my forgiveness there is my hand."

She extended her hand, and as she did so he literally sprang forward, seizing it. The next instant he had stooped and kissed it. After that he sank into a near chair.

"If you had not forgiven me," he said, "I should have been a very miserable man. Your pardon makes me happy. Now I am ready to turn over a new page of – of friendship – yes, friendship, of course. I shall never say those absurd, accusatory things again. What right have I to say them? What right have I to anything more than the honor of your notice, as long as you choose to bestow it? I have thought everything over; I've realized that the fact of your being willing to know me at all is an immense extended privilege!"

Pauline still remained standing. She had half turned from him while he thus impetuously spoke; she was staring down into the ruddy turmoil of the fire.

"Don't say anything more with regard to the little disagreement," she answered. "It is all ended. Now let us talk of other things."

He did not answer, and she let quite a long pause ensue while she still kept her eyes upon the snapping coal-blocks. At length she continued, —

"I shall have the full list of Mrs. Dares's guests quite soon. It has been promised me."

"Yes?" she heard him say, a little absently.

"I shall, no doubt, have it by to-morrow morning," she went on. "Then I shall begin my arrangements. I shall issue invitations to those whom I wish for my guests. And I shall expect you to help me. You promised to help me, as you know. There will be people on the list whom I have not yet met – a good many of them. You shall tell me all about these, or, if you prefer, you shall simply draw your pen through their names – Why don't you ask me how I shall obtain this boasted list?"

"You mean that Mrs. Dares will send it?" she heard him ask.

"No, I mean that I shall secure it from her daughter."

"Her daughter?"

"Yes – Cora. I have been to see Cora. I visited her studio – By the way, what a good portrait she has there of you. It is really an excellent likeness."

She slowly turned and let a furtive look sweep his face. It struck her that he was confused and discomfited in a wholly new way.

"I think it a fair likeness," he returned. "But I did not sit for it," he added quickly. "She painted it from memory. It – it is for sale like her other things."

"Oh, no, it is not for sale," said Pauline. She saw his color alter a little as her gaze again found stealthy means of scrutinizing it. "Miss Cora told me that very decidedly. She wants to keep it – no doubt as a precious memento. I thought the wish very flattering – I – I wondered why you did not ask Cora Dares to marry you."

She perceived that he had grown pale, now, as he rose and said, —

"I think I shall never ask any woman to marry me." He walked slowly toward the door, pausing at a little distance from its threshold. "When you want me," he now proceeded, "will you send for me? Then I will most gladly come."

"You mean – about the salon?" she questioned.

"Yes – about the salon. In that and all other ways I am yours to command – "

When he had gone she sat musing before the fire for nearly an hour. That night, at a little after nine o'clock, she was surprised to receive a copious list of names from Cora Dares, accompanied by a brief note.

She sent for Kindelon on the following day, and they spent the next evening together from eight until eleven. He was his old, easy, gay, brilliant self again. What had occurred between them seemed to have been absolutely erased from his memory. It almost piqued her to see how perfectly he played what she knew to be a part.

Soon afterward her invitations were sent out for the following Thursday. Each one was a simple "At Home." She awaited Thursday with much interest and suspense.