Fenwick's Career Part 35

He looked at his watch. Past midnight. By about three o'clock, in the midst of a wild autumnal storm, he had finished his letter to Madame de Pastourelles; and he fell asleep at his table, worn out, his head on his arms.

Before ten on the following morning Fenwick had seen Bella Morrison.

A woman appeared--the caricature of something he had once known, the high cheek-bones of his early picture touched with rouge, little curls of black hair plastered on her temples, with a mincing gait, and a manner now giggling and now rude. She was extremely sorry if she had put him out--really particularly sorry! She wouldn't have done so for the world; but her curiosity got the better of her. Also, she confessed, she had wished to see whether Mr. Fenwick would acknowledge his debt to her. It was only lately that she had come across a statement of it amongst her father's papers. It was funny he should have forgotten it so long; but there--she wasn't going to be nasty. As to poor Mrs. Fenwick, no, of course she knew nothing. She had inquired of some friends in the North, and they also knew nothing. They had only heard that husband and wife couldn't hit it off, and that Mrs.

Fenwick had gone abroad. It was a pity--but a body might have expected it, mightn't they?

The crude conceit and violence of her girlhood had given place, under the pressure of a hard life, to something venomous and servile. She never mentioned her visit to Phoebe; but her eyes seemed to mock her visitor all the time. Fenwick cut the interview short as soon as he could, hastily paid her a hundred pounds, though it left him overdrawn and almost penniless, and then rushed back to his hotel to see what might be waiting for him.

An envelope was lying on his table. It cost him a great effort to open it.

'I have received your letter. There is nothing to say, except that I must see you. I wish to keep what you have told me from my father, for the present, at any rate. There would be no possibility of our talking here. We have only one sitting-room, and my sister is there all the time. I will be at the Bosquet d'Apollon, by 11.30.'

Only that! He stared at the delicate, almost invisible writing. The moment he had dreaded for twelve years had arrived; and the world still went on, and quiet notes like that could still be written.

Long before the hour fixed he was in the Bosquet d'Apollon, walking up and down in front of the famous grotto, on whose threshold the white Apollo, just released from the chariot of the Sun, receives the ministrations of the Muses, while his divine horses are being fed and stalled in the hollows of the rock to either side. No stranger fancy than this ever engaged the architects and squandered the finances of the Builder-King. Reared in solid masonry on bare sandy ground now entirely disguised, the artificial rock that holds the grotto towers to a great height, crowned by ancient trees, weathered by wind and rain, overgrown by leaf and gra.s.s, and laved at its base by clear water. All round, the trees stand close--the lawns spread their quiet slopes. On this sparkling autumn morning, a glory of russet, amber, and red, begirt the white figures and the gleaming grotto. The Immortals, the champing horses, locked behind their _grilles_ lest the tourist should insult them--all the queer crumbling romance of the statuary, all the natural beauty of leaf and water, of the white clouds overhead and their reflexions below--combined to make Fenwick's guilty bewilderment more complete, to turn all life to dream, and all its figures into the puppets of a shadow-play.

A light step on the gra.s.s. A shock pa.s.sed through him. He made a movement, then checked it.

Eugenie paused at some distance from him. In this autumnal moment of the year, and on week-days, scarcely any pa.s.sing visitor disturbs the quiet of the Bosquet d'Apollon. In its deep dell of trees and gra.s.s, they were absolutely alone; the sunlight which dappled the white bodies of the Muses, and shone on the upstretched arm of Apollo, seemed the only thing of life besides themselves.

She threw back her veil as she came near him--her long widow's veil, which to-day she had resumed. Beneath it, framed in it, the face appeared of an ivory rigidity and pallor. The eyes only were wild and living as she came up to him, clasping her hands, evidently shrinking from him--yet composed.

'There is one thing more I want to know. If I have ever been your friend!--if you have ever felt any kindness for me, tell me--tell me frankly--why did your wife leave you?'

Fenwick's face fell. Had she come so soon to this point?--by the sureness of her own instinct?

'There were many troubles between us,' he said, hoa.r.s.ely, walking on beside her, his eyes on the gra.s.s.

'Was she--was she jealous?'--she breathed with difficulty--'of any of your models?--I know that sometimes happens--or of your sitters--of _me_, for instance?'

The last words were scarcely audible; but her gaze enforced them.

'She was jealous of my whole life--away from her. And I was utterly blind and selfish--I ought to have known what was going on--and I had no idea.'

'And what happened? I know so little.'

Her voice so peremptorily strange--so remote--compelled him. With difficulty he gave an outline of Phoebe's tragic visit to his studio.

His letter of the night before had scarcely touched on the details of the actual crisis, had dwelt rather on the months of carelessness and neglect on his own part, which had prepared it.

She interrupted.

'That was she?--the mother in the "Genius Loci"?'

He a.s.sented mutely.

She closed her eyes a moment, seeing, in her suffering, the face of the young mother and her child.

'But go on. And you were away? Please, please go on! When was it? It must have been that spring when--'

She put her hand to her head, trying to remember dates.

'It was just before the Academy,' he said, reluctantly.

'You were out?'

'I had gone to tell Watson and Cuningham the good news.'

His voice dropped.

Her hands caught each other again.

'It was that day--that very day we came to you?'

He nodded.

'But why?--what was it made her do such a thing?--go--for ever--without seeing you--without a word? She must have had some desperate reason.'

'She had none!' he said, with energy.

'But she must have thought she had. Can't--can't you explain it to me any more?'

He was almost at the end of his resistance.

'I told you--how she had resented--my concealment?'

'Yes--yes! But there must have been something more--something sudden--that maddened her?'

He was silent. She grew whiter than before.

'Mr. Fenwick--I--I have much to forgive. There is only one course of action--that can ever--make amends--and that is--an entire--an absolute frankness!'

Her terrible suspicion--her imperious will had conquered. Anything was better than to deny her, torture her--deceive her afresh.

He looked at her in a horrible indecision. Then, slowly, he put his hand within the breast of his coat.

'This is the letter she wrote me. I found it in my room.'

And he drew out the crumpled letter from his pocket-book, which he had worn thus almost from the day of Phoebe's disappearance.

Eugenie fell upon it, devoured it. Not a demur, not a doubt, as to this!--in one so strictly, so tenderly scrupulous. Even at that moment, it struck him pitifully. It seemed to give the measure of her pain.

'The picture?' she said, looking up--'I don't understand--you had sent it in.'

'Do you remember--asking me about the sketch? and I told you--it had been accidentally spoilt?'

She understood. Her lips trembled. Returning the letter, she sank upon a seat. He saw that her forces were almost failing her. And he dared not say a word or make a movement of sympathy.

For some little time she was silent. Her eyes ranged the green circuit of the hollow--the water, the reeds, the rock, and that idle G.o.d among his handmaidens. Her att.i.tude, her look expressed a moral agony, how strangely out of place amid this setting! Through her--innocent, unconscious though she were--the young helpless wife had come to grief--a soul had been risked--perhaps lost. Only a nature trained as Eugenie's had been, by suffering and prayer and lofty living, could have felt what she felt, and as she felt it.