The Beauty Part 25

WITH MY HEART'S LOVE

Scarcely had the hall door closed behind them when Hepworth turned to Dita inquiringly. "Would you not very much prefer that I left you?" he asked. "I can see that you are not well, and we can discuss anything that remains to be talked over at any other time."

"No," she shook her head, "I am quite well. I have not even the headache I claimed, and I must, indeed I must, talk to you to-night."

"But if our conversation this morning so upset and unnerved you," he urged, "would it not be wise to defer this?"

"Our conversation didn't," she replied with emphasis. "It was another conversation. Cresswell, will you answer me a question or two?"

"Anything you wish to know," he replied.

She got up, and, after a fashion she sometimes showed, perhaps unconsciously copied from him, began to walk restlessly up and down, occasionally stopping to pick up and examine some ornament quite as if she had never happened to notice it before.

She had picked up a small jade vase from the mantelpiece and was now bestowing upon it what appeared to be an exhaustive observation. In reality she was hardly conscious that she held it in her hand.

"Cresswell, why did you marry me?"

He started ever so slightly and then answered unhesitatingly, "Because I loved you, Dita."

A little spasm of some emotion he could not fathom pa.s.sed over her face.

"It was not because you wished to see how the flower blooming in a tin can in a tenement window would bloom in a wonderful lacquered vase in a marble court? It was not from curiosity or pity, Cresswell?"

"It was love, Dita."

Again that wave of emotion over her face, and then she looked about her with sad, tear-wet eyes and a trembling mouth.

"And my caprices, my stupidity, my inadequacy, soon destroyed that?"

"Never," he repeated. "Believe that. I was no gardener trying experiments. It was the flower I loved, Dita; the flower whose happiness I longed for, whose happiness I still long for. You do not need my love, do not care for it, why should you? But give me the happiness of still being able to a.s.sure for you the marble courts and the lacquered vases."

The little jade vase dropped from her fingers and fell unheeded to the rug at her feet. The tears were pouring now, down her white face. She made no effort either to conceal or to staunch them.

"Ah, blind and wasteful creature that I am!" she cried. "Why, why should you have chosen to love me?"

She stepped toward him and with both hands unwound the slender old-fashioned gold chain from her throat. She lifted her face, quivering, broken with feeling, and still streaming with tears, to his.

She held out the amulet toward him. "Cresswell," poignantly, "will you take this now, my old talisman, with my heart's love?"

He made one quick movement as if to take her in his arms and hold her close, close to his heart for ever. His face was irradiated, his cold eyes glowed with a warmth and fire that more mercurial and mutable natures can never know.

Then the light went out of his eyes and face. It did not fade, it was as if it were extinguished by some strong effort of will. His arms fell to his sides.

"My dear, my dear," his voice trembled, "how like your sweet, generous, prodigal nature! I see it all now, the reason for your pallor and heavy eyes. You have spent the day, since I left you this morning, in accusing and denouncing yourself until you have reached the frame of mind where you can only appease your offended and tyrannical conscience by some act of high sacrifice. And do you think I would accept it, poor, heroic, overwrought Dita? All day," that swift, flashing, heart-breaking smile of his gleamed a moment, "you have been convicting yourself of ingrat.i.tude, merely because I was offering you some of my money with the entirely selfish motive of securing my own happiness."

"You are wrong, wrong," she cried vehemently, pa.s.sionately. "What can I do to convince you? Oh, of course, you think that I am a creature of moods; you have every reason to think so; but what can I do, what can I say to convince you that I am not speaking from one of them now?"

"Say nothing, dearest," he murmured deeply, soothingly; "say no more. I shall always remember the sweetness of this moment."

"But I will not have it so," she cried. "You must, you must listen to me. You think that I love Eugene, that I have always loved Eugene. And I did not know, I did not know what love was. Eugene is charming and famous, and there was a sympathy between us, on one side of our natures.

We have the same love of color. It is a pa.s.sion with us. It spells music and poetry and all sorts of untranslatable things. It is something instinctive with us, something we were born with and we see shades and harmonies and values that other people do not. But this absolute understanding between us was only on one side of our natures, and yet sometimes it was so--so encompa.s.sing that I thought it embraced them all. So I did not know my own mind. I was puzzled, confused, always in doubt. And then, when I began really to--to flirt with Eugene, or so people construed it, it was when I was beginning to be bored with my marble court and my lacquered vase. I got so bored with being amused, just amused all the time."

"Ah, that was where I made my great, my unforgivable mistake," he interrupted.

"Yes, you made a mistake, in not letting me know you as you really are,"

she conceded, "but then, with all the boredom, I had that sense of futility, of failure behind me. Failure behind and nothing to look forward to but an endless succession of marble courts. No beautiful, dazzling unexpected. Just the same thing over and over and over. And then you went away and for a time I was frightened and forlorn, so Maud and I started our venture. Ah!" she clasped her hands together, the amulet dangling on its chain, "I have told you what work and success meant to me. You understand that; but gradually, as I got used to it, I began to see that it wasn't enough. No," she shook her head sadly, "it wasn't enough--there must be love. But I had got the idea into my head that it was Eugene who would speak the magic word, that magic word that I believed in and waited for. Yet all, all the time, from the moment you left me, you were in my thoughts. You see," with a faint smile, "I understood Eugene, but you were the unsolvable problem. I was always thinking about you, trying to understand you, and last night," her face glowed with a lovely light, "when you talked to me of the big, wonderful things, when you made me feel that I was an intelligent human being and not merely a pretty woman, why, my whole heart went out to you and I knew it was you, you alone that I loved. It is not the man who can conquer a city, many cities, with his grace and charm and genius. Not he who can win my poor heart, but the man who can conquer his own spirit.

Ah, Cresswell," she held out the amulet again to him, "will you not take this now?" "Perdita!" he cried deeply and held her close.

THE END