Fenwick's Career Part 30

Her lips parted in a sigh of aspiration. If only this unlucky thing had not happened!--this meeting of Arthur and of Fenwick, before the time, before she had prepared and engineered it.

And so she came to her second topic of meditation. Gradually as her mind pursued it, her aspect seemed to lose its new and tremulous brightness; the face became once more a little grey and pinched. They had somehow missed all the letters which should have warned them. To find Arthur established here, with his poor invalid wife--nothing had been more unexpected, and, alack, more unwelcome, considering the relations between them and John Fenwick--Fenwick who was practically her father's guest and hers.

Did Arthur think it strange, unkind? Wouldn't he really believe that it was pure accident! If so, it would be only because Elsie was there, influencing him against his old friends--poor, bitter, stricken Elsie.

Eugenie's lips quivered. There flitted before her the image of the girl of eighteen--muse of laughter and delight. And she recalled the taciturn woman whom she had seen on her sofa the night before, speaking coldly, in dry, sharp sentences, to her husband, her cousin, her maid--evidently unhappy and in pain.

Eugenie shaded her eyes from the light of the terrace. Her heart seemed to be sinking, contracting. Mrs. Welby had been already ill, and therewith jealous and tyrannical, for some little time before Madame de Pastourelles had been summoned to the death-bed of her husband! But now!--Eugenie shrank aghast before what she saw and what she guessed.

And it was, too, as if the present state of things--as if the new hardness in Elsie's eyes, and the strange hostility of her manner, especially towards the Findons, and her cousin Eugenie--threw light on earlier years, on many a puzzling trait and incident of the past.

There had been a terrible confinement, at the end of years of childlessness--a still-born child--and then, after a short apparent recovery, a rapid loss of strength and power. Poor, poor Elsie! But why--why should this trouble have awakened in her this dumb tyranny towards Arthur, this alienation from Arthur's friends?

Eugenie sharply drew herself together. She banished her thoughts.

Elsie was young, and would get well. And when she recovered, she would know who were her friends, and Arthur's.

A figure came towards her, crossing the _parterre d'eau_. She perceived her father--just released, no doubt, from two English acquaintances with whom he had been exploring the 'Bosquet d'Apollon.'

He hurried towards her--a tall Don Quixote of a man, gaunt, active, grey-haired, with a stride like a youth of eighteen, and the very minimum of flesh on his well-hung frame. Lord Findon had gone through many agitations during the last ten or twelve years. In his own opinion, he had upset a Ministry, he had recreated the army, and saved the Colonies to the Empire. That history was not as well aware of these feats as it should be, he knew; but in the memoirs, of which there were now ten volumes privately printed in his drawer, he had provided for that. Meanwhile, in the rush of his opinions and partisanships, two things at least had persisted unchanged--his adoration for Eugenie--and his belief that if only man--and much more woman--would but exchange 'gulping' for 'chewing'--would only, that is to say, reform their whole system of mastication, and thereby of digestion, the world would be another and a happier place.

He came up now, frowning, and out of temper.

'Upon my word, Eugenie, the blindness of some people is too amazing!'

'Is it? Sit down, papa, and look at that!'

She pushed a chair towards him, smiling, and pointed to the terrace, the woods, the sky.

'It's all very well, my dear,' said Lord Findon, seating himself--'but this place tries me a good deal.'

'Because the ladies in the restaurant are so stout?' said Eugenie.

'Dear papa--somebody must keep these cooks in practice!'

'Never did I see such spectacles!' said Lord Findon, fuming. 'And when one knows that the very smallest attention to their diet--and they might be sylphs again--as young as their grandchildren!--it's really disheartening.'

'It is,' said Eugenie. 'Shall we announce a little conference in the salon? I'm sure the ladies would flock.'

'The amount the French eat is appalling!' exclaimed Lord Findon--without noticing. 'And they have such ridiculous ideas about us! I said something about their gluttony to M. de Villeton this morning--and he fired up!--declared he had spent this summer in English country-houses, and we had seven meals a day--all told--and there wasn't a Frenchman in the world had more than three--counting his coffee in the morning.'

'He had us there,' said Eugenie.

'Not at all! It doesn't matter _when_ you eat--it's what and how much you eat. We _can't_ produce such women as one sees here. I tell you, Eugenie, we _can't_. It takes all the poetry out of the s.e.x.'

Eugenie smiled.

'Haven't you been walking with Lady Marney, papa?'

Lord Findon looked a little annoyed.

'She's an exception, my dear--a hideous exception.'

'I wouldn't mind her size,' said Eugenie, softly--'if only the complexion were better done.'

Lord Findon laughed.

'Paint is on the increase,' he declared--'and gambling too. Villeton tells me there was baccarat in the Marney's' apartment last night, and Lady Marney lost enormously. Age seems to have no effect on these people. She must be nearly seventy-five.'

'You may be sure she'll play till the last trump,' said Eugenie.

'Papa!'--her tone changed--'is that Elsie's chair?'

The group to which she pointed was still distant, but Lord Findon, even at seventy, had the eyes of an eagle, and could read an _affiche_ a mile off.

'It is.' Lord Findon looked a little disturbed, and, turning, he scanned the terrace up and down before he bent towards Eugenie.

'You know, darling, it's an awkward business about these two men. I don't believe Arthur's patience will hold out.'

'Oh yes, it will, papa. For our sakes, Arthur would keep the peace.'

'If the other will let him! I used to think, Eugenie, you had tamed the bear--but, upon my soul!'--Lord Findon threw up his hands in protest.

'He's in low spirits, papa. It will be better soon,' said Eugenie, softly, and as she spoke she rose and went down the steps to meet the Welbys.

Lord Findon followed her, tormented by a queer, unwelcome thought.

Was it possible that Eugenie was now--with her widowhood--beginning to take a more than friendly interest in that strange fellow, Fenwick? If so, _he_ would be tolerably punished for his meddling of long ago!

To have s.n.a.t.c.hed her from Arthur, in order to hand her to John Fenwick!--Lord Findon crimsoned hotly at the notion, all his pride of race and caste up in arms.

Of course she ought now to marry. He wished to see her before he died the wife of some good fellow, and the mistress of a great house. Why not? Eugenie's distinctions of person and family--leaving her fortune, which was considerable, out of count--were equal to any fate. 'It's all very well to despise such things--but we have to keep up the traditions,' he said to himself, testily.

And in spite of her thirty-seven years a suitable bridegroom would not be at all hard to find. Lord Findon had perceived that in Egypt, where they had spent the winter and early spring. Several of the most distinguished men then in Cairo had been her devoted slaves--ill as she was and at half-power. Alderney--almost certain to be the next Viceroy of India--one of the most charming of widowers, with an only daughter--it had been plain both to Lord Findon and his stupid wife that Eugenie had made a deep impression upon a man no less romantic than fastidious. Eugenie had but to lift her hand, and he would have followed them to Syria. On the contrary, she had taken special pains to prevent it. And General F,--and that clever fellow X,--who was now reorganising Egyptian finance--and several more--they were all under the spell.

But Eugenie had this quixotic liking for the 'intellectuals' of a particular sort, for artists and poets, and people in difficulties generally. Well, he had it himself, he reflected, frowning, as he strolled after her; but there were limits. Marriage was a thing apart; in that quarter, at any rate, it was no good supposing you could escape from the rules of the game.

Not that the rules always led you right--witness De Pastourelles and his villainies. But matrimonial anarchy was not to be justified, any more than social anarchy, by the failures and drawbacks of arrangements which were on the whole for people's good. _Pa.s.se encore_!--if Fenwick had only fulfilled the promise of his youth!--were at least a successful artist, instead of promising to become a quarrelsome failure!

Now if Arthur himself were free! Supposing this poor girl were to succ.u.mb?--what then?

At this point Lord Findon checked himself roughly, and a minute afterwards was shaking Welby by the hand and stooping with an old man's courtesy over the invalid carriage in which Mrs. Welby lay reclined.

Euphrosyne, indeed, had shed her laughter! A face with sunken eyes and drawn lips, and with that perpetual suspicious furrow in the brow, which meant a terror lest any movement or jar should let loose the enemy, pain; an emaciated body, from which all the soft mouldings of youth had departed; a frail hand, lying in mute appeal on the shawl with which she was covered:--this was now Elsie Welby, whose beauty in the first years of her marriage had been one of the adornments of London.

Eugenie was bending over her, and Mrs. Welby was pettishly answering.

'It's so stiff and formal. I don't admire this kind of thing. And there isn't a bit of shade on this terrace. _I_ think it's ugly!'

Welby laid a hand on hers, smiling.

'But to-day, Bebe, you like the sun?--in October?'

Mrs. Welby was very decidedly of opinion that even in October there was a glare--and in August--she shuddered to think of it! It was so tiresome, too, to have missed the Grandes Eaux. So like French red tape, to insist on stopping them on a particular date. Why should they be stopped? As to expense, that was nonsense. How could water cost anything! It was because the French were so _doctrinaire_, so tyrannical--so fond of managing for managing's sake.