Chapter 9

The talk at dinner flowed on easily enough, Arthur conversing in the strain which of old Helen had been pleased to call "amiable," and which fretted her by being conventional and not wholly sincere. She liked the artist best when he spoke without restraint, even though she might not agree with his extravagances and often detected a trace of artificiality in his clever epigrams. It seemed to her that the whole tendency of Edith's influence upon her husband was towards restraint, yet she could not be sure whether the ultimate result upon Fenton's character might not be beneficial.

"It depends upon Arthur himself," Helen mused. "If he is strong enough to endure the struggle of adapting his honest belief to her honest belief, he will be the better for it. I hope his love of ease will not make him evade the difficulty. It never used to occur to me how little I really know Arthur, so that I cannot tell how this will be."

When the host was enjoying his after dinner cigar, which by especial indulgence upon the part of Edith he was allowed to smoke in the parlor, Helen disclosed the object of her visit.

"Do you remember," she asked, "that model who posed for my May, and was to come to you next week?"

"Ninitta? Of course. What of her?"

"That is precisely what I wish to find out," she responded. "She has changed her address, and I thought it possible you might know something of her whereabouts."

"I have not seen her since the morning when she came into your studio. Doesn't Herman know?"

"The truth is," Helen said slowly, weighing her words with regard to their effect upon Edith, "that she has run away, and we do not know what has become of her. She went off in a rage, and I am troubled about her."

"Is she the Italian you spoke of, Arthur?" interrupted Mrs. Fenton in her soft voice. "What is she like?"

"Yes; a black-haired, splendidly shaped girl with piercing black eyes."

"I think I know where she is," Edith said quietly.

"You?" the others asked in one breath.

"You see," Mrs. Fenton explained, turning towards Helen, "I have made rather a plunge into charity work. Of course I meant to do something, but I hardly expected to begin quite so soon. But Mr. Candish is my rector, and he came for me yesterday to go to an Italian family that cannot speak English well. The children have just been put into our schools, but they have not advanced very far as yet. Their teacher asked Mr. Candish to do something for them; they are wretchedly poor. I wish you could see the place, Mrs. Greyson. Eight people in a room not so large as this, and such poverty as you could hardly imagine. Yet these people had taken in another. The mother goes about selling fruit, and she happened to speak to this girl that I think is Ninitta in her own language one night. The girl had been wandering about in the cold, not knowing where to go, and I suppose the sound of her own tongue touched her heart. Poor thing; she would not speak a word to me. How strange that I should chance to find her."

"Thank heaven she is safe," was Helen's inward exclamation. Aloud she said: "But what is she doing?"

"Nothing," Edith answered. "She seems to have had a little money, so that she can pay the family something, and she has helped to take care of the children. They are Catholics, naturally, and not in Mr. Candish's parish; but they do not seem to have much religion of any kind, and keep clear of the priest for some reason."

"My wife will know more of the North End in a month," Arthur observed with an effort at good humor which did not wholly conceal from Helen a trace of annoyance, "than I should in six years. I wonder she can bear to go into such dirty places. Of course philanthropy is all very well, but I'd rather take it after it has been disinfected."

The bitterness in his tone jarred upon Helen. She felt a pang at his evident dissatisfaction with his wife's views, his want of harmony with his new surroundings.

"Arthur must be disciplined," Mrs. Fenton said, smiling fondly. "If he once learns that the secret of being happy lies in helping others, he'll be unselfish from mere selfishness, if from nothing else."

"Happy!" Helen exclaimed involuntarily. "Does one ever expect to be happy nowadays? Happiness went out of fashion with our grandmothers' bonnets."

"In this world," Edith answered, without any trace in her voice of the reproof which Helen half expected, "perhaps you are right. The age is too restless and skeptical for happiness here; but that makes me long the more for it hereafter."

"But even in a future life," returned Helen, "I can hardly expect to be happy, since I shall still be myself."

"Happiness," was Mrs. Fenton's reply, "is a question of harmony with surroundings, is it not? And your surroundings in the other life may be such that you cannot but be happy."

"No more theology, please," interposed Arthur. "You forget, Edith, that I have been to church to-day, and too much piety at once might impair my spiritual digestion forever."

A perception that the flippancy of his tone shocked his wife, made Helen turn the conversation again to Ninitta, arranging to go with Mrs. Fenton in the morning to find the missing girl.

They fell into silence after this, the twilight deepening until only the glow of the fire lighted the room. Edith went to the piano and played a bit of Mozart, wandering off then into the hymn-tunes which she loved and which were familiar in all orthodox homes of the last generation: plaintive _Olmutz_ and stately _Geneva_, aspiring _Amsterdam_ and resonant _St. Martin's_, placid _Boylston_ and grand _Hamburg, Nuremburg, Benevento, Turner_ and _Old Hundred_; the tunes of our fathers, the melodies which embody the spirit of the old time New England Sabbath, a day heavy, constrained and narrow, it may be; but, too, a day calm, unworldly and pure.

Arthur's cigar was finished, and he had fallen into a deep reverie, looking into the coals. He recalled his conversations with Helen before his marriage. He wondered whether his acquiescence in the limitations of his present condition, his yielding to his wife's social and religious views, was an advance or a deterioration. These pious tunes jarred upon his mood, and he was glad when his wife left the instrument. His Bohemian instinct stirred within him, and taunted the ease-loving quality of his nature which put him in subjection to that which he believed no more now than in the days when he was the most sharp-spoken of the Pagans. A wave of disgust and self-loathing swept over him. He turned abruptly in the dusk toward Helen.

"Sing to us," he said. "Edith has never heard you."

But Helen had been moved by the melodies, which came to her as an echo from her childhood. She understood the half-peremptory accent in Arthur's voice to which she had so often yielded, but to which she would not now submit.

"No," she answered. "How can you ask me. My barbaric chant would be wholly out of keeping here. Some other time I shall be glad to sing for Mrs. Fenton; now I must go home."

XXIV.

IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING. I. Henry IV.; v.--I.

Notwithstanding her previous visit, Mrs. Fenton found it no easy matter to guide Helen to the place where Ninitta had taken refuge.

The poorer classes of foreigners in any city are led by similarity of language and occupations to gather into neighborhoods according to their nationality, and the Italians are especially clannish. The fruit-venders and organ-grinders form separate colonies, each distinguished by the peculiarities incident to the calling of its inhabitants, the crooked courts in the fruit-sellers' neighborhood being chiefly marked to outward observance by the number of two-wheeled hand-carts which, out of business hours, are crowded together there.

Ninitta was found in a room tolerably clean for that portion of the city, the old fruit woman who was its mistress having retained more of the tidiness of thrifty peasant ancestors than most of her class. One room was made to accommodate the mother and seven children, and during the absence of the former from home the premises were left in charge of a girl just entering her teens, who, when Helen and Edith reached the place, was engaged in preparing the family dinner of maccaroni. The younger members of the family had just returned from school, and were noisily clamoring for their share, and all together relating the incidents of the day.

Upon a bed in one corner lay the object of their search, her face flushed, her hair disordered, her eyes wild and vacant. To all appearances she was in a high fever, and she took no heed of Edith, who approached the bed and spoke to her. At the sound of Mrs. Greyson's voice, however, the sick girl gave a cry and raised herself into a sitting posture.

"No, no!" she exclaimed in Italian, excitedly, "I will not! I will not!"

Helen drew off her gloves and sat down upon the dingy bed beside Ninitta, regarding her with pitying eyes.

"You shall not," she answered, in the girl's own language. "You need do nothing but what you choose."

The soft tone seemed to calm Ninitta. She allowed Helen to arrange the soiled and crumpled pillows, and yielded when her self-constituted nurse wished her to lie down again. The latter procured a bowl of water, and with her handkerchief bathed the sick girl's face, soothing her with womanly touches which waked in Edith a new feeling of sympathy and tenderness. Mrs. Greyson's white fingers, contrasting strongly with the Italian's clear dark skin, smoothed the tangled hair from the hot forehead, and all the while her rich, pure voice murmured comforting words, of little meaning in themselves, perhaps, but sweet with the sympathy and womanhood which spoke through them.

Edith meanwhile was not idle. She applied herself to hushing the boisterous children, and to bringing something like quiet out of the tumult of the crowded room. She assisted the girl with her maccaroni, gravely listening to the principles which governed its equitable distribution, with her own hands giving the grimy little children the share belonging to each. An air of comfort seemed to come over the frowsy room after Edith had quietly set a chair straight here, picked up something from the floor there, and arranged the ragged shade at the window. Even the little Italians, half barbarians as they were, felt the change, and were more subdued.

Ninitta, too, was calmed and soothed, and, with Helen's cool hand upon her hot brow, she sank presently into a drowse.

"Mrs. Fenton," Helen whispered, fanning her sleeping patient, "Ninitta cannot remain here. I must take her home with me. I think she had better run the risk of being moved than to be ill in this crowded room."

"But," remonstrated Edith, somewhat aghast at this summary procedure, "you do not even know what is the matter with her."

"No," Helen returned lightly, "but I shall probably discover."

"Not by finding it something contagious, I hope," her friend said, laying her hand upon Mrs. Greyson's forehead with a slight, caressing touch.

"Can you get me a hack?" Helen asked of the girl who kept the house.

But the girl had no idea how to obtain one of those vehicles, which she had been accustomed to see driving about with a certain awe, but without the hope of ever being able to do more than admire them from a distance, unless, indeed, she should have the great good fortune of going to a funeral, when perhaps she might even ride in one, as did little Sally McMann of the next court, when her mother died. Mrs. Fenton therefore went herself for the carriage, finding remonstrance in vain to change her companion's decision.

During her absence Ninitta awakened, and, while seeming more rational, was less quiet than before. She repulsed her visitor with angry looks and muttered defiance. Knowing perfectly well the cause of the girl's agitation, Helen knew, also, that it was best to go directly to the root of the matter, and she did so unshrinkingly.

"You are wrong," she said in Ninitta's ear. "It is you he loves. You are to go home with me because he wishes it."

At first the sick girl seemed to gather no meaning from these words, but as Helen repeated the assurance again and again, in different phrases and with Herman's name, she became passive, as if she at least caught the spirit if not the actual significance.

Mrs. Fenton had some difficulty in finding a carriage, and by the time she returned Ninitta had yielded herself submissively to Helen's guidance.

Mrs. Greyson saw that her charge was carefully protected against the cold, a matter which the mildness of the day rendered easy, and, supported by the two ladies, the model was able to walk down stairs to the carriage.

During the drive homeward Helen lay back thinking hotly, and flushed with excitement. Ninitta sank into a doze, and Mrs. Fenton sat looking at her friend with the air of one who has discovered in an acquaintance characteristics before wholly unsuspected. She hesitated a little, and then, mastering her shyness, she bent forward and kissed Helen's hand.

The other submitted in silence. Indeed, the exaltation of her mood seemed to lift her above her surroundings so that she felt a strange remoteness from her companion. Yet she was conscious of a vague twinge of annoyance at Edith's act, although she could neither have excused nor defined the feeling. Mrs. Fenton not infrequently aroused in her a curious mingling of attraction and repulsion; and it was under the influence of the latter that she answered brusquely her friend's next remark.

"How did you quiet Ninitta?" Edith asked.

"By telling her lies," returned Helen wearily and laconically.

"What!"

"She is in no condition to be dealt with rationally," continued Mrs. Greyson, in a tone explanatory, but in no way defensive, "so I said whatever would soothe her."

Edith sat in silent dismay. Apparently the woman before her, by whose generous self-forgetfulness she had been touched, was perfectly untroubled by the idea of speaking a falsehood, a state of mind so utterly beyond Edith's experience as to be incomprehensible to her. She could not bring herself to remonstrate, but it pained her that such philanthropy should be stained by what she considered so wrong.

Mrs. Fenton was perhaps equally mistaken in her opinion of Helen's regard for truth and of her philanthropy. Mrs. Greyson had a deep repugnance to falsehood, and Arthur Fenton had often good-humoredly jeered at what he called her Puritanic scrupulousness in this respect. On an occasion such as at present, however, the use of an untruth would cause her not even a second thought, her reason so strongly supporting her course as even to overcome her instincts; a fact which a moralist might deplore but which still remains a fact.

Her philanthropy, upon the other hand, although seeming to Edith so disinterested, was largely instigated by a desire to aid Grant Herman. Just what she wished or expected him to do, she could not have told, her actions being no more regulated by strict logic than those of most women; but she felt that it was the office of friendship to see, if possible, that no harm came to the Italian through the jealousy which both herself and Herman knew to be but too well founded. She determined to take Ninitta home and do for her all that was necessary, in order that the sculptor be spared the remorse which would pursue him if harm came to his old betrothed. She was not without a secret feeling, moreover, scarcely acknowledged to herself, that she owed some reparation to the girl whose lover's heart she had won, no matter how undesignedly.

Reaching home, she got Ninitta to bed and sent for Dr. Ashton. Then she dispatched a note to Grant Herman, saying:

"Ninitta is with me; give yourself no uneasiness."

XXV.

THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME.

Measure for Measure; iv.--4.

Ninitta's illness proved after all very slight. So slight, indeed, that Dr. Ashton, calling in on his way to dine with the Fentons Thursday evening, found her gone. She had insisted upon returning to her attic, although Helen had not allowed her to depart without promising not to abscond a second time.

Ninitta was grateful to Mrs. Greyson with all the ardor of her passionate southern heart. She did not, it is true, understand the relations between Herman and Helen, but even her jealousy was lost in the gratitude she felt for the beautiful woman who had cared for her, and it is not unlikely saved her from a dangerous illness. It did not seem possible to the undisciplined Italian, versed only in crude, simple emotions, that a woman who was her rival could treat her with tenderness. She accepted Helen's kindness as indisputable proof that the latter did not love the sculptor, a conclusion which the premises scarcely warranted. She volunteered to pose again, and Mrs. Greyson, thinking it well to keep the girl under her influence, and desiring a return to at least the semblance of the peaceful existence preceding the stormy episode just ended, eagerly accepted this offer, only stipulating that the model should undertake nothing until she was really well able.

"I shall come back to supper," Dr. Ashton said, as he left his wife. "I have half a mind not to go to Fenton's; only it amuses me to watch the fellow's degeneration."

"It never amuses me to watch any degradation," she returned gravely. "How do you know he is degenerating? If you mean by following his wife, why, they may be right after all, and what we call superstition the veriest truth."

"Of course," answered he. "I never pretended to administer the exclusive mysteries of truth; but it is always a degradation to yield to personal influence at the expense of conviction. Arthur is as much of a heathen to-day as he ever was, only he is too fond of comfort to have the courage of his opinions."

Helen sighed.

"Truth to me," she said thoughtfully, "is whatever one sincerely believes; I cannot conceive of any other standard. One man's truth is often another's falsehood."

"You are as dull as a preface to-night, Helen; what carking care is gnawing at your vitals?"

"Nothing in particular. A certain melancholy is befitting a widow, you know, and that's what I am supposed to be."

"On the contrary there is a certain vivacity about the word widow to my mind."

"Your experience has been wider than mine. I am aware that I am too much given to vast moral reflections, but you provoke them."

"I am sorry to provoke you," he said gayly. "Forgive me before supper time; who knows what rich experiences I may have between now and then. Good-by."

As he walked toward his appointment, could Dr. Ashton's vision have reached to the house whither he was going, he would have seen Arthur Fenton and his wife sitting together before an open fire awaiting their guest. The artist was showing Edith a portfolio of sketches by foreign painters, which he had brought from his studio.

"What a strange uncanny thing this is," he remarked, holding one up. "It is just like Frontier; I never saw any thing more characteristic. I wonder you got so few of his tricks, Edith, while you studied with him."

"He always repelled me. I was afraid of him. Where did you get this sketch?"

"Dr. Ashton gave it to me."

"Dr. Ashton!"

"Yes; when he was in Paris, both he and his wife were intimate with Frontier. Or at least Will was."

"Oh, Arthur!"

She leaned forward in her chair, her always pale face assuming a new pallor. Laying her hand upon her husband's, she asked in a quick, excited manner:

"Do you know how Frontier died?"

"I know he died suddenly; now you speak of it, I have an idea it was a case of _felo de se_. You know I was in Munich at the time."

"Arthur," Edith said earnestly, "I have never told even you; but I saw Frontier die. I had a pass-key to his studio, and his private rooms were just behind it. That night I went in on my way from dinner--Uncle Peter and I had been dining together, and I left him at the door with the carriage--after a study I'd forgotten. We were going to Rome the next morning, and I didn't want to leave it. The picture was at the further end of the studio, and as I went down the room I heard voices and saw that Frontier's door was open. He sat at a table with a tiny wine-glass in his hand. A man who stood back to me said, just as I came within hearing: 'It is none of my affair, and I shall not interfere; but you'll allow me to advise you not to be rash.' I could not hear Frontier's answer, partly because I paid no attention, of course never suspecting the truth. But as I went towards my easel, Frontier, hearing the noise, I suppose, and afraid of being interrupted, caught up the glass and drank what was in it. The other man sprang forward just in time to catch him as he fell back, and it suddenly came over me that he was taking poison. I cried out and ran into the room, but it seemed only an instant before it vas all over. Oh, it was terrible, Arthur, terrible!"

She covered her agitated face with her hands, as if to shut out the vision which rose before her. Her husband sat in silent astonishment, a conviction growing in his mind of whom the other witness of Frontier's death must have been.

"Arthur," Edith broke out suddenly, "that man was no better than a murderer. He let Frontier kill himself. When I cried out, 'Oh, why didn't you stop him!' he said as coolly as if I had asked the most trivial question, 'Why should I? What right had I to interfere?' It was terrible! He seemed to me a perfect fiend!"

"It was--who was it?" demanded her husband, a name almost escaping him in his excitement.

"It was Dr. Ashton; the man who is coming to sit down at your table to-night. Arthur, I cannot meet him! I knew when he came to our reception that I had seen him before, but I could not tell where. There is his ring now. Let me get by you!"

"But where are you going?" Fenton asked in amazement.

"To my room. Any where to get out of his way."

"But what shall I tell him?"

"The truth; that I will not sit down to eat with a murderer."

She vanished from the room, leaving her husband alone. Dr. Ashton's step was already upon the stair, and however keenly Mrs. Fenton might feel the wickedness of the Doctor in not preventing Frontier's self-destruction, the action was too strictly in accord with Arthur's own views to allow of his condemning it. His friend found him in a state of confusion which instantly connected itself in the guest's mind with the non-appearance of Edith, an impression which was strengthened by the lameness of the excuses tendered for her absence. Dr. Ashton not unnaturally concluded that he had just escaped stumbling upon a family quarrel. He accepted whatever his host chose to say, and the two proceeded rather gloomily to dinner.

In Arthur's mind there sprang an irritation against both his wife and his friend. His instincts were all protective, that term including comfort as well as self-preservation. He was intensely annoyed at his wife's attitude, and began to vent his spleen in cynical speeches, which since his marriage had been rare with him.

"Christian grace," he declared, "is exactly like milk; excellent and nourishing while it is fresh, but hard to get pure, and even then sure to sour."

"Say something more original if you are cross, Arthur," observed his friend good humoredly. "What is the matter? Is it a new rug or a Japanese bronze you are dying for?"

"Hang rugs and bronzes," retorted Arthur, with a vicious determination to be ill-natured. "If I can get the necessities of life, I am lucky."

"Nonsense," was the reply. "It isn't that. The lack of the necessities of life makes a man sad; it is the lack of luxuries that makes him cynical."