The Beauty Part 15

"You have taught us that you prefer the other thing," he returned with some spirit, although his soul quaked within him.

"Who is she?" asked Mrs. Wilstead, without preamble.

"I don't know," said Mr. Preston miserably. He knew perfectly well that Mrs. Wilstead was too experienced to believe him, and would scorn his clumsy subterfuge. This confused him frightfully, but he hadn't the faintest idea what else to say, so he stumbled on with what he felt was yokel-like stupidity. "Really, I do not know."

"No, of course you would not know under the circ.u.mstances." Mrs.

Wilstead's tone was sweet and sincere, but beneath the sugar-coating of innocence he discerned the bitter pill of her complete understanding.

His ears burned and felt the size of an elephant's. He was very unhappy.

He stirred his tea round and round, as if his spoon were an egg-beater.

"Now that you are here," he said awkwardly, "she will be heard of no more."

Although he never knew it, that speech advanced him leagues in Alice Wilstead's favor. The genuine sincerity of his tone would have warmed the heart of any woman standing with reluctant feet where the brook of _pa.s.se_ joins the river of middle-age.

Alice regarded the opals on her fingers (she was born in October) with a pleased yet humorous smile.

"Accepting your inference, what chance has an elderly widow against a young and lovely actress?"

Preston started. She had played trumps when he was least expecting them. "Then you know--" he said.

"That Miss Fuschia Fleming is a star that will shoot madly from her sphere to brighten the firmament of New York this spring."

"I supposed, of course, that was her game," he said soberly. But he was thinking not so much of Fuschia Fleming as of that after revelation which this delightful woman had made. A widow of charm, of sparkle, of money. One felt the latter. She unconsciously exhaled it. And best a.s.set of all, the old and valued friend of Cresswell Hepworth. Preston was no cold-blooded schemer, neither was he an ardent, impetuous Hotspur. He merely calculated chances, not only by virtue of temperament but training, and when this jewel of a chance flashed its dazzling rays, he instinctively estimated its weight, the accuracy of the cutting and possible value.

Therefore Mr. Hayward Preston made such hay in the next few minutes, that when he left, or rather when Mrs. Wilstead dismissed him, he received another of that particular brand of smiles and walked home with his head among the stars.

CHAPTER XVI

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

One morning, shortly before she left for New York, Miss Fuschia Fleming and her father sat in the sitting-room of their suite in the hotel at Santa Barbara. The sunshine without lay broad and white and dazzling.

Within it seemed to be reflected, although through many tonal shadings in subdued, but still golden points of emphasis. There were bowls of yellow roses, there were baskets of oranges and lemons, there was Fuschia herself in a morning gown as pale as the gold of her hair which looked paler than ever in contrast to a great tawny, orange-colored flower, which she had leaned from her window and plucked a short while before and thrust carelessly above one ear.

Her chair was completely surrounded by newspapers, colored supplements, Sunday magazine sections. They billowed about her like waves. Whoever would reach her must cross a crackling sea. On the opposite side of the room, her father reclined comfortably in a large easy chair, smoking an excellent cigar and poring intently over a page of "past performances,"

with pencil in hand poised above it.

"Goodness!" said Fuschia suddenly, "she's a dream!"

"Who?" asked her father, looking up.

"Mrs. Hepworth." Fuschia was gazing at a page which presented many pictures of the same lady. "Put down that dope sheet, papa; it's time wasted studying it. All your money is needed to back just one favorite, and copper just one bet, and that's me."

"In common with my brothers, men, the workers and the shirkers, I am always ready with advice," obediently laying aside his paper.

"Save it for the weak brother then. I want to talk to you, to clear out my own thoughts. Now Mrs. Hepworth--"

"Cress' wife?" her father interrupted with a show of interest. "What's the matter there, Fuschia? Why isn't she here?"

"She's got a mission in life, just like you and me," Fuschia showed her beautiful even teeth in one of her widest, curliest smiles. "Yours, with the great motto inscribed upon your banner, 'Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits,' is to rescue your brother from the deadly thraldom of the home; mine is to reform the stage; Mrs. Hepworth's is to redeem women's clothes. She has all kinds of theories about color and design and she wanted to put them in practice. That nice Mrs. Wilstead says that she's an odd, capricious, undisciplined creature, but a genius in her line. Oh, I've learned a lot about her from what Mrs. Wilstead and all these newspapers have told me, and what Mr. Hepworth hasn't told me.

Papa, dear, I never admired any one in my life as I do that man. I've tried every way but using a drag-net to get him to tell me the whole story, but he's stood every test. He'll talk freely on any other subject."

"Didn't happen to give you any inside talk about those Arizona properties, did he?"

"He did not. You see he married the poor but beautiful girl, and then she got playing too gaily with Eugene Gresham, the great artist. You've heard of him surely. It was the triangle, you see. Same old dramatic motive. Then suddenly, just as every one was standing on their tiptoes to enjoy the view, why the triangle flew to pieces. The Cresswell Hepworth part landed out here, the Eugene Gresham part went to Europe, the Mrs. Hepworth part went into business with a Miss Carmine, and opened a big establishment in New York, and every one came down on their heels with a thud, and are still staring at each other wondering what's doing."

"If Cress really wants her," remarked Fleming, flicking the ashes from his cigar, "he surely wouldn't be such a fool as to leave the field.

He'd stay and fight for her."

"That's man-talk," said Fuschia lightly contemptuous. "A crazy idea you all have, that you can make women love you. Don't you know how the leading man always walks about the stage clenching and unclenching his hands, and muttering, 'By heaven, I'll make her love me; I'll win her against all the wir-r-rld.' Poor souls, they think they can dazzle us into loving them; and many feel that if they only talk enough about themselves, and their great achievements, what they've done and what they're going to do, that they can't fail to fascinate us; and it often suits us to let them think so. Awfully funny, isn't it?"

"I never succeeded in fascinating 'em, no matter what line I took," said her father with feeling.

"Women don't care much for you, do they? Well, cheer up, Daddy, dear.

They've never loved me. Once in a while, they're very nice to me, and we purr and purr and rub noses, but all the time we are watching each other out of our green eyes, and then one day there's the swift stroke of the velvet paw and the deep mark of claws."

"Mighty little purr and velvet for me," Fleming's petticoat reminiscences were invariably gloomy, "mostly claws."

Fuschia's unfeeling smile curved nearly up to her eyes. "How is that Idaho property anyway?" she asked with apparent irrelevance.

"Fine, my dear, fine. I think Cress may really make something on it himself, but in any event, he'll have no difficulty in unloading it."

"I'll need a pile of money for my campaign." She took an orange from the basket and began tossing it from one hand to the other. "I've brought a good deal of study to bear on the arrangement of this checker-board. I always like to get on to the game just as much as possible. Why have I been traveling about with those miserable little stock companies putting up with all kinds of hardships? Just to get experience. Now I'm ready for New York!" She mused a moment, and then took up the subject with fresh enthusiasm. "It's helped me a lot, all this newspaper notoriety about myself and Mr. Hepworth. Puts me before the public as nothing else could. Just look at these pictures!" She plunged her hand down into the rustling sea, and held out a Sunday supplement to him. "There's a lovely picture of the auto tumbling over a cliff and me landing in a tree. Simply great! Now just as soon as I get to New York, Mrs. Hepworth's got to be a sister to me."

"How do you know she'll cotton to you?" asked Fleming.

"What's that got to do with it?" His daughter opened her eyes in surprise. "I need her, for through her, I mean to have my portrait painted by Gresham. And his prices! La, la! Sure, you can put your hands on real money and plenty of it?"

"Fuschia, my child," her father laid aside his "dope sheet" and bent impressively toward her, "this new proposition has more in it than even you can spend, and you know what that means. It's one of those spectacular properties that make a poet of a man. You can talk it beautifully, splash on the color, you know, and it writes as well as it talks. Shows up superbly in a prospectus, photographs like an artist's dream. Just the thing to capture the eastern imagination. You see, it matters very little whether the property is intrinsically all right or not. That is always problematical, and to be left in the hands of Providence. The great thing is to know what is going to capture the eastern imagination. That's what you're really dealing with, not the proposition itself, by Jingo, but the eastern imagination."

"That's just what I tried to tell that unborn babe of a press agent this morning," cried Fuschia, nodding her head in emphatic agreement. "I got him because he was a Mayflower Yankee, just out of Harvard, and yet he's got no more idea of how to deal with his own people than a new-laid kitten. He came bounding to me an hour or two ago with a lot of stuff he'd been working over nights with wet towels around his head and a pot of black coffee at his elbow.

"'I think I've struck it,' said he. 'It is both true and new!' Pop, it was like this. 'Miss Fuschia Fleming can really do things, therefore she does not waste time talking about them. One of the most competent of stage managers, she never loses her temper. Admirable self-control a striking characteristic. Thoroughly systematic and methodical.'

"Lord, Papa! I felt sorry for the kid. It like to killed me, you know.

Well, I waited a bit till the daze wore off and then I said, 'I'm sorry, honey, but it won't do. If I'd made good in New York and had 'em all rooting for me, it would be different, but they're effete Easterners, boy, used to ruts and routine, and you can't change their breakfast food on 'em like that. They won't stand for it. Give 'em the same good old press notices that mother used to make back in 1860. Don't talk about my "trim neatness." You won't believe it, Daddy, but the poor kid actually did that! I said, 'Say that my favorite house costume is a Mexican riding-suit hung with silver dollars, and that, in cold weather, I always wear a Navajo blanket over my shoulders. Have a sketch of me rolling a cigarette between the thumb and second finger of one hand and throwing the lariat with the other. Describe me, when only fifteen, playing Rosalind in the redwoods of the Yosemite before a wildly enthusiastic audience of miners and cowboys. Then say that once before, when appearing before the most brilliant audience ever a.s.sembled in a San Francisco theater, I became so overwrought that I began to shoot holes through the drop curtain.' Do you think that was all right, Papa?"

Her father gazed at her with an almost awed admiration. "Honest to G.o.d, Fuschia," he said at last, "I don't know what to think of you. Here I've spent my life handling those Easterners, singly and in bunches, and here are you, without either experience or training, on to the game intuitively. Fuschia, this is a proud day for me. I've never told you, little girl, but sometimes I've had my doubts about your bringing up. I tell you after your mother ran away with my best friend and then divorced me for desertion and shortly died, leaving you, a two-year-old girl baby to me as a last bequest, it was a black hour. Like one of those Bible boys--Peter, wasn't it?--I went out and crew bitterly. 'If she was only a boy!' I said. 'What can Jim Fleming do with a she thing like this?' Then I took another look at you, in your white dress and blue shoes, smiling at me with your mouth all over your face, and, true as I stand here, Fuschia, you were the first thing in skirts that didn't seem to be looking at me across a great gulf.

"And then I talked to myself a while. You see, if your mother had come to me as man to man and said, 'Jim, I'm tired of you and I want to marry Henry,' I'd have said, hard as it might have hit me, you know that, Fuschia, 'Kate, I don't blame you, and I'll do what I can to help you.'

But she preferred the feminine route, a note on the pincushion and she gone with all her jewels and ten thousand I'd given her to buy a diamond necklace. But as I say, I looked at you in your white dress and blue shoes and that friendly grin on your little mug, and I said, 'G.o.d knows how it'll work, but this girl thing here ain't going to grow up thinking that there's fences built all around her and that she's got to coax and sneak and pretend to get her way. Poor Kate! With great price she obtained her freedom, but my little Fuschia, here, she's born free.'"

"Good old Poppy-doppy!" Fuschia's tone was fondly approving and something like a tear glimmered in the depths of her turquoise eyes.

"I'm glad you never tried the snaffle bit of parental training and home influences on me, because I'd sure have kicked myself free, and it mightn't have been pleasant. But to come back to the present, Mr.

Hepworth is so splendid, that unless his wife is really in love with this boy-Raphael or whatever he is, I'm going to get into the game and make home happy for the Hepworths."