"But it will all count in the bill, Al Irons."
X
THE BITTER PAST.
All's Well That Ends Well; v.--3.
"Do you see much of Mrs. Herman?" Helen Greyson asked of Edith Fenton,
as they sat at luncheon together in the latter's pretty dining-room.
"Why, no," was the somewhat hesitating answer. "I really see very
little of her. The fact is we have so little common ground to meet on.
--You know Arthur says I am dreadfully narrow, and I am sometimes
afraid he is right. I have tried to know her, but of course I couldn't
take her into society. She wouldn't enjoy it, and she wouldn't feel at
home, even if she'd go with me."
Helen smiled with mingled amusement and wistfulness.
"No," she responded. "I can't exactly fancy Ninitta in society. She'd
be quite out of her element. My master in Rome, Flammenti, had a way of
saying a thing was like the pope at a dancing-party, and I fancy
Ninitta at an afternoon tea would be hardly less out of place."
"But she must be very lonely," Edith said, stirring her coffee
meditatively. "She used to have a few Italians come to see her; people
she met that time she ran away, you remember, and we brought her home,
but they don't come now."
"Why not?"
Edith smiled and raised her eyebrows.
"A question of caste, I believe."
"Of caste?" echoed Helen. "What do you mean?"
"When her son was born," Edith responded, "she told them that the
_bambino_ was born a gentleman, and couldn't associate with them."
Helen laughed lightly; then her face clouded, and she sighed.
"Poor Ninitta!" she said. "There is something infinitely pitiful in her
devotion and faithfulness to her youthful love."
Edith's face assumed an expression of mingled perplexity and disquiet.
With eyes downcast she seemed for a moment to be seeking a phrase in
which properly to express some thought which troubled her. Then she
looked up quickly.
"I don't know that I ought to say it," she remarked, "but I can't help
feeling that Ninitta is not so fond of her husband as she used to be.
Of course I may be mistaken, but either I overestimated her devotion
before they were married, or she cares less for him now."
An expression of pain contracted Helen's brow.
"Isn't it possible," she suggested, "that her being more demonstrative
in her love for the boy makes her seem cold toward her husband?"
"No," returned Edith, shaking her head, "it is more than that. I fancy
sometimes that she unconsciously expected to be somehow transformed
into his equal by marrying him; and that the disappointment of being no
more on a level with him when she became his wife than before, has made
her somehow give him up, as if she concluded that she could never
really belong to his life. Of course I don't mean," she added, "that
Ninitta would reason this out, and very likely I am all wrong, anyway,
but certainly something of this kind has happened."
"Poor Ninitta," repeated Helen, "fate hasn't been kind to her."
"But Mr. Herman?" Edith returned. "What do you say of him? I think his
case is far harder. What a mistake his marriage was. I cannot conceive
how he was ever betrayed into such a _mesalliance_. She cannot be a
companion to him; she does not understand him: she is only a child who
has to be borne with, and who tries his patience and his endurance."
Edith had forgotten her husband's suggestion that her companion was
responsible for Grant Herman's marriage; but Helen, who for six years
had been questioning with herself whether she had done well in urging
the sculptor to marry his model, heard this outburst with beating heart
and flushing cheek. Had Helen allowed Herman to break his early pledge
to Ninitta, and marry his later love, it is probable that all her life
would have been shadowed by a consciousness of guilt. The conscience
bequeathed to her, as Fenton rightly said, by Puritan ancestors, would
ever have reproached her with having come to happiness over the ruins
of another woman's heart and hopes. Having in the supreme hour of
temptation, however, overcome herself and given him up, it was not
perhaps strange that Helen unconsciously fell somewhat into the
attitude of assuming that this sacrifice gave her not only the right to
sit in judgment upon Ninitta, but also that of having done somewhat
more than might justly have been demanded of her. She had often found
herself wondering whether she had been wise; whether her devotion to an
ideal had not been overstrained; and if she ought not to have
considered rather the happiness of the man she loved than devotion to
an abstract principle.
It was also undoubtedly true, although Helen had not herself reflected
upon this phase of the matter, that her half a dozen years' residence
in Europe had softened and broadened her views. In the present age of
the world there is no method possible by which one can resist the whole
tendency of modern thought and prevent himself from moving forward with
it, unless it be active and violent controversy. No man can be a
fanatic without opposition, either real or vividly fancied, upon which
to stay his resolution, and it is equally difficult to maintain a stand
at any given point of faith unless one has steadily to fight with vigor
for the right to possess it.
It is probable that to-day Helen might have found it more difficult
than six years before to urge Herman to marry Ninitta, since besides
the self-sacrifice then involved would now be a doubtfulness of
purpose. She sat silent some moments, reflecting deeply, while her
hostess watched her with a loving admiration which was growing very
strongly upon her.
"But what is to be done now," Helen asked slowly. "You would not have
him cast her off?"
"Oh, no," returned Edith, in genuine consternation. "Now, it is six
years too late."
"I am afraid I do not wholly agree with your point of view," answered
Mrs. Greyson, roused by the doubt in her own mind to a need to combat
the assumption that the marriage was a mistake. "I certainly do not
feel that the mere ceremony is the great point. See!" she continued,
becoming more animated, and half involuntarily saying aloud what she
had so often said in her own mind; "a man makes a woman love him. As
time goes on, he outgrows her. It is no fault of hers. Why should the
fact that he has or has not come into the marriage relations affect her
claims on him? Isn't he in honor bound to marry her?"
"But suppose," Edith returned, "that he has not only outgrown her but
made some other woman love him too?"
It was merely a chance shot of argument, but it smote Helen so that she
trembled as she sat.
"Is not that woman to be considered?" Edith continued. "Is the good of
the man to count for nothing? Mr. Herman is sacrificed to an old
mistake. Perhaps it is right that he should pay the price of his error;
and that in the end it will be overruled for his good, we may hope. But
it is hard to have patience now with the state of things."
Helen tapped her teaspoon nervously against her cup.
"But what can be done?"
"Nothing," Mrs. Fenton said, without the slightest hesitation. "You and
I may think these things, but it would be a crime for Mr. Herman to
think them."
"It might be cowardice to yield to them," responded Helen; "but how
crime? And how can one help the thoughts from turning whithersoever
they will?"
Edith pushed back her plate, leaned forward with folded arms resting
upon the edge of the table. She flushed a little, as she did sometimes
when she felt it her duty to say something to her husband which it was
hard to utter.
"I do not think you and I agree in this," she said, in a voice which
her earnestness made somewhat lower than before. "Marriage is to me a
sacrament, and this very fact gives it a nature different from ordinary
promises. We promise to love until death do us part. To me that is as
imperative as any vow I can make to God and man."
"But love," Helen urged, with a somewhat perplexed air, "is not a thing
to be coerced."
"It must be," Edith returned, inflexibly. "Even if my husband ceased to
love me, that does not absolve me. I must fulfil my promise and my
duty."
"But," Helen responded, doubtfully and slowly, "it seems to me a
sacrilege to live with a man after one has ceased to love him."
"But I would love him," Edith broke in almost fiercely. "That is just
the point. One must refuse to cease to love him."
"But if he ceased to love her?"
A flush came into Edith's clear cheek, and her eyes shone. Half
unconsciously to herself, she was fighting with the doubts which would
now and then rise in her own mind of her husband's affection.
"Then," she said, in a low voice, "one must still be worthy of his
love; one must do one's duty. Besides," she added, looking up with a
gleam of hope, "when one has made a solemn vow, as a wife vows to love
her husband until death part them, I firmly believe that strength to
keep that vow will not be withheld."
Helen was silent a moment. She by no means agreed to the position Edith
took. She had no belief in those promises in virtue of which the
sacraments of the church took on a peculiar sanctity; she did not at
all trust to any special help bestowed by higher powers. She did not,
however, care to argue upon these points, and she said more lightly,--
"You task womanhood pretty heavily."
"A little woman who is a _protegee_ of mine," Edith returned, in the
same manner, "said rather quaintly the other day, that women were made
so there should be somebody to be patient with men. She's having
trouble with her lover, I suspect, and takes it hardly."
"But," Helen persisted more gravely, "it seems to me that you set
before the unloved wife a task to which humanity is absolutely unequal."
"You remember St. Theresa and her two sous," Edith replied, her eyes
shining with deep inner feeling; "how she said, 'St. Theresa and two
sous are nothing, but St. Theresa and two sous and God are everything.'
I can't argue, but for myself, I could not live if I should give up my
ideal of duty."
As often it had happened before, Helen found herself so deeply moved by
the fervor and the genuineness of Edith's faith, that she felt it
impossible to go on with an argument which could convince only at the
expense of weakening this rare trust. She brought the conversation back
to its starting point.
"But about Ninitta," she said. "I saw her yesterday, and she acted as
if she had something on her mind. She somehow seemed to be trying to
tell me something. I told her that the _bambino_, as she calls Nino,
must keep her occupied most of the time, and she said the nurse stole
him away half of the day; she has the peasant instinct to take entire
charge of her own child."
"If that is a peasant instinct," Edith rejoined laughing, "I am afraid
I am a peasant."
"Oh, but you are reasonable about it, and know that it is better for
the boy to have change and so on. She acts as if she felt it to be a
conspiracy between the nurse and her husband to steal the child's
affections from her. Really, I felt as if she was coming to love Nino
so fiercely that she had fits of almost hating her husband."
The ringing of the door bell and the entrance of the servant with a
card interrupted the conversation, and Helen had only time to say,--
"Of course on general principles you know I do not agree with you.
Indeed, I should find it hard to justify what I consider the most
meritorious acts of my life if I did. But I do want to say that, given
your creed, your view of marriage seems to me the noble--indeed, the
only one."
As Helen walked home in the gray afternoon, sombre with a winter mist,
she thought over the conversation and measured her life by its
principles.
"If one accepts Edith's standard," she reflected, "it is impossible not
to accept her conclusions. She is a St. Theresa, with her strict
adherence to forms and her loyalty to her convictions. But surely one's
own self has some claims. My first duty to whatever the highest power
is,--the All, perhaps,--must be to do the best I can with myself. It
could not be my duty to go on living with Will"--
She stopped, with a faint shudder, raising her eyes and looking about
upon the wet and dreary landscape with an almost furtive glance, as if
she were oppressed by the fear that the eyes of the husband with whom
she had found it impossible to live, and who for six years had been
under the sod, dead by his own hand, might be watching her unawares. It
was one of those moments when a bygone emotion is so vividly revived,
as if some long hidden landscape were revealed by a sudden lightning
flash. The years had brought her immunity from the poignancy of the
pain of old sorrows, but for one brief and bitter instant she cowed
with the old fear, she trembled with the old-time agony.
Then she smiled at the unreasonableness of her feeling, and dropping
her eyes, walked on with slightly quickened steps.
"It cannot be a woman's duty to go on living with a man who is dragging
her down, or even who prevents her from realizing her best; and yet,
there is the influence. That is a trick of my old Puritan training, of
course, but after all it is right to consider. One must count influence
as a factor if one believes in civilization, and I do believe in
civilization; certainly, I would not go back to barbarism. But is a
woman to be tied down--oh! how a woman is always tied down! Limitation
--limitation--limitation; that is the whole story of a woman's life;
and the harder she struggles to get away from her bonds the more she
proves to herself by the pain of the wrist cut by the fetters how
impossible it is to break them. Women contrive to deceive men sometimes
into believing that they have overcome the limitations of their sex;
and they even deceive themselves; but they never deceive each other. A
woman may believe that she herself has accomplished the impossible, but
she knows no one of her sisters has."
She smiled sadly and yet humorously, pausing a moment on the curbstone
before crossing the wet and icy street. Then as she went on and a
coachman pulled up his horses almost upon their haunches to let her
pass, she took up the thread of her reflections once more,--
"Yet surely women must not rebel against civilization. Civilization is
after all quite as largely as anything else a determined ignoring and
combatting on the part of mankind of the cruel disadvantages under
which nature has put women. No; we must look at it in the large; we
must hold to the conventional even, rather than fight against
civilization, however wrong and illogical and heartless civilization
may be. It is the best we have and we go to the wall without it."
She had reached her boarding-house and fitted her latch-key into the
lock. As she opened the door she looked back into the gathering dusk of
the misty afternoon, and her thought was almost as if it were a last
word flung to some presence to be left behind and shut out, a
personality with whom she had argued, and who had logically defeated
but not convinced her.
"And yet," she said inwardly, with a sudden swelling of defiance and
conviction, "not for all the universe could I have done it. I could not
go on living with Will,--though," she added, a sudden compunction
seizing her, "I was fond of him in a way, poor fellow."
And the door closed.