HEART-SICK WITH THOUGHT.
Two Gentlemen of Verona; i.--I.
The Fentons were just going to dinner when Helen arrived, and she was
persuaded to dine with them. She was not without some curiosity to
observe her friend in his new relations, and she also found herself
attracted by Edith, although the two women had apparently little in
common.
The talk at dinner flowed on easily enough, Arthur conversing in the
strain which of old Helen had been pleased to call "amiable," and which
fretted her by being conventional and not wholly sincere. She liked the
artist best when he spoke without restraint, even though she might not
agree with his extravagances and often detected a trace of
artificiality in his clever epigrams. It seemed to her that the whole
tendency of Edith's influence upon her husband was towards restraint,
yet she could not be sure whether the ultimate result upon Fenton's
character might not be beneficial.
"It depends upon Arthur himself," Helen mused. "If he is strong enough
to endure the struggle of adapting his honest belief to her honest
belief, he will be the better for it. I hope his love of ease will not
make him evade the difficulty. It never used to occur to me how little
I really know Arthur, so that I cannot tell how this will be."
When the host was enjoying his after dinner cigar, which by especial
indulgence upon the part of Edith he was allowed to smoke in the
parlor, Helen disclosed the object of her visit.
"Do you remember," she asked, "that model who posed for my May, and was
to come to you next week?"
"Ninitta? Of course. What of her?"
"That is precisely what I wish to find out," she responded. "She has
changed her address, and I thought it possible you might know something
of her whereabouts."
"I have not seen her since the morning when she came into your studio.
Doesn't Herman know?"
"The truth is," Helen said slowly, weighing her words with regard to
their effect upon Edith, "that she has run away, and we do not know
what has become of her. She went off in a rage, and I am troubled about
her."
"Is she the Italian you spoke of, Arthur?" interrupted Mrs. Fenton in
her soft voice. "What is she like?"
"Yes; a black-haired, splendidly shaped girl with piercing black eyes."
"I think I know where she is," Edith said quietly.
"You?" the others asked in one breath.
"You see," Mrs. Fenton explained, turning towards Helen, "I have made
rather a plunge into charity work. Of course I meant to do something,
but I hardly expected to begin quite so soon. But Mr. Candish is my
rector, and he came for me yesterday to go to an Italian family that
cannot speak English well. The children have just been put into our
schools, but they have not advanced very far as yet. Their teacher
asked Mr. Candish to do something for them; they are wretchedly poor. I
wish you could see the place, Mrs. Greyson. Eight people in a room not
so large as this, and such poverty as you could hardly imagine. Yet
these people had taken in another. The mother goes about selling fruit,
and she happened to speak to this girl that I think is Ninitta in her
own language one night. The girl had been wandering about in the cold,
not knowing where to go, and I suppose the sound of her own tongue
touched her heart. Poor thing; she would not speak a word to me. How
strange that I should chance to find her."
"Thank heaven she is safe," was Helen's inward exclamation. Aloud she
said: "But what is she doing?"
"Nothing," Edith answered. "She seems to have had a little money, so
that she can pay the family something, and she has helped to take care
of the children. They are Catholics, naturally, and not in Mr.
Candish's parish; but they do not seem to have much religion of any
kind, and keep clear of the priest for some reason."
"My wife will know more of the North End in a month," Arthur observed
with an effort at good humor which did not wholly conceal from Helen a
trace of annoyance, "than I should in six years. I wonder she can bear
to go into such dirty places. Of course philanthropy is all very well,
but I'd rather take it after it has been disinfected."
The bitterness in his tone jarred upon Helen. She felt a pang at his
evident dissatisfaction with his wife's views, his want of harmony with
his new surroundings.
"Arthur must be disciplined," Mrs. Fenton said, smiling fondly. "If he
once learns that the secret of being happy lies in helping others,
he'll be unselfish from mere selfishness, if from nothing else."
"Happy!" Helen exclaimed involuntarily. "Does one ever expect to be
happy nowadays? Happiness went out of fashion with our grandmothers'
bonnets."
"In this world," Edith answered, without any trace in her voice of the
reproof which Helen half expected, "perhaps you are right. The age is
too restless and skeptical for happiness here; but that makes me long
the more for it hereafter."
"But even in a future life," returned Helen, "I can hardly expect to be
happy, since I shall still be myself."
"Happiness," was Mrs. Fenton's reply, "is a question of harmony with
surroundings, is it not? And your surroundings in the other life may be
such that you cannot but be happy."
"No more theology, please," interposed Arthur. "You forget, Edith, that
I have been to church to-day, and too much piety at once might impair
my spiritual digestion forever."
A perception that the flippancy of his tone shocked his wife, made
Helen turn the conversation again to Ninitta, arranging to go with Mrs.
Fenton in the morning to find the missing girl.
They fell into silence after this, the twilight deepening until only
the glow of the fire lighted the room. Edith went to the piano and
played a bit of Mozart, wandering off then into the hymn-tunes which
she loved and which were familiar in all orthodox homes of the last
generation: plaintive _Olmutz_ and stately _Geneva_, aspiring
_Amsterdam_ and resonant _St. Martin's_, placid _Boylston_ and grand
_Hamburg, Nuremburg, Benevento, Turner_ and _Old Hundred_; the tunes
of our fathers, the melodies which embody the spirit of the old time
New England Sabbath, a day heavy, constrained and narrow, it may be;
but, too, a day calm, unworldly and pure.
Arthur's cigar was finished, and he had fallen into a deep reverie,
looking into the coals. He recalled his conversations with Helen before
his marriage. He wondered whether his acquiescence in the limitations
of his present condition, his yielding to his wife's social and
religious views, was an advance or a deterioration. These pious tunes
jarred upon his mood, and he was glad when his wife left the
instrument. His Bohemian instinct stirred within him, and taunted the
ease-loving quality of his nature which put him in subjection to that
which he believed no more now than in the days when he was the most
sharp-spoken of the Pagans. A wave of disgust and self-loathing swept
over him. He turned abruptly in the dusk toward Helen.
"Sing to us," he said. "Edith has never heard you."
But Helen had been moved by the melodies, which came to her as an echo
from her childhood. She understood the half-peremptory accent in
Arthur's voice to which she had so often yielded, but to which she
would not now submit.
"No," she answered. "How can you ask me. My barbaric chant would be
wholly out of keeping here. Some other time I shall be glad to sing for
Mrs. Fenton; now I must go home."