Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

And barely a week later, John Fenwick had been dining in St. James's Square, looking harassed and ill indeed—it was supposed, from overwork; but, to his best friends, as silent as that grave of darkness and oblivion which had closed over his wife.

Yet, as the weeks of thought went on, Eugénie blamed him less and less. Her clear intelligence showed her all the steps of the unhappy business. She remembered the awkward, harassed youth, as she had first seen him at her father's table, with his curious mixture of arrogance and timidity; now haranguing the table, and now ready to die with confusion over some social slip. She understood what he had told her, in his first piteous letter, of his paralysed, tongue-tied states—of his fear of alienating her father and herself. And she went deeper. She confessed the hatefulness of those weakening timidities, those servile states of soul, by which our social machine balances the insolences and cruelties of the strong—its own breeding also; she felt herself guilty because of them; the whole of life seemed to her sick, because a young man, ill at ease and cowardly in a world not his own, had told or lived a foolish lie. It was as though she had forced it from him; she understood so well how it had come about. No, no!—her father might judge it as he pleased. She was angry no longer.

Nor—presently—did she even resent the treachery of those weeks at Versailles, so quick and marvellous was the play of her great gift of sympathy, which was only another aspect of imagination. In recoil from a dark moment of her own experience, of which she could never think without anguish, she had offered him a friend's hand, a friend's heart—offered them eagerly and lavishly. Had he done more than take them, with the craving of a man, for whom already the ways are darkening, who makes one last clutch at 'youth and bloom, and this delightful world'? He had been reckless and cruel indeed. But in its profound tenderness and humility and self-reproach her heart forgave him.

Yet of that forgiveness she could make no outward sign—for her own sake and Phoebe's. That old relation could never be again; the weeks at Versailles had killed it. Unless, indeed, some day it were her blessed lot to find the living Phoebe, and bring her to her husband! Then friendship, as well as love, might perhaps lift its head once more. And as during the months of winter, both before and since her departure from England, the tidings reached her of Fenwick's growing embarrassments, of his increasing coarseness and carelessness of work, his violence of temper, the friend in her suffered profoundly. She knew that she could still do much for him. Yet there, in the way, stood the image of Phoebe, as Daisy Hewson described her,—pale, weary, desperate,—making all speech, all movement, on the part of the woman, for jealousy of whom the wife had so ignorantly destroyed herself and Fenwick, a thing impossible.

Eugénie's only comfort indeed, at this time, was the comfort of religion. Her soul, sorely troubled and very stern with itself, wandered in mystical, ascetic paths out of human ken. Every morning she hurried through the woods to a little church beside the sea, filled with fishing-folk. There she heard Mass, and made the spiritual communion which sustained her.

Once, in the mediaeval siege of a Spanish fortress, so a Spanish chronicler tells us, all the defenders were slaughtered but one man; and he lay dying on the ground, across the gate. There was neither priest nor wafer; but the dying man raised a little of the soil between the stones to his lips, and so, says the chronicler, 'communicated in the earth itself,' before he passed to the Eternal Presence. Eugénie would have done the same with a like ardour and simplicity; her thought differing much, perhaps, in its perceived and logical elements, from that of the dying Spaniard, but none the less profoundly akin. The act was to her the symbol and instrument of an Inflowing Power; the details of those historical beliefs with which it was connected, mattered little. And as she thus leant upon the old, while conscious of the new, she never in truth felt herself alone. It seemed to her, often, that she clasped hands with a vast invisible multitude, in a twilight soon to be dawn.

CHAPTER XII

A fortnight later Dick Watson died. Fenwick saw him several times before the end, and was present at his last moments. The funeral was managed by Cuningham; so were the obituary notices; and Fenwick attended the funeral and read the notices, with that curious mixture of sore grief and jealous irritation into which our human nature is so often betrayed at similar moments.

Then he found himself absorbed by the later rehearsals of The Queen's Necklace; by the completion of his pictures for the May exhibition; and by the perpetual and ignominious hunt for money. As to this last, it seemed to him that each day was a battle in which he was for ever worsted. He was still trying in vain to sell his house at Chelsea, the house planned at the height of his brief prosperity, built and finely furnished on borrowed money, and now apparently unsaleable, because of certain peculiarities in it, which suited its contriver, and no one else. And meanwhile the bank from which he had borrowed most of his building money was pressing inexorably for repayment; the solicitor in Bedford Row could do nothing, and was manifestly averse to running up a longer bill on his own account; so that, instead of painting, Fenwick often spent his miserable days in rushing about London, trying to raise money by one shift after another, in an agony to get a bill accepted or postponed, borrowing from this person and that, and with every succeeding week losing more self-respect and self-control.

The situation would have been instantly changed if only his artistic power had recovered itself. And if Eugénie had been within his reach it might have done so. She had the secret of stimulating in him what was poetic, and repressing what was merely extravagant or violent. But she was far away: and as he worked at the completion of his series of 'Months,' or at various portraits which the kindness or compassion of old friends had procured for him, he fell headlong into all his worst faults.