What Will People Say? A Novel 31 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 31Chapter 31
18
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 31
Chapter 31
HughesEnglish
Luncheon was breakfast again with a few additions. Winifred had lost the hang of the range, and what successes she had were ruined by her inability to corral the herd on time. The soup was salted beyond the sanction of even the most amiable palate. The chickens were guaranteed not to be resurrections from a cold-storage tomb; but they would have been the better for a little longer hanging and a little shorter cooking. The vegetables had not been salted at all, nor warmed quite through.
"The average is perfect," was Ten Eyck's verdict.
"And the salad's fine, Winifred," said Mrs. Neff, in a desperate effort to console the despondent cook, who retreated to the kitchen and cried a little more salt into the soup.
Ten Eyck rubbed his sagging waistcoat and groaned:
"This is the emptiest empty house-party I ever went to."
"It would have been a noble institution in Lent," Persis sighed.
"You would come," Willie snapped.
"Thank heaven," Alice purred, "I have a five-pound box of chocolates in my room."
Mrs. Neff glared at her. "He'd better save his money. Or has he an account at Maillard's? You can't live on candy, you know."
"It's quite as nourishing as the Congressional Record," said Alice.
"Deuce all!" cried Ten Eyck. "But family matters aside, we've got to do something about food. I've survived the fireless and foodless cooking at breakfast and luncheon, but the dinnerless dinner would finish me. Winifred can afford to bant, I can't. I'm going to give a party. We'll all dine over at the Port of Missing Men and have dinner on me; that will get us through until to-morrow at least."
This was agreed upon with enthusiasm. Winifred was tactfully proffered a vote of thanks and a vacation. There remained only the afternoon to kill. Persis thought to steal a few minutes with Forbes, and they struck out for the sunken gardens, but Willie came panting after them and constituted himself their guide.
He was like one of those pests that can rob the Pitti Palace of interest and make the Vatican an old barn. He led them through the gardens, the greenhouses, the stables, and the kennels. Here a little sea of beagles flowed and frothed round Persis' feet. They were a relic of the days before the hunting fever left Westchester for Long Island. They were mad for exercise, and so were the horses in the stables.
"We must take these poor nags out for a run," said Persis, looking at Forbes, who accepted with his eyes.
"All right, we will. To-morrow morning," said Willie; and Forbes resigned with a look.
Unable to shake off Willie, Persis pleaded the need for a little sleep and retreated to her room. Forbes wandered about, puzzled at the appalling loneliness he could feel in so beautiful a place with so many people around and only one missing.
Eventually, however, the sun, which had begun the day with such ecstasy for him, began to approach the top of the western hill, and the caravan set out for the Port of Missing Men, which proved to be a little cottage of an inn set upon the edge of a small mountain and surveying a vast panorama.
On the piazza the crowd dined well, and returned through the great park to the homeward roads, for when they reached the Enslee bridge it was like coming home. The wings of the motor had made it possible to run twenty-five miles to dinner and twenty-five miles back in almost negligible time; but the exultant speed of the journey and the multitude of sights that had fled past fatigued the mind like a long voyage, and it was once more a subdued company that gathered before the living-room fireplace.
Silence fell upon them all, and they sat once more staring into the flames, each finding there the glittering castles of desire.
Prout came in with more logs of wood and tiptoed out, shaking his head in stupefaction at this latest game of these amazing people.
At some vaguely later hour Persis rose and went into the adjoining music-room. Forbes longed to follow, but feared to move. She strummed a few inexpert chords on the piano. Then she went to the victrola and searched among the black disks. A little later she called out:
"Everything in this house is last year's. There's not a turkey-trot on the place, or a tango."
A little later she spoke again, "Here's a bit of ancient history." She cranked up the machine, set the needle to the disk, and "The Beautiful Blue Danube" came twanging forth from a scarred record that riddled the melody with curious spatterings.
The once world-victorious rhapsody had almost a dirge-like tameness now; but it brought Willie to his feet, and he began to circle the room with Persis. She drooped over his inferior shoulders like a wilted flower.
Ten Eyck scooped Alice off the floor and danced in double time. Forbes bowed to Winifred, but she waved him away with a heavy hand. Mrs. Neff beckoned him.
"I'd rather be second choice than a wallflower. That music takes me back a thousand years."
She glided with an old-time dignity. Forbes tried to keep his eyes from Persis and heed Mrs. Neff's reminiscences.
"Waltzes, waltzes!" she wailed. "How much they meant once to me. There are no dances like the old dances."
"There never were," said Forbes. "I reckon that twenty years from now old folks will be shaking their heads and telling how sweet and dignified the turkey-trot was compared with the epileptic crawl and the hydrophobia skedaddle they'll be doing then."
"I reckon so," said Mrs. Neff. "I can just remember when the polka was considered immoral."
Other waltzes were played, but Willie's appetite for them was quenched after the first. He sank into a chair by the living-room table and took up a story in an old magazine.
Persis waltzed with Forbes more often than with the others; but Willie never knew. In fact, it was not long before his head grew heavier and heavier, and finally, with his chin in his necktie, he slept.
The dancing, the copious wine, and the sudden warmth of the weather soon led to the opening of doors. From the music-room one stepped out into a kind of cloister opening on the lawn.
Eventually Persis set a two-step record whirling on the machine. Forbes asked her to dance with him. As they were passing one of the doors a little gust of summer-night air blew upon them so appealingly that Forbes swung Persis across the sill and stepped out into the cloister, where the moonlight streamed like a distant searchlight.
The music followed them, but muffled, by the pat of their feet along the tiled floor. To silence this noise Forbes danced across the margin of stone out upon the smooth, short, silent grass. Persis made no resistance, and he danced always a little deeper into the lawn, a little farther from the house. He danced her round the inky plumes of a cluster of cedars. These shut out the lights from the door. The music was quite lost here, and Persis hummed the tune herself; seemed to croon it into his very heart.
The music must have stopped in the house long before they knew it, and some one must have put on a disk in whose hard-rubber surface was embedded the voice of Sembrich singing a waltz-song of Chopin's.
This angelic melody floated on the air as if it came from nowhere and everywhere, and Forbes and Persis fell into the swift rhythm of it. They must needs dance furiously fast to keep up; but the music brought with it some of its own resistless energy.
Out here in this moon-world they seemed to be utterly aloof from the earth. They seemed to whirl like twin stars in a cosmic dance to the music of the spheres, the song the stars sing together. The Milky Way was but moonlit dew on the lawn of the sky. And they darted between the planets in a divine rhythm on a vast orbit, until at last a breathlessness of soul and body compelled Persis to end the occult rite.
The moonlight fell about her in a magic veil, and Forbes could not let her go. He caught her closer to him. But before his lips could brush her cheek, she broke his clasp and said:
"We must get back."
"Oh, please!" he implored.
"The others will wonder."
"What of it?"
"We can't afford to set them talking."
"We can't afford to waste a night like this in a stuffy room."
"There will be other moonlight nights."
"How do you know? We can't be sure."
"The moon is pretty regular in its habits."
"But we may not be alive. It may rain to-morrow. And the day after I must be getting back to my post."
"Really? Oh, that is too bad!" There was such deep regret in her words that he took courage to say:
"If we could only walk together a long, long distance! Doesn't the moon seem to--to command you to march?"
"Yes; but--but my slippers are all wet with the dew."
"You could change them."
"And what would the others say?"
"Must they know?"
"How could they help knowing?"
"If you told them all good night and went to your room and changed your slippers, and came out later, and I met you--"
It was a very elaborate conspiracy for him, and she gasped:
"Do you think I'm quite mad?"
"I know I am, or it seems that I'll go mad unless I can be with you in this wonderful light."
"It is wonderful, but--even if I were crazy enough to do as you say you would spoil it all--you wouldn't be good."
"Oh yes, I would. I promise."
"Solemnly?"
"I solemnly promise that I will not annoy you. I will not presume to--to kiss you unless you ask me to."
"That ought to be safe enough," she laughed. "Well, I'll think it over. And now we really must get back. Alice and Murray are at the door looking this way."
They returned slowly to the cloister, discussing the beauty of the night and the brilliance of the moon. Persis told on herself; confessed that she had been foolish enough to dance on the grass, and her shoes and stockings were drenched.
Willie, who was partially awake, supplied the necessary excuse for absence. He demanded that she change at once and not risk pneumonia.
"If I'm sent to my room I won't come back," said Persis, and yawned convincingly. This set up a contagion of yawns. Everybody was instantly smitten with sleepiness. There was no necessity to keep awake, and they were all easy victims of the demands of long-deferred sleep.
There was some flurry over the nightcap drinks, and a leisurely exit of all except Persis, who left immediately. When the rest went up to their rooms Forbes went to his.
He waited with frantic impatience for the light to go out in Ten Eyck's room. It was nearly midnight when Forbes felt it safe to venture out into the hall and tiptoe down the stairs. He had just arrived there when Persis stole down and met him. There was no light except a shaft of moonshine weirdly recolored by a stained-glass window. They did not venture even a whisper. He took her arm and groped with his free hand through a black tunnel to a blacker door, which opened stealthily and admitted a flood of moonlight.
Persis was dressed warmly, and she had put on high boots and a short, thick mackinaw jacket. But she shivered with the midnight chill and with a kind of ecstatic terror.
Forbes had planned his route. He would avoid the ascending stairway to the temple of Enslee's worship, and lead her to the sunken gardens, which he had longed to explore with her at his side.
They did not wade out into the mid-sea of the lawn. He remembered Persis' dictum that behind the blinds there are always eyes. Like snickering truants they skirted the balustrade, the shadowy privet hedge, the masses of juniper and bay and box, till they reached the point where the winding stairway dropped down between its high brick walls.
The shadows were doubly dense here, and Persis hung back, but Forbes laughed at her for a poltroon, and she refused to take the dare. He was so afraid that she might fall that he finally suggested:
"If you are afraid of stumbling here, I--I'm not forgetting my promise; but I just wanted to say that I--I don't mind holding on to you, if you want to ask me to."
She declined with whispered thanks. Down, down the walk drifted. At length they heard a murmur--the mysteriously musical noise of a fountain. They rounded a few more curves and came upon a niched Cupid riding a dolphin, from whose mouth an arc of water poured with a sound of chuckling laughter. The green patina that covered the bronze was uncannily beautiful in the moonlight, and the water was molten silver.
They stood and watched it like children for a long while. Then Forbes urged Persis along to the lowest of the circular levels.
There he led her to a bench and dropped down beside her. They both looked off into the huge caldron of the hills, filled with moonlight as with a mist.
The ragged woods in the distance were superb now in blue velvet. Everything was ennobled--rewritten in poetry. Everything plain and simple and ugly took on splendor and mystic significance. Every object, every group of objects, became personal and seemed to be striving to say something.
Persis and Forbes sat worshiping like Parsees of the moon, in awesome silence, till Forbes could no longer hush the clamor in his heart.
"Miss Cabot," he said, "I promised not to annoy you. Would it annoy you if I told you that--that I love you with all my heart and soul and being?"
"How could you love me?" she answered, softly, hoping to be contradicted. "You've known me only a few days."
"There are some people we live with for years and never like nor understand; others we know and love the moment our eyes meet."
"And did you love me the moment our eyes met?"
"Long before that. I loved the back of your hat and one shoulder."
"Do you tell everybody you meet the same thing? It's rather a stale question to ask a man, but you do seem rather impulsive on so short an acquaintance."
"Short acquaintance? We've seen each other more than most people see of each other in six months. I know you and I know myself, and I know that I shall never be happy unless I can be trying to make you happy."
"I am very happy just now," she murmured.
"But we can't sit here forever, and we can't even be together for more than a day or two. I want you for my own. I don't want to see you only--only on--Mr. Enslee's property."
"Which reminds me," Persis said, with a tone of dispelled romance, "that we are still on Mr. Enslee's property, and it doesn't seem fair to him."
"Then let's leave Mr. Enslee's property."
"How? In an airship?"
"See that wall down there. That is one of the boundary lines. If we were over that I could tell you some things that I've got to tell you."
"It's an awfully long way."
"Not so long as you think."
"No, no; it's easy to descend to Avernus, or whatever it was; but to get back! I'd never have the strength for that."
"It's not far. Let's walk to keep warm. You are cold, aren't you?"
"Frozen, that's all. Well, come along, I'll go part way with you."
They set out upon the little path. There were no trees to shelter them now from the moon, and its light seemed to beat upon the hillside like waves. The moon that draws the sea along in tides could not but have its influence on these two atoms, and on the blood that sped through their tiny veins. The moon filled them with the love of love.
Constantly pausing to turn back, but finding it easier to drift on down than begin the upward climb, Persis went on and on, arm in arm with Forbes. By and by they reached the boundary wall. He helped her to set one knee upon it and mount awkwardly. He clambered up and sat down at her side. Their backs were toward the Enslee demesne, their feet in the unknown.
And there, without delay, Forbes told her that she must be his wife, told her that he loved her as woman had never been loved before.
His hands fought to caress her, his lips tingled to be again at her cheek, but he kept his promise.
Yet the influence of the promise was potent on her, too. She knew that he was in an anguish of temptation, and she glowed with his struggle. The moon and the width of the world, the silent night-cry of the world in the lonely dark, and the yearning light filled her with a need of love. She regretted the promise, she wished that he would break it, and her absolution waited ready for his deed.
But his sense of honor prevailed upon his hands, though he could not keep silent about his heartache.
"Couldn't you possibly love me, Miss Cabot? Couldn't you possibly?" he pleaded; and she whispered, with a sad sweetness:
"I could--all too easily, Mr. Forbes, but I am afraid to love. I thought I never should love anybody really. And now that I know I might, it is so terrible an awakening that I--I'm afraid of it."
"Don't be afraid," he implored. "Love me. Let yourself love me."
"I'm afraid, Mr. Forbes."
"Then if you're afraid to love, it's because you don't, because you--can't."
This hurt her pride. Her heart was so swollen with this new power that it would not be denied either by herself or him.
"Yes, I could! Oh, I could! But I mustn't--I mustn't let myself love you--not now--not so soon."
"Then I must wait," he sighed, and said no more. And she sat in a silence, though there was a great noise of heartbeats in her breast and in her temples and ears.
She began to shiver with the night and with her excitement. She wanted to say that they must start back; but her tongue stumbled thickly against her chattering teeth. The world was bitter cold--so far from him. In his arms would be warmth and comfort as at a fireplace. She was lonely, unendurably lonely and wistful.
And he sat at her side in an equal ague of distance and need.
Finally he took his eyes from the moon and bent his gaze on her. He saw how her shoulders quaked.
"You're cold, you poor, sweet child--you're cold. I'm dying to take you in my arms, but I promised--I promised."
She was afraid to surrender, and afraid to defy the will of the night. The chill shook her with violence again and again till she felt the world rocking, the stone wall wavering. Then she leaned toward him and whispered:
"Kiss me!"
He could hardly believe that he heard, but he caught her to him and sought her lips with his. Immediately she was afraid again. Again she hid the preciousness of her mouth from him, writhed and struggled and twisted her face, hid it in his breast. But now he fought her with gentle ruthlessness, took her cold cheeks in his cold hands, and, holding her face up to the moonlight, kissed her eyes, and her dew-besprent hair and her cheeks, and pressed the first great kiss on her lips. They fled from him no more.
Only a moment she lingered in Elysium, and then she sighed:
"We must go back--we must! I hate to, but there's to-morrow--and the people! What wouldn't they think if they saw us?"
He knew that they would not think the beautiful and holy thoughts that filled his heart and hers, so he consented to climb back from this lowly heaven to the Upper Purgatory.
Her strength was gone, and he had little of his own; but somehow he helped her up. Again and again they paused to rest, and every time he tried to tell her that he was poor, and at each pause found her lips so sweet that he could not speak of so mean a thing as money and the meaner lack of it.
And behind her aching brows there were wild decisions made and unmade to tell him that she had no right to his love until she had released herself from her pledge to Enslee. But at each pause she, too, put off the harsh truth. It was sacrilege to intrude the name of Enslee into this divine communion.
They could not harm the perfection of that bliss by any other confessions than their love.
And this is one of the pitifulest things in this world, that people lie mutely lest they spoil a beautiful truth; they put off till to-morrow what would mar to-night; they spare some heart-pain; they pay some virtue too exclusive court, and lo, they find afterward that they have brought about only corruption and confusion and damnation.
So Persis and Forbes climbed slowly the winding stairway, and their mood was one of hallowed reverence for God and His beautiful world. They paused to wish even the little bronze Cupid well, and his dolphin and the stream of living water; the moon had deserted it now, but still it chuckled. Forbes and Persis skirted the balustrade with a guilty rapture, avoiding the almost daylight of the moon-swept lawn. They opened the door with the innocent stealth of good fairies.
They mounted the stairway with their arms about each other's bodies, and in the hall above they kissed and whispered, "Good night! Good night! Good night!" and tiptoed in opposite directions.
At their remote doors they paused to throw kisses into the black dark toward each other's invisible presences.
Forbes turned the knob of his door with fierce caution, and waited to hear Persis close hers. There was a faint thud and a little click like a final kiss. He tiptoed across his sill, and was just closing his door after him when he heard somewhere in the hall the soft thud of another door, the click of another lock. His heart leaped as if a fist had seized it suddenly. Some one else had been in the hall. In the deep black there was no telling whose door it was. But some one else had been in the hall.
