Part 12

"I am sorry that they came--I somehow can't help but be sorry!" exclaimed Pauline, while she moved towards the door by which she had seen her kindred enter.

"Sorry? So am I," said Kindelon. He spoke below his breath, but Pauline heard him.

XI.

"I am very glad to see you," Pauline was telling her aunt, a little later. She felt, while she spoke them, that her words were the merest polite falsehood. "I did not suppose you would care to honor me this evening--I mean all three of you," she added, with a rather mechanical smile in the direction of Miss Sallie and Courtlandt.

Mrs. Poughkeepsie promptly spoke. She was looking about her through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses while she did so. Her portliness was not without a modish majesty; folds of a black, close-clinging, lace-like fabric fell about her large person with much grace of effect; her severe nose appeared to describe an even more definite arc than usual.

"Sallie and I had nothing for to-night," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie. "Lent began to-day, you know, and there wasn't even a dinner to go to."

"I am pleased to afford you a refuge in your social distress," returned Pauline. It flashed through her mind that circumstance was drawing upon her, to-night, for a good deal of bitter feeling. What subtle thunder was in the air, ready to sour the milk of human kindness to its last drop?

"My dear," murmured her aunt, temporarily discontinuing her stares, and speaking more in reproach than conciliation, "you must not be so very quick to take offence when none is intended."

Pauline gave a laugh which she tried to make amiable. "It pleases me to think that no offence was intended," she declared.

"Your little party was by no means a _pis-aller_ with _me_, dear Pauline," here stated Sallie, "whatever it may have been in mamma's case. I really wanted so much, don't you know, to see these--a--persons." The peculiar pause which Sallie managed to make before she pronounced the word "persons," and the gentle yet assertive accent which she managed to place upon the word itself, were both, in their way, beyond description. Not that either was of the import which would render description requisite, except from the point of view which considers all weightless trifles valuable.

Pauline bit her lip. She had long ago thought Sallie disqualified for contest by her native silliness. The girl had not a tithe of her mother's brains; she possessed all the servitude of an echo and all the imitativeness of a reflection. But like most weak things she had the power to wound, though her little sting was no doubt quite unintentional at present.

Courtlandt here spoke. He was perfectly his ordinary sober self as he said,--

"I happened to drop in upon Aunt Cynthia to-night, and she brought me here. I believe that I come without an invitation. Don't I? I've forgotten."

"You haven't forgotten," contradicted Pauline, though not at all unpleasantly. "You know I didn't invite you, because I didn't think you would care to come. You gave me every reason to think so."

"That was very rude," commented Sallie, with a rebuking look at Courtlandt. She had a great idea of manners, but her reverence was quite theoretical, as more than one ineligible and undesirable young gentleman knew, when she had chosen to freeze him at parties with the blank, indifferent regard of a sphinx. "It is so odd, really, Pauline," she went on, with her supercilious drawl, which produced a more irritating effect upon her cousin because apparently so spontaneous and unaffected--"it is so odd to meet people whom one does not know. I have always been accustomed to go to places where I knew everybody, and bowed, and had them come up and speak."

Pauline busied herself for an instant in smoothing the creases of her long gloves between wrist and elbow. "Don't you find it rather pleasant, Sallie," she said, "to procure an occasional change?"

"It ought to be refreshing," struck in Courtlandt, neutrally.

"You can have people to talk to you this evening, if you wish," pursued Pauline, while a certain sense that she was being persecuted by her relatives waged war with a decorous recognition of who and where she was.

Before Sallie could answer, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, who had ceased her determined survey, said in her naturally high, cool, suave tones,--

"Oh, of course we want you to present some of them to us, Pauline, dear. We came for that, Sallie and I. We want to see what has made you so fond of them. They are all immensely clever, of course. But one can listen and be instructed, if one does not talk. Do they expect you to talk, by the way? Will they not be quite willing to do all the talking themselves? I have heard--I don't just remember when or how--that they usually _are_ willing."

"My dear Aunt Cynthia," said Pauline, in a low but not wholly composed voice, "you speak of my guests as if they were the inmates of a menagerie."

Mrs. Poughkeepsie threw back her head a very little. The motion made a jewel of great price and fine lustre shoot sparks of pale fire from the black lace shrouding her ample bosom. She laughed at the same moment, and by no means ill-naturedly. "I am sure they wouldn't like to have you suggest anything so dreadful," she said, "you, their protectress and patroness."

"I am neither," affirmed Pauline stoutly.

Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted her brow in surprise. She almost lifted her august shoulders as well. "Then pray what are you, my dear?" she asked.

"Their hostess--and their equal," asserted Pauline. She spoke with momentary seriousness, but immediately afterward she chose to assume an air of careless raillery.

"Ah, Aunt Cynthia," she went on, "you don't know how you make me envy you!"

"Envy me, Pauline?"

"Oh, yes; you have settled matters so absolutely. You have no misgivings, no distrusts. You are so magnificently secure."

"I don't understand," politely faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. She looked inquiringly at Courtlandt.

"It is metaphysics," Courtlandt at once said. "They are a branch of study in which Pauline has made great progress." His face remained so completely placid and controlled that he might have been giving the number of a residence or recording the last quotation in stocks.

Sallie had become absorbed in staring here and there, just as her mother had been a brief while ago; Mrs. Poughkeepsie was at a little distance from her niece; Courtlandt stood close at Pauline's side, so that the latter could ask him, in an undertone full of curt, covert imperiousness,--

"Did you come here to say and do rude things?"

"I never say nor do rude things if I can help it," he answered, with a leaden stolidity in his own undertone.

"Why did _they_ come?" continued Pauline, lowering her voice still more.

"You invited them, I believe. That is, at least, my impression."

"I mentioned the affair. I never imagined they would wish to come."

"You see that you were mistaken. If I had been you I wouldn't have given them the awful opportunity."

"What awful opportunity?" queried Pauline, furtively bristling.

"Of coming," said Courtlandt.

"My dear Pauline," here broke in Mrs. Poughkeepsie, "shall you not present anybody to us?"

"Anyone whom you please to meet, Aunt," responded Pauline.

"But, my _dear_, we please to meet _anyone_. We have no preferences. How _can_ we have?"

"This is torment," thought poor Pauline. She glanced toward Courtlandt, but she might as well have appealed to one of her chairs. "What shall I do?" her thoughts sped fleetly on. "This woman and this girl would shock and repel whomever I should bring to them. It would be like introducing the North Pole and the South."

But her face revealed no sign of her perplexity. She quietly put her hand within Courtlandt's arm. "Come, Court," she said, with a very creditable counterfeit of gay sociality, "let us find a few devotees for Aunt Cynthia and Sallie."

"We shall find a good many," said Courtlandt, as they moved away. "Have no fear of that."

"I am by no means sure that we shall find _any_," protested Pauline, both with dismay and antagonism.

"Pshaw," retorted Courtlandt. "Mention the name. It will work like magic."

"The name? What name?"

"Poughkeepsie. Do you suppose these haphazard Bohemians wouldn't like to better themselves if they could?"

Pauline took her hand from his arm, though he made a slight muscular movement of detention.

"They are not haphazard Bohemians," she said. "You know, too, that they are not. They are mostly people of intellect, of culture, of high and large views. I don't know what you mean by saying that they would 'like to better themselves.' Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia? Her name would be simply a dead letter to them."

Courtlandt gave a low laugh, that was almost gruff, and was certainly harsh. "Where have they ever heard of Aunt Cynthia?" he repeated. "Why, she never dines out that the society column of half-a-dozen newspapers does not record it, and her name would be very far from a dead letter. It would be a decidedly living letter."

"But you don't understand," insisted Pauline, exasperatedly. "These people have no aims to know the so-called higher classes."

"Excuse me," said Courtlandt, with superb calm. "Everybody has aims to know the so-called higher classes--if he or she possibly can. Especially 'she'," he added in his colorless monotone.

Just then Pauline found herself confronted by Miss Upton. The moon-like face of this diminutive lady wore a flushed eagerness as she began to speak.

"Oh, Mrs. Varick," she said, "I've a great, _great_ favor to ask of you! I want you to introduce me to your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie."

"With pleasure," answered Pauline, feeling as if the request had been a sort of jeer. "You know my aunt by sight, then, Miss Upton?"

"Oh, yes, I've known her for some time by sight, Mrs. Varick. Miss Cragge pointed her out to me one night at Wallack's. She had a box, with her daughter and several other people. One of them was an English lord--or so Miss Cragge said.... But excuse my mentioning my friend's name, as you don't like her."

"Who told you that I did not like Miss Cragge?" asked Pauline, with abrupt crispness.

"Oh, nobody, nobody," hurried Miss Upton. "But you haven't invited her here to-night--you left her out, you know. That was all. And I thought...."

"Are you a friend of Miss Cragge's?" asked Pauline.

"Oh, yes ... that is, I know her quite well. She writes dramatic criticisms, you know, and she has seen me in amateur theatricals. She's kind enough to tell me that she _doesn't_ think that I have a tragic soul in a comic body." Here Miss Upton gave a formidably resonant laugh. "But I'm convinced that I have, and so I've never gone on the stage. But if I could get a few of the _very_ aristocratic people, Mrs. Varick,--like yourself, and your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie--to hear me give a private reading or two, from 'Romeo and Juliet' or 'The Hunchback' or 'Parthenia', why, I should be prepared to receive a _new opinion_, don't you understand, with regard to my abilities. There is nothing like being endorsed at the start by people who belong to the real upper circles of society."

"Of course there isn't," said Courtlandt, speaking too low for Miss Upton to catch his words, and almost in the ear of Pauline. "Introduce me," he went swiftly on. "I will save you the bore of further introductions. You will soon see how they will all flock about the great nabob, though she may be ignorant of aesthetics, philosophy, Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, and anybody you please."

Pauline turned and looked at him. There was the shadow of a sparkle in the familiar brown eyes--the eyes that she never regarded closely without being reminded of her girlhood, even of her childhood as well.

"It is a challenge then?" she asked softly.

For a second he seemed not to understand her. Then he nodded his head. "Yes--a challenge," he answered.

She gave an inward sigh.... A little later she had made the desired introduction.... Presently, as Miss Upton moved away on Courtlandt's arm in the direction of her aunt and Sallie, she burst into a laugh, of whose loudness and acerbity she was equally unconscious.

Martha Dares, appearing at her side, arrested the laugh. Pauline grew promptly serious as she looked into Martha's homely face, with its little black eyes beaming above the fat cheeks and the unclassic nose, but not beaming by any means so merrily as when she had last given all its features her full heed.

"You don't laugh a bit as if you were pleased," said Martha, in her short, alert way. "I hope nothing has gone wrong."

"It seems to me as if everything were going wrong," returned Pauline, with a momentary burst of frankness which she at once regretted.

"Good gracious!" said Martha. "I'm astonished to hear you tell me so."

"Forget that I have told you so," said Pauline, throwing a little delicate repulsion into voice and mien. "By the way, your sister is not here to-night, Miss Dares."

Martha's plump figure receded a step or two.

"No," she replied, in the tone of one somewhat puzzled for a reply. "I came with my mother."

"And your sister had a headache."

"A headache," repeated Martha, showing what strongly resembled involuntary surprise.

"Yes. So your mother told me."

"Well, it's true," said Martha. Pauline was watching her more closely than she perhaps detected. "Cora's been working very hard, of late. She works altogether too hard. I often tell her so--Here comes Mr. Kindelon," Martha pursued, very abruptly changing the subject, while her gaze seemed to fix itself on some point behind her companion. "He wants to speak with you, I suppose. I'll move along--you see, I go about just as I choose. What's the use of my waiting for an escort? I'm not accustomed to attentions from the other sex, so I just behave as if it didn't exist. That's the wisest plan."

"But you surely need not be afraid of Mr. Kindelon," said Pauline.

"Oh, we're not the best of friends just now," returned Martha.... She had passed quite fleetly away in another instant. And while Pauline was wondering at the oddity of her departure, Kindelon presented himself.

"You and Martha Dares are not good friends?" she quickly asked. She did not stop to consider whether or no her curiosity was unwarrantable, but she felt it to be a very distinct and cogent curiosity.

Kindelon frowned. "I don't want to talk of Martha Dares," he said, "and I hope that you do not, either. She is a very unattractive topic."

"Isn't that a rather recent discovery?"

"Oh, no--Shall we speak of something else? Your aunt's arrival, for instance. I see that she is quite surrounded."

"Surrounded?" replied Pauline falteringly. Her eyes turned in the direction of Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie.

It was true. Seven or eight ladies and gentlemen were gathered about the stately lady and her daughter. Both appeared to be holding a little separate and exclusive reception of their own.

"Courtlandt was right!" exclaimed Pauline ruefully, and with a stab of mortification. She turned to meet the inquiring look of Kindelon. "I thought Aunt Cynthia would be unpopular here," she continued. "I supposed that no one in my rooms to-night would care to seek her acquaintance."

"This is a grandee," said Kindelon, "and so they are glad enough to know her. If your cousin, Mr. Beekman, prophesied anything of that sort, he was indeed perfectly right."

Pauline shook her head musingly. "Good heavens!" she murmured, "are there any people in the world who can stand tests? I begin to think not." Her speech grew more animated, her eyes began to brighten indignantly and with an almost tearful light. "Here am I," she went on, "determined to encourage certain individuals in what I believed was their contempt of social frivolity and the void delusion which has been misnamed position and birth. With a sort of polite irony Aunt Cynthia appears and shows me that I am egregiously wrong--that she can hold her court here as well as at the most giddily fashionable assemblage.... Look; my cousin has just presented Mr. Whitcomb, the 'coming historian' with the pensive face, and Mr. Paiseley, the great American dramatist with the abnormal head. How pleased they both seem! They appear to tingle with deference. Aunt Cynthia is patronizing them, I am sure, as she now addresses them. She thinks them entirely her inferiors; she considers them out of her world, which is the correct world to be in, and there's an end of it. You can lay the Atlantic cable, you can build the Brooklyn Bridge, but you can't budge the granitic prejudices of Aunt Cynthia.... Yet why do they consent to be patronized by her? Do they not know and feel that she represents a mere sham? Do they value her for what she is, or misvalue her for something that she is not?"

Kindelon laughed a little gravely as he answered: "I am afraid they do the former. And in being what she is, she is a great deal."

"Surely not in the estimate of those who are at all serious on the subject of living--those whom superficialities in all conduct or thought weary and even disgust."

"But these," said Kindelon, with one of his hand-sweeps, "are not that sort of people."

"I supposed a great many of them were."

"You supposed wrongly."

Pauline gave a momentary frown, whose gloom meant pain. And before her face had re-brightened she had begun to speak. "But they cannot care to do as Aunt Cynthia does--to trifle, to idle."

"I fancy that a good many of them would trifle and idle if they had your aunt's facilities for that employment--or lack of it."

"But they paint, they read, they write, they think; they make poems, novels, dramas. They are people with an occupation, an ideal. How can they be interested in a fellow-creature who does nothing with her time except waste it?"

"She wastes it very picturesquely," replied Kindelon. "She is Mrs. Poughkeepsie; she represents great prosperity, aristocratic ease, lofty security above need. They read about her; they should not do so, but that they do is more the fault of modern journalism than theirs. Theoretically they may consider that she deserves their hardest feelings; but this has no concern whatever with their curiosity, their interest, their hope of advancement."

"Their hope of advancement!" echoed Pauline, forlornly, almost aghast. "What possible hope of advancement could _they_ have from such a source?"

Her querulous question had scarcely ended when she perceived that Arthur Trevor had presented himself at her side. The young poet was exceedingly smart to-night. His tawny hair was rolled off his wide brow with a sort of precise negligence; it looked as if a deliberative brush and not a careless hand had so rolled it. He fixed his dreamy blue eyes with steadfastness upon Pauline's face before speaking.

"I am so sorry, Mrs. Varick," he began, giving a distinct sigh and slowly shaking his head from side to side. "I wonder if you know what I am sorry about."

"Oh, yes," returned Pauline, with a nervous trill of laughter. "You have come to me with a complaint on the subject of Mr. Rufus Corson. You see, Mr. Trevor, rumor has forestalled you. I heard that you were furious because I omitted to ask your intimate enemy."

Arthur Trevor gave an exaggerated start; it was a very French start; he lifted his blond eyebrows as much as his shoulders. And he looked at Kindelon while he responded:

"Ah! I see! Kindelon has been telling you horrid things. Kindelon hates us poets. These men of the newspapers always do. But there is a wide gulf between the poetry of to-day and the newspapers of to-day."

"Of course there is," quickly struck in Kindelon. "That is why the modern newspaper is read so much and the modern poetry so little."

Arthur Trevor chose to ignore this barbed rejoinder. His dreamy eyes and general air of placid reverie made such an attitude singularly easy of assumption.

"Poor Rufus feels your slight," he said, addressing Pauline solely. "Why do you call him my intimate enemy? We are the dearest of friends. He adores decay, and sings of it. I do not sing of it, but I adore it for its color. There is always color in decay."

"Discolor," said Kindelon, with better wit than grammar.

"Decay," pursued Arthur Trevor, "is the untried realm of the future poet. Scarcely anything else is left him. He is driven to find a beauty in ugliness, and there is an immense beauty in ugliness, if one can only perceive it. The province of the future poet shall be to make one perceive it."

"That is like saying," declared Kindelon, "that the province of the future gentleman shall be to make one perceive the courtesy in discourtesy or the refinement in vulgarity."

Again Mr. Trevor ignored Kindelon. "Poor Rufus was so much less to blame than Leander Prawle," he continued. "And yet you invited Leander Prawle. Prawle is so absurdly optimistic. Prawle has absolutely no color. Prawle is irretrievably statuesque and sculpturesque. It is so nonsensical to be that in poetry. Sculpture is the only art that gives an imperious _rien ne va plus_ to the imagination. Prawle should have been a sculptor. He would have made a very bad one, because his ideas are too cold even for marble. But his poetry would not have been such an icy failure if it had been carved instead of written."

"You need not put up with this kind of thing any longer than you want," whispered Kindelon to Pauline. "Hostship, like Mr. Prawle's poetry, remember, has its limitations."

Pauline pretended not to hear this audacious aside. "Mr. Trevor," she said, making her voice very even and collected, "I regret that I could not quite bring myself to ask your friend. The Egyptians, you recollect, used to have a death's-head at their banquets. But that was a good many years ago, and New York isn't Thebes.... Please pardon me if I tell you that I must leave you for a little while."

As Pauline was passing him, Trevor lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. He did so without a hint of rhapsody, but in a sort of solemn exaltation. "New York is surely not Thebes!" he exclaimed. "Ah, if it only were! To have lived in Thebes for one day, to have got its real and actual color, would be worth ten years of dull existence here!"

"How I wish fate had treated him more to his taste!" said Kindelon, when Pauline and himself were a little distance off. "He meant to make an appeal for that mortuary Corson. He might better have tried to perpetuate his own welcome at your next _salon_."

"My next _salon_!" echoed Pauline, with a laugh full of fatigue and derision.

"What do you mean?" he asked shortly.

"I mean that I had best give no other _salon_," she replied. "I mean that this is a failure and a mockery."

She looked full up into his eyes as she spoke. They both paused. "So soon?" questioned Kindelon, as if in soft amazement.

"Yes--so soon," she answered, with a quiver in her voice and a slight upward movement of both hands. "What is it all amounting to?"

"What did I tell you?" he said.

"Oh, confirm your prophecy?" she broke forth, somewhat excitedly. "I know you warned me against disappointment. Enjoy your satisfaction--Look at Aunt Cynthia now. She is holding a perfect court. How they _do_ flock round Sallie and herself, just as Courtlandt said that they would! I feel that this is the beginning and the end. I have misjudged, miscalculated, misinterpreted. And I am miserably dejected!"

Just then Martha Dares approached Pauline. "Will you please introduce me to your aunt?" said Martha.

"With the greatest pleasure, Miss Dares," returned Pauline.

"_Et tu Brute?_" said Kindelon, under his breath. Pauline heard him, but Martha did not....

A little later Courtlandt had joined her, and Kindelon had glided away.

"Are you convinced?" said Courtlandt.

"Convinced of what?" she retorted, with an almost fierce defiance.

"Oh, of nothing, since you take it so ferociously." She saw that his calm brown eyes were coolly watching her face.

"When is your next _salon_?" he asked. "Is it to be a week from to-night?"