Chapter 12

All sorts of artistic rubbish had accumulated in the little gallery; broken casts, fragments of statues and vases, pieces of time discolored marble, and the thousand objects which make up the _débris_ of a sculptor's studio. A bit of warm colored though faded tapestry hung dustily over the railing of the little balcony, making the white-plaster goddess appear doubly wan. Against it stood a small antique altar, around whose base a train of garland-bearing Cupids danced in immortal glee.

"How lovely," Mrs. Greyson said eagerly. "I never saw this altar before. Where did you get it, and why is it hidden up here?"

"I picked it up in Rome, years ago," Herman returned, a trifle shamefacedly. "It came from somewhere in Greece. Isn't it beautiful?"

"Yes; but why is it hidden here?" she repeated.

"The truth is that when I was young and romantic, I bought that altar--it is a Hymeneal altar, they say--and said I would pour a libation upon it at my marriage; a sentimental and heathenish notion enough."

He paused a moment, a certain hesitancy showing itself more and more definitely in his manner. He glanced at his companion, then looked away into the ghost world below. Her heart was beating quickly. She cast down her eyes, her hand, the whiter by contrast with the discolored marble, resting upon the altar.

"When I left Rome," he resumed, "I could not quite make up my mind to leave it behind; so I had it boxed up and sent home. It has been boxed up ever since until--until recently."

However determined Helen might be to avoid dangerous topics, she was yet a woman, and she had in her heart a strong yearning towards the sculptor which could hardly be repressed. Before she had considered to what the question might lead, she asked:

"And recently?"

"Recently," re-echoed he, regaining his composure, "I took it out and meant it to stand down in the corner there to remind me."

He pointed as he spoke, down into the studio below, still dim, since the screens covered the large windows. Her glance followed his motion in an abstracted, impersonal way.

"To remind you?" she in turn echoed.

"To remind me," he took up the words again, "that I am like other men, and that life is at best an aspiration; at worst a despair."

She understood the intimation of his words, but it seemed not to touch her. She did not flush or start, but regarded abstractedly the jocund Cupids. Then she raised her eyes to his face.

"But you removed it here."

"Yes," he said. "Our friend Fenton once said that there is in this world only one good, into which all others resolve themselves--the amelioration of life. The reminder, with all its suggestiveness, was too poignant; I ameliorated my life by putting it up here out of sight."

She did not question him further, but, gathering up her dress, turned and went down the next flight of stairs, which brought her to a landing eight or ten feet from the floor of the studio. There she turned again and looked back at him descending. She almost seemed to herself not to speak, yet by some inward volition her lips formed the words:

"Hope is only a bubble, yet it rims with rainbows whatever we see mirrored in it."

"Yes?" he returned, inquiringly.

"I was only thinking," replied she, continuing her descent, "that it is worth some pains to keep the bubble unbroken as long as possible."

"But facts are such achromatic glasses."

To this she made no answer, and together they moved towards a modeling stand upon which stood something covered with wet cloths. These the sculptor carefully removed.

A perfectly nude male figure was disclosed, exquisitely modeled, and of superb proportions. It lay upon a hillock, about which fragments of broken weapons and the torn ground indicated a recent battle. The head and limbs of the figure drooped down the sides of the mound, falling with the limpness of death. About the noble, lifeless head were bent and broken stalks of poppies, ridden down by the horses, yet not wholly destroyed.

Herman and Mrs. Greyson stood in silence looking at the figure, the pathos of the work so penetrating Helen that the tears gathered in her eyes.

"What do you call it?" she asked, struggling to regain composure.

Her companion pulled away the cloth, which still lay against the pedestal, and she saw the words:

"I strew these opiate flowers Round thy restless pillow."

Again she was silent. Perplexity, regret, and, more keenly than all, a delicious exultation, overcame her. She stole a half-glance up into the face of the tall form beside her.

"But he is dead," she murmured at length.

"It seems so," he assented.

She turned and faced him, a sudden paleness making her very lips white.

"I have no right to let you show me this," she cried, in a voice thrilling with emotion. "My husband is alive. I never pretended to love him, but I am his wife. You must have seen him with Arthur Fenton--Dr. Ashton."

"Dr. Ashton!" he echoed, in bewilderment. "Your husband? Dr. Ashton, Teuton's friend?"

"Yes," replied she, her eyes falling, and her breast beginning to heave. "I had promised not to tell; but it was not right. I should have told you, but I could not bear--Oh," she cried, breaking off her sentence abruptly, "if you despise me it is only my due!"

"Despise you! As if it were possible! But don't you know? Haven't you been told?"

"Know? Been told?" demanded Helen, in alarm. "What is it?"

"Haven't you seen the morning paper, even?"

"No. What was in it? Has any thing happened to Dr. Ashton?"

"Yes," Herman said slowly, wondering in a baffled way if 'it was possible to soften the blow. "He is dead."

"Dead!"

Her cry rang out sharply in the dim studio, over that clay figure of a lifeless warrior.

A cry of horror, of pain, and, too, of remorse. There was in it nothing of love, only that nameless fear that death brings, and still more that groundless self-reproach which sensitive natures must feel when confronted by the irremediable--as if some blame must be taken for the acts of fate. Imaginative natures never quite shake off the responsibility of the inevitable, and Helen began instinctively to question herself. The scene of the previous night came before her. Ought she to have yielded to the love which had called her, late aftermath of a blighted wedded life? At least when her husband spoke of his suffering she might more strongly--A sudden thought pierced her like a knife.

"How did he die?" she questioned breathlessly.

"Of heart disease."

So then the world would not know the truth, if what she feared were truth.

"I will go home," she said. "Please tell Ninitta."

When she reached her rooms she found a letter, addressed in Dr. Ashton's hand, which the penny-post had left for her after she had gone out in the morning. It contained only an impression in wax which resembled a large seal. With hot eyes she bent over it, making nothing of its reversed letters. Then, with a sudden thought, she held it before the glass, seeing in the mirror the words, which read backwards, like the life of him whose last act had been their forming:

"DEATH FOILS THE GODS."

XXXI.

HE SPEAKS THE MERE CONTRARY. Love's Labor's Lost; i.--1.

"Edith," Arthur Fenton said, looking up from his paper at breakfast that morning, "Dr. Ashton is dead."

"Dead!" she exclaimed.

Her husband's indifferent tone shocked her. She was not without an unphrased feeling that death was so sacred or at least so solemn a subject that it should be treated with reverence. Any jesting upon it made her cringe, and the light mention of it seemed to her almost immoral.

"So the paper says," replied he; and he read aloud the paragraph containing the announcement of Dr. Ashton's sudden death from heart disease. "It is too bad," he commented. "He was a mighty smart fellow and square as a brick. I wonder what made him do it now."

"Made him do what?" she asked. "How strangely you talk. Made him die?"

"Yes; that's what I meant. I knew he had a trouble which would probably make him do it sooner or later, but I'd no idea it would come so soon."

"Arthur, what do you mean," Edith repeated, the tears coming into her eyes. "I don't like to hear you speak of death so--so--flippantly."

"Flippantly, my dear?" returned he. "I'm sure I don't know why you should use that word. If a man takes his life, why shouldn't I speak of it,--to you, that is; of course I should not in public."

"Takes his life!" she cried. "Do you mean--"

"Of course I know nothing about it," her husband replied as coolly as ever, and watching sharply the effect of his words; "but I presume Will took poison, poor old fellow."

She sank back in her chair, white and trembling.

"It is what might have been expected," she said. "It almost seems as if Providence measured to him the portion of poor Frontier."

"Providence is noted for close observance of the _lex talionis_" sneered Arthur, "but Dr. Ashton didn't believe in the existence of that functionary, so it really ought to have passed him by. It would certainly have been more dignified."

"But, oh!" she cried out, apparently not hearing or not heeding his last words, "into what sort of a world have you brought me, Arthur? Are all your friends so desperate that they think only of taking their own lives? Have they no faith, no hope, no beyond? I feel as if it were all a dreadful nightmare! It cannot be you alone, for Mrs. Greyson and Dr. Ashton--Oh, Arthur, where has religion, where has morality gone? Oh, I cannot understand it! I cannot bear it!"

She laid her bowed head on her arms upon the pretty breakfast table, and sobbed as if her heart would break. Her husband looked at her with intense irritation, and an inward curse that he had ever married her. He sipped his coffee; he noted with admiration the rich, glowing hues of the dull blue bowl of nasturtiums which adorned the table.

"There, Edith," he said at length, "it is rather idle to cry over the sins of your neighbors. According to your creed each of us has enough of his own derelictions to answer for, without going abroad for things to repent. As for religion, I suppose girls who do Kensington work will use it for decorative purposes for some time to come, but thinking people long ago outgrew such folly. In regard to my friends, it is all a question of standards, as I've said no end of times. From my point of view they are very sensible people, and you a little bigot. Grant Herman believes some pious nonsense, though he has too good taste to obtrude it, and I dare say Bently and Rangely have their superstitions. There are probably ten thousand people in this good city of Boston--and for aught I know a hundred thousand--who believe, or, if you like, disbelieve, as I do."

"It cannot be true," was Edith's reply. "But if it is so, it is too sad to think of."

"Why, I suspect," Arthur continued lightly, "that the Pagans regard me as too orthodox lately, though you'd hardly agree with them."

She made no reply, and Arthur continued his breakfast in silence. The sun shone in at the windows, the soft coal fire sputtered in the grate, and to all appearance the room was full of cheerfulness. Edith leaned her head upon her hand and reflected sadly. She resolved that her husband should be weaned from the Pagans, if that were within her power. She seemed to herself to relinquish joy in life, and to devote herself wholly to duty.

The entrance of a servant with the morning letters interrupted further conversation, until Arthur tossed his wife a letter which Dr. Ashton had mailed at the same time he posted the missive which Helen received later in the day.

"There, you see," Fenton remarked. "Of course I show it to you in confidence."

The room swam before Edith as she read, but she forced herself to be outwardly calm, as she ran her eye over this note:

DEAR ARTHUR:--

I've a strong presentiment--and although I disbelieve in presentiments, mine generally come true--that in about half an hour my obituary will be in order. Certain easily foreseen contingencies have determined me to give it up. I shall never have a better chance to make my exit dramatically, and you've often assured me that that is the chief thing to consider in this connection. I've contemplated such a possibility long enough to have my affairs in order, and doubtless your wife will have a mass or two said for the repose of my soul. If you ever have a chance to do Helen a good turn, you may regard it as a personal favor to my ghost to do it. I've left you my Diaz as a sort of propitiatory sop.

Yours, of course, as ever, W. A.

"Oh, Arthur, Arthur!" Edith sobbed, breaking down again. "It is awful! It is just as he always talked. It is as light as if he were going out to drive."

"Naturally," was the response. "If you fancy Will would cry baby at death, you knew him far from as well as I did. How strange it is to think of his being in the past tense, poor fellow. It was clever of him to leave me his Diaz; I always coveted it."

In the face of this, what was there for Edith to say. She was simply numbed to silence, and horror at her husband for the time deadened all sense of the shock of Dr. Ashton's death. It was not until later in the day that she was able to think of Helen.

"But, Arthur," she said then, "Mrs. Greyson?"

"Well; what of Mrs. Greyson?"

"I am going to see her."

"After your last night's indignation?"

"I may have been wrong," Mrs. Fenton said bravely, "I may have been hard. I realize every day how little I am able to judge for other people. Perhaps I am narrow, as you say. At least now her husband is dead I can show her my sympathy; and since I know more of him, it does not seem so strange that she left him."

"They left each other," he responded to these contradictory words. "But what can you say? The consolations of religion will hardly be available, and Helen never pretended to love Ashton?"

His tone wounded her, but she answered without a change of countenance:

"The death of the man who has been her husband can never be indifferent to any true woman. I shall not force her to listen to any religion she does not wish to hear."

XXXII.

A SYMPATHY OF WOE. Titus Andronicus; iii.--I.

"I am afraid you will think me intrusive," was Edith's hesitating greeting to Helen, "but I could not help coming. I thought you might feel lonely."

Helen looked at her for a moment with wistful eyes and trembling lips: then she crossed swiftly to where her friend stood and kissed her. And never could these two be so wholly separated or estranged again as to efface the memory of all the meaning that this caress conveyed. The word which Edith had used had been most happily chosen. Her woman's instinct divined the loneliness which overwhelmed the widow, and this proof of her sympathy was the passport to Mrs. Greyson's heart. Loneliness was the feeling of which Helen was most of all conscious. The death of even an indifferent acquaintance often may seem to desolate the earth from its simple irremediableness, and much more does the removal of one near to us make the world appear half a void.

Helen had been sitting alone before Edith came, reviewing her past and drearily speculating of her future. She went over the days of her wedded life; her innocent, introspective childhood, in which she had dreamed and read, dwelling in a world apart; alone but for the ideal creations of her books or her own quick fancy. She had married knowing as little of life or of love, as when, a lonely child, she had spelled out the tale of Prince Camaralzaman, and wondered what the divine passion really was, or if indeed it had existence, outside of fairy lore.

The torch of death throws its glare backward, and its funeral light showed many a past long since forgotten, but now revealed with new and distorting vividness. Helen remembered the baby which had lived but long enough to open its eyes with a smile that seemed of recognition, and then faded back into the unknown whence it had come. A throb of tenderness for the dead father moved the mother's heart as she thought of her baby, so little time hers, and so long asleep under the marguerites of a grave over the sea. She had suffered much from the selfishness, the dominant self-will, the distorted views of life of Dr. Ashton; and these things she even now could not forget; but, too, she thought of him as the father of her child, her baby ever dear and living in memory.

She reflected, too, of the men she had known, and especially of Arthur Fenton. Her nature had need of some one upon whom to expend its treasures, and she realized that had she not felt in the artist a certain insincerity, he might have awakened her love. He had been appreciative, sympathetic, brilliant; and, too, he had called largely upon her patience and forbearance, than which there is no surer way to win a generous woman's affection. Yet always some note rang false to her fine ear, and to the weakness of his nature she had never been wholly blind, although not until his marriage had given him a certain distance had she realized how deep and unsparing her knowledge of him really was.

Of Grant Herman she would not think. Thoughts of him arose again and again in her mind, but she resolutely put them down. Some secret stir of mingled pain and joy told her too well that the sculptor had awakened the first love of her life. But at least with her husband, however unloved, lying yet unburied, she would not dwell upon the passion of another.

She took Edith's hand, and the two women sat down side by side, shedding tears together, rather from a sense of the general woe and bitterness of life than for poignant grief for the present calamity. It was not much they said at first. Neither was of the talkative order of women, finding comfort in the mere utterance of words. They grew together, sustained by giving and receiving tenderness, and each tacitly asking and according forgiveness for unfriendly feelings in the past. It is probable, too, that Edith, heavy with the disappointments of her married life, found relief in being able to weep unrestrainedly, even though the true source of her tears was not the obvious one.

"I never loved him," Helen said of her husband. "After we separated we became friends, rather because of a common past when we were both strangers here, than from any fitness for each other. But he was once my husband."

Her friend pressed her hand in silence.

"We had a child," Helen spoke again; "a little daughter. She only lived one day. If she had not gone it might have been different. At least we should have kept on together. My poor little baby!"

Edith's eyes were full of tears, as she answered softly:

"I hope you will let me say that I believe she is waiting for you some where."

"She must be," the mother responded quickly. "Whatever one doubts, one must surely believe that. I could not lose her! She is mine, wherever in the universe she may be."

"Yes," was all Edith ventured in reply. "I am sure of it."

They gave no heed to the fading day, but sat with clasped hands until twilight had gathered, and it occurred at last to Mrs. Fenton that her husband and dinner must be awaiting her. Helen had been telling of her plans.

"I shall go abroad," she said, "I want to study in Rome; I want to meet great men; to be influenced by great works. I have been thinking of it for a long time, and now it seems as if some ties that held me here are broken, for we often obey claims which we yet deny. And besides," she added, in a lower tone, "it is a flight from temptation. I am in danger here."

"In danger?" Edith asked wonderingly.

"Only from myself," was the reply, "but that peril is sufficiently imminent to make me afraid."

Edith questioned no further, and to the true import of these words she had no clue. She looked at her friend a moment inquiringly and musingly, but as Helen did not continue, she rose to go.

"I must get home now," she said, in a tone so tender that it seemed to beg pardon for this abandonment. "Arthur is waiting for me and his dinner; and if he doesn't get the latter at least, I won't answer for the consequences. Mr. Calvin was with him when I came away."

"Mr. Peter Calvin!" exclaimed the other, in some surprise.

"Yes; he has bought one of Arthur's pictures, and he wants Arthur to propose him at the St. Filipe Club, I believe."

She spoke in perfect ignorance of the tumult her words excited in her hearer's mind. Long after Edith was gone Helen sat looking out into the darkening sky and thinking of Arthur Fenton. She had heard him talk too often about Mr. Peter Calvin not to know what was implied by this new friendship. Mr. Peter Calvin had been for years the head and front of Boston Philistinism in art. He had been the patron of subservient artists; the chairman of committees for the purchase of public statues; an elegant writer upon such live and timely topics as _Plaster Casting among the Egyptians, Notes upon Abyssinian Statues_, while his monograph upon the question, _What Was the Original Cost of the Venus de Milo?_ had by his flatterers been pronounced the masterpiece of all known art essays for power and critical research. His was a prominent name upon the covers of dilettante art journals; it was he who effectually crushed young and too daringly independent artists; who repressed impertinent originality; who headed the hosts of conventionality against individuality or genius which held itself above the established canons of antiquated tradition. He was the High Priest of Boston conservatism; the presiding genius of Philistia; and until the St. Filipe Club entered a protest against him by refusing to admit him to membership, his power had scarcely received a blow.

Tom Bently always insisted, with much profanity, that Mr. Peter Calvin was a joke.

"He writes with tremendous pomposity," Tom would say, "and he is in no end of societies for molly-coddling art. He goes on, too, about the plaster casts at that hospital for decrepit gods, the Art Museum, as if his whole soul was in the plaster barrels of the Greeks. But bless your soul! It's only his little joke. He doesn't really mean any thing by it. He's only a stupendous joke himself."

The Pagans, so far as they were to be regarded as an entity, represented the protest of the artistic soul against shams. They stood for sincerity above everything; for utter honesty in art, in life, in manners and morals alike. To them Philistinism was the substitution of convention for conviction. For the spirit of imitation, of blind subservience to authority, the Pagans had no tolerance. While they held themselves always open to conviction, they refused assent to any thing which was offered them _ex cathedra_; they devoted themselves to art with a passion of enthusiasm which was in itself the highest expression of their principles. That they seemed often iconoclastic was in reality less the result of their hatred of authority than the prevalence of unreasoning, and therefore by their standards necessarily insincere, adherence to established formulae. Dogmas they hated, not because they were popularly received, but because although they had been vital realities to their originators, they had become in time mere lifeless forms, held in reverence by blind devotees long after the soul had gone out of them.