What Will People Say? A Novel

by Rupert Hughes

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 illustrations.

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 clustered 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.