THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE.Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.—7.
Grant Herman looked across the breakfast table at his Italian wife thoughtfully a moment, considering, as he often did, what was likely to be the effect of something he was about to say. In six years of married life he had not learned how to adapt himself to the narrower mind and more personal views of his wife. He perhaps fell into the error, so common to strong natures, of being unable to comprehend that by far the larger part of the principles which influence broad minds do not for narrow ones exist at all. He continually tried to discover what process of reasoning led Ninitta to given results, but he was never able to appreciate the fact that often it was by no chain of logic whatever that certain conclusions had been arrived at. A mental habit of catching up opinions at haphazard, of acting simply from emotions, however transient, instead of from convictions, was wholly outside his mental experience, and equally unrealized in his comprehension.
He regarded Ninitta, whose foreign face and beautiful figure looked as much out of place behind the coffee urn as would the faun of Praxiteles at an afternoon reception, and a smothered sigh rose to his lips with the thought how utterly he was at a loss to comprehend her. It happened in the present case, as it often did, that his failure to understand arose chiefly from the fact that there was nothing in particular to understand, and, when he spoke, Ninitta received his remark quite simply.
"Mrs. Greyson is at home again," he said.
"Mrs. Greyson," she echoed, her dark eyes lighting up with genuine pleasure. "Oh, that is indeed good. Where is she? Have you seen her?"
There shot through Herman's mind the reflection that since his wife could not know that he married her out of love not for herself but for Helen Greyson, it was absurd to have fancied that Ninitta would be jealously displeased at Helen's return; and the inevitable twinge of conscience at his wife's trusting ignorance followed.
"I haven't seen her," he answered; "she only arrived yesterday. Mrs. Fenton told me when I met her at the Paint and Clay Exhibition last night."
Ninitta folded her hands on the edge of the table, with a gesture of childish pleasure.
"I wonder what she will say to Nino," she said musingly, her voice taking a new softness.
A sudden spasm contracted the sculptor's throat. His whole being was shaken by the return of the woman to whom all the passionate devotion of his manhood was given, and he never heard that soft, maternal note with which his wife spoke of his boy without emotion.
"She may say that the young rascal ought to be out of his bed in time for breakfast," he retorted with affected brusqueness. "He has all the Italian laziness in him."
He pushed back his chair as he spoke, and rose from the table. He hesitated a moment, as if some sudden thought absorbed him, then he went to his wife and kissed her forehead.
"Good-by," he said. "I sha'n't come up for lunch. Don't coddle the boy too much."
"But when," his wife persisted, as he turned away, "shall I see Mrs.Greyson? I want to show her thebambino."
She always spoke in Italian to her husband and her child, and indeed her English had never been of the most fluent.
"Thebambino" the father repeated, smiling. "He will be abambinoto you when he is as big as I am, I suppose. I do not know about Mrs. Greyson, but I will find out, if I can."
He left the room and went to the chamber where his swarthy boy of five lay still luxuriously in his crib, although he was fully awake. Nino gave a soft cry of joy at the sight of his father, and greeted him rapturously.
"Papa," he asked in Italian, "does the kitty know how much she hurts when she scratches? she made a long place on my arm, and it hurt like fire."
"Do you know how much you hurt her to make her do it?" his father returned, smiling fondly.
"Oh, but she is so soft and so little, of course I don't hurt her," Nino answered, with boyish logic. "Anyway, she ought not to hurt me. I don't like to be hurt."
The foolish, childish words came back to Herman's mind a couple of hours later, as he waited in the boarding-house parlor for Helen Greyson. He smiled with bitterness to think how perfectly they represented his own state of mind. He said to himself that he was tired of being hurt, and rose at the moment to take in both his hands the hands of a beautiful woman, to his eyes no older and no less fair than when he had said good-by to her on his wedding morning, six years before. He tried to speak, but tears came instead of words; choked and blinded, he turned away abruptly, struggling to regain his composure.
The meeting after long years of those who have loved and been separated, may, for the moment, carry them back to the time of their parting so completely that all that lies between seems annihilated. The old emotion reasserts itself so strongly, the past lives again so vividly, that there seems to have been no break in feeling, and they stand in relation to one another as if the parting were yet to come. When they had been together a little, the time which lay between them would once more become a reality; but at the first touch of their hands those bitter days of loneliness ceased to exist, and they seemed to stand together again, as when they were saying good-by six years before.
With her old time self-control, it was Helen who spoke first, and her words recalled him from the past and its passion, to the present and its duty.
"Tell me how Ninitta is," she said, "and the boy. I do so want to see that wonderful boy."
The sculptor commanded his voice by a powerful effort.
"They are both well," he answered. "The boy is a wonderful little fellow, although perhaps I am not an unprejudiced judge. Ninitta is crazy to show him to you. She has pretty nearly effaced herself since he came, and only lives for his benefit."
"She is a happy woman," Helen said, assuming that air of cheerfulness which is one of the first accomplishments that women are forced by life to learn. "I should know she would be devoted to her children."
There were a few moments of silence. Both cast down their eyes, and then each raised them to study whatever changes time might have made in the years that lay between them. Helen's heart was beating painfully, but she was determined not to lose her self-control. She knew of old how completely she could rule the mood of her companion, and she felt that upon her calmness depended his. She had been schooling herself for this interview from the moment she began to consider whether she might return to America, and she was therefore less unprepared than was Herman for the trying situation in which she now found herself; yet it required all her strength of mind and of will not to give way to the tide of love and emotion which surged within her breast.
Herman fixed his eyes resolutely on an ungainly group in pinkish clay which represented an American commercial sculptor's idea of Romeo and Juliet at the moment when the Nurse separates them with a message from Lady Capulet. With artistic instinct he noted the stupidity of the composition, the vulgarity of the lines, the cheap ugliness of the group. In that singular abstraction which comes so frequently in moments of high emotion, he let his glance wander to the pictures on the wall, the enormities in embroidery which adorned the chair backs, the garish hues of the rug lying before the open grate. Then it occurred to him, with a vague sense of amusement, how great was the incongruity between such a setting as this vulgar boarding-house reception-room, and the woman before him. The idea brought to his mind the contrast between the life to which Helen had come, and the life at Rome, artistic, rich, and full of possibilities, which she had left.
The thought of Rome recalled instantly the old days there, almost a score of years ago, when he had first known Ninitta. So vivid were the memories which awakened, that he seemed to see again the Roman studio, the fat old aunt, voluble and sharp eyed, who always accompanied her niece when the girl posed; and most clearly of all did his inner vision perceive the fresh, silent maiden whose exquisite figure was at once the admiration and the despair of all the young artists in Rome. He remembered how Hoffmeir had discovered the girl drawing water from an old broken fountain he had gone out to sketch; and the difficulties that had to be overcome before she could be persuaded to pose. The Capri maidens are brought up to be averse to posing, and Ninitta had not long enough breathed the air of Rome to have overcome the prejudices of her youth. He reflected, with a bitterness rendered vague by a certain strange impersonality of his mood, how different would have been his life had Hoffmeir been unable to overcome the girl's scruples. He wondered whether the fat old aunt, and the greasy, good-natured little priest with whom she had taken counsel, would have urged Ninitta to take up the life of a model, could they have foreseen all the results to which this course was to lead in the end.
Then, with a sudden stinging consciousness, the thought came of all that her decision had meant to his life. The old question whether he had done right in marrying Ninitta forced itself upon him as if it were some enemy springing up from ambush. He raised his eyes, and his glance met that of Mrs. Greyson.
"It is no use, Helen," he broke out, impulsively, "we must talk frankly. It is idle to suppose that we can go on in an artificial pretence that we have nothing to say."
She put up her hand appealingly.
"Only do not drive me away again," she pleaded. "Don't say things thatI have no right to hear!"
A dark red stained Herman's cheek, and the tears came into his eyes.
"No," he returned. "If any one is to be driven away it shall not be you."
"But why need we trouble the things that are past," she went on, with wistful eagerness. "Why cannot we accept it all in silence, and be friends."
He looked at her with a passionate, penetrating glance. She felt a wild and foolish longing to fling herself upon the floor and embrace his feet; but the old Puritan training, the resistant fibre inherited from sturdy ancestors, still did not fail her.
"You have your wife," she hurried on, "your home, your boy. That is enough. That"—
"That is not enough," he interrupted, with an emphasis, which seemed stern. "Helen, I shall not talk love to you. I am another woman's husband. I made a ghastly mistake when I married Ninitta, but it is done. She loves me; she is happy, and I love"—his voice faltered into a wonderful softness more eloquent than words,—"I love Nino."
She would not let him go on. She sprang up and ran to him, taking his hands in hers with a touch that made his blood rush tingling through his veins.
"Yes," she cried, "you love Nino! Think of that! Think most of all that whatever you are, good or bad, you are for your son, for Nino! Come! There is safety for us in that. We will go and talk with Nino between us. Then we shall say nothing of which we can be ashamed or regret."
There came to Herman a vision of his boy clasped in Helen's arms which made him feel as if suffocating with the excess of his emotion. He rose blindly, only half conscious of what he was doing; and without giving time for objections Helen hastened to dress herself for the street, and in a few moments they were walking together toward the sculptor's house.
To Herman's surprise, his wife was absent when he reached home. The maid did not know where she had gone. She often went out in the morning without saying where she was going, and of course the servant did not ask.
"That is odd," Herman said; "but she has probably gone shopping or something of the sort. It is too bad, she had so set her heart on showing you thebambino, as she calls him, herself."
But it proved that Nino also was out, having been taken for a walk; and so Helen, who returned home at once, saw neither of them.
THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME.Measure for Measure; iv.—4.
Ninitta had not gone shopping. She was posing for Arthur Fenton, at his studio. Even the presence of her boy could not wholly make up to the Italian for the loss of all the old interest and excitement of her life as a model. The boy was with his nurse or at the kindergarten for long hours during which Ninitta, who had few of the resources with which an educated woman would have filled her time, mingled longings for her old life with blissful gloatings over Nino's beauty and cleverness. Her husband was always kind, but since his marriage delicacy of sentiment had made him shrink from having his wife pose even for himself, while naturally no thought of her doing so for another would have been entertained for a moment.
Ninitta had been so long in the life, to pose had been so large a part of her very existence, that she hardly knew how to do without the old-time flavor. Mrs. Fenton had perceived something of this without at all appreciating the strength of the feeling of the sculptor's wife, and she had at one time tried to interest Ninitta in what might perhaps be called missionary work among the models of Boston, a class of whose calling Edith held views which her husband was not wholly wrong in calling absurdly narrow. She was met at once by the difficulty that it was impossible to make Ninitta see that missionary work was needed among the models, and the effort resulted in nothing except to convince Mrs. Fenton that she could do little with the Italian.
Just how Arthur Fenton had persuaded her to pose without her husband's knowledge, Ninitta could not have told; and the artist himself would have assured any investigator, even that speculative spirit which held the place left vacant by the dismissal of his conscience, that he had never deliberately tried to entice her. He had talked to her of the picture he was painting for a national competitive exhibition, it is true, and dwelt upon the difficulty of procuring a proper model; he had met her on the street one day and taken her into his studio to see it; he had regretted that it was impossible to ask her; and of a hundred apparently blameless and trivial things, the result was that this morning, while Helen and Herman were walking across the Common to find her, Ninitta was lying amid a heap of gorgeous stuffs and cushions in Fenton's studio, while he painted and talked after his fashion.
It is as impossible to trace the beginnings of any chain of events as it is to find the mystery of the growth of a seed. Whatever Arthur Fenton's faults, he certainly believed himself to be one who could not betray a friend. The ideal which he vaguely called honor, and which served him as that ultimate ethical standard which in one shape or another is necessary to every human being, forbade his taking advantage of any one whose friendship he admitted. His instinct of self-indulgence had, however, made him so expert a casuist that he was able to silence all inner misgivings by arguing that the demands of art were above all other laws. He reasoned that Ninitta's posing could do no possible harm to Grant Herman, while the success of hisFatimadepended upon it; and since art was his religion, he came at last to feel as if he were nobly sacrificing his prejudices to his highest convictions in violating for the sake of art his principle which forbade his deceiving her husband.
Least of all, in asking the Italian to pose, had Fenton been actuated by any intention of tempting her to evil. He needed a model for theFatimaas he needed his canvas and brushes; and his satisfaction at having induced Ninitta to serve his purpose was in kind much the same as his pleasure that his brushes and canvas were exactly what he wanted.
But it is always difficult to tell to what an action may lead; and most of all is it hard to foresee the consequences which will follow from the violation of principle. Perhaps the air of secrecy with which Ninitta found it necessary to invest her coming, had an intoxicating effect upon the artist; perhaps it was simply that his persistent egotism moved him to test his power. Men often feel the keenest curiosity in regard to the extent of their ability to commit crimes into which they have yet not the remotest intention of being betrayed; and especially is this true in their relations to women. Men of a certain vanity are always eager to discover how great an influence for evil they could exercise over women, even when they have not the nerve or the wickedness to exert it. A man must be morally great to be above finding pleasure in the belief that he could be a Don Juan if he chose; and moral grandeur was not for Arthur Fenton.
From whatever cause, the fact was, that as he painted this morning and reflected, with a complacency of which he was too keen an analyst not to know he should have been ashamed, how he had secured the model he desired despite her husband, the speculation came into his mind how far he could push his influence over Ninitta. At first a mere impersonal idea, the thought was instantly, by his habit of mental definiteness, realized so clearly that his cheek flushed, partly, it is to be said to his credit, with genuine shame. He looked at the beautiful model, and turned away his eyes. Then, hardly conscious of what he was doing, he laid down his palette, and took a step forward.
At that instant the studio bell rang sharply. He started with so terrible a sense of being discovered in a crime, that his jaw trembled and his knees almost failed under him.
Then instantly he recovered his self-possession, although his heart was beating painfully, and looked up at the clock.
"Heavens!" he exclaimed. "I had no idea how late it was! It is that beastly Irons for his last sitting. I'd forgotten all about him."
Ninitta rose from her position and hurried toward the screen behind which she dressed.
"Don't let him in," she said. "He knows me."
The bell rang again, as they stood looking at each other.
"I will try to send him off," Arthur said. "Dress as quickly as you can."
She retreated behind the screen while he went to the door and unlocked it. Instantly Irons stepped inside.
"You must excuse me," the artist said. "I'll be ready for you in fifteen minutes. I have a model here, and got to painting so busily that I forgot the time. Come back in a quarter of an hour."
"Oh, I don't mind," Irons said, advancing into the studio. "I'll look round until you are ready."
"But I never admit sitters when I have a model," Fenton protested, standing before him. "I shall have to ask you to go."
The other stopped and looked at the artist with suspicion in his eyes.
"What a fuss you make," he commented coarsely. "No intrigue, I suppose?"
A hot flush sprang into Fenton's face. He tried to assume a haughty air, but the consciousness of being entrapped in a misdemeanor had not left him. The need of getting Mrs. Herman out of the studio unseen would have been awkward at any time; when to this was added the sense of guilt and shame which was begotten of the base impulse to which he had almost yielded, the situation became for him painfully embarrassing.
"I am not in the habit of carrying on intrigues with my models," he replied, haughtily. "Or," he added, regaining self-possession, "of discussing my affairs with others."
Mr. Irons laughed in a significant way which made Arthur long to kill him on the spot, and, stepping past Fenton, he walked further into the studio.
"Don't put on airs with me," he said. "Your looks give you away. You've been up to some mischief."
He paused an instant before the unfinished picture on the easel, then when the artist coolly took the canvas and placed it with its face to the wall, he turned with deliberate rudeness and craned his neck so that he could look behind the screen. A leering smile came over his coarse features. Without a word he went over to the most distant corner of the studio, where he apparently became absorbed in studying a sketch hanging on the wall.
There was a dead silence of some moments. Fenton was literally speechless with rage, yet, too, his quick wit was busy devising some way of escape from the unpleasant predicament in which he found himself. He did not speak, nor did Mr. Irons turn until Ninitta had completed her toilet and slipped hastily out. As the door closed after her, Irons wheeled about and confronted the indignant artist with a smile of triumphant glee.
"Sly dog!" he said.
Fenton advanced a step toward his tormentor with his clenched hand half raised as if he would strike.
"What do you mean?" he demanded. "Do you call yourself a gentleman?"
"Oh, come, now," the other responded, with an easy wave of the hand, "no heroics, if you please. They won't go down with me. She's a devilish fine woman, and I don't blame you."
"I tell you," began Fenton, "you"—
"Oh, of course, of course. I know all that. But sit down while I say something to you."
As if under the constraining influence of a nightmare, Fenton obeyed when Mr. Irons, having seated himself in an easy chair, waved him into another with a commanding gesture. The artist felt himself to have lost his place as the stronger of the two, of which he had hitherto been proudly conscious, and he sat angrily gnawing his lip while his tormentor regarded him with smiling malice.
"Do you remember telling me one day," Irons asked, fixing his narrow eyes on the other's disturbed face, "that you could make your sitters tell you things?"
Fenton stared at his questioner in angry silence, but did not answer.
"Now, if," continued Irons; "I say if, you observe,—if Stewart Hubbard should chance to tell you where the new syndicate mean to locate their mills, it might be a mighty good thing for you."
Still Fenton said nothing, but his regard became each moment more wrathful.
"Of course," the sitter continued, with an assumption of airy lightness which grated on every nerve of the hearer, "you are not in a position to turn such knowledge to advantage; but I am, and I am always inclined to help a bright fellow like you when there is a good chance. So if you should come to me and say that the mills are to be so and so, I'd do all I could to make things pleasant for you. I happen to belong to a syndicate myself that has bought a mill privilege at Wachusett, and it is important to us to have the new railroad go our way, and we'd like to know how far the other fellows' plans are dangerous to our interests, don't you see."
Still Fenton did not speak. He had grown very pale, and his lips were set firmly together. His hands clasped the arms of his chair so strongly that the blood had settled under the middle of the nails. Mr. Irons looked at him with narrow, piercing eyes. He paused a moment and then went on.
"You are perfectly capable of keeping a secret," he said in a hard, deliberate tone, "so I don't in the least mind telling you what we should do. Your sitters always tell you things, you know; and you are to be trusted. The case is here; our syndicate stand in with the railroad corporation and ask the Railroad Commissioners for a certificate of exigency, to authorize laying the new branch out through Wachusett. Now we have information that Staggchase and Stewart Hubbard and that set, are planning to spring a petition asking for special legislation locating the road somewhere else. Of course, they'll have to get it in under a suspension of the rules, but they can work that easily enough. The Commissioners will have to hold on, then, until the Legislature finishes with that petition."
He paused again, with an air which convinced the artist that he was going on with this elaborate explanation to cover his awkwardness. Fenton did not speak, and his visitor continued,—
"The Commissioners might settle the matter now, but they won't, and we've got to have the fight, I suppose; so, of course, you can see how it is for our interest to know just what we are fighting."
He rose as he spoke, and with an air of deliberation, buttoned his overcoat, which he had not removed.
"I don't think you feel like painting this morning," he observed, "andI'll come in again. I'll leave you to think over what I have said."
Fenton rose also, regarding him with fierce, level eyes.
"And suppose," he said, "that I call you a damned scoundrel, and forbid you ever to set foot in my studio again?"
The other laughed, with the easy assurance of a bully who feels himself secure.
"Oh, you won't," he replied. "If you did,—well, I am on the committee for the new statue, and have to see Herman now and then you know, and I should, perhaps, ask him why his wife poses for you. Good morning."
And with a chuckling laugh, he took himself out.
A NECESSARY EVIL.Julius Caesar; ii.—2.
"Oh, I assure you that my temper has been such for a week that my family have threatened to have me sent to a nervine asylum," Ethel Mott observed to Fred Rangely, who was calling on her, ostensibly to inquire after her health, some trifling indisposition having kept her housed for a few days. "What with my cold and my vexation at losing things I wanted to go to, I have been positively unendurable."
"That's your way of looking at it," he responded; "but I hardly fancy that anybody else found it out. But what has there been to lose, except the Throgmorton ball?"
"Well, first there was the concert Saturday night."
"Do you care so much about the Symphonies, then? I thought you were the one girl in Boston who doesn't pretend to care for music."
"Oh, but we have lovely seats this year, and the nicest people all about us, you know. Thayer Kent and his mother are directly behind us."
"Where he can lean forward and talk to you," interrupted Rangely, jealously.
"Yes," she said, nodding with a gleam of mischievous laughter in her dark eyes. "And I do have a nice time at the Symphonies. Besides, I don't in the least object to the music, you know."
Fred fixed his gaze on a large old-fashioned oil painting on the opposite wall, a copy from some of the innumerable pastorals which have been made in imitation of Nicholas Poussin. It was of no particular value, but it was surrounded by a beautiful carved Venetian frame, and was one of those things which confer an air of distinction upon a Boston parlor, because they are plainly the art purchases of a bygone generation.
"But you have, of course, had no end of girls running in to see you," he observed.
"Yes; but, then, that didn't make up for the Throgmorton ball. You ask what else there was to lose; I should think that was enough. Why, Janet Graham says she never had such a lovely time in her life."
"Is Miss Graham engaged to Fred Gore?" Rangely asked.
Ethel's gesture of dissent showed how little she would have approved of such a consummation.
"No, indeed," she returned. "Fred Gore only wants Janet's money, anyway; and she can't abide him, any more than I can."
"Then, you have the correct horror of a marriage for money."
"I think a girl is a fool to let a man marry her for her money. She'd much better give him her fortune and keep herself back. Then she'd at least save something. I don't approve of people's marrying for money anyway; although, of course," she added, with a twinkle in her eye, "I think it is wicked to marry without it."
There shot through Rangely's mind the reflection that Thayer Kent had not an over-abundance of this world's goods; and to this followed the less pleasant thought that he was himself in the same predicament.
"But Jack Gerrish hasn't anything," he said, aloud.
"But Janet has enough, so she can marry anybody she wants to," was the reply; "and Jack Gerrish is too perfectly lovely for anything."
The visitor laughed, but he was evidently not at his ease. He was always uncomfortably conscious that Ethel had not the slightest possible scruple against laughing at him, and he was not a little afraid of her well-known propensity to tease. Ethel regarded him with secret amusement. A woman is seldom displeased at seeing a man disconcerted by her presence, even when she pities him and would fain put him at his ease. It is a tribute to her powers too genuine to be disputed, and while she may labor to overcome the man's feeling, her vanity cannot but be gratified that he has it.
"Did you ever know anything like the way Elsie Dimmont is going on with Dr. Wilson?" Ethel said, presently, by way of continuing the conversation. "I can't see what she finds to like in him. He's as coarse as Fred Gore, only, of course, he's cleverer, and he isn't dissipated."
"Wilson isn't a half bad fellow," Rangely replied, rather patronizingly. "Though, of course, I can understand that you wouldn't care for that kind of a man."
"Am I so particular, then?"
"Yes, I think you are."
"Thank you for nothing."
"Oh, I meant to be complimentary, I assure you. Isn't it a compliment to be thought particular in your tastes?"
"That depends upon how you are told. Your manner was not at all calculated to flatter me. It said too plainly that you thought me captious."
"But I don't."
"Of course you wouldn't own it," Ethel retorted, playing with a tortoise-shell paper-cutter she had picked up from the table by which she sat; "but your manner was not to be mistaken. It betrayed you in spite of yourself."
Rangely knew how foolish he was to be affected by light banter like this, but for his life he could not have helped it. The fact that Ethel knew how easily she could tease him lent a tantalizing sparkle to her eyes. She smiled mockingly as he vainly tried to keep the flush from rising in his cheeks.
"You are singularly fond of teasing," he observed, in a manner he endeavored to make cool and philosophical.
"Now you are calling me singular as well as captious."
"The girl who is singular," returned he, in an endeavor to turn the talk by means of an epigram which only made matters worse for him, "the girl who is singular runs great risk of never becoming plural."
Ethel laughed merrily, her glee arising chiefly from a sense of the chance he was giving her to work up one of those playful mock quarrels which amused her and so thoroughly teased her admirer.
"Upon my word, Mr. Rangely," she said, assuming an air of indignant surprise, "is it your idea of making yourself agreeable to tell an unfortunate girl that she is destined to be an old maid? I could stand being one well enough, but to be told that I've got to be is by no means pleasant."
He knew she was playing with him, but he could not on that account meet her on her own ground. He endeavored to protest.
"You are trying to make me quarrel."
"Make you quarrel?" she echoed. "I like that! Of course, though, to be so full of faults that you can't help abusing me is one way of making you quarrel."
"How you do twist things around!" exclaimed he, beginning to be thoroughly vexed.
She pursed up her lips and regarded him with an expression more aggravating than words could have been. She had been for several days deprived of the pleasure of teasing anybody, and her delight in vexing Rangely made his presence a temptation which she was seldom able to resist. She was unrestrained by any regard for the young author which should make her especially concerned how seriously she offended him; and when she now changed the conversation abruptly, it was with a forbearing air which was anything but soothing to his nerves.
"Don't you think," she asked, "that Mr. Berry was absurd in the way he acted about playing at Mrs. West's?"
"No, I can't say that I do," the caller retorted savagely. "Mrs. West gives out that she is going to give the neglected native musicians at last a chance to be heard, and then she invites them to play their compositions in her parlor. Westbrooke Berry isn't the man to be patronized in any such way. Just think of her having the cheek to give to a man whose work has been brought out in Berlin an invitation which is equivalent to saying that he can't get a public hearing, but she'll help him out by asking her guests to listen to him. Heavens! Mrs. West is a perfectly incredible woman."
Ethel smiled sweetly. In her secret heart she agreed with him; but it did not suit her mood to show that she did so.
"You seem bound to take the opposite view of everything to-day," she said, in tones as sweet as her smile; "or perhaps it is only that my temper has been ruined by my cold. I told you it had been bad."
He rose abruptly.
"If everything is to put us more at odds," he said, rather stiffly, "the sooner I withdraw, the better. I am sorry I have fallen under your displeasure; it is generally my ill luck to annoy you."
And in a few moments he was going down the street in a frame of mind not unusual to him after a call upon Miss Mott, from whose house he was apt to come away so ruffled and irritated that nothing short of a counteracting feminine influence could restore his self-complacency.
This office of comforter usually fell to the lot of Mrs. Frederick Staggchase. Indeed, his fondness for this lady was so marked as to give rise to some question among his intimates whether he were not more attached to her than to the avowed object of his affection.
An hour after he had made his precipitate retreat from Ethel's, he found himself sitting in the library at Mrs. Staggchase's, with his hostess comfortably enthroned in a great chair of carved oak on the opposite side of the fire. The conversation had somehow turned upon marriage. There is always a certain fascination, a piquant if faint sense of being upon the borderland of the forbidden, which makes such a discussion attractive to a man and woman who are playing at making love when marriage stands between them.
"But, of course," Rangely had said, "two married people can't live at peace when one of them is in love with somebody else."
Mrs. Staggchase clasped with her slender hand the ball at the end of the carved arm of the chair in which she was sitting, looking absently at the rings which adorned her fingers. She possessed to perfection the art of being serious, and the air with which she now spoke was admirably calculated to imply a deep interest in the subject under discussion. "I do not understand," she observed, thoughtfully, "why a man and woman need quarrel because they happen to be married to each other, when they had rather be married to somebody else. It wouldn't be considered good business policy to pull against a partner because one might do better with some other arrangement; and it does seem as if people might be as sensible about their marriage relations as in their business."
Her companion glanced at her, and then quickly resumed his intent regard of the fire beside which he sat.
"But people are so unreasonable," he remarked.
Mrs. Staggchase assented, with a characteristic bend of the head, and a movement of her flexible neck. She looked up with a smile.
"I think Fred and I are a model couple," she said. "Fred came into my room this noon, just as I had finished my morning letters. 'Good-morning,' he said, 'I hope you weren't frightened.'—'Frightened?' I said, 'what at?'—'Do you mean to say you didn't know I was out all night?'—'I hadn't an idea of it,' said I. He'd been playing cards at the club all night, and had just come in. He says that the next time, he shan't take the trouble to expose himself."
Rangely laughed in a somewhat perfunctory way.
"But if that is a model fashion of living, what becomes of the old notions of kindred souls, and all that sort of thing?" he asked. "I shouldn't want my wife"—
He paused, rather awkwardly, and Mrs. Staggchase took up the sentence with a smile of amusement, in which there was no trace of annoyance. She was too well aware how completely she was mistress of the situation, in dealing with Rangely, to be either vexed or embarrassed in talking with him.
"To be as frank with another man as I am with you?" she finished for him. "Oh, very likely not. You have all the masculine jealousy which is aroused in an instant by the idea that a woman should be at liberty to like more than one man. You are half a century behind us. Marriage as you conceive it is the old-fashioned article, for the use of families in narrow circumstances intellectually as well as pecuniarily. Love in a cottage is necessary, because people under those conditions can't live unless they are extravagantly devoted to each other. Marriage with us is just what it ought to be, an arrangement of mutual convenience. Fred and I suit each other perfectly, and are sufficiently fond of each other; but there are sides of his nature to which I do not answer, and of mine that he does not touch. He finds somebody who does; I find somebody on my part. You, for instance."
Rangely leaned back in his chair, and clasped his plump white fingers, regarding Mrs. Staggchase with a smile of amusement and admiration.
"You are so awfully clever," was his response, "that you could really never be uncommonly fond of anybody. You'd analyze the whole business too closely."
She laughed slightly, and went on with what she was saying, without heeding his interruption.
"Fred and I make good backgrounds for each other, and, after all, that is what is required. You answer to my need of companionship in another direction, and since that side of my nature is unintelligible to my husband, he is not defrauded, while I should be if I starved my desire for such friendship, to please an idea like yours, that a wife should find her all in her husband. Fortunately, Mr. Staggchase is a broader man than you are."
"Thank you," Rangely retorted, with a faint tinge of annoyance visible, despite his air of jocularity. "Arthur Fenton says a broad man is one who can appreciate his own wife. If Mr. Staggchase does that"—
"Come," interrupted Mrs. Staggchase, smiling with the air of one who has had quite enough of the topic, "don't you think the subject is getting to be unfortunately personal? I have a favor to ask of you."
Rangely was too well aware of the uselessness of trying to direct the conversation to make any attempt to continue the talk, which, moreover, had taken a turn not at all to his liking. He settled himself in his chair, in an attitude of easy attention.
"I am always delighted to do you a favor," he said. "It isn't often I get a chance."
The relations between these two were not easy to understand, unless one accepted the simplest possible theory of their friendship. It was, on the part of Mrs. Staggchase, only one of a succession of platonic intimacies with which her married life had been enriched. She found it necessary to her enjoyment that some man should be her devoted admirer, always quite outside the bounds of any possible love-making, albeit often enough she permitted matters to go to the exciting verge of a flirtation which might merit a name somewhat warmer than friendship. She was a brilliant and clever woman who allowed herself the luxury of gratifying her vanity by encouraging the ardent attentions of some man, which, if they ever became too pressing, she knew how to check, or, if necessary, to stop altogether. She was fond of talking, and she frankly avowed her conviction that women were not worth talking to. She liked an appreciative masculine listener with whom she could converse, now in a strain of bewildering frankness, now in a purely impersonal and intellectual vein, and who, however he might at times delude himself by misconstruing her confidences into expressions of personal regard, was clever enough to comprehend the little corrective hints by which, when necessary, she chose to undeceive him.
Analyzed to its last elements, her feeling, it must be confessed, was pretty nearly pure selfishness; but she was able, without effort, and by half-unconscious art, to throw over it the air of being disinterested friendship. Such a nature is essentially false, but chiefly in that it gives to a passing mood the appearance of a permanent sentiment, and, while seeking only self-gratification, seems actuated by genuine desire to give pleasure to another.
The attitude of Rangely toward Mrs. Staggchase was, perhaps, no more unselfish, and was certainly no more noble, but his sentiment was at least more genuine. He was flattered by her preference, and he was bewildered by her cleverness. He liked to believe himself capable of interesting her, and without in the most remote degree desiring or anticipating an intrigue, he was ready to go as far as she would allow in his devotion. He was constantly tormented by a vague phantom of conquest, which danced with will-o'-the-wisp fantasy before him, and from day to day he endeavored to discover how deeply in love she was willing he should fall. He was really fond of her, a fact that did not prevent his entertaining a half-hearted passion for Ethel Mott, the result of this mixture of emotion being that he was the slave, albeit with a difference, of either lady with whom he chanced to be. That he was the plaything of Mrs. Staggchase's fancy he was far from realizing, although from the nature of things he naturally regarded his fondness for Miss Mott as the permanent factor in the case. He even felt a certain compunction for the regret he supposed Mrs. Staggchase would feel when he should decide formally to transfer his allegiance to her rival; a misgiving he might have spared himself had he been wise enough to appreciate the situation in all its bearings. The lady understood perfectly how matters stood, but Rangely was her junior, and, besides, no man in such a case ever comprehends that he is being played with.
"It is in regard to the statue ofAmericathat I want you to be useful," Mrs. Staggchase said, replying to her visitor's proffer of service with a smile. "Do you know what the chances are in regard to the choice of a sculptor?"
"Why, I suppose Grant Herman will have the commission."
"But I think not."
"You think not? Who will then?"
"That is just it. Mr. Hubbard has been backing Mr. Herman; and Mr. Irons, who never will agree to anything that Mr. Hubbard wants, is putting up the claims of this new woman, just to be contrary."
"What new woman? Mrs. Greyson?"
"Yes. Mrs. Frostwinch told me all about it yesterday. Now there is a young man that we are interested in"—
"Who is 'we'?" interrupted Rangely.
"Oh, Mrs. Frostwinch, and Mrs. Bodewin Ranger, and a number of us."
"But whom have you got on the committee?"
"Mr. Calvin; and don't you see that Mr. Calvin's name in a matter of art is worth a dozen of the other two."
"Yes," Rangely assented, rather doubtfully, "in the matter of giving commissions it certainly is."
Mrs. Staggchase smiled indulgently, playing with the ring in which blazed a splendid ruby, and which she was putting on and off her finger.
"If you think," she said, "that you are going to entrap me into a discussion of the merits of art and Philistinism, you are mistaken. I told you long ago that I was a Philistine of the Philistines, deliberately and avowedly. The true artistic soul which you delight to call Pagan is only the servant of Philistinism, and I own that I prefer to stand with the ruling party. As, indeed," she added, with a mischievous gleam in her eye, "do many who will not confess it."
Rangely flushed. The thrust too closely resembled reproaches which in his more sensitive moments he received at the hand of his own inner consciousness, so to speak, not to make him wince. He felt himself, besides, becoming involved in a painful position. He had long been the intimate friend of Grant Herman, and felt that the sculptor had a right to expect whatever aid he could give him in a matter like this.
"But who," he asked, "is yourprotege?"
"His name," Mrs. Staggchase replied, "is Orin Stanton. He is a fellow of the greatest talent, and he has worked his way"—
Rangely put up his hand in a gesture of impatience.
"I know the fellow," he said. "He made a thing he calledHop Scotch, of which Fenton said the title was far too modest, since he'd not only scotched the subject but killed it."
"One never knew Mr. Fenton to waste the chance of saying a good thing simply for the sake of justice," Mrs. Staggchase observed, with unabated good humor. "But you are to help us in theDaily Observer, and there is to be no discussion about it. Since you know you are too good-natured not to oblige me in the end, why should you not do it gracefully and get the credit of being willing."
And then, being a wise woman, she disregarded Rangely's muttered remonstrance and turned the conversation into a new channel.
THIS IS NOT A BOON.Othello; iii.—3.
If the old-time opinion that a woman whose name is a jest with men has lost her claims to respect, Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson might be supposed to have little ground for the inner anger she felt at the scantness of the courtesy with which she was treated by Mr. Irons. That gentleman was calling upon her in her tiny suite of rooms at the top of one of those apartment hotels which stand upon the debatable ground between the select regions of Back Bay and the scorned precincts of the South End, and he was apparently as much at home as if the sofa upon which he lounged were in his own dwelling.
The apartment of Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson gave to the experienced eye evidences of a pathetic struggle to make scanty resources furnish at least an appearance of luxury. The walls were adorned with amateur china painting in the shape of dreadful placques and plates in livid hues; there was abundance of embroidery that should have been impossible, in garish tints and uneven stitches; much shift had been made to produce an imposing appearance by means of cheap Japanese fans and the inexpensive wares of which the potteries at Kioto, corrupted by foreign influence, turn out such vast quantities for the foreign market. Against the wall stood an upright piano—if a piano could be called upright which habitually destroyed the peace of the entire neighborhood—and over it was placed a scarf upon which apparently some boarding-school miss had taken her first lesson in painting wild flowers.
The room was small, and so well filled with furniture that there seemed little space for the long limbs of Alfred Irons, who, however, had contrived to make himself comfortable by the aid of various cushions covered with bright-colored sateens. He had lighted a cigar without thinking it necessary to ask leave, and had even made himself more easy by putting one leg across a low chair.
Mrs. Sampson was fully aware that in her struggles with life she had sometimes provoked laughter, often disapproval, and now and then given rise to positive scandal, yet she was still accustomed to at least a fair semblance of respect from the men who came to see her; women, it is to be noted, being not often seen within her walls, since those who were willing to come she did not care to receive, and those whom she invited seldom set her name down on their calling lists. Among themselves, at the clubs or elsewhere, the men speculated more or less coarsely and unfeelingly upon the foundations of the numerous scandals which had from time to time blossomed like brilliant and life-sapping parasites upon the tree of Mrs. Sampson's reputation. Her name, either spoken boldly or too broadly hinted at to be misunderstood, adorned many a racy tale told in smoking-rooms after good dinners, or when the hours had grown small in more senses than one; and her career was made to point more than one moral drawn for the benefit of the sisters and daughters of the men who joked and sneered concerning her.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was born of a good old Boston family, to which she clung with a desperate clutch which her relatives ignored so far as with dignity they were able. Her father had been a lawyer of reputation, and his portrait was still displayed prominently in the daughter's parlor, a circumstance which had given Chauncy Wilson opportunity for a jest rather clever than elegant concerning Judge Welsh's well-known fondness in life for watching the progress of criminal cases. Of her husband, the late Mr. Sampson, there was very little said, and not much was known beyond the fact that having run away from school to marry him, Amanda had shared a shady and it was whispered rather disreputable existence for three years, at the end of which she was fortunately relieved from the matrimonial net by his timely decease; an event of which she sometimes spoke to her more intimate male friends with undisguised satisfaction.
It might not have been easy to tell how far Mrs. Sampson's subsequent career was forced upon her by circumstances, and how far it was the result of her own choice. She always represented herself as the victim of a hard fate: but her relatives, one of whom was Mr. Staggchase, declared that Amanda had no capabilities of respectability in her composition. Mrs. Staggchase, upon whom marriage had conferred the privilege of expressing her mind with the freedom of one of the family, while it happily spared her from the responsibility of an actual relative, declared that everything had been done to keep Mrs. Sampson within the bounds of propriety, but all in vain. The income from the estate of the late Judge Welsh was not large, and as Mrs. Sampson's tastes, especially in dress, were somewhat expensive, it followed that she was often reduced to devices for increasing her bank account which were generally adroit and curious, but often not of a character to be openly boasted of. She had had some business transactions already with Irons, who was at this moment laying out the plan of work in a fresh operation where she might make herself useful.
"Of course," he said, "all the men from Wachusett way are on our side, and the men from the other part of the county will be against us."
"What other part of the county?" Mrs. Sampson inquired.
She had laid down her sewing and was listening intently, with a look of keen intelligence, the tips of her long and rather large fingers pressed closely together. She hated Irons devoutly, but his scheme meant financial profit to her, and various bills were troublesomely overdue.
"That's what we have to discover. When we find out, I'll let you know. The other syndicate have been deucedly close-mouthed about their plans, but of course they can't keep dark a great while longer; and in any case I am on the track of the information."
"And what," Mrs. Sampson asked, with an air of innocence too obviously artificial, "am I expected to do?"
Irons glanced at her with a wink, taking in her plain, vivacious face with its sparkling eyes, her fine figure, and stylish, if somewhat too pronounced, presence.
"The old game," he said. "Show a tender and sisterly interest in a few of the country members. There are one or two men from the western part of the state that we want to capture at once before the thing is started. Do you know anybody in that region?"
"My father, Judge Welsh," she answered with an amusing touch amid her frankness of the air with which she always mentioned her ancestors in society, "had numerous connections there."
"Ah, that is good," the visitor responded, with evident satisfaction.
He knocked the ashes from his cigar into a tiny bronze which Mrs. Sampson had put within his reach when he showed signs of throwing them upon the carpet, and then plunged into a discussion of the members of the State Legislature with whom it was possible for Mrs. Sampson to establish an acquaintance, and whom she was likely to be able to influence. He drew from his pocket a list of men, and with quite as business-like an air his hostess produced a similar document from her desk; the pair being soon deep in consultation over the schedules.
Lobbying in Massachusetts is not by the public recognized as a well-organized business, and yet any one who desires to secure personal influence to aid or to hinder legislation is seldom at a loss to find people well experienced in such work. The lobby to the eyes of the public, moreover, consists entirely of men, if one excepts the group of foolish intriguers in favor of the vagaries of proposed law-making by which it is supposed the distinctions of sex may be abolished. There are in the city, however, women who by no means lack experience in manipulating the votes of country members, and who are but too willing to sell their services to whoever can make it to their pecuniary interest to favor a bill.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was extremely adroit and careful in concealing her connection with the law-making of the State. She was in evidence in most public places; at the theatres, the concert halls, the County Club races, and at every fashionable entertainment to which her cleverness could procure her admission, her conspicuous figure, made more prominent by a certain indefinable loudness of style, a marked dash of manner, and gowns in a taste rather daring than refined, was too conspicuous to be overlooked. Yet it is doubtful if she had ever been up the steps leading to the gilded-domed capitol in her life. She went about much; and the unchaperoned life which in virtue of her widowhood and her love of freedom she chose to lead, the width of the circle over which her acquaintance extended, allowed her to carry on her work unobserved; so that while a great variety of stories of one sort of queerness or another were told of Mrs. Sampson, this particular side of her career was almost unknown.
"There is Mr. Greenfield," Mrs. Sampson observed, tapping her teeth with her pencil. "His wife was a cousin of my husband. I don't know them at all, but I could easily ask him to come and see me. It would be only proper to offer him the hospitality of the town, you know."
"Good!" cried Mr. Irons, slapping his open palm down on his knee. "Greenfield's the hardest nut we've got to crack in the whole business. He's the sort of man you can't talk to on a square business basis. You've got to mince things damned fine with him, and he's chairman of the Railroad Committee, you know. He'd have a tremendous amount of influence, anyway."
"He's a little tin god at Fentonville, I've heard," Mrs. Sampson responded, laughing in the mechanical way which was her habit. "When he's at home they say the sun doesn't rise there till he's given his permission."
Irons in his excitement took his leg down from its supporting chair and sat up straight, dropping his list of members to the floor and clasping his knees with his heavy hands.
"Now look here, old lady," he said, "here's a chance to show your mettle. If you'll manage Greenfield, I'll run the rest of the hayseed crowd, and I'll make it something handsomer than you ever had in your life."
The woman smiled a smile of greed and cunning.
"I'll take care of him," she said. "And he shall never know he has been taken care of either."
Irons laughed with coarse jocoseness.
"A man has very little chance that falls into your clutches," he observed, "but in this particular case you've got a heavy contract on hand. Greenfield's got his price, of course, like everybody else, but I'm hanged if I know what it is. If you offered him tin he'd simply fly out on the whole thing and nobody could hold him. There isn't any particular pull in politics on him. This new-fashioned independence has knocked all that to pieces; and Greenfield is an Independent from the word go. I don't know what you're to bait your hook with, unless it's your lovely self."
Mrs. Sampson began a laugh, and then recovering herself, she frowned.
"Don't be personal," she said. "I won't stand it."
She began to feel that the circumstances were such as to make her important to her caller's schemes, and her air by insensible degrees became more assured and less subservient. She knew her man, and she was prepared for his becoming proportionately more respectful. He dusted a little heap of ashes from the small table beside him and scattered them with his foot, in a well-meant attempt to cover the traces of his previous untidiness. She watched him with a covert sneer.
"Even so difficult a problem as that," she said, with a slight toss of the head, a bit of antique coquetry which impressed him with a new sense of her thorough self-possession, and imposed itself upon his untrained mind as the air of a true woman of the world; "I fancy I can solve. Leave him to me. I'll find out what can be done with him."
"If he can be got hold of," Irons remarked, reflectively, "he will carry the whole thing through. They'd believe him up at Feltonville if he told them it was right to walk backward and vote to give their incomes to the temperance cranks."
He rose to go as he spoke, unconsciously assuming with the overcoat he put on that air of stiffness and immaculate propriety which he wore always in public. He seldom allowed himself the undignified freedom which marked his intercourse with Mrs. Sampson, and he liked the rest he found in being for a time his vulgar, ill-bred self with no restraints of artificial manner.
"Well, good afternoon," he said, extending his large hand, into which she laid hers with a certain faint air of condescension. "I've got to go to a meeting of the committee on the new statue. They've got a new fellow they are trying to push in, a young unlicked cub that Peter Calvin's running. I'll let you know anything that's for our advantage."
When he was gone, Mrs. Sampson produced a brush and a dustpan from behind the books on a whatnot and carefully collected the scattered ashes of his cigar.
"Vulgar old brute!" she muttered. "To think of my having to clean up after him; his mother was my grandmother's laundress."
Then she smiled contemptuously, and added by way of self-consolation,—
"But it will all count in the bill, Al Irons."