Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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.

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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.