THE GIFT OF FREEDOM
With the departure of a third person the situation immediately changed
complexion. It became more intimate and therefore more embarrassing.
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
banality 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 passionate, 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 attitude 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 apron 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 shore. 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 passageway, 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?"
She started, cast one quick glance at him, and then stared frowningly
before her, but he noticed that her hand trembled on the back of the
chair. "Why do you ask me that? I--I am married to you--I--" her voice
faltered, broke.
"Oh, no conventional utterances, please," he cried quickly. "That is not
worthy of you, not like you. There should be, there must be absolute
sincerity between us now. Tell me, Perdita, are you in love with Eugene
Gresham?"
"Ah, that I do not know." She looked beyond him and, still gazing, shook
her head. "I do not know. I never have known, never been sure. We were
boy and girl together, he a few years older. He is associated in my mind
with the life of green old gardens and the smell of jasmine flowers. He
lives in a wonderful world, a world of color that something in me always
yearns toward. It seems to me sometimes as if I would rise to it, and my
heart would blossom in purple and red. I seem doomed to talk foolishly
to you," she exclaimed rather piteously, "but most people's hidden
thoughts would sound foolish to others, would they not?"
"Go on, my dear." Then his controlled utterance gave way. "For heaven's
sake, why should you not feel that you can say anything to me? What kind
of an idea have I given you of myself? But tell me," quickly subduing
his emotion, "what is it you feel?"
"As if--as if my heart were a flower which had never really bloomed--a
cold, tightly folded bud, that yet held within the colorless outer
leaves wonderful red and purple petals. All there, awaiting a sesame,
and I sometimes dream that only Eugene can give me that sesame. But,"
the glow left her eyes, her head drooped, "I don't know, I don't know. I
thought I was sure once that I loved him. I do not know now."
"Where was Gresham during the time you were struggling here?" he asked
presently. And it struck her irrelevantly.
"In the East somewhere, I think. Doing his desert pictures. I used to
hear from him once in a great while."
He said nothing. Then he came nearer and took both her hands in his.
"Dita, my clear, I'm going to be egotistical and talk about myself for a
minute. Let me see if I can explain." Again that worn and flashing
smile, with a deeper touch of cynicism, flitted over his arrogant face.
"'King Canute was weary-hearted,
He had reigned for years a score,
Pushing, struggling, battling, fighting,
Killing much and robbing more.'
"Let us hope that it is not quite so bad as the last line infers; but
it gives the idea, the picture. Well, Dita, I saw you, a beautiful
flower, purple and red, if you will, although I do not think the
combination of colors appropriate. And you were blooming in a tin can in
a tenement window. It was insupportable, so I dreamed of transplanting
the flower into its fitting surroundings, a marble court. That was what
I crudely thought would mean your happiness. But I never secured the
flower to adorn the marble court. Believe that. Above all, I wanted and
I want its happiness. Dita, I'm weary-hearted, but I long--I long above
all things--to make you happy. Take the poor surroundings that I can
give you; but let your beauty have its meed, let your heart flower as it
will. Feel free to meet, with outstretched hands, the romance your youth
has dreamed of, for, Dita, I, who have only fettered you with jewels, am
going to give you something really worth while, thanking God very humbly
that it is in my power to do so, and the gift is freedom. You are free
from now on."
She started back, looking at him in frowning bewilderment and yet he saw
deep within her eyes a wild gleam of hope, of joy. "Free!" she repeated
uncertainly, "Free! How can I be free when I am married to you?"
[Illustration: "Free! How can I be free?"]
He laughed once more, and the dreariness of that laughter rang suddenly
hours afterward in her ears. "Those things can always be arranged," he
said. "But I am going to ask you a favor." Although he said "favor" her
quick ear caught the ring of authority in his tone. "Since you are not
sure that you love Gresham, I am going to ask that you wait a year
before securing your legal freedom. You shall have it, whether you
decide on him or not. Oh, believe that. Ah, one more request. Let me
urge you not to have your portrait painted just now. In view of possible
future events, it is much wiser, much safer to let that go for the
present. I think you will have to trust my judgment here. There is no
danger of your beauty waning." Again his worn and flashing smile. "And
now, it is very late and I think you had better get some sleep. Good
night." He smiled again, but she noticed how dreadfully tired he looked.
She winced a bit in soul.
"I am sorry that it has been such a fizzle," she turned to him with a
sort of shy, girlish friendliness and impulsiveness.
He smiled again and lightly touched her cheek with his finger. "Give no
more thought to that." He turned abruptly away.
"Ah, Dita," his voice arrested her from the threshold, "one more request
I am going to make and that is that you get your amulet to-morrow. If
not I shall have to see about it myself and I am really too busy to
bother with it at present." Again that iron ring of authority was in his
voice, but authority masked in velvet. "Will you very kindly attend to
this, my dear?"
She nodded mutely from the doorway, but did not lift her down-bent head,
nor raise her eyes to his.