Fenwick's Career Part 37

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 Eugenie 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 entertain _jealousy_ of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugenie 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 pa.s.sionate pride and indignation--resting, no doubt ultimately, on those weeks at Versailles when even he, with all the other bystanders, had supposed that Eugenie would marry this man.

His mood, indeed, had been a curious combination of wounded affection with a cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances, but for the frequent presence of Eugenie, 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 crus.h.i.+ng effect upon a miserable man.

About Christmas, Lord Findon's health had again caused his family anxiety. He was ordered to Cannes, and Eugenie accompanied him. Before she went she had gone despairingly once more through all the ingenious but quite fruitless inquiries inst.i.tuted 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 a.s.sure you.'

The young man stood looking at the artist, in an att.i.tude 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 with _empress.e.m.e.nt_, 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!--_delighted_ to 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 furnis.h.i.+ng of his house--but after all he had earned large sums of money. He sat gloomily over his meal--frowning--and trying to remember. And once, amid the foggy darkness, there opened a vision of a Westmoreland stream, and a pleading face upturned to his in the moonlight--'And then, you know, I could look after money! You're _dreadfully_ bad about money, John!'

The echo of that voice in his ears made him restless. He rose and set forth again--toward Fitzroy Square.

On the way his thoughts recurred to the letter he had found waiting for him at the lawyer's. It came from Phoebe's cousin, Freddy Tolson.

Messrs. Butlin had traced this man anew--to a mining town in New South Wales. He had been asked to come to England and testify--no matter at what expense. In the letter just received--bearing witness in its improved writing and spelling to the prosperous development of the writer--he declined to come, repeating that he knew nothing whatever of his Cousin Phoebe's where-abouts, nor of her reasons for leaving her husband. He gave a fresh and longer account of his conversation with her, as far as he could remember it at this distance of time; and this longer account contained the remark that she had asked him questions about other colonies than Australia, to which he was himself bound. He thought Canada had been mentioned--the length of the pa.s.sage 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 Quebec--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 hoa.r.s.e whisper. 'My right lung has been getting rotten for a year past, and at Ma.r.s.eilles it happened to break. That's my explanation, anyway, and it does as well as the doctor's.--Well, how are you?'

Fenwick s.h.i.+fted 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 amus.e.m.e.nt of his friend.