“Don’t let me disturb you,” he added.
“Oh, I shall sleep no more.” He sat down opposite, looking over at her tenderly; Justine sat up sphinx-like, and he was losing the constraint her presence at first had caused him. The fact that she took the situation so as of course even gave him a certain support. In this French maid’s trained face he had much comfort. A new conductor came in to take their tickets; and they drew out again into the gray-white landscape of New England winter. Wemyss had made the journey many hundred times; and yet, as he sat there looking at Flossie, his one thought was a surprise that it did not seem more novel, even now. He tried, like Claude Melnotte, to think of Italy, and Como villas; but his imagination failed to go beyond their arrival in Boston and his arrangements for the voyage.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Gower’s thoughts were larger and less troubled. She had no thought for the immediate future, at least. And as to the distant future—well, she, too, had made up her mind. They were both rich; and she had tried her woman’s weapons on the world before. She by no means meant to give up her position in society; she purposed leading it with more celebrity than ever; and in Paris, London, not New York. They had no divorce in France; and no one she cared about would blame her for having exercised that envied American privilege. While in England—she could not go to court, of course; but what cared she for that? She had been presented once; and the more fashionable London court, the circle to which all her social friends belonged, would not dream of caring what the status or position of an American had been. Her springs in Paris, her summers in London, her winters in Pau—ah, this last was the life she secretly looked forward to. She knew that she could be as full of conquests, brilliant, captivating, as any of her favorite Feuillet’s heroines. She knew that she could still be there a reine du monde.
She smiled to herself as she thought how the news would fly around New York. She delighted to think that with Baby Malgam, her nearest friend and rival, a certain almost envious admiration would mingle with pretended triumph. Flossie had led them up to the very end; and then, when she was fairly bored with winning, she had dared the very steepest fence of all. But how the old madams would chuckle to themselves and the blue-blooded coterie she had laughed at so! She had driven a coach and four through all their stupid conventions, and led the fashion to its very end. And twenty years ago she had not been “in society.”
She took up the newspaper, and read the long account of the ball. She had always liked to see her beauty and her dresses hymned in the daily prints; and two whole paragraphs were given to her to-day. “No one attracted so much admiration as Mrs. Levison Gower”—Poor Lucie! She almost wished she had a different husband, though. Poor Lucie was likely to be simply sorry. She almost despised him again for this; if he had been a man like Kill Van Kull, for instance, it would have been an added excitement; and that faint reproach that came rather from her good-nature than her conscience would have been gone entirely. She laid the paper down, and fell again into a reverie; not reading the news of that great fire which the ball had relegated to the second page. On such trivial chances do the actions of our lives depend.
She in turn looked over at Mr. Caryl Wemyss, sitting opposite; he met her eye with a glance of adoration that seemed affected to sharp-sighted Flossie. A well-bred polished person this; but hardly that Guy Livingstone of her youthful fancy. The journey was certainly tedious; they were not at Hartford yet, and she looked out the window and watched the rude fences of her native land fly by, in dwindling perspective. She half-divined his thoughts—he was still reflecting of de Musset and George Sand; of Byron and the Countess Guiccioli; or perhaps, more recently, of Lord Eskdale, his friend, and Mrs. White-Thompson. She, however, for long had had no romance in her composition; but only love of adventure, admiration, social primacy, for good or evil. She tried to banish her companion from her mind, and scheme of future triumphs. Yet she knew that his position was safer in the world than hers.
Already the gray day was growing dark; and the monotonous white wooden houses that they passed were beginning to be lit with evening lamps. The empty fields and wooded hills about them made her lonely; and she pictured to herself, with a shudder, their commonplace firesides. Heavens, how stupid a thing must life be to some! They passed an ugly manufacturing village with its dull, wide streets and garniture of unpainted wood; and her fancy seemed to paint to her all their obscurity of life, their ox-like submission, with really no more faith or virtue, as she thought, than she, only more hypocrisy and less courage. Yet she remembered just such a village, hereabout, in her awkward youth; and something of the view of life it taught came back to her, now; abandoned, as it had been, from her very girlhood.
So this was the climax, after all! And all her triumphs and all her cleverness had led to this? Some people would call it but a common elopement, and say that her position in respectable society was gone forever. She had not valued this, nor all these things, when she had got them; not even perhaps as any Jenny Starbuck valued her diamond ring; would she care for them more, now she had lost them? She fancied not. And she looked over the unpicturesque New-England landscape and pretended that she was a French duchess, travelling in some barbaric province. And then she looked at Mr. Wemyss once more, and again half wished that it had been Van Kull. She knew very well that there was no grande passion in her case.
When they got to Springfield, Wemyss got out; and came back in some trepidation. “I have seen Charlie Clarendon,” said he; “but I don’t think that he noticed me.”
“And what does it matter whether he noticed you or not?” said Flossie, opening her eyes.