Chapter 11

The evident endeavor which the speaker made to appear flippant and at his ease showed her how deeply he was moved. His wife felt this without fully reasoning it out, and the consciousness that this self-controlled man was so stirred awoke in her a strange and powerful excitement. She turned a shade paler, as she looked silently down into her wine-glass. Her own life had been too sad for her not to feel some emotion at his words. She strove to repress the thoughts which made her bosom swell and heave, yet it was from them her words came when she broke the silence.

"It is bitterest to find one's self mistaken. To find that our gods are only clay like the rest of humanity. I could forgive a friend for neglect, abuse or any cruelty; but I could never forgive him for falling below my ideal of him."

"You do not mean me," he returned placidly, "for of me you never had an ideal; but waiving that for a moment, I should like to tell you of my second misfortune--if it isn't to be reckoned a blessing."

She looked at him without speaking. If this disclosure were but a repetition in varied form of the other, she had no wish to help him put it into words. Yet even as this thought passed through her mind, she fancied she had detected in his tone some new gravity.

"I've discovered," continued Dr. Ashton, with the same light manner he had used throughout the interview, "that I have a cancer gayly but with grim persistency developing under my arm."

"Oh, Will," Helen cried, clasping her hands, "you are not in earnest!"

"I assure you it is a very earnest matter with me, and has been for some time. I might have an operation, I suppose, if it were worth while; though it is so near the heart that it would be uncomfortably risky."

Helen became suddenly calm. The color faded slowly from her cheeks, and her husband, watching her narrowly, saw her beautiful lips assume a new expression of firmness and determination. She unconsciously lifted her head into a more erect carnage. Her eyes were moist and full of feeling. Slowly in her mind formed a resolve, and with a full knowledge of the renunciation of self which it involved, she called up all the nobility of her soul to aid her in living up to it. Creeds were little to this woman, yet her life was formed upon the principles which give to creeds their stability, and by which the moral is removed from the animal.

"Will," she at length said, slowly and gravely, "could it not be arranged for me to live with you? You did not tell me you were fond of me without having thought out the possibilities."

"I should have hesitated to ask so much," was his reply, "even of your love; I shall certainly not take it of your pity."

"My pity?" she murmured, not raising her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"You know. You cannot think me so dull as not to see that your proffer comes not from affection, but from generosity. I thank you, but I will accept no sacrifices."

He rose as he spoke, and put out his hand.

"I must be going," he said in an indifferent tone. "I have letters to write that must be mailed by midnight. I am not more than half as bad, Helen, as you have always persisted in thinking. I never made very profound pretensions, but I've treated every body squarely from my own point of view. If they have regarded my blessings as curses, it wasn't my fault, and I am not sufficiently hypocritical to pretend that I think it was. Good night."

He gave her hand a warmer and more lingering pressure than usual.

"I've had a very pleasant evening," he added, "despite the admixture of truth. Young people don't like any bitters, but we old, shattered wrecks need a dash of it in the wine of life to help digestion. Good night."

XXVIII.

LIKE COVERED FIRE. Much Ado about Nothing; iii.--I.

That night marked an epoch in the married life of Arthur and Edith Fenton.

The results of matrimony upon character are for the most part slow and hardly perceptible, yet even so not without certain well-defined stages by which their progression forces itself into recognition; and in fervid temperaments like that of the artist, any change is sure to be rapid, and marked by sharp and sudden crises.

Edith returned from Helen with her soul in a tumult. Grant Herman had described more than her face when he applied to her the epithet nun-like. It was a source of perpetual wonderment to many of her friends that such a girl could be so strongly attracted by Arthur Fenton; but those who knew his marvelous flexibility, the unconscious hypocrisy with which he adapted himself to any nature with which he came in contact, and on the other hand his fascinating manner, at once brilliant and sympathetic, felt Edith's love to be the perfectly natural consequence. She believed him to be what she wished, and he, without conscious deceit, became for the time being what she believed him to be.

It was a theory of Dr. Ashton's that what Arthur Fenton became was so purely a question of environment as to leave the artist all but irresponsible. This fatalistic view he had laid before his wife with some detail, at once explaining and defending his position.

"If a chameleon is put upon a black tree," he said on one occasion when the matter was under discussion, "you have really no right to blame him for becoming black too; it is simply his nature. If Arthur is like that it isn't his fault. He wasn't consulted, I fancy, about how he should be made at all. He is self-indulgent, and if a point hurts him he glides away from it. He cannot help it."

"There is something in what you say," Helen had reluctantly assented, "but I think you put it far too strongly."

"Oh, very likely," was the careless reply. "His strongest instinct, though, is to escape pain. We are none of us better than our instincts."

To such a decision as this, had she heard it, Edith, too religious to acknowledge any thing tending towards fatalism, would not for a moment have agreed; yet it embodied a truth destined to cause her deepest sorrow, and which was gradually forcing itself upon her. Already, although they had been married so few weeks, even her love-blinded eyes could not but perceive much in her husband which shocked and pained her. She had not considered deeply enough, never having had the experience which would have taught her the need of considering, how great was the gulf between her moral standpoint and that of her betrothed. He had seemed so yielding that she had failed to perceive that his compliances were merely outward, and left his mental attitude unchanged. Now when it became necessary, as in every wedded life it must sooner or later, for her to appeal to his ultimate moral belief, she was startled to find nothing with which she was in sympathy. A cynic--or, indeed, her husband himself--would have assured her that it was, after all, a question of standards merely, and that difference of judgment was natural and inevitable, and that measured by his own convictions Arthur was quite well enough. Her answer to such a proposition would have been that there was but one standard, and that what differed from that were not moral principles at all, but excuses for immoral obliquity.

Outwardly, it is true, there was little in her husband's life of which Edith could complain. He accompanied her to church, and if he quizzed the preacher after returning home, she was ready to excuse this as the natural result of a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. He allowed her to do as she chose in the matter of charity work, and he even refrained from going to his studio on Sunday, a sacrifice whose magnitude she had no means of estimating, and which she therefore thought would be continuous. It was when some ethical question arose between them that Edith was disquieted, feeling sometimes as if she were looking into black deeps of immorality. The principles which to her were most sacred, were to him light subjects upon which, she was well aware, only her presence prevented his jesting. The most obvious laws of rectitude were but thistle-down before the whirlwind of his subversive theories; and Edith found argument impossible with one who denied her every premise.

His old acquaintances found in Arthur Fenton a change more subtle but none the less distasteful. It was a trait of his nature to assume the character he was half unconsciously acting, as a player may between the scenes still feel the personality he is simulating upon the stage; and there was about Fenton when he came in contact with the Pagans, a vague air of remonstrance and disapproval, even when he was as bold as ever in his own cynical utterances.

"An expression of virtuous indignation isn't becoming in you, Fenton," Rangely said to him one day. "Especially in a discussion which you started yourself by the most shocking piece of wickedness I ever heard."

And among all the Pagans there existed a yet unspoken feeling that Fenton was ceasing to be one of them.

On returning from Helen's, Edith found her husband still engaged with Dr. Ashton, but as soon as the latter had gone Arthur came to her room.

"Well," he said, sinking leisurely into a chair. "Do you feel any milder? Have you had your dinner?"

"Yes," she returned, not leaving her seat on the opposite side of the room. "I have been dining with Mrs. Ashton."

"What!" cried Arthur, as if a bomb had exploded at his feet. Then he sank back into his languid position. "So she has told you," he remarked carelessly.

"Yes, she has told me. Did you know, Arthur, when you brought us together, that she was living under a false name, and under false pretenses?"

"I knew certainly," replied her husband with a coolness that marked his inward irritation, "that her legal name was Ashton. I have still to learn that she is living under false pretenses."

"Is it not false," retorted Edith, with difficulty controlling her voice, her indignation increasing with every word, "to pass as widow, to live separated from her husband?"

"Oh, false? Why, in your stiff, conventional definition of the word that calls the letter every thing, the spirit nothing, I dare say it is false; but what of that? She has a right to do as she pleases, has she not?"

Edith drew herself back in her chair and looked at him across the dimly lighted chamber. It is but justice to her husband to consider that he could not dream of the anguish she suffered. It was, as he so often said, a question of standards. By his, she was narrow, uncharitable, even bigoted; tried by the code of more orthodox circles she was simply high-minded, true and noble in her devotion to principle. She was neither bigoted nor prudish, however the alien circumstances in which she was placed made her appear so. To her it was a vital question of right and purity of which Arthur disposed with such contemptuous lightness. True as the sunlight herself, no pang could be more bitter than the knowledge that the truth was not sacred to the man she loved. Her husband's words pierced her like a dagger. It was some minutes before she answered him. He rose moodily, lit a cigar at the gas jet and sat down again before she broke the silence.

"Arthur," she said in a voice which was sad and full of the solemnity of deep feeling, "have you no regard for truth?"

"Truth!" retorted he. "To go back to Pilate's conundrum, 'What is truth?' If you mean a strict and fantastic adherence to facts and to stiff conventional rules, no, I haven't the slightest regard for truth. If you mean the eternal verities as a man's own nature and the occasion interpret them, yes, I have the highest."

"But that is only a confusion of words, Arthur. What do you mean by 'eternal verities' if not adherence to facts? The eternal verities cannot be whatever it pleases any one to say. Doesn't all human intercourse depend upon faith in one another that we will adhere to facts? Even if you do not look at the right and the wrong, there are surely reasons enough why the truth should be sacred."

Her husband whiffed his cigar, idly blowing a succession of graceful rings.

"You are quite a metaphysician. Did you have a pleasant dinner?"

"But, Arthur," Edith persisted, ignoring his attempt to break away, according to his habit, from a discussion which did not please him, "but, Arthur, do you think it right for Mrs. Greyson--Mrs. Ashton, I mean, to live so?"

"Right? Oh, that is the same old question in another shape. Mr. Candish will answer all those theological riddles; it is his business to. They don't interest me."

He threw away his half smoked cigar, dusted his coat sleeve of a stray fleck of ash, settled his cravat before the glass, and humming a tune walked towards his wife, his hands clasped behind him.

"We do not agree, Edith," he said with cold deliberation, "and unless you broaden your views, I am afraid we never shall. You are a dozen decades behind the day, and are foolish enough to take all your church teaches you in earnest. Religion should no more be taken without salt than radishes. The church inculcates it to excuse its own existence, but you certainly are reasonable enough to outgrow this old-fashioned Puritanism."

"Arthur," was her answer, "we do not agree, and if you wait for me to come to your standards, I am afraid you are right in saying that we never shall; and, indeed, I hope you are right. It makes me more unhappy than you can think," she continued, her eyes swimming with bitter tears, "that we are so far apart on what I must believe to be vital points; on truths which I believe, Arthur, with my whole soul--as you would, too, had you not carefully educated yourself into a doubt which cannot make you better or happier."

She had risen as she spoke, and stood facing him, her pure, pale face confronting his with a look of pathos which touched him despite himself. She came a step nearer, and put her arms about his neck.

"Oh, Arthur!" she pleaded, "I love you, and how can I help mourning that you wrong your better nature; that you resist the impulses of your own best self?"

He yielded to her caresses in silence. He remembered that Helen had used this same phrase.

"Women always appeal to one's best self," he commented inly, with a mental shrug, "which means a man's inclination to do whatever a woman asks of him."

But he kissed his wife's lips, and said, tolerantly:

"We will talk it over some other time, my dear. We are both tired to-night. But you are right, I suppose, as you always are."

And she loosened her arms from his neck, recognizing that he had put her appeal aside and waived the whole matter.

XXIX.

A NECESSARY EVIL. Julius Caesar; ii.--2.

At the St. Filipe Club, somewhere in the small hours of that same night, half-a-dozen members were lingering. One was at the piano, recalling snatches from various composers, the air being clouded alike with music and smoke wreaths.

"I think you fellows are hard on Fenton," the musician protested, in response to some remark of Ainsworth's. "I don't see what he's done to make you all so down on him."

"It isn't any thing that he has done," Tom Bently replied, "it is what he has become. He has developed an entirely new side of his nature, and a deucedly unpleasant one, too."

"I always had a mental reservation on Fenton," remarked another. "He was always insisting that his soul was his own, don't you know; and when a man keeps that up I always conclude that he has his private doubts on the subject; or if he hasn't, I have."

"That's about the case with all the musical rowing we've been having for the last year or two; every musician has been in a fever lest he should be thought to be truckling to somebody."

"What rubbish all this concert business is," remarked Tom. "In Boston a concert interests a little _clique_ of people, and another bigger _clique_ pretend to be interested. The nonsense that is talked about music here is nauseating. The public doesn't really care any thing about it. In Boston a concert is given in Music Hall; but in Paris it is given in the whole city. It is an event there, not a trifling incident."

"What do you know about music?" retorted the player, clashing a furious discord with his elbow as he turned towards the speaker. "I'll attend to you presently. Now I want to know about Fenton. What has he done that you are all blackguarding him?"

"I think he's got a creed," said Ainsworth, scowling and smiling together, according to his wont. "I hate to charge a man with any thing so black, but I think Fenton's wife has made him take a creed, and a pretty damned narrow one at that."

"By Jove!" the musician observed, solemnly. "It's too bad. Fenton is a mighty bright fellow, and no end obliging."

"If it's only a creed," swore Bently, "what's all this fuss about? Every body has a creed, hasn't he? A man's temperament is his creed."

"It isn't his having a creed that I object to," remarked Grant Herman; "it is the question of his sincerity that troubles me. If he has taken up some collection of dogmas merely to please his wife--who seems a very sweet, quiet body--that is of course against him; but if he believes it, I don't see why we should object."

"Believes it!" sniffed Ainsworth, in great contempt. "That is worse than any thing I've said. I don't think Fenton is quite such an idiot as that comes to. The idea of his believing in Puritanism! Oh, good Lord!"

"Puritanism," Bently threw in irrelevantly, and because he liked the sound of it, "Puritanism is the preliminary rottenness of New England. If he is struck with that by all means let him go; the further the better."

"Isn't it his night for the Pagans this month?" somebody inquired.

"Yes," returned Bently, "but I took the liberty of going to him and asking if he would let me take it this turn. I hope you fellows don't mind." The talk thus flowed on in a desultory fashion amid ever thickening clouds of tobacco smoke, and Grant Herman, sitting for the most part quiet, had a whimsical idea in looking at his half-extinguished cigar. Certain excellent cigars, his thoughts ran, have a way of burning sluggishly about the middle, and without actually going out, yet need to be relighted; and in the same way a man's life goes on better for the kindling flame of a fresh attachment in middle life. He fell into reverie, thinking of Helen and of Ninitta. He had not seen the Italian since her flight, but from Mrs. Greyson he had learned the story of the finding and recovery of the fugitive; and his heart kindled with gratitude toward the woman who had prevented consequences which he should have fruitlessly regretted. He became so absorbed in his thoughts that only the entrance of Fred Rangely aroused him.

"Hallo, Rangely," the new comer was greeted, "where do you come from at this time of night?"

"Oh, from the office of the Daily Day-before-yesterday. I had an article in, and I wanted to read the proof. I can stand any thing in the world better than I can endure a compositor's blunders. Do any of you know Dr. Ashton?"

"I do," somebody answered. "What of him?"

"Rather clever fellow, wasn't he?"

"Why, yes; I think he is. He's rather odd sometimes. What about him?"

"Dead."

"Nonsense! I saw him myself not three hours ago, posting a letter in the box opposite his office."

"He is dead, though. Heart disease. They just got the news at the _Advertiser_ office."

"Where was he?"

"In his office. The night porter of the building heard him fall against the door. They say he must have died without a struggle."

XXX.

HOW CHANCES MOCK. II Henry IV.; in.--I.

Early on the following forenoon Helen took her way to the studio. She was in unusually good spirits that day, for no especial reason that she could have told, although indeed it is possible that the prospect of meeting Grant Herman may have subtly contributed to the buoyancy of her mood.

She walked briskly through the bracing morning across the Common, her mind full of bright fancies. A thin column of smoke arose from the chimney of the lodge in the deer-park, rising straight in the clear air, and cheerfully suggestive that some tiny family, not too large for the building, were at breakfast within. It might even be the deer themselves; and Helen smiled at her whim, almost laughing outright as a picture arose of a matronly doe preparing coffee, while a solemn buck sat in his easy chair before the fire, reading his morning paper and now and then glancing at his wife over his spectacles.

In this joyous mood she came to the studio. A sudden thought darted through her mind, with no apparent connection, of the talk of the night previous, and for an instant her face clouded; but the exhilaration of the morning and the reaction from the sad, overstrained state in which her husband had left her, both helped her to throw off all mournful thoughts. Ninitta had not arrived, and Mrs. Greyson busied herself about the bas-relief, preparing for work. Suddenly the tap of Grant Herman sounded upon her door.

"Good morning," he said, entering in response to her invitation. "I knew by your step that you were in good spirits, and it gave me so much pleasure to think you were glad to be back, that I had to come up."

"I am in good spirits," she returned. "It is such a glorious morning, and Ninitta has kept me away from my work long enough for me to be very glad to return to it."

"What of Ninitta?" he asked, a shadow coming over his fine face. "She is not still with you?"

"No, but she is coming to pose this morning, though I hardly think she is strong enough."

The sculptor took in his hands a bit of clay and began nervously to model it into various shapes.

"Why did you take her home, Mrs. Greyson?" he asked after a moment's silence.

"Because she needed me," Helen answered. "And besides," she added hesitatingly, "I thought you would like her to be under my care."

"Did you?" he returned eagerly. "I was more grateful to you than you would let me tell you! I--"

He broke off abruptly as if determined to keep himself from any dangerous demonstrativeness.

"Come into my studio a moment," said he, throwing down the clay he held. "I have something to show you."

Helen followed willingly, glad to avoid the chance of their being interrupted by the arrival of Ninitta, whose jealousy might easily be aroused again. The sculptor led the way through a couple of chambers, bringing her out at the top of the stairs leading down in the corner of his studio. The morning sun shone in through the window far up in the side wall, tinged to rich colors by the stained glass which Herman had set there. The statues and casts looked in the light coming from above them, as if they had just emerged from garments of shadows which yet lay fallen about their feet. Helen uttered an exclamation of admiration.

"How charming the studio is in this light," she said. "It is like looking down into a ghost world."

"It is a ghost world," was the response. "It has long been haunted, but I had not supposed that any eyes but my own saw the wraiths which dwell here."

The vibratory quality in his voice warned her not to answer. She felt that she stood upon the brink of a significant interview, yet she lacked the resolution to turn back.

She descended the first flight of steps into the gallery, the sculptor following closely. She could not have defined to herself what she wished or intended. Somewhat paradoxically she wished to escape from Herman, yet had she fled she would have been unhappy had he not pursued. Nothing is more contradictory than a nascent passion, and, indeed, the tenderness of any woman for a man is not very profound if unmixed with some desire to escape from him.