What Will People Say? A Novel 68 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 68Chapter 68
18
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 68
Chapter 68
HughesEnglish
Persis watched him come, and did not move. It was unbelievable that disaster should fall to such as her from such as him in such a way. He was evidently only playing a part to frighten her.
She blew a puff of smoke from her cigarette and fanned it away with leisure, and smiled.
"You'd look well, now, wouldn't you, if one of the servants came in?"
She laughed at the picture.
"You're laughing at me again!" he groaned. "You're always laughing at me. But you won't feel so funny with this knife in you."
She saw now that he was not fooling. But she despised him for his effort to prove his bravery by a cowardice, and she eyed him with a marble calm worthy of a nobler cause and a better reward.
"Sit down, Willie, and don't threaten me. You don't frighten me at all. But you may alarm some of the servants and give them more of that gossip you have harped on so much."
Her obstinate pluck bewildered him, but he lowered his voice as he commented to some imaginary spectator: "My God! she has no higher thought than that! Even now when death stares her in the face!" Then he had a fanatic's mercy for her. "Why aren't you saying your prayers, you fool?"
She answered him with all the authority she could command:
"Put down that knife! Put it down, I say! You know I could save myself from any danger by raising my voice. And you know I'd rather die than bring the servants in on such a scene."
"A scene!" he shrieked. "A scene! Why, woman, I'm going to kill you. Don't you understand anything? You've only got a minute more to live. Say your prayers! Damn you! say your prayers!"
There was an insanity in his look that frightened her at last. She tried persuasion now, and her voice was soft and caressing.
"Gently, Willie; gently now, I beg you. You're not yourself, you know. You must control yourself. Please!--as a favor to me."
It was the wrong word. It maddened him, and he snarled: "As a favor to you? You dare ask favors of me? Go ask 'em of the man you've given favors to! The man? The men!"
And this was sacrilege to her one love. Her lip curled in angry contempt, and she turned from him in loathing, muttering:
"You dirty little beast!"
It was his muscles rather than his mind that did it. While his mind was recoiling from the insult his arm had struck out, and the knife had slid deep in the snow of her half-averted left breast; through the petal of a rose, and the satin gown, and the deep white flesh beneath it, and on into the wall of her struggling heart.
The blow and her effort to escape flung her backward, but the heavy chair held her. Before she could remember a wild scream broke from her lips.
As Enslee fell back his hand withdrew the knife. It came out all red. He gaped at it and shuddered, and it fell with a little clatter on the marble floor, flinging a few crimson drops on the black-and-white.
The noise startled him, and he retreated from her, clinging to the edge of the table. He felt queasy, and pushed back till he felt his chair and dropped into it--still staring at her and wondering, and she wondering at him.
It seemed a long time before her cry brought any response. Chedsey was in the cellar with Crofts and heard no sound, but Roake was in the pantry. He paused a moment, not trusting his ears, then he pushed the door open slightly and peered through. Other servants came crowding into the pantry whispering and jostling. He motioned them back.
His master and mistress were in their places. Mrs. Enslee looked pale and was lying back in her chair. He slipped through the door and spoke timidly:
"Beg pardon, ma'am; but did you call?"
Persis, at the sound of the door, finding her fan still in her hand, had instantly spread it across her wound. And her first impulse was to deny.
"No," she answered; then quickly: "Yes, I--I am ill--a little--suddenly. Telephone for Doctor--Doctor--the nearest doctor. You'd better run."
He turned to obey, but paused to ask:
"Isn't there anything I can do first, ma'am?"
"No, go! Go!" she fluttered.
"Sha'n't I send some one else while I am gone, ma'am?"
"No, no; keep them all away, all of them, till I ring."
Roake, with a face like ashes, still waited, staring.
"But, ma'am, you are hurt! You are bleeding!"
"Nonsense!" she stormed. "I spilled some claret on my fan. The doctor! Will you never go?" And he ran out through the jumble of servants, ordering them back to their stations.
And then Nichette came stumbling through the golden portal. She had heard the cry above, and had understood the pain and terror in it, and had run pell-mell down the great stairs, her hand whistling on the marble balustrade.
She paused now, clinging to one of the red curtains, and stammering:
"Madame, Madame! qu'y a-t-il? qu'avez-vous?"
Persis turned her head dolefully toward the face so wild with anxiety for her sake, and murmured, with a smile of affection and a tender form of speech:
"C'est toi, Nichette? Ce n'est rien, mais--mais"--A shiver ran through her. "Je sentis des frissons. Va faire mon lit. Je me vais coucher."
Nichette came forward unconvinced or to help her, but she motioned her off with a frantic hand, crying impatiently, "Depeche-toi! veux-tu te depecher!"
And Nichette, mutinously obedient, ran away, leaving Persis shivering indeed with a chill.
And now husband and wife were alone once more. And Willie could only stare and murmur, vacuously:
"What have I done? What have I done?"
"You've killed me, that's all," she answered, with a curious amusement. "It was such a funny thing for you to do, so old-fashioned."
There is a strange fact about wounds in the heart. If they are not so deep that they flood the lungs and smother out life they inspire a wild desire to talk, a fluttering garrulity.
So Persis, now, with that madly stitching shuttle in her breast, and that red seepage from her side, had unnumbered things to say. She chattered desperately, disjointedly:
"Oh, I suppose it had to come. It's what I get for trying to run things my own way. And now the tango-shop's closed up. But it's so funny that you should be the one to--and with a knife! You didn't mar my face, anyway. I thank you for that much. I'd hate to have my face hidden at the funeral. I should hate to make an ugly cor--"
Her lips refused the awful word as a thing unclean, abominable. Her body and all the voluptuous company of her senses felt panic-stricken at the thought of dissolution. She moaned and struggled with her chair.
"No, no, not that! What have I to do with death? I'm not ready to die. I'm not ready to die."
Willie got up and ran to her left side, but shrank back from what was there, and moved cautiously round on the slippery floor, crying: "You're too beautiful to die, too beautiful! You'll not die! The doctors will save you!"
"They must come very soon, then," Persis said, "for I'm bleeding--oh, so fast." She looked down along her side and complained: "See, my gown is quite ruined. And it was such a pretty gown. I'm afraid of my blood. How it gushes! Will it never stop? And it hurts! Willie, it hurts!"
In a long writhe of pain she gathered the table-cloth about her left side as if to stanch its flow. There was a rattle of falling glasses and a chink of tumbled silver as she moaned: "Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?" And she turned her head this way and that, panting as one pursued, bewildered, utterly at a loss. "Oh, what shall I do? I don't want to die. It's an awful thing to die--just now of all times, with no chance to make good the wrong I've done."
"You can't die; I won't let you die. You're too beautiful to die," Willie protested, and then turned to pleading: "I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to strike you, Persis, at all. It was just my hand. It wasn't me that stabbed you, Persis. I couldn't hurt you, Persis."
"Oh, that's all right, Willie. I understand. I understand things better now, with so few minutes more to live. It is you that must forgive me. I haven't been a good wife to you, Willie. And he--he, of all men!--said I wasn't worth fighting for! Faithless to you--faithless to him! But oh, God knows, most faithless to myself. And now I must die for it."
"You are too beautiful to die! I won't let you die! You can't die!"
"But I must, boy. Don't hate me too much. I didn't mean to harm you. Some day--long after--you'll forgive me, won't you?"
"Oh, if you only won't die I'll forgive you anything."
"That's awfully nice of you, Willie," she said, with almost a smile. "I wonder if God will be as polite? They--they usually pray for dying people, don't they? I'm afraid they'll never get a doctor in time, to say nothing of a preacher. So you'd better pray for me, Willie."
The idea was so ridiculously tragic that she laughed; but he would not so far surrender her as to pray. He sobbed:
"You've got to live! I don't know a single prayer. You mustn't die, I tell you. You've got to live!" And he wept his little heart out as he knelt at her side, and, clinging to her hand, mumbled it with kisses.
She wept, too; moaned, and dreaded the black Beyond, which she must voyage prayerless. Still she must talk. From her silence came a frail, thin voice like a far-off cry.
"It's growing very dark, Willie--very dark! And I'm drifting, I wonder where? Can you hear my voice away off there? Better throw me a kiss, and wish me bon voyage! for this--is the last--of Persis. Poor Persis!"
Something of old habit reminded her of the gossip that would break into storm at her death. This spurred her heart to strive again. She clutched at the table and at Willie's arm and shoulder, and held herself erect as with claws, while she babbled:
"Willie, Willie, I've just thought. They'll try you for--for murder. The newspapers--the newspapers! Oh, my poor father! And they'll put you in jail! That mustn't happen to you--not to one of your family!--not through me!--no--no, it just mustn't! You must run--run--run!"
Enslee shivered at the future, and would have fled if he could have found the strength to rise from his knees.
And then the swinging door puffed softly, sardonically, and on the tapestries Tristram and Isoud looked at each other and then at her and shook their heads in pity.
Crofts, who had neither heard nor been told, came in with that eminent champagne in a dingy and ancient bottle.
He went behind the screen to untwist the wires and rub away the spider-webs. Then he came forward toward Willie's place to pour the first few drops there, according to the rite, before he filled Persis' glass. He had eased out the cork, and the soul of the wine was frothing forth into the swathing cloth when he blinked at the empty chair; then his eyes went across to Persis. He stared at her in mute amazement. She stared at him. She beckoned.
He put the bottle on the table and shuffled toward her.
She motioned him nearer with a limp and tremulous hand, and he bent down to hear her tiny voice.
"Crofts, come closer--listen to me--do you hear?" He nodded. "Perfectly?" He nodded, wringing his dry old hands.
"Well," she began, "I must tell you--and you must remember. Mr. Enslee and I had a--a little quarrel--and I--I lost my temper--you know--and seized the knife and--and stabbed myself."
The old man did nothing unbecoming to his caste, but he stood doddering and longed to die in place of that beautiful youth. She beckoned him nearer again, and spoke in a strangled voice: "Remember, I did it--myself! Re-mem--"
Her head fell forward, her exquisite chin rested in her bosom. Her body collapsed upon itself, and only the arms of the chair and the table kept it from rolling out on the floor.
But as if even this last ugliness of attitude were intolerable to her, she fought against the chair and the table, and pushed and slid backward till her head was erect. And she was whispering courage to herself, hoarsely:
"Come--come--Persis!"
She seemed to be trying to die like a thoroughbred, a good loser.
And then her head rolled back in the billows of her hair, with the jeweled crown pointing downward and her eyes staring upward. Her wan, pouting, parted lips and the long arch of her perfect throat were themselves a prayer for mercy, offering up beauty as its own undoing and its own excuse.
She was dead.
THE AFTERMATH
I
We cannot live to ourselves alone, nor die so. If a man or a dog crawl off to perish in a wilderness, immediately death sets in motion a great activity. On the ground ants muster, flies drum and pound; in the earth worms make haste upward. On the empty sky a speck appears, wings gather, buzzards are overhead. In the bushes eyes peer, paws are lifted and set down with caution; coyotes, hyenas arrive. A city of scavengery is founded and begins to flourish.
Persis had said, "This is the last of Persis." As if there were ever the last of anybody or anything.
Of Persis it was almost the beginning. People were to hear of her now who had never known of her existence. She who had never done anything ambitious or earnest in any large sense was to become the cause of world-wide debate. The newspapers she dreaded so much were to give her head-lines above panics, wars, and empires.
When Persis screamed at the horror and the shame of being knifed, and Roake appeared, and she told him that she was ill, he believed her. He dispersed the servants. They knew, as servants always know, that a quarrel had been raging; but family quarrels were the staple of their lives, and they suspected nothing unusual.
Persis had told Roake to call the nearest physician. The telephone is the confusion of distance; it mixes near and far hopelessly. So Roake called the family physician, Dr. Thill; caught him dressing for the opera. He promised to "be right over."
Then Roake went back to give Mrs. Enslee this word. He found the woeful spectacle of Persis no longer able to hide her wound, no longer thinking of appearances. Enslee was on his knees sobbing. Crofts, too good a servant to express his emotions noisily, had not fallen to the floor or sunk into a chair; he had turned a little aside and stood waiting the next command; only, rubbing his hands together a little harder than usual, while the tears poured across his eyelids.
Roake tiptoed to him and put his hand on his arm, and whispered, "Mr. Crofts."
Crofts put his finger to his quivering lips and, beckoning his underling aside, whispered to him: "No word of this to the rest of the house, mind you. We'd best carry Mrs. Enslee to her room. Then we must help the master to his."
They took Persis' chair by the arms dreadfully; but Crofts could not lift his share of the weight. It was necessary to call Chedsey, and to explain things a little to him and to pledge him to silence for the honor of the house. He sickened of his burden and nearly fainted in the little elevator as they crowded into it with their hideously beautiful freight.
Nichette had the bed ready, and Enslee's man was helping her. Also two other chambermaids had gathered to talk of the scream that had shot through the house. Nichette banished the men while she took what care she could of what remained of Persis--so different an office now from what it had always been to Nichette.
Crofts told Roake to see to things below, and Roake and Chedsey went down to the dining-room. Here there were tasks that were not pleasant. They stared at the ruined graces of the table, the spilled wine and the red-stained flowers, the glasses shattered and fallen, as if an orgy had preceded there. The cook was told that the rest of the dinner would not be served. The laundress was called from her supper to take away the red table-cloth and the napkin. The housekeeper must know that Roake and Chedsey were not to be charged with the breakage. The kitchen-maid was sent to scrub the marble, and on her knees she must follow the crimson trail to the door of the elevator, and wash that, too.
Before the doctor arrived a dozen people had been told that the mistress of the household had killed herself. It was easy to warn them that loyalty to the family imposed absolute silence. But what money or what threat or plea could ever bribe a loose tongue to keep a secret for somebody else?
Then Dr. Thill came in his motor. He left his huge fur coat on the hall floor, and, dashing up-stairs, flung off his evening coat and his white waistcoat, and rolled back his cuffs. He wrought upon the exquisite bare flesh of Persis and upon the stopped clock of her heart with all his science; yet he could not make her anything but a cadaver.
As he toiled he asked questions. Crofts and Nichette told him what they knew, or thought they knew. Willie was supported in and questioned. Remorse and fright made him pitiable. Still there remained a fox-like intelligence. He told the doctor what Persis had told Crofts, but he was so full of contradictions and confusion that Dr. Thill quickly suspected the truth. He was enraged and revolted. The cruelty of the murder was bad enough; but the wantonness of destroying so perfect a machine, as he found Persis to be, was more wicked in his eyes.
Still, he was a typical family doctor. People who were dead were outside his province. His clients were the living, and his business to keep them alive and well. He had foiled death-bed revenges, aborted scandals that threatened ruin to the young; risked his life and his liberty for his patients. His trade was fighting the ravages of sin and error; saving people, not destroying them. He felt no call to deliver an Enslee to the electric chair.
He put Willie to bed, jammed bromides into him, and forbade him to talk or to see any one. He telephoned Persis' father and Willie's mother to come at once. He told them as delicately as he could. It was like breaking a thunderbolt gently. Persis' father was stricken frantic. He could not believe that his beautiful, his wonderful girl was dead. He ran to her bedside, lifted her in his arms as if she were again his little child, called to her, wept horribly over her, imagined the truth, and vowed every revenge.
After the first tempests had worn him out he began to feel that it would not comfort her to add scandal to her fate. He loathed the very name of Enslee; but he had profited by it; he was still involved with it financially; it was his daughter's final name. He joined the conspiracy to bury the truth in Persis' grave. To say that she had killed herself was an appeal for mercy; to proclaim that her indignant husband had executed her for her crimes was a damning epitaph. He solaced himself with the thought that it would be her wish.
Mrs. Enslee was first and last Willie's mother. Her thought was of him; her heart was his advocate alone. She committed herself utterly to his defense.
Dr. Thill was ready to give a certificate that Persis had died of heart-failure. Even the story of suicide would attract the noisy attention of the journals. He left the matter in abeyance for the moment. The needful thing was a few hours of saving peace and silence. He would be glad even to postpone the news from the next morning's to the next evening's papers.
But little things thwart great schemes.
II
One of the Enslee housemaids, who had been flirting with the brindle-haired reporter Hallard, remembered in the midst of the panic that he was to take her that night to a moving-picture theater. He would be loitering in the area now. She ran out bareheaded to explain that she could not keep her engagement. When he asked why, she told him falteringly that there had been a death in the family. She apologized for permitting such an affair to interfere with her promised evening out, but he gasped:
"A death in the Enslee family! Gosh, I've spent so many dismal hours on death-watches that it's great to have you slip me a nice little ready-made death like this. Whose was it? Who died?"
The maid felt that she had a clue now to Mr. Hallard's profession: from his cheerful reception of such news he must be an undertaker. She explained that it was Mrs. Willie Enslee who was dead.
"My God! the young one?" he cried, afire with the news possibilities.
"Yes; she killed herself."
This was almost too good to be true. Hallard grew greedy as a miser.
"Does anybody else know of this? Have any reporters called at the house?"
"Nobody; only the doctor."
Hallard looked at his watch. He had time to build up a big story, which was good; but there was time enough for the other papers also to arrive on the ground, which was bad.
"Why did she kill herself?"
"Nobody knows. She had a terrible quar'l with Mr. Enslee, though."
"What about?"
"Nobody could find out."
Hallard thought hard. The name of Forbes occurred to him, for he remembered the time he had seen Forbes with Persis.
"Did Captain Forbes call to-day?"
The maid stared. "Ain't you a wonder! How did you know?"
"Did they quarrel about him?"
"Nobody knows they did, but all of us feels sure they did."
Hallard bade his inamorata good night with genuine affection. She had been worth while.
He went to the door of the house and reached it just as Persis' father arrived in his car and was helped up the steps. Hallard tried to push in with him, but was thrust out. He sent his card in, and it was returned to him.
Dr. Thill threw up his hands in despair at the card. Reporters seemed to be as ubiquitous as microbes. But he realized that it was now necessary to make a formal announcement to the papers. He wrote out for Hallard a statement, and had the housekeeper telephone it to a press bureau, that "Mrs. William Enslee, during a period of mental aberration, committed suicide at her home at seven-thirty o'clock, in the presence of her husband. Mr. Enslee is prostrated with the shock." It was a simple announcement.
Meanwhile Hallard, rebuffed at the front door and at the tradesman's entrance, and rebuffed by telephone when he called up from a booth in the nearest drug-store, was trembling with the opportunities almost within his reach. His was the ecstasy of the writer of tragedies who exults in every new horror that he can inflict on his characters. Only, the Hallards are dealing in real lives, and not feigned.
Hallard's scent for news quickened at the thought of Forbes. Easily enough he learned the name of Forbes' hotel. He hurried there and sent up his card, with a penciled note: "Would appreciate expert opinion regard to probable fate Philippine Islands in case of war with Japan."
III
The card found Forbes not yet recovered from the hurricane of passion that had swept through his heart. He was dumfounded at what he had done and said; at his ruthless cruelty, his revulsions from love to hate and back again; at the supreme insolence of his treatment of the husband he had wronged.
He found Enslee's little silver-handled revolver in his pocket and tossed it on the table. He felt that he ought to turn it against himself in self-execution. It was too weak an instrument for such a business. He got out his own big army revolver. But he was not of the type that is capable of suicide, any more than Persis was.
He began to pack his things for his return to hard service away from the frivolities of the city. The sight of his uniforms made him the soldier once more. He grew homesick for the brisk salute of his soldiers, the gruff and wholesome joviality of fellow-officers, the noble reality of his chosen career.
And then he came across her boudoir cap again. It bewitched him. It was so utterly unmilitary, so far from usefulness or importance, all pliant and fragrant and adorably foolish. He put it back in its nest in the pocket next his heart. And his heart quickened its pace.
With that quickening came by reflex a sense of terror. What had become of Persis? He had left her to the mercies of Enslee. It occurred to Forbes that if a man had dealt with him as he had dealt with Enslee he would be so maddened that he would run amuck and slay the first thing he met, and first of all the woman who had dragged him into such shame below shame.
What if Enslee had attacked Persis? Beaten her, or torn her face with his nails, or hurled her out into the street? Forbes felt that he must go to her rescue. The impulse lasted only long enough to be ludicrous. What right had he in that household? What harm could Enslee wreak upon Persis to equal the wrongs that Forbes had done her? He blamed himself for everything, and, blaming himself, absolved Persis, forgave her, loved her again.
In this seethe of moods the card of Hallard arrived with a request for his expert military opinion on a subject that had been one of his hobbies in the days when military ambition was the major theme of his life. It renewed his hope. It was like the feel of something solid underfoot to a spent swimmer in cross-currents.
He welcomed Hallard with cordiality, apologized for the disorder of the room, expressed an opinion that he had met Hallard somewhere before. Hallard said he thought not. As he stated his plans for a Sunday special, a "symposium" of views on Philippine fortification, he picked up the silver-handled revolver on the table and laughed:
"Is this lady-like weapon the latest government issue?"
Forbes did not laugh; he flushed as he shook his head. A wild thought came to Hallard. Forbes might have been present at Mrs. Enslee's death. He might have killed her himself with her own revolver. It was a wild theory; but he had known so much of murder, and had come upon such fantastic crimes, that nothing seemed impossible to him.
With pretended carelessness he broke the silver revolver open and glanced at the cylinder. Every chamber was full but one. Had a shot been fired from it, or had one chamber been left unloaded for the hammer to rest on?
Hallard put down the weapon and talked yellow journalism of the Philippine problem. A little later he said, quite casually:
"Too bad about Mrs. Enslee, wasn't it, Captain?"
The startled look of Forbes confounded his theories.
"What is too bad about Mrs. Enslee?"
"Her sudden death, I mean."
"Her death!" Forbes cried, the world rocking with sudden earthquake. "Her death! Not Persis! Persis isn't dead?"
"Why, yes; didn't you know?"
"My God! My God! how did she die? She was well, perfectly well at--at--this afternoon when I--tell me, man, man, what do you mean?"
Hallard was readjusting his case. He spoke very gently.
"I'm mighty sorry to have told you without warning. I thought, of course, you knew. You were a great friend of the family, weren't you, Captain?"
Forbes whitened at this, but his grief was keener than his shame.
"Tell me, how did she die?"
"The story we get is that she killed herself--stabbed herself!"
Forbes gripped his head in his arms and bowed to the thunderbolts crashing about him. At length his distorted face appeared again and he demanded:
"Who was with her when she killed herself?"
"Her husband."
"Then it's a lie. She never--she wouldn't--he killed her! And it's my fault for leaving her with him. I ought to have known better. I was tempted to go back to her. I shouldn't have left her there with that--that--and now she's dead! He butchered her! I'll kill him for it. I will! He wasn't man enough to fight me--he--did you say you were a reporter?"
"Well, I'm a special writer."
Forbes' words began to roar back through his memory. He began to hear them as they would fall on a stranger's ear. Even in his frenzy he realized the danger of his madness. Talking to a reporter was like crying his thoughts aloud in Madison Square Garden. Grief, discretion, remorse, revenge, assailed him from all sides at once.
He seized Hallard by the shoulder and raged at him.
"Look here! This Philippine idea was just a trick, wasn't it, to startle me and make me forget myself? You fooled me, but you can't get away with it."
He saw his big Colt's revolver in his trunk-tray, and he thundered:
"I ought to shoot you for this, and I will unless you swear that you will never print a word of what I've said, never breathe a word of it to a soul. Promise, or by--"
Hallard smiled and raised his half-eyebrow.
"You're a little excited, Captain, aren't you? You're kind of forgetting that shooting a reporter would be about the poorest way of escaping publicity ever imagined. People would naturally ask what it was you were so anxious to conceal, eh?"
Forbes turned away helpless.
Hallard anticipated his next desperate idea. "I'm much obliged to you, Captain, for not offering me a ten-dollar bill or a new suit of clothes. They usually begin with that. But it rarely works, Captain. We're a shiftless lot, some of us, but we've got our ideas of duty, too."
"Duty to what?" Forbes sneered. "Duty to act as grave-robbers and expose the sorrows of the world to the laughter of the public? To drag families down to ruin?"
"Duty to throw the light into dark places, Captain; duty to make it hard to conceal things the public ought to know; duty to keep digging up the truth and throwing it into the air."
"Truth!" Forbes raged. "What have you got to do with the truth? Would you know it if you saw it? Would you use it if you had it?"
"You bet I would," Hallard said. "If you'll tell me the exact truth, as far as you know it, about the suicide--or murder, as you call it--of one of the most beautiful members of one of the most prominent families--I'll publish it."
"In your own way, yes."
"In your own words, Captain. I write shorthand. Just dictate to me the whole story of your acquaintance with Mrs. Enslee and your reasons for believing that her husband killed her; and I'll not change a word. You can read it, and sign it, and take affidavit that it's the truth, so help you--"
Forbes dropped into a chair, discredited, his bluff called. All the lofty motives and compulsions of chivalry took on an ugly look. Sir Launcelot was an adulterer and a welcher.
The hideously altered face of things shattered him so that Hallard felt merciful.
"I'm sorry, Captain; but you see how it is. You see why reporters get a little hard, why our mouths sag. We don't publish the truth oftener because people won't tell it to us. The truth isn't the pure white lady in a nice clean well that the painters represent her: the truth is a kind of a worm-eaten turnip that comes out of the ground with a lot of dirt on it. We don't print all we find out by a long shot. If we did this old town would make for the woods, and the people in the woods would run to cover in town. I'd be glad to drop this affair right here; but, don't you see, I can't. The Enslees are too big to overlook. There'll be an army of reporters on the job, with their little flashlights poking everywhere. The police will fall in line later. There'll be editorials on the wickedness of society. Society--if there is such a thing--isn't any wickeder than anybody else. The middle classes are rotten, and the lower classes are putrid. But society makes what old Horace Greeley called 'mighty interesting reading.'
"The name of Enslee is going to be a household word, because when an Enslee sins it's like sinning in the grandstand. I saw something like this coming a year ago. I thought it might simmer down; but it's broken bigger than I ever dreamed. You're in for it, Captain. The Great American People is going to rise on the bleachers and holler for blood. It will forget all about you the minute something else happens. Take your medicine, Captain. It will be somebody else's turn soon, for most of us are doing the tango on a thin crust of ashes over a crater. But it's the face-cards that the two-spots like to read about. The minute somebody else that's prominent pops through we'll let you alone. But you're in for it, Captain--'way in. Better crawl under my umbrella and give me the story."
He meant it well, but it was impossible for Forbes to accept his philosophy or his counsel. To Forbes he was a slimy reptile with a hellish mission. Forbes told him so, denied all that he had said, defied him, and turned him out. And now he had leisure to understand the full meaning of it all. First, his grief for Persis broke his heart open. He mourned her as a sweetheart, a betrothed, a wife; mourned her with an intolerable aching and rending and longing, and with an utter remorse because of his last words to her. When she was afraid and distraught he had heaped condemnation on her! And who was he to reproach her? Had he not pursued her, overwhelmed her, made and kept her his? And then to discard and desert her, knock aside her pleading hands and leave her in the clutch of the maniac who had threatened them both! He had taken Enslee's revolver away--as if that were the only weapon in the world!
Never had Persis seemed so beautiful to Forbes as he remembered her now, cowering under his wrath, pleading for pity, rushing to protect him even then, and falling in a white swoon at his feet, as if already dead. And even then he had spat on her and left her!
IV
The next morning's papers, without exception, gave the death of Mrs. Enslee "under mysterious circumstances" the doubtful honor of the front page, right-hand column. In some of them the account bridged several columns. The head-lines ranged from calm statements to blatant balderdash.
To Forbes, who had not slept all night and had sent down for the papers soon after daybreak, the stories were inconceivably cruel, ghoulish, fiendishly ingenious. The fact that Persis' wedding had been celebrated only a year before was emphasized in every account. She was called a "bride" in most of them, and her "honeymoon" was used dramatically in others. The importance of her family and of Enslee's was exaggerated beyond reason. Her portrait was published even in papers that rarely used illustrations.
Her beauty pleaded from every frame of head-lines till it seemed as if her face had been clamped in a pillory, and that the newspapers were pelting her without mercy or decency.
There was no way of protecting her, no way of punishing the anonymous rabble, no way of crying to the mob how lovable she had been and how impossible it was that she should have taken her own life. Forbes was understanding now how much worse a scandal it implied to say that she had been murdered. A woman might kill herself for any number of reasons, most of them pathetic; but a woman whom her husband puts to death can hardly escape calumny. Her lover was silenced by the reasons that silenced her father.
Forbes had not heard, or had forgotten, what paper Hallard represented. He soon recognized his touch. One paper, and one only, implied that Persis' death might not have been a suicide, but a murder. One paper alone referred to her "interest in a certain well-known army officer who had recently come into a large fortune and was much seen with her."
When he read this Forbes turned as scarlet as if he had been bound hand and foot and struck in the mouth.
Only one morning paper implied that Persis had strayed into the primrose path of dalliance. Not one evening paper failed to emphasize this theory. The editors of these sheets, appearing at their office before dawn, issued their first "afternoon" editions at 8 A.M., and had their "night" editions ready by noon. They all made use of Hallard's material and tried to supplement it.
Before Forbes had finished his breakfast he was visited by the first reporter, and refused to see him. Within the next half-hour a dozen reporters were clustered in the hotel lobby. They lay in wait for him below like a vigilance committee zealous for his lynching.
Forbes felt like a trapped desperado. He dared not venture out into that lurking inquisition. He dared not call upon any of his friends for help, lest they be tarred with the brush that was blackening his name. He had planned to take a morning train to his Western post. He was afraid to go to it now. He was afraid to arrive at the garrison, knowing that the scandal would have preceded him on the wires.
He decided that he must resign from the army before he was dismissed the service for bringing disgrace upon the uniform. There were officers enough whose irregularities were overlooked, but they had kept from the public prints. Forbes had not only sinned, but had been found out.
He felt like a mortgager who sees himself foreclosed and sold up. He had lost Persis, and he was about to lose his career. He wrote out his resignation, addressed the envelope, sealed it, bent his head down in his arms above it, and gave himself up to despair. His loneliness was almost more than he could endure.
By and by a letter was brought to his room. He had refused to answer the telephone, and he ignored the knocks of the hall boys. This letter was pushed under the door. It was from Ten Eyck:
DEAR HARVEY,--Just a line to tell you that my heart aches for you and with you. The thought of Persis dead is almost unthinkable, nearly unbearable to me. What it must be to you I dread to imagine.
I always remember the old Persian philosopher's motto when he was tempted to enjoy joy too much or grieve too much over grief: "This, too, will pass away."
You are too big a man to let this or anything break you down. Bend to it, but don't break.
It occurs to me that you may need a little time to recuperate, where you can't read the papers or hear them bawled under your window.
On Long Island I have a little shack on a sandbar on the edge of the ocean. How would you like to run down there for a few days? You can do your own cooking. If you wish I'll go along; but if you'd rather be by yourself I won't go. I think you'd better be by yourself and think it all out.
I enclose a time-table with the best trains marked.
Take a closed taxi to the station, and you'll not be noticed. If I can do anything, command me.
Affectionately yours,
MURRAY TEN EYCK.
Not a reproach. Not an "I told you so." Not a minimizing of the tragedy. Just a life-preserver thrown to a man in deep waters.
Forbes wrote:
God love you for this. I'll never forget. I'll prove my gratitude by sparing you the ordeal of my company.
He packed a suit-case, bribed a porter and an elevator man, and escaped from the hotel by one of the service elevators and the trade entrance. He swore to Heaven that this should be the last time he would sneak or cower. He reached his destination without remark, and found it congenially dreary.
There was a furious storm that night. Wind and rain flogged his cabin, and the sea cannonaded the beach. But the shack survived, and the beach was still there in the morning. There was only the wreckage of a little schooner cast ashore.
At first Forbes railed against the heartlessness of the sea. But gradually he came to understand that the ocean is not heartless; it simply obeys its own compulsions, and the wrecks it makes are those that should not have been out upon the waters or those that got in the way of the laws. That was what Forbes had done.
As he strolled the sands or sat and watched the endless procession of waves, waves, waves, hurling themselves upon the shore to their own destruction, in his thoughts memories came up one after another, like waves: memories of beautiful hours that seemed to have no meaning beyond their own brief charm; visions of Persis in a thousand attitudes of enchantment, in costume after costume. He saw her at the theater, lithe, exposed, incandescent; he clasped her in the tango; he clenched her hand at the opera; he saw her riding her cross-saddle in her boyish togs; he clasped her in the taxi-cab in the rain; he walked with her in moonlight and in the auroral rose; he galloped alongside her, strode with her in the woods; he held her in his arms while they watched the building burning gorgeously at night; he saw her in all the lawless intimacies of their secret life--careless, childish ecstasies and wild throes of rapture.
Then he remembered what she had told him of Ambassador Tait's warning: "The world is old, my child, but it is stronger than any of us. And it can punish without mercy."
He was tasting now the mercy of the world, and Persis, lying in cold white state, as he imagined her, was the visible slain sacrifice on the altar. They had indeed sinned. She had chosen wealth instead of love, and then had tried to steal love, too. The simple fact was that they had been wicked. They had duped and sneaked and feasted on stolen sweets. Their punishment was just. Many others had sinned more viciously and prospered in their sin or repented comfortably and suffered nothing. But they were not to be envied altogether.
Somehow to his man's heart it brought a strange kind of comfort to feel that this ruination was not a wanton cruelty, but a penalty exacted. It made the world less lonely; it replaced chaos with law and order. Perhaps other souls would take warning from their fate; perhaps other guilty couples would be frightened back to duty; perhaps somebody tempted by the scarlet allurements of passion would be helped toward contentment with the gray security and homely peace of fidelity.
The world was in a tempest against him. The waves had cast up his beautiful fellow-voyager on the sands. If only their shipwreck might keep somebody else from putting out to sea in pleasure craft unseaworthy and unlicensed!
V
Had Forbes read the papers he would have known that the storm had not subsided yet. The wealth of Enslee could not bribe the least mercy; it was rather a stimulus to the press.
At the height of the tempest the funeral of Persis was held. Almost nobody attended it, and the few that did were rather drawn by curiosity than respect. Those who knew Persis well were afraid to be seen in the company even of her body. They were busy denying their earlier intimacy or telling how they had foreseen this disaster. She went in lonely state to join the silent throng in the cemetery, and she knew no more of the storm that raged about her than the world knew of the one high achievement of her soul. She was like some little brilliant bird of paradise flung to the ground by a lightning stroke. The storm roared on, the ferocity of the newspaper attacks increased with every extra. The fact that a theory was hinted in an early edition was taken as proof enough for a positive statement in a later. Finally there were demands for the arrest of the husband.
The district-attorney was busy, however, on an Augean task--the cleaning out of the police stable. He delayed or forbore to take up the Enslee matter. He was accordingly attacked as a toady to the rich. This stung him to an investigation.
And at last the police entered into the affair. Enslee was sent for and cross-questioned by commissioners. He was at bay, and he revealed unexpected gifts of evasion. Willie's lawyers stood by him. They were high-priced men, and they earned whatever he paid them. They succeeded in fighting off an indictment.
But even now Hallard and his cronies would not let him rest above ground or Persis beneath. Conflicting bits of Enslee's testimony were published in parallel columns, and his explanation that Persis, in her final rage, had seized the knife from his hand and stabbed herself was declared impossible and unconvincing. Her dying statement, as sworn to by Crofts, stood, however, as the one strong shelter over Enslee's head.
The skeptics insisted that Crofts, being deaf, had heard wrong or been bribed to perjury. None of them dreamed that Persis could have devised that snow-white lie as her atonement to the man she had betrayed. Hallard was obsessed with an idea that if Persis' body were exhumed it would be shown that she could not have dealt the fatal wound with her own hand. He had once organized a campaign against a decision of the court sentencing a valet to the penitentiary, and kept it up until the prison gates were opened and the man gained an opportunity to tell his story anew. He was found guilty again and sent back to his cell; but the despotic power of the press was demonstrated. If Hallard could open the penitentiary, why not the grave in which a corpus delicti had been hastily hidden?
With every weapon in the vast armory of newspaperdom Hallard waged his battle. The political ambition of the district-attorney finally yielded to the coercion. An order was obtained from the court commanding the officials of the cemetery to unseal the tomb where Persis' body had been stored until the great monument Enslee had commissioned could be made ready to weigh her down irretrievably.
Forbes, having regained his courage in his absence in the wilderness, was seized with a mad desire to gaze upon his beloved's face once more and to whisper to her a prayer that she forgive him for abandoning her in her desolation and her peril. Ten Eyck used every plea to dissuade him; but, failing, determined to go with him.
Permission to be present at the exhumation was secured with little difficulty, and the two men joined the group of court officials and the six experts who were to decide from examination whether or not Persis could have inflicted the fatal wound upon herself.
VI
And so Persis came back again to the world in a mockery of resurrection, back again from the sodden earth to the light of day that had blessed her beauty and not known her sin.
Forbes waited her reappearance in a frenzy of anxiety. It was to him a kind of holy tryst that he must keep at any cost.
Slowly the casket was raised; one by one the screws in the coffin-lid were removed, and at last the board was removed from over the white, white face. Some impulse of protection led Ten Eyck to thrust Forbes back until he himself had taken the first look. He gazed and groaned at the havoc death had wrought in all that beauty. When Forbes pressed forward, Ten Eyck whirled and clapped his hands over Forbes' eyes and dragged him aside, whispering huskily:
"Don't look! In God's name keep the memory of her as she was."
Forbes suffered himself to be led aside. He and Ten Eyck waited at a distance while the tests were made. The knife was closed in the icy fingers, and the exquisite arms moved here and there. Over the cold and silent body the experts wrangled. And the upshot of the desecration was that they could not agree; three of the jurors declared that Persis could not have reached so far around to set the knife in her side; and three that she could have done it, whether she did or not.
Persis, wherever she was, kept her secret. And Willie, abiding the decision in a stupor of terror, thanked God and her for their silence.
The newspapers had much to say of this last phase of the Enslee mystery. They summed up again all the old scandals, and then they, too, went silent. Their readers grew weary of the juggle of facts and falsehoods. The mishaps of other lovers furnished them with unfailing supply of the old mistakes that are the eternal news. Forbes, who had withheld his resignation from the army at Ten Eyck's bidding, was received back into his place, shorn of his ambitions, his youth, and his pride.
Often and often when he is alone he takes from its hiding shelter a little nightcap of ribbons and laces and shakes his head with vain regret.
He thinks of Persis always as she was that morning when the filmy cap fell from her lawless curls. He cannot but feel that there was something elect in her, something divinely beautiful, however thwarted for this world.
But then he loved her, he could forgive her anything. If God loved her, could he not do as much?
When the skies are clouded he remembers her wise little saying, "Behind the blinds there are always eyes." He wonders if there are eyes behind the clouds and beyond the sun. And if there are, and if they are the seeing eyes of perfect understanding, What do those people say?
