What Will People Say? A Novel 56 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 56Chapter 56
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Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 56
Chapter 56
HughesEnglish
Persis sat in grim communion with her image for hours. She faintly heard her husband's tapping on her door, and calling through it at intervals in thicker and thicker speech. But it was like a far-off rumor from a street. She was in session with herself.
She took her boudoir cap from her hair, and sat in the cascade of it peering through as from a cavern, and smoking always. She was smoking much too much, but she felt a companionship in tobacco. As she held the cap in her hand she thought of Forbes; and the remembrance was so joyous that she vowed to brave the world to get back to him.
But she pondered what the world would say of her, how it had dealt with the others that had openly defied it, and she was afraid. Then she vowed that she would take her love secretly and cleverly. She would hunt for Forbes till she met him and regained him.
Then she pictured how he would look at her when he understood. She imagined him starting back from her as from something abhorrent. She threw a cigarette-stub at her face in the mirror and gasped: "Pagh!" She could endure anything better than such cheapening of herself in Forbes' eyes. And after a while she began to think of her self-respect. She had only herself. She must keep that self precious.
Worn out at last with her silent war, she bent her head on her crossed hands and fell asleep among the fripperies of her dressing-table. These temptations in the wilderness come to people in various places. This tired butterfly fought with evil and won the duel in a boudoir in a fashionable hotel in Paris.
Hours later she woke in broad daylight and crept to bed with tingling arms and aching forehead. She did not wake again till noon. Nichette had tiptoed about her like a sentinel and had kept Willie at a distance. He discharged her a dozen times, but she simply shrugged and sniffed and answered him in French too rapid for him to follow or reply to.
When at last Persis sat up with her coffee and crescents on her knees, Nichette read to her the news in the French columns of the Paris Herald. She learned that Ambassador-elect Tait and his entourage had gone to Evian-les-Bains.
Willie came in with new plans for Persis' diversion. He suggested a visit to Switzerland and Lake Geneva. She would have liked to go to the mountains. There was something heroic in them. But Evian was closely adjacent to Switzerland. She nobly suggested Norway and Sweden. The thought of fjords and midnight suns and things was also heroic.
In the meanwhile she must make haste to dress for the Prix des Drags, and she took some interest in the choice of a gown sufficiently striking to insure success in the fierce rivalry of that great costume race.
Everybody said that the world had not seen such undressing in public since the Grecian revival at the time of the Directoire. Persis was not the least astounding figure there. She felt that, after a deed of such sacrifice as she had achieved in forswearing love, she had earned an extra license in her draperies. Willie raised a tempest about her gown, but she felt that she had done enough for him. She was suffering that morning-after sullenness which follows unusual indulgences in virtue as well as other excesses.
Life once more was a tango. She shifted from costume to costume like a dressmaker's model. She went the rounds of thes dansants, and musicales, and embassies, town houses, hotels, and chateaux, watering-places, and mountains, lakes, and seas. But she kept away from Switzerland till she read that Ambassador Tait was at his desk in Paris; and then she avoided Paris and went to Trouville.
And so the days totaled into weeks, and the weeks became a month, two, three, six. She fled from boredom to boredom. She skimmed the cream of life and whipped it, and it turned sour. Though her abiding-places were all oases and her tents were of silk, she led only a Bedouin existence. After all, she and Willie were but tramps--velvet-clad hoboes. Variety became monotony, luxury an oppression, contentment a will-o'-the-wisp.
She went to America and found that loveless contentment was not among the Yankee inventions. She went back to Europe, and it was not among the Parisian devices. There was everything for sale on the Rue de la Paix except peace. She had not come to Paris purposely to find Harvey Forbes, but she had sickened of being good, and she had grown nauseated with denying her heart. If fate willed that their communion should be renewed she would no longer tamper with destiny.
She wondered if time had cured Forbes' love. She wondered if he cared for some one else--Mildred Tait, for instance, or some Parisian witch. At the mere thought her heart beat like the wings of a wounded bird, and she knew that she loved him and always would love him.
Half a year of Willie's tempers and whinings, his indigestions and colds, and his diminishing patience with her whims, his growing habit of complaining of her extravagances, his quarrels with their servants, with every waiter, every messenger-boy, and hotel-keeper, had worn out even her courtesy. They quarreled shamelessly in private, and with less and less caution in public.
And now she was beginning to feel that she earned all she got, and was paying usury on her money, and being badly treated in the bargain. She was arriving at that sick frame of mind that makes cashiers and statesmen and married people unfaithful to their trusts.
This was her humor when she met Forbes again. She had tried in various ways to gain invitations to affairs of the Embassy. But Tait wasted no diplomacy on cutting out the Enslees. He was the more brutal about this since he felt that he was guarding his daughter's welfare.
Mildred had made herself dear to the more earnest elements of Paris. She had grown somewhat less of a joke to the more frivolous. The entertainments at the Embassy were not quite so Puritanical now, and her costumes had amazingly improved since her father had put her under the direct control of a tyrannical dressmaker of world-wide fame.
Whether she were growing to be merely a habit with Forbes or not, they were more and more together. They fought bitterly on the question of war, which she considered an unmitigated horror and he believed to be the loftiest form of tragedy. But the whetting of mind on mind was producing sparks, and Tait hoped that some day one of them would set their two hearts on fire.
He was preparing for that day by making Forbes less poor. His post kept him from taking advantage of the financial secrets he stumbled on. But when he put Mildred in the hands of a dressmaker he gave the financial destinies of Forbes to a retired capitalist, who juggled Forbes' five hundred dollars into a thousand in a pair of weeks; and that thousand into three. Then he encouraged Forbes to borrow, indorsed his notes and speculated with the proceeds pyramidally. He was enjoying it as a form of chess. At the end of half a year Forbes was talking as much of the Bourse and Argentines as he was of projectiles and trajectories.
Having assured Forbes of enough money in bank to give him a salubrious self-confidence, Tait dropped hints of a certain clause in his will and sat back to watch the result. He was counting on receiving as his Christmas gift the news that Forbes and Mildred were to be married, and he was polishing up a joke about giving them inside rates on the consular fees for that complicated ceremony.
And then the Enslees came to Paris in an unusual snow-storm, and winter set in about the old man's overworked, undermined heart. He did his best to keep Persis and Forbes apart; but when were the old ever vigilant enough to thwart the young?
