A SYMPATHY OF WOE.
Titus Andronicus; iii.--I.
"I am afraid you will think me intrusive," was Edith's hesitating
greeting to Helen, "but I could not help coming. I thought you might
feel lonely."
Helen looked at her for a moment with wistful eyes and trembling lips:
then she crossed swiftly to where her friend stood and kissed her. And
never could these two be so wholly separated or estranged again as to
efface the memory of all the meaning that this caress conveyed. The
word which Edith had used had been most happily chosen. Her woman's
instinct divined the loneliness which overwhelmed the widow, and this
proof of her sympathy was the passport to Mrs. Greyson's heart.
Loneliness was the feeling of which Helen was most of all conscious.
The death of even an indifferent acquaintance often may seem to
desolate the earth from its simple irremediableness, and much more does
the removal of one near to us make the world appear half a void.
Helen had been sitting alone before Edith came, reviewing her past and
drearily speculating of her future. She went over the days of her
wedded life; her innocent, introspective childhood, in which she had
dreamed and read, dwelling in a world apart; alone but for the ideal
creations of her books or her own quick fancy. She had married knowing
as little of life or of love, as when, a lonely child, she had spelled
out the tale of Prince Camaralzaman, and wondered what the divine
passion really was, or if indeed it had existence, outside of fairy
lore.
The torch of death throws its glare backward, and its funeral light
showed many a past long since forgotten, but now revealed with new and
distorting vividness. Helen remembered the baby which had lived but
long enough to open its eyes with a smile that seemed of recognition,
and then faded back into the unknown whence it had come. A throb of
tenderness for the dead father moved the mother's heart as she thought
of her baby, so little time hers, and so long asleep under the
marguerites of a grave over the sea. She had suffered much from the
selfishness, the dominant self-will, the distorted views of life of Dr.
Ashton; and these things she even now could not forget; but, too, she
thought of him as the father of her child, her baby ever dear and
living in memory.
She reflected, too, of the men she had known, and especially of Arthur
Fenton. Her nature had need of some one upon whom to expend its
treasures, and she realized that had she not felt in the artist a
certain insincerity, he might have awakened her love. He had been
appreciative, sympathetic, brilliant; and, too, he had called largely
upon her patience and forbearance, than which there is no surer way to
win a generous woman's affection. Yet always some note rang false to
her fine ear, and to the weakness of his nature she had never been
wholly blind, although not until his marriage had given him a certain
distance had she realized how deep and unsparing her knowledge of him
really was.
Of Grant Herman she would not think. Thoughts of him arose again and
again in her mind, but she resolutely put them down. Some secret stir
of mingled pain and joy told her too well that the sculptor had
awakened the first love of her life. But at least with her husband,
however unloved, lying yet unburied, she would not dwell upon the
passion of another.
She took Edith's hand, and the two women sat down side by side,
shedding tears together, rather from a sense of the general woe and
bitterness of life than for poignant grief for the present calamity. It
was not much they said at first. Neither was of the talkative order of
women, finding comfort in the mere utterance of words. They grew
together, sustained by giving and receiving tenderness, and each
tacitly asking and according forgiveness for unfriendly feelings in the
past. It is probable, too, that Edith, heavy with the disappointments
of her married life, found relief in being able to weep unrestrainedly,
even though the true source of her tears was not the obvious one.
"I never loved him," Helen said of her husband. "After we separated we
became friends, rather because of a common past when we were both
strangers here, than from any fitness for each other. But he was once
my husband."
Her friend pressed her hand in silence.
"We had a child," Helen spoke again; "a little daughter. She only lived
one day. If she had not gone it might have been different. At least we
should have kept on together. My poor little baby!"
Edith's eyes were full of tears, as she answered softly:
"I hope you will let me say that I believe she is waiting for you some
where."
"She must be," the mother responded quickly. "Whatever one doubts, one
must surely believe that. I could not lose her! She is mine, wherever
in the universe she may be."
"Yes," was all Edith ventured in reply. "I am sure of it."
They gave no heed to the fading day, but sat with clasped hands until
twilight had gathered, and it occurred at last to Mrs. Fenton that her
husband and dinner must be awaiting her. Helen had been telling of her
plans.
"I shall go abroad," she said, "I want to study in Rome; I want to meet
great men; to be influenced by great works. I have been thinking of it
for a long time, and now it seems as if some ties that held me here are
broken, for we often obey claims which we yet deny. And besides," she
added, in a lower tone, "it is a flight from temptation. I am in danger
here."
"In danger?" Edith asked wonderingly.
"Only from myself," was the reply, "but that peril is sufficiently
imminent to make me afraid."
Edith questioned no further, and to the true import of these words she
had no clue. She looked at her friend a moment inquiringly and
musingly, but as Helen did not continue, she rose to go.
"I must get home now," she said, in a tone so tender that it seemed to
beg pardon for this abandonment. "Arthur is waiting for me and his
dinner; and if he doesn't get the latter at least, I won't answer for
the consequences. Mr. Calvin was with him when I came away."
"Mr. Peter Calvin!" exclaimed the other, in some surprise.
"Yes; he has bought one of Arthur's pictures, and he wants Arthur to
propose him at the St. Filipe Club, I believe."
She spoke in perfect ignorance of the tumult her words excited in her
hearer's mind. Long after Edith was gone Helen sat looking out into the
darkening sky and thinking of Arthur Fenton. She had heard him talk too
often about Mr. Peter Calvin not to know what was implied by this new
friendship. Mr. Peter Calvin had been for years the head and front of
Boston Philistinism in art. He had been the patron of subservient
artists; the chairman of committees for the purchase of public statues;
an elegant writer upon such live and timely topics as _Plaster
Casting among the Egyptians, Notes upon Abyssinian Statues_, while
his monograph upon the question, _What Was the Original Cost of the
Venus de Milo?_ had by his flatterers been pronounced the
masterpiece of all known art essays for power and critical research.
His was a prominent name upon the covers of dilettante art journals; it
was he who effectually crushed young and too daringly independent
artists; who repressed impertinent originality; who headed the hosts of
conventionality against individuality or genius which held itself above
the established canons of antiquated tradition. He was the High Priest
of Boston conservatism; the presiding genius of Philistia; and until
the St. Filipe Club entered a protest against him by refusing to admit
him to membership, his power had scarcely received a blow.
Tom Bently always insisted, with much profanity, that Mr. Peter Calvin
was a joke.
"He writes with tremendous pomposity," Tom would say, "and he is in no
end of societies for molly-coddling art. He goes on, too, about the
plaster casts at that hospital for decrepit gods, the Art Museum, as if
his whole soul was in the plaster barrels of the Greeks. But bless your
soul! It's only his little joke. He doesn't really mean any thing by
it. He's only a stupendous joke himself."
The Pagans, so far as they were to be regarded as an entity,
represented the protest of the artistic soul against shams. They stood
for sincerity above everything; for utter honesty in art, in life, in
manners and morals alike. To them Philistinism was the substitution of
convention for conviction. For the spirit of imitation, of blind
subservience to authority, the Pagans had no tolerance. While they held
themselves always open to conviction, they refused assent to any thing
which was offered them _ex cathedra_; they devoted themselves to
art with a passion of enthusiasm which was in itself the highest
expression of their principles. That they seemed often iconoclastic was
in reality less the result of their hatred of authority than the
prevalence of unreasoning, and therefore by their standards necessarily
insincere, adherence to established formulae. Dogmas they hated, not
because they were popularly received, but because although they had
been vital realities to their originators, they had become in time mere
lifeless forms, held in reverence by blind devotees long after the soul
had gone out of them.
In art especially the Pagans demanded the most absolute surrender of
self to truth; and it should be added that they defined truth exactly
as Helen did, "that which one sincerely believes." They had no
condemnation too severe or sweeping for the artist who worshipped the
golden gods of Philistia by following popular conventions at the
expense of his honest art ideals. It is not impossible that they
carried this feeling to extremes sometimes, suspecting every thing
which was stamped with popular approval, but in the main at least their
standard was of the highest and their lives conformed well to it.
Measured by the creeds they rejected, they might often enough be found
wanting; tried by their own, there had never been an apostate among
them until the defection of Fenton.
No one had been more bitter and outspoken in his condemnation of Mr.
Calvin and of what he represented than Arthur Fenton. Many a time he
had entertained Helen with stories of the presumption and the ignorance
of this man whom now he was receiving into his friendship, or, more
properly, in whose train of sycophants he had taken his place.
Helen could not forgive him. Leaving dinner untasted, she sat with
burning cheeks in the darkness, mourning over the apostacy of the man
who had been her warmest friend.