As a matter of fact Mr. Saltus played fair. He did not go to dine, but as soon as he was alone, he sent another note less formal than the first, asking Mrs. A—— to return the former note unopened, and saying that though dinner was impossible, he would give himself the pleasure of calling afterward.
This he did, and it turned the scales of his life. Questioned next day by his fiancée as to whether or not he had changed his mind and gone to dinner, he denied it vigorously. After that both ladies were invited for tea, great care being taken, however, that they should never meet again.
The following summer Mrs. A—— with a party of friends went abroad. Mr. Saltus joined them, safe in the knowledge that his fiancée was away with her family, where, being decidedly persona non grata, he could not be expected to follow. The summer passed and again he joined Mrs. A—— and her friends in Cuba. Spring saw him in New York again. A year had elapsed, during which he saw his fiancée occasionally and Mrs. A—— often.
From two letters written by Mrs. A——, which, used as book-marks, were found between the leaves of an old novel after Mr. Saltus' death, a love that counted no cost—passionate and paralyzing—oozes from the pages. "How could I live if you should cease to love me?" was asked again and again.
Cease he did, however. There are those so constituted that they can drift out of an affair so gradually that it is over without any perceptible transition. It was that way with Edgar Saltus. Mercurial to a degree, easily put off by something so slight no one else would have been susceptible to it, when he was done—he was done. As he himself expressed it, he could not "relight a burnt-out cigar."
That affair over, he remembered the ring he had given and the girl to whom he was engaged. In spite of living in a social world poles apart from Mrs. A——, and in spite of absence and travel, rumors of the affair had filtered to his fiancée. Straightforward herself, scorning subterfuge as weakness, she asked him to tell her the truth. With righteous indignation Mr. Saltus denied it in toto, declaring it was an invention intended to discredit him in her eyes. It was in this that he made the mistake of his life.
Talking it over with me years afterward, he admitted that had he told her the truth, loving him as she did, she would probably in the end have forgiven him. It was the streak of fear—fear of a moment's unpleasantness, which he might have faced then and there and surmounted—which was his undoing. Taking the easiest way for the time being, he reiterated his denials.
In glancing over the scenario of Edgar Saltus' life, this act, at the pinnacle of his popularity and fame, may in the region behind effects have set in motion forces which tore the peplum of popularity from him, and in spite of his genius pushed him into semi-obscurity at the last.
His denials accepted, and there being no reason for delay, he married Elsie Smith in Paris in 1895. It should have been a happy marriage, the two having sufficient in common and neither being in their first youth. Its rapid failure is therefore all the more pathetic.
Going from Paris to the south of France, the first mishap was that of breaking his ankle. Unable to stand pain, Mr. Saltus fainted three times while it was being set. That rather disgusted his wife. This accident led to their first misunderstanding, when, in answering a telegram from Mrs. Saltus Sr., news of the accident was excluded. Unwilling to hear anything of an unpleasant nature himself, Mr. Saltus was equally unwilling to tell any one he loved of a disagreeable episode. The memory of his early life and training was at the bottom of this, and from one aspect it was a most lovable quality.