The Pagans Part 9

"Well," Helen remarked, turning, "your conversation is amusing and doubtless deeply instructive, but I must go to the studio. My bas-relief will hardly complete itself, I suppose, and I've a splendid offer for it, to decorate a house in Milton. It is to be paneled into the side of an oak stairway at the back of the main hall. Isn't that fine?"

X.

O, WICKED WIT AND GIFT.

Hamlet; i.--5.

Anomalies are doubtless as truly the product of law as results whose logic is evident, and the strange relations between Mrs. Greyson and her husband were therefore to be considered the outcome of fixed causes from which no other result was possible.

Married when scarcely more than a girl, shy, undeveloped and ignorant of the world, Helen came from a secluded life, which had been pretty equally divided between the library of her dead father and the woods surrounding the country village where she lived. She had never even fancied that she loved Dr. Ashton; but she had married him as she would have obeyed any other command of the stern aunt who had presided severely over her orphaned childhood. He, half-a-dozen years her senior, had been enamored of her wonderful beauty and modest intellectuality; and, being accustomed always to gratify the impulse of the moment, he had married her with a precipitancy as characteristic as it was reckless. It was owing to a certain mutual scorn of conventionalities that Helen and her husband at length decided to separate. Without the aid of the law and without scandal, they settled back into single liberty, the wife taking again her father's name. They had spent their married life abroad, where Dr. Ashton had remained until a short time previous to the opening of our story, and as neither husband nor wife had been in their single life known in Boston, and as Helen was chary of new acquaintances, their relations had thus far remained undiscovered. Helen, at least, recognized how improbable it was that this secrecy would long remain inviolate, but she went quietly on her way, letting events take their own course.

Arthur Fenton was an old friend of her husband whom Helen had met in Europe, but had known intimately only during her Boston life. She had found him sympathetic, responsive and entertaining, and as any lonely woman clings to the companions.h.i.+p of an appreciative man, she had clung to the friends.h.i.+p and comrades.h.i.+p of the artist.

Going across the Common towards the studio on this sunny morning, when the air was brisk and bracing, the naked trees clearly and delicately defined against the sky, Helen's thoughts went back to her past; to her shy, secluded girlhood, to the years of her married life, and to the way in which she had been living since she and her husband parted. She reflected with a smile, half pity, half contempt, of the proud, reticent girl who had pored over books and drawings in the musty, deserted library at home, almost wondering if she were the same being.

She looked from the Joy Street mall across the hollow which holds the Frog Pond, the most charming view on the Common, yet not even the golden sparkle of the water or the beautiful line of the slope beyond could chase from her mind the picture of the high, dim old room, lined to the ceiling with book-shelves, dingy and dusty from neglect. She seemed to hear still the weird tapping of the beech-tree boughs against the tall narrow windows, and still to smell odor of old leather; she remembered vividly the dull dizziness that came from stooping too long over some volume too heavy to hold, above which, half lying upon the carpetless floor, she had bent with drooping golden curls. She remembered, too, the remoteness of the real world from the ideal sphere in which her fancy placed her; how unimportant and unsubstantial to her had appeared the events of daily life as compared with the incidents of the world the old books in the musty library opened to her. The life of these magic tomes was the real, and that humdrum state through which her visible pathway lay was the dream. To the imaginative girl, half child, half poet, her marriage had prospectively seemed merely an accident of the trivial outside existence which surrounded without penetrating her true being; and the sharpness of the rude awakening from this childish misconception still pierced the woman's proud soul.

No woman recalls her childhood without regret, and despite the philosophy she had cultivated, Helen felt a deep sadness as the old days, somber and dull though they had been, rose before her. She hurried her step a little as if to escape her past, when a pleasant voice at her elbow said:

"Good morning, Helen. Upon what wickedness are you bent now. You go too fast to be on a good errand."

"Good morning, Will," she answered, without turning, for the voice brought the speaker before her mental vision as plainly as her eyes could have done. "I was just thinking of you, and of the days when you found me at home."

"Yes," responded Dr. Ashton, "what were you thinking of them?"

"Nothing very pleasant," she answered with a sigh. "What a gorgeous day it is. Arthur has been breakfasting with me."

"Arthur is going to be married," remarked her companion good humoredly.

"I've just been out to buy him a wedding present."

"What is it?"

"Oh, something he chose himself. It is not safe to tell you, though."

"Haven't I proved my discretion?" Helen said lightly. "I thought that by this time you'd be willing to trust me with your most deadly secrets."

"This is a deadly secret, indeed," he returned, taking from his pocket a small morocco case.

"Oh, jewelry," Helen said, with an accent of disappointment. "I should never have suspected you of such commonplaceness, Will."

"Not jewelry; a jewel," retorted Dr. Ashton, opening the case and displaying a tiny vial.

"Will!" Helen exclaimed, stopping suddenly and catching her husband by the arm, "you won't give him that?"

"Why not? I promised him long ago that I'd get it for him, and he particularly asked for it as a wedding gift."

"Oh, Will; don't do it! He'll use it sometime when he's blue; he'll----"

"Nonsense," responded the physician, restoring the case to his pocket.

"I've diagnosed his case perfectly. He isn't very robust, he's infernally sensitive, and he's no end morbid. He fancies he may want to kill himself, and I dare say he will have leanings that way. Most of us do. He has wanted to a good many times before now, and he is likely to again, but he won't do it. He's too soft-hearted. He might get up steam enough as far as courage goes, but he'd never forget other people and their opinion. He couldn't bear to hurt others, and still less could he bear the idea of their blaming him. He is precisely the man who cannot take his own life."

"But what puts it into his head just now? Why should he marry if he dreads it so?"

"It is all of a piece with his morbidness. He is really in love with Miss Caldwell, I think, but he has brooded over the matter as he broods over every thing, and seeing the uncertain nature of matrimony, he like a wise man provides for contingencies. There may be something behind that I don't know of, but I think not. He'll feel easier if he has this, and I am honestly doing him a favor, if it isn't in the way he thinks."

"I do not know," persisted Helen, "but I do wish you wouldn't do it.

How would his bride feel if she knew?"

"I don't know her," Dr. Ashton returned coolly, "so of course I can't tell how sensible she is; but in any case I can trust Arthur's discretion."

"She's orthodox," said Helen, "or, no, I think she is not so bad as that; but she would regard the idea of suicide as unspeakably wicked.

At least I think so; I never saw her but once. Oh, I do hate to have Arthur marry her. It's dreadful!"

"Of course; it's dreadful to think of any man's marrying, for that matter," he returned with a smile, "but he is a man who was sure to do it sooner or later."

"He's a man of so much principle," Helen mused, half aloud.

"Principle," sneered her companion laughingly, "principle is only formulated policy."

"I am dreadfully tired of epigrams," sighed Helen as they walked down West street. "Whether Arthur learned the habit of you or you of him I don't know; but the pair of you are enough to corrupt all Boston. I do wish you'd give me that case. I'm sure I need it far more than Arthur does. He's going to be married, his pictures are praised and are beginning to sell, he has life before him and every thing to live for, while I have nothing."

"Life is before you, too," answered her husband gravely, putting his hand upon her arm to prevent her flying under the wheels of a carriage which in her absorption she had not noticed. "Look here, Helen; it wouldn't be any better if Arthur wanted to marry you. You are too melancholy alone without having him to push you deeper into the slough of despond."

"You are mistaken, Will," was the quiet response. "I am fond of Arthur, very fond, indeed; but not in that way. I am a fool to grieve about his marriage; I own that, though after all I've lived through I ought to be too hardened to care. But you must acknowledge that it isn't very pleasant for me to see him deliberately going away to marry a woman who would consider me a Bohemian, and very likely anything but respectable, because you and I choose to be comfortable apart instead of miserable together. If I were not so utterly alone in the world, losing a friend would not be so great a matter, perhaps; but he is all I have now, Will."

"It is hard, old lady; that's a fact. I wish I could straighten things out for you, but I don't see how I can."

"No," Helen said drearily, "n.o.body can."

XI.

WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED.

Comedy of Errors; i.--I.

Upon entering the small studio where her bas-relief stood, Helen found Herman there before her. He had removed the wet cloths from the clay and was examining the work with close attention.

"You need a model for this figure," he said, indicating the month of May. "You must take that turn of the shoulder from nothing but life."

Helen came and stood beside him, looking at the work. The instinct of the artist for the moment superseded all other feelings in her mind, and she forgot alike her own troubles and the ill-omened gift with which her husband purposed remembering the nuptials of her friend.

The figure of May of which Herman spoke was that of a beautiful young girl casting backward a wistful look at the fallen flowers which she had dropped but might not stay to gather up again. The splendid movement of the youthful figure, thrown forward in her running, but with one shoulder turned toward the spectator, so that the upper portion of the beautiful bosom was seen, formed one of the finest details of the composition.

"Yes," the sculptor said again, "you must have a model for that, and I have one coming this morning. To be honest, I came up here hoping you'd need her. I believe she is a good girl, and I do not like the idea of her being about among the studios."