THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE.Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.—7.
After the Pagans had separated that night Fred Rangely lingered inHerman'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."
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?"
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 asthat; 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 haveArthur 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."
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 ofMay. "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.
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 foreignateliers,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 viceper 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'sHellas:
I strew these opiate flowersOn thy restless pillow,—They were plucked from Orient bowers,By the Indian billow.Be thy sleepCalm 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 ladenWith the soul of slumber;It was sung by a Samian maidenWhose lover was of the numberWho now keepThat calm sleepWhence 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 beDead, 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.
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 shampar excellenceof the nineteenth century, this century of shams."
"It's something to be at the top of the heap in anything," interpolatedHerman, "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 genuinePagan."
"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.
THIS IS NOT A BOON.Othello; iii.—3.
"'I strew these opiate flowersOn 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 BurdHelen;
'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 inThe 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!"