The Pagans Part 29

Helen looked at her for a moment with wistful eyes and trembling lips: then she crossed swiftly to where her friend stood and kissed her. And never could these two be so wholly separated or estranged again as to efface the memory of all the meaning that this caress conveyed. The word which Edith had used had been most happily chosen. Her woman's instinct divined the loneliness which overwhelmed the widow, and this proof of her sympathy was the pa.s.sport to Mrs. Greyson's heart.

Loneliness was the feeling of which Helen was most of all conscious.

The death of even an indifferent acquaintance often may seem to desolate the earth from its simple irremediableness, and much more does the removal of one near to us make the world appear half a void.

Helen had been sitting alone before Edith came, reviewing her past and drearily speculating of her future. She went over the days of her wedded life; her innocent, introspective childhood, in which she had dreamed and read, dwelling in a world apart; alone but for the ideal creations of her books or her own quick fancy. She had married knowing as little of life or of love, as when, a lonely child, she had spelled out the tale of Prince Camaralzaman, and wondered what the divine pa.s.sion really was, or if indeed it had existence, outside of fairy lore.

The torch of death throws its glare backward, and its funeral light showed many a past long since forgotten, but now revealed with new and distorting vividness. Helen remembered the baby which had lived but long enough to open its eyes with a smile that seemed of recognition, and then faded back into the unknown whence it had come. A throb of tenderness for the dead father moved the mother's heart as she thought of her baby, so little time hers, and so long asleep under the marguerites of a grave over the sea. She had suffered much from the selfishness, the dominant self-will, the distorted views of life of Dr.

Ashton; and these things she even now could not forget; but, too, she thought of him as the father of her child, her baby ever dear and living in memory.

She reflected, too, of the men she had known, and especially of Arthur Fenton. Her nature had need of some one upon whom to expend its treasures, and she realized that had she not felt in the artist a certain insincerity, he might have awakened her love. He had been appreciative, sympathetic, brilliant; and, too, he had called largely upon her patience and forbearance, than which there is no surer way to win a generous woman's affection. Yet always some note rang false to her fine ear, and to the weakness of his nature she had never been wholly blind, although not until his marriage had given him a certain distance had she realized how deep and unsparing her knowledge of him really was.

Of Grant Herman she would not think. Thoughts of him arose again and again in her mind, but she resolutely put them down. Some secret stir of mingled pain and joy told her too well that the sculptor had awakened the first love of her life. But at least with her husband, however unloved, lying yet unburied, she would not dwell upon the pa.s.sion of another.

She took Edith's hand, and the two women sat down side by side, shedding tears together, rather from a sense of the general woe and bitterness of life than for poignant grief for the present calamity. It was not much they said at first. Neither was of the talkative order of women, finding comfort in the mere utterance of words. They grew together, sustained by giving and receiving tenderness, and each tacitly asking and according forgiveness for unfriendly feelings in the past. It is probable, too, that Edith, heavy with the disappointments of her married life, found relief in being able to weep unrestrainedly, even though the true source of her tears was not the obvious one.

"I never loved him," Helen said of her husband. "After we separated we became friends, rather because of a common past when we were both strangers here, than from any fitness for each other. But he was once my husband."

Her friend pressed her hand in silence.

"We had a child," Helen spoke again; "a little daughter. She only lived one day. If she had not gone it might have been different. At least we should have kept on together. My poor little baby!"

Edith's eyes were full of tears, as she answered softly:

"I hope you will let me say that I believe she is waiting for you some where."

"She must be," the mother responded quickly. "Whatever one doubts, one must surely believe that. I could not lose her! She is mine, wherever in the universe she may be."

"Yes," was all Edith ventured in reply. "I am sure of it."

They gave no heed to the fading day, but sat with clasped hands until twilight had gathered, and it occurred at last to Mrs. Fenton that her husband and dinner must be awaiting her. Helen had been telling of her plans.

"I shall go abroad," she said, "I want to study in Rome; I want to meet great men; to be influenced by great works. I have been thinking of it for a long time, and now it seems as if some ties that held me here are broken, for we often obey claims which we yet deny. And besides," she added, in a lower tone, "it is a flight from temptation. I am in danger here."

"In danger?" Edith asked wonderingly.

"Only from myself," was the reply, "but that peril is sufficiently imminent to make me afraid."

Edith questioned no further, and to the true import of these words she had no clue. She looked at her friend a moment inquiringly and musingly, but as Helen did not continue, she rose to go.

"I must get home now," she said, in a tone so tender that it seemed to beg pardon for this abandonment. "Arthur is waiting for me and his dinner; and if he doesn't get the latter at least, I won't answer for the consequences. Mr. Calvin was with him when I came away."

"Mr. Peter Calvin!" exclaimed the other, in some surprise.

"Yes; he has bought one of Arthur's pictures, and he wants Arthur to propose him at the St. Filipe Club, I believe."

She spoke in perfect ignorance of the tumult her words excited in her hearer's mind. Long after Edith was gone Helen sat looking out into the darkening sky and thinking of Arthur Fenton. She had heard him talk too often about Mr. Peter Calvin not to know what was implied by this new friendship. Mr. Peter Calvin had been for years the head and front of Boston Philistinism in art. He had been the patron of subservient artists; the chairman of committees for the purchase of public statues; an elegant writer upon such live and timely topics as _Plaster Casting among the Egyptians, Notes upon Abyssinian Statues_, while his monograph upon the question, _What Was the Original Cost of the Venus de Milo?_ had by his flatterers been p.r.o.nounced the masterpiece of all known art essays for power and critical research.

His was a prominent name upon the covers of dilettante art journals; it was he who effectually crushed young and too daringly independent artists; who repressed impertinent originality; who headed the hosts of conventionality against individuality or genius which held itself above the established canons of antiquated tradition. He was the High Priest of Boston conservatism; the presiding genius of Philistia; and until the St. Filipe Club entered a protest against him by refusing to admit him to membership, his power had scarcely received a blow.

Tom Bently always insisted, with much profanity, that Mr. Peter Calvin was a joke.

"He writes with tremendous pomposity," Tom would say, "and he is in no end of societies for molly-coddling art. He goes on, too, about the plaster casts at that hospital for decrepit G.o.ds, the Art Museum, as if his whole soul was in the plaster barrels of the Greeks. But bless your soul! It's only his little joke. He doesn't really mean any thing by it. He's only a stupendous joke himself."

The Pagans, so far as they were to be regarded as an ent.i.ty, represented the protest of the artistic soul against shams. They stood for sincerity above everything; for utter honesty in art, in life, in manners and morals alike. To them Philistinism was the subst.i.tution of convention for conviction. For the spirit of imitation, of blind subservience to authority, the Pagans had no tolerance. While they held themselves always open to conviction, they refused a.s.sent to any thing which was offered them _ex cathedra_; they devoted themselves to art with a pa.s.sion of enthusiasm which was in itself the highest expression of their principles. That they seemed often iconoclastic was in reality less the result of their hatred of authority than the prevalence of unreasoning, and therefore by their standards necessarily insincere, adherence to established formulae. Dogmas they hated, not because they were popularly received, but because although they had been vital realities to their originators, they had become in time mere lifeless forms, held in reverence by blind devotees long after the soul had gone out of them.

In art especially the Pagans demanded the most absolute surrender of self to truth; and it should be added that they defined truth exactly as Helen did, "that which one sincerely believes." They had no condemnation too severe or sweeping for the artist who worshipped the golden G.o.ds of Philistia by following popular conventions at the expense of his honest art ideals. It is not impossible that they carried this feeling to extremes sometimes, suspecting every thing which was stamped with popular approval, but in the main at least their standard was of the highest and their lives conformed well to it.

Measured by the creeds they rejected, they might often enough be found wanting; tried by their own, there had never been an apostate among them until the defection of Fenton.

No one had been more bitter and outspoken in his condemnation of Mr.

Calvin and of what he represented than Arthur Fenton. Many a time he had entertained Helen with stories of the presumption and the ignorance of this man whom now he was receiving into his friendship, or, more properly, in whose train of sycophants he had taken his place.

Helen could not forgive him. Leaving dinner untasted, she sat with burning cheeks in the darkness, mourning over the apostacy of the man who had been her warmest friend.

x.x.xIII.

A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN.

Love's Labor's Lost; i.--1.

Dr. Ashton had been in his grave several weeks. Life had gone on much as usual in Boston, with the bickerings of small souls the gaping imitations of the mob, the carping of the self-appointed critics, and the earnest endeavor of the honest and inspired workers, who leaven the lump of modern civilization.

Among the Pagans the nomination of Mr. Calvin to the St. Filipe Club by Arthur Fenton had been received with a bitterness born of a feeling of outraged confidence. They were to-night to meet in Tom Bently's studio, and Fenton, who had no intention of being present, was yet keenly conscious of what the talk there concerning him would be. He was glum and moody at dinner, and Edith, who knew that this was Pagan night, watched him wistfully. She hoped to win him away from friends and acquaintances who seemed to her dangerous. Perfectly honest and ready to lay down her life for her husband, she was yet urging him into paths which he felt it to be degradation to walk, since they led him away from sincerity. She had no means of knowing how his sudden championship of Mr. Calvin was regarded. Her own relations to art had been those of pretty amateurishness. She had been bred to believe in conventionality, and the flavor of Bohemianism alarmed and repelled her.

To-night she had put on her most becoming dress, she had ordered the dinner with especial reference to her husband's tastes, and she exerted herself to be as entertaining and attractive as lay in her power. She even allowed herself the innocent ruse of delaying dinner a little, that it might be later before Arthur could be ready to go out; and when the answer to her timid hope that he was to be at home that evening, was in the affirmative, her foolish, tender heart fluttered with delighted hope that she was influencing him to shake off his irregular a.s.sociations.

He was rather gloomy and silent all the evening, brooding of the Pagans, from whose meetings he had never before been absent, and of Helen, and what she would think. Edith tried all her arts and wiles to make him forget the pleasure he was losing, and she partly succeeded, since her attentions and endearments chimed in with the train of thought by which he was endeavoring to prove to his own satisfaction that he was the most virtuous of men, and that his swearing allegiance to Philistinism, was a n.o.ble example of a transgressor willing to confess and abjure his faults. He accepted his wife's attentions as eminently fitting under the circ.u.mstances, and could he have forgotten the Pagans and Helen, he might almost have been comfortable. More than once in the old days he had found it hard to face Mrs. Greyson's clear eyes, which saw so readily through shams, and now while he was able to work himself into a defensive att.i.tude towards all others of his old friends, he felt a horrible humiliation in the consciousness that Helen was sure to know of his course and to understand all its weakness.

It occurred to him, too, that Helen had avoided him of late. Since the death of Dr. Ashton, he had scarcely seen her, although she was often with his wife. He knew from Edith that she was soon to go abroad, and he wondered if the wish to escape him had any share in bringing her to this decision.

He tormented himself with speculations and memories until he could endure it no longer. He must have comfort; his wounded self-sufficiency craved the balm of approval, and although he was contemptuously conscious of his own weakness, he turned to Edith to seek admiration and praise.

"So you are glad that I am not going to the Pagans to-night," he said to her, as they sat before the fire, for the evening was damp and chilly.

"Very glad," she answered, leaving her chair to come and sit upon a low ha.s.sock by his knee. "It was so good of you."

She made a beautiful picture as she sat there, her long dress of cardinal and stone gray silk gathered in waves about her, the Elizabethan ruffle setting off her shapely head and slender neck, while the soft, yellow old lace showed how clear was the tone of her skin.

Her pure, sweet face, with its appealing dark eyes, was turned upward to her husband's, in an expression at once wistful and full of love.

Edith had always a highbred air, and to-night her att.i.tude and expression added the one charm of warmth and softness needed to make her most lovely and moving.

"You doubtless have some excellent reason," remarked Arthur smiling down on her.

"I am afraid of them; they are in arms against every thing that is acknowledged to be good."

"And yet they are the most honest men I ever knew," he returned, half musing, and with a little pleased sense of his magnanimity in saying this at a moment when they were probably abusing him.

"I don't know, Arthur. Perhaps they may be honest, but I am sure it is not good for you to be with them. They are so sure that their false views of life are true."

The little sting in the implication that he was not able to resist the influence which had surrounded him was forgotten in the satisfactory view which his wife took of the real value of the judgments of the Pagans. He knew how little she understood them. With every premise upon which her conclusions were founded he disagreed, yet he said to himself that Edith was right; that the Pagans were quite too infallible about every thing. They would have him grope along poor and unknown, he argued with himself, simply for the sake of standing in the position of chronic rebuke to established authorities; with only now and then a chance to get a hearing upon what they a.s.sumed to be the true theory of art. What they believed--ah! there after all was the weakness of the whole. What ground had they for their belief? Did he himself really believe any thing, or had he a right to a.s.sert in any matter a positive conviction? And even if they or he a.s.serted never so strongly, what sort of a test of truth was that? After all the Philistines, the Calvins, were as likely to be right as were a set of discontented if not disappointed artists; men whose natures would never allow them to be satisfied with any existing state of things, since it would inevitably differ from their dreamy ideals. And it was certainly true that the weight of authority and of numbers was with the Philistines.