What Will People Say? A Novel
"Then you think the poor have no right to marry?"
"Oh no, I'm not such a fool as that. There are people with simple tastes
who can be happy on nothing a year--sweet domestic women who love to
manage and cook and sweep and mend and sew. There are lots of unhappy
rich women who would be thoroughly contented if they were the wives of
laboring-men. But that doesn't happen to be my type. I can't help it. I
grow positively sick at the sight of a needle. Even fancy stitching
hurts my eyes. And I can't help that. There are lots of poor women who
are making their homes hells because they have no money. They'd be
angels if they didn't have to economize. Some people, rich and poor,
take a sensuous delight in watching a bank account grow, and they get
more thrill out of saving a penny than out of getting something more
beautiful for it.
"But I'm not one of those. I'm a squanderer by nature. I hate to be
denied things. I loathe counting the cost of things. I can't endure to
see some one else wearing better things than I've got on. I want to
throttle a woman who has a later hat than mine. Oh, I may be a bad one,
Harvey, but it isn't my fault. I am what I was born to be. I've got to
marry money, Harvey. I've just got to."
He cried out against her self-portrait as a libel. "Oh, Persis, don't
tell me that you are mercenary--a woman with a big heart like yours."
"I'm not mercenary exactly; I loathe money as money, but I like nice
things. I have to have them. I'm trying to be honest with myself and
with you--in time--before it's too late. It's hard; but I didn't arrange
the world, did I? I didn't choose my own soul, did I? But I've got to
get along with what was given me, haven't I? I tell you I'd ruin your
life, Harvey. You'd divorce me in a year."
"Don't talk like that, or you will ruin your own life! There's a big
tragedy in store for you, Persis, unless you--"
She was so tortured with disillusion and with the death of her first
romance that she grew very hard.
"Well, so long as it isn't the tragedy of being unable to pay my bills
and of eating my own cooking I can stand it. I'd rather be unhappy than
shabby. But it's growing late; we must get back."
He aided her to her feet, untied the horses, and offered her his hand
for a mounting-block. But she said:
"We can walk quicker here than we can ride." Taking her bridle in her
arm, she set out swiftly. She seemed once more to be running away from
something--a shadow of poverty, no doubt. He felt unspeakably sorry for
her. Again he was about to offer her back her heart when an abrupt light
broke over her face. She paused, laughed, turned to him.
"What a fool I am! My father set my sister up in business as a British
peeress and bought her her husband and settled a whacking dower on her.
He can do the same for me and keep the money in this country--and get
me a real husband. He could give me enough for us both to live on
comfortably."
"I reckon I could hardly accept that arrangement," Forbes said, as
gently as he might.
"You see!" she cried out. "You expect me to murder my pride and accept
poverty, but you won't accept wealth because you must keep your pride.
You couldn't object to my having the money to spend on myself, could
you?"
"No, I could hardly object to that," he said.
"Well, then, if everything goes right with my father's plans we'll have
love and money and all. It will be wonderful--heaven on earth! Kiss me!"
She put up her lips, and he kissed them and found them bitter-sweet.
Then she strode on with a lilting joy, humming a song and putting her
horse to his paces to keep up with her. Forbes remembered what Senator
Tait had said of her father's impending doom, and her rapture was a
heartbreak to him--a final irony.
As they issued from the green cave of the forest and walked down to the
State Road to take the saddle, a motor came along. Two men were in it.
The driver stopped the car in front of Persis, and the other man lifted
his hat. It disclosed a shock of brindle hair and half of one eyebrow
gone.
"Can you tell me if this road leads to Briarcliff?" he asked.
"Yes, I think so," Persis answered.
"Thank you, Miss Cabot," he called out, as the car whirred away.
Persis stared after him in amazement. "Now who was that? How did he know
my name?"
"By your pictures in the papers," Forbes suggested.
"No," said Persis; "I've met him somewhere. Oh, I know. He's a reporter
on the--some paper. Lord, I hope he didn't misconstrue our being here. I
didn't like the grin on his face."
CHAPTER XXXVIII
The reporter's fleering smile and his acidulous "Thank you, Miss Cabot,"
convinced Persis that the man had, with the sophistication reporters
learn too well, put the worst possible interpretation on her forest
promenade with Forbes. This was all that it needed to turn her
disappointment into dismay, her bewilderment into panic. She had lost
rhythm with her life and the world.
She thrust one boot into its stirrup, swung the other across the saddle,
and jerked her horse's head impatiently. Her temper threw his motor
machinery out of gear, and he found himself with at least two too many
feet. He bolted and sidled in a ragged syncopated gait, snorting and
flinging his head angrily. She could not get him into meter with himself
or her, or with the horse that Forbes brought clattering alongside.
At first she had felt infinitely sorry for Forbes and indignant only at
the fate that made him poor. As she rode her fretful horse she began to
feel infinitely sorry for herself and indignant at Forbes. He had
permitted her to think that he had ample means. He had encouraged her to
love him seriously. Her resentment was the fierce resentment people feel
when those they love and idealize do not live up to the standards set
for them.
Forbes had come into her life like a bull sauntering into a china shop.
A moment before his entrance everything was arranged, orderly,
exquisite, and formal--a little cold, perhaps, but charmingly definite.
Now everything was crashing about her. She must walk warily among the
fragments or she would suffer.
Persis was an orderly soul, and had not suspected that she was also a
passionate one. She was more like Forbes than either of them understood.
For all the deep intensity of his nature, training had made him first
the soldier. In battle he was the fiery warrior; but battles were
infrequent, and almost all his days had been spent in acquiring and
instilling precision, exactness in the manual of arms, rectitude in the
lines of drill formations, perfection in uniform and equipment, in the
company books and reports--everywhere.
So Persis had acquired from infancy the rituals of household service,
the proprieties and their observance, the arrangement of ceremonies,
social book-keeping. And now she was discovering what a disorganizer
love is, what an anarch among plans, what a smasher of china.
Before the advent of Forbes she had almost given up the expectation of
love. Then out of nothing the fates evoked this man. If he had confessed
even a pittance of twenty-five thousand a year, that would have meant at
worst "love in a cottage"--cottage being an elastic word. Friends of
hers owned cottages of palatial dimensions. But two thousand a
year--with a prospect of twenty-four hundred a year! She simply could
not imagine it.
She tried to mask her anger under an unusually cheerful manner. She
spoke with approval of the landscape, chattered vivaciously about
everything, and all the while was burning with resentment. It was small
wonder that Forbes felt the blight of her wrath when the very horses
knew of it. The most determined politeness can never imitate the fine
flower and bouquet of genuine enthusiasm. But what could Forbes say to
set things right? The one effective speech would have been a declaration
of independent means, a smiling disclaimer of poverty: "I was only
joking; I am really very rich."
That would have re-established the _entente_. But that was the one thing
Forbes could not say. He rode on at Persis' side, a silent and dejected
prisoner of circumstances, a spy captured in the enemy's camp in the
enemy's uniform.
Eventually they reached the Enslee place--the mountain that was
Enslee's, with the stately pleasure dome he had decreed there. The
majesty of it belittled Forbes still more. The beauty of it shamed him.
They trotted across the granite bridge and urged the horses to the
ascent.
The horses plodded doggedly up and up, and the beauty of every spot as
they reached it wore away Persis' anger. It was difficult to feel a
bitterness against anybody, even against the fates, when they permitted
some aromatic shrub to throw an almost visible veil of perfume about
her, and another to dandle before her eyes a smiling throng of blossoms
almost audibly singing like clustered cherubim. The mere dapple of
shadow and sun-splash was felicity, and the white road that curved among
its lawns was voluptuously sinuous, like a tawny Cleopatra on a green
divan or one of Titian's high-hipped Venuses.
The gardening was formal, the swards were shaved, the trees seemed to
have been whisk-broomed, the shrubs had been curled and scented; but
they were beautiful, and only wealth could have collected them or kept
them at their best. And above them all loomed the house, a chateau of
stately charm enthroned in beauty.
Forbes saw how good it was, and coveted it. But it was as if Naboth, the
soldier, had envied David, the King, his garden. Persis also saw how
good it was, and she could possess it all, become the chatelaine of this
place.
She spoke her thought aloud:
"It's this sort of thing, Harvey, that I love and need--beautiful things
and plenty of them."
"I understand," Forbes groaned.
"If only you could get them for us!"
"If only I could!"
A little farther she checked her horse, whose trunk was heaving like a
bellows. It was in a little colonnade of trees with an arched roof of
green leaves in more than Gothic confusion. Birds were everywhere,
fluting, fighting, and building.
"Listen to them, Harvey," Persis murmured, with a kind of sad joy, as he
reined in alongside. "It's their courtship-time, too. And the male bird
is the better dressed of the two."
Forbes noted how sweet her throat was as it arched back; and the under
surface of her chin, how beautiful. They were no longer his to admire,
and bitterness came into his heart. His smile was close to a sneer as he
said:
"The males put on their Sunday best and pour out their finest songs, and
the lady bird chooses, they say, the one that wears the best clothes."
She gave him a look that was both rebuking and rebuked, and urged her
horse along. But a little later her response to beauty filled her again
with the contentment of repletion, and she checked her horse by the
marble-walled pool, whose surface was broken and circled here and there
by gleaming red fish with lacy fins and tails; they were darting and
leaping in acrobatic ecstasies.
"They're making love, too, I suppose," Persis said, a trifle anxiously.
And he was still aggrieved enough to answer: "And the fish ladies also
select the gentleman with the most gold."
She stared at him a moment, hurt and shamed. Then she flung back at him:
"Then you oughtn't to blame us--us other females for making the wisest
choice we can. It must be a law of nature."
"It must be," he sighed, so humbly that she regretted her victory. She
would have put out her hand to comfort him, but she saw above them
Willie Enslee leaning across the balustrade. She lifted her horse into a
jog-trot, and they rode into the court, where a chauffeur waited to take
the horses to the stable.
Willie greeted them in his whiniest tone.
"Where on earth were you? We've been home for ages."