WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED.
Comedy of Errors; i.--1.
Never was a man more utterly wretched than was Arthur Fenton, after the
luckless day when Mr. Irons had lighted upon the presence of Mrs.
Herman at the studio. He raged against himself, against chance, most of
all against the unmannerly and coarse-minded fellow who had forced
himself into the studio, and then persisted in imagining evil which had
never existed. He experienced all the acute anguish of finding himself
in the toils, and of the added sting from wounded vanity, since he felt
that he had been wanting in adroitness and presence of mind. It is to
be doubted if he did not suffer more than would have been the case had
the injurious suspicions of Irons been correct. To a vain man, it is
often harder to be entrapped through stupidity or awkwardness than
through crime.
Fenton realized well enough how impossible it was now to correct the
evil that had been done. He might have explained away the fact that
Ninitta had been his model, but his own bearing under the accusation
had produced an impression not to be eradicated. The wavering before
his eyes, for a single instant, of the will-o'-the-wisp fire of sudden
temptation had blinded him, so that he had been guilty of a cursed
piece of folly, which had put him at once in the power of Irons. He
knew enough of the latter to be pretty sure that he was capable of
keeping his threat to enlighten Herman concerning his wife's visit to
the studio, and disgrace in the eyes of Herman meant more than Arthur
dared to think. Sensitive to the last fibre of his being, the artist
grew faint with exquisite pain at the thought of what he must endure
from a scandal spread among his friends. An accusation without
foundation would have been almost more than he could bear, but one
supported by such circumstantial evidence as lay behind the story Irons
would tell if he set himself to make trouble,--the bare idea drove
Fenton wild.
Fenton had always prided himself upon his superiority to public
opinion, but without public respect he could not but be supremely
miserable. It is true that he valued his own good opinion above that of
the world. It was his theory that the ultimate appeal in matters of
conduct was always to the man's inner consciousness, and in this
highest court only the man himself could be present, all the world
being shut out. It followed that a person's own opinion of his acts was
of infinitely more weight than that of any or all other people
whosoever.
"All standards are arbitrary," he was accustomed to say, "and all terms
are relative. Every man must make his own ethical code, and nobody but
the man himself can tell how far he lives up to it. Why should I care
whether people who do not even know what my rules of conduct are,
consider my course correct or not? Very likely the things they condemn
are the things it has cost me most struggle and self-denial to achieve.
We have outgrown old ethical systems, because the world has become
enlightened enough to perceive that every mind must make its own code;
to realize that what a man is must be his religion."
This course of reasoning was one shared by many of Fenton's friends,
and indeed by a goodly company of nineteenth century thinkers. Fenton
was in reality only going with the majority of liberalists in regarding
sincerity to personal conviction as the highest of ethical laws; and he
was generally pretty logical in choosing the approval of his inward
knowledge to that of the world outside. Yet his vanity was keenly
sensitive to disapprobation, and when the censure of the world
coincided with the condemnation of his own reason he suffered. To
self-contempt was added a baffled sense of having been discovered; and
as his imagination now ran forward to picture the effects of Irons's
disclosure, the suffering he endured was really pitiful.
"Nobody will understand," he said to himself one day, half in bitter
self-contempt and half in self-defence, "that I couldn't help doing as
I did; no cruelty surpasses that of holding weak and sensitive natures
accountable for shortcomings they are born incapable of avoiding."
And having accomplished an epigram at his own expense, he felt as if he
had to some degree atoned for his fault, just as a flagellant looks
upon his self-scourging as expiatory.
How to act in the position in which he had been placed by Irons's
insulting proposal was a question which he found more difficult to
answer than according to his theories, it should have been. When a man
becomes his own highest law he is constantly exposed to the danger of
finding his theories of conduct utterly confounded by a change in
self-interest; and Fenton began to have a most painful sense of being
ethically wholly at sea. He had not yielded to temptation, however. He
had given Stewart Hubbard a couple of sittings, and so great had been
his fear lest he should inadvertently gather from his sitter some hint
of the knowledge he had been urged to obtain, that he had half
unconsciously been reserved and silent. The picture was going badly,
and the sitter wondered what had come over the witty and vivacious
artist.
Besides these vexations the artist had, moreover, other causes for
uneasiness at this time. His financial affairs were by no means in
satisfactory condition. He had been filling a good many orders and
getting excellent prices for his work, yet somehow he had been all the
year running behindhand. He lived beyond his means, priding himself
upon being the one Boston artist who had been born, bred, and educated
a gentleman, as he chose to put it to himself, and who was able to live
as a man of the world should. His summer had been passed at Newport, a
place which Edith by no means liked, and where her ideas of propriety
and religion were constantly offended, especially in regard to the
sanctity of marriage. He entertained sumptuously, spent money freely at
the clubs, and, in a word, tried to be no less a man of fashion than an
artist.
The result was beginning to be disastrous. Living pretty closely up to
his income, a few losses and a speculation or two which turned out
unlucky, were sufficient to embarrass him seriously. It was the old
trite and dreary story of extravagance and its inevitable consequence;
and as Fenton had no talent for finance, his struggles rather made
matters worse than bettered them, as the efforts of a fly to escape
from the web, even although they may damage the net, are apt to end
also in binding the victim more securely.
The truth was that the painter, like many another man endowed with
imaginative gifts, had little practical knowledge of affairs beyond a
talent for spending money; and it is amazing how stupid a clever man
can contrive to be when he is taken out of his sphere. For such men
there is no safety save in keeping out of debt, and once the balance
was on the wrong side of his account, Fenton, self-poised as he was,
lost his head. It troubled and worried him to be in debt even when he
could see his way clear to paying everything, and now that matters
began to get too complicated to be settled by plain and obvious
arithmetic, he was miserable.
In the midst of these unhappy complications, he was one morning working
upon the portrait of Miss Damaris Wainwright, whose cousin and aunts,
the Dimmonts, had induced her to have it painted, although she was in
deep mourning. He was interested in the lovely, melancholy girl, and he
felt that he was doing some of the best work of his life in her
portrait. He sometimes was proud of his skill, and at others he was
unreasonably vexed that this picture should be so much better than that
of Mr. Hubbard promised to be.
He had been talking this morning half-absently, and merely for the sake
of keeping his sitter interested. He had not noticed that her whole
being was keyed up to a pitch of intense feeling, and he had almost
unconsciously accomplished the really difficult task of putting his
sitter at her ease and making her ready to talk.