The Eddy: A Novel of To-day

by Clarence Louis Cullen

Jesse's somewhat waxy, excessively smooth face flushed at Judd's afterthought.

"I marry?" he said, with a distinctly disagreeable laugh. "Well, it may come to that, some day or other. But can you see me marrying the daughter of your acknowledged——" He fumbled for the word; "mistress" was what he wanted to say, but he discarded it out of sheer timidity; "—your acknowledged companion?" he finished.

"Be good enough to keep out of my personal affairs, Jesse," said Judd, coldly. "I don't dip into your private concerns. You may take my advice or leave it. But you want to go pretty slow, if you're asking me. Nobody has yet forgotten that West Indian affair of yours; just remember that."

With Judd, one shot called for another. Jesse gave a start and paled slightly at Judd's allusion to "the West Indian affair." Judd waited only long enough to see that the shot found its mark; then, with an amused leer, he rose from the table, his luncheon finished, and lumbered away with a nod.

Jesse, discarding his cigarette, bit off the end of a cigar and fumed. The "West Indian affair" was a sore subject with him solely because the world knew all about it. He had not the least feeling of self-condemnation over it; it was the thought that, for once, he had been found out that caused him to rage internally when the matter was adverted to; for the newspapers had been full of it at the time of the occurrence.

"The West Indian affair," Jesse well knew, had not been forgotten, as Judd had said, nor was it likely to be forgotten. It threw a raking light upon his general attitude toward and his treatment of women. A year before, after one of his periodical triumphs in the cotton market, in which, to quote the newspapers' way of putting it, he had "cleaned up millions," Jesse had made a midwinter cruise of the West Indies on his yacht. A girl of unusual beauty, whom he had met by accident on an automobile tour on Long Island, had been his companion on the cruise. She was inexperienced, of humble parentage, and he had overborne her objections by vaguely intimating something as to a marriage when they should arrive in the West Indies. She had protested when, upon the yacht's touching at many ports, he had of course shown not the least inclination to make good his merely intimated promise; and, in his wrath over her attitude, he had not only committed the indefensible crime, but he had made the stupendous mistake, viewed from the politic point of view, of deserting the girl in a West Indian city, without money or resources, without even her clothing, and sailing back to New York alone.

The girl, thus stranded amid new and unfriendly surroundings, had but one resource—the American consul. The consul provided for her passage back to New York. The correspondents of the New York newspapers in the West Indian city had got hold of the details, adding a few neatly whimsical touches of their own, and for days the newspapers had reeked with the story. There had been talk of prosecuting Jesse for abduction, but he had employed the underground method, rendered easily available to him owing to his wealth, to smother that suggestion. But the grisly affair had thrown a cloud over Jesse from which he knew, raging as he knew it, there was no emerging. Several of his clubs—the good ones—had dropped him; men and women of the world to which he aspired, and in which he had been making progress, cut him right and left; his name had been erased from most of the worth-while invitation lists; and the hole in his armor was wide open to the shafts of the kind Judd had just discharged at him.

Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried. That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose life he had destroyed.

Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. That situation, he was confident, had been thrust upon her. But this consideration, and the additional one that she was, as he could not have failed to note, nobly undergoing the ordeal, which might have aroused the admiration and excited the sympathy of a man of merely average fairness, had touched no compassionate chord in Langdon Jesse. Adopting the trivial and far-fetched methods of analysis which are employed by men who consider themselves expert in their knowledge of women, he had calmly concluded that in all likelihood Louise Treharne's manner was a skillfully-studied pose. At any rate he meant to find out. He meant to "know her better." It was thus that his determination framed itself in his mind; he would "know her better."

In gaining the attention of women, he believed in the gentle siege and then the grand assault; it was, in truth, the only "system" with which he had any familiarity, and it had generally proved successful.