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The Philistines

A >> Arlo Bates >> The Philistines




However great his mental pluck, Fenton was physically a coward, and he
knew it. The New England climate and life have given to most of her
children, of any degree of cultivation, a nervous organization too
acutely sensitive to pain for them to be physically brave; but to this
disposition the New England training, the inherited manliness of sturdy
ancestors, has added a splendid moral energy to overcome this weakness.

In the first terrible shock of fear which followed his discovery that
the steamer had been run down, Fenton's body trembled with terror. He
felt a wild and dizzy impulse to rush somewhere madly; but in a moment
his will reasserted itself. He was intensely frightened, but he beat
down his fear with the lash of self-scorn, as he would have whipped a
hound that refused to do his bidding. He steadied himself for a moment
against the doorway with tense muscles, setting his teeth together. He
drew a deep breath, turned back into his stateroom, and put on a cork
jacket. He was cool enough. Before he buckled it he transferred his
wallet and papers from the pocket of his coat to that on the inside of
his waistcoat. Then he hurried out through the saloon on to the
afterdeck. The place was crowded, and the confusion was indescribable.
Fenton's first impulse was to put his hands over his ears, to shut out
the horrible din. The officers were shouting orders and getting the
boats manned, for even in this short time the steamer was settling. The
hissing swash of the waves beating into the breach, the prayers, the
imprecations, the hysterical sobs, the agonized cries of the struggling
passengers, the darkness, the terror, the yawning abyss of death
beneath them,--combined to sweep away all human feelings save the
instinct of self-preservation. The brute side of human nature revealed
itself with a hideousness more horrible than the terror of the night
and the sea. Unprotected women were crushed and trampled, and as the
boats were lowered a fierce hand-to-hand conflict ensued, men fighting
like wild cats to force their way into them. The officers beat them
back, and made way for the women as well as they could, struggling at
the same time with the difficult task of maintaining discipline among
the crew.

Shrill amid the uproar, a child's cry smote Fenton's ear as he came out
upon the deck. Directly before him a man was trying to pull a life-
preserver off from a boy, while a woman fought with him in a desperate
endeavor to shield her child. The lad was about the size of Caldwell
and in the confused light not wholly unlike him. With a sob and a
curse, Fenton struck the man full in the face with all his force,
sending the brute reeling backward into the crowd which was too dense
to allow of his falling. The mother hurriedly pulled the child into the
dense stream of people crowding toward the boats, and Fenton saw the
pair disappear over the side of the steamer, helped by one of the
officers.

There ran through his mind a momentary speculation of their chances of
escape, and the thought brought him back to the consideration of his
own situation. A sudden unreasonable disgust of the conditions which
made his salvation so improbable seized upon him. He reflected that he
might still baffle fate by taking his own life, and for an instant the
idea of thus escaping from all the vexations which surrounded him
presented itself to his mind in alluring colors. The idea of self-
destruction was one with which he had played so often that he
entertained it without a shock; and he realized now, almost with a
conviction that the fact forced him to suicide for the sake of
consistency, that his death under these circumstances would surely be
attributed to accident. He even began to fumble with the buckles of his
life-preserver; then with a smile of bitter scorn he looked down at his
hands, of which the fingers were trembling with nervous fear.

"Bah," he said to himself, "why should I pose to myself? Fate is too
much for me; if a gentle and beneficent Providence intends to make away
with me, so be it. I haven't the nerve to anticipate it."

He started toward the boats, and at that instant he caught sight of the
face of Ninitta. She was standing perfectly quiet, with her arm around
one of the small pillars supporting the covering to the deck. She was
fully dressed, though her head was uncovered and the rings of hair
clung about her face. Fenton forgot everything else at sight of her. In
a moment of supreme egotism there flashed through his mind the
consequences of Ninitta's being here. The consciousness of all that lay
between them made him keenly alive to the evil construction which might
be placed upon her having fled from home on the same boat which carried
him. He realized, with a profound feeling of impotence, that if they
were lost together he should be forever unable to explain or to dispel
the suspicion to which her presence might give rise; he felt with keen
bitterness how useless would be all his cleverness, and his heart
swelled with rage at the thought that his adroitness would be wasted
for lack of opportunity.

He forgot the danger, the terror of the wreck, the shrieking of the
women, the brutality of the men, and, for the moment, felt with the
keen desperation of enormous vanity the danger to his reputation. He
forced his way madly across the deck and confronted her in the ghastly
light of the swinging lantern and the gray foregleams of the coming
dawn.

"You followed me!" he cried with bitter harshness.

She looked at him in a calm, stunned way, as if she were past suffering
and almost past feeling. The recognition in her eyes came slowly, as if
she were dazed or as if some powerful mental stress held her attention.

"Now," he began, "your boy"--He was going to add, "will grow up to
believe you ran away with me;" but his manliness asserted itself and he
could not continue. It was like striking a woman, and the brutal words
died on his lip.

At the mention of her boy a sudden passion flamed in her eyes. She
loosed her hold upon the pillar and a sudden lurch of the sinking ship
threw her into Fenton's arms. She clung to him frantically.

"My boy!" she moaned. "My boy!"

Like quickly shifting pictures, there ran through Fenton's mind the
images of Nino, of the boy whose life-preserver he had saved, and of
his own son, asleep in safety in his nursery at home. With a quick
revulsion of feeling came the desire to save Ninitta, and with
instinctive quickness he hit upon a possible means of escape. As he
came through the saloon he had seen a man, a dim shape in the fog,
clambering through the shattered staterooms to climb over the broken
bowsprit into the vessel that had run them down. Hastily drawing
Ninitta along, he forced his way back into the saloon. The body of the
man who had been hurt in the collision lay dead and deserted on the
floor. He lifted his companion over it and made his way to the side of
the steamer. Others had discovered this road to safety and he had to
fight for his foothold amid the waves that now washed over his feet.
The men on the stranger vessel were sawing off the broken spar which
was entangled under the steamer's upper deck, lest their craft should
be dragged down by the sinking boat. He urged Ninitta forward, swinging
her by main force up into the tangled rigging.

"No, no," she cried, endeavoring to throw herself back. "I do not want
to go. It will be better for Nino."

The sublimity of her self-sacrifice smote him like a lash. He could not
stop to argue, but he forced her forward, and one of the men above,
feeling himself in safety, caught her by the arm to drag her up. But at
that instant the spar, cut nearly through, broke with a sharp crack
like the sound of a gun. The end fell, and with it the wretched woman
was carried down. She shrieked as she went, the water cutting short her
cry of mortal anguish. Fenton saw her face an instant, and then in the
fog and the darkness the lapping water closed over her.

An awful sickening shudder ran through him, a fear too great to be
resisted. There rose from his heart a despairing prayer; and the
unbeliever has sounded the depth of agony when he calls upon God.

At that instant a beam loosened from the upper deck, dragged downward
by the ropes of the falling bowsprit, fell with a crash, dashing him
downward into the gulf below. He felt the awful stinging pain of the
blow, like the thrust of a spear; a mighty wave seemed to mount upward
to meet and to engulf him. Then he lost all perception of what he was
doing or of what happened to him; and it might to his consciousness
have been either moments or hours before he found himself struggling in
the icy water. He swam instinctively, and he even remembered to try to
increase his distance from the steamer, that he might not be caught in
the eddy when it went down. He heard still the cries and shrieks, but
the noise of the sea at his ears was like a mighty uproar confusing
all. He could not tell in which direction lay the vessel; a mighty
pressure crushed his chest, and innumerable lights twinkling against a
background of intensest black seemed to shine before his eyes. He was
past thinking clearly. His memory was like a broken mirror whose
shattered fragments reflected a thousand bits from his past life,
confused, detached, and meaningless.

Then with a last supreme effort his strong will asserted itself in a
command upon his consciousness. For one intense instant, briefer than
the flash of the tiniest spark, he realized everything, save that the
blow or the nearness of death seemed to have dulled all sense of fear.
The most vivid thought of all was the reflection that he might have
been saved but for his efforts to help Ninitta. The grim humor of the
situation tickled his fancy, and in the very flood of death he faintly
smiled at the irony of fate which thus balanced accounts. And this
flash of cynical amusement was the last gleam of his earthly
consciousness.




XXXVII

A SYMPATHY OF WOE.
Titus Andronicus; iii.--1.

Fortunately Ninitta had made no secret of her departure except to
conceal it from her husband. She had been to see some Italian friends
of former days to ask about people she had known in Italy, and from
them her husband learned pretty nearly what her plans had been. Fenton
might have spared himself his fears lest she be suspected of going with
him. Such a thought did not for an instant enter into Herman's mind.
The sculptor found himself appreciating better than ever before the
strength of his wife's character. The knowledge of Ninitta's faults
died with her, and her memory was transmitted to her son enriched with
the halo of a martyr who has died in the path of supreme self-
sacrifice. Nine's father understood fairly well the train of reasoning
which had led his wife to the tragic resolve to leave their boy.
Ignorant of her fault, he blamed himself for the reproach by which he
feared he had forced her to believe that it were better for her son to
be freed from her presence.

His generous nature forgot, too, all anger against Fenton. To the noble
soul, death, by a reasoning which is above logic, seems to settle all
accounts. He remembered the artist's brightness, his quick sympathy,
his keen imagination, and his ready adaptability. The flippancy that
had often shocked him, the treachery to principles which he held sacred
that had wounded him, his kind memory put out of sight, as one wipes
the stains from a crystal; and in the mind of the man he had wronged,
the remembrance of Arthur Fenton remained fair and gracious, and nobler
than the nature whose monument it was.

He went to see Mrs. Fenton, but when he met her he at first could say
nothing. He stammered brokenly, tears choking his voice, holding her
hand in his, and vainly striving to put into words the sympathy he
felt. Then he stooped suddenly and kissed her hand.

"Our boys,"--he said, with awkward phrasing, but with an instinct which
reached to the ground of their deepest sympathy. "It might comfort them
a little to play together."

The widow clung with both her small hands to the large strong one which
had clasped hers; and bending down over it she burst into convulsive
sobs. He stood silent a moment, his lip trembling then with grave
kindness, he said,--

"I know how hard it is; but you have the comfort of being able to tell
the boy that his father was a genius and a noble man. Do you know that
a woman who was rescued says that your husband saved her boy, a little
lad like Caldwell. Arthur knocked down the man that was trying to rob
him of his life-preserver. The Captain told her afterward who it was."

He was perfectly sincere in what he said. It was difficult for him to
think evil of the living; of the dead it was impossible.

After he had gone, Edith took Caldwell on her knee and told him the
story. It was the brightest ray of comfort in all that sad time to be
able thus to glorify his father in the eyes of her son. The incident
dwelt in her mind, and her loving fancy added to it a hundred details
and drew from it numberless deductions with which to enrich the memory
of her dead. It came in time to be the most prominent thing in her
remembrance of her husband. It was the fact which she could recall with
the most unmixed satisfaction, which needed no evasions, no mental
reservations, no warpings of belief, to appear wholly noble. In the
light of this deed, the impulse of a moment, Fenton stood in her memory
as a hero; and in viewing him thus, she was able to lose sight of
everything which she must forgive, of everything which she wished to
forget.

Edith was happily spared the harassing complications of financial
difficulty which it had seemed must inevitably result from the
condition in which her husband's affairs were left.

On Mr. Irons's return from New York, he had been astounded and enraged
to find that he had been outwitted by the combined cleverness of Mrs.
Sampson and the stupidity of his clerk, and that he was in possession
of eleven thousand shares of Princeton Platinum stock. For seven
thousand shares he had paid at the rate of three dollars, and the stock
was now quoted at one and three eighths asked, with no particular
reason for supposing that the putting of even half his shares on the
market would not reduce it to zero. Irons blasphemed prodigiously and
emphatically, discharged his clerk, and went to call on Mrs. Sampson,
whom he threatened with all sorts of condign punishments if she did not
disgorge her ill-gotten gains. The widow received him affably, and
laughed in his face at this proposal, a course of action which won his
respect more fully than any other which she could have chosen. There
was evidently nothing left but to do what he could with the market, and
by methods best known to himself he succeeded in bulling the stock so
that he was able to unload at three dollars and a half.

The brokers in whose hands Fenton had left his stock had been watching
their opportunity, and closed it out at the top of the market, a
consummation for which Fenton had so devoutly longed that it seemed
cruel he could not have lived to see it. The returns from this and from
her husband's life insurance secured to Edith and her son a small
income, which was considerably increased by the sale of Fenton's
pictures which was soon after organized by the artists of the St.
Filipe Club.

It was about a month after Ninitta's death that Grant Herman went to
visit Helen. He had chosen to see her at her studio rather than at her
home. Poignant memories of the past were less likely to be aroused by
the unfamiliar appearance of this room which he had never before
entered. It was late in the afternoon, and Helen was standing by the
figure of a child upon which she had been working. She gave him her
hand impulsively, forgetting that the fingers were stained with clay.

"I beg your pardon," she said.

"It is no matter," he returned, and the commonplace phrases bridged the
awkwardness which belongs to the meeting of two people whose minds are
full of intense feeling which they are not prepared to speak. Helen led
him toward another modelling stand.

"I want you to see this bust," she remarked. "It's quite in the manner
which you used to say was my best."

He stood watching her with a swelling heart as she removed the damp
wrappings which kept the clay moist. Keen in the minds of both was the
knowledge that now there were no barriers between them; that the time
had come at last when they were free to love each other and to unite
their lives. The closeness of Ninitta's death kept this wholly from
their words, but it could not banish the exultation, so sharp as to be
almost pain, which would arise from the mere fact of their being
together. Both understood that however great the sorrow at her death
which he was too noble-hearted not to feel, he must rejoice in the
right to follow the dictates of his love at last.

He forced himself to examine the bust critically, and to speak of it
calmly; but he soon turned away from it, and stood looking at her a
moment, as if trying to find speech in which to phrase what he had come
to say. She waited for him to speak, meeting his glance frankly. Her
head was thrown backward a little, and he noted with pitying eagerness
that she was paler than of old, and that there were dark circles
beneath her eyes. He thought of the years in which their lives had been
separated, and sorrow for her suffering made his heart swell.

"Helen," he said, "I have come to ask a favor. I want you to look after
Nino a little. He has been given up to servants too much, and I am
perfectly helpless when it comes to managing his nurse. Is there any
way in which you can do anything for him?"

"Of course there is," she answered. "I will come in and see him every
day and find out how things go with him; then, if anything is wrong, I
can let you know."

"Thank you," he returned simply. "I was sure you would help me. But do
you think," he added, hesitating, "that it will be in any way awkward
for you?"

She smiled on him and she could not keep out of her eyes the joy she
felt at being able to serve him.

"Do you think," was her reply, "that I am likely to let that
consideration stand in my way? It is rather late in life for me to
begin to let conventionality interfere with what I think it right to
do. Besides," she continued, dropping her eyes, though without a shade
of self-consciousness, "I shall go when you are at the studio."

"And it will not be too much trouble?"

"I shall love to do what I can for Nino."

"I thank you," he said again.

Then without more words he held out his hand.

"Good-night," he said.

"Good-night," she repeated.

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