What Will People Say? Part 65

What she had to say could not be put on paper. Besides, it would be hideously indiscreet.

But Forbes was present in her thoughts. He was the chief wedding guest in her soul. He seemed to kneel between her and the groom and try to shoulder him away. This added a last terror to the mult.i.tude of her frights--frights ranging in importance from a fear that she might kneel on her veil and pull it askew to nameless terrors of the bridegroom.

There had been a lilt of gaiety in trying on the bridal robe for the rehearsals and the posings before the camera. But when she made her final entrance into the snowy costume it seemed to be entering into the shroud of maidenhood. The journey to the church was like a ride in her hea.r.s.e, only that the progress through the streets was difficult because of a crowd so dense that mounted policemen could hardly push and trample lane enough for her to reach the awning.

And under the narrow canopy a rabble jostled her and peered into her face, even plucked at her robes, as if she had been a French princess on her way to the guillotine. The rabble inside the church was hardly less insolently inquisitive for being better dressed.

The preliminaries of the march; the whispered instructions and warnings; the corrected blunders; the stupidity of her father, made a child by the shame that sweeps over a father at delivering his girl-child to a man to possess; the sudden grief of her sister, the Countess; Persis' almost overpowering tempest of desire to flee from the church and run to Forbes for refuge--a whirlpool of emotions and memoranda and impressions.

And then the march beginning, the organ blaring, the ushers setting forth, and her sister and the children and the maids of honor; herself clinging to her father's arm, which trembled so that she rather supported him than he her; the arrival at the altar, where Willie was standing, a sick green from church-fright; the waiting priests, the rites, the hush of the throng to hear the answers; the strange piping tone of Willie's voice; the odd sound of her own.

Now she was filled with a realization of the awe of this great deed, a realization so vivid and so new that it seemed to be her first understanding of it. While she was kneeling in the prayer her thoughts were not soaring aloft, but swirling with thoughts of Forbes and memories of his embraces, a sense of his arms clasping her now so that she could hardly breathe, a wondering if his eyes and thoughts were on her, and where her nightcap was, and a swooning recollection of her cry of "Help me, Harvey!" a frightful impulse to leap to her feet and cry again to him to help her--then sick shudders at the blasphemy of such thoughts amid the sacraments at her husband's side--for Willie was already her husband, she wore his ring. He had kissed her. They were standing up again. They were signing something. They were leaving the church. It was over. It was just beginning. She was no longer her own; nor her father's. Her father could not protect her from this man at her side. n.o.body could. The police and the judges and the laws were drawn up to keep her his.

Everybody was congratulating her, everybody was smiling, everybody was grinning to think that the marriage was not yet consummated. Back of all the gorgeousness and the glitter and the music and the sacrament waited the hideous profanation, the grossness, the violation of all that was precious and secret and holy.

She had a blurred sense of returning to the carriage and to the house, and of the mob there, the clatter of tongues, the price-mark appraisal of gifts, the swinish greediness about the buffet, the smirking repet.i.tion of the same ba.n.a.lities, the lines of drifting hands, the faces that floated up like melons on a stream and spoke and sometimes kissed her. But what did it matter who kissed her now? They were Willie's cheeks and Willie's lips. She was all Willie's, now and for evermore.

Eventually, when she was white-mouthed with fatigue and eager to swoon out of the pandemonium, some one took pity on her, and she was spirited away to her room and her bridal livery taken from her. The weight of the veil and the train had been greater than she knew. The blossoms were lifted from her head, and in their place a little black straw hat with a frill of black tulle was pinned. And in place of her white satin a simple Callot gown of sage-green cloth was fastened about her girlhood the last time.

She looked to be only a smart young woman, but she was now truly in the robe of sacrifice. They whispered about her and called her "Mrs. Enslee"

with immemorial mischief; but it was still Persis Cabot that slipped from the house and met Willie, still a bachelor. They hurried into the limousine and sped to that clandestine meeting in the hotel suite where they were to tarry till the morrow. And then the yacht was to take them on a long cruise across an ocean of bliss to the unknown continent beyond the honeymoon.

And now the crowdless silence seemed to ring in her ears. She had heard so much noise and suffered so many stares and vibrated to so many excitements that the abrupt hush left her dizzy as on the edge of an unexpected abyss. It was like one of Beethoven's symphonies, where sound is piled on sound and speed on speed till the storm sweeps toward an intolerable climax, and just as the thunder and the lightning are to come there is instead a complete hush; and then a little oboe voice tw.a.n.ging.

She had been swept and spun in a maelstrom, an eternal crash! crash!

crash! Then suddenly she was alone in a room with this little man. She heard the thud of the door like a coffin lid. She heard the lock click; she saw him peering at her with a fox-like slyness. He was whipping off his coat and waistcoat and fumbling at his scarf. And his words were in his whining, oboe voice:

"Well, that's over. And, thank G.o.d, I can get out of this d.a.m.ned collar before it chokes me!"

That was his first comment on their solitude! But it was better than the love speeches he tried to make next.

She sank into a chair; but he was wrapping his arms about her. He was trying to say pretty things, and making a complete fiasco. He was kissing her with ownership, and she dared not turn her lips from his, though all her soul was averted.

He was tugging at her hatpins and pulling her hair naggingly. She rose, controlling her impatience, and spoke with a meekness that amazed her:

"Nichette is there. She will--help me."

He grinned peevishly.

"Nichette, eh? I thought we were to be alone--for once? Well, send her away--as soon as you can."

He spoke already with command, and she said, with that sick meekness:

"All right, Willie."

She slunk away and was afraid to meet the eyes of Nichette. And even Nichette wept at her ministrations. And then she sent Nichette away. At the door Nichette paused to stare through eyes of water, then ran back and clasped Persis and kissed her, and ran out and closed the door.

And Persis waited for her husband. Her thoughts were bitter. She was utterly ashamed. It was not the beautiful shame of a bride whose lover knocks at her door. She was understanding her bargain. She had kept herself for Willie Enslee. She had fought off lovers and love and fled from her own heart that she might be worthy of Willie Enslee and his money! Her body was no longer a shrine. She had rented it to the highest bidder. And the tenant had arrived.

CHAPTER LI

As Forbes had once surveyed the tide of Fifth Avenue from the upper deck of a motor-bus, so now, from a sky-sc.r.a.ping ship he watched the thronged traffic along the s.p.a.cious avenue of the Hudson River and the broad plaza of the bay.

Among the tugs, noisy and rowdy as newsboys, the waddling ferry-boats, the barges loaded with refuse or freight-trains, the pa.s.senger-boats and excursion-boats, and the merchantmen from many ports, a few yachts picked their way superciliously, their bowsprits like upturned noses, their trim white flanks like skirts drawn aside.

Among these yachts, though Forbes was unaware of it, was the _Isolde_, known to those who know such things as a ridiculously luxurious craft, a floating residence. Persis had christened the yacht at Willie's request, and he had accepted the name as a good omen, since he said: "I always have a perfect sleep when _Isolde_ is under way."

Persis, herself now an Isolde wedded to one man and loving another, pa.s.sed the famous sky-line which seemed to continue another Palisades, only fantastically carved and honeycombed with windows. When these cliffs of human fashioning were pulled backward, there was a s.p.a.ce of dancing water, and then Governor's Island, with its moldy old mouse-trap of a fort.

Never dreaming that Forbes was on the liner that had gone down the bay a few moments before, Persis fastened her binocular on the island and tried to pick him out from among the men whom distance rendered lilliputian. She selected some vague promenader and sent him her blessings. If he ever received them he never knew whence they came.

Forbes was groping toward her in thought like a wireless telegrapher trying to reach another and unable to come to accord. Forbes was entering upon the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, and Persis was embarking on another sea equally new to her, for marriage is a kind of ocean to a woman. Maidens struggle toward it and consecrate themselves to it from far inland; they come forth upon the roaring wonder of its cathedral music; the surf flings white flowers at their feet. They venture farther and encounter the first shocks of the breakers, and thereafter the sea lies vast and monotonous with happiness or grief and their interchange. But the prosperity of the voyage is less from without than from within the boat. Persis was not lucky in the captain she had shipped with.

To-day's Persis on the boat was altogether another woman from yesterday's Persis. The toil and fever of preparation, the bacchantic orgies of purchase, the dressing up, the celebration of the festival--these were the joys of the wedding to her, and she had drained them to the full. They left her exhausted and sated. The antic.i.p.ation was over, the realization begun.

In some wiser communities the bride and groom separate for a day or two after the ceremony. But Persis had no such breathing-s.p.a.ce. Persis was delivered to Willie Enslee in a state of f.a.gged-out nerves, muscles, and brain. To him, however, the weeks of preparation had been a mere annoyance, a postponement, a prelude too long, too ornate. And when at last the prize was his he found the fact almost intolerably beautiful.

He possessed Persis Enslee! She had no longer even a name of her own.

Miss Cabot had been merged into the Enslee Estates.

One does not expect to-day the childlike innocence that was revealed or pretended by the brides of other years. Nowadays even their mothers "tell them things." And Willie knew that Persis was neither ignorant nor ingenuous. Her gossip, the scandal she knew, the books and plays she discussed, her sophisticated att.i.tude toward people and life had long ago proved that, whatever she might be, she was not without knowledge.

She knew as much as Mildred Tait, and her talk was nearly as free, but always from the cynical, the flippant, or the shocked point of view.

Willie did not expect to initiate an ignoramus into any unheard-of mysteries. He expected at most a certain modest reluctance and confusion. He was dumfounded to be met with icy horror and shuddering recoil. After the first repulse the terror with which she cringed away from his caresses enhanced her the more.

He imputed it to a native purity. He believed--and it was true--that she had come through all the years and temptations and the dangerous environments with her body and her soul somehow protected to this great event. It was a kind of purity. But not what he thought it.

Persis' creed--if she had thought much about it--would have been the creed of many a woman: that love sanctifies all that it inspires; and that unchast.i.ty is what Rahel Varnhagen defined it--intercourse without love, whether legalized or not.

If Persis had married the man she loved, the man whose touch was like a flame, she would still have been terrified; but love would have hallowed the conquest, changed fright into ecstasy, and glorified surrender.

Willie's touch had always chilled her clammily. What she saw in his eyes now offended her utterly, filled her with loathing and with panic as before a violation. But after this first rebellion she regained control of her fears and reasoned coldly with herself. When she had said "Yes"

to Willie's courtship, and when she had made her affirmations in the church, she had given him her I. O. U. She was not one to repudiate a gambling loss. She forbore resistance, but she could not mimic rapture.

Yet rapture was part of the bargain. Soul and flesh could not pay the obligation her mind had so lightly incurred.

And now it was Enslee that recoiled, strangely smitten with an awe, a reverence for her and her integrity. "You are a saint," he murmured, "an angel, and I am a brute. You are too good, too wonderful!"

Persis was startled at being treated with reverence. It was perhaps the first time she had ever been held sacred. She accepted this tribute in lieu of the others, and they left the hotel as they had entered it, still bachelor and maid, though they wore the same name.

But she was alone upon the ocean now, and she feared her husband more than before. She found him somewhat ridiculous in his uniform, with his yachting-cap a trifle top-heavy for his slim skull. Yet he was the owner; his flag and his club pennant were fluttering aloft. And Persis felt sure that he had repented of his mercy and was ashamed of his asceticism.

He ogled her as he paced the unstable deck, and found her more beautiful than ever, clad in a trim white suit and curled up in her chair like a purring kitten, the sun sifting over her through the awning like a golden powder. And he knew that she was his. He paused at her side and mellowed her cheek, pinched the lobe of her ear, and pursed his lips to kiss her red lips. She winced, then frowned, and shook her head.

"Why not?" he demanded.

"The crew is watching," she explained. And he retorted: