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The Pagans

by Arlo Bates · English · Gutenberg #8671 · 353,259 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Pagans

Author: Arlo Bates


        
Release date: August 1, 2005 [eBook #8671]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8671

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PAGANS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Erika Stokes and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.











THE PAGANS

By

Arlo Bates



The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
                             _All's Well That Ends Well_; iv--3




DEDICATION.


To those who would be Pagans, did any such organization
exist, I take pleasure in offering this attempt to picture a phase
of life which they know.



  She answered, "cast thy rosary on the ground; bind on thy
  shoulder the thread of paganism; throw stones at the glass of
  piety; and quaff from a full goblet."
                 _Persian Religious Hymn._



CONTENTS.

  I. SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE
  II. THE HEAVY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
  III. THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT
  IV. AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT
  V. THE BITTER PAST
  VI. A BOND OF AIR
  VII. IN WAY OF TASTE
  VIII. THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE
  IX. VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE
  X. O, WICKED WIT AND GIFT
  XI. WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED
  XII. WHAT TIME SHE CHANTED
  XIII. THE ASSAY OF ART
  XIV. THIS IS NOT A BOON
  XV. 'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL
  XVI. CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH
  XVII. THIS "WOULD" CHANGES
  XVIII. BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE
  XIX. NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS
  XX. THE WORLD IS STILL DECEIVED
  XXI. HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH
  XXII. UPON A CHURCH-BENCH
  XXIII. HEART-SICK WITH THOUGHT,
  XXIV. IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING,
  XXV. THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME,
  XXVI. THERE BEGINS CONFUSION,
  XXVII. WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE,
  XXVIII. LIKE COVERED FIRE,
  XXIX. A NECESSARY EVIL,
  XXX. HOW CHANCES MOCK,
  XXXI. HE SPEAKS THE MERE CONTRARY,
  XXXII. A SYMPATHY OF WOE,
  XXXIII. A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN,
  XXXIV. HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY,
  XXXV. PARTED OUR FELLOWSHIP,
  XXXVI. AS FALSE AS STAIRS OF SAND,
  XXXVII. FAREWELL AT ONCE, FOR ONCE, FOR ALL AND EVER.




PAGANS


I.

SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE.
  Measure for Measure, v--i.


A fine, drizzling rain was striking against the windows of a cosy third
floor sitting-room, obscuring what in pleasant weather was a fine
distant view of the Charles river. The apartment was evidently that of
a woman, as numerous details of arrangement and articles of feminine
use suggested; and quite as evidently it was the home of a person of
taste and refinement, and of one, too, who had traveled.

Arthur Fenton, a slender young artist, with elegant figure and deep set
eyes, was lounging in an easy chair in an attitude well calculated to
show to advantage his graceful outlines. For occupation he was turning
over a portfolio of sketches, whose authorship was indicated by the
attitude of the lady seated near by.

She was a woman of commanding presence, with full lips, whose
expression was contradicted by the almost haughty carriage of her fine
head and the keen glance of her eye, which indicated too much character
for the mere pleasure-seeker. Her hair was of a rich chestnut, and she
wore a dress of steel gray cashmere, relieved at the throat by a knot
of pale orange, which harmonized admirably with her clear complexion.
She watched her companion as if secretly anxious for his good opinion
of her drawings, yet too proud to betray any feeling in the matter. He,
for his part, turned them over with seeming listlessness, breaking out
now and then with some abrupt remark.

"Yes," he said suddenly, after a ten minutes' silence, "I'm going to be
married at once. It will be 'a marriage in the bush,' as the Suabians
call an impecunious match, since neither of us has any money; and I, at
least, haven't so great a superfluity of brains that in this
intelligent age of the world I am ever likely to make much by selling
myself; and that is the only way any body gets any money nowadays."

"I hardly think you'd be willing to sell," his companion answered, "no
matter how good the market."

"There's where you are wrong," he answered, looking up with a sudden
frown, "the worst thing about me is that with sufficient inducement--or
even merely from the temptation of an especially good opportunity--I
should sell myself body and soul to the Philistines."

"One would hardly fancy it, from the way you talk of Peter Calvin and
his followers."

"Oh, as to that," retorted the artist, "don't you see that judicious
opposition increases my market value when I am ready to sell? If I
could only be sufficiently prominent in my antagonism, I might
absolutely fix my own price."

The lady made no answer, but regarded him more intently than ever.

"That's a good thing," he broke out again, holding up a drawing. "Why
don't you do that in marble, or better still, in bronze?"

"I am putting it up in clay," she answered. "I thought I had shown it
to you. It is to be fired as my first experiment in a big piece of
terra-cotta. That is the first sketch; I think I have improved upon
it."

It was the study for a bas-relief representing the months, twelve
characteristic figures running forward with the utmost speed. Gifts
dropped from their hands as they ran; from the fingers of June fell
flowers, from those of August and September ripened fruits, upon which
November and December trampled ruthlessly. January, in his haste,
overturned an altar against which February stumbles.

"It is melancholy enough," Fenton observed, regarding it closely. "How
melancholy every thing is now-a-days?"

"To a man about to be married?" she asked, with a fine smile.

"Oh, always to me. The fact that I am going to be married does not
prevent my still being myself."

"Unfortunately not," she returned, with a faint suspicion of sarcasm in
her tone. "You pique yourself upon being somber."

"I dare say," answered he, a trifle petulantly. "Pain has become a
habit with me; discontent is about the only luxury I can afford, heaven
knows!"

"Unless it is gorgeous cravats."

"Oh, that," Fenton said, putting his hand to the blue and gold tie at
his throat. "I'm trying to furbish up my old body and decrepit heart
against my nuptials, so I invested fifty cents in this tie."

"You couldn't have done it cheaper," remarked she; "though, perhaps,"
she added dryly, "it is all the rejuvenation is worth."

Fenton smiled grimly and again applied himself to the examination of
the drawings, while the other looked out at the rain.

"Boston has more climate, and that far worse," she remarked, "than any
other known locality."

"Does that mean that you are going to Herman's this afternoon?" asked
Fenton.

"I should have gone this morning if you had not insisted upon my
wasting my time simply because you had determined to waste yours."

Fenton laughed.

"You are frank to a guest," he said. "I wished to be congratulated on
my marriage."

"I shall not congratulate you," she answered. "You are spoiled. The
women have petted you too much."

"According to the old fairy tale all goes well with the man of whom the
women are fond."

"I remember," she said. "I always pitied their wives."

"I shall treat Edith well."

"You are too good-natured not to, I suppose; especially when you look
forward to your marriage with such rapture."

"But, Helen, have I ever pretended to believe in marriage? Marriage is
a crime! Think of the wretched folly of those who talk of the holiness
of love's being protected by the sanctities of marriage. If love is
holy, let it have way; if it is not, all the sacraments priests can
devise cannot sanctify it."

"Then why, Arthur, do you marry at all?"

"Because marriage is a necessary evil as society is at present
constituted."

"But," Helen said slowly, "you who pretend to have so little regard for
society--"

"Ah, there it is," he interrupted. "Man is gregarious by instinct; he
must do as his fellows do. He must submit to the most absurd
_convenances_ of his fellowmen, as one sheep jumps where another
did though the bar be taken away. If he were strong enough to stand
alone he might take conventions by the throat and be a god!"

His outburst was too vehement and sudden not to come from some
underlying current of deep feeling, rather than from the present
conversation. He had risen while speaking, his head thrown back, his
eyes sparkling. His companion regarded him with admiration, not
unmixed, however, with amusement.

"And you," she said, "choose to call yourself a man without
enthusiasms."

"Yes," replied he, smiling and regaining his seat, "I am a man without
enthusiasms."

"That is the cleverest thing you ever said," Helen continued, musingly.
"And so we understand you intend to be ruled by conventionality and
marry?"

"Precisely; it would be unjust to Edith to even talk to her of my
views."

"I should hope so!" exclaimed his hostess. "But you will at least have
her to yourself, and that pays for every thing."

"Oh, _peutêtre!_" Fenton returned dubiously, perfectly well aware
that the remark had been made to elicit comment, yet too fond of
talking to resist temptation and leave it unanswered, "_peutêtre_,
though I never believed in the desert-island theory. It is more in your
line; you still have faith in it."

"Oh, I do," she rejoined quickly; "and so would you if you were in
love. You'd be content to be on a rock in the mid ocean if she were
there."

"Love on a desert island," returned the young man, smiling
significantly; "Oh, _le premier jour, c'est bon; le deuxième jour, ce
n'est pas si bon; le troisième jour--mon Dieu, mais comment on
s'ennuie!_"

"No, no, no," Helen broke in impetuously. "Good, always! Always,
always, or never!"

Fenton threw back his head and burst into a shout of laughter.

    "'Twere errant folly to presume,
    Love's flame could burn and not consume,"

he sang, going off again into peals of laughter. "Good by, _mon
amie_; oh, _mais comment on s'en--_"

"Stop," interrupted she. "I'll have no more blasphemy."

"Good-by, then," he said, picking up his hat.

"You may as well stay to lunch," his hostess said rising.

"No," returned he. "I must go and write to Edith."

And off he went, humming:

    "'Twere errant folly to presume
    Love's flame could burn and not consume."




II.

THE HEAVY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.
     Measure for Measure; iv--i.

As many of the Boston clocks as ever permitted themselves so far to
break through their constitutional reserve as to speak above a whisper,
had announced in varying tones that it was midnight, yet the group of
men seated in easy attitudes before the fire in one of the
sitting-rooms of the St. Filipe Club showed no signs of breaking up.
Indeed, the room was so pleasant and warm, with its artistically
combined colors, its good pictures and glowing grates, and the storm
outside raged so savagely, beating its wind and sleet against the
windows, that a reluctance to issue from the clubhouse door was only
natural, and there would be little room for surprise should the men
conclude to remain where they were until daylight.

The conversation, carried on amid clouds of fragrant tobacco smoke and
with potations, not excessive but comfortably frequent, was quiet and
unflagging, possessing, for the most part, that mellow quality which is
seldom attained before the small hours and the third cigar.

"Yes, virtue has to be its own reward," Tom Bently was saying lightly,
"for, don't you see, the people who practice it are too narrow-minded
to appreciate any thing else."

"And that makes it the most poorly paid of all the professions," was
the retort of Fred Rangely, who was lounging in a big easy chair;
"except literature, that is. Even sin is said to get death for its
wage, and that is something."

"Virtue may be an inestimable prize for any thing you newspaper men can
tell. It is not a commodity you are used to handling."

"Literature has little to do with virtue, it is true," was the
response. "Who would read a novel about virtuous people, for instance?
I'd as soon study the catechism."

"How art has to occupy itself with iniquity," Fenton observed with a
philosophical puff of his cigar. "Or what people call iniquity; though
a truer definition would be nature."

"Painting occupies itself with iniquity in its models," Rangely said
lazily. "I heard to-day--"

"No scandals," interrupted Grant Herman, good humoredly. "You are going
to tell the story about Flackerman, I know."

The speaker was the most noticeable man in the group. Tom Bently, an
artist, was a tall, swarthy fellow with thin black beard, stubble-like
hair, and a gypsyish look. Next came Fred Rangely, an author of some
reputation, of whom his friends expected great things, rather short in
stature, thick-set, and with a good-tempered, intelligent face.
Fenton's appearance has already been touched upon; he was of elegant
figure, with a face intellectual, high-bred, but marred by a suspicion
of superciliousness. Amid these friends, Herman gained something by
contrast with each and naturally became the center of the group. This
prominence was partly due to his figure, of large mold, finely formed
and firmly knit, carrying always an air of restful strength and
composure which made itself felt in whatever company he found himself.
His head, although not out of proportion with his fine shoulders and
trunk, was somewhat massive, a fact which was emphasized a little by
the profusion of his locks, now plentifully sprinkled with gray. His
face was indicative of much character, the lips firm and full, the eyes
large and dark, now serious under their heavy brows and now twinkling
with contagious merriment.

"It isn't every model you can talk scandal about," chuckled Bently, in
reply to Herman's remark. "We had a devilishly pretty fuss in Nick
Featherstone's studio the other day. Nick found his match in the new
model."

"What new model?" inquired Fenton, arranging himself into an effective
pose before the fire.

"Do you remember the picture of an Italian girl that Tom Demming sent
to the Academy exhibition two years ago? A homely face with lots of
character in it, and a splendid pose?"

"You mean the one he called _Marietta?_ It was well done, if I
remember."

"Oh, stunningly. That's the girl. She's just landed, and Demming gave
her letters to me. She's a staving good model!"

"But she isn't pretty."

"No; but she is suggestive. She has one of those faces that you can
make all sorts of things out of. Rollins made a sketch of her head that
is stunning; a lovely thing; and it looked like her too. Then her
figure is perfect, and what is more, she knows how to pose. She meets
an idea half way, you know, and hits the expression wonderfully. She
has given me points for my picture every time she has been at the
studio."

"Is her name Ninitta?" Grant Herman asked.

"Yes; do you know any thing about her?"

"I think I've seen her in Rome. But what is she doing on this side of
the water?"

To Arthur Fenton's keen perception there seemed more feeling in the
tone than an inquiry into the affairs of a stranger would be likely to
evoke, but he gave the matter no especial thought.

"Yes," he echoed lightly, "what is she here for? There is no art in
this country. New York is the home of barbarism and Boston of
Philistinism; while Cincinnati is a chromo imitation of both. She'd
better have staid abroad."

"Your remark is true, Arthur," Bently laughed, "if it isn't very
relevant. What people in this country want isn't art at all, but what
some Great Panjandrum or other abroad has labeled art. They don't know
what is good."

"That is so true," was the retort, "that I almost wonder they don't buy
your pictures, Tom."

"But why does the girl come to America?" persisted Herman, with a faint
trace of irritation in his tone. "She could do far better at home."

"Oh, Demming wrote that she was bound to come. You can never tell what
ails a woman anyhow. Probably she has a lover over here somewhere."

Herman made no reply save by an involuntary lowering of his heavy
brows, and Rangely brought the conversation back to its starting-point
by asking:

"But what about Nick Featherstone?"

"Oh, Nick? Well, Nick tried to kiss her yesterday, and she offered to
stab him with some sort of a devilish dagger arrangement she carries
about like an opera heroine."

"Featherstone is always a strong temptation to an honest man's boot,"
growled Herman out of his beard, as he sat with his head sunk upon his
breast, staring into the fire.

"They had a scene that wouldn't have done discredit to a first-class
opera-bouffe company," Bently went on, laughing at the remembrance.

"Nick was fool enough to hollo to somebody in the next room, and the
result was that we all came trooping in like a chorus. It was absurd
enough."

And he laughed afresh.

"But the girl?" persisted Grant Herman, not removing his gaze from the
fire. "How did she take it?"

"Oh, she was as calm and cold as you please. She gathered herself
together and went off without any fuss."

"I wish when you are done with her, you'd send her round to me," Herman
rejoined. "I want a model for a figure, and if I remember her, she'll
do capitally."

He rose as he spoke, with the air of a man who intends going home.

"By the way," Fenton said to him, "isn't the Pagan night next week?
Don't you have it this month?"

"Yes; you'll get your invitations sometime or other. Good night all."

"Oh, don't break good company," Rangely remonstrated. "I have half a
bottle here, and I do hate an alcoholic soliloquy."

But the movement for departure was general, and in a few moments more
the members of the company were wending their individual ways homeward
through the pelting rain.




III.

THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT.
       Othello; iv.--i.


The sun shone brightly in at the windows of a little bare studio next
morning, as if to atone for the gloom of the darkness and storm of the
night. The Midas touch of its rays fell upon the hair of Helen Greyson,
turning its wavy locks into gold as she softly sang over her modeling.

She seemed to find in her work a joy which accorded well with the
bright day. Pinned to the wall was an improved sketch of the bas-relief
whose design had attracted Fenton's notice in her portfolio, while
before the artist stood a copy in clay, upon which she was working with
those mysterious touches which to the uninitiated are mere meaningless
dabs, yet under which the figures were growing into sightliness and
beauty.

Suddenly her song was interrupted by the sound of footsteps without,
followed by a tap upon her door.

"Come," she called; and Grant Herman entered in response to the
invitation.

He carried in his arms a large vase, about whose sides green and golden
dragons coiled themselves in fantastic relief.

"Your vase came from the kiln," he said, "and I knew you would want to
see it at once. It is the most successful firing they have done here."

"Oh, I am so glad," she returned, laying down her modeling tools, and
approaching him eagerly. "I was sure there wouldn't be a head or a tail
left by the time the poor monsters came out of the fiery furnace. What
a splendid color that back is! And that golden fin is gorgeous."

"Yes, Mrs. Greyson," Herman said, "you have produced a veritable
dragon's brood this time. I can almost hear them hiss."

"Do you know," she responded, smoothing the glittering shapes with half
chary touches. "I should not be wholly willing to have the vase in my
room at night. They might, you know, come to life and go gliding about
in a ghastly way."

"I always wondered," the sculptor observed, "that Eve had the courage
to talk with the serpent. Do you suppose she squealed when she saw
him?"

"Oh, no, she probably divined that mischief was brewing, and that
contented her."

Herman had set the vase where all its gorgeous hues were brought out by
the sun, which sparkled and danced upon every spine and scale of the
writhing monsters. He walked away from it to observe the effect at a
greater distance.

"There is no pleasure like that of creating," he said. "Man is a god
when he can look on his work and pronounce it good."

"Which is seldom," she returned, "unless in the one instant after its
completion when we still see what we intended rather than what we have
made."

"It is fortunate our work cannot rise up to reproach us for the wide
difference between our intents and our performances. Fancy one of my
statues taking me to task because it hasn't the glory it had in my
brain."

"It is on that account," Mrs. Greyson said smiling, "that I fancy
Galatea must have been most uncomfortable to live with. Whenever
Pygmalion found fault, she had always the retort ready: 'At least I am
exactly what you chose to make me.' Poor Pygmalion!"

"It was no more true than in the case of every man that marries; we all
bow down to ideals, I suppose. Except," he added with a little
hesitation, "myself, of course."

The words were somewhat awkward in the hesitating accent which gave
them a suggestiveness at which the faintest of flushes mounted to her
cheek. She bent her observations more closely on the vase.

"It is fired so much better than the last miserable failure," observed
she, going to a shelf and reaching after a dusty vase, massive and
fantastic, which had been ruined in the kiln.

"Let me help you," Herman said.

But she had already loosened the vase, which proved heavier than she
expected, and it was only by darting forward, and throwing his arms
about her, that the sculptor was enabled to save her from a severe
blow. The vase fell crashing to the floor, breaking into heavy shards,
rattling the windows and the casts upon the wall by the concussion.

An exclamation escaped him. He had drawn Mrs. Greyson backward, and for
a brief instant, held her in his strong clasp. It was an accident which
to mere acquaintances might mean nothing; to lovers, every thing.
Herman was for a moment pale with the fear that Helen might be injured;
then the hot blood surged into his cheeks as he released his hold and
stepped back, He bent over the fragments of the vase that she might not
see his face, and by so doing, as he reflected afterward, he failed to
perceive what was her expression. He straightened himself with an
impetuous movement, and came a step nearer.

"How can you be so careless?" he demanded, almost with irritation. "It
might have killed you."

"I did not remember that it was so heavy," she returned, a little pale
and panting. "Do you think I was trying to pull it on my head? I am
very much obliged, though. You have saved me a heavy blow at least.
There is not much left of that unlucky vase. It was always
ill-starred."

"All's well that ends well," returned the sculptor, sufficiently
recovering his self-control to speak lightly; "only don't run such a
risk another time."

"Oh, I assure you," she replied, "I do not make my vases either to
break my head or to be broken themselves. I shall take better care of
this one, you may be confident."

"I was more concerned for yourself than for the vase."

"For myself it really does not so much matter."

"It is scarcely kind to your friends to say so."

"Oh,--my friends!"

Over her face came an inexplicable expression, which might be gloom or
exultation, and the tone in which she spoke was equally difficult of
interpretation. She seemed determined, however, to fall into no snares
of speech; she smiled upon the sculptor with a glance at once radiant
and perplexing.

She turned towards the new vase and began slowly to whirl the
modeling-stand upon which Herman had placed it. A thousand reflections
danced and flickered about the little room as it revolved in the
sunlight, glowing and glittering like the sparkles from a carcanet of
jewels. The fiery monsters seemed to twine and coil in living motion as
the light shone upon their emerald and golden scales and bristling
spines.

"I wonder if Eve's serpent was so splendid," Mrs. Greyson laughed,
twirling the stand yet faster upon its pivot. "Would I do for Mother
Eve, do you think?"

"If the power to tempt a man be the test," he retorted with an odd
brusqueness quite disproportionate to the apparent lightness of the
occasion, the dark blood mantling his face, "there can be no doubt of
it."

A swift change came over her at his words. She left the vase and stand
abruptly. She flushed crimson then grew pale and looked about her with
a half frightened glance, as if uncertain which way to turn. The
movement touched her companion as no words could have done.

"I beg your pardon," he muttered.

And with a still deeper flush on his swarthy cheek he turned abruptly
and quitted the room.




IV.

AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT.
      Henry VIII.; i.--3.


"In the first place," said Edith Caldwell brightly, "you know, Arthur,
that I ought not to be in Boston at all, when I have so much to see to
at home; and in the second place Aunt Calvin is shocked at the
unconventionality of my being seen any where in public after the
wedding cards are out; but I was determined to see this picture. I saw
it when he had just begun it in Paris, you know, three years ago."

"As for being seen," Arthur Fenton returned, "we certainly shall never
be seen here. The Art Museum is the most solitary place in the city;
and as for conventionalities, why, the wedding is so quiet and so far
off that I think nobody here even realizes that the stupendous event is
imminent at all."

"Oh, but I do," Edith said, laughing and clasping her hands with a
pretty gesture of mock despair. "I feel that the day of my bondage is
advancing with unfaltering tread, like the day of doom."

"Then you should do as I do by the day of doom, disbelieve in it
altogether until it comes."

"It is of no use. Even disbelief will not alter the almanac, as you'll
find when the day of doom swoops down on you."

They were sitting upon one of the hard benches in the picture-gallery
of the Art Museum before an important work just sent over from Europe
by its American purchaser. The afternoon light was beginning to be a
little dim, and Edith was troubled with the consciousness that the
errands which had brought her for the day to Boston were far from being
accomplished. It was pleasant to linger, however, especially as this
might be the last tranquil day she should pass with Arthur before their
marriage.

She rose from her seat and crossed to the picture of Millet
representing a peasant girl with a distaff of flax in her hand. Fenton
sat a moment looking after his betrothed, critically though fondly,
then with a deliberate movement he left his seat and followed her.

"Think of the distance between this country and that picture," he
remarked, regarding the beautiful canvas. "Art in America is simply an
irreclaimable mendicant that stands on the street corners and holds out
the catch-penny hand of a beggar."

"Oh, no," Miss Caldwell replied, turning her clear glance to his, "that
is only an impostor that pretends to be art. The real goddess has her
temples here."

"Yes," returned he, with a laugh that covered a sneer, "but not in the
way you mean."

A shadow passed over her face; she turned a wistful glance towards him.

"I cannot understand, Arthur," she said, "why you speak so bitterly
about art here. Of course, all great men are apt to be misunderstood at
first, but you--"

"I am over estimated," he interrupted, inly vexed at having given the
conversation this turn. "It is only for the sake of talking, _ma
petite_. Don't mind it."

"But, Arthur," she persisted, "I want to say something. Uncle Peter
talks as if you sided with the artists here who--who--"

She was wholly at a loss to phrase what she wished to say, both because
her ideas were rather vague and because she feared lest she might
offend her lover by talking upon a subject which he had markedly
avoided. He made now a fresh effort to divert the talk into a new
channel.

"Never mind the artists," he said, "we really must go. Besides, you are
only in town for a day and it is no use to attempt the discussion of
questions which involve the entire order of the universe. I promised
Mrs. Calvin I'd bring you back in half-an-hour, and we've been here
twice that time already."

He ran on brightly and rapidly, leading the way out of the gallery and
down the stairs, and she followed with a suspicion of shadow upon her
face as if the subject of which she had spoken was one of real
importance to her.

"Come in and see the jolly old Pasht," Arthur suggested, as they
descended the wide staircase.

She acquiesced by turning with him into the room devoted to the Way
collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the center of which stands a
somewhat mutilated granite statue of the goddess Pasht, the cat-headed
deity, referred to the time of Amenophis III, about 1500 B.C. Calm,
impassive and saturnine the goddess sits, holding the sign of life with
lifeless fingers in as unconscious mockery now as when the symbol was
placed within the stony grasp by some unrecorded sculptor dead more
than thirty centuries ago. All that it has looked upon, all the
shifting scenes and varied lands upon which have gazed those sightless
eyes, have left no record on that emotionless face, whose lips still
keep unchanged their faint smile beneath which lurks a sneer.

Arthur and Edith stood before it, as a pair of Egyptian lovers may have
stood long ago, and for a time regarded it in silence, each moved in a
way, though very differently, as their temperaments differed.

"It is the patron saint of our Pagans," the artist said at length. "How
much the old creature knows, if she only chose to tell. She could give
us more genuine wisdom than we shall hear in our whole lives, if she
would but condescend to speak."

"Wisdom always knows the value of silence," Edith returned smiling.

"But Pasht belies her sex by not being a communicative party," was her
companion's reply; "although communicativeness was never a
characteristic of the gods."

"No irreverence, sir," Edith said with an air of mock authority, "even
for these dethroned deities. What were the attributes of your
cat-headed goddess?"

"Oh, various things. Pasht means, I believe, the devouring one, and she
has another name signifying 'she who kindles a fire.' She was the
goddess of war and of libraries, and the 'mistress of thought.' A sort
of Egyptian Minerva, I suppose."

"Violence and wisdom always seemed to me a strange combination," Edith
said thoughtfully, regarding the stone image intently, as if to drag
from its cold lips a solution of the difficulty.

"You overlook the destructive power of words; besides, the sword or the
tongue, what does it matter? Life is always a conflict, and it is of
minor importance what the weapons are. It is appropriate enough for
this dilapidated, but eminently respectable female to be the
figure-head of a society like the Pagans where we fight with words but
may come to blows any time."

He spoke gayly, pleased with having put entirely out of the
conversation the unpleasant subject of his relations to her uncle, Mr.
Peter Calvin, upon which Edith had touched. But he who talks with a
woman must expect the unexpected, and as they turned away from the
statue of Pasht, and walked towards the street where the carriage was
waiting, Miss Caldwell abruptly brought the matter up again by asking:

"But why are you artists opposed to Uncle Peter, Arthur? What is the--"

"The Pagans, _ma belle_" he interrupted coolly, quite as if he
were answering her question, although in reality nothing was further
from his intention, "isn't really a society at all. It is only the name
by which we've taken to calling a knot of fellows who meet once a month
in each other's studios. We are all St. Filipe men, but we've no
organization as a club." "Well?" Edith asked, as he paused; evidently
puzzled to discover any connection between her question and his reply.

"And you," her betrothed responded, tucking her into the carriage and
surreptitiously kissing her hand, "are the loveliest of your sex. I'll
come to take you to the depot at six, you know. Good-by."

He closed the carriage door, watched her drive off, and then went his
own way.




V.

THE BITTER PAST.
  All's Well that Ends Well; v.--3.


"The Pagans: Friday, Jan. 17.
Pipes, pictures and punch.
              GRANT HERMAN."


Such was the invitation received one day by each of the Pagans, under a
seal bearing the impress of the goddess Pasht.

There is little that need be added to Fenton's account of the Pagans.
The society had no organization beyond a rule to meet each month and to
limit its membership to seven; no especial principles beyond an
unformulated although by no means unexpressed antagonism against
Philistinism. Fenton had suggested Pasht as a sort of _dea mater_,
and had furnished the seal bearing the image of that goddess which it
was customary to use upon the notifications of meetings; and for the
rest there was nothing definite to distinguish this group of earnest
and sometimes fiery young men from any other. They doubtless said a
great many foolish things, but they did so many wise ones that it
seemed but reasonable to assume that there must be some grains of
wisdom mingled with whatever dross was to be found in their speech.

Their views were extreme enough. Fenton was fond of maintaining
astounding propositions, using the club much as Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes once privately said Wendell Phillips does the community, "to try
the strength of extravagant theories;" and none of the Pagans were
restrained by any conventionality from a free expression of opinion.

It was on the afternoon of the day fixed for the Pagan meeting when
Helen Greyson took her way across the Common and through the business
portion of the city to the building down by the wharves where were the
studios of Herman and his pupils. It was feebly raining, the weather
having been decidedly whimsical all that week, and the clouds rolled in
ragged, sullen masses overhead. Helen felt the gloom of the day as a
vague depression which she endeavored in vain to shake off, and
hastened towards her studio, hoping to be able to lose herself in her
work.

Picking her steps among the piles of fire-brick and terra-cotta which
lumbered the yard and the long shed skirting the building, which was a
terra-cotta manufactory, she let herself in at a side door and went
directly to her studio.

Removing the wet cloths from her bas-relief, she stood for a moment
studying it, and then investing herself in a great apron, set busily to
work upon one of the fleeting figures in the composition.

She had scarcely begun when as often before a heavy step was heard upon
the stair without, a tap sounded lightly upon her door, and, in answer
to her invitation, Grant Herman entered.

He, too, had evidently been working in clay, of which his loose blouse
bore abundant marks. A paper cap, not unlike that of a pastry-cook in
an English picture, was stuck a little aslant over his iron gray locks,
giving him a certain roguish air, with which the occasional twinkle in
his eye harmonized well.

"Good morning, Mrs. Greyson," he said in his hearty voice, and then
stood for a moment looking over her shoulder at her work in silence.

"Do you think the movement of that figure too violent?" his pupil
asked, turning to look up at him, and noticing for the first time that
despite the saucy pose of his cap, the sculptor was evidently not in
the best of spirits.

"No," returned he, rather absently. "But you must have less agitation
in the robe; it is merely hurried now, not swift. Lengthen and simplify
those folds--so."

As he indicated the desired curves with his nervous fingers, Mrs.
Greyson's quick eye caught sight of a striking ring upon his hand, and
without thought she said, involuntarily:

"You have a new ring!"

"Yes," returned Herman, flushing; "or rather a very old one. It is an
intaglio that the artist Hoffmeir--I have told you of our friendship in
Rome--gave me one Christmas. I returned it to him when I left Rome, and
at his death he in turn sent it back to me."

"But Hoffmeir has been dead several years."

"More than six; but the ring has just come into my hands."

The intaglio was a dark sard beautifully cut with the head of Minerva,
and Mrs. Greyson's artistic instincts were keenly alive to the
exquisite delicacy of its workmanship. She inquired something of its
origin and probable age, and then dropped it from her attention, save
that, being a woman, she wondered a little what was the personal
bearing of this token, and whether the sculptor's sadness arose from
the awakening of memories connected with it.

"It must seem like a token from the grave," she said, "coming as it
does, so long after Hoffmeir's death."

"It does," the other replied, soberly; "but it brought a message with
it. Oh, the wretchedness of hearing a voice from the dead, to whom you
can send no answer!"

The burst of emotion with which he said this was very unusual, and Mrs.
Greyson regarded him with perhaps as much surprise as sympathy, having
never before seen him so deeply moved.

"I am afraid," she ventured, hesitatingly, "that what I said seemed
intrusive, though of course it was not meant to be."

"It did not seem so; but I am out of sorts this afternoon. I have sent
my model away because I am too much unstrung to work."

"I hope nothing bad has happened," said Helen, quickly.

"No, nothing; it's only this message from dear old Hoffmeir."

He walked away and pulled aside the curtain which screened the lower
half of the window overlooking the water, and stood gazing out at a
vessel lying beside the wharf beneath. Mrs. Greyson laid down her
modeling tools, disturbed by the other's disquiet, and wondering how
best to distract his attention from himself. Her glance roved
inquiringly about the little room, noting every cast upon the dingy
walls, bits of sculptured foliage, architectural forms, and portions of
the human figure. Then her gaze rested an instant upon her own work,
and from that turned toward the robust form by the window.

"Come, Mr. Herman," she said at length, in a tone half jesting, "I
never saw you so somber."

"It is not that Hoffmeir is dead, poor fellow!" Herman replied,
answering her unspoken question. "I'd made up my mind to endure that,
and any man with his over-sensitive temperament is better off on the
other side of the grass than this any day. I may as well tell you, Mrs.
Greyson, though as a rule I do not find much comfort in blurting out
things. The fact is that Hoffmeir and I quarreled over a girl. We were
both in love with her, like two young fools as we were; but she'd
promised to marry me, and--it was a deal better that she didn't, too. I
thought he tried to take her from me. Now I know I was wrong, and that
Fritz was as high-souled as a god in the matter; but then I sent him
back his ring, and broke off with him and her too. I was a fiery young
fool in those days," he added, with a sad and bitter smile, "a young
fool."

"And was it never explained?"

"Never until to-day. He was far too proud a man to call me back."

"But the girl?" queried Helen, with increasing eagerness. "What did she
do?"

"Oh, the girl," he repeated, turning away again and directing his gaze
out of the window; "what would you expect her to do? She was only a
peasant; and though I was honest enough then, I outgrew that fever
centuries ago."

"Yes, you did," returned Helen, with gentle persistence, "but what did
she do?"

"What do women usually do when they break with one lover? Get another,
I suppose!"

The words were so hard and coarse to come from a man like Grant Herman
that she involuntarily looked up quickly at him, and perhaps he noticed
the action.

It was evident that some deep pain had provoked the expression, yet had
found no relief in the rough words. The sculptor turned toward his
companion as if to speak. Then slowly his eyes fell, and he said
firmly, if a little stiffly:

"I believe I do her injustice. If she ever loved a man she was one who
would love him always."

He left the little room without more words, his firm, even tread
sounding down the uncarpeted stairs until the door of his own studio
was heard to close after him. Mrs. Greyson stood before her clay
wondering, and then, sinking into a chair, sat so long absorbed in
thought that the short daylight faded about her and she was forced to
give up further work that day. Replacing the wet cloth with which her
bas-relief had been covered, she prepared to return home. As she passed
the door of Herman's studio the sculptor opened it.

"I do not know," he said, extending his hand, "what made me so rude
this afternoon. I am a bear of a fellow, but I had meant to treat you
well."

He had fully recovered his composure, but his evident desire to efface
the impression he had made naturally rendered it more lasting in
Helen's mind.




VI.

A BOND OF AIR.
  Troilus and Cressida; i.--3.


Had Helen been present at the scene which took place in Herman's studio
earlier in the afternoon, she would perhaps have wondered less at his
disturbance.

In response to the sculptor's request made at the Club when Ninitta's
name was first mentioned, Bently, when the girl finished posing for
him, sent her to the sculptor's studio.

She came a day or two later than Bently had directed her, not
hastening, although for six years she had shaped her entire life to the
end of meeting Grant Herman. She came into the studio as calmly and as
quietly as if it were some familiar place which she had left but
yesterday, and she greeted the sculptor with as even and musical tone
as in the old Roman days when as yet nothing had occurred to stir her
peaceful bosom.

For his part the man stood and looked at her in silence. Even when a
ghost from the past has appeared at his especial summons, one seldom
sees it unmoved, and Herman was conscious that his heart beat more
quickly, that he breathed more heavily as Ninitta let fall behind her
the rug _portière_ and came towards him through the studio.

She had a dark, homely face, only redeemed from positive ugliness by
her deep, expressive eyes. Her figure was superb; rather slender, lithe
and sinewy, but without an angle or thin curve. Like Diana, she was
long limbed, so that she seemed taller than she really was. The sweep
of neck and shoulder was exquisite, and her simple dress was admirably
adapted to display the lines of her supple form. As she walked down the
studio, setting her feet firmly and carrying her head with fine poise,
Grant Herman felt the ghost of an old passion stir in his heart.

"How do you do?" he composedly answered her greeting. "You have
improved since I saw you last."

"Thank you," she said, in a rich voice with strong but pleasant accent.
"I have had time."

"But improvement is not always a question of time," returned he. "Look
at me."

"You have grown old," Ninitta commented, regarding him keenly. "You are
gray now."

"Yes," retorted the other lightly, "I am an old man. It is really a
very long time since you posed for me in my little den at Rome."

"You remember those days perhaps, sometimes?" she said, dropping the
long lashes over her eyes.

A shadow passed over Herman's high brow.

"Is one likely to forget such days?" he demanded. "Is one likely to
forget how love may be turned to treachery and--"

"Pardon," the woman interrupted with dignity. "I did not come to be
reproached, _eccelenza_. You have not forgotten Signor Hoffmeir?"

"No," he answered, with a deepening frown. "I have not forgotten the
man who pretended to be my friend and proved it by stealing my
betrothed."

"It is well that you have not forgotten," Ninitta went on calmly, but
earnestly, "for I have a message from him. He charged me when he was
dying," she added, crossing herself, "to give it to you with my own
hands. I have been waiting for all these years, but now I am free of my
promise."

Herman took the packet she extended toward him, and turned abruptly
away. Ninitta seated herself in one of the tall easy chairs, removed
her hat, and began a leisurely survey of the place. The sounds from the
wharf outside, the cries of the sailors, the creaking of the cordage
and the ships came softened and mellowed like the daylight into the
wide, dim studio, giving a certain sense of remoteness by the contrast
they suggested between the silence within and the stir of the world
without. For all her outward calm, Ninitta's heart was beating hotly,
and she longed with a great yearning for a touch from the hand of the
silent man before her; for a word of kindness from his lips. She
watched him furtively, under cover of looking at a cast of Celini's
Perseus upon a bracket above his head, as he stood reading the letter
from Hoffmeir.

"Why did you not bring this to me before?" the sculptor asked at
length, turning towards her. "It is six years now."

"Have I been able to shape my life?" returned Ninitta. "I have followed
you to Florence, to Paris; you came to America. I followed you to New
York; you were here. I have never ceased trying to reach you. It was
not easy for me to cross half the world alone and without help; with no
friends, no money; with nothing."

"But you have been in Boston a couple of months."

"Yes," she said quietly, looking up into his face. "But you knew it. I
waited for you to send for me."

"I have only known it a week," was the sculptor's reply. "Do you know
what was in Hoffmeir's letter?"

"His ring; the one you wore in Rome."

"But do you know what he wrote?"

"No," she answered. "How should I?"

Her questioner looked at her a moment in silence. She put up her head
proudly with an involuntary response to the questioning which his
silence implied, and met his eyes unflinchingly. Yet he put his thought
into words.

"It is seven years since I saw you," he said at length.

"It is seven years," she echoed.

"In seven years a great deal may happen," continued he, still regarding
her closely.

"Much, much has happened," she returned, still meeting his gaze without
shrinking.

"Are you married?" he asked, with a certain abruptness which to a
careful observer might have indicated that the question cost him an
effort.

"No," Ninitta returned simply; "how could I be when I was betrothed to
you?"

"But that was broken off--"

The sentence stuck in his throat; and he wondered that he could have
begun it. He wondered, too, how he could even have doubted the faith of
the woman before him; and most of all he wondered if he had ever really
loved her. He had an irritating consciousness that something was
expected of him which he was unwilling to give; some sign of
tenderness, some caress such as befitted the reconciliation of lovers
long separated by misunderstanding and blinding jealousy. He felt as if
he were falling below the demands of the occasion, most annoying of
sensations to the masculine mind. But an important interview can with
difficulty be changed from the key in which it is begun, and even had
his feelings prompted a display of tenderness, he felt that it would
seem abrupt and forced. He waited for Ninitta to speak.

"Yes," she said, after a moment, as he did not continue, "it was broken
off, but Signor Hoffmeir said that was because you did not understand,
and that everything would be as it had been when you got his letter."

A sad hopelessness began to appear in her eyes; she had of old been too
accustomed to submit to her lover's will to assume the initiative now,
despite the development and strength which time had given to her
character. The sculptor did not dream how her heart throbbed beneath
her quiet demeanor, but he was too sensitive not to be touched by the
unconscious appeal of her voice and look.

Seven years before, an enthusiastic student in Rome, he had loved or
believed he loved, the peasant girl Ninitta, whom he had found in an
excursion to Capri and induced to come to the Eternal City as a model.

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."

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.

But to-day Ninitta was a different woman, changed by the agony of a
night into which had been compressed the bitterness of years. She had
been too sharply wounded at being greeted by a hand-shake in place of
the too well remembered kisses, with commonplace kind inquiries instead
of an embrace, not to realize at least how entirely the relations
between herself and Herman were changed. She did not understand the
alteration, it is true. To do that would have required not only a
knowledge of facts of which she could have no cognizance, but far
keener powers of reason than were centered in Ninitta's shapely head.
Only of one thing she was sure; there the instinct of her sex stood her
in good stead. She was convinced that some other woman had won the
sculptor's love from her. When she came into Helen's studio this
morning she watched sharply for some token which should show her the
relations in which the two artists stood to each other; but she could
detect nothing significant. Mrs. Greyson was intent only upon her work,
and whatever the sculptor may have felt at the meeting of Helen and
Ninitta, he made no outward sign.

The model showed a quickness of comprehension in taking the pose
required, and the shoulder she bared was of so exquisite mold that
Helen's keenest artistic powers were aroused. Ninitta understood the
art of posing as a painter knows the use of brush and colors; she had
for it an inborn capacity impossible except in the child of an art
land. Moved by the inspiration of that most beautiful bust, Mrs.
Greyson worked enthusiastically, scarcely noticing when her master left
the room, an indication of indifference which the model did not fail to
note.




XII.

WHAT TIME SHE CHANTED.
         Hamlet; iv.--7.


It was February, and the night but one before the day fixed for Arthur
Fenton's marriage. He was spending the evening with Mrs. Greyson, and
it chanced that Grant Herman and Fred Rangely were also there. The
sculptor went seldom to the house of his pupil, and when he did visit
her, he satisfied some fine, secret delicacy by taking always a friend
with him. Helen was sufficiently Bohemian or sufficiently unworldly to
care little if people criticised her way of living. She had inherited a
small property which made her comfortable and independent; and she
declined being hampered by a chaperon.

"My art is my chaperon," she wrote to an elderly relative who wished to
come to Boston and matronize her. "A woman who is daring enough to be
an artist is regarded as bold enough to take care of herself, I
suppose. At least nobody troubles me, and I ask nothing more."

On the present occasion Arthur Fenton asked leave to light his cigar,
and although Herman felt this something of a profanation, it was not
long before he and Rangely added their wreaths to the smoke garlands
which hung upon the air, and had not the hostess become somewhat
accustomed to tobacco in foreign _ateliers,_ it is to be doubted
if she could have complacently endured the fumes which arose.

All subjects of heaven and earth came drifting into the talk, and at
length something evoked from Rangely his opinion of Emerson.

"Emerson was great," he said, "Emerson often recalled Goethe in
Goethe's cooler and more intellectual moods; but Emerson lacked the
loftiness of vice; he was eternally narrow."

"'The loftiness of vice,'" echoed the hostess. "What does that mean? It
sounds vicious enough."

"Emerson," Rangely returned, "knew only half of life. He never had any
conception of the passionate longing for vice _per se;_ the
thrill, the glow which comes to some men at the splendid caress of sin
in her most horrible shape. Do you see what I mean? He couldn't imagine
the ecstasy that may lie in mere foulness."

"No," replied Helen, "I'm afraid I don't quite see. Though I am sure I
ought to be shocked. Do you mean that he should have been vicious?"

"Certainly not; but it was his limitation not to be tempted; not to be
able to project himself into a personality which riots in wickedness
far more intensely than a saint follows righteousness."

"If you mean that he could not have been wicked if he tried, that, I
own, was in a sense a limitation."

"Yes; and a fatal one. No man can be wholly great who understands only
one half of human impulses."

"But what do you mean by wickedness?" demanded Herman, a little
combatively.

"Oh," laughed Rangely, "I'm not to be entrapped into giving
metaphysical and theological definitions. I mean what we are expected
to call wickedness, conventionally speaking. I've an old cad of a
parson in my new play and I am trying to decide if it will do to have
him advocate a grand scheme for reforming the world by reversing
definitions and calling those things men choose to do virtues, and
dubbing whatever man detests, vices."

"That is rather more clever than orthodox," Helen laughed. "How is your
play getting on, Mr. Rangely?"

"Oh, fairish, thank you. The trouble is that the drama went out of
fashion long ago. First they replaced it by dresses and scenery, but
now every thing has given way to souvenir programmes; so I've got to
write up to a souvenir or I sha'n't make any thing out of the play."

"I hoped you were above such mercenary considerations."

"I am trying to make myself so," he retorted. "I think about three
successful plays would be tonic enough to bring my conscience up to
proper art levels."

Herman had taken little part in this colloquy, smoking in silence, and
regarding his companions. Fenton had thus far been even more quiet,
scarcely contributing a word to the conversation; and the sculptor's
thoughts turned upon the handsome young fellow, sitting in one of his
favorite twisted attitudes in a German chair, his beardless face paler
than usual, though a red spot glowed in either cheek, and his dilated
pupils betrayed his excitement. He was smoking steadily, but with
little apparent knowledge of either his cigar or his surroundings.

"Upon my word," mused Herman. "A cheerful looking man for a bridegroom
he is. If he were going to the scaffold he could hardly seem more
melancholy. What in the world is the matter with him? I wonder if he
has been dragged into a marriage he doesn't like. How Mrs. Greyson
watches him."

Helen was indeed watching Fenton closely, although to a less keen
observer than Herman her surveillance would hardly have been apparent.
She, too, was thinking of Fenton's downcast air, and knowing him more
intimately than did the sculptor, she reasoned less doubtfully,
although perhaps not more accurately than the latter concerning what
was passing in the mind of her silent friend.

"He surely loves Miss Caldwell," she thought, "but he is so foolish. He
is thinking now that he will never meet these comrades again as an
unhampered man. He feels just now all he is giving up. I should like
him better to remember what he is gaining. Are all men inherently
selfish, I wonder. It is well for Miss Caldwell's peace of mind that
she cannot see him now. Perhaps when he is with her he sees only the
other side; I am sure I hope so."

She turned away with a sigh, and saw Herman looking at her. Their eyes
met in one of those brief glances of intelligence which serve as fine
fibers to knit people together.

The conversation soon turned upon the opinion a certain critic had
expressed concerning a picture then on exhibition.

"Bah!" cried Fenton suddenly; "what does he know about art?--he is
bow-legged!"

"Hallo!" exclaimed Rangely, "have you waked up? I thought we were safe
from you for the whole evening."

"It is never safe to count on his silence," Herman said. "He has
probably been meditating some stinging epigram against woman. We shall
have something wild directly."

"No; I've nothing to say against women now," Arthur returned, rising,
"for I want Mrs. Greyson to sing. I wish you'd stop poisoning the air
with those confounded cigarettes, Fred. The use of cigarettes degrades
smoking to the level of the small vices, and I object to it on
principle."

He opened the piano as he spoke, and without demur Helen allowed him to
lead her to the instrument.

"If you do not mind," she said a little diffidently, turning to her
guests after she had seated herself, "I should like to have the gas
lowered a trifle. It may seem a little sentimental, but I do not like
to be looked at too keenly when I sing."

The flames of the gas jets were dimmed, and Helen struck a few soft
chords. Herman listened intently. He had heard Fenton praise Mrs.
Greyson's singing, but he was entirely unprepared for what was to come,
and he never forgot the thrill of that experience.

An unpretending, flowing prelude; then suddenly the tones of the
singer.

Helen's voice was a rich, fibrous mezzo-soprano; and the music she
sang, half chant, half melody, was evidently an improvisation. The
words were the exquisite song which opens Shelley's _Hellas:_


I strew these opiate flowers
On thy restless pillow,--
They were plucked from Orient bowers,
By the Indian billow.
Be thy sleep
Calm and deep,
Like theirs who fell; not ours who weep.

Away, unlovely dreams!
Away, false shapes of sleep!

Be his, as Heaven seems,
Clear and bright and deep!
Soft as love and calm as death,
Sweet as summer night without a breath.

Sleep! sleep! My song is laden
With the soul of slumber;
It was sung by a Samian maiden
Whose lover was of the number
Who now keep
That calm sleep
Whence none may wake; where none shall weep.

I touch thy temples pale!
I breathe my soul on thee!
And could my prayers avail,
All my joy should be
Dead, and I would live to weep,
So thou might'st win one hour of quiet sleep!


It is difficult to convey the effect of this song upon its hearers. The
strangeness, the unconventionality of the recitative, the wonderful,
sad beauty of the poem, the dim light through which Helen's vibrating,
passionate voice thrilled, all helped to impress the hearers. There was
a personal quality about the chant which made it seem like a direct
appeal from the singer to the heart of each listener. It came to each
as a spontaneous outflowing of the singer's innermost self; a
confidence made in mystic wise, sacred and inviolable, and setting him
honored by receiving it forever from the common multitude of men. It
was an appeal to some unspoken and unspeakable bond of fealty, which
made the pulses throb and great emotions stir in the breast. Before
hearing one would be stubbornly incredulous of the possibility of his
being so deeply affected; afterward he would remember how he had been
moved with wonder and longing.

Especially was Grant Herman much moved. Thoughts came into his mind of
the old minstrels chanting to their harps; he seemed to hear Sappho
singing again in the gardens of Mytilene; this was the woman he loved,
and he felt himself as never before surrounded palpably by her
presence. The improvisation was a part of herself as no other music
could have been; and in some subtle, sensuous way, the lover seemed for
the moment to be one with his beloved. His eyes filled with tears in a
sort of ecstasy, and he shrank back into the shadow lest some of his
friends should detect the glad, salt drops which no eyes but hers had a
right to see.




XIII.

THE GREAT ASSAY OF ART.
         Macbeth; iv.--3.


A hush followed the conclusion of Mrs. Greyson's song.

No one wished to speak what all felt, and when the silence was broken,
it was with talk of the poet rather than of the singer. To the singing
they came only by slow degrees, and over it, when at length their
admiration found speech, they passed lightly.

One thing which seemed to be effected by the music was the awakening of
Fenton from his gloomy reverie. He began to talk in his most
extravagant and whimsical style, answering every question instantly, if
with no especial care concerning the relevancy of his replies.

"What nonsense it is," he exclaimed, "to talk of any man's originating
any thing. Why, when even Adam couldn't be made without material, what
are we, his descendants, that we should hope to create? The authors of
this old wisdom that we revamp to-day copied somebody further back, and
those in turn put down what the masses felt; collected the foam which
gathered on the yeasty waves of their age. Every truth comes to the
people first if they could only recognize it when it comes. It is
evolved by the friction of the masses, just as a fire is set by the
rubbing together of tree-boughs in primeval forests, and the dusky
redman incontinently roasted in his uncontaminated innocence. The
longer I live the less faith I have that a man evolves any thing from
his inner consciousness. Fancies are only the lies of the mendacious
brain, which perceives one thing and declares to us another."

"Go slow, Fenton," interrupted Herman, "you know our poor wits are apt
to be dazzled by too much brilliancy."

"The age," Fenton rattled on, "blooms once into a great man as an aloe
into a crown of bloom."

"Right in there," broke in Rangely, who longed for a share in the
conversation, "just consider how necessary it is that every art
producer shall be in sympathy with the human life about him. That he
should take the best wherever it is to be found. There's a miserable
sentiment about shutting one's self up in some dark corner, and
producing some tremendous thing. Don't you know how many New York and
Boston artists have gone to Europe and hermetically sealed themselves
up somewhere to ferment into greatness like a jug of cider turning into
vinegar in a farmer's cellar?"

"That's what made Hunt such a big fellow," Herman interposed; "because
he took the good wherever it offered."

"But that depends upon whether a man goes direct to Nature for
inspiration," declared Fenton, "or sets himself to get a living by
filching the good things his neighbors have won from her."

"Hunt did go to nature; that is just where he was great."

"I think," said Fred, laughingly, "that you will appreciate the mood in
which I once wrote a preface. I planned a great metaphysical and
philosophical work--I was a good deal younger than I am now--and the
preface was to be, 'As to the originality of these ideas, I have
nothing more to say than that I do not remember that they have ever
been printed with my name on the title-page.' Of course, after that
declaration, I felt at liberty to take any thing I wanted from any
where; but, unluckily, my book never got beyond the preface."

"I'm glad you had the sense to stop there," declared Arthur. "I forgive
the preface, but I could never have forgiven the book."

Helen rose from her seat at the piano and turned up the gas a little.
The effect for which the light had been lowered was secured, and it was
better, she recognized, to give to her singing a certain isolation,
which must be done before the conversation became so general that the
change from gloom to light would not be noticed.

She wore that evening a gray silk with black lace, a slight turning
away showing the whiteness of her beautiful throat. Her jewels were
cats'-eyes.

"Do you wear your cats'-eyes in honor of the cat-headed deity of the
Pagans, Mrs. Greyson?" Rangely asked, as she paused near his chair,
watching a burner which seemed disposed to flicker.

"No," returned she, smiling. "I am no follower of your Pasht; a goddess
of 'winged-words' attracts me less than a deity whose province is the
sacred sphere of silence. My dress is of Mr. Fenton's designing. He is
deeply versed in the subject of clothes. I even suspect him of being
the true author of _'Sartor Resartus.'_"

"That brings up my pet abomination," Fenton observed, with emphasis. "I
do hate Carlyle. I've even lain awake nights to think how I'd like to
pound his head. The self-conceited, self-centered, self-adoring old
humbug! He was the sham _par excellence_ of the nineteenth
century, this century of shams."

"It's something to be at the top of the heap in anything," interpolated
Herman, "even in shams."

"The trouble with Carlyle," Fenton continued, "besides his enormous
egotism, was that he never got beyond the whim that the truth is
something absolute. He could not abide the idea that it is merely a
relative thing and must be treated as such. If he'd got above the mass
of cloudy vapor he called truth, he might have gained a glimpse of real
sunlight; but his aggressive self-conceit clogged his wings. Don't you
recognize that a lie is often truer than the truth?" he ran on, sitting
up in his chair and speaking more rapidly; "that where the truth will
often produce an erroneous impression, a lie will convey a correct one?
that to be true to the spirit it is often necessary to violate the
letter?"

"Your patron saint should be the god of falsehood," Helen said lightly.
"I fear your allegiance to Pasht is not very sincere."

"Ah! but it is," retorted he, quickly. "My allegiance is to the goddess
of 'winged words'; to the glorious mother of fictitious speech; to
Pasht, the goddess of splendid, golden lying. A lie is only the truth
agreeably and effectively told. _Vive la fausseté!_"

"Doubtless each interprets Pasht's attributes according to his own
light," Herman observed, a little grimly.

He was only half-pleased with Fenton's badinage. But the latter,
apparently, did not feel the thrust.

"Let him alone," Helen said, "he believes in nothing; he is a genuine
Pagan."

"You are wrong in your idea," was Fenton's swift reply. "A true Pagan
must have a belief in some god to take from his shoulders the burden of
personal responsibility, or he cannot be joyous as a Pagan should.
However, to-night I make myself believe that I believe something, so it
comes to much the same thing."

Helen turned and looked at him, attracted by some subtle quality in his
voice.

He was sitting sidewise in his chair, holding an ivory paper-knife in
his slender fingers. His cheeks burned, his eyes were bright, his lips
red. He had shaken off the depression which oppressed him earlier in
the evening. An air of joyous, quivering excitement pervaded him. He
threw up his head with a characteristic gesture, and looked about him
like one who has conquered in some desperate conflict.

"Come," the hostess said, wondering in what inward struggle he had come
off victor; "you promised to assist me with the coffee. I make no boast
of my house or my hospitality, gentlemen," she added, with a charming
glance around, "but I warn you in advance that not to admire my coffee
is to lose my friendship forever."

In answer to her ring, a servant brought in a small mortar and a pretty
little bowl of whole coffee, delicately browned, and scarcely cold from
its roasting. Arthur, who seemed acquainted with Mrs. Greyson's methods
of procedure, began to pound the berries, roasted to perfect crispness,
in the ebony mortar, reducing them to an almost impalpable powder,
which diffused upon the air the entrancing odor dear to the nostrils of
all artists.

The servant meantime had provided tiny cups, a little copper ibrik and
an alcohol lamp over which simmered a vessel of boiling water.

"Coffee should be prepared only over coals of perfumed wood," Helen
remarked as she measured into the ibrik the small spoonful of coffee
dust designed for a single cup. "But alcohol is the next best thing, it
burns with such a supernatural flame."

She put into the ibrik a measure of boiling water, rested it an instant
over the flame to restore the heat lost in the cooler copper, and then
poured the beverage into the egg-shell cup destined for it.

"To my master first," she said, presenting the steaming cup to Herman,
who received it much as one might a gift from the skies. "I learned my
coffee making," she continued, "from an old Arab at Cairo, who used to
say that it was one of the only two things in life worth doing, the
other being the duties of religion; and it therefore should be
perfectly done."

"It is simply divine," the sculptor said. "I have never really tasted
coffee before. Only if it is made like this your Arab might have said
there was but one thing in life, for this becomes a religious duty."
One by one with equal care were prepared cups for the others, who were
neither slow nor perfunctory in their endorsement of the sculptor's
praise.




XIV.

THIS IS NOT A BOON.
    Othello; iii.--3.


    "'I strew these opiate flowers
    On thy restless pillow;'"

Hummed Grant Herman to himself, taking his lonely way down the dim and
dingy streets leading to the wharves where he had his abode:

    "'I strew these opiate flowers--'

Oh, what a woman she is! She might be Brunhilde, or she might be Burd
Helen;

    'I strew these--'

I wonder what she had to say to Fenton that she made him stay. Confound
that fellow! I'm not more than half sure that I'm fond of him; though I
can't bring myself fairly and squarely to dislike him. But I wish he
didn't know Mrs. Greyson quite so well; he's going to be married, too.
I wonder how he came to know her, any how. It is strange she doesn't
wear black if she is a widow. I'd like to learn something more definite
about her, but Fenton's the only one who would be likely to know, and I
certainly will not ask him. I suppose he is there yet, lounging in some
sort of an outlandish shape."

Arthur was indeed still in Helen's parlor, and in as crooked an
attitude as a man ever compassed. He had so managed to dispose of
himself over three chairs as to give the general effect of having been
suddenly arrested in the midst of an acrobatic feat of unusual
difficulty, and with a cigar in his long, nervous fingers, was watching
Mrs. Greyson, who occupied herself in tidying the room a little.

"We have been too good friends," she said, "to say good-by in public.
The old days have been pleasant, and it is hard to give them up."

"You have insisted upon it that they are gone forever," he returned,
"until I almost begin to believe you. But it is no matter. _Che sarà
sarà_."

"Yes; _che sarà sarà_," she echoed. "But now are you willing to do
me a favor? I haven't asked many of you."

"You certainly deserve that I should say yes without a quibble,"
replied Fenton, "but your air is so serious that I do not dare run the
risk; so I will merely answer,--I would like to do you a favor if I
may."

She came and sat down near him, a beautiful woman, flushed and tender.
It arose perhaps from the delicate sensitiveness of both that they had
always instinctively avoided those chance contacts which between lovers
become so significant, confining themselves to rare hand-shakes at
meeting and parting; and it may be that their very scrupulousness in
this matter proves how near they had been to more emotional relations
than those of simple friendship. Now when Helen laid her hand upon her
friend's arm it marked an earnestness which showed how much she felt
what she was about to say.

"I want you to give me something that Will gave you the other day."

Fenton's first feeling was one of annoyance, but this was quickly
replaced by a desire to fathom the motives which prompted her request.

"How did you know of it?" he asked.

"By divination," she answered, with a faint smile. "Will you give it to
me?"

"Why should I?"

"Because I ask you."

"To go back to that, then, why do you ask me?"

"Because I cannot bear to think of your going to be married with that
in your possession. Because it is cruel for you so to wrong Miss
Caldwell as to marry her while you find it possible to think it may
lead you to--to use that. How can you do it! You know I've no sympathy
with those who call it cowardly to take one's life. I think we've a
right to do that sometimes, perhaps. But it is cowardly to many a woman
with the deliberate idea of escaping her if you are not happy; of
deserting her after you have inextricably involved her life in yours.
You've no right to do that if you mean to make it a tragedy."

"She is involved in my life already," he returned gravely; "and it is a
tragedy. But I am not so wholly selfish as you assume. Honestly, Helen,
it is for her sake as much, at least, as my own that I wanted that
vial. It is all like a scene in _The City of Dreadful Night_. I
cannot be sure that I may not have to kill myself for her happiness.
Heaven knows I have not found myself so good company as to have very
strong reasons to suppose that any body else will."

"No," Helen said. "That is sophistry. I am a woman and I have been a
wife. I know what I say. You have no right to marry any woman and allow
the existence of such a possibility. It may not be logic, but it is
true."

"But she will not know."

"She may not know, but she will feel. You are too finely strung not to
discover to a delicate ear any discord, no matter how hard you try to
conceal it; and the ear of a woman who loves is sensitive to the
slightest changes. No, Arthur, if you have any love for her, any
friendship for me, any respect for yourself, give me that vial."

He made no answer to her appeal for a moment, although she clasped his
arm more tightly and looked beseechingly into his face. It was one of
those moments when he gave way to his best impulses; when he indulged
in the pleasure of letting his higher nature vibrate in response to
appeals addressed to it, and for the instant tasted the intoxicating
pleasure of conscious virtue. He turned to scrutinize her more closely.

"But what would you do with it, Helen?"

She started a little. She had not been without a half-formed thought
that she should be glad to have the deadly gift with its power of swift
oblivion in her possession, although until now she had scarcely been
conscious of it. But she saw that some suspicion of this was present in
Arthur's mind, and must be allayed before she could hope to accomplish
her purpose.

"You are wrong," she said quickly. "It is for your own sake that I want
you to give it up. I will do whatever you like with it. I pledge you my
word that I will never use it myself."

He still made no movement to surrender the vial, but she held out her
hand.

"Come," she pleaded. "I appeal to your best self. For the sake of your
mother, Arthur,--you have told me you could refuse her nothing she
asked, and she would surely ask this if she were alive and knew. Give
it to me."

He slowly drew from some inner pocket the little morocco case and held
it in both hands looking at it.

"It is a comfort to me," he said. "It means an end of every thing. It
means annihilation; it means getting rid of this nightmare of
existence. I can remember when I dreaded the idea of annihilation, but
I have come to feel that it is the only good to be desired. To be done
with every thing and to forget every thing! Don't you see, Helen; I
should never be satisfied with any thing short of omnipotence and
omniscience, and annihilation is the only refuge for a nature like
that. I want to be everything; to feel the joy of the conqueror and yet
not miss the keen, fine pang of the conquered--Lowell says it
somewhere; to be

    'Both maiden and lover'--

I forget it--'bee and clover, you know; to be the 'red slayer' and 'the
slain' both. Do you wonder I want to keep this?"

A feeling of helplessness and hopelessness came over Helen. Only half
consciously she spoke a thought aloud:

"You are half mad from introspection."

He turned upon her a quizzical smile.

"I dare say," said he. "It isn't a comfortable process either. If a man
has lived twenty-five years, Helen, and has not so entangled his life
in a web of circumstances that no power will ever be able to
extricate it, he may consider his first quarter century of existence a
success."

He spoke with a bitter good humor not uncommon with him, and he
believed himself sincere. He even mentally applauded himself for the
justness of the sentiment, and was not untouched with pity for a being
in whom such sadness was possible. It may have been this secret
complacency that Helen detected in his face and fancied it a sign of
relenting. She put out her hand and took hold of the morocco case.
Arthur did not release his hold, yet neither did his grasp tighten, and
she drew the dangerous gift out of his fingers.

She sprang up and locked it away in a cabinet.

"There!" she exclaimed, standing before him in a sudden revulsion of
feeling, her face flushed and her eyes shining. "Now I will tell you
what I think of you. I think you mean to be good to others, but--"

"You always think better of me than I deserve," he interrupted; "at
least you treat me better."

"That does not necessarily indicate any leniency of judgment," retorted
Helen. "I think you are self-centered, and morbid; and if marriage
doesn't reform you, I give you up, for nothing will. Suffering is only
an effect, the cause is sensibility; and you keep yourself abnormally
sensitive by having yourself always upon the vivisection table."

She turned and walked away from him. Her emotion was getting beyond her
control. Her friendships were keen with the intensity of her passionate
nature; she had not passed through this struggle lightly, and perhaps
the victory unnerved her more than defeat would have done. On his part
he endeavored to turn every thing off as usual with a jest.

"Have I told you Bently's latest?" he began. "He--"

"It is of no use," she said, returning to him, tears overflowing her
eyes. "You cannot help my making a spectacle of myself; and you had
better go. Oh, Arthur, I hope so much for you; I do so hope for
happiness coming to you out of this marriage; but I shall be so
lonely."

Her voice broke despite her effort. She came nearer, she hesitated an
instant; then she bent over and kissed his forehead. A hot tear
splashed upon his hand.

"There," she said. "Good night, and good-by. When you come back you
will see what a fine steady old lady I have become."

He got on to his feet, confused, troubled, pitying her profoundly and
commiserating himself upon the awkwardness of the situation. He tried
to frame some sentence which might bridge the distance that seemed
suddenly to have opened between them. Like a farewell, a renunciation
or a dedication, that kiss impressed upon him a certain remoteness new
and oppressive.

"Bah!" he broke off. "I can say nothing, Helen. I have thus far served
in an already sufficiently unhappy world only to make people more
miserable still. I'm not worth a faintest regret. Good-night. If I can
ever serve you--Good-by!"




XV.

'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL.
           Othello; i--3.


Helen's first conscious sensation next morning was a feeling of loss,
which resolved itself into a deep sadness when she was fairly awake and
realized that Arthur had gone. She had not Considered how much his
companionship and friendliness had been to her until now, when she felt
them lost. A woman so lonely yet so affectionate as Helen could not
spare from her life a friend so dear as Fenton had been without being
much moved. So strong had been her attachment, and so intimate had been
the acquaintance between herself and Arthur, that Dr. Ashton had
believed his wife to love the artist; but Helen, closely questioning
her heart, was able to assure herself that warm as had been her regard
for Fenton, he had never awakened in her bosom a single thrill of love.
She was sad this morning with the sorrow of a broken friendship, not of
a blighted passion.

She sighed deeply, the sigh of one but too well accustomed to life's
disappointments, and arose the determination to lose herself in her
work, and to shake off if possible the sadness which seemed to paralyze
her energies and enervate her whole being.

The gown which she had worn upon the previous evening lay over a chair,
giving out, as she lifted it, an odor of tobacco smoke. Some remark
made by Grant Herman about the fumes which had filled the little parlor
came into her mind, giving a new current to her thoughts. She
unconsciously fell to thinking of the sculptor, and, by a natural
connection of ideas, of Ninitta, who was still nominally posing for
her.

Partly from interest in the girl herself and partly from the perception
that it pleased her master to have the Italian remain with her, she had
retained Ninitta, although the bas-relief was so far advanced that the
model was hardly needed. She had even set herself, by those unobtrusive
ways at the command of gracious women, to win the girl's confidence,
not so much for the sake of hearing her story as to give the waif so
strangely cast in her path the feeling that the friendship she so
sorely needed was within her reach. It had resulted, however, in her
hearing Ninitta's history. Many women have no idea of returning
kindness save by unreserved confidence, and although Ninitta was
perhaps scarcely to be reckoned among these extremists, she yet found
so much comfort in pouring out her sorrows to one who could both
sympathize and appreciate, that little by little the whole pathetic
tale was told.

"I did not understand," Ninitta said once in her broken English, "when
he left Rome. It was as if somebody had taken my life away somehow. I
couldn't make it seem that I was really alive all the same, though I
knew it could not be his fault. He would not have done it if he had
known. You do not believe he would have left me if he had known the
truth?"

"No," Helen answered. "He could not have left you if he had known. It
was because he was hurt so much, and that could only be because he
loved you so much."

"He loved me so much," poor Ninitta repeated murmuringly, "he loved me
so much."

And all that day she followed Helen with wistful eyes, as if she longed
to hear her say again those precious words.

"I cannot tell you what it was like in Paris," she said at another
time. "In Rome they all knew me. They knew I was betrothed, and no one
ever troubled me. But in Paris it was different. Oh, I hate Paris! And
it was so cruel that he was not there. It was so dreadful that he
should be on the other side of that horrible sea!"

The girl was so self-forgetful in these revelations, she spoke always
with such an unshaken faith in Herman and was so free from any thought
of blaming him, that Helen could not but be touched. She soothed poor
Ninitta as well as she was able, having power to promise nothing,
seeing no way out of the entanglement, yet at least showing to the
lonely Italian that her woman's heart bled for her sorrow if she might
not alleviate it. Sometimes she felt like going to the sculptor and
entreating him to take pity upon the girl who so adoringly loved him.
Once when the model had told her how just as she had saved by long,
painful economy, nearly money enough to pay the passage to America it
was stolen and she was forced to begin the slow process over again,
Helen impulsively left her studio and found herself on the very
threshold of Herman's door before she realized what she had been about
to do. By what authority was she to interfere in a matter like this? If
Ninitta loved the sculptor who had long ago ceased to return her
affection, could matters be helped by an unloving marriage? It was not
for her, moreover, to give unasked her advice to such a man as she knew
Grant Herman to be. If he consulted her, she reflected, she might
present the pathetic, touching story which Ninitta had told her, but
she had plainly no pretext for forcing her feelings upon her master
unsought.

She turned and went slowly up the stairs toward her little room; but
suddenly she paused. She had all at once become conscious that she
desired eagerly to know the nature of the sculptor's feelings toward
his old love. Why, she asked herself, was she so interested in what
after all did not personally concern her. A quick emotion, almost too
vague to be called a thought, made her cheek flame.

"No, no," she said half aloud. "It is only that I am touched by
Ninitta's sadness. It is nothing more."

But her breath came more quickly, and it was with difficulty that upon
re-entering her studio she assumed a quiet mien, lest her model should
guess at her unfulfilled errand.

On the morning following the meeting of the Pagans at her rooms, Helen
was alone in her studio. She had told Ninitta she should be late and
the latter was therefore tardy in arriving. Mrs. Greyson uncovered her
bas-relief, now rapidly nearing completion, and stood before it,
examining critically its merits and defects. A familiar step in the
passage, a tap at the door, and Grant Herman joined her.

"You look as fresh as ever this morning," he said. "I feared that the
entertaining of such a company of Bohemians would have tired you out."

"No, indeed," she returned. "I am of far too much endurance to be worn
out by any thing of that sort. I have a drop of Bohemian blood in my
veins myself, I think, and I like to meet men as men--when they are
simply good fellows together, I mean. A woman usually sees men in an
attitude of either deference or defense, and there is something
inspiriting to her in being occasionally received as a comrade."

"There are few women who can be received so," returned Herman. "I
suppose it requires both an especial temperament and especial
experiences to render a woman capable of being a comrade to men."

The talk drifted away to general and indifferent subjects, broken here
and there by allusions and criticisms relating to the Flight of the
Months, and not infrequently dropping into brief silences. One of these
Herman broke by saying abruptly:

"You do not know how your song has haunted me all night. I have been
saying over and over to myself

    'I strew these opiate flowers
    On thy restless pillow.'

And, indeed, I longed for some such soporific myself before morning.
Your coffee or your song, or--yourself,"--he hesitated over the last
word--kept me very effectually awake."

"It must have been the coffee; there was little potency in either of
the other causes."

"There is much," he returned resolutely, advancing a step nearer. "Mrs.
Greyson, I have not wasted the night. I have thought out a great many
things; the first and chief being in regard to yourself."

His tone, the piercing glow of his eyes, warned Helen what was coming.
She thought of Ninitta, and retreated a step.

"It is true," the sculptor continued, as if answering the doubt implied
by her movement, "that I--"

The door opened softly and Ninitta came in.

His outstretched hand dropped; the words died upon his lips. He turned
from one woman to the other an appealing look of hopeless sadness and
left the studio in silence.

It was characteristic of Helen's generosity that her first thought
should be of the pain which Ninitta must feel. One glance at the model
was sufficient to show that the Italian had comprehended enough of the
interrupted scene to be made wretched; but it did not then occur to
Mrs. Greyson that to Ninitta's jealous soul, unsuspicious of Herman,
the only explanation of a fondness between the sculptor and his pupil
lay in an effort on the part of the latter to win from the model her
rightful and long betrothed lover.




XVI.

CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH.
               As You Like It; i.--2.


Grant Herman sat in his studio in the gathering twilight thinking
gloomily. However little Mrs. Greyson suspected the tumult which would
be aroused in Ninitta's breast by the misadventure of the morning, the
sculptor was too well aware of the Italian's passionate nature not to
dread the consequences of the jealousy she was sure to feel. He knew,
moreover, that Ninitta's rage would vent itself not upon him but upon
Helen, and he wondered how best to avert the danger that threatened.

He debated with himself, too, how much he owed to the girl who gave her
life up so unreservedly to him. His old love--"call it rather mere
boyish passion," he-thought scornfully--was long since dead beyond
hope; yet the devotion which it had awakened in Ninitta burned on as
steadily as ever. Had he now a right to repulse the love he had himself
called into being; to throw aside the fondness he had himself fostered
and which he had once prized above measure.

"No," he thought, "a thousand times no. A man must be a villain who
would not marry a girl under such circumstances. I am hers; the fact
that I have changed is my misfortune, not her fault. If I have any
manliness about me, I won't let things go on in this way any longer.
I'll marry Ninitta. It is the smallest reparation I can make for the
long years of pain I have caused her. There is no other course for me.

"But I do not love her, and a woman, they say, always instinctively
feels it when a man's heart is not hers. Nonsense! That is only a
cowardly excuse. At least Ninitta would never be troubled. She has not
known so much love that she can draw very sharp comparisons. No; she
will be satisfied; and I--well, if a man is such a devilish fool as I
have been, it remains for him to pay the penalty. Oh, if youth only
knew!"

He sighed deeply and began to walk up and down the studio, in which the
dusk was gathering thickly. A last faint gleam from a window high in
the riverward wall fell upon one of the mutilated goddesses in the
gallery. Herman looked up, contemplating the phantom-like head
gloomily. Something in its pose, or perhaps more truly something in his
own mind, suggested a faint likeness to Helen, as if it were her ghost
looking down from some far height upon the conflict of his soul.

"Ah!" he cried hotly to himself. "And she? How can I give up the hope
of winning her? What was a boy's foolish fancy to the passion of a
man--and for such a woman! She is half goddess. No, no; I cannot do it.
I cannot marry this Italian peasant, this model that has who knows what
history! I will not; I owe something to myself, to my art. What is the
simple happiness of Ninitta to my art? I should be a fool to ignore how
much more to the world my own well-being is worth than is hers; and
what could I not do with the inspiration of the other! Oh, my God!"

The darkness grew. The phantom faded imperceptibly away. He was left
alone in the darkness to fight out his battle. He marched with great
strides, avoiding obstacles by a certain sixth sense born of constant
familiarity with the place. He fought manfully, persuading himself that
his scruples were as idle as air, remnants of the long since outgrown
superstitions of his childhood. He defiantly claimed the right to be
true to his powers, to his genius, rather than to an empirical standard
erected by narrow moralists. He should be thankful that he had escaped
entangling his life by that absurd marriage in Rome seven years ago,
and that he was now free to win a wife worthy Of himself and of his
art.

Yet he cut through all the meshes of logic he had himself been weaving,
by striking his strong hands together there in the dark, and crying
aloud, his voice startling him in the stillness:

"My God! What a poltroon I have become! Shall I cast on others the
burden of my own mistakes?"

And seizing hat and cloak he left the studio, taking his way towards
the narrow street where Ninitta lodged, hastening to ask her to marry
him before his resolution faltered.




XVII.

THIS "WOULD" CHANGES.
        Hamlet; iv.--7.


Herman found Ninitta alone in the attic which served her for a home in
this bleak northern city, so far and so different from her own sunny
Capri.

Bare and half furnished as was the room, the girl had contrived to
impart to it a certain air which removed it from the common-place. A
bit of flimsy drapery, begged from some studio, hung over one of the
windows; a rude print of the Madonna was pinned to the wall, and under
it, on the wooden table, was a bunch of withered flowers. They were
roses which Helen had given Ninitta, and the Italian, returning home
that day, had in her jealous rage thrown them to the floor and trampled
upon them. Then remembering that they had been offered to the Madonna,
she had been seized with a superstitious fear, and carefully restoring
the battered flowers, had eagerly vowed a fresh bunch to the Holy
Mother if she might be forgiven this sacrilege.

But the most beautiful article in the room was a cast of a woman's
shoulder. It had been modeled by Herman in the earliest days of his
acquaintance with Ninitta, when she had been still only his model and
not his betrothed. He was touched as he looked at it now. Yellow with
time and soiled by its various journeyings, it still preserved unmarred
its lovely shape, exquisite curve melting into exquisite curve as
softly and sweetly as in those glowing days when he had molded it under
the sky of Italy.

He looked from the cast to Ninitta. He had only seen her at the studio,
and he experienced a faint feeling of surprise at detecting a subtle
difference in her here at home. It was nothing so tangible that he
could have told by what means he received the impression, yet it was
sufficiently definite to make him lose something of the freedom with
which he had always addressed her. She was no longer simply the model,
she was an Italian woman in her own home.

The years during which they had been separated had formed and
strengthened Ninitta's character. If Herman had not before noted the
alteration, it was due in part to his pre-occupation and in part to the
force of old habit which made her manner toward him much the same as
formerly. To-night he began to appreciate the change in her, and he
felt the awkwardness which always results from the discovery that we
must adapt ourselves to a modified condition in a friend.

On her side Ninitta was naturally surprised at seeing the sculptor. She
had come to regard as hopeless all speculations upon his intentions,
and she had waited patiently until he should choose to show her favor,
tacitly acknowledging his right to do whatever should be his good
pleasure. Had he come at any time and said, "Ninitta, I am here to
marry you," she would gladly but quietly have made ready to follow
where he chose to lead, even to the world's end. Equally, had he said,
"Ninitta, I have come to say good-by; you will never see me again," she
would have acquiesced without a murmur, and then, perhaps, have taken
her own life. As long as it was his simple wish, uninfluenced by the
will of another, she would never have questioned.

Now, however, all passive acquiescence was at an end. Since the scene
in Helen's studio, Ninitta had an object upon which to expend all her
energies, and she even almost forgot to love Herman in the intensity of
her sudden jealous hatred of Mrs. Greyson. Yesterday Grant Herman would
have found a woman not unlike the Ninitta of old times, tender, loving,
pathetically submissive; today he was confronted by a fury, only
restrained by the respect for his presence born of long habit.

"Good evening!" he said gently, as he entered, his mood softened by the
struggle through which he had passed in his studio.

"Good evening!" she answered defiantly, in Italian. "So you are not
with her!"

"What!" he exclaimed.

He had been wholly unprepared for this outburst, and for the instant
was too surprised to at all understand it.

A sudden rage seemed to seize Ninitta, which swept away all barriers of
restraint.

"_Si_, _si_, _si_," she cried, "I am not blind! What if
you are my betrothed, when this woman comes to entrap you, to bewitch
you with an evil eye, to steal your soul! Yes, yes; you are not with
her to-night as you were last night. Did I not see you myself come out
of her house?"

"Stop!" he said in his most commanding tone, but without anger.

The calmness and decision of the manner arrested her. She sank back
into a chair, regarding him with defiant eyes.

"So you have followed me," continued Herman, speaking with painful
slowness, so that every word seemed to poor Ninitta to fall upon her
like a curse; "so you have played the spy upon me. Ah!"

As he looked at her she began to cower. She shrank back in her seat,
putting up her hands to shield her face from his gaze.

"Yet I meant to marry you," he said, half to himself, although still
addressing her. "I came to-night to say, 'Come, Ninitta, let us take up
the broken romance that a cruel mistake interrupted there in Rome.' I
had long ago outgrown my old fancy, but I meant to be true to my
promise to you. I meant to give up even my ambition for your sake; to
make your life happy and secure. And this is your trust in me! If you
really loved me, to track me like a thief would have been impossible to
you. And where have you learned this trick of playing the spy?" he went
on with growing wrath, becoming more and more cruel with every word.
"It is a relic of your Paris life, I fancy. It is hardly a resource to
which a good girl would be driven. I at least believed you when you
told me you had been true to me."

He spoke rapidly, aggressively. The fact that he was outraging his own
instincts in beating with bitter words the girl who bowed before him
with drooping head and disheveled hair made him but the more harsh. To
fall from the height of self-sacrifice into a pool of vulgar intrigue!
Bah! His disgust at himself for ever having known this woman seemed too
great to be borne.

Yet under all his passionate protest and repulsion he was conscious
that he doubted what he was himself saying with so much vehemence; that
he secretly believed Ninitta to be true and pure, and that to her
Italian blood, to her peasant nurture, was due the espionage in which
she had been self-betrayed. The sting of conscience, too, in the
knowledge that the model's jealousy of Helen was well founded, the
humiliation of finding his feelings and motives discovered, increased
his irritation. He felt a base desire to stab and humiliate Ninitta,
but for whom he might be free to win the one woman he had ever loved;
and the more his denunciations recoiled to hurt himself, the more
eagerly he poured them out, as in some moods of mental anguish one
finds relief in the pain of self-inflicted physical hurts.

"Yes," he said, more and more completely abandoning control of himself;
"yes, this tells sufficiently what you have learned in Paris."

"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried, flinging herself at his feet and groveling
there. "No, no! For the love of the Virgin, signor, not that! I have
been good. Oh, for the love of God, signor! For the love of God!"

She was shaken by the storm of sobs in which her words ended. She got
hold of his feet and refused to rise when he attempted to lift her. Her
long hair, escaped from its stilletto, fell about her face. Even in
this agitated moment the sculptor in Grant Herman noted with a sharp,
aesthetic pleasure the beautiful curves of her neck and shoulders.

"Pity," she went on between her agonized sobs. "Oh, forgive me! I will
do any thing you wish. I will go away and leave you."

He stooped and raised her by main force, yet tenderly.

"There, there, Ninitta," he said, "I was wrong. I do believe you are a
good girl; but you should not have played the spy."

He soothed her as well as he was able, her violence spending itself in
passionate tears. She drew herself away from him, and sat down again in
the chair she had been occupying. She put up her hands to her head,
twisting the loose tresses into a great coil. The sleeve of her dress,
unfastened in her agitation, fell back from her rounded arm. The superb
lines of her figure were displayed by her attitude. Her face, flushed
with weeping and lighted by the still tear-wet eyes, if not beautiful,
was appealing and pitiful. Some fiber touched of old vibrated anew in
his being. He made a step forward.

"Ninitta," he said, "I came to-night to ask you to marry me at once; to
fulfill the promise I made you so long ago."

The words and the tone both were tender, but he had said those same
words in anger just before.

"But you do not love me," she responded, her arms dropping pathetically
into her lap. "You have said it."

"But I was angry," answered Herman, for the moment almost believing
that his old love was re-awakened. "I did not mean you to believe it."

"If you do love me," she said, a new look coming into her eyes, "you
will promise me never to see her again."

He started back as if from a blow. His frail dream of passion was
shattered like a bubble at her words. A wave of bitter self-contempt
that its existence had been possible swept over him. The blood surged
into his cheeks. Ninitta saw the flush and her eye kindled.

"Promise me," she repeated. "It is little for love to ask. It is my
right."

With instinctive feminine guile she leaned towards him in an attitude
so beautiful, so appealing that even now he was moved. But with this
emotion came, too, a subtle if now fainter sense of degradation that he
was susceptible to this dangerous fascination, with a painful
consciousness of how wide a moral gulf had opened between them by the
anger and vulgar jealousy which Ninitta displayed. It is not
impossible, too, that his instinctive clinging to Helen was a stronger
power than he knew; while still through all his mingled emotions ran
the resolve he had made to give himself up to his old betrothed.

"No," he said; yet as he moved slowly towards the door he had the air
of a man who still deliberates.

She threw herself back in her seat with a touching gesture of despair,
but also with a gleam of malice in her eyes, which he, turning with his
hand upon the latch, caught and understood.

"No," he repeated with final decision. "No, no!"




XVIII.

BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE.
    Love's Labor's Lost; ii.--I.


Fenton had returned to Boston with his bride, but as yet Helen had not
seen him. One morning late in March, however, he came to call.

"I could not come before," he said after the first greeting, "'I have
married a wife,' and the amount of arrangement and adjustment implied
in that statement is simply astounding."

"I am glad to see you at last," she returned. "And your wife, is she
well?"

"My wife," replied he, with a little hesitancy over the unfamiliar
term, "is well. Cannot you come to see us before that dreadful
reception through which I am to be dragged? I'd like you to know Edith
in a different way from the crowd."

Helen crossed the room and sat down in her favorite chair by the
window.

"He ought to understand," was her thought. "Why cannot he see that it
is impossible for his wife and me to harmonize. We have no common
ground."

"I shall be glad to," she said aloud, inwardly shrinking at the need of
speaking disingenuously to one with whom she had so long been upon
terms of frankness. "I will come very soon; to-day or to-morrow.
To-day, though, I must go and see my bas-relief. It is all ready to be
cut for the furnace; I only want to take a last look at it, to be sure
that every thing is right. If it will not bore you," she added, a
little hesitatingly, "you might come too; it is your last chance to
find fault to any advantage, for any changes must be made at once."

"I'd like to go," answered her friend, looking at his watch, "if I can
get back to luncheon. Yes, there's plenty of time."

"Benedick, the married man," laughed Helen. "That I should ever live to
see this air of domesticity!"

They crossed the Common, chatting idly, and both conscious that the
frankness of their old intercourse was somehow lacking; that it was
necessary to begin a new adjustment upon a basis different from the
former one. They talked upon indifferent subjects, of what had occurred
during the three weeks of Arthur's absence, playing the part of
amiability without pleasure, endeavoring to simulate the old relations
which no longer had real existence.

"Oh, Arthur," Helen laughed, suddenly, "let's not go on in this way!
Let us quarrel, or something. Say a wicked epigram; do any thing,
only don't be so eminently amiable!"

"My head is as empty of ideas," he returned laughing, in his turn, "as
is a modern title-page of punctuation points. Besides, Edith has
forbidden wicked epigrams."

"Does she therefore suppose she can suppress them?"

"Oh, I don't know," responded Fenton, good-humoredly. "I am not in as
epigrammatic a frame of mind as I was."

"'Tis a good sign."

"Yes; a sign I am growing inane and respectable."

"I can imagine you one about as easily as the other."

"That is bitter-sweet; a compliment and a flout."

"If I had said that," Helen observed, smiling, "you would have
retorted, with a look of gloomy solemnity, that most things in life are
bitter-sweet; unless, indeed, you felt called upon to phrase it that it
had the advantage of most earthly matters by not being wholly bitter."

"Was I ever guilty of such commonplace attempts at epigrams as that?"
returned Arthur. "If so it is certainly a good thing that I have given
up repartee for matrimony."

"Oh, that is brilliant beside many of your attempts, I assure you. And
as for your giving them up--I reserve my decision."

"You shall see, skeptic," he said lightly. "I expect to change the face
of the whole world if necessary."

"It is a common error of ardent temperaments," she returned pleasantly,
but with evident sincerity, "to assume that a state of feeling can
change the world."

"But I must, I will," he began eagerly. Then the light died out of his
face and he ended with a shrug.

Helen put up her hand with an impulsive gesture, as if about to speak.

Then letting her arms fall by her side, she turned to unlock the studio
door, which by this time they had reached.

The bas-relief was still shrouded in its damp envelopes, which Helen
carefully removed, keeping Fenton away, that he might first see the
work as a whole, and not lose its legitimate effect by catching
fragmentary glimpses as it was uncovered. When at last it was fully
disclosed, she called him to her as she stood before it.

"By Jove! That's stunning!" he exclaimed, after an instant's pause,
which gave him time to see it fairly. "Helen, you have outdone
yourself! That figure is simply superb. I hadn't an idea you would come
out so well. I'm wonderfully proud of you."

"You are more amiable than ever," she responded; but her flushed cheek
showed that she was touched by his earnest praise. "For that figure I
have to thank Ninitta's posing. She is an inspiration."

"But Ninitta did not inspire that splendid head," observed Arthur,
pointing with his cane at the December, "and you evidently did that
_con amore_. By Jove! It's Grant Herman, as I live!"

As he spoke he turned and saw Ninitta on the threshold.

"Shall you want me to-day?" the latter asked of Helen.

"What made that girl look so savage?" Fenton questioned as the door
closed behind the model.

"She perhaps chooses to be jealous of me," Helen replied composedly.

"_Elle a peutêtre raison_."

"Perhaps."

"You say that too calmly by half," was his gay response. "Yet as every
work a woman does has a man for its end--I learned that from the
classics; Penelope, you know, and even washwoman Nausicaä--I suppose it
is fair to assume this had. Only who is the man?"

Helen flushed slightly. She recalled the ambition with which she had
begun this work, to make the man beside her praise its completion; and
she was conscious that before she finished it was the praise of Herman
for which she strove.

"It is filthy lucre that inspires me," she replied steadily. "I need no
other incentive."

They walked about the studio, talking of the bas-relief as seen from
different points; of how it was to be cut for firing; and on the safe
ground of art they forgot all personal constraints, until the striking
of a clock aroused Fenton to a sense of the flight of time.

"I must go," he said. "I am no end glad I came. The truth is I am not
very well acquainted with this married man, and it is comfortable to
slip back occasionally into a familiar bachelor mood. However," he
continued with his brightest smile, "I like the Benedick far better
than I should ever have dreamed possible; and his wife is charming. And
I want to say, too," he added, "that I have a thousand times thanked
you for taking that vial before I went to be married. I'm in a spasm of
virtuousness just now, and it is pleasant to remember that I did not
have it that day."

They went down stairs and out into the soft, spring-like day,
sauntering homeward in a happy and accordant mood. Arthur urged Helen's
going home to lunch with himself and Edith, but to Helen the morning
was far too precious to be ended in a possibly inharmonious meeting
with Mrs. Fenton.

And that afternoon Herman sent for Mrs. Greyson in all haste. Ninitta
had vented her jealous rage upon the bas-relief, destroying the head of
December which she heard Fenton say must have been done _con
amore_, and the beautiful May for which she herself had posed.




XIX.

NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS.
   Romeo and Juliet; ii.--4.


Mrs. Fenton's wedding reception was largely attended. However strongly
the artist might savor of Bohemianism, his wife was connected with
certain prominent Philistines, and he had exhibited a most remarkable
readiness to have them present in force.

"Into the camp of Philistia itself," muttered Rangely to Bently, as
they elbowed their way through the crowd. "By the great horn spoon, if
there isn't Peter Calvin! Arthur calls him the Great Boston Art Greek.
That ever I should live to see the humbug under Fenton's roof-tree!"

"Pshaw!" returned Bently with an oath. "What a set of rubbishy old fobs
and dowagers there is here anyway. Is this the kind of people Fenton
means to know?"

"Means to know," echoed Rangely. "He's got to go down on his marrow
bones to get them to consent to know him. They patronize art, and that
means that they snub artists."

"Humph!" exclaimed Bently. "Is he sycophant enough to do that?"

"That's as you look at it. His wife probably decides the matter for
him. She very naturally likes to know what she would call 'nice
people.' How those women chatter! I wonder what they find to talk
about."

"Not necessarily any thing. They always talk all the same whether
they've any thing to say or not."

"How much of life is wasted in enduring people for whom one does not
care," philosophized Rangely, looking over the throng which filled to
overflowing the Fentons' somewhat limited rooms. "Ah! There is Dr.
Ashton. How do you do, Doctor?"

"As well as could be expected," the Doctor answered, "in this
antiquated assembly."

"Oh, Boston is only an antiquarian society," laughed Rangely, "and
these old tabbies are all honorary members. By Jove, though, there are
some awfully pretty girls here."

"I've observed that Boston girls are apt to be pretty when they give
their minds to it," remarked Bently. "Not when they wander round with
Homer under one arm and Virgil under the other and dyspepsia in the
stomach, but when they are deliberately frivolous."

The throng separated them at this moment, and Dr. Ashton went in search
of host and hostess. Arthur caught sight of his tall figure, and made a
sign at once of recognition and summons. Struggling between a young
Episcopal clergyman and a corpulent old lady, Dr. Ashton made his way
with difficulty to the spot where his friend was standing.

"You are the most married man I know, Arthur," was his greeting.
"Brigham Young wasn't a circumstance. I have been half an hour crossing
the room."

"Dr. Ashton, Edith; my wife, Will," was the only reply Fenton made,
unless one could interpret the quizzical glance he bestowed upon his
friend.

"I feel already acquainted with you," was Mrs. Fenton's remark, "I have
heard of you so often. My husband has spoken to me so much of his
friends that it is hard for me to realize that I do not know them
myself."

"You have been very little in Boston, I believe," Dr. Ashton said,
looking at her in a sudden surprise at remembering that he had seen her
face before.

"Very little," replied she, "I have been abroad a great part of my life
and--"

New claims upon her attention ended the conversation with that charming
abruptness characteristic of such an occasion, and the Doctor was left
to elbow his way out of the crush, with the sense of having done all
that would be required of him. He found a corner where he could watch
the hostess and fell to wondering whether Mrs. Fenton in her turn
remembered their previous meeting.

Edith Fenton was a slender, nun-like woman, too pale, with a smile of
wonderful attractiveness. "A woman to wear lilies," was the way Grant
Herman put it afterward; a remark which conveyed well the purity of her
face. Her ease of manner showed familiarity with the conventionalities
of life, yet in some vague way she seemed removed from the people by
whom she was to-day surrounded.

"She has been brought up in the old narrow ways," Dr. Ashton reflected,
"but there are great possibilities about her. She'll either be the
making of Fenton or send him to the dogs. She will scarcely find much
room in her house for many of his former friends, I fancy."

He stood watching the people and amusing himself with cynical
speculations until he saw Grant Herman's great figure among the guests.
He knew him but slightly and looked at him with an indifference which a
couple of hours later he regretted. Herman cared little for the
formalities of the occasion, and very likely might have gone away
without even being presented to the hostess had not Fred Rangely taken
him in charge and brought him safely through that ceremony. Now the
sculptor was looking for Mrs. Greyson, of whom he soon caught sight,
when he began making his way towards her. She however perceived him,
and with the feeling that she could not bear to meet him in public just
at this time, she evaded him by slipping into the window where her
husband was ensconced.

"Take me out of this, please," she said, "I am tired."

He gave her his arm without speaking, and together they made their way
from the room.

"I want to talk to you," he remarked easily. "Mayn't I walk home with
you?"

When she was ready they went together out into the starlit streets.
Neither spoke at first, each carrying on a train of thought to which
the other could have no adequate clew.

"Who is Arthur's wife?" Dr. Ashton asked at length. "I know she was a
Miss Caldwell, that she came from Providence, and that she has been an
orphan so short a time that they had a perfectly quiet wedding; but
that is the extent of my knowledge. Is she an artist?"

"An amateur," answered Helen. "She studied in Paris. He met her there.
She is a relative, I forget just how far or near, of Peter Calvin. She
seems to me an icicle. Think of Arthur's marrying a _religieuse_!"

"What is his game, I wonder," said her companion thoughtfully. "Do you
know when she was in Paris? Was it when we were there."

"Let me see," Helen responded, with a mental calculation. "Yes; she
must have been there the last year we were. Why? Did you ever meet
her?"

"Perhaps," was the careless reply.

They reached Helen's door as he spoke.

"Come in," she said. "Fortunately I can make you a salad. It is a long
time since we had a _petit souper_ together. I have, too,
something to say to you."

He followed her to the pretty parlor, and sat idly chatting while she
made her preparations for the supper.




XX.

THE WORLD IS STILL DECEIVED.
  Merchant of Venice; iii.--2.


It was a dainty little table to which Helen invited her husband when
every thing was ready. The china was of odd bits picked up here and
there abroad, and it was now disposed with an artist's eye for color
and grouping. A tall bottle of Rhine wine had come from some mysterious
nook, and beside it were a pair of fine old German glasses, frail as
bubbles.

"I have always to offer my guests Rhine wine," Helen said, "for I've no
glasses for any thing else. Arthur is ungracious enough to object. He
does not like white wine as you do."

"I do like it," her guest answered, drawing the cork, "and so does
Arthur, only he does not know it. He has somewhere stumbled upon the
whim of pretending not to, and he can deceive himself more completely
than any other man I ever saw. Rhine wine is the most poetic of
beverages. It should go down like oil and only leave a fragrance like a
poet's dream behind it."

"That is quite a rhapsody for you, Will; only your cool tone gives it a
certain cynical flavor."

"I mean all I say, I assure you. Champagne is vulgar. It is the drink
of self-made snobs and cads who wish to pass for men of the world; but
Rhine wine is the drink for poets and artists."

"I am delighted to hear you defend it; it is very good of you, when I
happen to know you are not fond of it. It is a graceful return for my
inhospitality in not giving you your favorite Burgundy, but I haven't a
drop."

"Oh, don't mind the wine! I came to see you," Dr. Ashton said, with his
delightful smile. "How droll it was to see Arthur to-day. Do you think
he has really persuaded himself he is in love with his wife?"

"Arthur has great adaptability," Helen returned. "I think he believes
he is in love. I'm sure I hope you'll not feel it your duty to tell him
he isn't."

"I'm not Mephistopheles," answered Dr. Ashton, smiling, and watching
appreciatively as she made the salad.

Mrs. Greyson had dressed carefully for the reception from which she had
just come, and her cream-colored cashmere, with soft old thread lace,
and a bunch of amber-hued roses at the throat, became her as only a
dress chosen by an artist could. It fell away from her exquisite arms,
and from among the lace rose her beautiful neck, the stuff of her gown
setting off the lovely texture of her skin to perfection.

"I must not ruin my best attire," she said lightly, gathering it up.
"Now Ninitta has spoiled my bas-relief, it may be long before I get
more. I owe you a good deal, Will, for letting me study modeling in
Paris."

"It was pure selfishness," he returned good-humoredly. "I wanted to
keep you busy so that I might go my own way. But what about your
bas-relief? Who spoiled it? Who is Ninitta, and what has she against
you?"

"That is what I wanted to tell you."

She did not speak again for a moment, seemingly intent upon the exact
measurement of the ingredients of her salad. In reality she was
considering how best to present what she had to say. She mentally ran
over the points she wished to make, becoming thereby conscious that she
had herself come to no definite conclusions upon the topic she was
about to discuss. She looked furtively at her husband, noting his
attitude, his expression, and whatever her past experience enabled her
to construe into indications of his mood. As well and as long as she
had known this man, she was still ignorant of the key to his nature--that
feeling or motive which, touched in an ultimate appeal, would
always insure a response. Conscience is the fruit of the tree of
experience, and, taken in this sense, every man must be possessed of a
conscience, which by its inner voice re-enforces any pleading which
coincides with its dictates. What was the nature of her husband's
inward monitor Helen had never been able to discover and at this moment
she realized keenly her ignorance.

"Will," she said earnestly, laying down her salad-fork and spoon, "I
think it is wrong for us to live as we do."

He shrugged his shoulders, looking at her curiously.

"I cannot flatter myself that you care to return to the old
uncomfortableness."

She flushed warmly, with a keen pang of mingled pain and indignation.

"No," she replied. "No; never that. It is not for ourselves, but for
others."

"Others! Fenton?"

She flushed more deeply still.

"I have told you already that you are mistaken about my regard for
Arthur. It was not he I meant."

She served her guest, and sat playing nervously with her fork as he ate
and praised the salad.

"Mr. Herman sent for me the other afternoon," she began again, forcing
herself to speak calmly. "My model Ninitta is very fond of him, and
chose to be jealous of his praise of my work. It might have all gone
over without an outburst, I suppose, if she had not had her attention
called to the fact that I had modeled his head for December. Why she
had never happened to notice it I don't know; she was in the studio
constantly."

"Not when he was there?" queried Dr. Ashton, holding up his graceful,
antique wine-glass and admiring it.

"No, not when he was there," repeated his wife. "She had pounded off
the head when he sent for me with a mallet she had picked up in his
studio. I never saw him in such a rage. She was gone when I got there.
She didn't make any attempt to conceal it. She came stalking
melodramatically into his studio with the mallet and laid it down.
'There,' said she, 'now kill me. I have broken her work.' It was like a
fashion magazine story. He thought at first she had gone mad."

"So she had. Women are always insane when they are jealous. I wish I
had Arthur's knack at epigram, and I'd make that sound original."

"He says he was very harsh," Helen continued, "though I fancy he could
not be quite that in any circumstances. It was very hard," she added
with a sigh. "It was like looking at a dead child to see my best work
ruined. It was really a part of myself."

"But can't it be repaired? It was in the clay, wasn't it?"

"Yes, but I fear for my exhausted enthusiasm. I can never do it as it
was before. My poor, unlucky December."

She toyed with her glass absently, apparently for the moment forgetting
her companion, who continued his supper with no less relish than
before. He watched her keenly, however, fully aware that there was more
to be told. He was a man too accustomed to follow any desire or indulge
any whim not to notice appreciatively, as he had noticed many times
before, how beautiful were the curves of his wife's arms and throat,
and with what grace her head was poised. He had once defined a liberal
man as one who could appreciate his own wife, and he would have been
far more insensible than he was, if, with this beautiful woman before
him he had not been, judged by his own standard, extremely liberal.

"And this has what to do with the question of our relations being
known?" he asked.

She started from her reverie, the red again showing faintly in her
cheek.

"It is hardly fair," she answered in a tone softer and lower than that
in which she had been speaking, "to tell you all that Mr. Herman said.
He wishes to marry me."

"And you wish you were free to have it so?"

There was once more a pause. Helen busied herself in an elaborate
arrangement of the torn lettuce leaves upon her plate, seemingly
concentrating all her thoughts upon forming them into an intricate
figure.

"Will," she said, suddenly, lifting her eyes and leaning towards him,
"I do not know how to make you understand. I haven't succeeded so well
in my attempts thus far in life as to be very sanguine of doing it now.
You do not know how ashamed and contemptible I felt for being party to
the deception that made it possible for him to speak so to me. He was
so honest, so earnest; he was so unconscious of the barriers between
us. I felt that I had done him such an irreparable wrong by concealing
the truth. He had a right to know that I am a married woman."

"Did you tell him?"

"No; but I must. I want to be free from the promise we made to each
other."

"It all comes," returned her husband without any show of irritation,
"from my telling Fenton."

"I cannot see what that has to do with it. I like the absence from
questioning, the avoidance of gossip, as much as you can; but it makes
me feel as if I were a living lie to have Mr. Herman bringing his
honest love to me to be met only by deception. It is cruel and it is
wrong."

"That depends entirely upon how you define wrong," retorted Dr. Ashton
coolly. "I do not see why it is wrong for me to decline to sacrifice my
convenience to Mr. Herman's sentiment. But without going into the
question of metaphysics, let us look at the matter reasonably. Do you
love Mr. Herman?"

Notwithstanding the studied nonchalance of his tone, a glance into his
eyes might have shown Helen how much importance he attached to her
answer. A woman is peculiarly dangerous when she is telling one man
that another loves her. The masculine greed of possession is aroused by
the mere thought of a possible rival, and Dr. Ashton was conscious at
this moment of a kindling desire himself to win Helen's love, which he
knew perfectly well had never been his.

"That is not at all relevant," was her reply, her eyes downcast. "The
question of honesty is enough now. At least I respect Mr. Herman, and I
must treat him squarely, as you would say. You have always told me to
be 'a square fellow,' you know," she added, raising her glance with a
faint smile.

"But if you tell him," said her husband, with a subtle tinge of
impatience in his tone, "others must know. You can't go on letting one
after another into the secret without its soon becoming public
property."

"Why not then?" she responded. "I wonder we have been able to keep it
so long. It is sure to be known now you have come home. I do not mean
to proclaim it upon the housetops; but to let it work out if it will.
What harm can it do?"

"It will harm me. My life is not so secluded as yours is, Helen, It
will make things confoundedly awkward. I shall have to go about giving
endless explanations. Besides, here is Arthur's wife. I particularly
don't want her to know."

"Why not? It is precisely that I was coming to. She seems to feel far
more kindly to me than I should have supposed possible. I can't lie to
her, Will. She has already asked me questions about my past life hard
to answer. I want to tell her, so that we may have an honest basis for
our friendship. I don't want to lose my hold on her."

"Nor on Arthur," acquiesced he gravely. "It is for that reason that I
say you had better not tell her. I usually know what I am saying, do I
not? I tell you it is for your own sake that I warn you to be quiet.
Arthur isn't going to be held in the leash very long by that piece of
china-ware piety, and it is to you he will naturally turn for sympathy.
Don't spoil your chance of his friendship by breaking with her yet."

"Will," his wife said, with a glitter in her eyes he knew of old,
"sometimes you talk like a very fiend incarnate."

"That," he replied rising, "is precisely what I am. There are a few
rare, but fairly well authenticated cases on record, Helen, where a man
under stress of circumstances, has been able to keep his own counsel;
women without a confidant go mad. For your own sake you'd better trust
me, now that Arthur isn't available; so I'll come and see you again. I
am obliged to you for this jolly little supper. Your salads always were
perfection. I'd like to stay and have you make me some coffee, but I
have an engagement at twelve. Good-night."



XXI.

HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH.
  Two Gentlemen of Verona; iv.--2.


When Grant Herman attempted to speak with Mrs. Greyson at the Fenton's
reception, he had more in view than simply the desire of being near the
woman he loved. He was full of trouble and bewilderment, and
instinctively turned toward her for aid and sympathy.

The scene between himself and Helen, to which the latter had alluded in
her conversation with Dr. Ashton, was of far deeper import than her
words might have seemed to imply. In the first shock of discovering
that her work was broken she had been so overcome, that although she
struggled bravely to conceal her feelings, she had excited the
sculptor's keenest pity; and it not unnaturally followed that in
attempting to express his sympathy he found himself telling his love
before he was aware. He had determined to be silent upon this subject.
Uncertain what were Helen's feelings towards him and restrained by a
sense of loyalty to the bond which united him to Ninitta, he had
resolved to bury his love in his own breast, at least until time gave
him opportunity of honorably declaring it. Now circumstances betrayed
him into an avowal of his passion; and he was not without the indignant
feeling that Ninitta's act had freed him from all obligations to her.
It might have required an ingenious casuist to arrive logically at the
conclusion that an injury which the Italian had done to another
released him from his plighted word, but the person injured was the
woman he loved, and he blindly felt that Ninitta had struck at himself
through his most sensitive feelings. He renounced all the fealty to
which he had been held by a sense of honor, and he now poured out to
Helen the full tide of his passionate love.

The sculptor was not a man to be lightly moved, but it is these calm,
grave natures that once aroused are most irresistible. His passionate
outburst took Helen unaware; she scarcely knew what she did, and she
became suddenly aware of a truth so overwhelming that every thing else
faded into insignificance beside it.

"I love you!" he cried out; and at the word she first knew, with a
poignant pang of mingled bliss and anguish, that she too loved him.

It seemed to her that some power above her own volition ruled her, as
in moments of high excitement the body sometimes appears to declare its
independence of the will, and to act wholly by its own decisions. She
was aware that she raised her eyes to his, although she would have
given much to avoid his glance; and she knew that it was from what he
read there that he took courage to fold her in his embrace.

Yet with his arms about her and his piercing kisses upon her face,
Helen felt as if sinking helplessly into a mighty ocean; as if all
struggles must be unavailing, and she could only yield to the
resistless love which engulfed her.

From this first feeling of powerlessness, however, her strong nature
sprang with a sharp recoil. She was too noble to surrender without a
struggle. She would not even think whether she loved this man; that
might be considered upon some safe vantage ground; now all energy must
be concentrated upon escaping from the deadly peril in which she found
herself.

Helen had freed herself as far as she was able from the marriage bond
which had so galled her, and she was glad to forget that such a tie had
ever existed, but she yet remembered that she was still a wife, and the
kiss of a man not her husband overwhelmed her with shuddering
humiliation and fear. She struggled from her lover's embrace with such
an expression of terror upon her face, that he started back amazed and
grieved.

He began to stammer confused words of contrition, of sorrow, of love,
and of supplication.

"How could you!" she gasped. "Oh, leave me!"

There came into her excited mind a way of escape, upon which, even
though it brought with it a sense of baseness, she seized in despair.

"Ninitta," she said. "Ninitta!"

He gave her a look of pain which went to her very heart. He did not
move or answer, but his whole soul seemed to look through his dark eyes
in pitiful appeal.

"Go," she continued, but in a hurried voice which betrayed her
agitation. "Leave me now. Oh, I cannot bear it!"

And crushed with pain and shame, she buried her face in her hands and
burst into tears.

Herman made a step towards her, but instantly she recovered herself,
looking up with swimming eyes and lips that quivered despite her utmost
effort.

"No," she said, "do not touch me. You must go. I cannot bear another
word. Forgive me," she went on rapidly, as he hesitated, still with
those appealing eyes fixed upon her. "Oh, forgive me, but go."

He turned slowly and moved towards the door. The broken bas-relief,
with its beautiful mutilated figure caught his eye, and seemed again to
remind him that he had at last a right to speak to Helen, unhampered by
the thought of Ninitta. He looked back as if he would even now disobey
her and plead his love anew. But her eyes refused his prayer before it
could be uttered. He lingered still an instant.

"I cannot go," he broke out suddenly. "I love you! I must stay! I must
at least have an answer. Do you think a man could kiss you once and
then leave you like this?"

She shivered as if she felt anew his passionate embrace and shrank from
it. She threw her glance about as to discover some means of escape. The
gesture, the look, overwhelmed him with sudden remorse. He trusted
himself not for a single backward look now, but rushed out of the
studio, leaving her sitting there like the princess of the fairy tale
who overcame the genii only by recourse to immortal fire which consumed
her also.

Alone in his studio the sculptor strode up and down, struggling with
the emotion which mastered him. He debated with himself whether Helen
loved him or not; yet the more carefully he recalled his interview with
her, the more impossible he found it to determine. But hope plucked
courage out of this very uncertainty, and clung to the belief that had
not Helen in her heart some affection for him, she could not have been
so touched.

But what of Ninitta? He threw back his head and walked down the studio,
his steps sounding sharply upon the hard cement floor. What of Ninitta?
He had absurdly dallied with his supposed obligations to her long
enough. Now, at least, after this outrage, he repeated to himself, he
was free. He was at liberty now--if indeed he had not always been--to
consider what he owed to himself; what to the woman he loved.

He recalled the hot words he had spoken to the model earlier in the
afternoon when the anger of discovery was fresh upon him, and he felt a
pang of self-reproach. He could not but know how poignant to Ninitta
must be the grief of giving him up, although he assured himself that in
the long years of separation she must have become accustomed to live
without him, and that her grief would be rather fancied than real. Yet
he was too tender-hearted to be wholly at ease after all his reasoning.
He at last started out to find Ninitta, perhaps to comfort her, perhaps
to cast her off forever. At least to come to some definite conclusion
of their doubtful relations.

But Ninitta was not to be found. She was not in her attic; nor did she
return that night, nor the next day, nor yet the following; and it was
to tell of the model's disappearance, and to ask aid in tracing her,
that Herman had wished to speak to Helen at the Fenton's reception.




XXII.

UPON A CHURCH BENCH.
  Much Ado about Nothing; iii.--3.


Herman did not see Helen for several days after the reception, but she
came down to the studio Sunday afternoon to begin the repairing of her
mutilated bas-relief. The sculptor heard her step pass his door, and
felt a thrill at the sound for which he had longingly waited every
waking hour since he had heard Helen go out upon the night of Ninitta's
disappearance.

He waited what seemed to him a long time, forcing himself to perform
certain trifling things needful in the studio, yet Mrs. Greyson had
only been able to get fairly to work before she heard his footstep, and
then his tap upon her door.

He entered the studio almost hesitatingly, and after the usual
greetings stood looking gravely at the disfigured clay.

"I began to think you were never coming to restore it," he remarked,
breaking at last the silence.

"I could not bear to touch it," she returned, not caring to confess
that she had also wished to avoid him until time should have restored
his usual self-control. "But I determined yesterday to begin this
morning, only strangely enough I went to church for the first time
since I came from Europe."

"Ah!" returned Herman smiling. "I often go to church when I am not too
busy."

"I hardly supposed that a Pagan was guilty of going to any church where
he could not worship Pasht."

"One can worship whatever deity he pleases in whatever temple, I
suppose," was his rejoinder. "I'm catholic in my tastes. I do not so
much mind what people worship, if they are only sincere about it."

"It must be a great comfort to believe every thing, if one only could."

"There is often danger," he observed, "that we assume it to be a
weakness to believe any thing."

"It is, I'm afraid," replied she, turning her face from him and
seemingly intent upon her modeling.

"At least we believe in work," Herman answered, "else we are not
artists. You certainly find joy and support in your art."

"Yes," Helen said with a sigh; "but I fancy the joy of creation, great
as it is, can never be so satisfying to a woman as to a man. It is
humiliating to confess--or it is presumptuous to boast, I am not sure
which--but a woman is never so fully an artist as a man. He is in great
moments all artist; but a woman is never able to lay herself aside even
in her most imaginative moods."

"I cannot think you wholly right," her master returned smiling; "but to
go back a little, at least faith is woman's peculiar province and
prerogative. We seem nowadays to pride ourselves upon being superior to
belief in any thing; but it is really a poor enough hypocrisy. If we
really believed nothing, should we ever give up a single selfish desire
or combat any impulse that seizes us. For my part, I am glad to find
men better than their professions. But this," he added with his genial
smile, "is more of a sermon, very likely, than you heard at church."

"I at least agree with it better than the one I heard at church this
morning. The preacher patronized the Deity so that he shocked me."

"That troubles me at church," Herman assented; "preachers are so
irreverent."

Helen stepped back to observe the effects of the work she was doing.

"Do you think," she ventured, "that it would be possible for me to
induce Ninitta to pose again for the May? If I told her that I am not
angry, that I understand, and that----"

"But Ninitta is gone!" exclaimed the sculptor, suddenly recalled to
present difficulties. "I have not been able to find her since the day
she did this."

"Gone!" echoed Helen in dismay; "and you cannot find her?"

Herman related in detail the steps he had taken to trace Ninitta, all
of which had thus far proved unavailing. He had endeavored to avoid
publicity, but he already began to fear that it would be necessary to
call detectives to his aid.

"Not yet," Helen said. "Let me try first. Have you seen Mr. Fenton?"

"No; why? I have been very cautious. I have told nobody but Fred
Rangely."

Helen reflected a moment. Her woman's instinct told her that it was not
likely Ninitta would put any great distance between herself and the
sculptor. The model could have but few acquaintances in the city, and
as she would need support it seemed probable she might try posing for
some of the artists. As this thought crossed her mind, Helen remembered
that Ninitta had promised to pose for Fenton when no longer wanted for
the has-relief. It was therefore possible that Fenton might know
something of the whereabouts of the missing girl; and in any case Helen
had been so used to consulting the artist in any perplexity, that it
was but natural for her thoughts to turn to him now.

"Let me try," she repeated. "It will be less likely to excite talk if I
look for her; she was my model. Trust the search to me for a day or
two."

He was only too glad to do so; glad to be released from the burden of
anxiety, as by virtue of some subtle faith in Mrs. Greyson he was; glad
of any thing in which he might obey her; glad above all of any bond of
common interest which might draw them nearer to each other, even if it
were search for the woman who stood between them.

On her way homeward Helen went into Studio Building, but before she had
climbed half way to Fenton's room, she encountered Dr. Ashton.

"It is of no use," was his greeting. "He isn't in. His wife has
probably taken him to church."

"He was at church this morning," Helen answered, putting her hand into
the one Dr. Ashton extended. "I saw him."

"Did you go to church? What a lark."

"It was rather a lark," she assented; "only I got wretchedly blue
before the service was done."

"What church was it? Mrs. Fenton looks as if she'd poise dizzily on
high church altitudes like the angel on St. Angelo."

"So she does; she goes to the Nativity."

"How did Arthur look?"

"Amused at first; then bored; then cross; and finally, when the sermon
was well under way, indignant."

"And his wife?"

"His wife, Will," Helen said with a sudden enthusiasm, "looked like a
saint. She really believes all these fables. I wish I did."

"It will be some fun to watch Arthur's conversion and backsliding," Dr.
Ashton observed, "if he really gets far enough along to be able to
backslide. Where are you going?"

"To see Arthur. I have an errand."

"Do you object to my walking with you?" he asked with a deference rare
enough to attract her notice.

The sun was setting, and the trees on the Common, as yet showing but
faintest signs of coming buds, stood out against the saffron sky. The
long shadows stretched softly over the dull ground, while every slight
prominence was gilded and transfigured by the golden glow which flooded
from the west. The atmosphere had that peculiar brilliancy
characteristic of the season, while the cool and bracing air was full
of that champagne-like exhilaration in which lies at once the
fascination and the fatality of the New England climate.

It was some time before either broke the silence.

"How I wish," at length began Helen wistfully.

"That shows," spoke her husband, as she left the sentence unfinished,
"that you are still under forty. When you have quadrupled your decades
you'll thank your stars for deliverances and ask for nothing more."

"When I get to that stage, then," she returned, "I'll take poison."

"Is that a hint?"

"Life is bad enough now," she continued without heeding the
interruption, "but better a bitter savor than none at all."

"You should devote yourself to cultivating the approval of conscience
as I do. I only do what I think to be right, you know."

"But think right whatever you do."

"Not quite that," returned the Doctor with a laugh, "but the approval
of my conscience--or of my reason, which stands in its place--is
necessary to my happiness, so I change my principles whenever my acts
don't accord with them."

"So do a great many persons," she responded; "perhaps most of us, for
that matter, only we are seldom honest enough to own it."

"By the way," queried her companion, as they approached her
destination, "how came Mrs. Fenton so quickly domesticated at the
Church of the Nativity?"

"There is a young man there--a deacon or a monk; I never know these
high church terms; they are usually faded out pieces of Romanism--that
once wrote an article which enjoyed the honor of being interred in the
Princeton Review when her uncle was one of its editors."

They reached the doorsteps and Dr. Ashton said good-by. Then he turned
back.

"By the by," he said. "I walked up with you to make you invite me to
supper again. I enjoyed the last time very much."

"Did you?" returned his wife, rather carelessly. "Come to-morrow--no,
not until Thursday night."

"Very well. I am to dine here then, and I'll come and give you an
account of my visit."




XXIII.

HEART-SICK WITH THOUGHT.
  Two Gentlemen of Verona; i.--I.


The Fentons were just going to dinner when Helen arrived, and she was
persuaded to dine with them. She was not without some curiosity to
observe her friend in his new relations, and she also found herself
attracted by Edith, although the two women had apparently little in
common.

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, a

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