THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE.
Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.--7.
After the Pagans had separated that night Fred Rangely lingered in
Herman's studio.
The sculptor somehow found it possible to be more frank with Rangely
than with any other of his companions, and although there was a
difference of some half a dozen in the count of their years, and
perhaps more in their ages as measured by experiences, Herman's strong
but naturally stormy nature found much pleasure in the calm philosophy
of his friend.
Scarcely were the two men alone, when Rangely turned to his host and
demanded abruptly:
"Now, I want to know, Grant, what in the devil is the matter with you
to-night? What set you out to pitch into Fenton so?"
Herman poured out a glass of wine and swallowed it before replying.
"Because I am a damned idiot!" he retorted savagely. "I'm all shaken
up, Fred; and the worst of it is that I don't see any way out of the
snare I'm in."
"It isn't real trouble, I hope."
"Isn't it! By Jove!" cried the sculptor, "the more honest a man is in
this world the worse off he is. If I hadn't had a conscience when I was
a young fellow, I should be all right now. Who is it--Fenton?--that is
always saying that he asks forgiveness for his virtues and thanks the
gods for every vice he can cultivate?"
"Well," Rangely remarked, filling a pipe, and curiously surveying his
companion, who was raging up and down the studio, "you don't seem to be
in an especially cheerful and enlivening frame of mind; that's a fact.
If a fellow can be of any help, call on; if not, at least try to take
it a little more gently for the sake of your friends."
"Do any thing?" retorted the other. "No; there's nothing to be done.
I'm a fool."
"Even that disease has been remedied before now," Rangely said coolly;
"though usually experience and time are necessary to the cure."
"I'll tell you the whole story," Herman exclaimed, flinging himself
into a chair. "It is all simple enough. It is always simple enough to
tangle things up so that Lucifer himself cannot unsnarl them. When I
was in Rome I was in love--crazily, gushingly in love, you understand,
like a big schoolboy--with a girl I found in Capri. She was a good
little thing, with a figure like Helen's; that's what did the business
for me. I coaxed her to Rome to be my model, and then that infernal
conscience of mine made me ask her to marry me. I could have done any
thing I liked with her; I knew that; she had nobody to look after her
but a half sister who paid about as much attention to her as if she had
been a grasshopper. But the infernal New England Puritanism in my blood
wouldn't let me hurt her."
"And somebody else wasn't so scrupulous?" asked the listener as his
friend paused in his story.
"You think so?" returned Herman eagerly. "Then I wasn't so unutterably
a scoundrel for thinking so, too, was I? I did doubt her; I had reason
to. She posed for a friend of mine, a painter; you know, of course--Hang
it! What's the use of going into all the details. I was poor as a
church mouse or she shouldn't have done it at all, even for him. The
gist of the story is that I was jealous and flew out at both of them,
and left Rome in a rage!"
The two men sat in silence for some moments. Rangely puffed vigorously
at his pipe, while his companion stared savagely into the shadows in
the further end of the studio. Neither looked at the other; the hearer
appreciated too well the shame-facedness by which these unusual
confidences must be accompanied. From some distant steeple a clock was
faintly heard striking two.
"And to-day," Herman at length began again in an altered voice, "to-day
she came here. She has followed me all these years, going through
heaven knows what experiences and hardships, to bring me the proof that
I was a madman blinded by groundless jealousy, and that instead of
being wronged I cursedly abused both her and poor dead old Hoffmeir."
Again there came an interval of silence. A lamp flickered and went out
with a muffled sound. The thoughts of both men were of that formless
character scarcely to be distinguished from emotions; on the one hand
sad and remorseful, on the other sympathetic and pitiful.
"Well?" Rangely ventured after a time.
"But what shall I do?" demanded Herman. "I cannot marry her."
"No, of course not. She cannot expect it after banging about the
world."
"Oh, it isn't that," the other said hastily. "She is as good and as
pure as when I left her; at least I believe so. And she does expect
it."
"She does expect it!" echoed his friend. "Ah!"
The reception of a confidence is a most delicate ordeal through which
few people come unscathed. Rare individuals are born with the ready
sympathies, quick apprehension, and exquisite tact needful; but the
vast majority are sure to wound their friends if the latter ever
venture to approach with their armor of reticence laid wholly aside.
Although perhaps not the ideal confidant, Rangely was sympathetic and
possessed of at least sufficient discretion to avoid comment until he
knew the whole situation and was sure that his opinion was desired. He
was still unable fully to understand his friend's agitation, the task
of disposing of an old sweetheart in so inferior a position not
appearing to his easy-going nature a matter sufficiently difficult to
warrant so deep disquiet.
Precisely the clew that he needed the sculptor had not given, but he
was endeavoring to overcome his repugnance to disclosing his most
secret feelings. Every word cost him an effort, but he went on with a
savage sense of doing penance by the self-inflicted torture.
"Yes," he repeated, "she expects it. Why shouldn't she, poor thing? She
has not changed, and she does not understand that I may have altered."
"And you have?"
Grant Herman looked up and down the great studio, now growing dusky
from the burning out of candles here and there. An antique lamp which
was lighted only on special occasions stood where the breeze came to it
from the high window, and the flame, wind-swept, smoked and flared.
Through the silence the listener's ear could detect a faint sound of
the tide washing against the piles of the wharf outside.
The sculptor started up suddenly and stood firmly, throwing back his
splendid head and shoulders, and looking straight into the eyes of his
friend.
"Yes," he said in a clear, low voice. "I have changed. I---There is
some one else."
"Life," remarked Rangely, with seeming irrelevancy, "life is a
fallacy."
"I'd like to be honorable," Herman continued, "but how can I? It is
impossible to be honest to both her and myself. If I hadn't had any
scruples, then---Bah! What a beast I am! Poor Ninitta."
Still Rangely smoked in silence, and the sculptor went on again.
"It has always been my creed that when a man has allowed a woman to
love him--much more, made her love him, as I did--he is a black-hearted
knave to let a change in himself wreck her happiness. Now I am put to
the test."
"And the other one?" asked Rangely. "Does she know that you care for
her?"
"I have never said so to her. Heaven only knows how much she feels by
intuition. A man always fancies that the woman he loves can tell."
"That may depend something on how often you see her." "I see her
nearly every day. She is my pupil."
"Mrs. Greyson?"
"Yes," Herman said, a little defiantly, as if now the secret was told
he challenged the right of another man to share it.
"Is she a widow?"
"Yes," the other answered, with no perceptible pause, and yet between
the question and his reply had come to him the swift remembrance that
he really knew nothing of his pupil's life or history, and had simply
taken it for granted that her husband was not living. "Arthur Fenton
brought her here," he added, rather thinking aloud than answering any
point of Rangely's query. "He was an old friend of her husband."
"But what will you do with the other?"
Instead of replying Herman got up from the seat into which he had flung
himself, and went about the studio putting out the lights.
"Go home," he said with a whimsical smile. "I'm sure I don't know what
we are talking about at this time of the morning. As for what I shall
do--Well, time will show; I am as ignorant as yourself on the subject."