The Beauty Part 9

"I mean it just the same." He placed his tea-cup on the table and bent toward her. "Look here, Maud, your friend, Mrs. Hepworth, is a very pretty woman, but she isn't a very bright one."

"That is just where you are mistaken," she returned. "She is extremely clever but you don't seem to understand how much training and environment have to do with those things. Take a woman as pretty as Dita, a woman who has been beautiful and admired from her babyhood--she has always been the center of attraction, she has never had to observe people closely, to study their moods and characteristics, never has had to try to please." There was a depth of mournful experience in Maud's tone. "Therefore she seems to carry things with a high hand, seems to lack subtlety and finesse and deference to the opinions of others.

Therefore, you, seeing this, immediately put it down to lack of brains.

It is a stupidity unworthy of you, at least it is a snap-shot judgment, a lack of that careful, sympathetic study and a.n.a.lysis of character which I should fancy would be necessary to you as a playwright."

He sat for a moment or two, with hands loosely clasped between his knees, gazing into the bed of glowing coals. This att.i.tude and silence on his part continued for some minutes. "There!" he turned around so suddenly that she jumped, "I've given due and careful consideration to all you have to say and I will repeat my original statement. Mrs.

Hepworth is a very pretty woman, but she isn't a very bright one, not bright enough to be ordinarily discreet."

Her shoulders twitched petulantly. "Wallace! The blot on your character is that you are a bit of a gossip, yes you are, and you mingle with a lot of idle people who have nothing better to do than to spend time that might be put to valuable uses in making mountains out of mole hills.

Truly, it's an idiotic mental employment that is not worthy of you."

"Maud, you rouse me to argument; you do, really. I am not talking about Mrs. Hepworth's very manifestly displayed interest in Gresham last night. That might be attributed to half a dozen different causes. She might have had a row with her husband or dressmaker, or have been so bored by the happy family group gathered about her that she was ready for anything. Any one could see that she was rather out-of-sorts, excited and reckless and all that. I am not even thinking of last night, and I will immediately withdraw any aspersions I may seem to have cast on Mrs. Hepworth's brain power, if you will tell me why she gave Eugene Gresham that old trinket, amulet, talisman or whatever it is?"

Maud began to laugh, quite naturally at first, and then she stopped suddenly. She remembered the scene of the night before, the empty s.p.a.ce in the tray. She remembered Cresswell Hepworth's surprise, and Dita's sullenness.

"But you heard Dita last night say that it was broken and that it was being mended," she protested, but some way her protestations sounded flat and unconvincing in her own ears.

"Yes, and you remember that she glanced quickly at Eugene Gresham before she answered. You also remember that Hepworth, in the innocence of his heart, explained that the old legend or tradition which had been connected with the charm for centuries had been that it could neither be bought nor sold, but that it could only be given away, given away with the heart's love of the possessor, and in that case it would prove a blessing to both him who gave and him who took."

Martin stooped and lifted the Persian cat upon his knees. "Well, my dear Maud, the end of that story is that Gresham has the amulet."

"If that is true," she flashed back, "he took it to be mended for her."

"The circ.u.mstances do not seem to point that way," he said mildly.

"Really, Maud, it's the deuce of a mix-up, and I'm simply trying to prepare you for the worst. You know those English people, the Nasmyths, in draggled tweeds and velveteens; the mother wears an India shawl, and the daughter a hat which looks as if it were made of carpet. Well, they were at the Hewstons' to luncheon to-day and they had just come from Eugene Gresham's studio where they had been pottering about the best part of the morning, although Alice Wilstead said their boots and their faces looked as if they had been chasing over plowed fields. Well, they were yelping about Gresham like all other women, and raving about the beautiful things he had, and Mrs. Nasmyth told how she got to poking about on a table and found your friend's amulet; and she, of course, made an awful scream about it, and Gresham, who, she navely remarked, didn't seem any too pleased at her discovery, explained that it was a good-luck charm, of very ancient workmans.h.i.+p, which had been given to him by a dear friend, and then he gently and firmly locked it up before her eyes in a little cabinet."

"Horrid creature!" murmured Maud.

"Who?" said Wallace eagerly. "You can't possibly mean Gresham, do you, Maud? What!" his tones expressed a wondering delight as she mutely but emphatically nodded her head. "To hear a woman speak thus of that hero of romance! Never has such a grateful sound saluted my ears. Never!

Maud, I am really afraid I am going to hug you."

"You are going to do nothing of the kind." She could not help laughing, although she was seriously worried.

"Well, we'll waive it for the present," he conceded, again sinking languidly back in his chair, "but that isn't the worst. I told you that it was the deuce of a mix-up, and so it is. To continue now on page eight hundred and ninety-nine, the Nasmyths babbled all this out at luncheon, and old Hewston got perfectly apoplectic. He swelled up and became purple and emitted the most dreadful snorts and whiffles, and grunts and groans, until finally just as his wife and Alice Wilstead thought he was going to fall down in a fit, he got up and puffed away from the table, and Alice and Mrs. Hewston rushed after him, leaving the poor Nasmyths to take care of themselves. And not one thing could those two women do with him. You know what an obstinate, pig-headed, meddlesome old thing he is--and his head was set on jumping into his car and off to tell Hepworth as quickly as possible and, my dear Maud, that is what he did. Alice Wilstead said that she and Mrs. Hewston hung on to his coat-tails up to the very moment he entered the car, begging, praying, beseeching, imploring. She said he dragged them all the way across the sidewalk and literally kicked himself free from them." Martin threw back his head in a great burst of laughter in which Maud very feebly joined.

"I wish I'd been there," she said regretfully. "He'd only have got in that motor over my dead body; but, Wallace, when did you hear all this?"

"I met Alice Wilstead limping up the avenue, on her way home, and she told me about it."

"I wish--" began Maud, but she was interrupted by a summons to the telephone. When she returned to the room a few moments later, her face was graver than ever.

"I'll have to leave you, Wallace," she said. "You can stay here with the cat and the fire and the tea-kettle if you want to. Perhaps mother will come in, but Dita wishes me to come to her at once."

CHAPTER X

OUT OF THE GILDED CAGE

Prompt as Maud was in responding to Dita's plea for her immediate presence, Dita was equally prompt in hurling herself upon her friend's sympathetic bosom.

Maud had been shown at once to the sitting-room of Mrs. Hepworth's personal suite of apartments, and there Dita sat in the dim and depressing gloaming of the unlighted chamber, a figure of dejection.

She had not even removed her hat, but sat brooding in the twilight until Maud's entrance roused her and she flung herself across the room and into the latter's arms with the impetuous rush of a cyclone.

Dita was temperamentally far more given to anger than to tears, but the strain of the last two days had culminated now in a burst of wild weeping, and Maud found it necessary to soothe and calm her before she could venture to inquire into the immediate cause of her friend's very poignant and unfeigned distress; so she applied herself to the task of consolation with only vague conjectures as to the cause for grief.

She was able, however, from Dita's almost incoherent statements, to patch together a fairly accurate idea of what had occurred.

"Just read this letter," Dita thrust the sheets into Maud's hand. "Oh, you can not, not in this light. Wait a moment," she touched a b.u.t.ton and the room was flooded with a rose-colored radiance. Maud stepped nearer one of the lamps and gave her most earnest attention to the words Cresswell Hepworth had written. His utterance through the medium of the pen, was brief, self-controlled, restrained and to the point. And as Maud read his well-considered words, something like a feeling of despair swept over her.

"He has gone, actually gone," cried Dita, as Maud handed the letter back to her without comment. "Gone," she repeated the words as if the fact in itself were quite unbelievable. She crushed the letter in her hand and threw it on the floor. "He will be gone months, looking after his mines and railroads and I'm to stay here. He never even said good-by to me, and this," she touched the crumpled ball of paper contemptuously with her foot, "gives me very plainly to understand that it is a virtual separation. Oh," she jerked the pins out of her hat and sent that plumey velvet head-covering spinning across the room, then turned to her calm and sympathetic friend with a real fear and a real appeal in her eyes.

"What am I going to do? For a few months it will be all right, and then people will begin to talk like everything. And you know how it will appear. Every one will say that Cresswell discovered that I was having an affair with some one, Eugene, of course, and that he, Cresswell, and I had a row and that he refused to live with me longer, but that he nevertheless was so chivalrous that he turned over this house and the country places to me. Oh, dear, why did I have to have a sirocco?"

"Heaven knows," said Maud. "Let it be a lesson to you. Never have another one. There, there, dear, I didn't mean any reproaches or I told-you-sos. So stop howling or you'll mar your beauty permanently.

Oh, now, don't lift your head and glare at me indignantly and say you hope you will, that it's never been anything but a curse to you. I've been too plain all my life to listen with patience to anything of the kind. Now, let me think." She sat with finger on lip deeply considering, while Dita still punctured the silence with loud occasional sobs.

"You will have to travel," she said decisively. "Yup will have to travel until people begin to talk and then you will have to keep on traveling until they stop talking. But oh, Dita, can't you try and patch it up?"

Her words gave fresh impetus to Perdita's gradually decreasing sobs.

"You do not know him," she wept, "and to tell the truth, neither do I; but I have enough of an understanding of him to know that he always considers a step very thoroughly before he takes it, looks well into the chasm before he leaps, and it's no use trying to get him to change his mind when he has decided what course he means to pursue. Anyway, I do not wish it. I want to be free, but not this way. Oh, was ever a woman placed in such a position as I? I believe Cresswell would forgive anything but the sin of not knowing one's own mind and I had to confess to him last night that I wasn't sure of mine or of my heart either. He has a contempt for me, of course, and," rising restlessly and moving about, "I can't and won't accept his contempt, and I can't and won't continue to live on his money and potter about his old houses. I feel as if I would rather die."

"But, dearest," cried Maud bewildered. "What else is there for you to do? What else can you do?"

"Nothing apparently," she said. Her dark gown fell about her in the long lines of perfect grace. As she stood there, beautiful as the tragic muse, her great eyes transfixed Maud with her scorn, but the scorn was not for her friend, but for herself. "What can I do? I am about the most useless creature on all this green earth. I sit and cry at a situation which tortures my pride, instead of coming to a decision. I made a beggardly pittance trying to earn my own living, and I won't go back to that kind of life, a disgusting, sordid, scrimpy life, which stifled every generous impulse or spontaneous action. I will not go back, I will not give up all the things I love and have become accustomed to. I was born to this. I love it, and will have it, but not on these terms.

"I haven't been utterly futile here, as I was in those other circ.u.mstances. I have made Cresswell Hepworth's upholstery, stiff houses, 'decorated and furnished by the most expensive and artistic firms,' look really livable and lovely. Truly, haven't I? Great artists have raved over them. Oh, I'm not afraid of velvets and tapestries and embroideries. I have no burgeois reverence for them. Color was always like clay to me. I always long to take it and mold it into new combinations. Why, I couldn't keep my hands off a rainbow if I got a chance at it, even the angels couldn't shoo me away." She was in one of her swift, mercurial changes of mood, her mouth dimpling, her eyes sparkling. "I'm not afraid of all the splendor of color or of all the gorgeously rich materials that G.o.d or man ever devised. I ache to take them and combine them and melt them together and contrast them. I'll dare any combination to get an effect I want, an effect that haunts me, and is like music in my consciousness. Isn't it strange that I can do anything I like with great heavy draperies? I wave my hand at them and they fall into just the lines I want. I can get all kinds of effects in a room, but give me a little palette with little gobs of paint on it, and little, little brushes and I can't do even a decent lamp mat. That is one reason Eugene and I have always understood each other so well.

He, too, knows the call of color. Oh, stop looking that way, as if I were going straight to s.h.i.+pwreck just because I mention Eugene. The important thing to consider now is what I am going to do."

"I've told you once," said Maud, with settled conviction; "travel."

"On Cresswell's money?" bitterly. "Well, I suppose you think it's either that or huddling into some black hole and attempting to earn my living again--a phrase that's the synonym for me of a cheap and nasty experience, but there must be some way out. No, I am utterly wasted, futile, ineffective. I do not believe, I solemnly do not believe, that I have one single, solitary gift in this world except being pretty."

"Look at me!" said Maud with a rather whimsical, cynical little smile.

"I think that I'm the living proof of one of your especial gifts. Why, Dita, my dear, I'm a creation of yours. I'm considered one of the most stunning women in town and about the best dressed and," Maud's really soft and attractive smile transfixed her face, "I've won, I am really beginning to dare to believe it, the interest and I hope the affection of the only man I ever cared for and who never gave me a glance when I was just 'that plain Maud Carmine, who is musical, you know.' Oh, I mean Wallace, of course," blus.h.i.+ng. "I haven't got over the wonder of it yet, I a.s.sure you. I'm still mentally pinching myself and saying, 'If this be I.' Think of it, Dita! I know the treasures of the socially humble, if any one does. I always had position, but that amounts to very little in these days, unless one has other things to back it up. It has been gradually losing importance, pushed to the wall by money, the ability to entertain, personal charm and good clothes, an air, a flare, a wit; until now the poor, solemn, superannuated thing, so long unduly revered, is really trotted back into the corner. Yes, I had position, but not recognition. The back seats for me, so I rubbed along on my music and conversation as best I could, poor fool! And then you came, and waved your magic wand over me, took me in hand, and the world began to appraise me at your valuation."

"That was nothing," said Dita carelessly. "I just have the knack of seeing people as they ought to be. I could do what I did for you with anybody, if they would only let me. You were nice and plastic and put yourself entirely in my hands."

"Plastic!" echoed Maud. "You mean hopeless! But turn about is fair play.

Take the advice I offer you, and travel. If you say the word we'll start for j.a.pan to-morrow. And you needn't touch a penny of your husband's money either, my child. I have enough for both of us."

"Maud, you're a darling." Dita smiled in warm appreciation. "But--"

"But, Dita," Maud's voice held both fear and appeal, "if you do stay here, you will not, you must not see Eugene Gresham."

Dita smiled at her again, inscrutably. "An idea has come to me," she said, quite irrelevantly, "a dazzling idea. I really believe that it is the solution of the whole matter."