The Beauty Part 2

She did not see that, but the lightness of his words and tone p.r.i.c.ked her to an immediate decision, a decision which she had, unconsciously, postponed until she had seen him. Her face paled, her lips folded in a tight line.

"I am going to marry the millionaire," she said firmly enough, although there was a slight tremor in her voice. "It depends on you whether or not there is a portrait of Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth by Gresham." There was triumph in her eyes and voice as thus she lifted her pride from the dust.

"Cresswell Hepworth!" His astonishment was unbounded. "Perdita! I throw my hat at your feet. Cresswell Hepworth! The pick of the bunch.

Wonderful! But," looking at her curiously, "how on earth did you meet him?"

"He heard of my amulet through a man I met at old Mrs. Huff's, Mr.

Martin. He has a wonderful collection of amulets, and he wanted to buy it of me."

"But you didn't sell it?" he said quickly. "No, of course not. H'm-m.

That old amulet. You laugh at my superst.i.tions, Dita, but you must admit that it's queer the way it's interwoven with the history of our family."

He began to roll cigarettes and lay them with neat and exquisite regularity on the table beside him. His eyebrows were raised, his mouth twisted in a sort of rueful yet whimsical grimace. When he had finished rolling the sixth cigarette, he laid it in line with the others, an exact line, his eye was so true. Then at last he looked at her, and his cynical, earnest, mocking, enthusiastic face softened. His eyes enveloped her with tenderness. There was a heart-break in his smile.

"Ah, star-eyed Perdita, how shall I give you up? The only woman!" He mused a moment, and then repeated: "The only woman! If we had but had the courage to take the bitter with the sweet, Perdita."

Unwitting goad! It struck too deep for her to conceal the wound.

"You do not say 'can,' I observe, Eugene," she said laughingly, but there was an edge to her voice like that on finely tempered steel.

"No," he returned, his fingers busy with a rearrangement of the cigarettes; "you see it involves you and me. Not John Jones and Jane Smith, but you and me. Do you know what that means? Well, it means that it involves the inheritance and training of a good many generations. Do you think I do not know how you loathe all this?" He flicked with his fingers the dainty trifles on the table. "I know well the craving of your nature for splendor and beauty, how necessary they are to you, and how d.i.n.kiness and makeshifts irritate and depress you, take the heart out of you. That is one you, one Perdita. There is another. I saw her when I came in to-night. G.o.d, I wish I hadn't!" His voice dropped on this exclamation and she did not hear it. "She is young. Her beautiful, dark eyes ask love and give it. Her heart dreams of it. It is in every tone of her voice. These two are at war, the natural woman and the woman with her inherited love of ease and luxury and cultivated, artificial desires. Which is the stronger? Why, to-night"--he picked up one of the cigarettes and prepared to light it; his hands trembled, his face was white--"the woman who is ready to love. She would listen to me--to-night. I would hold her. Oh, what's the use?" He twisted his shoulders impatiently. Then he bent forward and tapped the table lightly but emphatically, as if to add weight to his words. "You'd listen to me to-night, I know that; but as sure as to-morrow's dawn I'd get a little note from you saying that the morn had brought wisdom. But, oh, I am glad I'm sailing to-morrow."

"So am I," she flashed out. "You think--you take too much for granted, Eugene."

"I dare say." His voice sounded flat. "No one ever appreciates renunciation. Well, it's out into the night in more senses than one." He rose and looked at her as she sat with downcast eyes, and half stretched out his arms toward her. Then as she too rose, he clasped his fingers about the back of her head and drew her face toward him, although she strove to avert it from him. "Good-by, sweetheart." Even she must believe in the ardor and sincerity of his tones. "Good-by, Perdita of the South." He kissed her lightly on one cheek and then the other.

"Good-by, my jasmine flower."

He hesitated a moment in leaving the room, as if to turn and clasp her to him and bear her away; then he shut the door gently behind him and she heard his halting, hurried step upon the stair. She sat listening until its last echoes had died away, and then, casting her outstretched arms on the table, sending the favors and menus and candle-shades in a shower to the floor, she burst into a storm of tears.

There was a low, discreet, respectful knock, Olga's knock on the door leading into Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth's splendid apartments. Perdita started violently and came back to the present from her far world of dreaming. She had not even begun to dress, but still was sitting, chin on hand, gazing with apparent intentness at her image in the mirror.

"It is almost time for Madame to start," Olga smiled from the doorway, "so I ventured to remind."

"Yes," Perdita spoke hurriedly, rising at the same time. "Get me into my gown quickly, please, and tie my shoes."

Olga was deft and practised, and Perdita's dressing was the work of a few minutes.

"My veil now," said the new Mrs. Hepworth, "and--oh, I almost forgot."

She turned to lift from her dressing-table an exceedingly quaint and striking ornament, depending from a long, thin chain. It was a square of crystal about an inch and a half in diameter, set curiously in strands of silver and gold, twisted and beaten together, and, as must be apparent to even the casual observer, was of ancient and unique workmanship. This was Perdita's amulet, the old charm, which Eugene with his superst.i.tious fancies had always longed to possess, and which had excited also the desire of the collector in Hepworth; but in spite of many temptations to part with it, Dita had always retained possession of it. It was her one link with the past, a personal link, but also a traditional and hereditary one. She wound the chain several times about her neck, and the crystal pendant gleamed dully against the dark blue cloth of her gown.

"You also are ready, Olga?" she said as she pa.s.sed through the door.

"Yes, Madame."

Hepworth was waiting for Perdita at the head of the stairs. He was in his heavy motoring coat, his cap in hand.

He smiled as he saw her. "Just in time," he said. "I'm afraid we will have to make haste, rather. Ah," as his eye caught the talisman, "you are wearing the amulet, are you not? Blessed old thing. If it had not been for that, I should never have met you."

"I believe you only married me to get it," she replied with an answering smile, "you are such an insatiable collector."

"Do you believe that? Do you?" he asked. "Because if you do, you are as stupid as you are pretty, and you have no idea what that implies."

CHAPTER III

PINK AND WHITE EXISTENCE

So Mr. and Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth whirled away in the big motor and for the next few months wandered about the globe. Perdita, who had seen nothing but an old southern plantation and New York, the latter from the curb, as it were, must see everything; so in pursuit of this aim, the Hepworths were constantly stepping from huge, magnificent boats to huge, magnificent motors, thence to huge, magnificent hotels. And cities, the open country, villages, mountain peaks, strange peoples, were as debris strewing the pathway of Perdita's avid flight through new experiences.

It was tremendously stimulating, even heady, she found, to hold the world between one's thumb and finger, and turn it this way and that to catch the light. Headier still to discover that to wish is to realize, but proportionately a shock to find that the life of infinite variety may only be lived within circ.u.mscribed boundaries. What is more disillusionizing than to learn that money has its limitations? It can merely buy the very best of things, the superlatives of the commonplace, but these, in the last a.n.a.lysis, remain food, lodgings, clothes, conveyances, ornaments, no more. Money can not buy stars or dreams, or love or happiness.

Perdita's soaring youth resented it. But she was adaptable, enormously interested and the ground within the boundaries was new, affording daily opportunities for fresh exploration. And she, quick to observe and compare, had profited by her new experiences. Money became to her merely the medium of exchange for any beautiful thing she might want. Speedily she lost her first, fresh pleasure in making it flutter its little golden wings and fly; but her love of art deepened and strengthened, and at many famous shrines she offered her heart's homage. She took up the study of designing, and worked at it systematically with an ardor and intensity which at first amused and then puzzled her husband.

On their return from their travels Perdita occupied herself in altering, refurnishing and redecorating one or two of Hepworth's country places and his town house. She worked in consultation with a great firm, and succeeded in changing the weary acquiescence of "our Mr. So and So"

to interest and an astonishment bordering on enthusiasm. She was not the average rich woman who had gone in for being artistic, with a head full of glaringly impossible ideas and a flow of helpful suggestions which set the professional teeth on edge.

On the contrary, this girl, Mrs. Hepworth, really knew a few things and was willing to learn more. She was a student. "The only woman," murmured dazedly "our Mr. Smith-Jones," "the only woman I ever met who realizes that decoration must conform to architecture, not defy it. You usually have to fracture their skulls to make them understand that pompadour prettinesses are not suitable in a Gothic chapel."

But when she had finished the houses, and designed more costumes than she could wear, she looked about her for fresh worlds to conquer, and discovered that she was up against the boundaries. Walls everywhere!

She could do anything she chose, travel, buy clothes, motors, an aeroplane if she wanted it, only she did not. She next went through a phase when she decided that the people with whom she was thrown were intolerable, representing a frivolous and empty-headed society. Her imagination dwelt on the cla.s.s who "did things," "the dreamers," she called them to herself, who adorned a brilliant, picturesque, delightfully haphazard Bohemia, where, at feasts, princ.i.p.ally of red wine and bloomy, purple grapes, laughter pealed to the rafters, and the conversation sparkled as if sprinkled with stardust. She strove to enter this Olympian vagabondia, and found herself entangled in the nets of many fowlers, sycophantic, impecunious, and, unsated of their many banquets, physically hungry.

She began to have seasons of ennui and depression, increasing in frequency. What was the matter with her world? Nothing, she would hasten to a.s.sure herself, it was the best of all possible worlds, and she, a darling of fortune--once, unforgetably, the waif of chance--was the most contented of women. Only--what was the matter with this perversely empty and uninteresting world?

It was not always so. It was once invested with wonderful things, and such simple things, too. She remembered how she used to stand at the window of her little work-room watching the day fade, marveling at the miracle of the twilight. While the sun was high, she had seen only commonplace, dusty streets, crowded with people, and had heard only a crazy, creaking old piano-organ grinding away on the pavement beneath, but in the soft indefiniteness of twilight these solid houses and buildings would become unsubstantial, mere shadowy arabesques on the spangled gloom of night. There were purple vistas, glittering lights and fairy towers. She would hold her breath, almost expecting to hear a nightingale. It was all mystery and magic, life and romance, that eternal romance her starved youth asked. How she used to dream of the unexpected, the dazzling unexpected!

And then Cresswell had come, and, as she thought, offered it to her. To do Perdita justice, she had not married Hepworth merely because of his great wealth. She was incapable of such sordid and callous calculation.

But Cophetua had met this beggar maid at her most disheartened and despairing moment, and without difficulty had succeeded in first winning her interest and then enchaining her imagination.

In her two years of struggle to earn her livelihood Eugene had become more or less a memory, and, in spite of the fascination and interest he had always had for her, she did not blind herself to certain erratic tendencies of his. He might appear at any moment, so she judged him, with vows of eternal love, and straightway, if the mood seized him, begin a new picture and forget her. And so she married Hepworth largely that life might become a successive series of introductions to an ever varying unexpected. Instead, although her quest was feverish, she encountered only the commonplace. She was like a mouse which has discovered the inadequacy of cheese to quench its soul-yearnings. What remained?

The truth of the matter was that Perdita's world, which seemed so hopelessly askew to her, had an architectural defect. It lacked that sure antidote to ennui--a Bluebeard's closet.

Now Perdita was young and healthy. She had great curiosity, and a certain insatiable mental quality which would have successfully riveted her interest to life, but for one fact, her heart was as ardent and insatiable as her intelligence--and her husband bored her. There is no record of Bluebeard boring any of his wives.

She became more and more conscious of a continual little plaint running always through her consciousness, like the sad, monotonous murmur of an ever-flowing stream, a little unceasing plaint against life in the abstract and life in its personal application.

"There must be as many worlds as there are points of view," so ran the stream, "but my life's like a wedding-cake, all white and sparkling and overdecorated, and absolutely insipid. Candy! That's what it is ... my rooms are all pink and white, and I'm crusted over with pink sugar."

Perdita always thought in color. "I'm tired of all this pink and white and baby-blue existence. I'd welcome a little scarlet and black sin for a change. Oh, it's just your corsets over again. You're put in them when you're about fifteen and you never get out of them again. We women think in corsets, breathe in them. We live in them mentally, and accept all their constrictions and restrictions as a matter of course. We take in drafts of air, and expand our lungs and say we're emanc.i.p.ated, but we only expand as much as the corsets allow. We've put our world in corsets, to confine us still more ... mine used to be mended, frequently washed, with some of the bones broken; now I have many pairs, brocade, satin--cloth of gold, if I want them--but they are the same thing, corsets, corsets on our bodies and brains and lives.

"Look at Cresswell. He doesn't wear corsets. He has an interesting, absorbing, unfettered life. He's using the muscles of his brain--strengthening them on some resisting substance. He's in the thick of it.... What fun! Planning, visioning things in his mind, and seeing them take form in the external. He's a builder. He wears an imperturbable mask. That's for defense; but behind it I sometimes see keen, powerful, calculating gleams in his eyes, and I want to know about them, but I can't.... I can't talk to him about any but surface things.

I can't show him what is in my heart.... The corsets are between us.

He's one of the great powers, and he's mine, a possession like the Kohinoor, but I do not fancy that the Kohinoor const.i.tutes the queen's happiness.

"What are Cresswell and I to each other, anyway? Why, he's my Kohinoor, a possession of great price which endows me with distinction, and runs my credit up into the millions. He's as brilliant and cold and secretive as his prototype. And I--I'm his doll, a very jewel of a doll. One of the prettiest in the world, wonderfully dressed, exquisitely marceled, faultlessly manicured. I can smile enchantingly, and open and shut my mouth to ask for what I want and what I don't want, particularly the latter, and lisp 'thank you' when he drops a diamond necklace or a ruby tiara into my lap.

"I hate a man that puts me on a pedestal. Any woman does. He thinks I'm sugar and salt and will melt and break. I wish he'd come to me, just once, with some enthusiasm and hug me breathless. I'm tired of his everlasting chivalry and deference.... When he begins to treat me with reverence and guards my youth and all that, I'd like to swear at him like the disreputable parrot of a drunken sailor.... Wouldn't I surprise him? I wonder what he would do if I'd cut loose? Oh, dear, I wish he'd come home drunk some night and smash up some of this junk and--what is that phrase of Wallace Martin's--swipe me one; and then be penitent and remorseful and ashamed and human--instead of always being like a darned old statue of the American statesman with one hand thrust in the bosom of his frock-coat.