What Will People Say? A Novel
voice carried no conviction, and Winifred took her place at the
instrument and howled in her best cook lingo:
"Get up and come down, or I'll quit you cold and lave you to starve.
It's scrambled eggs and bacon the marnin', and no goods exchanged."
She went back to the range, only to be called to the telephone again.
Mrs. Neff was imploring a brief respite. Water boiling over and
scuttering in hot hailstones from the stove brought Winifred back with a
screech. She upbraided Persis for a useless scullery maid and threatened
Forbes with a skillet. She was enjoying herself tremendously. She
ordered Persis to set the table in the breakfast-room, but refused
Forbes permission to help her.
But he slipped away a little later, when she went to rummage the
ice-room. He found Persis drifting about in a lake of golden sunshine,
distributing delicate chinas and looking like a moving figurine of
bisque. There was a pleasant clink of silver as she laid the knives and
forks and spoons, and he thought how wonderful she would be in such a
little home as he could offer her, how she would grace the quarters at
an army post. She smiled on him, and her smile was sunshine. He went at
her once more with that rush of desire. She put up her hand to fend him
off, and he knocked a cup out of it.
They knelt together to pick up the pieces. He began:
"While I'm down here on my knees, I ask you again--" She put her hand to
her lips in warning, but he seized the hand. She snatched it away and
rose to her feet just as Willie Enslee came in.
Forbes, still on his knees, set busily to work picking up the scattered
petals of the china. He felt guilty as a caught burglar, but the
unsuspecting Willie paused on the threshold to yawn. Willie was always
yawning on the threshold of discovery.
"'Morning! 'Morning!" was his almost swallowed greeting.
"We just broke one of your cups," said Persis, "while we were setting
the table."
"So long as you don't break the table, I suppose I'm to be
congratulated. Had a fearful time this morning without my man. Had to
fill my own tub, put own buttons in, shave self--cut a map of Russia on
face. Couldn't get tie tied to save life. Persis, you'll have to help
your little Willie with his bib."
So Persis knotted his scarf for him while Forbes grew restive at the
sight. Willie was proprietary in his tone, and he clung drowsily to
Persis' arm while her hands hovered about his throat. But when the task
was done he toddled through the swinging-door to see what wreck had been
made of the kitchen.
"You see!" said Persis, reproachfully, putting down the silver very
slowly. "You nearly got caught."
"But what of it?" Forbes broke out. "I love you. I'm not ashamed of my
love or of you. I want you to be my wife."
The boyish manly sincerity of this convinced her and filled her eyes
with a morning haze.
"You do? Really?" She moved on to the next place. He followed her.
"Of course I do. Will you?"
She continued slowly circling the table, with side trips to the
sideboard, and he followed with a great ado of helping her. The two were
making a slower job of it than either would have required alone.
"It's rather fun being proposed to while one is setting the table,"
Persis murmured. "We're getting terribly domestic already."
"You'd be so beautiful domesticated," Forbes urged.
"But so somebody else thinks--and we're on his grounds." And since it
was characteristic of Persis to express a virtue in a sporting term, she
shook her head. "We're not playing strictly according to Hoyle. It's not
quite cricket."
"I know it," said Forbes. "And I--I dare you to come outside--off the
place."
"All right. I will, the first chance I get."
"The first chance you get to what?" said Mrs. Neff, who appeared as
suddenly as Cinderella's witch. And she looked a trifle witchy this
morning without the rejuvenating spells of her maid. "I couldn't help
overhearing, but my eyes aren't open. I didn't see anything."
Persis surprised Forbes and Mrs. Neff by her frankness.
"I was saying I would take a long walk with Mr. Forbes the first chance
I get."
"Good work!" said Mrs. Neff, quite earnestly. "I was telling him what a
love of a couple you two would make."
Persis turned on her in amazement. "You were telling Mr. Forbes that?"
"Yes, I was. When a woman gets as old as I feel of mornings, she has the
right to be a matchmaker. You two go on and work out your own salvation
and I'll keep Willie off the scent. If I could prevent Alice from
marrying Stowe Webb, and you from marrying Willie, I'd retire on my
laurels. I dote on conspiracies. That's where Alice gets her knack for
plots."
This to her daughter, who sauntered in just in time to receive the facer
and gasp:
"Why, mother, what do you mean?"
"Oh, I can smell a mouse even if I can't trap it right away. I know you
telephone him and write him and all that. I used to when I was your age.
Only, I fooled my mother and married the man I wanted to. If I'd married
the one she wanted me to, I'd be one of the richest women on earth
instead of a starving twice-widow with a pack of children to drive to
market."
"Isn't she the most appalling mother a poor child ever had?" Alice
gasped. "Sometimes I think I ought to take her over my knee and spank
her."
Forbes and Persis paid little heed to the usual duel of these two women.
They were thinking of the complexity of outside interference in their
own program of quiet communion.
Persis' mind was full of reproof for Mrs. Neff; but she was silenced by
the presence of Alice, and Ten Eyck's appearance, and the irruption of
Winifred with a great tray of egg-gold and bacon-bronze.
It was an informal gathering at that breakfast-table. Important articles
of toilet had been forgotten, and there were no maids or men to repair
the omissions. But too great correctness would have been an anachronism
at Winifred's table. Everybody had gone to bed early and tired, and had
slept longer and better than usual. Doing without was a new game to
these people, and they made a picnic-ground of the breakfast-room.
Even Willie tried to romp with his guests, but he lacked the genius for
hilarity, and his jokes consisted principally of repeating exactly what
somebody else had just said, then laughing as hard as he could.
He told Persis that he wanted to show her the farm, and the new fountain
in the sunken gardens, and he told her in such a way that the others
felt themselves cordially invited not to go along. But they were used to
tactlessness from Willie, and they merely winked mutually.
Willie seemed to feel the winks in the air, and to realize that he had
not done exactly the perfect thing, so he reverted to his favorite
witticism: "You take Mrs. Neff, Mr. Forbes" (he was getting the name
right at times now). "You take Mrs. Neff and go where you please. You
turtle-doves will find several arbors and summer-houses and lovers'
lanes scattered around the place. I'll tell the gardener and his men to
keep out of the way. Come along, Persis."
Forbes watched them off with a look of jealousy that did not escape Mrs.
Neff. She put a kindly hand on his arm.
"After all, he owns the place; he's the host--a poor thing, but our
host. She'd rather be with you, and you'd rather be with her; but you'll
have to wait. You'll probably get plenty of each other soon enough."
Winifred detailed Alice and Ten Eyck to wash the breakfast dishes. The
turn of the others would come later. Persis and Mrs. Neff were to make
the beds.
"Winifred was born to be a poor man's wife," said Mrs. Neff, as she led
Forbes across the lawn. "She dotes on cooking and pot-walloping and
mending, and she had to be born with a mint of money, and the only man
that ever cared for her is Bob Fielding, who will hardly let her lift
her teacup to her lips, for fear she'll overwork herself.
"Now Persis is as dainty as a cat, and as hard to boss. And she has a
fatal attraction for men who can't afford to keep her. Willie's the only
suitor she ever had that has more money than she could spend. And I
think she likes him less than anything on earth except work."
Forbes was tempted to confess to Mrs. Neff what he had divulged to Ten
Eyck, but he postponed the miserable business. It was an uncongenial
company for proclaiming one's poverty.
The surroundings were as tempting as Naboth's vineyard was to David. He
understood why men grew unscrupulous in the hunt for great wealth.
Mrs. Neff led Forbes about the place, which she knew well. But the
beauties were only torments to him. Below the climbing marble stairway
to the temple there was a broken stairway winding down the hill. It
meandered like the dry bed of a stream, between brick walls, bordered
with flowers, with now and then a resting-place, or some quaint niche
where a little statue smiled or a fountain trilled and tinkled.
At two stages of the descent there were circular levels with ornate
shelters and aristocratic plants. From the lowest shelf there was only a
path dropping down the long hill to a distant wall; beyond this a ragged
woods like a mob of poor shut out from a rich man's place.
"That wall is the end of the Enslee estate," said Mrs. Neff.
"There is an end to it, then?" said Forbes, more bitterly than he
intended.
"There's an end to everything, my boy," Mrs. Neff brooded, with a
far-off bitterness of her own--"an end to wealth and love
and--everything."
"Who owns that place off there, I wonder?" said Forbes.
"Nobody in particular," said Mrs. Neff. "Some old cantankerous absentee
that won't sell. Do you want to buy it to be near Mrs. Enslee? Willie
has offered him all sorts of money, but he won't let go. You might have
better luck."
Forbes again ignored the assumption that he was wealthy, and said:
"There are things, then, that even the Enslee money can't buy?"
"Many things," said Mrs. Neff. "Persis' love, for one, and Willie's own
happiness, and a foot more of height and a certain charm, and--but
aren't we stupid and cynical this beautiful morning?"
"Are we?" Forbes smiled.
"We are, and I have a right to be," said Mrs. Neff. "But you haven't.
You are not white-haired, nor old, nor a woman."
"Are those the only causes for unhappiness?"
"They are three of the worst, and the most incurable."
But Forbes was too young in his own anxieties to give much importance to
her ancient plaints, though she was not too old to understand his. He
was glancing upward now and then to the little temple. It was visible
from here, though the two figures in it were small and blurred with
light.
Forbes was sure that Enslee was proposing to Persis, for he
gesticulated, pointed at the landscape and the house. He was evidently
commending these to Persis, laying them at her feet, begging her to
become at once the chatelaine of this splendor.
Forbes wanted to abandon Mrs. Neff and fly to the rescue of Persis. He
wanted to break in on that proposal, prove to her how much better he
loved her than Enslee did, how much greater happiness she could have
with him than with Enslee. But he made no move in that direction. It was
one of those simple things that almost nobody can find the courage to
do. He loitered with Mrs. Neff, hating himself for a skulker.
He could not know that he pleaded well enough at a distance. His absence
wrought for him against Willie Enslee's presence. Willie was indeed
commending his estate to Persis, urging her to marry him at once and
settle here for the summer, except what time they might spend abroad or
on the yacht, or his other palace at Newport.
But while he pleaded Persis was searching Enslee's landscape for Forbes.
The view had been entrancing from the temple with Forbes at her side.
Now she felt that it was not after all so satisfying. The very fact that