Chapter 10

Dr. Ashton was perfectly right in his inward comment that Fenton was secretly regretting his marriage. This was the thought that filled Arthur's mind. It was true he had had no absolute disagreement with his wife, although it is not impossible that it might have come to this, had a delay in the guest's arrival allowed time. But it filled the husband with an unreasoning rage that Edith presumed to establish so strict a code of morals. He felt that her position as his wife demanded more conformity to his standards. Why need she trouble herself about that which did not concern her, and sit in such lofty judgment upon the morals of her neighbors? Did she propose keeping Dr. Ashton's conscience as well as her own--and his? Certainly those whom the husband found worthy his friendship it ill became the wife to stigmatize and avoid. He sat moodily tearing his fish in pieces instead of eating; for the moment wholly forgetting his duty as host.

"If you'll pardon my mentioning it," Dr. Ashton said at length, "you are about as cheerful company as a death's head. You are so melancholy that I am tempted to fling in your face one of my old epigrams; that love is a gay young bachelor who can never be persuaded to marry and settle down."

The other laughed and made an effort to shake off his gloom; but with so little success that his guest resolved to escape at the earliest moment possible. Something in Fenton's forced talk, however, attracted Dr. Ashton's attention.

"My wife was a pupil of Frontier."

The simple phrase, which had escaped Arthur's lips because it had been in his mind not to allude to this fact, might have gone unnoticed had not the speaker himself so strongly felt the shock of disclosure as to show sudden confusion. The whole matter was at once clear to Dr. Ashton, who having recognized Edith at the reception, had been prepared for identification in his own turn.

"So that," he observed calmly, "is the reason Mrs. Fenton does not dine with us to-night. I knew she was sure to recognize me sooner or later; but as I had no motive for concealing this matter, on the other hand I had no reason for recalling so unpleasant a circumstance to her mind."

There was a pause of a moment, and then the Doctor continued:

"I think Frontier was rather foolish. I told him so. A charming little Hungarian girl of whom he was fond, had left him to follow the fortunes of a Polish Count, or something of the sort. I do not see why a man should kill himself for so trifling a thing as a woman; but if he chose to, I am not one of those officious persons who feel justified in interfering with any private act they don't happen to approve. I certainly should resent such impertinent intrusion into my own affairs."

"And I," assented Arthur doggedly; "but my wife----"

"Certainly; I understand. Mrs. Fenton says hard things of me because I would not rob poor Frontier of what little comfort he could get from dying. Very well; I will not offend her by my presence. Only she is setting herself a hard task in attempting to treat people according to their conservatism. In these days the sheep and goats have come to be so much alike in appearance, that I scarcely see how a mere mortal is to distinguish between them. My own case I settle for her by avoiding her house."

"But this is my house," protested Arthur, intensely chagrined.

"No," his guest replied, still smiling and moving toward the door. "It is the nest you have built for your love and your--regeneration! Good night."

XXVI.

THERE BEGINS CONFUSION. I Henry VI.; iv.--i.

Alone in her own room, Edith relieved her overwrought feelings by a burst of tears, brief, indeed, but bitter. Like her husband, she felt that this incident, although not assuming the guise of a quarrel, was an opening wedge in the unity of their affection. Unlike Arthur, however, she thought of it with self-reproach and misgiving. She did not for an instant consider the possibility of having taken a different position in regard to Dr. Ashton, yet in a womanly, illogical way, she felt that she should have learned her husband's wishes before so vehemently declaring her own views.

She heard the artist and his guest go in to dinner, and the thought flashed upon her that this was the first time her husband had dined without her since their marriage. She wondered if he remembered it, and, remembering, regretted. She longed for companionship, for some friend into whose sympathetic ear she could pour her story, from whom she might ask advice. She reflected sadly how far she was removed from her intimate friends. Of her new acquaintances many had been most kind to her, but towards none of them, not even to her relatives, had she been so strongly drawn as to wish now to go to them for confidence and sympathy; unless, came a second thought, it were Mrs. Greyson. She was a widow, Edith reflected, and had evidently suffered much, while the strength of her character was evident from her dealing with the Italian girl. It would be no disloyalty to go to her; there had been no words spoken between husband and wife which could not be told a friend, and Edith felt that she needed the advice of a woman more versed in the intricacies of life than herself.

She dressed herself for walking, and slipped noiselessly out of the house.

Mrs. Greyson was at dinner, and was naturally surprised at seeing her caller, but she had both too much tact and too much breeding to ask explanations.

"I do hope you have not dined," she said. "I am so much alone that it is a perfect delight to me to have company. My dinner is a little like a picnic, but if you will only consider how great a favor you are doing me by sharing it, the consciousness of philanthropy ought to make it palatable."

Neither lady mentioned Arthur, although his name was uppermost in the thoughts of both. They sat down together in Helen's tiny dining-room, and served by her only maid, had a charming meal. The hostess exerted herself to entertain her guest, wisely judging that what Edith said in calmness she would be far less likely to regret than words uttered in the unguarded moments of her excitement. She told Mrs. Fenton stories of her studio life both in Boston and abroad, she led Edith on to speak of her own travels and experiences, until the latter almost forgot that she was dining in one house and her husband in another. It was not until the coffee was reached, coffee made as only Helen could make it, that the subject of the visit was really broached.

"How is Mr. Fenton?" Helen asked deliberately, believing the time had come for such a question.

The face of the other fell. She experienced a pang at the consciousness of having been gay and happy, forgetful of her husband and her trouble.

"He is well," she answered falteringly.

"Why did you not bring him with you?" continued Mrs. Greyson lightly, yet with a secret determination to know the cause of her guest's evident disturbance.

"He did not know I was coming," Edith responded in a low voice. "That is what I came to talk about. I thought you might understand; but it involves a third person, and perhaps I ought not to tell you. I am sure, though," she went on, gaining confidence now that the ice was broken, "that I can trust you. A friend of Arthur's came to dine to-night, and just as the door-bell rang, I found him to be the man I once saw commit murder in Paris."

"Murder!" exclaimed Helen, turning white. "Commit murder?"

"Consent to it," corrected Edith, unconsciously a little pleased to have produced so great an effect upon her usually self-possessed friend. "He looked on while Frontier took poison, without trying to prevent him."

"But that," Mrs. Greyson said slowly, "is hardly the same thing as murder."

"It is quite as bad," Edith protested earnestly. "It makes me shudder to think of his dining alone with Arthur at this moment. Who knows what might happen!"

"Nothing tragic, I think," Helen replied smiling. "He does not go about with pistols in his belt, I suppose.'

"It is awful to me," Edith continued, with increasing excitement, too much stirred to notice the sarcasm. "I told Arthur I could not sit down with a murderer, and just at that moment we heard his step, and I ran away upstairs; and then I felt dreadfully, and I came to you."

"I thank you for your confidence. But what do you mean to do? What will Arthur tell him?"

"The truth, I hope."

"He is scarcely likely to say to the guest he has himself invited that you think him a murderer," answered her friend, smiling again, "and I am not sure that he would even look at this quite so severely as you do."

"How else can he look at it?" demanded Edith. "How else can any one look at it? Isn't it murder to take human life, and if one does not prevent suicide when he might, isn't it the same as if he did it himself?"

"We will not get into a discussion," Helen replied gently. "I feel about it as you do; though I believe very differently. But I see perfectly well how a man might be strictly honest in thinking that it was the privilege of any human being to lay aside his life when he is weary of it; and I do not presume to condemn others for feeling what I only think I believe."

"Think you believe!" cried the other in horror. "You do not think you believe that murder is right?"

"Assuredly not; but as there are so many related points upon which we do not agree, would it not be better to talk of this particular case than of general belief?"

"But it is impossible for any one to believe as you say," persisted Edith; "simply impossible. No one can believe that wrong is right."

"But each has his own standard."

Against this Edith protested, but Helen returned no answer. She regretted being involved in such a debate, and resolved to let the discussion go no further. They sat in silence a moment, and then Edith again spoke.

"I do not know what to do," she said. "Of course Arthur cannot know that man any longer. You were in Paris at the time Frontier died, were you not? Did you ever know----"

She broke off suddenly, remembering that she had not intended disclosing the name of her guest.

"Dr. Ashton?" Helen returned, fixing her eyes upon her companion, and unconsciously speaking with a deliberation which gave especial weight to her words. "Yes; I know him. We went to Paris together."

"Together! Was he a friend of your husband? How did you know whom I meant?"

There was no perceptible pause before Helen answered; but meanwhile she determined to throw aside all concealment. She could no longer stand before Arthur Fenton's wife with the humiliation of even a tacit deception between them. She felt a spirit of defiance rising within her. Who was this woman that she assumed the right to judge them all by standards for whose narrowness only contempt was possible! At least she would rise above all conventional prejudices, and no longer tacitly ask, as by silence she had done, exemption from the harsh judgments of Mrs. Fenton's creed.

Helen was too womanly not to shrink from this disclosure, and she had been too thoroughly educated in the faith by which Edith lived not to understand just how her life would appear seen through the latter's belief. Disconnected with a question relating to the marriage relation and by implication casting reflection upon her delicacy and even purity of life as a woman separated from her lawful husband, Helen could have met with dispassionate reasoning whatever assault Edith made upon her. This point was too vital, it touched too closely the core of her woman's nature, and although she retained perfectly her self-control, there was a pulse of passion in her voice when she spoke.

"Dr. Ashton," she said unflinchingly, "is my husband."

"What?" cried Edith.

"We have not found it convenient to live together," Helen continued, with increasing calmness, a faint tinge of contempt creeping into her voice, "and so since my return from Europe I have taken my mother's name to avoid gossip. Dr. Ashton and I are very good friends still."

"And did Mr. Fenton know this?" asked the other, very pale.

"Certainly; although you understand that it is not a matter which we discuss with the world at large. I pass, I believe, as a widow; though I have never done or said any thing to give color to that idea."

It is doubtful if Helen fully comprehended the effect of these words upon her guest. Every fiber of Edith's being tingled. All her most sacred principles seemed outraged. She in some remote way felt, moreover, as if to hear without protest so lax notions of the responsibilities of marriage was to stain her womanhood and dim the luster of her modesty.

"How dared he introduce you to me?" she cried. "You are the wife of a murderer and you defend his crime; you pretend to be a widow, you ignore your marriage----"

"Stop," the hostess said with dignity. "We need not go over the ground. Mr. Fenton made us acquainted, I presume, because he agrees with me in seeing nothing wrong in my position, however unconventional it may be. You will see that if I had been ashamed of the fact I could easily have kept it from your knowledge."

But Edith made her no answer. She was too much overwhelmed by the various emotions which the disclosure of the evening had aroused.

Edith was, from Helen's point of view, fatally narrow, it is true; but the latter might have reflected that the limitations of her friend's vision were the faiths of the Christian world, and that her tenacity arose not from obstinacy but sincerity. It is an age when belief and doubt are brought face to face so sharply that the shock disturbs by its jar the most ordinary affairs of life.

Edith was pure, high minded, simple souled, and for the rest she was honest and earnest. Her creeds were vitalized by the warm fervor with which she clung to them, and what more could be demanded of her?

She quitted the dining-room, and soon Helen heard the outer door close behind her. The night gathered, and the lonely woman left behind sat long in sad reverie, until the door was again opened to admit Dr. Ashton.

XXVII.

WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE. Hamlet; i.--2.

Dr. Ashton came in too full of his own interview with Arthur to notice particularly if his wife showed signs of agitation.

"My dear," he said, throwing himself into a chair, "it is at once one of the latest and the wisest of my reflections that you had better consider a newly married man as an entire stranger and form his acquaintance quite from the foundation, wholly unbiased by any notion you had of him as a bachelor."

"His wife," responded Helen quietly, "has been dining with me, so I understand something of the situation. But how did Arthur behave?"

"Like any husband who does not care to quarrel with his wife even when he disapproves of her. It is upon that principle that matrimonial felicity depends. Do you say Mrs. Fenton has been here?"

"Yes; she came to me for sympathy and I administered it by telling her that I am your wife."

"The devil! I beg your pardon; but, Helen, it was precisely because I knew she was sure to remember this Frontier scrape that I wanted her not to know. She will be very hard on you."

"Christianity is always hard," returned she; "but what difference does it make; it was only a question of time. She is sweet and pure and good, Will, but her religion holds her in bands stronger than steel. I couldn't long keep step with one in chains. It might as well come now as any time."

Her husband looked at her with evident interest not unmixed with admiration.

"She provokes me to do and to say childish things," Helen continued, "just to shock her. I told her bluntly the other day that I had been telling a falsehood, and she had the impertinence to look shocked. I am not sure that I did not go so far as to say I 'lied,' a word that hardly holds the place in English that it did in the good days of Mrs. Opie. She would have been reconciled if I had said I told what I hoped was true."

"I should have told her," laughed Dr. Ashton, "that I only used truth as the Egyptians used straw in bricks, the smallest possible quantity that will hold the rest together."

"I cannot see why Arthur married her," Helen said musingly.

"Oh, as to that, an idle man will fall in love with any pretty woman who will snub him."

"But Arthur isn't idle, and she doesn't snub him."

"Very well; he married her because he fell in love for no reason but the weakness of our sex."

"Love seems generally to be regarded by the masculine mind in the light of a weakness."

"Isn't it?" her husband returned. "Love is the condition of desiring the impossible, and if that is not a weakness, what becomes of logic?"

"I am tired of logic," she said, rising abruptly. "I am tired of every thing. Let us have supper. I want a glass of wine. I am sure I tried to be kind to Mrs. Fenton. I would have helped her if I could; but how could I assist her unless she chose to let me, and that, too, knowing who I am."

"I never knew you to be other than kind," was the grave reply, which brought to Helen's cheek a faint flush of pleasure.

The servant came in with supper, and the slender glasses were filled with Rhine wine.

"I could not help thinking," Dr. Ashton said, lifting his glass,--"I drink to your very good health, my dear--I could not help thinking of my wedding gift to Arthur, that he asked me for it, I mean."

"I thought of it, too, when his wife told me the story. It is well she does not know that of you."

"Oh, it wouldn't matter," he said carelessly. "She couldn't feel a greater horror of me than she does already. Do you see the mark of Cain on my forehead, Helen?"

"Isn't it droll," she returned, with a smile half pensive, half humorous, "to feel ourselves suddenly tried by new standards and found so wanting. I am not sure but dramatic propriety demands that I should poison Mrs. Fenton. I have that vial, you know."

"Did you notice the inscription on the vial?"

"No; is there one?"

"See for yourself," he answered, refilling his glass.

She rose from the table and brought from a small cabinet the morocco case, unopened since Arthur had given it to her. A certain dread and distaste had prevented her examining it. Now she sat down again in her place, a beautiful woman, with the light falling upon her from above, shining upon her golden hair, and bringing out the hues of her sea-blue dress. Her husband watched her as she held the case a moment in her delicate, firm fingers before unclasping it. He had learned within these last weeks that his old love for Helen had re-awakened; or more truly that a new affection had been born. The knowledge had come to him through thinking upon the relations between Helen and Arthur and in speculating concerning her feeling for Grant Herman, and it had been in his mind when he described love as the desire for the impossible. He had determined to speak his passion, but as he looked at his wife sitting within arm's length yet as remote as if half the world lay between them, he hesitated. Helen unclasped the case and lifted the tiny cut-glass vial from its velvet bed.

"How extravagant you were in your vial," she said, involuntarily lifting it to her nostrils.

"Don't!" Dr. Ashton exclaimed, leaning forward suddenly.

"Is it so deadly as that!" she asked in some dismay, holding it off.

"It is simply pure prussic acid," he replied. "But it might be loosely stopped."

She examined carefully the minute writing engraved upon the glass.

"'Death foils the gods,'" she read. "Is it one of your own wickednesses, Will?" "I don't know. By the way, we might send it to Mrs. Fenton now as a souvenir of the two desirable acquaintances she has lost."

"What a brood of vipers she must think us, Will. I think it is pathetic, probably; but I cannot help being amused. It is rather an odd sensation to find that instead of being the harmless, insignificant body I have always supposed, I am really a hardened and abandoned reprobate."

"Oh, I've always known it, but I did not tell you for fear of destroying your peace of mind."

"I'm afraid," sighed Helen, rather absently, "that--if you don't mind the slang--Arthur has an elephant on his hands."

"Yes," assented the other, "himself."

She laughed musically, toying with the little cut-glass vial.

"How familiarity takes away the dread of any thing," she remarked. "We become accustomed to any thing; and, while I dare say it is the shallowest of sophistry, that ought to be an argument in favor of the theory that vice and fearfulness are alike only strangeness."

"That is rather a sophistical bit of logic; so perfectly so that it ought to be theology. Excuse me, but could you let me have a morsel of cheese."

"There does not seem to be any for you to have," she said, glancing over the table.

"Isn't there," returned he, as carelessly as if he had not noted that fact. "It is of no consequence."

"Oh, I can easily get it; I suppose Hannah forgot it."

She restored the vial to its place, laying the closed case by her plate, and left the room. The instant the door closed behind her, Dr. Ashton reached across the table, possessed himself of the vial, returning the case to its former position. His wife turned just outside the door, and came back with a meaning smile to take up the empty case and lock it again in the cabinet.

"I cannot trust you," she remarked with a smile; "you are too eager to foil the gods."

He smiled in return, holding his wine-glass up to the light.

"There is more where that came from," he said. "You forget my profession."

"Of what are you musing so intently?" Helen queried, half an hour later, while, the supper being ended, her husband was enjoying his cigar.

"Of two things which I have to communicate. One is a folly and the other--or perhaps I should say each--is a misfortune."

"The folly," returned she, "I forgive; the misfortune I regret. What are they?" "I am glad you forgive the folly. That gives me boldness to tell it. I have fallen in love."

"You, Will! With whom?"

"That is the madness of it. With my wife."

"Will!"

"It is the truth," he went on, half whimsically, but with a certain ring of earnestness in his tone. "I acknowledge the madness, the poor taste of a man's falling in love with his own wife, but the fact stubbornly remains. I have been in love with you for a long time, but I stood back for Arthur like a good fellow."

"I never was in love with Arthur," she interrupted.

"It is no matter," he continued. "The question is, can't you get up a grain of grace for me, old lady?"

He leaned over the table, his dark eyes shining as she had never seen them before. She was fascinated by his gaze; she felt as if the ground were slipping from beneath her feet, and as though he were casting upon her an evil spell. A wave of despair swept over her. Must she again submit to his power; were the old days of bitter bondage to return; was she nothing but a puppet to his will?

In this extremity a memory saved her. Unable to withdraw her gaze from her husband's face, there came to her suddenly the look in the eyes of Grant Herman that day when he told her his love. The blood surged to her cheeks, but her calmness returned.

"It is of no use, Will," she said with gentle firmness. "All that is past forever between us. We had better not speak of it," she added wistfully. "I have so few friends that I cannot bear to lose any one of them."

"My folly is then my misfortune," he responded, with no appearance of diminished good humor. "It is the pleasure of the gods to torment me; I suppose it amuses them. The old Romans were only aping them in their blood-thirsty sports, and I fancy that is the secret of their deification, for nothing seems so much to the liking of the gods as to torment humanity."