Already over the picked-up codfish, flapjacks, Hamburg steaks and cognate enticements on which the Bronx and Harlem breakfasts, the news of it had buttered the toast, flavoured the coffee, added a sweetness to this April day and provided a cocktail to people who did not know Paliser from the Pierrot in the moon. That he was spectacularly wealthy was a tid-bit, that he had been killed at the Metropolitan was a delight, the war news was nothing to the fact that the party with the stiletto had escaped "unbeknownst." These people were unacquainted with Paliser. But here was a young man with an opera-box of his own, and think of that! Here was the mythological monster that the Knickerbocker has become. Here was the heir to unearned and untold increments. These attributes made him as delectable to the majority who did not know him, as he had become to the privileged few who did.
Elsewhere, and particularly in and about fashion's final citadel which the Plaza is, solemn imbeciles viewed the matter vehemently. "Young Paliser! Why, there is no better blood in town! By Jove, I believe we are related!"
Or else: "That's M. P.'s son, isn't it? Yes, here it is. I never met the old cock but I heard of him long before we came East. A damned outrage, that's what I call it."
Or again: "Dear me, what is the world coming to? What a blessing it is we were not there. They might have come and murdered us all!"
Adjacently, in clubland, old men with one foot in the grave and the other on Broadway, exchanged reminiscences of the nights when social New York was a small and early family party and M. P. led the ball, and at a pace so klinking that he danced beyond the favours of the cotillon—the german as it, the cotillon, was then lovingly called—into assemblies, certainly less select, but certainly, too, more gay, and had horrified scrumptious sedateness with the uproar of his orgies.
The indicated obituaries followed. "Well, at any rate, they didn't murder him for it." "The son now, a chip of the old block, eh?" "Nothing of the kind, a quiet young prig." "The papers say——" "Damn the papers, they never know anything." "You mean they don't print what they do know." "I mean they don't give us the woman. For it was a woman. I'll eat my hat it was a woman." "Let's have lunch instead."
Generally, for the moment, that was the verdict, one in which the police had already collaborated. But what woman? And, assuming the woman, whence had she come? Where had she gone?—problems, momentarily insoluble but which investigations, then in progress, would probably decide.
At the great white house on upper Fifth Avenue, the servants knew only that they knew nothing. Nothing at all. Already coached, they were sure and unshakable in their knowledge of that. A Mr. Harvey—from Headquarters—could not budge them an inch. Not one!
The night before, at the first intelligence of it, M. P. came nearer to giving up the ghost than is commonly advisable. Suffocation seized him. An incubus within was pushing his life-springs out. So can emotion and an impaired digestion affect a father. The emotion was not caused by grief. It was fear. For weeks, for months, during the tedium and terror of the trial, his name, Paliser, would top the page! It had topped it before, very often, but that was years ago. Then he had not cared. Then the wine of youth still bubbled. No, he had not cared. But that was long ago. Since then the wine of youth had gone, spilled in those orgies which he had survived, yet, in the survival, abandoned more and more to solitude and making him seek, what the solitary ever do seek, inconspicuousness. For years he had courted obscurity as imbeciles court fame. And now!
If only the boy had had the decency to die of pneumonia!