What Will People Say? A Novel 37 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 37Chapter 37
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Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 37
Chapter 37
HughesEnglish
Forbes had been recruiting strength to tell her that he released her; but she anticipated him by jilting him first--and in sporting terms. He stared at her, but he could not see the tears raining down in her heart. He heard her, but was deaf to the immense regret in the little words she added:
"You're pretty poor, aren't you?"
His very forehead was drenched with red shame at such comment from her. She could see how she had hurt his pride, and she put on the solemnity he expected her to wear.
"Oh, don't misunderstand me, Harvey, I implore you! I love you all the more for being just your glorious self. You've paid me the greatest honor I ever had--or shall have. You asked me to be your wife, and you are willing to divide up your pitiful little income with me. You'd give it all to me. You'd run into debt till you smothered. But it wouldn't work out. Mother was right: 'People can do without love easier than without money.'"
"Not people with hearts like yours," he ventured at last to put in as a feeble objection.
"Oh, I'm afraid of this heart of mine," she answered. "If it had any sense it wouldn't have fallen in love with you--you of all men. I knew you weren't really terribly rich, but I didn't think you were so pitifully, cruelly poor."
The epithet reiterated stung him like a whip in the face. He protested impatiently:
"I'm not really poor. Army officers have many ways of saving expenses. I might not give you princely luxuries, Persis, but I'd make your life happy."
His resistance gave her something to fight, and her resentment at fate welcomed it.
"Me happy at an army post? With nothing but poker for you and gossip for me? No, thank you!"
She caught a twitch of anger in his brows, and she grew harsher:
"Look here! Would you give up your career for me?"
"A woman can't ask a man to give up his career," he answered; and she retorted with the spirit of her time:
"Then why should she give up hers for him?"
He looked an old-fashioned surprise. "And have you a career?"
"Of course I have. Every woman has; and nowadays a woman has got to look out for herself and her future, or she'll get left at the post."
"And what career have you?" he asked, amazed.
"Marriage. It's the average woman's main business in life, Harvey. If she fails in that she fails in everything."
"Then you think the poor have no right to marry?"
"Oh no, I'm not such a fool as that. There are people with simple tastes who can be happy on nothing a year--sweet domestic women who love to manage and cook and sweep and mend and sew. There are lots of unhappy rich women who would be thoroughly contented if they were the wives of laboring-men. But that doesn't happen to be my type. I can't help it. I grow positively sick at the sight of a needle. Even fancy stitching hurts my eyes. And I can't help that. There are lots of poor women who are making their homes hells because they have no money. They'd be angels if they didn't have to economize. Some people, rich and poor, take a sensuous delight in watching a bank account grow, and they get more thrill out of saving a penny than out of getting something more beautiful for it.
"But I'm not one of those. I'm a squanderer by nature. I hate to be denied things. I loathe counting the cost of things. I can't endure to see some one else wearing better things than I've got on. I want to throttle a woman who has a later hat than mine. Oh, I may be a bad one, Harvey, but it isn't my fault. I am what I was born to be. I've got to marry money, Harvey. I've just got to."
He cried out against her self-portrait as a libel. "Oh, Persis, don't tell me that you are mercenary--a woman with a big heart like yours."
"I'm not mercenary exactly; I loathe money as money, but I like nice things. I have to have them. I'm trying to be honest with myself and with you--in time--before it's too late. It's hard; but I didn't arrange the world, did I? I didn't choose my own soul, did I? But I've got to get along with what was given me, haven't I? I tell you I'd ruin your life, Harvey. You'd divorce me in a year."
"Don't talk like that, or you will ruin your own life! There's a big tragedy in store for you, Persis, unless you--"
She was so tortured with disillusion and with the death of her first romance that she grew very hard.
"Well, so long as it isn't the tragedy of being unable to pay my bills and of eating my own cooking I can stand it. I'd rather be unhappy than shabby. But it's growing late; we must get back."
He aided her to her feet, untied the horses, and offered her his hand for a mounting-block. But she said:
"We can walk quicker here than we can ride." Taking her bridle in her arm, she set out swiftly. She seemed once more to be running away from something--a shadow of poverty, no doubt. He felt unspeakably sorry for her. Again he was about to offer her back her heart when an abrupt light broke over her face. She paused, laughed, turned to him.
"What a fool I am! My father set my sister up in business as a British peeress and bought her her husband and settled a whacking dower on her. He can do the same for me and keep the money in this country--and get me a real husband. He could give me enough for us both to live on comfortably."
"I reckon I could hardly accept that arrangement," Forbes said, as gently as he might.
"You see!" she cried out. "You expect me to murder my pride and accept poverty, but you won't accept wealth because you must keep your pride. You couldn't object to my having the money to spend on myself, could you?"
"No, I could hardly object to that," he said.
"Well, then, if everything goes right with my father's plans we'll have love and money and all. It will be wonderful--heaven on earth! Kiss me!"
She put up her lips, and he kissed them and found them bitter-sweet. Then she strode on with a lilting joy, humming a song and putting her horse to his paces to keep up with her. Forbes remembered what Senator Tait had said of her father's impending doom, and her rapture was a heartbreak to him--a final irony.
As they issued from the green cave of the forest and walked down to the State Road to take the saddle, a motor came along. Two men were in it. The driver stopped the car in front of Persis, and the other man lifted his hat. It disclosed a shock of brindle hair and half of one eyebrow gone.
"Can you tell me if this road leads to Briarcliff?" he asked.
"Yes, I think so," Persis answered.
"Thank you, Miss Cabot," he called out, as the car whirred away.
Persis stared after him in amazement. "Now who was that? How did he know my name?"
"By your pictures in the papers," Forbes suggested.
"No," said Persis; "I've met him somewhere. Oh, I know. He's a reporter on the--some paper. Lord, I hope he didn't misconstrue our being here. I didn't like the grin on his face."
