Fenwick's Career Part 13

They set off in bitter weather. The driver was a farmer's son who had come to the station to fetch his small brother. Fenwick and he took the little school-boy between them, to protect him as best they could from the wind and sleet. They piled some empty sacks, from the back of the cart, on their knees and shoulders; and the old grey horse set forward cautiously, feeling its way down the many hills of the Ambleside road.

The night was not yet wholly in possession. The limestone road shone dimly white, the forms of the leafless trees pa.s.sed them in a windy procession, and afar on the horizon, beyond the dark gulf of the lake, there was visible at intervals a persistent dimness, something less black than the sky above and the veiled earth below, which Fenwick knew must be the snowy tops of the mountains. But it was a twilight more mournful than a total darkness; the damp air was nipping cold, and every few minutes gusts of sleet drove in their faces.

The two brothers talked to each other sometimes, in a broad Westmoreland speech. To Fenwick the dialect of his childhood was already strange and disagreeable. So, too, was the wild roughness of the Northern night, the length of the road, the sense of increasing distance from all that most held his mind. He longed, indeed, to see Phoebe and the child, but it was as though he had wilfully set up some barrier between himself and them, which spoiled his natural pleasure.

Moreover, he was afraid of Phoebe, of her quick jealous love, and of certain pa.s.sionate possibilities in her character that he had long ago discerned. If she discovered that he had made a mystery of his marriage--that he had pa.s.sed in London as unmarried? It was an ugly and uncomfortable 'if.' Did he shrink from the possible blow to her--or the possible trouble to himself? Well, she must not find it out! It had been a wretched sort of accident, and before it could do any harm it should be amended.

Suddenly, a sound of angry water. They were close on the lake, and waves driven by the wind were plashing on the sh.o.r.e. Across the lake, a light in a house-window shone through the storm, the only reminder of human life amid a dark wilderness of mountains. Wild sounds crashed through the trees; and accompanying the tumult of water came the rattle of a bitter rain lashing the road, the cart, and their bent shoulders.

'There'll not be a dry st.i.tch on us soon,' said Fenwick, presently, to the young man beside him.

'Aye, it's dampish,' said his companion, cheerfully.

The caution of the adjective set Fenwick grinning. The North found and gripped him; these are not the ways of the South.

And in a moment the sense of contrast, thus provoked, had carried him far--out of the Westmoreland night, back to London, and his shabby studio in Bernard Street. There, throned on a low platform, sat Madame de Pastourelles; and to her right, himself, sitting crouched before his easel, working with all his eyes and all his mind. The memory of her was, as it were, physically stamped upon his sight, his hands; such an intensity of study had he given to every detail of her face and form. Did he like her? He didn't know. There were a number of curious resentments in his mind with regard to her. Several times in the course of their acquaintance she had cheapened or humiliated him in his own eyes; and the sensation had been of a sharpness as yet unknown to him.

Of course, there was in it, one way or another, an aristocratic insolence! There must be: to move so delicately and immaculately through life, with such superfine perceptions, must mean that you were brought up to scorn the common way, and those who walk in it. 'The poor in a lump are bad'--coa.r.s.e and ill-mannered at any rate--that must be the real meaning of her soft dignity, so friendly yet so remote, her impossibly ethereal standards, her light words that so often abashed a man for no reasonable cause.

She had been sitting to him, off and on, for about six weeks.

Originally she had meant him to make a three-hour sketch of her. He triumphed in the remembrance that she and Lord Findon had found the sketch so remarkable that, when he had timidly proposed a portrait in oils, Lord Findon himself had persuaded her to sit. Since that moment his work on the portrait, immediately begun, had absorbed him to such a degree that the 'Genius Loci,' still unfinished, had been put aside, and must have its last touches when he returned to town.

But in the middle of the sittings, Madame de Pastourelles being away, and he in a mood to destroy all that he had done, he had suddenly spent a stray earning on a railway ticket to Paris.

There--excitement!--illumination!--and a whole fresh growth of ambition! Some of the mid-century portraits in the Luxembourg, and in a loan exhibition then open in the Rue Royale, excited him so that he lost sleep and appet.i.te. The work of Bastien-Lepage was also to be seen; and the air rang with the cries of Impressionism. But the beautiful surface of the older men held him. How to combine the breadth of the new with the keeping, the sheer _pleasure_ of the old!

He rushed home--aflame!--and fell to work again.

And now he found himself a little more able to cope with his sitter.

He was in possession, at any rate, of fresh topics--need not feel himself so tongue-tied in the presence of this cosmopolitan culture of hers, which she did her feminine best to disguise--which nevertheless made the atmosphere of her personality. She had lived some six years in Paris, it appeared; and had known most of the chief artists and men of letters. Fenwick writhed under his ignorance of the French language; it was a disadvantage not to be made up.

However, he talked much, and sometimes arrogantly; he gave his views, compared one man with another; if he felt any diffidence, he showed little. And indeed she led him on. Upon his art he had a right to speak, and the keen intellectual interest she betrayed in his impressions--the three days impressions of a painter--stirred and flattered him.

But he made a great many rather ludicrous mistakes, inevitable to one who had just taken a first canter through the vast field of French art; mistakes in names and dates, in the order of men and generations.

And when he made a blunder he was apt to stick to it absurdly, or excuse it elaborately. She soon gave up correcting him, even in the gentle, hesitating way she at first made use of. She said nothing; but there was sometimes mischief, perhaps mockery, in her eyes. Fenwick knew it; and would either make fresh plunges, or paint on in a sulky silence.

How on earth had she guessed the authorship of those articles in the _Mirror_? He supposed he must have talked the same kind of stuff to her. At any rate, she had made him feel in some intangible way that it seemed to her a dishonourable thing to be writing anonymous attacks upon a body from whom you were asking, or intending to ask, exhibition s.p.a.ce for your pictures and the chance of selling your work. His authorship was never avowed between them. Nevertheless this criticism annoyed and p.r.i.c.ked him. He said to himself that it was just like a woman--who always took the personal view. But he had not yet begun on his last two articles, which were overdue.

On one occasion, encouraged perhaps by some kindness of expression on her part, he had ventured an indirect question or two, meant to procure him some information about her past history and present way of life. She had rebuffed him at once; and he had said to himself fiercely that it was of course because he was a man of the people and she one of 'the upper ten.' He might paint her; but he must not presume to know her!

On the other hand, his mind was still warm with memories of her encouragement, her praise. Sometimes in their talks he would put the portrait aside, and fall to sketching for her--either to ill.u.s.trate his memories of pictures, or things noticed in French life and landscapes. And as the charcoal worked; as he forgot himself in hurried speech, and those remarks fell from him which are the natural outcome of a painter's experience, vivacious also and touched with literature; then her brown eyes would lighten and soften, and for once his mind would feel exultant that it moved with hers on equal terms--nay, that he was teacher and she taught. Whenever there emerged in him the signs of that demonic something that makes greatness she would be receptive, eager, humble even. But again his commoner, coa.r.s.er side, his mere lack of breeding, would reappear; and she would fall back on her cold or gentle defensiveness. Thus protected by what his wrath called 'airs,' she was a mystery to him, yet a mystery that tamed and curbed him. He had never dreamt that such women existed.

His own views of women were those of the shopkeeping middle cla.s.s, practical, selfish, or sensual. But he had been a reader of books; and through Madame de Pastourelles certain sublimities or delicacies of poetry began to seem to him either less fantastic or more real.

All the same:--he was not sure that he liked her, and while one hour he was all restlessness to resume his task, the next it was a relief to be temporarily quit of it. As for Lord Findon, except for a certain teasing vagueness on the business side of things, he had shown himself a good friend. Several times since the first variegated evening had Fenwick dined with them, mostly _en famille_. Lady Findon, indeed, had been away, nursing an invalid father; Madame de Pastourelles filled her place. The old fellow would talk freely--politics, connoisseurship, art. Fenwick too was allowed his head, and said his say; though always surrounded and sometimes chafing under that discipline of good society which is its only or its best justification. It flattered his vanity enormously, however, to be thus within touch of the inner circle in politics and art; for the Findons had relations and friends in all the foremost groups of both; and incidentally Fenwick, who had the grudges and some of the dreams of the democrat, was beginning to have a glimpse of the hidden springs and powers of English society--to his no small bewilderment often!

Great luck--he admitted--all this--for a nameless artist of the people, only six months in London. He owed it to Cuningham, and believed himself grateful. Cuningham was often at the Findons, made a point, indeed, of going. Was it to maintain his place with them, and to keep Fenwick under observation? Fenwick triumphantly believed that Lord Findon greatly preferred his work--and even, by now, his conversation--to Cuningham's. But he was still envious of Cuningham's smooth tact, and agreeable, serviceable ways.

As to Welby and his place in the Findon circle, that was another matter altogether. He came and went as he pleased, on brotherly terms with the son and the younger daughters, clearly an object of great affection to Lord Findon, and often made use of by her ladyship.

What was the degree of friendship between him and Madame de Pastourelles?--that had been already the subject of many meditations on Fenwick's part.

The cart deposited the school-boy in Brathay and started again for Langdale.

'Yo couldna get at Langdale for t' snaw la.s.st week,' said the young farmer, as they turned a corner into the Skelwith Valley. 'T' roads were fair choked wi't.'

'It's been an early winter,' said Fenwick.

'Aye, and t' Langdales get t' brunt o't. It's wild livin there, soomtimes, i' winter.'

They began to climb the first steep hill of the old road to Langdale.

The snow lay piled on either side of the road, the rain beat down, and the trees clashed and moaned overhead. Not a house, not a light, upon their path--only swirling darkness, opening now and then on that high glimmer of the snow. Fresh from London streets, where winter, even if it attack in force, is so soon tamed and conquered, Fenwick was for the first time conscious of the harsher, wilder aspects of his native land. Poor Phoebe! Had she been a bit lonesome in the snow and rain?

The steep lane to the cottage was still deep in snow. The cart could not attempt it. Fenwick made his way up, fighting the eddying sleet.

As he let fall the latch of the outer gate, the cottage door opened, and Phoebe, with the child in her arms, stood on the threshold.

'John!'

'Yes! G.o.d bless my soul, what a night!' He reached the door, put down his umbrella with difficulty, and dragged his bag into the pa.s.sage.

Then, in a moment, his coat was off and he had thrown his arm round her and the child. It seemed to him that she was curiously quiet and restrained. But she kissed him in return, drew him further within the little pa.s.sage, and shut the outer door, shivering.

'The kitchen's warm,' she said, at last.

She led him in, and he found the low-ceiled room bright with fire and lamp, the table spread, and his chair beside the blaze. Kneeling down, she tried to unlace his wet boots.

'No, no!' he said, holding her away--'I'll do that, Phoebe. What's wrong with you?--you look so--so queer!'

She straightened herself, and with a laugh put back her fair hair. Her face was very pale--a greyish pallor--and her wonderful eyes stared from it in an odd, strained way.

'Oh, I'm all right,' she said; and she turned away from him to the fire, opening the oven-door to see whether the meat-pie was done.

'How have you kept in this weather?' he said, watching her. 'I'd no notion you'd had it so bad.'

'Oh, I don't know. I suppose I've had a chill or something. It's been rather weariful.'

'You didn't tell me anything about your chill.'

'Didn't I? It seems hardly worth while telling such things, from such a distance. Will you have supper at once?'

He drew up to the table, and she fed him and hovered round him, asking the while about his work, in a rather perfunctory way, about his rooms and the price of them, inquiring after the state of his clothes. But her tone and manner were unlike herself, and there was in his mind a protesting consciousness that she had not welcomed him as a young wife should after a long separation. Her manner too was extraordinarily nervous; her hand shook as she touched a plate; her movements were full of starts, and checks, as though, often, she intended a thing and then forgot it.

They avoided talking about money, and he did not mention the name of Madame de Pastourelles; though of course his letters had reported the external history of the portrait. But Phoebe presently inquired after it.

'Have you nearly done painting that lady, John?--I don't know how to say her name.'

As she spoke, she lifted a bit of bread-and-b.u.t.ter to her mouth and put it down untasted. In the same way she had tried to drink some tea, and had not apparently succeeded. Fenwick rose and went over to her.

'Look here, Phoebe,' he said, putting his hand on her beautiful hair and turning her face to him--'what's the matter?'

Her eyelids closed, and a quiver went through the face.

'I don't know. I--I had a fright a few days ago--at night--and I suppose I haven't got over it.'