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.