What Will People Say? Part 93

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 h.e.l.lish 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 circ.u.mstances" 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 ill.u.s.trations.

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 cl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.s 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:

G.o.d love you for this. I'll never forget. I'll prove my grat.i.tude 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 ash.o.r.e.

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 sh.o.r.e 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 att.i.tudes 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 Amba.s.sador 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.body 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?