A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN.
Love's Labor's Lost; i.--1.
Dr. Ashton had been in his grave several weeks. Life had gone on much
as usual in Boston, with the bickerings of small souls the gaping
imitations of the mob, the carping of the self-appointed critics, and
the earnest endeavor of the honest and inspired workers, who leaven the
lump of modern civilization.
Among the Pagans the nomination of Mr. Calvin to the St. Filipe Club by
Arthur Fenton had been received with a bitterness born of a feeling of
outraged confidence. They were to-night to meet in Tom Bently's studio,
and Fenton, who had no intention of being present, was yet keenly
conscious of what the talk there concerning him would be. He was glum
and moody at dinner, and Edith, who knew that this was Pagan night,
watched him wistfully. She hoped to win him away from friends and
acquaintances who seemed to her dangerous. Perfectly honest and ready
to lay down her life for her husband, she was yet urging him into paths
which he felt it to be degradation to walk, since they led him away
from sincerity. She had no means of knowing how his sudden championship
of Mr. Calvin was regarded. Her own relations to art had been those of
pretty amateurishness. She had been bred to believe in conventionality,
and the flavor of Bohemianism alarmed and repelled her.
To-night she had put on her most becoming dress, she had ordered the
dinner with especial reference to her husband's tastes, and she exerted
herself to be as entertaining and attractive as lay in her power. She
even allowed herself the innocent ruse of delaying dinner a little,
that it might be later before Arthur could be ready to go out; and when
the answer to her timid hope that he was to be at home that evening,
was in the affirmative, her foolish, tender heart fluttered with
delighted hope that she was influencing him to shake off his irregular
associations.
He was rather gloomy and silent all the evening, brooding of the
Pagans, from whose meetings he had never before been absent, and of
Helen, and what she would think. Edith tried all her arts and wiles to
make him forget the pleasure he was losing, and she partly succeeded,
since her attentions and endearments chimed in with the train of
thought by which he was endeavoring to prove to his own satisfaction
that he was the most virtuous of men, and that his swearing allegiance
to Philistinism, was a noble example of a transgressor willing to
confess and abjure his faults. He accepted his wife's attentions as
eminently fitting under the circumstances, and could he have forgotten
the Pagans and Helen, he might almost have been comfortable. More than
once in the old days he had found it hard to face Mrs. Greyson's clear
eyes, which saw so readily through shams, and now while he was able to
work himself into a defensive attitude towards all others of his old
friends, he felt a horrible humiliation in the consciousness that Helen
was sure to know of his course and to understand all its weakness.
It occurred to him, too, that Helen had avoided him of late. Since the
death of Dr. Ashton, he had scarcely seen her, although she was often
with his wife. He knew from Edith that she was soon to go abroad, and
he wondered if the wish to escape him had any share in bringing her to
this decision.
He tormented himself with speculations and memories until he could
endure it no longer. He must have comfort; his wounded self-sufficiency
craved the balm of approval, and although he was contemptuously
conscious of his own weakness, he turned to Edith to seek admiration
and praise.
"So you are glad that I am not going to the Pagans to-night," he said
to her, as they sat before the fire, for the evening was damp and
chilly.
"Very glad," she answered, leaving her chair to come and sit upon a low
hassock by his knee. "It was so good of you."
She made a beautiful picture as she sat there, her long dress of
cardinal and stone gray silk gathered in waves about her, the
Elizabethan ruffle setting off her shapely head and slender neck, while
the soft, yellow old lace showed how clear was the tone of her skin.
Her pure, sweet face, with its appealing dark eyes, was turned upward
to her husband's, in an expression at once wistful and full of love.
Edith had always a highbred air, and to-night her attitude and
expression added the one charm of warmth and softness needed to make
her most lovely and moving.
"You doubtless have some excellent reason," remarked Arthur smiling
down on her.
"I am afraid of them; they are in arms against every thing that is
acknowledged to be good."
"And yet they are the most honest men I ever knew," he returned, half
musing, and with a little pleased sense of his magnanimity in saying
this at a moment when they were probably abusing him.
"I don't know, Arthur. Perhaps they may be honest, but I am sure it is
not good for you to be with them. They are so sure that their false
views of life are true."
The little sting in the implication that he was not able to resist the
influence which had surrounded him was forgotten in the satisfactory
view which his wife took of the real value of the judgments of the
Pagans. He knew how little she understood them. With every premise upon
which her conclusions were founded he disagreed, yet he said to himself
that Edith was right; that the Pagans were quite too infallible about
every thing. They would have him grope along poor and unknown, he
argued with himself, simply for the sake of standing in the position of
chronic rebuke to established authorities; with only now and then a
chance to get a hearing upon what they assumed to be the true theory of
art. What they believed--ah! there after all was the weakness of the
whole. What ground had they for their belief? Did he himself really
believe any thing, or had he a right to assert in any matter a positive
conviction? And even if they or he asserted never so strongly, what
sort of a test of truth was that? After all the Philistines, the
Calvins, were as likely to be right as were a set of discontented if
not disappointed artists; men whose natures would never allow them to
be satisfied with any existing state of things, since it would
inevitably differ from their dreamy ideals. And it was certainly true
that the weight of authority and of numbers was with the Philistines.
"Perhaps you are right, Edith," he said aloud. "I hope so at least, for
they are probably indignant enough with me."
"With you? Why?"
"Oh, they choose to think I went over to Philistia when I proposed Mr.
Calvin for the St. Filipe. I'm sure I don't see why I haven't a right
to propose whom I please."
"But Mr. Calvin, Arthur," responded Edith, who regarded that gentleman
as one of the art gods of Boston. "I should think any body would be
proud to propose him. Why, he is one of the most distinguished men in
the city."
Her husband did not answer for a moment. He looked into the fire and
watched his inner consciousness adapt itself to this view of the case,
which than himself no one had condemned more bitterly. Yet it was the
theory upon which it was necessary to rest did he expect to arrive at
any comfort in the course of supporting Mr. Calvin, which he had
already pursued so far that retreat was impossible. Yes, he assured
himself, he could even accept this. And why not? Did not common opinion
confirm it; and however much common opinion might be sneered at, it was
surely the voice of the common sense of the world.
He looked down at his wife, who looked back smiling proudly. He
realized how pure, how tender, how true she was. He knew, too, that she
was daily and hourly weaving about him bands which held him captive to
beliefs which though true to her were the veriest falsehoods to him;
and that only his love of ease, his fatal complaisance, prevented his
rending these cords as did Samson the new ropes of the Philistines. He
realized that he was sacrificing his manhood, that he was bartering his
convictions for flattery and ease by allying himself to Calvin and his
following. He recalled Helen's remark that what is called being honest
with one's self is often the subtlest form of hypocrisy, and he did not
spare himself a single pang of self-humiliation and contempt; and then,
when he was full to the throat with self-loathing, he let his sensuous,
self-loving nature devise excuse and soothe his wounded vanity.
He looked into the fire with a smile of mingled bitterness and
complacency, half ashamed, half amused at the view which introspection
gave him.
But whenever into his musings came the thought of Helen it rankled like
a poisoned barb. For he secretly believed that Helen loved him, and
although if a man humiliates himself in the eyes of the woman he loves
it is as bitter as death; yet to prove unworthy in the sight of her who
hopelessly loves him, contains a more subtly envenomed shaft, which
wounds that most sensitive spot in a sensuous man's nature--his vanity.