What Will People Say? A Novel
to go along, an unwilling and unwitting chaperon.
She saw Forbes in the church, but at a distance, and noted with a gush
of pity how haggard and lonely he seemed. She hoped that not all of his
grief was for his dead friend. She longed to go to him with comfort, but
she ventured only a nod from afar and one of her slow, sweet, tender
smiles.
Forbes had been kept intensely active at the Embassy, where the Consul
took over the interrupted duties of the Ambassador's office, but left to
Forbes the personal details of the funeral ceremony, the closing up of
the house, and the arrangements for getting Mildred back to New York.
The Ambassador's body was to be taken home to America on board a
war-ship proffered by the French Republic.
For three days Forbes was too grimly busy and too grief-stricken to feel
more than a longing to see Persis; an impossible desire without impulse
to achieve it.
Mildred was, for once, demanding help instead of giving it. The loss of
her father was a devastation in her soul. She clung to Forbes as to a
brother. Had Persis seen her in his arms she might have felt a jealousy;
but not if she could have seen Forbes' heart. That was filled only with
a sense of shame. He felt that in denying Mildred his love he had robbed
the old man of his last great wish. At times he reproached himself with
the very murder of his best friend, the murder of a great statesman,
the noble father of a noble woman. And the motive of the assassination
was his obstinate devotion to another man's wife!
People have a genius for remorse as for other emotions, and Forbes was
of those who can mercilessly indict their own souls. Storms of
self-condemnation were succeeded by storms of longing. About him hovered
the tantalizing beckoning vision of Persis. He was mad to see her. He
kept alternately vowing that he would not go near her and wondering when
he should.
At first he dared not make an effort to see her, because he feared to
involve her and because he had not a moment he could call his own. He
was burdened with tasks of every sort, and in and out of his office he
was beset with correspondents like sparrows demanding crumbs of news to
cable to America. He had no leisure of his own except the black hours
when he sank into his bed.
He would trudge to his room so exhausted, so drowsy, that he could
hardly get his clothes off. The moment he lay down he was the prey to a
swarm of black emotions that swooped about him like bats in a cave,
swooped and shot and chittered, swept him with their vile wings and
fastened their claws in his hair. He reproached himself with every
wickedness and worthlessness from hideous ingratitude to murder and
adultery that dared not take what it lusted for.
Sleepless nights and restless days wore him out until the funeral, an
affair of great pomp and enormous impressiveness. When he saw Persis in
the church her beauty was overwhelming in the black costume she wore
under the shadow of a black hat.
Somehow, after the funeral ceremony, the prayers, and the long ritual,
with which the church formally restored the soul to the heaven from
which it emigrated and the body to the earth of which it was made, there
came a great relief to Forbes--the restful word "Finis."
That night he dined with Mildred. She, too, felt the relaxation of a
burden removed. She almost collapsed into sleep at the table, and her
maid supported her to her room. She had wept herself out.
Forbes envied her nothing but her fluency in weeping. He carried about
with him the ache of the tears a man feels but cannot release, the
unshed tears that scratch the eyes like blown grit. He longed to be a
boy again and cry his heart out as he had cried when his father was
brought home dead. He longed to weep stormily as he had wept when the
boy he was had been denied some luxury he greatly desired--honey, or a
staying home from school, or some wild animal for a pet.
The thought of Persis came to him now with the charm of all
three--honey, truancy to duty, and danger. He lifted the telephone from
the rack to ask her permission to call. He put it down again, his heart
beating as if he had touched a snake. He went out into the air.
It was a typical, sharp, wet winter night in Paris, the chill going with
a peculiar directness straight to the marrow of the bones and freezing
the body from within outward. Forbes had buffeted blizzards and the
still, grim, icy airs of Dakota when the mercury seemed to crowd into
the bulb of the thermometer to keep warm. But he wondered if he had ever
been so cold in his life as he was now, when the thermometer had not
reached even the zero of the French centigrade.
Paris was not Paris. The sidewalks were not peopled with tables, and the
restaurants were deserted within. There were few people abroad, for the
audiences were at this hour in the theaters and the home-keepers were at
home. Nobody loitered in the streets but a few miserables, and they were
wretchedly cold.
Forbes was so desperately lonely that he resolved to call upon Persis,
even if he had to talk to her husband. He walked to the Meurice, but
dared not turn in; he went on by. Later he was back again. Three times
his courage--or his cowardice--failed him. The last time he stopped
short as if he heard a sudden "Halt!"
Willie Enslee was just stepping into a car with two other men, violently
American and manifestly bent on finding in Paris what Paris manufactures
for American visitors.
Willie paused and cast his eyes along the street idly while he waited
for the other two to precede him. Forbes stepped behind a shelter till
Willie vanished.
Forbes, the brave, the upright, found himself dodging to escape Willie's
fishy eyes, found himself chuckling over Willie's blindness. Then he
cursed himself for a reptile. He turned away from the hotel and started
back to his apartment, groaning to himself, "The woman doesn't live that
can make a sneak of me."
CHAPTER LX
When he had gone a few hundred paces he whirled about and hurried back
to the hotel; asked for Monsieur _et_ Madame Enslee; sent up his card;
wished he had it back; received a summons to come up; cursed the
slowness of the Parisian _ascenseur_; wished it would fall and kill him;
moved toward Persis' door as to his execution; and was ushered in by
Nichette, who was cloaked and bonneted for an evening out. She left him
a moment, then came back and rattled off a string of French, from which
he gleaned that he was _voulez-vous'd_ to seat himself and attend a
little moment. Then Nichette left him and hastened to the corner of the
street, where a little waiting _piou-piou_ shivered in his uniform.
The hostility Forbes read in Nichette's look was merely her impatience
at being kept a few moments longer from her sergeant after having been
detained an hour by a quarrel of the Enslees--a quarrel ending in a
defiant announcement from Willie that he was going to see the wickedest
show he could find in Paris, and from Persis an hilarious "_Bonne
chance!_ I hope you find somebody to take you off my hands for a while!"
This had horrified Willie as a sacrilege, and he had regretted his vow.
But in the court of the hotel he found two Americans who had typically
arrived in Paris, and bibulously prepared for a night of social
investigation without having taken the trouble to learn a word of
French, the distinction of coins, or the system of cab fares and tips.
They welcomed Enslee as a life-saver, embraced him, and bade him confirm
their worst suspicions of Paris.
This Forbes did not know, and he misinterpreted Nichette's brusquerie.
His own thoughts were brusque. He loathed himself, and hated Persis and
blamed her as if she had cast down a net from her window and dragged him
to her feet.
He paced the lavishly furnished reception-room of the suite and resolved
to escape before it was too late. The thought of the cold loneliness of
the streets, of the town, of the world, held him back. He was
unutterably forlorn. He sank into a chair and clenched his hands
together.
Then he heard Persis' voice. It came through the glistening portieres
masking the doors to the room adjoining, a kind of living-room. Music
and welcome and all of Persis' beauty were in the little hospitable
words:
"Come in here, Harvey, won't you? I can't budge, and I'm all by myself."
Wondering where she was and how he should find her, he pushed through
the curtains timidly, as timidly as Joseph entering Potiphar's wife's
boudoir.
He found Persis cuddled up on a chaise longue of gold and satin. She was
almost lost in a jumble of parcels and toys and knickknacks. She had
been writing addresses, and the fingers she gave into his were smudged
with ink.
She sat like a sultana, with her feet curled under her. She wore a light
confection of a house-gown of some astonishingly attractive hue, with
plentiful display of white lace and arms and bosom and a good deal of
stocking. She wore a boudoir-cap fetchingly awry.
Forbes put her hand up to his lips and laughed as he kissed the smudge
of ink. It was the first laugh he had known for days. It was like the
first chuckle of rain after a drought. It brought moisture to his eyes.
He clung to her hand. It was now a rescuing hand put out to lift him
from the dry well of gloom. He dropped to his knee, and without any
coquetry she put her arms around him and huddled him close. His hot
cheek knew the ineffable comfort of her silken shoulder; his brow felt
her lips upon them. He was at home.
All the strength that had sustained him, all his ideas of duty and
honor, were blown away like the down of a dandelion puff by the mere
breath of her lips. And now the tears his eyes had refused broke from
them in flood. He wept because he was happy and because he had found
contentment and refuge. He wept as great heroes and fierce warriors used
to weep before tears went out of fashion for men and began to fall into
disuse even among women.
Persis mothered him, wondering at his childishness. She did not weep
with him. She smiled. She laughed the low, thorough laughter of the
victorious Delilah getting her Samson back. She loved him though she
betrayed him. She loved the triumph of her beauty, the victory of her
soft bosom, over all the hateful inconveniences of law and justice and
piety.
By and by he was smiling, too, with shame at his humanity and his return
to boyhood, and with the revel of her companionship. She humiliated him
deliciously by drying his wet eyelids with her fragrant tiny
handkerchief and by the silly baby talk she lavished on him. But it was
the only comfortable shame he had felt in the past black days.
And now they were indeed acquainted with each other. She had seen him
weep. When a woman has gained that advantage over a man, what dignity
has he left? She can make a face at him, and all his pride becomes a
laughing-stock.
At length, to avoid the reefs of more important talk, he asked her how
she came to be alone, and what all the bundles were for. She explained
that she had been shopping betimes for Christmas presents and had been
making the things ready for the morrow's American mail; Willie had
mutinied and gone vaudevilling; his man had taken the English maid of a
neighbor in the hotel to a dance at the Red Mill; and Nichette had
refused to miss her soldier's evening out.
Persis made Forbes help her with the remaining packages, and they
laughed like youngsters over the knots she tied, and the blots she made,
and the things she had bought for all the people she had to buy things
for--her father, her mother-in-law, her sister, her sister's children,
and an army of servants. When finally the last address was inscribed she
felt that she had done enough duty for a month, and voted herself a