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Fenwick's Career

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Title: Fenwick's Career

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12403]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FENWICK'S CAREER ***

FENWICK'S CAREER

by

MRS HUMPHRY WARD

1910







TO

MY DEAR SISTER

J.F.H.

MAY, 1906




[Illustration: _Robin Ghyll Cottage_]




A PREFATORY WORD


The story told in the present book owes something to the past, in its
picturing of the present, as its predecessors have done; though in
much less degree. The artist, as I hold, may gather from any field,
so long as he sacredly respects what other artists have already made
their own by the transmuting processes of the mind. To draw on the
conceptions or the phrases that have once passed through the warm
minting of another's brain, is, for us moderns, at any rate, the
literary crime of crimes. But to the teller of stories, all that is
recorded of the real life of men, as well as all that his own eyes can
see, is offered for the enrichment of his tale. This is a clear and
simple principle; yet it has been often denied. To insist upon it is,
in my belief, to uphold the true flag of Imagination, and to defend
the wide borders of Romance.

In addition to this word of notice, which my readers will perhaps
accept from me once for all, this small preface must also contain
a word of thanks to my friend Mr. Sterner, whose beautiful art has
contributed to this story, as to several of its forerunners. I have
to thank him, indeed, not only as an artist, but as a critic. In the
interpreting of Fenwick, he has given me valuable aid; has corrected
mistakes, and illumined his own painter's craft for me, as none but
a painter can. But his poetic intelligence as an artist is what makes
him so rare a colleague. In the first lovely drawing of the husband
and wife sitting by the Westmoreland stream, Phoebe's face and look
will be felt, I think, by any sympathetic reader, as a light on the
course of the story; reappearing, now in storm, as in the picture of
her despair, before the portrait of her supposed rival; and now in
tremulous afterglow, as in the scene with which the drawings close. To
be so understood and so bodied forth is great good-fortune; and I beg
to be allowed this word of gratitude.

The lines quoted on page 166 are taken, as any lover of modern poetry
will recognise, from the 'Elegy on the Death of a Lady,' by Mr. Robert
Bridges, first printed in 1873.

MARY A. WARD.




CONTENTS


PART I.   WESTMORELAND

PART II.  LONDON

PART III. AFTER TWELVE YEARS





NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS


FENWICK'S COTTAGE

This cottage, known as Robin Ghyll, is situated near the Langdale
Pikes in Westmoreland. It is owned by Miss Dorothy Ward, the author's
daughter. The older part of the building served as the model for
Fenwick's cottage.

HUSBAND AND WIFE

From an original drawing by Albert Sterner.

EUGÉNIE

From an original drawing by Albert Sterner.

PHOEBE'S RIVAL

From an original drawing by Albert Sterner.

'BE MY MESSENGER'

From an original drawing by Albert Sterner.

ROBIN GHYLL COTTAGE

A nearer view of Miss Ward's cottage. (See frontispiece.)

FENWICK STOOD LOOKING AT THE CANVAS

From an original drawing by Albert Sterner.


All of the illustrations in this volume are photogravures, and except
where otherwise stated, are from photographs taken especially for this
edition.





INTRODUCTION


Fenwick's career was in the first instance suggested by some incidents
in the life of the painter George Romney. Romney, as is well known,
married a Kendal girl in his early youth, and left her behind him in
the North, while he went to seek training and fortune in London. There
he fell under other influences, and finally under the fascinations
of Lady Hamilton, and it was not till years later that he returned to
Westmoreland and his deserted wife to die.

The story attracted me because it was a Westmoreland story, and
implied, in part at least, that setting of fell and stream, wherein,
whether in the flesh or in the spirit, I am always a willing wanderer.
But in the end it really gave me nothing but a bare situation
into which I had breathed a wholly new meaning. For in Eugénie de
Pastourelles, who is Phoebe's unconscious rival, I tried to embody,
not the sensuous intoxicating power of an Emma Hamilton, but those
more exquisite and spiritual influences which many women have
exercised over some of the strongest and most virile of men. Fenwick
indeed possesses the painter's susceptibility to beauty. Beauty comes
to him and beguiles him, but it is a beauty akin to that of Michel
Angelo's 'Muse and dominant Lady, spirit-wed'--which yet, for all its
purity, is not, as Fenwick's case shows, without its tragic effects in
the world.

On looking through my notes, I find that this was not my first idea.
The distracting intervening woman was to have been of a commoner type,
intellectual indeed rather than sensuous, but yet of the predatory
type and class, which delights in the capture of man. When I began to
write the first scene in which Eugénie was to appear, she was still
nebulous and uncertain. Then she did appear--suddenly!--as though the
mists parted. It was not the woman I had been expecting and preparing
for. But I saw her quite distinctly; she imposed herself; and
thenceforward I had nothing to do but to draw her.

The drawing of Eugénie made perhaps my chief pleasure in the story,
combined with that of the two landscapes--the two sharply contrasted
landscapes--Westmoreland and Versailles, which form its main
background. I find in a note-book that it was begun 'early in May,
1905, at Robin Ghyll. Finished (at Stocks) on Tuesday night or rather
Wednesday morning, 1 A.M., Dec. 6, 1905. Deo Gratias!' And an earlier
note, written in Westmoreland itself, records some of the impressions
amid which the first chapters were written. I give it just as I find
it:

'The exquisiteness of the spring. The strong-limbed sycamores with
their broad expanding leaves. The leaping streams, and the small
waterfalls, white and foaming--the cherry blossom, the white
farms, the dark yews which are the northern cypresses--and the tall
upstanding firs and hollies, vigorously black against the delicate
bareness of the fells, like some passionate self-assertive life....

'The "old" statesman B----. His talk of the gentle democratic poet
who used to live in the cottage before us. "He wad never täak wi the
betther class o' foak--but he'd coom mony a time, an hae a crack wi my
missus an me."

'The swearing ploughman that I watched this morning--driving his
plough through old pastures and swearing at the horse--"Dang ye!
Darned old hoss! Pull up, will ye--_pull_ up, dang ye!"

'Elterwater, and the soft grouping of the hills. The blue lake, the
woods in tints of pale green and pinkish brown, nestling into the
fells, the copses white with wind flowers. Everywhere, softness and
austerity side by side--the "cheerful silence of the fells," the high
exhilarating air, dark tortured crags and ghylls--then a soft and
laughing scene, gentle woods, blue water, lovely outlines, and
flower-carpeted fields.

'The exquisite _colour_ of Westmoreland in May! The red of the autumn
still on the hills,--while the bluebells are rushing over the copses.'

The little cottage of Robin Ghyll, where the first chapters were
written, stands, sheltered by its sycamore, high on the fell-side,
above the road that leads to the foot of the Langdale Pikes. But--in
the dream-days when the Fenwicks lived there!--it was the _old_
cottage, as it was up to ten or fifteen years ago;--a deep-walled,
low-ceiled labourer's cottage of the sixteenth century, and before any
of the refinements and extensions of to-day were added.

The book was continued at Stocks, during a quiet summer. Then with
late September came fatigue and discouragement. It was imperative to
find some stimulus, some complete change of scene both for the tale
and its writer. Was it much browsing in Saint-Simon that suggested
to me Versailles? I cannot remember. At any rate by the beginning of
October we were settled in an apartment on the edge of the park and a
stone's throw from the palace. Some weeks of quickened energy and more
rapid work followed--and the pleasures of that chill golden autumn are
reflected in the later chapters of the book. Each sunny day was
more magnificent than the last. Yet there was no warmth in the
magnificence. The wind was strangely bitter; it was winter before the
time. And the cold splendour of the weather heightened the spell of
the great, dead, regal place; so that the figures and pageants of a
vanished world seemed to be still latent in the sharp bright air--a
filmy multitude.

This brilliance of an incomparable _décor_ followed me back to
Hertfordshire, and remained with me through winter days. But when the
last pages came, in December, I turned back in spirit to the softer,
kinder beauty amid which the little story had taken its rise, and I
placed the sad second spring of the two marred lives under the dear
shelter of the fells.

MARY A. WARD.




PART I

WESTMORELAND

  'Who can contemplate Fame through clouds unfold
  The star which rises o'er her steep, nor climb?'




CHAPTER I


Really, mother, I can't sit any more. I'm that stiff!--and as cold as
anything.'

So said Miss Bella Morrison, as she rose from her seat with an
affected yawn and stretch. In speaking she looked at her mother, and
not at the painter to whom she had been sitting for nearly two hours.
The young man in question stood embarrassed and silent, his palette on
his thumb, brush and mahlstick suspended. His eyes were cast down: a
flush had risen in his cheek. Miss Bella's manner was not sweet; she
wished evidently to slight somebody, and the painter could not flatter
himself that the somebody was Mrs. Morrison, the only other person
in the room beside the artist and his subject. The mother looked up
slightly, and without pausing in her knitting--'It's no wonder you're
cold,' she said, sharply, 'when you wear such ridiculous dresses in
this weather.'

It was now the daughter's turn to flush; she coloured and pouted. The
artist, John Fenwick, returned discreetly to his canvas, and occupied
himself with a fold of drapery.

'I put it on, because I thought Mr. Fenwick wanted something pretty to
paint. And as he clearly don't see anything in _me_!'--she looked over
her shoulder at the picture, with a shrug of mock humility concealing
a very evident annoyance--'I thought anyway he might like my best
frock.'

'I'm sorry you're not satisfied, Miss Morrison,' said the artist,
stepping back from his canvas and somewhat defiantly regarding the
picture upon it. Then he turned and looked at the girl--a coarsely
pretty young woman, very airily clothed in a white muslin dress, of
which the transparency displayed her neck and arms with a freedom
not at all in keeping with the nipping air of Westmoreland in
springtime--going up to his easel again after the look to put in
another touch.

As to his expression of regret, Miss Morrison tossed her head.

'It doesn't matter to me!' she declared. 'It was father's fad, and
so I sat. He promised me, if I didn't like it, he'd put it in his
own den, where _my_ friends couldn't see it. So I really don't care a
straw!'

'Bella! don't be rude!' said her mother, severely. She rose and came
to look at the picture.

Bella's colour took a still sharper accent; her chest rose and fell;
she fidgeted an angry foot.

'I told Mr. Fenwick hundreds of times,' she protested, 'that he was
making my upper lip miles too long--and that I _hadn't_ got a nasty
staring look like that--nor a mouth like that--nor--nor anything.
It's--it's too bad!'

The girl turned away, and Fenwick, glancing at her in dismay, saw that
she was on the point of indignant tears.

Mrs. Morrison put on her spectacles. She was a small, grey-haired
woman with a face, wrinkled and drawn, from which all smiles seemed
to have long departed. Even in repose, her expression suggested hidden
anxieties--fears grown habitual and watchful; and when she moved
or spoke, it was with a cold caution or distrust, as though in all
directions she was afraid of what she might touch, of possibilities
she might set loose.

She looked at the picture, and then at her daughter.

'It's not flattered,' she said, slowly. 'But I can't say it isn't
like you, Bella.'

'Oh, I knew _you'd_ say something like that, mother!' said the
daughter, scornfully. She stooped and threw a shawl round her
shoulders; gathered up some working materials and a book with which
she had been toying during the sitting; and then straightened herself
with an air at once tragic and absurd.

'Well, good-bye, Mr. Fenwick.' She turned to the painter. 'I'd rather
not sit again, please.'

'I shouldn't think of asking you, Miss Morrison,' murmured the young
man, moving aside to let her pass.

'Hullo, hullo! what's all this?' said a cheery voice at the door.
'Bella, where are you off to? Is the sitting done?'

'It's been going on two hours, papa, so I should think I'd had about
enough,' said Miss Bella, making for the door.

But her father caught her by the arm.

'I say, we _are_ smart!--aren't we, mamma? Well, now then--let me
have a look.'

And drawing the unwilling girl once more towards the painter, he
detained her while he scrutinised the picture.

'Do I squint, papa?' said Miss Morrison, with her head haughtily
turned away.

'Wait a minute, my dear.'

'_Have_ I got the colour of a barmaid, and a waist like Fanny's?'
Fanny was the Morrison's housemaid, and was not slim.

'Be quiet, Bella; you disturb me.'

Bella's chin mounted still higher; her foot once more beat the ground
impatiently, while her father looked from the picture to her, and back
again.

Then he released her with a laugh. 'You may run away, child, if you
want to. Upon my word, Fenwick, you're advancing! You are: no doubt
about that. Some of the execution there is astonishing. But all
the same I don't see you earning your bread-and-butter at
portrait-painting; and I guess you don't either.'

The speaker threw out a thin hand and patted Fenwick on the shoulder,
returning immediately to a close examination of the picture.

'I told you, sir, I should only paint portraits if I were compelled!'
said the young man, in a proud, muffled voice. He began to gather up
his things and clean his palette.

'But of course you'll be compelled--unless you wish to die "clemmed,"
as we say in Lancashire,' returned the other, briskly. 'What do _you_
say, mamma?'

He turned towards his wife, pushing up his spectacles to look at her.
He was a tall man, a little bent at the shoulders from long years of
desk-work; and those who saw him for the first time were apt to be
struck by a certain eager volatility of aspect--expressed by the
small head on its thin neck, by the wavering blue eyes, and smiling
mouth--not perhaps common in the chief cashiers of country banks.

As his wife met his appeal to her, the slight habitual furrow on her
own brow deepened. She saw that her husband held a newspaper crushed
in his right hand, and that his whole air was excited and restless. A
miserable, familiar pang passed through her. As the chief and
trusted official of an old-established bank in one of the smaller
cotton-towns, Mr. Morrison had a large command of money. His wife had
suspected him for years of using bank funds for the purposes of his
own speculations. She had never dared to say a word to him on the
subject, but she lived in terror--being a Calvinist by nature and
training--of ruin here, and Hell hereafter.

Of late, some instinct told her that he had been forcing the pace; and
as she turned to him, she felt certain that he had just received some
news which had given him great pleasure, and she felt certain also
that it was news of which he ought rather to have been ashamed.

She drew herself together in a dumb recoil. Her hands trembled as she
put down her knitting.

'I'd be sorry if a son of mine did nothing but paint portraits.'

John Fenwick looked up, startled.

'Why?' laughed her husband.

'Because it often seems to me,' she said, in a thin, measured
voice, 'that a Christian might find a better use for his time than
ministering to the vanity of silly girls, and wasting hours and hours
on making a likeness of this poor body, that's of no real matter to
anybody.'

'You'd make short work of art and artists, my dear!' said Morrison,
throwing up his hands. 'You forget, perhaps, that St. Luke was a
painter?'

'And where do you get that from, Mr. Morrison, I'd like to ask?' said
his wife, slowly; 'it's not in the Bible--though I believe you think
it is. Well, good-night to you, Mr. Fenwick. I'm sorry you haven't
enjoyed yourself, and I'm not going to deny that Bella was very rude
and trying. Good-night.'

And with a frigid touch of the hand, Mrs. Morrison departed. She
looked again at her husband as she closed the door--a sombre,
shrinking look.

Morrison avoided it. He was pacing up and down in high spirits. When
he and Fenwick were left alone, he went up to the painter and laid an
arm across his shoulders.

'Well!--how's the money holding out?'

'I've got scarcely any left,' said the painter, instinctively moving
away. It might have been seen that he felt himself dependent, and
hated to feel it.

'Any more commissions?'

'I've painted a child up in Grasmere, and a farmer's wife just
married. And Satterthwaite, the butcher, says he'll give me a
commission soon. And there's a clergyman, up Easedale way, wants me to
paint his son.'

'Well; and what do you get for these things?'

'Three pounds--sometimes five,' said the young man, reluctantly.

'A little more than a photograph.'

'Yes. They say if I won't be reasonable there's plenty as'll take
their pictures, and they can't throw away money.'

'H'm! Well, at this rate, Fenwick, you're not exactly galloping into a
fortune. And your father?'

Fenwick made a bitter gesture, as much as to say, 'What's the good of
discussing _that_?'

'H'm!--Well, now, Fenwick, what are your plans? Can you live on what
you make?'

'No,' said the other, abruptly. 'I'm getting into debt.'

'That's bad. But what's your own idea? You must have some notion of a
way out.'

'If I could get to London,' said the other, in a low, dragging voice,
'I'd soon find a way out.'

'And what prevents you?'

'Well, it's simple enough. You don't really, sir, need to ask. I've no
money--and I've a wife and child.'

Fenwick's tone was marked by an evident ill-humour. He had thrown
back his handsome head, and his eyes sparkled. It was plain that Mr.
Morrison's catechising manner had jarred upon a pride that was all on
edge--wounded by poverty and ill-success.

'Yes--that was an imprudent match of yours, my young man!
However--however--'

Mr. Morrison walked up and down ruminating. His long, thin hands were
clasped before him. His head hung in meditation. And every now and
then he looked towards the newspaper he had thrown down. At last he
again approached the artist.

'Upon my word, Fenwick, I've a mind to do something for you--I have
indeed. I believe you'd justify it--I do! And I've always had a soft
heart for artists. You look at the things in this room'--he waved
his hand towards the walls, which were covered with water-colour
drawings--'I've known most of the men who painted them, and
I've assisted a very great many of them. Those pictures--most of
them--represent loans, sir!--loans at times of difficulty, which I
was _proud_ to make'--Mr. Morrison struck his hand on the table--'yes,
proud--because I believed in the genius of the men to whom I made
them. I said, "I'll take a picture"--and they had the money--and the
money saved their furniture--and their homes--and their wives and
children. Well, I'm glad and proud to have done it, Fenwick!--you mark
my words.'

He paused, his eyes on the artist, his attitude grasping, as it were,
at the other's approval--hungry for it. Fenwick said nothing. He stood
in the shadow of a curtain, and the sarcasm his lip could not restrain
escaped the notice of his companion. 'And so, you see, I'm only
following out an old custom when I say, I believe in you, Fenwick!--I
believe in your abilities--I'm sorry for your necessities--and I'll
come to your assistance. Now, how much would take you to London and
keep you there for six months, till you've made a few friends and done
some work?'

'A hundred pounds,' said the painter, breathing hard.

'A hundred pounds. And what about the wife?'

'Her father very likely would give her shelter, and the child. And of
course I should leave her provided.'

'Well, and what about my security? How, John, in plain words, do you
propose to repay me?'

Mr. Morrison spoke with extreme mildness. His blue eyes, whereof the
whites were visible all round the pupils, shone benevolently on the
artist--his mouth was all sensibility. Whereas, for a moment, there
had been something of the hawk in his attitude and expression, he
was now the dove--painfully obliged to pay a passing attention to
business.

Fenwick hesitated.

'You mentioned six guineas, I think, for this portrait?' He nodded
towards the canvas, on which he had been at work.

'I did. It is unfortunate, of course, that Bella dislikes it so. I
shan't be able to hang it. Never mind. A bargain's a bargain.'

The young man drew himself up proudly.

'It is so, Mr. Morrison. And you wished me to paint your portrait,
I think, and Mrs. Morrison's.' The elder man made a sign of assent.
'Well, I could run up to your place--to Bartonbury--and paint those in
the winter, when I come to see my wife. As to the rest--I'll repay you
within the year--unless--well, unless I go utterly to grief, which of
course I may.'

'Wait here a moment. I'll fetch you the money. Better not promise to
repay me in cash. It'll be a millstone round your neck. I'll take it
in pictures.'

'Very well; then I'll either paint you an original finished
picture--historical or romantic subject--medium size, by the end of
the year, or make you copies--you said you wanted two or three--one
large or two small, from anything you like in the National Gallery.'

Morrison laughed good-temperedly. He touched a copy of _The Art
Journal_ lying on the table.

'There's an article here about that German painter--Lenbach--whom
they crack up so nowadays. When he was a young man, Baron Schack, it
appears, paid him one hundred pounds a year, _for all his time_, as
a copyist in Italy and Spain.' He spoke very delicately, mincing his
words a little.

Fenwick's colour rose suddenly. Morrison was not looking at him, or he
would have seen a pair of angry eyes.

'Prices have gone up,' said the painter, dryly. 'And I guess living
in London's dearer now than living in Italy was when Lenbach (which he
pronounced Lenback) was young!'

'Oh! so you know all about Lenbach?'

'You lent me the article. However'--Fenwick rose--'is that our
bargain?'

The note in the voice was trenchant, even aggressive. Nothing of the
suppliant, in tone or attitude. Morrison surveyed him, amused.

'If you like to call it so,' he said, lifting his delicate eyebrows a
moment. 'Well, I'll take the risk.'

He left the room. Fenwick thrust his hands into his pockets, with a
muttered exclamation, and walked to the window. He looked out upon a
Westmoreland valley in the first flush of spring; but he saw nothing.
His blood beat in heart and brain with a suffocating rapidity. So his
chance was come! What would Phoebe say?

As he stood by the large window, face and form in strong relief
against the crude green without, the energy of the May landscape was,
as it were, repeated and expressed in the man beholding it. He was
tall, a little round-shouldered, with a large, broad-browed head,
covered with brown, straggling hair; eyes, glancing and darkish, full
of force, of excitement even, curiously veiled, often, by suspicion;
nose, a little crooked owing to an injury at football; and mouth, not
coarse, but large and freely cut, and falling readily into lines of
sarcasm.

The general look was one of great acuteness, rather antagonistic, as
a rule, than sympathetic; and the hands, which were large and yet
slender, were those of a craftsman finely endowed with all the
instincts of touch.

Suddenly the young man turned on his heel and looked at the
water-colours on the wall.

'The old hypocrite!' he thought; 'they're worth hundreds--and I'll be
bound he got them for nothing. He'll try to get mine for nothing; but
he'll find I'm his match!'

For among these pictures were a number of drawings by men long since
well known, and of steady repute among the dealers or in the auctions,
especially of Birmingham and the northern towns. Morrison had been for
years a bank-clerk in Birmingham before his appointment to the post
he now held. A group of Midland artists, whose work had become famous,
and costly in proportion, had evidently been his friends at one
time--or perhaps merely his debtors. They were at any rate well
represented on the wall of this small Westmoreland house in which he
spent his holidays.

Presently Mr. Morrison was heard returning. He placed an envelope in
Fenwick's hand, and then, pointing him to a chair at the table, he
dictated a form of IOU, specifying that the debt was to be returned
within a year, either in money or in the pictures agreed upon.

'Oh, no fine speeches, please, my boy--no fine speeches!' said
Morrison, as the artist rose, stammering out his thanks. 'That's been
my nature all my life, I tell you--to help the lame dogs--ask anybody
that knows me. That'll do; that'll do! Now then, what's going to be
your line of action?'

Fenwick turned on him a face that vainly endeavoured to hide the joy
of its owner.

'I shall look out, of course, first of all, for some bread-and-butter
work. I shall go to the editors of the illustrated papers and show
them some things. I shall attend some life-school in the evenings. And
the rest of the time I shall paint--paint like Old Harry!'

The words caused a momentary wrinkling of Mr. Morrison's brow.

'I should avoid those expressions, if I were you, Fenwick. But paint
what, my dear boy?--paint what?'

'Of course I have my ideas,' said Fenwick, staring at the floor.

'I think I have earned a right to hear them.'

'Certainly. I propose to combine the colour and romance of the
Pre-Raphaelites with the truth and drawing of the French school,' said
the young man, suddenly looking up.

Surprise betrayed his companion into a broad grin.

'Upon my word, Fenwick, you won't fail for lack of ambition!'

The young man reddened, then quietly nodded.

'No one gets on without ambition. My ideas have been pretty clear for
a long time. The English Romantic school have no more future, unless
they absorb French drawing and French technique. When they have done
that, they will do the finest work in the world.'

Morrison's astonishment increased. The decision and self-confidence
with which Fenwick spoke had never yet shown themselves so plainly in
the harassed and humbly born painter of Miss Bella's portrait.

'And you intend to do the finest work in the world?' said the patron,
in a voice of banter.

Fenwick hesitated.

'I shall do good work,' he said, doggedly, after a pause. Then,
suddenly raising his head, he added, 'And if I weren't sure of it, I'd
never let you lend me money.'

Morrison laughed.

'That's all right.--And now what will Mrs. Fenwick say to us?'

Fenwick turned away. He repossessed himself of the envelope, and
buttoned his coat over it, before he replied.

'I shall, of course, consult her immediately. What shall I do with
this picture?' He pointed to the portrait on the easel.

'Take it home with you, and see if you can't beautify it a little,'
said Morrison, in a tone of good-humour. 'You've got a lot of worldly
wisdom to learn yet, my dear Fenwick. The women _must_ be flattered.'

Fenwick repeated that he was sorry if Miss Bella was disappointed,
but the tone was no less perfunctory than before. After stooping and
looking sharply for a moment into the picture--which was a strong,
ugly thing, with some passages of remarkable technique--he put it
aside, saving that he would send for it in the evening. Then, having
packed up and shouldered the rest of his painter's gear, he stood
ready to depart.

'I'm awfully obliged to you!' he said, holding out his hand.

Morrison looked at the handsome young fellow, the vivacity of the
eyes, the slight agitation of the lip.

'Don't mention it,' he said, with redoubled urbanity. 'It's my
way--only my way! When'll you be off?'

'Probably next week. I'll come and say good-bye.'

'I _must_ have a year! But Phoebe will take it hard.' John Fenwick had
paused on his way home, and was leaning over a gate beside a stream,
now thinking anxiously of his domestic affairs, and now steeped in
waves of delight--vague, sensuous, thrilling--that flowed from the
colours and forms around him. He found himself in an intricate and
lovely valley, through which lay his path to Langdale. On either side
of the stream, wooded or craggy fells, gashed with stone-quarries,
accompanied the windings of the water, now leaving room for a scanty
field or two, and now hemming in the river with close-piled rock and
tree. Before him rose a white Westmoreland farm, with its gabled porch
and moss-grown roof, its traditional yews and sycamores; while to his
left, and above the farm, hung a mountain-face, dark with rock, and
purple under the evening shadows--a rich and noble shape, lost above
in dim heights of cloud, and, below, cleft to the heart by one
deep ghyll, whence the golden trees--in the glittering green of
May--descended single or in groups, from shelf to shelf, till their
separate brilliance was lost in the dense wood which girdled the white
farmhouse.

The pleasure of which he was conscious in the purple of the mountain,
the colour of the trees, and all that magic of light and shade which
filled the valley--a pleasure involuntary, physical, automatic,
depending on certain delicacies of nerve and brain--rose and
persisted, while yet his mind was full of harassing and disagreeable
thoughts.

Well, Phoebe might take her choice!--for they had come to the parting
of the ways. Either a good painter, a man on the level of the
best, trained and equipped as they, or something altogether
different--foreman, a clerk, perhaps, in his uncle's upholstery
business at Darlington, a ticket-collector on the line--anything! He
could always earn his own living and Phoebe's. There was no fear of
that. But if he was finally to be an artist, he would be a first-rate
one. Let him only get more training; give him time and opportunity;
and he would be as good as any one.

Morrison, plainly, had thought him a conceited ass. Well, let him!

What chance had he ever had of proving what was in him? As he hung
over the gate smoking, he thought of his father and mother, and of his
childhood in the little Kendal shop--the bookseller's shop which had
been the source and means of his truest education.

Not that he had been a neglected child. Far from it. He remembered
his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing
determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to
boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father. He
remembered her death--and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted
room--effects of light and shadow--of flowers--of the grey head
uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at
night, in his own room, with chalk and paper--and then his passion
with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were,
another self saw and approved.

Then came school-days. His father had sent him to an old endowed
school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under
discipline. There he had received a plain commercial education,
together with some Latin and Greek. His quick, restless mind had
soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he
well knew, he had done nothing supremely well. But Homer and Virgil
had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found
Shakespeare and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote,' fresh
and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped. Drawing
everywhere--on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on
the whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn
with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had
provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster.

And the old drawing-master!--a German--half blind, though he would
never confess it--who dabbled in oil-painting, and let the boy watch
his methods. How he would twirl his dirty brush round and dab down a
lump of Prussian blue, imagining it to be sepia, hastily correcting
it a moment afterwards with a lump of lake, and then say chuckling
to himself: 'By Gode, dat is fine!--dat is very nearly a good purple.
Fenwick, my boy, mark me--you vill not find a good purple no-vere!
Some-vere--in de depths of Japanese art--dere is a good purple. Dat I
believe. But not in Europe. Ve Europeans are all tam fools. But I
vill not svear!--no!--you onderstand, Fenwick; you haf never heard me
svear?' And then a round oath, smothered in a hasty fit of coughing.
And once he had cut off part of the skirt of his Sunday coat, taking
it in his blindness for an old one, to clean his palette with; and it
was thought, by the boys, that it was the unseemly result of this rash
act, as disclosed at church the following Sunday morning, which had
led to the poor old man's dismissal.

But from him John had learnt a good deal about oil-painting--something
too of anatomy--though more of this last from that old book--Albinus,
was it?--that he had found in his father's stock. He could see himself
lying on the floor--poring over the old plates, morning, noon, and
night--then using a little lad, his father's apprentice, to examine
him in what he had learnt--the two going about arm-in-arm--Backhouse
asking the questions according to a paper drawn up by John--'How many
heads to the deltoid?'--and so on--over and over again--and with what
an eagerness, what an ardour!--till the brain was bursting and the
hand quivering with new knowledge--and the power to use it. Then
Leonardo's 'Art of Painting' and Reynolds's Discourses'--both
discovered in the shop, and studied incessantly, till the boy of
eighteen felt himself the peer of any Academician, and walked proudly
down the Kendal streets, thinking of the half-finished paintings in
his garret at home, and of the dreams, the conceptions, the ambitions
of which that garret had already been the scene.

After that--some evil days! Quarrels with his father, refusals to
be bound to the trade, to accept the shop as his whole future and
inheritance--painful scenes with the old man, and with the customers
who complained of the son's rudeness and inattention--attempts of
relations to mediate between the two, and all the time his own burning
belief in himself and passion to be free. And at last a time of
truce, of conditions made and accepted--the opening of the new Art
School--evenings of delightful study there--and, suddenly, out of the
mists, Phoebe's brown eyes, and Phoebe's soft encouragement!

Yes, it was Phoebe, Phoebe herself who had determined his career; let
her consider that, when he asked for sacrifices! But for the balm
she had poured upon his sore ambitions--but for those long walks and
talks, in which she had been to him first the mere recipient of his
dreams and egotisms, and then--since she had the loveliest eyes, and
a young wild charm--a creature to be hotly wooed and desired, he might
never have found courage enough to seize upon his fate.

For her sake indeed he had dared it all. She had consoled and inspired
him; but she had made the breach with his father final. When they met
she was only a struggling teacher in Miss Mason's school, the daughter
of a small farmer in the Vale of Keswick. Old Fenwick looked much
higher for his son. So there was renewed battle at home, till at last
a couple of portrait commissions from a big house near Kendal clinched
the matter. A hurried marriage had been followed by the usual parental
thunders. And now they had five years to look back upon, years of
love and struggle and discontent. By turning his hand to many things,
Fenwick had just managed to keep the wolf from the door. He had worked
hard, but without much success; and what had been an ordinary good
opinion of himself had stiffened into a bitter self-assertion. He knew
very well that he was regarded as a conceited, quarrelsome fellow, and
rather gloried in it. The world, he considered, had so far treated him
ill; he would at any rate keep his individuality.

Phoebe, too, once so sweet, so docile, so receptive, had begun to be
critical, to resist him now and then. He knew that in some ways he had
disappointed her; and there was gall in the thought. As to the London
plan, his word would no longer be enough. He would have to wrestle
with and overcome her.

London!--the word chimed him from the past--threw wide the future. He
moved on along the rough road, possessed by dreams. He had a vision of
his first large picture; himself rubbing in the figures, life-size, or
at work on the endless studies for every part--fellow-students coming
to look, Academicians, buyers; he heard himself haranguing, plunging
headlong into ideas and theories, holding his own with the best
of 'the London chaps.' Between whiles, of course, there would be
hack-work--illustration--portraits--anything to keep the pot boiling.
And always, at the end of this vista, there was success--success great
and tangible.

He was amused by his own self-confidence, and laughed as he walked.
But his mood never wavered.

He _had_ the power--the gift. Nobody ever doubted that who saw him
draw. And he had, besides, what so many men of his own class made
shipwreck for want of--he had _imagination_--enough to show him what
it is that makes the mere craftsman into the artist, enough to make
him hunger night and day for knowledge, travel, experience. Thanks to
his father's shop, he had read a great deal already; and with a little
money, how he would buy books, how he would read them!--

And at the thought, fresh images, now in rushing troops, and now in
solitary fantastic beauty, began to throng before the inward eye,
along the rich background of the valley; images from poetry and
legend, stored deep in a greedy fancy, a retentive mind. They came
from all sources--Greek, Arthurian, modern; Hephaestus, the lame god
and divine craftsman, receiving Thetis in his workshop of the skies,
the golden automata wrought by his own hands supporting him on either
side; the maidens of Achilles washing the dead and gory body of Hector
in the dark background of the hut, while in front swift-foot Achilles
holds old Priam in talk till the sad offices are over, and the father
may be permitted to behold his son; Arthur and Sir Bedivere beside
the lake; Crusaders riding to battle--the gleam of their harness--the
arched necks of their steeds--the glory of their banners--the shade
and sunlight of the deep vales through which they pass; the Lady of
Shalott as the curse conies upon her--Oenone--Brunhilda--Atalanta.
Swift along the May woods the figures fled, vision succeeding vision,
beauty treading on beauty. It became hallucination--a wildness--an
ecstasy. Fenwick stood still, gave himself up to the possession--let
it hold him--felt the strangeness and the peril of it--then, suddenly,
wrenched himself free.

Running down to the edge of the river, he began to pick up stones
and throw them violently into the stream. It was a remedy he had long
learnt to use. The physical action released the brain from the tyranny
of the forms which held it. Gradually they passed away. He began to
breathe more quietly, and, sitting down by the water, his head in his
hands, he gave himself up to a quieter pleasure in the nature round
him, and in the strength of his own faculty.

To something else also. For while he was sitting there, he found
himself _praying_ ardently for success--that he might do well in
London, might make a name for himself, and leave his mark on English
art. This was to him a very natural outlet of emotion; he was not sure
what he meant by it precisely; but it calmed him.




CHAPTER II


Meanwhile Phoebe Fenwick was watching for her husband.

She had come out upon the green strip of ground in front of Green
Nab Cottage, and was looking anxiously along the portion of high-road
which was visible from where she stood.

The small, whitewashed house--on this May day, more than a generation
ago--stood on a narrow shelf that juts out from the face of one of the
eastern fells, bounding the valley of Great Langdale.

When Phoebe, seeing no one on the road, turned to look how near the
sun might be to its setting, she saw it, as Wordsworth saw it of
old, dropping between the peaks of those 'twin brethren' which to the
northwest close in the green bareness of the vale. Between the two
pikes the blaze lingered, enthroned; the far winding of the valley,
hemmed in also by blue and craggy fells, was pierced by rays of
sunset; on the broad side of the pikes the stream of Dungeon Ghyll
shone full-fed and white; the sheep, with their new-born lambs beside
them, studded the green pastures of the valley; and sounds of water
came from the fell-sides. Everywhere lines of broad and flowing
harmony, moulded by some subtle union of rock and climate and
immemorial age into a mountain beauty which is the peculiar possession
of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Neither awful, nor yet trivial;
neither too soft for dignity, nor too rugged for delight.
The Westmoreland hills are the remains of an infinitely older
world--giants decayed, but of a great race and ancestry; they have
the finish, the delicate or noble loveliness--one might almost say the
_manner_--that comes of long and gentle companionship with those
chief forces that make for natural beauty, with air and water, with
temperate suns and too abundant rains. Beside them the Alps are
inhuman; the Apennines mere forest-grown heaps--mountains in the
making; while all that Scotland gains from the easy enveloping glory
of its heather, Westmoreland, which is almost heatherless, must owe
to an infinitude of fine strokes, tints, curves, and groupings, to
touches of magic and to lines of grace, yet never losing the wild
energy of precipice and rock that belongs of right to a mountain
world.

To-day Langdale was in spring. The withered fern was still red on the
sides of the pikes; there was not a leaf on the oaks, still less on
the ashes; but the larches were green in various plantations, and the
sycamores were bursting. Half a mile eastward the woods were all in
soft bloom, carpeted with windflowers and bluebells. Here, but for the
larches, and the few sycamores and yews that guard each lonely farm,
all was naked fell and pasture. The harsh spring wind came rioting up
the valley, to fling itself on the broad sides of the pikes; the lambs
made a sad bleating; the water murmured in the ghyll beyond the house;
the very sunshine was clear and cold.

Calculations quick and anxious passed through the young wife's brain.
Debts here, and debts there; the scanty list of small commissions
ahead, which she knew by heart; the uncertainty of the year before
them; clothes urgently wanted for the child, for John, for herself.
She drew a long and harassed breath.

Phoebe Fenwick was a tall, slender creature, very young; with a little
golden head on a thin neck, features childishly cut, and eyes that
made the chief adornment of a simple face. The lines of the brow, the
lids and lashes, and the clear brown eye itself were indeed of a most
subtle and distinguished beauty; they accounted, perhaps, for the
attention with which most persons of taste and cultivation observed
Fenwick's wife. For the eyes seemed to promise a character, a career;
whereas the rest of the face was no more, perhaps, than a piece of
agreeable pink-and-white.

She wore a dress of dark-blue cotton, showing the spring of her
beautiful throat. The plain gown with its long folds, the uncovered
throat, and rich simplicity of her fair hair had often reminded
Fenwick and a few of his patrons of those Florentine photographs which
now, since the spread of the later Pre-Raphaelites and the opening of
the Grosvenor Gallery, were to be seen even in the shops of country
towns. There was a literary gentleman in Kendal who said that Mrs.
Fenwick was like one of Ghirlandajo's tall women in Santa Maria
Novella. Phoebe had sometimes listened uncomfortably to these
comparisons. She was a Cumberland girl, and had no wish at all to be
like people in Italy. It seemed somehow to cut her off from her own
folk.

'John is late!' said a voice beside her. An elderly woman had stepped
out of the cottage porch. Miss Anna Mason, the head-mistress of
an endowed girls school in Hawkshead, had come to spend a Saturday
afternoon with her old pupil, Phoebe Fenwick. A masterful-looking
woman--ample in figure, with a mouth of decision. She wore a grey
alpaca dress, adorned with a large tatted collar, made by herself, and
fastened by a brooch containing a true-lover's knot in brown hair.

'He'll have stayed on to finish,' said Phoebe, looking round. 'Where's
Carrie?'

Miss Mason replied that the child wouldn't wait any longer for her
supper, and that Daisy, the little servant, was feeding her. Then,
slipping her arm inside Mrs. Fenwick's, Miss Mason looked at the
sunset.

'It's a sweet little cottage,' she said, shading her eyes from the
fast-sinking orb, and then turning them on the tiny house--'but I dare
say you'll not be here long, Phoebe.'

Mrs. Fenwick started.

'John told Mr. Harrock he'd pay him rent for it till next Easter.'

Miss Mason laughed.

'Are you going to let John go wasting his time here till next Easter?'

The arm she held moved involuntarily.

'He has several commissions--people not far from here,' said Mrs.
Fenwick, hurriedly. 'And if the weather's too bad, we can always go to
rooms in Kendal or Ambleside.'

'Well, if that's what you're thinking of, my dear, you'd better make a
clerk of him at once and have done with it! He told me his uncle would
always find him work in the upholstery business.'

Phoebe's soft cheeks trembled a little.

'Some day we'll have saved some money,' she said, in a low voice--'and
then we'll go to London; and--and John will get on.'

'Yes--when you stop holding him back, Mrs. Phoebe Fenwick!'

'Oh! Miss Anna, I don't hold him back!' cried the wife, suddenly,
impetuously.

Miss Mason shook an incredulous head.

'I haven't heard a single word of his bettering himself--of his doing
anything but muddle on here--having a "crack" with this farmer and
that--and painting pictures he's a sight too good for, since I came
this morning; and we've talked for hours. No--I may as well have it
out--I'm a one for plain speaking; I'm a bit disappointed in you both.
As for you, Phoebe, you'll be precious sorry for it some day if you
don't drive him out of this.'

'Where should I drive him to?' cried Mrs. Fenwick, stifled. She had
broken a sycamore twig, and was stripping it violently of its buds.

Miss Anna looked at her unmoved. The grey-haired schoolmistress was
a woman of ideas and ambitions beyond her apparent scope in life.
She had read her Carlyle and Ruskin, and in her calling she was an
enthusiast. But, in the words of the Elizabethan poet, she was
perhaps 'unacquainted still with her own soul.' She imagined herself a
Radical; she was in truth a tyrant. She preached Ruskin and the
simple life; no worldling ever believed more fiercely in the gospel
of success. But, let it be said promptly, it was success for others,
rarely or never for herself; she despised the friend who could not
breast and conquer circumstance; as for her own case, there were
matters much more interesting to think of. But she was the gadfly, the
spur of all to whom she gave her affection. Phoebe, first her pupil,
then her under-mistress, and moulded still by the old habit of
subordination to her, both loved and dreaded her. It was said that she
had made the match between her _protégée_ and old Fenwick's rebellious
and gifted son. She had certainly encouraged it, and, whether from
conscience or invincible habit, she had meddled a good deal with it
ever since.

In reply to Phoebe's question, Miss Anna merely inquired whether Mrs.
Fenwick supposed that George Romney--the Westmoreland artist--would
have had much chance with his art if he had stayed on in Westmoreland?
Why, the other day a picture by Romney had been sold for three
thousand pounds! And pray, would he ever have become a great painter
at all if he had stuck to Kendal or Dalton-in-Furness all his
life?--if he had never been brought in contact with the influences,
the money, and the sitters of London? Those were the questions that
Phoebe had to answer. 'Would the beautiful Lady This and Lady That
ever have come to Kendal to be painted?--would he ever have seen Lady
Hamilton?'

At this Mrs. Fenwick flushed hotly from brow to chin.

'I rather wonder at you, Miss Anna!' she said, breathing fast;
'you think it was all right he should desert his wife for thirty
years--so--so long as he painted pictures of that bad woman, Lady
Hamilton, for you to look at!'

Miss Anna looked curiously at her companion. The schoolmistress was
puzzled--and provoked.

'Well!--you don't suppose that John's going to desert you for thirty
years!' said the other, with an impatient laugh. 'Don't be absurd,
Phoebe.'

Phoebe said nothing. She heard a cry from the baby Carrie, and she
hurried across the little garden to the house. At the same moment
there was a shout of greeting from below, and Fenwick came into sight
on the steep pitch of lane that led from the high-road to the cottage.
Miss Anna strolled down to meet him.

In the eyes of his old friend, John Fenwick made a very handsome
figure as he approached her, his painter's wallet slung over his
shoulder. That something remarkable had happened to him she divined at
once. In moments of excitement a certain foreign look--as some people
thought, a _gypsyish_ look--was apt to show itself. The roving eyes,
the wild manner, the dancing step betrayed the in most man--banishing
altogether the furtive or jealous reserve of the North-Countryman,
which were at other times equally to be noticed. Miss Anna had often
wondered how the same man could be so shy--and so vain!

However, though elation of some sort was uppermost, he was not at
first inclined to reveal himself. He told Miss Anna as they walked up
together that he had done with Miss Bella; that old Morrison praised
the portrait, and the girl hated it; that she was a vulgar, conceited
creature, and he was thankful to have finished.

'If I were to show it at Manchester next month, you'd see what the
papers would say. But I suppose Miss Bella would sooner die than let
her father send it. Silly goose! Powdering every time--and sucking
her lips to make them red--and twisting her neck about--ugh! I've no
patience with women like that! When I get on a bit, I'll paint nobody
I don't want to paint.'

'All right--but get on first,' said Miss Anna, patting him on the arm.
'What next, John--what next?'

He hesitated. His look grew for a moment veiled and furtive. 'Oh,
there's plenty to do,' he said, evasively.

They paused on the green ledges outside the cottage.

'What--portraits?'

He nodded uncertainly.

'You'll not grow fat on Great Langdale,' said Miss Anna, waving an
ironical hand towards the green desolation of the valley.

He looked at her, walked up and down a moment, then said with an
outburst, though in a low tone, and with a look over his shoulder at
the open window of the cottage, 'Morrison's lent me a hundred pounds.
He advises me to go to London at once.'

Miss Anna raised her eyebrows. 'Oh--oh!' she said--'_that's_ news!
What do you mean by "at once"?--September?'

'Next week--I won't lose a day.'

Miss Anna pondered.

'Well, I dare say Phoebe can hurry up.'

'Oh! I can't take Phoebe,' he said, in a hasty, rather injured voice.

'Not take Phoebe!' cried the other under her breath, seeming to hear
around her the ghosts of words which had but just passed between her
and Phoebe--'and what on earth are you going to do with her?'

He led her away towards the edge of the little garden--arguing,
prophesying, laying down the law.

While he was thus engaged came Phoebe's silver voice from the parlour:

'Is that you, John? Supper's ready.'

He and Miss Anna turned.

'Hush, please!' said Fenwick to his companion, finger on lip; and they
entered.

'You'll have got the money from Mr. Morrison, John?' said Phoebe,
presently, when they were settled to their meal.

'Aye,' said Fenwick, 'that's all right. Phoebe, that's a real pretty
dress of yours.'

Soft colour rose in the wife's cheeks.

'I'm glad you like it,' said Phoebe, soberly. Then looking up--

'John--don't give Carrie that!--it'll make her sick.'

For Fenwick was stealthily feeding the baby beside him with morsels
from his own plate. The child's face--pink mouth and blue eyes, both
wide open--hung upon him in a fixed expectancy.

'She does like it so--the little greedy puss! It won't do her any
harm.'

But the mother persisted. Then the child cried, and the father and
mother wrangled over it, till Fenwick caught up the babe by Phoebe's
peremptory directions and carried it away upstairs. At the door of
the little parlour, while Phoebe was at his shoulder, wiping away the
child's tears and cooing to it, Fenwick suddenly turned his head and
kissed his wife's cheek, or rather her pretty ear, which presented
itself. Miss Anna, still at table, laughed discreetly behind their
backs--the laugh of the sweet-natured old maid.

When the child was asleep upstairs, Phoebe and the little servant
cleared away while Fenwick and Miss Anna read the newspaper, and
talked on generalities. In this talk Phoebe had no share, and it might
have been noticed by one who knew them well, that in his conversation
with Miss Mason, Fenwick became another man. He used tones and phrases
that he either had never used, or used no longer, with Phoebe. He
showed himself, in fact, intellectually at ease, expansive, and, at
times, amazingly arrogant. For instance, in discussing a paragraph
about the Academy in the London letter of the _Westmoreland Gazette_,
he fired up and paced the room, haranguing his listener in a loud,
eager voice. Of course she knew--every one knew--that all the best
men and all the coming forces were now _outside the Academy_.
Millais, Leighton, Watts--spent talents, extinct volcanoes!--Tadema a
marvellous mechanic, without ideas!--the landscape men, chaotic,--no
standard anywhere, no style. On the other hand, Burne-Jones and the
Grosvenor Gallery group--ideas without drawing, without knowledge,
feet and hands absurd, muscles anyhow. While as for Whistler and
the Impressionists--a lot of maniacs, running a fad to death--but
_clever_--by Jove!--

No!--there was a new art coming!--the creation of men who had learnt
to draw, and could yet keep a hold on ideas--

'_Character_!--that's what we want!' He struck the table; and finally
with a leap he was at the goal which Miss Anna--sitting before
him, arms folded, her strong old face touched with satire--had long
foreseen. 'By George, _I'd_ show them!--if I only had the chance.'

He threw the pictures back into the cupboard.

'No doubt,' said Miss Anna, dryly. 'I think you _are_ a great man,
John, though you say it. But you've got to prove it.'

He laughed uncomfortably.

'I've written a good many of these things to the _Gazette_,' he said,
evading her direct attack. 'They'll put them in next week.'

'I wish you hadn't, John!' said Phoebe, anxiously. She was sitting
under the lamp with her needlework.

He turned upon her aggressively.

'And why, please?'

'Because the last article you wrote lost you a commission. Don't you
remember--that gentleman at Grasmere--what he said?'

She nodded her fair head gravely. It struck Miss Anna that she was
looking pale and depressed.

'Old fool!' said Fenwick. 'Yes, I remember. He wouldn't ask anybody
to paint his children who'd written such a violent article. As if I
wanted to paint his children! Besides, it was a mere excuse--to save
the money.'

'I don't think so,' murmured Phoebe. 'And oh, I had counted on that
five pounds!'

'What does five pounds matter, compared to speaking to one's mind?'
said Fenwick, roughly.

There was a silence. Fenwick, looking at the two women, felt them
unsympathetic, and abruptly changed the subject.

'I wish you'd give us some music, Phoebe.'

Phoebe rose obediently. He opened the little pianette for her, and lit
the candles.

She played some Irish and Scotch airs, in poor settings, and with
much stumbling. After a little, Fenwick listened restlessly, his brow
frowning, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. They were all
glad when it was over.

Phoebe, hearing a whimper from the child, went upstairs. The two
others were soon in hushed but earnest conversation.

Miss Anna had gone to bed. Fenwick was sitting with a book before
him--lost in anxious and exciting calculations--when Phoebe entered
the room.

'Is that you?' he said, jumping up. 'That's all right. I wanted to
talk to you.'

'I thought you did,' she said, with a very quiet, drooping air; then
going to the window, which was open, she leaned out into the May
night. 'Where shall we go? It's warmer.'

'Let's go to the ghyll,' said Fenwick; 'I'll fetch you a shawl.'

For, as both remembered, Miss Anna was upstairs, and in that tiny
cottage all sounds were audible.

Fenwick wrapt a shawl round his companion, and they sallied forth.

The valley lay below them. A young moon was near its setting over the
farthest pike, and the fine lines of the mountain rose dimly clear,
from its base on the valley floor to the dark cliffs of Pavey Ark. Not
a light was visible anywhere. Their little cottage on its shelf, with
the rays of its small lamp shining through the window, seemed to
be the only spectator of the fells; it talked with them in a lonely
companionship.

They passed through the fence of the small garden out on to the
fell-side. Dim forms of sheep rose in alarm as they came near, and
bleating lambs hurried beside them. Soft sounds of wind, rising and
falling along the mountain or stirring amid last year's bracken,
pursued them, till they reached the edge of the ghyll, and, descending
its side, found the water murmuring among the stones, the only audible
thing in a deep shade and silence.

They sat down by the stream, and Fenwick, taking up some pebbles,
began to drop them nervously into the water. Phoebe, beside him,
clasped her hands round her knees; in a full light it would have been
seen that the hands were trembling.

'Phoebe--old Morrison's offered to lend me some money.'

Phoebe started.

'I--I thought perhaps he had.'

'And he wants me to go to London at once.'

'You've _got_ the money?'

'In my pocket'--he laid his hand upon it. Then he laughed: 'He didn't
pay me for the portrait, though. That's like him. And of course I
couldn't ask for it.'

A silence.

Fenwick turned round and took one of her hands.

'Well, little woman, what do you think? Are you going to let me go and
make my fortune?--our fortune?'

'As if I could stop you!' she said, hoarsely. 'It's what you've wanted
for months.'

[Illustration: _Husband and Wife_]

'Well, and if I have, where's the harm? We can't go on living like
this!'

And he began to talk, with great rapidity, about the absurdity of
attempting to make a living as an artist out of Westmoreland--out of
any place, indeed, but London, the natural centre and clearing-house
of talent.

'I could make a living out of teaching, I suppose, up here. I could
get--in time--a good many lessons going round to schools. But that
would be a dog's life. You wouldn't want to see me at that for ever,
would you, Phoebe? Or at painting portraits at five guineas apiece? I
could chuck it all, of course, and go in for business. But I can tell
you, England would lose something if I did.'

And, catching up another stone, he threw it into the beck with a
passion which made the clash of it, as it struck upon a rock, echo
through the ghyll. There was something magnificent in the gesture, and
a movement, half thrill, half shudder, ran through the wife's delicate
frame. She clasped her hands round his arm, and drew close to him.

'John!--are you going to leave baby and me behind?'

Her voice, as she pressed towards him, her face upraised to his, rose
from deep founts of feeling; but she kept the sob in it restrained.
Fenwick felt the warmth and softness of her young body; the fresh
face, the fragrant hair were close upon his lips. He threw both his
arms round her and folded her to him.

'Just for a little while,' he pleaded--'till I get my footing. One
year! For both our sakes--Phoebe!'

'I could live on such a little--we could get two rooms, which would be
cheaper for you than lodgings.'

'It isn't that!' he said, impatiently, but kissing her. 'It is that I
must be my own master--I must have nothing to think of but my art--I
must slave night and day--I must live with artists--I must get to
know all sorts of people who might help me on. If you and Carrie came
up--just at first--I couldn't do the best for myself--I couldn't, I
tell you. And of course I mean the best for _you_, in the long run.
If I go, I must succeed. And if I can give all my mind, I _shall_
succeed. Don't you think I shall?'

He drew away from her abruptly--holding her at arm's length,
scrutinising her face almost with hostility.

'Yes,' said Phoebe, slowly, 'Yes, of course you'll succeed--if you
don't quarrel with people.'

'Quarrel,' he repeated, angrily. 'You're always harping on
that--you're always so _afraid_ of people. It does a man no harm, I
tell you, to be a bit quick-tempered. I shan't be a fool.'

'No, but--I could warn you often. And then you know,' she said,
slowly, caressing his shoulder with her hand--'I could look after
money. You're dreadfully bad about money, John. Directly you've got
it, you spend it--and sometimes when you borrow you forget all about
paying it back.'

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'll _never_ be 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't_ you 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'd _pay_, 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 that
I 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.




PART II

LONDON

'Was _that_ the 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.'




CHAPTER III


'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
charming _genre_--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 face
  Among 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 to
Cuningham. '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 the _personnel_ of the life-school Fenwick was
attending, the opening of a new _atelier_ in 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 about
_women_, 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--this
Fenwick--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 the _Mirror_?' 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 ask _you_!' 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

It _must_ succeed! 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. His _gaucherie_ should 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 to _arrive_. 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 being _knew_ he
was writing those articles in the _Mirror_? He threw out his challenge
to the darkness, and so fell asleep.




CHAPTER IV


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 his _protégé_,
drew out as quickly as he could _la 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 own _malaise_.

Lady Findon's eyebrows lifted in amusement. She threw him another
glance.

Good-looking!--but really Findon should wait till they were a little
_décrotté_.

'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 like _him_, 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 admire _his_ work?' 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 dead _genre_. But the man who painted them could
_draw_.

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 surface _gaucherie_, 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, these _raffinées_ of 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's
_Hamlet_ and _Othello_, 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--'a _barbarian_! 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.'

'What did he do?'

'My dear, he spoiled the whole business after dinner--harangued the
table!--as good as told De Chailles he had no right to talk about
Irving or Shakespeare, being a foreigner. You never saw such an
exhibition!'

'Poor Mr. Fenwick. I must go and talk to him.'

'Eugénie, don't be a goose. Why should you take any trouble about
him?'

'He's wonderfully clever, papa. And clever people are always getting
into scrapes. Somebody must take him in hand.'

And, rising, she threw her father a whimsical backward look as she
departed. Lord Findon watched her with mingled smiles and chagrin.
How charmingly she was dressed to-night--his poor Eugénie! And how
beautifully she moved!--with what grace and sweetness! As he turned to
do his duty by an elderly countess near him, he stifled a sigh--that
was also an imprecation.

It had often been said of Eugénie de Pastourelles that she possessed
a social magic. She certainly displayed it on this occasion. Half an
hour later Lord Findon, who was traversing the drawing-rooms after
having taken the Ambassadress to her carriage, found a regenerate and
humanised Fenwick sitting beside his daughter; the centre, indeed, of
a circle no less friendly to untutored talent than the circle of the
dinner-table had been hostile. Lord Findon stopped to listen. Really
the young man was now talking decently!--about matters he understood;
Burne-Jones, Rossetti--some French pictures in Bond Street--and so
forth. The ruffled host was half appeased, half wroth. For if he
_could_ make this agreeable impression, why such a superfluity
of naughtiness downstairs? And the fellow had really some general
cultivation; nothing like Welby, of course--where would you find
another Arthur Welby?--but enough to lift him above the mere
journeyman. After all, one must be indulgent to these novices--with
no traditions behind them--and no--well, to put it plainly--no
grandfathers! And so, with reflexions of this kind, the annoyance of a
good-natured man subsided.

It was all Eugénie's doing, of course. She and Welby between them
had caught the bear, tamed him, and set him to show whatever parlour
tricks he possessed. Just like her! He hoped the young man understood
her condescension--and that to see her and talk with her was a
privilege. Involuntarily Lord Findon glanced across the room, at the
_décolleté_ shoulders and buxom good looks of his wife. When Eugénie
was in the house the second Lady Findon never seemed to him well
dressed.

When Fenwick and Cuningham had departed--Fenwick in a glow of grateful
good-humour, expressing himself effusively to his host--Madame de
Pastourelles approached her father, smiling.

'That youth has asked me to sit to him.'

'The audacious rascal!' cried Lord Findon, fuming. 'He has never seen
you before--and, besides, how does any one know what he can do?'

'Why, you said yourself his picture was remarkable.'

'So it is. But what's one picture? What do you think, Welby?' he
said, impulsively addressing the man beside him. 'Wasn't it like his
impudence?'

Welby smiled.

'Like Eugénie's kindness! It was rather charming to see his look when
she said "Yes"!'

'You said "_Yes_"!' Lord Findon stared at her.

'Come with me and see what he can do in a morning.' She laid a
quieting hand on her father's arm. 'You know that always amuses you.
And I want to see his picture.'

'His picture is not bad,' said Lord Findon, with decision.

'I think you will have to buy it, papa.'

'There you go,' said Lord Findon--'letting me in!'

'Well, I'm off to bed.' Smiling, she gave her hand to each, knowing
that she had gained her point, or would gain it. Arthur Welby,
turning, watched her move away, say 'Good-night' to Lady Findon, and
disappear through a distant door. Then for him, though the room was
still full of people, it was vacant. He slipped away without any more
'Good-byes.'




CHAPTER V


It was Christmas Eve, and the dark had fallen. The train from Euston
had just drawn up in Windermere Station, and John Fenwick, carrying
his bag, was making his way among the vehicles outside the station,
inquiring whether any one was going in the direction of Great
Langdale, who could give him a lift. He presently found a farmer's
cart bound for a village on the road, and made a bargain with the lad
driving it to carry him to his destination.

They set off in bitter weather. The driver was a farmer's son who had
come to the station to fetch his small brother. Fenwick and he took
the little school-boy between them, to protect him as best they could
from the wind and sleet. They piled some empty sacks, from the back
of the cart, on their knees and shoulders; and the old grey horse
set forward cautiously, feeling its way down the many hills of the
Ambleside road.

The night was not yet wholly in possession. The limestone road shone
dimly white, the forms of the leafless trees passed them in a windy
procession, and afar on the horizon, beyond the dark gulf of the lake,
there was visible at intervals a persistent dimness, something less
black than the sky above and the veiled earth below, which Fenwick
knew must be the snowy tops of the mountains. But it was a twilight
more mournful than a total darkness; the damp air was nipping cold,
and every few minutes gusts of sleet drove in their faces.

The two brothers talked to each other sometimes, in a broad
Westmoreland speech. To Fenwick the dialect of his childhood was
already strange and disagreeable. So, too, was the wild roughness of
the Northern night, the length of the road, the sense of increasing
distance from all that most held his mind. He longed, indeed, to see
Phoebe and the child, but it was as though he had wilfully set up some
barrier between himself and them, which spoiled his natural pleasure.
Moreover, he was afraid of Phoebe, of her quick jealous love, and of
certain passionate possibilities in her character that he had long
ago discerned. If she discovered that he had made a mystery of his
marriage--that he had passed in London as unmarried? It was an ugly
and uncomfortable 'if.' Did he shrink from the possible blow to
her--or the possible trouble to himself? Well, she must not find it
out! It had been a wretched sort of accident, and before it could do
any harm it should be amended.

Suddenly, a sound of angry water. They were close on the lake, and
waves driven by the wind were plashing on the shore. Across the lake,
a light in a house-window shone through the storm, the only reminder
of human life amid a dark wilderness of mountains. Wild sounds crashed
through the trees; and accompanying the tumult of water came the
rattle of a bitter rain lashing the road, the cart, and their bent
shoulders.

'There'll not be a dry stitch on us soon,' said Fenwick, presently, to
the young man beside him.

'Aye, it's dampish,' said his companion, cheerfully.

The caution of the adjective set Fenwick grinning. The North found and
gripped him; these are not the ways of the South.

And in a moment the sense of contrast, thus provoked, had carried him
far--out of the Westmoreland night, back to London, and his shabby
studio in Bernard Street. There, throned on a low platform, sat Madame
de Pastourelles; and to her right, himself, sitting crouched before
his easel, working with all his eyes and all his mind. The memory of
her was, as it were, physically stamped upon his sight, his hands;
such an intensity of study had he given to every detail of her face
and form. Did he like her? He didn't know. There were a number of
curious resentments in his mind with regard to her. Several times in
the course of their acquaintance she had cheapened or humiliated him
in his own eyes; and the sensation had been of a sharpness as yet
unknown to him.

Of course, there was in it, one way or another, an aristocratic
insolence! There must be: to move so delicately and immaculately
through life, with such superfine perceptions, must mean that you were
brought up to scorn the common way, and those who walk in it. 'The
poor in a lump are bad'--coarse and ill-mannered at any rate--that
must be the real meaning of her soft dignity, so friendly yet so
remote, her impossibly ethereal standards, her light words that so
often abashed a man for no reasonable cause.

She had been sitting to him, off and on, for about six weeks.
Originally she had meant him to make a three-hour sketch of her. He
triumphed in the remembrance that she and Lord Findon had found the
sketch so remarkable that, when he had timidly proposed a portrait in
oils, Lord Findon himself had persuaded her to sit. Since that moment
his work on the portrait, immediately begun, had absorbed him to such
a degree that the 'Genius Loci,' still unfinished, had been put aside,
and must have its last touches when he returned to town.

But in the middle of the sittings, Madame de Pastourelles being away,
and he in a mood to destroy all that he had done, he had suddenly
spent a stray earning on a railway ticket to Paris.

There--excitement!--illumination!--and a whole fresh growth of
ambition! Some of the mid-century portraits in the Luxembourg, and in
a loan exhibition then open in the Rue Royale, excited him so that
he lost sleep and appetite. The work of Bastien-Lepage was also to
be seen; and the air rang with the cries of Impressionism. But the
beautiful surface of the older men held him. How to combine the
breadth of the new with the keeping, the sheer _pleasure_ of the old!
He rushed home--aflame!--and fell to work again.

And now he found himself a little more able to cope with his sitter.
He was in possession, at any rate, of fresh topics--need not feel
himself so tongue-tied in the presence of this cosmopolitan culture of
hers, which she did her feminine best to disguise--which nevertheless
made the atmosphere of her personality. She had lived some six years
in Paris, it appeared; and had known most of the chief artists and
men of letters. Fenwick writhed under his ignorance of the French
language; it was a disadvantage not to be made up.

However, he talked much, and sometimes arrogantly; he gave his views,
compared one man with another; if he felt any diffidence, he showed
little. And indeed she led him on. Upon his art he had a right
to speak, and the keen intellectual interest she betrayed in his
impressions--the three days impressions of a painter--stirred and
flattered him.

But he made a great many rather ludicrous mistakes, inevitable to one
who had just taken a first canter through the vast field of French
art; mistakes in names and dates, in the order of men and generations.
And when he made a blunder he was apt to stick to it absurdly, or
excuse it elaborately. She soon gave up correcting him, even in the
gentle, hesitating way she at first made use of. She said nothing; but
there was sometimes mischief, perhaps mockery, in her eyes. Fenwick
knew it; and would either make fresh plunges, or paint on in a sulky
silence.

How on earth had she guessed the authorship of those articles in the
_Mirror_? He supposed he must have talked the same kind of stuff to
her. At any rate, she had made him feel in some intangible way that
it seemed to her a dishonourable thing to be writing anonymous attacks
upon a body from whom you were asking, or intending to ask, exhibition
space for your pictures and the chance of selling your work. His
authorship was never avowed between them. Nevertheless this criticism
annoyed and pricked him. He said to himself that it was just like a
woman--who always took the personal view. But he had not yet begun on
his last two articles, which were overdue.

On one occasion, encouraged perhaps by some kindness of expression
on her part, he had ventured an indirect question or two, meant to
procure him some information about her past history and present way
of life. She had rebuffed him at once; and he had said to himself
fiercely that it was of course because he was a man of the people
and she one of 'the upper ten.' He might paint her; but he must not
presume to know her!

On the other hand, his mind was still warm with memories of her
encouragement, her praise. Sometimes in their talks he would put the
portrait aside, and fall to sketching for her--either to illustrate
his memories of pictures, or things noticed in French life and
landscapes. And as the charcoal worked; as he forgot himself in
hurried speech, and those remarks fell from him which are the natural
outcome of a painter's experience, vivacious also and touched with
literature; then her brown eyes would lighten and soften, and for
once his mind would feel exultant that it moved with hers on equal
terms--nay, that he was teacher and she taught. Whenever there emerged
in him the signs of that demonic something that makes greatness
she would be receptive, eager, humble even. But again his commoner,
coarser side, his mere lack of breeding, would reappear; and she would
fall back on her cold or gentle defensiveness. Thus protected by what
his wrath called 'airs,' she was a mystery to him, yet a mystery that
tamed and curbed him. He had never dreamt that such women existed.
His own views of women were those of the shopkeeping middle class,
practical, selfish, or sensual. But he had been a reader of books; and
through Madame de Pastourelles certain sublimities or delicacies of
poetry began to seem to him either less fantastic or more real.

All the same:--he was not sure that he liked her, and while one hour
he was all restlessness to resume his task, the next it was a relief
to be temporarily quit of it. As for Lord Findon, except for a certain
teasing vagueness on the business side of things, he had shown himself
a good friend. Several times since the first variegated evening had
Fenwick dined with them, mostly _en famille_. Lady Findon, indeed, had
been away, nursing an invalid father; Madame de Pastourelles
filled her place. The old fellow would talk freely--politics,
connoisseurship, art. Fenwick too was allowed his head, and said
his say; though always surrounded and sometimes chafing under
that discipline of good society which is its only or its best
justification. It flattered his vanity enormously, however, to be thus
within touch of the inner circle in politics and art; for the Findons
had relations and friends in all the foremost groups of both; and
incidentally Fenwick, who had the grudges and some of the dreams of
the democrat, was beginning to have a glimpse of the hidden springs
and powers of English society--to his no small bewilderment often!

Great luck--he admitted--all this--for a nameless artist of the
people, only six months in London. He owed it to Cuningham, and
believed himself grateful. Cuningham was often at the Findons, made a
point, indeed, of going. Was it to maintain his place with them, and
to keep Fenwick under observation? Fenwick triumphantly believed
that Lord Findon greatly preferred his work--and even, by now, his
conversation--to Cuningham's. But he was still envious of Cuningham's
smooth tact, and agreeable, serviceable ways.

As to Welby and his place in the Findon circle, that was another
matter altogether. He came and went as he pleased, on brotherly terms
with the son and the younger daughters, clearly an object of great
affection to Lord Findon, and often made use of by her ladyship.
What was the degree of friendship between him and Madame de
Pastourelles?--that had been already the subject of many meditations
on Fenwick's part.

The cart deposited the school-boy in Brathay and started again for
Langdale.

'Yo couldna get at Langdale for t' snaw lasst week,' said the young
farmer, as they turned a corner into the Skelwith Valley. 'T' roads
were fair choked wi't.'

'It's been an early winter,' said Fenwick.

'Aye, and t' Langdales get t' brunt o't. It's wild livin there,
soomtimes, i' winter.'

They began to climb the first steep hill of the old road to Langdale.
The snow lay piled on either side of the road, the rain beat down, and
the trees clashed and moaned overhead. Not a house, not a light, upon
their path--only swirling darkness, opening now and then on that high
glimmer of the snow. Fresh from London streets, where winter, even if
it attack in force, is so soon tamed and conquered, Fenwick was for
the first time conscious of the harsher, wilder aspects of his native
land. Poor Phoebe! Had she been a bit lonesome in the snow and rain?

The steep lane to the cottage was still deep in snow. The cart could
not attempt it. Fenwick made his way up, fighting the eddying sleet.
As he let fall the latch of the outer gate, the cottage door opened,
and Phoebe, with the child in her arms, stood on the threshold.

'John!'

'Yes! God bless my soul, what a night!' He reached the door, put down
his umbrella with difficulty, and dragged his bag into the passage.
Then, in a moment, his coat was off and he had thrown his arm round
her and the child. It seemed to him that she was curiously quiet and
restrained. But she kissed him in return, drew him further within the
little passage, and shut the outer door, shivering.

'The kitchen's warm,' she said, at last.

She led him in, and he found the low-ceiled room bright with fire and
lamp, the table spread, and his chair beside the blaze. Kneeling down,
she tried to unlace his wet boots.

'No, no!' he said, holding her away--'I'll do that, Phoebe. What's
wrong with you?--you look so--so queer!'

She straightened herself, and with a laugh put back her fair hair. Her
face was very pale--a greyish pallor--and her wonderful eyes stared
from it in an odd, strained way.

'Oh, I'm all right,' she said; and she turned away from him to the
fire, opening the oven-door to see whether the meat-pie was done.

'How have you kept in this weather?' he said, watching her. 'I'd no
notion you'd had it so bad.'

'Oh, I don't know. I suppose I've had a chill or something. It's been
rather weariful.'

'You didn't tell me anything about your chill.'

'Didn't I? It seems hardly worth while telling such things, from such
a distance. Will you have supper at once?'

He drew up to the table, and she fed him and hovered round him, asking
the while about his work, in a rather perfunctory way, about his rooms
and the price of them, inquiring after the state of his clothes. But
her tone and manner were unlike herself, and there was in his mind a
protesting consciousness that she had not welcomed him as a young wife
should after a long separation. Her manner too was extraordinarily
nervous; her hand shook as she touched a plate; her movements were
full of starts, and checks, as though, often, she intended a thing and
then forgot it.

They avoided talking about money, and he did not mention the name of
Madame de Pastourelles; though of course his letters had reported the
external history of the portrait. But Phoebe presently inquired after
it.

'Have you nearly done painting that lady, John?--I don't know how to
say her name.'

As she spoke, she lifted a bit of bread-and-butter to her mouth and
put it down untasted. In the same way she had tried to drink some tea,
and had not apparently succeeded. Fenwick rose and went over to her.

'Look here, Phoebe,' he said, putting his hand on her beautiful hair
and turning her face to him--'what's the matter?'

Her eyelids closed, and a quiver went through the face.

'I don't know. I--I had a fright a few days ago--at night--and I
suppose I haven't got over it.'

'A fright?'

'Yes. There was a tramp one night came to the door. I half-opened
it--and his face was so horrible I tried to shut it again at once. And
he struggled with me, but I was strongest. Then he tried to get in
at the window, but luckily I had fastened the iron bar across the
shutter--and the back door. But it all held, mercifully. He couldn't
get in. Then he abused me through the door, and said he would have
killed me and the child, if he could have got in--and some day he
would come again.' She shuddered.

Fenwick had turned pale. With his painter's imagination he saw the
thing--the bestial man outside, the winter night, the slender form
within pressing against the door and the bolt--

'Look here,' he said, abruptly. 'We can't have this. Somebody must
sleep here. Did you tell the police?'

'Yes, I wrote--to Ambleside. They sent a man over to see me. But they
couldn't catch him. He's probably left the country. I got a bell'--she
opened her eyes, and pointed to it. 'If I rang it, they might hear it
down at Brow Farm. They _might_--if the wind was that way.'

There was silence a moment. Then Fenwick stooped and kissed her.

'Poor old girl!' he said, softly. She made but slight response. He
returned to his place, repeating with a frowning energy--'You must
have some one to sleep here.'

'Daisy would come--if I'd pay her.'

Daisy was their little servant of the summer, the daughter of a
quarryman near by.

'Well, pay her!'

She drew herself up sharply. 'I haven't got the money--and you always
say, when you write, you haven't any either.'

'I'll find some for that. I can't have you scared like this.'

But, though his tone was vehement, it was not particularly
affectionate. He was horribly discomposed indeed, could not get the
terrible image out of his mind. But as he went on with his supper, the
shock of it mingled with a good many critical or reproachful thoughts.
Why had she persisted in staying on in Langdale, instead of going to
her father? All that foolish dislike of her stepmother! It had been
open to her to stay in her father's farm, with plenty of company. If
she wouldn't, was _he_ to blame if the cottage was lonesome?

But as though she divined this secret debate she presently said:

'I went to Keswick last week.'

He looked up, startled. 'Well?'

'Father's ill--he's got a bad chest, and the doctor says he may be
going into a consumption.'

'Doctors'll say anything!' cried Fenwick, wrathfully. 'If ever there
was a strong man, it's your father. Don't you believe any croaking of
that sort, Phoebe.'

She shook her head.

'He looks so changed,' she said; and began drawing with her finger on
the tablecloth. He saw that her lips were trembling. A strong impulse
worked in him, bidding him go to her again, kiss away her tears, and
say--'Hang everything! Come with me to London, and let's sink or swim
together.'

Instead of which some perverse cross-current hurried him into the
words:

'He'd be all right if you'd go and nurse him, Phoebe.'

'No, not at all. They didn't want me--and Mrs. Gibson, poor creature,
was real glad when I said I was going. She was jealous of me all the
time.'

'I expect you imagined that.'

Phoebe's face flushed angrily.

'I didn't!' she said, shortly. 'Everybody in the house knew it.'

The meal went on rather silently. Fenwick's conscience said
to him, 'Take her back with you!--whatever happens, take her to
London--she's moping her life out here.' And an inner voice clamoured
in reply--'Take her to those rooms?--in the very middle of the
struggle with those two pictures?--go through all the agitation
and discomfort of explanations with Lord Findon and Madame de
Pastourelles?--run the risk of estranging them, and of distracting
your own mind from your work at this critical moment?--the further
risk, moreover, of Phoebe's jealousy?'

For in her present nervous and fidgety state she would very likely be
jealous of his sitter, and of the way in which Madame de Pastourelles'
portrait possessed his mind. No, it really couldn't be done!--it
really _couldn't!_ He must finish the two pictures--persuade Lord
Findon to buy the 'Genius Loci,' and make the portrait such a success
that he must needs buy that too. Then let discovery come on; it should
find him steeled.

Meanwhile, Phoebe must have a servant, and not any mere slip of a
girl, but some one who would be a companion and comfort. He began
to talk of it, eagerly, only to find that Phoebe took but a languid
interest in the idea.

She could think of no one--wanted no one, but Daisy. Again his secret
ill-humour waxed and justified itself. It was unreasonable and selfish
that she should not be able to think for herself and the child better;
after all, he was slaving for her as much as for himself.

Meanwhile, Carrie sat very silent beside her father, observing him,
and every now and then applying her pink lips to some morsel he held
out to her on his fork. He had kissed her, and tossed her, and she was
now sitting in his pocket. But after these eight months the child of
four was shy and timid with this unfamiliar father. He on his side saw
that she was prettier than before; his eye delighted in some of the
rarer and lovelier lines of her little face; and he felt a fatherly
pride. He must make some fresh studies of her; the child in the
'Genius Loci' might be improved.

After supper, Phoebe seemed to him so pale and tottering that he made
her rest beside the fire, while he himself cleared the supper-things
away. She lay back in her chair, laughing at his awkwardness, or
starting up when china clashed.

Meanwhile, as in their farewell talk beside the ghyll eight months
before, her mood gradually and insensibly changed. Whatever unloving
thoughts or resentments had held her in the first hour of their
meeting, however strong had been the wish to show him that she had
been lonely and suffering, she could not resist what to her was the
magic of his presence. As he moved about in the low, firelit room, and
she watched him, her whole nature melted; and he knew it.

Presently she took the child upstairs. He waited for her, hanging over
the fire--listening to the storm outside--and thinking, thinking--

When she reappeared, and he, looking round, saw her standing in the
doorway, so tall and slender, her pale face and hair coloured by the
glow of the fire, passion and youth spoke in him once more.

He sprang up and caught her in his arms. Presently, sitting in the old
armchair beside the blaze, he had gathered her on his knee, and she
had clasped her hands round his neck, and buried her face against him.
All things were forgotten, save that they were man and wife together,
within this 'wind-warm space'--ringed by night, and pattering sleet,
and gusts that rushed in vain upon the roof that sheltered them.

But next morning, within the little cottage--beating rain on the
windows, and a cheerless storm-light in the tiny rooms--the hard
facts of the situation resumed their sway. In the first place money
questions had to be faced. Fenwick made the most of his expectations;
but at best they were no more, and how to live till they became
certainties was the problem. If Lord Findon had commissioned the
portrait, or definitely said he would purchase the 'Genius Loci,'
some advance might have been asked for. As it was, how could money
be mentioned yet a while? Phoebe had a fine and costly piece of
embroidery on hand, commissioned through an 'Art Industry' started at
Windermere the summer before; but it could not be finished for some
weeks, possibly months, and the money Fenwick proposed to earn during
his fortnight in the North by some illustrations long overdue had been
already largely forestalled. He gloomily made up his mind to appeal
to an old cousin in Kendal, the widow of a grocer, said to be richly
left, who had once in his boyhood given him five shillings. With much
distaste he wrote the letter and walked to Elterwater in the rain
to post it. Then he tried to work; but little Carrie, fractious from
confinement indoors, was troublesome and disturbed him. Phoebe, too,
would make remarks on his drawing which seemed to him inept. In old
days he would have laughed at her for pretending to know, and turned
it off with a kiss. Now what she said set him on edge. The talk he had
been living amongst had spoilt him for silly criticisms. Moreover,
for the first time he detected in her a slight tone of the
'schoolmarm'--didactic and self-satisfied, without knowledge. The
measure Madame de Pastourelles had dealt out to him, he in some sort
avenged on Phoebe.

At the same time there were much more serious causes of difference.
Each had a secret from the other. Fenwick's secret was that he had
foolishly passed in London as an unmarried man, and that he could not
take Phoebe back with him, because of the discomforts and risks in
which a too early avowal of her would involve him. He was morbidly
conscious of this; brooded over it, and magnified it.

She on the other hand was tormented by a fixed idea--already in
existence at the time of their first parting, but much strengthened by
loneliness and fretting--that he was tired of her and not unwilling to
be without her. The joy of their meeting banished it for a time, but
it soon came back. She had never acquiesced in the wisdom of their
separation; and to question it was to resent it more and more
deeply--to feel his persistence in it a more cruel offence, month by
month. Her pride prevented her from talking of it; but the soreness
of her grievance invaded their whole relation. And in her moral unrest
she showed faults which had been scarcely visible in their early
married years--impatience, temper, suspicion, a readiness to magnify
small troubles whether of health or circumstance.

During her months alone she had been reading many novels of an
indifferent sort, which the carrier brought her from the lending
library at Windermere. She talked excitedly of some of them, had
'cried her eyes out' over this or that. Fenwick picked up one or two,
and threw them away for 'trash.' He scornfully thought that they had
done her harm, made her more nervous and difficult. But at night, when
he had done his work, he never took any trouble to read to her, or to
talk to her about other than household things. He smoked or drew in
silence; and she sat over her embroidery, lost in morbid reverie.

One morning he discovered amongst her books a paper-covered 'Life of
Romney'--a short compilation issued by a local bookseller.

'Why, whatever did you get this for, Phoebe?' he said, holding it up.

She looked up from her mending, and coloured. 'I wanted to read it.'

'But why?'

'Well'--she hesitated--'I thought it was like you.'

'Like me?--you little goose!'

'I don't know,' she said, doggedly, looking hard at her work--'there
was the hundred pounds that he got to go to London with--and then,
marrying a wife in Kendal--and'--she looked up with a half-defiant
smile--'and leaving her behind!'

'Oh! so you think that's like me?' he said, seating himself again at
his drawing.

'It's rather like.'

'You suppose you're going to be left here for thirty years?' He
laughed as he spoke.

She laughed too, but not gaily--with a kind of defiance.

'Well, it wouldn't be quite as easy now, would it?--with trains, and
all that. There were only coaches then, I suppose. Now, London's so
near.'

'I wish you'd always think so!' he cried. 'Why, of course it's near.
I'm only seven hours away. What's that, in these days? And in three
months' time, things will be all right and square again.'

'I dare say,' she said, sighing.

'Why can't you wait cheerfully?' he asked, rather
exasperated--'instead of being so down.'

'Because'--she broke out--'I don't see the reason of it--there! No,
I don't!--However!'--she pressed back her hair from her eyes and drew
herself together. 'You've never shown me your studies of that--that
lady--John; you said you would.'

Relieved at the change of subject, he took a sketch-book out of his
pocket and gave it to her. It contained a number of 'notes' for his
portrait of Madame de Pastourelles--sketches of various poses, aspects
of the head and face, arrangements of the hands, and so forth. Phoebe
pondered it in silence.

'She's pretty--I think,' she said, at last, doubtfully.

'I'm not sure that she is,' said Fenwick. 'She's very pale.'

'That doesn't matter. The shape of her face is awfully pretty--and her
eyes. Is her hair like mine?'

'No, not nearly so good.'

'Ah, if I could only do it as prettily as she does!' said Phoebe,
faintly smiling. 'I suppose, John, she's very smart and fashionable?'

'Well, she's Lord Findon's daughter--that tells you. They're pretty
well at the top.'

Phoebe asked various other questions, then fell silent, still
pondering the sketches. After a while she put down her work and came
to sit on a stool beside Fenwick, sometimes laying her golden
head against his knee, or stretching out her hand to touch his. He
responded affectionately enough; but as the winter twilight deepened
in the little room, Phoebe's eyes, fixed upon the fire, resumed their
melancholy discontent. She was less necessary to him even than before;
she knew by a thousand small signs that the forces which possessed his
mind--perhaps his heart!--were not now much concerned with her.

She tried to control, to school herself. But the flame within was
not to be quenched--was, indeed, perpetually finding fresh fuel. How
quietly he had taken the story of the tramp's attack upon her!--which
still, whenever she thought of it, thrilled her own veins with horror.
No doubt he had been over to Ambleside to speak to the police; and he
had arranged that the little servant, Daisy, should come to her when
he left. But if he had merely caught her to him with one
shuddering cry of love and rage--that would have been worth all his
precautions!--would have effaced the nightmare, and filled her heart.

As to his intellectual life, she was now much more conscious of her
exclusion from it than she ever had been in their old life together.

For it was a consciousness quickened by jealousy. Little as Fenwick
talked about Madame de Pastourelles, Phoebe understood perfectly that
she was a woman of high education and refinement, and that her stored
and subtle mind was at once an attraction and a cause of humiliation
to John. And through his rare stories of the Findon household and the
Findon dinner-parties, the wife dimly perceived a formidable world,
bristling with strange acquirements and accomplishments, in which he,
perhaps, was beginning to find a place, thanks to his art; while she,
his obscure and ignorant wife, must resign herself to being for ever
shut out from it--to knowing it from his report only. How could she
ever hold her own with such people? He would talk with them, paint
them, dine with them, while she sat at home--Carrie's nurse, and the
domestic drudge.

And yet she was of that type which represents perhaps the most
ambitious element in the lower middle class. It had been a great
matter that she, a small farmer's daughter, should pass her
examinations and rise to be a teacher in Miss Mason's school. She had
had her triumphs and conceits; had been accustomed to think herself
clever and successful, to hold her head high amongst her schoolmates.
Whereas now, if she tried to talk of art or books, she was hotly aware
that everything she said was, in John's eyes, pretentious or
absurd. He was comparing her with others all the time, with men
and women--women especially--in whose presence he felt himself as
diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet
dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres
and books, who could amuse him and distract him. And meanwhile _she_
went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton apron and rolled-up
sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning--for her child and for him.
She felt through every nerve that he was constantly aware of details
of dress or _ménage_ that jarred upon him; she suspected miserably
that all her little personal ways and habits seemed to him ugly and
common; and the suspicion showed itself in pride or _brusquerie_.

Meanwhile, if she had been _restful_, if he could only have forgotten
his cares in her mere youth and prettiness, Fenwick would have been
easily master of his discontents. For he was naturally of a warm,
sensuous temper. Had the woman understood her own arts, she could have
held him.

But she was not restful, she was exacting and self-conscious; and,
moreover, a certain new growth of Puritanism in her repelled him.
While he had been passing under the transforming influences of
an all-questioning thought and culture, she had been turning to
Evangelical religion for consolation. There was a new minister in a
Baptist chapel a mile or two away, of whom she talked, whose services
she attended. The very mention of him presently became a boredom
to Fenwick. The new influence had no effect upon her jealousies and
discontents; but it re-enforced a natural asceticism, and weakened
whatever power she possessed of playing on a husband's passion.
Meanwhile, Fenwick was partly aware of her state of mind, and far
from happy himself. His conscience pricked him; but such prickings are
small help to love. Often he found himself guiltily brooding over Lord
Findon's tirades against the early marriages of artists. There was
a horrid truth in them. No doubt an artist should wait till his
circumstances were worthy of his gifts; and then marry a woman who
could understand and help him on.

Nor was even the child a binding influence. Fenwick in this visit
became for the first time a fond father. A certain magic in the little
Carrie flattered his vanity and excited his hopes. He drew her many
times, and prophesied confidently that she would be a beauty. But,
in his secret opinion, she was spoilt and mismanaged; and he talked a
good deal to Phoebe about her bringing-up, theorising and haranguing
in his usual way. Phoebe listened generally with impatience, resenting
interference with her special domain. And often, when she saw the
father and child together, a fresh and ugly misery would raise its
head. Would he in time set even Carrie against her--teach the child to
look down upon its mother?

One day he returned from Ambleside, pale and excited--bringing a
Manchester paper.

'Phoebe!' he called, from the gate.

Startled by something in his voice, Phoebe ran out to him.

'Phoebe, an awful thing's happened! Old Morrison's--dead! Look here!'

And he showed her a paragraph headed 'Defalcations and suicide.' It
described how Mr. James Morrison, the chief cashier of the Bartonbury
Bank, had committed suicide immediately after the discovery by the
bank authorities of large falsifications in the bank accounts. Mr.
Morrison had shot himself, leaving a statement acknowledging a long
course of fraudulent dealings with the funds entrusted to him,
and pleading with his employers for his wife and daughter. 'Great
sympathy,' said the _Guardian_ reporter, 'is felt in Bartonbury with
Mrs. Morrison, whose character has always been highly respected. But,
indeed, the whole family occupied a high position, and the shock to
the locality has been great.' On which followed particulars of the
frauds and a long report of the inquest.

Phoebe was struck with horror. She lingered over the paper,
commenting, exclaiming; while Fenwick sat staring into the fire, his
hands on his knees.

Presently she came to him and said in a low voice:

'And what about the money, John--the loan?'

'I am not obliged to return it in money,' he said, sharply.

'Well, the pictures?'

'That'll be all right. I must think about it. There'll be no hurry.'

'Did Mrs. Morrison know--about the loan?'

'I dare say. I never heard.'

'I suppose she and the daughter'll have nothing?'

'That doesn't follow at all. Very likely he'd settled something on
them, which can't be touched. A man like that generally does.'

'Poor things!' she said, shuddering. 'But, John--you'll pay it back to
Mrs. Morrison?'

'Of course I shall,' he said, impatiently--'in due time. But please
remember, Phoebe, that's my affair. Don't you talk of it--_to any
one_.'

He looked up to emphasise his words.

Phoebe flushed.

'I wasn't going to talk of it to any one,' she said, proudly, as she
moved away.

Presently he took up his hat again and went out, that he might be
alone with his thoughts. The rain had vanished; and a frosty sunshine
sparkled on the fells, on the red bracken and the foaming becks. He
took the mountain-path which led past the ghyll, up to the ridge
which separates Langdale from Grasmere and Easedale. Morrison's finely
wrinkled face, with its blue, complacent eyes and thin nose, hovered
before him--now as he remembered it in life, and now as he imagined it
in death. Hard fate! There had been an adventurous, poetic element in
Morrison--something beyond the ken of the ordinary Philistine--and
it had come to this. Fenwick remembered him among the drawings he had
collected. Real taste--real sense of beauty--combined no doubt with
the bargaining instinct and a natural love of chicanery. Moreover,
Fenwick believed that, so far as a grasping temper would allow, there
had been a genuine wish to help undiscovered talent. He thought of the
hand which had given him the check, and had a vision of it holding
the revolver--of the ghastly, solitary end. And no one had
guessed--unless, indeed, it were his wife? Perhaps that look of
hers--as of a creature hunted by secret fears--was now explained.

How common such things are!--and probably, so ran his thoughts,
will always be. We are all acting. Each man or woman carries this
potentiality of a double life--it is only a question of less or more.

Suddenly he coloured, as he saw _himself_ thus writ double--first
as he appeared to Madame de Pastourelles, and then as he appeared to
Phoebe. Masquerading was easy, it seemed; and conscience made little
fuss! Instantly, however, the inner man rebelled against the implied
comparison of himself with Morrison. An accidental concealment,
acquiesced in temporarily, for business reasons--what had that in
common with villainy like Morrison's? An awkward affair, no doubt; and
he had been a fool to slip into it. But in a few weeks he would put it
right--come what would.

As to the debt--he tried to fight against a feeling of
deliverance--but clearly he need be in no hurry to pay it. He had been
living in dread of Morrison's appearing in Bernard Street to claim
his bond--revealing Phoebe's existence perhaps to ears unprepared--and
laying greedy hands upon the 'Genius Loci.' It would have been hard to
keep him off it--unless Lord Findon had promptly come forward--and it
would have been odious to yield it to him. 'Now I shall take my time.'
Of course, ultimately, he would repay the money to Mrs. Morrison and
Bella. But better, even in their interests, to wait a while, till
there could be no question of any other claim to it.

So from horror he passed to a personal relief, of which he was rather
ashamed, and then again to a real uneasy pity for the wife and for
the vulgar daughter who had so bitterly resented his handling of her
charms. He remembered the note in which she had acknowledged the final
delivery of her portrait. In obedience to Morrison's suggestion, he
had kept it by him a few days; and then, either unable or proudly
unwilling to alter it, he had returned it to its owner. Whereupon a
furious note from Miss Bella, which--knowing that her father took no
account of her tempers--Fenwick had torn up with a laugh. It was clear
that she had heard of her father's invitation to him to 'beautify' it,
and when the picture reappeared unaltered she took it as a direct and
personal insult--a sign that he disliked her and meant to humiliate
her. It was an odd variety of the _spretae injuria formae_. Fenwick
had never been in the least penitent for his behaviour. The picture
was true, clever--and the best he could do. It was no painter's
business to endow Miss Bella with beauty, if she did not possess it.
As a piece of paint, the picture _had_ beauty--if she had only eyes to
find it out.

Poor girl!--what husband now would venture on such a termagant
wife?--penniless too, and disgraced! He would like to help her, and
her mother--for Morrison's sake. Stirred by a fleeting impulse, he
began to scheme how he might become their benefactor, as Morrison had
been his.

Then, as he raised his eyes from the path--with a rush of delight
he noticed the flood of afternoon sunlight pouring on the steep
fell-side, the sharp black shadows thrown by wall and tree, the
brilliance of the snow along the topmost ridge. He raced along,
casting the Morrisons out of his thoughts, forgetting everything
but the joy of atmosphere and light--the pleasure of his physical
strength. Near one of the highest crags he came upon a shepherd-boy
and his dog collecting some sheep. The collie ran hither and thither
with the marvellous shrewdness of his breed, circling, heading,
driving; the stampede of the sheep, as they fled before him, could be
heard along the fell. The sun played upon the flock, turning its dirty
grey to white, caught the little figure of the shepherd-boy, as he
stood shouting and waving, or glittered on the foaming stream beside
him. Purple shadows bathed the fell beyond--and on its bosom the
rustic scene emerged--a winter idyl.

Fenwick sat down upon a rock, ransacked his pockets for sketch-book
and paints, and began to sketch. When he had made his 'note,' he sat
lost a while in the pleasure of his own growing skill and sharpening
perceptions, and dreaming of future 'subjects.' A series of
'Westmoreland months,' illustrating the seasons among the fells and
the life of the dalesmen, ran through his mind. Nature appeared to his
exultant sense as a vast treasure-house stored for him only--a mine
inexhaustible offered to his craftsman's hand. For him the sweeping
hues, the intricate broideries--green or russet, red or purple--of
this winter world!--for him the delicacy of the snow, the pale azure
of the sky, the cloud-shadows, the white becks, the winding river in
the valley floor, the purple crags, the lovely accents of light and
shade, the hints of composition that wooed his eager eye. Who was it
that said 'Composition is the art of preserving the accidental look'?
Clever fellow!--there was the right thing said, for once! And so he
slipped into a reverie, which was really one of those moments--plastic
and fruitful--by which the artist makes good his kinship with 'the
great of old,' his right to his own place in the unending chain.

Strange!--from that poverty of feeling in which he had considered
the Morrison tragedy--from his growing barrenness of heart towards
Phoebe--he had sprung at a bound into this ecstasy, this expansion of
the whole man. It brought with it a vivid memory of the pictures he
was engaged upon. By the time he turned homeward, and the light was
failing, he was counting the days till he could return to London--and
to work.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was still, however, another week of his holiday to run. He wrote
to Mrs. Morrison a letter which cost him much pains, expressing a
sympathy that he really felt. He got on with his illustration work,
and extracted a further advance upon it. And the old cousin in Kendal
proved unexpectedly generous. She wrote him a long Scriptural letter,
rating him for disobedience to his father, and warning him against
debt; but she lent him twenty pounds, so that, for the present, Phoebe
could be left in comparative comfort, and he had something in his
pocket.

Yet with this easing of circumstance, the relation between husband and
wife did not improve. During this last week, indeed, Phoebe teased
him to make a sketch of himself to leave with her. He began it
unwillingly, then got interested, and finally made a vigorous sketch,
as ample as their largest looking-glass would allow, with which he was
extremely pleased. Phoebe delighted in it, hung it up proudly in the
parlour, and repaid him with smiles and kisses.

Yet the very next day, under the cloud of his impending departure, she
went about pale and woe-begone, on the verge of tears or temper. He
was provoked into various harsh speeches, and Phoebe felt that despair
which weak and loving women know, when parting is near, and they
foresee the hour beyond parting--when each unkind word and look, too
well remembered, will gnaw and creep about the heart.

But she could not restrain herself. Nervous tension, doubt of her
husband, and condemnation of herself drove her on. The very last night
there was a quarrel--about the child--whom Fenwick had punished for
some small offence. Phoebe hotly defended her--first with tears, then
with passion. For the first time these two people found themselves
looking into each other's eyes with rage, almost with hate. Then they
kissed and made up, terrified at the abyss which had yawned between
them; and when the moment came, Phoebe went through the parting
bravely.

But when Fenwick had gone, and the young wife sat alone beside the
cottage fire, the January darkness outside seemed to her the natural
symbol of her own bitter foreboding. Why had he left her? There was
no reason in it, as she had said. But there must be some reason behind
it. And slowly, in the firelight, she fell to brooding over the image
of that pale classical face, as she had seen it in the sketch-book.
John had talked quite frankly about Madame de Pastourelles--not like
a man beguiled; making no mystery of her at all, answering all
questions. But his restlessness to get back to London had been
extraordinary. Was it merely the restlessness of the artist?

This was Tuesday. To-morrow Madame de Pastourelles was to come to a
sitting. Phoebe sat picturing it; while the curtain of rain descended
once more upon the cottage, blotting out the pikes, and washing down
the sodden fields.




CHAPTER VI


'I must alter that fold over the arm,' murmured Fenwick, stepping
back, with a frown, and gazing hard at the picture on his easel--'it's
too strong.'

Madame de Pastourelles gave a little shiver.

The big bare room, with its Northern aspect and its smouldering fire,
had been of a polar temperature this March afternoon. She had been
sitting for an hour and a half. Her hands and feet were frozen, and
the fur cloak which she wore over her white dress had to be thrown
back for the convenience of the painter, who was at work on the velvet
folds.

Meanwhile, on the further side of the room sat 'propriety'--also
shivering--an elderly governess of the Findon family, busily knitting.

'The dress is coming!' said Fenwick, after another minute or two.
'Yes, it's coming.'

And with a flushed face and dishevelled hair he stood back again,
staring first at his canvas and then at his sitter.

Madame de Pastourelles sat as still as she could, her thin, numbed
fingers lightly crossed on her lap. Her wonderful velvet dress, of
ivory-white, fell about her austerely in long folds, which, as they
bent or overlapped, made beautiful convolutions, firm yet subtle, on
the side turned towards the painter, and over her feet. The classical
head, with its small ear, the pale yet shining face, combined with
the dress to suggest a study in ivory, wrought to a great delicacy and
purity. Only the eyes, much darker than the hair, and the rich brown
of the sable cloak where it touched the white, gave accent and force
to the ethereal pallor, the supreme refinement, of the rest--face,
dress, hands. Nothing but civilisation in its most complex workings
could have produced such a type; that was what prevailed dimly in
Fenwick's mind as he wrestled with his picture. Sometimes his day's
work left him exultant, sometimes in a hell of despair.

'I went to see Mr. Welby's studio yesterday,' he said, hastily, after
another minute or two, seeing her droop with fatigue.

Her face changed and lit up.

'Well, what did you see?'

'The two Academy pictures--several portraits--and a lot of studies.'

'Isn't it fine--the "Polyxena"?'

Fenwick twisted his mouth in a trick he had.

'Yes,' he said, perfunctorily.

She coloured slightly, as though in antagonism.

'That means that you don't admire it at all?'

'Well, it doesn't say anything to me,' said Fenwick, after a pause.

'What do you dislike?'

'Why doesn't he paint flesh?' he said, abruptly--'not coloured wax.'

'Of course there is a decorative convention in his painting'--her tone
was a little stiff--'but so there is in all painting.'

Fenwick shrugged his shoulders.

'Go and look at Rubens--or Velasquez.'

[Illustration: _Eugénie_]

'Why not at Leonardo--and Raphael?'

'Because they are not _moderns_--and we can't get back into their
skins. Rubens and Velasquez _are_ moderns,' he protested, stoutly.

'What is a "modern"?' she asked, laughing.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, 'You are--and it is only
fashion--or something else--that makes you like this archaistic
stuff!' But he restrained himself, and they fell into a skirmish, in
which, as usual, he came off badly. As soon as he perceived it, he
became rather heated and noisy, trying to talk her down. Whereupon she
sprang up, came down from her pedestal to look at the picture, called
mademoiselle to see--praised--laughed--and all was calm again. Only
Fenwick was left once more reflecting that she was Welby's champion
through thick and thin. And this ruffled him.

'Did Mr. Welby study mostly in Italy?' he asked her presently, as he
fetched a hand-glass, in which to examine his morning's work.

'Mostly--but also in Vienna.'

And, to keep the ball rolling, she described a travel-year--apparently
before her marriage--which she, Lord Findon, a girl friend of hers,
and Welby had spent abroad together--mainly in Rome, Munich,
and Vienna--for the purpose, it seemed, of Welby's studies. The
experiences she described roused a kind of secret exasperation in
Fenwick. And what was really resentment against the meagreness of
his own lot showed itself, as usual, in jealousy. He said something
contemptuous of this foreign training for an artist--so much concerned
with galleries and Old Masters. Much better that he should use his
eyes upon his own country and its types; that had been enough for all
the best men.

Madame de Pastourelles politely disagreed with him; then, to change
the subject, she talked of some of the humours and incidents of
their stay in Vienna--the types of Viennese society--the Emperor, the
beautiful mad Empress, the Archdukes, the priests--and also of
some hurried visits to Hungarian country houses in winter, of the
cosmopolitan luxury and refinement to be found there, ringed by
forests and barbarism.

Fenwick listened greedily, and presently inquired whether Mr. Welby
had shared in all these amusements.

'Oh yes. He was generally the life and soul of them.'

'I suppose he made lots of friends--and got on with everybody?'

Madame de Pastourelles assented--cautiously.

'That's all a question of manners,' said Fenwick, with sudden
roughness.

She gave a vague 'Perhaps'--and he straightened himself aggressively.

'I don't think manners very important, do you?'

'Very!' She said it, with a gay firmness.

'Well, then, some of us will never get any,' his tone was surly--'we
weren't taught young enough.'

'Our mothers teach us generally--all that's wanted!'

He shook his head.

'It's not as simple as that. Besides--one may lose one's mother.'

'Ah, yes!' she said, with quick feeling.

And presently a little tact, a few questions on her part had brought
out some of his own early history--his mother's death--his years of
struggle with his father. As he talked on--disjointedly--painting
hard all the time, she had a vision of the Kendal shop and its
customers--of the shrewd old father, moulded by the business, the
avarice, the religion of an English country town, with a Calvinist
contempt for art and artists--and trying vainly to coerce his sulky
and rebellious son.

'Has your father seen these pictures?' She pointed to the 'Genius
Loci' on its further easel--and to the portrait.

'My father! I haven't spoken to him or seen him for years.'

'Years!' She opened her eyes. 'Is it as bad as that?'

'Aye, that's North-Country. If you've once committed yourself, you
stick to it--like death.'

She declared that it might be North-Country, but was none the less
barbarous. However, of course it would all come right. All the
interesting tales of one's childhood began that way--with a cruel
father, and a rebellious son. But they came to magnificent ends,
notwithstanding--with sacks of gold and a princess. Diffident, yet
smiling, she drew conclusions. 'So, you see, you'll make money--you'll
be an R.A.--you'll _marry_--and Mr. Fenwick will nurse the
grandchildren. I assure you--that's the fairy-tale way.'

Fenwick, who had flushed hotly, turned away and occupied himself in
replenishing his palette.

'Papa, of course, would say--Don't marry till you're a hundred and
two!' she resumed. 'But pray, don't listen to him.'

'I dare say he's right,' said Fenwick, returning to his easel, his
face bent over it.

'Not at all. People should have their youth together.'

'That's all very well. But many men don't know at twenty what they'll
want at thirty,' said Fenwick, painting fast.

Madame de Pastourelles laughed.

'The doctors say nowadays--it is papa's latest craze--that it doesn't
matter what you eat--or how little--if you only chew it properly. I
wonder if that applies to matrimony?'

'What's the chewing?'

'Manners,' she said, laughing--'that you think so little of. Whether
the food's agreeable or not, manners help it down.'

'Manners!--between husband and wife?' he said, scornfully.

'But certainly!' She lifted her beautiful brows for emphasis. 'Show me
any persons, please, that want them more!'

'The people I've been living among,' said Fenwick, with sharp
persistence, 'haven't got time for fussing about manners--in the sense
you mean. Life's too hard.'

A flush of bright colour sprang into her face. But she held her
ground.

'What do you suppose I mean? I don't meant court trains and
courtesies--I really don't.'

Fenwick was silent a moment, and then said--aggressively--' We can't
all of us have the same chances--as Mr. Welby, for instance.'

Madame de Pastourelles looked at him in astonishment. What an
extraordinary obsession! They seemed not to be able to escape from
Arthur Welby's name: yet it never cropped up without producing some
sign of irritation in this strange young man. Poor Arthur!--who had
always shown himself so ready to make friends, whenever the two
men met--as they often did--in the St. James's Square drawing-room.
Fenwick's antagonism, indeed, had been plain to her for some time.
It was natural, she supposed; he was clearly very sensitive on the
subject of his own humble origin and bringing-up; but she sighed that
a perverse youth should so mismanage his opportunities.

As to 'chances,' she declared rather tartly that they had nothing to
do with it. It was natural to Arthur Welby to make himself agreeable.

'Yes--like all other kinds of aristocrats,' said Fenwick, grimly.

Madame de Pastourelles frowned.

'Of all the words in the dictionary--that word is the most
detestable!' she declared. 'It ought to be banished. Well, thank
goodness, it _is_ generally banished.'

'That's only because we all like to hide our heads in the sand--you
who possess the privileges--and we who envy them!'

'I vow I don't possess any privileges at all,' she said, with
defiance.

'You say so, because you breathe them--live in them--like the
air--without knowing it,' said Fenwick, also trying to speak lightly.
Then he added, suddenly putting down his palette and brushes, while
his black eyes lightened--'And so does Mr. Welby. You can see from
his pictures that he doesn't know anything about common, coarse
people--_real_ people--who make up the world. He paints wax, and calls
it life; and you--'

'Go on!--_please_ go on!'

'I shall only make a fool of myself,' he said, taking up his brushes
again.

'Not at all. And I praise humbug?--and call it manners?'

He paused, then blurted out--'I wouldn't say anything rude to you for
the world!'

She smiled--a smile that turned all the delicate severity of her face
to sweetness. 'That's very nice of you. But if you knew Mr. Welby
better, you'd never want to say anything rude to _him_ either!'

Fenwick was silent. Madame de Pastourelles, feeling that for the
moment she also had come to the end of her tether, fell into a
reverie, from which she was presently roused by finding Fenwick
standing before her, palette in hand.

'I don't want you to think me an envious brute,' he said, stammering.
'Of course, I know the "Polyxena" is a fine thing--a very fine thing.'

She looked a little surprised--as though he offered her moods to which
she had no key. 'Shall I show you something I like much better?' she
said, with quick resource. And drawing towards her a small portfolio
she had brought with her, she took out a drawing and handed it to him.
'I am taking it to be framed. Isn't it beautiful?'

It was a drawing, in silver-point, of an orange-tree in mingled fruit
and bloom--an exquisite piece of work, of a Japanese truth, intricacy,
and perfection. Fenwick looked at it in silence. These silver-point
drawings of Welby's were already famous. In the preceding May there
had been an exhibition of them at an artistic club. At the top of
the drawing was an inscription in a minute handwriting--'Sorrento:
Christmas Day,' with the monogram 'A.W.' and a date three years old.

As Madame de Pastourelles perceived that his eyes had caught the
inscription, she rather hastily withdrew the sketch and returned it to
the portfolio.

'I watched him draw it,' she explained--'in a Sorrento garden. My
father and I were there for the winter. Mr. Welby was in a villa near
ours, and I used to watch him at work.'

It seemed to Fenwick that her tone had grown rather hurried and
reserved, as though she regretted the impulse which had made her show
him the drawing. He praised it as intelligently as he could; but his
mind was guessing all the time at the relation which lay behind the
drawing. According to Cuningham's information, it was now three years
since a separation had been arranged between Madame de Pastourelles
and her husband, Comte Albert de Pastourelles, owing to the Comte's
outrageous misconduct. Lord Findon had no doubt taken her abroad after
the catastrophe. And, besides her father, Welby had also been near,
apparently--watching over her?

He returned to his work upon the hands, silent, but full of
speculation. The evident bond between these two people had excited
his imagination and piqued his curiosity from the first moment of his
acquaintance with them. They were both of a rare and fine quality; and
the signs of an affection between them, equally rare and fine, had
not been lost on those subtler perceptions in Fenwick which belonged
perhaps to his heritage as an artist. If he gave the matter an
innocent interpretation, and did not merely say to himself, 'She has
lost a husband and found a lover,' it was because the woman herself
had awakened in him fresh sources of judgement. His thoughts simply
did not dare besmirch her.

       *       *       *       *       *

The clock struck five; and thereupon a sound of voices on the stairs
outside.

'Papa!' said Madame de Pastourelles, jumping up--in very evident
relief--her teeth chattering.

The door opened and Lord Findon put in a reconnoitring head.

'May I--or we--come in?'

And behind him, on the landing, Fenwick with a start perceived the
smiling face of Arthur Welby.

'I've come to carry off my daughter,' said Findon, with a friendly nod
to the artist. 'But don't let us in if you don't want to.'

'Turn me out, please, at once, if I'm in the way,' said Welby. 'Lord
Findon made me come up.'

It was the first time that Welby had visited the Bernard Street
studio. Fenwick's conceit had sometimes resented the fact. Yet now
that Welby was there he was unwilling to show his work. He muttered
something about there being 'more to see in a day or two.'

'There's a great deal to see already,' said Lord Findon. 'But, of
course, do as you like. Eugénie, are you ready?'

'Please!--may I be exhibited?' said Madame de Pastourelles to Fenwick,
with a smiling appeal.

He gave way, dragged the easel into the best light, and fell back
while the two men examined the portrait.

'Stay where you are, Eugénie,' said Lord Findon, holding up his hand.
'Let Arthur see the pose.'

She sat down obediently. Fenwick heard an exclamation from Welby, and
a murmured remark to Lord Findon; then Welby turned to the painter,
his face aglow.

'I say, I do congratulate you! You _are_ making a success of it! The
whole scheme's delightful. You've got the head admirably.'

'I'm glad you like it,' said Fenwick, rather shortly, ready at once to
suspect a note of patronage in the other's effusion. Welby--a little
checked--returned to the picture, studying it closely, and making a
number of shrewd, or generous comments upon it, gradually quenched,
however, by Fenwick's touchy or ungracious silence. Of course the
picture was good. Fenwick wanted no one to tell him that.

Meanwhile, Lord Findon--though in Fenwick's studio he always behaved
himself with a certain jauntiness, as a man should who has discovered
a genius--was a little discontented.

'It's a fine thing, Eugénie,' he was saying to her, as he helped
her put on her furs, 'but I'm not altogether satisfied. It wants
animation. It's too--too--'

'Too sad?' she asked, quietly.

'Too grave, my dear--too grave. I want your smile.'

Madame de Pastourelles shook her head.

'What do you mean?' he asked.

'I can't go smiling to posterity!' she said; first gaily--then
suddenly her lip quivered.

'Eugénie, darling--for God's sake--'

'I'm all right,' she said, recovering herself instantly. 'Mr. Arthur,
are you coming?'

'One moment,' said Welby; then, turning to Fenwick as the others
approached them, he said, 'Might I make two small criticisms?'

'Of course.'

'The right hand seems to me too large--and the chin wants fining.
Look!' He took a little ivory paper-cutter from his pocket, and
pointed to the line of the chin, with a motion of the head towards
Madame de Pastourelles.

Fenwick looked--and said nothing.

'By George, I think he's right,' said Lord Findon, putting on
spectacles. 'That right hand's certainly too big.'

'In my opinion, it's not big enough,' said Fenwick, doggedly.

Welby withdrew instantly from the picture, and took up his hat. Lord
Findon looked at the artist--half angry, half amused. 'You don't buy
her gloves, sir--I do.'

Eugénie's eyes meanwhile had begun to sparkle, as she stood in her
sable cap and cloak, waiting for her companions. Fenwick approached
her.

'Will you sit to-morrow?'

'I think not--I have some engagements.'

'Next day?'

'I will let you know.'

Fenwick's colour rose.

'There is a good deal to do still--and I must work at my other
picture.'

'Yes, I know. I will write.'

And with a little dry nod of farewell she slipped her hand into her
father's arm and led him away. Welby also saluted pleasantly, and
followed the others.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fenwick was left to pace his room in a tempest, denouncing himself as
a 'damned fool,' bent on destroying all his own chances in life. Why
was it that Welby's presence always had this effect upon him:--setting
him on edge, and making a bear of him? No!--it was not allowed to
be so handsome, so able, so ingratiating. Yet he knew very well
that Welby made no enemies, and that in his grudging jealousy of a
delightful artist he, Fenwick, stood alone.

He walked to the window. Yes, there they were, all three--Mademoiselle
Barras seemed to have gone her ways separately--just disappearing into
Russell Square. He saw that Welby had possessed himself of the
fair lady's portfolio, and was carrying her shawl. He watched their
intimate, laughing ways--how different from the stiffness she had
just shown _him_--from the friendly, yet distant relations she always
maintained between herself and her painter! A fierce and irritable
ambition swept through him--rebellion against the hampering conditions
of birth and poverty, which he felt as so many chains upon body and
soul. Why was he born the son of a small country tradesman,
narrow, ignorant, and tyrannical?--harassed by penury, denied
opportunities--while a man like Welby found life from the beginning a
broad road, as it were, down a widening valley, to a land of abundance
and delight?

But the question led immediately to an answering outburst of vanity.
He paced up and down, turning from the injustice of the past to
challenge the future. A few more years, and the world would know where
to place _him_--with regard to the men now in the running--men with
half his power--Welby and the like. A mad arrogance, a boundless
confidence in himself, flamed through all his veins. Let him paint,
paint, _paint_--think of nothing, care for nothing but the maturing of
his gift!

How long he lost himself in this passion of egotism and defiance he
hardly knew. He was roused from it by the servant bringing a lamp; and
as she set it down, the light fell upon a memorandum scrawled on the
edge of a sketch which was lying on the table: 'Feb. 21--10 o'clock.'

His mood collapsed. He sat down by the dying fire, brooding and
miserable. How on earth was he going to get through the next few
weeks? Abominable!--thoughtlessly cruel!--that neither Lord Findon nor
Madame de Pastourelles should ever yet have spoken to him of money!
These months of work on the portrait--this constant assumption on the
part of the Findon circle that both the portrait and the 'Genius Loci'
were to become Findon possessions--and yet no sum named--no clear
agreement even--nothing, as it seemed to Fenwick's suspicious temper,
in either case, that really bound Lord Findon. 'Write to the old
boy'--so Cuningham had advised again and again--'get something
definite out of him.' But Fenwick had once or twice torn up a letter
of the kind in morbid pride and despair. Suppose he were rebuffed?
That would be an end of the Findon connexion, and he could not bring
himself to face it. He must keep his _entrée_ to the house; above all,
he clung to the portrait and the sittings.

But the immediate outlook was pretty dark. He was beginning to be
pestered with debts and duns--the appointment on the morrow was with
an old frame-maker who had lent him twenty pounds before Christmas,
and was now begging piteously for his money. There was nothing to pay
him with--nothing to send Phoebe, in spite of a constant labour at
paying jobs in black-and-white that often kept him up till three or
four in the morning. He wondered whether Watson would help him with a
loan. According to Cuningham, the queer fellow had private means.

The fact was he was overstrained--he knew it. The year had been the
hardest of his life, and now that he was approaching the time of
crisis--the completion of his two pictures, the judgement of the
Academy and the public, his nerve seemed to be giving way. As he
thought of all that success or failure might mean, he plunged into
a melancholy no less extravagant than the passion of self-confidence
from which he had emerged. Suppose that he fell ill before the
pictures were finished--what would become of Phoebe and the child?

As he thought of Phoebe, suddenly his heart melted within him. Was
she, too, hating the hours? As he bowed his head on his arms a few
hot, unwilling tears forced themselves into his eyes. Had he been
unkind and harsh to her?--his poor little Phoebe! An imperious impulse
seemed to sweep him back into her arms. She was his own, his very own;
one flesh with him; of the same clay, the same class, the same customs
and ideals. Let him only recover her, and his child--and live his own
life as he pleased. No more dependence on the moods of fine people.
He hated them all! Clearly he had offended Madame de Pastourelles.
Perhaps she would not sit again--the portrait would be thrown on his
hands--because he had not behaved with proper deference to her spoilt
and petted favourite.

Involuntarily he looked up. The lamp-light fell on the portrait.

There she sat, the delicate, ethereal being, her gentle brow bent
forward, her eyes fixed upon him. He perceived, as though for the
first time, what an image of melancholy grace it was which he had
built up there. He had done it, as it were, without knowing--had
painted something infinitely pathetic and noble without realising it
in the doing.

As he looked, his irritation died away, and something wholly
contradictory took its place. He felt a rush of self-pity, and then of
trust. What if he called on her to help him--unveiled himself to
this kind and charming woman--confessed to her his remorse about
Phoebe--his secret miseries a

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