Richard Vandermarck: A Novel

by Miriam Coles Harris

I had a pretty house (and re-furnished it very often, which always gave me pleasure). I had no care, for Richard had arranged that I should have a very excellent sort of person for duenna, who had a good deal of tact, and didn't bore me, and was shrewd enough to make things very smooth. I liked her very much, though I think now she was something of a hypocrite. But she had enough principle to make things very respectable, and I never took her for a friend. We had very pretty little dinners, and little evenings when anybody wanted them, though the house wasn't very large. My duenna (by name Throckmorton) liked journeys as well as I did, and never objected to going anywhere. Altogether we were very comfortable.

The people whom I had known in that first year of my social existence, had drifted away from me a good deal in this new life. Sophie I could not help meeting sometimes, for she was still a gay woman, but I naturally belonged to a younger set, and did not go very long into general society. We still disliked each other with the cordiality of our first acquaintance, but I was very sorry for it, and had a great many repentances about it after every meeting. Kilian I met a good deal, but we rather avoided each other, at short range, though exceedingly good friends to the general observation.

Mary Leighton I seldom saw; no doubt she was consumed with envy when she heard of me, for they were poor, and not able to keep up with gay life as would have pleased her. She still maintained her intimacy with Kilian, for he had not the resolution to break off a flirtation of which, I was sure, he must be very tired.

Henrietta had married very well, two years after I saw her at R----, and was the staid, placid matron that she was always meant to be.

Charlotte Benson was the clever woman still: a little stronger-minded, and no less good-looking than of old, and no more. People were beginning to say that she would not marry, though she was only twenty-six. She did not go much to parties, and was not in my set. She affected art and lectures, and excursions to mountains, and campings-out, and unconventionalities, and no doubt had a good time in her way. But it was not my way: and so we seldom met. When we did, she did not show much more respect for me than of old, which always had the effect of making me feel angry.

And as for Richard, we could not have been much further apart, if he had lived "in England and I at Rotterdam." For a year, while he was settling up the estate, he was closely in the city. I did not see him more than once or twice, all business being transacted through his lawyer, and the clerk of whom he had spoken to me. After the business matters of the estate were all in order, he went away, intending, I believe, to stay a year or two. But he came back before many months were over, and settled down into the routine of business life, which now seemed to have become necessary to him.

Travel was only a weariness to him in his state of mind; and work, and city-life, seemed the panacea. He did not live with Sophie, but took apartments, which he furnished plainly; and seemed settling down, according to his brother, into much of the sort of life that Uncle Leonard had led so many years in Varick-street.

Sophie still went to R----, and I often heard of the pleasant parties there in summer. But Richard seldom went, and seemed to have lost his interest in the place, though I have no doubt he spent more money on it than before. I heard of many improvements every year.

And Richard was now a man of wealth, so much so that people talked about him; and the newspapers said, in talking about real-estate, or investments, or institutions of charity--"When such men as Richard Vandermarck allow their names to appear, we may be sure," etc., etc. He was now the head of the firm, and one of the first business men of the city. He seemed a great deal older than he was; thirty-seven is young to occupy the place he held.

Such a parti could not be let alone entirely. His course was certainly discouraging, and it needs tough hopes to live on nothing. But stranger things had happened; more obdurate men had yielded; and unappropriated loveliness hoped on. The story of an early attachment was afloat in connection with his name. I don't know whether I was made to play a part in it or not.