"It is not simply that you gave her your word," Helen returned, struggling bravely with herself; "it is that you made her love you, and that obligation you can never shake off. Oh, it is because you are too n.o.ble to take a woman"s love and then trample upon it, that I love you--that you fill my heart."
She poured out the words, her eyes blazing, her splendid form dilated, her arms involuntarily extended towards him. He took her into his embrace; not hastily, not wildly; but with a slow, irresistible movement that had in it something of solemnity. He showered kisses upon her hair, her forehead, her lips; he pressed her to his bosom as if he would absorb her into himself.
"My darling, my darling," he said, in a hoa.r.s.e, fiery whisper, "I cannot give you up! Think how lonely I am; how I love you!"
She put up her face and kissed him with a long, clinging kiss; then she freed herself from his arms. They stood face to face, her eyes appealing, until his glance fell before hers.
"Yes," he said in a voice so low that she bent forward to listen, "yes; you must be right."
"I am right," she responded sadly, "I have fought against it too much not to be sure of that."
"It is an odd way of proving my love for you to give you up," continued Herman, with a new accent of bitterness in his voice. "Oh, the folly of that boyish pa.s.sion!"
He strode away from her, as she leaned panting against a modeling stand. The darkness was gathering so rapidly that when he turned back his face came out of the gloom like a surprise.
"My reward," he said, "must be that you love me; but that very reward makes it harder to deserve it. I am sure that we would be wiser and happier if we had no scruples to hamper us."
"But we have," was her response; "to take your own words, we are not mere puppets."
Again he walked away from her, and for a few moments there was no sound but that of his heavy footsteps, which seemed to make the silence more solemn and penetrating.
"I will do whatever you ask," he burst out suddenly. "I will even marry her if you wish."
"I ask nothing. It is not I but your convictions you should follow. I am not even able to advise. Your own instincts are better and n.o.bler than any thing I can say to you." She stopped and choked back a sob.
"Oh, Grant, it is so hard!" she cried.
She had never used that name before, and it so thrilled him with joy and pain that he made an impulsive movement as if once more to take her in his arms; but she lifted her hand with a gesture of negation.
"I have been tempted as well as you," she continued, "I have said to myself a thousand times that love justified all, and that these theories were too fine spun. I could not keep the thought of you down even when I first knew I was a widow, and I said over and over to myself that now no one stood between us. I knew it was no use, but I lay awake in the night and tried to prove to myself that Ninitta had no claim,--but, oh! you are too much to me for me to be willing that you should do what we both know is wrong and cruel. I can endure anything better than that you should not always be my ideal; and I should hate myself if I tempted you to wrong."
"What I am," he said brokenly, moved most of all by the tears upon her cheeks, "is nothing. You have beaten this temptation, not I; I would have done any thing if you had encouraged me. I am a very ordinary mortal, Helen, when one really knows my littleness."
She smiled through her tears at him.
"You shall not abuse yourself;" she replied. "I will not have it."
There was not much further said between them. They remained together until the dusk filled the studio, and it looked again like a ghost-world as on the morning they two had come into it to see the dead form modeled in red clay. Perhaps it was upon this remembrance that at length Mrs. Greyson said:
"Will you give me, before I go to Europe, that figure you showed me?"
"I will give you any thing you ask," he answered; "I wish I might add myself. Is it right," he added, with sudden fire, "for me to tie myself to that model girl? Am I worth nothing better than that?"
"You are worth the best woman on earth; but--oh I cannot argue it, but I feel it; I am sure that it cannot be right to deny the claim which you yourself gave her, Grant. I know by myself what it would be to lose you."
"But she is not the woman you are. Her feelings are those of an ignorant peasant; she--"
Helen laid her fingers lightly upon his lips.
"No," she said, "don"t go on. We have said it all once. You are trying to out-argue your own convictions. I must go now. It is almost dark already."
She took a step or two towards the door and again laid her hand upon the rug _portiere_. Then as by a common impulse they turned towards each other, and once more she was locked in his embrace.
And to-night, sitting alone in the dark, with dilated eyes, Helen felt still the ecstasy of that moment, but murmured to herself:
"It must not be again; I will not see him alone."
x.x.xV.
PARTED OUR FELLOWSHIP.
Oth.e.l.lo; ii.--I.
Tom Bently"s studio that night was a sight well worth seeing.
Tom had two rooms in Studio Building, opening into each other by folding doors, which were never known to be shut. The walls were hung with old French tapestry, its rich, soft colors harmonizing exquisitely with some dull-red velvet draperies from Venice. Bits of armor, some of them very splendid, were disposed here and there, while a wealth of _bric-a-brac_ enriched every nook and corner. In the doorway hung an old altar-lamp of silver, with a cup of ruby gla.s.s, and from various points depended other lamps of Moresque and antique shapes. A pair of tall bra.s.s flambeau-stands, spoil of a Belgian cathedral sacked a couple of centuries ago, upheld the heaviest candles Tom had been able to find, which smoked and flared most picturesquely.
Bently had traveled widely, every where picking up graceful and artistic trifles--stuffs from Algiers; rugs from Persia and Turkey; weapons from Tripoli and India and Tunis; musical instruments from Egypt and Spain; antiques from Greece and Germany and Italy; and pottery from every where. His studio was the envy of all his brother artists, although he himself growled about it profanely, declaring that he had so much rubbish about him that he could not work, yet nevertheless declining to part with a single object.
"I ought to clear the place out," he would say. "My pictures are getting to look like advertis.e.m.e.nts of an old clo" shop, and if a man doesn"t change all his properties every year, the sapient critics say he has become mannered. But I can"t let them go; or rather they won"t let me go; they hang on like barnacles to an old hulk."
The Pagans were six that night, Fenton"s place being unfilled. The delinquency of the absent artist was a good deal commented upon, yet always as if an effort were made to keep the subject out of the conversation. It came up again and again, and that not unnaturally, since it was necessarily in every man"s thoughts.
"He"s a mellifluous coward, now isn"t he?" Bently remarked, with his usual picturesque disregard of the conventional use of words. "The average American couldn"t have been more sneaking."
"He was always afraid of the rough grain of life," Rangely responded.
"I always told him he was a born coward. He could never serve any cause that wouldn"t give him a uniform of broadcloth. But he was born for something better than tagging after Calvin and his tribe, heaven knows."
"Bah!" went on Bently, "the bad taste of it! I could get over every thing else, but the bad taste of proving a sneak, and giving up every thing worth while."
Somebody threw in a quotation from Browning"s _Lost Leader_, and then Grant Herman, trying to turn the conversation, took up Bently"s remark.
"You"re right, Tom," he said, "in your view of taste. Taste is sublimated morality. It is the appreciation of the proportion and fitness of all things in the universe, and of course it is above simple morality, for that is founded upon a partial view. Taste is the universal, where a system of morals is the local."
"Can"t you say that of art?" asked Rangely. "I should think art is the universal, where religion is the provincial. A religion expresses the needs and the aspirations of a race or a country, while art embodies the aspirations and attributes of humanity."
"Good!" Bently responded. "That is better than I should have said it, but it"s my belief, all the same. There are so few people who have imagination enough even to understand what one means by saying that art is the only thing in the world worth living for. Why, art is the supreme expression of humanity; the apotheosis of all the best there is in the race."
"I don"t see that," objected another. "Isn"t religion the expression of the longings of the soul, or whatever there is in us we call soul? I can"t say it well, but it seems to me you talk of religions, not religion."
"People seldom take the trouble to make that distinction. He who attacks any of the religions is generally set down as striking at religion itself."
"Religion," returned Bently, "is the expression of fear, and nothing else, if you sift it to the bottom. Knowledge kills so-called religion as surely as it does those lower forms of belief which it is nowadays the fashion to dub superst.i.tion. It is precisely the same feeling that builds churches and that rhymes the country hag"s charms. Fairies and saints are double and twisted cousins, after all."
"But religion," persisted the German, "is more than the expression of fear; it is the embodiment of the aspirations of mankind; of the instinct and desire for worship."