What Will People Say? A Novel
But when he had an hour of leisure or of sleeplessness, she came back to
him like a ghost with eery beauty and uncanny charm. He found her in
nearly every newspaper, too. The announcement of her engagement brought
forth a shower of portraits. There were articles about the alliance
between the two families of Enslee and Cabot, about the bride's style of
beauty, her recipes for beauty, silly accounts of interviews she never
gave, beauty secrets she never used, exercises she never took, opinions
on matters on which she had never thought. She was caught by
camera-bogies on every shopping expedition, at the steeplechases, at the
weddings of other people--everywhere. There were moving pictures of her;
pictures of her in her babyhood, her girlhood, in old-fashioned costumes
and poses. Women began to copy her hats, her coiffures, her costumes. An
alert merchant with a large amount of an unsalable material on hand
named it "Persis pink," and women fought for it. It became a household
word, or, its substitute nowadays, a newspaper word.
Forbes was dumfounded at the publicity of Persis. He was tempted to
believe that she had gone mad and hired a press-agent. But a woman who
marries a rich enough man needs no booming to-day. The whisper of her
engagement starts the avalanche. She becomes as public as a queen or a
politician or a criminal.
The incessant encounter with Persis' beauty in every newspaper, morning
and evening and Sunday, and in the illustrated weeklies, kept Forbes'
wound open. He could not escape her. It was like being a prisoner at a
window where she was always passing. She smiled at him everywhere, and
always with the shadow of the Enslee name imminent above her.
On the morning of the day he sailed, as he held his newspaper between
his coffee and his cigar, certain head-lines leaped up and shouted at
him from the top of a column with a roar as of apocalyptic trumpets. He
hastened to his room to be alone while he read the chronicle of what was
already past.
MISS PERSIS CABOT
WEDS WM. ENSLEE
HEAD OF THE FAMOUS HOUSE
MARRIED AT ST. THOMAS'S
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON
Reception at Bride's Home
Earl and Countess of Kelvedon among Distinguished Guests.
Church a Mass of Bloom.
The marriage of William Enslee, the present head of the great
dynasty of Enslee, and Miss Persis Cabot, the famous beauty,
daughter of an equally distinguished family, was celebrated at 4:30
yesterday afternoon in St. Thomas's Church, Fifty-third Street and
Fifth Avenue. This was the largest and most brilliant wedding of
the season.
The chancel of the church was banked with rambler roses and white
daisies, against a background of camellia-trees and towering palms,
and the way to the altar was marked with bay and orange trees. The
altar was a mass of bridal roses under an immense trellis of
trailing smilax.
While the guests were arriving a recital was given by an orchestra,
which played several selections at the bride's request, including
the "Evening Star" from "Tannhaeuser," the prelude to "Lohengrin,"
the gavotte from "Mignon," and Simonetti's "Madrigale."
The ushers who seated the guests included the bride's brother,
LeGrand Cabot, Murray Ten Eyck, Robert Gammell Fielding, and Ives
Erskine.
The full vested-choir service was used for the ceremony, and
Barnby's "O Perfect Love" was played as the processional. The bride
walked down the nave with her father, who gave her in marriage,
being preceded by the ushers, bridesmaids, matron, maid of honor,
and flower-bearers. The bride wore a robe of heavy white satin, the
skirt being draped with long motifs of old family lace and finished
with a square train, which was edged with clusters of orange
blossoms. The bodice was cut low and square in front, of lace and
chiffon, with a deep collar of rose point lace of square and
distinctive cut at the back. Her tulle veil was arranged about her
head in cap effect, held by a coronet of orange blossoms. Her only
ornament was a superb necklace of diamonds, the gift of the
bridegroom.
She carried a cluster bouquet of white orchids, an ivory
prayer-book that was also carried by her mother at her wedding, and
a Valenciennes handkerchief.
The Countess of Kelvedon, the bride's sister, was matron of honor.
She wore a costume of soft white charmeuse, with an overskirt
drapery effect of green chiffon, almost as deep in color as
jade-green, and the upper part of her gown was a combination of
satin and white chiffon, with a V opening at the neck. Her round
leghorn hat was encircled with jade-green satin, and topped at the
side with bows of green ribbon and pink roses. Her only ornament
was a solitaire diamond suspended on an invisible platinum chain,
and she carried a bouquet of Mme. Chatenay roses.
Her two little children were the flower-bearers, the tiny Honorable
Paul Hadham and the exquisite little Lady Maude Hadham.
The four bridesmaids, the Misses Winifred Mather, Emma Gay, Lois
Twombly, and Frances Iselin, also wore gowns that were a charming
combination of white and green. Wide panels of green chiffon fell
from the back of the shoulders to the hem of the ankle-length
skirts of charmeuse, which disclosed white slippers with large
rhinestone buckles. The green chiffon crossed the shoulders in
fichu effect, and the elbow-length sleeves were edged with bands of
green. Their leghorn hats of brown straw were trimmed with green
satin and white chiffon, and faced with black velvet, with upright
bows of green at the side. They each carried bouquets of roses,
sweet-peas, and field-daisies, tied with pink satin streamers, and
their ornaments were locket watches, the gift of the bride.
The ceremony was performed by the rector of the church, assisted
by....
Twenty-five hundred invitations were sent out for the wedding. The
church was quite full, and the residence of the bride's parents,
where the wedding reception was held, was crowded to its utmost.
Mr. and Mrs. Enslee received congratulations in the Cabot
drawing-room. A collation was served in the....
Some of the wedding-gifts were shown in rooms on the third floor.
They were....
After the reception Mr. and Mrs. Enslee will leave almost
immediately for a honeymoon cruise on Mr. Enslee's yacht. They will
tour Europe later.
Among those invited to the wedding were....
The paper dropped from Forbes' hand. The irrevocable was accomplished.
She was Enslee's, body and soul and name.
CHAPTER L
Forbes had not been invited to Persis' wedding. She had debated the
matter feverishly and resolved that it was the lesser slight to leave
him out of the twenty-five hundred who received the double-enveloped
engravings. There was a certain distinction in being omitted, and she
knew that he could not account it an oversight. She had been tempted to
write him a letter. She scrawled off a dozen and tore them up in turn.
What she had to say could not be put on paper. Besides, it would be
hideously indiscreet.
But Forbes was present in her thoughts. He was the chief wedding guest
in her soul. He seemed to kneel between her and the groom and try to
shoulder him away. This added a last terror to the multitude of her
frights--frights ranging in importance from a fear that she might kneel
on her veil and pull it askew to nameless terrors of the bridegroom.
There had been a lilt of gaiety in trying on the bridal robe for the
rehearsals and the posings before the camera. But when she made her
final entrance into the snowy costume it seemed to be entering into the
shroud of maidenhood. The journey to the church was like a ride in her
hearse, only that the progress through the streets was difficult because
of a crowd so dense that mounted policemen could hardly push and trample
lane enough for her to reach the awning.
And under the narrow canopy a rabble jostled her and peered into her
face, even plucked at her robes, as if she had been a French princess on
her way to the guillotine. The rabble inside the church was hardly less
insolently inquisitive for being better dressed.
The preliminaries of the march; the whispered instructions and warnings;
the corrected blunders; the stupidity of her father, made a child by the
shame that sweeps over a father at delivering his girl-child to a man to
possess; the sudden grief of her sister, the Countess; Persis' almost
overpowering tempest of desire to flee from the church and run to Forbes
for refuge--a whirlpool of emotions and memoranda and impressions.
And then the march beginning, the organ blaring, the ushers setting
forth, and her sister and the children and the maids of honor; herself
clinging to her father's arm, which trembled so that she rather
supported him than he her; the arrival at the altar, where Willie was
standing, a sick green from church-fright; the waiting priests, the
rites, the hush of the throng to hear the answers; the strange piping
tone of Willie's voice; the odd sound of her own.
Now she was filled with a realization of the awe of this great deed, a
realization so vivid and so new that it seemed to be her first
understanding of it. While she was kneeling in the prayer her thoughts
were not soaring aloft, but swirling with thoughts of Forbes and
memories of his embraces, a sense of his arms clasping her now so that
she could hardly breathe, a wondering if his eyes and thoughts were on
her, and where her nightcap was, and a swooning recollection of her cry
of "Help me, Harvey!" a frightful impulse to leap to her feet and cry
again to him to help her--then sick shudders at the blasphemy of such
thoughts amid the sacraments at her husband's side--for Willie was
already her husband, she wore his ring. He had kissed her. They were
standing up again. They were signing something. They were leaving the
church. It was over. It was just beginning. She was no longer her own;
nor her father's. Her father could not protect her from this man at her
side. Nobody could. The police and the judges and the laws were drawn
up to keep her his.
Everybody was congratulating her, everybody was smiling, everybody was
grinning to think that the marriage was not yet consummated. Back of all
the gorgeousness and the glitter and the music and the sacrament waited
the hideous profanation, the grossness, the violation of all that was
precious and secret and holy.
She had a blurred sense of returning to the carriage and to the house,
and of the mob there, the clatter of tongues, the price-mark appraisal
of gifts, the swinish greediness about the buffet, the smirking
repetition of the same banalities, the lines of drifting hands, the
faces that floated up like melons on a stream and spoke and sometimes
kissed her. But what did it matter who kissed her now? They were
Willie's cheeks and Willie's lips. She was all Willie's, now and for
evermore.
Eventually, when she was white-mouthed with fatigue and eager to swoon
out of the pandemonium, some one took pity on her, and she was spirited
away to her room and her bridal livery taken from her. The weight of the
veil and the train had been greater than she knew. The blossoms were
lifted from her head, and in their place a little black straw hat with a
frill of black tulle was pinned. And in place of her white satin a
simple Callot gown of sage-green cloth was fastened about her girlhood
the last time.
She looked to be only a smart young woman, but she was now truly in the