HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY.
Love's Labor's Lost; i.--1.
All the world feels the pathos of helplessness hurt and wounded; but
only some recognize how this applies to a great and noble nature
attacked by unscrupulousness. In an encounter with dishonesty, nobility
of soul may be, in its effect for the moment, utter weakness. Assailed
by deceit or treachery the great heart has often no resource but
endurance; and while endurance may save, it cannot defend.
The moment Grant Herman's eyes fell upon the _Fatima_, he understood
fully why Fenton had so volubly remarked that he had painted the
picture from old studies. He tried to fight with his conviction that
what the artist said was false, although even as he did so he could not
crush down the feeling of having been wounded by the hand of a friend.
It seemed to him incredible that Fenton, even though the painter's
defection from the Pagans had caused something of a breach between
them, could have been guilty of this outrage. He choked with an
intolerable sense of shame for himself, for the artist, and for
Ninitta. A terrible anguish wrung his heart as he looked across the
crowded gallery gay with lights, with the rich dresses, with laughter,
and with the beauty of women, to where hung the picture of the mother
of his boy, an image of sensuous enticement. The fact that Fenton had
substituted another face for that of Ninitta did not, for the moment,
console him. To his sculptor's eye, form was the important thing, and
the fact that he recognized the model bore down all else. He remembered
how marked had been Ninitta's unwillingness to accompany him to the
exhibition, and the possible connection between this and the picture
forced itself upon his mind.
With all the instinctive generosity of his soul, however, Herman strove
to believe that the _Fatima_ had been painted, as Fenton said, from old
studies, and that his wife had not been guilty of the painful indecorum
of posing. He compelled himself to answer the artist calmly, although
he could not make his manner cordial. And as he spoke, his eye,
searching the picture for confirmation of his hope or of his fear,
recognized among the draperies a Turkish shawl he had himself given his
wife after their marriage.
He made his way out of the gallery and out of the club house. He felt
that he must get away from the innumerable eyes by which he was
surrounded. He started toward home, but before he had gone a block, he
stopped, hesitated a moment, and struck off into a side street. He was
not ready to go home. He had said to himself too often, reiterating it
in his mind constantly for six years, that in dealing with his wife his
must be the wisdom, the patience, and the forbearance of both. He
remembered a night long ago, when he had gone to Ninitta's room, in a
mood of contrition, to renew the troth of his youth, and had fallen
instead into a fit of bitter anger. With no evident reason, came back
to him to-night the beautiful weeping figure of the Italian as she had
cast herself at his feet and implored his forgiveness. He would not go
to her now until he was calmer, and until he had considered carefully
all the points of the situation.
In that whirl which comes in desperate circumstances before the
startled and bewildered thoughts can be reduced to order, Herman
wandered on, not thinking where he was going, until he found himself
leaning against a railing and looking over the waters of the Charles
River. It was a beautiful starlight night with a wavering wind that
came in uncertain gusts only to die away again. The water was like a
flood of ink, across which streamed thin tremulous lines of brightness,
and over which were strewn the flickering reflections of the stars. The
gas jets of the city across the flood, the rows of lamps which marked
the bridges, the distant horse cars which rumbled between Cambridge and
Boston with their colored lights, the green and red lanterns that
glowed from the railroad tracks farther down the river, all suggested
the busy life of men with its passions, its greed, and its
heartlessness; but the darkness held all remote, as if the world of men
were a dream. And overhead the immovable stars, like the unpitying
gods, hung above the city and were reflected in the water, and wounded
the soul of the lonely man with the terrible sense of power inimitably
removed, of passionless strength which served to humanity but as a
measure of its own weakness and triviality. The misfortunes of life
might be endured; its disappointments, its anguish, even its inviolable
loneliness might be supported, but a sense of the awful futility of
existence crushes man to the depths of impotent despair.
A review of the past is usually a protest against fate, and manly as
Herman was it was inevitable that into his reverie should come a sense
that the wrong and suffering of his life had been thrust upon him
undeserved. He could not be blind to the fact that it had been through
his virtues that he had been wounded. A sense of injustice comes with
the consciousness of having suffered through merit. Many a man is too
noble basely to avoid the consequences of his acts, but few can wholly
rid themselves of the feeling that the uncomplaining acceptance of
painful results should serve as expiation for the deeds which caused
them. The nobility of his nature, the purity of his intentions had made
of a boyish folly the curse of a lifetime. With whatever tenderness the
sculptor regarded Ninitta as the mother of his son, it was vain for him
to attempt to deceive himself in regard to his love for her. A man with
whom cordiality was instinctive, who was born for the most frank and
intimate domestic relations, he found in his wife small sympathy and
less comprehension. He had married her, believing that she had a right
to claim happiness at his hands because he had taught her to love him.
He had long since been obliged to own to himself that he had done this
at the expense of his own peace, and he now questioned whether the
experiment had succeeded better in her case than in his. If she had not
been able to comprehend his aims and to enter into his scheme of life,
it was equally true that she must have found in him little response to
the calls of her own nature. The bitterness of the sigh which wrung his
bosom, as he stood with his hand upon the railing and looked over the
water with the lights reflected on its blackness, was as much for her
as for himself.
Yet he would not have been human had he not felt thrills of anger when
he thought of the _Fatima._ No faintest suspicion crossed his mind of
any darker shame which might lie behind the fact that his wife had
posed for Fenton. This he could not doubt that she had done. This
explained her frequent absences from home in the morning, to which he
had before given no thought. He remembered, too, that for weeks a
furtive restlessness, poorly concealed, had been evident in Ninitta's
manner. He had attributed it to her intense opposition to Nino's being
sent to school; but now he read it differently. He could not but be
angry, yet his pity was greater than his wrath; and he resolved not
only to be forbearing with his wife, but hereafter to use greater
endeavors to enrich her colorless life. He was too thoroughly an artist
himself not to feel and appreciate how much the old love of posing, the
longing for the air of a studio, and the art instinct might have had to
do with Ninitta's fault.
But in regard to Fenton his heart burned with that rage which is
largely grief. It was like the anger, which is half astonishment, of a
child who is unexpectedly struck by its playmate. The fact that he was
incapable of comprehending how it was possible to betray a friend made
him confused in thinking of the artist's share in the transaction; and
the fact that he could vent upon Fenton his righteous indignation
enabled him to free his feelings toward Ninitta of almost all
animosity. When at last he turned to go home, it was with a profound
pity that he thought of his wife.
It was a little after eleven when he reached his house. The gas was
burning in his chamber and Ninitta lay apparently sleeping. The
wretched woman feigned a slumber which she had in vain courted. She was
convinced that her husband could not see the _Fatima_ without
discovering her secret, and the guilty knowledge in her heart filled
her with growing fears as the moments went on.
When at last she heard Herman's step, she had started up in bed like a
wild creature, her heart fluttering, her ears strained as if to catch
from the sound some clue to his mood. But instantly she had lain down
again, and, with an instinct like that of the timorous animals whose
nature it is to feign death when they cannot flee, had composed herself
into the appearance of slumber.
Herman paused a moment, just inside the chamber door, and looked at his
wife. Something in her pose suggested to him so vividly the _Fatima_
that, despite his self-conquest on the bridge, a flood of anger swelled
within him. The masculine instinct, nourished through a thousand
generations, that no palliation gives the wife a right to claim
forgiveness from her husband for the shame she has put upon him by a
violation of modesty, surged up within him. He drew in a deep
inspiration and started forward with an inarticulate sound as if he
could throw himself upon this woman and tighten his fingers on her
throat.
Ninitta raised herself in bed with an exclamation of fear. Her black
hair streamed loose, and her dark eyes shone. Her swarthy passionate
face was an image of terror. She was not far enough away from her
peasant ancestors not to be moved by the size and strength of her
husband's large and vigorous frame. Many generations and much subtlety
of refinement must lie between herself and savagery before a woman can
learn instinctively to fear the soul of a man rather than his muscles
in a crisis like this. Husband and wife confronted each other as he
walked quickly across the chamber. Her cowering attitude, the fear
which was written in every line of her face, fed his anger, until, in
his blind rage, all pity and self-restraint seemed to be swept away.
But just as he neared the bed, when in his burning look Ninitta seemed
already to feel his hands clutching her with cruel force, his foot
struck against something which lay on the floor. It was one of Nino's
wooden soldiers. The father stopped, and his look changed. He
remembered how Nino had come in from the nursery while he was dressing
that night, bringing his arms full of more or less shattered figures
which he had appealed to his father to put to rights for a grand battle
which was to be fought in the morning. Herman looked down at the toy
and forgot his anger. He looked up at his wife and she saw with wonder
the change in his face. It had been full of indignation against the
wife who had deceived him; on it now was written reproachful anguish,
and pity for the mother of his son.
"Ninitta," he said. "How could you do it?"
She cowered down in the bed, burying her face in her hands. She could
not answer, and there came over him a painful sense of the uselessness
of words.
"Everybody must recognize Fenton's picture," he said. "If you did not
remember me, Ninitta, how could you forget Nino? How will he feel when
he is old enough to realize what you have done?"
The frightened woman burst into convulsive sobs mixed with moans like
those of a hurt animal. In the last hours she had been thinking no less
than her husband; but where he had considered her, she had thought
chiefly of her boy. Mingled with the fear of her husband's anger had
been the nobler feeling, that she was no longer worthy to be with her
son. The very passion of the love she bore him moved her now with the
determination to leave him. It was always Ninitta's instinct to run
away in trouble, and now, added to the impulse to escape from her
husband was the determination forming itself with awful stress of
anguish in her soul, to go away from Nino; to take away from her son
whom she loved better than life itself, this woman who had no right in
his pure presence. She did not look upon it as an expiation of her
fault; it was only that maternal love gathered up whatever was noble in
her nature, in this supreme sacrifice for her son.
To Herman, looking down upon the cowering figure of his wife, with a
heartbreaking sense of the impossibility of effecting anything by
words, she was simply a cowardly woman who took refuge in tears from
the reproaches which her conduct deserved. Could he have known what was
passing in her heart, it would have moved him to a deeper respect and a
keener pity than he had ever felt for her. No more than a dumb animal
had she any language in which she could have made him understand her
feelings had she tried; and at last he turned away with a choking in
his throat.