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 G.o.d!"

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 superst.i.tions 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 G.o.d! 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 superst.i.tious 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d, signor! For the love of G.o.d!"

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 pa.s.sionate 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 att.i.tude. 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 pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude 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!"