Fenwick's Career Part 23

But much more than these!

For him, the unspoken agony of loss suffered when she married; for her, the memories of her marriage, of the dreary languor into which its wreck had plunged her, and of the gradual revival in her of the old intellectual pleasures, the old joys of the spirit, under the influence of Arthur's life and Arthur's companionship. How simply he had offered all that his art, his tact, his genius had to give!--and how pitifully, how hungrily she had leaned upon it! It had seemed so natural. Her own mind was clear, her own pulses calm; their friendship had appeared a thing apart, and she was able to feel, with sincerity and dignity, that if she received much, she also gave much--the hours of relief and pleasure which ease the labour, the inevitable torment of the artist, all that protecting environment which a woman's sweet and agile wit can build around a man's taxed brain or ruffled nerves.

To chat with her, in success or failure; to be sure of her welcome, her smile at all times; to ask her sympathy in matters where he had himself trained in her the faculty of response; to rouse in her the gentle, diffident humour which seemed to him a much rarer and more distinguished thing than other women's brilliance; to watch the ways of a personality which appeared to many people a little cold, pale, and over-refined, and was to him supreme distinction; to search for pleasures for her, as a botanist hunts rare flowers; to save her from the most trifling annoyance, if time and brains could do it;--these things, for three years, had made the charm of Welby's life. And Eugenie knew it--knew it with an affectionate grat.i.tude that had for long seemed both to her and to the world the last word of their situation on both sides--a note, a tone, which could always be evoked from it, touch or strike it where you would.

And now?

Through what subtle phases and developments had time led them to this moment of change and consciousness?--representing in her, sharp recoil, an instant girding of the will--and in him a new despair, which was also a new docility, a readiness to content and tranquillise her at any cost. As they stood thus, for these few seconds, amid the shadows of the rich enc.u.mbered room, the picture of the weeks and months they had just pa.s.sed through flashed through both minds--illuminated--thrown into true relation with surrounding and irrevocable fact. Both trembled--she under the admonition of her own higher life--he, because existence beside her could never again be as sweet to him to-morrow as it had been yesterday.

She moved. The trance was broken.

'I do, indeed, want to talk to you,' she said, in her gentlest voice.

'We shan't have very long. Papa wants me in half an hour.'

She motioned to the seat beside her; and their talk began.

Lord Findon sat alone in his study on the ground-floor, balancing a paper-knife on one finger, fidgeting with a newspaper of which he never read a word, and otherwise beguiling the time until the sound of Welby's step on the stairs should tell him that the interview upstairs was over.

His mind was full of disagreeable thoughts. Eugenie was dearer to him than any other human being, and Welby--his ward, the orphan child of one of his oldest friends--had been from his boyhood almost a son of the house. Eight years before, what more natural than that these two should marry? Welby had been then deeply in love; Eugenie in her first maiden bloom had been difficult to read, but a word from the father she adored would probably have been enough to incline her towards her lover, to transform and fire a friendship which was already more romantic than she knew. But Lord Findon could not make up his mind to it. Arthur was a dear fellow; but from the worldly point of view it was not good enough. Eugenie was born for a large sphere; it was her father's duty to find it for her if he could.

Hence the French betrothal--the crowning point of a summer visit to a French chateau where Eugenie had been the spoiled child of a party containing some of the greatest names in France. It flattered both Lord Findon's vanity and imagination to find himself brought into connexion with historic families all the more attractive because of that dignified alienation from affairs, imposed on them by their common hatred of the Second Empire. Eugenie, too, had felt the romance of the _milieu_; had invested her French suitor with all that her own poetic youth could bring to his glorification; had gone to him a timid, willing, and most innocent bride.

Ah, well! it did not do to think of the sequel. Perhaps the man was mad, as Eugenie insisted; perhaps much was due to some obscure brain effects of exposure and hardship during the siege of Paris--for the war had followed close on their honeymoon. But, madness or wickedness, it was all the same; Eugenie's life was ruined, and her father could neither mend it nor avenge it.

For owing to some--in his eyes--quixotic tenderness of conscience on Eugenie's part, she would not sue for her divorce. She believed that Albert was not responsible--that he might return to her. And that pa.s.sionate spiritual life of hers, the ideas of which Lord Findon only half understood, forbade her, it seemed, any step which would finally bar the way of that return; unless Albert should himself ask her to take it. But the Comte had never made a sign. Lord Findon could only suppose that he found himself as free as he wished to be, that the ladies he consorted with were equally devoid of scruples, and that he, therefore, very naturally, preferred to avoid publicity.

So here was Eugenie, husbandless and childless at eight-and-twenty--for the only child of the marriage had died within a year of its birth; the heroine of an odious story which, if it had never reached the law courts, was none the less perfectly well known in society; and, in the eyes of those who loved her, one of the bravest, saddest, n.o.blest of women. Of course Welby had shared in the immense effort of the family to comfort and console her. They had been so eager to accept his help; he had given it with such tact and self-effacement; and now, meanly, they must help Eugenie to dismiss him! For it was becoming too big a thing, this devotion of his, both in Eugenie's life and also in the eyes of the world. Lord Findon must needs suppose--he did not choose to _know_--that people were talking; and if Eugenie would not free herself from her wretched Albert, she must not provide him--poor child!--with any plausible excuse.

All of which reasoning was strictly according to the canons as Lord Findon understood them; but it did not leave him much the happier. He was a sensitive, affectionate man, with great natural cleverness, and much natural virtue--wholly unleavened by either thought or discipline. He did the ordinary things from the ordinary motives; but he suffered when the ordinary things turned out ill, more than another man would have done. It would certainly have been better, he ruefully admitted, if he had not meddled so much with Eugenie's youth. And presently he supposed he should have to forgive Charlie!--(Charlie was the son who had married his nurse)--if only to prove to himself that he was not really the unfeeling or sn.o.bbish father of the story-books.

Ah! there was the upstairs door! Should he show himself, and make Arthur understand that he was their dear friend all the same, and always would be?--it was only a question of a little drawing-in.

But his courage failed him. He heard the well-known step come downstairs and cross the hall. The front door closed, and Lord Findon was still balancing the paper-knife.

Would he really marry that nice child Elsie? Elsie Bligh was a cousin of the Findons; a fair-haired, slender slip of a thing, the daughter of a retired Indian general. The Findons had given a ball the year before for her coming-out, and she had danced through the season, haloed, Euphrosyne-like, by a charm of youth and laughter--till she met Arthur Welby. Since then Euphrosyne had grown a little white and piteous, and there had been whisperings and shakings of the head amongst the grown-ups who were fond of her.

Well, well; he supposed Eugenie would give him some notion of the way things had gone. As to her--his charming, sweet-natured Eugenie!--it comforted him to remember the touch of resolute and generally cheerful stoicism in her character. If a hard thing had to be done, she would not only do it without flinching, but without avenging it on the bystanders afterwards. A quality rare in women!

'Papa!--is the carriage there?'

It was her voice calling. Lord Findon noticed with relief its even, silvery note. The carriage was waiting, and in a few minutes she was seated beside him, and they were making their way eastwards through the sunset streets.

'Dear?' he said, with timid interrogation, laying his hand momentarily on hers.

Eugenie was looking out of window with her face turned away.

'He was very--kind,' she said, rather deliberately. 'Don't let us talk about it, papa--but wait--and see!'

Lord Findon understood that she referred to Elsie Bligh--that she had sown her seed, and must now let it germinate.

But herself--what had it cost her? And he knew well that he should never ask the question; and that, if he did, she would never answer it.

By the time they were threading the slums of Seven Dials, she was talking rather fast and flowingly of Fenwick.

'You have brought the cheque, papa?'

'I have my cheque-book.'

'And you are quite certain about the pictures?'

'Quite.'

'It will be nice to make him happy,' she said, softly. 'His letters have been pretty doleful.'

'What has he found to write about?' exclaimed Lord Findon, wondering.

'Himself, mostly!' she laughed. 'He likes rhetoric--and he seems to have found out that I do too. As I told you, he began with an apology--and since then he writes about books and art--and--and the evils of aristocracy.'

'Bless my soul, what the deuce does he know about it! And you answer him?'

'Yes. You see he writes extremely well--and it amuses me.'

Privately, he thought that if she encouraged him beyond a very moderate point, Fenwick would soon become troublesome. But whenever she pleaded that anything 'amused' her, he could never find a word to say.

Every now and then he watched her, furtively trying to pierce that grey veil in which she had wrapt herself. To-morrow morning, he supposed, he should hear her step on the stairs, towards eight o'clock--should hear it pa.s.sing his door in going, and an hour later in coming back--and should know that she had been to a little Ritualist church close by, where what Lady Findon called 'fooleries'

went on, in the shape of 'daily celebrations' and 'vestments' and 'reservation.' How lightly she stepped; what a hidden act it was; never spoken of, except once, between him and her! It puzzled him often; for he knew very well that Eugenie was no follower of things received. She had been a friend of Renan and of Taine in her French days; and he, who was a Gallic with a leaning to the Anglican Church, had sometimes guessed with discomfort that Eugenie was in truth what his Low Church wife called a 'free-thinker.' She never spoke of her opinions, directly, even to him. But the books she ordered from Paris, or Germany, and every now and then the things she let fall about them, were enough for any shrewd observer. It was here too, perhaps, that she and Arthur were in closest sympathy; and every one knew that Arthur, poor old boy, was an agnostic.

And yet this daily pilgrimage--and that light and sweetness it breathed into her aspect!--

So one day he had asked her abruptly why she liked the little church so much, and its sacramental 'goings-on.'

'One wouldn't expect it, you know, darling--from the things you read.'

Eugenie had coloured faintly.

'Wouldn't you, papa? It seems to me so simple. It's an _Action_--not words--and an action means anything you like to put into it--one thing to me--another to you. Some day we shall all be tired, shan't we?--of creeds, and sermons, but never of "This _do,_ in remembrance of Me!'"

And she had put up her hand to caress his, with such a timid sweetness of lip, and such a shining of the eye, that he had been silenced, feeling himself indeed in the presence of something he was not particularly well fitted to explore.

Well, if she was inconsequent, she was dear!--and if her mystical fancies comforted and sustained her, n.o.body should ever annoy or check her in the pursuit of them. He put a very summary stop to his wife's 'Protestant nonsense,' whenever it threatened to worry Eugenie; though on other occasions it amused him.

The landlady in Bernard Street greeted them with particular effusion.

If they had only known, they represented to her--cautious yet not unkindly soul!--the main security for those very long arrears of rent she had allowed her lodger to run up. Were they now come--at this unusual hour--to settle up with Mr. Fenwick? If so, her own settling up--sweet prospect!--might be in sight. Cuningham and Watson had recently left her, and taken a joint studio in Chelsea. Their rooms, moreover, were still unlet. Her anxieties therefore were many, and it was with lively expectation that she watched the 'swells' grope their way upstairs to Mr. Fenwick's room. She always knew it must come right some day, with people like that about.