The Pagans Part 25

He rose as he spoke, and put out his hand.

"I must be going," he said in an indifferent tone. "I have letters to write that must be mailed by midnight. I am not more than half as bad, Helen, as you have always persisted in thinking. I never made very profound pretensions, but I've treated every body squarely from my own point of view. If they have regarded my blessings as curses, it wasn't my fault, and I am not sufficiently hypocritical to pretend that I think it was. Good night."

He gave her hand a warmer and more lingering pressure than usual.

"I've had a very pleasant evening," he added, "despite the admixture of truth. Young people don't like any bitters, but we old, shattered wrecks need a dash of it in the wine of life to help digestion. Good night."

XXVIII.

LIKE COVERED FIRE.

Much Ado about Nothing; iii.--I.

That night marked an epoch in the married life of Arthur and Edith Fenton.

The results of matrimony upon character are for the most part slow and hardly perceptible, yet even so not without certain well-defined stages by which their progression forces itself into recognition; and in fervid temperaments like that of the artist, any change is sure to be rapid, and marked by sharp and sudden crises.

Edith returned from Helen with her soul in a tumult. Grant Herman had described more than her face when he applied to her the epithet nun-like. It was a source of perpetual wonderment to many of her friends that such a girl could be so strongly attracted by Arthur Fenton; but those who knew his marvelous flexibility, the unconscious hypocrisy with which he adapted himself to any nature with which he came in contact, and on the other hand his fascinating manner, at once brilliant and sympathetic, felt Edith's love to be the perfectly natural consequence. She believed him to be what she wished, and he, without conscious deceit, became for the time being what she believed him to be.

It was a theory of Dr. Ashton's that what Arthur Fenton became was so purely a question of environment as to leave the artist all but irresponsible. This fatalistic view he had laid before his wife with some detail, at once explaining and defending his position.

"If a chameleon is put upon a black tree," he said on one occasion when the matter was under discussion, "you have really no right to blame him for becoming black too; it is simply his nature. If Arthur is like that it isn't his fault. He wasn't consulted, I fancy, about how he should be made at all. He is self-indulgent, and if a point hurts him he glides away from it. He cannot help it."

"There is something in what you say," Helen had reluctantly a.s.sented, "but I think you put it far too strongly."

"Oh, very likely," was the careless reply. "His strongest instinct, though, is to escape pain. We are none of us better than our instincts."

To such a decision as this, had she heard it, Edith, too religious to acknowledge any thing tending towards fatalism, would not for a moment have agreed; yet it embodied a truth destined to cause her deepest sorrow, and which was gradually forcing itself upon her. Already, although they had been married so few weeks, even her love-blinded eyes could not but perceive much in her husband which shocked and pained her. She had not considered deeply enough, never having had the experience which would have taught her the need of considering, how great was the gulf between her moral standpoint and that of her betrothed. He had seemed so yielding that she had failed to perceive that his compliances were merely outward, and left his mental att.i.tude unchanged. Now when it became necessary, as in every wedded life it must sooner or later, for her to appeal to his ultimate moral belief, she was startled to find nothing with which she was in sympathy. A cynic--or, indeed, her husband himself--would have a.s.sured her that it was, after all, a question of standards merely, and that difference of judgment was natural and inevitable, and that measured by his own convictions Arthur was quite well enough. Her answer to such a proposition would have been that there was but one standard, and that what differed from that were not moral principles at all, but excuses for immoral obliquity.

Outwardly, it is true, there was little in her husband's life of which Edith could complain. He accompanied her to church, and if he quizzed the preacher after returning home, she was ready to excuse this as the natural result of a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. He allowed her to do as she chose in the matter of charity work, and he even refrained from going to his studio on Sunday, a sacrifice whose magnitude she had no means of estimating, and which she therefore thought would be continuous. It was when some ethical question arose between them that Edith was disquieted, feeling sometimes as if she were looking into black deeps of immorality. The principles which to her were most sacred, were to him light subjects upon which, she was well aware, only her presence prevented his jesting. The most obvious laws of rect.i.tude were but thistle-down before the whirlwind of his subversive theories; and Edith found argument impossible with one who denied her every premise.

His old acquaintances found in Arthur Fenton a change more subtle but none the less distasteful. It was a trait of his nature to a.s.sume the character he was half unconsciously acting, as a player may between the scenes still feel the personality he is simulating upon the stage; and there was about Fenton when he came in contact with the Pagans, a vague air of remonstrance and disapproval, even when he was as bold as ever in his own cynical utterances.

"An expression of virtuous indignation isn't becoming in you, Fenton,"

Rangely said to him one day. "Especially in a discussion which you started yourself by the most shocking piece of wickedness I ever heard."

And among all the Pagans there existed a yet unspoken feeling that Fenton was ceasing to be one of them.

On returning from Helen's, Edith found her husband still engaged with Dr. Ashton, but as soon as the latter had gone Arthur came to her room.

"Well," he said, sinking leisurely into a chair. "Do you feel any milder? Have you had your dinner?"

"Yes," she returned, not leaving her seat on the opposite side of the room. "I have been dining with Mrs. Ashton."

"What!" cried Arthur, as if a bomb had exploded at his feet. Then he sank back into his languid position. "So she has told you," he remarked carelessly.

"Yes, she has told me. Did you know, Arthur, when you brought us together, that she was living under a false name, and under false pretenses?"

"I knew certainly," replied her husband with a coolness that marked his inward irritation, "that her legal name was Ashton. I have still to learn that she is living under false pretenses."

"Is it not false," retorted Edith, with difficulty controlling her voice, her indignation increasing with every word, "to pa.s.s as widow, to live separated from her husband?"

"Oh, false? Why, in your stiff, conventional definition of the word that calls the letter every thing, the spirit nothing, I dare say it is false; but what of that? She has a right to do as she pleases, has she not?"

Edith drew herself back in her chair and looked at him across the dimly lighted chamber. It is but justice to her husband to consider that he could not dream of the anguish she suffered. It was, as he so often said, a question of standards. By his, she was narrow, uncharitable, even bigoted; tried by the code of more orthodox circles she was simply high-minded, true and n.o.ble in her devotion to principle. She was neither bigoted nor prudish, however the alien circ.u.mstances in which she was placed made her appear so. To her it was a vital question of right and purity of which Arthur disposed with such contemptuous lightness. True as the sunlight herself, no pang could be more bitter than the knowledge that the truth was not sacred to the man she loved.

Her husband's words pierced her like a dagger. It was some minutes before she answered him. He rose moodily, lit a cigar at the gas jet and sat down again before she broke the silence.

"Arthur," she said in a voice which was sad and full of the solemnity of deep feeling, "have you no regard for truth?"

"Truth!" retorted he. "To go back to Pilate's conundrum, 'What is truth?' If you mean a strict and fantastic adherence to facts and to stiff conventional rules, no, I haven't the slightest regard for truth.

If you mean the eternal verities as a man's own nature and the occasion interpret them, yes, I have the highest."

"But that is only a confusion of words, Arthur. What do you mean by 'eternal verities' if not adherence to facts? The eternal verities cannot be whatever it pleases any one to say. Doesn't all human intercourse depend upon faith in one another that we will adhere to facts? Even if you do not look at the right and the wrong, there are surely reasons enough why the truth should be sacred."

Her husband whiffed his cigar, idly blowing a succession of graceful rings.

"You are quite a metaphysician. Did you have a pleasant dinner?"

"But, Arthur," Edith persisted, ignoring his attempt to break away, according to his habit, from a discussion which did not please him, "but, Arthur, do you think it right for Mrs. Greyson--Mrs. Ashton, I mean, to live so?"

"Right? Oh, that is the same old question in another shape. Mr. Candish will answer all those theological riddles; it is his business to. They don't interest me."

He threw away his half smoked cigar, dusted his coat sleeve of a stray fleck of ash, settled his cravat before the gla.s.s, and humming a tune walked towards his wife, his hands clasped behind him.

"We do not agree, Edith," he said with cold deliberation, "and unless you broaden your views, I am afraid we never shall. You are a dozen decades behind the day, and are foolish enough to take all your church teaches you in earnest. Religion should no more be taken without salt than radishes. The church inculcates it to excuse its own existence, but you certainly are reasonable enough to outgrow this old-fashioned Puritanism."

"Arthur," was her answer, "we do not agree, and if you wait for me to come to your standards, I am afraid you are right in saying that we never shall; and, indeed, I hope you are right. It makes me more unhappy than you can think," she continued, her eyes swimming with bitter tears, "that we are so far apart on what I must believe to be vital points; on truths which I believe, Arthur, with my whole soul--as you would, too, had you not carefully educated yourself into a doubt which cannot make you better or happier."

She had risen as she spoke, and stood facing him, her pure, pale face confronting his with a look of pathos which touched him despite himself. She came a step nearer, and put her arms about his neck.

"Oh, Arthur!" she pleaded, "I love you, and how can I help mourning that you wrong your better nature; that you resist the impulses of your own best self?"

He yielded to her caresses in silence. He remembered that Helen had used this same phrase.

"Women always appeal to one's best self," he commented inly, with a mental shrug, "which means a man's inclination to do whatever a woman asks of him."

But he kissed his wife's lips, and said, tolerantly:

"We will talk it over some other time, my dear. We are both tired to-night. But you are right, I suppose, as you always are."

And she loosened her arms from his neck, recognizing that he had put her appeal aside and waived the whole matter.

XXIX.