Edgar Fawcett

“ If you listened intently you could catch a kind of dreamy hum from the vast city, which might almost be said to begin its busy, tumultuous life here in this very spot, thence pushing through many a life-crowded street and avenue, sheer on to the rocky fields and goat-haunted gutters of dreary Harlem.
"What a glorious bay it is!" exclaimed Kindelon, while he and Pauline stood on the breezy esplanade. "There never was a city with more royal approaches than New York." ”

“ She bore a striking likeness to her father; she possessed his blue eyes, a trifle darker in shade, his broad white forehead, his sloping delicacy of visage, and his erect though slender frame. From him, too, had come the sunny quality of her smile, the gold tints in her chestnut hair, the fine symmetry of hands and feet. Rather from association than heredity she had caught his kindly warmth of manner; but in Claire the cordial impulse was far less spontaneous; she had her black list of dislikes, and she took people on trust with wary prudence. ”

“ She lives in the present, Nature's own child. The ocean that gave her to us seems to have claimed her as its own. She loves the sea in all its moods. When the storm was at its fiercest and the huge waves swept over us, she insisted on being on deck, and clapped her hands and laughed in glee, as thoughtless of danger as one of Mother Cary's chickens. Now, when this horrible calm is drawing the very life out of us all, she sings and laughs and is merry; or, when not merry, wears a calm, passionless, almost soulless face. I don't wonder that the men think that she is a witch. ”

“ Your objection to my marriage with Ralph Kindelon is horrible—that and nothing more! He towers above the idiot whom you are glad to have Sallie marry! What do I care for the little 'lord'? You bow before it; I despise it. You call my project, my dream, my desire, a failure ... I grant that it is. But it is immeasurably above that petty worship of the Golden Calf, which you name respectability and which I denounce as only a pitiful sham! The world is growing older, but you don't grow old with it. You close your eyes to all progress. ”

“ His hard, brown face had clouded with sulky disapprobation. A little gleam of teeth had stolen out under his crisp, short mustache, with an effect not unlike what we see when an angry dog snarls. He felt offended, and this meant that he should either sting with his tongue or smite with his fists. But in the present case a fresh glance at Claire, whose profile was turned to him, made his spleen swiftly perish. Her cheek had got a deep tint of rose; he saw the liquid sparkle of one dark-blue eye, and the dense, rippling hair, chestnut threaded with gold, flowing above one faint-veined temple. ”

“ Now, Hepworth Coleman was a man of iron nerve, an athlete in body and spirit, who, although full of romantic and poetic impulses, was at the base of his character as brave and steadfast as a lion. Still, even the best courage has its moment of faltering, and just at the point when one whole wall of his cell was withdrawn, so that he stood in the full glare of twenty brilliant chandeliers that lighted a large, gorgeously decorated hall, he felt the blood grow stiflingly heavy on his heart. ”

“ The alienation must now be life-long. She had made him despise her, and she could never win him back. Seated before the fire, that snapped and flashed as if in jeering glee at her own misery, she wept tears that had a real pathos in them—the pathos of a repulsed love. She had never believed herself at fault in her conduct toward Claire. Jealousy had speedily blackened the filial act of her rival, but in any case the story, as Mrs. Twining told it, would have roused her conviction that this desertion had been a most unnatural and cruel one. ”

“ Pauline gave a little soft cry. "You mean because I am rich, no doubt!" she said, a kind of melancholy sarcasm tinging her words.
"Riches mean a great deal," said Cora.
"But if you have no special endowment that separates you from the rest of the world, you are still a woman."
"I am not sorry to be a woman."
"No! because you are a living protest against the inferiority of our sex. You can do something; you need not forever have men doing something for you, like the great majority of us!" ”

“ Barrowe, "why he is my worst enemy, as—as I fear, my dear madam, that Miss Cragge is yours!"
"Oh, never mind Miss Cragge," said Pauline, with a sweet, quick laugh; "and never mind Mr. Kindelon, either. I have only to talk about you, Mr. Barrowe, and to tell you that I have never yet met a good, true man (for I am certain that you are such) who stood in his own light so persistently as you do. You have an immense talent for quarrelling," she went on, with pretty seriousness. "Neglect it—crush it down—be yourself! Yourself is a very honest and agreeable self to be. ”

“ Van Horn always did surprisingly well; she could enter or retire from a room with an effect quite her own in its supple graciousness and dignity. But Claire soon felt that both the graciousness and dignity had something mystic about them. It was somehow as if an oracle had pronounced something very oracular indeed. The civility of the invitation had been so totally unforeseen, and it had followed with so keen a suddenness the recent bewildering revelation, that Claire did not know how to explain the whole proceeding, to construe it, to read between its lines. ”

“ Youth is the spring time when "Longen folk to gon on pilgrimages," as old Chaucer words it, and it would be hard to find the young man who has not felt the vaguely outlined yet irresistible desire to wander, to go over the horizon into a strange, new world. Hepworth Coleman, when he was taken with this longing, felt no restraint cast around him. He was absolutely free, had all the means necessary—why should he not go where he pleased? If it seems strange that he should have been attracted to New Orleans rather than to the Old World, we must remember what New Orleans was in 1820. ”

“ An invisible phantom was at the heels of the community and we were part of a mighty stampede. After fumbling for an instant at the bell and pushing back several ghastly creatures who were on the steps, I must have applied my shoulder to the door and pushed it in. Some one appeared to be resisting on the other side, but it gave way and I half fell into Judge Brisbane's vestibule. An instant later we were looking into each other's faces, I, bloody and soiled and ragged and wild with the frenzy of fear and impatience; he, pale as death, but resolute, and holding an enormous bar over me. ”

“ On the evening of Sophia's "sociable" Claire remained in a large chamber that was approached from the second hall of the house, and appointed with that admirable taste which clearly indicated that the Bergemanns had once confided devoutly in their upholsterer, just as they now did in their milliner. She was quite alone; she held a book open in her lap, but was not reading it; her black dress became her charmingly; it seemed to win a richer shade from the chestnut-and-gold of her tresses, and to increase the delightful fragility of her oval, soft-tinted face. ”

“ I ought to be very sorry for you, Courtlandt, and I am. You're clever enough not to let yourself rust, like this, all your days. I don't believe you've ever read one of the works of the great modern English thinkers. You're sluggishly satisfied to go jogging along in the same old ruts that humanity has worn deep for centuries. Of course you never had, and never will have, the least spark of enthusiasm. You're naturally lethargic; if a person stuck a pin into you I don't believe you would jump. But all this is no reason why you shouldn't try and live up to the splendid advancements of your age. ”

“ Pauline went up to the speaker and stood close beside her while she responded,—
"Ah! my dear Miss Dares, the love between man and woman is entitled to no more respect than the law of gravitation. Both belong to the great unknown scheme. We may shake our heads in transcendental disapprobation, but it is quite useless. The loftiest affection of the human heart is no more important and no more mysterious than the question of why Newton's apple fell from the tree or why a plant buds in spring. All causes are unknown, and to seek their solution is to idly grope." ”

“ I cried as I wheeled about and forced her before me for an instant, "if you have real courage leap to the head of yonder column, then on to the next! Quick! be brave enough to save yourself and——"
"No! I will not run away and leave you to die."
"For God's sake you will run away and save me."
"Why? How?"
"I will join you there, go! Quick, or it will be too late!"
Another leap of the lion! Bang! Bang!
This time he did not fall back, but held on by sheer force of his powerful arms; his terrible claws tearing at the granite slab as they hung and hooked over its outer edge.
Bang! Bang! Bang! ”

“ But in yours, Claire Twining, I maintain that it will turn out a dowry of bitter risk if not woful disaster. I exhort you to be careful, to be very careful, lest it prove the latter. Don't let your American 'push' impel you into swamps and quicksands. Don't let it thrust you away from what is true and sterling in yourself. Be loyal to it as a good impulse, and it will not betray and confound you like a bad one. You can do something so much better than to wreck your life; you can make it a force, a guidance, a standard, a leadership. ”

“ We live in New York, you and I. Do you know what New York means? It means what America means—or what America ought to mean, from Canada to the Gulf! And that is—exemption from the hateful bonds of self-glorifying snobbery which have disgraced Europe for centuries! You call yourself an aristocrat. How dare you do so? You dwell in a land which was washed with the blood, less than a century ago, of men who died to kill just what you boast of and exalt! Look more to your breeding and your brains, and less to your so-called caste! ”

“ Gerald was already angered by the dispatch. The taunting epithet was timed to excite him to fury, which he impulsively spent upon the more immediate provoker. He seized Ravelli by the throat, but without choking him, and almost instantly let him go, as though ashamed of having assailed a man of not much more than half his own strength and nearly twice his age. With Italian quickness Ravelli grabbed Gerald's knife from the desk, against which he was flung. ”

“ What a man of cleaner life and thought would simply have praised as sweet and chaste about her fired in this corrupt oaf his one gross substitute for sentiment. She could no more appeal to him by her fineness of line, coloring, or movement than the field-flower when cropped by the brute mouth whose appetite its very grace and perfume may perhaps whet. And Claire divined this. Pure things know impure ones, all through the large scheme of nature. ”

“ You would not for the world be considered a person who cared for the aristocratic purple, and yet you wrap it round you in the most illogical fashion. Mrs. Dares has her evenings; to-night is one of them. You, as yet, have no evenings; your salon is still in embryo. You want to affiliate with her, to be one of her set, her surroundings, her monde. And yet you quietly bid her to your house, as though she were proposing your co-operation, your support, your intimacy, and not you hers!"
Pauline, with perhaps a deepened tinge of color in her cheeks, was staring at the floor when Kindelon ended. ”

“ A horrible conviction seized me that the ordinary restraints of society were breaking down, and that speedily panic would mount to chaos. I saw that this dread was adding to the terror of everybody, aside from the fear of IT. Like an assemblage in a burning building, the fear of each other was more subtile and operative than the fear of the elements. By indefatigable labor I got off the main thoroughfare and reached Hudson Street, and here in the crowd I learned the latest news and discovered the cause of the rapidly increasing excitement. ”

“ The cars tinkled sleepily; the omnibuses lagged in rumbling sloth; foul smells beset the nostrils, even from genteel gutters or the doorways of high-priced restaurants. People looked up at the wool-like pallor of the sky, and wished that it would darken into the cooling gloom of a thunderstorm.
But Claire scarcely minded the heat. She had known the fetid miseries of a Greenpoint summer. Those spacious chambers and halls of the Bergemanns' solid-built mansion were delicious indeed by contrast. ”

“ The chastity of some names is so perfect that any touch whatever will soil it."
"If so, then mine has been soiled already!" cried Pauline. "Oh," she went on, "you men are all alike toward us women! Our worst crime is that you yourselves should talk about us! To have your fellow-men say, 'This woman has been rendered the object of a scandalous insult, but has retaliated with courage,' is to make her seem in your eyes as if the insult were really a deserved one! Whenever we are prominent, except in a social way, we are called notorious. ”

“ Something, God alone knew what, had happened to our planet, and humanity was to be swept away in one of those cataclysms with which soulless Nature prepares for a new order of existence.
I was rudely awakened from this reverie of wretchedness by the crowd which surged against me with a blind, unvindictive violence. My one desire was to get uptown to the woman I loved and had neglected, and I saw that every minute was adding to the difficulty. ”

“ Diggs on a sudden became solemn.
"Claire," she went on, "you remember what I told you in our little confab, the other day, at the Lauderdales' reception? It's true, my dear. You're like a person at a gambling-table, who begins to play for pastime and ends by playing for greed. You know I dote on you, and you know I never choose my words when I'm in downright earnest. Your love for pomp and luxury, my dear, is becoming a vice. Yes, an actual vice. You don't take your triumphs moderately, as you do your champagne-and-water. You drink deep of them, and let them fly to your head. ”

“ As it is, what am I? A man far below you in all worldly place, who has gained from you a matrimonial promise. Marry me!—marry me at once!—to-morrow!—and everything will be different! Then you shall have become mine to defend, and I will show you how I can defend what is my own!"
"To-morrow!" murmured Pauline.
"Yes, to-morrow! You will say it is too soon. You will urge conventionalism now, though a minute ago you accused me of urging it! When you are once my wife I shall feel empowered to lawfully befriend you!" ”

“ This outburst, so uncharacteristic and so unexpected, did not bear for him a grain of pathos. He saw behind it nothing save an implacable selfishness that chose to misname itself affection. The ambition of Claire saddened him to contemplate; it had so rich a potentiality for its background. He was forever seeing the true and wise woman that she might have been. Even the nettles in her soil flourished with a certain beauty of their own, proving its fertile resources if more wholesome growths had taken root there. But in Cornelia Van Horn's nature all was barren and arid. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thurston had gone. She felt her cheeks burn as she sat and stared at the floor. His declaration had strangely shocked her, at first, for the entire man, as it were, had undergone a transformation so abrupt and radical as to wear a hue of actual miracle; and it is only across a comfortable lapse of centuries that the human mind can regard such manifestations with anything like complacency. Balaam could not have been more bewildered and disturbed when the Ass spoke. Claire had never thought of Thurston as capable of a live sentiment toward any woman. ”

“ Bond Street has always been but a brief strip of thoroughfare, running at right angles between the Bowery and Broadway. Scarcely more than thirty years ago it possessed the quietude and dignity of a patrician domain; it was beloved of our Knickerbocker social element; it was the tranquil stronghold of caste and exclusiveness. Its births, marriages and deaths were all touched with a modest distinction. Extravagance was its horror and ostentation its antipathy. ”

“ The birthright was a perilous one; it was a heritage of discontent; its tendency was perpetual longings for better environment, for ampler share in the world's good gifts, for higher place in its esteem and stronger claim to its heed. But what in her mother had been ambition almost as crudely eager as a boorish elbow-thrust, was in Claire more decorous and interesting, like the push of a fragile yet determined hand through a sullen crowd. ”

“ She was precisely the sort of person whom Coney Island must have pleased.
But it pleased Claire in a totally different way. The immense concourse of people who flocked thither, by such easy modes of travel, from New York and Brooklyn and elsewhere, were an incessant source of interest. Their numbers, their activities, their enjoyments, kept her blood in a soft tingle. This brilliant and picturesque city by the sea appeared to her in the light of a delicious reparation. It was a long, splendid festivity, compensating her for those years of dire dullness passed but a few miles away. ”

“ Thurston's farewell words rang incessantly through her memory. She would crush down all that American "push," once and forever. She would steer from the perils against which he had warned her, by one broad, divergent swerve. Her remorse and her resignation held a poetic ardor of kinship. Her past longings had indeed been a folly, and as such she would unvaryingly treat them. She would be consistent henceforward, and seek only what lay within her lawful scope of action. She was like the convert to a new faith, and she had all a convert's intensity of fervor. ”

“ Why do you show me that you would like to know Cornelia Van Horn?"
"Why?" still repeated Claire. "Did I show you that?"
"Not openly—not in so many words, don't you know? But I imagine it."
"You are very quick at imagining," said Claire, with a little playful toss of the head. "Well, if you choose, I should like to know her. I should like to know any one who ranks herself high, like that, and has a recognized claim. I have a fellow-feeling for ambitious people. I'm ambitious myself."
Mrs. Diggs seemed deeply amused. She lifted a forefinger, and shook it at Claire. ”

“ He was a very old man; he leant on a staff, and was clad in an evident holiday-attire of black, whose rusty broadcloth hung about his shrunken shape with tell-tale looseness; it had too evidently been cut for a far more portly person. He had a wrinkled face, and yet one of rubicund plumpness; a spot of red flushed each cheek, centring in a little crimson net-work of veins there, while the same peculiarity cropped out a third time, as it were, on the ball-like lump at the end of his irregular nose. Claire had a feeling, as she looked at him, that he was a reformed toper. ”

“ My old school-enemy, Ada Gerrard, more freckled, more arrogant, more stupid than ever, is one of my most willing allies. I had conquered them all, but I could not conquer those two women. They stood aloof, and their standing aloof was a perpetual distress."
"Claire, Claire," exclaimed Mrs. Diggs, "you make me wonder at you! What was the hostility of these two women, whether open or repressed? You had all the others to pay you court. Why should you have cared? They saw your success. They are powerful, but their power could not keep you from asserting and maintaining yours. ”

“ Claire nearly broke into a laugh at her own soft and quaint little apostrophe. Like most lonely people who dislike their solitude, she often felt the temptation to soliloquize; especially since her imagination was vigorous, and sometimes loved, as well, to let mount from its wrist the agile falcon of fancy. But a practical bent, as we call it, and a rather sharp sense of the humor of things besides, usually mingled to repress this volatile impulse. ”

“ The two parallel yet contrary streams of vehicles made an incessant subdued clatter; numerous pedestrians were also passing to and fro along either sidewalk; the weather had changed again from harsh to clement; the strip of clear, blue sky above the massive housetops wore a shining delicacy and airiness of tint; even Claire's new wound, that still bled unseen, could not distract her from a buoyant congeniality with the prosperous and festal tumult so amply manifest. ”

“ Excitement had put rosy tints in either cheek; the jewels that she wore had no sweeter splendor than her eyes, and yet both by color and glow in a certain way aptly matched them. A gear of velvet is dangerous to women in whom exuberance of figure has the least assertive rule. Velvet is the sworn enemy of embonpoint. But Claire's figure was of such supple and flexile slenderness that the weight and volume of this apparel made her light step and airy contour win a new charm and a new vivacity.
"It is all perfect—quite perfect," said Mrs. Diggs, after taking a rapid survey of Claire's attire. ”

“ But by degrees the slow, continual pressure of habit wore away the edge of her distaste, as a constant sea-wash will blunt the rim of a shell. She absorbed herself in study, made rapid progress, and learned much that a fashionable school would have left untaught.
Her fastidiousness in a measure vanished. A good deal of the old acquired nicety stayed, but her age was impressionable, and ceaseless contact with rough manners and crude opinions wrought its certain effect. ”

“ The man who makes the best of things by instinct is very apt to have the best of things made for him by fortune.
His inalienable love for Claire caused him to regard her long hypocrisy with fondly lenient eyes. The wrong done himself rapidly took a secondary place; it was nearly always thus with Hollister, except in those grosser cases of wanton injury from his own sex; and now, when it became a matter between his heart and the woman that heart devotedly loved, he was ready to forego a most liberal share of the usual human egotism. ”