The Beauty Part 6

"But you were born to it," interposed her husband quickly, "no one more so."

"Perhaps," she sighed a little, her eyes and voice grew softer, "but at a time when the outward manifestation had vanished."

The glow had lingered, even become intensified in Gresham's face. "By Jove!" he cried again, "you were trying to be sarcastic and all that, Dita, but it was a great idea of yours just the same. I will paint your portrait and it shall be hung side by side with my working girl. They shall be companions of contrast. You see," explaining his idea to Hepworth, "I am going to paint my working girl in the city streets just at twilight on a winter evening, hastening home after the day's long toil. The lights and colors of the shop windows dance and glitter about her, blurred by the falling snow. Everything, lights, buildings, pa.s.sers-by, are all in that blurred, indistinct atmosphere, and she, herself, is a part of the blur, looking through it, with her young, worn face and wistful eyes, craving the beauty and the joy of life."

"No, no!" cried Dita suddenly. Rising, she moved rapidly up and down the room, her head bent, her finger at her lip. "No!" she cried again, her voice deeply vibrating. "I reckon you've just missed it, Eugene, it's too--too conventional. I can imagine something truer than that. My working girl, if I were painting her, should not be born to toil, not always have regarded it as the great fact of existence, an inevitable portion of her days and years from which she has never dreamed of escape. No, I would picture her delicate, highly nurtured, with traditions of race and breeding behind her; but poor, oh, very poor. And she shouldn't look out on life with resigned, wistful eyes, but with pa.s.sionate, demanding ones, rebelling that her youth, her wonderful, beautiful, dreaming youth was pa.s.sing in a tomb of tradition, a green and flowery tomb perhaps, maybe an old southern garden, but nevertheless a place of dead lives, dead memories, dead customs. And she, this girl, hates it, the dust and must of it. She hears always in her ears the surges of that mighty ocean of life. And she can't resist it. She can't.

Then because her heart is set on it, she comes to a great city like this, comes with all her high hopes and her untarnished confidence in herself; and all this magnificent swirling tide of life, with its mingled and mingling streams, seems to bear her onward to the highest crest of the highest wave. Then she begins to hear, at first faintly and then ever louder and more menacing, the voice of New York, with its ceaseless reiteration of one theme, 'pay, pay, pay.' She turns desperately to her little accomplishments, those little, untrained, unskilful things that she can do, straws on that ocean; and expects them to save her.

"Ah!" she drew her hand across her brow, her face contracting a moment.

"Then comes the grind between the millstones, the continual disappointments, the terror by day and night, the rent, that rolls like a s...o...b..ll, the dreary evenings which she must spend alone in the dreary little room, while all the time she hears the mocking invitation of the great, glittering city to partake of her many feasts.

"And she," again Dita sighed deeply, "she begins to believe herself doomed to dash her youth and beauty against the walls of a tomb. And she has to learn so many things, among them the hideous accomplishment of making both ends meet. What does she know of the use and value of money?

Oh, of course all kinds of cheap, left-handed pleasures are offered her, because people consider her pretty, but it is an impossibility for her to accept them. She has been born in the traditions of real lace and real jewels. And the panic-fear! Ah!--" she broke off abruptly.

"Dear me, Dita. You should have been an orator." For the past five minutes Eugene had been scarcely able to conceal his irritation, frowning, biting his lips, twisting in his chair and casting furtive glances at Hepworth. "I remember you used to be given to those bursts of eloquence now and then."

"And what finally becomes of her?" asked Hepworth of his wife, ignoring Eugene's interruption. His voice was low, expressing nothing more than a polite interest.

"I don't know," said Dita wearily. "A number of things. She may comfortably die, or marry, poor thing, any one who will have her."

"Very dramatic," said Gresham dryly. "You always did have histrionic talent, Dita. I've often wondered that you did not attempt the stage."

Perdita opened and closed her eyes once or twice as if she had just returned from a far country.

"I certainly wasn't much of a success at painting lamp-shades and menus, was I, Eugene, in spite of your early training?"

He shrugged his shoulders without answering, made a slight, disclaiming gesture with one hand and rose to his feet. "What!" listening intently as a clock chimed somewhere. "I had no idea it was so late." His face cleared. He was evidently relieved at his chance of escape. He shook hands with Hepworth and then turned to Dita. "Remember that the first sitting will be at twelve o'clock Wednesday morning, and please don't keep me waiting. That is a fact that I have to impress on these charming women," he turned laughingly to Hepworth, "that I am neither their manicure nor hair-dresser. I am accustomed to keep them waiting if I choose."

"I'll be ready," she said indifferently, but Eugene noticed with apprehension, even alarm, that those deep vibrations which spoke of barely controlled emotion were still existent in her tones. "I'll be ready, velvet, diamonds, hurrah of jewels, if you wish, sables and all."

Again a gust of wind swept through the room and Hepworth went over to close a window.

Eugene took quick advantage of the occasion. "For Heaven's sake," he whispered, "pull yourself together."

His words were too late. Too late by half an hour. The sirocco had done its work.

CHAPTER VII

THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

With the departure of a third person the situation immediately changed complexion. It became more intimate and therefore more embarra.s.sing.

With Eugene had departed the audience and the stimulus of playing to it.

The star and the stage manager were left alone. Untrammeled emotional expression no longer seemed an heroic necessity. Under the calm, unreadable, steady regard of her husband's eyes it held its elements of ba.n.a.lity and of sensationalism, of pseudo-emotion. Dita became sullen.

"I think I shall go to bed," she said abruptly and for the second time and then turned to the door.

"Wait a moment." His voice was courteous, pleasant, but it would have been a dull ear which could not have discerned the tone of command beneath its even modulations.

It was new to Dita and arresting, and she paused, wavered a moment and came back to the chair she had left and folding her arms upon its high cushioned back, stood with still, sullen mouth and downcast eyes, exhaling reluctance. She was feeling the reaction from her late mood of exaltation, of dramatic visioning of poignant past experiences.

He waited a second or so, and then said, "Your working girl was a far more dramatic conception than Gresham's. It might not lend itself so much to pictorial representation. It might be more literary." He appeared to give this question some consideration. "However," he dismissed it with a wave of the hand, "that is neither here nor there.

What counts is this, were you the girl whose life you described so feelingly and dramatically?"

There was silence between them for a moment. Dita's first impulse was to maintain it indefinitely; ignore this question with barely suggested contempt; with a faint gesture of dissent, signify that she considered it a crudity, almost a vulgarity, and lightly, languidly, indifferently dismiss the whole subject and leave the room. She knew how, intuitively. Behind her were generations who understood how to flick an unpleasant situation from the tips of their fingers, who would ignore and dismiss with amused disdain an invitation to exculpate themselves or explain, when to explain meant practically to retract. But false as she felt, with waves of shame, she had been to her traditions and upbringing in revealing her emotion, she was no coward. She lifted her head and met his eyes. Gray eyes faced gray eyes--but with a difference. Hers were the pa.s.sionate, emotional Irish gray--with black beneath them, and the long curling black lashes, but his were like mountain lakes, reflecting a gray and steely sky. Hers revealed all the secrets she might wish to hide; his concealed all his secrets admirably--discreet windows, revealing nothing but what their owner desired they should reveal.

"Yes," she said with defiant brevity.

He appeared again to give this reply due consideration. He had risen now and was walking up and down the floor. "What an impression it must have made on you!" he said at last, very gently.

She plaited the lace of her sleeve. "You knew about me before we were married," she said. "Why--?"

"Quite true, but sometimes something is said, it may be only a word, and one's eyes become, as it were, unsealed. One sees a perfectly familiar object or situation in an entirely new light. Your att.i.tude now," he turned to her rather sharply, "is that I am about to blame you, to take you to task. Far from it. Why should I blame you for what has been beyond your power? Your words to-night have made me realize that it has been quite impossible for you to care for me, and that I have not been able to make you happy. Ah," lifting his hand as she was about to speak, "do not disclaim it. I know. You see, that very fact sends the whole house of cards tumbling. The bitterness with which you have spoken to-night would not have been in your mind, rankling, rankling all this time, if you had been a happy woman. It was bound to burst into flame sooner or later."

"Oh!" she broke out. "You have always won. You do not know what it is like to lose; but I--I missed every mark I aimed at. I came up from the South, so dead sure that I was a very gifted and accomplished person, and that all I had to do was to hold out my ap.r.o.n and all the beautiful and delightful things would tumble into it. But this great city surely taught me a lesson, and she's no very gentle teacher, either. And I used to sit up there in that tiresome little apartment among those candle-shades and cotillion favors and think how--how pretty I was," she flushed under his smile, "and rage, and get sick with disgust when I thought how I would look after about twenty years of that kind of life.

I knew exactly how I'd look. I'd be one of those peaked, wistful-eyed old maids, with rusty black clothes turning green and brown, and a general air of apology for living. I could just see myself ironing out the ribbons of my winter bonnet with which to trim my summer hat, and then laundering my handkerchiefs and pasting them on the window-panes to dry. And life, life was like a great, wonderful river, flowing by and leaving me stranded on the sh.o.r.e. And then you came."

Hepworth laughed. "I don't wonder that you took the alternative. I'm conceited enough to think it better than those ugly pictures your young eyes were gazing at."

"Yes, they were ugly," she agreed. "Life just seemed like a dark, dreary, cobwebby pa.s.sageway, but I always felt as if I might come to a door any minute and step through it into a beautiful garden. You seemed the door." She spoke the last words a little shyly.

He glanced at her again, inscrutable, unfathomable things in that gaze.

"Ah, youth, youth and the waste of it!" There were tones in his voice that brought the tears to her eyes, but he did not see them. He was musing on the accident of her life, this flower of the dust, which he had taken from the dingy environment she loathed. He had lavished all the beauty and experience within his power upon her, and taken away perhaps the one thing that had redeemed her life. He had seen only the limitations and the makeshifts and how they had oppressed her dainty and fastidious spirit; but it had never struck him before that in lifting her away from them, above them, he had taken from her the one thing that might have glorified her life, that the sordidness and the scrimpiness were for her for ever haunted by the unexpected. That because she was young and beautiful and free, the dreariness must have been irradiated always by the rainbow tints of romance; and he had given her all the beauty and glitter his money could buy in exchange for the joy of a dream, and fancied that he had actually done something for her.

"Dita, forgive me," he murmured, a curiously bitter smile about his mouth.

"Forgive you!" she looked at him a little cautiously. She didn't understand the workings of his mind. He never gave her a hint either in eyes or expression that would seem as a clue for her to follow.

"Yes. You should." Again he smiled at her. "You didn't get a fair exchange. I see that very plainly now."

"You must not speak like that," she said quickly. "Believe me, it was a great deal more than a fair exchange and I have always regarded it so.

Why do you think I have not been happy?"

"Because you have never really loved me."

"But I--I have always liked you," she cried quickly. "But," forlornly, "you knew the truth at the time. Even if I had not, I should have had to marry you anyway. I was so deep in debt I couldn't help it. I could not manage any more than I can speak Sanscrit. So you see that there is nothing to forgive. Believe me, I am always grateful, for before I married you, I thought and thought, but I could see no other way."

He laughed again. He couldn't help it. He had a sense of humor and he seemed to see, in a flashlight of vision, shocked Romance gather up her skirts and shake the dust of Dita's threshold from her winged shoes.

"You are so really fearless and honest, Dita, that I venture to ask the question." He put it with a rather diffident gentleness. "You have found it quite impossible to care for me?"

"Oh, no," impulsively. "I have always liked you. I am really very fond of you. But I am always tongue-tied before you. I never can think of anything to say to you and I always say foolish things." She regarded him with a wistful timidity.

He laughed ruefully. It was sorry mirth. "That is a proof of my stupidity, my child, not yours."

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Up and down the room he walked twice, three times, engrossed. Then having arrived at a decision, he put it into words. "Dita," he stopped before her and looked at her earnestly, "perhaps I am utterly rash and foolish, but will you answer me one question? But first get all melodramatic ideas of the state of my feelings out of your head." His smile was faintly cynical, obscurely so. "And believe me, that what really concerns me is your happiness. Are you in love with Eugene Gresham?"