The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel. Fawcett Edgar
themselves between his shut teeth.
"I can't believe that you really mean to do it," he said, watching Pauline's face as she moved onward, looking neither to right nor left. "It would be horrible of you! He is over sixty if he's a day, besides having been mixed up in more than one scandal with women over there in Paris. I think it must be all a joke on your part. If it is, I wish for God's sake that you'd tell me so, Pauline!"
"It isn't," she said. She turned her face to his, then, letting him see how pale and sad it was. "I must do it, Court," she went on. "It's like a sort of fate, forcing and dragging me. I had no business to mention mamma in the matter, I suppose. She couldn't make me consent, of course, although, if I did not, her lamentations would take a most distracting form for the next year or two. No; it's not she; it's myself. I don't live in a world where people hold very high views of matrimony. And I hate the life I'm living now. The other would be independence, even if bought at a dear price. And how many girls would envy me my chance? What am I at present but a mere pensioner on my wealthy relatives? I can't stay in; I've started with the whirl, and I can't stop. Everybody whom I know is dancing along at the same pace. If I declined invitations; if I didn't do as all the other girls are doing; if I said 'No, I'm poor and can't afford it,' – then mamma would begin tuning her harp and sending up her wail. And I should be bored to death, besides." Here Pauline gave a hollow laugh, and slightly threw back her head. "Good Heavens!" she continued, "there's nothing strange in it. I've been brought up to expect it; I knew it would probably come, and I was taught, prepared, warned, to regard it when it did come in only one way. If he hadn't been old he might have been shocking. What a piercing pertinence there is to my case in that little proverb, 'Beggars mustn't be choosers!' I'm a beggar, you know: ask Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie if she doesn't think I am. And he's quite the reverse of shocking, truly. His hair may be rather white, but his teeth are extremely so, and I think they're indigenous, aboriginal; I hope if they're not he will never tell me, anyway."
She gave another laugh, as mirthless as if the spectre of herself had framed it. She had turned her face away from him again, and slightly quickened her walk.
"You mean, then, that your mind is really made up!" said Courtlandt, with an ire, a fierceness, that she had never seen in him before. "You mean that for a little riches, a little power, you'll turn marriage, that should be a holy usage, into this wicked mockery?"
Pauline bit her lip. Such a speech as this from her equanimous cousin was literally without precedent. She felt stung and guilty as she said, with cool defiance, —
"Who holds marriage as a holy usage? I've never seen anyone who did."
"I do!" he asseverated, with clouding face. "You do, too, Pauline in your heart."
"I haven't any heart. They're not worn nowadays. They're out of fashion. We carry purses instead – when we can."
"I think I will tell Mr. Varick you said that," he answered, measuring each word grimly.
"Oh, do!" Pauline exclaimed. A weary and mournful bravado filled her tones. "How he would laugh! Do you fancy he thinks I care a button for him? Why, nearly the first sentence he spoke to mamma on this weighty subject concerned the number of yearly thousands he was willing to settle upon me."
"So, it is all arranged?"
"It only awaits your approval."
"It can only get my contempt!"
"That is too bad. I thought you would anticipate some of the charming little dinners I intend to give. He has dreadful attacks of the gout, I have learned, and sometimes I'll ask you to preside with me in his vacant chair. That is, if you" —
But he would hear no more. He turned on his heel and left her. He bitterly told himself that her heart was ice, and not worth wasting a thought upon. But he wasted a good many that night, and days afterward.
Whether ice or not, it was a very heavy heart as Pauline went homeward. Just in proportion as the excuses for her conduct were ready on her lips, so they were futile to appease her conscience.
And yet she exulted in one justifying circumstance, as she herself named it. "If I loved anybody – Court, or anybody else," she reflected, "I never could do it! But I don't. It's going to make a great personage of me. I want to find out how it feels to be a great personage. I want to try the new sensation of not wearing charity gloves…" She had almost a paroxysm of nervous tears, alone in her own room, a little later. That evening Mr. Varick once more presented himself…
At about eleven o'clock he jumped into a cab which he had kept waiting an interminable time, and lighted a very fragrant cigar as he was being driven off.
"Elle est belle à faire peur," he muttered aloud. And the next moment a thought passed through his mind which would resemble this, if put into English, though he always thought in French: —
"I will write to Madeleine to-morrow, and send her ten thousand francs. That will end everything – and if the gout spares me five years longer I shan't see Paris while it does."
He had not by any means come home to die. He had said so because it had a neat sound, throwing a perfume of sentiment about his return. And he was always fond of the perfume of sentiment. In reality he had come home to look after his affairs, which had grown burdensomely prosperous, and then sail back with all the decorous haste allowable.
Perhaps he had come home with a few other trifling motives. But of every conceivable motive, he had not come with one. That one was – to marry. And yet he had to-night arranged his alliance (satisfactorily on both sides, it was to be hoped) with Miss Pauline Van Corlear.
He leaned back in the dimness of the speeding cab, and reflected upon it. His reflections made him laugh, and as he laughed his lip curled up below his white mustache and showed his white teeth, with the good, dark cigar between them – the teeth of which Pauline had said that if they were false she did not wish to know it.
II
The marriage was a quiet one, and took place in the early following spring. Pauline made a very lovely bride, but as this comment is delivered upon a most ample percentage of all the brides in Christendom, it is scarcely worth being recorded. The whole important constituency of her kindred were graciously pleased at the match, with a single exception. This was Courtlandt Beekman, who managed to be absent in Washington at the time of the wedding. Pauline's presents were superb; the Poughkeepsies, Amsterdams, and all the rest, came forth in expensive sanction of the nuptials. After a brief Southern tour the wedded pair took up their abode in the newly appointed Bond Street mansion. Mrs. Van Corlear, already ensconced there, welcomed them with as beaming a smile as her invalid state would permit. Pauline, as she kissed her, wondered if those same bloodless lips would ever have any further excuse for querulous complaint. It was pathetic to note the old lady's gratified quiver while her thin hand was gallantly imprinted, as well, by the kiss of her new son-in-law. She had surely reached the goal of all her earthly hopes. She had a silken chair to rock in, and a maid as her special attendant, and a doctor to be as devoted and exorbitant as he chose. Her neuralgia, her asthma, her rheumatism, her thousand and one ailments, were henceforth to wreak their dolorous inflictions among the most comfortable and sumptuous surroundings. And yet, as if in mockery of her new facilities for being the truly aristocratic invalid, this poor lady, after a few weeks of the most encouraging opportunity, forsook all its commodious temptations and quietly died in her bed of a sudden heart-seizure.
On the occasion of her death Pauline's husband, who had thus far been scrupulously polite, made a remark which struck his wife as brutal, and roused her resentment. He was a good deal more brutal, in a glacial, exasperating way, as Pauline's anger manifested itself. But shortly after the funeral he was prostrated by a sharp attack of his gout, during which Pauline nursed him with forgiving assiduity.
The young wife was now in deep mourning. Her husband's attack had been almost fatal. His recovery was slow, and a voyage to Europe was urgently recommended by his physicians. They sailed in latter June. Courtlandt was among those who saw Pauline off in the steamer. He looked, while taking her hand in farewell, as if he felt very sorry for her. Pauline seemed in excellent spirits; her black dress became her; she was so blonde that you saw the gold hair before you marked the funereal garb; and then she had