Never was a man more utterly wretched than was Arthur Fenton, after the luckless day when Mr. Irons had lighted upon the presence of Mrs. Herman at the studio. He raged against himself, against chance, most of all against the unmannerly and coarse-minded fellow who had forced himself into the studio, and then persisted in imagining evil which had never existed. He experienced all the acute anguish of finding himself in the toils, and of the added sting from wounded vanity, since he felt that he had been wanting in adroitness and presence of mind. It is to be doubted if he did not suffer more than would have been the case had the injurious suspicions of Irons been correct. To a vain man, it is often harder to be entrapped through stupidity or awkwardness than through crime.
Fenton realized well enough how impossible it was now to correct the evil that had been done. He might have explained away the fact that Ninitta had been his model, but his own bearing under the accusation had produced an impression not to be eradicated. The wavering before his eyes, for a single instant, of the will-o'-the-wisp fire of sudden temptation had blinded him, so that he had been guilty of a cursed piece of folly, which had put him at once in the power of Irons. He knew enough of the latter to be pretty sure that he was capable of keeping his threat to enlighten Herman concerning his wife's visit to the studio, and disgrace in the eyes of Herman meant more than Arthur dared to think. Sensitive to the last fibre of his being, the artist grew faint with exquisite pain at the thought of what he must endure from a scandal spread among his friends. An accusation without foundation would have been almost more than he could bear, but one supported by such circumstantial evidence as lay behind the story Irons would tell if he set himself to make trouble,—the bare idea drove Fenton wild.
Fenton had always prided himself upon his superiority to public opinion, but without public respect he could not but be supremely miserable. It is true that he valued his own good opinion above that of the world. It was his theory that the ultimate appeal in matters of conduct was always to the man's inner consciousness, and in this highest court only the man himself could be present, all the world being shut out. It followed that a person's own opinion of his acts was of infinitely more weight than that of any or all other people whosoever.
"All standards are arbitrary," he was accustomed to say, "and all terms are relative. Every man must make his own ethical code, and nobody but the man himself can tell how far he lives up to it. Why should I care whether people who do not even know what my rules of conduct are, consider my course correct or not? Very likely the things they condemn are the things it has cost me most struggle and self-denial to achieve. We have outgrown old ethical systems, because the world has become enlightened enough to perceive that every mind must make its own code; to realize that what a man is must be his religion."
This course of reasoning was one shared by many of Fenton's friends, and indeed by a goodly company of nineteenth century thinkers. Fenton was in reality only going with the majority of liberalists in regarding sincerity to personal conviction as the highest of ethical laws; and he was generally pretty logical in choosing the approval of his inward knowledge to that of the world outside. Yet his vanity was keenly sensitive to disapprobation, and when the censure of the world coincided with the condemnation of his own reason he suffered. To self-contempt was added a baffled sense of having been discovered; and as his imagination now ran forward to picture the effects of Irons's disclosure, the suffering he endured was really pitiful.
"Nobody will understand," he said to himself one day, half in bitter self-contempt and half in self-defence, "that I couldn't help doing as I did; no cruelty surpasses that of holding weak and sensitive natures accountable for shortcomings they are born incapable of avoiding."
And having accomplished an epigram at his own expense, he felt as if he had to some degree atoned for his fault, just as a flagellant looks upon his self-scourging as expiatory.
How to act in the position in which he had been placed by Irons's insulting proposal was a question which he found more difficult to answer than according to his theories, it should have been. When a man becomes his own highest law he is constantly exposed to the danger of finding his theories of conduct utterly confounded by a change in self-interest; and Fenton began to have a most painful sense of being ethically wholly at sea. He had not yielded to temptation, however. He had given Stewart Hubbard a couple of sittings, and so great had been his fear lest he should inadvertently gather from his sitter some hint of the knowledge he had been urged to obtain, that he had half unconsciously been reserved and silent. The picture was going badly, and the sitter wondered what had come over the witty and vivacious artist.
Besides these vexations the artist had, moreover, other causes for uneasiness at this time. His financial affairs were by no means in satisfactory condition. He had been filling a good many orders and getting excellent prices for his work, yet somehow he had been all the year running behindhand. He lived beyond his means, priding himself upon being the one Boston artist who had been born, bred, and educated a gentleman, as he chose to put it to himself, and who was able to live as a man of the world should. His summer had been passed at Newport, a place which Edith by no means liked, and where her ideas of propriety and religion were constantly offended, especially in regard to the sanctity of marriage. He entertained sumptuously, spent money freely at the clubs, and, in a word, tried to be no less a man of fashion than an artist.
The result was beginning to be disastrous. Living pretty closely up to his income, a few losses and a speculation or two which turned out unlucky, were sufficient to embarrass him seriously. It was the old trite and dreary story of extravagance and its inevitable consequence; and as Fenton had no talent for finance, his struggles rather made matters worse than bettered them, as the efforts of a fly to escape from the web, even although they may damage the net, are apt to end also in binding the victim more securely.