What Will People Say? A Novel

He waited with frantic impatience for the light to go out in Ten Eyck's room. It was nearly midnight when Forbes felt it safe to venture out into the hall and tiptoe down the stairs. He had just arrived there when Persis stole down and met him. There was no light except a shaft of moonshine weirdly recolored by a stained-glass window. They did not venture even a whisper. He took her arm and groped with his free hand through a black tunnel to a blacker door, which opened stealthily and admitted a flood of moonlight. Persis was dressed warmly, and she had put on high boots and a short, thick mackinaw jacket. But she shivered with the midnight chill and with a kind of ecstatic terror. Forbes had planned his route. He would avoid the ascending stairway to the temple of Enslee's worship, and lead her to the sunken gardens, which he had longed to explore with her at his side. They did not wade out into the mid-sea of the lawn. He remembered Persis' dictum that behind the blinds there are always eyes. Like snickering truants they skirted the balustrade, the shadowy privet hedge, the masses of juniper and bay and box, till they reached the point where the winding stairway dropped down between its high brick walls. The shadows were doubly dense here, and Persis hung back, but Forbes laughed at her for a poltroon, and she refused to take the dare. He was so afraid that she might fall that he finally suggested: "If you are afraid of stumbling here, I--I'm not forgetting my promise; but I just wanted to say that I--I don't mind holding on to you, if you want to ask me to." She declined with whispered thanks. Down, down the walk drifted. At length they heard a murmur--the mysteriously musical noise of a fountain. They rounded a few more curves and came upon a niched Cupid riding a dolphin, from whose mouth an arc of water poured with a sound of chuckling laughter. The green patina that covered the bronze was uncannily beautiful in the moonlight, and the water was molten silver. They stood and watched it like children for a long while. Then Forbes urged Persis along to the lowest of the circular levels. There he led her to a bench and dropped down beside her. They both looked off into the huge caldron of the hills, filled with moonlight as with a mist. The ragged woods in the distance were superb now in blue velvet. Everything was ennobled--rewritten in poetry. Everything plain and simple and ugly took on splendor and mystic significance. Every object, every group of objects, became personal and seemed to be striving to say something. Persis and Forbes sat worshiping like Parsees of the moon, in awesome silence, till Forbes could no longer hush the clamor in his heart. "Miss Cabot," he said, "I promised not to annoy you. Would it annoy you if I told you that--that I love you with all my heart and soul and being?" "How could you love me?" she answered, softly, hoping to be contradicted. "You've known me only a few days." "There are some people we live with for years and never like nor understand; others we know and love the moment our eyes meet." "And did you love me the moment our eyes met?" "Long before that. I loved the back of your hat and one shoulder." "Do you tell everybody you meet the same thing? It's rather a stale question to ask a man, but you do seem rather impulsive on so short an acquaintance." "Short acquaintance? We've seen each other more than most people see of each other in six months. I know you and I know myself, and I know that I shall never be happy unless I can be trying to make you happy." "I am very happy just now," she murmured. "But we can't sit here forever, and we can't even be together for more than a day or two. I want you for my own. I don't want to see you only--only on--Mr. Enslee's property." "Which reminds me," Persis said, with a tone of dispelled romance, "that we are still on Mr. Enslee's property, and it doesn't seem fair to him." "Then let's leave Mr. Enslee's property." "How? In an airship?" "See that wall down there. That is one of the boundary lines. If we were over that I could tell you some things that I've got to tell you." "It's an awfully long way." "Not so long as you think." "No, no; it's easy to descend to Avernus, or whatever it was; but to get back! I'd never have the strength for that." "It's not far. Let's walk to keep warm. You are cold, aren't you?" "Frozen, that's all. Well, come along, I'll go part way with you." They set out upon the little path. There were no trees to shelter them now from the moon, and its light seemed to beat upon the hillside like waves. The moon that draws the sea along in tides could not but have its influence on these two atoms, and on the blood that sped through their tiny veins. The moon filled them with the love of love. Constantly pausing to turn back, but finding it easier to drift on down than begin the upward climb, Persis went on and on, arm in arm with Forbes. By and by they reached the boundary wall. He helped her to set one knee upon it and mount awkwardly. He clambered up and sat down at her side. Their backs were toward the Enslee demesne, their feet in the unknown. And there, without delay, Forbes told her that she must be his wife, told her that he loved her as woman had never been loved before. His hands fought to caress her, his lips tingled to be again at her cheek, but he kept his promise. Yet the influence of the promise was potent on her, too. She knew that he was in an anguish of temptation, and she glowed with his struggle. The moon and the width of the world, the silent night-cry of the world in the lonely dark, and the yearning light filled her with a need of love. She regretted the promise, she wished that he would break it, and her absolution waited ready for his deed. But his sense of honor prevailed upon his hands, though he could not keep silent about his heartache. "Couldn't you possibly love me, Miss Cabot? Couldn't you possibly?" he pleaded; and she whispered, with a sad sweetness: "I could--all too easily, Mr. Forbes, but I am afraid to love. I thought I never should love anybody really. And now that I know I might, it is so terrible an awakening that I--I'm afraid of it." "Don't be afraid," he implored. "Love me. Let yourself love me." "I'm afraid, Mr. Forbes." "Then if you're afraid to love, it's because you don't, because you--can't." This hurt her pride. Her heart was so swollen with this new power that it would not be denied either by herself or him. "Yes, I could! Oh, I could! But I mustn't--I mustn't let myself love you--not now--not so soon." "Then I must wait," he sighed, and said no more. And she sat in a silence, though there was a great noise of heartbeats in her breast and in her temples and ears. She began to shiver with the night and with her excitement. She wanted to say that they must start back; but her tongue stumbled thickly against her chattering teeth. The world was bitter cold--so far from him. In his arms would be warmth and comfort as at a fireplace. She was lonely, unendurably lonely and wistful. And he sat at her side in an equal ague of distance and need. Finally he took his eyes from the moon and bent his gaze on her. He saw how her shoulders quaked. "You're cold, you poor, sweet child--you're cold. I'm dying to take you in my arms, but I promised--I promised." She was afraid to surrender, and afraid to defy the will of the night. The chill shook her with violence again and again till she felt the world rocking, the stone wall wavering. Then she leaned toward him and whispered: "Kiss me!" He could hardly believe that he heard, but he caught her to him and sought her lips with his. Immediately she was afraid again. Again she hid the preciousness of her mouth from him, writhed and struggled and twisted her face, hid it in his breast. But now he fought her with gentle ruthlessness, took her cold cheeks in his cold hands, and, holding her face up to the moonlight, kissed her eyes, and her dew-besprent hair and her cheeks, and pressed the first great kiss on her lips. They fled from him no more. Only a moment she lingered in Elysium, and then she sighed: "We must go back--we must! I hate to, but there's to-morrow--and the people! What wouldn't they think if they saw us?" He knew that they would not think the beautiful and holy thoughts that filled his heart and hers, so he consented to climb back from this lowly heaven to the Upper Purgatory. Her strength was gone, and he had little of his own; but somehow he helped her up. Again and again they paused to rest, and every time he tried to tell her that he was poor, and at each pause found her lips so sweet that he could not speak of so mean a thing as money and the meaner lack of it. And behind her aching brows there were wild decisions made and unmade to tell him that she had no right to his love until she had released herself from her pledge to Enslee. But at each pause she, too, put off the harsh truth. It was sacrilege to intrude the name of Enslee into this divine communion. They could not harm the perfection of that bliss by any other confessions than their love. And this is one of the pitifulest things in this world, that people lie mutely lest they spoil a beautiful truth; they put off till to-morrow what would mar to-night; they spare some heart-pain; they pay some virtue too exclusive court, and lo, they find afterward that they have brought about only corruption and confusion and damnation. So Persis and Forbes climbed slowly the winding stairway, and their mood was one of hallowed reverence for God and His beautiful world. They paused to wish even the little bronze Cupid well, and his dolphin and the stream of living water; the moon had deserted it now, but still it chuckled. Forbes and Persis skirted the balustrade with a guilty rapture, avoiding the almost daylight of the moon-swept lawn. They opened the door with the innocent stealth of good fairies. They mounted the stairway with their arms about each other's bodies, and in the hall above they kissed and whispered, "Good night! Good night! Good night!" and tiptoed in opposite directions. At their remote doors they paused to throw kisses into the black dark toward each other's invisible presences. Forbes turned the knob of his door with fierce caution, and waited to hear Persis close hers. There was a faint thud and a little click like a final kiss. He tiptoed across his sill, and was just closing his door after him when he heard somewhere in the hall the soft thud of another door, the click of another lock. His heart leaped as if a fist had seized it suddenly. Some one else had been in the hall. In the deep black there was no telling whose door it was. But some one else had been in the hall. CHAPTER XXXII Lieutenant Forbes had known what it was to bivouac in the black of night in Mindanao, surrounded by wild men native to the trees and as stealthy as the dark, and armed with blow-guns, carved, painted, sometimes studded with gems, but emitting poisonous darts. He had stood then trying to peer them out in the gloom, knowing they were there and unable to descry them. So he stood now gripping his door-knob lest it turn in his hand and betray him. He realized that he and Persis had lingered in a social ambush. They were in no peril of life, but the unknown spy might let loose upon them an envenomed dart from the silent, the sometimes jeweled blow-gun of gossip. Forbes' eyes fought in vain against a dark that was like a black bandage. He felt sure that it was not Ten Eyck's door that had thudded so slyly shut. But he could not even guess whether it were the door of Enslee or of one of the women.