The Beauty Part 8

They were almost alone, nearly every one had left the room. A long trail of wistaria blew before her eyes. The light glowed through the silken, yellow shades. The South! She smelled roses and jasmine. It seemed to her for one bewildering moment as if her heart had indeed blossomed in purple and red. She smiled lingeringly, sweetly into his eyes.

"The portrait's only postponed, Eugene, look at it in that way." The words recalled her to herself with a start. This was paper wistaria and electric light. She was no longer a girl in a flower-scented, green old garden about to pose for a boyish and impatient artist. Here she was, in spite of all her vows to the contrary, yielding to Eugene's spell without a struggle. She was quite sure of his charm and magnetism, but what she doubted now was her own heart.

"'Ah, the little more and how much it is. And the little less, and what worlds away,'" she murmured beneath her breath, wondering unhappily if she were born to doubt everything.

"But I can't and I won't submit to a postponement." He was now both impatient and impa.s.sioned.

"It is not final," she explained. "Do take it as a postponement, nothing more. He has his reasons--oh, they are not what you suspect. He is not jealous. He is too big for that. It is something I can not go into now."

Her sentences were disjointed. She seemed almost incoherent to him. "Let it be so for the present. I implore, no, I insist, that there be no explanations. But I must go, it is getting late," she started as if to rise; then sank back in her chair and held out her hand. "Oh, the amulet, Eugene."

"I haven't got it," he threw out both empty hands and looked up at her from under his brows with the expression of a naughty child. "Now listen, Dita, before you get angry, although you're so wonderful when you're angry that any one might be forgiven for tempting you into that state; but after you called me up, the Nasmyths, those English people you know, mother and daughter, were at the studio, and I was so intent on getting them away in time to meet you, the mother is the most interminable talker, that I finally bundled them out of the door and came with them, with never a thought of the amulet."

"'Gene, how like you!" Her face was full of dismay. "Cresswell especially asked me to get it to-day, and I don't think he believed for one moment that clumsy fib I told about having it mended."

"I'll go at once and get it, and bring it to the house," he said contritely. "You can make any explanation--"

"No, no more explanations," she said decisively. "They are perfect spider-webs, the most involving things any poor fly can tangle himself up in. They are, to mix metaphors, the quicksands of any situation.

They make of the simplest matter a problem of complexities."

"What does that go for?" Gresham tilted his head on one side and studied her. "Does it mean that you and Hepworth quarreled about me, last night?"

She looked back at him in inscrutable pondering, as if considering the point, wondering, in fact, whether she and her husband really had quarreled about him.

"No explanations, Eugene, that's fixed."

"As you will," in careless a.s.sent. "But, Dita," again that ardent note of tenderness, warming his voice, and stirring her heart with all those intimations of romance which she had never known. "We might as well accept the inevitable, accept it with joy, face the light quite fearlessly. We might as well see clearly at last, what for years we should have known and believed and welcomed with all our hearts--that we belong to each other."

Her quickly lowered eyelids veiled the sudden glow of her eyes.

"Perhaps," she whispered, "only I want time to think it out, to be sure of myself. I--I've grown cautious."

He looked at her with the smile that could say so many things and to her said but one. "Take time then, Dita, but permit me to pray that it will not be long. And I--I shall await with what patience I may that dazzling morning when you will open your beautiful, dreaming eyes, and know at once and for ever that you are at last awake. When you will say, 'This is my day of love, this is my hour and Eugene's! The world may go.' Take your days or months, Dita. I give them to you, for I know that every hour that pa.s.ses will bring you nearer to me."

Famous artist, famous lover! Men saw his irregular, swarthy face, his lifted shoulder, his limp, and wondered. But women saw the experiences and aspirations and dreams that that face held, they saw the smiles which said so many things exquisitely, they felt the subtle, intuitive comprehension of every word, an understanding which held no condemnation, but was as warming and stimulating as sunshine. His love-making was as delightful and perfect as his art.

But again she threw off the sweet, poignantly sweet influence and strove to think clearly.

"You had your chance, Eugene, before I was married. I would have listened to you then, the night before you sailed for Europe, but you didn't believe in me, you showed it plainly." Angry tears glittered in her eyes at the remembrance.

"Ah, how could I?" His smile was at once cynical and tender. "I knew your temperament, that craving, artistic temperament. It is much like my own. We spring from the same stock, remember. You had all the inherited love of luxury and beauty as I told you then and you were starved, starved, Dita, and in a state of revolt. Your imagination was aflame with what Hepworth offered. And I--" he threw out his hands with a disclaiming gesture, "Where was I? My feet on shifting sands, I hadn't touched bedrock then. Ah, well, what's the use? The past is past. It's the future we face. My heaven, Perdita, what a future!"

His eyes held her, drew her. Involuntarily, she swayed toward him. Then, impatiently, as if resenting her own att.i.tude, she rose to her feet.

Dita drove home, with the faint smile still lingering about her lips, still dreaming in her eyes. She drove through the park, green still in spite of frost. A mist palely irradiated by the sunshine it obscured enveloped the landscape in a sort of opaline enchantment and unsubstantiality.

It was with a sigh of regret that she entered her own house. She felt as if she had wilfully shut the door on the wooing and pensive autumn without and gone into the bleak and wintry atmosphere of regret and puzzle and doubt.

But as she moved listlessly across the hall a servant handed her a note from her husband.

She tore it open and read it. Then she read it again. It seemed to her that the rustle of the paper was like the crackle of thorns, and the fool's laughter a.s.sociated with it. She had meant to manage this situation in her own way, to keep her hand well on the lever, and behold it was all arranged for her.

Very briefly the letter informed her that Hepworth's western interests would require his personal supervision for several months. That he hoped she would endeavor to make herself as comfortable and happy as possible and arrange her time in any way that best suited her. That was all. But as she walked to her own apartments it seemed to her that the air echoed and rang with the arid and mirthless laughter of fools.

CHAPTER IX

A TELEPHONE CALL

Maud Carmine was slowly pulling off her gloves before the fire in the old-fashioned drawing-room of the old-fashioned down-town house where she and her mother lived alone. It was not five o'clock, but the evenings were so short now that she hesitated whether or not to turn on the lights, but the firelight was brilliant and so much more attractive than electricity, no matter how softly shaded that might be.

Yes, the firelight was so bright that in its radiance she could see her figure reflected in the long mirror between the windows with its ornate and early Victorian frame. She walked forward and standing before it gazed at herself with a little smile. She was not a pretty woman, but she was certainly a striking and attractive one and quite beautifully gowned. That was the most noticeable thing about her, the _dernier cri_ worn with style and distinction. Her heart went out in grat.i.tude to Perdita.

While she stood there still surveying herself Wallace Martin was announced.

"And no tea here for you," said Maud. "I've been out all afternoon.

Mother is gadding somewhere at this unconscionable hour, so I suppose they thought I didn't want any. I'll send for some and it will be here in a jiffy."

"I do want some, and some solid substantial bread and b.u.t.ter," confessed Martin. "I'm hungry. I'm dining out to-night, but the dinner is set for some unholy late hour, and I've been at a rehearsal all afternoon."

"A rehearsal of your own play?"

He nodded. "My very own," he said. "One of the million or two I've written has actually been accepted."

"Oh, Wallace!" She held out her hands, her interest and pleasure showing plainly in her voice. "I am more than delighted. It seems too good to be true."

"Don't be too enthusiastic yet," he strove to speak dryly. "It may be accepted by the managers, it is still a question whether it will be accepted by the public. It's run one gantlet, but whether it will run two remains to be seen."

"Oh, Wallace," she cried again. "How can you be so pessimistic and calm and calculating and all that? Why, I should be off my head with joy."

"I am," he said tersely. "Maud, don't tell any one, but I feel like a Wright aeroplane."

"I won't breathe it," she promised gaily, "but please don't add to the fame I'm sure you're going to get from that play, by flying over the housetops to rehearsals. Oh, here is tea, m.u.f.fins, bread and b.u.t.ter, cake. Anything else you'll have?"

He sank back contentedly. "Nothing but to insist that you tell that 1820 butler of yours that you're not at home to any one else. It's too deliciously cosy to be spoiled by women simpering and rustling and men lounging and clattering in. Just the firelight--it's a little early for fire, but this evening is quite chilly--and the tea-kettle singing in that nice homey way, and even a big Persian cat on the hearthrug. It's 'ome and 'eaven. And what a contrast to last night! Better a dinner of herbs like this, where love is, than the stalled ox of yestere'en."

A faint blush seemed to tinge Maud's cheek, but it may have been, after all, but the flickering firelight.

"Last night wasn't awfully pleasant, was it?" she said with a little sigh.

"Pleasant! It was deadly. Poor Maud!" helping himself to more bread and b.u.t.ter. "How hard you worked!"

"How silly you are!" she cried indignantly. "Perfectly absurd the way you all acted. Horrid-minded creatures, bored and trying to make a situation out of nothing. Eugene Gresham and Dita have known each other for years. There is even some kind of a southern relationship between them, quite near, I believe."

"La, la!" said Wallace, again helping himself generously this time to cake, "your loyalty is beautiful, but don't let it drive you to take a stand you may have to abandon."

"Wallace!" she turned from him indignantly and the firelight showed that her eyes were full of tears.