Fenwick pursued his course to Oxford Street in a morbid self-consciousness. It seemed to him that all the world knew him by now for a failure and a bankrupt; that he was stared and pointed at.
He took refuge from this nightmare in an Oxford Street restaurant, and as he ate his midday chop he asked himself, for the hundredth time, how the deuce it was that he had got into the debts which weighed him down. He had been extravagant on the building and furnishing of his house—but after all he had earned large sums of money. He sat gloomily over his meal—frowning—and trying to remember. And once, amid the foggy darkness, there opened a vision of a Westmoreland stream, and a pleading face upturned to his in the moonlight—'And then, you know, I could look after money! You're dreadfully bad about money, John!'
The echo of that voice in his ears made him restless. He rose and set forth again—toward Fitzroy Square.
On the way his thoughts recurred to the letter he had found waiting for him at the lawyer's. It came from Phoebe's cousin, Freddy Tolson. Messrs. Butlin had traced this man anew—to a mining town in New South Wales. He had been asked to come to England and testify—no matter at what expense. In the letter just received—bearing witness in its improved writing and spelling to the prosperous development of the writer—he declined to come, repeating that he knew nothing whatever of his Cousin Phoebe's where-abouts, nor of her reasons for leaving her husband. He gave a fresh and longer account of his conversation with her, as far as he could remember it at this distance of time; and this longer account contained the remark that she had asked him questions about other colonies than Australia, to which he was himself bound. He thought Canada had been mentioned—the length of the passage there, and its cost. He had not paid much attention to it at the time. It had seemed to him that she was glad, poor thing, of some one to have a 'crack' with—'for I guess she'd been pretty lonesome up there.' But she might have had something in her head—he couldn't say. All he could declare was that if she were in Canada, or any other of the colonies, he had had no hand in it, and knew no more than a 'born baby' where she might be hidden.
So now, on this vague hint, a number of fresh inquiries were to be set on foot. Fenwick hoped nothing from them. Yet as he walked fast through the London streets, from which the fog was lifting, his mind wrestled with vague images of great lakes, and virgin forests, and rolling wheat-lands—of the streets of Montreal, or the Heights of Québec—and amongst them, now with one background, now with another, the slender figure of a fair-haired woman with a child beside her. And through his thoughts, furies of distress and fear pursued him—now as always.
'Well, this is a queer go, isn't it?' said Watson, in a half-whispering voice. 'Nature has horrid ways of killing you. I wish she'd chosen a more expeditious one with me.'
Fenwick sat down beside his friend, the lamp-light in the old panelled room revealing, against his will, his perturbed and shaken expression.
'How did this come on?' he asked.
'Of itself, my dear fellow'—laughed Watson, in the same hoarse whisper. 'My right lung has been getting rotten for a year past, and at Marseilles it happened to break. That's my explanation, anyway, and it does as well as the doctor's.—Well, how are you?'
Fenwick shifted uneasily, and made a vague answer.