



Produced by Fulvia Hughes, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)







Transcriber's Note:
  Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
  The upside-down asterisms are denoted by *.*
  The list of the corrected items is at the end of this e-book.




=Edgar Fawcett's Novels.=

_Mr. Fawcett is a novelist who does a service that greatly needs to be
done,--a novelist who writes of the life with which he is closely
acquainted, and who manfully emphasizes his respect for his native land,
and his contempt for the weakness and affectation of those who are
ashamed of their country._--New York Evening Post.


_A GENTLEMAN OF LEISURE._

_Ninth Edition._ "Little Classic" style. 18mo, $1.00.

Take it as a whole, we know no English novel of the last few years fit
to be compared with it in its own line for simplicity, truth, and
rational interest.--_London Times._

It is the most truly American novel that has been given to the world in
some time, for the reason that it teaches Americans--or, at all events,
should teach them--what puny and puerile beings they become when they
attempt to decry their own country and ape the idiosyncrasies of
another.--_New York Express._

An amazingly clever book, the story well managed in the telling, the
dialogue bright and sparkling, and the humor unforced and
genuine.--_Boston Transcript._

It is a most charming story of American life and character, with a rare
dash of humor in it, and a good deal of vigorous satire.--_Quebec
Chronicle._


_A HOPELESS CASE._

_Fourth Edition._ "Little Classic" style. 18mo, $1.25.

"A Hopeless Case" contains much that goes to make up a novel of the best
order--wit, sarcasm, pathos, and dramatic power--with its sentences
clearly wrought out and daintily finished. It is a book which ought to
have a great success.--_Cincinnati Commercial._

"A Hopeless Case" will, we are sure, meet with a very enthusiastic
reception from all who can appreciate fiction of a high order. The
picture of New York society, as revealed in its pages, is remarkably
graphic and true to life.... A thoroughly delightful novel--keen, witty,
and eminently American. It will give the author a high rank as a writer
of fiction.--_Boston Traveller._

As a sprightly and interesting comedy this book will find hosts of
interested readers. It has its lessons of value in the striking
contrasts it furnishes of the different styles of life found in our
great cities.--_New England Journal of Education._

Its brilliant and faithful pictures of New York society and its charming
heroine can hardly fail to make it very popular.--_Salem Gazette._


_AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN._

12mo, cloth, $1.50.

*.* _For sale by Booksellers. Sent, by mail, post-paid, on receipt of
price by the Publishers_,

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., BOSTON, MASS.




    AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN

    _A Novel_

    BY

    EDGAR FAWCETT

    AUTHOR OF "A GENTLEMAN OF LEISURE," "A HOPELESS
    CASE," ETC.

    [Illustration]

    BOSTON
    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
    New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
    =The Riverside Press, Cambridge=
    1884




    Copyright, 1888,
    BY EDGAR FAWCETT.

    _All rights reserved._




    _The Riverside Press, Cambridge:_
    Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.




AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN.

I.


If any spot on the globe can be found where even Spring has lost the
sweet trick of making herself charming, a cynic in search of an
opportunity for some such morose discovery might thank his baleful stars
were chance to drift him upon Greenpoint. Whoever named the place in
past days must have done so with a double satire; for Greenpoint is not
a point, nor is it ever green. Years ago it began by being the sluggish
suburb of a thriftier and smarter suburb, Brooklyn. By degrees the
latter broadened into a huge city, and soon its neighbor village
stretched out to it arms of straggling huts and swampy river-line, in
doleful welcome. To-day the affiliation is complete. Man has said let it
all be Brooklyn, and it is all Brooklyn. But the sovereign dreariness of
Greenpoint, like an unpropitiated god, still remains. Its melancholy,
its ugliness, its torpor, its neglect, all preserve an unimpaired
novelty. It is very near New York, and yet in atmosphere, suggestion,
vitality, it is leagues away. Our noble city, with its magnificent
maritime approaches, its mast-thronged docks, its lordly encircling
rivers, its majesty of traffic, its gallant avenues of edifices, its
loud assertion of life, and its fine promise of riper culture, fades
into a dim memory when you have touched, after only a brief voyage, upon
this forlorn opposite shore.

No Charon rows you across, though your short trip has too often the most
funereal associations. You take passage in a squat little steamboat at
either of two eastern ferries, and are lucky if a hearse with its
satellite coaches should fail to embark in your company; for, curiously,
the one enlivening fact associable with Greenpoint is its close nearness
to a famed Roman Catholic cemetery. It is doubtful if the unkempt child
wading in the muddy gutter ever turns his frowzy head when these dismal
retinues stream past him. They are always streaming past him; they are
as much a part of this lazy environ as the big, ghostly geese that
saunter across its ill-tended cobblestones, the dirty goats that nibble
at the placards on its many dingy fences, or the dull-faced Germans that
plod its semi-paven streets. Death, that is always so bitter a
commonplace, has here become a glaring triteness. Watched, along the
main thoroughfare, from porches of liquor-shops and windows of
tenement-houses, death has perhaps gained a sombre popularity with not a
few shabby gazers. It rides in state, at a dignified pace; it has
followers, too, riding deferentially behind it. Sometimes it has martial
music, and the pomp of military escort. Life seldom has any of this, in
Greenpoint. It cannot ride, or rarely. It must walk, and strain to keep
its strength even for that. One part of it drudges with the needle,
fumes over the smoky stove, sighs at the unappeasable baby; another part
takes by dawn the little dwarfish ferry-boat, and hies to the great
metropolis across the river, returning jaded from labor by nightfall.
No wonder, here, if death should seem to possess not merely a mournful
importance but a gloomy advantage as well, or if for these toilful
townsfolk philosophy had reversed itself, and instead of the paths of
glory leading to the grave, it should look as if the grave were forever
leading to some sort of peculiar and comfortable glory.

But Greenpoint, like a hardened conscience, still has her repentant
surprises. She is not quite a thing of sloth and penury. True, the broad
street that leads from steamboat to cemetery is lined with squalid
homes, and the mourners who are so incessantly borne along to Calvary
must see little else than beer-sellers standing slippered and coatless
beside their doorways, or thin, pinched women haggling with the venders
of sickly groceries. But elsewhere one may find by-streets lined with
low wooden dwellings that hint of neatness and suggest a better grade of
living. A yellowish drab prevails as the hue of these houses; they seem
all to partake of one period, like certain homogeneous fossils. But they
do not breathe of antiquity; they are fanciful with trellised piazzas
and other modern embellishments of carpentry; sometimes they possess
miniature Corinthian pillars, faded by the trickle of rain between their
tawny flutings, as if stirred with the dumb desire to be white and
classic. Scant gardens front them, edged with a few yards of ornamental
fence. Their high basement windows stare at you from a foundation of
brick. They are very prosaic, chiefly from their lame effort to be
picturesque; and when you look down toward the river, expecting to feel
refreshed by its gleam, you are disheartened at the way in which
lumber-yards and sloop-wharves have quite shut any glimpse of it from
your eyes.

In one of these two-storied wooden houses, not many years ago, dwelt a
family of three people,--a Mr. Francis Twining, his wife, and their only
child, a girl, named Claire. Mr. Twining was an Englishman by birth;
many years had passed since he first landed on these shores. He had come
here nearly penniless, but with proud hopes. He was then only
three-and-twenty. He had sprung from a good country family, had been
fitted at Eton for Oxford, and had seen one year at the famed
University. Then sharp financial disaster had overtaken his father,
whose death soon followed. Francis was a younger son, but even to the
heir had fallen a shattered patrimony, and to himself merely a slender
legacy. With this, confident and undaunted as though it were the purse
of Fortunio, Francis had taken voyage for New York. At first he had
shown a really splendid energy. Slim of figure, with a pale, womanish
face lit by large, soft blue eyes, he gave slight physical sign of force
or even will. But though possessed of both, he proved one of those
ill-fated beings whom failure never tires of rebuffing. His mental
ability was unquestioned; he shrank with sensitive disgust from all
vice; he had plenty of ambition, and the instinct of solid industry.
Yet, as years passed on, both secured him but meagre recompense for
struggle. He had begun his career with a clerkship; now, at fifty-three,
he was a clerk still. All his hope had fled; he had undergone bitter
heart-burnings; he had striven to solve the problem of his own defeat.
Meanwhile its explanation was not difficult. He had a boyish trust in
his fellow-creatures that no amount of stern experience seemed to
weaken. Chicanery had made him its sport. Five separate times he had
been swindled mercilessly by men in whom he had reposed implicit faith.
There had lain his rock of ruin: he was always reposing implicit faith
in everybody. His life had been one long pathos of over-credulity. He
could think, reason, reflect, analyze, but he was incapable of doubting.
A fool could have deceived him, and naturally, on repeated occasions,
knaves had not found it difficult. At fifty-three his last hard-earned
savings had been wormed from him by the last plausible scamp. And now he
had accepted himself as the favorite of misfortune; over the glow of his
spirit disappointment had cast its dulling spell, like the deep film of
ash that sheathes a spent ember. He had now one aim--to keep his wife
and child from indigence while he lived, and one despair--that he could
not keep them from indigence after he was dead. But his really lovely
optimism still remained. He had been essentially amiable and complaisant
in all intercourse with his kind, and this quality had not lost a ray of
its fine former lustre. With ample excuse for the worst cynic feeling,
he continued a gentle yet unconscious philanthropist. There was
something piteously sweet in the obstinacy with which he still saw only
the bright side of humanity. His delicate person had grown more slim;
his rusty clothes hung about him with a mournful looseness; his oval
face, worn by worriment, had taken keener lines; but his large blue eyes
still kept their liquid sparkle, and kindled in prompt unison with his
alert smile. The flaxen growth that had always fringed his lips and chin
with cloudy lightness, had now become of a frosty gray. Seen passingly,
no one would have called him, as the current phrase goes, a gentleman.
His wearied mien forbade the suggestion of leisure, while his broadcloth
spoke of long wear and speedy purchase. But a close gaze might have
caught the unperished refinement that still clung to him with sad
persistence, and was evident in such minor effects of personal detail as
a glimpse of cleanly linen about throat and wrist, a cheap yet careful
lustre of the often jaded boot, a culture and purity of the hand, or
even a choice nicety of the finger-nail.

He had married after reaching these shores, and his marriage had proved
another instance of misplaced confidence. His wife had been handsome
when a young woman, and she had become Mrs. Twining at about the age of
five-and-twenty. She was personally quite the opposite of her
bridegroom; she was an inch taller than he, and had an aquiline face,
splendid with a pair of very black eyes that she had rolled and flashed
at the other sex since early girlhood. She had rolled and flashed them
at her present husband, and so conquered him. She was a good inch taller
than he, and lapse of time had not diminished the difference since their
union. She had been extremely vulgar as Miss Jane Wray, when Twining had
married her, and she was extremely vulgar still. She had first met him
in a boarding-house in East Broadway, where Twining had secured a room
on his arrival from England. At this period East Broadway wore only a
waning grace of gentility; some few conservative nabobs still lingered
there, obstinately defying plebeian inroads. Its roomy brick mansions,
with their arched, antique doorways devoid of any vestibule; their
prim-railed stoops that guessed not of ornate balusters; and their
many-paned, thin-sashed windows where plate-glass had never glittered,
were already invaded by inmates whose Teuton names and convex noses
prophesied the social decline that must soon grasp this once select
purlieu. Jane Wray was neither German nor Hebrew; she was American in
the least pleasant sense of that word, both as regarded parentage and
breeding. She was an orphan, and the recipient of surly charity from
unprosperous relatives. She wanted very greatly to marry, and Twining
had seemed to her a golden chance. There was much about her from which
he shrank; but she contrived to rouse his pity, and then to lure from
him a promise which he would have despised himself not to keep.

The succeeding years had brought bitter mutual disappointments. Mrs.
Twining had believed firmly in her husband's powers to sound the horn of
luck and slay the giant of adversity. But he had done neither, and it
now looked as if his bones were one day to bleach along the roadway to
success. She became an austere grumbler, forever pricking her
sweet-tempered lord with a tireless little bodkin of reproach. Her
vulgarities had sharpened; her wit, always cruel and acute, had tipped
itself with a harsher venom and fledged itself with a swifter feather;
her bright, coarse beauty had dimmed and soured; she was at present a
gaunt, elderly female, with square shoulders and hard, dark eyes, who
flung sarcasms broadcast with a baleful liberality, and seemed forever
standing toward her own destiny in the attitude of a person who has some
large unsettled claim against a nefarious government.

Claire Twining, the one child who had been born of this ill-assorted
marriage, was now nineteen years old. She bore a striking likeness to
her father; she possessed his blue eyes, a trifle darker in shade, his
broad white forehead, his sloping delicacy of visage, and his erect
though slender frame. From him, too, had come the sunny quality of her
smile, the gold tints in her chestnut hair, the fine symmetry of hands
and feet. Rather from association than heredity she had caught his
kindly warmth of manner; but in Claire the cordial impulse was far less
spontaneous; she had her black list of dislikes, and she took people on
trust with wary prudence. Here spoke her mother's share in the girl's
being, as it spoke also in a certain distinct chiseling of every
feature, that suggested a softened memento of Miss Jane Wray's girlish
countenance, though Claire's coloring no more resembled her mother's of
past time than wild-rose is like peony, or pastel like chromo. But there
was one more maternal imprint set deep within this girl's nature, not to
be thinned or marred by any stress of events, and productive of a trait
whose development for good or ill is the chief cause that her life has
here been chronicled. The birthright was a perilous one; it was a
heritage of discontent; its tendency was perpetual longings for better
environment, for ampler share in the world's good gifts, for higher
place in its esteem and stronger claim to its heed. But what in her
mother had been ambition almost as crudely eager as a boorish
elbow-thrust, was in Claire more decorous and interesting, like the push
of a fragile yet determined hand through a sullen crowd. In both cases
the dissatisfaction was something that is peculiar to the woman of our
land and time--a desire not to try and adorn the sphere in which she is
born, but to try and reach a new sphere held as more suited for her own
adornment. Yet Claire's restless yearning lacked the homely grossness of
her mother's; it reflected a finer flash; it was not all cut from one
piece; it had its subtlety, its enthusiasm, even its justification. It
was not a mere stubborn hunger for advancement; it was a wish to gain
advancement by the passport of proper worthiness. She did not want the
air to lift her away from hated surroundings, but she wanted wings that
would turn the air her willing ally. It was what her father had made her
that touched what her mother had made her with a truly poetic
tenderness. By only a little prouder curve of the neck and a little
happier fullness of the plume, we part the statuesque swan from
considerably more commonplace kindred. Something like this delightful
benison of difference had fallen upon Claire.




II.


Circumstance, too, had fed the potency of this difference. Claire had
not been reared like her mother. When she was nine years old her parents
were living in a tiny brick house near the East River, among New York
suburbs. But Claire had been sent to a small school near by, kept by a
dim, worn lady, with an opulent past and a most precarious present. She
had studied for three years under this lady's capable care, and had lost
nothing by the opportunity. Her swift, apt mind had delighted her
instructress, whose name was Mrs. Carmichael. Claire was remarkably
receptive; she had acquired without seeming effort. Mrs. Carmichael was
one of the many ladies who attempt the education of youth without either
system or equipment for so serious a task. Her slight body, doubtless
attenuated by recurring memories of a cherished past, would sometimes
invisibly quake before Claire's precocious questionings. She knew all
that she knew superficially, and she soon became fearful lest Claire
should pierce, by a sort of adroit ignorance, her veneer of academic
sham. She had a narrow little peaked face, of a prevailing pink hue, as
though it were being always bathed in some kind of sunset light, like
the rosy afterglow of her own perished respectability. Her nervous,
alert head was set on a pair of sloping shoulders, and she wore its
sparse tresses shaped into roulades and bandeaus which had an amateurish
look, and seemed to imitate the deft handiwork of some long-departed
tirewoman. She carried her small frame with erect importance. She was
always referring to vanished friendships with this or that notability,
but time and place were so ignored in these volunteered reminiscences as
to make her allusions acquire a tender mythic grandeur. Claire had
watched well her teacher's real and native elegance, and she had set
this down as a solid fact. Perhaps the child had probed her many
harmless falsities with equal skill. As for Mrs. Carmichael, she would
sometimes pat her pupil on the cheek and praise her in no weak terms. "I
wish that I had only known you a long time ago, my little lady," she
would say, in her serene treble voice. "I would have brought you up as
my own dear child, for I never had a child of my own. I would have given
you a place in the world to be proud of, and have watched with interest
the growth of your fine mental abilities, surrounded by those poor lost
friends of mine who would have delighted in so clever a girl as you
are."

"When you speak of your friends as lost, Mrs. Carmichael," Claire had
once replied, "do you mean that they are all dead now?"

At this question the lady slowly shook her head, with just enough
emphasis not to imperil the modish architecture of her locks.

"Some of them are dead, my dear," she murmured, with the least droop of
each pink eyelid, "but the rest are much too grand for me at present.
They have quite forgotten me." Here Mrs. Carmichael gave a quick,
fluttered cough, and then put the tips of her close-pressed fingers to
the edges of her close-pressed lips.

Claire privately thought them very churlish friends to have forgotten
anybody so high-bred and winsome as Mrs. Carmichael. And she publicly
expressed this thought at supper the same evening, while she sat with
her parents in a small lower room opening directly off the kitchen. A
weary maid, whose face flamed from the meal she had just cooked, was
patiently serving it. Mrs. Twining, who had lent no light hand toward
the Monday's washing, was in the act of distributing a somewhat meagre
beefsteak, which fate and an incompetent range had conspired to cover on
both sides with a layer of thick, sooty black. Mr. Twining was waiting
to get a piece of the beefsteak; he did not yet know of its disastrous
condition, for a large set of pewter casters reared its uncouth pyramid
between himself and the maltreated viand; but although such calamities
of cookery were not rare to his board, he was putting confidence, as
usual, in the favors of fortune, and preparing himself blandly for a
fresh little stroke of chagrin.

Outside it was midwinter dusk, and a bleak wind was blowing from
the ice-choked river, pale and dull under the sharp stars.
One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street was in those years a much wilder spot
than now; its buildings, like its flag-stones, were capricious
incidents; its boon of the elevated railroad was yet undreamed of by
capitalists; you rode to it in languid horse-cars from the remote
centres of commerce, upward past parapets of virgin rock where perched
the hut of the squatter, or wastes of houseless highway where even the
aspiring tavern had not dared to pioneer. Mr. Twining had just ridden
hither by this laggard means, and he was tired and hungry; he wanted his
supper, a little valued chat with his beloved Claire, and a caress or
two from the child as well. After these he wanted a few hours of rest
before to-morrow re-dawned, with its humdrum austerities. One other
thing he desired, and this was a blessing more often desired than
attained. He had the wish for a peaceful domestic interval, as regarded
his wife's deportment, between home-coming and departure.

But to-night it had been otherwise decreed. Mrs. Twining's faint spark
of innate warmth was never roused by the contact of suds. Monday was her
day of wrath; you might almost have fancied that she had used a bit of
her superfluous soap in vainly trying to rub the rust from her already
tarnished hopes.

The small room where the trio sat was void of any real cheer. A pygmy
stove, at one side of it, stood fuel-choked and nearly florid in hue.
From this a strong volume of heat engulfed Mrs. Twining in its
oppressive spell, but lost vigor before it reached her husband or
Claire, and left the corners of the apartment so frigid that a gaunt
sofa, off where the light of the big oil-lamp could only vaguely touch
it, took upon its slippery hair-cloth surface the easy semblance of ice.
Two windows, not fashioned to thwart the unwonted bitterness of the
weather, were draped with nothing more resistant than a pair of canvas
shades, gorgeously pictorial in the full light of day, when seen by the
passer who seldom passed. These shades were of similar designs; in
justice to Mrs. Twining it must be told that they had been rented with
the house. On each a plumed gentleman in a gondola held fond converse
with a disheveled lady in a balcony. The conception was no less
Venetian in meaning than vicious in execution; but to-night, for any
observant wayfarer, such presentments of sunny Italy, while viewed
between blotches of wan frost that crusted the intervening panes, must
have appeared doubly counterfeit. Still, the chief discomfort of the
chamber, just at present, was a layer of brooding cold that lay along
its floor, doggedly inexterminable, and the sole approach to regularity
of temperature that its four walls contained.

It had made Claire gather up her feet toward the top rung of her chair,
and shiver once or twice, but it had not chilled the pretty gayety of
her childish talk, all of which had thus far been addressed to her
father.

"And so you like Mrs. Carmichael, my dear?" Twining had said, in his
smooth, cheerful voice. "Well, I am glad of that."

"Oh yes, I like her," replied Claire, with a slight, wise nod of her
head, where the clear gold of youth had not yet given way to the
brown-gold of maidenhood. "But I think it strange that all her fine
friends have dropped off from her. That's what she told me to-day,
Father; truly, she did! Why don't they care for her any more? Is it
because she's poor and has to teach little dunces like me?"

Twining's feminine blue eyes scanned the rather dingy tablecloth for a
moment. "I am afraid it is," he said, in a low voice, pressing between
his fingers a bit of ill-baked bread that grew doughy at a touch.

Mrs. Twining ceased to carve the obdurate beefsteak, though still
retaining her hold on the horn-handled knife and fork. She lifted her
head so that it quite towered above the formidable group of casters, and
looked straight at her husband.

"Don't put false notions into the child, Francis," she said, each word
seeming to strike the next with a steely click. "You're always doing it.
_You_ know nothing of where that woman came from, or who she is."

Twining looked at his wife. His gaze was very mild. "I only know what
she has told me, Jane," he said.

Mrs. Twining laughed and resumed the carving. Her laugh never went with
a smile; it never had the least concern with mirth; it was nearly always
a presage of irony, as an east wind will blow news of storm.

"Oh, certainly; what she's told you! That's you, all over! Suppose she'd
told you she'd been Lady of the White House once. You wouldn't have
believed her, not you! Of course not!"

"What is a Lady of the White House?" asked Claire, appealing to her
father. She was perfectly accustomed to these satiric outbursts on her
mother's part; they belonged to the home-circle; she would have missed
them if they had ceased; it would have been like a removal of the
hair-cloth sofa, or an accident to one of the lovers on the
window-shades.

Twining disregarded this simple question, which was a rare act with him;
he usually heard and heeded whatever Claire had to say.

"Please don't speak hard things of Mrs. Carmichael," he answered his
wife. "She's really a person who has seen better days."

"Better days!" echoed Mrs. Twining. "Well, then, we ought to shake
hands. _I_ think she's just _the_ plainest humbug I ever saw, with her
continual brag about altered circumstances. But I'll take your word for
it, Francis. The next time I see her I'll tell her we're
fellow-unfortunates. We'll compare our 'better days' together, and
calc'late who's seen the most."

Twining gave a faint sigh, and looked down. Then he raised his eyes
again, and a new spark lit their mildness. Something to-night had made
him lack his old patient tolerance.

"I'm afraid Mrs. Carmichael would have much the longer list," he said.

"Oh, you think so!"

"I know so."

Mrs. Twining tossed her head. The gloss was still on her dark hair,
whose gray threads had yet to come, later, in the Greenpoint days. She
was still, as the phrase goes, a fine figure of a woman. Her black eyes
had not lost their fire, nor her form its imposing fullness. She raised
herself a little from her chair, as she now spoke, and in her voice
there was the harshness that well fitted her bristling, aggressive mien.

"Oh! you _know_ so, do you?" she said, in hostile undertone. Then her
next words were considerably louder. "But _I_ happen to know, Francis
Twining, _Es_quire, who and what _I_ was when you took me from a
comfortable home to land me up here at the end of the world, where I'm
lucky if I can get hold of yesterday's newspaper to-morrow, and cross
over to the cars without leaving a shoe behind me in the mud!"

The least flush had tinged Twining's pale cheeks. He had looked very
steadily at his wife all through this speech. And when he now spoke, his
voice made Claire start. It did not seem his.

"You were a poor girl in a third-rate boarding-house, when I married
you," he said. "And the boarding-house was kept by relatives who
disliked and wanted to be rid of you. I don't see how you have fallen
one degree lower since you became my wife. But if you think that you
have so fallen, I beg that you will not forever taunt me with idle
sneers, of which I am sick to the soul!"

Mrs. Twining rose from her chair. Her dress was of some dark-red stuff,
and as the stronger light struck its woof the wrath of