Her voice broke despite her effort. She came nearer, she hesitated an instant; then she bent over and kissed his forehead. A hot tear splashed upon his hand.

"There," she said. "Good night, and good-by. When you come back you will see what a fine steady old lady I have become."

He got on to his feet, confused, troubled, pitying her profoundly and commiserating himself upon the awkwardness of the situation. He tried to frame some sentence which might bridge the distance that seemed suddenly to have opened between them. Like a farewell, a renunciation or a dedication, that kiss impressed upon him a certain remoteness new and oppressive.

"Bah!" he broke off. "I can say nothing, Helen. I have thus far served in an already sufficiently unhappy world only to make people more miserable still. I'm not worth a faintest regret. Good-night. If I can ever serve you--Good-by!"

XV.

'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL.

Oth.e.l.lo; i--3.

Helen's first conscious sensation next morning was a feeling of loss, which resolved itself into a deep sadness when she was fairly awake and realized that Arthur had gone. She had not Considered how much his companionship and friendliness had been to her until now, when she felt them lost. A woman so lonely yet so affectionate as Helen could not spare from her life a friend so dear as Fenton had been without being much moved. So strong had been her attachment, and so intimate had been the acquaintance between herself and Arthur, that Dr. Ashton had believed his wife to love the artist; but Helen, closely questioning her heart, was able to a.s.sure herself that warm as had been her regard for Fenton, he had never awakened in her bosom a single thrill of love.

She was sad this morning with the sorrow of a broken friendship, not of a blighted pa.s.sion.

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 un.o.btrusive 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sage, 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion," 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 G.o.ddesses 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 pa.s.sion of a man--and for such a woman! She is half G.o.ddess. No, no; I cannot do it.