“Oh, I didn’t show anything,” said Verena, gaily. “I am learning to dissimulate,” she added in a moment. “I suppose you have to as you go along. I pretend not to notice.”
At this moment the gong sounded for luncheon, and the two young women covered up their ears, face to face, Verena with her quick smile, Olive with her pale patience. When they could hear themselves speak, the latter said abruptly:
“How did Mrs. Burrage come to invite Mr. Ransom to her party? He told Adeline he had never seen her before.”
“Oh, I asked her to send him an invitation—after she had written to me, to thank me, when it was definitely settled we should come on. She asked me in her letter if there were any friends of mine in the city to whom I should like her to send cards, and I mentioned Mr. Ransom.”
Verena spoke without a single instant’s hesitation, and the only sign of embarrassment she gave was that she got up from her chair, passing in this manner a little out of Olive’s scrutiny. It was easy for her not to falter, because she was glad of the chance. She wanted to be very simple in all her relations with her friend, and of course it was not simple so soon as she began to keep things back. She could at any rate keep back as little as possible, and she felt as if she were making up for a dereliction when she answered Olive’s inquiry so promptly.
“You never told me of that,” Miss Chancellor remarked, in a low tone.
“I didn’t want to. I know you don’t like him, and I thought it would give you pain. Yet I wanted him to be there—I wanted him to hear.”
“What does it matter—why should you care about him?”
“Well, because he is so awfully opposed!”
“How do you know that, Verena?”
At this point Verena began to hesitate. It was not, after all, so easy to keep back only a little; it appeared rather as if one must either tell everything or hide everything. The former course had already presented itself to her as unduly harsh; it was because it seemed so that she had ended by keeping the incident of Basil Ransom’s visit to Monadnoc Place buried in unspoken, in unspeakable, considerations, the only secret she had in the world—the only thing that was all her own. She was so glad to say what she could without betraying herself that it was only after she had spoken that she perceived there was a danger of Olive’s pushing the inquiry to the point where, to defend herself as it were, she should be obliged to practise a positive deception; and she was conscious at the same time that the moment her secret was threatened it became dearer to her. She began to pray silently that Olive might not push; for it would be odious, it would be impossible, to defend herself by a lie. Meanwhile, however, she had to answer and the way she answered was by exclaiming, much more quickly than the reflections I note might have appeared to permit, “Well, if you can’t tell from his appearance! He’s the type of the reactionary.”
Verena went to the toilet-glass to see that she had put on her hat properly, and Olive slowly got up, in the manner of a person not in the least eager for food. “Let him react as he likes—for heaven’s sake don’t mind him!” That was Miss Chancellor’s rejoinder, and Verena felt that it didn’t say all that was in her mind. She wished she would come down to luncheon, for she, at least, was honestly hungry. She even suspected Olive had an idea she was afraid to express, such distress it would bring with it. “Well, you know, Verena, this isn’t our real life—it isn’t our work,” Olive went on.
“Well, no, it isn’t, certainly,” said Verena, not pretending at first that she did not know what Olive meant. In a moment, however, she added, “Do you refer to this social intercourse with Mr. Burrage?”
“Not to that only.” Then Olive asked abruptly, looking at her, “How did you know his address?”
“His address?”
“Mr. Ransom’s—to enable Mrs. Burrage to invite him?”
They stood for a moment interchanging a gaze. “It was in a letter I got from him.”
At these words there came into Olive’s face an expression which made her companion cross over to her directly and take her by the hand. But the tone was different from what Verena expected when she said, with cold surprise: “Oh, you are in correspondence!” It showed an immense effort of self-control.
“He wrote to me once—I never told you,” Verena rejoined, smiling. She felt that her friend’s strange, uneasy eyes searched very far; a little more and they would go to the very bottom. Well, they might go if they would; she didn’t, after all, care so much about her secret as that. For the moment, however, Verena did not learn what Olive had discovered, inasmuch as she only remarked presently that it was really time to go down. As they descended the staircase she put her arm into Miss Chancellor’s and perceived that she was trembling.
Of course there were plenty of people in New York interested in the uprising, and Olive had made appointments, in advance, which filled the whole afternoon. Everybody wanted to meet them, and wanted everybody else to do so, and Verena saw they could easily have quite a vogue, if they only chose to stay and work that vein. Very likely, as Olive said, it wasn’t their real life, and people didn’t seem to have such a grip of the movement as they had in Boston; but there was something in the air that carried one along, and a sense of vastness and variety, of the infinite possibilities of a great city, which—Verena hardly knew whether she ought to confess it to herself—might in the end make up for the want of the Boston earnestness. Certainly, the people seemed very much alive, and there was no other place where so many cheering reports could flow in, owing to the number of electric feelers that stretched away everywhere. The principal centre appeared to be Mrs. Croucher‘s, on Fifty-sixth Street, where there was an informal gathering of sympathisers who didn’t seem as if they could forgive her when they learned that she had been speaking the night before in a circle in which none of them were acquainted. Certainly, they were very different from the group she had addressed at Mrs. Burrage’s, and Verena heaved a thin, private sigh, expressive of some helplessness, as she thought what a big, complicated world it was, and how it evidently contained a little of everything. There was a general demand that she should repeat her address in a more congenial atmosphere; to which she replied that Olive made her engagements for her, and that as the address had been intended just to lead people on, perhaps she would think Mrs. Croucher’s friends had reached a higher point. She was as cautious as this because she saw that Olive was now just straining to get out of the city; she didn’t want to say anything that would tie them. When she felt her trembling that way before luncheon it made her quite sick to realise how much her friend was wrapped up in her—how terribly she would suffer from the least deviation. After they had started for their round of engagements the very first thing Verena spoke of in the carriage (Olive had taken one, in her liberal way, for the whole time), was the fact that her correspondence with Mr. Ransom, as her friend had called it, had consisted on his part of only one letter. It was a very short one, too; it had come to her a little more than a month before. Olive knew she got letters from gentlemen; she didn’t see why she should attach such importance to this one. Miss Chancellor was leaning back in the carriage, very still, very grave, with her head against the cushioned surface, only turning her eyes towards the girl.
“You attach importance yourself; otherwise you would have told me.”
“I knew you wouldn’t like it—because you don’t like him.”
“I don’t think of him,” said Olive; “he’s nothing to me.” Then she added, suddenly, “Have you noticed that I am afraid to face what I don’t like?”
Verena could not say that she had, and yet it was not just on Olive’s part to speak as if she were an easy person to tell such a thing to: the way she lay there, white and weak, like a wounded creature, sufficiently proved the contrary. “You have such a fearful power of suffering,” she replied in a moment.
To this at first Miss Chancellor made no rejoinder; but after a little she said, in the same attitude, “Yes, you could make me.”
Ver
ena took her hand and held it awhile. “I never will, till I have been through everything myself.”
“You were not made to suffer—you were made to enjoy,” Olive said, in very much the same tone in which she had told her that what was the matter with her was that she didn’t dislike men as a class—a tone which implied that the contrary would have been much more natural and perhaps rather higher. Perhaps it would; but Verena was unable to rebut the charge; she felt this, as she looked out of the window of the carriage at the bright, amusing city, where the elements seemed so numerous, the animation so immense, the shops so brilliant, the women so strikingly dressed, and knew that these things quickened her curiosity, all her pulses.
“Well, I suppose I mustn’t presume on it,” she remarked, glancing back at Olive with her natural sweetness, her uncontradicting grace.
That young lady lifted her hand to her lips—held it there a moment; the movement seemed to say, “When you are so divinely docile, how can I help the dread of losing you?” This idea, however, was unspoken, and Olive Chancellor’s uttered words, as the carriage rolled on, were different.
“Verena, I don’t understand why he wrote to you.”
“He wrote to me because he likes me. Perhaps you’ll say you don’t understand why he likes me,” the girl continued, laughing. “He liked me the first time he saw me.”
“Oh, that time!” Olive murmured.
“And still more the second.”
“Did he tell you that in his letter?” Miss Chancellor inquired.
“Yes, my dear, he told me that. Only he expressed it more gracefully.” Verena was very happy to say that; a written phrase of Basil Ransom’s sufficiently justified her.
“It was my intuition—it was my foreboding!” Olive exclaimed, closing her eyes.
“I thought you said you didn’t dislike him.”
“It isn’t dislike—it’s simple dread. Is that all there is between you?”
“Why, Olive Chancellor, what do you think?” Verena asked, feeling now distinctly like a coward. Five minutes afterwards she said to Olive that if it would give her pleasure they would leave New York on the morrow, without taking a fourth day; and as soon as she had done so she felt better, especially when she saw how gratefully Olive looked at her for the concession, how eagerly she rose to the offer in saying, “Well, if you do feel that it isn’t our own life—our very own!” It was with these words, and others besides, and with an unusually weak, indefinite kiss, as if she wished to protest that, after all, a single day didn’t matter, and yet accepted the sacrifice and was a little ashamed of it—it was in this manner that the agreement as to an immediate retreat was sealed. Verena could not shut her eyes to the fact that for a month she had been less frank, and if she wished to do penance this abbreviation of their pleasure in New York, even if it made her almost completely miss Basil Ransom, was easier than to tell Olive just now that the letter was not all, that there had been a long visit, a talk, and a walk besides, which she had been covering up for ever so many weeks. And of what consequence, anyway, was the missing? Was it such a pleasure to converse with a gentleman who only wanted to let you know—and why he should want it so much Verena couldn’t guess—that he thought you quite preposterous? Olive took her from place to place, and she ended by forgetting everything but the present hour, and the bigness and variety of New York, and the entertainment of rolling about in a carriage with silk cushions, and meeting new faces, new expressions of curiosity and sympathy, assurances that one was watched and followed. Mingled with this was a bright consciousness, sufficient for the moment, that one was moreover to dine at Delmonico’s and go to the German opera. There was enough of the epicurean in Verena’s composition to make it easy for her in certain conditions to live only for the hour.
XXX I
When she returned with her companion to the establishment in Tenth Street she saw two notes lying on the table in the hall; one of which she perceived to be addressed to Miss Chancellor, the other to herself. The hand was different, but she recognised both. Olive was behind her on the steps, talking to the coachman about sending another carriage for them in half an hour (they had left themselves but just time to dress); so that she simply possessed herself of her own note and ascended to her room. As she did so she felt that all the while she had known it would be there, and was conscious of a kind of treachery, an unfriendly wilfulness, in not being more prepared for it. If she could roll about New York the whole afternoon and forget that there might be difficulties ahead, that didn’t alter the fact that there were difficulties, and that they might even become considerable—might not be settled by her simply going back to Boston. Half an hour later, as she drove up the Fifth Avenue with Olive (there seemed to be so much crowded into that one day), smoothing her light gloves, wishing her fan were a little nicer, and proving by the answering, familiar brightness with which she looked out on the lamp-lighted streets that, whatever theory might be entertained as to the genesis of her talent and her personal nature, the blood of the lecture-going, night-walking Tarrants did distinctly flow in her veins; as the pair proceeded, I say, to the celebrated restaurant, at the door of which Mr. Burrage had promised to be in vigilant expectancy of their carriage, Verena found a sufficiently gay and natural tone of voice for remarking to her friend that Mr. Ransom had called upon her while they were out, and had left a note in which there were many compliments for Miss Chancellor.
“That’s wholly your own affair, my dear,” Olive replied, with a melancholy sigh, gazing down the vista of Fourteenth Street (which they happened just then to be traversing, with much agitation), towards the queer barrier of the elevated railway.
It was nothing new to Verena that if the great striving of Olive’s life was for justice she yet sometimes failed to arrive at it in particular cases; and she reflected that it was rather late for her to say, like that, that Basil Ransom’s letters were only his correspondent’s business. Had not his kinswoman quite made the subject her own during their drive that afternoon? Verena determined now that her companion should hear all there was to be heard about the letter; asking herself whether, if she told her at present more than she cared to know, it wouldn’t make up for her hitherto having told her less. “He brought it with him, written, in case I should be out. He wants to see me tomorrow—he says he has ever so much to say to me. He proposes an hour—says he hopes it won’t be inconvenient for me to see him about eleven in the morning; thinks I may have no other engagement so early as that. Of course our return to Boston settles it,” Verena added, with serenity.
Miss Chancellor said nothing for a moment; then she replied, “Yes, unless you invite him to come on with you in the train.”
“Why, Olive, how bitter you are!” Verena exclaimed, in genuine surprise.
Olive could not justify her bitterness by saying that her companion had spoken as if she were disappointed, because Verena had not. So she simply remarked, “I don’t see what he can have to say to you—that would be worth your hearing.”
“Well, of course, it’s the other side. He has got it on the brain!” said Verena, with a laugh which seemed to relegate the whole matter to the category of the unimportant.
“If we should stay, would you see him—at eleven o’clock?” Olive inquired.
“Why do you ask that—when I have given it up?”
“Do you consider it such a tremendous sacrifice?”
“No,” said Verena good-naturedly; “but I confess I am curious.”
“Curious—how do you mean?”
“Well, to hear the other side.”
“Oh heaven!” Olive Chancellor murmured, turning her face upon her.
“You must remember I have never heard it.” And Verena smiled into her friend’s wan gaze.
“Do you want to hear all the infamy that is in the world?”
“No, it isn’t that; but the more he should talk the better chance he would give me. I guess I can meet him.”
“Life is too short. Leave him as he is.?
??
“Well,” Verena went on, “there are many I haven’t cared to move at all, whom I might have been more interested in than in him. But to make him give in just at two or three points—that I should like better than anything I have done.”
“You have no business to enter upon a contest that isn’t equal; and it wouldn’t be, with Mr. Ransom.”
“The inequality would be that I have right on my side.”
“What is that—for a man? For what was their brutality given them, but to make that up?”
“I don’t think he’s brutal; I should like to see,” said Verena gaily.
Olive’s eyes lingered a little on her own; then they turned away, vaguely, blindly, out of the carriage-window, and Verena made the reflection that she looked strangely little like a person who was going to dine at Delmonico’s. How terribly she worried about everything, and how tragical was her nature; how anxious, suspicious, exposed to subtle influences! In their long intimacy Verena had come to revere most of her friend’s peculiarities; they were a proof of her depth and devotion, and were so bound up with what was noble in her that she was rarely provoked to criticise them separately. But at present, suddenly, Olive’s earnestness began to appear as inharmonious with the scheme of the universe as if it had been a broken saw; and she was positively glad she had not told her about Basil Ransom’s appearance in Monadnoc Place. If she worried so about what she knew, how much would she not have worried about the rest! Verena had by this time made up her mind that her acquaintance with Mr. Ransom was the most episodical, most superficial, most unimportant of all possible relations.
Olive Chancellor watched Henry Burrage very closely that evening; she had a special reason for doing so, and her entertainment, during the successive hours, was derived much less from the delicate little feast over which this insinuating proselyte presided, in the brilliant public room of the establishment, where French waiters flitted about on deep carpets and parties at neighbouring tables excited curiosity and conjecture, or even from the magnificent music of “Lohengrin,”1 than from a secret process of comparison and verification, which shall presently be explained to the reader. As some discredit has possibly been thrown upon her impartiality it is a pleasure to be able to say that on her return from the opera she took a step dictated by an earnest consideration of justice—of the promptness with which Verena had told her of the note left by Basil Ransom in the afternoon. She drew Verena into her room with her. The girl, on the way back to Tenth Street, had spoken only of Wagner’s music, of the singers, the orchestra, the immensity of the house, her tremendous pleasure. Olive could see how fond she might become of New York, where that kind of pleasure was so much more in the air.