O, WICKED WIT AND GIFT.
Hamlet; i.--5.
Anomalies are doubtless as truly the product of law as results whose
logic is evident, and the strange relations between Mrs. Greyson and
her husband were therefore to be considered the outcome of fixed causes
from which no other result was possible.
Married when scarcely more than a girl, shy, undeveloped and ignorant
of the world, Helen came from a secluded life, which had been pretty
equally divided between the library of her dead father and the woods
surrounding the country village where she lived. She had never even
fancied that she loved Dr. Ashton; but she had married him as she would
have obeyed any other command of the stern aunt who had presided
severely over her orphaned childhood. He, half-a-dozen years her
senior, had been enamored of her wonderful beauty and modest
intellectuality; and, being accustomed always to gratify the impulse of
the moment, he had married her with a precipitancy as characteristic as
it was reckless. It was owing to a certain mutual scorn of
conventionalities that Helen and her husband at length decided to
separate. Without the aid of the law and without scandal, they settled
back into single liberty, the wife taking again her father's name. They
had spent their married life abroad, where Dr. Ashton had remained
until a short time previous to the opening of our story, and as neither
husband nor wife had been in their single life known in Boston, and as
Helen was chary of new acquaintances, their relations had thus far
remained undiscovered. Helen, at least, recognized how improbable it
was that this secrecy would long remain inviolate, but she went quietly
on her way, letting events take their own course.
Arthur Fenton was an old friend of her husband whom Helen had met in
Europe, but had known intimately only during her Boston life. She had
found him sympathetic, responsive and entertaining, and as any lonely
woman clings to the companionship of an appreciative man, she had clung
to the friendship and comradeship of the artist.
Going across the Common towards the studio on this sunny morning, when
the air was brisk and bracing, the naked trees clearly and delicately
defined against the sky, Helen's thoughts went back to her past; to her
shy, secluded girlhood, to the years of her married life, and to the
way in which she had been living since she and her husband parted. She
reflected with a smile, half pity, half contempt, of the proud,
reticent girl who had pored over books and drawings in the musty,
deserted library at home, almost wondering if she were the same being.
She looked from the Joy Street mall across the hollow which holds the
Frog Pond, the most charming view on the Common, yet not even the
golden sparkle of the water or the beautiful line of the slope beyond
could chase from her mind the picture of the high, dim old room, lined
to the ceiling with book-shelves, dingy and dusty from neglect. She
seemed to hear still the weird tapping of the beech-tree boughs against
the tall narrow windows, and still to smell odor of old leather; she
remembered vividly the dull dizziness that came from stooping too long
over some volume too heavy to hold, above which, half lying upon the
carpetless floor, she had bent with drooping golden curls. She
remembered, too, the remoteness of the real world from the ideal sphere
in which her fancy placed her; how unimportant and unsubstantial to her
had appeared the events of daily life as compared with the incidents of
the world the old books in the musty library opened to her. The life of
these magic tomes was the real, and that humdrum state through which
her visible pathway lay was the dream. To the imaginative girl, half
child, half poet, her marriage had prospectively seemed merely an
accident of the trivial outside existence which surrounded without
penetrating her true being; and the sharpness of the rude awakening
from this childish misconception still pierced the woman's proud soul.
No woman recalls her childhood without regret, and despite the
philosophy she had cultivated, Helen felt a deep sadness as the old
days, somber and dull though they had been, rose before her. She
hurried her step a little as if to escape her past, when a pleasant
voice at her elbow said:
"Good morning, Helen. Upon what wickedness are you bent now. You go too
fast to be on a good errand."
"Good morning, Will," she answered, without turning, for the voice
brought the speaker before her mental vision as plainly as her eyes
could have done. "I was just thinking of you, and of the days when you
found me at home."
"Yes," responded Dr. Ashton, "what were you thinking of them?"
"Nothing very pleasant," she answered with a sigh. "What a gorgeous day
it is. Arthur has been breakfasting with me."
"Arthur is going to be married," remarked her companion good humoredly.
"I've just been out to buy him a wedding present."
"What is it?"
"Oh, something he chose himself. It is not safe to tell you, though."
"Haven't I proved my discretion?" Helen said lightly. "I thought that
by this time you'd be willing to trust me with your most deadly
secrets."
"This is a deadly secret, indeed," he returned, taking from his pocket
a small morocco case.
"Oh, jewelry," Helen said, with an accent of disappointment. "I should
never have suspected you of such commonplaceness, Will."
"Not jewelry; a jewel," retorted Dr. Ashton, opening the case and
displaying a tiny vial.
"Will!" Helen exclaimed, stopping suddenly and catching her husband by
the arm, "you won't give him that?"
"Why not? I promised him long ago that I'd get it for him, and he
particularly asked for it as a wedding gift."
"Oh, Will; don't do it! He'll use it sometime when he's blue; he'll----"
"Nonsense," responded the physician, restoring the case to his pocket.
"I've diagnosed his case perfectly. He isn't very robust, he's
infernally sensitive, and he's no end morbid. He fancies he may want to
kill himself, and I dare say he will have leanings that way. Most of us
do. He has wanted to a good many times before now, and he is likely to
again, but he won't do it. He's too soft-hearted. He might get up steam
enough as far as courage goes, but he'd never forget other people and
their opinion. He couldn't bear to hurt others, and still less could he
bear the idea of their blaming him. He is precisely the man who cannot
take his own life."
"But what puts it into his head just now? Why should he marry if he
dreads it so?"
"It is all of a piece with his morbidness. He is really in love with
Miss Caldwell, I think, but he has brooded over the matter as he broods
over every thing, and seeing the uncertain nature of matrimony, he like
a wise man provides for contingencies. There may be something behind
that I don't know of, but I think not. He'll feel easier if he has
this, and I am honestly doing him a favor, if it isn't in the way he
thinks."
"I do not know," persisted Helen, "but I do wish you wouldn't do it.
How would his bride feel if she knew?"
"I don't know her," Dr. Ashton returned coolly, "so of course I can't
tell how sensible she is; but in any case I can trust Arthur's
discretion."
"She's orthodox," said Helen, "or, no, I think she is not so bad as
that; but she would regard the idea of suicide as unspeakably wicked.
At least I think so; I never saw her but once. Oh, I do hate to have
Arthur marry her. It's dreadful!"
"Of course; it's dreadful to think of any man's marrying, for that
matter," he returned with a smile, "but he is a man who was sure to do
it sooner or later."
"He's a man of so much principle," Helen mused, half aloud.
"Principle," sneered her companion laughingly, "principle is only
formulated policy."
"I am dreadfully tired of epigrams," sighed Helen as they walked down
West street. "Whether Arthur learned the habit of you or you of him I
don't know; but the pair of you are enough to corrupt all Boston. I do
wish you'd give me that case. I'm sure I need it far more than Arthur
does. He's going to be married, his pictures are praised and are
beginning to sell, he has life before him and every thing to live for,
while I have nothing."
"Life is before you, too," answered her husband gravely, putting his
hand upon her arm to prevent her flying under the wheels of a carriage
which in her absorption she had not noticed. "Look here, Helen; it
wouldn't be any better if Arthur wanted to marry you. You are too
melancholy alone without having him to push you deeper into the slough
of despond."
"You are mistaken, Will," was the quiet response. "I am fond of Arthur,
very fond, indeed; but not in that way. I am a fool to grieve about his
marriage; I own that, though after all I've lived through I ought to be
too hardened to care. But you must acknowledge that it isn't very
pleasant for me to see him deliberately going away to marry a woman who
would consider me a Bohemian, and very likely anything but respectable,
because you and I choose to be comfortable apart instead of miserable
together. If I were not so utterly alone in the world, losing a friend
would not be so great a matter, perhaps; but he is all I have now,
Will."
"It is hard, old lady; that's a fact. I wish I could straighten things
out for you, but I don't see how I can."
"No," Helen said drearily, "nobody can."