The Pagans by Arlo Bates
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Arlo Bates >> The Pagans
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"Oh, but I do," Edith said, laughing and clasping her hands with a
pretty gesture of mock despair. "I feel that the day of my bondage is
advancing with unfaltering tread, like the day of doom."
"Then you should do as I do by the day of doom, disbelieve in it
altogether until it comes."
"It is of no use. Even disbelief will not alter the almanac, as you'll
find when the day of doom swoops down on you."
They were sitting upon one of the hard benches in the picture-gallery
of the Art Museum before an important work just sent over from Europe
by its American purchaser. The afternoon light was beginning to be a
little dim, and Edith was troubled with the consciousness that the
errands which had brought her for the day to Boston were far from being
accomplished. It was pleasant to linger, however, especially as this
might be the last tranquil day she should pass with Arthur before their
marriage.
She rose from her seat and crossed to the picture of Millet
representing a peasant girl with a distaff of flax in her hand. Fenton
sat a moment looking after his betrothed, critically though fondly,
then with a deliberate movement he left his seat and followed her.
"Think of the distance between this country and that picture," he
remarked, regarding the beautiful canvas. "Art in America is simply an
irreclaimable mendicant that stands on the street corners and holds out
the catch-penny hand of a beggar."
"Oh, no," Miss Caldwell replied, turning her clear glance to his, "that
is only an impostor that pretends to be art. The real goddess has her
temples here."
"Yes," returned he, with a laugh that covered a sneer, "but not in the
way you mean."
A shadow passed over her face; she turned a wistful glance towards him.
"I cannot understand, Arthur," she said, "why you speak so bitterly
about art here. Of course, all great men are apt to be misunderstood at
first, but you--"
"I am over estimated," he interrupted, inly vexed at having given the
conversation this turn. "It is only for the sake of talking, _ma
petite_. Don't mind it."
"But, Arthur," she persisted, "I want to say something. Uncle Peter
talks as if you sided with the artists here who--who--"
She was wholly at a loss to phrase what she wished to say, both because
her ideas were rather vague and because she feared lest she might
offend her lover by talking upon a subject which he had markedly
avoided. He made now a fresh effort to divert the talk into a new
channel.
"Never mind the artists," he said, "we really must go. Besides, you are
only in town for a day and it is no use to attempt the discussion of
questions which involve the entire order of the universe. I promised
Mrs. Calvin I'd bring you back in half-an-hour, and we've been here
twice that time already."
He ran on brightly and rapidly, leading the way out of the gallery and
down the stairs, and she followed with a suspicion of shadow upon her
face as if the subject of which she had spoken was one of real
importance to her.
"Come in and see the jolly old Pasht," Arthur suggested, as they
descended the wide staircase.
She acquiesced by turning with him into the room devoted to the Way
collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the center of which stands a
somewhat mutilated granite statue of the goddess Pasht, the cat-headed
deity, referred to the time of Amenophis III, about 1500 B.C. Calm,
impassive and saturnine the goddess sits, holding the sign of life with
lifeless fingers in as unconscious mockery now as when the symbol was
placed within the stony grasp by some unrecorded sculptor dead more
than thirty centuries ago. All that it has looked upon, all the
shifting scenes and varied lands upon which have gazed those sightless
eyes, have left no record on that emotionless face, whose lips still
keep unchanged their faint smile beneath which lurks a sneer.
Arthur and Edith stood before it, as a pair of Egyptian lovers may have
stood long ago, and for a time regarded it in silence, each moved in a
way, though very differently, as their temperaments differed.
"It is the patron saint of our Pagans," the artist said at length. "How
much the old creature knows, if she only chose to tell. She could give
us more genuine wisdom than we shall hear in our whole lives, if she
would but condescend to speak."
"Wisdom always knows the value of silence," Edith returned smiling.
"But Pasht belies her sex by not being a communicative party," was her
companion's reply; "although communicativeness was never a
characteristic of the gods."
"No irreverence, sir," Edith said with an air of mock authority, "even
for these dethroned deities. What were the attributes of your
cat-headed goddess?"
"Oh, various things. Pasht means, I believe, the devouring one, and she
has another name signifying 'she who kindles a fire.' She was the
goddess of war and of libraries, and the 'mistress of thought.' A sort
of Egyptian Minerva, I suppose."
"Violence and wisdom always seemed to me a strange combination," Edith
said thoughtfully, regarding the stone image intently, as if to drag
from its cold lips a solution of the difficulty.
"You overlook the destructive power of words; besides, the sword or the
tongue, what does it matter? Life is always a conflict, and it is of
minor importance what the weapons are. It is appropriate enough for
this dilapidated, but eminently respectable female to be the
figure-head of a society like the Pagans where we fight with words but
may come to blows any time."
He spoke gayly, pleased with having put entirely out of the
conversation the unpleasant subject of his relations to her uncle, Mr.
Peter Calvin, upon which Edith had touched. But he who talks with a
woman must expect the unexpected, and as they turned away from the
statue of Pasht, and walked towards the street where the carriage was
waiting, Miss Caldwell abruptly brought the matter up again by asking:
"But why are you artists opposed to Uncle Peter, Arthur? What is the--"
"The Pagans, _ma belle_" he interrupted coolly, quite as if he
were answering her question, although in reality nothing was further
from his intention, "isn't really a society at all. It is only the name
by which we've taken to calling a knot of fellows who meet once a month
in each other's studios. We are all St. Filipe men, but we've no
organization as a club." "Well?" Edith asked, as he paused; evidently
puzzled to discover any connection between her question and his reply.
"And you," her betrothed responded, tucking her into the carriage and
surreptitiously kissing her hand, "are the loveliest of your sex. I'll
come to take you to the depot at six, you know. Good-by."
He closed the carriage door, watched her drive off, and then went his
own way.
V.
THE BITTER PAST.
All's Well that Ends Well; v.--3.
"The Pagans: Friday, Jan. 17.
Pipes, pictures and punch.
GRANT HERMAN."
Such was the invitation received one day by each of the Pagans, under a
seal bearing the impress of the goddess Pasht.
There is little that need be added to Fenton's account of the Pagans.
The society had no organization beyond a rule to meet each month and to
limit its membership to seven; no especial principles beyond an
unformulated although by no means unexpressed antagonism against
Philistinism. Fenton had suggested Pasht as a sort of _dea mater_,
and had furnished the seal bearing the image of that goddess which it
was customary to use upon the notifications of meetings; and for the
rest there was nothing definite to distinguish this group of earnest
and sometimes fiery young men from any other. They doubtless said a
great many foolish things, but they did so many wise ones that it
seemed but reasonable to assume that there must be some grains of
wisdom mingled with whatever dross was to be found in their speech.
Their views were extreme enough. Fenton was fond of maintaining
astounding propositions, using the club much as Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes once privately said Wendell Phillips does the community, "to try
the strength of extravagant theories;" and none of the Pagans were
restrained by any conventionality from a free expression of opinion.
It was on the afternoon of the day fixed for the Pagan meeting when
Helen Greyson took her way across the Common and through the business
portion of the city to the building down by the wharves where were the
studios of Herman and his pupils. It was feebly raining, the weather
having been decidedly whimsical all that week, and the clouds rolled in
ragged, sullen masses overhead. Helen felt the gloom of the day as a
vague depression which she endeavored in vain to shake off, and
hastened towards her studio, hoping to be able to lose herself in her
work.
Picking her steps among the piles of fire-brick and terra-cotta which
lumbered the yard and the long shed skirting the building, which was a
terra-cotta manufactory, she let herself in at a side door and went
directly to her studio.
Removing the wet cloths from her bas-relief, she stood for a moment
studying it, and then investing herself in a great apron, set busily to
work upon one of the fleeting figures in the composition.
She had scarcely begun when as often before a heavy step was heard upon
the stair without, a tap sounded lightly upon her door, and, in answer
to her invitation, Grant Herman entered.
He, too, had evidently been working in clay, of which his loose blouse
bore abundant marks. A paper cap, not unlike that of a pastry-cook in
an English picture, was stuck a little aslant over his iron gray locks,
giving him a certain roguish air, with which the occasional twinkle in
his eye harmonized well.
"Good morning, Mrs. Greyson," he said in his hearty voice, and then
stood for a moment looking over her shoulder at her work in silence.
"Do you think the movement of that figure too violent?" his pupil
asked, turning to look up at him, and noticing for the first time that
despite the saucy pose of his cap, the sculptor was evidently not in
the best of spirits.
"No," returned he, rather absently. "But you must have less agitation
in the robe; it is merely hurried now, not swift. Lengthen and simplify
those folds--so."
As he indicated the desired curves with his nervous fingers, Mrs.
Greyson's quick eye caught sight of a striking ring upon his hand, and
without thought she said, involuntarily:
"You have a new ring!"
"Yes," returned Herman, flushing; "or rather a very old one. It is an
intaglio that the artist Hoffmeir--I have told you of our friendship in
Rome--gave me one Christmas. I returned it to him when I left Rome, and
at his death he in turn sent it back to me."
"But Hoffmeir has been dead several years."
"More than six; but the ring has just come into my hands."
The intaglio was a dark sard beautifully cut with the head of Minerva,
and Mrs. Greyson's artistic instincts were keenly alive to the
exquisite delicacy of its workmanship. She inquired something of its
origin and probable age, and then dropped it from her attention, save
that, being a woman, she wondered a little what was the personal
bearing of this token, and whether the sculptor's sadness arose from
the awakening of memories connected with it.
"It must seem like a token from the grave," she said, "coming as it
does, so long after Hoffmeir's death."
"It does," the other replied, soberly; "but it brought a message with
it. Oh, the wretchedness of hearing a voice from the dead, to whom you
can send no answer!"
The burst of emotion with which he said this was very unusual, and Mrs.
Greyson regarded him with perhaps as much surprise as sympathy, having
never before seen him so deeply moved.
"I am afraid," she ventured, hesitatingly, "that what I said seemed
intrusive, though of course it was not meant to be."
"It did not seem so; but I am out of sorts this afternoon. I have sent
my model away because I am too much unstrung to work."
"I hope nothing bad has happened," said Helen, quickly.
"No, nothing; it's only this message from dear old Hoffmeir."
He walked away and pulled aside the curtain which screened the lower
half of the window overlooking the water, and stood gazing out at a
vessel lying beside the wharf beneath. Mrs. Greyson laid down her
modeling tools, disturbed by the other's disquiet, and wondering how
best to distract his attention from himself. Her glance roved
inquiringly about the little room, noting every cast upon the dingy
walls, bits of sculptured foliage, architectural forms, and portions of
the human figure. Then her gaze rested an instant upon her own work,
and from that turned toward the robust form by the window.
"Come, Mr. Herman," she said at length, in a tone half jesting, "I
never saw you so somber."
"It is not that Hoffmeir is dead, poor fellow!" Herman replied,
answering her unspoken question. "I'd made up my mind to endure that,
and any man with his over-sensitive temperament is better off on the
other side of the grass than this any day. I may as well tell you, Mrs.
Greyson, though as a rule I do not find much comfort in blurting out
things. The fact is that Hoffmeir and I quarreled over a girl. We were
both in love with her, like two young fools as we were; but she'd
promised to marry me, and--it was a deal better that she didn't, too. I
thought he tried to take her from me. Now I know I was wrong, and that
Fritz was as high-souled as a god in the matter; but then I sent him
back his ring, and broke off with him and her too. I was a fiery young
fool in those days," he added, with a sad and bitter smile, "a young
fool."
"And was it never explained?"
"Never until to-day. He was far too proud a man to call me back."
"But the girl?" queried Helen, with increasing eagerness. "What did she
do?"
"Oh, the girl," he repeated, turning away again and directing his gaze
out of the window; "what would you expect her to do? She was only a
peasant; and though I was honest enough then, I outgrew that fever
centuries ago."
"Yes, you did," returned Helen, with gentle persistence, "but what did
she do?"
"What do women usually do when they break with one lover? Get another,
I suppose!"
The words were so hard and coarse to come from a man like Grant Herman
that she involuntarily looked up quickly at him, and perhaps he noticed
the action.
It was evident that some deep pain had provoked the expression, yet had
found no relief in the rough words. The sculptor turned toward his
companion as if to speak. Then slowly his eyes fell, and he said
firmly, if a little stiffly:
"I believe I do her injustice. If she ever loved a man she was one who
would love him always."
He left the little room without more words, his firm, even tread
sounding down the uncarpeted stairs until the door of his own studio
was heard to close after him. Mrs. Greyson stood before her clay
wondering, and then, sinking into a chair, sat so long absorbed in
thought that the short daylight faded about her and she was forced to
give up further work that day. Replacing the wet cloth with which her
bas-relief had been covered, she prepared to return home. As she passed
the door of Herman's studio the sculptor opened it.
"I do not know," he said, extending his hand, "what made me so rude
this afternoon. I am a bear of a fellow, but I had meant to treat you
well."
He had fully recovered his composure, but his evident desire to efface
the impression he had made naturally rendered it more lasting in
Helen's mind.
VI.
A BOND OF AIR.
Troilus and Cressida; i.--3.
Had Helen been present at the scene which took place in Herman's studio
earlier in the afternoon, she would perhaps have wondered less at his
disturbance.
In response to the sculptor's request made at the Club when Ninitta's
name was first mentioned, Bently, when the girl finished posing for
him, sent her to the sculptor's studio.
She came a day or two later than Bently had directed her, not
hastening, although for six years she had shaped her entire life to the
end of meeting Grant Herman. She came into the studio as calmly and as
quietly as if it were some familiar place which she had left but
yesterday, and she greeted the sculptor with as even and musical tone
as in the old Roman days when as yet nothing had occurred to stir her
peaceful bosom.
For his part the man stood and looked at her in silence. Even when a
ghost from the past has appeared at his especial summons, one seldom
sees it unmoved, and Herman was conscious that his heart beat more
quickly, that he breathed more heavily as Ninitta let fall behind her
the rug _portiere_ and came towards him through the studio.
She had a dark, homely face, only redeemed from positive ugliness by
her deep, expressive eyes. Her figure was superb; rather slender, lithe
and sinewy, but without an angle or thin curve. Like Diana, she was
long limbed, so that she seemed taller than she really was. The sweep
of neck and shoulder was exquisite, and her simple dress was admirably
adapted to display the lines of her supple form. As she walked down the
studio, setting her feet firmly and carrying her head with fine poise,
Grant Herman felt the ghost of an old passion stir in his heart.
"How do you do?" he composedly answered her greeting. "You have
improved since I saw you last."
"Thank you," she said, in a rich voice with strong but pleasant accent.
"I have had time."
"But improvement is not always a question of time," returned he. "Look
at me."
"You have grown old," Ninitta commented, regarding him keenly. "You are
gray now."
"Yes," retorted the other lightly, "I am an old man." It is really a
very long time since you posed for me in my little den at Rome."
"You remember those days perhaps, sometimes?" she said, dropping the
long lashes over her eyes.
A shadow passed over Herman's high brow.
"Is one likely to forget such days?" he demanded. "Is one likely to
forget how love may be turned to treachery and--"
"Pardon," the woman interrupted with dignity. "I did not come to be
reproached, _eccelenza_. You have not forgotten Signor Hoffmeir?"
"No," he answered, with a deepening frown. "I have not forgotten the
man who pretended to be my friend and proved it by stealing my
betrothed."
"It is well that you have not forgotten," Ninitta went on calmly, but
earnestly, "for I have a message from him. He charged me when he was
dying," she added, crossing herself, "to give it to you with my own
hands. I have been waiting for all these years, but now I am free of my
promise."
Herman took the packet she extended toward him, and turned abruptly
away. Ninitta seated herself in one of the tall easy chairs, removed
her hat, and began a leisurely survey of the place. The sounds from the
wharf outside, the cries of the sailors, the creaking of the cordage
and the ships came softened and mellowed like the daylight into the
wide, dim studio, giving a certain sense of remoteness by the contrast
they suggested between the silence within and the stir of the world
without. For all her outward calm, Ninitta's heart was beating hotly,
and she longed with a great yearning for a touch from the hand of the
silent man before her; for a word of kindness from his lips. She
watched him furtively, under cover of looking at a cast of Celini's
Perseus upon a bracket above his head, as he stood reading the letter
from Hoffmeir.
"Why did you not bring this to me before?" the sculptor asked at
length, turning towards her. "It is six years now."
"Have I been able to shape my life?" returned Ninitta. "I have followed
you to Florence, to Paris; you came to America. I followed you to New
York; you were here. I have never ceased trying to reach you. It was
not easy for me to cross half the world alone and without help; with no
friends, no money; with nothing."
"But you have been in Boston a couple of months."
"Yes," she said quietly, looking up into his face. "But you knew it. I
waited for you to send for me."
"I have only known it a week," was the sculptor's reply. "Do you know
what was in Hoffmeir's letter?"
"His ring; the one you wore in Rome."
"But do you know what he wrote?"
"No," she answered. "How should I?"
Her questioner looked at her a moment in silence. She put up her head
proudly with an involuntary response to the questioning which his
silence implied, and met his eyes unflinchingly. Yet he put his thought
into words.
"It is seven years since I saw you," he said at length.
"It is seven years," she echoed.
"In seven years a great deal may happen," continued he, still regarding
her closely.
"Much, much has happened," she returned, still meeting his gaze without
shrinking.
"Are you married?" he asked, with a certain abruptness which to a
careful observer might have indicated that the question cost him an
effort.
"No," Ninitta returned simply; "how could I be when I was betrothed to
you?"
"But that was broken off--"
The sentence stuck in his throat; and he wondered that he could have
begun it. He wondered, too, how he could even have doubted the faith of
the woman before him; and most of all he wondered if he had ever really
loved her. He had an irritating consciousness that something was
expected of him which he was unwilling to give; some sign of
tenderness, some caress such as befitted the reconciliation of lovers
long separated by misunderstanding and blinding jealousy. He felt as if
he were falling below the demands of the occasion, most annoying of
sensations to the masculine mind. But an important interview can with
difficulty be changed from the key in which it is begun, and even had
his feelings prompted a display of tenderness, he felt that it would
seem abrupt and forced. He waited for Ninitta to speak.
"Yes," she said, after a moment, as he did not continue, "it was broken
off, but Signor Hoffmeir said that was because you did not understand,
and that everything would be as it had been when you got his letter."
A sad hopelessness began to appear in her eyes; she had of old been too
accustomed to submit to her lover's will to assume the initiative now,
despite the development and strength which time had given to her
character. The sculptor did not dream how her heart throbbed beneath
her quiet demeanor, but he was too sensitive not to be touched by the
unconscious appeal of her voice and look.
Seven years before, an enthusiastic student in Rome, he had loved or
believed he loved, the peasant girl Ninitta, whom he had found in an
excursion to Capri and induced to come to the Eternal City as a model.
Too honorable to betray her, he had meant to make the model his wife,
and was betrothed to her with a solemnity of which he was keenly
reminded to-day by the ring which she still wore upon her finger.
Circumstances had convinced him, however, that Ninitta was deceiving
him, and that she preferred the artist Hoffmeir, his best friend. To
break off both engagement and friendship without listening to a word
of explanation, to leave Rome and Italy, were comparatively easy for a
passionate man stung to the quick by a double treachery. To forget was
more difficult, and although a thousand times had Herman assured
himself that he had extinguished the last spark of emotion concerning
this episode, the faintest breath of an old memory was still sufficient
to rekindle some seemingly dead ember. To-day, holding in his hand the
letter from his lost friend which removed all his doubts, he saw that
instead of being injured he had himself been cruel and unjust; he felt
the full anguish of having committed an irreparable fault. We may
outlive our past; its sorrows we may forget, its wrongs we may forgive,
we may even smile at its crushed hopes, ambitions and loves with
scarcely a tinge of bitterness; but that which we have been stings us
ever with the burning pain of an undying remorse. It is not what we
have done which awakens our deepest self-scorn; it is the fact that we
were this which made it possible for us to do it. To feel that he had
been capable of the cruelty of abandoning his betrothed and of wounding
his closest friend, merely from a groundless suspicion, was to Grant
Herman a pain never to be wholly outlived.
Nor was he without a teasing pain, through a less noble trait in his
nature, from the consciousness that he had loved Ninitta. Once the
fires of love have burned out, any mortal is apt to be lost in amazed
wonderment how they were ever kindled; and that it was hard for Grant
Herman, at thirty-five, to understand how Grant Herman, at
twenty-seven, could have adored an Italian peasant model is not so
without precedent as to be wholly incomprehensible.
Ninitta had been a good girl, his thoughts ran, was doubtless so still;
her figure was enchanting, he would have been no sculptor had he failed
to appreciate that; he had been a boy, a foolish youngster to be
dizzied by a rushing of the blood to his head; but to make her his wife
now----
"Ninitta," he said, suddenly, breaking off from his thoughts into
words, "I am not well to-day: come to-morrow. Are you comfortably
settled in town? Do you need money?"
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