AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT.
Henry VIII.; i.--3.
The announcement by the Secretary of the St. Filipe Club that a vote of
censure had been passed upon Fenton had not only caused a tempest of
excitement, but had brought about the unexpected result of eliciting
testimony to prove that the charge against him was without foundation.
Men came forward to testify that Snaffle entered the club alone on the
evening when Fenton was said to have brought him there, while Tom
Bently, Ainsworth, and others had seen the artist come in afterward,
and had spoken with him before he went upstairs with Fred Rangely to
the card-room. The Executive Committee found itself in a most awkward
predicament, and its members took what comfort they could in pitching
upon the Secretary, who had, without authorization, announced the vote
of censure on the call for the monthly meeting. He was now directed to
write to Mr. Fenton a letter of apology, which he did with such small
grace as he could command, taking the precaution to mark the note
"confidential."
The artist experienced more than a feeling of conscious virtue at being
thus exonerated from a fault which he had committed; and it was with
mingled glee and a certain dare-devil desperation that he resolved upon
his own course of action.
The monthly meeting of the St. Filipe came on the evening of the day
when Mrs. Staggchase gave her luncheon. By a misunderstanding of
Fenton's wishes, his wife had invited friends to dine that night. He
meant to excuse himself after dinner and go to the club for a short
time, returning to his guests after he had said a few words upon which
he had determined.
The guests were Mr. and Mrs. Stewart Hubbard, Helen Greyson, Ethel
Mott, Miss Catherine Penwick, Thayer Kent, the Rev. De Lancy Candish,
and Fred Rangely. It was wholly by chance, and without malicious intent
that Edith assigned Ethel to Mr. Kent, while Rangely took Mrs. Greyson
in to dinner. Mrs. Fenton, of course, knew that gossip had sometimes
connected the names of Ethel and Rangely in a speculative way, but she
partly suspected and partly knew by feminine intuition that Fred was
practically out of the running, and that Ethel's heart was given to
Thayer Kent. It was hardly to be expected that Rangely should be
pleased at the sight of his rival's advantage; but having passed the
morning in squiring Miss Merrivale, his conscience was hardly
case-hardened enough to have made him at his ease had he been able to
exchange places with Kent.
To Mr. Candish was given the care of Miss Penwick, since with her Edith
knew that his sensitive awkwardness would be as comfortable as was
possible with any one; and the guests were so arranged that the
clergyman sat upon his hostess's left hand, being thus in a manner
intrenched between her and Miss Penwick against the raillery which Mrs.
Fenton knew her husband would press as far as his position as host
would allow. Edith always made it a point to do all that she could for
Mr. Candish's comfort, and it was largely on his account that she had
included Miss Penwick in the list of guests. She had a certain
tenderness for the forlorn old lady, but it might not have found active
expression had not the rector's pleasure come into the question. Arthur
had laughed when the proposed arrangement was submitted to him.
"Does your care for your pastor's spiritual welfare go so far," he
asked jocosely, "that you don't dare trust him with a young woman?
Really, it looks as if you were jealous of the red-haired angel."
"Mr. Candish is not a young woman's man," had been Edith's answer;
whereat her husband laughed again.
The talk at dinner was less animated than was usual at Fenton's table.
The host was preoccupied, despite his efforts not to appear so, and the
company was somehow not fully in touch. No conversation could be wholly
dull, however, which Arthur led; and while the "lady's finger" in his
cheek told his wife and Helen that he was laboring under some intense
excitement, he held himself pluckily in hand.
The conversation at first was between neighbors, but soon the host,
according to his fashion, began to answer any remark that his quick
ears caught, no matter from whose lips.
"You talk about marriage like a Pagan," he heard Helen say to Rangely.
"Oh, no," Fenton broke in, "he doesn't go half far enough for a Pagan.
The Pagan position is that matrimony is a matter of temperament and
convenience; it is essentially Philistine to consider that a marriage
ceremony imposes eternal obligations."
"There, Mr. Fenton," Mrs. Hubbard rejoined, "I haven't heard you say
anything so heathenish for half a dozen years. I hoped your wife had
reformed you."
"Or that he had come to years of discretion," suggested Mr. Hubbard,
with his charming smile.
"Oh, but I find years of indiscretion so much more interesting," Fenton
retorted.
A moment later Helen said something about the truth, and Rangely
retorted,--
"Truth is generally what one wishes to believe."
"Except in Puritanism," broke in Arthur, "there it was whatever one
didn't wish to believe."
"Don't you think," questioned Mr. Hubbard, "that you are always a
little hard on the Puritans? You must admire their conviction and their
bravery."
"Oh, yes," was Fenton's reply; "there is something superb in the
earnestness of the Puritans, and their absorption in one idea; but that
idea has left its birthmark of gloom on all their descendants, and one
cannot forget that Puritanism was the soil from which sprang the
unbelief of today."
"Bless us!" cried Rangely, "is Saul also among the prophets? Are you
also condemning unbelief?"
"Not at all," said Fenton, coolly, "I only want those who defend
Puritanism to accept its legitimate results."
"It seems to me," protested Mr. Candish, who had become very red
according to his unfortunate wont; "that if you argue in that way, you
must always condemn good, because evil may come after it."
"Oh, I do," retorted Fenton, airily.
Everybody except the clergyman laughed at the unexpectedness of this
reply; but Mr. Candish was wounded by the most faint suspicion of
anything like trifling with sacred things.
"My husband is utterly abandoned, as you see, Mr. Candish," said Edith,
coming to the rescue, as she always did when Arthur showed signs of
baiting the rector. "Is the decision made in regard to the _America_?"
she continued, turning to Mr. Hubbard, by way of changing the subject.
"Yes," he answered, "the commission is to be given to Orin Stanton."
"Orin Stanton?" asked Kent. "Who is he?"
"Oh, he," returned Fenton, "is a man that had the misfortune to be born
with a wooden toothpick in his mouth instead of a silver spoon."
"Is he Irish?"
"No, but he ought to be to have won favor in the sight of a committee
appointed by the Boston City Government."
"Come," said Helen; "that is rather severe when Mr. Hubbard is on the
committee."
"Oh, I don't mind," returned Hubbard. "I know Fenton wouldn't lose a
chance of having his fling at the Irish."
"Well," Fenton explained, defensively, "I am always irritated at the
pity of the United States having expended so much blood and treasure to
free itself from the dominion of the whole of Great Britain simply to
sink into dependence upon so insignificant a part of that kingdom as
Ireland."
"Mercy!" exclaimed Miss Penwick. "What extreme sentiments!"
They smiled at the old lady's words, and then Edith went back to the
statue.
"I fancy young Stanton hasn't been above some wire-pulling," she
remarked. "He sent his prospective sister-in-law, Melissa Blake, to ask
me to use my influence with Uncle Peter in his behalf."
"He needn't have troubled," Mr. Hubbard returned. "Mr. Calvin supported
him from the first."
"Oh, yes," Ethel said; "Mrs. Frostwinch and Mrs. Bodewin Ranger chose
Stanton long ago and persuaded Mr. Calvin to help them."
"I can't fancy Mr. Calvin as anybody's tool," commented Kent, who would
have regarded his companion's words as a trifle too frank to be spoken
at the table of Mr. Calvin's niece, had his mind been in a condition to
take exception to anything that she said.
"Isn't that Melissa Blake," asked Mr. Hubbard of Edith, "the one you
recommended to me as a copyist?"
"Yes, I hope you found her satisfactory."
Mr. Hubbard smiled somewhat grimly.
"Indeed he did not," broke in Mrs. Hubbard speaking for him. "She broke
confidence."
"Broke confidence!" echoed Edith, in astonishment. "Melissa Blake?"
"Yes," Hubbard returned. "I really didn't mean to tell you, but my
wife, you see, has all the indignation of a woman against a woman."
"But how did she break confidence?" demanded Edith. "I would trust her
as implicitly as I would myself."
"The papers she copied," was the reply, "were the plans for a syndicate
to put up mills at Fentonville. We kept the scheme quiet until the
route of the new railroad should be decided, and when we came before
the Committee of the House, the whole thing had been given away, and
the Wachusett men had even secured the chairman, Tom Greenfield. He
lives in Fentonville himself, and we had counted him at least as sure."
"That must have been the thing," placidly observed Miss Penwick to
Rangely, "that Mr. Irons was talking to Mrs. Sampson about, the night
we dined there to meet Miss Merrivale."
Rangely glanced up in vexation, to see if Miss Mott were listening, and
caught a gleam of mischievous intelligence from her eyes.
"I don't remember it," he answered ambiguously.
"But how do you know," persisted Edith, "that the information came from
Miss Blake?"
"Because Mr. Staggchase found out at Fentonville afterward that she
came from there, and that a young man she is engaged to had just
forfeited on a mortgage some of the meadows our company was to buy."
"The evidence doesn't seem to me conclusive," remarked Fenton, "and
simply as a matter of family unity I am bound to believe in my wife's
_proteges_."
Even the faint sense of humor which he felt at the situation could not
prevent him from experiencing the sting of self-shame. Had it been an
equal who was unjustly accused of a fault he had committed he would
have felt less humiliated. To the degradation of having betrayed
Hubbard, the addition of this last touch of having also unconsciously
injured an inferior came to him like the exquisite irony of fate. He
wondered in an abstract and dispassionate way whether the ghost of all
his misdeeds were continually to rise before him. "Really," he said to
himself with a smile that curled his lips "in that case I shall become
a perfect Macbeth." And at that instant the ghost most dreadful of all
rose at the feast like that of Banquo as Rangely said,--
"I knocked at your studio this morning but couldn't get in."
There flashed through Fenton's mind all the possibilities of discovery
and disaster that might lie behind this remark, and his one strong
feeling was that it would be unsafe to venture on a definite statement;
he took refuge in the vaguest of general remarks.
"I am sorry not to have seen you," he said.
He tried to reflect, while Edith said something further in defence of
Melissa. He joked with Ethel about the probable appearance of the
statue young Stanton would make, which was to be set up directly
opposite her father's house. He noticed that Helen was very silent, and
he even reflected how handsome a man was Thayer Kent; but through it
all he seemed to hear the echo of that knock upon his studio door and a
foreboding which he could not shake off made him reflect gloomily how
utterly defenceless he should be in case of discovery.
A brief silence suddenly recalled him to his duties as host, and he
caught quickly at the first topic which presented itself to his mind,
going back to the question of the _America_, which had been much
discussed because the funds to pay for it had been bequeathed to the
city by a woman of prominent social position.
"I suppose," he observed, turning to Hubbard, "that with two such
lights of the art world as Peter Calvin and Alfred Irons on the
committee, the new statue will be regarded as the flower of Boston
culture. Of all droll things," he added, "nothing could be funnier than
coupling those two men. It is more striking than the lion and the lamb
of Scriptural prophecy."
"Who is the lion and who the lamb?" asked Candish.
"It is your place to apply Scripture, not mine," retorted Fenton.
"I represent the minority of the committee," was Hubbard's reply to his
host's question. "There is no other position so safe in matters of art
as that of an objector."
"That is because art appeals to the most sensitive of human
characteristics," Arthur retorted smiling,--"human vanity."
"Vanity?" echoed Mrs. Hubbard.
"That from you?" exclaimed Miss Mott.
"Really, Mr. Fenton," protested Miss Penwick, in accents of real
concern, "you shouldn't say such a thing; there are so many people who
would suppose you meant it."
The simple old creature knew no more of the real meaning of art than
she did of that of the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian obelisk, but she
had lectured on it, and she felt for it the deep reverence common to
those who label their superstition with the name "culture."
"But I do mean it," returned Fenton, becoming more animated from the
pleasure of defending an extravagant position. "What is the object of
art but to perpetuate and idealize the emotions of the race; and how
does it touch men, except by flattering their vanity with the
assumption that they individually share the grand passions of mankind."
A chorus of protests arose; but Arthur went on, laughingly over-riding
it.
"Really," he said, "we all care for the Apollo Belvidere and the Venus
of Milo because it tickles our vanity to view the physical perfection
of the race to which we belong; it is our own possibilities of anguish
that we pity in the Laocoon and the Niobe; it is"--
"Oh, come, Fenton," interrupted Rangely; "we all know that you can be
more deliciously wrongheaded than any other live man, but you can't
expect us to sit quietly by while you abuse art."
"That is more absolute Philistinism," put in Hubbard, "than anything I
have heard from Mr. Irons even."
"Oh; Philistinism," was Fenton's rejoinder, "is not nearly so bad as
the inanities that are talked about it."
"That sounds like a personal thrust at Mr. Hubbard," Kent observed; and
as Arthur disclaimed any intention of making it so, Mrs. Fenton gave
the signal for rising.