The Purple Heights

by Marie Conway Oemler

He usually knew exactly why any certain woman pleased him. He had usually demanded beauty; he had worshiped beauty all his life. But beauty must go hand in hand with intellectual qualities; he hated a fool. To-night he found himself puzzled. He couldn't tell exactly why Anne Champneys pleased him. Studying her critically, he decided that she was not beautiful. He could not even call her pretty. Perhaps it was her unusualness. But wherein was she so unusual? He had met women with red hair and white skin and gray-green eyes before—women far, far more seductive than Jason's ward. Yet not one of them all had so potently gripped his imagination.

Mrs. Vandervelde was a brilliant pianist, and after dinner Hayden begged her to play. Under cover of the music, he watched Mrs. Champneys. She was sitting almost opposite him, and he could observe her changing countenance. Nancy was beginning to love and understand good music. Men create music; women receive and carry it as they receive and carry life. It is quite as much a part of themselves.

Nancy's eyes shadowed. She leaned back in her chair, and the man watched the curve of her white cheek and throat, and the thick braids of her red hair. She had forgotten his presence. He was saying to himself, with something of wonder, "No, she's not beautiful: but, my God! how real she is!" when, subtly drawn by the intensity of his gaze, she turned, looked at him with her clouded eyes, and smiled vaguely. Still smiling, she turned her head again and gave herself up to listening, unconscious that destiny had clapped her upon the shoulder.

The man sat quite still. It had come to him with, the suddenness of a lightning stroke, and his first feeling was one of stunned amazement, and an almost incredulous resentment. He had gone to and fro in the earth and walked up and down in it, comfortably immune, an amused and ironic looker-on. And now, at thirty, without rhyme or reason he had fallen in love with a red-haired young woman of whom he knew absolutely nothing, beyond the bare fact that she was Jason Vandervelde's ward. A woman who didn't conform to any standard he had ever set for himself, whose mind was a closed book to him, of whose very existence he had been ignorant until to-night. Old Dame Destiny must have sniggered when she thrust Mrs. Peter Champneys, née Nancy Simms, into the exquisitely ordered life of Mr. Berkeley Hayden!

He presently discovered from Jason all that the trustee of the Champneys estate knew of Mrs. Peter, which really wasn't very much, as the lawyer and his wife had never seen Nancy until the morning of her marriage. And he didn't have much to say about her as she was then. Hayden gathered that it was a marriage of convenience, for family reasons—to keep the money in the family. He asked a few questions about Peter, whom Vandervelde thought a likely young fellow enough, but whom Hayden fancied must be a poor sort—probably a freak with a pseudo-artistic temperament. There couldn't have been very much love lost between a husband and wife who had consented to so singular a separation. Hayden had a very poor opinion of Mr. Peter Champneys! But he was fiercely glad it hadn't been a love-match, glad that that other man's claim upon Anne was at the best nominal, that theirs was a marriage in name only.

He saw her several times before her departure, and came no nearer to understanding her. The night before they sailed, he gave a dinner in his apartment, an old aunt of his, more enchanting at sixty than at sixteen, being the only other guest. That apartment with its brocaded walls and its marvelous furniture was a revelation to Nancy. It was like an opened door to her.

She looked at her host with a new interest. He appeared to greater advantage seen, as it were, against his proper and natural background. And that background had the glamour of things strange, exciting, and alluring, smacking somewhat of, say, an Arabian Night's entertainment. Over the dining-room mantel hung a curious and colorful landscape, in which two brown girls, naked to the waist and from thence to the knees wrapped in straight, bright-colored stuff, raised their angular arms to pluck queer fruit from exotic trees.

He knew all that, she thought; he had seen that strange landscape and those brown women, and tasted the fruit they reached to pluck. Just as he knew those tiny terra-cotta figurines over there, and that pottery which must have been made out of ruby-dust. Just as he knew everything. All this had been in his world, always. A world full of things beautiful and strange. He had had everything that she had missed. It seemed to her that he incarnated in his proper and handsome person all the difference and the change that had come into her life.

And quite suddenly she saw Nancy Simms dusting the Baxter parlor, pausing to stand admiringly before a picture on a white-and-gold easel, that cherished picture of a house with mother-of-pearl puddles in front of it. A derisive and impish amusement flickered like summer lightning across her face, and with an inscrutable smile she mocked the mother-of-pearl puddles and her old admiration of them. She lifted her eyes to the painting over Berkeley Hayden's mantel, and the smile deepened.

"Perhaps it is her smile," thought he, watching her. "Yes, I am sure it must be her smile. I am rather glad Marcia is taking her abroad. I do not wish to make a fool of myself, and there'd be that danger if she remained." Yet the idea of her absence gave him an unaccustomed pang.