Part 68 (1/2)

She shook her head violently, and yawned and spoke so eloquently of her fatigue that he slunk away to his own room.

The next day he set his secretary to work running down a berth on a steamer. Everything seemed to be gone. People whom the panicky times had reduced from wealth to anxiety were crossing the ocean to places where they could economize without ostentation. The final report was that the only suitable berth was the imperial suite on the new _Imperator_.

”Did you grab it?” said Willie. The secretary shook his head.

”Why the devil didn't you?” Willie snapped.

”They ask five thousand dollars for it.”

Even Willie winced at this. ”I don't want it for a year,” he groaned.

”Just one voyage.”

”It has a private deck, a drawing-room, two bath-rooms, two servants'

rooms--”

The ”private deck” decided Willie; but when he told Persis he laid stress on the price he paid; not from any braggart motive, but as a pathetic sort of courts.h.i.+p.

Persis smiled a little. It was something. But when she found the private deck she took pains to invite other pa.s.sengers she knew to make it their own piazza. Among the pa.s.sengers were Mrs. Neff and Alice.

After Persis had thwarted Alice's elopement with Stowe Webb the boy had been tempted to go to Mrs. Neff and plead with her to withdraw her ban, seeing that he was now a man of affairs with an a.s.sured income. But he imagined what she would say when she asked him the amount of that income; and he imagined her smile. She did not have to ridicule his fortune. The sum itself was so petty that it ridiculed itself.

He and Alice had met clandestinely a few times at the houses of friends, but both were young and both were timid, and their friends were cynical with discouragement. Alice wanted to go to watch him off at the dock, but had not dared, and only sent him a tear-blotted steamer letter. And while he was down in his state-room reading it she was locked in her pink-and-white virginal chamber crying her blue eyes crimson on her bed.

She never spoke of him to her mother, and Mrs. Neff did not know what had become of him.

So the two child-lovers pined away. New York became a deserted village to Alice, and Stowe found the ocean a congenial waste, for he felt in his breast an Atlantic loneliness. Nor was Paris less sad; its allurements were only thorns; he felt that he must be true to his little wife-to-be, and it seemed that even to indulge in the more innocent gaieties would belie his desolation.

Then Mrs. Neff grew just a trifle too shrewd. Noting that Alice never spoke of Stowe Webb, she made up her crafty old mind that the two young wretches were meeting secretly. Since nothing happened at all, she all too cleverly decided that something was about to happen, and resolved to nip the pa.s.sion-flower in the bud. She read Alice a long curtain-lecture on the perfection with which children obeyed their parents when she was young, then dilated on the advantages of European travel in broadening the mind, and drew such a glowing portrait of her own benevolence in offering Alice the opportunity of going abroad that the girl began to foresee what was coming, and what real motive was actuating her mother.

By the time Mrs. Neff arrived at the heartbreaking news that she was about to drag Alice off to Paris the simple child was able to dissemble her ecstasy and give a convincing portrayal of a daughter who would rather go anywhere on earth than to France. Like Br'er Rabbit, she pleaded not to be thrown into the briar-patch of all places. So she was thrown into the briar-patch. Alice was on her way to Paris.

She took Persis into her confidence, and Persis found a dreary pleasure in the joke. She even forbore to warn Alice against the folly of marrying into poverty. She was not so satisfied with her own triumph as to recommend her example to others.

There was, as there will always be, a certain joy in having the best and the most expensive things of every sort. But there was, as there will always be, a disappointment in getting by merely wis.h.i.+ng or commanding; especially as the fairy gift of wishes has always carried a few amendments: ”You may have anything you wish for except--” Whereupon the ”excepts” become the only things sincerely wishable.

Persis found London at the height of its June festivity. The President of France was visiting the King of England, and there were state banquets and state b.a.l.l.s and state everything, mingled with private celebrations that rivaled them in pomp; and a horse-show, and horse-races, regimental polo tournaments; the annual hysterical wholesale celebration of nothing in particular.

Many of Persis' school-girl friends were d.u.c.h.esses, countesses, marchionesses, mere ladies. Lady Crainleigh, whom Persis had once beaten in a potato-race at a country horse-show in Westchester, gave a dance where seven hundred guests were present and where t.i.tles were as common as pebbles on a sh.o.r.e. Persis wore her ”all-around” diamond crown, and danced with a Russian grand-duke and a prince or two.

The tango and the turkey-trot had spread overseas, and royalties trod on Persis' toes as they bungled the steps like yokels. It was fantastic to hear the trashy tunes of American music-halls resounding through the ballrooms of mansions and palatial hotels.

At the Royal Ascot the Queen sent a duke to fetch Persis to the royal box, and spoke amiably of her sister.

But, however Persis glittered abroad, when the inevitable time came to become mere woman and go to bed, she must always return to the nagging presence of Willie, infatuated the more by the inaccessible distances her soul kept from his.

With his harrowed face, his unwelcome caresses, his unanswerable prayers for a little love, he ceased to be tragic. He became a pest.

Persis was learning wherein wealth, as well as poverty, has its poverties, its nauseas, its petty annoyances, its daily denials, its hair-cloth s.h.i.+rts.