The Dear Departed
I
One by one the guests had gone, and with Trella now there was but a poet who had elevated rhyme to the dignity of a sport. His name was Villiers. In addition to rhyme and other gymnastics less violent, he cultivated paradox. At the moment, he was twisting his painted fingers, fumbling his hostess with his yellow eyes. Then, pontifically, he addressed her:
“There is but one enduring delight—certainty in love. Certainty that it exists, certainty that it is returned, certainty that it will never diminish.”
Trella looked at him so fixedly that he tacked.
“The idea suggests itself,” he hastened to add, “in connection with the Infanta of whom we were talking at dinner. Nobody seems to recognize that the one to blame for her conduct is her father. Don Carlos is a most ordinary person. He goes about talking, ‘God and my country,’ by day, wrecking households at night, as ignorant of Molière as my masseur. Evil exists only in the noise that it makes.
“ ‘Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l’offense
Et ce n’est pas pécher que pécher en silence.”
“Have you been hearing things about me?” Trella interrupted.
Villiers promptly assumed the appearance of an idiot.
“Do you believe them?” she asked.
He waved his painted fingers. “Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I have heard so many lies concerning myself that how can you expect me to believe the stories I hear of others? No,” he continued, remotely, “had Don Carlos only known enough to cram Tartuffe down the girl’s throat she might not have carried on as she has. And then, again, she might have. Bad taste is in the Bourbon blood. The Princess Isabelle let herself down thirty feet out of a window, and ran off with a Polish mucker. They were caught and married by main strength.”
Trella patted a yawn.
“Tell me of yourself,” he agilely added. “What have you been doing? Or, rather, what have you not been doing? Do you know, I should love so to put my ideas of you in a poem. For private circulation, of course. It would have to be, wouldn’t it, unless it appeared in Latin?”
But, as for all reply she smiled indifferently; the poet stood up, and, balancing himself on his heels, smiled, too.
“ ‘Our Lady of the Immaculate Conversation,’ would, I think, be a very good title for that poem. Bonsoir, belle dame.”
Raising her wrist, he brushed it with his lips. In a moment he had gone.
As he passed from the room a servant entered. On a little tray he had a telegram which he brought her. Dated London and addressed to the Countess of Cloden, Avenue Marceau, Paris, it contained these words: “Will be with you tonight.”
With a gesture, she dismissed the man, and, leaning on a mantel, stared in a mirror, stared through it into the past, stared beyond it into the future, and then at herself, at her royal beauty, at the sunburst of flesh which she was.
In all our great Northwest, her grandfather, Commodore Verelst, had been accounted the richest and hardest of men. As a lad he tracked muskrats in the Michigan marshes. As a man, he constructed and commanded a fleet of lake steamers. As a corpse, he left millions. He had one son, who took them all, took them away to New York, and married. The result of the union was Trella. The original Verelst was a German, his wife was French. There was the gold of the Rhine in the glisten of Trella’s hair. In the faint umber of her skin, in the mobility and droop of her lips there was France. When Teuton and Latin combine there can be some very fetching results. Witness the Venetian. But when to these elements is added the magic of Manhattan the result not merely fetches, it astounds. Trella developed into an astounding young person.
As a girl, she reminded you of what the Argive Helen may have been in her teens. Her mouth seemed to promise more than any mortal mouth could give. Her voice was so insinuating that it conveyed the sensation of a kiss. She had glances as she had intonations, which dispensed a charm quite incandescent. Her eyes were particularly enthralling. They were large and blue, blue as the sea and bluer. Generally, she was prudent enough to keep them half closed. When she opened them they revealed a number of things—curiosity, restlessness and that je-m’en-ficheisme which is mistaken for frankness. When she chose, she could flood them with languors. She just lacked being tall.
In the process of the production and development of these witcheries her father concluded to leave for another world. After a proper period of regret, his widow left for another world, also. But it was Europe she selected. Though a New Yorker by birth, and inordinately rich, she had never succeeded in forcing certain portals. Such things annoy a woman. Hence the migration.
The migration effected, Mrs. Verelst discovered that to be decently lodged, two domiciles are obligatory.
