The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue Incident. Saltus Edgar

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СКАЧАТЬ retainer will never reach me. You would not hurt a fly."

      "Wouldn't I?" And Annandale assumed an expression of great ferocity. "You don't know me. I can imagine circumstances in which I could wade in gore. By the way, I have ordered a revolver."

      "What!"

      "Yes, a burglar got in my place the night before last and woke me up. If he comes back and wakes me up again I'll blow his head off."

      Sylvia looked at him much as she might at a boastful child. "Yes, yes, Arthur, but please don't take so much of that whisky."

      "I think I will have a drop of it, if I may," said Loftus, who meanwhile had been talking to Fanny. In a moment he turned to her anew.

      "Where are you going this summer?"

      "To Narragansett. It is cool and cheap. Why don't you come?"

      "It is such a beastly hole."

      "Well, perhaps. But do you think you would think so if I were there?"

      "That would rather depend on how you treated me."

      "You mean, don't you, that it would rather depend on how I let you treat me?" Fanny, as she spoke, looked Loftus in the eyes and made a face at him.

      That face, Loftus, after a momentary interlude with knife and fork, tried to mimic. "If a chap gave you the chance you would drive him to the devil."

      On Fanny's lips a smile bubbled. She shook her pretty head. "No, not half so far. Not even so far as the other end of Fifth avenue, where I saw you trying to scrape acquaintance with that girl. Apropos. You might tell me. How are matters progressing? Has the castle capitulated?"

      "I haven't an idea what you are talking about."

      "That's right. Assume a virtue though you have it not. It's a good plan."

      "It does not appear to be yours."

      "Appearances may be deceptive."

      "And even may not be."

      Sylvia interrupted them. "What are you two quarreling about?"

      "Mr. Loftus does not like my hat. Don't you like it, Mr. Orr?"

      "I like everything about you, everything, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet."

      "There!" exclaimed Fanny. "That is the way I like to have a man talk."

      "It is dreadfully difficult," Loftus threw in.

      "You seem to find it so," Fanny threw back.

      Sylvia raised a finger. "Mr. Loftus, if you do not stop quarreling with Fanny I will make you come and sit by me."

      "If I am to look upon that as a punishment, Miss Waldron," Loftus with negligent gallantry replied, "what would you have me regard as a reward?"

      "Arthur! Arthur!" Fanny cried. "Did you hear that? This man is making up to Sylvia."

      But Annandale did not seem in the least alarmed. He was looking about for Ferdinand. "Here," he began, when at last the waiter appeared. "You neglect us shamefully. We want some more moselle and more Scotch."

      "None for me," said Loftus rising. "I have an appointment."

      "Appointment," Fanny announced, "is very good English for rendezvous."

      "And taisez-vous, mademoiselle, is very good French for I wish it were with yourself."

      "I have not a doubt of it."

      "Fanny!" Sylvia objected. "You are impossible."

      "Yes," Fanny indolently replied. "Yet then, to be impossible and seem the reverse is the proper caper for a debutante. Heigho! I wish girls smoked here. I would give a little of my small change for a cigarette. Are you really off, Royal. Well, my love to the lady."

       CHAPTER III

      THE EX-FIRST LADY

      LOFTUS, letting himself into a hansom, sailed away. At Morris Park that afternoon there were to be races, and up the maelstrom of Fifth avenue came scudding motors, fleeting traps.

      As the hansom descended the current Loftus nodded to this acquaintance and to that, occasionally raising his hat as women smiled and bowed. Occasionally, too, he contemplated what he could of himself in the little mirror at the side of the cab. He looked triumphant and treacherous.

      Fanny, he reflected, was ideal. But exacting, ambitious even. She had a perfect mania for matrimony. There was another girl that he had in mind whom he fancied more reasonable. This other was Marie Durand.

      In just what way he had met her was never quite clear. Fanny, who had witnessed the preliminary skirmish, always believed that he had picked her up. Afterward, at the time of the trial, it was so reported. The report was false in addition to being vulgar. Marie Durand was not of that sort. There was nothing fast or flirtatious about her. But she was a human being. She had eyes. She had a heart. By nature she was sensitive. Moreover, she was but nineteen. Being human, sensitive, and not very old, having eyes to see and a heart that throbbed, she was impressionable and, to her misfortune, Loftus impressed her.

      Loftus was rather used to impressing people. He saw the girl on Fifth avenue, followed her home, learned her name – or thought he did – and sent her flowers every day until he saw her again, when he presumed to accost her. At that impertinence Marie tilted her nose and trotted on, distant, disdainful, demure.

      But not indifferent. Not oblivious either. Often she had seen him. Occasionally on a high drag behind a piebald four-in-hand. In crowded Fifth avenue, drags, with or without piebalds, are infrequent. This drag Marie had seen not merely tooling along the street but pictured in the press. With, of course, full accounts of the driver. As a consequence she knew who he was, knew that he was one of the rich young men of New York and that he moved and had his being in the upper circles.

      Marie's own sphere of life was obscure. She lived with her father in Gay street. Her father, a tailor by trade, was a naturalized Frenchman, a gaunt Gaul, who had a sallow face, walked with a stoop, complained of his heart and adored his daughter. To him she was a pearl, a perle, rather. For though he had been long in New York and spoke English well, he had never quite acquired the accent.

      Marie spoke English without any accent whatever. She also spoke French, sang in it, too, sang in Italian and, with a view to the lyric stage, or, more exactly, with the hope of studying for it abroad, was, at the time when this drama begins, taking lessons in what is termed the bel canto.

      But her aspirations, in so far as they concerned Europe, her father was unable to gratify. He could not let her go alone and he could not afford to throw up what he called his beesness. Here, then, was this girl, pretty as a picture, with a lovely contralto voice, with aspirations entirely worldly, with wings, you might say, cooped in Gay street, spiritually and mentally starved there.

      Gay street lies back of Jefferson Market. In shape a crescent, it curves briefly in a lost and dismal way through a region which, though but a block or two from Fifth avenue, is almost squalid. At one end of its short curve is a saloon, at the other an apothecary.

      It was from this apothecary that Loftus learned Marie's name – or thought he did. For inadvertently the man got things mixed as his drugs СКАЧАТЬ