"Why did not some one tell me they were together; together, at the
Hotel Champlain? I tell you—something will happen!"
"To which of them?" asked Miss Cordova satirically. In spite of a good deal of nonsense in her composition, there was an under-stratum of shrewd wisdom, inherited, no doubt, from her New England mother, and her admiration for her more brilliant friend did not blind her to certain irregularities of disposition and many weak points in Pauline's character, inseparable from her abnormal bringing up. "I wouldn't excite myself so much if I were you," continued the other. "I've learnt not to worry about men harming other men; it's when they come to harming women I think it's time to worry about them. Look at me—I don't know for certain whether Ned Stanbury's alive or not; I know Schenk's alive, although he may not last long, but I never worry about their meeting. But if Schenk came here to disturb me, or went to my mother's to get the children from her, then I might take on."
"But, my dear, everything's different in my case!" exclaimed Miss
Clairville, fretfully pacing up and down the common room.
A village dressmaker, one of the numerous Tremblays, had, in a great hurry, made her a black dress; her face showed sallow against it now, and even her hands, always conspicuously well-kept and white, looked yellow and old as they hung down at the side of her tall, straight figure, or clasped and unclasped restlessly behind her. A key to much of her present unhappy mood lay in her last exclamation; family pride, another kind of pride in her personal knowledge of the world, in her consciousness of gifts and physical attractions, the feeling that she was in every way Miss Cordova's superior, all this rendered Pauline's affairs, in her own eyes, of vastly greater importance and intrinsic excellence and interest than those of her companion. A Clairville—there could be no doubt of this—was a lady, a gentlewoman, to use an incorruptible phrase, whereas, no matter how unsmirched the simple annals of Sadie Cordova, the small farm, the still smaller shop were behind the narrow beginnings of the painstaking and pious Yankee shoemaker who retired in middle life to the country and died there. Pauline's father and brother, both weakly degenerates, could nevertheless boast of a lineage not inconsiderable for older lands, of possessions identified with the same, such as portraits and books and furniture, of connexions through marriage with the law and the militia, and, above all, of having lived on their land for very many years without doing anything, most distinguished trait of all. Hence, Pauline's remark; how could Miss Cordova fully understand or properly sympathize with the altered conditions by which the daughter of the manor was now second in importance to one of a family of menials, the flighty, giggling, half-witted Artemise-Palmyre, whose marriage to Henry Clairville was an accepted fact.
"You cannot understand," Pauline had said for the tenth or eleventh time, and Miss Cordova listened, outwardly smiling and not immediately replying.
"Do you suppose your brother's marriage was legal and binding?" she said after a while, and Pauline stopped in her walk. The idea was not altogether new.
"I fancy it must have been," she managed to say carelessly. "Dr. Renaud and his Reverence know all about it, and even if it were not, where is the money to enable me to—how do you say—contest it?"
"Wouldn't Mr. Poussette lend it to you?"
"Oh, what an idea! Do you think I would take it from him, I, a
Clairville?"
She had nearly used the once-despised prefix and called herself a De Clairville, for since Henry's death her intolerant view of his darling project had strangely altered; so many things were slipping from her grasp that she clutched at anything which promised well for the future.