The Pagans by Arlo Bates

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She sighed deeply, the sigh of one but too well accustomed to life's
disappointments, and arose the determination to lose herself in her
work, and to shake off if possible the sadness which seemed to paralyze
her energies and enervate her whole being.

The gown which she had worn upon the previous evening lay over a chair,
giving out, as she lifted it, an odor of tobacco smoke. Some remark
made by Grant Herman about the fumes which had filled the little parlor
came into her mind, giving a new current to her thoughts. She
unconsciously fell to thinking of the sculptor, and, by a natural
connection of ideas, of Ninitta, who was still nominally posing for
her.

Partly from interest in the girl herself and partly from the perception
that it pleased her master to have the Italian remain with her, she had
retained Ninitta, although the bas-relief was so far advanced that the
model was hardly needed. She had even set herself, by those unobtrusive
ways at the command of gracious women, to win the girl's confidence,
not so much for the sake of hearing her story as to give the waif so
strangely cast in her path the feeling that the friendship she so
sorely needed was within her reach. It had resulted, however, in her
hearing Ninitta's history. Many women have no idea of returning
kindness save by unreserved confidence, and although Ninitta was
perhaps scarcely to be reckoned among these extremists, she yet found
so much comfort in pouring out her sorrows to one who could both
sympathize and appreciate, that little by little the whole pathetic
tale was told.

"I did not understand," Ninitta said once in her broken English, "when
he left Rome. It was as if somebody had taken my life away somehow. I
couldn't make it seem that I was really alive all the same, though I
knew it could not be his fault. He would not have done it if he had
known. You do not believe he would have left me if he had known the
truth?"

"No," Helen answered. "He could not have left you if he had known. It
was because he was hurt so much, and that could only be because he
loved you so much."

"He loved me so much," poor Ninitta repeated murmuringly, "he loved me
so much."

And all that day she followed Helen with wistful eyes, as if she longed
to hear her say again those precious words.

"I cannot tell you what it was like in Paris," she said at another
time. "In Rome they all knew me. They knew I was betrothed, and no one
ever troubled me. But in Paris it was different. Oh, I hate Paris! And
it was so cruel that he was not there. It was so dreadful that he
should be on the other side of that horrible sea!"

The girl was so self-forgetful in these revelations, she spoke always
with such an unshaken faith in Herman and was so free from any thought
of blaming him, that Helen could not but be touched. She soothed poor
Ninitta as well as she was able, having power to promise nothing,
seeing no way out of the entanglement, yet at least showing to the
lonely Italian that her woman's heart bled for her sorrow if she might
not alleviate it. Sometimes she felt like going to the sculptor and
entreating him to take pity upon the girl who so adoringly loved him.
Once when the model had told her how just as she had saved by long,
painful economy, nearly money enough to pay the passage to America it
was stolen and she was forced to begin the slow process over again,
Helen impulsively left her studio and found herself on the very
threshold of Herman's door before she realized what she had been about
to do. By what authority was she to interfere in a matter like this? If
Ninitta loved the sculptor who had long ago ceased to return her
affection, could matters be helped by an unloving marriage? It was not
for her, moreover, to give unasked her advice to such a man as she knew
Grant Herman to be. If he consulted her, she reflected, she might
present the pathetic, touching story which Ninitta had told her, but
she had plainly no pretext for forcing her feelings upon her master
unsought.

She turned and went slowly up the stairs toward her little room; but
suddenly she paused. She had all at once become conscious that she
desired eagerly to know the nature of the sculptor's feelings toward
his old love. Why, she asked herself, was she so interested in what
after all did not personally concern her. A quick emotion, almost too
vague to be called a thought, made her cheek flame.

"No, no," she said half aloud. "It is only that I am touched by
Ninitta's sadness. It is nothing more."

But her breath came more quickly, and it was with difficulty that upon
re-entering her studio she assumed a quiet mien, lest her model should
guess at her unfulfilled errand.

On the morning following the meeting of the Pagans at her rooms, Helen
was alone in her studio. She had told Ninitta she should be late and
the latter was therefore tardy in arriving. Mrs. Greyson uncovered her
bas-relief, now rapidly nearing completion, and stood before it,
examining critically its merits and defects. A familiar step in the
passage, a tap at the door, and Grant Herman joined her.

"You look as fresh as ever this morning," he said. "I feared that the
entertaining of such a company of Bohemians would have tired you out."

"No, indeed," she returned. "I am of far too much endurance to be worn
out by any thing of that sort. I have a drop of Bohemian blood in my
veins myself, I think, and I like to meet men as men--when they are
simply good fellows together, I mean. A woman usually sees men in an
attitude of either deference or defense, and there is something
inspiriting to her in being occasionally received as a comrade."

"There are few women who can be received so," returned Herman. "I
suppose it requires both an especial temperament and especial
experiences to render a woman capable of being a comrade to men."

The talk drifted away to general and indifferent subjects, broken here
and there by allusions and criticisms relating to the Flight of the
Months, and not infrequently dropping into brief silences. One of these
Herman broke by saying abruptly:

"You do not know how your song has haunted me all night. I have been
saying over and over to myself

'I strew these opiate flowers
On thy restless pillow.'

And, indeed, I longed for some such soporific myself before morning.
Your coffee or your song, or--yourself,"--he hesitated over the last
word--kept me very effectually awake."

"It must have been the coffee; there was little potency in either of
the other causes."

"There is much," he returned resolutely, advancing a step nearer. "Mrs.
Greyson, I have not wasted the night. I have thought out a great many
things; the first and chief being in regard to yourself."

His tone, the piercing glow of his eyes, warned Helen what was coming.
She thought of Ninitta, and retreated a step.

"It is true," the sculptor continued, as if answering the doubt implied
by her movement, "that I--"

The door opened softly and Ninitta came in.

His outstretched hand dropped; the words died upon his lips. He turned
from one woman to the other an appealing look of hopeless sadness and
left the studio in silence.

It was characteristic of Helen's generosity that her first thought
should be of the pain which Ninitta must feel. One glance at the model
was sufficient to show that the Italian had comprehended enough of the
interrupted scene to be made wretched; but it did not then occur to
Mrs. Greyson that to Ninitta's jealous soul, unsuspicious of Herman,
the only explanation of a fondness between the sculptor and his pupil
lay in an effort on the part of the latter to win from the model her
rightful and long betrothed lover.

XVI.

CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH.
As You Like It; i.--2.

Grant Herman sat in his studio in the gathering twilight thinking
gloomily. However little Mrs. Greyson suspected the tumult which would
be aroused in Ninitta's breast by the misadventure of the morning, the
sculptor was too well aware of the Italian's passionate nature not to
dread the consequences of the jealousy she was sure to feel. He knew,
moreover, that Ninitta's rage would vent itself not upon him but upon
Helen, and he wondered how best to avert the danger that threatened.

He debated with himself, too, how much he owed to the girl who gave her
life up so unreservedly to him. His old love--"call it rather mere
boyish passion," he-thought scornfully--was long since dead beyond
hope; yet the devotion which it had awakened in Ninitta burned on as
steadily as ever. Had he now a right to repulse the love he had himself
called into being; to throw aside the fondness he had himself fostered
and which he had once prized above measure.

"No," he thought, "a thousand times no. A man must be a villain who
would not marry a girl under such circumstances. I am hers; the fact
that I have changed is my misfortune, not her fault. If I have any
manliness about me, I won't let things go on in this way any longer.
I'll marry Ninitta. It is the smallest reparation I can make for the
long years of pain I have caused her. There is no other course for me.

"But I do not love her, and a woman, they say, always instinctively
feels it when a man's heart is not hers. Nonsense! That is only a
cowardly excuse. At least Ninitta would never be troubled. She has not
known so much love that she can draw very sharp comparisons. No; she
will be satisfied; and I--well, if a man is such a devilish fool as I
have been, it remains for him to pay the penalty. Oh, if youth only
knew!"

He sighed deeply and began to walk up and down the studio, in which the
dusk was gathering thickly. A last faint gleam from a window high in
the riverward wall fell upon one of the mutilated goddesses in the
gallery. Herman looked up, contemplating the phantom-like head
gloomily. Something in its pose, or perhaps more truly something in his
own mind, suggested a faint likeness to Helen, as if it were her ghost
looking down from some far height upon the conflict of his soul.

"Ah!" he cried hotly to himself. "And she? How can I give up the hope
of winning her? What was a boy's foolish fancy to the passion of a
man--and for such a woman! She is half goddess. No, no; I cannot do it.
I cannot marry this Italian peasant, this model that has who knows what
history! I will not; I owe something to myself, to my art. What is the
simple happiness of Ninitta to my art? I should be a fool to ignore how
much more to the world my own well-being is worth than is hers; and
what could I not do with the inspiration of the other! Oh, my God!"

The darkness grew. The phantom faded imperceptibly away. He was left
alone in the darkness to fight out his battle. He marched with great
strides, avoiding obstacles by a certain sixth sense born of constant
familiarity with the place. He fought manfully, persuading himself that
his scruples were as idle as air, remnants of the long since outgrown
superstitions of his childhood. He defiantly claimed the right to be
true to his powers, to his genius, rather than to an empirical standard
erected by narrow moralists. He should be thankful that he had escaped
entangling his life by that absurd marriage in Rome seven years ago,
and that he was now free to win a wife worthy Of himself and of his
art.

Yet he cut through all the meshes of logic he had himself been weaving,
by striking his strong hands together there in the dark, and crying
aloud, his voice startling him in the stillness:

"My God! What a poltroon I have become! Shall I cast on others the
burden of my own mistakes?"

And seizing hat and cloak he left the studio, taking his way towards
the narrow street where Ninitta lodged, hastening to ask her to marry
him before his resolution faltered.

XVII.

THIS "WOULD" CHANGES.
Hamlet; iv.--7.

Herman found Ninitta alone in the attic which served her for a home in
this bleak northern city, so far and so different from her own sunny
Capri.

Bare and half furnished as was the room, the girl had contrived to
impart to it a certain air which removed it from the common-place. A
bit of flimsy drapery, begged from some studio, hung over one of the
windows; a rude print of the Madonna was pinned to the wall, and under
it, on the wooden table, was a bunch of withered flowers. They were
roses which Helen had given Ninitta, and the Italian, returning home
that day, had in her jealous rage thrown them to the floor and trampled
upon them. Then remembering that they had been offered to the Madonna,
she had been seized with a superstitious fear, and carefully restoring
the battered flowers, had eagerly vowed a fresh bunch to the Holy
Mother if she might be forgiven this sacrilege.

But the most beautiful article in the room was a cast of a woman's
shoulder. It had been modeled by Herman in the earliest days of his
acquaintance with Ninitta, when she had been still only his model and
not his betrothed. He was touched as he looked at it now. Yellow with
time and soiled by its various journeyings, it still preserved unmarred
its lovely shape, exquisite curve melting into exquisite curve as
softly and sweetly as in those glowing days when he had molded it under
the sky of Italy.

He looked from the cast to Ninitta. He had only seen her at the studio,
and he experienced a faint feeling of surprise at detecting a subtle
difference in her here at home. It was nothing so tangible that he
could have told by what means he received the impression, yet it was
sufficiently definite to make him lose something of the freedom with
which he had always addressed her. She was no longer simply the model,
she was an Italian woman in her own home.

The years during which they had been separated had formed and
strengthened Ninitta's character. If Herman had not before noted the
alteration, it was due in part to his pre-occupation and in part to the
force of old habit which made her manner toward him much the same as
formerly. To-night he began to appreciate the change in her, and he
felt the awkwardness which always results from the discovery that we
must adapt ourselves to a modified condition in a friend.

On her side Ninitta was naturally surprised at seeing the sculptor. She
had come to regard as hopeless all speculations upon his intentions,
and she had waited patiently until he should choose to show her favor,
tacitly acknowledging his right to do whatever should be his good
pleasure. Had he come at any time and said, "Ninitta, I am here to
marry you," she would gladly but quietly have made ready to follow
where he chose to lead, even to the world's end. Equally, had he said,
"Ninitta, I have come to say good-by; you will never see me again," she
would have acquiesced without a murmur, and then, perhaps, have taken
her own life. As long as it was his simple wish, uninfluenced by the
will of another, she would never have questioned.

Now, however, all passive acquiescence was at an end. Since the scene
in Helen's studio, Ninitta had an object upon which to expend all her
energies, and she even almost forgot to love Herman in the intensity of
her sudden jealous hatred of Mrs. Greyson. Yesterday Grant Herman would
have found a woman not unlike the Ninitta of old times, tender, loving,
pathetically submissive; today he was confronted by a fury, only
restrained by the respect for his presence born of long habit.

"Good evening!" he said gently, as he entered, his mood softened by the
struggle through which he had passed in his studio.

"Good evening!" she answered defiantly, in Italian. "So you are not
with her!"

"What!" he exclaimed.

He had been wholly unprepared for this outburst, and for the instant
was too surprised to at all understand it.

A sudden rage seemed to seize Ninitta, which swept away all barriers of
restraint.

"_Si_, _si_, _si_," she cried, "I am not blind! What if
you are my betrothed, when this woman comes to entrap you, to bewitch
you with an evil eye, to steal your soul! Yes, yes; you are not with
her to-night as you were last night. Did I not see you myself come out
of her house?"

"Stop!" he said in his most commanding tone, but without anger.

The calmness and decision of the manner arrested her. She sank back
into a chair, regarding him with defiant eyes.

"So you have followed me," continued Herman, speaking with painful
slowness, so that every word seemed to poor Ninitta to fall upon her
like a curse; "so you have played the spy upon me. Ah!"

As he looked at her she began to cower. She shrank back in her seat,
putting up her hands to shield her face from his gaze.

"Yet I meant to marry you," he said, half to himself, although still
addressing her. "I came to-night to say, 'Come, Ninitta, let us take up
the broken romance that a cruel mistake interrupted there in Rome.' I
had long ago outgrown my old fancy, but I meant to be true to my
promise to you. I meant to give up even my ambition for your sake; to
make your life happy and secure. And this is your trust in me! If you
really loved me, to track me like a thief would have been impossible to
you. And where have you learned this trick of playing the spy?" he went
on with growing wrath, becoming more and more cruel with every word.
"It is a relic of your Paris life, I fancy. It is hardly a resource to
which a good girl would be driven. I at least believed you when you
told me you had been true to me."

He spoke rapidly, aggressively. The fact that he was outraging his own
instincts in beating with bitter words the girl who bowed before him
with drooping head and disheveled hair made him but the more harsh. To
fall from the height of self-sacrifice into a pool of vulgar intrigue!
Bah! His disgust at himself for ever having known this woman seemed too
great to be borne.

Yet under all his passionate protest and repulsion he was conscious
that he doubted what he was himself saying with so much vehemence; that
he secretly believed Ninitta to be true and pure, and that to her
Italian blood, to her peasant nurture, was due the espionage in which
she had been self-betrayed. The sting of conscience, too, in the
knowledge that the model's jealousy of Helen was well founded, the
humiliation of finding his feelings and motives discovered, increased
his irritation. He felt a base desire to stab and humiliate Ninitta,
but for whom he might be free to win the one woman he had ever loved;
and the more his denunciations recoiled to hurt himself, the more
eagerly he poured them out, as in some moods of mental anguish one
finds relief in the pain of self-inflicted physical hurts.

"Yes," he said, more and more completely abandoning control of himself;
"yes, this tells sufficiently what you have learned in Paris."

"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried, flinging herself at his feet and groveling
there. "No, no! For the love of the Virgin, signor, not that! I have
been good. Oh, for the love of God, signor! For the love of God!"

She was shaken by the storm of sobs in which her words ended. She got
hold of his feet and refused to rise when he attempted to lift her. Her
long hair, escaped from its stilletto, fell about her face. Even in
this agitated moment the sculptor in Grant Herman noted with a sharp,
aesthetic pleasure the beautiful curves of her neck and shoulders.

"Pity," she went on between her agonized sobs. "Oh, forgive me! I will
do any thing you wish. I will go away and leave you."

He stooped and raised her by main force, yet tenderly.

"There, there, Ninitta," he said, "I was wrong. I do believe you are a
good girl; but you should not have played the spy."

He soothed her as well as he was able, her violence spending itself in
passionate tears. She drew herself away from him, and sat down again in
the chair she had been occupying. She put up her hands to her head,
twisting the loose tresses into a great coil. The sleeve of her dress,
unfastened in her agitation, fell back from her rounded arm. The superb
lines of her figure were displayed by her attitude. Her face, flushed
with weeping and lighted by the still tear-wet eyes, if not beautiful,
was appealing and pitiful. Some fiber touched of old vibrated anew in
his being. He made a step forward.

"Ninitta," he said, "I came to-night to ask you to marry me at once; to
fulfill the promise I made you so long ago."

The words and the tone both were tender, but he had said those same
words in anger just before.

"But you do not love me," she responded, her arms dropping pathetically
into her lap. "You have said it."

"But I was angry," answered Herman, for the moment almost believing
that his old love was re-awakened. "I did not mean you to believe it."

"If you do love me," she said, a new look coming into her eyes, "you
will promise me never to see her again."

He started back as if from a blow. His frail dream of passion was
shattered like a bubble at her words. A wave of bitter self-contempt
that its existence had been possible swept over him. The blood surged
into his cheeks. Ninitta saw the flush and her eye kindled.

"Promise me," she repeated. "It is little for love to ask. It is my
right."

With instinctive feminine guile she leaned towards him in an attitude
so beautiful, so appealing that even now he was moved. But with this
emotion came, too, a subtle if now fainter sense of degradation that he
was susceptible to this dangerous fascination, with a painful
consciousness of how wide a moral gulf had opened between them by the
anger and vulgar jealousy which Ninitta displayed. It is not
impossible, too, that his instinctive clinging to Helen was a stronger
power than he knew; while still through all his mingled emotions ran
the resolve he had made to give himself up to his old betrothed.

"No," he said; yet as he moved slowly towards the door he had the air
of a man who still deliberates.

She threw herself back in her seat with a touching gesture of despair,
but also with a gleam of malice in her eyes, which he, turning with his
hand upon the latch, caught and understood.

"No," he repeated with final decision. "No, no!"

XVIII.

BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE.
Love's Labor's Lost; ii.--I.

Fenton had returned to Boston with his bride, but as yet Helen had not
seen him. One morning late in March, however, he came to call.

"I could not come before," he said after the first greeting, "'I have
married a wife,' and the amount of arrangement and adjustment implied
in that statement is simply astounding."

"I am glad to see you at last," she returned. "And your wife, is she
well?"

"My wife," replied he, with a little hesitancy over the unfamiliar
term, "is well. Cannot you come to see us before that dreadful
reception through which I am to be dragged? I'd like you to know Edith
in a different way from the crowd."

Helen crossed the room and sat down in her favorite chair by the
window.

"He ought to understand," was her thought. "Why cannot he see that it
is impossible for his wife and me to harmonize. We have no common
ground."

"I shall be glad to," she said aloud, inwardly shrinking at the need of
speaking disingenuously to one with whom she had so long been upon
terms of frankness. "I will come very soon; to-day or to-morrow.
To-day, though, I must go and see my bas-relief. It is all ready to be
cut for the furnace; I only want to take a last look at it, to be sure
that every thing is right. If it will not bore you," she added, a
little hesitatingly, "you might come too; it is your last chance to
find fault to any advantage, for any changes must be made at once."

"I'd like to go," answered her friend, looking at his watch, "if I can
get back to luncheon. Yes, there's plenty of time."

"Benedick, the married man," laughed Helen. "That I should ever live to
see this air of domesticity!"

They crossed the Common, chatting idly, and both conscious that the
frankness of their old intercourse was somehow lacking; that it was
necessary to begin a new adjustment upon a basis different from the
former one. They talked upon indifferent subjects, of what had occurred
during the three weeks of Arthur's absence, playing the part of
amiability without pleasure, endeavoring to simulate the old relations
which no longer had real existence.

"Oh, Arthur," Helen laughed, suddenly, "let's not go on in this way!
Let us quarrel, or something. Say a wicked epigram; do any thing,
only don't be so eminently amiable!"

"My head is as empty of ideas," he returned laughing, in his turn, "as
is a modern title-page of punctuation points. Besides, Edith has
forbidden wicked epigrams."

"Does she therefore suppose she can suppress them?"

"Oh, I don't know," responded Fenton, good-humoredly. "I am not in as
epigrammatic a frame of mind as I was."

"'Tis a good sign."

"Yes; a sign I am growing inane and respectable."

"I can imagine you one about as easily as the other."

"That is bitter-sweet; a compliment and a flout."

"If I had said that," Helen observed, smiling, "you would have
retorted, with a look of gloomy solemnity, that most things in life are
bitter-sweet; unless, indeed, you felt called upon to phrase it that it
had the advantage of most earthly matters by not being wholly bitter."

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