Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski | Page 5

her reappearance,
Van Twiller, having dined at the club, and feeling more like himself
than he had felt for weeks, returned to his chamber, and, putting on
dressing-gown and slippers, piled up the greater portion of his library
about him, and fell to reading assiduously. There is nothing like a quiet
evening at home with some slight intellectual occupation, after one's
feathers have been stroked the wrong way.
When the lively French clock on the mantel-piece--a base of malachite
surmounted by a flying bronze Mercury with its arms spread gracefully
on the air, and not remotely suggestive of Mademoiselle Olympe in the
act of executing her grand flight from the trapeze--when the clock, I
repeat, struck nine, Van Twilier paid no attention to it. That was
certainly a triumph. I am anxious to render Van Twiller all the justice I
can, at this point of the narrative, inasmuch as when the half hour
sounded musically, like a crystal ball dropping into a silver bowl, he
rose from the chair automatically, thrust his feet into his walking-shoes,
threw his overcoat across his arm, and strode out of the room.

To be weak and to scorn your weakness, and not to be able to conquer
it, is, as has been said, a hard thing; and I suspect it was not with
unalloyed satisfaction that Van Twiller found himself taking his seat in
the back part of the private box night after night during the second
engagement of Mademoiselle Olympe. It was so easy not to stay away!
In this second edition of Van Twiller's fatuity, his case was even worse
than before. He not only thought of Olympo quite a number of times
between breakfast and dinner, he not only attended the interlude
regularly, but he began, in spite of himself, to occupy his leisure hours
at night by dreaming of her. This was too much of a good thing, and
Van Twiller regarded it so. Besides, the dream was always the same--a
harrowing dream, a dream singularly adapted to shattering the nerves of
a man like Van Twiller. He would imagine himself seated at the theatre
(with all the members of Our Club in the parquette), watching
Mademoiselle Olympe as usual, when suddenly that young lady would
launch herself desperately from the trapeze, and come flying through
the air like a firebrand hurled at his private box. Then the unfortunate
man would wake up with cold drops standing on his forehead.
There is one redeeming feature in this infatuation of Van Twiller's
which the sober moralist will love to look upon--the serene
unconsciousness of the person who caused it. She went through her
rôle with admirable aplomb, drew her salary, it may be assumed,
punctually, and appears from first to last to have been ignorant that
there was a miserable slave wearing her chains nightly in the left-hand
proscenium-box.
That Van Twiller, haunting the theatre with the persistency of an
ex-actor, conducted himself so discreetly as not to draw the fire of
Mademoiselle Olympe's blue eyes shows that Van Twiller, however
deeply under a spell, was not in love. I say this, though I think if Van
Twiller had not been Van Twiller, if he had been a man of no family
and no position and no money, if New York had been Paris and
Thirty-fourth Street a street in the Latin Quarter--but it is useless to
speculate on what might have happened. What did happen is sufficient.
It happened, then, in the second week of Queen Olympe's second

unconscious reign, that an appalling Whisper floated up the Hudson,
effected a landing at a point between Spuyten Duyvel Creek and Cold
Spring, and sought out a stately mansion of Dutch architecture standing
on the bank of the river. The Whisper straightway informed the lady
dwelling in this mansion that all was not well with the last of the Van
Twillers; that he was gradually estranging himself from his peers, and
wasting his nights in a play-house watching a misguided young woman
turning unmaidenly somersaults on a piece of wood attached to two
ropes.
Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller came down to town by the
next train to look into this little matter.
She found the flower of the family taking an early breakfast, at 11 a.m.,
in his cosey apartments on Thirty-fourth Street. With the least possible
circumlocution she confronted him with what rumor had reported of his
pursuits, and was pleased, but not too much pleased, when he gave her
an exact account of his relations with Mademoiselle Zabriski, neither
concealing nor qualifying anything. As a confession, it was unique, and
might have been a great deal less entertaining. Two or three times in
the course of the narrative, the matron had some difficulty in preserving
the gravity of her countenance. After