The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue IncidentSaltus, Edgar
General
The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue Incident
Saltus, Edgar
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Trials (Murder) -- Fiction
Princess she was and looked, yet, despite the glory of her raiment,
rather a princess in a drawing-room than the daughter of a Pharaoh in
a Memphian crypt. She seemed pleased, sure of her charm, and she
pleased and charmed at sight. The house, the most apathetic--save
Covent Garden--in the world, and, musically, the most ignorant as
well, rose to her.
Sylvia turned to Orr. In his gloved hand was a program. "What a dear!"
she murmured. "Who is she?"
Orr, before answering, looked at Annandale. The latter's eyes were on
the roof. He may have been drinking the song, unconscious of the
singer. But it is more probable that his thoughts were elsewhere,
though hardly in the Tombs, where, during his relatively brief
sojourn, he had lived at the relatively reasonable rate of a hundred
dollars a day.
"A debutante," Orr answered. "She is billed as Dellarandi."
The curtain fell. The box was invaded. Men indebted to Mrs. Annandale
for dinner, or who hoped to be, dropped in. Orr got up and went out.
The second act began. There was an alternating chorus. During it
Amneris sat mirroring her beauty in a glass. Presently her voice
mounted, mounting as mounts a bird and higher. She was joining in the
incomparable duo that ensues. It passed. A march, blown from Egyptian
trumpets, followed, preluding the dance of priestesses which precedes
the tenor's return. As that progressed the leader of the orchestra
shook like an epileptic. From his own musicians, from those on the
stage, from chorus and singers, he drew wave after wave of melody, a
full sea of transcendent accords that bathed Sylvia with harmony,
filtered through her, penetrating blissfully from fingertips to spine.
Delightedly she turned to Annandale. The visitors had gone. Orr was
entering. In his bulldog face was an expression vatic and amused.
"Yes," he resumed, seating himself at Sylvia's side, "she is billed as
Dellarandi, but I knew her as Marie Leroy."
Sylvia started, her lips half parted, her eyes dilated with surprise.
Annandale bent forward. "What is it?" he asked.
"Amneris, the contralto. Do you know who she is?"
"I know she is a devilish pretty woman. What about her?"
"She is the girl whose father was the twelfth juror in your case."
Annandale, who had been standing, literally dropped with astonishment
in a chair. But Sylvia was insatiable. She could not ask enough, she
could not get the answers quickly enough in reply. Orr, however, knew
very little, odds and ends merely that he gathered in the lobby,
summarily that the girl had married Tambourini, the music teacher, and
was regarded as destined to be one of the great queens of song.
So interested were all three that the third act was barely noticed. It
took the melting beauty of the final duo to distract them from the
debutante. But the witchery of that aria would distract a moribund. It
was with the bewildering loveliness of it in their ears that they
moved out from the box.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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