Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

CHAPTER IX

'Quand vous arriverez au troisième, monsieur, montez, montez toujours! Vous trouverez un petit escalier tournant, en bois. Ça vous conduira à l'atelier.'

Thus advised by the wife of the concierge, Fenwick crossed the courtyard of an old house in the Rue du Bac, looked up a moment at the sober and distinguished charm of its architecture, at the corniced, many-paned windows, so solidly framed and plentifully lined in white, upon the stone walls, and the high roof, with its lucarne windows just touched with classical decoration; each line and tint contributing to a seemly, restrained whole, as of something much worn by time, yet merely enhanced thereby, something deliberately built, moreover, to stand the years, and abide the judgement of posterity. The house in Saint-Simon's day had belonged to one of those newly ennobled dukes, his contemporaries and would-be brethren, whose monstrous claims to rank with himself and the other real magnificences among the ducs et pairs de France drove him to distraction. It was now let out to a multitude of families, who began downstairs in affluence and ended in the genteel or artistic penury of the garrets. The first floor was occupied by a deputy and ex-minister, one of the leaders of the Centre Gauche—in the garrets it was possible for a rapin to find a bedroom at sixteen francs a month. But it was needful that he should be a seemly rapin, orderly and quietly ambitious, like the house, otherwise he would not have been long suffered within its tranquil and self-respecting walls.

Fenwick climbed and climbed, discovered the little wooden staircase, and still climbed. At the very top he found a long and narrow corridor, along which he groped in darkness. Suddenly, at the end, a door opened, and a figure appeared on the threshold.

'Fenwick!—that you? All right!—no steps! The floor was left au naturel about 1680—but you won't come to grief.'

Fenwick arrived at the open door, and Dick Watson drew him into the large studio beyond. Fenwick looked round him in astonishment. The room was a huge grenier in the roof of the old house, roughly adapted to the purposes of a studio. A large window to the north had been put in, and the walls had been rudely plastered. But all the blasts of heaven seemed still to blow through them, and through the chinks or under the eaves of the roof; while in the middle of the floor a pool of water, the remains of a recent heavy shower, testified to the ease with which the weather could enter if it chose.

'I say'—said Fenwick, pointing to the water—'can you stand this kind of thing?'

Watson shivered.

'Not in this weather. I'm off next week. In the summer it's pleasant enough. Well, it's deuced lucky I caught sight of you at that show yesterday! How are you? I believe it's nearly two years since we met last.'

'I'm all right,' said Fenwick, accepting a shaky seat and a cigarette.

Watson lighted a fresh one for himself, and then with arms akimbo surveyed his visitor.

'I've seen you look better. What's the matter? Have you been working through the summer in London?'

'I'm all right,' Fenwick repeated; then, with a little grimace—'or I should be, if I could pay my way, and paint the things I want to paint.'

He looked up.

'Well, why don't you?'

'Because—somehow—one has to live.'

Watson climbed on to his high stool, still observing his visitor. For a good many years now, Fenwick had been always well and carefully dressed—an evident Londoner, accustomed to drawing-rooms and frequenting expensive tailors. But to-day there was something in his tired, dishevelled look, and comparatively shabby coat, which reminded Watson of years long gone by—of a studio in Bernard Street, and a broad-browed, handsome fellow, with queer manners and a North-Country accent. As to good looks, Fenwick's face and head were now far finer than they had been in first youth; Watson's critical eye took note of it. The hair, touched lightly with grey, had receded slightly on the temples, and the more ample brow, heavily lined, gave a nobler shelter than of old to the still astonishing vivacity of the eyes. The carriage of the head, too, was prouder and more assured. Fenwick, indeed, as far as years went, was, as Watson knew, in the very prime of life. Nevertheless, there was in his aspect, as he sat there, a prophetic note of discouragement, of ebbing vitality which startled his friend.

'I say,' said Watson, abruptly, 'you've been over-doing it. Have you made it up with the Academy?'

Fenwick laughed.

'Goodness, no!'

'Where have you been exhibiting this year?'

'At the gallery I always take. And I sent some things to the
Grosvenor.'

Watson shook his head.

'It's an awful pity. You'd got in—you should have stayed in—and made yourself a power.'

Fenwick's attitude stiffened.

'I have never regretted it for a single hour—except that the scene itself was ridiculous.'

Watson knew very well to what he referred. Some two years before, it had been the nine days wonder of artistic London. Fenwick, then a newly elected Associate of the Academy, and at what seemed to be the height of his first success as an artist, had sent in a picture to the Spring Exhibition which appeared to the Hanging Committee of the moment a perfunctory thing. They gave it a bad place, and an Academician told Fenwick what had happened. He rushed to Burlington House, tore down his picture from the wall, stormed at the astonished members of the Hanging Committee, carried off his property, and vowed that he would resign his Associateship. He was indeed called upon to do so; and he signalised his withdrawal by a furious letter to the Times in which the rancours, grievances, and contempts of ten chequered and ambitious years found full and rhetorical expression. The letter naturally made a breach between the writer and England's official art. Watson, who was abroad when the whole thing happened, had heard of it with mingled feelings. 'It will either make him—or finish him!' was his own judgement, founded on a fairly exhaustive knowledge of John Fenwick; and he had waited anxiously for results. So far no details had reached him since. Fenwick seemed to be still exhibiting, still writing to the papers, and, as far as he knew, still selling. But the aspect of the man before him was not an aspect of prosperity.

Watson, however, having started a subject which he well knew to be interminable, would instantly have liked to escape from it. He was himself nervous, critical, and easily bored. He did not know what he should do with Fenwick's outpourings when he had listened to them.

But Fenwick had come over—charged—and Watson had touched the spring. He sat there, smoking and declaiming, his eyes blazing, one hand playing with Watson's favourite dog, an Aberdeen terrier who was softly smelling and pushing against him. All that litany of mockery and bitterness, which the Comic Spirit kindles afresh on the lips of each rising generation, only to quench it again on the lips of those who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for 'arrival,' when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased by success, dismisses the revolts of his youth. But this was still the language—and the fierce language—of revolt! The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any 'school' worth the name—the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the snobbery of the rich world in its dealings with art: all these jeremiads which he recited were much the same—mutatis mutandis—as those with which, half a century before, poor Benjamin Haydon had filled the 'autobiography' which is one of the capital 'documents' of the artistic life. This very resemblance, indeed, occurred to Watson.

'Upon my word,' he said, with a queer smile, 'you remind me of
Haydon.'

Fenwick started; with an impatient movement he pushed away the dog, who whimpered.

'Oh, come—I hope it's not as bad as that,' he said, roughly.

Watson sharply regretted his remark. Through the minds of both there passed the same image of Haydon lying dead by his own hand beneath the vast pictures that no one would buy.

'Why you talk like this, I'm sure I don't know,' Watson said, with an impatient laugh. 'I'm always seeing your name in the papers. You have a great reputation, and I don't expect the Academy matters to your clientèle.'

Fenwick shook his head. 'I haven't sold a picture for more than a year—except a beastly portrait—one of the worst things I ever did.'

'That's bad,' said Watson. 'Of course that's my state—perennially!
But you're not used to it.'

Fenwick said nothing, and the delicate sensibility of the other instantly divined that, friends as they were, the comparison with himself had not been at all welcome to his companion. And, indeed, at the time when Watson left England to begin the wandering life he had been leading for some three years, it would have been nothing less than grotesque. Fenwick was then triumphant, in what, it was supposed, would be his 'first period'—that 'young man's success,' brilliant, contested, noisy, from which, indeed, many roads lead, to many goals; but with him, at that time, the omens were of the best. His pictures were always among the events of the spring exhibitions; he had gathered round him a group of enthusiastic pupils who worked in the studio of the new house; and he had already received a good many honours at the hands of foreign juries. He was known to be on the threshold of the Academy, and to be making, besides, a good deal of money. 'Society' had first admitted him as the protégé of Lord Findon and the friend of Madame de Pastourelles, and was now ready to amuse itself with him, independently, as a genius and an 'eccentric.' He had many enemies; but so have all 'fighters.' The critics spoke severely of certain radical defects in his work, due to insufficiency of early training; defects which time might correct—or stereotype. But the critics 'must be talking'; and the public, under the spell of a new and daring talent, appeared to take no notice.

As these recollections passed through Watson's mind, another expression showed itself in the hollow-cheeked, massive face. It was the look of the visionary who sees in events the strange verification of obscure instincts and divinations in which he himself perhaps has only half-believed. He and Fenwick had been friends now—in some respects, close friends—for a good many years. Of late, they had met rarely, and neither of the men was a good correspondent. But the friendship, the strong sense of congruity and liking, persisted. It had sprung, originally—unexpectedly enough—from that loan made to Fenwick in his days of stress and poverty; and there were many who prophesied that it would come to an end with Fenwick's success. Watson had no interest in and small tolerance for the prosperous. His connexion with Cuningham, in spite of occasional letters, had dropped long ago, ever since that clever Scotch painter had shown himself finally possessed of the usual Scotch power to capture London and a competence. But his liking for Fenwick had never wavered through all the blare of Fenwick's success.

Was it that the older man with his melancholy Celtic instinct had divined from the first that he and Fenwick were in truth of the same race—the race of the [Greek: dusammoroi]—the ill-fated—those for whom happiness is not written in the stars?

He sat staring at his companion, his eyes dreamily intent, taking note of the restless depression of the man before him, and of the disagreeable facts which emerged from his talk—declining reputation, money difficulties, and—last and most serious—a new doubt of himself and his powers, which Watson never remembered to have noticed in him before.

'But you must have made a great deal of money!' he said to him once, interrupting him.

Fenwick turned away uneasily.

'So I did. But there was the new house and studio. I have been trying to sell the house. But it's a white elephant.'

'Building's the deuce,' said Watson, gloomily. 'It ruins everybody from Louis Quatorze and Walter Scott downward. Have no barns—that's my principle—and then you can't pull 'em down and build greater! But, you know, it's all great nonsense, your talking like this! You're as clever as ever—cleverer. You've only got to paint—and it'll be all right. But, of course, if you will spend all your time in writing letters to the papers, and pamphlets, and that kind of thing—well!—'

He shrugged his shoulders.

Fenwick took the remark good-temperedly. 'I've finished three large pictures in eight months—if only somebody would buy 'em. And I'm in Paris now'—he hesitated a moment—'on a painting job. I've promised C——' (he named a well-known actor-manager in London) 'to help him with the production of a new play! I never did such a thing before—but—'

He looked up uncertainly, his colour rising.

'What?—scenery for The Queen's Necklace? I've seen the puffs in the papers. Why not? Hope he pays well. Then you're going to Versailles, of course?'

Fenwick replied that he had taken some rooms at the Hôtel des Réservoirs and must make some sketches in the palace; also in the park, and the Trianon garden. Then he rose abruptly.

'Well, and what have you been after?'

'The same old machines,' said Watson, tranquilly, pointing to a couple of large canvases. 'My subjects are no gayer than they used to be. Except that—ah, yes—I forgot—I had a return upon myself this spring—and set to work on some Bacchantes.' He stopped, and picked up a canvas which was standing with its face to the wall.

It represented a dance of Bacchantes. Fenwick looked at it in silence. Watson replaced it with a patient sigh. 'Theophile Gautier said of some other fellow's Bacchantes that they had got drunk on "philosophical" wine. He might, I fear, have said it of mine. Anyway, I felt I was not made for Bacchantes—so I fell back on the usual thing.'

And he showed an 'Execution of a Witch'—filled with gruesome and poignant detail—excellent in some of its ideas and single figures, but as a whole crude, horrible, and weak.

'I don't improve,' he said, abruptly, turning away—'but it keeps me contented—that and my animals. Anatole!—vaurien!—où es-tu?'

A small monkey, in a red jacket, who had been sitting unnoticed on the top of a cabinet since Fenwick's entrance, clattered down to the floor, and, running to his master, was soon sitting on his shoulder, staring at Fenwick with a pair of grave, soft eyes. Watson caressed him;—and then pointed to a wicker cage outside the window in which a pigeon was pecking at some Indian-corn. The cage door was wide open. 'She comes to feed here by day. In the morning I wake up and hear her there—the darling! In the evening she spreads her wings, and I watch her fly toward Saint-Cloud. No doubt the jade keeps a family there. Oh! some day she'll go—like the rest of them—and I shall miss her abominably.'

'You seem also to be favoured by mice?' said Fenwick, idly looking at two traps on the floor beside him.

Watson smiled.

'My femme de service sets those traps every night. She says we are overrun—the greatest nonsense! As if there wasn't enough for all of us! Then in the night—I sleep there, you see, behind that screen—I wake, and hear some little fool squeaking. So I get up, and take the trap downstairs in the dark—right away down—to the first floor. And there I let the mouse go—those folk down there are rich enough to keep him. The only drawback is that my old woman is so cross in the morning, and she spends her life thinking of new traps. Ah, ben!—Je la laisse faire!'

'And this place suits you?'

'Admirably—till the cold comes. Then I march. I must have the sun.'

He shivered again. Fenwick, struck by something in his tone, looked at him more closely.

'How are you, by the way?' he asked, repentantly, 'I ought to have inquired before. You mentioned consulting some big man here. What did he say to you?'

'Oh, that I am phthisical, and must take care,' said Watson, carelessly—'that's no news. Ah! by the way'—he hurried the change of subject—'you know, of course, that Lord Findon and madame are to be at Versailles?'

'They will be there to-night,' said Fenwick, after a moment.

'Ah! to-night. Then you meet them?'

'I shall see them, of course.'

'What a blessed thing to be rid of that fellow!—What's she been doing since?'

Fenwick replied that since the death of her husband—about a year before this date—Madame de Pastourelles, worn out with nursing, had been pursuing health—in Egypt and elsewhere. Her father, stepmother, and sister had been travelling with her. The sister and she were to stay at Versailles till Christmas. It was a place for which Madame de Pastourelles had an old affection.

'And I suppose you know that you will find the Welbys there too?'

Fenwick made a startled movement.

'The Welbys? How did you hear that?'

'I had my usual half-yearly letter from Cuningham yesterday. He's the fellow for telling you the news. Welby has begun a big picture of Marie Antoinette, at Trianon, and has taken a studio in Versailles for the winter.'

Fenwick turned away and began to pace the bare floor of the studio.

'I didn't know,' he said, evidently discomposed.

'By the way, I have often meant to ask you. I trust he wasn't mixed up in the "hanging" affair?' said Watson, with a quick look at his companion.

'He was ill the day it was done, but in my opinion he behaved in an extremely mean and ungenerous manner afterwards!' exclaimed Fenwick, suddenly flushing from brow to chin.

'You mean he didn't support you?'

'He shilly-shallied. He thought—I have very good reason to believe—that I had been badly treated—that there was personal feeling in the matter—resentment of things that I had written—and so on but he would never come out into the open and say so!'

The excitement with which Fenwick spoke made it evident that Watson had touched an extremely sore point.

Watson was silent a little, lit another cigarette, and then said, with a smile:

'Poor Madame de Pastourelles!'

Fenwick looked up with irritation.

'What on earth do you mean?'

'I am wondering how she kept the peace between you—her two great friends.'

'She sees very little of Welby.'

'Ah! Since when?'

'Oh! for a long time. Of course they meet occasionally—'

A big, kindly smile flickered over Watson's face.

'What—was little Madame Welby jealous?'

'She would be a great goose if she were,' said Fenwick, turning aside to look through some sketches that lay on a chair beside him.

Watson shook his head, still smiling, then remarked:

'By the way, I understand she has become quite an invalid.'

'Has she?' said Fenwick. 'I know nothing of them.'

Watson began to talk of other things. But as he and Fenwick discussed the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick's own projects, as they talked of Manet, and Zola's 'L'Oeuvre,' and the Goncourts, as they compared the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and tendencies—Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a passionate partisan, loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir recently opened at a Paris dealer's—Watson's inner mind was really full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that salon of hers in the old Westminster house in Dean's Yard, of which during so many years Fenwick had made one of the principal figures. It should perhaps be explained that some two years after Fenwick's arrival in London, Madame de Pastourelles had thought it best to establish a little ménage of her own, distinct from the household in St. James's Square. Her friends and her stepmother's were not always congenial to each other; and in many ways both Lord Findon and she were the happier for the change. Her small panelled rooms had quickly become the meeting-place of a remarkable and attractive society. Watson himself, indeed, had never been an habitué of that or any other drawing-room. As he had told Lord Findon long ago, he was not for the world, nor the world for him. But whereas his volatile lordship could never draw him from his cell, Lord Findon's daughter was sometimes irresistible, and Watson's great shaggy head and ungainly person was occasionally to be seen beside her fire, in the years before he left London. He had, therefore, been a spectator of Fenwick's gradual transformation at the hands of a charming woman; he had marked the stages of the process; and he knew well that it had never excited a shadow of scandal in the minds of any reasonable being. All the same, the deep store of hidden sentiment which this queer idealist possessed had been touched by the position. The young woman isolated and childless, so charming, so nobly sincere, so full of heart—was she to be always Ariadne, and forsaken? The man—excitable, nervous, selfish, yet, in truth, affectionate and dependent—what folly, or what chivalry kept him unmarried? Ever since the death of M. le Comte de Pastourelles, dreams concerning these two people had been stirring in the brain of Watson, and these dreams spoke now in the dark eyes he bent on Fenwick.

Presently, Fenwick began to talk gloomily of the death of his old Bernard Street landlady, who had become his housekeeper and factotum in the new Chelsea house and studio, which he had built for himself.

'I don't know what I shall do without her. For eleven years I've never paid a bill or engaged a servant for myself. She's done everything. Every morning she used to give me my pocket-money for the day.'

'The remedy, after all, is simple,' said Watson, with a sudden turn of the head.

Fenwick raised his eyebrows interrogatively.

'I imagine that what Mrs. Gibbs did well, "Mrs. Fenwick" might do even better—n'est-ce pas?'

Fenwick sprang up.

'Mrs.—?' he repeated, vaguely.

He stood a moment bending over Watson—his eyes staring, his mouth open. Then he controlled himself.

'You talk as though she were round the corner,' he said, turning away and buttoning his coat afresh. 'But please understand, my dear fellow, that she is not round the corner, nor likely to be.'

He spoke with a hard emphasis, smiling, and slapping the breast of his coat.

Watson looked at him and said no more.

Fenwick walked rapidly along the Quai Voltaire, crossed the Pont Neuf, and found himself inside the enclosure of the Louvre. Twenty minutes to four. Some impulse, born of the seething thoughts within, took him to the door of the Musée. He mounted rapidly, and found himself in the large room devoted to the modern French school.

He went straight to two pictures by Hippolyte Flandrin—'Madame Vinet' and 'Portrait de Jeune Fille.' When, in the first year of his London life, he had made his hurried visits to Paris, these pictures, then in the Luxembourg, had been among those which had most vitally affected him. The beautiful surface and keeping which connected them with the old tradition, together with the modern spirit, the trenchant simplicity of their portraiture, had sent him back—eager and palpitating—to his own work on the picture of Madame de Pastourelles, or on the last stages of the 'Genius Loci.'

He looked into them now, sharply, intently, his heart beating to suffocation under the stress of that startling phrase of Watson's. Still tremulous—as one in flight—he made himself recognise certain details of drawing and modelling in 'Madame Vinet' which had given him hints for the improvement of the portrait of Phoebe; and, again, the ease with which the head moves on its shoulders, its relief, its refinement—how he had toiled to rival them in his picture of Madame Eugénie!—translating as he best could the cold and disagreeable colour of the Ingres school into the richer and more romantic handling of an art influenced by Watts and Burne-Jones!

Then he passed on to the young girl's portrait—the girl in white muslin, turning away her graceful head from the spectator, and showing thereby the delicacy of her profile, the wealth of her brown hair, the beauty of her young and virginal form. Suddenly, his eyes clouded; he turned abruptly away, left the room without looking at another picture, and was soon hurrying through the crowded streets northward towards the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Carrie!—his child!—his own flesh and blood. His heart cried out for her. Watson's brusquerie—the young girl of the picture—and his own bitter and disappointed temper—they had all their share in the emotion which possessed him.

The child whom he remembered, with her mother's eyes, and that light mutinous charm, which was not Phoebe's—why, she was now seventeen!—a little younger—only a little younger, than the girl of the portrait. His longing fancy pursued her—saw her a wild, pretty, laughing thing, nearly a woman—and then fell back passionately on a more familiar image!—of the baby at his knee, open-mouthed, her pink lips rounded for the tidbit just about to descend upon them, her sweet and sparkling eyes fixed upon her father.

'My God!—where are they?—are they alive, or dead? How cruel—cruel!' And he ground his teeth in one of those paroxysms which every now and then, at long intervals, represented the return upon him of the indestructible past. Often for months together it meant little or nothing to him, but the dull weight of his secret; twelve years had inevitably deadened feeling, and filled the mind with fresh interests, while of late the tumult of his Academy and Press campaign had silenced the stealing, distant voices. Yet there were moments when all was as fresh and poignant as it had been in the first hours, when Phoebe, with her golden head and her light, springing step, seemed to move beside him, and he felt the drag of a small hand in his.

He stiffened himself—like one attacked. The ghosts of dead hours came trooping and eddying round him, like the autumn leaves that had begun to strew the Paris streets—all the scenes of that first ghastly week when he had hunted in desperation for his lost wife and child. His joyous return from Chelsea, on the evening of his good-fortune—Mrs. Gibbs's half-sulky message on the door-step that 'Mrs. Fenwick' was in the studio—his wild rush upstairs—the empty room, the letter, the ring:—his hurried journey North—the arrival at the Langdale cottage, only to find on the table of the deserted parlour another letter from Phoebe, written before she left Westmoreland, in the prevision that he would come there in search of a clue, and urging him for both their sakes to make no scandal, no hue and cry, to accept the inevitable, and let her go in peace—his interview with the servant Daisy, who had waited with the child in an hotel close to Euston, while Phoebe went to Bernard Street, and had been sent back to the North immediately after Phoebe's return, without the smallest indication of what her mistress meant to do—his fruitless consultations with Anna Mason!—the whole dismal story rose before him, as it was wont to do periodically, filling him with the same rage, the same grief, the same fierce and inextinguishable resentment.

Phoebe had destroyed his life. She had not only robbed him of herself and of their child, she had forced him into an acted lie which had poisoned his whole existence, and, first and foremost, that gracious and beautiful friendship which was all, save his art, that she had left him. For, in the first moments of his despair and horror, he had remembered what it would mean to Madame de Pastourelles, did she ever know that his mad wife had left him out of jealousy of her. He was not slow to imagine the effect of Phoebe's action on that proud, pure nature and sensitive conscience; and he knew what she and her father must feel towards the deception which had led her into such a position, and made such a tragedy possible. He foresaw her recoil, her bitter condemnation, the final ruin of the relation between himself and her; and yet more than these did he dread her pain, her causeless, innocent pain. To stab the hand which had helped him, the heart which had already suffered so much, in the very first hours of his own shock and misery, he had shrunk from this, he had tried his best to protect Madame de Pastourelles.

Hence the compact with his landlady, by which he had in fact bribed her to silence, and transformed her into a devoted servant always under his eye; hence the various means by which he had found it possible to quiet the members of his own family and of Phoebe's—needy folk, most of them, cannily unwilling to make an enemy of a man who was likely, so they understood, to be rich, and who already showed a helpful disposition. When once he had convinced himself that he had no clue, and that Phoebe had disappeared, it had not been difficult indeed to keep his secret, and to hide the traces of his own wrong-doing, his own share in the catastrophe. Between Phoebe's world and the world in which he was now to live, there were few or no links. Bella Morrison might have supplied one. But she and her mother had moved to Guernsey, and a year after Phoebe's flight Fenwick ascertained that old Mrs. Morrison was dead, and that Bella had gone to South America as companion to a lady.

So in an incredibly short time the crisis was over. The last phase was connected with the cousin—Freddy Tolson—who had visited Phoebe the night before her journey to London, and was now in New South Wales.

A letter from Fenwick to this young man, containing a number of questions as to his conversation with Phoebe, and written immediately after Phoebe's flight, obtained an answer after some three or four months, but Tolson's reply was wholly unprofitable. He merely avowed that he had discovered nothing at all of Phoebe's intention, and could throw no light whatever upon her disappearance. The letter was laboriously written by a man of imperfect education, and barely covered three loosely written sides of ordinary note-paper. It arrived when Fenwick's own researches were already at a standstill, and seemed to leave nothing more to hope for. The police inquiries which had been initiated went on intermittently for a while, then ceased; the waters of life closed over Phoebe Fenwick and her child.

What was Fenwick's present feeling towards his wife? If amid this crowded Paris he had at last beheld her coming to him, had seen the tall figure and the childish look, and the lovely, pleading eyes, would his heart have leapt within him?—would his hands have been outstretched to enfold and pardon her?—or would he have looked at her sombrely, unable to pass the gulf between them—to forget what she had done?

In truth, he could not have answered the question; he was uncertain of himself. Her act, by its independence, its force of will, and the ability she had shown in planning and carrying it out, had transformed his whole conception of her. In a sense, he knew her no longer. That she could do a thing at once so violent and so final, was so wholly out of keeping with all his memories of her, that he could only think of the woman who had come in his absence to the Bernard Street studio, and defaced the sketch of Madame de Pastourelles, as in some sort a stranger—one whom, were she to step back into his life, he would have had to learn afresh. Sometimes, when anything reminded him of her suddenly—as, for instance, the vision in a shop-window of the very popular mezzotint which had been made from the 'Genius Loci' the year after its success in the Academy—the pang from which he suffered would seem to show that he still loved her, as indeed he had always loved her, through all the careless selfishness of his behaviour. But, again, there were many months when she dropped altogether—or seemed to drop—out of his mind and memory, when he was entirely absorbed in the only interests she had left him—his art, his quarrels, and his relation to Eugénie de Pastourelles.

There was a time, indeed—some two or three years after the catastrophe—when he passed through a stage of mental and moral tumult, natural to a man of strong passions and physique. Even in their first married life, Phoebe had been sometimes jealous, and with reason. It was her memory of these occasions that had predisposed her to the mad suspicion which wrecked her. And when she had deserted him, he came violently near, on one or two occasions, to things base and irreparable. But he was saved—first by the unconscious influence, the mere trust, of a good woman—and, secondly, by his keen and advancing intelligence. Dread lest he should cast himself out of Eugénie's delightful presence; and the fighting life of the mind: it was by these he was rescued, by these he ultimately conquered.

And yet, was it, perhaps, his bitterest grievance against his wife that she had, in truth, left him nothing!—not even friendship, not even art. In so wrenching herself from him, she had perpetuated in him that excitable and unstable temper it should have been her first object to allay, and had thus injured and maimed his artistic power; while at the same time she had so troubled, so falsified his whole attitude towards the woman who on his wife's disappearance from his life had become naturally and insensibly his dearest friend, that not even the charm of Madame de Pastourelles' society, of her true, delicate, and faithful affection, could give him any lasting happiness. He himself had begun the falsification, but it was Phoebe's act which had prolonged and compelled it, through twelve years.

For a long time, indeed, his success as an artist steadily developed. The very energy of his resentment—his inner denunciation—of his wife's flight, the very force of his fierce refusal to admit that he had given her the smallest real justification for such a step, had quickened in him for a time all the springs of life. Through his painting, as we have seen, he wrestled out his first battles with fate and with temptation; and those early years were the years of his artistic triumph, as they were also the years of Madame de Pastourelles' strongest influence upon him. But the concealment on which his life was based, the tragedy at the heart of it, worked like 'a worm i' the bud.' The first check to his artistic career—the 'hanging' incident and its sequel—produced an effect of shock and disintegration out of all proportion to its apparent cause—inexplicable indeed to the spectators.

Madame de Pastourelles wondered, and sorrowed. But she could do nothing to arrest the explosion of egotism, arrogance, and passion which Fenwick allowed himself, after his breach with the Academy. The obscure causes of it were hidden from her; she could only pity and grieve; and Fenwick, unable to satisfy her, unable to re-establish his own equilibrium, full of remorse towards her, and of despair about his art, whereof the best forces and inspirations seemed to have withered within him like a gourd in the night, went from one folly to another, while his pictures steadily deteriorated, his affairs became involved, and a shrewd observer like Lord Findon wondered who or what the deuce had got hold of him—whether he had begun to take morphia—or had fallen into the clutches of a woman.

In the midst of these developments, so astonishing and disappointing to Fenwick's best friends, Eugénie de Pastourelles was suddenly summoned to the death-bed of the husband from whom she had been separated for nearly fifteen years. It was now nearly twelve months since Fenwick had seen her; and it was his eagerness to meet her again, much more than the necessities of his new commission, which had brought him out post-haste to Paris and Versailles, where, indeed, Lord Findon, in a kind letter, had suggested that he should join them.

* * * * *

Amid these memories and agitations, he found himself presently at the Gare Saint-Lazare, taking his ticket at the guichet. It was characteristic of him that he bought a first-class return without thinking of it, and then, when he found himself pompously alone in his compartment, while crowds were hurrying into the second-class, he reproached himself for extravagance, and passed the whole journey in a fume of discomfort. For eight or nine years he had been rich; and he loathed the small ways of poverty.

Versailles was in the glow of an autumn sunset, as he walked from the station to the famous Hôtel des Réservoirs on the edge of the Park. The white houses, the wide avenues, the château on its hill, were steeped in light—a light golden, lavish, and yet melancholy, as though the autumn day still remembered the October afternoon when Marie Antoinette turned to look for the last time at the lake and the woods of Trianon.

As Fenwick crossed the Rue de la Paroisse, a lady on the other side of the road, who was hurrying in the opposite direction, stopped suddenly at sight of him, and stared excitedly. She was a woman no longer young, much sunburnt, with high cheek-bones and a florid complexion. He did not notice her, and after a moment's hesitation she resumed her walk.

He went into the Park, where the statues shone flamelike amid the bronze and orange of the trees, where the water of the fountains was dyed in blue and rose, and all the faded magnificence and decaying grace of the vast incomparable scene were kindling into an hour's rich life, under the last attack of the sun. He wandered a while, restless and unhappy—yet always counting the hours till he should see the slight, worn figure which for a year had been hidden from him.

He dined in the well-known restaurant, wandered again in the mild dusk, then mounted to his room and worked a while at some of the sketches he was making for his new commission. While he was so engaged, a carriage drew up below, and two persons descended. He recognised Lord Findon, much aged and whitened in these last years. The lady in deep mourning behind him paused a moment on the broad pathway, and looked round her, at the hill of the château, at the bright lights in the restaurant. She threw back her veil, and Fenwick's heart leapt as he recognised the spiritual beauty, the patient sweetness of a face which through twelve troubled years had kept him from evil and held him to good—had been indeed 'the master light' of all his seeing.

And to his best and only friend he had lied, persistently and unforgiveably, for twelve years. There was the sting—and there the pity of it.