He cheerfully departed, leaving his hosts to “a night of memories and sighs.” He was followed with curses both deep and loud.
Vreeland put all these little matters lightly away as a part of the usual “burrowing mole” work of New York high life; but he was really astonished, a week later, when his employer’s physician, Dr. Hugo Alberg, haled him away to a confidential Sunday morning breakfast.
The “German specialist” was an indurated foreign egotist of thirty, and a cunning gleam lingered behind his golden glasses.
His fresh, bewhiskered face was slightly Semitic in its cast, and his record of prosperity was all too evident in that richness of jewelry which has been a legacy of the Biblical times when the Egyptians made such incautious loans of their ornaments.
Harold Vreeland had now an unwritten chapter in his life devoted entirely to the thirsty-hearted Justine, and from that subjugated Gallic beauty he knew of all Alberg’s crafty approaches upon the mistress by a coarsely familiar wooing of the woman who had given herself over, body and soul, to Vreeland’s service.
And so he marveled not that in the cozy private room at Martin’s the Doctor’s slim, white, “sterilized” hand reached out in the direction of a secret which Vreeland himself knew naught of.
“I’ll just let this fool talk,” mused Vreeland, as the intriguing foreigner became both familiar and friendly. “He has his own little scheme. Perhaps he may point me toward what no one seems to know.”
And so, in an affected bruderschaft, the would-be vampire listened with a beating heart to Alberg’s confidences when the strong Rhine wine had loosened the “Medical Arzt’s” slightly thickened tongue.
“We ought to understand each other, mein lieber
Vreeland,” urged the Doctor, who had now thrown the mask off. “You and I are the two men nearest to this magnificent woman. You are her confidential man of affairs.