MR. INCOUL’S MISADVENTURE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
_THE PHILOSOPHY OF DISENCHANTMENT._
Crown 8vo.
“Mr. Saltus is a scientific pessimist, as witty, as bitter, as
satirical, as interesting and as insolent to humanity in general as are
his great teachers, Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.”--_Worcester Spy._
_THE ANATOMY OF NEGATION._
Crown 8vo.
“A whole library of pessimism compressed into one small volume by a
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genius.”--_Chicago Herald._
“The work is remarkable in every way and its originality and power will
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the force with which it deals with its theme its literary merits are of
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able thinker.”--_Boston Saturday Review._
IN PREPARATION,
_CIMMERIA_.
MR. INCOUL’S
MISADVENTURE
A NOVEL
BY
EDGAR SALTUS
_And thine eye shall not pity._
_Deuteronomy, XIX. 21._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
BENJAMIN & BELL
M DCCC LXXXVII
Copyright, 1887, by EDGAR SALTUS
GILLISS BROTHERS & TURNURE
THE ART AGE PRESS
400 & 402 WEST 14TH STREET, N. Y.
TO
E. A. S.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER. PAGE
I. Mr. Incoul, 11
II. Miss Barhyte Agrees to Change her Name, 18
III. After Darkness, 30
IV. An Evening Call, 42
V. A Yellow Envelope, 51
VI. Biarritz, 68
VII. What may be Seen from a Palco, 84
VIII. An Unexpected Guest, 101
IX. Mr. Incoul Dines in Spain, 114
X. The Point of View, 127
XI. The House in the Parc Monceau, 138
XII. Mr. Incoul is Preoccupied, 146
XIII. What may be Heard in a Greenroom, 155
XIV. Karl Grows a Moustache, 163
XV. May Expostulates, 178
XVI. The Bare Bodkin, 188
XVII. Maida’s Nuptials, 202
XVIII. Mr. Incoul Goes over the Accounts, 211
CHAPTER I.
MR. INCOUL.
When Harmon Incoul’s wife died, the world in which he lived said that
he would not marry again. The bereavement which he had suffered was
known to be bitter, and it was reported that he might betake himself to
some foreign land. There was, for that matter, nothing to keep him at
home. He was childless, his tastes were too simple to make it necessary
for him to reside as he had, hitherto, in New York, and, moreover, he
was a man whose wealth was proverbial. Had he so chosen, he had little
else to do than to purchase a ticket and journey wheresoever he listed,
and the knowledge of this ability may have been to him not without
its consolations. Yet, if he attempted to map some plan, and think
which spot he would prefer, he probably reflected that whatever place
he might choose, he would, in the end, be not unlike the invalid who
turns over in his bed, and then turns back again on finding the second
position no better than the first. However fair another sky might be,
it would not make his sorrow less acute.
He was then one of those men whose age is difficult to determine.
He had married when quite young, and at the time of his widowerhood
he must have been nearly forty, but years had treated him kindly.
His hair, it is true, was inclined to scantiness, and his skin was
etiolated, but he was not stout, his teeth were sound, he held himself
well, and his eyes had not lost their lustre. At a distance, one might
have thought him in the thirties, but in conversation his speech was
so measured, and about his lips there was a compression such that the
ordinary observer fancied him older than he really was.
His position was unexceptionable. He had inherited a mile of real
estate in a populous part of New York, together with an accumulation
of securities sufficient for the pay and maintenance of a small army.
The foundations of this wealth had been laid by an ancestor, materially
increased by his grandfather, and consolidated by his father, who had
married a Miss Van Tromp, the ultimate descendant of the Dutch admiral.
His boyhood had not been happy. His father had been a lean, taciturn,
unlovable man, rigid in principles, stern in manner, and unyielding in
his adherence to the narrowest tenets of Presbyterianism. His mother
had died while he was yet in the nursery, and, in the absence of any
softening influence, the angles of his earliest nature were left in the
rough.
At school, he manifested a vindictiveness of disposition which made
him feared and disliked. One day, a comrade raised the lid of a desk
adjoining his own. The raising of the lid was abrupt and possibly
intentional. It jarred him in a task. The boy was dragged from him
senseless and bleeding. In college, he became aggrieved at a tutor.
For three weeks he had him shadowed, then, having discovered an
irregularity in his private life, he caused to be laid before the
faculty sufficient evidence to insure his removal. Meanwhile, acting
presumably on the principle that an avowed hatred is powerless, he
treated the tutor as though the grievance had been forgotten. A little
later, owing to some act of riotous insubordination, he was himself
expelled, and the expulsion seemed to have done him good. He went to
Paris and listened decorously to lectures at the Sorbonne, after which
he strayed to Heidelberg, where he sat out five semesters without
fighting a duel or making himself ill with beer. In his fourth summer
abroad, he met the young lady who became his wife. His father died, he
returned to New York, and thereafter led a model existence.
He was proud of his wife and indulgent to her every wish. During
the years that they lived together, there was no sign or rumor
of the slightest disagreement. She was of a sweet and benevolent
disposition, and though beyond a furtive coin he gave little to the
poor, he encouraged her to donate liberally to the charities which she
was solicited to assist. She was a woman with a quick sense of the
beautiful, and in spite of the simplicity of his own tastes, he had a
house on Madison avenue rebuilt and furnished in such a fashion that it
was pointed out to strangers as one of the chief palaces of the city.
She liked, moreover, to have her friends about her, and while he cared
as much for society as he did for the negro minstrels, he insisted that
she should give entertainments and fill the house with guests. In the
winter succeeding the fifteenth anniversary of their marriage, Mrs.
Incoul caught a chill, took to her bed and died, forty-eight hours
later, of pneumonia.
It was then that the world said that he would not marry again. For two
years he gave the world no reason to say otherwise, and for two years
time hung heavy on his hands. He was an excellent chess-player, and
interested in archæological pursuits, but beyond that his resources
were limited. He was too energetic to be a dilettante, he had no taste
for horseflesh, the game of speculation did not interest him, and his
artistic tendencies were few. Now and then, a Mr. Blydenburg, a florid,
talkative man, a widower like himself, came to him of an evening, and
the chess-board was prepared. But practically his life was one of
solitude, and the solitude grew irksome to him.
Meanwhile his wound healed as wounds do. The cicatrix perhaps was
ineffaceable, but at least the smart had subsided, and in its
subsidence he found that the great house in which he lived had taken on
the silence of a tomb. Soon he began to go out a little. He was seen
at meetings of the Archæological Society and of an afternoon he was
visible in the Park. He even attended a reception given to an English
thinker, and one night applauded Salvini.
At first he went about with something of that uncertainty which visits
one who passes from a dark room to a bright one, but in a little while
his early constraint fell from him, and he found that he could mingle
again with his fellows.
At some entertainment he met a delicious young girl, Miss Maida Barhyte
by name, whom for the moment he admired impersonally, as he might
have admired a flower, and until he saw her again, forgot her very
existence. It so happened, however, that he saw her frequently. One
evening he sat next to her at a dinner and learning from her that she
was to be present at a certain reception, made a point of being present
himself.
This reception was given by Mrs. Bachelor, a lady, well known in
society, who kept an unrevised list, and at stated intervals issued
invitations to the dead, divorced and defaulted. When she threw her
house open, she liked to have it filled, and to her discredit it must
be said that in that she invariably succeeded. On the evening that Mr.
Incoul crossed her vestibule, he was met by a hum of voices, broken by
the rhythm of a waltz. The air was heavy, and in the hall was a smell
of flowers and of food. The rooms were crowded. His friend Blydenburg
was present and with him his daughter. The Wainwarings, whom he had
always known, were also there, and there were other people by whom he
had not been forgotten, and with whom he exchanged a word, but for Miss
Barhyte he looked at first in vain.
He would have gone, a crowd was as irksome to him as solitude, but
in passing an outer room elaborately supplied with paintings and
bric-à-brac, he caught a glimpse of the girl talking with a young man
whom he vaguely remembered to have seen in earlier days at his own home.
He walked in: Miss Barhyte greeted him as an old friend: there were
other people near her, and the young man with whom she had been talking
turned and joined them, and presently passed with them into another
room.
Mr. Incoul found a seat beside the girl, and, after a little unimportant
conversation asked her a question at which she started. But Mr. Incoul
was not in haste for an answer, he told her that with her permission, he
would do himself the honor of calling on her later, and, as the room was
then invaded by some of her friends, he left her to them, and went his
way.