Fenwick's Career Part 39

'Good-bye, old man--courage! Seek--till you find. She's in the world--and she's sorry. I could swear it.'

Fenwick stood beside him, quivering with emotion and despondency.

Their eyes met steadily, and Watson whispered:

'I pa.s.s from one thing to another. Sometimes it's Omar Khayyam--"One thing is certain and the rest is lies--The flower that once is born for ever dies"--and the next it's the Psalms, and I think I'm at a prayer-meeting--a Welsh Methodist again.'

He fell into a flow of Welsh, hoa.r.s.ely musical. Then, with a smile, he nodded farewell; and Fenwick went.

Fenwick wrote that night to Eugenie de Pastourelles at Cannes, enclosing a copy of the letter received from Freddy Tolson. It meant nothing; but she had asked to be kept informed. As he entered upon the body of his letter, his eyes still recurred to its opening line:

'Dear Madame de Pastourelles.'

For many years he had never addressed her except as 'My dear friend.'

Well, that was all gone and over. The memory of her past goodness, of those walks through the Trianon woods, was constantly with him. But he had used her recklessly and selfishly, and she had done with him.

He admitted it now, as often before, in a temper of dull endurance; bending himself to the task of his report.

Eugenie read his letter, sitting on a bench above the blue Mediterranean, in the pine woods of the Cap d'Antibes. She had torn it open in hope, and the reading of it depressed her. In the pine-scented, sun-warmed air she sat for long motionless and sad. The delicate greenish light fell on the soft brown hair, the white face and hands. Eugenie's deep black had now a.s.sumed a slight 'religious'

air which disturbed Lord Findon, and kindled the Protestant wrath of her stepmother. That short moment of a revived _mondanite_ which Versailles had witnessed, was wholly past; and for the first and only time in her marred life, Eugenie's natural gaiety was quenched. She knew well that in the burden which weighed upon her there were morbid elements; but she could only bear it; she could not smile under it.

Fenwick's letter led her thoughts back to the early incidents of this fruitless search. Especially did she recall every moment of her interview with Daisy Hewson--Phoebe Fenwick's former nursemaid, now married to a small Westmoreland farmer. One of the first acts of the lawyers had been to induce this woman to come to London to repeat once more what she knew of the catastrophe.

Then, after the examination by the lawyers, Eugenie had pleaded that she might see her--and see her alone. Accordingly, a shy and timid woman, speaking with a broad Westmoreland accent, called one morning in Dean's Yard.

Eugenie had won from her many small details the lawyers had been unable to extract. They were not, alack, of a kind to help the search for Phoebe; but, interpreted by the aid of her own quick imagination, they drew a picture of the lost mother and child, which sank deep, deep, into Eugenie's soul.

Mrs. Fenwick, said Mrs. Hewson, scarcely spoke on the journey south.

She sat staring out of window, with her hands on her lap, and Daisy thought there was 'soomat wrang'--but dared not ask. In saying good-bye at Euston, Mrs. Fenwick had kissed her, and given the guard a shilling to look after her. She was holding Carrie in her arms, as the train moved away. The girl had supposed she was going to join her husband.

And barely a week later, John Fenwick had been dining in St. James's Square, looking hara.s.sed and ill indeed--it was supposed, from overwork; but, to his best friends, as silent as that grave of darkness and oblivion which had closed over his wife.

Yet, as the weeks of thought went on, Eugenie blamed him less and less. Her clear intelligence showed her all the steps of the unhappy business. She remembered the awkward, hara.s.sed youth, as she had first seen him at her father's table, with his curious mixture of arrogance and timidity; now haranguing the table, and now ready to die with confusion over some social slip. She understood what he had told her, in his first piteous letter, of his paralysed, tongue-tied states--of his fear of alienating her father and herself. And she went deeper.

She confessed the hatefulness of those weakening timidities, those servile states of soul, by which our social machine balances the insolences and cruelties of the strong--its own breeding also; she felt herself guilty because of them; the whole of life seemed to her sick, because a young man, ill at ease and cowardly in a world not his own, had told or lived a foolish lie. It was as though she had forced it from him; she understood so well how it had come about. No, no!--her father might judge it as he pleased. She was angry no longer.

Nor--presently--did she even resent the treachery of those weeks at Versailles, so quick and marvellous was the play of her great gift of sympathy, which was only another aspect of imagination. In recoil from a dark moment of her own experience, of which she could never think without anguish, she had offered him a friend's hand, a friend's heart--offered them eagerly and lavishly. Had he done more than take them, with the craving of a man, for whom already the ways are darkening, who makes one last clutch at 'youth and bloom, and this delightful world'? He had been reckless and cruel indeed. But in its profound tenderness and humility and self-reproach her heart forgave him.

Yet of that forgiveness she could make no outward sign--for her own sake and Phoebe's. That old relation could never be again; the weeks at Versailles had killed it. Unless, indeed, some day it were her blessed lot to find the living Phoebe, and bring her to her husband!

Then friendship, as well as love, might perhaps lift its head once more. And as during the months of winter, both before and since her departure from England, the tidings reached her of Fenwick's growing embarra.s.sments, of his increasing coa.r.s.eness and carelessness of work, his violence of temper, the friend in her suffered profoundly. She knew that she could still do much for him. Yet there, in the way, stood the image of Phoebe, as Daisy Hewson described her,--pale, weary, desperate,--making all speech, all movement, on the part of the woman, for jealousy of whom the wife had so ignorantly destroyed herself and Fenwick, a thing impossible.

Eugenie's only comfort indeed, at this time, was the comfort of religion. Her soul, sorely troubled and very stern with itself, wandered in mystical, ascetic paths out of human ken. Every morning she hurried through the woods to a little church beside the sea, filled with fishing-folk. There she heard Ma.s.s, and made the spiritual communion which sustained her.

Once, in the mediaeval siege of a Spanish fortress, so a Spanish chronicler tells us, all the defenders were slaughtered but one man; and he lay dying on the ground, across the gate. There was neither priest nor wafer; but the dying man raised a little of the soil between the stones to his lips, and so, says the chronicler, 'communicated in the earth itself,' before he pa.s.sed to the Eternal Presence. Eugenie would have done the same with a like ardour and simplicity; her thought differing much, perhaps, in its perceived and logical elements, from that of the dying Spaniard, but none the less profoundly akin. The act was to her the symbol and instrument of an Inflowing Power; the details of those historical beliefs with which it was connected, mattered little. And as she thus leant upon the old, while conscious of the new, she never in truth felt herself alone.

It seemed to her, often, that she clasped hands with a vast invisible mult.i.tude, in a twilight soon to be dawn.

CHAPTER XII

A fortnight later d.i.c.k Watson died. Fenwick saw him several times before the end, and was present at his last moments. The funeral was managed by Cuningham; so were the obituary notices; and Fenwick attended the funeral and read the notices, with that curious mixture of sore grief and jealous irritation into which our human nature is so often betrayed at similar moments.

Then he found himself absorbed by the later rehearsals of _The Queen's Necklace_; by the completion of his pictures for the May exhibition; and by the perpetual and ignominious hunt for money. As to this last, it seemed to him that each day was a battle in which he was for ever worsted. He was still trying in vain to sell his house at Chelsea, the house planned at the height of his brief prosperity, built and finely furnished on borrowed money, and now apparently unsaleable, because of certain peculiarities in it, which suited its contriver, and no one else. And meanwhile the bank from which he had borrowed most of his building money was pressing inexorably for repayment; the solicitor in Bedford Row could do nothing, and was manifestly averse to running up a longer bill on his own account; so that, instead of painting, Fenwick often spent his miserable days in rushing about London, trying to raise money by one shift after another, in an agony to get a bill accepted or postponed, borrowing from this person and that, and with every succeeding week losing more self-respect and self-control.

The situation would have been instantly changed if only his artistic power had recovered itself. And if Eugenie had been within his reach it might have done so. She had the secret of stimulating in him what was poetic, and repressing what was merely extravagant or violent. But she was far away: and as he worked at the completion of his series of 'Months,' or at various portraits which the kindness or compa.s.sion of old friends had procured for him, he fell headlong into all his worst faults.

His handling, once so distinguished through all its inequalities, grew steadily more careless and perfunctory; his drawing lost force and grip; his composition, so rich, interesting, and intelligent in his early days, now meant nothing, said nothing. The few friends who still haunted his studio during these dark months were often struck with pity; criticism or argument was useless; and some of them believed that he was suffering from defects of sight, and was no longer capable of judging his own work.

The portrait commissions, in particular, led more than once to disaster. His angry vanity suspected that while he was now thought incapable of the poetic or imaginative work in which he had once excelled, he was still considered--'like any fool'--good enough for portraits. This alone was enough to make him loathe the business. On two or three occasions he ended by quarrelling with the sitter. Then for hours he would walk restlessly about his room, smoking enormously, drinking--sometimes excessively--out of a kind of excitement and _desoeuvrement_--his strong, grizzled hair bristling about his head, his black eyes staring and bloodshot, and that wild gypsyish look of his youth more noticeable than ever in these surroundings of what promised soon to be a decadent middle age.

One habit of his youth had quite disappeared. The queer tendency to call on Heaven for practical aid in any practical difficulty--to make of prayer a system of 'begging-letters to the Almighty'--which had of ten quieted or distracted him in his early years of struggle, affected him no longer. His inner life seemed to himself shrouded in a sullen numbness and frost.

And the old joy in reading, the old plenitude and facility of imagination, were also in abeyance. He became the fierce critic of other men's ideas, while barren of his own. To be original, successful, happy, was now in his eyes the one dark and desperate offence. Yet every now and then he would have impulses of the largest generosity; would devote hours to the teaching of some struggling student and the correction of his work; or draw on his last remains of credit or influence--pester people with calls, or write reams to the newspapers--on behalf of some one, unduly overlooked, whose work he admired.

But through it all, the shadows deepened, and a fixed conviction that he was moving towards catastrophe. In spite of Watson's touching words to him, he did not often let himself think of Phoebe. Towards her, as towards so much else, his mind and heart were stiffened and voiceless.

But for hours in the night--since sleeplessness was now added to his other torments--he would brood on the loss of his child, would try to imagine her dancing, singing, sewing--or helping her mother in the house. Seventeen! Why, soon no doubt they would be marrying her, and he, her father, would know nothing, hear nothing. And in the darkness he would feel the warm tears rise in his eyes, and hold them there, proudly arrested.

The rehearsals in which he spent many hours of the week, generally added to his distress and irritation. The play itself was, in his opinion, a poor vulgar thing, utterly unworthy of the 'spectacle' he had contrived for it. He could not hide his contempt for the piece, and indeed for most of its players; and was naturally unpopular with the management and the company. Moreover, he wanted his money desperately, seeing that the play had been postponed, first from November to February, and then from February to April; but the actor-manager concerned was in somewhat dire straits himself, and nothing could be got before production.

One afternoon, late in March, a rehearsal was nearing its completion, everybody was tired out, and everything had been going badly. One of Fenwick's most beautiful scenes--carefully studied from the Trianon gardens on the spot--had been, in his opinion, hopelessly spoilt in order to bring in some ridiculous 'business' wholly incongruous with the setting and date of the play. He had had a fierce altercation on the stage with the actor-manager. The cast, meanwhile, dispersed at the back of the stage or in the wings, looked on maliciously or chatted among themselves; while every now and then one or other of the antagonists would call up the leading lady, or the conceited gentleman who was to act Count Fersen, and hotly put a case. Fenwick was madly conscious all the time of his lessened consideration and dignity in the eyes of a band of people whom he despised. Two years before, his cooperation would have been an honour and his opinion law.

Now, nothing of the kind; indeed, through the heated remarks of the actor-manager there ran the insolent implication that Mr. Fenwick's wrath was of no particular account to anybody, and that he was presuming on a commission he had been very lucky to get.

At last a crowd of stage-hands, setting scenery for another piece in the evening, invaded the stage, and the rehearsal was just breaking up when Fenwick, still talking in flushed exasperation, happened to notice two ladies standing in the wings, on the other side of the vast stage, close to the stage-entrance.

He suddenly stopped talking--stammered--looked again. They were two girls, one evidently a good deal older than the other. The elder was talking with the a.s.sistant stage-manager. The younger stood quietly, a few yards away, not talking to any one. Her eyes were on Fenwick, and her young, slightly frowning face wore an expression of amus.e.m.e.nt--of something besides, also--something puzzled and intent. It flashed upon him that she had been there for some time, that he had been vaguely conscious of her--that she had, in fact, been watching from a distance the angry scene in which he had been engaged.

'Why!--whatever is the matter, Mr. Fenwick?' said the actor beside him, startled by his look.

Fenwick made no answer, but he dropped a roll of papers he was holding and suddenly rushed forward across the stage, through the throng of carpenters and scene-shifters who were at work upon it. Some garden steps and a fountain just being drawn into position came in his way; he stumbled and fell, was conscious of two or three men coming to his a.s.sistance, rose again, and ran on, blindly, pushing at the groups in his way, till he ran into the arms of the stage-manager.

'Who were those ladies?--where are they?' he said, panting, and looking round him in despair; for they had vanished, and the stage-entrance was blocked by an outgoing stream of people.

'Don't know anything about them,' said the man, sulkily. Fenwick had been the plague of his life in rehearsals. 'What?--you mean those two girls? Never saw 'em before.'

'But you must know who they are--you must!' shouted Fenwick. 'What's their name? Why did you let them go?'

'Because I had finished with them.'

The manager turned on his heel, and was about to give an order to a workman, when Fenwick caught him by the arm.

'I implore you,' he said, in a shaking voice, his face crimson--'tell me who they are--and where they went.'

The man looked at him astonished, but something in the artist's face made him speak more considerately.