Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

How very little—all the same—could Eugénie feel herself with the saints, on this October afternoon! She sat, to begin with, on the threshold of Madame de Pompadour's apartment; and in the next place, she had never been more tremulously steeped in doubts and yearnings, entirely concerned with her friends and her affections. It was a re-birth; not of youth—how could that be, she herself would have asked, seeing that she was now thirty-seven?—but of the natural Eugénie, who, 'intellectual' though she were, lived really by the heart, and the heart only. And since it is the heart that makes youth and keeps it—it was a return of youth—and of beauty—that had come upon her. In her black dress and shady hat, her collar and cuffs of white lawn, she was very discreetly, quietly beautiful; the passer-by did not know what it was that had touched and delighted him, till she had gone, and he found himself, perhaps, looking after the slim yet stately figure; but it was beauty none the less. And the autumn violets, her sister's gift, that were fastened to-day in profusion at her waist, marked in truth the re-awakening of buried things, of feminine instincts long repressed. For months, her maid Fanchette had dressed her, and she had worn obediently all the long crape gowns and veils dictated by the etiquette of French mourning. But to-day she had chosen for herself; and in this more ordinary garb, she was vaguely—sometimes remorsefully—conscious of relief and deliverance.

Two subjects filled her mind. First, a conversation with Fenwick that she had held that morning, strolling through the upper alleys of the Park. Poor friend, poor artist! Often and often, during her wanderings, had her thoughts dwelt anxiously on his discontents and calamities; she had made her sister or her father write to him when she could not write herself—though Lord Findon indeed had been for long much out of patience with him; and during the last few months she herself had written every week. But she had never felt so clearly the inexorable limits of her influence with him. This morning, just as of old, he had thrown himself tempestuously upon her advice, her sympathy; and she had given him counsel as she best could. But a woman knows when her counsel is likely to be followed, or no. Eugénie had no illusions. In his sore, self-tormented state he was, she saw, at the mercy of any passing idea, of anything that seemed to offer him vengeance on his enemies, or the satisfaction of a vanity that writhed under the failure he was all the time inviting and assuring.

Yet as she thought of him, she liked him better than ever. He might be perverse, yet he appealed to her profoundly! The years of his success had refined and civilised him no doubt, but they had tended to make him like anybody else. Whereas this passionate accent of revolt—as of some fierce, helpless creature, struggling blindly in bonds of its own making—had perhaps restored to him that more dramatic element which his personality had possessed in his sulky, gifted youth. He had expressed himself with a bitter force on the decline of his inspiration and the weakening of his will. He was going to the dogs, he declared; had lost all his hold on the public; and had nothing more to say or to paint. And she had been very, very sorry for him, but conscious all the time that he had never been so eloquent, and never in such good looks, what with the angry energy of the eyes, and the sweep of grizzled hair across the powerful brow, and the lines cut by life and thought round the vigorous, impatient mouth. How could he be at once so able and so childish! Her woman's wit pondered it; while at the same time she remembered with emotion the joy with which he had greeted her, his eager, stammering sympathy, his rough grasp of her hand, his frowning scrutiny of her pale face.

Yes, he was a great, great friend—and, somehow, she must help him! Her lips parted in a sigh of aspiration. If only this unlucky thing had not happened!—this meeting of Arthur and of Fenwick, before the time, before she had prepared and engineered it.

And so she came to her second topic of meditation. Gradually as her mind pursued it, her aspect seemed to lose its new and tremulous brightness; the face became once more a little grey and pinched. They had somehow missed all the letters which should have warned them. To find Arthur established here, with his poor invalid wife—nothing had been more unexpected, and, alack, more unwelcome, considering the relations between them and John Fenwick—Fenwick who was practically her father's guest and hers.

Did Arthur think it strange, unkind? Wouldn't he really believe that it was pure accident! If so, it would be only because Elsie was there, influencing him against his old friends—poor, bitter, stricken Elsie. Eugénie's lips quivered. There flitted before her the image of the girl of eighteen—muse of laughter and delight. And she recalled the taciturn woman whom she had seen on her sofa the night before, speaking coldly, in dry, sharp sentences, to her husband, her cousin, her maid—evidently unhappy and in pain.

Eugénie shaded her eyes from the light of the terrace. Her heart seemed to be sinking, contracting. Mrs. Welby had been already ill, and therewith jealous and tyrannical, for some little time before Madame de Pastourelles had been summoned to the death-bed of her husband! But now!—Eugénie shrank aghast before what she saw and what she guessed.

And it was, too, as if the present state of things—as if the new hardness in Elsie's eyes, and the strange hostility of her manner, especially towards the Findons, and her cousin Eugénie—threw light on earlier years, on many a puzzling trait and incident of the past.

There had been a terrible confinement, at the end of years of childlessness—a still-born child—and then, after a short apparent recovery, a rapid loss of strength and power. Poor, poor Elsie! But why—why should this trouble have awakened in her this dumb tyranny towards Arthur, this alienation from Arthur's friends?

Eugénie sharply drew herself together. She banished her thoughts. Elsie was young, and would get well. And when she recovered, she would know who were her friends, and Arthur's.