Aunt Maria had, so to speak, reveled in the fortune and position of the Van Arsdels. She had dictated the expenditures of their princely income; she had projected parties and entertainments; she had supervised lists of guests to be invited; she had ordered dresses and carriages and equipages, and hired and dismissed servants at her sovereign will and pleasure. Nominally, to be sure, Mrs. Van Arsdel attended to all these matters; but really Aunt Maria was the power behind the throne. Mrs. Van Arsdel was a pretty, graceful, self-indulgent woman, who loved ease and hated trouble—a natural climbing plant who took kindly to any bean-pole in her neighborhood, and Aunt Maria was her bean-pole. Mrs. Van Arsdel's wealth, her station, her éclat, her blooming daughters, all climbed up, so to speak, on Aunt Maria, and hung their flowery clusters around her, to her praise and glory. Besides all this, there were very solid and appreciable advantages in the wealth and station of the Van Arsdel family as related to the worldly enjoyment of Mrs. Maria Wouvermans. Being a widow, connected with an old rich family, and with but a small fortune of her own and many necessities of society upon her, Mrs. Wouvermans had found her own means in several ways supplemented and carried out by the redundant means of her sister. Mrs. Wouvermans lived in a moderate house on Murray Hill, within comfortable proximity to the more showy palaces of the New York nobility. She had old furniture, old silver, camel's hair shawls and jewelry sufficient to content her heart, but her yearly income was far below her soul's desires, and necessitated more economy than she liked. While the Van Arsdels were in full tide of success she felt less the confinement of these limits. What need for her to keep a carriage when a carriage and horses were always at her command for the asking—and even without asking, as not infrequently came to be the case? Then, the Van Arsdel parties and hospitalities relieved her from all expensive obligations of society. She returned the civilities of her friends by invitations to her sister's parties and receptions; and it is an exceedingly convenient thing to have all the glory of hospitality and none of the trouble—to have convenient friends to entertain for you any person or persons with whom you may be desirous of keeping up amicable relations. On the whole, Mrs Wouvermans was probably sincere in the professions, to which Mr. Van Arsdel used to listen with a quiet amused smile, that "she really enjoyed Nelly's fortune more than if it were her own."
"Haven't a doubt of it," he used to say, with a twinkle of his eye which he never further explained.
Mr. Van Arsdel's failure had nearly broken Aunt Maria's heart. In fact, the dear lady took the matter more sorely than the good man himself.
Mr. Van Arsdel was, in a small dry way, something of a philosopher. He was a silent man for the most part, but had his own shrewd comments on the essential worth of men and things—particularly of men in the feminine gender. He had never checked his pretty wife in any of her aspirations, which he secretly valued at about their real value; he had never quarreled with Aunt Maria or interfered with her sway in his family within certain limits, because he had sense enough to see that she was the stronger of the two women, and that his wife could no more help yielding to her influence than a needle can help sticking to a magnet.
But the race of fashionable life, its outlays of health and strength, its expenditures for parties, and for dress and equipage, its rivalries, its gossip, its eager frivolities, were all matters of which he took quiet note, and which caused him often to ponder the words of the wise man of old, "What profit hath a man of all his labor and the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored under the sun?"
To Mr. Van Arsdel's eye the only profit of his labor and travail seemed to be the making of his wife frivolous, filling her with useless worries, training his daughters to be idle and self-indulgent, and his sons to be careless and reckless of expenditure. So when at last the crash came, there was a certain sense of relief in finding himself once more an honest man at the bottom of the hill, and he quietly resolved in his inmost soul that he never would climb again. He had settled up his affairs with a manly exactness that won the respect of all his creditors, and they had put him into a salaried position which insured a competence, and with this he resolved to be contented; his wife returned to the economical habits and virtues of her early life; his sons developed an amount of manliness and energy which was more than enough to compensate for what they had lost in worldly prospects. He enjoyed his small, quiet house and his reduced establishment as he never had done a more brilliant one, for he felt that it was founded upon certainties and involved no risks. Mrs. Van Arsdel was a sweet-tempered, kindly woman, and his daughters had each and every one met the reverse in a way that showed the sterling quality which is often latent under gay and apparently thoughtless young womanhood.
Aunt Maria, however, settled it in her own mind, with the decision with which she usually settled her relatives' affairs, that this state of things would be only temporary.
"Of course," she said to her numerous acquaintances, "of course, Mr. Van Arsdel will go into business again—he is only waiting for a good opening—he'll be up again in a few years where he was before."
And to Mrs. Van Arsdel she said, "Nelly, you must keep him up—you mustn't hear of his sinking down and doing nothing"—doing nothing being his living contentedly on a comfortable salary and going without the "pomps and vanities." "Your husband, of course, will go into some operations to retrieve his fortunes, you know," she said. "What is he thinking of?"
"Well, really, Maria, I don't see as he has the least intention—he seems perfectly satisfied to live as we do."