What Will People Say? A Novel
then. And yet it was intelligent. It was wise. Only he loved her more
when she was uttering those childish plans of hers for a life in which
the funds were to be taken from a fairy purse automatically replenished
as fast as it was depleted.
Yet he feared both of the women she was: the cautious and forethoughtful
who might in all wisdom refuse his penury, and the spoiled demander who
might resent it.
They trotted now into a park-like domain with roads branching out on
either side. At the edge of each of them stood a sign-board warning
against trespass and signed with the resounding name of the richest man
on earth.
"They say he's worth a hundred or two hundred million dollars," Persis
called across to Forbes.
"That ought to be enough," said Forbes. "It's more than we shall have."
And he smiled at the comparison. Persis sighed:
"If he could lend us just one million for a few years we could make good
use of it."
"I might ask him," said Forbes. "I'll send a boy over for it to-night."
He said it lightly, yet there was a sardonic bitterness in his smile. He
understood for the moment why the established poor become so eager to
take away from men who were once poor the wealth they have somehow
amassed.
It seemed to Forbes that he would never reach the limit of this man's
acres. But at last he escaped from the oppression of some one else's
success. They cantered through a little village, and crossed rusty
railroad-tracks into another ocean of sparsely settled country. It
amazed Forbes to find so much wilderness so close to so vast a
metropolis. There were long stretches where the woods on either side had
a look of the primeval. He felt a longing to explore some of these leafy
jungles. He told her his whim, and it was hers.
By and by they came to a grass-matted road that lost itself in ferns and
undergrowth. Forbes looked at Persis. Her eyes consented. He laid his
bridle-hand on the left side of his horse's mane and shifted his weight
a trifle. And his horse shouldered hers into the jungle. Heads bent low,
the horses mounted with cautious hoofs till the ferns were brushing
their saddle-girths. The prattle of a brook somewhere lured them
farther, and they pressed on into a fog of leaves and crackling boughs
and flowers. Birds cried warnings and shot through the branches, bearing
news of the invasion. Others in sentimental oblivion did not budge, but
sat still and went on sawing the air with silver phrases shrilly sweet.
Suddenly the brook was visible, rushing here and there through the woods
and making noises that were rapture just to hear. And with that music of
water and woods, and that multitudinous beauty about them, they gazed
only into each other's eyes, inclined together, and locked arms and
breasts and lips in close embrace. They clung together till the soulless
horses, nibbling here and there, sundered them.
And then they slid from the saddles and, slipping the bridles to their
elbows, walked on with arms about each other's bodies and eyes so
mutually engaged that they stumbled like blind folk. At last she sank to
the ground at the edge of the brook, and he, instead of helping her up,
dropped down at her side.
He took her into his arms again and kissed her and laughed at her.
"I reckon you'll warn me now that the horses are looking."
"No," she said; "but one of them is standing on one of my coat-tails."
So he rose and led the horses to a tree a few paces off and tied them
there. When he came back he found her swinging her little boots over a
still pool in an alcove of the brook. Its quiet surface mirrored her
feet from beneath quaintly. "We're at the antipodes already," he
laughed. She put out her hand beggingly.
"It's secluded enough for a smoke. Can you give me a cigarette? I forgot
mine." He had nothing but a cigar, and she ventured a puff or two of
that, then gave it back and sighed, "I wish we were married and all."
"Why?"
"I'd take off my boots and dip my poor aching feet in that water."
"Why don't you?"
"In the first place, I don't know you well enough to go barefoot before
you. In the second, somebody would be sure to come along."
"Not here," he urged.
"Well, then, there's that other Me down in the pool watching this Me,
and saying, 'Don't make a fool of yourself, honey.'"
"There are two Persises, then?"
"At least a hundred. But there's one down there. Look, you can see her
yourself!"
She knelt above the water-glass, and he bent over to gaze. He saw her
looking up at him, and his own image looking up close to hers. They
smiled and made faces like children. And when he rubbed his cheek
against hers the images imitated the foolishness.
"See, they're mocking us," she said. A little breeze wrinkled the
mirror, and she cried: "They're frowning! They want us to be sensible!
Come along! They'll be missing us at home."
"At home?" he echoed, reprovingly.
"At Willie's, I mean," she corrected. And then she put his hands away
and spoke earnestly. "It came mighty near being home to me. I have a
confession to make. I ought to have made it before. I have been amazed
at myself for not telling you, for taking your love when I had no right
to."
He stared at her in terror, and she smiled with pride at his fear and
babbled on almost incoherently.
"Don't be afraid--though I'm glad you are. But I hope you won't despise
me. But I couldn't seem to help myself. You're really to blame for being
so terribly overwhelming. You see, I--I--I've told you how often Willie
Enslee proposed to me, and--well, one day--that very day you saw me in
my old hat--the first time, you know--well, I had just had a talk with
my father, and the poor old boy was all cut up about his--his money
matters. He's too nice and sweet to be much of a financier, you know,
and--well, I was scared to death, and I thought the world was coming to
an end, and I'd better--better get aboard the ark, you know--and I
hadn't met you then, you know, and Willie proposed again, and I--I
accepted him."
"You promised to be his wife!" Forbes whispered, chokingly.
"Yes," she answered. "I--you see, I didn't know you. I didn't dream I
should ever meet anybody who would--would thrill me--that's the only
word--as you did, as you do. I didn't imagine that I should ever love as
other people do--insanely, madly, dishonorably--anythingly to be with
the one I loved. And I didn't dare give up Willie till I was sure I
loved you, and when I was sure I loved you, I--it seemed so hateful even
to mention his name. It would have been like--like this."
With her heel she pushed a rock into the water, and it thumped and
splashed and curdled the little pool.
"That's the effect his name would have had on our moonlight, and I
couldn't tell you then. Will you forgive me, or do you think I'm a
hopeless rotter and a sneak?"
He smiled at her mixed vocabulary, and gathered her into his arms. "My
love! My Persis! But you'll tell him now, won't you?"
"Oh, now, yes!" she cried, ecstatic as a comforted child. "You are
glorious to forgive me so easily, and not be nasty and lecture-y. And
see the pool; it's all smooth and clear again."
He looked, and held back the confession he was about to make in his
turn. The mention of his poverty would be pushing another rock into the
pool. And he wondered if the mirror would clear after that. He could
forgive her her betrothal to Enslee because that was of the past; but
the lack of money was not a matter for forgiving and forgetting; it was
something to endure. It was asking love to accept poverty as a concubine
or a mother-in-law.
He kept silent on that score, and they murmured their loves and kissed
and laughed with contentedness purling through their hearts, and the
world far away. She glanced back at the horses blissfully tearing young
leaves from high branches.
"We ought to keep those horses as a souvenir of our engagement. It would
be a pity to let any one else ride the dear old brutes, wouldn't it?"
"It would, indeed!" he said.
"Let's buy them from Willie. He would sell them for a song."
"That's a fine idea," Forbes answered, with a gulp. He knew how much
horses like these were worth--and saddles, bridles, and stables.
"We shouldn't want to ride in a car all the time, should we?" she asked.
"No, indeed," he answered. She was at her fairy plans again, and his
heart sickened.
"We mustn't let ourselves get fat. Of all things we must avoid that,"
she said. "We might have just a little car like Winifred's--to hold only
two. I could drive down and get you and bring you home. It would save
wear on our limousine--or perhaps we won't get a limousine just yet. If
we didn't have a big car it would be a good excuse for not having a lot
of people tagging round with us everywhere, wouldn't it? I feel an awful
longing for a lot of solitude with just you and me. I suppose we'll have
to put up with the United States army. But I want to shake the gang I've
been running with--at least for a year or so, till you and I can get
acquainted. Will you buy me a little car like Winifred's--a good one?
There's no use wasting money on the cheap kind. The good little ones
cost as much as the good big ones; but once they're paid for, they don't
run up repair bills, and they take you where you're going instead of
dying under you half-way there. Will you buy me a little car for just
us? You can get a darling for about twenty-five hundred; I was asking
Winifred."
He made no answer. She turned and looked at him and saw on his face the
look she had seen on her father's that day--the look a man wears when
he cannot buy his beloved what she pleads for. Now, as then, Persis felt
ashamed rather than resentful, and she hastened to add:
"If you can't afford it, old boy, say so. You mustn't mind me. My father
says I'm a terrible asker. Just say No, and I won't mind. Promise me
that, dear. I want to be a good economical housewife to you; and I was
only thinking that if we had a little car it would save taking the big
car out, and that saves tires and gasolene and general upkeep."
He heard Enslee's words, "It's the upkeep that costs," and they mocked
him again. He realized that in persuading this girl to choose him
instead of Enslee, who had already chosen her, he was not only robbing
her of a yacht, a palace, two or three palaces, half a dozen
automobiles, servants, and servants of servants, foreign travel and
foreign clothes and jewels--he was not only robbing her of such things,
but he was asking her to learn a new way of life, a habit of infinite
denial, eternal economy, and meager amusement.
Experience and common sense--for he had them in large measure in his
ordinary life--seemed to bend down and say: "Let your sea-gull go.
She'll die in your cage, or she'll break it apart."
But she was in his arms. She was leaning against him, flicking his boots
with her riding-crop, and loving him, contented utterly. Romance elbowed
Reason aside and said: "See how happy she is. It isn't money that makes
happiness. You're sitting on the edge of a silly little brook in
somebody's backwoods, and you're happy as a king and queen on a throne
of gold."
Common Sense grinned: "Suppose it should rain? This is all very well for
a while, but what of next winter?"
Reason and Romance wrangled in his head while she was babbling something
in her elfin economy about, "So we won't have two cars yet, just one, a
nice big 1913 six, with my chauffeur to run it. Father pays him fifteen
hundred a year, and that's good pay. Don't you let him wheedle you out
of a penny more."
Forbes' heart cried aloud within him: "My God! her very chauffeur gets
nearly as much as I do!" This was the spark of resentment that gave him