The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel. Fawcett Edgar
very ready, which had always won nearly everybody. Perhaps only Courtlandt, in his wise, grave taciturnity, saw just how factitious the smile was.
Mr. Varick quite recovered from this attack. Pauline's letters said so. They had soon left London, near which the Cunarder had brought them, and gone to Paris; Mr. Varick was feeling so much better from the voyage, and had always felt so at home in Paris. For several months afterward Pauline's letters were sent over-sea in the most desultory and irregular fashion. And what they contained by no means pleased their recipients. She appeared to tell nothing about herself; she was always writing of the city. As if one couldn't read of the Tuileries and Nôtre Dame in a thousand books! As if one hadn't been there oneself! Why did she not write how they were getting on together? That was the one imperative stimulus for curiosity among all Pauline's friends and kindred – how they were getting on together. All, we should add, except Courtlandt, who seemed to manifest no curiosity of whatever sort. Of course one could not write and ask her, point blank! What was one to do? Did rambling essays upon the pleasures of a trip to Versailles, or the recreation of a glimpse of Fontainebleau, mean that Mr. Varick had or had not broken loose in a mettlesome manner from his latter-day matrimonial traces?
"We are prepared for anything, you know," Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Pauline's aunt and former patron, had once rather effusively said to Courtlandt. "Now that Hamilton Varick is well, he might be larking over there to any dreadful extent. And Pauline, from sheer pride, mightn't be willing to tell us."
"Very cruel of her, certainly," Courtlandt had responded, laconic and not a little sarcastic as well.
But as months went by, Pauline's correspondents forgot, in the absorption engendered by more national incentives for gossip, the unsatisfactory tone of her letters. Once, however, Pauline wrote that she wished very much to return, but that her husband preferred remaining in Paris.
"He won't come back!" immediately rose the cry on this side of the water. "He's keeping her over there against her will! How perfectly horrible! Well, she deserves it for marrying a vieux galant like that! Poor Pauline! With her looks she might have married somebody of respectable age. But she wouldn't wait. She was so crazy to make her market, poor girl! It's to be hoped that he doesn't beat her, or anything of that frightful sort!"
One auditor of these friendly allusions would smile at them with furtive but pardonable scorn. This auditor was Courtlandt; and he remembered how the same compassionate declaimers had been the first to applaud Pauline's astounding betrothal.
After two years of absence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Varick, certain rumors drifted to America. This or that person had seen them in Paris. Pauline was still pretty as ever, but living quite retired. It was said she had taken to books and general mental improvement. No one ever saw her with her husband. She never alluded to him in any way. There were queer stories about his goings on. It was hard to verify them; Paris was so big, and so many men were always doing such funny things there.
The conclave on these shores heard and sympathetically shuddered. The "new set" had now healed all its old feuds. New York society was in a condition of amicably cemented factions. The Briggs girls and the Snowe girls had married more or less loftily, and had proved to the Amsterdams and others that they were worthy of peaceable affiliation. "Poor Pauline Varick" began to be a phrase, though a somewhat rare one, for without anybody actually wakening to the fact, she had been living abroad four whole years. And then, without the least warning, came the news that she was a widow.
She was universally expected home, then, after the tidings that her husband was positively dead had been confirmed beyond the slightest doubt. But perhaps for this reason Pauline chose to remain abroad another year. When she did return her widowhood was an established fact. Her New York clientèle had grown used to it. Mr. Varick had left her all his fortune; she was a very wealthy young widow. Aggressive queries respecting his death, or his deportment during the foreign sojourn that preceded his death, were now quite out of order. She had buried him, as she had married him, decently and legally. He slept in Père la Chaise, by his own ante mortem request. No matter what sort of a life he had led her; it was nobody's business. She returned home, two years later, to take a high place and hold a high head. Those merciful intervening years shielded her from a multitude of stealthy interrogatories. She did not care to be questioned much regarding her European past as the wife of Mr. Varick, and she soon contrived to make it plain that she did not. There was no dissentient voice in the verdict that she had greatly changed. And in a physical sense no one could deny that she had changed for the better.
Her figure, which had before been quite too thin despite its pliant grace, was now rounded into soft and charming curves. Her gray eyes sparkled less often, but they glowed with a steadier light for perhaps this reason; they looked as if more of life's earnest actualities had been reflected in them. Her face, with its chiselled features all blending to produce so high-bred and refined an expression, rarely broke into a smile now, but some unexplained fascination lay in its acquired seriousness, that made the smile of brighter quality and deeper import when it really came. She wore her copious and shining hair in a heavy knot behind, and let it ripple naturally toward either pure temple, instead of having it bush low down over her forehead in a misty turmoil, as previously. Her movements, her walk, her gestures, all retained the volatile briskness and freedom they had possessed of old; there was not even the first matronly hint about her air, and yet it was more self-poised, more emphatic, more womanly.
"I really must move out of this dreadful Bond Street," she said to Courtlandt, rather early in the conversation which took place between them on the day of their first meeting. "I think I could endure it for some time longer if that immense tailor-shop had not gone up there at the Broadway corner, where such a lovely, drowsy old mansion used to stand. Yes, I must let myself be compliantly swept further up town. There is a kind of Franco-German tavern just across the way that advertises a 'regular dinner' – whatever that is – from twelve o'clock till three, every day, at twenty-five cents."
"I see you haven't forgotten our national currency," said Courtlandt, with one of his inscrutable dispositions of countenance.
Pauline tossed her head in a somewhat French way. "I have forgotten very little about my own country," she said.
"You are glad to get back to it, then?"
"Yes, very. I want to take a new view of it with my new eyes."
"You got a new pair of eyes in Europe?"
"I got an older pair." She looked at him earnestly for a moment. "Tell me, Court," she went on, "how is it that I find you still unmarried?"
He shifted in his chair, crossing his legs. "Oh," he said, "no nice girl has made me an offer."
Pauline laughed. "As if she'd be nice if she had! Do you remember how they used to say you would marry in the other set? Is there another set now?"
"There is a number of fresh ones. New York is getting bigger every day, you know. Young men are being graduated from college, young girls from seminaries. I forget just what special set you mean that you expected me to marry into."
"No, you don't!" cried Pauline, with soft positiveness. She somehow felt herself getting quietly back into the old easy terms with Courtlandt. His sobriety, that never echoed her gay moods, yet always seemed to follow and enjoy them, had re-addressed her like a familiar though alienated friend. "You recollect perfectly how Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie used to lift that Roman nose of hers and declare that she would never allow her Sallie to know those fast Briggs and Snowe girls, who had got out because society had been neglected by all the real gentry in town for a space of at least five years?"
Courtlandt gave one of his slow nods. "Oh, yes, I recollect. Aunt Cynthia was quite wrong. She's pulled in her horns since then. The Briggses and the Snowes were much too clever for her. They were always awfully well-mannered girls, too, besides being so jolly. They needed her, and they coolly made use of her, and of a good many revived leaders like her, besides. Most of the good men like them; that was their strong point. It was all very well to say they hadn't had ancestors who knew Canal Street when it was a canal, and shot deer on Twenty-Third Street; but that wouldn't do at all. No matter how their parents had made their money, they knew how to spend it like swells, and they had pushed themselves into power and were not to be elbowed out. The whole fight soon died a natural