The Beauty Part 22

"I--I--suppose so." Dita had rarely been so taken aback. She looked at him a moment like some insulted queen. His eyes, however, were discreetly downcast. "Oh, of course," she said as quickly as she could recover her breath, "of course," her laugh was forced and rang hollowly.

"Oh, yes, don't let your beauty get on your nerves. The world is full of beautiful women. My new amulet--I told you that I had a new one, did I not?--was given me by one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. I have her picture somewhere. I must show it to you."

Mr. Cresswell Hepworth was entirely without design in his choice of topics. He had spoken of some of his great western enterprises because his mind had been more or less occupied with them during the day, and had been so surprised and pleased that these subjects had gained his wife's interests that he had continued the discussion of them. Again, in his seeming disparagement of her beauty, he had merely thought to console her for what she regarded as the constant belittling of her mental endowment, evidently a sore spot in her consciousness.

Dita played with her fork a moment without answering his last remark.

She had no right to feel either resentment or irritation. Her sense of justice a.s.sured her of that, but she suffered a twinge of both emotions, nevertheless.

"Wallace Martin tells me that good old Hewston made an awful scene when those distorted pictures of Fuschia Fleming and myself appeared in the paper." Hepworth laughed more heartily than usual.

"Oh, do not mention that unspeakable old creature!" she cried petulantly. "Tell me of more interesting things."

"Dita," he spoke to her more earnestly, more self-revealingly she felt than he had ever done before, "I am going to tell you something. When I went west last winter, it was not alone because I was called thither by various business affairs, but because, after thinking the matter all over, I definitely decided that the only thing for me to do was to relieve you of my presence. I was convinced that, although you might not be fully conscious of it, still in the depths of your heart you really loved Gresham. I was also convinced that I loved you infinitely, and that it was quite beyond my power to interest you. But since my return I find myself at sea. The moment I saw you I saw the difference in you, the change that made me revise my former crude, stupid estimates of you.

I realize that you are the sort of woman who must have an object, a purpose in life, an expression; in fact, that you set little store by the beauty others praise extravagantly, because it has always been yours. You value it no more than one values the sun and wind. It is achievement that fascinates you, isn't it?"

"Ah, yes, but I had failed, you know, and I was afraid to try again. I knew that you were doing big things, but you never would talk of them to me, and I thought that you considered me too stupid to understand them."

"Dita, how blindly we have misunderstood each other. Is it too late?" He whispered the words as he put her wrap about her shoulders, his voice ardent, impa.s.sioned as she had never heard it.

She cast one astonished, almost frightened glance upon him. Then, as in a daze, a dream, walked down the room, never seeing the admiring eyes that everywhere met her. She might have been in the desert, as far as they were concerned.

As the door of the motor closed on them a panic of shyness seized her.

"You, you spoke of your new amulet," she said, s.n.a.t.c.hing at a topic.

"Have you it with you?"

"Yes. But I do not know whether you can get a very good idea of it in these s.h.i.+fting lights."

He took the case from his pocket and, lifting out the ornament, gave it into her hands. It was fas.h.i.+oned of half a dozen uncut diamonds in a setting of the most delicate and exquisite filigree.

"Old Spanish, you see," he said.

"Beautiful!" she exclaimed, turning it over and looking at it more closely. But the attention she was bestowing upon it was a mere seeming.

She was thinking, or rather attempting to think, but her heart was fluttering wildly, her whole impulsive nature seemed to impel her to the action she was meditating.

"Cresswell," she lifted a face white as a snowdrop to his, "will you make an exchange with me? Will you give me this amulet and take mine?"

"Perdita!" he cried, "you do not--" his voice broke.

"Yes, I do," she exclaimed, "it is not a wild whim, a caprice on my part. I have been thinking about it all day, ever since this morning."

"This morning!" sharply; looking at her keenly, quickly. "Ah," with a long breath, "it was this morning that Hewston drove poor Isabel to your house to prevent the duel between Gresham and myself." He laughed, but it was dreary mirth. "Hewston is a most imaginative fellow. I have a railway deal on which I spoke of to him as a duel. And so, you were going to sacrifice yourself in order to make quite sure that I would spare Eugene. Oh, rest content, Perdita. He is quite safe from my poignard or pistol. Never fear."

It seemed to her that the satire in his voice bit into her soul. With a great gasp of relief she realized that the car had stopped before her door. "Oh, take your amulet," she cried, "since you will not have mine."

She almost threw it at him.

He thought that she was angry and sullen as she walked up the steps and into the house without a word to him, and with the barest inclination of the head. In reality, she was striving hard to control her sobs.

CHAPTER XXIII

ITS ANCIENT CHARM

The hour which Dita had set for her appointment with Cresswell Hepworth was twelve the next morning, consequently she was not only surprised but perturbed when Eugene's name was brought to her a little after eleven.

He looked haggard, she thought, as if he had not slept, but his eyes were brighter than usual.

"Good morning, Queen of the May," he cried, coming forward to take both her hands in his as she came through the doorway. "Did you know, by the way, that this is May day? Ah," his eyes fastening themselves on the crystal amulet gleaming against her white gown, "you have it still. That was what disturbed me and drove slumber from my eyelids during the long night. He is a strong man, a very able and masterful man and he wants that amulet and you, Dita, and I feared--oh, you know how things appear in the dead of night, what monstrous and fantastic ideas come to one."

"You might have saved your fears and your fancies," she answered with a delicately ironical smile. "He does not want me. He would, I think, like the amulet. Nevertheless, he declined it."

"Then you offered it to him? Really!"

"Yes," the irony still in her voice. "You were a better prophet than you dreamed, Eugene, you predicted exactly what happened. I offered it to him and he declined." Her voice faltered.

"Naturally," laughing, "what else could he do under the circ.u.mstances?

Even he, with all a collector's greed, would hardly care for a gift which is supposed to be invariably accompanied by the heart's love of the donor. He knew, poor wretch, that all he was getting was the bit of gla.s.s, while the heart's love was mine, for ever and ever mine."

His voice sank to those musical cadences which ever prove so enthralling to the ear. And Dita, who loved music and beauty and romance, smiled dreamily. But doubt, like a shadow, lay in her eyes and about her mouth.

"No," she cried, "oh, I do not know, Eugene. When I am with you, you throw a glamour over me. I believe that I am just on the eve of loving you--that any minute you will say the word which will make me fully realize that I do, but as soon as you leave me, Eugene, the moment pa.s.ses."

"It is because you are perplexed, worried about this other matter, that is all, dearest. When that is settled and you are free, then I will sweep away at once and for ever all these doubts in your mind, sweep them away as if they were cobwebs."

"Will you? Perhaps," but she shook her head as if only half convinced.

"Hus.h.!.+ What is that! I think it was the bell of the outer door. You must go at once, Eugene. Cresswell was to be here at twelve o'clock. It must be quite that now."

"And I have no desire to meet him." He picked up his hat. "I will step through the little back room into the hall, and thence out. I dare say you and he have some final arrangements to make. Is that it, eh?"

She nodded, but without looking at him. Her face had grown very pale and the hand which she placed on the tall back of a chair to steady herself trembled a little.

Her ears had not deceived her, it was Hepworth's ring--and the echo of Eugene's retreating footsteps had barely died away before a maid drew a curtain and Hepworth crossed the threshold.

If he upon his arrival had at once noticed a subtle but marked change in Perdita, she now was struck by an equally vital and informing alteration in him. He had always seemed to her before as one who leaned back in an automobile and merely dictated the directions the chauffeur was to take, but now he was the man who was driving his car himself, at unlawful speed, and keeping quite cool and collected during the performance.

He took the chair opposite the one in which she had seated herself, and she noticed a flicker of a smile across his face as his eye caught the amulet hung about her neck, a tender, humorous, sad little smile.

"Yes, I am still wearing it," she said, as if in answer to some question of his, "and I have had the box containing the others brought down here.

It is there on that table in the corner." She spoke with a bravado which only half concealed her embarra.s.sment.

He glanced toward it indifferently. "Then we will fasten my new one in the s.p.a.ce left vacant by yours," his swift, delightful smile came and went, transforming his face for the moment like a gleam of sunlight, but although brilliant, it was sad, sad as all regret, and Dita, seeing it, felt some wild, momentary impulse to beseech forgiveness, she could not tell exactly for what.

The amulet, her old bit of crystal, was swinging at the end of a long chain, and, a little embarra.s.sed, she lifted it in her hand and gazed at it mechanically, turning it this way and that to catch the different reflections of light.

"Did you know that we are lawbreakers, you and I, Dita?" asked Hepworth with another smile, "meeting to discuss the details of a properly arranged divorce? Well, my dear, it will not rest particularly heavy on my conscience if it makes things easier for you in the least degree.

Your lawyers will instruct you just what to do, but there is one matter which I wish to discuss with you personally, and that is some settlements.