“Why do you keep them waiting?” There was no caress in that note! It was
polished granite.
He looked up at her on her high seat by the extremely dilapidated negro,
and then he walked forward and took his place beside his veiled
fiancee, among the glass eyes. A hiss of sharp noise spurted from the
automobiles, horses danced, and then, smoothly, the two huge engines
were gone with their cargo of large, distorted shapes, leaving behind
them--quite as our present epoch will leave behind it--a trail of power,
of ingenuity, of ruthlessness, and a bad smell.
“Hold hard, old boy!” chuckled Beverly, to whom I communicated this
sentiment. “How do you know the stink of one generation does not become
the perfume of the next?” Beverly, when he troubled to put a thing
at all (which was seldom--for he kept his quite good brains well-nigh
perpetually turned out to grass--or rather to grass widows) always put
it well, and with a bracing vocabulary. “Hullo!” he now exclaimed, and
walked out into the middle of the roadway, where he picked up a parasol.
“Kitty will be in a jolly old stew. None of its expensive bones broken
however.” And then he hailed me by a name of our youth. “What are you
doing down here, you old sourbelly?”
“Watching you sun yourself on the fat cushions of the yellow rich.”
“Oh, shucks, old man, they’re not so yellow!”
“Charley strikes me as yellower than his own gold.”
“Charley’s not a bad little sort. Of course, he needs coaching a bit
here and there--just now, for instance, when he didn’t see that that
girl wouldn’t think of riding in the machine that had just killed her
dog. By Jove, give that girl a year in civilization and she’d do! Who
was the young fire-eater?”
“Fire-eater! He’s a lot more decent than you or I.”
“But that’s saying so little, dear boy!”
“Seriously, Beverly.”
“Oh, hang it with your ‘seriously’! Well, then, seriously, melodrama
was the correct ticket and all that in 1840, but we’ve outgrown it; it’s
devilish demode to chuck things in people’s faces.
“I’m not sorry John Mayrant did it!” I brought out his name with due
emphasis.
“All the same,” Beverly was beginning, when the automobile returned
rapidly upon us, and, guessing the cause of this, he waved the parasol.
Charley descended to get it--an unnecessary act, prompted, I suppose, by
the sudden relief of finding that it was not lost.
He made his thanks marked. “It is my sister’s,” he concluded, to me, by
way of explanation, in his slightly foreign accent. “It is not much, but
it has got some stones and things in the handle.”
We were favored with a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from
Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in a moment.
“You’ve got a Frenchman along,” I said.
“Little Gazza,” Beverly returned. “Italian; though from his morals you’d
never guess he wasn’t Parisian. Great people in Rome. Hereditary right
to do something in the presence of the Pope--or not to do it, I forget
which. Not a bit of a bad little sort, Gazza. He has just sold a lot of
old furniture--Renaissance--Lorenzo du Borgia--that sort of jolly old
truck--to Bohm, you know.”