Chapter 3

Too honorable to betray her, he had meant to make the model his wife, and was betrothed to her with a solemnity of which he was keenly reminded to-day by the ring which she still wore upon her finger. Circumstances had convinced him, however, that Ninitta was deceiving him, and that she preferred the artist Hoffmeir, his best friend. To break off both engagement and friendship without listening to a word of explanation, to leave Rome and Italy, were comparatively easy for a passionate man stung to the quick by a double treachery. To forget was more difficult, and although a thousand times had Herman assured himself that he had extinguished the last spark of emotion concerning this episode, the faintest breath of an old memory was still sufficient to rekindle some seemingly dead ember. To-day, holding in his hand the letter from his lost friend which removed all his doubts, he saw that instead of being injured he had himself been cruel and unjust; he felt the full anguish of having committed an irreparable fault. We may outlive our past; its sorrows we may forget, its wrongs we may forgive, we may even smile at its crushed hopes, ambitions and loves with scarcely a tinge of bitterness; but that which we have been stings us ever with the burning pain of an undying remorse. It is not what we have done which awakens our deepest self-scorn; it is the fact that we were this which made it possible for us to do it. To feel that he had been capable of the cruelty of abandoning his betrothed and of wounding his closest friend, merely from a groundless suspicion, was to Grant Herman a pain never to be wholly outlived.

Nor was he without a teasing pain, through a less noble trait in his nature, from the consciousness that he had loved Ninitta. Once the fires of love have burned out, any mortal is apt to be lost in amazed wonderment how they were ever kindled; and that it was hard for Grant Herman, at thirty-five, to understand how Grant Herman, at twenty-seven, could have adored an Italian peasant model is not so without precedent as to be wholly incomprehensible.

Ninitta had been a good girl, his thoughts ran, was doubtless so still; her figure was enchanting, he would have been no sculptor had he failed to appreciate that; he had been a boy, a foolish youngster to be dizzied by a rushing of the blood to his head; but to make her his wife now----

"Ninitta," he said, suddenly, breaking off from his thoughts into words, "I am not well to-day: come to-morrow. Are you comfortably settled in town? Do you need money?"

"No," she answered, rising, "I do not want money."

She went slowly down the studio without further word, only turning back as she passed Bently's picture for which she had posed, and which had been brought for the meeting of the Pagans.

"You have seen," she said, "I am able to earn. I have learned much while I was bringing you that letter. Across the world is a long way. No; I have no need of money."

VII.

IN WAY OF TASTE. Troilus and Cressida; iii.--3.

Grant Herman's studio, in which the Pagans met that night, was in its way no less unique than the company there gathered. It was a great, misshapen place, narrow, half a hundred feet long, and disproportionately high, with undressed brick walls and cement floor. The upper half of one of the end walls was taken up with large windows, before which were drawn dingy curtains. Here and there about the place were scattered modeling stands, water tanks mounted upon rude tripods, casts, and the usual lumber of a sculptor's studio; while upon the walls were stuck pictures, sketches, and reproductions in all sorts of capricious groupings.

In one corner a flight of stairs led to a gallery high up against the wall, over the rude railing of which looked the heads of a couple of legless statues. From this gallery the stairs continued to ascend until a door near the roof was reached, leading to unknown regions well up in the building behind which the studio had been built as an afterthought. On shelves were confusedly disposed dusty bits of bronze, plaster, coarse pottery and rare glass; things valueless and things beyond price standing in careless fellowship. A canvas of Corot looked down upon a grotesque, grimacing Japanese idol, a beautiful bronze reproduction of a vase by Michael Angelo stood shoulder to shoulder with a bean-pot full of tobacco; a crumpled cravat was thrown carelessly over the arm of a dancing faun, while a cluster of Barye's matchless animals were apparently making their way with great difficulty through a collection of pipes, broken modeling tools, faded flowers and loose papers. Every where it was evident that the studio of Herman differed from heaven in at least its first law.

Quite in keeping with the picturesque, richly stored room, was the group of men walking about the place or seated near the rough table upon which refreshments were placed. On this table were a couple of splendid punch-bowls of antique cut glass, which, if not full now, had unmistakable marks of having been so earlier in the evening. A coarse dish of yellow earthen ware beside them held an ample supply of biscuits, and was in turn flanked by a couple of plates of cheese. Fruit, beer, and tobacco in various forms, with abundant glasses and pipes, completed the furnishing of the board, upon which a newspaper supplied the place of a cloth.

Tom Bently's long, shapely limbs were disposed in a big easy-chair by the table, his tongue being just now employed in one of his not infrequent harangues upon art, his remarks being plentifully spiced with profanity.

"Whatever crazy ideas on art," Bently was saying, "aren't good for any thing else have to be put into a book. The surest recommendation in art circles is getting out a book or giving a rubbishy lecture. Every woman who has painted a few bunches of flowers or daubed a little pottery, writes a book to tell how she did it; as if it were the most astonishing thing in the world."

"Women are very like hens," interpolated Fenton; "they always cackle most over the smallest egg."

"If any one of the crew," continued Bently, "could appreciate a fiftieth part of the suggestions in a single sketch of an old master, she might have something to write about."

"But then she would know enough to keep still," said Rangely.

"Oh, a woman never knows enough to keep still," Bently retorted. "It is damned amusing to hear the average American----"

A chorus of protestations arose.

"We'll have nothing about the 'Average American,' Bently!"

"Start somebody else on his hobby," suggested Ainsworth; "that's the only way to choke Bently off. Where's Fenton? I never knew him quiet for so long in my life."

Arthur had been watching his companions and smoking in silence. He smiled brilliantly at Ainsworth's challenge.

"I'm overwhelmed by Bently's oaths," he said. "He outdoes himself to-night."

"When it comes time for Tom's epitaph," observed Rangely, "I shall suggest that it be a dash."

"Why do you swear so?" inquired Ainsworth. "Don't you think it in execrable taste?"

"Taste?" laughed Bently. "Yes; it's so far above all taste as to be a--sight higher and bigger."

"I make a distinction," Herman put in good naturedly, "between swearing and blasphemy; and Tom never blasphemes. His cursing is all in the interest of the highest virtues."

"Profanity is like smoking," added Tom. "Every thing depends upon how you do it. The English, for instance, smoke for the brutality of the thing; they never have any of the French _finesse,_ and their smoking is nothing less than a crime. But as the Arabs smoke it is one of the loftiest virtues; there's something godlike about it.

"It is from smoking," Fenton chimed in, "that the Orientals learned how to treat women; for a woman is like tobacco, the aroma should be enjoyed and the ashes thrown away."

"By George!" exclaimed one of the Pagans, moved by some rare compunction to remember that he had a wife at home, "that's infamous, Arthur."

"It is my belief," observed Ainsworth deliberately, "that Fenton lies awake nights to invent beastly things to say about women, and when he gets something that he thinks is smart he throws it into the conversation any where, without the slightest regard to whether it fits or not."

"What makes you so bitter against women?" asked Bently.

"Yes," added Rangely, with mock deprecation. "Why do you want to annihilate the sex? What harm have women ever done to you?"

"Oh," retorted the artist, "it is on theoretical principles, purely. I adore that masculine ideal which man calls woman, but only finds in his brain. The highest on earth is reached only by the absolute elimination of the feminine. Ah! man is at his best in war," he went on, his attitude becoming less studied and more forcible, as he allowed his intellectual interest to overpower his vanity; "there he is all masculine; man without the limitations that the presence of woman imposes upon him. There woman is ignored, and even if she has been the cause of the war--and to be the cause of war is woman's noblest prerogative!--she is for the time being as completely forgotten as if she had never existed. She slips into oblivion as does the horn of grog which gives his courage."

Fenton was in a mood when he fancied he was talking well, a conviction which was not always an accurate measure of the real worth of his remarks. He delighted in presenting half truths in forcible phraseology, relishing the taste of an epigram quite without reference to its verity. He amused himself and his friends with talk more or less brilliant, of which no one knew better than himself the fallacy, but whose cleverness atoned with him for all defects. The intellectual excitement of giving free rein to his fancy and his tongue was dangerously pleasant to Arthur, who often more than half convinced himself of the verity of his extravagant theories, and oftener still involved himself in their defense by yielding to the mere whim of phrasing them effectively.

"You are on your high horse to-night, Fenton," cried Rangely, "you make no more of a metaphor than a racer of a hurdle."

"Don't stop him," Ainsworth said. "Let him run the course out now he's on the track."

"When man comes into his kingdom," Fenton broke out again, too fully aroused to mind the banter, yet with a sort of double consciousness enjoying the absurdity of the whole conversation, "when man comes into his kingdom, when we get to the perfection of the race, there will be no women. The ultimate man will be masculine--men, only men; gloriously and eternally masculine!" "But how will the race perpetuate itself?" asked Tom in as matter of fact a tone as he might have inquired the time of day.

"Perpetuate itself!" blazed the other. "The race will not need to perpetuate itself. The world will be peopled with gods! When once women are gone the race will have become immortal!"

A shout of mingled applause and derision greeted this outburst, amid which Fenton threw himself back in a lounging chair and lighted a fresh cigar. He was intoxicated with himself, and few draughts are more dangerous.

"Take to the lecture platform, Fenton," jeered Ainsworth. "You'll make your mark in the world yet."

"I wonder you stopped at immortality," remarked Fred Rangely. "You usually go on to dispose of the future state."

"Impossible," retorted the artist, "for you never heard me say I believed in one."

"That's a fact," confessed the other, "but you insist so emphatically that women have no moral sense that your philosophy certainly would dispose of them if it allow any future state."

"For my part," declared Herman, "I've heard Fenton talk nonsense as long as I want to; let's look at the pictures."

An informal exhibition had been arranged, consisting of pictures loaned by friends, and including several by members of the club. The most important of the latter was a gypsy which Bently had just completed, and which exhibited that artist's defects and excellences in the emphatic manner usual with his productions. The _motif_ was better than the _technique_, but Bently's splendid feeling for color somehow carried him through, and made the picture not only striking but rich and suggestive.

"If you could learn to draw, Tom," Fenton said, as they stood looking at it, "you'd be the biggest man in America."

"Is that the new model you were talking about?" asked Rangely.

"Yes," Bently answered. "Isn't she a stunner?"

"I thought that shoulder was something new," put in Fenton. "The girl poses well; trust a woman with shoulders like that to know how to display them."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Grant Herman in sudden and rare irritation, "can you never have done slurring at women? Didn't you have a mother? In heaven's name let some woman escape your tongue for her sake!"

Such an outburst from their host produced a profound sensation upon the Pagans. The most tolerant of men, he was accustomed to listen to their wholesale denunciations of all things with a good natured smile, contenting himself with a calm contradiction now and then. Proverbial for his patience and good temper, he produced the greater sensation now when he gave vent to his anger upon a subject which not only Fenton but every guest present usually considered fair game.

"I'm sorry I vexed you, Herman," Fenton said, turning to him after a moment's silence, "but however much I've abused women, you never heard me blackguard a woman in your life."

"You are right," the sculptor replied, catching the other's slender hand in his stalwart grasp. "I beg your pardon. I'm out of sorts, I suppose, or I shouldn't be quarreling like a Christian. Let's brew a new bowl and drink to Pagan harmony."

VIII.

THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE. Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.--7.

After the Pagans had separated that night Fred Rangely lingered in Herman's studio.

The sculptor somehow found it possible to be more frank with Rangely than with any other of his companions, and although there was a difference of some half a dozen in the count of their years, and perhaps more in their ages as measured by experiences, Herman's strong but naturally stormy nature found much pleasure in the calm philosophy of his friend.

Scarcely were the two men alone, when Rangely turned to his host and demanded abruptly:

"Now, I want to know, Grant, what in the devil is the matter with you to-night? What set you out to pitch into Fenton so?"

Herman poured out a glass of wine and swallowed it before replying.

"Because I am a damned idiot!" he retorted savagely. "I'm all shaken up, Fred; and the worst of it is that I don't see any way out of the snare I'm in."

"It isn't real trouble, I hope."

"Isn't it! By Jove!" cried the sculptor, "the more honest a man is in this world the worse off he is. If I hadn't had a conscience when I was a young fellow, I should be all right now. Who is it--Fenton?--that is always saying that he asks forgiveness for his virtues and thanks the gods for every vice he can cultivate?"

"Well," Rangely remarked, filling a pipe, and curiously surveying his companion, who was raging up and down the studio, "you don't seem to be in an especially cheerful and enlivening frame of mind; that's a fact. If a fellow can be of any help, call on; if not, at least try to take it a little more gently for the sake of your friends."

"Do any thing?" retorted the other. "No; there's nothing to be done. I'm a fool."

"Even that disease has been remedied before now," Rangely said coolly; "though usually experience and time are necessary to the cure."

"I'll tell you the whole story," Herman exclaimed, flinging himself into a chair. "It is all simple enough. It is always simple enough to tangle things up so that Lucifer himself cannot unsnarl them. When I was in Rome I was in love--crazily, gushingly in love, you understand, like a big schoolboy--with a girl I found in Capri. She was a good little thing, with a figure like Helen's; that's what did the business for me. I coaxed her to Rome to be my model, and then that infernal conscience of mine made me ask her to marry me. I could have done any thing I liked with her; I knew that; she had nobody to look after her but a half sister who paid about as much attention to her as if she had been a grasshopper. But the infernal New England Puritanism in my blood wouldn't let me hurt her."

"And somebody else wasn't so scrupulous?" asked the listener as his friend paused in his story.

"You think so?" returned Herman eagerly. "Then I wasn't so unutterably a scoundrel for thinking so, too, was I? I did doubt her; I had reason to. She posed for a friend of mine, a painter; you know, of course--Hang it! What's the use of going into all the details. I was poor as a church mouse or she shouldn't have done it at all, even for him. The gist of the story is that I was jealous and flew out at both of them, and left Rome in a rage!"

The two men sat in silence for some moments. Rangely puffed vigorously at his pipe, while his companion stared savagely into the shadows in the further end of the studio. Neither looked at the other; the hearer appreciated too well the shame-facedness by which these unusual confidences must be accompanied. From some distant steeple a clock was faintly heard striking two.

"And to-day," Herman at length began again in an altered voice, "to-day she came here. She has followed me all these years, going through heaven knows what experiences and hardships, to bring me the proof that I was a madman blinded by groundless jealousy, and that instead of being wronged I cursedly abused both her and poor dead old Hoffmeir."

Again there came an interval of silence. A lamp flickered and went out with a muffled sound. The thoughts of both men were of that formless character scarcely to be distinguished from emotions; on the one hand sad and remorseful, on the other sympathetic and pitiful.

"Well?" Rangely ventured after a time.

"But what shall I do?" demanded Herman. "I cannot marry her."

"No, of course not. She cannot expect it after banging about the world."

"Oh, it isn't that," the other said hastily. "She is as good and as pure as when I left her; at least I believe so. And she does expect it."

"She does expect it!" echoed his friend. "Ah!"

The reception of a confidence is a most delicate ordeal through which few people come unscathed. Rare individuals are born with the ready sympathies, quick apprehension, and exquisite tact needful; but the vast majority are sure to wound their friends if the latter ever venture to approach with their armor of reticence laid wholly aside.

Although perhaps not the ideal confidant, Rangely was sympathetic and possessed of at least sufficient discretion to avoid comment until he knew the whole situation and was sure that his opinion was desired. He was still unable fully to understand his friend's agitation, the task of disposing of an old sweetheart in so inferior a position not appearing to his easy-going nature a matter sufficiently difficult to warrant so deep disquiet.

Precisely the clew that he needed the sculptor had not given, but he was endeavoring to overcome his repugnance to disclosing his most secret feelings. Every word cost him an effort, but he went on with a savage sense of doing penance by the self-inflicted torture.

"Yes," he repeated, "she expects it. Why shouldn't she, poor thing? She has not changed, and she does not understand that I may have altered."

"And you have?"

Grant Herman looked up and down the great studio, now growing dusky from the burning out of candles here and there. An antique lamp which was lighted only on special occasions stood where the breeze came to it from the high window, and the flame, wind-swept, smoked and flared. Through the silence the listener's ear could detect a faint sound of the tide washing against the piles of the wharf outside.

The sculptor started up suddenly and stood firmly, throwing back his splendid head and shoulders, and looking straight into the eyes of his friend.

"Yes," he said in a clear, low voice. "I have changed. I---There is some one else."

"Life," remarked Rangely, with seeming irrelevancy, "life is a fallacy."

"I'd like to be honorable," Herman continued, "but how can I? It is impossible to be honest to both her and myself. If I hadn't had any scruples, then---Bah! What a beast I am! Poor Ninitta."

Still Rangely smoked in silence, and the sculptor went on again.

"It has always been my creed that when a man has allowed a woman to love him--much more, made her love him, as I did--he is a black-hearted knave to let a change in himself wreck her happiness. Now I am put to the test."

"And the other one?" asked Rangely. "Does she know that you care for her?"

"I have never said so to her. Heaven only knows how much she feels by intuition. A man always fancies that the woman he loves can tell."

"That may depend something on how often you see her." "I see her nearly every day. She is my pupil."

"Mrs. Greyson?"

"Yes," Herman said, a little defiantly, as if now the secret was told he challenged the right of another man to share it.

"Is she a widow?"

"Yes," the other answered, with no perceptible pause, and yet between the question and his reply had come to him the swift remembrance that he really knew nothing of his pupil's life or history, and had simply taken it for granted that her husband was not living. "Arthur Fenton brought her here," he added, rather thinking aloud than answering any point of Rangely's query. "He was an old friend of her husband."

"But what will you do with the other?"

Instead of replying Herman got up from the seat into which he had flung himself, and went about the studio putting out the lights.

"Go home," he said with a whimsical smile. "I'm sure I don't know what we are talking about at this time of the morning. As for what I shall do--Well, time will show; I am as ignorant as yourself on the subject."

IX.

VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE. Comedy of Errors; ii.--i.

It suited Fenton's whim next morning to dine with Mrs. Greyson. He had established the habit of dropping in when he chose, always sure of a welcome, and always sure, too, of a listener to the tirades in which he was fond of indulging. If Helen did not always accord him agreement, she at least gave attention, and he cared rather to talk than to convince.

His aesthetic taste, moreover, was gratified by the pretty breakfast table; and he was not without a subtle sense of pleasure in the beauty and harmonious dress of his hostess, who possessed the rare charm of contriving to be always well attired. This morning she wore a gown of russet cashmere with here and there knots of dull gold ribbon, which tint formed a pleasing link between the stuff and the color of her clear skin.

"It is good of you to come," she said, as she poured his coffee. "There are so few days left before you will have married a wife and cannot come. I shall miss you very much."

"Why do you persist in talking in that way?"

Fenton returned. "I'm not going out of the country or out of the world. You could not take a more absolute farewell if I were about to be cremated."

"You do not know," replied she, smiling. "However, I am glad you are to be married. It will do you good. You need a wife, if you do dread matrimony so much."

"It is abominable," he observed deliberately, "to talk as I do. Of course I do not mind what you choose to think of me; or rather I am sure you will not misunderstand."

"I do not," Mrs. Greyson interpolated significantly.

"But it seems a reflection upon Miss Caldwell," he continued, answering her interruption only by a grimace, "for me to discourse of marriage just as I do. It isn't because I'm not fond of her. It is my protest against the absurd and false way in which society regards marriage; in a word against marriage itself."