"You see," he said, with a clumsy attempt at easy familiarity, "Mrs.
Fenton"s a niece of Mr. Calvin, who is on the statue committee. Mrs.
Frostwinch says Mr. Calvin"s the man who has most influence in the committee, and it occurred to me that it would be a good thing if you"d put Mrs. Fenton up to taking my part with Calvin. You see," he continued, in an offhand manner, "artists don"t get any show nowadays unless they keep their eyes open, and I mean to be wide awake. I"m ready to do a good turn, too, for anybody that helps me. John told me the other day that you and he had had a row, and if you can do me a good turn in this, I may be able to pay you by smoothing John down."
Milly flushed painfully. Her delicacy was outraged, but, too, her combative instinct was roused to defend her lover.
"John and I haven"t quarrelled," she said, in a voice a little raised; "he is worried about the debts and that makes him out of sorts, sometimes, that is all."
A look of shrewd cunning came into Orin"s narrow eyes. He suspected the allusion to John"s determination to clear his father"s memory from dishonor to be a clever device to win a concession from him. He looked upon the remark as a statement from Milly of the price of her aid.
"If I get this commission," he said, watching the effect of his words, "I shall be in a position to help John pay off those debts, and I shall tell him he has you to thank for my helping him out in his foolishness,--for it is foolishness to waste money on dead debts."
A glad light sprang into Milly"s face. She was too childlike to suspect the thought which led Orin to make this proffer, and the hope of having John aided at once and of being able to contribute to the bringing about of this result, made her heart beat joyfully. "You know how glad I shall be if I can help you," she said quickly. "I will speak to Mrs.
Fenton when I see her to-morrow; though I do not see what good I can do you," her honesty forced her to add, with sudden self-distrust.
"Oh, you just put in and do your level best," Orin responded, with the smile which Mrs. Frostwinch had once called his "deplorably Satanic grin," "and it is sure to come out all right. There are other wires being pulled."
XIV
THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT.
Oth.e.l.lo; iv.--I.
It was not often that Arthur Fenton permitted himself to be ill-tempered at home. He had too keen an appreciation of good taste to allow his dark humors to vent themselves upon the heads of those with whom he lived.
"A man is to be excused for being cross abroad," he was wont to observe, "but only a brute is peevish at home."
On the morning following his conversation with Damaris Wainwright, however, he was decidedly out of sorts, and proved but ill company for his wife at the breakfast table. She ventured some simple remark in relation to a plan which Mr. Candish had for the re-decoration of the Church of the Nativity, and her husband retorted with an open sneer.
"Oh, don"t talk about Mr. Candish to me," he said. "He is that obsolete thing, a clergyman."
"I supposed," Edith responded good-naturedly, "that a question of artistic decoration would interest you, even if it was connected with a church."
"I hate anything connected with a religion," Fenton observed savagely.
"A religion is simply an artificial scheme of life, to be followed at the expense of all harmony with nature."
It was evident to Edith that her husband was nervous and irritable, and with wifely protective instinct she attributed his condition to overwork. She did not take up the challenge which he in a manner flung down. She seldom argued with him now; she cast about in her mind for a safe topic of conversation, and, by ill-luck, hit upon the one least calculated to restore Arthur to good humor and a sane temper.
"Helen was in last evening," she said. "She is troubled about Ninitta; but I think it is because she isn"t used to her ways."
Fenton started guiltily.
"What about Ninitta?" he demanded.
"Helen says she acts strangely, as if she had something on her mind; and that she complains bitterly that her husband doesn"t care for her."
Arthur shrugged his shoulders. He was on his guard now, and perfectly self-possessed.
"No?" he said, inquiringly. "Why should he?"
"Why should he?" echoed his wife indignantly. Then she recovered herself, and let the question pa.s.s, saying simply: "That would lead us into one of our old discussions about right and wrong."
"Those struggles and quibbles between right and wrong," Fenton retorted contemptuously, "have ceased to amuse me. They were interesting when I was young enough for them to have novelty, but now I find grand pa.s.sions and a strong will more entertaining than that form of amus.e.m.e.nt."
Edith raised her clear eyes to his with a calmness which she had learned by years of patient struggle.
"And yet," she answered, "the people whom I have found most true, most helpful, and even most comfortable, have been those who believed these questions of right and wrong the most vital things in the universe."
"Oh, certainly," was the reply. "A superst.i.tion is an admirable thing in its place."
He rose from the table as he spoke, and stood an instant with his hand upon the back of his chair, looking at her in apparent indecision. She saw that he was troubled, and she longed to help him, but she had learned that his will was definite and unmanageable, and she secretly feared that her inquiry would be fruitless when she asked,--
"What is it that troubles you this morning, Arthur? Has anything gone wrong?"
"Things are always wrong," replied he. Then, with seeming irrelevance, he added: "People are so illogical! They so insist that a man shall think in the beaten rut. They are angry because I don"t like the taste of life. Good Heavens! Why haven"t I the same right to dislike life that I have to hate sweet champagne? If other people want to live and to drink Perrier Jouet, I am perfectly willing that they should, but, for my own part, I don"t want one any more than the other."
What he said sounded to Edith like one of the detached generalities he was fond of uttering, and if she had learned that beneath his seemingly irrelevant words always lay a connecting thread of thought, she had learned also that she could seldom hope to discover what this cord might be. To understand his words, now, it would have been necessary for her to be aware of the net spread for him by Irons, the struggle in his mind as he talked with Miss Wainwright, and the effort he was now making to bring himself up to the firmness needed for the important interview with Mr. Hubbard which lay before him. In the sleepless hours of the night, Fenton had gone over the ground again and again; he had painted to himself the baseness of the thing he meant to do, and all his instincts of loyalty, of taste, of good-breeding, rose against it; but none the less did he cling doggedly to his determination. His purpose never wavered. His decision had been made, and this summing up of the cost did not shake him; it only made him miserable by the keen appreciation it brought him of the bitter humiliation fate--for so he viewed it--was heaping upon his head.
The strength and weakness which are often mingled in one character, like the iron and clay in the image of the prophet"s vision, make the most surprising of the many strange paradoxes of human life. Fenton was sensuous, selfish, yielding, yet he possessed a tenacity of purpose, a might of will, which nothing could shake. He looked across the table now, at his sweet-faced, clear-eyed wife, with a dreadful sense of her purity, her honor, her remoteness; it cut him to the quick to think that the breach of trust he had in view would fill her mind with loathing; yet the possibility of therefore abandoning his purpose did not occur to him. Indeed, such was his nature, that it might be said that the possibility of abandoning his deliberately formed intention, on this or on any other grounds, did not for him exist.
It was one of the peculiarities which he shared with many sensitive and sensuous natures, that his first thought in any unpleasant situation was always a reflection upon the bitterness of existence. He always thought of the laying down of life as the easiest method of escape from any disagreeable dilemma. He was infected with the distaste of life, that disease which is seldom fatal, yet which in time destroys all save life alone. He thought now how he hated living, and the inevitable reflection came after, how easy it were to get out of the coil of humanity. A faint smile of bitterness curled his lips as he recalled a remark which Helen Greyson had once quoted to him as having been made of him by her dead husband. "He"ll want to kill himself, but he won"t.
He"s too soft-hearted, and he"d never forget other people and their opinions." He had acknowledged to himself that this was true, and he wondered whether Mrs. Greyson appreciated its justice.
The thought of Helen brought up the old days when he had been so frankly her friend that he had told her everything that was in his heart except those things which vanity bade him conceal lest he fall in her estimation.
It was so long since he had known a friend on those intimate terms under which it makes no especial difference what is said, since even in silence the understanding is perfect, and the pleasure of talking depends chiefly on the exchange of the signs of complete mutual comprehension, that the old days appealed to him with wonderful power.
There is an immeasurable and soothing restfulness in such intercourse, especially to a man like Fenton, in whom exists an inner necessity always to say something when he talks; and as he recalled them now, something almost a sob rose in Arthur"s throat. Many men suppose themselves to be cultivating their intellect when they are only, by the gratification of their tastes, quickening their susceptibilities; and Fenton"s whole self-indulged existence had resulted chiefly in rendering him more sensitive to the discomforts of a universe in the making of which other things had been considered besides his pleasure.
He looked across the breakfast table at his wife. He noted with appreciation the beautiful line of her cheek outlined against the dark leather of the wall behind her. He felt a twinge of remorse for coming so far short of her ideal of him. He knew how resolutely she refused to see his worst side, and he reflected with philosophy half bitter and half contemptuous, that no woman ever lived who could wholly outgrow the feeling that to believe or to disbelieve a thing must in some occult way affect its truth. At least she had fulfilled all the unspoken promises, so much more important than vows put into words could be, with which she had married him. A remorseful feeling came over his mind, and instantly followed the instinctive self-excuse that she could never suffer as keenly as he suffered, no matter how greatly he disappointed her.
"People are to be envied or pitied," he said aloud, "not for their circ.u.mstances, but for their temperaments."
Edith looked up inquiringly. He went round to where she was sitting, smiling to think how far she must be from divining his thought.
"I stayed at the club too late last night," he said, stooping to kiss her smooth white forehead in an unenthusiastic, habitual way which always stung her. "Some of the fellows insisted upon my playing poker, and I got so excited that I didn"t sleep when I did get to bed."
Edith sighed, but she made no useless remonstrances.
Walking down to his studio, carefully dressed, faultlessly booted and gloved, and, as Tom Bently was accustomed to say, "too confoundedly well groomed for an artist," Fenton tried in vain to determine how he should manage the important conversation with Mr. Hubbard. He had racked his brains in the night in vain attempts to solve this problem, but in the end he was forced to leave everything for chance or circ.u.mstances to decide.
When Stewart Hubbard sat before him, Fenton was conscious of a tingling excitement in every vein, but outwardly he was only the more calm. A close observer might have noticed a nervous quickness in his movements, and a certain shrillness in his voice, but the sitter gave no heed to these tokens, which he would have regarded as of no importance had he seen them. The talk was at first rather rambling, and was not kept up with much briskness on either side. Fenton, indeed, was so absorbed in the task which lay before him that he hardly followed the other"s remarks, and he suddenly became aware that he had lost the thread of conversation altogether, so that he could not possibly imagine what the connection was when Hubbard observed,--
"Yes, it is certainly the hardest thing in the world for one being to comprehend another."
Fenton rallied his wits quickly, and retorted with no apparent hesitation,--
"It is so. Probably a cat couldn"t possibly understand how a human mother can properly bring up a child when she has no tail for her offspring to play with."