What Will People Say? Part 31

And Persis: what were the thoughts that burned within her soul and twitched at her fingers, or tugged at her eyebrows, shook her eyelids, or tightened her lips? Was she thinking of Forbes as he was thinking of her?

Suddenly her drooping bosom expanded with a great breath, her lips parted, her eyes widened, her hand rose. She was about to speak. What would she say?

She yawned. Her hand automatically came up for politeness' sake, but lingered to pat her straining lips as if in approval. Her eyes blurred and fairly writhed. All the muscles of her divine beauty were contorted.

She was not so much yawning as yawned. She was enjoying it, too, and as it ended she sighed over it as over a sweetmeat. The musing G.o.ddess had been suddenly restored to humanity with a thump.

Her comfortable sigh was echoed and her yawn outdone by Winifred, who moaned:

"I'm so d.a.m.ned sleepy I'll turn in here if the rest of you will get off the bed."

Then Alice yawned and wriggled, and Mrs. Neff gaped with a slight restraint and staggered to her feet.

"I'm on my way. I'd be bored to death if I weren't so excited over the wonderful sleep I'm to have. I hope I don't wake up for a week."

"I hope you don't," said Willie, thrusting out his arms in an all-embracing oscitation.

There was an epidemic of yawns, and they staggered to the console table where a long row of candles waited. Ten Eyck lighted them and distributed them, and the line moved on like a drunken torchlight procession, helped and hindered one another up, and sang out faint "Good nights" as they dispersed in the upper hall.

Doors were closed, only to be flung open with wails of distress. Martha and Prout had lugged all the trunks and suit-cases and handbags to the wrong rooms.

The three men were compelled to act as porters. Willie was furious and full of "I told you so's"; but Ten Eyck impersonated the transfer-men he had met, and had a different dialect for every room.

Forbes went timidly into the exquisite apartment where Persis was ensconced. It was a shrine to him, and he averted his eyes from the carved and lace-adorned altar of her bed.

But Ten Eyck turned back to pound on the door and put in his palm, whining:

"Don't forget the poor baggage-smasher, lady."

Persis opened the door a trifle and gave him a twenty-five-cent piece.

She held out another for Forbes, and he took it with a foolish rapture.

Ten Eyck bit his coin and touched his hat, with a husky murmur of:

"'Ch obliged, mum! 'Ch obliged!"

Forbes kept his for a lucky piece--the first keepsake he had had from her.

CHAPTER XXVII

If Persis and the others were rejoicing in their emanc.i.p.ation from formalities too familiar, Forbes was glad that he had escaped them for the reverse reason. Hospitality had been dispensed on a lavish scale at his own home in the South before his father's death, but the servants there were negroes, slaves, or descendants of slaves, and he knew just the right mixture of affection and tyranny to administer to them. But where servile white foreigners, with their curious humilities and pomposities, bowed heads and elevated eyebrows, he had not learned just how much to demand and how much to concede.

He was glad that there was no valet to unpack his things, for he was afraid that his secret wardrobe might not pa.s.s such experienced inspection. He laid out his own pajamas, brushes, and clean things against the morning.

Ten Eyck, who shared the same bathroom with Forbes, came in to borrow a match for his pipe, noted Forbes' industry, and quoted one of the few cla.s.sics that he still read--Rabelais: "Panurge had it right when he said, 'I am never so well served as when I am my own valet.'"

"Is this your first experience as your own man?" said Forbes.

"I should say not!" Ten Eyck snorted, with a cloud of smoke. "I've roughed it as rough as any rough-neck going, Forbesy."

Forbes, from the experience of a campaigner, a wilderness hiker, lifted an eyebrow of patronizing incredulity. Ten Eyck retorted:

"You needn't grin. I don't mean any of this roughing _de luxe_. I had the real thing. I quarreled with the governor once. I was. .h.i.tting it up pretty hard, and he gave me a call. I told him I didn't need his dirty money; I could earn my own, and I swore I'd never ask him for a cent. I lit out for the Wild and Woolly. What I took with me went fast. I couldn't get a job I'd look at; and by the time I was ready to look at any job I could get, n.o.body would look at me. Finally they took me on as unskilled labor in the construction camp of a railroad. I slept in cattle-cars, or on the ground, or in wooden bunks with Swedes and Finns, and Huns and c.o.o.ns, and other swine in the adjoining styes. I fought 'em, too, when I had to. Later I waited on the table in a cheap hashery.

"G.o.d knows where I'd have ended if my dear old dad hadn't got so homesick he put the Pinkertons on my trail. And when he found me he apologized and begged me to come back. And I very graciously accepted. I had had all the poverty I needed for a lifetime. Hereafter, Forbesy, I'm for the nap on the velvet and the plush on the peach. I tell you, Forbesy, we millionaires may have our little troubles, but we escape the worst of 'em, eh John D.?"

"I wish you'd cut out that talk about my being a millionaire," Forbes broke in, impatiently.

"Millionaire is a newspaper term," Ten Eyck explained, "for anybody who is worth more than a few thousand dollars."

"But I'm not worth anything and never shall be," Forbes confessed. "I'm not rich at all. I've nothing but a few hundred dollars and my picayune salary."

Ten Eyck took the great denial without emotion. "Then I congratulate you on being one of the poor but honest, instead of the criminal rich."

"I'm poor, but I'm not honest," Forbes said; "I'm obtaining courtesy under false pretenses."

"Rot!" said Ten Eyck. "Money couldn't buy what you're getting, and the lack of it couldn't lose what you've gained. They like you. You belong.

That's all there is to it."

"I wonder."

"Of course that's all. What does anybody here care how much you've got or haven't got, so long as you're congenial and aren't proposing to marry anybody."

Forbes lifted his head with a quick, startled movement that did not escape Ten Eyck, who pretended to misunderstand.

"Of course, if you really are after Mrs. Neff or the little Neffkin, there might be a call for a show-down of bankbooks."

"I'd be just as much obliged if you people would drop that joke about my courting Mrs. Neff," Forbes grumbled. Ten Eyck was patient; his voice fell to a deep and earnest tone:

"What I say goes along the line, Forbesy. You were good to me when I was sick in Manila. Don't you go and get sick here. You told me what I mustn't eat and drink and wear out there, and I want to warn you against the dangers of this place. There's a tropics right here, too, with deadly miasmas and mosquitoes that buzz strange things and sting you full of delirious fevers. Don't fall in love too far, Forbesy. I like you mighty well and--naming no names--I like her mighty well, but don't get false notions in your head, and don't put false notions in hers."

"About my money, you mean?"

"Umm-humm."

"You think that money would make a difference to her?"

"Hah!" Ten Eyck snorted. "Would water make any difference to a fish?"

"But if she loved--"

"My boy, you can keep a mighty sweet canary in a mighty little cage, and it will sing away like mad and be very fond of you; but you can't keep a bird of paradise there--or a sea-gull--can you?"

"I reckon not," said Forbes.