The Pagans by Arlo Bates

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But Edith made her no answer. She was too much overwhelmed by the
various emotions which the disclosure of the evening had aroused.

Edith was, from Helen's point of view, fatally narrow, it is true; but
the latter might have reflected that the limitations of her friend's
vision were the faiths of the Christian world, and that her tenacity
arose not from obstinacy but sincerity. It is an age when belief and
doubt are brought face to face so sharply that the shock disturbs by
its jar the most ordinary affairs of life.

Edith was pure, high minded, simple souled, and for the rest she was
honest and earnest. Her creeds were vitalized by the warm fervor with
which she clung to them, and what more could be demanded of her?

She quitted the dining-room, and soon Helen heard the outer door close
behind her. The night gathered, and the lonely woman left behind sat
long in sad reverie, until the door was again opened to admit Dr.
Ashton.

XXVII.

WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE.
Hamlet; i.--2.

Dr. Ashton came in too full of his own interview with Arthur to notice
particularly if his wife showed signs of agitation.

"My dear," he said, throwing himself into a chair, "it is at once one
of the latest and the wisest of my reflections that you had better
consider a newly married man as an entire stranger and form his
acquaintance quite from the foundation, wholly unbiased by any notion
you had of him as a bachelor."

"His wife," responded Helen quietly, "has been dining with me, so I
understand something of the situation. But how did Arthur behave?"

"Like any husband who does not care to quarrel with his wife even when
he disapproves of her. It is upon that principle that matrimonial
felicity depends. Do you say Mrs. Fenton has been here?"

"Yes; she came to me for sympathy and I administered it by telling her
that I am your wife."

"The devil! I beg your pardon; but, Helen, it was precisely because I
knew she was sure to remember this Frontier scrape that I wanted her
not to know. She will be very hard on you."

"Christianity is always hard," returned she; "but what difference does
it make; it was only a question of time. She is sweet and pure and
good, Will, but her religion holds her in bands stronger than steel. I
couldn't long keep step with one in chains. It might as well come now
as any time."

Her husband looked at her with evident interest not unmixed with
admiration.

"She provokes me to do and to say childish things," Helen continued,
"just to shock her. I told her bluntly the other day that I had been
telling a falsehood, and she had the impertinence to look shocked. I am
not sure that I did not go so far as to say I 'lied,' a word that
hardly holds the place in English that it did in the good days of Mrs.
Opie. She would have been reconciled if I had said I told what I hoped
was true."

"I should have told her," laughed Dr. Ashton, "that I only used truth
as the Egyptians used straw in bricks, the smallest possible quantity
that will hold the rest together."

"I cannot see why Arthur married her," Helen said musingly.

"Oh, as to that, an idle man will fall in love with any pretty woman
who will snub him."

"But Arthur isn't idle, and she doesn't snub him."

"Very well; he married her because he fell in love for no reason but
the weakness of our sex."

"Love seems generally to be regarded by the masculine mind in the light
of a weakness."

"Isn't it?" her husband returned. "Love is the condition of desiring
the impossible, and if that is not a weakness, what becomes of logic?"

"I am tired of logic," she said, rising abruptly. "I am tired of every
thing. Let us have supper. I want a glass of wine. I am sure I tried to
be kind to Mrs. Fenton. I would have helped her if I could; but how
could I assist her unless she chose to let me, and that, too, knowing
who I am."

"I never knew you to be other than kind," was the grave reply, which
brought to Helen's cheek a faint flush of pleasure.

The servant came in with supper, and the slender glasses were filled
with Rhine wine.

"I could not help thinking," Dr. Ashton said, lifting his glass,--"I
drink to your very good health, my dear--I could not help thinking of
my wedding gift to Arthur, that he asked me for it, I mean."

"I thought of it, too, when his wife told me the story. It is well she
does not know that of you."

"Oh, it wouldn't matter," he said carelessly. "She couldn't feel a
greater horror of me than she does already. Do you see the mark of Cain
on my forehead, Helen?"

"Isn't it droll," she returned, with a smile half pensive, half
humorous, "to feel ourselves suddenly tried by new standards and found
so wanting. I am not sure but dramatic propriety demands that I should
poison Mrs. Fenton. I have that vial, you know."

"Did you notice the inscription on the vial?"

"No; is there one?"

"See for yourself," he answered, refilling his glass.

She rose from the table and brought from a small cabinet the morocco
case, unopened since Arthur had given it to her. A certain dread and
distaste had prevented her examining it. Now she sat down again in her
place, a beautiful woman, with the light falling upon her from above,
shining upon her golden hair, and bringing out the hues of her sea-blue
dress. Her husband watched her as she held the case a moment in her
delicate, firm fingers before unclasping it. He had learned within
these last weeks that his old love for Helen had re-awakened; or more
truly that a new affection had been born. The knowledge had come to him
through thinking upon the relations between Helen and Arthur and in
speculating concerning her feeling for Grant Herman, and it had been in
his mind when he described love as the desire for the impossible. He
had determined to speak his passion, but as he looked at his wife
sitting within arm's length yet as remote as if half the world lay
between them, he hesitated. Helen unclasped the case and lifted the
tiny cut-glass vial from its velvet bed.

"How extravagant you were in your vial," she said, involuntarily
lifting it to her nostrils.

"Don't!" Dr. Ashton exclaimed, leaning forward suddenly.

"Is it so deadly as that!" she asked in some dismay, holding it off.

"It is simply pure prussic acid," he replied. "But it might be loosely
stopped."

She examined carefully the minute writing engraved upon the glass.

"'Death foils the gods,'" she read. "Is it one of your own
wickednesses, Will?" "I don't know. By the way, we might send it to
Mrs. Fenton now as a souvenir of the two desirable acquaintances she
has lost."

"What a brood of vipers she must think us, Will. I think it is
pathetic, probably; but I cannot help being amused. It is rather an odd
sensation to find that instead of being the harmless, insignificant
body I have always supposed, I am really a hardened and abandoned
reprobate."

"Oh, I've always known it, but I did not tell you for fear of
destroying your peace of mind."

"I'm afraid," sighed Helen, rather absently, "that--if you don't mind
the slang--Arthur has an elephant on his hands."

"Yes," assented the other, "himself."

She laughed musically, toying with the little cut-glass vial.

"How familiarity takes away the dread of any thing," she remarked. "We
become accustomed to any thing; and, while I dare say it is the
shallowest of sophistry, that ought to be an argument in favor of the
theory that vice and fearfulness are alike only strangeness."

"That is rather a sophistical bit of logic; so perfectly so that it
ought to be theology. Excuse me, but could you let me have a morsel of
cheese."

"There does not seem to be any for you to have," she said, glancing
over the table.

"Isn't there," returned he, as carelessly as if he had not noted that
fact. "It is of no consequence."

"Oh, I can easily get it; I suppose Hannah forgot it."

She restored the vial to its place, laying the closed case by her
plate, and left the room. The instant the door closed behind her, Dr.
Ashton reached across the table, possessed himself of the vial,
returning the case to its former position. His wife turned just outside
the door, and came back with a meaning smile to take up the empty case
and lock it again in the cabinet.

"I cannot trust you," she remarked with a smile; "you are too eager to
foil the gods."

He smiled in return, holding his wine-glass up to the light.

"There is more where that came from," he said. "You forget my
profession."

"Of what are you musing so intently?" Helen queried, half an hour
later, while, the supper being ended, her husband was enjoying his
cigar.

"Of two things which I have to communicate. One is a folly and the
other--or perhaps I should say each--is a misfortune."

"The folly," returned she, "I forgive; the misfortune I regret. What
are they?" "I am glad you forgive the folly. That gives me boldness to
tell it. I have fallen in love."

"You, Will! With whom?"

"That is the madness of it. With my wife."

"Will!"

"It is the truth," he went on, half whimsically, but with a certain
ring of earnestness in his tone. "I acknowledge the madness, the poor
taste of a man's falling in love with his own wife, but the fact
stubbornly remains. I have been in love with you for a long time, but I
stood back for Arthur like a good fellow."

"I never was in love with Arthur," she interrupted.

"It is no matter," he continued. "The question is, can't you get up a
grain of grace for me, old lady?"

He leaned over the table, his dark eyes shining as she had never seen
them before. She was fascinated by his gaze; she felt as if the ground
were slipping from beneath her feet, and as though he were casting upon
her an evil spell. A wave of despair swept over her. Must she again
submit to his power; were the old days of bitter bondage to return; was
she nothing but a puppet to his will?

In this extremity a memory saved her. Unable to withdraw her gaze from
her husband's face, there came to her suddenly the look in the eyes of
Grant Herman that day when he told her his love. The blood surged to
her cheeks, but her calmness returned.

"It is of no use, Will," she said with gentle firmness. "All that is
past forever between us. We had better not speak of it," she added
wistfully. "I have so few friends that I cannot bear to lose any one of
them."

"My folly is then my misfortune," he responded, with no appearance of
diminished good humor. "It is the pleasure of the gods to torment me; I
suppose it amuses them. The old Romans were only aping them in their
blood-thirsty sports, and I fancy that is the secret of their
deification, for nothing seems so much to the liking of the gods as to
torment humanity."

The evident endeavor which the speaker made to appear flippant and at
his ease showed her how deeply he was moved. His wife felt this without
fully reasoning it out, and the consciousness that this self-controlled
man was so stirred awoke in her a strange and powerful excitement. She
turned a shade paler, as she looked silently down into her wine-glass.
Her own life had been too sad for her not to feel some emotion at his
words. She strove to repress the thoughts which made her bosom swell
and heave, yet it was from them her words came when she broke the
silence.

"It is bitterest to find one's self mistaken. To find that our gods are
only clay like the rest of humanity. I could forgive a friend for
neglect, abuse or any cruelty; but I could never forgive him for
falling below my ideal of him."

"You do not mean me," he returned placidly, "for of me you never had an
ideal; but waiving that for a moment, I should like to tell you of my
second misfortune--if it isn't to be reckoned a blessing."

She looked at him without speaking. If this disclosure were but a
repetition in varied form of the other, she had no wish to help him put
it into words. Yet even as this thought passed through her mind, she
fancied she had detected in his tone some new gravity.

"I've discovered," continued Dr. Ashton, with the same light manner he
had used throughout the interview, "that I have a cancer gayly but with
grim persistency developing under my arm."

"Oh, Will," Helen cried, clasping her hands, "you are not in earnest!"

"I assure you it is a very earnest matter with me, and has been for
some time. I might have an operation, I suppose, if it were worth
while; though it is so near the heart that it would be uncomfortably
risky."

Helen became suddenly calm. The color faded slowly from her cheeks, and
her husband, watching her narrowly, saw her beautiful lips assume a new
expression of firmness and determination. She unconsciously lifted her
head into a more erect carnage. Her eyes were moist and full of
feeling. Slowly in her mind formed a resolve, and with a full knowledge
of the renunciation of self which it involved, she called up all the
nobility of her soul to aid her in living up to it. Creeds were little
to this woman, yet her life was formed upon the principles which give
to creeds their stability, and by which the moral is removed from the
animal.

"Will," she at length said, slowly and gravely, "could it not be
arranged for me to live with you? You did not tell me you were fond of
me without having thought out the possibilities."

"I should have hesitated to ask so much," was his reply, "even of your
love; I shall certainly not take it of your pity."

"My pity?" she murmured, not raising her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"You know. You cannot think me so dull as not to see that your proffer
comes not from affection, but from generosity. I thank you, but I will
accept no sacrifices."

He rose as he spoke, and put out his hand.

"I must be going," he said in an indifferent tone. "I have letters to
write that must be mailed by midnight. I am not more than half as bad,
Helen, as you have always persisted in thinking. I never made very
profound pretensions, but I've treated every body squarely from my own
point of view. If they have regarded my blessings as curses, it wasn't
my fault, and I am not sufficiently hypocritical to pretend that I
think it was. Good night."

He gave her hand a warmer and more lingering pressure than usual.

"I've had a very pleasant evening," he added, "despite the admixture of
truth. Young people don't like any bitters, but we old, shattered
wrecks need a dash of it in the wine of life to help digestion. Good
night."

XXVIII.

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."

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