Part 19 (1/2)
”Can you beat 'em, Mr. Lord? They're never so happy as when they're crying their make-up off. They pretend they're blue, but they've been having the time of their lives.”
And Forbes hated him for saying it. Then he noted that Persis was not applauding. She was pulling off a long glove slowly and wincingly. When it was off, she looked ruefully at her left hand and nursed it in her right. She glanced to see that the others were busy with their wraps, then she held her hand out where Forbes could see it; and gave him a look of pouting reproach.
His first stare showed him only that her soft, slim fingers were almost hidden with rings. And then he saw that the flesh was all creased and bruised and marred with marks like tiny teeth. He realized that it was his fierce clench that had ground the rings and their settings into her flesh, and his heart was wrung with shame and pity.
He saw, too, that on one of the little fingers there was a thread of blood. The alert old eyes of Mrs. Neff caught the by-play of the two, and her curiosity brought her forward with a question.
”How in heaven did you hurt your finger?”
Persis answered quietly and at once:
”I caught it on the thorn of a rose. It's nothing.”
Willie insisted on seeing the wound, and was frantic with excitement. He was genuinely distressed. He poured out sympathy for the pain, anxiety for the future of the wound, the necessity for sterilizing it. But it was Willie's doom to be always tactless or unwelcome, and his sympathy was an annoyance.
Forbes was compelled to silence by Persis' explanation of the accident.
He must not say how sorry he was, though he had wounded her--he had wounded Persis till she bled!
CHAPTER XVIII
There was an atmosphere of mourning everywhere as the enormous audience issued from the exits. It had a.s.sisted at the obsequies of a tremendous love, and all the eyes were sad.
Forbes had seen it stated until he had come to believe it, that the Metropolitan Opera was supported by sn.o.bs who attended merely to show off their jewels, and that the true music-lovers were to be found in the gallery. It came upon him now that this is one of the many cheap missiles poor people of poor wit hurl at luckier folk, with no more discrimination than street Arabs show when they throw whatever they can find in the street at whoever pa.s.ses by in better clothes.
Forbes was sure that most of these sad-eyed aristocrats, so lavish in their praise of the singers and the music and the conductor, had come with a musical purpose, and he wondered if some few, at least, of those in the gallery might not have climbed thither less for art's sake than to see in the flesh those people of whose goings and comings and dressings, weddings and partings, they read so greedily in the newspapers.
During the long wait for the carriage, a wealthy rabble stood in a draughty doorway waiting turns at the slowly disintegrating army of limousines and landaulets and touring-cars and taxicabs--even of obsolete broughams and coaches drawn by four-legged anachronisms.
Mrs. Neff claimed Forbes as her personal escort, and carried him off in her own chariot, which rolled up long before Enslee's.
Forbes regretted to leave Persis standing there, with throat open as usual to the night gale; but his consolation was that he could gossip about her.
Mrs. Neff's first word, of course, was of tobacco. The door was hardly slammed upon them before she had her cigarettes out.
”Give me a light, there's a dear boy. I've just time for a puff. And you light your cigar; I know you're dying for it. You can finish it in the cloak-room. You men have still a few advantages left. The one I envy you most is your right to smoke in public.”
It was strange to Forbes to be proffering a light to a white-haired lady. His own mother had thought it almost an escapade to sit on a piazza with a man who was armed with a cigar. Years ago, when Forbes had come home from West Point, she had said to him after dinner:
”I reckon my boy is simply pe'is.h.i.+ng for a cigar. Of course a gentleman can't smoke in the drawing-room, and the odor never comes out of the curtains. But I don't mind it in the open air--much. We'll stroll in the garden. They say tobacco is good for the plants--bad for the insects.”
And she took his arm and sauntered with him while he ruined the scent of the honeysuckle vines.
And Forbes had heard an anecdote, probably untrue, of the great Mrs.
Astor; according to this legend, a man, hankering for a cigar, yet hesitating to suggest it, asked her casually: ”What would you say if a man asked you for permission to smoke?” To which she answered, in her stately way: ”I don't know. No man ever asked me.” And neither did he.
But nowadays a man rarely ever murmurs the formula: ”Do you object to smoke?” He is apter to say: ”Do you carry your own, or will you try mine?”
The pet.i.te grande dame, Mrs. Neff, carried her own. The glow of it in the dark seemed to add one more ruby to her burdened fingers. And when she lost her light, she reached out for Forbes' cigar and rekindled her cigarette, smiling: