HEPWORTH MISUNDERSTANDS
Dita's fears calmed by Mrs. Wilstead's essentially common-sense point of
view, her confidence was further restored by Eugene's evident ignorance
of any plots and plans on Mr. Cresswell Hepworth's part of bringing this
triangular situation, involving himself, his wife and the other man, to
a fiction-hallowed and moss-grown conclusion.
It was therefore without particular apprehension, at any rate
apprehensions of the kind nourished by Mr. Hewston, that she dressed for
the dinner _en tete-a-tete_ with her husband. It was rather with a sense
of mounting interest, even excitement.
She wavered in her choice of a gown, scanning with hypercritical eye a
dozen or more. White savored of a school-girl simplicity and disarmed
her if she chose to be subtle. Blue was unbecoming; sufficient taboo.
"Green's forsaken and yellow's forsworn," she murmured ruefully. Black
remained, thin, soft-falling gauze, distinguished, distinctive,
exquisite in design and effect; above its shadow rose her neck of cream,
her hair was the dusk shadow of copper, her eyes were darkly brilliant.
She hesitated at jewels. He had given her so many. Which would go best
with her gown? Then she turned away from even the mental contemplation
of them with a feeling of distaste. She could not, even to please him,
wear his jewels when he and she were almost strangers, when but the
details of their final parting remained to be settled. And yet would it
not look a bit odd to appear without any ornaments whatever?
She considered the matter a moment, and then smiling a little, she
opened the box which Gresham had given into her hands that morning, and
which lay upon her dressing-table.
She turned over this old trinket in her hand, and gazed at it, forgetful
of the passing time. How impressive Eugene had been when he had returned
it to her!
[Illustration: She gazed at the old trinket.]
"I am only lending it to you, remember that, for you will give it to me
with your heart's love, Dita, and soon."
She was roused from her reverie by the sound of a motor stopping
without. Her maid waited to place a black and gold wrap about her
shoulders. "One moment," said Dita. Quickly she slipped the amulet on a
thin, old-fashioned gold chain and fastened it about her throat. Then
she went downstairs to greet her husband.
Commonplaces of the most conventional and banal order they talked.
Nothing else on the drive to the restaurant, nothing else on first
taking their seats at the table on one side of the great garish room.
There were many curious eyes on them, necks craned, the incredulous
whisper ran:
"Mr. and Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth actually together! What does it mean!"
The stereotyped babbling went on intermittently, until dinner had been
ordered and the earlier courses come and gone, and then Dita suddenly
awoke to the fact that her husband had taken the conversation into his
own hands and was actually talking to her. Oh, of course, he had often
talked to her before, arranged new amusements for her, discussed what
jewels she would like, what plays she would care to see, what people
interested her most, what journey she would enjoy.
But now, she almost caught her breath at the surprise of it, he was
talking to her as if she were a man, or at least an intelligent human
being and not just merely--a pretty woman.
He was talking straight ahead, discussing business matters, several
interesting problems which had come up in his affairs during his recent
western sojourn. He did not pause to explain anything to her, quite took
it for granted that she would understand. He did not apparently stop to
consider whether she was interested or amused, and that pleased her
enormously. She began to ask questions, and he answered them fully, even
pondering some of them carefully before replying. One he considered for
a moment or so and then said: "Do you know, I had not thought of that
before, that puts a new phase upon the whole situation." Her strand of
rubies had never given Dita such a glow of pride and pleasure.
"Ah, why have you never talked to me like this before?" she asked
naively. "Think of all the stupid dinners we've eaten together when you
treated me like a tiresome little girl who had to be continually amused,
and I was one, too; as tongue-tied and missish as anything, because you
took it for granted that I was."
"No one could accuse you of being either tongue-tied or missish
to-night. You are quite matronly in that black gown."
"Oh, I love to hear about the big things that go on," she said
enthusiastically, if irrelevantly, "but men will never talk to me about
them. All my life, whenever I'd try really to talk sense to a man, he'd
say, 'What wonderful eyes you have,' showing that he hadn't heard one
word I'd been saying. They always seem to think that I expect them to
tell me how lovely I am. It's the curse of the pretty woman."
"Oh, well, console yourself," he said carelessly. "There are prettier
women in the world than you, quantities of them!"
"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 assured 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, impassioned 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, snatching 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 shifting lights."
He took the case from his pocket and, lifting out the ornament, gave it
into her hands. It was fashioned 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.