What Will People Say? Part 29

Forbes granted himself a plenary indulgence, and resumed packing, smiling again at Willie's idea that he was a suitor for the post of third husband to Mrs. Neff.

He did not smile so well a few hours later, when Willie, with the kindliest of motives, a.s.signed him to Mrs. Neff's automobile.

"You two sweethearts," Enslee said, with a matchmaker's grin, "will want to ride together, of course. Persis and I will keep out of your way as much as we can."

Forbes was sportsman enough to credit Willie with a bull's-eye. He smothered his chagrin and helped Mrs. Neff into her car, while his two suit-cases were strapped in the trunk-rack with the family baggage.

The motor-caravan was made up of three machines. Winifred ran her own roadster, nursing the steering-wheel to her bosom, while her fat elbows harried Ten Eyck's cramped form. Bob Fielding had been unable to get away from the troubled waters of Wall Street, and Winifred had adopted Ten Eyck as his understudy.

Mrs. Neff took her four-pa.s.senger touring-car. Forbes decided after several appalling b.u.mps that it had belonged to her first husband. Alice sat with the chauffeur, dreaming of Stowe Webb, no doubt. In the rear Mrs. Neff, in her most garrulous mood, talked nonsense through a veil whose flying ends kept snapping in Forbes' face. And when they were beyond Broadway her cigarette ashes kept sifting into his eyes.

He was as polite as possible, but his thoughts were trying to pierce the dust-wake of the great six-cylinder touring-car in which Willie Enslee led the way with Persis. All Forbes could see of her was the top of her motor-hood and the veil that fled back like a signal beseeching him to make haste and save her.

Broadway in the late afternoon was thick with the home-going armies, and it seemed to stretch as long and as crowded as the Milky Way. On through Yonkers to Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown the journey took them, pa.s.sing an occasional monument of our brief history, a tablet to mark where Rochambeau met Washington and brought France to our rescue, or a memorial to the cowboys that arrested Major Andre.

In Forbes' then humor no small charms of nature or legend could have caught his mind from his jealousy. Even the epic levels of the Hudson River and the Valhalla walls of the Palisades hardly impressed him. What success they had with him was mainly due to his remembrance of seeing them first from the train that brought him to New York a few days, or a few eons, ago. He was full then of ambitions to shine as a soldier in an enlarged camp. Now his treasons and stratagems were concerned with a love-campaign whose spoils was Persis Cabot.

There was a pause by agreement for dinner at a road-house--"their last civilized meal," as Ten Eyck mournfully prophesied, "before they entered the Purgatory of Winifred's cooking at Willie's boarding-house."

When the task of fretting out a dinner was finished they got under way, pushing north again.

Eventually the pilot-car, or, rather, its guiding cloud of dust, swept off to the east, turning its back on the Hudson and plunging into the heart of Westchester County, an ocean of hills like green billows, and valleys like their troughs; peaceful castles set on high places, and pleasant villages dispersed in low; the homely roominess of farms, and now and then a huddle of crowded rookeries, where Italian peasants had set up a congenial little slums along some ugly waste.

Everything took on a wistfulness in the evening air, which the sunset was tincturing like claret poured into water. Forbes was aching to be with Persis, and he hoped that she was wistful to be with him. The moon had loitered with torch half aglow in the wings of the sky until the sun was gone, and then its lamp was raised, and it entered its own scene. In the houses lights began to pink the dark with the trite but irresistible appeal of Christmas-card transparencies.

Forbes lost all sense of direction in the winding roads, and even Mrs.

Neff's chatter yielded to the brow-caressing dusk. The swift progress of the car gave no suggestion of wheels, but rather of a flying keel on a smooth stream.

Finally the searchlights of Enslee's machine turned sharp at right angles. A beautiful granite bridge leaped into view as suddenly as if the great G.o.d Wotan had builded it with a word. At the farther side of the bridge stood a lodge-keeper's home, whose architecture seemed to shift the scene instantly to the France of the first Francis.

"Here we are!" Mrs. Neff cried. "And I'm half frozen. I hope the gardener has aired the rooms and put dry sheets on the beds, or I'm in for lumbago."

"Mother, you're just death to romance!" Alice protested. She had doubtless been thinking of Stowe Webb.

The car glided across the bridge, and the moon-whipped stream reveling below it, then preceded through a granite gateway with a portcullis suspended like a social guillotine. And then the sense of privacy began.

The very moon seemed to become a part of the Enslee Estates.

The motors tilted backward as the hill rose; and Mrs. Neff's rheumatic car groaned and worried a spiraling road up and up through ma.s.ses of anonymous shrubs pouring forth incense, through s.p.a.ces of moon-swept hillside and thickets of somber velours. Then there was a glimpse of the radiant geometry of moon-washed roofs. A turn or two more, and the wheels were swishing into the graveled court of a stately mansion.

The door under the porte-cochere was open, and in its embrasure stood a leanish man and his fattish wife, hospitable as innkeepers, the warm light streaming back of them like peering children.

Enslee's voice came out of the silence:

"That you, Prout? H'are you, Martha?" And then, with characteristic originality, "Well, we got here."

To which Prout responded with equal importance:

"So you did, sir."

He and his wife had been working like mad since Enslee telephoned, trying to turn themselves into a troop of servants, whisking shrouds from table and piano and chairs, and mopping a cloth of dust from every surface. They were as respectful now as Philemon and Baucis welcoming Jupiter, and as apologetic as if the palace were their own unworthy cot.

"I've got a pack of Indians with me, Prout," said Enslee. "I didn't want 'em, but they would come, and now we've got to make the best of it.

Don't let 'em trample your flower-beds. And if anybody breaks a flower-stem we'll have him or her shot at sunrise."

Martha giggled into her fat palm.

"Oh, 'e will 'ave 'is joke; 'e will so. And isn't this Miss Cabot? Of course it is."

Forbes, seated in the rear car, heard again that a.s.sumption of Persis and Enslee as a couple.

The cars rolled up to the door in turn. The women as they got out piled their wraps on Martha till she completely disappeared, except for a pair of clutching hands, and a voice from the depths.

The chauffeurs made off down the road to the distant garage, with instructions to stay there after one of them should have come back for Winifred's roadster.

The gardener, apologizing for his awkwardness in the office of a butler, led the little troop into the great living-room, where a big fire blazed, splashing walls and floors with banners of red and yellow.

Prout explained that he had been unable to start either the hot-water furnace that heated the house or the dynamo that lighted it. And, being short-handed like, and took with a stroke of sciatiky from the onseasonable cold of the backward spring, he had found time to make fires only in the master's room, his mother's room, and one other. The caretaker, who had kept a fire going all winter for the sake of the water-pipes, had let it go out at the first warm weather and gone for a visit to his wife's mother.

"That's what we get for coming up before the place has been set to rights," Willie grumbled. "I suppose you girls will have to draw lots for my room."

"Me for the nursery," said Winifred. "It's the sunniest place in the house, and--"

"You're not going to try to sleep on one of those children's beds?"

Willie gasped.

"No, nor on two of them," said Winifred; "but there's a glorious window-seat a mile wide."

Willie's self-sacrifice was of the parsimonious sort that made acceptance impossible. None of the women would deprive him of his bed.

Mrs. Neff was a.s.signed to Willie's mother's room, and Alice and Persis to those on either side. Forbes and Ten Eyck were exiled to the southwest wing.

Prout and Martha could not believe that Mr. Enslee had come without the retinue of servants that ordinarily preceded his august appearance. In fact, the adventure was as unlike Enslee as it was uncongenial to him.

He could not and would not see the fun of it.

Martha and Prout offered their service, but Winifred would not let them mar the perfection of her Swiss Family Robinson. She overawed Willie and drove the old couple back to their own cottage.

When they had retired with prophecies of disaster and evil the would-be gipsies felt relieved of all the enc.u.mbrances of civilization. Winifred called it a return to nature. For the time being, however, the chief emotion was one of blissful weariness. Host and guests had kept themselves keyed up all season, like instruments in a concert, and now that the tension was released they seemed to collapse upon themselves.

In front of the great fireplace was a divan almost as big as a life-boat, and cushioned into such a cloud as the G.o.ds rested on.

Winifred and Mrs. Neff and Alice were lolling on it, and Murray Ten Eyck sat on the edge. Back of it was the usual living-room table with a pile or two of books and magazines.

Persis paused for a moment, looking over the books to select something to take up to her room. She pushed them about with indifference.

"Last year's novels!" she smiled. "As thrilling as last year's birds'

nests."

She turned up an ill.u.s.trated society weekly of a former spring. The frontispiece held her a moment, and she shook her head.

"And last year's reputations. Here's a big portrait of Mrs. Richard Lanthorpe and her two children." She read the caption aloud: "'Prominent young matron who is just opening her Newport villa. Though a devoted mother to her charming little daughters, Mrs. Lanthorpe is also well known as a skilful whip.'"