Fenwick's Career Part 15

'Oh! so you think that's like me?' he said, seating himself again at his drawing.

'It's rather like.'

'You suppose you're going to be left here for thirty years?' He laughed as he spoke.

She laughed too, but not gaily--with a kind of defiance.

'Well, it wouldn't be quite as easy now, would it?--with trains, and all that. There were only coaches then, I suppose. Now, London's so near.'

'I wish you'd always think so!' he cried. 'Why, of course it's near.

I'm only seven hours away. What's that, in these days? And in three months' time, things will be all right and square again.'

'I dare say,' she said, sighing.

'Why can't you wait cheerfully?' he asked, rather exasperated--'instead of being so down.'

'Because'--she broke out--'I don't see the reason of it--there! No, I don't!--However!'--she pressed back her hair from her eyes and drew herself together. 'You've never shown me your studies of that--that lady--John; you said you would.'

Relieved at the change of subject, he took a sketch-book out of his pocket and gave it to her. It contained a number of 'notes' for his portrait of Madame de Pastourelles--sketches of various poses, aspects of the head and face, arrangements of the hands, and so forth. Phoebe pondered it in silence.

'She's pretty--I think,' she said, at last, doubtfully.

'I'm not sure that she is,' said Fenwick. 'She's very pale.'

'That doesn't matter. The shape of her face is awfully pretty--and her eyes. Is her hair like mine?'

'No, not nearly so good.'

'Ah, if I could only do it as prettily as she does!' said Phoebe, faintly smiling. 'I suppose, John, she's very smart and fashionable?'

'Well, she's Lord Findon's daughter--that tells you. They're pretty well at the top.'

Phoebe asked various other questions, then fell silent, still pondering the sketches. After a while she put down her work and came to sit on a stool beside Fenwick, sometimes laying her golden head against his knee, or stretching out her hand to touch his. He responded affectionately enough; but as the winter twilight deepened in the little room, Phoebe's eyes, fixed upon the fire, resumed their melancholy discontent. She was less necessary to him even than before; she knew by a thousand small signs that the forces which possessed his mind--perhaps his heart!--were not now much concerned with her.

She tried to control, to school herself. But the flame within was not to be quenched--was, indeed, perpetually finding fresh fuel. How quietly he had taken the story of the tramp's attack upon her!--which still, whenever she thought of it, thrilled her own veins with horror.

No doubt he had been over to Ambleside to speak to the police; and he had arranged that the little servant, Daisy, should come to her when he left. But if he had merely caught her to him with one shuddering cry of love and rage--that would have been worth all his precautions!--would have effaced the nightmare, and filled her heart.

As to his intellectual life, she was now much more conscious of her exclusion from it than she ever had been in their old life together.

For it was a consciousness quickened by jealousy. Little as Fenwick talked about Madame de Pastourelles, Phoebe understood perfectly that she was a woman of high education and refinement, and that her stored and subtle mind was at once an attraction and a cause of humiliation to John. And through his rare stories of the Findon household and the Findon dinner-parties, the wife dimly perceived a formidable world, bristling with strange acquirements and accomplishments, in which he, perhaps, was beginning to find a place, thanks to his art; while she, his obscure and ignorant wife, must resign herself to being for ever shut out from it--to knowing it from his report only. How could she ever hold her own with such people? He would talk with them, paint them, dine with them, while she sat at home--Carrie's nurse, and the domestic drudge.

And yet she was of that type which represents perhaps the most ambitious element in the lower middle cla.s.s. It had been a great matter that she, a small farmer's daughter, should pa.s.s her examinations and rise to be a teacher in Miss Mason's school. She had had her triumphs and conceits; had been accustomed to think herself clever and successful, to hold her head high amongst her schoolmates.

Whereas now, if she tried to talk of art or books, she was hotly aware that everything she said was, in John's eyes, pretentious or absurd. He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women--women especially--in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him and distract him. And meanwhile _she_ went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton ap.r.o.n and rolled-up sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning--for her child and for him.

She felt through every nerve that he was constantly aware of details of dress or _menage_ that jarred upon him; she suspected miserably that all her little personal ways and habits seemed to him ugly and common; and the suspicion showed itself in pride or _brusquerie_.

Meanwhile, if she had been _restful_, if he could only have forgotten his cares in her mere youth and prettiness, Fenwick would have been easily master of his discontents. For he was naturally of a warm, sensuous temper. Had the woman understood her own arts, she could have held him.

But she was not restful, she was exacting and self-conscious; and, moreover, a certain new growth of Puritanism in her repelled him.

While he had been pa.s.sing under the transforming influences of an all-questioning thought and culture, she had been turning to Evangelical religion for consolation. There was a new minister in a Baptist chapel a mile or two away, of whom she talked, whose services she attended. The very mention of him presently became a boredom to Fenwick. The new influence had no effect upon her jealousies and discontents; but it re-enforced a natural asceticism, and weakened whatever power she possessed of playing on a husband's pa.s.sion.

Meanwhile, Fenwick was partly aware of her state of mind, and far from happy himself. His conscience p.r.i.c.ked him; but such p.r.i.c.kings are small help to love. Often he found himself guiltily brooding over Lord Findon's tirades against the early marriages of artists. There was a horrid truth in them. No doubt an artist should wait till his circ.u.mstances were worthy of his gifts; and then marry a woman who could understand and help him on.

Nor was even the child a binding influence. Fenwick in this visit became for the first time a fond father. A certain magic in the little Carrie flattered his vanity and excited his hopes. He drew her many times, and prophesied confidently that she would be a beauty. But, in his secret opinion, she was spoilt and mismanaged; and he talked a good deal to Phoebe about her bringing-up, theorising and haranguing in his usual way. Phoebe listened generally with impatience, resenting interference with her special domain. And often, when she saw the father and child together, a fresh and ugly misery would raise its head. Would he in time set even Carrie against her--teach the child to look down upon its mother?

One day he returned from Ambleside, pale and excited--bringing a Manchester paper.

'Phoebe!' he called, from the gate.

Startled by something in his voice, Phoebe ran out to him.

'Phoebe, an awful thing's happened! Old Morrison's--dead! Look here!'

And he showed her a paragraph headed 'Defalcations and suicide.' It described how Mr. James Morrison, the chief cashier of the Bartonbury Bank, had committed suicide immediately after the discovery by the bank authorities of large falsifications in the bank accounts. Mr.

Morrison had shot himself, leaving a statement acknowledging a long course of fraudulent dealings with the funds entrusted to him, and pleading with his employers for his wife and daughter. 'Great sympathy,' said the _Guardian_ reporter, 'is felt in Bartonbury with Mrs. Morrison, whose character has always been highly respected. But, indeed, the whole family occupied a high position, and the shock to the locality has been great.' On which followed particulars of the frauds and a long report of the inquest.

Phoebe was struck with horror. She lingered over the paper, commenting, exclaiming; while Fenwick sat staring into the fire, his hands on his knees.

Presently she came to him and said in a low voice:

'And what about the money, John--the loan?'

'I am not obliged to return it in money,' he said, sharply.

'Well, the pictures?'

'That'll be all right. I must think about it. There'll be no hurry.'

'Did Mrs. Morrison know--about the loan?'

'I dare say. I never heard.'

'I suppose she and the daughter'll have nothing?'

'That doesn't follow at all. Very likely he'd settled something on them, which can't be touched. A man like that generally does.'

'Poor things!' she said, shuddering. 'But, John--you'll pay it back to Mrs. Morrison?'

'Of course I shall,' he said, impatiently--'in due time. But please remember, Phoebe, that's my affair. Don't you talk of it--_to any one_.'

He looked up to emphasise his words.

Phoebe flushed.

'I wasn't going to talk of it to any one,' she said, proudly, as she moved away.

Presently he took up his hat again and went out, that he might be alone with his thoughts. The rain had vanished; and a frosty sunshine sparkled on the fells, on the red bracken and the foaming becks. He took the mountain-path which led past the ghyll, up to the ridge which separates Langdale from Grasmere and Easedale. Morrison's finely wrinkled face, with its blue, complacent eyes and thin nose, hovered before him--now as he remembered it in life, and now as he imagined it in death. Hard fate! There had been an adventurous, poetic element in Morrison--something beyond the ken of the ordinary Philistine--and it had come to this. Fenwick remembered him among the drawings he had collected. Real taste--real sense of beauty--combined no doubt with the bargaining instinct and a natural love of chicanery. Moreover, Fenwick believed that, so far as a grasping temper would allow, there had been a genuine wish to help undiscovered talent. He thought of the hand which had given him the check, and had a vision of it holding the revolver--of the ghastly, solitary end. And no one had guessed--unless, indeed, it were his wife? Perhaps that look of hers--as of a creature hunted by secret fears--was now explained.

How common such things are!--and probably, so ran his thoughts, will always be. We are all acting. Each man or woman carries this potentiality of a double life--it is only a question of less or more.

Suddenly he coloured, as he saw _himself_ thus writ double--first as he appeared to Madame de Pastourelles, and then as he appeared to Phoebe. Masquerading was easy, it seemed; and conscience made little fuss! Instantly, however, the inner man rebelled against the implied comparison of himself with Morrison. An accidental concealment, acquiesced in temporarily, for business reasons--what had that in common with villainy like Morrison's? An awkward affair, no doubt; and he had been a fool to slip into it. But in a few weeks he would put it right--come what would.