Fenwick's Career Part 3

'I'm awfully obliged to you!' he said, holding out his hand.

Morrison looked at the handsome young fellow, the vivacity of the eyes, the slight agitation of the lip.

'Don't mention it,' he said, with redoubled urbanity. 'It's my way--only my way! When'll you be off?'

'Probably next week. I'll come and say good-bye.'

'I _must_ have a year! But Phoebe will take it hard.' John Fenwick had paused on his way home, and was leaning over a gate beside a stream, now thinking anxiously of his domestic affairs, and now steeped in waves of delight--vague, sensuous, thrilling--that flowed from the colours and forms around him. He found himself in an intricate and lovely valley, through which lay his path to Langdale. On either side of the stream, wooded or craggy fells, gashed with stone-quarries, accompanied the windings of the water, now leaving room for a scanty field or two, and now hemming in the river with close-piled rock and tree. Before him rose a white Westmoreland farm, with its gabled porch and moss-grown roof, its traditional yews and sycamores; while to his left, and above the farm, hung a mountain-face, dark with rock, and purple under the evening shadows--a rich and n.o.ble shape, lost above in dim heights of cloud, and, below, cleft to the heart by one deep ghyll, whence the golden trees--in the glittering green of May--descended single or in groups, from shelf to shelf, till their separate brilliance was lost in the dense wood which girdled the white farmhouse.

The pleasure of which he was conscious in the purple of the mountain, the colour of the trees, and all that magic of light and shade which filled the valley--a pleasure involuntary, physical, automatic, depending on certain delicacies of nerve and brain--rose and persisted, while yet his mind was full of hara.s.sing and disagreeable thoughts.

Well, Phoebe might take her choice!--for they had come to the parting of the ways. Either a good painter, a man on the level of the best, trained and equipped as they, or something altogether different--foreman, a clerk, perhaps, in his uncle's upholstery business at Darlington, a ticket-collector on the line--anything! He could always earn his own living and Phoebe's. There was no fear of that. But if he was finally to be an artist, he would be a first-rate one. Let him only get more training; give him time and opportunity; and he would be as good as any one.

Morrison, plainly, had thought him a conceited a.s.s. Well, let him!

What chance had he ever had of proving what was in him? As he hung over the gate smoking, he thought of his father and mother, and of his childhood in the little Kendal shop--the bookseller's shop which had been the source and means of his truest education.

Not that he had been a neglected child. Far from it. He remembered his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father. He remembered her death--and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted room--effects of light and shadow--of flowers--of the grey head uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at night, in his own room, with chalk and paper--and then his pa.s.sion with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were, another self saw and approved.

Then came school-days. His father had sent him to an old endowed school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under discipline. There he had received a plain commercial education, together with some Latin and Greek. His quick, restless mind had soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he well knew, he had done nothing supremely well. But Homer and Virgil had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found Shakespeare and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote,' fresh and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped. Drawing everywhere--on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on the whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster.

And the old drawing-master!--a German--half blind, though he would never confess it--who dabbled in oil-painting, and let the boy watch his methods. How he would twirl his dirty brush round and dab down a lump of Prussian blue, imagining it to be sepia, hastily correcting it a moment afterwards with a lump of lake, and then say chuckling to himself: 'By G.o.de, dat is fine!--dat is very nearly a good purple.

Fenwick, my boy, mark me--you vill not find a good purple no-vere!

Some-vere--in de depths of j.a.panese art--dere is a good purple. Dat I believe. But not in Europe. Ve Europeans are all tam fools. But I vill not svear!--no!--you onderstand, Fenwick; you haf never heard me svear?' And then a round oath, smothered in a hasty fit of coughing.

And once he had cut off part of the skirt of his Sunday coat, taking it in his blindness for an old one, to clean his palette with; and it was thought, by the boys, that it was the unseemly result of this rash act, as disclosed at church the following Sunday morning, which had led to the poor old man's dismissal.

But from him John had learnt a good deal about oil-painting--something too of anatomy--though more of this last from that old book--Albinus, was it?--that he had found in his father's stock. He could see himself lying on the floor--poring over the old plates, morning, noon, and night--then using a little lad, his father's apprentice, to examine him in what he had learnt--the two going about arm-in-arm--Backhouse asking the questions according to a paper drawn up by John--'How many heads to the deltoid?'--and so on--over and over again--and with what an eagerness, what an ardour!--till the brain was bursting and the hand quivering with new knowledge--and the power to use it. Then Leonardo's 'Art of Painting' and Reynolds's Discourses'--both discovered in the shop, and studied incessantly, till the boy of eighteen felt himself the peer of any Academician, and walked proudly down the Kendal streets, thinking of the half-finished paintings in his garret at home, and of the dreams, the conceptions, the ambitions of which that garret had already been the scene.

After that--some evil days! Quarrels with his father, refusals to be bound to the trade, to accept the shop as his whole future and inheritance--painful scenes with the old man, and with the customers who complained of the son's rudeness and inattention--attempts of relations to mediate between the two, and all the time his own burning belief in himself and pa.s.sion to be free. And at last a time of truce, of conditions made and accepted--the opening of the new Art School--evenings of delightful study there--and, suddenly, out of the mists, Phoebe's brown eyes, and Phoebe's soft encouragement!

Yes, it was Phoebe, Phoebe herself who had determined his career; let her consider that, when he asked for sacrifices! But for the balm she had poured upon his sore ambitions--but for those long walks and talks, in which she had been to him first the mere recipient of his dreams and egotisms, and then--since she had the loveliest eyes, and a young wild charm--a creature to be hotly wooed and desired, he might never have found courage enough to seize upon his fate.

For her sake indeed he had dared it all. She had consoled and inspired him; but she had made the breach with his father final. When they met she was only a struggling teacher in Miss Mason's school, the daughter of a small farmer in the Vale of Keswick. Old Fenwick looked much higher for his son. So there was renewed battle at home, till at last a couple of portrait commissions from a big house near Kendal clinched the matter. A hurried marriage had been followed by the usual parental thunders. And now they had five years to look back upon, years of love and struggle and discontent. By turning his hand to many things, Fenwick had just managed to keep the wolf from the door. He had worked hard, but without much success; and what had been an ordinary good opinion of himself had stiffened into a bitter self-a.s.sertion. He knew very well that he was regarded as a conceited, quarrelsome fellow, and rather gloried in it. The world, he considered, had so far treated him ill; he would at any rate keep his individuality.

Phoebe, too, once so sweet, so docile, so receptive, had begun to be critical, to resist him now and then. He knew that in some ways he had disappointed her; and there was gall in the thought. As to the London plan, his word would no longer be enough. He would have to wrestle with and overcome her.

London!--the word chimed him from the past--threw wide the future. He moved on along the rough road, possessed by dreams. He had a vision of his first large picture; himself rubbing in the figures, life-size, or at work on the endless studies for every part--fellow-students coming to look, Academicians, buyers; he heard himself haranguing, plunging headlong into ideas and theories, holding his own with the best of 'the London chaps.' Between whiles, of course, there would be hack-work--ill.u.s.tration--portraits--anything to keep the pot boiling.

And always, at the end of this vista, there was success--success great and tangible.

He was amused by his own self-confidence, and laughed as he walked.

But his mood never wavered.

He _had_ the power--the gift. n.o.body ever doubted that who saw him draw. And he had, besides, what so many men of his own cla.s.s made shipwreck for want of--he had _imagination_--enough to show him what it is that makes the mere craftsman into the artist, enough to make him hunger night and day for knowledge, travel, experience. Thanks to his father's shop, he had read a great deal already; and with a little money, how he would buy books, how he would read them!--

And at the thought, fresh images, now in rushing troops, and now in solitary fantastic beauty, began to throng before the inward eye, along the rich background of the valley; images from poetry and legend, stored deep in a greedy fancy, a retentive mind. They came from all sources--Greek, Arthurian, modern; Hephaestus, the lame G.o.d and divine craftsman, receiving Thetis in his workshop of the skies, the golden automata wrought by his own hands supporting him on either side; the maidens of Achilles washing the dead and gory body of Hector in the dark background of the hut, while in front swift-foot Achilles holds old Priam in talk till the sad offices are over, and the father may be permitted to behold his son; Arthur and Sir Bedivere beside the lake; Crusaders riding to battle--the gleam of their harness--the arched necks of their steeds--the glory of their banners--the shade and sunlight of the deep vales through which they pa.s.s; the Lady of Shalott as the curse conies upon her--Oenone--Brunhilda--Atalanta.

Swift along the May woods the figures fled, vision succeeding vision, beauty treading on beauty. It became hallucination--a wildness--an ecstasy. Fenwick stood still, gave himself up to the possession--let it hold him--felt the strangeness and the peril of it--then, suddenly, wrenched himself free.

Running down to the edge of the river, he began to pick up stones and throw them violently into the stream. It was a remedy he had long learnt to use. The physical action released the brain from the tyranny of the forms which held it. Gradually they pa.s.sed away. He began to breathe more quietly, and, sitting down by the water, his head in his hands, he gave himself up to a quieter pleasure in the nature round him, and in the strength of his own faculty.

To something else also. For while he was sitting there, he found himself _praying_ ardently for success--that he might do well in London, might make a name for himself, and leave his mark on English art. This was to him a very natural outlet of emotion; he was not sure what he meant by it precisely; but it calmed him.

CHAPTER II

Meanwhile Phoebe Fenwick was watching for her husband.

She had come out upon the green strip of ground in front of Green Nab Cottage, and was looking anxiously along the portion of high-road which was visible from where she stood.

The small, whitewashed house--on this May day, more than a generation ago--stood on a narrow shelf that juts out from the face of one of the eastern fells, bounding the valley of Great Langdale.

When Phoebe, seeing no one on the road, turned to look how near the sun might be to its setting, she saw it, as Wordsworth saw it of old, dropping between the peaks of those 'twin brethren' which to the northwest close in the green bareness of the vale. Between the two pikes the blaze lingered, enthroned; the far winding of the valley, hemmed in also by blue and craggy fells, was pierced by rays of sunset; on the broad side of the pikes the stream of Dungeon Ghyll shone full-fed and white; the sheep, with their new-born lambs beside them, studded the green pastures of the valley; and sounds of water came from the fell-sides. Everywhere lines of broad and flowing harmony, moulded by some subtle union of rock and climate and immemorial age into a mountain beauty which is the peculiar possession of Westmoreland and c.u.mberland. Neither awful, nor yet trivial; neither too soft for dignity, nor too rugged for delight.

The Westmoreland hills are the remains of an infinitely older world--giants decayed, but of a great race and ancestry; they have the finish, the delicate or n.o.ble loveliness--one might almost say the _manner_--that comes of long and gentle companionship with those chief forces that make for natural beauty, with air and water, with temperate suns and too abundant rains. Beside them the Alps are inhuman; the Apennines mere forest-grown heaps--mountains in the making; while all that Scotland gains from the easy enveloping glory of its heather, Westmoreland, which is almost heatherless, must owe to an infinitude of fine strokes, tints, curves, and groupings, to touches of magic and to lines of grace, yet never losing the wild energy of precipice and rock that belongs of right to a mountain world.

To-day Langdale was in spring. The withered fern was still red on the sides of the pikes; there was not a leaf on the oaks, still less on the ashes; but the larches were green in various plantations, and the sycamores were bursting. Half a mile eastward the woods were all in soft bloom, carpeted with windflowers and bluebells. Here, but for the larches, and the few sycamores and yews that guard each lonely farm, all was naked fell and pasture. The harsh spring wind came rioting up the valley, to fling itself on the broad sides of the pikes; the lambs made a sad bleating; the water murmured in the ghyll beyond the house; the very sunshine was clear and cold.

Calculations quick and anxious pa.s.sed through the young wife's brain.

Debts here, and debts there; the scanty list of small commissions ahead, which she knew by heart; the uncertainty of the year before them; clothes urgently wanted for the child, for John, for herself.

She drew a long and hara.s.sed breath.

Phoebe Fenwick was a tall, slender creature, very young; with a little golden head on a thin neck, features childishly cut, and eyes that made the chief adornment of a simple face. The lines of the brow, the lids and lashes, and the clear brown eye itself were indeed of a most subtle and distinguished beauty; they accounted, perhaps, for the attention with which most persons of taste and cultivation observed Fenwick's wife. For the eyes seemed to promise a character, a career; whereas the rest of the face was no more, perhaps, than a piece of agreeable pink-and-white.

She wore a dress of dark-blue cotton, showing the spring of her beautiful throat. The plain gown with its long folds, the uncovered throat, and rich simplicity of her fair hair had often reminded Fenwick and a few of his patrons of those Florentine photographs which now, since the spread of the later Pre-Raphaelites and the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, were to be seen even in the shops of country towns. There was a literary gentleman in Kendal who said that Mrs.

Fenwick was like one of Ghirlandajo's tall women in Santa Maria Novella. Phoebe had sometimes listened uncomfortably to these comparisons. She was a c.u.mberland girl, and had no wish at all to be like people in Italy. It seemed somehow to cut her off from her own folk.

'John is late!' said a voice beside her. An elderly woman had stepped out of the cottage porch. Miss Anna Mason, the head-mistress of an endowed girls school in Hawkshead, had come to spend a Sat.u.r.day afternoon with her old pupil, Phoebe Fenwick. A masterful-looking woman--ample in figure, with a mouth of decision. She wore a grey alpaca dress, adorned with a large tatted collar, made by herself, and fastened by a brooch containing a true-lover's knot in brown hair.

'He'll have stayed on to finish,' said Phoebe, looking round. 'Where's Carrie?'

Miss Mason replied that the child wouldn't wait any longer for her supper, and that Daisy, the little servant, was feeding her. Then, slipping her arm inside Mrs. Fenwick's, Miss Mason looked at the sunset.

'It's a sweet little cottage,' she said, shading her eyes from the fast-sinking orb, and then turning them on the tiny house--'but I dare say you'll not be here long, Phoebe.'

Mrs. Fenwick started.

'John told Mr. Harrock he'd pay him rent for it till next Easter.'

Miss Mason laughed.

'Are you going to let John go wasting his time here till next Easter?'

The arm she held moved involuntarily.

'He has several commissions--people not far from here,' said Mrs.

Fenwick, hurriedly. 'And if the weather's too bad, we can always go to rooms in Kendal or Ambleside.'