Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

For him, the unspoken agony of loss suffered when she married; for her, the memories of her marriage, of the dreary languor into which its wreck had plunged her, and of the gradual revival in her of the old intellectual pleasures, the old joys of the spirit, under the influence of Arthur's life and Arthur's companionship. How simply he had offered all that his art, his tact, his genius had to give!—and how pitifully, how hungrily she had leaned upon it! It had seemed so natural. Her own mind was clear, her own pulses calm; their friendship had appeared a thing apart, and she was able to feel, with sincerity and dignity, that if she received much, she also gave much—the hours of relief and pleasure which ease the labour, the inevitable torment of the artist, all that protecting environment which a woman's sweet and agile wit can build around a man's taxed brain or ruffled nerves. To chat with her, in success or failure; to be sure of her welcome, her smile at all times; to ask her sympathy in matters where he had himself trained in her the faculty of response; to rouse in her the gentle, diffident humour which seemed to him a much rarer and more distinguished thing than other women's brilliance; to watch the ways of a personality which appeared to many people a little cold, pale, and over-refined, and was to him supreme distinction; to search for pleasures for her, as a botanist hunts rare flowers; to save her from the most trifling annoyance, if time and brains could do it;—these things, for three years, had made the charm of Welby's life. And Eugénie knew it—knew it with an affectionate gratitude that had for long seemed both to her and to the world the last word of their situation on both sides—a note, a tone, which could always be evoked from it, touch or strike it where you would.

And now?

Through what subtle phases and developments had time led them to this moment of change and consciousness?—representing in her, sharp recoil, an instant girding of the will—and in him a new despair, which was also a new docility, a readiness to content and tranquillise her at any cost. As they stood thus, for these few seconds, amid the shadows of the rich encumbered room, the picture of the weeks and months they had just passed through flashed through both minds—illuminated—thrown into true relation with surrounding and irrevocable fact. Both trembled—she under the admonition of her own higher life—he, because existence beside her could never again be as sweet to him to-morrow as it had been yesterday.

She moved. The trance was broken.

'I do, indeed, want to talk to you,' she said, in her gentlest voice.
'We shan't have very long. Papa wants me in half an hour.'

She motioned to the seat beside her; and their talk began.

* * * * *

Lord Findon sat alone in his study on the ground-floor, balancing a paper-knife on one finger, fidgeting with a newspaper of which he never read a word, and otherwise beguiling the time until the sound of Welby's step on the stairs should tell him that the interview upstairs was over.

His mind was full of disagreeable thoughts. Eugénie was dearer to him than any other human being, and Welby—his ward, the orphan child of one of his oldest friends—had been from his boyhood almost a son of the house. Eight years before, what more natural than that these two should marry? Welby had been then deeply in love; Eugénie in her first maiden bloom had been difficult to read, but a word from the father she adored would probably have been enough to incline her towards her lover, to transform and fire a friendship which was already more romantic than she knew. But Lord Findon could not make up his mind to it. Arthur was a dear fellow; but from the worldly point of view it was not good enough. Eugénie was born for a large sphere; it was her father's duty to find it for her if he could.

Hence the French betrothal—the crowning point of a summer visit to a French château where Eugénie had been the spoiled child of a party containing some of the greatest names in France. It flattered both Lord Findon's vanity and imagination to find himself brought into connexion with historic families all the more attractive because of that dignified alienation from affairs, imposed on them by their common hatred of the Second Empire. Eugénie, too, had felt the romance of the milieu; had invested her French suitor with all that her own poetic youth could bring to his glorification; had gone to him a timid, willing, and most innocent bride.