The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel. Fawcett Edgar
thing in the world to find an American who had only "heard of" the New York "Asteroid."
In a political sense, and moreover in all senses, he was a zealous liberal. How he had managed to scrape together so remarkable an amount of knowledge was a mystery to himself. Everything that he knew had been literally "scraped together;" the phrase could not be apter than when applied to his mental store of facts. He read with an almost phenomenal swiftness, and his exquisite memory retained whatever touched it with a perfection like that of some marvellously sensitive photographic agent. He never forgot a face, a book, a conversation. He hardly forgot a single one of his newspaper articles, and their name was legion. His powers just stopped short of genius, but they distinctly stopped there. He did many things well – many things, in truth, which for a man so hazardously educated it was surprising that he did at all. But he did nothing superlatively well. It was the old story of that fatal facility possessed by numbers of his own countrymen who have migrated to these shores. Perhaps the one quality that he lacked was a reflective patience – and this is declared of his brains alone, having no reference to his moral parts. He leaped upon subjects, and devoured them, so to speak. It never occurred to him that there is a cerebral digestion, which, if we neglect its demands, inevitably entails upon us a sort of dyspeptic vengeance. In crushing the fruit with too greedy a speed we get to have a blunted taste for its finer flavor.
Within certain very decided limits he had thus far made an easy conquest of Pauline. She had never before met any one whom he remotely resembled. In the old days she would have shrank from him as being unpatrician; now, his fleet speech, his entire lack of repose, his careless, unmodish, though scrupulously clean dress, all had for her an appealing and individual charm. After parting on the arrival in New York, she and Kindelon had soon re-met. He bore the change from oceanic surroundings admirably in Pauline's eyes. With characteristic candor he told her that he had come back from the recent visit to his old parents in Ireland (Pauline knowing all about this visit, of course) to find himself wofully poor. She was wondering whether he would resent the offer of a loan if she made him one, when he suddenly surprised her by a statement with regard to "present funds," that certainly bore no suggestion of poverty. The truth was, he lacked all proper appreciation of the value of money. Economy was an unknown virtue with him; to have was to spend; he was incapable of saving; no financial to-morrow existed for him, and by his careless and often profuse charities he showed the same absence of caution as that which marked all other daily expenditures.
In her immediate purchase of a new residence she consulted with him, and allowed herself to be guided by his counsels. This event brought them more closely together for many days than they would otherwise have been. His artistic feeling and his excellent taste were soon a fresh surprise to her. "I begin to think," she said to him one day, "that there is nothing you do not know."
He laughed his blithe, bass laugh. "Oh," he said, "I know a lot of things in a loose, haphazard way. We newspaper men can't escape general information, Mrs. Varick. We breathe it in, naturally, and in spite of ourselves."
"But tell me," Pauline now asked, "are these other people to whom I shall soon be presented as clever as you are?"
He looked at her with merriment twinkling in his light-tinted eyes. "They're a good deal cleverer – some of them," he replied. "They could give me points and beat me, as we say in billiards."
"You make me very anxious to know them."
"When you talk like that I feel as if I might be tempted to postpone all introductions indefinitely," he responded. He spoke with sudden seriousness, and she felt that mere gallantry had not lain at the root of this answer.
As a matter of course, Kindelon and Courtlandt soon met each other in Pauline's drawing-room. Courtlandt was quite as quiet as usual, and the Irishman perhaps rather unwontedly voluble. Pauline thought she had never heard her new friend talk better. He made his departure before her cousin, and when he had gone Pauline said, with candid enthusiasm:
"Isn't he a wonderful man?"
"Wonderful?" repeated Courtlandt, a trifle drowsily.
She gave him a keen look, and bristled visibly while she did so. "Certainly!" she declared. "No other word just expresses him. I didn't observe you very closely, Court," she went on, "but I took it for granted that you were being highly interested. I can't imagine your not being."
"He gave me a kind of singing in the ears," said Courtlandt. "I've got it yet. He makes me think of one of those factories where there's a violent hubbub all the time, so that you have to speak loud if you want to be heard."
Pauline was up in arms, then. "I never listened to a more scandalously unjust criticism!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me, unblushingly, that you do not think him a very extraordinary person?"
"Oh, very," said her cousin.
Pauline gave an exasperated sigh. "I am so used to you," she said, "that I should never even be surprised by you. But you need not pretend that you can have any except one truthful opinion about Mr. Kindelon."
"I haven't," was the reply. "He's what they call a smart newspaper man. A Bohemian chap, you know. They're nearly all of them just like that. They can talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, if you only give them a chance."
"I don't think the dumbness required any great effort, as far as you were concerned!" declared Pauline, with sarcastic belligerence.
She never really quarrelled with Courtlandt, because his impregnable stolidity made such a result next to impossible. But she was now so annoyed by her cousin's slighting comments upon Kindelon that her treatment was touched with a decided coolness for days afterward.
Meanwhile her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, had undergone considerable discomforting surprise. Mrs. Poughkeepsie had been prepared to find Pauline changed, but by no means changed in her present way. On hearing her niece express certain very downright opinions with regard to the life which she was bent upon hereafter living, this lady at first revealed amazement and afterward positive alarm.
"But my dear Pauline," she said, "you cannot possibly mean that you intend to get yourself talked about?"
"Talked about, Aunt Cynthia? I don't quite catch your drift, really."
"Let me be plainer, then. If you remain out of society, that is one thing. I scarcely went anywhere, as you know, for ten years after my husband's death – not, indeed, until Sallie had grown up and was ready to come out. There is no objection, surely, against closing one's doors upon the world, provided one desires to do so – although I should say that such a step, Pauline, at your age, and after two full years of widowhood, was decidedly a mistake. Still" —
"Pardon me, Aunt Cynthia," Pauline here broke in. "Nothing is further from my wish than to close my doors upon the world. On the contrary, I want to open them very wide indeed."
Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted in shocked manner both her fair, plump, dimpled hands. She was a stout lady, with that imposing, dowager-like effect of embonpoint which accompanies a naturally tall and majestic stature. Her type had never in girlhood been a very feminine one, and it now bordered upon masculinity. Her eyes were hard, calm and dark; her arching nose expressed the most serene self-reliance. She was indeed a person with no doubts; she had, in her way, settled the universe. All her creeds were crystallized, and each, metaphorically, was kept in cotton, as though it were a sort of family diamond. She had been a Miss Schenectady, of the elder, wealthy and more conspicuous branch; it was a most notable thing to have been such a Miss Schenectady. She had married a millionaire, and also a Poughkeepsie; this, moreover, was something very important and fine. She had so distinct a "position" that her remaining out of active participation in social pursuits made no difference whatever as regarded her right to appear and rule whenever she so chose; it had only been necessary for her to lift her spear, when Miss Sallie required her chaperonage, and the Snowes and Briggses had perforce to tremble. And this fact, too, she held as a precious, delectable prerogative.
In not a few other respects she was satisfied regarding herself. There was nothing, for that matter, which concerned herself in any real way, about which she did not feel wholly satisfied. Her environment in her own opinion was of the best, and doubtless in the opinion of a good many of her adherents also. From the necklace of ancestral brilliants which she