The Beauty — A Reader’s Guide

There were those in the large audience who saw a certain pathos in the fact that she was given away by one of Hepworth's friends, thus exposing the lack of either relatives or friends of her own, but there was nothing in her bearing to indicate that she was conscious of her isolated position as she advanced, leaning lightly on Mr. Hewston's arm.

The world, Hepworth's world, and it was a large one, was tingling with curiosity. He was a great figure, looming immense upon the financial horizon; but no one had ever heard of the bride. The invitations to the wedding were the first intimation of his impending marriage, and the bride's name, Perdita Carey, conveyed nothing to anybody. By dint of careful collection of scraps of information, it gradually became known that she was young, of southern birth and extremely pretty. Bare facts. No more.

It was also considered rather an odd reading of the customary conventions on Hepworth's part, this crowded church wedding exposing the bride's poverty in relatives, the breakfast to follow, at his town house, thus making equally plain her homeless state; but when this view was set before him, sighingly, by Isabel Hewston, and vivaciously by Alice Wilstead, he became obstinate in the insistence of his plans. He seemed possessed of some masculine idea of getting things over, of having all his friends meet his wife en masse, so to speak, and having the matter settled.

And so it was, "Nice customs curtsy to great kings"--or millionaires. The audience then of his friends--there was none of hers present, if indeed she possessed any--sat with heads turned at an aching angle and awaited, with concealed impatience, the choice of Cresswell Hepworth.

The weight of opinion leaned to a sunburst of a woman, darkly splendid, opulently graceful, and instead, when the stately strains of the wedding-march echoed through the church, the guests lifted their astonished eyes to a brown and slender girl; but no matter what the expectation had been, each realized that he gazed on a more poetic loveliness than he had dreamed.

Another unhesitating mental admission. Obscure, unknown she might have been, but she could never be considered ordinary. It had taken generations of cultivation to give that pose of the head and shoulders, that arch of the instep, that taper to her slender wrist. And what intimation of individuality! Few women could have borne more regally the weight of heavy and lusterless satin or a diadem of flashing jewels; but this girlish bride of a millionaire had insisted on being married in the white muslin her own scanty purse had furnished; and wore as if it were a crown of diamonds the wreath of white jasmine flowers which held her long tulle veil close about the cloudy masses of her hair.

For once the entire interest of any occasion which he happened to grace was not centered on Hepworth, who, with his usual invincible composure, awaited the bride at the altar, fortified by his best man, Wallace Martin.

But the owner of millions--unctuous sound--is worth more than a mere dismissing word. Let the bride continue to advance, he to await her, while he is presented in a lightning sketch.

Cresswell Hepworth was far from old, not fifty. He had more than three generations of cultivated ancestry behind him. In type he was American, approaching the Indian; tall, slightly aquiline of feature, somewhat granitic and imperturbable. His hair, which had been brown, was almost white, his eyes were gray, trained to express nothing, but startlingly penetrating when he chose to lift rather heavy lids with a peculiarly long droop at the corners.

Emerson says somewhere that "a feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds."

Hepworth was a strong man. He saw possible houses and farms, externalized them and became the acquirer of vast and profitable tracts of land--a fair map blackly dotted with mines and scrawled with the angular lines of intersecting railroads. In this yellow triangle, a great wheat farm. Here, in this square of living green, irrigated and profitable ranches. He stood, this "Colossus of Finance"--journalese--with his feet planted firmly on this solid map-basis, and, with a golden rake, drew toward him from countless clutching hands securities, stocks, bonds, curios, pictures (he was an ardent collector), loot of every description, and, it was even whispered through the church, his young and lovely bride.