"Sardonic, as usual," retorted Fred, laughing; and then he went to find Miss Merrivale, convinced that under the circ.u.mstances the sooner he proposed to her the better.

x.x.xII

HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY.

Love's Labor's Lost; i.--1.

All the world feels the pathos of helplessness hurt and wounded; but only some recognize how this applies to a great and n.o.ble nature attacked by unscrupulousness. In an encounter with dishonesty, n.o.bility of soul may be, in its effect for the moment, utter weakness. a.s.sailed by deceit or treachery the great heart has often no resource but endurance; and while endurance may save, it cannot defend.

The moment Grant Herman's eyes fell upon the _Fatima_, he understood fully why Fenton had so volubly remarked that he had painted the picture from old studies. He tried to fight with his conviction that what the artist said was false, although even as he did so he could not crush down the feeling of having been wounded by the hand of a friend.

It seemed to him incredible that Fenton, even though the painter's defection from the Pagans had caused something of a breach between them, could have been guilty of this outrage. He choked with an intolerable sense of shame for himself, for the artist, and for Ninitta. A terrible anguish wrung his heart as he looked across the crowded gallery gay with lights, with the rich dresses, with laughter, and with the beauty of women, to where hung the picture of the mother of his boy, an image of sensuous enticement. The fact that Fenton had subst.i.tuted another face for that of Ninitta did not, for the moment, console him. To his sculptor's eye, form was the important thing, and the fact that he recognized the model bore down all else. He remembered how marked had been Ninitta's unwillingness to accompany him to the exhibition, and the possible connection between this and the picture forced itself upon his mind.

With all the instinctive generosity of his soul, however, Herman strove to believe that the _Fatima_ had been painted, as Fenton said, from old studies, and that his wife had not been guilty of the painful indecorum of posing. He compelled himself to answer the artist calmly, although he could not make his manner cordial. And as he spoke, his eye, searching the picture for confirmation of his hope or of his fear, recognized among the draperies a Turkish shawl he had himself given his wife after their marriage.

He made his way out of the gallery and out of the club house. He felt that he must get away from the innumerable eyes by which he was surrounded. He started toward home, but before he had gone a block, he stopped, hesitated a moment, and struck off into a side street. He was not ready to go home. He had said to himself too often, reiterating it in his mind constantly for six years, that in dealing with his wife his must be the wisdom, the patience, and the forbearance of both. He remembered a night long ago, when he had gone to Ninitta's room, in a mood of contrition, to renew the troth of his youth, and had fallen instead into a fit of bitter anger. With no evident reason, came back to him to-night the beautiful weeping figure of the Italian as she had cast herself at his feet and implored his forgiveness. He would not go to her now until he was calmer, and until he had considered carefully all the points of the situation.

In that whirl which comes in desperate circ.u.mstances before the startled and bewildered thoughts can be reduced to order, Herman wandered on, not thinking where he was going, until he found himself leaning against a railing and looking over the waters of the Charles River. It was a beautiful starlight night with a wavering wind that came in uncertain gusts only to die away again. The water was like a flood of ink, across which streamed thin tremulous lines of brightness, and over which were strewn the flickering reflections of the stars. The gas jets of the city across the flood, the rows of lamps which marked the bridges, the distant horse cars which rumbled between Cambridge and Boston with their colored lights, the green and red lanterns that glowed from the railroad tracks farther down the river, all suggested the busy life of men with its pa.s.sions, its greed, and its heartlessness; but the darkness held all remote, as if the world of men were a dream. And overhead the immovable stars, like the unpitying G.o.ds, hung above the city and were reflected in the water, and wounded the soul of the lonely man with the terrible sense of power inimitably removed, of pa.s.sionless strength which served to humanity but as a measure of its own weakness and triviality. The misfortunes of life might be endured; its disappointments, its anguish, even its inviolable loneliness might be supported, but a sense of the awful futility of existence crushes man to the depths of impotent despair.

A review of the past is usually a protest against fate, and manly as Herman was it was inevitable that into his reverie should come a sense that the wrong and suffering of his life had been thrust upon him undeserved. He could not be blind to the fact that it had been through his virtues that he had been wounded. A sense of injustice comes with the consciousness of having suffered through merit. Many a man is too n.o.ble basely to avoid the consequences of his acts, but few can wholly rid themselves of the feeling that the uncomplaining acceptance of painful results should serve as expiation for the deeds which caused them. The n.o.bility of his nature, the purity of his intentions had made of a boyish folly the curse of a lifetime. With whatever tenderness the sculptor regarded Ninitta as the mother of his son, it was vain for him to attempt to deceive himself in regard to his love for her. A man with whom cordiality was instinctive, who was born for the most frank and intimate domestic relations, he found in his wife small sympathy and less comprehension. He had married her, believing that she had a right to claim happiness at his hands because he had taught her to love him.

He had long since been obliged to own to himself that he had done this at the expense of his own peace, and he now questioned whether the experiment had succeeded better in her case than in his. If she had not been able to comprehend his aims and to enter into his scheme of life, it was equally true that she must have found in him little response to the calls of her own nature. The bitterness of the sigh which wrung his bosom, as he stood with his hand upon the railing and looked over the water with the lights reflected on its blackness, was as much for her as for himself.

Yet he would not have been human had he not felt thrills of anger when he thought of the _Fatima._ No faintest suspicion crossed his mind of any darker shame which might lie behind the fact that his wife had posed for Fenton. This he could not doubt that she had done. This explained her frequent absences from home in the morning, to which he had before given no thought. He remembered, too, that for weeks a furtive restlessness, poorly concealed, had been evident in Ninitta's manner. He had attributed it to her intense opposition to Nino's being sent to school; but now he read it differently. He could not but be angry, yet his pity was greater than his wrath; and he resolved not only to be forbearing with his wife, but hereafter to use greater endeavors to enrich her colorless life. He was too thoroughly an artist himself not to feel and appreciate how much the old love of posing, the longing for the air of a studio, and the art instinct might have had to do with Ninitta's fault.

But in regard to Fenton his heart burned with that rage which is largely grief. It was like the anger, which is half astonishment, of a child who is unexpectedly struck by its playmate. The fact that he was incapable of comprehending how it was possible to betray a friend made him confused in thinking of the artist's share in the transaction; and the fact that he could vent upon Fenton his righteous indignation enabled him to free his feelings toward Ninitta of almost all animosity. When at last he turned to go home, it was with a profound pity that he thought of his wife.

It was a little after eleven when he reached his house. The gas was burning in his chamber and Ninitta lay apparently sleeping. The wretched woman feigned a slumber which she had in vain courted. She was convinced that her husband could not see the _Fatima_ without discovering her secret, and the guilty knowledge in her heart filled her with growing fears as the moments went on.

When at last she heard Herman's step, she had started up in bed like a wild creature, her heart fluttering, her ears strained as if to catch from the sound some clue to his mood. But instantly she had lain down again, and, with an instinct like that of the timorous animals whose nature it is to feign death when they cannot flee, had composed herself into the appearance of slumber.

Herman paused a moment, just inside the chamber door, and looked at his wife. Something in her pose suggested to him so vividly the _Fatima_ that, despite his self-conquest on the bridge, a flood of anger swelled within him. The masculine instinct, nourished through a thousand generations, that no palliation gives the wife a right to claim forgiveness from her husband for the shame she has put upon him by a violation of modesty, surged up within him. He drew in a deep inspiration and started forward with an inarticulate sound as if he could throw himself upon this woman and tighten his fingers on her throat.

Ninitta raised herself in bed with an exclamation of fear. Her black hair streamed loose, and her dark eyes shone. Her swarthy pa.s.sionate face was an image of terror. She was not far enough away from her peasant ancestors not to be moved by the size and strength of her husband's large and vigorous frame. Many generations and much subtlety of refinement must lie between herself and savagery before a woman can learn instinctively to fear the soul of a man rather than his muscles in a crisis like this. Husband and wife confronted each other as he walked quickly across the chamber. Her cowering att.i.tude, the fear which was written in every line of her face, fed his anger, until, in his blind rage, all pity and self-restraint seemed to be swept away.

But just as he neared the bed, when in his burning look Ninitta seemed already to feel his hands clutching her with cruel force, his foot struck against something which lay on the floor. It was one of Nino's wooden soldiers. The father stopped, and his look changed. He remembered how Nino had come in from the nursery while he was dressing that night, bringing his arms full of more or less shattered figures which he had appealed to his father to put to rights for a grand battle which was to be fought in the morning. Herman looked down at the toy and forgot his anger. He looked up at his wife and she saw with wonder the change in his face. It had been full of indignation against the wife who had deceived him; on it now was written reproachful anguish, and pity for the mother of his son.

"Ninitta," he said. "How could you do it?"

She cowered down in the bed, burying her face in her hands. She could not answer, and there came over him a painful sense of the uselessness of words.

"Everybody must recognize Fenton's picture," he said. "If you did not remember me, Ninitta, how could you forget Nino? How will he feel when he is old enough to realize what you have done?"

The frightened woman burst into convulsive sobs mixed with moans like those of a hurt animal. In the last hours she had been thinking no less than her husband; but where he had considered her, she had thought chiefly of her boy. Mingled with the fear of her husband's anger had been the n.o.bler feeling, that she was no longer worthy to be with her son. The very pa.s.sion of the love she bore him moved her now with the determination to leave him. It was always Ninitta's instinct to run away in trouble, and now, added to the impulse to escape from her husband was the determination forming itself with awful stress of anguish in her soul, to go away from Nino; to take away from her son whom she loved better than life itself, this woman who had no right in his pure presence. She did not look upon it as an expiation of her fault; it was only that maternal love gathered up whatever was n.o.ble in her nature, in this supreme sacrifice for her son.

To Herman, looking down upon the cowering figure of his wife, with a heartbreaking sense of the impossibility of effecting anything by words, she was simply a cowardly woman who took refuge in tears from the reproaches which her conduct deserved. Could he have known what was pa.s.sing in her heart, it would have moved him to a deeper respect and a keener pity than he had ever felt for her. No more than a dumb animal had she any language in which she could have made him understand her feelings had she tried; and at last he turned away with a choking in his throat.

x.x.xIII

A BOND OF AIR.

Troilus and Cressida; i.--3.

The stock of the Princeton Platinum Company was issued in ten-dollar shares, it being the conviction of Erastus Snaffle, deduced from a more or less extensive experience, that the gullible portion of the public is more likely to buy stock of a low par value. On the morning after the exhibition at the St. Filipe Club, the shares were quoted at two dollars and an eighth.

Arthur Fenton read the stock reports at breakfast. He laid the paper down calmly, drank his coffee in silence, and absently played with his fork, while his wife attended to Caldwell's breakfast and her own. He said nothing until the boy, whose mind was intent upon some new toy or other, having hastily finished his meal, asked to be excused.

"Don't be in a hurry, Caldwell," his mother said, gently. "I want you to learn to wait for older people."

"Let him go, Edith," his father interposed. "I want to talk to you."

The boy jumped down quickly and ran to give his father a hasty kiss. He had learned to look to Fenton to help him in evading his mother's attempts at discipline, and Edith noted with pain, as she had too often noticed before, the knowing smile which came into the child's face at her husband's words. Caldwell evidently regarded his father's remark merely as a convenient excuse, and it hurt Edith to see how in subtile ways her son was learning to distrust the honesty of his father.

On this occasion, however, Arthur had meant what he said. When the door had closed behind the little fellow, he looked up to observe in the most matter-of-fact tone,--

"I suppose it is only fair, Edith, that I should tell you that we are ruined."

She looked at him with a puzzled face.

"What do you mean?" she said.

"I mean," he returned, "that I have been getting into no end of a mess, and that some stock I bought to help myself out of it, has gone down and made things ten times worse."

She folded her hands in her lap and regarded him wistfully. She had been so often repressed when she had tried to gain his confidence in regard to business matters that she hesitated to speak now.

"Should I understand if you told me about it?" she asked.

"Oh, very likely not," he returned, coolly; "but I don't in the least mind telling you, if it's any satisfaction to you. It isn't any great matter, only that I live so near the ragged edge that a dollar or two either way makes all the difference between poverty and independence."

Edith breathed more freely. Her husband's self-possessed manner, and the fact that she knew him to be so given to exaggeration, made her feel that things were not so hopeless as his words had at first implied.

"I have three thousand shares of Princeton Platinum stock," Fenton went on, with the condescending air of one who elaborately explains details which he knows will not be understood. "I bought at two and seven-eighths, with money that should go to pay notes due on Sat.u.r.day.

The stock was worth two and an eighth last night and very likely by to-night won't be worth anything."

"Then why didn't you sell yesterday?" Edith asked.

Arthur smiled at the feminine turn of her words.

"Because, my shrewd financier, I don't want to sell at a loss, and Mr.

Irons a.s.sures me that there will be a rise before the final collapse."

He did not add, as he might have done, the substance of the talk between himself and Irons. That wily financier had said to him one day,--

"Fenton, you were almighty toploftical about those railroad shares, and I'll give you another chance. I've had four thousand shares of Princeton Platinum turned over to me on an a.s.signment. It cost me two, and you may have it at that figure, though it's worth two and a half in the market to-day."

"You are too generous, by half," Fenton had answered.

"Well, the fact is," Irons had responded, "I hate infernally to be under obligations. Princeton Platinum is wild-cat fast enough, but it will touch four before they let the bottom drop out. That I happen to know. This will give you a chance to make a neat thing out of it, and it will square off the obligation our syndicate's under to you."