"No, I have never talked with her."
"Very likely she"d give us another figure like those that are stuck all over Boston, like pins in a pincushion," Hubbard objected. "Some carpet-knight, with a face spread over with a grin as inane as that of Henry Clay on a cigar-box cover."
Irons laughed contemptuously, and rose, throwing away his cigar stub.
"Well, I must go," he announced. "We don"t seem to be getting ahead very fast. I"ll try and find out if she"ll go into a compet.i.tion, and you two had better do the same with your folks. Then we shall at least have something to go upon. The _Daily Observer_ has already begun to ask why something isn"t done, and I"d like to get the thing finished up, myself."
The two others rose also, and it was thereby manifest that this unproductive sitting of the committee was at an end.
XII
WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED.
Comedy of Errors; i.--1.
Never was a man more utterly wretched than was Arthur Fenton, after the luckless day when Mr. Irons had lighted upon the presence of Mrs.
Herman at the studio. He raged against himself, against chance, most of all against the unmannerly and coa.r.s.e-minded fellow who had forced himself into the studio, and then persisted in imagining evil which had never existed. He experienced all the acute anguish of finding himself in the toils, and of the added sting from wounded vanity, since he felt that he had been wanting in adroitness and presence of mind. It is to be doubted if he did not suffer more than would have been the case had the injurious suspicions of Irons been correct. To a vain man, it is often harder to be entrapped through stupidity or awkwardness than through crime.
Fenton realized well enough how impossible it was now to correct the evil that had been done. He might have explained away the fact that Ninitta had been his model, but his own bearing under the accusation had produced an impression not to be eradicated. The wavering before his eyes, for a single instant, of the will-o"-the-wisp fire of sudden temptation had blinded him, so that he had been guilty of a cursed piece of folly, which had put him at once in the power of Irons. He knew enough of the latter to be pretty sure that he was capable of keeping his threat to enlighten Herman concerning his wife"s visit to the studio, and disgrace in the eyes of Herman meant more than Arthur dared to think. Sensitive to the last fibre of his being, the artist grew faint with exquisite pain at the thought of what he must endure from a scandal spread among his friends. An accusation without foundation would have been almost more than he could bear, but one supported by such circ.u.mstantial evidence as lay behind the story Irons would tell if he set himself to make trouble,--the bare idea drove Fenton wild.
Fenton had always prided himself upon his superiority to public opinion, but without public respect he could not but be supremely miserable. It is true that he valued his own good opinion above that of the world. It was his theory that the ultimate appeal in matters of conduct was always to the man"s inner consciousness, and in this highest court only the man himself could be present, all the world being shut out. It followed that a person"s own opinion of his acts was of infinitely more weight than that of any or all other people whosoever.
"All standards are arbitrary," he was accustomed to say, "and all terms are relative. Every man must make his own ethical code, and n.o.body but the man himself can tell how far he lives up to it. Why should I care whether people who do not even know what my rules of conduct are, consider my course correct or not? Very likely the things they condemn are the things it has cost me most struggle and self-denial to achieve.
We have outgrown old ethical systems, because the world has become enlightened enough to perceive that every mind must make its own code; to realize that what a man is must be his religion."
This course of reasoning was one shared by many of Fenton"s friends, and indeed by a goodly company of nineteenth century thinkers. Fenton was in reality only going with the majority of liberalists in regarding sincerity to personal conviction as the highest of ethical laws; and he was generally pretty logical in choosing the approval of his inward knowledge to that of the world outside. Yet his vanity was keenly sensitive to disapprobation, and when the censure of the world coincided with the condemnation of his own reason he suffered. To self-contempt was added a baffled sense of having been discovered; and as his imagination now ran forward to picture the effects of Irons"s disclosure, the suffering he endured was really pitiful.
"n.o.body will understand," he said to himself one day, half in bitter self-contempt and half in self-defence, "that I couldn"t help doing as I did; no cruelty surpa.s.ses that of holding weak and sensitive natures accountable for shortcomings they are born incapable of avoiding."
And having accomplished an epigram at his own expense, he felt as if he had to some degree atoned for his fault, just as a flagellant looks upon his self-scourging as expiatory.
How to act in the position in which he had been placed by Irons"s insulting proposal was a question which he found more difficult to answer than according to his theories, it should have been. When a man becomes his own highest law he is constantly exposed to the danger of finding his theories of conduct utterly confounded by a change in self-interest; and Fenton began to have a most painful sense of being ethically wholly at sea. He had not yielded to temptation, however. He had given Stewart Hubbard a couple of sittings, and so great had been his fear lest he should inadvertently gather from his sitter some hint of the knowledge he had been urged to obtain, that he had half unconsciously been reserved and silent. The picture was going badly, and the sitter wondered what had come over the witty and vivacious artist.
Besides these vexations the artist had, moreover, other causes for uneasiness at this time. His financial affairs were by no means in satisfactory condition. He had been filling a good many orders and getting excellent prices for his work, yet somehow he had been all the year running behindhand. He lived beyond his means, priding himself upon being the one Boston artist who had been born, bred, and educated a gentleman, as he chose to put it to himself, and who was able to live as a man of the world should. His summer had been pa.s.sed at Newport, a place which Edith by no means liked, and where her ideas of propriety and religion were constantly offended, especially in regard to the sanct.i.ty of marriage. He entertained sumptuously, spent money freely at the clubs, and, in a word, tried to be no less a man of fashion than an artist.
The result was beginning to be disastrous. Living pretty closely up to his income, a few losses and a speculation or two which turned out unlucky, were sufficient to embarra.s.s him seriously. It was the old trite and dreary story of extravagance and its inevitable consequence; and as Fenton had no talent for finance, his struggles rather made matters worse than bettered them, as the efforts of a fly to escape from the web, even although they may damage the net, are apt to end also in binding the victim more securely.
The truth was that the painter, like many another man endowed with imaginative gifts, had little practical knowledge of affairs beyond a talent for spending money; and it is amazing how stupid a clever man can contrive to be when he is taken out of his sphere. For such men there is no safety save in keeping out of debt, and once the balance was on the wrong side of his account, Fenton, self-poised as he was, lost his head. It troubled and worried him to be in debt even when he could see his way clear to paying everything, and now that matters began to get too complicated to be settled by plain and obvious arithmetic, he was miserable.
In the midst of these unhappy complications, he was one morning working upon the portrait of Miss Damaris Wainwright, whose cousin and aunts, the Dimmonts, had induced her to have it painted, although she was in deep mourning. He was interested in the lovely, melancholy girl, and he felt that he was doing some of the best work of his life in her portrait. He sometimes was proud of his skill, and at others he was unreasonably vexed that this picture should be so much better than that of Mr. Hubbard promised to be.
He had been talking this morning half-absently, and merely for the sake of keeping his sitter interested. He had not noticed that her whole being was keyed up to a pitch of intense feeling, and he had almost unconsciously accomplished the really difficult task of putting his sitter at her ease and making her ready to talk.
Suddenly, after a brief silence, she said,--"You provoke confidences."
Some note in her voice and the closeness of connection between her words and the thought in his own mind that he certainly must be able to do what Irons asked, arrested Fenton"s attention.
"Yes," he returned, his air of sincerely meaning what he said being by no means wholly unreal; "that is because I am unworthy of them."
Miss Wainwright smiled. The self-detraction seemed delicate, and the unexpectedness of the reply amused her.
"That is perhaps a modest thing to say, Mr. Fenton," she responded, "but the truth must be--if you"ll pardon my saying anything so personal--that you are very sympathetic."
The artist moved backward a step from his easel, regarding his work with that half-shutting of the eyes and turning of the head which seems to be an essential of professional inspection.
"Even so," persisted he, "a sympathetic person is one whose emotions are fickle enough to give place to whatever others any sudden accident brings up; and if one"s feelings are so transient, how can he be worthy of confidence?"
"I can"t argue with you," Damaris replied, smiling and shaking her head, "but all the same I don"t agree with what you say."
"Oh, I hoped you wouldn"t when I said it," Fenton threw back lightly.
He went on with his work, outwardly tranquil, as if he had no thought beyond the perfect shading of the cheek he was painting; but his mind was in a tumult. He thought how easy it is to deceive; how constantly, indeed, we do deceive whether we will or no; how foolish it is to rule our lives by standards which rest so largely on mere seeming; how--Bah!
Why should he pretend to himself? He was not really concerned with generalities or great moral principles. He was trying to decide whether he should worm a secret out of Hubbard to throw as a sop to that vile cursed cad, Irons, to keep his foul mouth shut about Ninitta. Heavens!
What a tangle he had got into simply because he wanted a decent model for his picture! The abominable prudery and hypocrisy of the time lay behind the whole matter. But this would never do. He must work now; not think of these exciting things. It was hardly a brief moment before to his last words he added aloud,--
"Did what you said mean that I was to be favored with a confidence?"
A painful, deep problem was weighing upon her heart, wearing away her reason and her life alike. She had almost been ready to ask advice of the artist, although she by no means knew him well enough to render so intimate a conversation other than strange.
"Not necessarily," was her reply to Fenton"s question.
She found it after all impossible to utter anything definite upon the subject which lay so near her heart. She even felt a dim wonder whether she had really ever seriously contemplated speaking of it, even never so remotely.
"I was thinking," she continued, "of the point the conversation had reached this morning when I left my friend at the door downstairs."
"It was some great moral problem, I think you said," Fenton responded, trying to recall accurately what she had told him earlier in the sitting of a talk she had had with a friend on her way to the studio.
"The object of life, or something of that sort. Well, the object of life is to endure life, I suppose, just as the object of time is to kill time."
"We had got so far in our talk as to decide," Miss Wainwright went on, too much absorbed in recalling the interview she was relating to notice the painter"s words, "he decided, that is, not I--that the only thing to do is to enjoy the present and to let the future go; but I object that one cannot help dreading what might come."
She spoke, of course, solely with reference to her own inner experiences, but Fenton, with the egotism which is universal to humanity, received the words in their application to his own case. If he could but determine what would come, he might decide how to act in this hard present. Yet, whatever that future might be, he must at any cost extricate himself from this coil which pressed so cruelly upon him.
"Even so he would be right," he answered her words. "Happiness in this world consists, at best, in a choice of evils, and at least one may make of the present a sauce _piquante_ to cover the flavor of the dread of the future."
"You take a more desperate view of the matter than my friend," Miss Wainwright said, sighing bitterly. "His only fear is that I shall lose everything by not making sure of whatever present happiness is possible."
Fenton glanced at her curiously, aware no less from her tone and manner than from her words that the conversation was touching her as well as himself through some keen personal experience. A feeling of sharp and irritating remorse stung him from the thought that he, whose whole sensuous nature strove for selfish joyousness in life, was discussing this question from his own standpoint, while the pale, lovely girl before him was regarding the whole problem from the high plane of duty.
Instinctively he set himself to justify his position against hers; to demonstrate that his Pagan, selfish philosophy was the true guide.
"Oh," he cried out with sudden vehemence, waving his palette with a gesture of supreme impatience, "I do take a desperate view! Life is desperate, and the most absurd of all the mult.i.tudinous ways of making it worse is to waste the present in dreading the future. I"ve no patience with the notion that seems to be so many people"s creed, that we can do nothing n.o.bler than to be as miserable as possible. It is a dreadful remainder of that awful malady of Puritanism. Besides, where is the logic of supposing we shall be better prepared for any misfortune that may come if we can only contrive to dread it enough beforehand. Good heavens! We all need whatever strength we can get from happiness whenever it comes, as much as a plant needs the sunshine while it lasts. You wouldn"t prepare a delicate plant for cloudy days by keeping it in the shadow; and I think one is simply an idiot who keeps in the shade to accustom himself to-day after to-morrow"s storm."
His excitement increased as he went on. He was arguing against the coward sense that he had deserved the troubles which had come upon him.
He was saying in as plain language as the conditions of the conversation would allow, that he had been right in gratifying his desires; in living as he wished without too closely considering the consequences which were likely to follow. He spoke with a bitter earnestness born of the intense strain under which he was laboring; and he did not consider how his words might or might not affect his hearer.
The thought came into his mind how he had deliberately sacrificed his convictions in marrying Edith Caldwell and going over to Philistinism; and he reflected that this decision had shaped his life. Already his course was determined; it was idle to ignore the fact.
Why should he hesitate from squeamish scruples to do what Irons asked when to meet the consequences of the latter"s anger would not only be supremely disagreeable but contrary to his whole theory of life?