A FAR WORLD OF DREAMING
The bride had passed through the admiring groups with a smile here, a
word there and was already half up the stairway, above the voices, the
heavy flower scents, the sentimental melodies which stole from the
musicians' bower. On, a white, mystic figure, her veil floating behind
her; on, without undue haste, but most eagerly, as if she climbed some
mount which led from the world to a desired solitude.
On the first landing she paused, leaning for a moment, Juliet-like as
from a balcony, and looked down on the moving mosaic of color beneath,
the gay, light tones of the women's gowns thrown into relief by the dark
coats of the men. The gazers paid her the tribute of involuntary "Ohs,"
and barely restrained themselves from applause as if at the appearance
of their favorite actress. As usual Perdita had made a picture of
herself, an involuntary and unpremeditated picture; but in effect beyond
the calculations of the most vigilant stage manager.
She stood with one arm lightly upraised holding her bouquet of white
jasmine above her laughing face. Behind her, a stained glass window,
before her the marble balustrade. Then the bouquet, its white ribbons
waving and circling, whirled through the air, over the sea of upturned
faces and white clutching hands and straight into Alice Wilstead's arms.
With the laughter and clamor of voices ringing in her ears, Perdita,
hidden from sight now by a turn of the staircase, followed, with
unconcealed haste, the crimson velvet pathway which led to solitude.
At the top of the stairs she hesitated briefly, glancing right and left.
She had been in the house but twice before, both times under the
chaperonage of Mrs. Hewston, and she was not sure of the exact
geographical position of her own suite of apartments.
At this moment her maid, engaged from that morning, stepped forward and
threw open a door. Perdita smiled approval. It would have been
difficult to withhold it. Olga, a paragon of maids, if references and
experience count, showed no signs of the wear and tear of previous
mistresses. She was delightful in appearance, rosy-cheeked, amiable,
immaculate, with that air of trained capability which invites
confidence.
Perdita paused before entering. "Are all my traveling things out?" she
asked.
"Yes, madame."
"Very well, I shall not need you for a few moments. Remain here and when
I want you I will ring."
"Yes, madame."
Perdita drew a breath of relief as the door was closed gently behind
her. At last she was alone, away from eyes, eyes that were everywhere.
She had felt all morning as if she were encompassed by them, appraising
eyes, envious eyes, unfamiliar, inquisitive eyes.
She looked slowly about her. And these were her own apartments, these
beautiful, cold, unlived-in rooms, as empty of life or individuality as
a shell.
Yesterday she had walked through them with Isabel Hewston, pleased,
admiring, but a little overawed. She had not realized before what a
wizard's wand Cresswell wielded. He had but waved it and great
architects and decorators, their disciplined and cultivated imaginations
stimulated by the prospect of unlimited expenditure had devised for her,
penniless Perdita Carey, all this beauty and luxury. She had only
stipulated timidly that she might be environed in her favorite rose
color, a mere suggestion for those who had the matter in charge. It was
enough. Her bed chamber bloomed with the pale but vivid flush of pink
roses, La France, accentuated with cool, suave, silver notes, like the
delicate, contrasted phrasing of a musical theme. The result of color
and arrangement was youthful, joyous, spacious. Beyond a softly falling
curtain, she caught a glimpse of her sitting-room. American beauty, a
radiant spot with delicious water colors on the walls, bowls of roses,
the sunshine falling through the windows, and shelves of books, each
volume bound in creamy vellum.
In one of the long mirrors which reflected her graceful figure from
every angle she saw through an opposite door her dressing-room and
bath, with its elaborate appointments, more inviting and luxurious than
any of which the proudest Roman beauty could have dreamed. She looked
about her with a faint, strange smile. What a contrast were these cold
and splendid rooms, not yet animated by her personality, to that little
apartment with its two or three tiny chambers, high up under the roof,
where she had lived and worked!
Then she turned back to her reflection in the mirror. It was extremely
becoming to her, all this background of rose and silver. Perdita
realized that as she unfastened the white flowers from her hair and let
her long veil fall like a cloud about her. With a deft movement she
caught it and tossed it on a chair for Olga to fold later. She slipped
out of her wedding-gown next and laid it more carelessly still upon a
couch. Then she leaned forward, her elbow on the dressing-table, her
chin on her hand, and regarded herself steadily, that faint, strange
smile still on her lips.
Well, she had fulfilled her destiny, justified Eugene Gresham's
prophecy. She heard his words to her, spoken the last time she had seen
him, three months before, as plainly as if his voice still rang in her
ears.
"Perdita, your destiny is written on your face. It includes marrying a
millionaire and having your portrait painted by me."
Fateful words! She had just married the millionaire, but even here, upon
the threshold of this new life, she was constrained to halt a moment and
cast one backward glance, "just for the old love's sake."
It was the night before Eugene Gresham sailed for Europe to paint the
portraits of "Princessin, Contessin and high Altessin." Again she
awaited him. Again she heard his step on the stair without, a quick,
light step with an odd halt in it.
He was coming, and her heart beat. How it beat as she stood there
breathless beside the window!
"Perdita!" Eugene's voice. He was across the room in a flash, both her
hands in his. "Here, let me see you in the light." He drew her toward a
lamp. "Two years, two years since we have met, and me wasting time
painting in the desert places when I might have been with you. Time is
not in the Far East. Ah, my cousin!" (the relationship was remote) he
sighed. "Why, as I live," with a quick change of tone, "you've got
another dimple, and that makes you a new and lovelier Perdita."
She flushed adorably. "How nice and southern," she cried with an attempt
at lightness, "and how exactly like you, just like the old 'Gene."
"The old 'Gene," his eyes still holding hers, "has never changed."
"How--how--are the pictures going?" withdrawing her hands from his.
"Beautifully!" he said carelessly. "The glassy eyes of the millionaires
are all turning toward me, and I have more commissions to make beautiful
on canvas their pug-nosed, fat-faced wives than I care to accept. Those
ladies hail me as a great psychological artist. Their mirrors are so
cruel to them that when my brushes flatter them they say that I paint
their souls; strip away the husk of the flesh and reveal enduring
loveliness."
He struck a match to light a cigarette and then hastily shielded it with
his cupped hand from the breeze which blew through the open window. The
light flared into his down-bent face, bringing out its dissonances
almost grotesquely in that small, momentary flash. Pick Gresham to
pieces and he was incontrovertibly convicted of sheer ugliness, but the
fact bothered him not at all. He knew that few ever arrived at the cool,
dispassionate frame of mind regarding him where they were capable of
that exhaustive analysis known as picking to pieces. He was slender and
rather small of stature, not more than medium height. One shoulder was
noticeably higher than the other and he walked with a slight limp, the
result of an injury received in boyhood. Coarse, blue-black hair with a
sort of crinkle in it stood out from his head like a cloud. His skin was
swarthy, his features irregular, even his eyes, dark eyes, were only
occasionally brilliant. But he might have been appreciably uglier,
almost as hideous as the Yellow Dwarf or Beauty's Beast,--it would have
mattered no more than his present lack of beauty, and well he knew it.
His was the magic gift of glamour, and all the dissonances and
inharmonies of appearance as well as of character seemed but the
italics emphasizing his charm. His mind was supple and flexible, his
wits nimble, even subtle. He was as vivid, as veering, as fascinating as
flame.
His match, the third he had struck, blew out before it had lighted his
cigarette, and he threw it away with a petulant gesture. He did not
answer her, as he was again attempting to light his cigarette, this time
with success. Then he began to saunter about the room.
In spite of her penury Perdita had yet managed to invest her little
workshop with both daintiness and charm. The walls were hung with pink
and white chintz and here and there were bits of fragile china and rare
old silver on claw-legged mahogany tables, while from dim canvases in
tarnished silver frames smiled the sweet, dark eyes of haughty southern
beauties of a generation unused to life's struggles.
"You really saved some of the best things from that hideous auction,
didn't you?" picking up a bit of china to scrutinize it more carefully.
"I was horrified when I heard of it across the world, several months
after it was all over. If I'd only been there to buy the whole lot in.
Plucky little girl you were, Perdita, to come on here and manage to keep
the gaunt, gray wolf at bay."
"What else was there for me to do?" she asked without turning her head.
"Aunt died, the place had to go. As for the wolf, if you look sharp,
Eugene, you may see his paws thrusting under this door."
In the center of the room was a large table covered with paint brushes,
colors, a litter of candle shades, cotillion favors and cards in various
stages of completion. Eugene carefully cleared a space on that edge of
the table nearest Perdita's chair, and perched upon it, looking down at
her with a smile.
"My stars, Dita!" he cried with the truest conviction, "you are a
beauty! The moment I return, I mean to paint you again. And this time
I'll set the world afire. Do you remember how many portraits I have made
of you? Why, just to see you brings back my boyhood,--the hopes, the
struggles, the effort, the haunted days, the feverish nights. I used to
think, 'If I can just learn how to get this effect, I'll know the whole
secret.' I've got past that now. There's always a new and more
difficult riddle every day. But Dita, Dita, the dreams of my youth you
recall!"
The smile died from her face. Her eyes grew wistful. "The dreams of our
youth," she repeated. "I'm young yet; but they haunt me. They were
beautiful dreams down there on that gray, old river. Can't you shut your
eyes, Eugene, and see the terraces sloping down to the water, the
lovely, neglected garden with its tangle of roses and jasmine?"
"Do I remember?" His eyes looked deep into hers. "I swear I never smell
jasmine without thinking of the old place and you. Perdita, do you ever
think what life might have been for us if it hadn't been for our
accursed poverty? If we'd only had just a little between us. It's a
question of courage. If we'd only had the courage to face things hand in
hand we'd have got along somehow, I dare say. But we didn't have that
quality, did we? We didn't believe enough in our dreams. That's the
worst of life. She won't let you."
"Oh, the dreams!" she scoffed. Her color remained high, her eyes
glittered, but with irritation, not tears. She suffered from an old
laceration of the heart, the more wounding in that, for pride's sake,
she must ever deny it expression. Eugene always took the attitude as if
they together had renounced a mutual love, and often implied, without
rancor, but with a forgiving, almost understanding tenderness, that the
responsibility of their marred lives lay on her shoulders.
Perdita was of the twentieth century, but she was also a southern woman
of many traditions, and she could not say the words which rose to her
defensive lips: "Eugene, you have never asked me to face life hand in
hand with you." He would with a glance, she could see it, feel it,
convict her of blunted intuitions, of an inability to discern exquisite
shades of emotion; and then he would express his love for her in
glowing, passionate phrases, confusingly evasive, elusive beyond
definition, committing himself to nothing.
And if this shifting of responsibility on her, this ardent skirting of a
definite issue were premeditated or his unavoidable, temperamental way
of viewing the matter, she could not tell. Conjecture was idle. Her
knowledge of his character, her ready mental accusations and equally
ready excuses, these comprising the sole weight of evidence, merely held
the scales steady.
Eugene began to pick up, first one, then another, of the favors on the
table, a smile, tender yet humorous, about his lips.
"By Jove, these are not so bad! They are rather stunning. You always did
have a lot of feeling for form and color, Dita, but you wouldn't work.
You weren't willing to drudge and to starve if necessary. That was
because you lacked the clear vision. It wasn't always before you, a
pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night." None might doubt
his sincerity or conviction now. It was mounting as flame. "Artistic and
appreciative you are, Dita. All this trash shows it, but you lack the
creative impulse. You were never meant to be a barefooted, tattered
follower of the vision, a lodger in a new palace of dreams each night.
You should build your house on the rock of substantial things,
bread-and-butter facts.
"Oh, do not toss up your head in that wounded-stag manner. Good Lord!
Isn't it enough that you are beautiful? And how beautiful! I'm almost
tempted to cancel my passage and, instead of sailing to-morrow morning,
stop here and paint you again. Really, I am. But what would it profit
me? I'd just be sowing the seed for a new harvest of heartaches.
Perdita, your destiny is written on your face." It was as if he willed
to speak lightly. "It includes marrying a millionaire, and having your
portrait painted by me. You'll never have an international reputation as
a beauty until you do both." But in spite of his smile and his flippant
words there was bitterness in his eyes.
She did not see that, but the lightness of his words and tone pricked
her to an immediate decision, a decision which she had, unconsciously,
postponed until she had seen him. Her face paled, her lips folded in a
tight line.
"I am going to marry the millionaire," she said firmly enough, although
there was a slight tremor in her voice. "It depends on you whether or
not there is a portrait of Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth by Gresham." There
was triumph in her eyes and voice as thus she lifted her pride from the
dust.
"Cresswell Hepworth!" His astonishment was unbounded. "Perdita! I throw
my hat at your feet. Cresswell Hepworth! The pick of the bunch.
Wonderful! But," looking at her curiously, "how on earth did you meet
him?"
"He heard of my amulet through a man I met at old Mrs. Huff's, Mr.
Martin. He has a wonderful collection of amulets, and he wanted to buy
it of me."
"But you didn't sell it?" he said quickly. "No, of course not. H'm-m.
That old amulet. You laugh at my superstitions, Dita, but you must admit
that it's queer the way it's interwoven with the history of our family."
He began to roll cigarettes and lay them with neat and exquisite
regularity on the table beside him. His eyebrows were raised, his mouth
twisted in a sort of rueful yet whimsical grimace. When he had finished
rolling the sixth cigarette, he laid it in line with the others, an
exact line, his eye was so true. Then at last he looked at her, and his
cynical, earnest, mocking, enthusiastic face softened. His eyes
enveloped her with tenderness. There was a heart-break in his smile.
"Ah, star-eyed Perdita, how shall I give you up? The only woman!" He
mused a moment, and then repeated: "The only woman! If we had but had
the courage to take the bitter with the sweet, Perdita."
Unwitting goad! It struck too deep for her to conceal the wound.
"You do not say 'can,' I observe, Eugene," she said laughingly, but
there was an edge to her voice like that on finely tempered steel.
"No," he returned, his fingers busy with a rearrangement of the
cigarettes; "you see it involves you and me. Not John Jones and Jane
Smith, but you and me. Do you know what that means? Well, it means that
it involves the inheritance and training of a good many generations. Do
you think I do not know how you loathe all this?" He flicked with his
fingers the dainty trifles on the table. "I know well the craving of
your nature for splendor and beauty, how necessary they are to you, and
how dinkiness and makeshifts irritate and depress you, take the heart
out of you. That is one you, one Perdita. There is another. I saw her
when I came in to-night. God, I wish I hadn't!" His voice dropped on
this exclamation and she did not hear it. "She is young. Her beautiful,
dark eyes ask love and give it. Her heart dreams of it. It is in every
tone of her voice. These two are at war, the natural woman and the woman
with her inherited love of ease and luxury and cultivated, artificial
desires. Which is the stronger? Why, to-night"--he picked up one of the
cigarettes and prepared to light it; his hands trembled, his face was
white--"the woman who is ready to love. She would listen to
me--to-night. I would hold her. Oh, what's the use?" He twisted his
shoulders impatiently. Then he bent forward and tapped the table lightly
but emphatically, as if to add weight to his words. "You'd listen to me
to-night, I know that; but as sure as to-morrow's dawn I'd get a little
note from you saying that the morn had brought wisdom. But, oh, I am
glad I'm sailing to-morrow."
"So am I," she flashed out. "You think--you take too much for granted,
Eugene."
"I dare say." His voice sounded flat. "No one ever appreciates
renunciation. Well, it's out into the night in more senses than one." He
rose and looked at her as she sat with downcast eyes, and half stretched
out his arms toward her. Then as she too rose, he clasped his fingers
about the back of her head and drew her face toward him, although she
strove to avert it from him. "Good-by, sweetheart." Even she must
believe in the ardor and sincerity of his tones. "Good-by, Perdita of
the South." He kissed her lightly on one cheek and then the other.
"Good-by, my jasmine flower."
He hesitated a moment in leaving the room, as if to turn and clasp her
to him and bear her away; then he shut the door gently behind him and
she heard his halting, hurried step upon the stair. She sat listening
until its last echoes had died away, and then, casting her outstretched
arms on the table, sending the favors and menus and candle-shades in a
shower to the floor, she burst into a storm of tears.
There was a low, discreet, respectful knock, Olga's knock on the door
leading into Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth's splendid apartments. Perdita
started violently and came back to the present from her far world of
dreaming. She had not even begun to dress, but still was sitting, chin
on hand, gazing with apparent intentness at her image in the mirror.
"It is almost time for Madame to start," Olga smiled from the doorway,
"so I ventured to remind."
"Yes," Perdita spoke hurriedly, rising at the same time. "Get me into my
gown quickly, please, and tie my shoes."
Olga was deft and practised, and Perdita's dressing was the work of a
few minutes.
"My veil now," said the new Mrs. Hepworth, "and--oh, I almost forgot."
She turned to lift from her dressing-table an exceedingly quaint and
striking ornament, depending from a long, thin chain. It was a square of
crystal about an inch and a half in diameter, set curiously in strands
of silver and gold, twisted and beaten together, and, as must be
apparent to even the casual observer, was of ancient and unique
workmanship. This was Perdita's amulet, the old charm, which Eugene with
his superstitious fancies had always longed to possess, and which had
excited also the desire of the collector in Hepworth; but in spite of
many temptations to part with it, Dita had always retained possession of
it. It was her one link with the past, a personal link, but also a
traditional and hereditary one. She wound the chain several times about
her neck, and the crystal pendant gleamed dully against the dark blue
cloth of her gown.
"You also are ready, Olga?" she said as she passed through the door.
"Yes, Madame."
Hepworth was waiting for Perdita at the head of the stairs. He was in
his heavy motoring coat, his cap in hand.
He smiled as he saw her. "Just in time," he said. "I'm afraid we will
have to make haste, rather. Ah," as his eye caught the talisman, "you
are wearing the amulet, are you not? Blessed old thing. If it had not
been for that, I should never have met you."
"I believe you only married me to get it," she replied with an answering
smile, "you are such an insatiable collector."
"Do you believe that? Do you?" he asked. "Because if you do, you are as
stupid as you are pretty, and you have no idea what that implies."