'There were many troubles between us,' he said, hoarsely, walking on beside her, his eyes on the grass.
'Was she—was she jealous?'—she breathed with difficulty—'of any of your models?—I know that sometimes happens—or of your sitters—ofme, for instance?'
The last words were scarcely audible; but her gaze enforced them.
'She was jealous of my whole life—away from her. And I was utterly blind and selfish—I ought to have known what was going on—and I had no idea.'
'And what happened? I know so little.'
Her voice so peremptorily strange—so remote—compelled him. With difficulty he gave an outline of Phoebe's tragic visit to his studio. His letter of the night before had scarcely touched on the details of the actual crisis, had dwelt rather on the months of carelessness and neglect on his own part, which had prepared it.
She interrupted.
'That was she?—the mother in the "Genius Loci"?'
He assented mutely.
She closed her eyes a moment, seeing, in her suffering, the face of the young mother and her child.
'But go on. And you were away? Please, please go on! When was it? It must have been that spring when—'
She put her hand to her head, trying to remember dates.
'It was just before the Academy,' he said, reluctantly.
'You were out?'
'I had gone to tell Watson and Cuningham the good news.'
His voice dropped.
Her hands caught each other again.
'It was that day—that very day we came to you?'
He nodded.
'But why?—what was it made her do such a thing?—go—for ever—without seeing you—without a word? She must have had some desperate reason.'
'She had none!' he said, with energy.
'But she must have thought she had. Can't—can't you explain it to me any more?'
He was almost at the end of his resistance.
'I told you—how she had resented—my concealment?'
'Yes—yes! But there must have been something more—something sudden—that maddened her?'
He was silent. She grew whiter than before.
'Mr. Fenwick—I—I have much to forgive. There is only one course of action—that can ever—make amends—and that is—an entire—an absolute frankness!'
Her terrible suspicion—her imperious will had conquered. Anything was better than to deny her, torture her—deceive her afresh.
He looked at her in a horrible indecision. Then, slowly, he put his hand within the breast of his coat.
'This is the letter she wrote me. I found it in my room.'
And he drew out the crumpled letter from his pocket-book, which he had worn thus almost from the day of Phoebe's disappearance.
Eugénie fell upon it, devoured it. Not a demur, not a doubt, as to this!—in one so strictly, so tenderly scrupulous. Even at that moment, it struck him pitifully. It seemed to give the measure of her pain.
'The picture?' she said, looking up—'I don't understand—you had sent it in.'
'Do you remember—asking me about the sketch? and I told you—it had been accidentally spoilt?'
She understood. Her lips trembled. Returning the letter, she sank upon a seat. He saw that her forces were almost failing her. And he dared not say a word or make a movement of sympathy.
For some little time she was silent. Her eyes ranged the green circuit of the hollow—the water, the reeds, the rock, and that idle god among his handmaidens. Her attitude, her look expressed a moral agony, how strangely out of place amid this setting! Through her—innocent, unconscious though she were—the young helpless wife had come to grief—a soul had been risked—perhaps lost. Only a nature trained as Eugénie's had been, by suffering and prayer and lofty living, could have felt what she felt, and as she felt it.
Fumbling, Fenwick put back the letter in his pocket-book—thrust it again into his coat. Never once did the thought cross Eugénie's mind that he had probably worn it there, through these last days, while their relation had grown so intimate, so dear. All recollection of herself had left her. She was possessed with Phoebe. Nothing else found entrance.
At last, after much more questioning—much more difficult or impetuous examination—she rose feebly.
'I think I understand. Now—we have to find her!'
She stood, her hands loosely clasped, her eyes gazing into the sunny vacancy of sky, above the rock.
Fenwick advanced a step. He felt that he must speak, must grovel to her—repeat some of the things he had said in his letter. But here, in her presence, all words seemed too crude, too monstrous. His voice died away.
So there was no repetition of the excuses, the cry for pardon he had spent the night on; and she made no reference to them.
They walked back to the hotel, talking coldly, precisely, almost as strangers, of what should be done. Fenwick—whose work indeed was finished—would return to England that night. After his departure, Madame de Pastourelles would inform her father of what had happened; a famous solicitor, Lord Findon's old friend, was to be consulted; all possible measures were to be taken once more for Phoebe's discovery.
At the door of the hotel, Fenwick raised his hat. Eugénie did not offer her hand; but her sweet face suddenly trembled afresh—before her will could master it. To hide it, she turned abruptly away; and the door closed upon her.
After a moderately bright morning, that after-breakfast fog which we owe to the British kitchen and the domestic hearth was descending on the Strand. The stream of traffic, on the roadway and the pavements, was passing to and fro under a yellow darkness; the shop-lights were beginning to flash out here and there, but without any of their evening cheerfulness; and on the passing faces one saw written the inconvenience and annoyance of the fog—the fear, too, lest it should become worse and impenetrable.
Fenwick was groping his way along, eastward; one moment feeling and hating the depression of the February day, of the grimy, overcrowded street; the next, responsive to some dimly beautiful effect of colour or line—some quiver of light—some grouping of phantom forms in the gloom. Halfway towards the Law-Courts he was hailed and overtaken by a tall, fair-haired man.
'Hallo, Fenwick!—just the man I wanted to see!'
Fenwick, whose eyes—often very troublesome of late—were smarting with the fog, peered at the speaker, and recognised Philip Cuningham. His face darkened a little as they shook hands.
'What did you want me for?'
'Did you know that poor old Watson had come back to town—ill?'
'No!' cried Fenwick, arrested. 'I thought he was in Algiers.'
Cuningham walked on beside him, telling what he knew, Fenwick all the time dumbly vexed that this good-looking, prosperous fellow, this Academician in his new fur coat, breathing success and commissions, should know more of his best friend's doings than he.
Watson, it appeared, had been seized with hemorrhage at Marseilles, and had thereupon given up his winter plans, and crawled home to London, as soon as he was sufficiently recovered to bear the journey. Fenwick, much troubled, protested that it was madness to have come back to the English winter.
'No,' said Cuningham, looking grave. 'Better die at home than among strangers. And I'm afraid it's come to that, dear old fellow!'
Then he described—with evident self-satisfaction—how he had heard, from a common friend, of Watson's arrival, how he had rescued the invalid from a dingy Bloomsbury hotel, and settled him in some rooms in Fitzroy Square, with a landlady who could be trusted.
'We must have a nurse before long—but he won't have one yet. He wants badly to see you. I told him I'd look you up this evening. But this'll do instead, won't it? You'll remember?—23, Fitzroy Square. Shall I tell him when he may expect you? Every day we try to get him some little pleasure or other.'
Fenwick's irritation grew. Cuningham was talking as though the old relation between him and Richard Watson were still intact; while Fenwick knew well how thin and superficial the bond had grown.
'I shall go to-day,' he said, rather shortly. 'I have two or three things to do this morning, but there'll be time before my rehearsal this afternoon.'
'Your rehearsal?' Cuningham looked amiably curious.
Fenwick explained, but with fresh annoyance. The papers had been full enough of this venture on which he was engaged; Cuningham's ignorance offended him.
'Ah, indeed—very interesting,' said Cuningham, vaguely. 'Well, good-bye. I must jump into a hansom.'
'Where are you off to?'
'The Goldsmiths' Company are building a new Hall, and they want my advice about its decoration. Precious difficult, though, to get away from one's pictures, this time of year, isn't it?'
He hailed a hansom as he spoke.
'That's not a difficulty that applies to me,' said Fenwick, shortly.
Cuningham stared—frowned—and remembered.
'Oh, my dear fellow—what a mistake that was!—if you'll let me say so. Can't we put it right? Command me at any time.'
'Thank you. I prefer it as it is.'
'We'll talk it over. Well, good-bye. Don't forget old Dick.'
Fenwick walked on, fuming. Cuningham, he said to himself, was now the type of busy, pretentious mediocrity, the type which eternally keeps English art below the level of the Continent.
'I say—one moment! Have you had any news of the Findons lately?'
Fenwick turned sharply, and again saw Cuningham, whose hansom had been blocked by the traffic, close to the pavement. He was hanging over the door, and smiling.
In reply to the question, Fenwick merely shook his head.
'I had a capital letter from her ladyship a week or two ago,' saidCuningham, raising his voice, and bringing himself as near to Fenwickas his position allowed. 'The old fellow seems to be as fit as ever.But Madame de Pastourelles must be very much changed.'
Fenwick said nothing. It might have been thought that the traffic prevented his hearing Cuningham's remark. But he had heard distinctly.
'Do you know when they'll be home?' he asked, reluctantly, walking beside the hansom.
'No—haven't an idea. I believe I'm to go to them for Easter. Ah!—now we go on. Ta-ta!'
He waved his hand, and the hansom moved away.
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 entertainjealousyof 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.
After his interview with the magnificent gentlemen in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he made his way wearily to a much humbler office in Bedford Row. Here was a small solicitor to whom he had often resorted lately, under the constant pressure of his financial difficulties. He spent an hour in this man's room. When he came out, he walked fast towards Oxford Street and the west, hardly conscious in his excitement of where he was going. The lawyer he had just seen had for the first time mentioned the word 'bankruptcy.' 'I scarcely see, Mr. Fenwick, how you can avoid it.'
Well, it might come to that—it might. But he still had his six pictures—time to finish two others that were now on hand—and the exhibition.
It was with that he was now concerned. He called on the manager of a small gallery near Hanover Square with whom he had already made an arrangement for the coming May—paying a deposit on the rent—early in the winter. In his anxiety, he wished now to make the matter still clearer, to pay down the rest of the rent if need be. He had the notes always in his breast-pocket, jealously hidden away, lest any other claim, amid the myriads which pressed upon him, should sweep them from him.
The junior partner in charge of the gallery and the shop of which it made part, received him very coldly. The firm had long since regretted their bargain with a man whose pictures were not likely to sell, especially as they could have relet the gallery to much better advantage. But their contract with Fenwick—clinched by the deposit—could not be evaded; so they were advised.
All, therefore, that the junior partner could do was to try to alarm Fenwick, as to the incidental expenses involved—hanging, printing, service, etc. But Fenwick only laughed. 'I shall see to that!' he said, contemptuously. 'And my pictures will sell, I tell you,' he added, raising his voice. 'They'll bring a profit both to you and to me.'
The individual addressed said nothing. He was a tall, well-fed young man, in a faultless frock-coat, and Fenwick, as they stood together in the office—the artist had not been offered a chair—disliked him violently.
'Well, shall I pay you the rest?' said Fenwick, abruptly, turning to go, and fumbling at the same time for the pocket-book in which he kept the notes.
The other gave a slight shrug.
'That's just as you please, Mr. Fenwick.'
'Well, here's fifty, anyway,' said Fenwick, drawing out a fifty-pound note and laying it on the table.
'We are not in any hurry, I assure you.'
The young man stood looking at the artist, in an attitude of cool indifference; but at the same time his hand secured the note, and placed it safely in the drawer of the table between them.
He wrote a receipt, and handed it to Fenwick.
'Good-day,' said Fenwick, turning to go.
The other followed him, and as they stepped out into the exhibition-rooms of the shop, hung in dark purple, Fenwick perceived in the distance what looked like a fine Corot, and a Daubigny—and paused.
'Got some good things, since I was here last?'
'Oh, we're always getting good things,' said his companion, carelessly, without the smallest motion towards the pictures.
Fenwick nodded haughtily, and walked towards the door. But his soul smarted within him. Two years before, the owners of any picture-shop in London would have received him withempressement, have shown him all they had to show, and taken flattering note of his opinion.
On the threshold he ran against the Academician with the orange hair and beard, who had been his fellow-guest at the Findon's on the night of his first dinner-party there. The orange hair was now nearly white; its owner had grown to rotundity; but the sharp, glancing eyes and pompous manner were the same as of old. Mr. Sherratt nodded curtly to Fenwick, and was then received with bows and effusion by the junior partner standing behind.
'Ah, Mr. Sherratt!—delightedto see you! Come to look at the Corot?By all means! This way, please.'
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'redreadfullybad 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.
Watson turned to look at him.
'What pictures have you on hand?'
Fenwick gave a list of the completed pictures still in his studio, and described the arrangements made to exhibit them. He was not as ready as usual to speak of himself; his gaze and his attention were fixed upon his friend. But Watson probed further, into the subjects of his recent work. Fenwick was nearing the end, he explained, of a series of rustic 'Months' with their appropriate occupations—an idea which had haunted his mind for years.
'As old as the hills,' said Watson, 'but none the worse for that.You've painted them, I suppose, out-of-doors?'
Fenwick shrugged his shoulders.
'As much as possible.'
'Ah, that's where those French fellows have us,' said Watson, languidly. 'One of them said to me in Paris the other day, "It's bad enough to paint the things you've seen—it's the devil to paint the things you've not seen."'
'The usual fallacy,' said Fenwick, firing up. 'What do they mean by "seen"?'
He would have liked this time to go off at score. But a sure instinct told him that he was beside a dying man; and he held himself back, trying instead to remember what small news and gossip he could, for the amusement of his friend.
Watson sat in a deep armchair, propped up by pillows. The room in which they met had been a very distinguished room in the eighteenth century. It had still some remains of carved panelling, a graceful mantelpiece of Italian design, and a painted ceiling half-effaced. It was now part of a lodging-house, furnished with shabby cheapness; but the beauty, once infused, persisted; and it made no unworthy setting for a painter's death.
The signs of desperate illness in Richard Watson were indeed plainly visible. His shaggy hair and thick, unkempt beard brought into relief the waxen or purple tones of the skin. The breath was laboured and the cough frequent. But the eyes were still warm, living, and passionate, the eyes of a Celt, with the Celtic gifts, and those deficiencies, also, of his race, broadly and permanently expressed in the words of a great historian—'The Celts have shaken all States, and founded none!' No founder, noachiever, this—no happy, harmonious soul—but a man who had vibrated to life and Nature, in their subtler and sadder aspects, through whom the nobler thoughts and ambitions had passed, like sound through strings, wringing out some fine, tragic notes, some memorable tones. 'I can't last more than a week or two,' he said, presently, in a pause of Fenwick's talk, to which he had hardly listened—'and a good job too. But I don't find myself at all rebellious. I'm curiously content to go. I've had a good time.'
This from a man who had passed from one disappointed hope to another, brought the tears to Fenwick's eyes.
'Some of us may wish we were going with you,' he said, in a low voice, laying his hand a moment on his friend's knee.
Watson made no immediate reply. He coughed—fidgeted—and at last said:
'How's the money?'
Fenwick hastily drew himself up. 'All right.'
He reached out a hand to the tongs and put the fire together.
'Is that so?' said Watson. The slight incredulity in his voice touched some raw nerve in Fenwick.
'I don't want anything,' he said, almost angrily. 'I shall get through.'
Cuningham had been talking, no doubt. His affairs had been discussed.His morbid pride took offence at once.
'Mine'll just hold out,' said Watson, presently, with a humorous inflexion—'it'll bury me, I think—with a few shillings over. But I couldn't have afforded another year.'
There was silence a while—till a nurse came in to make up the fire. Fenwick began to talk of old friends, and current exhibitions; and presently tea made its appearance. Watson's strength seemed to revive. He sat more upright in his chair, his voice grew stronger, and he dallied with his tea, joking hoarsely with his nurse, and asking Fenwick all the questions that occurred to him. His face, in its rugged pallor and emaciation, and his great head, black or iron-grey on the white pillows, were so fine that Fenwick could not take his eyes from him; with the double sense of the artist, he saw thesubjectin the man; a study in black and white hovered before him.
When the nurse had withdrawn, and they were alone again, in a silence made more intimate still by the darkness of the panelled walls, which seemed to isolate them from the rest of the room, enclosing them in a glowing ring of lamp and firelight, Fenwick was suddenly seized by an impulse he could not master. He bent towards the sick man.
'Watson!—do you remember advising me to marry when we met in Paris?'
'Perfectly.'
The invalid turned his haggard eyes upon the speaker, in a sudden sharp attention.
There was a pause; then Fenwick said, with bent head, staring into the fire:
'Well—Iammarried.'
Watson gave a hoarse 'Phew!'—and waited.
'My wife left me twelve years ago and took our child with her. I don't know whether they are alive or dead. I thought I'd like to tell you. It would have been better if I hadn't concealed it, from you—and—and other friends.'
'Great Scott!' said Watson, slowly, bringing the points of his long, emaciated fingers together, like one trying to master a new image. 'So that's been the secret—'
'Of what?' said Fenwick, testily; but as Watson merely replied by an interrogative and attentive silence, he threw himself into his tale—headlong. He told it at far greater length than Eugénie had ever heard it; and throughout, the subtle, instinctive appeal of man to man governed the story, differentiating it altogether from the same story, told to a woman.
He spoke impetuously, with growing emotion, conscious of an infinite relief and abandonment. Watson listened with scarcely a comment. Midway a little pattering, scuffling noise startled the speaker. He looked round and saw the monkey, Anatole, who had been lying asleep in his basket. Watson nodded to Fenwick to go on, and then feebly motioned to his knee. The monkey clambered there, and Watson folded his bony arms round the creature, who lay presently with his weird face pressed against his master's dressing-gown, his melancholy eyes staring out at Fenwick.
'It was Madame she was jealous of?' said Watson, when the story came to an end.
Fenwick hesitated—then nodded reluctantly. He had spoken merely of 'one of my sitters.' But it was not possible to fence with this dying man.
'And Madame knows?'
'Yes.'
But Fenwick sharply regretted the introduction of Madame de Pastourelles' name. He had brought the story down merely to the point of Phoebe's flight and the search which followed, adding only—with vagueness—that the search had lately been renewed, without success.
Watson pondered the matter for some time. Fenwick took out his handkerchief and wiped a brow damp with perspiration. His story—added to the miseries of the day—had excited and shaken him still further.
Suddenly Watson put out a hand and seized his wrist. The grip hurt.
'Lucky dog!'
'What on earth do you mean?'
'You've lost them—but you've had a woman in your arms—a child on your knee! You don't go to your grave—[Greek: apraktos]—an ignorant, barren fool—like me!'
Fenwick looked at him in amazement. Self-scorn—bitter and passionate regret—transformed the face beside him. He pressed the fevered hand.
'Watson!—dear fellow!'
Watson withdrew his hand, and once more folded the monkey to him.
'There are plenty of men like me,' he muttered. 'We are afraid of living—and art is our refuge. Then art takes its revenge—and we are bad artists, because we are poor and sterilised human beings. But you'—he spoke with fresh energy, composing himself—'don't talk rot!—as thoughyourchance was done. You'll find her—she'll come back to you—when she's drunk the cup. Healthy young women don't die before thirty-five;—and by your account she wasn't bad—she had a conscience. The child'll waken it. Don't you be hard on her!'—he raised himself, speaking almost fiercely—'you've no right to! Take her in—listen to her—let her cry it out. My God!'—his voice dropped, as his head fell back on the pillows—'what happiness—what happiness!'
His eyes closed. Fenwick stooped over him in alarm, but the thin hand closed again on his.
'Don't go. What was she like?'
Fenwick asked him whether he remembered the incident of the sketch-book at their first meeting—the drawing of the mother and child in the kitchen of the Westmoreland farm.
'Perfectly. And she was the model for the big picture, too? I see. A lovely creature! How old is she now?'
'Thirty-six—if she lives.'
'I tell you, shedoeslive! Probably more beautiful now than she was then. Those Madonna-like women mellow so finely. And the child?Vois-tu, Anatole!—something superior to monkeys!'
But he pressed the little animal closer to him as he spoke. Fenwick rose to go, conscious that he had stayed too long. Watson looked up.
'Good-bye, old man—courage! Seek—till you find. She's in the world—and she's sorry. I could swear it.'
Fenwick stood beside him, quivering with emotion and despondency.
Their eyes met steadily, and Watson whispered:
'I pass from one thing to another. Sometimes it's Omar Khayyám—"One thing is certain and the rest is lies—The flower that once is born for ever dies"—and the next it's the Psalms, and I think I'm at a prayer-meeting—a Welsh Methodist again.'
He fell into a flow of Welsh, hoarsely musical. Then, with a smile, he nodded farewell; and Fenwick went.
* * * * *
Fenwick wrote that night to Eugénie de Pastourelles at Cannes, enclosing a copy of the letter received from Freddy Tolson. It meant nothing; but she had asked to be kept informed. As he entered upon the body of his letter, his eyes still recurred to its opening line:
'Dear Madame de Pastourelles.'
For many years he had never addressed her except as 'My dear friend.'
Well, that was all gone and over. The memory of her past goodness, of those walks through the Trianon woods, was constantly with him. But he had used her recklessly and selfishly, and she had done with him. He admitted it now, as often before, in a temper of dull endurance; bending himself to the task of his report.
* * * * *
Eugénie read his letter, sitting on a bench above the blue Mediterranean, in the pine woods of the Cap d'Antibes. She had torn it open in hope, and the reading of it depressed her. In the pine-scented, sun-warmed air she sat for long motionless and sad. The delicate greenish light fell on the soft brown hair, the white face and hands. Eugénie's deep black had now assumed a slight 'religious' air which disturbed Lord Findon, and kindled the Protestant wrath of her stepmother. That short moment of a revivedmondanitéwhich Versailles had witnessed, was wholly past; and for the first and only time in her marred life, Eugénie's natural gaiety was quenched. She knew well that in the burden which weighed upon her there were morbid elements; but she could only bear it; she could not smile under it.
Fenwick's letter led her thoughts back to the early incidents of this fruitless search. Especially did she recall every moment of her interview with Daisy Hewson—Phoebe Fenwick's former nursemaid, now married to a small Westmoreland farmer. One of the first acts of the lawyers had been to induce this woman to come to London to repeat once more what she knew of the catastrophe.
Then, after the examination by the lawyers, Eugénie had pleaded that she might see her—and see her alone. Accordingly, a shy and timid woman, speaking with a broad Westmoreland accent, called one morning in Dean's Yard.
Eugénie had won from her many small details the lawyers had been unable to extract. They were not, alack, of a kind to help the search for Phoebe; but, interpreted by the aid of her own quick imagination, they drew a picture of the lost mother and child, which sank deep, deep, into Eugénie's soul.
Mrs. Fenwick, said Mrs. Hewson, scarcely spoke on the journey south. She sat staring out of window, with her hands on her lap, and Daisy thought there was 'soomat wrang'—but dared not ask. In saying good-bye at Euston, Mrs. Fenwick had kissed her, and given the guard a shilling to look after her. She was holding Carrie in her arms, as the train moved away. The girl had supposed she was going to join her husband.
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.
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 ofThe 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.
His handling, once so distinguished through all its inequalities, grew steadily more careless and perfunctory; his drawing lost force and grip; his composition, so rich, interesting, and intelligent in his early days, now meant nothing, said nothing. The few friends who still haunted his studio during these dark months were often struck with pity; criticism or argument was useless; and some of them believed that he was suffering from defects of sight, and was no longer capable of judging his own work.
The portrait commissions, in particular, led more than once to disaster. His angry vanity suspected that while he was now thought incapable of the poetic or imaginative work in which he had once excelled, he was still considered—'like any fool'—good enough for portraits. This alone was enough to make him loathe the business. On two or three occasions he ended by quarrelling with the sitter. Then for hours he would walk restlessly about his room, smoking enormously, drinking—sometimes excessively—out of a kind of excitement anddésoeuvrement—his strong, grizzled hair bristling about his head, his black eyes staring and bloodshot, and that wild gypsyish look of his youth more noticeable than ever in these surroundings of what promised soon to be a decadent middle age.
One habit of his youth had quite disappeared. The queer tendency to call on Heaven for practical aid in any practical difficulty—to make of prayer a system of 'begging-letters to the Almighty'—which had of ten quieted or distracted him in his early years of struggle, affected him no longer. His inner life seemed to himself shrouded in a sullen numbness and frost.
And the old joy in reading, the old plenitude and facility of imagination, were also in abeyance. He became the fierce critic of other men's ideas, while barren of his own. To be original, successful, happy, was now in his eyes the one dark and desperate offence. Yet every now and then he would have impulses of the largest generosity; would devote hours to the teaching of some struggling student and the correction of his work; or draw on his last remains of credit or influence—pester people with calls, or write reams to the newspapers—on behalf of some one, unduly overlooked, whose work he admired.
But through it all, the shadows deepened, and a fixed conviction that he was moving towards catastrophe. In spite of Watson's touching words to him, he did not often let himself think of Phoebe. Towards her, as towards so much else, his mind and heart were stiffened and voiceless. But for hours in the night—since sleeplessness was now added to his other torments—he would brood on the loss of his child, would try to imagine her dancing, singing, sewing—or helping her mother in the house. Seventeen! Why, soon no doubt they would be marrying her, and he, her father, would know nothing, hear nothing. And in the darkness he would feel the warm tears rise in his eyes, and hold them there, proudly arrested.
The rehearsals in which he spent many hours of the week, generally added to his distress and irritation. The play itself was, in his opinion, a poor vulgar thing, utterly unworthy of the 'spectacle' he had contrived for it. He could not hide his contempt for the piece, and indeed for most of its players; and was naturally unpopular with the management and the company. Moreover, he wanted his money desperately, seeing that the play had been postponed, first from November to February, and then from February to April; but the actor-manager concerned was in somewhat dire straits himself, and nothing could be got before production.
One afternoon, late in March, a rehearsal was nearing its completion, everybody was tired out, and everything had been going badly. One of Fenwick's most beautiful scenes—carefully studied from the Trianon gardens on the spot—had been, in his opinion, hopelessly spoilt in order to bring in some ridiculous 'business' wholly incongruous with the setting and date of the play. He had had a fierce altercation on the stage with the actor-manager. The cast, meanwhile, dispersed at the back of the stage or in the wings, looked on maliciously or chatted among themselves; while every now and then one or other of the antagonists would call up the leading lady, or the conceited gentleman who was to act Count Fersen, and hotly put a case. Fenwick was madly conscious all the time of his lessened consideration and dignity in the eyes of a band of people whom he despised. Two years before, his cooperation would have been an honour and his opinion law. Now, nothing of the kind; indeed, through the heated remarks of the actor-manager there ran the insolent implication that Mr. Fenwick's wrath was of no particular account to anybody, and that he was presuming on a commission he had been very lucky to get.
At last a crowd of stage-hands, setting scenery for another piece in the evening, invaded the stage, and the rehearsal was just breaking up when Fenwick, still talking in flushed exasperation, happened to notice two ladies standing in the wings, on the other side of the vast stage, close to the stage-entrance.
He suddenly stopped talking—stammered—looked again. They were two girls, one evidently a good deal older than the other. The elder was talking with the assistant stage-manager. The younger stood quietly, a few yards away, not talking to any one. Her eyes were on Fenwick, and her young, slightly frowning face wore an expression of amusement—of something besides, also—something puzzled and intent. It flashed upon him that she had been there for some time, that he had been vaguely conscious of her—that she had, in fact, been watching from a distance the angry scene in which he had been engaged.
'Why!—whatever is the matter, Mr. Fenwick?' said the actor beside him, startled by his look.
Fenwick made no answer, but he dropped a roll of papers he was holding and suddenly rushed forward across the stage, through the throng of carpenters and scene-shifters who were at work upon it. Some garden steps and a fountain just being drawn into position came in his way; he stumbled and fell, was conscious of two or three men coming to his assistance, rose again, and ran on, blindly, pushing at the groups in his way, till he ran into the arms of the stage-manager.
'Who were those ladies?—where are they?' he said, panting, and looking round him in despair; for they had vanished, and the stage-entrance was blocked by an outgoing stream of people.
'Don't know anything about them,' said the man, sulkily. Fenwick had been the plague of his life in rehearsals. 'What?—you mean those two girls? Never saw 'em before.'
'But you must know who they are—you must!' shouted Fenwick. 'What's their name? Why did you let them go?'
'Because I had finished with them.'
The manager turned on his heel, and was about to give an order to a workman, when Fenwick caught him by the arm.
'I implore you,' he said, in a shaking voice, his face crimson—'tell me who they are—and where they went.'
The man looked at him astonished, but something in the artist's face made him speak more considerately.
'I am extremely sorry, Mr. Fenwick, but I really know nothing about them. Oh, by the way'—he fumbled in his pocket. 'Yes—one of them did give me a card—I forgot—I never saw the name before.' He extracted it with difficulty and handed it to Fenwick, who stood trembling from head to foot.
Fenwick looked at it.
'Miss Larose.' Nothing else. No address.
'But the other one!—the other one!' he said, beside himself.
'I never spoke to her at all,' said his companion, whose name was Fison. 'They came in here twenty minutes ago and asked to see me. The door-keeper told them the rehearsal was just over and they would find me on the stage. The lady I was talking to wished to know whether we had all the people we wanted for the ballroom scene. Some friend with whom she had been acting in the country had advised her to apply—'
'Actingwhere?' said Fenwick, still gripping him.
The stage-manager rubbed his nose in perplexity.
'I really can't remember. Leeds—Newcastle—Halifax—was it? It's altogether escaped my memory.'
'For God's sake, remember!' cried Fenwick.
The stage-manager shook his head.
'I really didn't take notice. I liked the young lady very well. We got on, as you may say, at once. I talked to her while you were discussing over there. But I had to tell her there was no room for her—and no more there is. Her sister—or her friend—whichever it was—was an uncommonly pretty girl. I noticed that as she went out—which reminds me—she asked me to tell her who you were.'
Fenwick gazed at the speaker in passionate despair.
'And you can't tell me any more—can't help me?' His voice rose again into a shout, then failed him.
'No, I really can't,' said the other, decidedly, pulling himself away.'You go and ask the door-keeper. Perhaps he'll know something.'
But the door-keeper knew only that he had been asked for 'Mr. Fison' by two nice-spoken young ladies, that he had directed them where to go, and had opened the stage-door for them. He hadn't happened to be in his 'lodge' when they went out, and couldn't say in which direction they had gone.
'Why, lor' bless you, sir, they come here in scores every week!'
Fenwick rushed out into the Strand, and walked from end to end of the theatrical section of it several times, questioning the policemen on duty. But he could discover nothing.
Then, blindly, he made his way down a narrow street to the Embankment.There he threw himself on a bench, almost fainting, unable to stand.
What should he do? He was absolutely convinced that he had seen Carrie—his child; his little Carrie!—his own flesh and blood. It was her face—her eyes—her movement—changed, indeed, but perfectly to be recognised by him, her father. And by the cruel, the monstrous accidents of the meeting, she had been swept away from him again into this whirlpool of London, before he had had the smallest chance of grasping at the little form as it floated past him on this aimless stream of things. His whole nature was in surging revolt against life—against men's senseless theories of God and Providence. If it should prove that he had lost all clue again to his wife and child, he would put an end, once for all, to his share in the business—he swore, with clenched hands, that he would. The Great Potter had made sport of him long enough; it was time to break the cup and toss its fragments back into the vast common heap of ruined and wasted things. 'Some to honour—and some to dishonour'—the words rang in his ears, mingling with that deep bell of St. Paul's, whereof the echoes were being carried up the river towards him on the light southeasterly wind.
But first—he tried to make his mind follow out the natural implications and consequences of what had happened. Carrie had asked his name. But clearly, when it was given her, it had meant nothing to her. She could not have left her father there—knowing it was her father—without a word. No; Phoebe's first step, of course, would have been to drop her old name, and the child would have no knowledge of it.
But Phoebe? If Carrie was in England, so was Phoebe. He could not believe that she would part with the child. And supposing Carrie spoke of the prating, haranguing fellow she had seen?—mentioned the name, which the stage-manager had given her?—what then? Could Phoebe still have the cruelty, the wickedness to maintain her course of action—to keep Carrie from him? Ah! if he had been guilty towards her in the old days, she had wrung out full payment long ago; the balance of injury had long since dropped heavily on his side. But who could know how she had developed?—whether towards hardness or towards repentance. Still—to-night, probably—she would hear what and whom Carrie had seen. Any post might bring the fruits of it. And if not—he was not without a clue. If a girl whose name is known has been playing recently at an English provincial theatre, it ought to be possible somehow to recover news of her. He looked at his watch. Too late for the lawyers. But he roused himself, hailed a cab, and went to his club, where he wrote at length to his solicitor, describing what had happened, and suggesting various lines of action.
Then he went home, got some charcoal and paper and by lamp-light began to draw the face which he had seen—a very young and still plastic face, with delicate lips open above the small teeth; and eyes—why, they were Phoebe's eyes, of course!—no other eyes like them in the world. He drew them with an eager hand, knowing the way of them. He put the light—the smile—into them; a happy smile!—as of one to whom life has been kind. No sign of fear, distress, or cringing poverty—rather an innocent sovereignty, lovely and unashamed. Then the brow, and the curly hair in its brown profusion; and the small neck; and the thin, straight shoulders. He drew in the curve of the shady hat—the knot of lace at the throat—the spare young lines of the breast.
So it emerged; and when it was done, he put it on an easel and sat staring at it, his eyes blind with tears.
Yes, it was Carrie—he had no doubt whatever that it was Carrie. And behind her, mingling with her image—yet distinct—a veiled, intangible presence, stood Phoebe—Phoebe so like her, and yet so different. But of Phoebe—still—he would not think. It was as when a man, mortally tired, shrinks from some fierce contest of brain and limb, which yet he knows may some day have to be faced. He put his wife aside, and sank himself in the covetous, devouring vision of his child.
Next day there was great activity among the lawyers. They were confident of recovering the clue, and if Fenwick's identification was a just one, the search was near its end.
Only, till they reallywereon the track, better say nothing toLord Findon and Madame de Pastourelles. This was the suggestion of theFindon's solicitor, and Fenwick eagerly endorsed it.
Presently inquiry had been made from every management in London as to the touring companies of the year; confidential agents had been sent to every provincial town that possessed a theatre; long lists of names had been compiled and carefully scanned. Fenwick's drawing of the girl whom he had seen had been photographed; and some old likenesses of Phoebe and Carrie had been reproduced and attached to it, for the use of Messrs. Butlin's provincial correspondents. The police were appealed to; the best private detectives to be had were employed.
In vain! The smiling child of seventeen had emerged for that one appearance on the stage of her father's life, only, it seemed, to vanish again for ever. No trace could be found anywhere of a 'Miss Larose,' either as a true or a theatrical name; the photographs suggested nothing to those who saw them; or if various hints and clues sometimes seemed to present themselves, they led to no result.
Meanwhile, day after day, Fenwick waited on the post, hurrying for and scanning his letters with feverish, ever-waning hope. Not a sign, not a word from Phoebe. His heart grew fierce. There were moments when he felt something not unlike hatred for this invisible woman, who was still able to lay a ghostly and sinister hand upon his life. And yet, and yet!—suppose, after all, that she were dead?
During these same weeks of tormentThe Queen's Necklacewas produced; it was a pretentious failure, and after three weeks of difficult existence flickered to an end. The management went into bankruptcy, and the greater part of Fenwick's payment was irrecoverable. He could hardly now meet his daily living expenses, and there was an execution in his house, put in by the last firm of builders employed.
Close upon this disaster came the opening of his private exhibition.Grimly, in a kind of dogged abstraction, he went through with it.He himself, with the help of a lad who was his man-of-all-work inChelsea, nailed up the draperies, hung the pictures, and issued theinvitations for the private view.
About a hundred people came to the private view. His reputation was not yet dead, and there was much curiosity about his circumstances. But Fenwick, looking at the scanty crowd, considering the faces that were there and the faces that were not there, knew very well that it could be of no practical assistance to him. Not a picture sold; and next day there were altogether seven people in the gallery, of whom five were the relations of men to whom he had given gratuitous teaching at one period or other of his career.
And never, alack, in the case of any artist of talent, was there a worse 'press' than that which dealt with his pictures on the following morning. The most venomous article of all was the work of a man whom Fenwick had treated with conceit and rudeness in the days of his success. The victim now avenged himself, with the same glee which a literary club throws into the black-balling of some evil tongue—some too harsh and too powerful critic of the moment. 'Scamped and empty work,' in which 'ideas not worth stating' find an expression 'not worth criticism.' Mannerisms grown to absurdity; faults of early training writ dismally large; vulgarity of conception and carelessness of execution—no stone that could hurt or sting was left unflung, and the note of meditative pity in which the article came to an end, marked the climax of a very neat revenge. After reading it, Fenwick felt himself artistically dead and buried.
A great silence fell upon him. He spoke to no one in the gallery, and he avoided his club. Early in the afternoon he went to Lincoln's Inn Fields—only to hear from the lawyers that they had done all they could with the new scent, and it was no use pursuing it further. He heard what they had to say in silence, and after leaving their office he visited a shop in the Strand. Just as the light was waning, about seven o'clock on a May evening, he found himself again in his studio. It was now absolutely bare, save for a few empty easels, a chair or two, and some tattered portfolios. The two men representing the execution were in the dining-room. He could hear the voices of a charwoman and of the lad who had helped him to arrange the gallery, talking in the kitchen.
Fenwick locked himself into the studio. On his way thither he had recoiled, shivering, from the empty desolation of the house. In the general disarray of the ticketed furniture and stripped walls, all artistic charm had disappeared. And he said to himself, with a grim twist of the mouth, that if the house had grown ugly and commonplace, that only made it a better setting for the ugly and commonplace thing which he was about to do.
* * * * *
About half an hour later a boy, looking like the 'buttons' of a lodging-house, walked up to the side entrance of Fenwick's ambitious mansion—which possessed a kind of courtyard, and was built round two sides of an oblong. The door was open and the charwoman just inside, so that the boy had no occasion to ring. He carried a parcel carefully wrapped in an old shawl.
'Is this Mr. Fenwick's?' asked the boy, consulting a dirty scrap of paper.
'Aye,' said the woman. 'Well, who's it from? isn't there no note with it?'
The boy replied that there was no note, and his instructions were to leave it.
'But what name am I to say?' the woman called after him as he went down the path.
The boy shook his head.
'Don't know—give it up!' he said, impudently, and went off whistling.
'Silly lout,' said the woman, crossly, and, taking up the package, which was not very large, she went with it to the studio, reflecting as she went that by the feel of it it was an unframed picture, and that if some one would only take away some of the beastly, dusty things that were already in the house—that wouldn't, so the bailiffs said, fetch a halfpenny—it would be better worth while than bringing new ones where they weren't wanted.
There was at first no answer to her knock. She tried the door, and wondered to find it locked. But presently she heard Fenwick moving about inside.
'Well, what is it?'
His voice was low and impatient.
'A parcel for you, sir.'
'Take it away.'
'Very well, sir.'
She turned obediently and was halfway down the passage which led to the dining-room, when the studio door opened with a great crash and Fenwick looked out.
'Bring that here. What is it?'
She retraced her steps.
'Well, it's a picture, I think, sir.'
He held out his hand for it, took it, and instantly withdrew into the studio and again locked the door. She noticed that he seemed to have lit one candle in the big studio, and his manner struck her as strange. But her slow mind followed the matter no further, and she went back to the cooking of his slender supper.
Fenwick meanwhile was standing with the parcel in his hand. At the woman's knock he had risen from a table, where he had been writing a letter. A black object, half-covered with a painting-rag, lay beside the ink-stand.
'I must make haste,' he thought, 'or she will be bothering me again.'
He looked at the letter, which was still unfinished. Meanwhile he had absently deposited the parcel on the floor, where it rested against the leg of the table.
'Another page will finish it. Hôtel Bristol, Rome—till the end of the week?—if I only could besurethat was what Butlin said!'
He paced up and down, frowning, in an impotent distress, trying to make his brain work as usual. On his visit of the afternoon he had asked the lawyers for the Findon's address; but his memory now was of the worst.
Suddenly he wheeled round, sat down, and took up a book which had been lying face downwards on the table. It was the 'Memoirs of Benjamin Haydon,' and he opened it at one of the last pages—
'About an hour after, Miss Haydon entered the painting-room, and found her father stretched out dead, before the easel on which stood, blood-sprinkled, his unfinished picture. A portrait of his wife stood on a smaller easel facing his large picture.'
* * * * *
The man reading, paused.
'He had suffered much more than I,' he thought—'but his wife had helped him—stood by him—'
And he passed on to the next page—to the clause in Haydon's will which runs—'My dearest wife, Mary Haydon, has been a good, dear, and affectionate wife to me—a heroine in adversity and an angel in peace.'
'And he repaid her by blowing his brains out,' thought Fenwick, contemptuously. 'But he was mad—of course he was mad. We are all mad—when it comes to this.'
And he turned back, as though in fascination, to the page before, to the last entry in Haydon's Journal.
'21st.—Slept horribly. Prayed in sorrow and got up in agitation. '22d.—God forgive me. Amen.'
'Amen!' repeated Fenwick, aloud, as he dropped the book. The word echoed in the empty room. He covered his eyes with his right hand, leaning his arm on the table.
The other hand, as it fell beside him, came in contact with the parcel which was propped against the table. His touch told him that it contained a picture—an unframed canvas. A vague curiosity awoke in him. He took it up, peered at the address, then began to finger with and unwrap it.
Suddenly—he bent over it. What was it!
He tore off the shawl, and some brown paper beneath it, lifted the thing upon the table, so that the light of the one candle fell upon it, and held it there.