Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

'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.