The Pagans Part 5

In response to the sculptor's request made at the Club when Ninitta's name was first mentioned, Bently, when the girl finished posing for him, sent her to the sculptor's studio.

She came a day or two later than Bently had directed her, not hastening, although for six years she had shaped her entire life to the end of meeting Grant Herman. She came into the studio as calmly and as quietly as if it were some familiar place which she had left but yesterday, and she greeted the sculptor with as even and musical tone as in the old Roman days when as yet nothing had occurred to stir her peaceful bosom.

For his part the man stood and looked at her in silence. Even when a ghost from the past has appeared at his especial summons, one seldom sees it unmoved, and Herman was conscious that his heart beat more quickly, that he breathed more heavily as Ninitta let fall behind her the rug _portiere_ and came towards him through the studio.

She had a dark, homely face, only redeemed from positive ugliness by her deep, expressive eyes. Her figure was superb; rather slender, lithe and sinewy, but without an angle or thin curve. Like Diana, she was long limbed, so that she seemed taller than she really was. The sweep of neck and shoulder was exquisite, and her simple dress was admirably adapted to display the lines of her supple form. As she walked down the studio, setting her feet firmly and carrying her head with fine poise, Grant Herman felt the ghost of an old pa.s.sion stir in his heart.

"How do you do?" he composedly answered her greeting. "You have improved since I saw you last."

"Thank you," she said, in a rich voice with strong but pleasant accent.

"I have had time."

"But improvement is not always a question of time," returned he. "Look at me."

"You have grown old," Ninitta commented, regarding him keenly. "You are gray now."

"Yes," retorted the other lightly, "I am an old man. It is really a very long time since you posed for me in my little den at Rome."

"You remember those days perhaps, sometimes?" she said, dropping the long lashes over her eyes.

A shadow pa.s.sed over Herman's high brow.

"Is one likely to forget such days?" he demanded. "Is one likely to forget how love may be turned to treachery and--"

"Pardon," the woman interrupted with dignity. "I did not come to be reproached, _eccelenza_. You have not forgotten Signor Hoffmeir?"

"No," he answered, with a deepening frown. "I have not forgotten the man who pretended to be my friend and proved it by stealing my betrothed."

"It is well that you have not forgotten," Ninitta went on calmly, but earnestly, "for I have a message from him. He charged me when he was dying," she added, crossing herself, "to give it to you with my own hands. I have been waiting for all these years, but now I am free of my promise."

Herman took the packet she extended toward him, and turned abruptly away. Ninitta seated herself in one of the tall easy chairs, removed her hat, and began a leisurely survey of the place. The sounds from the wharf outside, the cries of the sailors, the creaking of the cordage and the ships came softened and mellowed like the daylight into the wide, dim studio, giving a certain sense of remoteness by the contrast they suggested between the silence within and the stir of the world without. For all her outward calm, Ninitta's heart was beating hotly, and she longed with a great yearning for a touch from the hand of the silent man before her; for a word of kindness from his lips. She watched him furtively, under cover of looking at a cast of Celini's Perseus upon a bracket above his head, as he stood reading the letter from Hoffmeir.

"Why did you not bring this to me before?" the sculptor asked at length, turning towards her. "It is six years now."

"Have I been able to shape my life?" returned Ninitta. "I have followed you to Florence, to Paris; you came to America. I followed you to New York; you were here. I have never ceased trying to reach you. It was not easy for me to cross half the world alone and without help; with no friends, no money; with nothing."

"But you have been in Boston a couple of months."

"Yes," she said quietly, looking up into his face. "But you knew it. I waited for you to send for me."

"I have only known it a week," was the sculptor's reply. "Do you know what was in Hoffmeir's letter?"

"His ring; the one you wore in Rome."

"But do you know what he wrote?"

"No," she answered. "How should I?"

Her questioner looked at her a moment in silence. She put up her head proudly with an involuntary response to the questioning which his silence implied, and met his eyes unflinchingly. Yet he put his thought into words.

"It is seven years since I saw you," he said at length.

"It is seven years," she echoed.

"In seven years a great deal may happen," continued he, still regarding her closely.

"Much, much has happened," she returned, still meeting his gaze without shrinking.

"Are you married?" he asked, with a certain abruptness which to a careful observer might have indicated that the question cost him an effort.

"No," Ninitta returned simply; "how could I be when I was betrothed to you?"

"But that was broken off--"

The sentence stuck in his throat; and he wondered that he could have begun it. He wondered, too, how he could even have doubted the faith of the woman before him; and most of all he wondered if he had ever really loved her. He had an irritating consciousness that something was expected of him which he was unwilling to give; some sign of tenderness, some caress such as befitted the reconciliation of lovers long separated by misunderstanding and blinding jealousy. He felt as if he were falling below the demands of the occasion, most annoying of sensations to the masculine mind. But an important interview can with difficulty be changed from the key in which it is begun, and even had his feelings prompted a display of tenderness, he felt that it would seem abrupt and forced. He waited for Ninitta to speak.

"Yes," she said, after a moment, as he did not continue, "it was broken off, but Signor Hoffmeir said that was because you did not understand, and that everything would be as it had been when you got his letter."

A sad hopelessness began to appear in her eyes; she had of old been too accustomed to submit to her lover's will to a.s.sume the initiative now, despite the development and strength which time had given to her character. The sculptor did not dream how her heart throbbed beneath her quiet demeanor, but he was too sensitive not to be touched by the unconscious appeal of her voice and look.

Seven years before, an enthusiastic student in Rome, he had loved or believed he loved, the peasant girl Ninitta, whom he had found in an excursion to Capri and induced to come to the Eternal City as a model.

Too honorable to betray her, he had meant to make the model his wife, and was betrothed to her with a solemnity of which he was keenly reminded to-day by the ring which she still wore upon her finger.

Circ.u.mstances had convinced him, however, that Ninitta was deceiving him, and that she preferred the artist Hoffmeir, his best friend. To break off both engagement and friendship without listening to a word of explanation, to leave Rome and Italy, were comparatively easy for a pa.s.sionate man stung to the quick by a double treachery. To forget was more difficult, and although a thousand times had Herman a.s.sured himself that he had extinguished the last spark of emotion concerning this episode, the faintest breath of an old memory was still sufficient to rekindle some seemingly dead ember. To-day, holding in his hand the letter from his lost friend which removed all his doubts, he saw that instead of being injured he had himself been cruel and unjust; he felt the full anguish of having committed an irreparable fault. We may outlive our past; its sorrows we may forget, its wrongs we may forgive, we may even smile at its crushed hopes, ambitions and loves with scarcely a tinge of bitterness; but that which we have been stings us ever with the burning pain of an undying remorse. It is not what we have done which awakens our deepest self-scorn; it is the fact that we were this which made it possible for us to do it. To feel that he had been capable of the cruelty of abandoning his betrothed and of wounding his closest friend, merely from a groundless suspicion, was to Grant Herman a pain never to be wholly outlived.

Nor was he without a teasing pain, through a less n.o.ble trait in his nature, from the consciousness that he had loved Ninitta. Once the fires of love have burned out, any mortal is apt to be lost in amazed wonderment how they were ever kindled; and that it was hard for Grant Herman, at thirty-five, to understand how Grant Herman, at twenty-seven, could have adored an Italian peasant model is not so without precedent as to be wholly incomprehensible.

Ninitta had been a good girl, his thoughts ran, was doubtless so still; her figure was enchanting, he would have been no sculptor had he failed to appreciate that; he had been a boy, a foolish youngster to be dizzied by a rushing of the blood to his head; but to make her his wife now----

"Ninitta," he said, suddenly, breaking off from his thoughts into words, "I am not well to-day: come to-morrow. Are you comfortably settled in town? Do you need money?"

"No," she answered, rising, "I do not want money."

She went slowly down the studio without further word, only turning back as she pa.s.sed Bently's picture for which she had posed, and which had been brought for the meeting of the Pagans.

"You have seen," she said, "I am able to earn. I have learned much while I was bringing you that letter. Across the world is a long way.

No; I have no need of money."

VII.

IN WAY OF TASTE.

Troilus and Cressida; iii.--3.

Grant Herman's studio, in which the Pagans met that night, was in its way no less unique than the company there gathered. It was a great, misshapen place, narrow, half a hundred feet long, and disproportionately high, with undressed brick walls and cement floor.

The upper half of one of the end walls was taken up with large windows, before which were drawn dingy curtains. Here and there about the place were scattered modeling stands, water tanks mounted upon rude tripods, casts, and the usual lumber of a sculptor's studio; while upon the walls were stuck pictures, sketches, and reproductions in all sorts of capricious groupings.