What Will People Say? A Novel 30 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 30Chapter 30
18
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 30
Chapter 30
HughesEnglish
She studied Forbes closely and laughed aloud at the almost nausea he plainly felt.
"I thought that would shock the nonsense out of you," she triumphed. "Now let's be sensible while the sun shines, and get better acquainted. Tell me more about you, and I'll tell you some awful things about me."
She sauntered on in an arch and riant humor. He resented it, and yet he followed her, hating this mood of hers, yet finding her more precious as he found her more difficult. If he had known women better he would have guessed, or "reckoned," that her very effort to make herself difficult was a proof that she was not really so difficult as she would have him believe. The one who takes such joy in being pursued is not entirely unwilling to be caught.
She quizzed him about his life, his home, his earlier loves. She demanded descriptions of every sweetheart he had cherished, from the first chub of infancy to the girl he left behind in Manila; and she said she hated them all impartially.
She told him of her life: endowed with every material comfort, yet with a vague unhappiness for something or somebody--"perhaps it was for you," she added, but spoke teasingly. She had had nurses and governesses and maids from her first day on earth. She had been to school in France, and traveled round the world; she had been presented at the courts of England and Italy, Germany and Russia; had visited at castles and chateaux. Her sister was in England. She had married a title and was unhappy; but for the matter of that, so were the wives of most of the stanch Americans she knew, rich and poor.
Persis had had flirtations of cosmopolitan variety. Her ambition was to go on skimming the cream off of life. She had given up the hope of ever loving, at least with abandonment. There was too much else in the world. She had been so thoroughly and incessantly schooled in self-control that she doubted if even her heart could forget the rules of conduct. She did not want love to make the fool of her it had made of so many of her friends, and of the people she read about in newspapers and books.
She never took much enjoyment in adventures, anyway, she said, because her imagination was always busy with the appearance of her acts. She found herself considering: "How will this look? What gossip will that start?" She hated herself for the cold, calculating instinct; but she could not rid herself of it.
"This very minute," she admitted, "my fun is half spoiled by thinking of what those people down there in the house will say if they learn that I've been up here with you? Nothing could be more harmless than a stroll before breakfast in a highly illuminated forest, but they'd talk and--well, I'd rather they wouldn't."
She led the protesting Forbes homeward again, down the long flight of steps. The most he could exact was the promise of another walk together--sometime when it could be arranged without attracting attention or detracting from the duties toward the host and his other guests.
As they started across the lawn, whose dew the risen sun had pretty well imbibed, they met the gardener. Prout was yawning, and when he took off his hat he looked sleepy enough to fall over into it.
"You folks been up all night?" he asked, with a drowsy surliness.
Persis shook her head and smiled. "It's you that have overslept."
He changed the subject abruptly. "I just been buildin' a fire for Miss Mather."
"Good Lord, is she awake?" Persis gasped.
"Well," said Prout, "as to that, she's not wot you'd exackly call awake, but she's up an' doin' in the kitchin."
While the gardener shuffled away to play valet to his flowers, Persis stood irresolute.
"I hope Winifred hasn't seen us," she said. "The kitchen and the nursery are both to the east. We'll take a chance. You go on into the kitchen and help her, and I'll telephone down from my room. Au 'voir!"
She opened the outer door ever so slightly and oozed through the slit as narrowly as Bernhardt used to when she had murdered Scarpia. Forbes dawdled a few moments, then went into the kitchen.
He found Winifred playing the part of cook with a vengeance. Her hair was disheveled, her sleeves rolled back, and her face smudged from her smudgy fingers. She had assumed a cook's prerogative of wrath. The moment she saw Forbes she began with a savage, "Oh, it's you! And who's been littering up my clean kitchen?"
"I took the liberty of making myself a little coffee," said Forbes.
"There are two cups."
"I made two cups," said Forbes; and she was too busy to notice the evasion.
"Then, since you've had your breakfast," she snapped, "you can help me get something for the rest. You'd better put this on."
Like another Omphale, she fastened a womanish apron on Hercules, and set him at uncongenial tasks, retrieving butter, milk, salt, and eggs.
After a time there was a buzz, and a little hopper fell in a box on the wall. Winifred went to the house telephone and called out:
"Well! H'lo, Perse, what you doing awake so early? Insomnia? No, I will not send your breakfast up on a tray! You can come down and get it. My little snojer man is helping me."
She hung up the ear-piece and turned to Forbes with her broad smile.
"A cook has no chance to entertain her gempman friends. The minute I get a policeman in here somebody rings."
She kept him wretchedly ill at ease by more of the same banter, which he hardly knew how to take. And she seized his arm with a gesture of culinary coquetry just as Persis sauntered in. Forbes was horrified to note a look of anger in Persis' eyes. He should have been flattered. She greeted Winifred, and also Forbes, with a discreet "Good morning!"
"Good get-busy!" Winifred growled.
"What can I do?" said Persis, helplessly.
"For one thing, you can rout the other loafers out of bed."
"How?"
"Use the telephone. Tell 'em the house is on fire."
While Forbes fetched and carried at Winifred's beck and call, Persis rang up the various rooms and conveyed Winifred's orders. But her gentle voice carried no conviction, and Winifred took her place at the instrument and howled in her best cook lingo:
"Get up and come down, or I'll quit you cold and lave you to starve. It's scrambled eggs and bacon the marnin', and no goods exchanged."
She went back to the range, only to be called to the telephone again. Mrs. Neff was imploring a brief respite. Water boiling over and scuttering in hot hailstones from the stove brought Winifred back with a screech. She upbraided Persis for a useless scullery maid and threatened Forbes with a skillet. She was enjoying herself tremendously. She ordered Persis to set the table in the breakfast-room, but refused Forbes permission to help her.
But he slipped away a little later, when she went to rummage the ice-room. He found Persis drifting about in a lake of golden sunshine, distributing delicate chinas and looking like a moving figurine of bisque. There was a pleasant clink of silver as she laid the knives and forks and spoons, and he thought how wonderful she would be in such a little home as he could offer her, how she would grace the quarters at an army post. She smiled on him, and her smile was sunshine. He went at her once more with that rush of desire. She put up her hand to fend him off, and he knocked a cup out of it.
They knelt together to pick up the pieces. He began:
"While I'm down here on my knees, I ask you again--" She put her hand to her lips in warning, but he seized the hand. She snatched it away and rose to her feet just as Willie Enslee came in.
Forbes, still on his knees, set busily to work picking up the scattered petals of the china. He felt guilty as a caught burglar, but the unsuspecting Willie paused on the threshold to yawn. Willie was always yawning on the threshold of discovery.
"'Morning! 'Morning!" was his almost swallowed greeting.
"We just broke one of your cups," said Persis, "while we were setting the table."
"So long as you don't break the table, I suppose I'm to be congratulated. Had a fearful time this morning without my man. Had to fill my own tub, put own buttons in, shave self--cut a map of Russia on face. Couldn't get tie tied to save life. Persis, you'll have to help your little Willie with his bib."
So Persis knotted his scarf for him while Forbes grew restive at the sight. Willie was proprietary in his tone, and he clung drowsily to Persis' arm while her hands hovered about his throat. But when the task was done he toddled through the swinging-door to see what wreck had been made of the kitchen.
"You see!" said Persis, reproachfully, putting down the silver very slowly. "You nearly got caught."
"But what of it?" Forbes broke out. "I love you. I'm not ashamed of my love or of you. I want you to be my wife."
The boyish manly sincerity of this convinced her and filled her eyes with a morning haze.
"You do? Really?" She moved on to the next place. He followed her.
"Of course I do. Will you?"
She continued slowly circling the table, with side trips to the sideboard, and he followed with a great ado of helping her. The two were making a slower job of it than either would have required alone.
"It's rather fun being proposed to while one is setting the table," Persis murmured. "We're getting terribly domestic already."
"You'd be so beautiful domesticated," Forbes urged.
"But so somebody else thinks--and we're on his grounds." And since it was characteristic of Persis to express a virtue in a sporting term, she shook her head. "We're not playing strictly according to Hoyle. It's not quite cricket."
"I know it," said Forbes. "And I--I dare you to come outside--off the place."
"All right. I will, the first chance I get."
"The first chance you get to what?" said Mrs. Neff, who appeared as suddenly as Cinderella's witch. And she looked a trifle witchy this morning without the rejuvenating spells of her maid. "I couldn't help overhearing, but my eyes aren't open. I didn't see anything."
Persis surprised Forbes and Mrs. Neff by her frankness.
"I was saying I would take a long walk with Mr. Forbes the first chance I get."
"Good work!" said Mrs. Neff, quite earnestly. "I was telling him what a love of a couple you two would make."
Persis turned on her in amazement. "You were telling Mr. Forbes that?"
"Yes, I was. When a woman gets as old as I feel of mornings, she has the right to be a matchmaker. You two go on and work out your own salvation and I'll keep Willie off the scent. If I could prevent Alice from marrying Stowe Webb, and you from marrying Willie, I'd retire on my laurels. I dote on conspiracies. That's where Alice gets her knack for plots."
This to her daughter, who sauntered in just in time to receive the facer and gasp:
"Why, mother, what do you mean?"
"Oh, I can smell a mouse even if I can't trap it right away. I know you telephone him and write him and all that. I used to when I was your age. Only, I fooled my mother and married the man I wanted to. If I'd married the one she wanted me to, I'd be one of the richest women on earth instead of a starving twice-widow with a pack of children to drive to market."
"Isn't she the most appalling mother a poor child ever had?" Alice gasped. "Sometimes I think I ought to take her over my knee and spank her."
Forbes and Persis paid little heed to the usual duel of these two women. They were thinking of the complexity of outside interference in their own program of quiet communion.
Persis' mind was full of reproof for Mrs. Neff; but she was silenced by the presence of Alice, and Ten Eyck's appearance, and the irruption of Winifred with a great tray of egg-gold and bacon-bronze.
It was an informal gathering at that breakfast-table. Important articles of toilet had been forgotten, and there were no maids or men to repair the omissions. But too great correctness would have been an anachronism at Winifred's table. Everybody had gone to bed early and tired, and had slept longer and better than usual. Doing without was a new game to these people, and they made a picnic-ground of the breakfast-room.
Even Willie tried to romp with his guests, but he lacked the genius for hilarity, and his jokes consisted principally of repeating exactly what somebody else had just said, then laughing as hard as he could.
He told Persis that he wanted to show her the farm, and the new fountain in the sunken gardens, and he told her in such a way that the others felt themselves cordially invited not to go along. But they were used to tactlessness from Willie, and they merely winked mutually.
Willie seemed to feel the winks in the air, and to realize that he had not done exactly the perfect thing, so he reverted to his favorite witticism: "You take Mrs. Neff, Mr. Forbes" (he was getting the name right at times now). "You take Mrs. Neff and go where you please. You turtle-doves will find several arbors and summer-houses and lovers' lanes scattered around the place. I'll tell the gardener and his men to keep out of the way. Come along, Persis."
Forbes watched them off with a look of jealousy that did not escape Mrs. Neff. She put a kindly hand on his arm.
"After all, he owns the place; he's the host--a poor thing, but our host. She'd rather be with you, and you'd rather be with her; but you'll have to wait. You'll probably get plenty of each other soon enough."
Winifred detailed Alice and Ten Eyck to wash the breakfast dishes. The turn of the others would come later. Persis and Mrs. Neff were to make the beds.
"Winifred was born to be a poor man's wife," said Mrs. Neff, as she led Forbes across the lawn. "She dotes on cooking and pot-walloping and mending, and she had to be born with a mint of money, and the only man that ever cared for her is Bob Fielding, who will hardly let her lift her teacup to her lips, for fear she'll overwork herself.
"Now Persis is as dainty as a cat, and as hard to boss. And she has a fatal attraction for men who can't afford to keep her. Willie's the only suitor she ever had that has more money than she could spend. And I think she likes him less than anything on earth except work."
Forbes was tempted to confess to Mrs. Neff what he had divulged to Ten Eyck, but he postponed the miserable business. It was an uncongenial company for proclaiming one's poverty.
The surroundings were as tempting as Naboth's vineyard was to David. He understood why men grew unscrupulous in the hunt for great wealth.
Mrs. Neff led Forbes about the place, which she knew well. But the beauties were only torments to him. Below the climbing marble stairway to the temple there was a broken stairway winding down the hill. It meandered like the dry bed of a stream, between brick walls, bordered with flowers, with now and then a resting-place, or some quaint niche where a little statue smiled or a fountain trilled and tinkled.
At two stages of the descent there were circular levels with ornate shelters and aristocratic plants. From the lowest shelf there was only a path dropping down the long hill to a distant wall; beyond this a ragged woods like a mob of poor shut out from a rich man's place.
"That wall is the end of the Enslee estate," said Mrs. Neff.
"There is an end to it, then?" said Forbes, more bitterly than he intended.
"There's an end to everything, my boy," Mrs. Neff brooded, with a far-off bitterness of her own--"an end to wealth and love and--everything."
"Who owns that place off there, I wonder?" said Forbes.
"Nobody in particular," said Mrs. Neff. "Some old cantankerous absentee that won't sell. Do you want to buy it to be near Mrs. Enslee? Willie has offered him all sorts of money, but he won't let go. You might have better luck."
Forbes again ignored the assumption that he was wealthy, and said:
"There are things, then, that even the Enslee money can't buy?"
"Many things," said Mrs. Neff. "Persis' love, for one, and Willie's own happiness, and a foot more of height and a certain charm, and--but aren't we stupid and cynical this beautiful morning?"
"Are we?" Forbes smiled.
"We are, and I have a right to be," said Mrs. Neff. "But you haven't. You are not white-haired, nor old, nor a woman."
"Are those the only causes for unhappiness?"
"They are three of the worst, and the most incurable."
But Forbes was too young in his own anxieties to give much importance to her ancient plaints, though she was not too old to understand his. He was glancing upward now and then to the little temple. It was visible from here, though the two figures in it were small and blurred with light.
Forbes was sure that Enslee was proposing to Persis, for he gesticulated, pointed at the landscape and the house. He was evidently commending these to Persis, laying them at her feet, begging her to become at once the chatelaine of this splendor.
Forbes wanted to abandon Mrs. Neff and fly to the rescue of Persis. He wanted to break in on that proposal, prove to her how much better he loved her than Enslee did, how much greater happiness she could have with him than with Enslee. But he made no move in that direction. It was one of those simple things that almost nobody can find the courage to do. He loitered with Mrs. Neff, hating himself for a skulker.
He could not know that he pleaded well enough at a distance. His absence wrought for him against Willie Enslee's presence. Willie was indeed commending his estate to Persis, urging her to marry him at once and settle here for the summer, except what time they might spend abroad or on the yacht, or his other palace at Newport.
But while he pleaded Persis was searching Enslee's landscape for Forbes. The view had been entrancing from the temple with Forbes at her side. Now she felt that it was not after all so satisfying. The very fact that Willie praised it brought up suspicion. She would prefer to choose another landscape, one better suited to her and Forbes, not a second-hand landscape built along some other person's lines.
It would be a joy for Forbes and her to pick out a hundred acres or more--not too far from New York; perhaps among the hunting and poloing colonies on Long Island. While they were building they could cruise.
But perhaps Forbes could not afford a yacht. She must not run him into extravagances. Well, after all, the suites de luxe on some of the ocean liners were not so bad, with their own dining-saloons attached. By omitting the yacht they could have a stunning town house. Mrs. Jimmie Chives wanted to sell her place for a song, and nearly every room in it was imported bodily from some European castle or mansion. With a few changes it could be made quite a habitable shack.
And so, while Willie pleaded in his nagging way, her own imagination was attorney for Forbes. Only it was imagining a Forbes that did not exist, a fairly rich and decently leisurely Forbes. Down below, looking up to her with such eyes as lovers in hell cast on their beloveds in heaven, was the real Forbes, poor, hard-worked, with no financial prospects beyond a minute increase of wage by slow promotion. And he had only a few days more of leisure before he resumed the livery of the nation.
