The woman laughed. “Would that buy your beloved Simití?” she asked. “Well, you poor, unsophisticated girl, suppose we just go down there and buy the whole town. It would at least give me an interest in life. Do you think I could stand the heat there? But tell me more about it. How did you live, and what did you do? And who is this Josè? And are you really descended from the old Incas?”
They were alone in the darkened music room, and the soft-stepping, liveried butler had just set the tea table before them, 73 At one end of the long room a cheery fire snapped and crackled in the huge fireplace, tempering the sharpness of the early spring day and casting a ruddy glow upon the tapestried walls and polished floor in front, where dozed the Beaubien’s two “babies,” Japanese and Pekingese spaniels of registered pedigree and fabulous value. Among the heavy beams of the lofty ceiling grotesque shadows danced and flickered, while over the costly rugs and rare skins on the floor below subdued lights played in animated pantomime. Behind the magnificent grand piano a beautifully wrought harp reflected a golden radiance into the room. Everything in the woman’s environment was softened into the same degree of voluptuousness which characterized her and the life of sybaritic ease which she affected.
From the moment Carmen entered the house she had been charmed, fascinated, overpowered by the display of exhaustless wealth and the rich taste exhibited in its harmonious manifestation. The Hawley-Crowles home had seemed to her the epitome of material elegance and comfort, far exceeding the most fantastic concepts of her childish imagination, when she had listened enraptured to Padre Josè’s compelling stories of the great world beyond Simití. But the gorgeous web of this social spider made even the Hawley-Crowles mansion suffer in comparison.
“And yet,” said the amused Beaubien, when Carmen could no longer restrain her wonder and admiration, “this is but a shed beside the new Ames house, going up on Fifth Avenue. I presume he will put not less than ten millions into it before it is finished.”
“Ten millions! In just a house!” Carmen dared not attempt to grasp the complex significance of such an expenditure.
“Why, is that such a huge amount, child?” asked the Beaubien, as accustomed to think in eight figures as in two. “But, I forget that you are from the jungle. Yet, who would imagine it?” she mused, gazing with undisguised admiration at the beautiful, animated girl before her.
Silence then fell upon them both. Carmen was struggling with the deluge of new impressions; and the woman fastened her eyes upon her as if she would have them bore deep into the soul of whose rarity she was becoming slowly aware. What thoughts coursed through the mind of the Beaubien as she sat studying the girl through the tempered light, we may not know. What she saw in Carmen that attracted her, she herself might not have told. Had she, too, this ultra-mondaine, this creature of gold and tinsel, felt the spell of the girl’s great innocence and purity of thought, her righteousness? Or did 74 she see in her something that she herself might once have been––something that all her gold, and all the wealth of Ormus or of Ind could never buy?
“What have you got,” she suddenly, almost rudely, exclaimed, “that I haven’t?” And then the banality of the question struck her, and she laughed harshly.
“Why,” said Carmen, looking up quickly and beaming upon the woman, “you have everything! Oh, what more could you wish?”
“You,” returned the woman quickly, though she knew not why she said it. And yet, memory was busy uncovering those bitter days when, in the first agony of marital disappointment, she had, with hot, streaming tears, implored heaven to give her a child. But the gift had been denied; and her heart had shrunk and grown heavily calloused.