VI

THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE.

Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.--7.

Grant Herman looked across the breakfast table at his Italian wife

thoughtfully a moment, considering, as he often did, what was likely to

be the effect of something he was about to say. In six years of married

life he had not learned how to adapt himself to the narrower mind and

more personal views of his wife. He perhaps fell into the error, so

common to strong natures, of being unable to comprehend that by far the

larger part of the principles which influence broad minds do not for

narrow ones exist at all. He continually tried to discover what process

of reasoning led Ninitta to given results, but he was never able to

appreciate the fact that often it was by no chain of logic whatever

that certain conclusions had been arrived at. A mental habit of

catching up opinions at haphazard, of acting simply from emotions,

however transient, instead of from convictions, was wholly outside his

mental experience, and equally unrealized in his comprehension.

He regarded Ninitta, whose foreign face and beautiful figure looked as

much out of place behind the coffee urn as would the faun of Praxiteles

at an afternoon reception, and a smothered sigh rose to his lips with

the thought how utterly he was at a loss to comprehend her. It happened

in the present case, as it often did, that his failure to understand

arose chiefly from the fact that there was nothing in particular to

understand, and, when he spoke, Ninitta received his remark quite

simply.

"Mrs. Greyson is at home again," he said.

"Mrs. Greyson," she echoed, her dark eyes lighting up with genuine

pleasure. "Oh, that is indeed good. Where is she? Have you seen her?"

There shot through Herman's mind the reflection that since his wife

could not know that he married her out of love not for herself but for

Helen Greyson, it was absurd to have fancied that Ninitta would be

jealously displeased at Helen's return; and the inevitable twinge of

conscience at his wife's trusting ignorance followed.

"I haven't seen her," he answered; "she only arrived yesterday. Mrs.

Fenton told me when I met her at the Paint and Clay Exhibition last

night."

Ninitta folded her hands on the edge of the table, with a gesture of

childish pleasure.

"I wonder what she will say to Nino," she said musingly, her voice

taking a new softness.

A sudden spasm contracted the sculptor's throat. His whole being was

shaken by the return of the woman to whom all the passionate devotion

of his manhood was given, and he never heard that soft, maternal note

with which his wife spoke of his boy without emotion.

"She may say that the young rascal ought to be out of his bed in time

for breakfast," he retorted with affected brusqueness. "He has all the

Italian laziness in him."

He pushed back his chair as he spoke, and rose from the table. He

hesitated a moment, as if some sudden thought absorbed him, then he

went to his wife and kissed her forehead.

"Good-by," he said. "I sha'n't come up for lunch. Don't coddle the boy

too much."

"But when," his wife persisted, as he turned away, "shall I see Mrs.

Greyson? I want to show her the _bambino_."

She always spoke in Italian to her husband and her child, and indeed

her English had never been of the most fluent.

"The _bambino_" the father repeated, smiling. "He will be a _bambino_

to you when he is as big as I am, I suppose. I do not know about Mrs.

Greyson, but I will find out, if I can."

He left the room and went to the chamber where his swarthy boy of five

lay still luxuriously in his crib, although he was fully awake. Nino

gave a soft cry of joy at the sight of his father, and greeted him

rapturously.

"Papa," he asked in Italian, "does the kitty know how much she hurts

when she scratches? she made a long place on my arm, and it hurt like

fire."

"Do you know how much you hurt her to make her do it?" his father

returned, smiling fondly.

"Oh, but she is so soft and so little, of course I don't hurt her,"

Nino answered, with boyish logic. "Anyway, she ought not to hurt me. I

don't like to be hurt."

The foolish, childish words came back to Herman's mind a couple of

hours later, as he waited in the boarding-house parlor for Helen

Greyson. He smiled with bitterness to think how perfectly they

represented his own state of mind. He said to himself that he was tired

of being hurt, and rose at the moment to take in both his hands the

hands of a beautiful woman, to his eyes no older and no less fair than

when he had said good-by to her on his wedding morning, six years

before. He tried to speak, but tears came instead of words; choked and

blinded, he turned away abruptly, struggling to regain his composure.

The meeting after long years of those who have loved and been

separated, may, for the moment, carry them back to the time of their

parting so completely that all that lies between seems annihilated. The

old emotion reasserts itself so strongly, the past lives again so

vividly, that there seems to have been no break in feeling, and they

stand in relation to one another as if the parting were yet to come.

When they had been together a little, the time which lay between them

would once more become a reality; but at the first touch of their hands

those bitter days of loneliness ceased to exist, and they seemed to

stand together again, as when they were saying good-by six years before.

With her old time self-control, it was Helen who spoke first, and her

words recalled him from the past and its passion, to the present and

its duty.

"Tell me how Ninitta is," she said, "and the boy. I do so want to see

that wonderful boy."

The sculptor commanded his voice by a powerful effort.

"They are both well," he answered. "The boy is a wonderful little

fellow, although perhaps I am not an unprejudiced judge. Ninitta is

crazy to show him to you. She has pretty nearly effaced herself since

he came, and only lives for his benefit."

"She is a happy woman," Helen said, assuming that air of cheerfulness

which is one of the first accomplishments that women are forced by life

to learn. "I should know she would be devoted to her children."

There were a few moments of silence. Both cast down their eyes, and

then each raised them to study whatever changes time might have made in

the years that lay between them. Helen's heart was beating painfully,

but she was determined not to lose her self-control. She knew of old

how completely she could rule the mood of her companion, and she felt

that upon her calmness depended his. She had been schooling herself for

this interview from the moment she began to consider whether she might

return to America, and she was therefore less unprepared than was

Herman for the trying situation in which she now found herself; yet it

required all her strength of mind and of will not to give way to the

tide of love and emotion which surged within her breast.

Herman fixed his eyes resolutely on an ungainly group in pinkish clay

which represented an American commercial sculptor's idea of Romeo and

Juliet at the moment when the Nurse separates them with a message from

Lady Capulet. With artistic instinct he noted the stupidity of the

composition, the vulgarity of the lines, the cheap ugliness of the

group. In that singular abstraction which comes so frequently in

moments of high emotion, he let his glance wander to the pictures on

the wall, the enormities in embroidery which adorned the chair backs,

the garish hues of the rug lying before the open grate. Then it

occurred to him, with a vague sense of amusement, how great was the

incongruity between such a setting as this vulgar boarding-house

reception-room, and the woman before him. The idea brought to his mind

the contrast between the life to which Helen had come, and the life at

Rome, artistic, rich, and full of possibilities, which she had left.

The thought of Rome recalled instantly the old days there, almost a

score of years ago, when he had first known Ninitta. So vivid were the

memories which awakened, that he seemed to see again the Roman studio,

the fat old aunt, voluble and sharp eyed, who always accompanied her

niece when the girl posed; and most clearly of all did his inner vision

perceive the fresh, silent maiden whose exquisite figure was at once

the admiration and the despair of all the young artists in Rome. He

remembered how Hoffmeir had discovered the girl drawing water from an

old broken fountain he had gone out to sketch; and the difficulties

that had to be overcome before she could be persuaded to pose. The

Capri maidens are brought up to be averse to posing, and Ninitta had

not long enough breathed the air of Rome to have overcome the

prejudices of her youth. He reflected, with a bitterness rendered vague

by a certain strange impersonality of his mood, how different would

have been his life had Hoffmeir been unable to overcome the girl's

scruples. He wondered whether the fat old aunt, and the greasy,

good-natured little priest with whom she had taken counsel, would have

urged Ninitta to take up the life of a model, could they have foreseen

all the results to which this course was to lead in the end.

Then, with a sudden stinging consciousness, the thought came of all

that her decision had meant to his life. The old question whether he

had done right in marrying Ninitta forced itself upon him as if it were

some enemy springing up from ambush. He raised his eyes, and his glance

met that of Mrs. Greyson.

"It is no use, Helen," he broke out, impulsively, "we must talk

frankly. It is idle to suppose that we can go on in an artificial

pretence that we have nothing to say."

She put up her hand appealingly.

"Only do not drive me away again," she pleaded. "Don't say things that

I have no right to hear!"

A dark red stained Herman's cheek, and the tears came into his eyes.

"No," he returned. "If any one is to be driven away it shall not be

you."

"But why need we trouble the things that are past," she went on, with

wistful eagerness. "Why cannot we accept it all in silence, and be

friends."

He looked at her with a passionate, penetrating glance. She felt a wild

and foolish longing to fling herself upon the floor and embrace his

feet; but the old Puritan training, the resistant fibre inherited from

sturdy ancestors, still did not fail her.

"You have your wife," she hurried on, "your home, your boy. That is

enough. That"--

"That is not enough," he interrupted, with an emphasis, which seemed

stern. "Helen, I shall not talk love to you. I am another woman's

husband. I made a ghastly mistake when I married Ninitta, but it is

done. She loves me; she is happy, and I love"--his voice faltered into

a wonderful softness more eloquent than words,--"I love Nino."

She would not let him go on. She sprang up and ran to him, taking his

hands in hers with a touch that made his blood rush tingling through

his veins.

"Yes," she cried, "you love Nino! Think of that! Think most of all that

whatever you are, good or bad, you are for your son, for Nino! Come!

There is safety for us in that. We will go and talk with Nino between

us. Then we shall say nothing of which we can be ashamed or regret."

There came to Herman a vision of his boy clasped in Helen's arms which

made him feel as if suffocating with the excess of his emotion. He rose

blindly, only half conscious of what he was doing; and without giving

time for objections Helen hastened to dress herself for the street, and

in a few moments they were walking together toward the sculptor's house.

To Herman's surprise, his wife was absent when he reached home. The

maid did not know where she had gone. She often went out in the morning

without saying where she was going, and of course the servant did not

ask.

"That is odd," Herman said; "but she has probably gone shopping or

something of the sort. It is too bad, she had so set her heart on

showing you the _bambino_, as she calls him, herself."

But it proved that Nino also was out, having been taken for a walk; and

so Helen, who returned home at once, saw neither of them.