LIKE COVERED FIRE.
Much Ado about Nothing; iii.--I.
That night marked an epoch in the married life of Arthur and Edith
Fenton.
The results of matrimony upon character are for the most part slow and
hardly perceptible, yet even so not without certain well-defined stages
by which their progression forces itself into recognition; and in
fervid temperaments like that of the artist, any change is sure to be
rapid, and marked by sharp and sudden crises.
Edith returned from Helen with her soul in a tumult. Grant Herman had
described more than her face when he applied to her the epithet
nun-like. It was a source of perpetual wonderment to many of her
friends that such a girl could be so strongly attracted by Arthur
Fenton; but those who knew his marvelous flexibility, the unconscious
hypocrisy with which he adapted himself to any nature with which he
came in contact, and on the other hand his fascinating manner, at once
brilliant and sympathetic, felt Edith's love to be the perfectly
natural consequence. She believed him to be what she wished, and he,
without conscious deceit, became for the time being what she believed
him to be.
It was a theory of Dr. Ashton's that what Arthur Fenton became was so
purely a question of environment as to leave the artist all but
irresponsible. This fatalistic view he had laid before his wife with
some detail, at once explaining and defending his position.
"If a chameleon is put upon a black tree," he said on one occasion when
the matter was under discussion, "you have really no right to blame him
for becoming black too; it is simply his nature. If Arthur is like that
it isn't his fault. He wasn't consulted, I fancy, about how he should
be made at all. He is self-indulgent, and if a point hurts him he
glides away from it. He cannot help it."
"There is something in what you say," Helen had reluctantly assented,
"but I think you put it far too strongly."
"Oh, very likely," was the careless reply. "His strongest instinct,
though, is to escape pain. We are none of us better than our
instincts."
To such a decision as this, had she heard it, Edith, too religious to
acknowledge any thing tending towards fatalism, would not for a moment
have agreed; yet it embodied a truth destined to cause her deepest
sorrow, and which was gradually forcing itself upon her. Already,
although they had been married so few weeks, even her love-blinded eyes
could not but perceive much in her husband which shocked and pained
her. She had not considered deeply enough, never having had the
experience which would have taught her the need of considering, how
great was the gulf between her moral standpoint and that of her
betrothed. He had seemed so yielding that she had failed to perceive
that his compliances were merely outward, and left his mental attitude
unchanged. Now when it became necessary, as in every wedded life it
must sooner or later, for her to appeal to his ultimate moral belief,
she was startled to find nothing with which she was in sympathy. A
cynic--or, indeed, her husband himself--would have assured her that it
was, after all, a question of standards merely, and that difference of
judgment was natural and inevitable, and that measured by his own
convictions Arthur was quite well enough. Her answer to such a
proposition would have been that there was but one standard, and that
what differed from that were not moral principles at all, but excuses
for immoral obliquity.
Outwardly, it is true, there was little in her husband's life of which
Edith could complain. He accompanied her to church, and if he quizzed
the preacher after returning home, she was ready to excuse this as the
natural result of a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. He allowed her
to do as she chose in the matter of charity work, and he even refrained
from going to his studio on Sunday, a sacrifice whose magnitude she had
no means of estimating, and which she therefore thought would be
continuous. It was when some ethical question arose between them that
Edith was disquieted, feeling sometimes as if she were looking into
black deeps of immorality. The principles which to her were most
sacred, were to him light subjects upon which, she was well aware, only
her presence prevented his jesting. The most obvious laws of rectitude
were but thistle-down before the whirlwind of his subversive theories;
and Edith found argument impossible with one who denied her every
premise.
His old acquaintances found in Arthur Fenton a change more subtle but
none the less distasteful. It was a trait of his nature to assume the
character he was half unconsciously acting, as a player may between the
scenes still feel the personality he is simulating upon the stage; and
there was about Fenton when he came in contact with the Pagans, a vague
air of remonstrance and disapproval, even when he was as bold as ever
in his own cynical utterances.
"An expression of virtuous indignation isn't becoming in you, Fenton,"
Rangely said to him one day. "Especially in a discussion which you
started yourself by the most shocking piece of wickedness I ever
heard."
And among all the Pagans there existed a yet unspoken feeling that
Fenton was ceasing to be one of them.
On returning from Helen's, Edith found her husband still engaged with
Dr. Ashton, but as soon as the latter had gone Arthur came to her room.
"Well," he said, sinking leisurely into a chair. "Do you feel any
milder? Have you had your dinner?"
"Yes," she returned, not leaving her seat on the opposite side of the
room. "I have been dining with Mrs. Ashton."
"What!" cried Arthur, as if a bomb had exploded at his feet. Then he
sank back into his languid position. "So she has told you," he remarked
carelessly.
"Yes, she has told me. Did you know, Arthur, when you brought us
together, that she was living under a false name, and under false
pretenses?"
"I knew certainly," replied her husband with a coolness that marked his
inward irritation, "that her legal name was Ashton. I have still to
learn that she is living under false pretenses."
"Is it not false," retorted Edith, with difficulty controlling her
voice, her indignation increasing with every word, "to pass as widow,
to live separated from her husband?"
"Oh, false? Why, in your stiff, conventional definition of the word
that calls the letter every thing, the spirit nothing, I dare say it is
false; but what of that? She has a right to do as she pleases, has she
not?"
Edith drew herself back in her chair and looked at him across the dimly
lighted chamber. It is but justice to her husband to consider that he
could not dream of the anguish she suffered. It was, as he so often
said, a question of standards. By his, she was narrow, uncharitable,
even bigoted; tried by the code of more orthodox circles she was simply
high-minded, true and noble in her devotion to principle. She was
neither bigoted nor prudish, however the alien circumstances in which
she was placed made her appear so. To her it was a vital question of
right and purity of which Arthur disposed with such contemptuous
lightness. True as the sunlight herself, no pang could be more bitter
than the knowledge that the truth was not sacred to the man she loved.
Her husband's words pierced her like a dagger. It was some minutes
before she answered him. He rose moodily, lit a cigar at the gas jet
and sat down again before she broke the silence.
"Arthur," she said in a voice which was sad and full of the solemnity
of deep feeling, "have you no regard for truth?"
"Truth!" retorted he. "To go back to Pilate's conundrum, 'What is
truth?' If you mean a strict and fantastic adherence to facts and to
stiff conventional rules, no, I haven't the slightest regard for truth.
If you mean the eternal verities as a man's own nature and the occasion
interpret them, yes, I have the highest."
"But that is only a confusion of words, Arthur. What do you mean by
'eternal verities' if not adherence to facts? The eternal verities
cannot be whatever it pleases any one to say. Doesn't all human
intercourse depend upon faith in one another that we will adhere to
facts? Even if you do not look at the right and the wrong, there are
surely reasons enough why the truth should be sacred."
Her husband whiffed his cigar, idly blowing a succession of graceful
rings.
"You are quite a metaphysician. Did you have a pleasant dinner?"
"But, Arthur," Edith persisted, ignoring his attempt to break away,
according to his habit, from a discussion which did not please him,
"but, Arthur, do you think it right for Mrs. Greyson--Mrs. Ashton, I
mean, to live so?"
"Right? Oh, that is the same old question in another shape. Mr. Candish
will answer all those theological riddles; it is his business to. They
don't interest me."
He threw away his half smoked cigar, dusted his coat sleeve of a stray
fleck of ash, settled his cravat before the glass, and humming a tune
walked towards his wife, his hands clasped behind him.
"We do not agree, Edith," he said with cold deliberation, "and unless
you broaden your views, I am afraid we never shall. You are a dozen
decades behind the day, and are foolish enough to take all your church
teaches you in earnest. Religion should no more be taken without salt
than radishes. The church inculcates it to excuse its own existence,
but you certainly are reasonable enough to outgrow this old-fashioned
Puritanism."
"Arthur," was her answer, "we do not agree, and if you wait for me to
come to your standards, I am afraid you are right in saying that we
never shall; and, indeed, I hope you are right. It makes me more
unhappy than you can think," she continued, her eyes swimming with
bitter tears, "that we are so far apart on what I must believe to be
vital points; on truths which I believe, Arthur, with my whole soul--as
you would, too, had you not carefully educated yourself into a doubt
which cannot make you better or happier."
She had risen as she spoke, and stood facing him, her pure, pale face
confronting his with a look of pathos which touched him despite
himself. She came a step nearer, and put her arms about his neck.
"Oh, Arthur!" she pleaded, "I love you, and how can I help mourning
that you wrong your better nature; that you resist the impulses of your
own best self?"
He yielded to her caresses in silence. He remembered that Helen had
used this same phrase.
"Women always appeal to one's best self," he commented inly, with a
mental shrug, "which means a man's inclination to do whatever a woman
asks of him."
But he kissed his wife's lips, and said, tolerantly:
"We will talk it over some other time, my dear. We are both tired
to-night. But you are right, I suppose, as you always are."
And she loosened her arms from his neck, recognizing that he had put
her appeal aside and waived the whole matter.