Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Fenwick pursued his walk plunged in disagreeable thought. 'Much changed?' What did that mean? He had noticed no such change before the Findons left London. The words fell like a fresh blow upon a wound.

He turned north, toward Lincoln's Inn Fields, called at the offices of Messrs. Butlin & Forbes, the well-known solicitors, and remained there half an hour. When he emerged from the old house, he looked, if possible, more harried and cast down than when he had entered it.

They had had a letter to show him, but in his opinion it contributed nothing. There was no hope—and no clue! How could there be? He had never himself imagined for a moment that any gain would come of these new researches. But he had been allowed no option with regard to them. Immediately after his return to London from Versailles he had received a stern letter from Lord Findon, insisting—as his daughter had already done—that the only reparation he, Fenwick, could make to the friends he had so long and cruelly deceived, was to allow them a free hand in a fresh attempt to discover his wife, and so to clear Madame de Pastourelles from the ridiculous suspicions that Mrs. Fenwick had been led so disastrously to entertain. 'Most shamefully and indefensibly my daughter has been made to feel herself an accomplice in Mrs. Fenwick's disappearance,' wrote Lord Findon; 'the only amends you can ever make for your conduct will lie in new and vigorous efforts, even at this late hour, to find and to undeceive your wife.'

Hence, during November and December, constant meetings and consultations in the well-known offices of Lord Findon's solicitors. At these meetings both Madame de Pastourelles and her father had been often present, and she had followed the debates with a quick and strained intelligence, which often betrayed to Fenwick the suffering behind. He painfully remembered with what gentleness and chivalry Eugénie had always treated him personally on these occasions, with what anxious generosity she had tried to curb her father.

But there had been no private conversation between them. Not only did they shrink from it; Lord Findon could not have borne it. The storm of family and personal pride which the disclosure of Fenwick's story had aroused in the old man had been of a violence impossible to resist. That Fenwick's obscure and crazy wife should have dared to entertain jealousy of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugénie then was—that she should have made a ridiculous tragedy out of it—and that Fenwick should have conduced to the absurd and insulting imbroglio by his ill-bred and vulgar concealment:—these things were so irritating to Lord Findon that they first stimulated a rapid recovery from his illness at Versailles, and then led him to frantic efforts on Phoebe's behalf, which were in fact nothing but the expression of his own passionate pride and indignation—resting, no doubt ultimately, on those weeks at Versailles when even he, with all the other bystanders, had supposed that Eugénie would marry this man. His mood, indeed, had been a curious combination of wounded affection with a class arrogance stiffened by advancing age and long indulgence. When, in those days, the old man entered the room where Fenwick was, he bore his grey head and sparkling eyes with the air of a teased lion.

Fenwick, a man of violent temper, would have found much difficulty in keeping the peace under these circumstances, but for the frequent presence of Eugénie, and the pressure of his own dull remorse. 'I too—have—much to forgive!'—that, he knew well, would be the only reference involving personal reproach that he would ever hear from her lips, either to his original deceit, or to those wild weeks at Versailles (that so much ranker and sharper offence!)—when, in his loneliness and craving, he had gambled both on her ignorance and on Phoebe's death. Yet he did not deceive himself. The relation between them was broken; he had lost his friend. Her very cheerfulness and gentleness somehow enforced it. How natural!—how just! None the less his bitter realisation of it had worked with crushing effect upon a miserable man.

About Christmas, Lord Findon's health had again caused his family anxiety. He was ordered to Cannes, and Eugénie accompanied him. Before she went she had gone despairingly once more through all the ingenious but quite fruitless inquiries instituted by the lawyers; and she had written a kind letter to Fenwick begging to be kept informed, and adding at the end a few timid words expressing her old sympathy with his work, and her best wishes for the success of the pictures that she understood he was to exhibit in the spring.

Then she and her father departed. Fenwick had felt their going as perhaps the sharpest pang in this intolerable winter. But he had scarcely answered her letter. What was there to say? At least he had never asked her or her father for money—had never owed Lord Findon a penny. There was some small comfort in that.

* * * * *

Nevertheless, it was of money that he thought—and must think—night and day.