The Adventures of a Widow. Fawcett Edgar
for a moment. It was a great crush, and people were babbling all about them. "There's something I want to speak of," the girl presently said, in a lingering way.
A kind of chill stole through Courtlandt's veins at this—he did not know why; he always afterward had a lurking credence in the truth of presentments.
"What is it?" he asked.
Pauline told him what it was. He grew white as he listened, and a glitter crept into his eyes, and brightened there.
"You're not going to do it?" he said, when she had finished.
She made no answer. She had some flowers knotted in the bosom of her walking dress, and she now looked down at them. They were not the flowers Mr. Varick had sent; they were a bunch bestowed by Courtlandt himself at a little informal dance of the previous evening, where the cotillon had had one pretty floral figure. She regarded their petals through a mist of unshed tears, now, though her cousin did not know it.
He repeated his question, bending nearer. It seemed to him as if the sun in heaven must have stopped moving until she made her answer.
"You know what mamma is, Court," she faltered.
"Yes, I do. She has very false views of many things. But you have not. You can't be sold without your own consent."
"Let us go away from here together," she murmured. "These rooms are so hot and crowded that I can hardly breathe in them."
He gave her his arm, and they pushed their way forth into a neighboring hall through one of the broad yet choked doorways.
Outside, in Fifth Avenue, the February twilight had just begun to deepen. The air was mild though damp; a sudden spell of clemency had enthralled the weather, and the snow, banked in crisp pallor along the edge of either sidewalk, would soon shrink and turn sodden. At the far terminus of every western street burned a haze of dreamy gold light where the sun had just dropped from view, but overhead the sky had that treacherous tint of vernal amethyst which is so often a delusive snare to the imprudent truster of our mutable winters. Against this vapory mildness of color the house-tops loomed sharp and dark; a humid wind blew straight from the south; big and small sleighs were darting along, with the high, sweet carillons of their bells now loud and now low; through the pavements that Courtlandt and Pauline were treading, great black spots of dampness had slipped their cold ooze, to tell of the thaw that lay beneath. Yesterday the sky had been a livid and frosty azure, and the sweep of the arctic blast had had the cut of a blade in it; to-day the city was steeped in a languor of so abrupt a coming that you felt its peril while you owned its charm. Courtlandt broke the silence that had followed their exit. He spoke as if the words forced 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.