Chapter 4

Mrs. Greyson understood Arthur Fenton as well as any woman can understand a man who is her friend. Her friendship softened the harshness of her judgments, but she could not be blind to his vanity, his constant efforts at self-deception, and so far as she was in possession of the facts, she reasoned correctly in regard to his approaching marriage.

"No," she said calmly, "it isn't even that. You talk partly for the sake of saying things that sound effective, and partly because you are morbid from over introspection. If you were vicious, I should say you did it as an atonement. Many people would not understand you, but as I do, it is harmless for you to talk to me."

"Introspective? Of course. Can any body help being that in this age? And as for being morbid--it all depends upon definitions. I try to be honest with myself."

"The subtlest form of hypocrisy," she answered, "often consists in what we call being honest with ourselves. I gave that up long ago. You are not honest with yourself about this marriage. If you don't wish to marry Miss Caldwell, who forces you to do so?"

"Forces me to? Good heavens! I do wish to marry her. Of course I don't ever expect to be perfectly happy. In this inexplicable world natures that demand that every thing shall be explained must necessarily remain unsatisfied. Still, I'd take a little more coffee as a palliation of my lot, if you please."

"It is well you are to marry," observed Helen, refilling his cup. "You've concentrated your attention upon yourself too long."

"But I am afraid of poverty. If I find some old Boston duffer with a lot of money, and can fool him into admiring the frame of one of my pictures, he may buy it, and I can pay the butcher, the baker and the gas man for a week. If I can't, I must daub the canvas a little higher and try the same game in New York, and--"

"Rubbish!" she interrupted. "The difficulty is, you are too self-indulgent. You are too much afraid of the little discomforts."

"No," he answered; "men--at least sensitive men--do not suffer so much from the discomforts of poverty as from its indignities."

"If--" began Helen; but without finishing, she rose from the table, went to the window and stood looking out.

Fenton watched her idly, knowing perfectly that the woman before him was capable of sacrificing for him all the little income which was her's; and he wondered, as men will, how deep her feeling for him had really become, and whether it had ever passed that mysterious and undefinable line which separates love from friendship.

Helen had often endeavored to assist the artist out of some financial difficulty by buying one of his unsellable pictures, a pretext which he had the grace to put aside by refusing to sell, sometimes sending her as a gift precisely the work for which he could most easily find a purchaser. There was continually a silent struggle, more or less consciously carried on between the two, although seldom appearing upon the surface. Too much Fenton's friend not to be pained by his weaknesses, Helen was stung to the quick by a certain insincerity which she often detected alike beneath his raillery and his cynicism. Too noble to yield to any belief in a friend's unworthiness without resistance, she suffered anew whenever his words seemed to ring false, and now there were tears in her eyes as she looked out into the sunny street. She pressed them firmly back, however, and turned a calm face towards her guest, who sat playing with his spoon and watching her with a half troubled, half amused expression.

"I've composed my epitaph," he said irrelevantly. "Will you please compose my monument."

"Oh, willingly. But it will be necessary to know the epitaph, so that the monument may express the same sentiment."

"I shall have no name," Arthur returned. "Only-- _L'homme est mort. Soit_. How does that strike you?"

"Ah," she cried impulsively, "how does any thing strike me? You play at being wretched as sentimental school girls do, when in their case it is slate pencils and pickled limes and in your case it is vanity. If you were half as miserable as you pretend, you'd have blown your brains out long ago, or deemed yourself the veriest craven alive. I've no patience with such attitudinizing."

"You are partly right," he admitted, "but do any of us find the savor of life so sweet as to make it worth while?"

Something in his voice, a ring of what might be pity in his tone, humiliated Helen. She suspected that he thought her outburst arose from a too great fondness for himself, for grief at parting and at giving him up to another. She struggled to regain her calmness; she felt the impossibility of contradicting the belief which she was sure existed in his mind; she was conscious that to say, "I do not love you," would appear to him proof incontrovertible that the reverse was true. Her throat contracted painfully and she cast down her eyes lest the tears in them should be seen.

"The Caffres," Fenton continued, after an instant's pause, "are said to be so fond of sugar that they will eat a handful of sand rather than lose a grain or two that has fallen to the ground; it seems to me life is the sand and joy in the proportion of the sugar. I'm not willing to take the sand, and I protest against it. There is no morality in it."

"There is no morality in any thing but death," Helen returned drearily.

"Death!" echoed Fenton. "Do you call that moral! Death that crushes the emotions, that kills the passions, that pollutes the flesh; the monster which debauches all that is sacred in the physical, that degrades to the level of the lowest all that is high in the intellectual--is this your idea of the moral? The coarsest rioting of sensual life is sacred beside it. Death moral? _Mon Dieu_, Helen, how you do abuse terms!"

Fenton was continually treading upon the dangerous edge between pathos and bathos, between impressiveness and absurdity. Had he not possessed extremely sensitive perceptions which enabled him to judge swiftly and exactly of the effect of his declamations, and the keenest sense of the ludicrous that helped him to turn into ridicule whatever could not be made to pass for earnest, much of his extravagant talk would have excited amusement and, not impossibly, contempt, instead of producing the half serious effect he desired. He could impart a vast air of sincerity to his speech, moreover, and could even for the moment be sincere. In the present case his earnest and real feeling saved this outburst from the somewhat theatrical air which the words might easily have had if spoken at all artificially.

"The history of mankind," went on the artist, in a sort of two-fold consciousness, deeply feeling on the one hand what he was saying, but on the other endeavoring to direct the conversation to generalities in which would be lost the dangerous personal remarks which threatened, "the whole history of mankind is a protest against death as an insult, an outrage. All religions are only mankind's defiance of death more or less largely phrased."

"No," Helen said. "Not our defiance; our confession of a craven fear. I am afraid of death. I don't dare take my life."

"We are talking," responded her companion, in his turn leaving the table and approaching the window, "like a couple of unmitigated ghouls. I acknowledge your right to put aside your life if it bores you; man has at least that one inalienable right. But why should you? Art is left still."

"Art," she repeated with profound sadness; "yes, but a woman is never content with abstractions. She demands something more definite. And, by the way, Will came to see me yesterday."

"Yes! What did he want?"

"He said he only came to see how I was. I think he recognizes that now he has come from Europe our secret is sure to leak out soon, and is looking the ground over to see how it is best to behave. He was very entertaining; I never enjoyed him more thoroughly."

"He's a model husband," Fenton observed thoughtfully. "As well as you like each other, I'll be hanged if I can see why you don't live like other people."

"It is precisely because we don't live like other people," was the reply, "that we do like each other so well. We are the best of friends; we were the worst possible husband and wife. I hated him officially, and---There! Why must you bring all that up again? Let the dead past bury its dead."

"But the past won't bury its dead. It sits over their corpses like a persistent resurrectionist, in a fashion which is irresistibly disheartening. Did it never strike you, by the way, what a droll caricature might be made on that line? Time as a decrepit old sexton, you know."

"So few people can joke on those subjects that it would appeal to a very limited audience, I'm afraid."

"Oh, that's true of every thing that is good for any thing."

"Unfortunately the converse is not true, for every thing appealing to a small audience is by no means good."

"Not even marriage?"

"Still harping on matrimony," said Helen, laughing. "What will you do after the knot is really tied? You speak in the mournful tone of one who reads _'Lasciate ogni speranza'_ upon his wedding horseshoe."

"Oh, not quite," he laughed back, "for after marriage a man can always amuse himself, you know, by looking at any woman he may meet and fancying how much worse off he might be if he had married her instead of his wife."

"Well," Helen remarked, turning, "your conversation is amusing and doubtless deeply instructive, but I must go to the studio. My bas-relief will hardly complete itself, I suppose, and I've a splendid offer for it, to decorate a house in Milton. It is to be paneled into the side of an oak stairway at the back of the main hall. Isn't that fine?"

X.

O, WICKED WIT AND GIFT. Hamlet; i.--5.

Anomalies are doubtless as truly the product of law as results whose logic is evident, and the strange relations between Mrs. Greyson and her husband were therefore to be considered the outcome of fixed causes from which no other result was possible.

Married when scarcely more than a girl, shy, undeveloped and ignorant of the world, Helen came from a secluded life, which had been pretty equally divided between the library of her dead father and the woods surrounding the country village where she lived. She had never even fancied that she loved Dr. Ashton; but she had married him as she would have obeyed any other command of the stern aunt who had presided severely over her orphaned childhood. He, half-a-dozen years her senior, had been enamored of her wonderful beauty and modest intellectuality; and, being accustomed always to gratify the impulse of the moment, he had married her with a precipitancy as characteristic as it was reckless. It was owing to a certain mutual scorn of conventionalities that Helen and her husband at length decided to separate. Without the aid of the law and without scandal, they settled back into single liberty, the wife taking again her father's name. They had spent their married life abroad, where Dr. Ashton had remained until a short time previous to the opening of our story, and as neither husband nor wife had been in their single life known in Boston, and as Helen was chary of new acquaintances, their relations had thus far remained undiscovered. Helen, at least, recognized how improbable it was that this secrecy would long remain inviolate, but she went quietly on her way, letting events take their own course.

Arthur Fenton was an old friend of her husband whom Helen had met in Europe, but had known intimately only during her Boston life. She had found him sympathetic, responsive and entertaining, and as any lonely woman clings to the companionship of an appreciative man, she had clung to the friendship and comradeship of the artist.

Going across the Common towards the studio on this sunny morning, when the air was brisk and bracing, the naked trees clearly and delicately defined against the sky, Helen's thoughts went back to her past; to her shy, secluded girlhood, to the years of her married life, and to the way in which she had been living since she and her husband parted. She reflected with a smile, half pity, half contempt, of the proud, reticent girl who had pored over books and drawings in the musty, deserted library at home, almost wondering if she were the same being. She looked from the Joy Street mall across the hollow which holds the Frog Pond, the most charming view on the Common, yet not even the golden sparkle of the water or the beautiful line of the slope beyond could chase from her mind the picture of the high, dim old room, lined to the ceiling with book-shelves, dingy and dusty from neglect. She seemed to hear still the weird tapping of the beech-tree boughs against the tall narrow windows, and still to smell odor of old leather; she remembered vividly the dull dizziness that came from stooping too long over some volume too heavy to hold, above which, half lying upon the carpetless floor, she had bent with drooping golden curls. She remembered, too, the remoteness of the real world from the ideal sphere in which her fancy placed her; how unimportant and unsubstantial to her had appeared the events of daily life as compared with the incidents of the world the old books in the musty library opened to her. The life of these magic tomes was the real, and that humdrum state through which her visible pathway lay was the dream. To the imaginative girl, half child, half poet, her marriage had prospectively seemed merely an accident of the trivial outside existence which surrounded without penetrating her true being; and the sharpness of the rude awakening from this childish misconception still pierced the woman's proud soul.

No woman recalls her childhood without regret, and despite the philosophy she had cultivated, Helen felt a deep sadness as the old days, somber and dull though they had been, rose before her. She hurried her step a little as if to escape her past, when a pleasant voice at her elbow said:

"Good morning, Helen. Upon what wickedness are you bent now. You go too fast to be on a good errand."

"Good morning, Will," she answered, without turning, for the voice brought the speaker before her mental vision as plainly as her eyes could have done. "I was just thinking of you, and of the days when you found me at home."

"Yes," responded Dr. Ashton, "what were you thinking of them?"

"Nothing very pleasant," she answered with a sigh. "What a gorgeous day it is. Arthur has been breakfasting with me."

"Arthur is going to be married," remarked her companion good humoredly. "I've just been out to buy him a wedding present."

"What is it?"

"Oh, something he chose himself. It is not safe to tell you, though."

"Haven't I proved my discretion?" Helen said lightly. "I thought that by this time you'd be willing to trust me with your most deadly secrets."

"This is a deadly secret, indeed," he returned, taking from his pocket a small morocco case.

"Oh, jewelry," Helen said, with an accent of disappointment. "I should never have suspected you of such commonplaceness, Will."

"Not jewelry; a jewel," retorted Dr. Ashton, opening the case and displaying a tiny vial.

"Will!" Helen exclaimed, stopping suddenly and catching her husband by the arm, "you won't give him that?"

"Why not? I promised him long ago that I'd get it for him, and he particularly asked for it as a wedding gift."

"Oh, Will; don't do it! He'll use it sometime when he's blue; he'll----"

"Nonsense," responded the physician, restoring the case to his pocket. "I've diagnosed his case perfectly. He isn't very robust, he's infernally sensitive, and he's no end morbid. He fancies he may want to kill himself, and I dare say he will have leanings that way. Most of us do. He has wanted to a good many times before now, and he is likely to again, but he won't do it. He's too soft-hearted. He might get up steam enough as far as courage goes, but he'd never forget other people and their opinion. He couldn't bear to hurt others, and still less could he bear the idea of their blaming him. He is precisely the man who cannot take his own life."

"But what puts it into his head just now? Why should he marry if he dreads it so?"

"It is all of a piece with his morbidness. He is really in love with Miss Caldwell, I think, but he has brooded over the matter as he broods over every thing, and seeing the uncertain nature of matrimony, he like a wise man provides for contingencies. There may be something behind that I don't know of, but I think not. He'll feel easier if he has this, and I am honestly doing him a favor, if it isn't in the way he thinks."

"I do not know," persisted Helen, "but I do wish you wouldn't do it. How would his bride feel if she knew?"

"I don't know her," Dr. Ashton returned coolly, "so of course I can't tell how sensible she is; but in any case I can trust Arthur's discretion."

"She's orthodox," said Helen, "or, no, I think she is not so bad as that; but she would regard the idea of suicide as unspeakably wicked. At least I think so; I never saw her but once. Oh, I do hate to have Arthur marry her. It's dreadful!"

"Of course; it's dreadful to think of any man's marrying, for that matter," he returned with a smile, "but he is a man who was sure to do it sooner or later."

"He's a man of so much principle," Helen mused, half aloud.

"Principle," sneered her companion laughingly, "principle is only formulated policy."

"I am dreadfully tired of epigrams," sighed Helen as they walked down West street. "Whether Arthur learned the habit of you or you of him I don't know; but the pair of you are enough to corrupt all Boston. I do wish you'd give me that case. I'm sure I need it far more than Arthur does. He's going to be married, his pictures are praised and are beginning to sell, he has life before him and every thing to live for, while I have nothing."

"Life is before you, too," answered her husband gravely, putting his hand upon her arm to prevent her flying under the wheels of a carriage which in her absorption she had not noticed. "Look here, Helen; it wouldn't be any better if Arthur wanted to marry you. You are too melancholy alone without having him to push you deeper into the slough of despond."

"You are mistaken, Will," was the quiet response. "I am fond of Arthur, very fond, indeed; but not in that way. I am a fool to grieve about his marriage; I own that, though after all I've lived through I ought to be too hardened to care. But you must acknowledge that it isn't very pleasant for me to see him deliberately going away to marry a woman who would consider me a Bohemian, and very likely anything but respectable, because you and I choose to be comfortable apart instead of miserable together. If I were not so utterly alone in the world, losing a friend would not be so great a matter, perhaps; but he is all I have now, Will."

"It is hard, old lady; that's a fact. I wish I could straighten things out for you, but I don't see how I can."

"No," Helen said drearily, "nobody can."

XI.

WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED. Comedy of Errors; i.--I.

Upon entering the small studio where her bas-relief stood, Helen found Herman there before her. He had removed the wet cloths from the clay and was examining the work with close attention.

"You need a model for this figure," he said, indicating the month of May. "You must take that turn of the shoulder from nothing but life."

Helen came and stood beside him, looking at the work. The instinct of the artist for the moment superseded all other feelings in her mind, and she forgot alike her own troubles and the ill-omened gift with which her husband purposed remembering the nuptials of her friend.

The figure of May of which Herman spoke was that of a beautiful young girl casting backward a wistful look at the fallen flowers which she had dropped but might not stay to gather up again. The splendid movement of the youthful figure, thrown forward in her running, but with one shoulder turned toward the spectator, so that the upper portion of the beautiful bosom was seen, formed one of the finest details of the composition.

"Yes," the sculptor said again, "you must have a model for that, and I have one coming this morning. To be honest, I came up here hoping you'd need her. I believe she is a good girl, and I do not like the idea of her being about among the studios."

He went on to speak of the figure, adding suggestions of treatment, feeling and posing; and as he talked he was conscious of needlessly prolonging the conversation for the mere pleasure of being near this woman, and of secretly cherishing some vague feeling that not only would Ninitta be safe under Mrs. Greyson's guardianship, but that some solution of the complexities in which he found himself involved would result from bringing together the two women so closely connected with his life.

He went away into his own studio at length, but Helen had scarcely got fairly to work before he reappeared with Ninitta.

Ninitta was much the same in outward appearance as upon the previous day, but between this morning's mental state and that of yesterday there was a great gulf. The Italian's character was a strange if not wholly unique mixture of simplicity and worldly wisdom. All her experiences, her life as a model in various parts of the world, her hardships and successes, while teaching her only too sharply the follies and vices of mankind, had never for an instant shaken her faith in Grant Herman. He was her god. It is even doubtful if any thing he could have done would have destroyed her belief in his integrity and nobility of soul. When he left her, she acquiesced, it is true, but with a wild passion of anguish. She knew he misjudged, but she chose to phrase it to herself that he was deceived; his rashness and hot-headedness were to her only so many fresh evidences of his greatness of character. She was not the first woman who has vaguely felt that unreasoning jealousy and passion are admirable or even essential attributes of virility, and who has worshiped a man as much for his faults as for his virtues.

To the dream of meeting Herman with the proofs that he had been deceived, Ninitta had clung unyieldingly through the dreary years since the death of Hoffmeir, who had been kind to her for the sake of his shattered friendship with Herman, and for the sake, too, of his own hopeless love for herself. It was from mingled shyness and pride that Ninitta had waited for a summons from the sculptor after she had reached Boston; but when she had at last gone to his studio it was with keen emotion. She had not considered that both herself and her old-time lover had changed in the seven years of separation. She had not reflected that believing her false he could not but have endeavored to forget her. She could not know that contact with the world, if it had not made him ashamed of his youthful enthusiasm, had at least showed him how the marriage he had contemplated would have appeared in the eyes of worldly wisdom, and had so educated him that reason was less helpless before passion than of old.