What Will People Say? A Novel

by Rupert Hughes

FORBES had not been invited to Persis' wedding. She had debated the matter feverishly and resolved that it was the lesser slight to leave him out of the twenty-five hundred who received the double-enveloped engravings. There was a certain distinction in being omitted, and she knew that he could not account it an oversight. She had been tempted to write him a letter. She scrawled off a dozen and tore them up in turn. 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 multitude 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 hearse, 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. Nobody 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 repetition of the same banalities, 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.