DEDICATION.

To my three friends who, by generously acting as amanuenses, have made it possible that the book should be finished, I take pleasure in gratefully dedicating

"This is no square temple to the gate of which thou canst arrive precipitately; this is no mosque to which thou canst come with tumult but without knowledge." Persian Religious Hymn.

CONTENTS. CHAPTER

I. IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING II. SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE III. IN WAY OF TASTE IV. NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS V. 'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL VI. THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE VII. THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME VIII. A NECESSARY EVIL IX. THIS IS NOT A BOON X. THE BITTER PAST XI. THE GREAT ASSAY OF ART XII. WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED XIII. THIS "WOULD" CHANGES XIV. THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT XV. LIKE COVERED FIRE XVI. WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE XVII. THE HEAVY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT XVIII. HE SPEAKS THE MERE CONTRARY XIX. HOW CHANCES MOCK XX. VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE XXI. A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN XXII. HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH XXIII. AS FALSE AS STAIRS OF SAND XXIV. THERE BEGINS CONFUSION XXV. AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT XXVI. O, WICKED WIT AND GIFT XXVII. UPON A CHURCH BENCH XXVIII. BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE XXIX. CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH XXX. THE WORLD IS STILL DECEIVED XXXI. PARTED OUR FELLOWSHIP XXXII. HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY XXXIII. A BOND OF AIR XXXIV. WHAT TIME SHE CHANTED XXXV. HEARTSICK WITH THOUGHT XXXVI. FAREWELL AT ONCE, FOR ONCE, FOR ALL AND EVER XXXVII. A SYMPATHY OF WOE

THE PHILISTINES

I

IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING. I Henry IV.; v.—I.

When Arthur Fenton, the most outspoken of all that band of protesting spirits who had been so well known in artistic Boston as the Pagans, married Edith Caldwell, there had been in his mind a purpose, secret but well defined, to turn to his own account his wife's connection with the Philistine art patrons of the town. Miss Caldwell was a niece of Peter Calvin, a wealthy and well-meaning man against whom but two grave charges could be made,—that he supposed the growth of art in this country to depend largely upon his patronage, and that he could never be persuaded not to take himself seriously. Mr. Calvin was regarded by Philistine circles in Boston as a sort of re-incarnation of Apollo, clothed upon with modern enlightenment, and properly arrayed in respectable raiment. Had it been pointed out that to make this theory probable it was necessary to conceive of the god as having undergone mentally much the same metamorphosis as that which had transformed his flowing vestments into trousers, his admirers would have received the

remark as highly complimentary to Mr. Peter Calvin. To assume identity between their idol and Apollo would be immensely flattering to the son of Latona.

Fenton understood perfectly the weight and extent of Calvin's influence, yet, in determining to profit by it, he did not in the least deceive himself as to the nature of his own course.

"Honesty," he afterward confessed to his friend Helen Greyson, who scorned him for the admission, "is doubtless a charming thing for digestive purposes, but it is a luxury too expensive for me. The gods in this country bid for shams, and shams I purpose giving them."

So well did he carry out his intention, that in a few years he came to be the fashionable portrait-painter of the town; the artist to whom people went who rated the worth of a picture by the amount they were required to pay for it, and the reputation of the painter in conventional circles; the man to whom a Boston society woman inevitably turned when she wished the likeness of her charms preserved on canvas, and when no foreigner was for the moment in vogue and on hand.

The steps by which Fenton attained to this proud eminence were obvious enough. In the first place, he persuaded Mr. Calvin to sit to him. Mr. Calvin always sat to the portrait painters whom he endorsed. This was a sort of official recognition, and the results, as seen in the needlessly numerous likenesses of the gentleman which adorned his Beacon Hill mansion, would have afforded a cynic some amusement, and not a little food for reflection. Once launched under distinguished patronage, Fenton was clever enough to make his way. He really was able to paint well when he chose, a fact which was, on the whole, of less importance in his artistic career than were the adroitness of his address, and his ready and persuasive sympathy. The qualifications of a fashionable doctor, a fashionable clergyman, and a fashionable portrait-painter are much the same; it is only in the man-milliner that skill is demanded in addition to the art of pleasing.

As usually happens in such a case, Fenton's old friends avoided him, or found themselves left in the distance by his rapid strides toward fame and fortune. Then such of them as still came in contact with him made his acquaintance in a new character, and learned to accept him as a wholly different man from the one they had supposed themselves to know in the days when he was never weary of pouring forth tirades against the Philistinism he had now embraced. They admired the skill with which he painted stuffs and gowns, but among themselves they agreed that the old-time vigor and sincerity were painfully lacking in his work; and if they grumbled sometimes at the prices he got, it is only just to believe that it was seldom with any real willingness to pay, in the sacrifice of convictions and ideals, the equivalent which he had given for his popularity.

Fenton was one morning painting, in his luxuriously appointed studio, the portrait of a man who was in the prime of life, and over whom vulgar prosperity had, in forming him, left everywhere her finger marks plainly to be seen. He was tall and robust, with light eyes and blonde whiskers, and a general air of insisting upon his immense superiority to all the world. That he secretly felt some doubts of the perfection of his social knowledge, there were indications in his manner, but on the whole the complacency of a portly bank account overcame all misgivings of this sort. His character might have been easily inferred from the manner in which he now set his broad shoulders expansively back in the armchair in which he was posing, and regarded the artist with a patronizing air of condescending to be wonderfully entertained by his conversation.

"You are the frankest fellow I ever saw," he said, smiling broadly.

"Oh, frank," Fenton responded; "I am too frank. It will be the ruin of me sooner or later. It all comes of being born with a habit of being too honest with myself."

"Honesty with yourself is generally held up as a cardinal virtue."

"Nonsense. A man is a fool who is too frank with himself; he is always sure to end by being too frank with everybody else, just from mere habit."

Mr. Irons smiled more broadly still. He by no means followed all Fenton's vagaries of thought, but they tickled his mental cuticle agreeably. The artist had the name of being a clever talker, and with such a listener this was more than half the battle. The men who can distinguish the real quality of talk are few and far to seek; most people receive what is said as wit and wisdom, or the reverse, simply because they are assured it is the one or the other; and Alfred Irons was of the majority in this.

Fenton painted in silence a moment, inwardly possessed of a desire to caricature, or even to paint in all its ugliness, the vulgar mouth upon which he was working. The desire, however, was not sufficiently strong to restrain him from the judicious flattery of cleverly softening and refining the coarse lips, and he was conscious of a faint amusement at the incongruity between his thought and his action.

"And there is the added disadvantage," he continued the conversation as he glanced up and saw that his sitter's face was quickly, in the silence, falling into a heavy repose, "that frankness begets frankness. My sitters are always telling me things which I do not want to know, just because I am so beastly outspoken and sympathetic."

"You must have an excellent chance to get pointers," responded the sitter, his pale eyes kindling with animation. "You've painted two or three men this winter that could have put you up to a good thing."

"That isn't the sort of line chat takes in a studio," Fenton returned, with a slight shrug. "It isn't business that men talk in a studio. That would be too incongruous."

Irons sneered and laughed, with an air of consequence and superiority.

"I don't suppose many of you artist fellows would make much of a fist at business," he observed.

"Modern business," laughed the other, amused by his own epigram, "is chiefly the art of transposing one's debts. The thing to learn is how to pass the burden of your obligations from one man's shoulders to those of another often enough so that nobody who has them gets tired out, and drops them with a crash."

His sitter grinned appreciatively.

"And they don't tell you how to do this?"

"Oh, no. The things my sitters tell me about are of a very different sort. They make to me confidences they want to get rid of; things you'd rather not hear. Heavens! I have all I can do to keep some men from treating me like a priest and confessing all their sins to me."

Mr. Irons regarded the artist closely, with a curious narrowing of the eyes.

"That must give you a hold over a good many of them," he said. "I shall be careful what I say."

Fenton laughed, with a delightful sense of superiority. It amused him that his sitter should be betraying his nature at the very moment when he fancied himself particularly on his guard.

"You certainly have no crimes on your conscience that interfere with your digestion," was his reply; "but in any case, you may make yourself easy; I am not a blackmailer by profession."

"Oh, I didn't mean that," Mr. Irons answered, easily; "only of course you are a man who has his living to make. Every painter has to depend on his wits, and when you come in contact with men of another class professionally it would be natural enough to suppose you would take advantage of it."

The "lady's finger" in Fenton's cheek stood out white amid the sudden red, and his eyes flashed.

"Of course a sitter," he said in an even voice, which had somehow lost all its smooth sweetness, "is in a manner my guest, and the fact that his class was not up to mine, or that he wasn't a gentleman even, wouldn't excuse my taking advantage of him."

The other flushed in his turn. He felt the keenness of the retort, but he was not dexterous enough to parry it, and he took refuge in coarse bullying.

"Come, now, Fenton," he cried with a short, explosive laugh, "you talk like a gentleman."

But the artist, knowing himself to have the better of the other, and not unmindful, moreover, of the fact that to offend Alfred Irons might mean a serious loss to his own pocket, declined to take offence.

"Of course," he answered lightly, and with the air of one who appreciates an intended jest so subtile that only cleverness would have comprehended it, "that is one of the advantages I have always found in being one. I think I needn't keep you tied down to that chair any longer to-day. Come here and see how you think we are getting on."

And the sitter forgot quickly that he had been on the very verge of a quarrel.

II

SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE. Measure for Measure; v.—I.

When dinner was announced that night, Mrs. Arthur Fenton had not appeared, but presently she came into the room with that guilty and anxious look which marks the consciousness of social misdemeanors. She was dressed in a gown of warm primrose plush, softened by draperies of silver-gray net. It was a costume which her husband had designed for her, and which set off beautifully her brown hair and creamy white skin.

"I hope I have not kept you waiting long," she said, "but I wanted to dress for Mrs. Frostwinch's before dinner, and I was late about getting home."

There was a certain wistfulness in her manner which betrayed her anxiety lest he should be vexed at the trifling delay. Arthur Fenton was too well bred to be often openly unkind to anybody, but none the less was his wife afraid of his displeasure. He was one of those men who have the power of making their disapproval felt from the simple fact that they feel it so strongly themselves. The most oppressive of domestic tyrants are by no means those who vent their ill-nature in open words. The man who strenuously insists to himself upon his will, and cherishes in silence his dislike of whatever is contrary to it, is oftener a harder man to live with than one who is violently outspoken. Fenton was hardly conscious of the absolute despotism with which he ruled his home, but his wife was too susceptible to his moods not to feel keenly the unspoken protest with which he met any infringement upon his wishes or his pleasure. Tonight he was in good humor, and his sense of beauty was touched by the loveliness of her appearance.

"Oh, it is no matter," he answered lightly. "How stunning you look. That topaz," he continued, walking toward her, and laying his finger upon the single jewel she wore fastened at the edge of the square-cut corsage of her gown, "is exactly right. It is so deep in color that it gives the one touch you need. It was uncommonly nice of your Uncle Peter to give it to you."

"And of you to design a dress to set it off," returned she, smiling with pleasure. "I am glad you like me in it."

"You are stunning," her husband repeated, kissing her with a faint shade of patronage in his manner. "Now come on before the dinner is as cold as a stone. A cold dinner is like a warmed-over love affair; you accept it from a sense of duty, but there is no enjoyment in it."

Mrs. Fenton smiled, more from pleasure at his evident good nature than from any especial amusement, and they went together into the pretty dining-room.

Fenton acknowledged himself fond of the refinements of life, and his sensitive, sensuous nature lost none of the delights of a well-appointed home. He lived in a quiet and elegant luxury which would have been beyond the attainment of most artists, and which indeed not infrequently taxed his resources to the utmost.

The table at which the pair sat down was laid with exquisite damask and china, the dinner admirable and well served. The dishes came in hot, the maid was deft and comely in appearance, and the master of the house, who always kept watch, in a sort of involuntary self-consciousness, of all that went on about him, was pleasantly aware that the most fastidious of his friends could have found nothing amiss in the appointment or the service of his table. How much the perfect arrangement of domestic affairs demanded from his wife, Fenton found it more easy and comfortable not to inquire, but he at least appreciated the results of her management. He never came to accept the smallest trifles of life without emotion. His pleasure or annoyance depended upon minute details, and things which people in general passed without notice were to him the most important facts of daily life. The responsibility for the comfort of so highly organized a creature, Edith had found to be anything but a light burden. Only a wife could have appreciated the pleasure she had in having the most delicate shades in

her domestic management noted and enjoyed; or the discomfort which arose from the same source. It was delightful to have her husband pleased by the smallest pains she took for his comfort; to know that his eye never failed to discover the little refinements of dress or cookery or household adornment; but wearing was the burden of understanding, too, that no flaw was too small to escape his sight. Mrs. Fenton's friends rallied her upon being a slave to her housekeeping; few of them were astute enough to understand that, kind as was always his manner toward her, she was instead the slave of her husband.

The room in which they were dining was one in which the artist took especial pleasure. He had panelled it with stamped leather, which he had picked up somewhere in Spain; while the ceiling was covered with a novel and artistic arrangement of gilded matting. Among Edith's wedding gifts had been some exquisite jars of Moorish pottery, and these, with a few pieces of Algerian armor, were the only ornaments which the artist had admitted to the room. The simplicity and richness of the whole made an admirable setting for the dinner table, and as the host when he entertained was willing to take the trouble of overlooking his wife's arrangements, the Fentons' dinner parties were among the most picturesquely effective in Boston.

"I have two big pieces of news for you," Mrs. Fenton said, when the soup had been removed. "I have been to call on Mrs. Stewart Hubbard this afternoon, and Mr. Hubbard is going to have you paint him. Isn't that good?"

Her husband looked up in evident pleasure.

"That isn't so bad," was his reply. "He'll make a stunning picture, and the Hubbards are precisely the sort of people one likes to have dealings with. Is he going at it soon?"

"He is coming to see you to-morrow, Mrs. Hubbard said. The picture is to be her birthday present. I told her you were so busy I didn't know when you could begin."

"I would stretch a point to please Mr. Hubbard. I am almost done with Irons, vulgar old cad. I wish I dared paint him as bad as he really looks."

"But your artistic conscience won't let you?" she queried, smiling. "He is a dreadful old creature; but he means well."

"People who mean well are always worse than those who don't mean anything; but I can make it up with Hubbard. He looks like Rubens' St. Simeon. I wish he wore the same sort of clothes."

"You might persuade him to, for the picture. But my second piece of news is almost as good. Helen is coming home."

"Helen Greyson?"

"Helen Greyson. I had a letter from her today, written in Paris. She had already got so far, and she ought to be here very soon."

"How long has she been in Rome?" Fenton asked.

He had suddenly become graver. He had been intimate with Mrs. Greyson, a sculptor of no mean talent, in the days when he had been a fervid opponent of people and of principles with whom he had later joined alliance, and the idea of her return brought up vividly his parting from her, when she had scornfully upbraided him for his apostasy from convictions which he had again and again declared to be dearer to him than life.

"It is six years," Mrs. Fenton answered. "Caldwell was born the March after she went, and he will be six in three weeks. Time goes fast. We are getting to be old people."

Fenton stared at his plate absently, his thoughts busy with the past.

"Has Grant Herman been married six years?" he asked, after a moment.

"Grant Herman? Yes; he was married just before she sailed; but what of it?"

Fenton laid down the fork with which he had been poking the bits of fish about on his plate. He folded his arms on the edge of the table, and regarded his wife.

"It is astonishing, Edith," he observed, "how well one may know a woman and yet be mistaken in her. For six years I have supposed you to be religiously avoiding any allusion to Helen's love for Grant Herman, and it seems you never knew it at all."

It was Mrs. Fenton's turn to look up in surprise.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Her husband laughed lightly, yet not very joyously.

"Nothing, if you will. Nobody ever told me they were in love with each other, but I am as sure that Helen made Herman marry Ninitta as if I had been on hand to see the operation."

"Made him marry her? Why should he marry her if he didn't want to?"

"Oh, well, I don't know anything about it. I know Ninitta followed Herman to America, for she told me so; and I am sure he had no idea of marrying her when she got here. Anybody can put two and two together, I suppose, especially if you know what infernally Puritanical notions Helen had."

"Puritanical?"

The artist leaned back in his chair and smiled at his wife in his superior and tantalizing fashion.