What Will People Say? A Novel
vacation--also a cigarette. She told Forbes where Willie's cigars were
kept, but he made a punctilio of not smoking them, though he had none of
his own and would not order any from the hotel.
They talked small talk and love talk; they laughed and cooed. They were
congenial to the infinitesimal degree. The world outside was dank and
cheerless. They shut it away with great curtains. They forgot that there
was any curse upon their rapture. They shut out all their obligations as
things clammy and odious.
Nature had selected them for each other. Nature mated them and wooed for
them, and did not know or did not care what other plans they had made,
what contracts or pledges had been assumed. The true damnation was in
the earlier crime: that solemn marriage in the church before the world.
The wickedness was begun at the altar: the violation of duty, the breach
of the seventh "Thou shalt not." It was there that Persis' feet took
hold on hell.
Yet the world had made a jubilee of that occasion. People had put on
their best clothes and were proud to be asked to assist. Rather, they
should have hidden their eyes from the abomination; they should have
resented the request to play accomplice to that indecency. Instead, they
celebrated the crime with flowers, and music, and with surplices in a
church.
There would be resentment enough, but belated, when the consequences of
that impious sacrifice were reaped, when nature demanded restitution and
scoffed at the mortgage. If this night's rite were ever heard of it
would be cried out against, the celebrants would be shunned, banished.
None of this is to say that faith should not be kept, however rashly
pledged, or that people should make a virtue of refusing to pay the
debts they run and repudiating the laws that shelter them.
Persis' earlier crime did not justify or cancel the latter, but added
another to it. She had entered with open eyes into her compact with
Enslee; she auctioned herself off; he was the highest bidder, and she
knocked herself down. She was in honor bound to stay sold. But the very
readiness to commit that infamy, the yielding to that temptation, was
instruction for the next. Easy bind, easy break.
Her only safety was in keeping away from Forbes. That was the
Ambassador's wisdom. He feared the very proximity of Persis and Forbes.
He foresaw that, while nature would hold cheap the laws of mankind,
mankind would not accept nature as an excuse for lawlessness.
In spite of him Persis and Forbes were reunited. The withes that
marriage had bound about her were as nothing to the great changes it had
made in her soul. It had taken away the enormous power that exists in
maidenhood, with its self-awe and its fierce defense of integrity. That
instinct of self-preciousness that had made Persis hide her lips from
Forbes' kisses on a far-off day was annulled, for her lips had been
Willie Enslee's for more than half a year. Her body had been his toy. He
had schooled her to maturity, made a woman of the girl.
And now in the presence of the bridegroom selected by nature and love
what protection had she? She had no harem walls to inclose her, no
guardians to keep the suitor away or to threaten exposure. She had lost
the fawn-like girlishness that would take flight; there was no
nun-spirit within her now to cry "Help me!"
What remorse there was was the man's. He blamed himself for overpowering
where he was overpowered and decoyed. With the traditional mistake of
the man he accused himself of a ruthless conquest when he was really the
prey of ancient guile and wile. And this again is not to blame Persis.
She was herself the mere puppet of world-old impulses along the wires of
sense. She was a victim, too. But her remorse was hardly remorse at all,
rather amazement or dismay. It was Forbes that condemned himself for
dishonor.
Man is the maker of laws, the upholder of laws, the punisher of those
who violate the majesty of the law.
But law for law's sake has little or no meaning for woman. She has her
own codes and reads them within. The complex tissue of her loves and
hates is her attorney, always plaintiff or defendant, not often referee.
She has her glories, and perhaps they are greater than any of man's; but
the creation of laws and constitutions and codes is not one of them. She
is timid, she is brave, she is merciful, she is ruthless. She may
reproach herself for indiscretion, for folly, for misplaced trust, for
misguided emotion; but did any woman ever honestly reproach herself for
a breach of honor as honor? A disloyalty to religion, yes; to faith,
yes; to love, oh yes; but to honor?
Persis was dumfounded at the completeness of her success by surrender
and at its rashness. She was afraid that Forbes might despise her; but
she felt also the barbaric primeval perfection of the triumph of nature.
She had achieved her destiny. She had been female to the male of her
choice. She would fight the consequences; she would deny the fact, but
she felt that she could never regret it.
Immediately having made conquest of Forbes, she began to own him. She
began to resent his other obligations, his other codes; her jealousy
began to function.
She implored him to postpone his return to America; to follow the
Ambassador's body on a later steamer; not to go, at least, on the
steamer Mildred took--anything to escape the breaking of the rose-chains
wherewith she withed him. But his almost filial love for his benefactor
overcame even his passion. Nothing could move him from that last
foothold on self-respect.
The triumph of love wound up in a war, a downright quarrel, with all the
brutality of a married couple. And that came to an abrupt end with the
tinkle of a clock sounding the hour. Both of them blenched. It was as if
rats fighting heard the bell of the cat.
"You must hurry," she gasped, "Willie is long past due."
Forbes needed no urging. He fled so precipitately that he hardly paused
for a farewell kiss. They had time for no future plans. He sneaked along
the corridors of the hotel. He feared to summon the elevator lest Willie
step out of it. He went down by the stairways. From the entresol he
studied the lobby of the hotel to make sure of not meeting Enslee. A
detective might have suspected him for a thief had not his manner been
the immemorial stealth of clandestine lovers. Love had belittled him
thus in one evening.
Little Willie Enslee could have put him to flight, have struck him
without resistance, have shot him down without provoking an answering
shot.
So Forbes had coerced and terrified soldiers of his who were far
superior to him in bulk and brawn. They saw his shoulder-straps and
respected them, took a pride in being humble before them. Back of them
was the whole power and dignity of the nation.
Willie Enslee wore the shoulder-straps of the husband. He wore that
authority, and back of it was arrayed the decency and the safety of
human society.
CHAPTER LXI
Forbes took the steamer he had planned to take, though he had such
battles with his recalcitrant heart that he did not feel safe till the
tender at Cherbourg put away from the ship and left him no opportunity
of return.
Equally disconsolate was young Stowe Webb, who had lost his post with
his chief, and who was in a panic of uncertainty. But Mildred, on her
first day of calm, reverted to habit and began to take thought of the
welfare of others. She asked Stowe of his plans, and, learning of his
hopelessness, immediately begged him to act as her own secretary--"at an
increase of salary because of the extra trouble she would give him."
The reaction from despair to this paradise was so great that young Webb
found it hard to maintain the appropriate solemnity. He fired off a
wireless to the friend who received his messages for Alice, and when he
heard it crackling from the mast it was like a volley of festival
sky-rockets.
He told Forbes of his new-found hope and how poor it was at best, and
Forbes envied him his very deferment; there was something so clean and
beautiful about a young lover trying to earn enough to earn the girl
that waits for him. Young Webb was building a home, and Forbes was
destroying one.
The arrival in New York brought a new mountain of tasks for Forbes.
Mildred had adopted him as an elder brother; she gave him power of
attorney in the endless interviews with the lawyers, executors,
directors, and the officials in the Department of State.
Forbes soon learned what the Ambassador's hints as to his will had
meant. A recent codicil bequeathed to him almost as much as Tait's dead
son was to have had.
It seemed to Forbes as if Satan had laid the wealth of Ormus and of Ind
at his feet and knelt there grinning over the hoard. There was a further
sardonic bitterness in the legacy, since he knew that it had been given
him so that he might feel able to make Mildred his wife without
sacrifice of his pride.
The thought came to him that he could square himself with the dead and
with the living by carrying out this implied, if not inscribed,
condition of the deed of gift.
Mildred was a splendid soul. She was not Aphrodite like Persis, but
Minerva was beautiful, too. Mildred was far nobler than Persis, who was
not noble at all. She would be a magnificent wife. She would make their
home a bee-hive of lofty purposes amid serene delights. A union with
Mildred would be wonderful. It would crown life.
And he felt that Mildred would not oppose it. He resolved again and
again to ask her; but he simply could not tell her that he loved her as
a wife ought to be loved. He and Mildred had become so dear to each
other as brother and sister that no other affection seemed possible. To
marry her would mean not only an infidelity to Persis, but a more cruel
infidelity to Mildred.
Unable to fulfil the condition of the legacy, he tried to refuse it. The
executors asked him why; his evasions led them to suspect his sanity.
Mildred would ask him why? What could he tell her?
He consulted Ten Eyck, but could tell him only that he could not give
Mildred the love that was needed to sanctify the marriage. Ten Eyck
probably understood more than he admitted. He lifted one eyebrow and
lowered the other, as if his mind were divided between two comments. He
said:
"I see why you can't go to nice old Mildred and say, 'Dear girl, I
wouldn't marry you for a hundred thousand dollars.' That would be an
awful black eye to hand a charming lady. But I can't say that your
motives of love appeal to me, Forbesy. You sound like the heroine of an
old-fashioned novel refusing to marry a rich man because she loves old
Dr. A. Nother.
"But whatever you do, Forbesy, don't refuse the money. In times like
these, when bank presidents are robbing their children's savings-banks
for carfare, don't spurn any real money, or you'll cause several persons
to die of apoplexy, and strong men will lead you to the paddedest cell
in the house of foolishness.
"Take the money and build an Old Ladies' Home with it; but don't make a
solemn jackass of yourself right out in public."
Forbes took the money, promising himself that he would scatter it in
beautiful deeds of charity.
But he didn't.
One never does.
In the first place, money in large quantities has singular adhesive and
cohesive properties. In the second place, when the news of his wealth
was published he received such serial avalanches of begging letters of
every sort, noble and ignoble, that he was dismayed. He showed a stack
of them to Ten Eyck, who said:
"You could give away your fortune in a week, and make about as much of a
show as if you drove a sprinkling-cart along the main street of hell.
All millionaires grow callous; if they don't, they cease to be
millionaires."