Fenwick's Career Part 19

Fenwick was left to pace his room in a tempest, denouncing himself as a 'd.a.m.ned fool,' bent on destroying all his own chances in life. Why was it that Welby's presence always had this effect upon him:--setting him on edge, and making a bear of him? No!--it was not allowed to be so handsome, so able, so ingratiating. Yet he knew very well that Welby made no enemies, and that in his grudging jealousy of a delightful artist he, Fenwick, stood alone.

He walked to the window. Yes, there they were, all three--Mademoiselle Barras seemed to have gone her ways separately--just disappearing into Russell Square. He saw that Welby had possessed himself of the fair lady's portfolio, and was carrying her shawl. He watched their intimate, laughing ways--how different from the stiffness she had just shown _him_--from the friendly, yet distant relations she always maintained between herself and her painter! A fierce and irritable ambition swept through him--rebellion against the hampering conditions of birth and poverty, which he felt as so many chains upon body and soul. Why was he born the son of a small country tradesman, narrow, ignorant, and tyrannical?--hara.s.sed by penury, denied opportunities--while a man like Welby found life from the beginning a broad road, as it were, down a widening valley, to a land of abundance and delight?

But the question led immediately to an answering outburst of vanity.

He paced up and down, turning from the injustice of the past to challenge the future. A few more years, and the world would know where to place _him_--with regard to the men now in the running--men with half his power--Welby and the like. A mad arrogance, a boundless confidence in himself, flamed through all his veins. Let him paint, paint, _paint_--think of nothing, care for nothing but the maturing of his gift!

How long he lost himself in this pa.s.sion of egotism and defiance he hardly knew. He was roused from it by the servant bringing a lamp; and as she set it down, the light fell upon a memorandum scrawled on the edge of a sketch which was lying on the table: 'Feb. 21--10 o'clock.'

His mood collapsed. He sat down by the dying fire, brooding and miserable. How on earth was he going to get through the next few weeks? Abominable!--thoughtlessly cruel!--that neither Lord Findon nor Madame de Pastourelles should ever yet have spoken to him of money!

These months of work on the portrait--this constant a.s.sumption on the part of the Findon circle that both the portrait and the 'Genius Loci'

were to become Findon possessions--and yet no sum named--no clear agreement even--nothing, as it seemed to Fenwick's suspicious temper, in either case, that really bound Lord Findon. 'Write to the old boy'--so Cuningham had advised again and again--'get something definite out of him.' But Fenwick had once or twice torn up a letter of the kind in morbid pride and despair. Suppose he were rebuffed?

That would be an end of the Findon connexion, and he could not bring himself to face it. He must keep his _entree_ to the house; above all, he clung to the portrait and the sittings.

But the immediate outlook was pretty dark. He was beginning to be pestered with debts and duns--the appointment on the morrow was with an old frame-maker who had lent him twenty pounds before Christmas, and was now begging piteously for his money. There was nothing to pay him with--nothing to send Phoebe, in spite of a constant labour at paying jobs in black-and-white that often kept him up till three or four in the morning. He wondered whether Watson would help him with a loan. According to Cuningham, the queer fellow had private means.

The fact was he was overstrained--he knew it. The year had been the hardest of his life, and now that he was approaching the time of crisis--the completion of his two pictures, the judgement of the Academy and the public, his nerve seemed to be giving way. As he thought of all that success or failure might mean, he plunged into a melancholy no less extravagant than the pa.s.sion of self-confidence from which he had emerged. Suppose that he fell ill before the pictures were finished--what would become of Phoebe and the child?

As he thought of Phoebe, suddenly his heart melted within him. Was she, too, hating the hours? As he bowed his head on his arms a few hot, unwilling tears forced themselves into his eyes. Had he been unkind and harsh to her?--his poor little Phoebe! An imperious impulse seemed to sweep him back into her arms. She was his own, his very own; one flesh with him; of the same clay, the same cla.s.s, the same customs and ideals. Let him only recover her, and his child--and live his own life as he pleased. No more dependence on the moods of fine people.

He hated them all! Clearly he had offended Madame de Pastourelles.

Perhaps she would not sit again--the portrait would be thrown on his hands--because he had not behaved with proper deference to her spoilt and petted favourite.

Involuntarily he looked up. The lamp-light fell on the portrait.

There she sat, the delicate, ethereal being, her gentle brow bent forward, her eyes fixed upon him. He perceived, as though for the first time, what an image of melancholy grace it was which he had built up there. He had done it, as it were, without knowing--had painted something infinitely pathetic and n.o.ble without realising it in the doing.

As he looked, his irritation died away, and something wholly contradictory took its place. He felt a rush of self-pity, and then of trust. What if he called on her to help him--unveiled himself to this kind and charming woman--confessed to her his remorse about Phoebe--his secret miseries and anxieties--the bitterness of his envies and ambitions? Would she not rain balm upon him--quiet him--guide him?

He yearned towards her, as he sat there in the semi-darkness--seeking the _ewig-weibliche_ in the sweetness of her face--without a touch of pa.s.sion--as a Catholic might yearn towards his Madonna. Her slight and haughty farewell showed that he had tried her patience--had behaved like an ungenerous cur. But he must and would propitiate her--win her friendship for himself and Phoebe. The weakness of the man threw itself strangely, instinctively, on the moral strength of the woman; as though in this still young and winning creature he might recover something of what he had lost in childhood, when his mother died. He mocked at his own paradox, but it held him. That very night would he write to her; not yet about Phoebe--not yet!--but letting her understand, at least, that he was _not_ ungrateful, that he valued her sympathy and good-will. Already the phrases of the letter, warm and eloquent, yet restrained, began to flow through his mind. It might be an unusual thing to do; but she was no silly conventional woman; she would understand.

By Jove! Welby was perfectly right. The hand was too big. It should be altered at the next sitting. Then he sprang up, found pen and paper, and began to write to Phoebe--still in the same softened and agitated state. He wrote in haste and at length, satisfying some hungry instinct in himself by the phrases of endearment which he scattered plentifully through the letter.

That letter found Phoebe on a mid-March morning, when the thrushes were beginning to sing, when the larches were reddening, and only in the topmost hollows of the pikes did any snow remain, to catch the strengthening sunlight.

As she opened it, she looked at its length with astonishment. Then the tone of it brought the rushing colour to her cheek, and when it was finished she kissed it and hid it in her dress. After weeks of barrenness, of stray post-cards and perfunctory notes, these ample pages, with their rhetorical and sentimental effusion, brought new life to the fretting, lonely woman. She went about in penitence.

Surely she had done injustice to her John; and she dreaded lest any inkling of those foolish or morbid thoughts she had been harbouring should ever reach him.

She wrote back with pa.s.sion--like one throwing herself on his breast.

The letter was long and incoherent, written at night beside Carrie's bed--and borrowing much, unconsciously, from the phraseology of the novels she still got from Bowness. Alack! it is to be feared that John Fenwick--already at another point in spiritual s.p.a.ce when the letter reached him--gave it but a hasty reading.

But, for the time, it was an untold relief to the writer. Afterwards, she settled down to wait again, working meanwhile night and day at her beautiful embroidery that John had designed for her. Miss Anna came to see her, exclaimed at her frail looks, wanted to lend her money.

Phoebe in a new exaltation, counting the weeks, and having still three or four sovereigns in the drawer, refused--would say nothing about their straits. John, she declared, was on the eve of an _enormous_ success. It would be all right presently.

Weeks pa.s.sed. The joy of that one golden letter faded; and gradually the shadows re-closed about her. Fenwick's letters dwindled again to post-cards, and then almost ceased. When the hurried lines came, the strain and hara.s.s expressed in them left no room for affection.

Something wrong with the 'Genius Loci'!--some bad paints--hours of work needed to get the beastly thing right--the portrait still far from complete--but the dress would be a _marvel_!--without quenching the head in the least. And not a loving word!--scarcely an inquiry after the child.

April came. The little shop in the neighbouring village gave Mrs.

Fenwick credit--but Phoebe, brought up in frugal ways, to loathe the least stain of debt, hated to claim it, and went there in the dusk, that she might not be seen.

Meanwhile not a line from John to tell her that his pictures had gone in to the Academy. She saw a paragraph, however, in the local papers describing 'Show Sunday.' Had John been entertaining smart people to tea, and showing his pictures, with the rest? If so, couldn't he find ten minutes in which to send her news of it? It _was_ unkind! All her suspicions and despair revived.

As she carried her child back from the village, tottering often under the weight, gusts of mingled weakness and pa.s.sion would sweep over her. She would not be treated so--John should see! She would get her money for her work and go to London--whether he liked it or no--tax him with his indifference to her--find out what he was really doing.

The capacity for these moments of violence was something new in her--probably depending, if the truth were known, on some obscure physical misery. She felt that they degraded her, yet could not curb them.

And, in this state, the obsession of the winter seized her again. She brooded perpetually over the doleful Romney story--the tale of a great painter, born, like her John, in this Northern air, and reared in Kendal streets, deserting his peasant wife--enslaved by Emma Hamilton through many a pa.s.sionate year--and coming back at last that the drudge of his youth might nurse him through his decrepit old age. She remembered going with John in their sweetheart days to see the house where Romney died, imbecile and paralysed, with Mary Romney beside him.

'I would never have done it--_never_!' she said to herself in a mad recoil. 'He had chosen--he should have paid!'

She sat closer and closer at her work, in a feverish eagerness to finish it, sleeping little and eating little. When she wrote to her husband it was in a bitter, reproachful tone she had never yet employed to him. 'I have had one nice letter from you this winter, and only one. As you can't take the trouble to write any more, you'll hardly wonder if I think you sent that one to keep me quiet.' She wrote too often in this style. But, whether in this style or another, John made no answer--had apparently ceased to write.

One afternoon towards the end of April she was sitting at her work in the parlour, with the window open to the lengthening day, when she heard the gate open and shut. A woman in black came up the pathway, and, seeing Phoebe at the window, stopped short. Phoebe rose, and, as the visitor threw back her veil, recognised the face of Mr. Morrison's daughter, Bella.

She gave a slight cry; then, full of pity and emotion, she hastened to open the door.

'Oh, Miss Morrison!' She held out her hand; her att.i.tude, her beautiful eyes, breathed compa.s.sion, and also embarra.s.sment. The thought of the debt rushed into her mind. Had Miss Morrison come to press for it? It was within a fortnight of twelve months since the loan was granted. She felt a vague terror.

The visitor just touched her hand, then looked at her with an expression which stirred increasing alarm in the woman before her. It was so hard and cold; it threatened, without speech.

'I came to return you something I don't want any more,' said the girl, with a defiant air; and Phoebe noticed, as she spoke, that she carried in her left hand a large, paper-covered roll. In her deep black she was more startling than ever, with spots of flame-colour on either cheek, the eyes fixed and staring, the lips wine-red. It might have been a face taken from one of those groups of crudely painted wood or terra-cotta, in which northern Italy--as at Orta or Varallo--has expressed the scenes of the Pa.s.sion. The Magdalen in one of the ruder groups might have looked so.

'Will you please to come in?' said Phoebe, leading the way to the parlour, which smelled musty and damp for lack of fire, and was still littered with old canvases, studies, casts, and other gear of the painter who had once used it as his studio.

Bella Morrison came in, but she refused a chair.

'There's no call for me to stay,' she said, sharply. 'You won't like what I came to do--I know that.'

Phoebe looked at her, bewildered.

'I've brought back that picture of me your husband painted,' said the girl, putting down her parcel on the table. 'It's in there.'

'What have you done that for?' said Phoebe, wondering.

'Because I loathe it--and all my friends loathe it, too. Papa--'

'Oh! do tell me--how is Mrs. Morrison?' cried Phoebe, stepping forward, her whole aspect quivering with painful pity.

'She's all right,' said Bella, looking away. 'We're going to live in Guernsey. We're selling this house. It's hers, of course. Papa settled it on her, years before--'

She stopped--then drew herself together.

'So, you see, I got that picture out of mother. I've never forgiven Mr. Fenwick for taking it home, saying he'd improve it, and then sending it back as bad as ever. I knew he'd done that to spite me--he'd disliked me from the first.'

'John never painted a portrait to spite anybody in his life,' cried Phoebe. 'I never heard such nonsense.'