Chapter 9

Gladys was now twenty-four and was even more anxious to marry than is the average unmarried person. She had been eleven years a wanderer; she was tired of it. She had no home; and she wanted a home.

Her aunt--her mother's widowed sister--had taken her abroad when she was thirteen. John was able to defy or to deceive their mother. But she could and did enforce upon Gladys the rigid rules which her fanatical nature had evolved--a minute and crushing tyranny. Therefore Gladys preferred any place to her home. For ten years she had been roaming western Europe, nominally watched by her lazy, selfish, and physically and mentally near-sighted aunt. Actually her only guardian had been her own precocious, curiously prudent, curiously reckless self. She had been free to do as she pleased; and she had pleased to do very free indeed. She had learned all that her intense and catholic curiosity craved to know, had learned it of masters of her own selecting--the men and women who would naturally attract a lively young person, eager to rejoice in an escape from slavery. Her eyes had peered far into the human heart, farthest into the corrupted human heart; yet, with her innocence she had not lost her honesty or her preference for the things she had been brought up to think clean.

But she had at last wearied of a novelty which lay only in changes of scene and of names, without any important change in characters or plot. She began to be bored with the game of baffling the hopes inspired by her beauty and encouraged by her seeming simplicity. And when her mother came--as she said to Pauline, "The only bearable view of mother is a distant view. I had forgot there were such people left on earth--I had thought they'd all gone to their own kind of heaven." So she fled to America, to her brother and his wife.

Dumont stayed eight days at the Eyrie on that trip, then went back to his congenial life in New York--to his business and his dissipation. He tempered his indulgence in both nowadays with some exercise--his stomach, his heart, his nerves and his doctor had together given him a bad fright. The evening before he left he saw Pauline and Gladys sitting apart and joined them.

"Why not invite Scarborough to spend a week up here?" he asked, just glancing at his wife. He never ventured to look at her when there was any danger of their eyes meeting.

Her lips tightened and the color swiftly left her cheeks and swiftly returned.

"Wouldn't you like it, Gladys?" he went on.

"Oh, DO ask him, Pauline," said Gladys, with enthusiasm. Like her brother, she always went straight to the point--she was in the habit of deciding for herself, of thinking what she did was above criticism, and of not especially caring if it was criticised. "Please do!"

Pauline waited long--it seemed to her long enough for time to wrinkle her heart--before answering: "We'll need another man. I'll ask him--if you wish."

Gladys pressed her hand gratefully--she was fond of Pauline, and Pauline was liking her again as she had when they were children and playmates and partners in the woes of John Dumont's raids upon their games. Just then Langdon's sister, Mrs. Barrow, called Gladys to the other end of the drawing-room. Dumont's glance followed her.

"I think it'd be a good match," he said reflectively.

Pauline's heart missed a beat and a suffocating choke contracted her throat.

"What?" she succeeded in saying.

"Gladys and Scarborough," replied Dumont. "She ought to marry--she's got no place to go. And it'd be good business for her--and for him, too, for that matter, if she could land him. Don't you think she's attractive to men?"

"Very," said Pauline, lifelessly.

"Don't you think it would be a good match?" he went on.

"Very," she said, looking round wildly, as her breath came more and more quickly.

Langdon strolled up.

"Am I interrupting a family council?" he asked.

"Oh, no," Dumont replied, rising. "Take my chair." And he was gone.

"This room is too warm," said Pauline. "No, don't open the window. Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window behind her. It was a moonless, winter night--stars thronging the blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in the southern horizon.

When she had been walking there for a quarter of an hour the door-window opened and Langdon looked out. "Oh--there you are!" he said.

"Won't you join me?" Her tone assured him that he would not be intruding. He got a hat and overcoat and they walked up and down together.

"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while. "They make me appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity, and that I'm----there's nothing little enough to express the human atom where the earth's only a grain. And then they go on to taunt me with how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me--for ever. A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the heel of the Great Executioner."

"Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline. "But again--often, as a child--and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've gone where I could see them. And they seemed to draw all the fever and the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of--not happiness, not even content, but--courage."

They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he studying her face. It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so beautiful. She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her hair high above her forehead. She looked like a splendid plume dropped from the starry wing of night.

"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their family. And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the earthworms."

Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath, closed her eyes and opened them very wide.

"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what 'to live' means."

"Then why don't you?" he asked--he liked to catch people in their confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts, not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.

"Because I'm a daughter--that's anchor number one. Because I'm a mother--that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife--that's anchor number three. And anchor number four--because I'm under the spell of inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in them. Tied, hands and feet!"

"Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton at life's banquet. It takes away my appetite."

She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It frightens ME away from the table."

XV.

GRADUATED PEARLS.

But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness then and when she met him at other houses.

"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps things before him in his career. Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Pauline.

She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she originally set. She told herself she had reached the limit of endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys' growing intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it was impossible for her longer to neglect the new house in Fifth Avenue. With an effort she added: "You'd rather stay on here, wouldn't you?"

"I detest New York," replied Gladys. "And I've never enjoyed myself in my whole life as I'm enjoying it here."

So she went East alone, went direct to Dawn Hill, their country place at Manhasset, Long Island, which Dumont never visited. She invited Leonora Fanshaw down to stand between her thoughts and herself. Only the society of a human being, one who was light-hearted and amusing, could tide her back to any sort of peace in the old life--her books and her dogs, her horseback and her drawing and her gardening. A life so full of events, so empty of event. It left her hardly time for proper sleep, yet it had not a single one of those vivid threads of intense and continuous interest--and one of them is enough to make bright the dullest pattern that issues from the Loom.

In her "splendor" her nearest approach to an intimacy had been with Leonora.

She had no illusions about the company she was keeping in the East. To her these "friends" seemed in no proper sense either her friends or one another's. Drawn together from all parts of America, indeed of the world, by the magnetism of millions, they had known one another not at all or only slightly in the period of life when thorough friendships are made; even where they had been associates as children, the association had rarely been of the kind that creates friendship's democratic intimacy. They had no common traditions, no real class-feeling, no common enthusiasms--unless the passion for keeping rich, for getting richer, for enjoying and displaying riches, could be called enthusiasm. They were mere intimate acquaintances, making small pretense of friendship, having small conception of it or desire for it beyond that surface politeness which enables people whose selfish interests lie in the same direction to get on comfortably together.

She divided them into two classes. There were those who, like herself, kept up great establishments and entertained lavishly and engaged in the courteous but fierce rivalry of fashionable ostentation. Then there were those who hung about the courts of the rich, invited because they filled in the large backgrounds and contributed conversation or ideas for new amusements, accepting because they loved the atmosphere of luxury which they could not afford to create for themselves.

Leonora was undeniably in the latter class. But she was associated in Pauline's mind with the period before her splendor. She had been friendly when Dumont was unknown beyond Saint X. The others sought her--well, for the same reasons of desire for distraction and dread of boredom which made her welcome them. But Leonora, she more than half believed, liked her to a certain extent for herself--"likes me better than I like her." And at times she was self-reproachful for being thus exceeded in self-giving. Leonora, for example, told her her most intimate secrets, some of them far from creditable to her. Pauline told nothing in return. She sometimes longed for a confidant, or, rather, for some person who would understand without being told, some one like Olivia; but her imagination refused to picture Leonora as that kind of friend. Even more pronounced than her frankness, and she was frank to her own hurt, was her biting cynicism--it was undeniably amusing; it did not exactly inspire distrust, but it put Pauline vaguely on guard. Also, she was candidly mercenary, and, in some moods, rapaciously envious. "But no worse," thought Pauline, "than so many of the others here, once one gets below their surface. Besides, it's in a good-natured, good-hearted way."

She wished Fanshaw were as rich as Leonora longed for him to be. She was glad Dumont seemed to be putting him in the way of making a fortune. He was distasteful to her, because she saw that he was an ill-tempered sycophant under a pretense of manliness thick enough to shield him from the unobservant eyes of a world of men and women greedy of flattery and busy each with himself or herself. But for Leonora's sake she invited him. And Leonora was appreciative, was witty, never monotonous or commonplace, most helpful in getting up entertainments, and good to look at--always beautifully dressed and as fresh as if just from a bath; sparkling green eyes, usually with good-humored mockery in them; hard, smooth, glistening shoulders and arms; lips a crimson line, at once cold and sensuous.

On a Friday in December Pauline came up from Dawn Hill and, after two hours at the new house, went to the jeweler's to buy a wedding present for Aurora Galloway. As she was passing the counter where the superintendent had his office, his assistant said: "Beg pardon, Mrs. Dumont. The necklace came in this morning. Would you like to look at it?"

She paused, not clearly hearing him. He took a box from the safe behind him and lifted from it a magnificent necklace of graduated pearls with a huge solitaire diamond clasp. "It's one of the finest we ever got together," he went on. "But you can see for yourself." He was flushing in the excitement of his eagerness to ingratiate himself with such a distinguished customer.

"Beautiful!" said Pauline, taking the necklace as he held it out to her. "May I ask whom it's for?"

The clerk looked puzzled, then frightened, as the implications of her obvious ignorance dawned upon him.

"Oh--I--I----" He almost snatched it from her, dropped it into the box, put on the lid. And he stood with mouth ajar and forehead beaded.

"Please give it to me again," said Pauline, coldly. "I had not finished looking at it."

His uneasy eyes spied the superintendent approaching. He grew scarlet, then white, and in an agony of terror blurted out: "Here comes the superintendent. I beg you, Mrs. Dumont, don't tell him I showed it to you. I've made some sort of a mistake. You'll ruin me if you speak of it to any one. I never thought it might be intended as a surprise to you. Indeed, I wasn't supposed to know anything about it. Maybe I was mistaken----"

His look and voice were so pitiful that Pauline replied reassuringly: "I understand--I'll say nothing. Please show me those," and she pointed to a tray of unset rubies in the show-case.

And when the superintendent, bowing obsequiously, came up himself to take charge of this important customer, she was deep in the rubies which the assistant was showing her with hands that shook and fingers that blundered.

She did not permit her feelings to appear until she was in her carriage again and secure from observation. The clerk's theory she could not entertain for an instant, contradicted as it was by the facts of eight years. She knew she had surprised Dumont. She had learned nothing new; but it forced her to stare straight into the face of that which she had been ignoring, that which she must continue to ignore if she was to meet the ever heavier and crueler exactions of the debt she had incurred when she betrayed her father and mother and herself. At a time when her mind was filled with bitter contrasts between what was and what might have been, it brought bluntly to her the precise kind of life she was leading, the precise kind of surroundings she was tolerating.

"Whom can he be giving such a gift?" she wondered. And she had an impulse to confide in Leonora to the extent of encouraging her to hint who it was. "She would certainly know. No doubt everybody knows, except me."

She called for her, as she had promised, and took her to lunch at Sherry's. But the impulse to confide died as Leonora talked--of money, of ways of spending money; of people who had money, and those who hadn't money; of people who were spending too much money, of those who weren't spending enough money; of what she would do if she had money, of what many did to get money. Money, money, money--it was all of the web and most of the woof of her talk. Now it ran boldly on the surface of the pattern; now it was half hid under something about art or books or plays or schemes for patronizing the poor and undermining their self-respect--but it was always there.

For the first time Leonora jarred upon her fiercely--unendurably. She listened until the sound grew indistinct, became mingled with the chatter of that money-flaunting throng. And presently the chatter seemed to her to be a maddening repetition of one word, money--the central idea in all the thought and all the action of these people. "I must get away," she thought, "or I shall cry out." And she left abruptly, alleging that she must hurry to catch her train.

Money-mad! her thoughts ran on. The only test of honor--money, and ability and willingness to spend it. They must have money or they're nobodies. And if they have money, who cares where it came from? No one asks where the men get it--why should any one ask where the women get it?

XVI.

CHOICE AMONG EVILS.

A few days afterward--it was a Wednesday--Pauline came up to town early in the afternoon, as she had an appointment with the dressmaker and was going to the opera in the evening. At the dressmaker's, while she waited for a fitter to return from the workroom, she glanced at a newspaper spread upon the table so that its entire front page was in view. It was filled with an account of how the Woolens Monopoly had, in that bitter winter, advanced prices twenty to thirty-five per cent. all along the line. From the center of the page stared a picture of John Dumont--its expression peculiarly arrogant and sinister.

She read the head-lines only, then turned from the table. But on the drive up-town she stopped the carriage at the Savoy and sent the footman to the news-stand to get the paper. She read the article through--parts of it several times.

She had Langdon and Honoria Longview at dinner that night; by indirect questioning she drew him on to confirm the article, to describe how the Woolens Monopoly was "giving the country an old-fashioned winter." On the way to the opera she was ashamed of her ermine wrap enfolding her from the slightest sense of the icy air. She did not hear the singers, was hardly conscious of her surroundings. As they left the Metropolitan she threw back her wrap and sat with her neck bared to the intense cold.

"I say, don't do that!" protested Langdon.

She reluctantly drew the fur about her. But when she had dropped him and then Honoria and was driving on up the avenue alone, she bared her shoulders and arms again--"like a silly child," she said. But it gave her a certain satisfaction, for she felt like one who has a secret store of food in time of famine and feasts upon it. And she sat unprotected.

"Is Mr. Dumont in?" she asked the butler as he closed the door of their palace behind her.

"I think he is, ma'am."

"Please tell him I'd like to see him--in the library."

She had to wait only three or four minutes before he came--in smoking jacket and slippers. It was long since she had looked at him so carefully as she did then; and she noted how much grosser he was, the puffs under his eyes, the lines of cruelty that were coming out strongly with autocratic power and the custom of receiving meek obedience. And her heart sank. "Useless," she said to herself. "Utterly useless!" And the incident of the necklace and its reminders of all she had suffered from him and through him came trooping into her mind; and it seemed to her that she could not speak, could not even remain in the room with him.

He dropped into a chair before the open fire. "Horribly cold, isn't it?"

She moved uneasily. He slowly lighted a cigar and began to smoke it, his attitude one of waiting.

"I've been thinking," she began at last--she was looking reflectively into the fire--"about your great talent for business and finance. You formed your big combination, and because you understand everything about wool you employ more men, you pay higher wages, and you make the goods better than ever, and at less cost."

"Between a third and a half cheaper," he said. "We employ thirty thousand more men, and since we settled the last strike"--a grim smile that would have meant a great deal to her had she known the history of that strike and how hard he had fought before he gave in--"we've paid thirty per cent. higher wages. Yet the profits are--well, you can imagine."

"And you've made millions for yourself and for those in with you."

"I haven't developed my ideas for nothing."

She paused again. It was several minutes before she went on:

"When a doctor or a man of science or a philosopher makes a discovery that'll be a benefit to the world"--she looked at him suddenly, earnest, appealing--"he gives it freely. And he gets honor and fame. Why shouldn't you do that, John?" She had forgotten herself in her subject.

He smiled into the fire--hardly a day passed that he did not have presented to him some scheme for relieving him of the burden of his riches; here was another, and from such an unexpected quarter!

"You could be rich, too. We spend twenty, fifty times as much as we can possibly enjoy; and you have more than we could possibly spend. Why shouldn't a man with financial genius be like men with other kinds of genius? Why should he be the only one to stay down on the level with dull, money-grubbing, sordid kinds of people? Why shouldn't he have ideals?"

He made no reply. Indeed, so earnest was she that she did not give him time, but immediately went on:

"Just think, John! Instead of giving out in these charities and philanthropies--I never did believe in them--they're bound to be more or less degrading to the people that take, and when it's so hard to help a friend with money without harming him, how much harder it must be to help strangers. Instead of those things, why not be really great? Just think, John, how the world would honor you and how you would feel, if you used your genius to make the necessaries cheap for all these fellow-beings of ours who have such a hard time getting on. That would be real superiority--and our life now is so vain, so empty. It's brutal, John."

"What do you propose?" he asked, curious as always when a new idea was presented to him. And this was certainly new--apparently, philanthropy without expense.

"You are master. You can do as you please. Why not put your great combine on such a basis that it would bring an honest, just return to you and the others, and would pay the highest possible wages, and would give the people the benefit of what your genius for manufacturing and for finance has made possible? I think we who are so comfortable and never have to think of the necessaries of life forget how much a few cents here and there mean to most people. And the things you control mean all the difference between warmth and cold, between life and death, John!"

As she talked he settled back into his chair, and his face hardened into its unyielding expression. A preposterous project! Just like a good, sentimental woman. Not philanthropy without expense, but philanthropy at the expense both, of his fortune and of his position as a master. To use his brain and his life for those ungrateful people who derided his benefactions as either contributions to "the conscience fund" or as indirect attempts at public bribery! He could not conceal his impatience--though he did not venture to put it into words.

"If we--if you and I, John," she hurried on, leaning toward him in her earnestness, "had something like that to live for, it might come to be very different with us--and--I'm thinking of Gardiner most of all. This'll ruin him some day. No one, NO ONE, can lead this kind of life without being dragged down, without becoming selfish and sordid and cruel."

"You don't understand," he said curtly, without looking at her. "I never heard of such--such sentimentalism."

She winced and was silent, sat watching his bold, strong profile. Presently she said in a changed, strange, strained voice: "What I asked to see you for was--John, won't you put the prices--at least where they were at the beginning of this dreadful winter?"

"Oh--I see!" he exclaimed. "You've been listening to the lies about me."