Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

A few minutes later Fenwick found himself alone. He stood in front of the picture, staring into Phoebe's eyes. A wave of passionate remorse broke upon him. He had as good as denied her; and she sat there before him like some wronged, helpless thing. He seemed to hear her voice, to see her lips moving.

Hastily he took her last letter out of his pocket.

'I am glad you're getting on so well, and I'm counting the weeks to Christmas. Carrie kisses your photograph morning and night, but I'm afraid she'll have forgotten you a good deal. Sometimes I'm very weary here—but I don't mind if you're getting on, and if it won't be much longer. Miss Anna has sent me some new patterns for my tatting, and I'm getting a fine lot done. All the visitors are quite gone now, and it's that quiet at nights! Sometimes when it's been raining I think I can hear the Dungeon Ghyll stream, though it's more than a mile away.'

Fenwick put up the letter. He had a sudden vision of Phoebe in her white night-dress, opening the casement-window of the little cottage on a starry night, and listening to the sounds of distant water. Behind her was the small room with its candle—the baby's cot—the white bed, with his vacant place. A pang of longing—of homesickness—stirred him.

Then he began to pace his room, driven by the stress of feeling to take stock of his whole position. He had reached London in May; it was now November. Six months—of the hardest effort, the most strenuous labour he had ever passed through. He looked back upon it with exultation. Never had he been so conscious of expanding power and justified ambition. Through the Berners Street life-school he had obtained some valuable coaching and advice which had corrected faults and put him on the track of new methods. But it was his own right hand and his own brain he had mostly to thank, together with the opportunities of London. Up early, and to bed late—drawing from the model, the antique, still life, drapery, landscape; studying pictures, old and new, and filling his sketch-book in every moment of so-called leisure with the figures and actions of the great city—he had made magnificent use of his time; Phoebe could find no fault with him there.

Had he forgotten her and the babe?—found letters to her sometimes a burden, and his heart towards her dry often and barren? Well, he had written regularly; and she had never complained. Men cannot be like women, absorbed for ever in the personal affections. For him it was the day of battle, in which a man must strain all his powers to the uttermost if any laurels are to be won before evening. His whole soul was absorbed in the stress of it, in the hungry eagerness for fame, and—though in a lesser degree—for money.

Money! The very thought of it filled him with impatient worry. Morrison's hundred was nearly gone. He knew well enough that Phoebe was right when she accused him of managing his money badly. It ran through his fingers loosely, incessantly. He hardly knew now where the next remittances to Phoebe were to come from. At first he had done a certain amount of illustrating work and had generally sent her the proceeds of it. But of late he had been absorbed in his big picture, and there had been few or no small earnings. Perhaps, if he hadn't written those articles to the Mirror, there would have been time for some? Well, why shouldn't he write them? His irritable pride took fire at once at the thought of blame.

No one could say, anyway, that he had spent money in amusement. Why, he had scarcely been out of Bloomsbury!—the rest of London might not have existed for him. A gallery-seat at the Lyceum Theatre, then in its early fame, and hot discussions of Irving and Ellen Terry with such artistic or literary acquaintance as he had made through the life-school or elsewhere—these had been his only distractions. He stood amazed before his own virtues. He drank little—smoked little. As for women—he thought with laughter or wrath of Phoebe's touch of jealousy! There was an extremely pretty girl—a fair-haired, conscious minx—drawing in the same room with him at the British Museum. Evidently she would have been glad to capture him; and he had loftily denied her. If he had ever been as susceptible as Phoebe thought him, he was susceptible no more. Life burned with sterner fire!

And yet, for all these self-denials, Morrison's money and his own savings were nearly gone. Funds might hold out till after Christmas. What then?

He had heard once or twice from Morrison, asking for news of the pictures promised. Lately he had left the letters unanswered; but he lived in terror of a visit. For he had nothing to offer him—neither money nor pictures. His only picture so far—as distinguished from exercises—was the 'Genius Loci.' He had begun that in a moment of weariness with his student work, basing it on a number of studies of Phoebe's head and face he had brought South with him. He had been lucky enough to find a model very much resembling Phoebe in figure; and now, suddenly, the picture had become his passion, the centre of all his hopes. It astonished himself; he saw his artistic advance in it writ large; of late he had been devoting himself entirely to it, wrapt, like the body of Hector, in a heavenly cloud that lifted him from the earth! If the picture sold—and it would surely sell—then all paths were clear. Morrison should be paid; and Phoebe have her rights. Let it only be well hung at the Academy, and well sold to some discriminating buyer—and John Fenwick henceforward would owe no man anything—whether money or favour.