What Will People Say? A Novel

care of Mildred. She'll have money enough--and so will you. I've fixed that--but--she'll need somebody to--well, we'll talk it over at Evian. Let's go, home." He moved on, leaning heavily on Forbes, but Winifred, seeing him about to escape, pounced on him and led him away in search of an imaginary diplomat. Forbes, left alone, sank again on the marble bench, a prey to his thoughts. He felt that if he waited in this semi-obscurity he would not be discovered by Persis. But she was hunting for him. She had eluded Willie, and appeared in the garden just as the Ambassador was being haled away. She paused to wait for Forbes to be alone, and at that moment her husband regained her side; she heard his voice. CHAPTER LV "I say, Persis, I lost track of you in that ghastly mob. I'm sorry. By the way, wasn't that tall fella in the uniform the same Lieutenant What's-his-name that was honeying around Mrs. Neff?" Persis was in too fierce a mood to continue that nonsense. She turned on Willie as a she-wolf turns on a terrier at her heels: "Oh, Lord! Can't I escape you for a moment? Do go somewhere and smoke something. Or if the worst comes to the worst, drink something; but don't stand there making green eyes at me like an ape." "Green eyes like an ape!" he echoed, stupidly. "Well, I'll be--" Then an unusual vigor of wrath stirred him. "Look here, Persis, I won't have you make fun of me. Everybody else laughs at me, even for winning you. They think you've made a fool of me, and they think you couldn't have married me except for my money. I don't suppose it could be love--nobody ever did love me. But whatever it was that made you marry me, you did marry me, and, by gad, you've got to remember it." "There's no danger of my forgetting that," Persis snapped, frantic lest Forbes escape her. "Don't be odious! Don't make me hate you." Willie grew the more fierce. "Well, I'd rather have you hate me than make a fool of me. I won't be laughed at--I won't." Persis groaned with repugnance: "Oh, you've ceased to be a laughing matter to me, Willie." Willie was about to reply in kind, but he gave her a long look and, seeing how beautiful she was, grew more tender. "Everything seems to have ceased to be a laughing matter to you, Persis. What has come over you? Before we were married you were always laughing--at everything, everybody. I used to love to watch you. Even when you guyed me I didn't much mind--because there was fun in it. I used to say I'd give everything I possessed just to have you about, and see the world through your eyes. But from the time we were married you quit laughing. Hang it all, I married you to cheer me up a bit. What in Heaven's name has changed you?" Before this weakness she relented a little. "Oh, nothing has changed me. Don't worry about me. I'm just a trifle bored with life." "I've bought you everything you asked for, haven't I?" he asked. "Gad, your dressmaker's bills were enough. But the minute a gown came home you sickened of it. You tired of the theater, of the opera, of dancing. When I took you to the Royal Ascot you yawned as the horses came down the stretch. I bought you three new automobiles, and when we came down from Dieppe to Paris at a million miles an hour the pace scared me cold, but you--you went to sleep." "It was soothing," she smiled. "Soothing? Gad! do you want a bally flying-machine?" "If it could take me to another planet." Never dreaming how eager she was to be rid of him, he tried to please her in every manner save the one sure method of going away. He grew desperate: "Isn't there anything you want that money can buy?" "I don't want anything that money can buy," was her dreary confession. Somehow he seemed at last to understand. "I suppose you're just tired of me," he sighed--"everlasting me. I must be a nuisance to you. Lord knows I am to myself!" She looked at him with suddenly gentler eyes. In contemning himself he was commending himself. The best approach to a human tribunal, as to a divine, is a humble and a contrite heart. She put out her hand to him, but he did not see it; he set off to find some one to lead him to a Scotch highball. And Persis, now that she was rid of him, was free to glide forward to the marble bench, where she could see Forbes half concealed in a grotto of shadow and a mood of gloom. The thought of what she was about to do gave her pause. She realized the atrocity of attempting to keep Forbes in mind when she had taken such solemn vows so publicly. She must be kinder to Willie. She tried to dismiss her conscience by telling herself that it would be childish to run away from Forbes. She caught sight of Mrs. Neff hovering about with the recaptured Alice. She dreaded what interpretation Mrs. Neff would put upon her appearance in the environs of Forbes. She remembered with what fierce criticism she had always met the slightest indiscretions of other married women. A wife's progress must be along a tight wire, and she must walk it exactly. The least step aside attracts attention and invites disaster like the inaccuracy of a Blondel crossing Niagara and carrying a man on his shoulders. Persis hesitated, breathing hard with enormous excitement over so small a matter. While she hesitated an Italian duke who had been a little too gracious in London approached her like an erect cobra. Her skin crawled at his manner. Yet he had no worse motive than she was dallying with. Before she could exquisitely make it clear to him that with all due deference she despised him, she saw Senator Tait hurrying toward Forbes, greeting hastily those who stopped him and thredding the increasingly mucilaginous crowd till he reached Forbes' side. Then the two men made their way out beyond the intervening mass. Persis went back into the house and danced with the Italian duke what he called "_il trotto alla turca_." She was so distraite that she never knew how well he made love and how badly he danced. Later she happened upon the surreptitious Stowe Webb, and learned that Senator Tait and Forbes were leaving Paris in the morning to take the waters somewhere--Vichy, Carlsbad, Marienbad, or Matlock; he was not sure where. Now Persis regretted her hesitation. She had wasted a precious opportunity to warm her chilled soul with a word from the beloved lips and a look from the eyes and a pressure of the hand that were dearer than any other in the world to her. She was amazed at her own ability to suffer so much from the loss of so little. She felt an impulse to be alone with her anguish, to huddle over the hearth where the ashes could at least remind her of how warm and cozy she once had been. She sent for Willie, and he came with a slight elevation of manner which showed that he had found some one to arrange him at least one Scotch-and-soda. He was demonstrative in the car and very affectionate in the elevator at the Hotel Meurice, where they were stopping. This did not endear him to Persis. His man exchanged a glance with her maid as they peeled off their wraps. When man and maid had been sent to bed Willie came shuffling into Persis' dressing-room where she sat staring at her doleful beauty in the mirror. He saw how listless she was, and was awkwardly eager to cheer her up. He could not have depressed her more than by trying to cheer her up. Even he realized his failure eventually and yawned sonorously: "We're married, and I suppose we've got to stay married--for a while, at least. But I hate to see you unhappy. It's an awful slam on me to have you so blue before the honeymoon is really begun." "Don't worry any more, Willie," she said, gently. "I suppose I'm just like a child on Christmas afternoon. I always used to get blue after I'd looked over all the presents and broken most of my toys--and grown tired of the others--and eaten too much candy. And I thought, 'So this is the Christmas I've waited for the whole year long! It doesn't amount to much. I've had all that money can buy--and--and I'm too tired to sleep.'" "I used to feel like that, too," he said. "And I remember that I usually turned back to some cheap old toy; usually it was a little lead soldier--my first love." "First love!" she murmured. He tried to shake off gloom as a wet spaniel shakes off water. "Oh, I say, Persis, buck up! Don't feel like this. You're so beautiful; you're simply ripping to-night." He laid his hand on her bare arm. She started at his touch and before she realized it gasped, "Please don't paw me." He stared at her, aghast: "Do you hate me as much as that?" "Oh, I don't hate you, Willie! It's myself I hate," Persis cried. "You mustn't mind me; I'm just a little blue and lonely." He laughed gruesomely. "Bride and groom together on honeymoon, and both terribly lonely! Gad! I wonder if other married couples come to feel this way when the honeymoon turns to green cheese. And do they just bluff it through? It reminds me of that chap in Hogarth's _Mariage a la Mode_, where the wife is yawning and the husband is sunk back in his chair in a dismal stupor. Only he was drunk--I think I'll get drunk." He stumbled out to find his usual nepenthe. When he came back her door was locked. CHAPTER LVI Persis sat in grim communion with her image for hours. She faintly heard her husband's tapping on her door, and calling through it at intervals in thicker and thicker speech. But it was like a far-off rumor from a street. She was in session with herself. She took her boudoir cap from her hair, and sat in the cascade of it peering through as from a cavern, and smoking always. She was smoking much too much, but she felt a companionship in tobacco. As she held the cap in her hand she thought of Forbes; and the remembrance was so joyous that she vowed to brave the world to get back to him. But she pondered what the world would say of her, how it had dealt with the others that had openly defied it, and she was afraid. Then she vowed that she would take her love secretly and cleverly. She would hunt for Forbes till she met him and regained him. Then she pictured how he would look at her when he understood. She imagined him starting back from her as from something abhorrent. She threw a cigarette-stub at her face in the mirror and gasped: "Pagh!" She could endure anything better than such cheapening of herself in Forbes' eyes. And after a while she began to think of her self-respect. She had only herself. She must keep that self precious. Worn out at last with her silent war, she bent her head on her crossed hands and fell asleep among the fripperies of her dressing-table. These temptations in the wilderness come to people in various places. This tired butterfly fought with evil and won the duel in a boudoir in a fashionable hotel in Paris. Hours later she woke in broad daylight and crept to bed with tingling arms and aching forehead. She did not wake again till noon. Nichette had tiptoed about her like a sentinel and had kept Willie at a distance. He discharged her a dozen times, but she simply shrugged and sniffed and answered him in French too rapid for him to follow or reply to. When at last Persis sat up with her coffee and crescents on her knees, Nichette read to her the news in the French columns of the Paris _Herald_. She learned that Ambassador-elect Tait and his entourage had gone to Evian-les-Bains. Willie came in with new plans for Persis' diversion. He suggested a visit to Switzerland and Lake Geneva. She would have liked to go to the mountains. There was something heroic in them. But Evian was closely adjacent to Switzerland. She nobly suggested Norway and Sweden. The thought of fjords and midnight suns and things was also heroic.