Chapter 9

What he said sounded to Edith like one of the detached generalities he was fond of uttering, and if she had learned that beneath his seemingly irrelevant words always lay a connecting thread of thought, she had learned also that she could seldom hope to discover what this cord might be. To understand his words, now, it would have been necessary for her to be aware of the net spread for him by Irons, the struggle in his mind as he talked with Miss Wainwright, and the effort he was now making to bring himself up to the firmness needed for the important interview with Mr. Hubbard which lay before him. In the sleepless hours of the night, Fenton had gone over the ground again and again; he had painted to himself the baseness of the thing he meant to do, and all his instincts of loyalty, of taste, of good-breeding, rose against it; but none the less did he cling doggedly to his determination. His purpose never wavered. His decision had been made, and this summing up of the cost did not shake him; it only made him miserable by the keen appreciation it brought him of the bitter humiliation fate--for so he viewed it--was heaping upon his head.

The strength and weakness which are often mingled in one character, like the iron and clay in the image of the prophet's vision, make the most surprising of the many strange paradoxes of human life. Fenton was sensuous, selfish, yielding, yet he possessed a tenacity of purpose, a might of will, which nothing could shake. He looked across the table now, at his sweet-faced, clear-eyed wife, with a dreadful sense of her purity, her honor, her remoteness; it cut him to the quick to think that the breach of trust he had in view would fill her mind with loathing; yet the possibility of therefore abandoning his purpose did not occur to him. Indeed, such was his nature, that it might be said that the possibility of abandoning his deliberately formed intention, on this or on any other grounds, did not for him exist.

It was one of the peculiarities which he shared with many sensitive and sensuous natures, that his first thought in any unpleasant situation was always a reflection upon the bitterness of existence. He always thought of the laying down of life as the easiest method of escape from any disagreeable dilemma. He was infected with the distaste of life, that disease which is seldom fatal, yet which in time destroys all save life alone. He thought now how he hated living, and the inevitable reflection came after, how easy it were to get out of the coil of humanity. A faint smile of bitterness curled his lips as he recalled a remark which Helen Greyson had once quoted to him as having been made of him by her dead husband. "He'll want to kill himself, but he won't. He's too soft-hearted, and he'd never forget other people and their opinions." He had acknowledged to himself that this was true, and he wondered whether Mrs. Greyson appreciated its justice.

The thought of Helen brought up the old days when he had been so frankly her friend that he had told her everything that was in his heart except those things which vanity bade him conceal lest he fall in her estimation.

It was so long since he had known a friend on those intimate terms under which it makes no especial difference what is said, since even in silence the understanding is perfect, and the pleasure of talking depends chiefly on the exchange of the signs of complete mutual comprehension, that the old days appealed to him with wonderful power. There is an immeasurable and soothing restfulness in such intercourse, especially to a man like Fenton, in whom exists an inner necessity always to say something when he talks; and as he recalled them now, something almost a sob rose in Arthur's throat. Many men suppose themselves to be cultivating their intellect when they are only, by the gratification of their tastes, quickening their susceptibilities; and Fenton's whole self-indulged existence had resulted chiefly in rendering him more sensitive to the discomforts of a universe in the making of which other things had been considered besides his pleasure.

He looked across the breakfast table at his wife. He noted with appreciation the beautiful line of her cheek outlined against the dark leather of the wall behind her. He felt a twinge of remorse for coming so far short of her ideal of him. He knew how resolutely she refused to see his worst side, and he reflected with philosophy half bitter and half contemptuous, that no woman ever lived who could wholly outgrow the feeling that to believe or to disbelieve a thing must in some occult way affect its truth. At least she had fulfilled all the unspoken promises, so much more important than vows put into words could be, with which she had married him. A remorseful feeling came over his mind, and instantly followed the instinctive self-excuse that she could never suffer as keenly as he suffered, no matter how greatly he disappointed her.

"People are to be envied or pitied," he said aloud, "not for their circumstances, but for their temperaments."

Edith looked up inquiringly. He went round to where she was sitting, smiling to think how far she must be from divining his thought.

"I stayed at the club too late last night," he said, stooping to kiss her smooth white forehead in an unenthusiastic, habitual way which always stung her. "Some of the fellows insisted upon my playing poker, and I got so excited that I didn't sleep when I did get to bed."

Edith sighed, but she made no useless remonstrances.

Walking down to his studio, carefully dressed, faultlessly booted and gloved, and, as Tom Bently was accustomed to say, "too confoundedly well groomed for an artist," Fenton tried in vain to determine how he should manage the important conversation with Mr. Hubbard. He had racked his brains in the night in vain attempts to solve this problem, but in the end he was forced to leave everything for chance or circumstances to decide.

When Stewart Hubbard sat before him, Fenton was conscious of a tingling excitement in every vein, but outwardly he was only the more calm. A close observer might have noticed a nervous quickness in his movements, and a certain shrillness in his voice, but the sitter gave no heed to these tokens, which he would have regarded as of no importance had he seen them. The talk was at first rather rambling, and was not kept up with much briskness on either side. Fenton, indeed, was so absorbed in the task which lay before him that he hardly followed the other's remarks, and he suddenly became aware that he had lost the thread of conversation altogether, so that he could not possibly imagine what the connection was when Hubbard observed,--

"Yes, it is certainly the hardest thing in the world for one being to comprehend another."

Fenton rallied his wits quickly, and retorted with no apparent hesitation,--

"It is so. Probably a cat couldn't possibly understand how a human mother can properly bring up a child when she has no tail for her offspring to play with."

"That wasn't exactly what I meant," the other returned, laughing; "but what a fellow you are to give an unexpected turn to things."

"Do you think so?" the artist said. Then, with a painful feeling of tightness about the throat, and a soberness of tone which he could not prevent, he added,--"That is a reason why I have always felt that I was one of those comparatively rare persons whom wealth would adorn, if somebody would only show me an investment to get rich on."

"You are one of those still rarer persons who would adorn wealth," Mr. Hubbard retorted, ignoring the latter part of the artist's remark. "Only that you are so astonishingly outspoken, that you might cause a revolution if you had Vanderbilt's millions to add weight to your words. It doesn't do to be too honest."

The sigh which left Fenton's lips was almost one of relief, although he felt that this first attempt to turn the talk into financial channels had failed.

"No," he replied. "Civilized honesty consists largely in making the truth convey a false impression, so that one is saved a lie in words while telling one in effect."

"It is strange how we cling to that old idea that as long as the letter of what we say is true it is no matter if the spirit be false," was Mr. Hubbard's response. "I thought of it yesterday at the meeting of the committee on the statue, when we were all sitting there trying to get the better of each other by telling true falsehoods."

"How does the statue business come on?" Fenton asked.

"Not very fast. I am sure I wish I was out of it. America always was a trouble, and this time is no exception to the rule."

"I hope," Arthur said, speaking with more seriousness, "that Grant Herman will be given the commission. He's all and away the best man."

He had secretly a feeling that he was putting an item on the credit side of his account with the sculptor in urging his fitness for this work.

"It is hard to do anything with Calvin and Irons. I've always been for Herman, but I don't mind telling you in confidence that I stand alone on the committee."

"Isn't there any way of helping things on? Wouldn't a petition from the artists do some good?"

"It might. But if you get up one don't let me know. I'd rather be able to say that I had no knowledge of it if it came before us."

Fenton smiled and continued his painting. With a thrill half of triumph, half of rage, he became aware that he was this morning succeeding admirably in getting just the likeness he wanted in the sitter's portrait. He had feared lest his excitement should render him unfit for work, but it had, on the contrary, spurred him up to unusual effectiveness. The thought came into his mind of the price at which he was buying this skill, and it was characteristic that the reflection which followed was that at least, if he caused Hubbard to lose money by betraying the secret he hoped to get from him, he was, to a degree, repaying him by painting a portrait which could under no other circumstances be so good.

It was no less characteristic of Fenton's mental habits that he looked upon himself as having committed the crime against his sitter which had yet to be carried out. In his logic, the legitimate, however distorted, legacy from Puritan ancestors, the sin lay in the determination; and he would have held himself almost as guilty had circumstances at this moment freed him from the disagreeable necessity of going on with his attempt. Doubtless in this fact lay in part the explanation of the firmness of his purpose. He would still have suffered in self-respect, since abandonment of his plan, even if voluntary, would not alter the fact that he had in intention been guilty. He would have said that theoretically there was no difference between intention and commission, and however casuists might reason, he took a curious delight in being scrupulously exacting with himself in his moral requirements, the fact that he held himself in his actions practically above such considerations naturally making this less difficult than it otherwise would have been. Every man has his private ethical methods, and this was the way in which Arthur Fenton's mind held itself in regard to that right of which he often denied the existence.

"I suppose," he remarked at length, with deliberate intent of entrapping Hubbard into some inadvertent betrayal of his secret, "that you business men have no sort of an idea how ignorant a man of my profession can be in regard to business. I had a note this morning from a broker whom I've been having help me a little in a sort of infantile attempt at stock gambling, and he advises me to find a financial kindergarten and attend it."

"I dare say he is right," the other returned, smiling. "You had better beware of stock gambling, if you are not desirous of ending your days in a poorhouse."

"But what can one do? It is only the men of large experience and so much capital that they do not need it who have a chance at safe investments."

He felt that he was bungling horribly, but he knew no other way of getting on in his attempt. He was terrified by the openness of his tactics. It seemed to him that any man must be able to perceive what he was driving at, but he desperately assured himself that after all Hubbard could not possibly have any reason to suspect him of a design of pumping him.

"Oh, there are plenty of safe investments," the sitter said, as if the matter were one of no great moment. Then, looking at his watch, he added, "I must go in fifteen minutes. I have an engagement."

Fenton dared not risk another direct trial, but he skirted about the subject on which his thoughts were fixed. His attempts, however, though ingenious, were fruitless; and he saw Hubbard step down from the dais where he posed, with a baffled sense of having failed utterly.

"The country is really beginning to look quite spring-like," he said, as he stood by while his sitter put on his overcoat.

He spoke in utter carelessness, simply to avoid a silence which would perhaps seem a little awkward; but the shot of accident hit the mark at which his careful aim had been vain.

"Yes, it is," the other responded. "I was out of town with Staggchase yesterday, looking at some meadows we talk of buying for a factory site, and I was surprised to see how forward things are."

Yesterday Mrs. Staggchase had casually mentioned to Fred Rangely that her husband had gone to Feltonville; and at the St. Filipe Club in the evening, as they were playing poker, Rangely had excused the absence of Mr. Staggchase, who was to be of the party, by telling this fact.

After Hubbard was gone, Fenton stood half dizzy with mingled exultation and shame. He exulted in his victory, but he felt as if he had committed murder.

And that evening Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson received a note from Mr. Irons, in which Feltonville was mentioned.

XV

LIKE COVERED FIRE. Much Ado about Nothing; iii.--2.

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was playing a somewhat difficult game, and she was playing it well. She was entertaining Mr. Greenfield, the Feltonville member, and she had also as a casual guest for the evening, Mr. Erastus Snaffle, and successfully to work the one off against the other was a task from which the cleverest of society women might be excused for shrinking, even had it been presented to her in terms of her own circle.

Greenfield was an honest, straightforward countryman; big, and rather burly, with a clear eye and a curling chestnut beard. He was a man at once of great force of character, and of singular simplicity. He exerted a vast influence in his country neighborhood in virtue of the respect inspired by his invincible integrity, a certain shrewdness which was the more effective at short range from the fact that it was really narrow in its spread, and perhaps most of all of his bluff, demonstrative kindliness. Tom Greenfield's hearty laugh and cordial handshake had won him more votes than many a more able man has been able to secure by the most thorough acquaintance with the questions and interests with which election would make it the duty of a man to be concerned; but it must be added that no man ever used his influence more disinterestedly and honestly, or more conscientiously fulfilled the duties of his position, as he understood them.

Such a man was peculiarly likely to become the victim of a woman like Mrs. Sampson. The plea of relationship on which she had sought his acquaintance disarmed suspicion at the outset. His country manners were familiar with family ties as a genuine bond, and he had no reason whatever to suppose that any ulterior motive was possible to this woman who affected to be so ignorant of politics and public business.

In the weeks which had elapsed since her interview with Alfred Irons, Mrs. Sampson had been making the most of the fraction of the season which remained to her. She had offered excuses which Greenfield's simple soul found satisfactory why she had not sought her cousin's acquaintance early in the winter, and the very irksomeness of the enforced absence from his country home which seized him as spring came on, made him the more susceptible to the blandishments of the mature siren who, with cunning art, was meshing her nets about him.

He had quite fallen into the habit of passing his unoccupied evenings with the widow, and she in turn had denied herself to some of her familiar friends on occasions when she had reason to expect him. Had she known he was likely to come this evening, she would have taken care to guard against his meeting with Snaffle; but as that gentleman was first in the field, she had her choice between sending Greenfield away and seeing them together. Like the clever woman she was, she chose the latter alternative, and found, too, her account in so doing.

Erastus Snaffle was more familiarly than favorably known in financial circles of Boston, as the man who had put afloat more wild-cat stocks than any other speculator on the street. It might be supposed that his connection with any scheme would be enough to wreck its prospects, yet whatever he took hold of floated for a time. There was always a feeling among his victims that at length he had come to the place where he must connect himself with a respectable scheme for the sake of re-establishing his reputation; but this hope was never realized. Perhaps whatever he touched ceased from that moment to be either reliable or respectable. However, since Snaffle was possessed of so inexhaustible a fund of plausibility that he never failed to find investors who placed confidence in his wildest statements, it after all made very little difference to him what his reputation or his financial standing might be.

By one of those singular compensations in which nature seems now and then to make a struggle to adjust the average of human characteristics with something approaching fairness, Snaffle was hardly less gullible than he was skilful in ensnaring others. He was continually making a fortune by launching some bogus stock or other, but it seemed always to be fated that he should lose it again in some equally wild scheme started by a brother sharper. Perhaps between his professional strokes he was obliged to practise at raising credulity in himself merely to keep his hand in; perhaps it was simply that the habit of believing financial absurdities had become a sort of second nature in him; or yet again is it possible that he felt obliged to assume credulity in regard to the falsehoods of his fellow sharpers, as a sort of equivalent for the faith he so often demanded of them; but, whatever may have been the reason, it was at least a fact that his money went in much the same way it came.

In person, Erastus Snaffle was not especially prepossessing. His face would have been more attractive had the first edition of his chin been larger and the succeeding ones smaller, while the days when he could still boast of a waist were so far in the irrevocable past that the imagination refused so long a flight as would be required to reach it. His eyes were small and heavy-lidded, but in them smouldered a dull gleam of cunning that at times kindled into a pointed flame. His dress was in keeping with his person, and his manner quite as vulgar as either.

He was sitting to-night in one corner of the sofa, his corpulent person heaped up in an unshapely mass, talking with a fluency that now and then died away entirely, while he paused to speculate what sort of a game his hostess might be playing with Mr. Greenfield.

"The fact is," Mrs. Sampson was saying, as Snaffle recalled his attention from one of these fits of abstraction, "that I don't know what I shall do this summer; and I don't like to believe that summer is so near that I must decide soon."

"You were at Ashmont last year, weren't you?" Snaffle asked. "Why don't you go there again."

Mrs. Sampson shot him a quick glance which Snaffle understood at once to mean that he was to second her in something she was attempting. He did not yet get his clew clearly enough to understand just how, but the look put him on the alert, as the hostess answered,--

"Oh, it is all spoiled. The railroad has been put through and all the summer visitors are giving it up. I'm sure I don't know what will become of all the poverty-stricken widows that made their living out of taking boarders. That railroad has been an expensive job for Ashmont in every way."

Greenfield smiled, his big, genial smile which had so much warmth in it.

"That isn't usually the way people look at the effect of a railroad on a town."

This time the look which Mrs. Sampson gave Snaffle told him so plainly what she wanted him to do that he spoke at once, her almost imperceptible nod showing him that he was on the right track.

"Oh, a railroad is always the ruin of a small town," he said, "unless it is its terminus. It sucks all the life out of the villages along the way. You go along any of the lines in Massachusetts, and you will find that while the towns have been helped by the road, the small villages have been knocked into a cocked hat. All the young people have left them; all the folks in the neighborhood go to some city to do their trading, and the stuffing is knocked out of things generally."

Mrs. Sampson looked at Snaffle with a thoroughly gratified expression.

"I don't know much about the business part of the question, of course," she said, "but I do know that a railroad takes all the young men out of a village. A woman I boarded with at Ashmont last year wrote to me the other day in the greatest distress because her only son had left her. She said it was all the railroad, and her letter was really pathetic."

"Oh, that's a woman's way of looking at it," rejoined Greenfield, the greatest struggle of whose life, as Mrs. Sampson was perfectly well aware, was to keep at home his only child, a youth just coming to manhood. "It is easy enough for boys to get away nowadays, and just having a railroad at the door wouldn't make any great difference."

"It does, though, make a mighty sight of difference," Snaffle said, rolling his head and putting his plump white hands together. "Somehow or other, the having that train scooting by day in and day out unsettles the young fellows. The whistle stirs them up, and keeps reminding them how easy it is to go out West or somewhere or other. I've seen it time and again."

"Well," Greenfield returned, a shadow over his genial face, "I have a youngster that's got the Western fever pretty bad without any railroads coming to Feltonville. But what you say is only one side of the question. When a railroad comes it always brings business in one way or another. The increase of transportation facilities is sure to build things up."

"Oh, yes, it builds them up," Snaffle chuckled, as if the idea afforded him infinite amusement, "but how does it work. There are two or three men in the town who start market gardens and make something out of it. They sell their produce in the city and they do their trading there; they hire Irish laborers from outside the village; and how much better off is the town, except that it can tax them a trifle more if it can get hold of the valuation of their property." "Which it generally can't," interpolated Greenfield grimly, with an inward reminder of certain experiences as assessor.

"Or somebody starts a factory," Snaffle went on, "and then the town is made, ain't it? Outside capital is invested, outside operatives brought in to turn the place upside down and to bring in all the deviltries that have been invented, and all the town has to show in the long run is a little advance in real estate over the limited area where they want to build houses for the mill-hands. There's no end of rot talked about improving towns by putting up factories, but I can't see it myself."