The Adventures of a Widow. Fawcett Edgar

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 death. They and their supporters are nearly all married now and married pretty well."

      "And you didn't marry one of them, Court?"

      Courtlandt gave a slight, dry cough. "I'm under the impression, Pauline," he said, "that I did not."

      "How long ago it all seems!" she murmured, drooping her blond head and fingering with one hand at a button on the front of her black dress. "It's only four years, and yet I fancy it to be a century." She raised her head. "Then the Knickerbockers, as we used to call them, no longer rule?"

      Courtlandt laughed gravely. "I don't know that they ever did," he answered.

      "Well, they used to give those dancing-classes, you know, where nobody was ever admitted unless he or she had some sort of patrician claim. Don't you recollect how Mrs. Schenectady, when she gave Lily a Delmonico Blue-Room party (do they have Delmonico Blue-Room parties, now?), instructed old Grace Church Brown to challenge at the Fourteenth Street entrance (where he would always wait as a stern horror for the coachmen of the arriving and departing carriages) anybody who did not present a certain mysterious little card at the sacred threshold?"

      "Oh, yes," returned Courtlandt ruminatively.

      "And how," continued Pauline, "that democratic Mrs. Vanderhoff happened to bring, on this same evening, some foreign gentleman who had dined with her, and whom she meant to present with an apologetic flourish to the Schenectadys, when suddenly the corpulent sentinel, Brown, desired from her escort the mysterious card, and finding it not to be forthcoming sent a messenger upstairs? And how Mr. Schenectady presently appeared and informed Mrs. Vanderhoff, with a cool snobbery which had something sublime about it, that he was exceedingly sorry, but the rule had been passed regarding the admission of any non-invited guest to his entertainment?"

      "Oh, yes; I remember it all," said Courtlandt. "Schenectady behaved like a cad. Nobody is half so strict, nowadays, nor half so grossly uncivil. You'll find society very much changed, if you go out. You'll see people whose names you never heard before. I sometimes think there's nothing required to make one's self a great swell nowadays except three possessions, all metallic—gold, silver, and brass."

      "How amusing!" said Pauline. "And yet," she suddenly added, with a swift shake of the head, "I'm sure it will never amuse me! No, Court, I have grown a very different person from the ignorant girl you once saw me!" She lowered her voice here, and regarded him with a tender yet impressive fixity. "When I look back upon it all now, and think how I used to hold the code of living which those people adopt as something that I must respect and even reverence, I can scarcely believe СКАЧАТЬ