What Will People Say? Part 92

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 G.o.d! My G.o.d! 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, a.s.sailed 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 cla.s.ses are rotten, and the lower cla.s.ses 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."