Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

CHAPTER XI

After a moderately bright morning, that after-breakfast fog which we owe to the British kitchen and the domestic hearth was descending on the Strand. The stream of traffic, on the roadway and the pavements, was passing to and fro under a yellow darkness; the shop-lights were beginning to flash out here and there, but without any of their evening cheerfulness; and on the passing faces one saw written the inconvenience and annoyance of the fog—the fear, too, lest it should become worse and impenetrable.

Fenwick was groping his way along, eastward; one moment feeling and hating the depression of the February day, of the grimy, overcrowded street; the next, responsive to some dimly beautiful effect of colour or line—some quiver of light—some grouping of phantom forms in the gloom. Halfway towards the Law-Courts he was hailed and overtaken by a tall, fair-haired man.

'Hallo, Fenwick!—just the man I wanted to see!'

Fenwick, whose eyes—often very troublesome of late—were smarting with the fog, peered at the speaker, and recognised Philip Cuningham. His face darkened a little as they shook hands.

'What did you want me for?'

'Did you know that poor old Watson had come back to town—ill?'

'No!' cried Fenwick, arrested. 'I thought he was in Algiers.'

Cuningham walked on beside him, telling what he knew, Fenwick all the time dumbly vexed that this good-looking, prosperous fellow, this Academician in his new fur coat, breathing success and commissions, should know more of his best friend's doings than he.

Watson, it appeared, had been seized with hemorrhage at Marseilles, and had thereupon given up his winter plans, and crawled home to London, as soon as he was sufficiently recovered to bear the journey. Fenwick, much troubled, protested that it was madness to have come back to the English winter.

'No,' said Cuningham, looking grave. 'Better die at home than among strangers. And I'm afraid it's come to that, dear old fellow!'

Then he described—with evident self-satisfaction—how he had heard, from a common friend, of Watson's arrival, how he had rescued the invalid from a dingy Bloomsbury hotel, and settled him in some rooms in Fitzroy Square, with a landlady who could be trusted.

'We must have a nurse before long—but he won't have one yet. He wants badly to see you. I told him I'd look you up this evening. But this'll do instead, won't it? You'll remember?—23, Fitzroy Square. Shall I tell him when he may expect you? Every day we try to get him some little pleasure or other.'

Fenwick's irritation grew. Cuningham was talking as though the old relation between him and Richard Watson were still intact; while Fenwick knew well how thin and superficial the bond had grown.

'I shall go to-day,' he said, rather shortly. 'I have two or three things to do this morning, but there'll be time before my rehearsal this afternoon.'

'Your rehearsal?' Cuningham looked amiably curious.

Fenwick explained, but with fresh annoyance. The papers had been full enough of this venture on which he was engaged; Cuningham's ignorance offended him.

'Ah, indeed—very interesting,' said Cuningham, vaguely. 'Well, good-bye. I must jump into a hansom.'

'Where are you off to?'

'The Goldsmiths' Company are building a new Hall, and they want my advice about its decoration. Precious difficult, though, to get away from one's pictures, this time of year, isn't it?'

He hailed a hansom as he spoke.

'That's not a difficulty that applies to me,' said Fenwick, shortly.

Cuningham stared—frowned—and remembered.

'Oh, my dear fellow—what a mistake that was!—if you'll let me say so. Can't we put it right? Command me at any time.'

'Thank you. I prefer it as it is.'

'We'll talk it over. Well, good-bye. Don't forget old Dick.'

Fenwick walked on, fuming. Cuningham, he said to himself, was now the type of busy, pretentious mediocrity, the type which eternally keeps English art below the level of the Continent.

'I say—one moment! Have you had any news of the Findons lately?'

Fenwick turned sharply, and again saw Cuningham, whose hansom had been blocked by the traffic, close to the pavement. He was hanging over the door, and smiling.

In reply to the question, Fenwick merely shook his head.

'I had a capital letter from her ladyship a week or two ago,' said
Cuningham, raising his voice, and bringing himself as near to Fenwick
as his position allowed. 'The old fellow seems to be as fit as ever.
But Madame de Pastourelles must be very much changed.'

Fenwick said nothing. It might have been thought that the traffic prevented his hearing Cuningham's remark. But he had heard distinctly.

'Do you know when they'll be home?' he asked, reluctantly, walking beside the hansom.

'No—haven't an idea. I believe I'm to go to them for Easter. Ah!—now we go on. Ta-ta!'

He waved his hand, and the hansom moved away.

Fenwick pursued his walk plunged in disagreeable thought. 'Much changed?' What did that mean? He had noticed no such change before the Findons left London. The words fell like a fresh blow upon a wound.

He turned north, toward Lincoln's Inn Fields, called at the offices of Messrs. Butlin & Forbes, the well-known solicitors, and remained there half an hour. When he emerged from the old house, he looked, if possible, more harried and cast down than when he had entered it.

They had had a letter to show him, but in his opinion it contributed nothing. There was no hope—and no clue! How could there be? He had never himself imagined for a moment that any gain would come of these new researches. But he had been allowed no option with regard to them. Immediately after his return to London from Versailles he had received a stern letter from Lord Findon, insisting—as his daughter had already done—that the only reparation he, Fenwick, could make to the friends he had so long and cruelly deceived, was to allow them a free hand in a fresh attempt to discover his wife, and so to clear Madame de Pastourelles from the ridiculous suspicions that Mrs. Fenwick had been led so disastrously to entertain. 'Most shamefully and indefensibly my daughter has been made to feel herself an accomplice in Mrs. Fenwick's disappearance,' wrote Lord Findon; 'the only amends you can ever make for your conduct will lie in new and vigorous efforts, even at this late hour, to find and to undeceive your wife.'

Hence, during November and December, constant meetings and consultations in the well-known offices of Lord Findon's solicitors. At these meetings both Madame de Pastourelles and her father had been often present, and she had followed the debates with a quick and strained intelligence, which often betrayed to Fenwick the suffering behind. He painfully remembered with what gentleness and chivalry Eugénie had always treated him personally on these occasions, with what anxious generosity she had tried to curb her father.

But there had been no private conversation between them. Not only did they shrink from it; Lord Findon could not have borne it. The storm of family and personal pride which the disclosure of Fenwick's story had aroused in the old man had been of a violence impossible to resist. That Fenwick's obscure and crazy wife should have dared to entertain jealousy of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugénie then was—that she should have made a ridiculous tragedy out of it—and that Fenwick should have conduced to the absurd and insulting imbroglio by his ill-bred and vulgar concealment:—these things were so irritating to Lord Findon that they first stimulated a rapid recovery from his illness at Versailles, and then led him to frantic efforts on Phoebe's behalf, which were in fact nothing but the expression of his own passionate pride and indignation—resting, no doubt ultimately, on those weeks at Versailles when even he, with all the other bystanders, had supposed that Eugénie would marry this man. His mood, indeed, had been a curious combination of wounded affection with a class arrogance stiffened by advancing age and long indulgence. When, in those days, the old man entered the room where Fenwick was, he bore his grey head and sparkling eyes with the air of a teased lion.

Fenwick, a man of violent temper, would have found much difficulty in keeping the peace under these circumstances, but for the frequent presence of Eugénie, and the pressure of his own dull remorse. 'I too—have—much to forgive!'—that, he knew well, would be the only reference involving personal reproach that he would ever hear from her lips, either to his original deceit, or to those wild weeks at Versailles (that so much ranker and sharper offence!)—when, in his loneliness and craving, he had gambled both on her ignorance and on Phoebe's death. Yet he did not deceive himself. The relation between them was broken; he had lost his friend. Her very cheerfulness and gentleness somehow enforced it. How natural!—how just! None the less his bitter realisation of it had worked with crushing effect upon a miserable man.

About Christmas, Lord Findon's health had again caused his family anxiety. He was ordered to Cannes, and Eugénie accompanied him. Before she went she had gone despairingly once more through all the ingenious but quite fruitless inquiries instituted by the lawyers; and she had written a kind letter to Fenwick begging to be kept informed, and adding at the end a few timid words expressing her old sympathy with his work, and her best wishes for the success of the pictures that she understood he was to exhibit in the spring.

Then she and her father departed. Fenwick had felt their going as perhaps the sharpest pang in this intolerable winter. But he had scarcely answered her letter. What was there to say? At least he had never asked her or her father for money—had never owed Lord Findon a penny. There was some small comfort in that.

* * * * *

Nevertheless, it was of money that he thought—and must think—night and day.

After his interview with the magnificent gentlemen in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he made his way wearily to a much humbler office in Bedford Row. Here was a small solicitor to whom he had often resorted lately, under the constant pressure of his financial difficulties. He spent an hour in this man's room. When he came out, he walked fast towards Oxford Street and the west, hardly conscious in his excitement of where he was going. The lawyer he had just seen had for the first time mentioned the word 'bankruptcy.' 'I scarcely see, Mr. Fenwick, how you can avoid it.'

Well, it might come to that—it might. But he still had his six pictures—time to finish two others that were now on hand—and the exhibition.

It was with that he was now concerned. He called on the manager of a small gallery near Hanover Square with whom he had already made an arrangement for the coming May—paying a deposit on the rent—early in the winter. In his anxiety, he wished now to make the matter still clearer, to pay down the rest of the rent if need be. He had the notes always in his breast-pocket, jealously hidden away, lest any other claim, amid the myriads which pressed upon him, should sweep them from him.

The junior partner in charge of the gallery and the shop of which it made part, received him very coldly. The firm had long since regretted their bargain with a man whose pictures were not likely to sell, especially as they could have relet the gallery to much better advantage. But their contract with Fenwick—clinched by the deposit—could not be evaded; so they were advised.

All, therefore, that the junior partner could do was to try to alarm Fenwick, as to the incidental expenses involved—hanging, printing, service, etc. But Fenwick only laughed. 'I shall see to that!' he said, contemptuously. 'And my pictures will sell, I tell you,' he added, raising his voice. 'They'll bring a profit both to you and to me.'

The individual addressed said nothing. He was a tall, well-fed young man, in a faultless frock-coat, and Fenwick, as they stood together in the office—the artist had not been offered a chair—disliked him violently.

'Well, shall I pay you the rest?' said Fenwick, abruptly, turning to go, and fumbling at the same time for the pocket-book in which he kept the notes.

The other gave a slight shrug.

'That's just as you please, Mr. Fenwick.'

'Well, here's fifty, anyway,' said Fenwick, drawing out a fifty-pound note and laying it on the table.

'We are not in any hurry, I assure you.'

The young man stood looking at the artist, in an attitude of cool indifference; but at the same time his hand secured the note, and placed it safely in the drawer of the table between them.

He wrote a receipt, and handed it to Fenwick.

'Good-day,' said Fenwick, turning to go.

The other followed him, and as they stepped out into the exhibition-rooms of the shop, hung in dark purple, Fenwick perceived in the distance what looked like a fine Corot, and a Daubigny—and paused.

'Got some good things, since I was here last?'

'Oh, we're always getting good things,' said his companion, carelessly, without the smallest motion towards the pictures.

Fenwick nodded haughtily, and walked towards the door. But his soul smarted within him. Two years before, the owners of any picture-shop in London would have received him with empressement, have shown him all they had to show, and taken flattering note of his opinion.

On the threshold he ran against the Academician with the orange hair and beard, who had been his fellow-guest at the Findon's on the night of his first dinner-party there. The orange hair was now nearly white; its owner had grown to rotundity; but the sharp, glancing eyes and pompous manner were the same as of old. Mr. Sherratt nodded curtly to Fenwick, and was then received with bows and effusion by the junior partner standing behind.

'Ah, Mr. Sherratt!—delighted to see you! Come to look at the Corot?
By all means! This way, please.'

Fenwick pursued his course to Oxford Street in a morbid self-consciousness. It seemed to him that all the world knew him by now for a failure and a bankrupt; that he was stared and pointed at.

He took refuge from this nightmare in an Oxford Street restaurant, and as he ate his midday chop he asked himself, for the hundredth time, how the deuce it was that he had got into the debts which weighed him down. He had been extravagant on the building and furnishing of his house—but after all he had earned large sums of money. He sat gloomily over his meal—frowning—and trying to remember. And once, amid the foggy darkness, there opened a vision of a Westmoreland stream, and a pleading face upturned to his in the moonlight—'And then, you know, I could look after money! You're dreadfully bad about money, John!'

The echo of that voice in his ears made him restless. He rose and set forth again—toward Fitzroy Square.

On the way his thoughts recurred to the letter he had found waiting for him at the lawyer's. It came from Phoebe's cousin, Freddy Tolson. Messrs. Butlin had traced this man anew—to a mining town in New South Wales. He had been asked to come to England and testify—no matter at what expense. In the letter just received—bearing witness in its improved writing and spelling to the prosperous development of the writer—he declined to come, repeating that he knew nothing whatever of his Cousin Phoebe's where-abouts, nor of her reasons for leaving her husband. He gave a fresh and longer account of his conversation with her, as far as he could remember it at this distance of time; and this longer account contained the remark that she had asked him questions about other colonies than Australia, to which he was himself bound. He thought Canada had been mentioned—the length of the passage there, and its cost. He had not paid much attention to it at the time. It had seemed to him that she was glad, poor thing, of some one to have a 'crack' with—'for I guess she'd been pretty lonesome up there.' But she might have had something in her head—he couldn't say. All he could declare was that if she were in Canada, or any other of the colonies, he had had no hand in it, and knew no more than a 'born baby' where she might be hidden.

So now, on this vague hint, a number of fresh inquiries were to be set on foot. Fenwick hoped nothing from them. Yet as he walked fast through the London streets, from which the fog was lifting, his mind wrestled with vague images of great lakes, and virgin forests, and rolling wheat-lands—of the streets of Montreal, or the Heights of Québec—and amongst them, now with one background, now with another, the slender figure of a fair-haired woman with a child beside her. And through his thoughts, furies of distress and fear pursued him—now as always.

'Well, this is a queer go, isn't it?' said Watson, in a half-whispering voice. 'Nature has horrid ways of killing you. I wish she'd chosen a more expeditious one with me.'

Fenwick sat down beside his friend, the lamp-light in the old panelled room revealing, against his will, his perturbed and shaken expression.

'How did this come on?' he asked.

'Of itself, my dear fellow'—laughed Watson, in the same hoarse whisper. 'My right lung has been getting rotten for a year past, and at Marseilles it happened to break. That's my explanation, anyway, and it does as well as the doctor's.—Well, how are you?'

Fenwick shifted uneasily, and made a vague answer.

Watson turned to look at him.

'What pictures have you on hand?'

Fenwick gave a list of the completed pictures still in his studio, and described the arrangements made to exhibit them. He was not as ready as usual to speak of himself; his gaze and his attention were fixed upon his friend. But Watson probed further, into the subjects of his recent work. Fenwick was nearing the end, he explained, of a series of rustic 'Months' with their appropriate occupations—an idea which had haunted his mind for years.

'As old as the hills,' said Watson, 'but none the worse for that.
You've painted them, I suppose, out-of-doors?'

Fenwick shrugged his shoulders.

'As much as possible.'

'Ah, that's where those French fellows have us,' said Watson, languidly. 'One of them said to me in Paris the other day, "It's bad enough to paint the things you've seen—it's the devil to paint the things you've not seen."'

'The usual fallacy,' said Fenwick, firing up. 'What do they mean by "seen"?'

He would have liked this time to go off at score. But a sure instinct told him that he was beside a dying man; and he held himself back, trying instead to remember what small news and gossip he could, for the amusement of his friend.

Watson sat in a deep armchair, propped up by pillows. The room in which they met had been a very distinguished room in the eighteenth century. It had still some remains of carved panelling, a graceful mantelpiece of Italian design, and a painted ceiling half-effaced. It was now part of a lodging-house, furnished with shabby cheapness; but the beauty, once infused, persisted; and it made no unworthy setting for a painter's death.

The signs of desperate illness in Richard Watson were indeed plainly visible. His shaggy hair and thick, unkempt beard brought into relief the waxen or purple tones of the skin. The breath was laboured and the cough frequent. But the eyes were still warm, living, and passionate, the eyes of a Celt, with the Celtic gifts, and those deficiencies, also, of his race, broadly and permanently expressed in the words of a great historian—'The Celts have shaken all States, and founded none!' No founder, no achiever, this—no happy, harmonious soul—but a man who had vibrated to life and Nature, in their subtler and sadder aspects, through whom the nobler thoughts and ambitions had passed, like sound through strings, wringing out some fine, tragic notes, some memorable tones. 'I can't last more than a week or two,' he said, presently, in a pause of Fenwick's talk, to which he had hardly listened—'and a good job too. But I don't find myself at all rebellious. I'm curiously content to go. I've had a good time.'

This from a man who had passed from one disappointed hope to another, brought the tears to Fenwick's eyes.

'Some of us may wish we were going with you,' he said, in a low voice, laying his hand a moment on his friend's knee.

Watson made no immediate reply. He coughed—fidgeted—and at last said:

'How's the money?'

Fenwick hastily drew himself up. 'All right.'

He reached out a hand to the tongs and put the fire together.

'Is that so?' said Watson. The slight incredulity in his voice touched some raw nerve in Fenwick.

'I don't want anything,' he said, almost angrily. 'I shall get through.'

Cuningham had been talking, no doubt. His affairs had been discussed.
His morbid pride took offence at once.

'Mine'll just hold out,' said Watson, presently, with a humorous inflexion—'it'll bury me, I think—with a few shillings over. But I couldn't have afforded another year.'

There was silence a while—till a nurse came in to make up the fire. Fenwick began to talk of old friends, and current exhibitions; and presently tea made its appearance. Watson's strength seemed to revive. He sat more upright in his chair, his voice grew stronger, and he dallied with his tea, joking hoarsely with his nurse, and asking Fenwick all the questions that occurred to him. His face, in its rugged pallor and emaciation, and his great head, black or iron-grey on the white pillows, were so fine that Fenwick could not take his eyes from him; with the double sense of the artist, he saw the subject in the man; a study in black and white hovered before him.

When the nurse had withdrawn, and they were alone again, in a silence made more intimate still by the darkness of the panelled walls, which seemed to isolate them from the rest of the room, enclosing them in a glowing ring of lamp and firelight, Fenwick was suddenly seized by an impulse he could not master. He bent towards the sick man.

'Watson!—do you remember advising me to marry when we met in Paris?'

'Perfectly.'

The invalid turned his haggard eyes upon the speaker, in a sudden sharp attention.

There was a pause; then Fenwick said, with bent head, staring into the fire:

'Well—I am married.'

Watson gave a hoarse 'Phew!'—and waited.

'My wife left me twelve years ago and took our child with her. I don't know whether they are alive or dead. I thought I'd like to tell you. It would have been better if I hadn't concealed it, from you—and—and other friends.'

'Great Scott!' said Watson, slowly, bringing the points of his long, emaciated fingers together, like one trying to master a new image. 'So that's been the secret—'

'Of what?' said Fenwick, testily; but as Watson merely replied by an interrogative and attentive silence, he threw himself into his tale—headlong. He told it at far greater length than Eugénie had ever heard it; and throughout, the subtle, instinctive appeal of man to man governed the story, differentiating it altogether from the same story, told to a woman.

He spoke impetuously, with growing emotion, conscious of an infinite relief and abandonment. Watson listened with scarcely a comment. Midway a little pattering, scuffling noise startled the speaker. He looked round and saw the monkey, Anatole, who had been lying asleep in his basket. Watson nodded to Fenwick to go on, and then feebly motioned to his knee. The monkey clambered there, and Watson folded his bony arms round the creature, who lay presently with his weird face pressed against his master's dressing-gown, his melancholy eyes staring out at Fenwick.

'It was Madame she was jealous of?' said Watson, when the story came to an end.

Fenwick hesitated—then nodded reluctantly. He had spoken merely of 'one of my sitters.' But it was not possible to fence with this dying man.

'And Madame knows?'

'Yes.'

But Fenwick sharply regretted the introduction of Madame de Pastourelles' name. He had brought the story down merely to the point of Phoebe's flight and the search which followed, adding only—with vagueness—that the search had lately been renewed, without success.

Watson pondered the matter for some time. Fenwick took out his handkerchief and wiped a brow damp with perspiration. His story—added to the miseries of the day—had excited and shaken him still further.

Suddenly Watson put out a hand and seized his wrist. The grip hurt.

'Lucky dog!'

'What on earth do you mean?'

'You've lost them—but you've had a woman in your arms—a child on your knee! You don't go to your grave—[Greek: apraktos]—an ignorant, barren fool—like me!'

Fenwick looked at him in amazement. Self-scorn—bitter and passionate regret—transformed the face beside him. He pressed the fevered hand.

'Watson!—dear fellow!'

Watson withdrew his hand, and once more folded the monkey to him.

'There are plenty of men like me,' he muttered. 'We are afraid of living—and art is our refuge. Then art takes its revenge—and we are bad artists, because we are poor and sterilised human beings. But you'—he spoke with fresh energy, composing himself—'don't talk rot!—as though your chance was done. You'll find her—she'll come back to you—when she's drunk the cup. Healthy young women don't die before thirty-five;—and by your account she wasn't bad—she had a conscience. The child'll waken it. Don't you be hard on her!'—he raised himself, speaking almost fiercely—'you've no right to! Take her in—listen to her—let her cry it out. My God!'—his voice dropped, as his head fell back on the pillows—'what happiness—what happiness!'

His eyes closed. Fenwick stooped over him in alarm, but the thin hand closed again on his.

'Don't go. What was she like?'

Fenwick asked him whether he remembered the incident of the sketch-book at their first meeting—the drawing of the mother and child in the kitchen of the Westmoreland farm.

'Perfectly. And she was the model for the big picture, too? I see. A lovely creature! How old is she now?'

'Thirty-six—if she lives.'

'I tell you, she does live! Probably more beautiful now than she was then. Those Madonna-like women mellow so finely. And the child? Vois-tu, Anatole!—something superior to monkeys!'

But he pressed the little animal closer to him as he spoke. Fenwick rose to go, conscious that he had stayed too long. Watson looked up.

'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 pass from one thing to another. Sometimes it's Omar Khayyám—"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, hoarsely musical. Then, with a smile, he nodded farewell; and Fenwick went.

* * * * *

Fenwick wrote that night to Eugénie 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.

* * * * *

Eugénie 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. Eugénie's deep black had now assumed a slight 'religious' air which disturbed Lord Findon, and kindled the Protestant wrath of her stepmother. That short moment of a revived mondanité which Versailles had witnessed, was wholly past; and for the first and only time in her marred life, Eugénie'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, Eugénie 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.

Eugénie 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 Eugénie'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 harassed 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, Eugénie blamed him less and less. Her clear intelligence showed her all the steps of the unhappy business. She remembered the awkward, harassed 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 embarrassments, of his increasing coarseness 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.

Eugénie'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 Mass, 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 passed to the Eternal Presence. Eugénie 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 multitude, in a twilight soon to be dawn.