The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue Incident Part 13

"And Sylvia!"

The earlier shots had not inflicted any visible damage, but this must have told.

"I shall have to write to her," f.a.n.n.y with unusual meekness replied.

"Yes, do. Do by all means. Tell her you have taken her leavings. And why? Merciful heavens, why? If you were as staid and stiff as she I could understand. But a girl like you, with your tastes, your extravagances, a girl with a national reputation for beauty, to go and accept twenty-five thousand a year is--is--sinful, that's what it is.

Your own father has that, and on it we are out at elbows. It is just about enough for you to dress on. Oh, f.a.n.n.y, f.a.n.n.y!"

Hysterically the old lady waved her hands. "Oh, f.a.n.n.y, I have so prayed that you would make a brilliant match. I have scrimped and saved that you might, and you go and take a blond beast of a pauper.

It is too cruel!"

f.a.n.n.y winced. It was cruel. But the cruelty was not hers. It was Fate's. She too had hoped for the very marriage her mother had so ardently desired. But Loftus had not cared. Occupied elsewhere he had sailed away. As well then Annandale as another.

"You see, you know," she said in a wretched effort at smoothing things over, "he is quite a hero."

But this was too much. Mrs. Price shook her head like a battle horse and fairly neighed.

"Because he saved your clothes? If it had been your life and you had said 'Thank you' it would have been ample. But your clothes! Not mine; the beast had not sense enough for that, but yours! I do hope you will give that as an excuse to Sylvia!"

CHAPTER X

A VICTIM

Sylvia had gone from Newport. She was then at Lenox. It was there the previous autumn that her interest in Annandale had begun. The interest had so deepened that she gave him her heart. Never before had she given that to anyone. Annandale had taken it and then, one night, he had so bruised it that she thought it broken. He had written that he had not meant to. His letter had been full of regrets, of protestations, of bad grammar. Such things may palliate, but they do not cure. Only time can do that.

Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge. Suddenly a whisper, a breeze that pa.s.ses, shows that it has done its work. With Sylvia time was having its will.

Furtively she had found herself wondering, as Annandale had wondered, how it should fare with her, and how with him, could the past be effaced and the old days renewed. But those days were gone, she decided. Though into that decision a doubt would creep, not indeed concerning the departure, but concerning her att.i.tude and the justice of it.

Annandale had sinned. He had sinned wantonly, grievously. From an atmosphere of vice--an atmosphere from which, under pain of her displeasure, she had distinctly warned him--he had staggered to her, its pollution about him, reeking with drink, talking abundantly about nothing imaginable, and at her just remonstrance had become instantly irritable, refusing almost to leave the house.

So had his condition and the spectacle of it shocked her that, for awhile, memory of him and of it was repellent. In her own eyes she felt degraded. That men drank, she knew. But in her sphere of life they drank either moderately or else in haunts invisible to her. And it was precisely from such a haunt he had come, a shameless haunt, one that sullied her even to know of.

Yes, he had sinned, wantonly, grievously, almost unforgivably. Almost, she reflected, but perhaps not quite. In his letter of protest and regret he had told her that he remembered nothing, nothing whatever, absolutely nothing at all, save one vague, brief vision of herself.

The rest, the beginning, the end, the inter-s.p.a.ces were, he a.s.sured her, blank. At first she had thought that sheer nonsense. But, later, the earnest way in which it was put impressed her. Then on the heels of that communication there had followed one from Orr, indorsing what Annandale said, declaring that it was all quite possible, adding that, in certain temperaments, memory when influenced by toxics will play tricks stranger than the average mind can comfortably credit.

These letters she had not answered. Logically she could not admit the validity of the statements which they contained. But the heart has logic which logic does not know. Then, too, is there not that within us that prompts us to believe less what we should than what we wish?

Sylvia's reason, guided by her inexperience, refused at first to accept the idea that any sane man could act as Annandale had and afterward be oblivious of it. That remorse there should be was only natural, but that there should be no memory of anything whatever seemed to her absurd.

But there was her cousin's a.s.surance to the contrary. Then imperceptibly, little by little, that a.s.surance, filtering through the saddened girl, took possession of her, insisting on recognition, telling her that, though her lover had erred, yet, in erring, he was more to be pitied than condemned. Dominated by drink, which, Orr added, he had promised to renounce, he had gone to that haunt and, contaminated there, knew not what he did. But she, instead of realizing that, she who was to have been his in sickness and health, for better, for worse, she, in her pride, had dismissed him.

He had erred, Sylvia told herself, deeply, grievously, but so, too, had she. She had condemned when she should have condoned; she had spurned him when it was her solicitude that he needed.

At the sure cognition of that, it was as though from her eyes a bandage had fallen. Then at once in her tender conscience she beheld herself, detestable in pride, a girl without a heart, one of whom he, no doubt, was well rid of.

It was during the process of this awakening that the conflagration at Narragansett Pier occurred. Sylvia read of it. She read, too, of certain prowesses which the dismissed had displayed.

The account, very inexact as such accounts always are, was also highly colored, spun out for s.p.a.ce purposes for much more than the s.p.a.ce was worth. Had you not known better you would have taken it for granted that the heroism of Annandale was on a par with that of Leonidas at Thermopylae and even of Roosevelt at San Juan. It quite stirred you.

It stirred Sylvia. The paper fell from her. But the past returned. At once it seemed to her that it might be mended and the old days renewed. The hero of whom the paper told she knew now that she had wholly loved, and she knew, too, that wholly she still loved him.

Time had done its work ridiculously, inopportunely, yet effectively at last. But the gates of life are double. On one stands written "Too Soon." On the other "Too Late." It is unfortunate to get wedged between them. Of that fact Sylvia became rapidly aware. On the morrow she began a letter to Annandale. Before it was finished there came one from f.a.n.n.y, announcing that she was to be Annandale's wife.

In certain crises of the emotions there is a certain sense of unreality. Even as Sylvia read what f.a.n.n.y said she could not grasp it.

When presently she did, she could not believe it. But there it was.

Then immediately she experienced the agony which comes when we battle in dream with the intangible and the dread, when we know it is dream and yet feel it is death.

"It is all my fault," she cried. She found but that. At the moment she was in that condition which precedes the great commotion of tears, when the strangulation of agony is subsiding and contracted nerves distend. But the tears did not come. The pain was infinite. There was a weight which she felt not without but within, a weight so heavy that she thought she could not bear it. It racked her. Only her mind was active. "It is my fault," she repeated. Then she added, "And my cross."

From a crisis such as this, in a nature such as hers, the soul issues as from an orgy. It has supped on sorrow. It is fed. It ceases to look back. It looks forward, marveling indeed that it should look at all, yet looking. Life's burdens are more bearable than the despairful think. Until the eyes are closed and the heart no longer beats, in some way, somehow, they can be carried.

Sylvia took up her cross. It was leaden. But in the effort she was aided. Pride helped her. The a.s.sistance of pride may be poor, yet is it not better than none? To Sylvia it was useful. It enabled her to answer f.a.n.n.y's letter.

"You have my congratulations, f.a.n.n.y dear," she wrote, "all of them, my best and warmest, and so has Arthur too. Please say so to him and tell him that, in marrying by dearest friend, he and I must be dear friends also."

Then the tears did come, swiftly, like the ripple of the rain. On the table where she sat she put her head down and sobbed, paroxysmally, as sobs a child.

THE GENERAL SESSIONS

CHAPTER I

DISENCHANTMENT

"_Il segreto_----"

Marie's voice rang out, clear and fluid, scattering notes through the room, filling it with them, charging the air with melody, then, like a chorus entering a crypt, it sank in diminis.h.i.+ng accords and, sinking, died slowly away.

The _segreto_ indeed! The secret of happiness was remoter now than when, under the teaching of the ex-first lady, she had first attacked the score. But her voice had improved. It was fuller, more resonant and ample.

Marie, too, had improved. In face and figure beauty had developed. Her manner was securer, her eyes more grave, her smile less frequent. The bud had blossomed.

In the process a year had gone. From high Norman downs she had watched the summer pa.s.s. Autumn had met her in the Elysian Fields. There the wolfish winter had approached. At the first bite there had been a flight to Havre, the return to New York. Now it was spring again.

Through the open windows of the Arundel came the city's hum and with it the subtleties and enticements of May.

A year had gone. But there are years that count double. There are others so vast that in them you may have evolved a world, seen it glow and subside. The solitudes of s.p.a.ce appal. The solitudes of the heart may be as endless as they. In those where Marie loitered a world had had its birth and subsidence, a world with gem-like hopes for stars, a world lighted by a sun so eager that its rays had made her blind.

There had been aspirations, gorgeous and tangental as comets are.

There had been the colorless ether of which dreams are made. For cosmic matter there was love. A year had gone. In it, these wonders had formed and fled.

Marie got from the piano. It had no secret to tell. But there was another which the year had revealed, a secret which, at first opaque and obscure, little by little had taken shape and changed from an impossibility into a monstrous fact. Marie had begun by disavowing it.

She had disowned it, would have none of it. But disavowals cease. In certain conditions we get used to monsters. The soul makes itself at home with what it must. The monster to which Marie was accustoming herself was the knowledge that her lover had lied.

In departing with him from the den of the ex-first lady it was not merely with faith and trust, but with absolute certainty that marriage, if delayed, was only postponed; that a week, a month at the furthest, would see her his wife.