He was struck dumb for a moment with astonishment; feeling at the same time the trembling of the form which his arm still encircled.
'Well, Phoebe,' he said, at last, 'you seem determined to say disagreeable things to me to-night. I suppose I might remind you that you're much younger than I; and that of course a man knows much more about business than a young thing like you can. How, I should like to know, could we have done any better than we have done, since we married? As far as money goes, we've had a hell of a time, from first to last!'
'It would have been much worse,' said Phoebe, softly, 'if I hadn't been there—you know it would. You know last year when we were in such straits, and all our things were nearly sold up, you let me take over things, and keep the money. And I went to see all the people we owed money to—and—and it's pretty bad—but it isn't as bad as it was—'
She hid her face on her knees, choked by the sob she could no longer repress.
'Well, of course it's better,' said Fenwick, ungraciously; 'I don't say you haven't got a head, Phoebe—why, I know you have! You did first-rate! But, after all, I had to earn the money.'
She looked up eagerly.
'That's what I say. You'd never be able to think about little things—you'd have to be painting always—and going about—and—'
He bit his lip.
'Why, I could manage for myself—for a bit,' he said, with a laugh. 'I'm not such an idiot as all that. Old Morrison's lent me a hundred pounds, Phoebe!'
He enjoyed her amazement.
'A hundred pounds!' she repeated, faintly. 'And however are we going to repay all that?'
He drew her back to him triumphantly.
'Why, you silly child, I'm going to earn it, of course—and a deal more. Don't you hinder me, Phoebe! and I shall be a rich man before we can look round, and you'll be a lady—with a big house—and your carriage, perhaps!'
He kissed her vehemently, as though to coerce her into agreeing with him.
But she released herself.
'You and I'llneverbe rich. We don't know how.'
'Speak for yourself, please.' He stretched out his right hand, laughing. 'Look at that hand. If it gets a fair chance it's got money in it—and fame—and happiness for us both!Don'tyou believe in me, Phoebe? Don't you believe I shall make a painter?'
He spoke with an imperious harshness, repeating his query. It was evident, curiously evident, that he cared for her opinion.
'Of course I believe in you,' she said, her chest heaving.'It's—it's—other things.'
Then, coming to him again, she flung her arms piteously round him. 'Oh, John, John—for a year past—and more—you've been sorry you married me!'
'What on earth's the matter with you?' he cried, half in wrath, half astonished. 'What's come to you, Phoebe?'
'Oh! I know,' she said, withdrawing herself and speaking in a low current of speech. 'You were very fond of me when we married—and—and I dare say you're fond of me now—but it's different. You were a boy then—and you thought you'd get drawing-lessons in Kendal, and perhaps a place at a school—and you didn't seem to want anything more. And now you're so ambitious—so ambitious, John—I'—she turned her head away—'I sometimes feel when I'm with you—I can't breathe—it's just burning you away—and me too. You've found out what you can do—and people tell you you're so clever—and then you think you've thrown yourself away—and that I'm a clog on you. John'—she approached him suddenly, panting—'John, do you mean that baby and I are to stay all the winter alone in that cottage?' She motioned towards it.
He protested that he had elaborately thought out all that she must do. She must go to her father at Keswick for the summer and possibly for the winter, till he had got a footing. He would come up to see her as often as work and funds would permit. She must look after the child, make a little money perhaps by her beautiful embroidery.
'I'll not go to my father,' she said, with energy.
'But why not?'
'You seem to forget that he married a second wife, John, last year.'
'I'm sure Mrs. Gibson was most friendly when we were there last month.And we'dpay, of course—we'd pay.'
'I'm not going to plant myself and Carrie down on Mrs. Gibson for six months and more, John, so don't ask me. No, we'll stay here—we'll stay here!'
She began to pluck at the grass with her hand, staring before her at the moonlit stream like one who sees visions of the future. The beauty of her faintly visible head and neck suddenly worked on John Fenwick's senses. He threw his arm round her.
'And I shall soon be back. You little silly, can't you understand thatI shall always be wanting you?'
'We'll stay here,' she repeated, slowly. 'And you'll be in London making smart friends—and dining with rich folk—and having ladies to sit to you—'
'Phoebe, you're not jealous of me?' he cried, with a great, good-humoured laugh—'that would be the last straw.'
'Yes, I am jealous of you!' she said, with low-voiced passion; 'and you know very well that I've had some cause to be.'
He was silent. Through both their minds there passed the memory of some episodes in their married life—slight, but quite sufficient to show that John Fenwick was a man of temperament inevitably attracted by womankind.
He murmured that she had made mountains out of mole-hills. She merely raised his hand and kissed it. 'The women make a fool of you, John,' she said, 'and I ought to be there to protect you—for you do love me, you know—you do!'
And then with tears she broke down and clung to him again, in a mood that was partly the love of wife for husband and partly an exquisite maternity—the same feeling she gave her child. He responded with eagerness, feeling indeed that he had won his battle.
For she lay in his arms—weak—protesting no more. The note of anguish, of deep, incalculable foreboding, which she had shown, passed away from her manner and words; while on his side he began to draw pictures of the future so full of exultation and of hope that her youth presently could but listen and believe. The sickle moon descended behind the pikes; only the stars glimmered on the great side of the fell, on solitary yews black upon the night, on lines of wall, on dim, mysterious paths, old as the hills themselves, on the softly chiding water. The May night breathed upon them, calmed them, brought out the better self of each. They returned to the cottage like children, hand in hand, talking of a hundred practical details, thankful that the jarring moment had passed away, each refraining from any word that could wound the other. Nor was it till Fenwick was sound asleep beside her that Phoebe, replunged in loneliness and dread, gave herself in the dawn-silence to a passion of unconquerable tears.
'Wasthatthe landmark? What,—the foolish well Whose wave, low down, I did not stoop to drink, But sat and flung the pebbles from its brink In sport to send its imaged skies pell-mell, (And mine own image, had I noted well!) Was that my point of turning? I had thought The stations of my course should rise unsought, As altar-stone, or ensigned citadel.'
'Why does that fellow upstairs always pass you as though he were in a passion with somebody?' said Richard Watson, stepping back as he spoke, palette on thumb, from the picture upon which he was engaged. 'He almost knocked me down this morning, and I am not conscious of having done anything to offend his worship.'
His companion in the dingy Bloomsbury studio, where they were both at work, also put down palette and brush, examining the canvas before him with a keen, cheerful air.
'Perhaps he loathes mankind, as I did yesterday.'
'And to-day it's all right?'
'Well, come and look.'
Watson crossed over. He was a tall and splendid man, a 'black Celt' from Merionethshire, with coal-black hair, and eyes deeply sunken and lined, with fatigue or ill health. Beside him, his comrade, Philip Cuningham, had the air of a shrewd clerk or man of business—with his light alertness of frame, his reddish hair, and sharp, small features. A pleasant, serviceable ability was stamped on Cuningham's whole aspect; while Watson's large, lounging way, and dishevelled or romantic good looks suggested yet another perennial type—the dreamer entangled in the prose of life.
He looked at the picture which Cuningham turned towards him—his hands thrust into the vast pockets of his holland coat. It was a piece of charminggenre—a crowded scene in Rotten Row, called 'Waiting for the Queen,' painted with knowledge and grace; owing more to Wilkie than to Frith, and something to influences more modern than either; a picture belonging to a familiar English tradition, and worthily representing it.
'Yes—you've got it!' he said, at last, in a voice rather colourless and forced. Then he made one or two technical comments, to which the other listened with something that was partly indulgence, partly deference; adding, finally, as he moved away, 'And it'll sell, of course—like hot potatoes!'
'Well, I hope so,' said Philip, beginning to put away his brushes and tubes with what seemed to be a characteristic orderliness—'or I shall be in Queer Street. But I think Lord Findon wants it. I shouldn't wonder if he turned up this afternoon!'
'Ah?' Watson raised his great shoulders with a gesture which might have been sarcastic, but was perhaps more than anything else languid and weary. He returned to his own picture, looking at it with a painful intensity.
'Nobody will ever want to buy that!' he said, quietly.
Cuningham stood beside him, embarrassed.
'It's full of fine things,' he said, after a moment. 'But—'
'You wish I wouldn't paint such damned depressing subjects?'
'I wish you'd sometimes condescend to think of the public, old fellow!'
'That—never!' said the other, under his breath. 'Starve—and please yourself! But I shan't starve—you forget that.'
'Worse luck!' laughed Cuningham. 'I believe Providence ordained the British Philistine for our good—drat him! It does no one any harm to have to hook the public. All the great men have done it. You're too squeamish, Master Dick!'
Watson went on painting in silence, his lips working. Presently Cuningham caught—half lost in the beard—'There's a public of to-day, though—and a public of to-morrow!'
'Oh, all right,' said Philip. 'So long as you take a public of some sort into consideration! I like your jester.'
He bent forward to look into the front line of the large composition crowded with life-size figures on which Watson was engaged. It was an illustration of some Chaucerian lines, describing the face of a man on his way to execution, seen among a crowd:
'a pale faceAmong a press …'
so stricken that, amid all the thronging multitude, 'men might know his face that was bestead' from all the rest.
The idea—of helpless pain, in the grip of cruel and triumphant force—had been realised with a passionate wealth of detail, comparable to some of the early work of Holman Hunt. The head of the victim bound with blood-stained linen, a frightened girl hiding her eyes, a mother weeping, a jester with the laugh withered on his lip by this sudden vision of death and irremediable woe—and in the distance a frail, fainting form, sweetheart or sister—each figure and group, rendered often with very unequal technical merit, had yet in it something harshly, intolerably true. The picture was too painful to be borne; but it was neither common nor mean.
Cuningham turned away from it with a shudder.
'Some of it's magnificent, Dick—but I couldn't live with it if you paid me!'
'Because you look at it wrongly,' said Watson, gruffly. 'You take it as an anecdote. It isn't an anecdote—it's a symbol.'
'What?—The World?—and The Victim?—from all time?—and to all time? Well, that makes it more gruesome than ever. Hullo, who's that? Come in!'
The door opened. A young man, in some embarrassment, appeared on the threshold.
'I believe these letters are yours,' he said, offering a couple toCuningham. 'They brought them up to me by mistake.'
Philip Cuningham took them with thanks, then scanned the newcomer as he was turning to depart.
'I think I saw you at Berners Street the other night?'
John Fenwick paused.
'Yes—' he said, awkwardly.
'Have you been attending all the summer?'
'Pretty well. There were about half a dozen fellows left in August. We clubbed together to keep the model going.'
'I don't remember you in the Academy.'
'No. I come from the North. I've painted a lot already—I couldn't be bothered with the Academy!'
Watson turned and looked at the figure in the doorway.
'Won't you come in and sit down?'
The young man hesitated. Then something in his look kindled as it fell on Watson's superb head, with its strong, tossed locks of ebon-black hair touched with grey, the penthouse brows, and the blue eyes beneath with their tragic force of expression.
Fenwick came in and shut the door. Cuningham pushed him a chair, and Watson offered him a cigarette, which he somewhat doubtfully accepted. His two hosts—men of the educated middle-class—divined at once that he was self-taught, and risen from the ranks. Both Cuningham and Watson were shabbily dressed; but it was an artistic and metropolitan shabbiness. Fenwick's country clothes were clumsy and unbecoming; and his manner seemed to fit him as awkwardly as his coat. The sympathy of both the older artists did but go out to him the more readily.
Cuningham continued the conversation, while Watson, still painting, occasionally intervened.
They discussed thepersonnelof the life-school Fenwick was attending, the opening of a newatelierin North London by a well-known Academician, the successes at the current 'Academy,' the fame of certain leading artists. At least Cuningham talked; Fenwick's contributions were mostly monosyllabic; he seemed to be feeling his way.
Suddenly, by a change of attitude on the painter's part, the picture on which Dick Watson was engaged became visible to Fenwick. He walked eagerly up to it.
'I say!'—his face flushed with admiration. 'That figure's wonderful.' He pointed to the terror-stricken culprit. 'But that horse there—you don't mind, do you?—that horse is wrong!'
'I know he is! I've worked at him till I'm sick. Can't work at him any more!'
'It should be like this.'
He took out a sketch-book from his pocket, caught up a piece of charcoal and rapidly sketched the horse in the attitude required. Then he handed the book to Watson, who looked first at the sketch, and then at some of the neighbouring pages, which were covered with studies of horses observed mostly on the day of some trade-union procession, when mounted police were keeping the road.
Watson was silent a moment, then, walking up to his picture, he took his palette-knife and scraped out the whole passage. 'I see!' he said, and, laying down the knife, he threw himself into a chair, flushed and discomposed.
'Oh, you'll soon put it right!' said Fenwick, encouragingly.
Watson winced—then nodded.
'May I see that book?' He held out his hand, and Fenwick yielded it.
Watson and Cuningham turned it over together. The 'notes,' of which it was full, showed great brilliancy and facility, an accurate eye, and a very practised hand. They were the notes of a countryman artist newly come to London. The sights, and tones, and distances of London streets—the human beings, the vehicles, the horses—were all freshly seen, as though under a glamour. Cuningham examined them with care.
'Is this the sort of thing you're going to do?' he said, looking up, and involuntarily his eye glanced towards his own picture on the distant easel.
Fenwick smiled.
'That's only for practice. I want to do big things—romantic things—if I get the chance.'
'What a delightful subject!' said Cuningham, stooping suddenly over the book.
Fenwick started, made a half-movement as though to reclaim his property, and then withdrew his hand. Cuningham was looking at a charcoal study of a cottage interior. The round table of rude black oak was set for a meal, and a young woman was feeding a child in a pinafore who sat in a high-chair. The sketch might have been a mere piece of domestic prettiness; but the handling of it was so strong and free that it became a significant, typical thing. It breathed the North, a life rustic and withdrawn—the sweetness of home and motherhood.
'Are you going to make a picture of that?' said Watson, putting on his spectacles, and peering into it. 'You'd better.'
Fenwick replied that he might some day, but had too many things on hand to think of it yet a while. Then with no explanation and a rather hasty hand he turned the page. Cuningham looked at him curiously.
They were still busy with the sketch-book when a voice was heard on the stairs outside.
'Lord Findon,' said Cunningham.
He coloured a little, ran to his picture, arranged it in the best light, and removed a small fly which had stuck to one corner.
'Shall I go?' said Fenwick.
He too had been clearly fluttered by the name, which was that of one of the best-known buyers of the day.
Watson in reply beckoned him on to the leads, upon which the Georgian bow-window at the end of the room opened. They found themselves on a railed terrace looking to right and left on a row of gardens, each glorified by one of the plane-trees which even still make the charm of Bloomsbury.
Watson hung over the rail, smoking. He explained that Lord Findon had come to see Cuningham's picture, which he had commissioned, but not without leaving himself a loophole, in case he didn't like it.
'He will like it,' said Fenwick. 'It's just the kind of thing people want.'
Watson said nothing, but smoked with energy. Fenwick went on talking, letting it be clearly understood that he personally thought the picture of no account, but that he knew very well that it was of a kind to catch buyers. In a few minutes Watson resented his attitude as offensive; he fell into a cold silence; Fenwick's half-concealed contempt threw him fiercely on his friend's side.
'Well, I've done the trick!' said Cuningham, coming out jauntily, his hands in his trousers pockets; then, with a jerk of the head towards the studio, and a lowered voice, 'He's writing the cheque.'
'How much?' said Watson, without turning his head. Fenwick thought it decent to walk away, but he could not prevent himself from listening. It seemed to him that he heard the words 'Two hundred and fifty,' but he could not be sure. What a price!—for such a thing. His own blood ran warm and quick.
As he stood at the further end of the little terrace ruminating,Cuningham touched him on the shoulder.
'I say, have you got anything to show upstairs?'
Fenwick turned to see in the sparkling eyes and confident bearing of the Scotchman, success writ large, expressing itself in an impulse of generosity.
'Yes—I've got a picture nearly finished.'
'Come and be introduced to Findon. He's a crank—but a good sort—lots of money—thinks he knows everything about art—they all do—give him his head when he talks.'
Fenwick nodded, and followed Cuningham back to the studio, where Lord Findon was now examining Watson's picture with no assistance whatever from the artist, who seemed to have been struck with dumbness.
Fenwick was introduced to a remarkably tall and handsome man, with the bearing of a sportsman or a soldier, who greeted him with a cordial shake of the hand, and a look of scrutiny so human and kindly that the very sharp curiosity which was in truth the foundation of it passed without offence. Lord Findon was indeed curious about everything; interested in everything; and a dabbler in most artistic pursuits. He liked the society of artists; and he was accustomed to spend some hundreds, or even thousands, a year out of his enormous income, in the purchase of modern pictures. Possibly the sense of power over human lives which these acquisitions gave him pleased him even more than the acquisitions themselves.
He asked Fenwick a few easy questions, sitting rakishly on the edge of a tilted chair, his hat slipping back on his handsome, grizzled head. Where did he come from—with whom had he studied—what were his plans? Had he ever been abroad? No. Strange! The artists nowadays neglected travel. 'But you go! Beg your way, paint your way—but go! Go before the wife and the babies come! Matrimony is the deuce. Don't you agree with me, Philip?' He laid a familiar hand on the artist's arm.
'Take care!' said Cuningham, laughing. 'You don't know what I may have been up to this summer.'
Findon shrugged his shoulders. 'I know a wise man when I see him. But the fools there are about! Well, I take a strong line'—he waved his hand, with a kind of laughing pomposity, rolling his words—'whenever I see a young fellow marrying before he has got his training—before he has seen a foreign gallery—before he can be sure of a year's income ahead—above all, before he knows anything at all aboutwomen, and the different ways in which they can play the devil with you!—well, I give him up—I don't go to see his pictures—I don't bother about him any more. The man's an ass—must be an ass!—let him bray his bray! Why, you remember Perry?—Marindin?'
On which there followed a rattling catalogue of matrimonial failures in the artist world, amusing enough—perhaps a little cruel. Cuningham laughed. Watson, on whom Lord Findon's whole personality seemed to have an effect more irritating than agreeable, fidgeted with his brushes. He struck in presently with the dry remark that artists were not the only persons who made imprudent marriages.
Lord Findon sprang up at once, and changed the subject. His youngest son, the year before, had married the nurse who had pulled him through typhoid—and was still in exile, and unforgiven.
Meanwhile no one had noticed John Fenwick. He stood behind the other two while Lord Findon was talking—frowning sometimes and restless—a movement now and then in lips and body, as though he were about to speak—yet not speaking. It was one of those moments when a man feels a band about his tongue, woven by shyness or false shame, or social timidity. He knows that he ought to speak; but the moment passes and he has not spoken. And between him and the word unsaid there rises on the instant a tiny streamlet of division, which is to grow and broaden with the nights and days, till it flows, a stream of fate, not to be turned back or crossed; and all the familiar fields of life are ruined and blotted out.
Finally, as the great patron was going, Cuningham whispered a word in his ear. Lord Findon turned to Fenwick.
'You're in this house, too? Have you anything you'd let me see?'
Fenwick, flushed and stammering, begged him to walk upstairs. Cuningham's puzzled impression was that he gave the invitation reluctantly, but could not make up his mind not to give it.
They marched upstairs, Lord Findon and Cuningham behind.
'Does he ever sell?' said Lord Findon, in Cuningham's ear, nodding towards the broad shoulders and black head of Watson just in front.
'Not often,' said Cuningham, after a pause.
'How, then, does he afford himself?' said the other, smiling.
'Oh! he has means—just enough to keep him from starving. He's a dear old fellow! He has too many ideas for this wicked world.'
Cuningham spoke with a pleasant loyalty. Lord Findon shrugged his shoulders.
'The ideas are too lugubrious! And this young fellow—thisFenwick—where did you pick him up?'
Cuningham explained.
'A character!—perhaps a genius?' said Findon. 'He has a clever, quarrelsome eye. Unmarried? Good Lord, I hope so, after the way I've been going on.'
Cuningham laughed. 'We've seen no sign of a wife. But I really know nothing about him.'
They were entering the upper room, and at sight of the large picture it contained, Lord Findon exclaimed:
'My goodness!—what an ambitious thing!'
The three men gathered in front of the picture. Fenwick lingered nervously behind them.
'What do you call it?' said Lord Findon, putting up his glasses.
'The "Genius Loci,"' said Fenwick, fumbling a little with the words.
It represented a young woman seated on the edge of a Westmoreland ghyll or ravine. Behind her the white water of the beck flowed steeply down from shelf to shelf; beyond the beck rose far-receding walls of mountain, purple on purple, blue on blue. Light, scantily nourished trees, sycamore or mountain-ash, climbed the green sides of the ghyll, and framed the woman's form. She sat on a stone, bending over a frail new-born lamb upon her lap, whereof the mother lay beside her. Against her knee leaned a fair-haired child. The pitiful concern in the woman's lovely eyes was reflected in the soft wonder of the child's. Both, it seemed, were of the people. The drawing was full of rustical suggestion, touched here and there by a harsh realism that did but heighten the general harmony. The woman's grave comeliness flowered naturally, as it were, out of the scene. She was no model posing with a Westmoreland stream for background. She seemed a part of the fells; their silences, their breezes, their pure waters, had passed into her face.
But it was the execution of the picture which perhaps specially arrested the attention of the men examining it.
'Eclectic stuff!' said Watson to himself, presently, as he turned away—'seen with other men's eyes!'
But on Lord Findon and on Cuningham the effect was of another kind. The picture seemed to them also a combination of many things, or rather of attempts at many things—Burne-Jones' mystical colour—the rustic character of a Bastien-Lepage or a Millet—with the jewelled detail of a fourteenth-century Florentine, so wonderful were the harebells in the foreground, the lichened rocks, the dabbled fleece of the lamb: but they realised that it was a combination that only a remarkable talent could have achieved.
'By Jove!' said Findon, turning on the artist with animation, 'where did you learn all this?'
'I've been painting a good many years,' said Fenwick, his cheeks aglow. 'But I've got on a lot this last six months.'
'I suppose, in the country, you couldn't get properly at the model?'
'No. I've had no chances.'
'Let's all pray to have none,' said Cuningham, good-naturedly. 'I had no notion you were such a swell.'
But his light-blue eyes as they rested on Fenwick were less friendly. His Scotch prudence was alarmed. Had he in truth introduced a genius unawares to his only profitable patron?
'Who is the model, if I may ask?' said Lord Findon, still examining the picture.
The reply came haltingly, after a pause.
'Oh!—some one I knew in Westmoreland.'
The speaker had turned red. Naturally no one asked any further questions. Cuningham noticed that the face was certainly from the same original as the face in the sketch-book, but he kept his observation to himself.
Lord Findon, with the eagerness of a Londoner discovering some new thing, fell into quick talk with Fenwick; looked him meanwhile up and down, his features, bearing, clothes; noticed his North-Country accent, and all the other signs of the plebeian. And presently Fenwick, placed at his ease, began for the first time to expand, became argumentative and explosive. In a few minutes he was laying down the law in his Westmoreland manner—attacking the Academy—denouncing certain pictures of the year—with a flushed, confident face and a gesticulating hand. Watson observed him with some astonishment; Lord Findon looked amused—and pulled out his watch.
'Oh, well, everybody kicks the Academy—but it's pretty strong, as you'll find when you have to do with it.'
'Have you been writing those articles in theMirror?' said Watson, abruptly.
'I'm not a journalist.' The young man's tone was sulky. He got up and his loquacity disappeared.
'Well, I must be off,' said Lord Findon. 'But you're coming to dinner with me to-morrow night, Cuningham, aren't you? Will you excuse a short invitation'—he turned, after a moment's pause, to Fenwick—'and accompany him? Lady Findon would, I'm sure, be glad to make your acquaintance. St. James's Square—102. All right'—as Fenwick, colouring violently, stammered an acceptance—'we shall expect you. Aurevoir! I'm afraid it's no good to askyou!' The last words were addressed smilingly to Watson, as Lord Findon, with outstretched hand, passed through the door, which Cuningham opened for him.
'Thank you,' said Watson, with a grave inclination—'I'm a hermit.'
The door closed on a gay and handsome presence. Lord Findon could not possibly have been accused of anything so ill-mannered as patronage. But there was in his manner a certain consciousness of power—of vantage-ground; a certain breath of autocracy. The face of Watson showed it as he returned to look closely into Fenwick's picture.
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.
'Iamglad 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, hehadwritten 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 theMirror, 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.
At this point he returned to his picture, grappling with it afresh in a feverish pleasure. He caught up a mirror and looked at it reversed; he put in a bold accent or two; fumed over the lack of brilliancy in some colour he had bought the day before; and ended in a fresh burst of satisfaction. By Jove, it was good! Lord Findon had been evidently 'bowled over' by it—Cuningham too. As for that sour-faced fellow, Watson, what did it matter what he thought?
Itmustsucceed! Suddenly he found himself on his knees beside his picture, praying that he might finish it prosperously, that it might be given a good place in the Academy, and bring him fame and fortune.
Then he got up sheepishly, looking furtively round the room to be sure that the door was shut, and no one had seen him. He was a good deal ashamed of himself, for he was not in truth of a religious mind, and he had, by now, few or no orthodox beliefs. But in all matters connected with his pictures the Evangelical tradition of his youth still held him. He was the descendant of generations of men and women who had prayed on all possible occasions—that customers might be plentiful and business good—that the young cattle might do well, and the hay be got in dry—that their children might prosper—and they themselves be delivered from rheumatism, or toothache, or indigestion. Fenwick's prayer to some 'magnified non-natural man' afar off, to come and help him with his picture, was of the same kind. Only he was no longer whole-hearted and simple about it, as he had been when Phoebe married him, as she was still.
He put on his studio coat and sat down to his work again, in a very tender, repentant mood. What on earth had possessed him to make that answer to Lord Findon—to let him and those other fellows take him for unmarried? He protested, in excuse, that Westmoreland folk are 'close,' and don't like talking about their own affairs. He came of a secretive, suspicious stock; and had no mind at any time to part with unnecessary facts about himself. As talkative as you please about art and opinion; of his own concerns not a word! London had made him all the more cautious and reticent. No one knew anything about him except as an artist. He always posted his letters himself; and he believed that neither his landlady nor anybody else suspected him of a wife.
But to-day he had carried things too far—and a guilty discomfort weighed upon him. What was to be done? Should he on the first opportunity set himself right with Lord Findon—speak easily and unexpectedly of Phoebe and the child? Clearly what would have been simplicity itself at first was now an awkwardness. Lord Findon would be puzzled—chilled. He would suppose there was something to be ashamed of—some skeleton in the cupboard. And especially would he take it ill that Fenwick had allowed him to run on with his diatribes against matrimony as though he were talking to a bachelor. Then the lie about the picture. It had been the shy, foolish impulse of a moment. But how explain it to Lord Findon?
Fenwick stood there tortured by an intense and morbid distress; realising how much this rich and illustrious person had already entered into his day dream. For all his pride as an artist—and he was full of it—his trembling, crude ambition had already seized on Lord Findon as a stepping-stone. He did not know whether he could stoop to court a patron. His own temper had to be reckoned with. But to lose him at the outset by a silly falsehood would be galling. A man who has to live in the world as a married man must not begin by making a mystery of his wife. He felt the social stupidity of what he had done, yet could not find in himself the courage to set it right.
Well, well, let him only make a hit in the Academy, sell his picture, and get some commissions. Then Phoebe should appear, and smile down astonishment. Hisgaucherieshould be lost in his success.
He tossed about that night, sleepless, and thinking of Cuningham's two hundred and fifty pounds—for a picture so cheaply, commonly clever. It filled him with the thirst toarrive. He had more brains, more drawing, more execution—more everything!—than Cuningham. No doubt a certain prudence and tact were wanted—tact in managing yourself and your gifts.
Well!—in spite of Watson's rude remark, what human beingknewhe was writing those articles in theMirror? He threw out his challenge to the darkness, and so fell asleep.
Fenwick had never spent a more arduous hour than that which he devoted to the business of dressing for Lord Findon's dinner-party. It was his first acquaintance with dress-clothes. He had, indeed, dined once or twice at the tables of the Westmoreland gentry in the course of his portrait-painting experiences. But there had been no 'party,' and it had been perfectly understood that for the Kendal bookseller's son a black Sunday coat was sufficient. Now, however, he was to meet the great world on its own terms; and though he tried hard to disguise his nervousness from his sponsor, Philip Cuningham, he did not succeed. Cuningham instructed him where to buy a second-hand dress-suit that very nearly fitted him, and he had duly provided himself with gloves and tie. When all was done he put his infinitesimal looking-glass on the floor of his attic, flanked it with two guttering candles, and walked up and down before it in a torment, observing his own demeanour and his coat's, saying 'How d'ye do?' and 'Good-bye' to an imaginary host, or bending affably to address some phantom lady across the table.
When at last he descended the stairs, he felt as though he were just escaped from a wrestling-match. He followed Cuningham into the omnibus with nerves all on edge. He hated the notion, too, of taking an omnibus to go and dine in St. James's Square. But Cuningham's Scotch thriftiness scouted the proposal of a hansom.
On the way Fenwick suddenly asked his companion whether there was a Lady Findon. Cuningham, startled by the ignorance of hisprotégé, drew out as quickly as he couldla carte du pays.
Lady Findon, the second wife, fat, despotic, and rich, rather noisy, and something of a character, a political hostess, a good friend, and a still better hater; two sons, silent, good-looking and clever, one in the brewery that provided his mother with her money, the other in the Hussars; two daughters not long 'introduced'—one pretty—the other bookish and rather plain; so ran the catalogue.
'I believe there is another daughter by the first wife—married—something queer about the husband. But I've never seen her. She doesn't often appear—Hullo—here we are.'
They alighted at the Haymarket, and as they walked down the street Fenwick found himself in the midst of the evening whirl of the West End. The clubs were at their busiest; men passed them in dress-suits and overcoats like themselves, and the street was full of hansoms, whence the faces of well-dressed women, enveloped in soft silks and furs, looked out.
Fenwick felt himself treading a new earth. At such an hour he was generally wending his way to a Bloomsbury eating-house, where he dined for eighteenpence; he was a part of the striving, moneyless student-world.
But here, from this bustling Haymarket with its gay, hurrying figures, there breathed new forces, new passions which bewildered him. As he was looking at the faces in the carriages, the jewels and feathers and shining stuffs, he thought suddenly and sharply of Phoebe sitting alone at her supper in the tiny cottage room. His heart smote him a little. But, after all, was he not on her business as well as his own?
The door of Lord Findon's house opened before them. At sight of the liveried servants within, Fenwick's pride asserted itself. He walked in, head erect, as though the place belonged to him.
Lord Findon came pleasantly to greet them as they entered the drawing-room, and took them up to Lady Findon. Cuningham she already knew, and she gave a careless glance and a touch of the hand to his companion. It was her husband's will to ask these raw, artistic youths to dinner, and she had to put up with it; but really the difficulty of knowing whom to send them in with was enormous.
'I am glad to make your acquaintance,' she said, mechanically, to Fenwick, as he stood awkwardly beside her, while her eyes searched the door for a Cabinet Minister and his wife who were the latest guests.
'Thank you; I too am pleased to make yours,' said Fenwick, nervously pulling at his gloves, and furious with his ownmalaise.
Lady Findon's eyebrows lifted in amusement. She threw him another glance.
Good-looking!—but really Findon should wait till they were a littledécrotté.
'I hear your picture is charming,' she said, distractedly; and then, suddenly perceiving the expected figures, she swept forward to receive them.
'Very sorry, my dear fellow, we have no lady for you; but you will be next my daughter, Madame de Pastourelles,' said Lord Findon, a few minutes later, in his ear, passing him with a nod and a smile. His gay, half-fatherly ways with these rising talents were well known. They made part of his fame with his contemporaries; a picturesque element in his dinner-parties which the world appreciated.
Fenwick found his way rather sulkily to the dining-room. It annoyed him that Cuningham had a lady and he had none. His companion on the road downstairs was the private secretary, who tried good-naturedly to point out the family portraits on the staircase wall. But Fenwick scarcely replied. He stalked on, his great black eyes glancing restlessly from side to side; and the private secretary thought him a boor.
As he was standing bewildered inside the dining-room a servant caught hold of him and piloted him to his seat. A lady in white, who was already seated in the next chair, looked up and smiled.
'My father told me we were to be neighbours. I must introduce myself.'
She held out a small hand, which, in his sudden pleasure, Fenwick grasped more cordially than was necessary. She withdrew it smiling, and he sat down, feeling himself an impulsive ass, intimidated by the lights, the flowers, the multitude of his knives and forks, and most of all, perhaps, by this striking and brilliant creature beside him.
Madame de Pastourelles was of middle height, slenderly built, with pale-brown hair, and a delicately white face, of a very perfect oval. She had large, quiet eyes, darker than her hair; features small, yet of a noble outline—strength in refinement. The proud cutting of the nose and mouth gave delight; it was a pride so unconscious, so masked in sweetness, that it challenged without wounding. The short upper lip was sensitive and gay; the eyes ranged in a smiling freedom; the neck and arms were beautiful. Her dress, according to the Whistlerian phrase just coming into vogue, might have been called an 'arrangement in white.' The basis of it seemed to be white velvet; and breast and hair were powdered with diamonds delicately set in old flower-like shapes.
'You are in the same house with Mr. Cuningham?' she asked, when a dean had said grace and the soup was served. Her voice was soft and courteous; the irritation in Fenwick felt the soothing of it.
'I am on the floor above.'
'He paints charming things.'
Fenwick hesitated.
'You think so?' he said, bluntly, turning to look at her.
She coloured slightly and laughed.
'Do you mean to put me in the Palace of Truth?'
'Of course I would if I could,' said Fenwick, also laughing. 'But I suppose ladies never say quite what they mean.'
'Oh yes, they do. Well, then, I am not much enamoured of Mr.Cuningham's pictures. I likehim, and my father likes his painting.'
'Lord Findon admires that kind of thing?'
'Besides a good many other kinds. Oh! my father has a dreadfully catholic taste. He tells me you haven't been abroad yet?'
Fenwick acknowledged it.
'Ah, well; of course you'll go. All artists do—except'—she dropped her voice—'the gentleman opposite.'
Fenwick looked, and beheld a personage scarcely, indeed, to be seen at all for his very bushy hair, whiskers, and moustache, from which emerged merely the tip of a nose and a pair of round eyes in spectacles. As, however, the hair was of an orange colour and the eyes of a piercing and pinlike sharpness, the eclipse of feature was not a loss of effect. And as the flamboyant head was a tolerably familiar object in the shop-windows of the photographers and in the illustrated papers, Fenwick recognised almost immediately one of the most popular artists of the day—Mr. Herbert Sherratt.
Fenwick flushed hotly.
'Lord Findon doesn't admirehiswork?' he said, almost with fierceness, turning to his companion.
'He hates his pictures and collects his drawings.'
'Drawings!' Fenwick shrugged his shoulders. 'Anybody can make a clever drawing. It's putting on the paint that counts. Why doesn't he go abroad?'
'Oh, well, he does go to Holland. But he thinks Italian painting all stuff, and that so many Madonnas and saints encourage superstition. But what's the use of talking? They have to station a policeman beside his picture in the Academy to keep off the crowd. Hush-sh! He is looking this way.'
She turned her head, and Fenwick feared she was lost to him. He managed to get in another question. 'Are there any other painters here?'
She pointed out the president of the Academy, a sculptor, and an art-critic, at whose name Fenwick curled his lip, full of the natural animosity of the painter to the writer.
'And, of course, you know my neighbour?'
Fenwick looked hastily, and saw a very handsome youth bending forward to answer a question which Lord Findon had addressed to him from across the table; a face in the 'grand style'—almost the face of a Greek—pure in outline, bronzed by foreign suns, and lit by eyes expressing so strong a force of personality that, but for the sweetness with which it was tempered, the spectator might have been rather repelled than won. When the young man answered Lord Findon, the voice was, like the face, charged—perhaps over-charged—with meaning and sensibility.
'I took Madame de Pastourelles to see it to-day,' the youth was saying. 'She thought it as glorious as I did.'
'Oh! you are a pair of enthusiasts,' said Lord Findon. 'I keep my head.'
The 'it' turned out to be a Titian portrait from the collection of an old Roman family, lately brought to London and under offer to the National Gallery, of which Lord Findon was a trustee.
Madame de Pastourelles looked towards her father, confirming what the unknown youth had said. Her eyes had kindled. She began to talk rapidly in defence of her opinion. Between her, Lord Findon, and her neighbour there arose a conversation which made Fenwick's ears tingle. How many things and persons and places it touched upon that were wholly unknown to him! Pictures in foreign museums—Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg—the names of French or German experts—quotations from Italian books or newspapers—the three dealt lightly and familiarly with a world in which Fenwick had scarcely a single landmark. How clever she was! how charming! What knowledge without a touch of pedantry! And how the handsome youth kept up with her—nay, rather, led her, with a mastery, a resource, to which she always yielded in case of any serious difference of opinion! It seemed that they had been abroad together—had seen many sights in each other's company—had many common friends.
Fenwick felt himself strangely sore and jealous as he listened. Who was this man? Some young aristocrat, no doubt, born silver spoon in mouth—one of your idle, insolent rich, with nothing to do but make a hobby of art, and patronise artists. He loathed the breed.
Her voice startled him back from these unspoken tirades, and once more he found her eyes fixed upon him. It provoked him to feel that their scrutiny made him self-conscious—anxious to please. They were so gentle, so gay!—and yet behind the first expression there sat what seemed to him the real personality, shrewd, critical, and remote.
'You must see this picture,' she said, kindly. 'It's glorious!'
'Where is it?'
'In a house near here. But father could get you in.'
He hesitated, then laughed, ungraciously.
'I don't seem to have finished yet with the National Gallery.Who—please—is the gentleman on your right?'
She smiled.
'Oh! don't you know him? You must let me introduce him. It is Mr.Arthur Welby. Doesn't he talk well?'
She introduced them. Welby received the introduction with a readiness—a touch of eagerness indeed—which seemed to show a mind favourably prepared for it.
'Lord Findon tells me you're sending in a most awfully jolly thing to the Academy!' he said, bending across Madame de Pastourelles, his musical voice full of cordiality. Fenwick made a muttered reply. It might have been thought he disliked being talked to about his own work. Welby accordingly changed the subject at once; he returned to the picture he had been pressing on Lord Findon.
'Haven't you seen it? You really should.' But this elicited even less response. Fenwick glared at him—apparently tongue-tied. Then Madame de Pastourelles and her neighbour talked to each other, endeavouring to draw in the stranger. In vain. They fell back, naturally, into the talk of intimates, implying a thousand common memories and experiences; and Fenwick found himself left alone.
His mind burned with annoyance and self-disgust. Why did he let these people intimidate him? Why was he so ridiculously self-conscious?—so incapable of holding his own? He knew all about Arthur Welby; his name and fame were in all the studios. The author of the picture of the year—in the opinion, at least, of the cultivated minority for whom rails and policemen were not the final arbiters of merit; glorified in the speeches at the Academy banquet; and already overwhelmed with more commissions than he could take—Welby should have been one of the best hated of men. On the contrary, his mere temperament had drawn the teeth of that wild beast, Success. Well-born, rich, a social favourite, trained in Paris and Italy, an archaeologist and student as well as a painter, he commanded the world as he pleased. Society asked him to dinners, and he gave himself no professional airs and went when he could. But among his fellows he lived a happy comrade's life, spending his gifts and his knowledge without reserve, always ready to help a man in a tight place, to praise a friend's picture, to take up a friend's quarrel. He took his talent and his good-fortune so simply that the world must needs insist upon them, instead of contesting them.
As for his pictures, they were based on the Italian tradition—rich, accurate, learned, full of literary allusion and reminiscence. In Fenwick's eyes, young as was their author, they were of the past rather than of the future. He contemptuously thought of them as belonging to a deadgenre. But the man who painted them coulddraw.
Meanwhile he seemed to have lost Madame de Pastourelles, and must needs fall back on the private secretary beside him. This gentleman, who had already entered him on the tablets of the mind as a mannerless outsider, was not particularly communicative. But at least Fenwick learned the names of the other guests. The well-known Ambassador beside Lady Findon, with a shrewd, thin, sulky face, and very black eyes under whitish hair—eyes turned much more frequently on the pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet Minister—of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the Cabinet—and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;—all these he learned gradually to discriminate.
So this was the great world. He was stormily pleased to be in it, and at the same time scornful of it. It seemed to contain not a few ancient shams and hollow pretenders—
Ah! once more the soft, ingratiating voice beside him. Madame de Pastourelles was expressing a flattering wish to see his picture, of which her father had talked so much.
'And he says you have found such a beautiful model—or, rather, better than beautiful—characteristic.'
Fenwick stared at her. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'She is my wife.' But he did not say it. He imagined her look of surprise—'Ah, my father had no idea!'—imagined it with a morbid intensity, and saw no way of confronting or getting round it; not at the dinner-table, anyway—with all these eyes and ears about him—above all, with Lord Findon opposite. Why, they might think he had been ashamed of Phoebe!—that there was some reason for hiding her away. It was ridiculous—most annoying and absurd; but now that the thing had happened, he must really choose his own moment for unravelling the coil.
So he stammered something unintelligible about a 'Westmoreland type,' and then hastily led the talk to some other schemes he had in mind. With the sense of having escaped a danger he found his tongue for the first time, and the power of expressing himself.
Madame de Pastourelles listened attentively—drew him out, indeed—made him show himself to the best advantage. And presently, at a moment of pause, she said, with a smile and a shrug, 'How happy you are to have an art! Now I—'
She let her hand fall with a little plaintive movement.
'I am sure you paint,' said Fenwick, eagerly.
'No.'
'Then you are musical?'
'Not at all. I embroider—'
'All women should,' said Fenwick, trying for a free and careless air.
'I read—'
'You do not need to say it.'
She opened her eyes at this readiness of reply; but still pursued:
'And I have a Chinese pug.'
'And no children?' The words rose to Fenwick's lips, but remained unspoken. Perhaps she divined them, for she began hastily to describe her dog—its tricks and fidelities. Fenwick could meet her here; for a mongrel fox-terrier—taken, a starving waif, out of the streets—had been his companion since almost the first month of his solitude. Each stimulated the other, and they fell into those legends of dog-life in which every dog-lover believes, however sceptical he may be in other directions. Till presently she said, with a sigh and a stiffening of her delicate features:
'But mine shows some symptoms of paralysis. He was run over last summer. I'm afraid it will be long and painful.'
Fenwick replied that she should send for the vet. and have the dog painlessly killed.
'No. I shall nurse him.'
'Why should you look on at suffering?'
'Why not—if sometimes he enjoys life?'
'I am thinking of the mistress.'
'Oh, for us,' she said, quickly, 'for me—it is good to be with suffering.'
As she spoke, she drew herself slightly more erect. Neither tone nor manner showed softness, made any appeal. The words seemed to have dropped from her, and the strange pride and dignity she at once threw around them made a veiling cloud through which only a man entirely without the finer perceptions would have tried to penetrate. Fenwick, for all his surfacegaucherie, did not attempt it. But he attacked her generalisation. With some vehemence he developed against it a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy—love of the earth and its natural pleasures—courage to take and dare—avoidance of suffering—and war on asceticism. He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality, whatever value they might have as a philosophy.
She listened with a charming kindness, laughing now and then, putting in a humorous comment or two, and never by another word betraying her own position. But he was more and more conscious of the double self in her—of the cultivated, social self she was bringing into play for his benefit, and of something behind—a spirit watchful and still—wrapt in a great melancholy—or perhaps a great rebellion? And by this sense of something concealed or strongly restrained, she began to affect his imagination, and so, presently, to absorb his attention. Something exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive nature an excited response. He began to envisage what these highly trained women of the upper class, theseraffinéesof the world, may be for those who understand them—a stimulus, an enigma, an education.
It flashed on him that women of this type could teach him much that he wanted to know; and his ambition seized on the idea. But what chance that she would ever give another thought to the raw artist to whom her father had flung a passing invitation?
He made haste, indeed, to prove his need of her or some other Egeria; for she was no sooner departed with the other ladies than he came to mischief. Left alone with the gentlemen, his temperament asserted itself. He had no mind in any company to be merely a listener. Moreover, that slight, as he regarded it, of sending him down without a lady, still rankled; and last, but not least, he had drunk a good deal of champagne, to which he was quite unaccustomed. So that when Lord Findon fell into a discussion with the Ambassador of Irving'sHamletandOthello, then among the leading topics of London—when the foreigner politely but emphatically disparaged the English actor and Lord Findon with zeal defended him—who should break into the august debate but this strong-browed, black-eyed fellow, from no one knew where, whose lack of some of the smaller conventions had already been noticed by a few of the company.
At first all looked well. A London dinner-party loves novelty, and is always ready to test the stranger within its gates. Fenwick slipped into the battle as a supporter of Lord Findon's argument, and his host with smiling urbanity welcomed him to the field. But in a few minutes the newcomer had ravaged the whole of it. The older men were silenced, and Fenwick was leaning across the table, gesticulating with one hand, and lifting his port-wine with the other, addressing now Lord Findon and now the Ambassador—who stared at him in amazement—with an assurance that the world only allows to its oldest favourites. Lord Findon in vain tried to stop him.
'Didn't know this was to be a dinner with speeches,' murmured the financier, after a few minutes, in his neighbour's ear. 'Think I'll get up and propose a vote of thanks to the chairman.'
'There ought, at least, to be a time-limit,' said the neighbour, with a shrug. 'Where on earth did Findon pick him up?'
'I say, what an awfully rum chap!' said the young son of the house—wondering—to Arthur Welby. 'What does he talk like that for?'
'He doesn't talk badly,' said Welby, whose mouth showed the laughter within.
Meanwhile Fenwick—loud-voiced, excited—had brought his raid to a climax by an actual attack upon the stately Frenchman opposite, whose slight sarcastic look pricked him intolerably. All other conversation at the table fell dumb.
Lord Findon coloured, and rose.
'You are a great deal more sure of my own opinion than I am myself,' he said, coldly. 'I am much obliged to you, but—shall we adjourn this conversation?'
As the men walked upstairs, Fenwick realised that he had blundered; he felt himself isolated and in disfavour. Arthur Welby had approached him, but Lord Findon had rather pointedly drawn an arm through Welby's and swept him away. No one else spoke to him, and even the private secretary, who had before befriended him, left him severely alone. None of the ladies in the drawing-room upstairs showed, as it seemed to him, any desire for his company, and he was reduced to looking at a stand of miniatures near the door, while his heart swelled fiercely. So this was what society meant?—a wretched pleasure purchased on degrading terms! A poor dependant like himself, he supposed, was to be seen and not heard—must speak when he was spoken to, play chorus, and whisper humbleness. As to meeting these big-wigs on equal terms, that clearly was not expected. An artist may be allowed to know something about art; on any other subject let him listen to his betters.
He said to himself that he was sick of the whole business; and he would gladly have slipt through the open door down the stairs, and out of the house. He was restrained, however, by the protest of a sore ambition which would not yet admit defeat. Had he set Lord Findon against him?—ruined the chance of a purchaser for his picture and of a patron for the future? Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cuningham, neat, amiable, and self-possessed, sitting in a corner by Lady Findon, who smiled and chatted incessantly. And it was clear to him that Welby was the spoilt child of the room. Wherever he went men and women grouped themselves about him; there was a constant eagerness to capture him, an equal reluctance to let him go.
'Well, I'm as good as he—as either of them,' thought Fenwick fiercely, as he handled a Cosway. 'Only they can talk these people's lingo, and I can't. I can paint as well as they any day—and I'll be bound, if they let me alone, I could talk as well. Why do people ask you to their houses and then ill-treat you? Damn them!'
Meanwhile, Lord Findon had had a few whispered words with his daughter in an inner room.
'My dear!'—throwing up his hands—'abarbarian! Can't have him here again.'
'Mr. Fenwick, papa?'
'Of course. Cuningham ought to have warned me. However, I suppose I brought it on myself. I do these rash things, and must pay for them. He was so rude to De Chailles that I have had to apologise.'
'Poor papa! Where is he?'
'In the other room—looking at things. Better leave him alone.'
'Oh no; he'll feel himself neglected.'
'Well, let him. A man ought to be made to understand that he can't behave like that.'