FOOLS' LAUGHTER
When Dita wakened the next morning, it was very late, almost noon. She
came slowly to waking consciousness over wastes of apprehension,
oppressed by some heavy sense of disaster. What had happened? Ah, she
remembered it, it was last night. She squirmed uncomfortably and then
lay gazing with somber and introspective eyes about the beautiful room.
Slowly, the chaotic and uncomfortable thoughts which thronged
confusingly in her mind resolved themselves into two or three distinct
facts as scorching to her sensitiveness as if written in letters of
fire. First, she had let herself go unwarrantably. An electric storm
always exerted a sinister effect upon her, inducing a wildness, a
recklessness at first, eventually followed by melancholy and culminating
either in tears or temper. And she had yielded weakly to every phase of
this storm-induced mood.
Why did events have to take the bits in their teeth and gallop madly
along the road to ruin at the most placid and unexpected moments? Why
should an electric storm have blotted the sky and flashed its jagged
lightning over her nerves that especial evening? Why had she not
mastered the sirocco, driven it off in its first stealthy approaches?
But she melted to self-pity; Cresswell should not have taken her so
seriously. He might have realized that the storm, and that tiresome
dinner, and those tiresome people had goaded her unendurably. Grant them
every virtue, every grace, admit that there might have been an
attraction between herself and them in ordinary circumstances, but the
fact that they were old friends of her husband changed the whole
chemical situation. Attraction became repulsion, attempt to conceal the
fact as she would. But self-pity ultimately merged into self-accusation.
No matter what the causes, she had made a melodramatic scene. She had
told a lot of bare truths, which, like all bare truths, were only half
truths; about Eugene, for instance, practically admitting that she loved
him.
Well, did she? She sat up suddenly in bed and pushed the hair back from
her brow with both hands. She pondered intensely a moment. She didn't
know. She really didn't know. Was it love, this feeling she had for him,
had had for him ever since she had been a girl of fifteen? It was a
powerful attraction anyway--a sympathy, an understanding.
And Cresswell had offered her freedom, freedom! What did it mean? Her
heart began to beat quickly, excitedly. It meant the great adventure ...
if one had the courage ... one need "mourn no joy untasted, envy no
bliss gone by." She would throw off this ennui, this apathy which
afflicted her. She was free, free to seek and meet the unexpected. The
great adventure, a thousand adventures were before her. At last, she
would live. Suddenly she remembered her amulet. She must get it. She
gave this a moment's consideration, and then, before summoning her maid,
she went quickly to the telephone in her sitting-room, and rang up
Eugene Gresham's studio.
To her relief, he was there and answered the ring almost immediately.
"Are you there, 'Gene. I want to see you to-day, as soon as possible,
within an hour or so. Will it be convenient for you?"
"Oh, perfectly. But," there was anxiety in his voice, "nothing is wrong,
I hope."
"Oh, nothing much," she replied evasively, "only I want to talk to
you--but not here."
"Why not take luncheon with me," he replied, "at half-past one and
where?"
"Oh, not in any crowded restaurant," she answered a little impatiently.
"At some quiet place. A tea-room--the Wistaria?"
"Very well. Then within an hour and a half."
"And, oh, Eugene," her voice detaining him, "I want the talisman. Do not
fail to bring it. Do you understand?"
If Dita wore as a protecting disguise the simple and conventional dark
gown which has been prescribed by certain unalterable rules of fiction
as the proper costume for a lady hastening to a rendezvous, it failed of
its effect, but served instead to accentuate her beauty; nor detracted
in the least from her as an object of interest and comment.
And Eugene, with his fame, and his air, and his eyes, his lifted
shoulder and his limp, the pointed laurel leaves seeming to gleam
through his cloud of hair, handed her from her motor-car with the manner
of courts, his hat in hand, to the admiration of the passers-by. The
whisper ran: "Eugene Gresham and the beautiful Mrs. Hepworth." They
passed through a gaping aisle. They entered the tea-room to the craning
of necks. Poor souls! This was their measure of seclusion. Beauty and
genius! Fame and wealth! It is a combination New York loves. She serves
them up to her multitudes on a salver.
They were successful, however, in finding a remote table beneath swaying
purple clusters of artificial wistaria and a dimly mellow light. And
while Eugene ordered the luncheon, Dita glanced about her with a
sensation of relief; new surroundings always seem to hold out the
alluring if frequently vain promise of new thoughts and this was the
beginning of adventure, of that new life of infinite variety she meant
to live at last.
Eugene turned from the waiter, and leaning across the table narrowly
observed her.
"A trifle pale," he remarked. "Mad Dita!" reproachfully and yet
tenderly. "I hope all that atmospheric unpleasantness--mental, I mean,
did not come boiling and seething to the surface after I left last
night. I hoped the sirocco had spent itself before I left. But doubtless
Hepworth understands how you are affected by a storm."
"I'm afraid I did make rather a scene," she admitted, her lashes on her
cheek. "However, that is neither here nor there."
He drew a breath of relief.
"Then it is all over, the atmosphere cleared and we are to begin our
sittings to-morrow." He smiled in anticipation and laughingly drew her
picture upon the air.
"No," she shook her head, and spoke more reluctantly than before,
"Cresswell has requested me not to have my portrait painted just now. He
is kind enough," her smile was shadowy, "to think that there is no
particular danger of an immediate waning of my beauty and he desires me
to wait a few months."
"But that is impossible! Incredible!" he scowled with irritation and
threw himself back in the chair. "Oh, what a sirocco, what a sirocco it
must have been!" He shook his head back and forth and then dropped it in
his hands, studying the pattern of the table-cloth as though it were the
map of the situation. "To pass over my disappointment"--he lifted his
head and mechanically pushed about some of the dishes the waiter placed
before him on the table--"ignore it, let it go. I'm not going to press
that now; but there are other things to be considered. It is known that
I am to do your portrait. It was openly discussed last night. All this
must be taken into account. That is for appearances as far as you are
concerned. Then regarding me. I am not a paper-hanger or house painter
to be engaged and then dismissed at the whim of a millionaire. I can not
accept a commission from Hepworth and permit him to cancel it by a
negligent message, sent through a third person. Absurd!" He frowningly
bit a finger. "My plans and arrangements must be concluded for months
ahead. They can not be thrown askew like this. Oh, Dita, what did you
do, what did you say that brought this about? I worked like a Trojan
last night to avert anything of the kind."
She did not answer, but sipped her tea with downcast eyes and he saw
that the lashes on her cheeks were wet.
"Ah, Dita," his voice fell to a charming note of tenderness, a note to
stir any woman's heart, with the purple and white of the wistaria
clusters swaying above their heads and the mellow light reflected in his
eyes, his eager eyes which pierced life's stained and sordid curtain and
saw the wonder and miracle of beauty; and it was this power to discern
the eternal vision which illuminated his ugly, irregular, fascinating
face upon which work and dreams and experience had stamped their
impress. "You can not fancy what it means to me to paint your portrait
now. I've painted it before, crudely, in boyhood, and experienced then a
casual delight in the effort to portray a beautiful thing, and wrest a
few new secrets of art from the portrayal. That was all. But now," his
voice without being raised, yet lifted exultantly, "but now--my heart is
swept with insurgent seas at the thought of what it means. I am lover
and artist, fused in a fire of white enthusiasm. The lover sees, divines
what the artist can only guess at, and the artist offers to the lover a
perfected technique. I feel the stirring of this power to catch your
loveliness, Dita, and fix it on canvas imperishably. It would be the
great achievement. That is in the background of every artist's thoughts.
It is his pillar of cloud by day and his pillar of fire by night. The
great achievement!" He dreamed over it a moment. "I would paint the
South in you, Dita, 'warm and sweet and fickle is the South.' Ah! I
thought I loved you then. I thought I loved you the evening we parted,
but I know now that I have never really loved you before or I could not
have given you up."
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 impassioned.
"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 assent. "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 passes 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 attitude, 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 associated 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.