'I see you doubt what I say. Of course it is quite right that you should be careful about admitting anybody to my husband's rooms in his absence. But here is the last letter I received from him a week or two ago.'

And, drawing it from its envelope, Phoebe showed first the signature, 'John Fenwick,' and then pointed to the address on the envelope—'Mrs. John Fenwick, Green Nab Cottage, Great Langdale.'

'Well, I never!' said Mrs. Gibbs, staring still more widely, and slowly retreating—'and he never lettin' me post a letter since he came here—not once—no confidence nowhere—and I'm sure I have been his good friend!'

Phoebe moved towards the staircase.

'Is Mr. Fenwick's room on the first floor or the second?'

Lost in protesting wonder, Mrs. Gibbs wheezily mounted the stairs far enough to point to the door of Fenwick's room.

'Here's matches'—she fumbled in her apron-pocket. 'There's a candle on the mantelpiece. Though I dare say he's left his lamp going. He generally does—he don't take no account of what I says to him about it.'

Phoebe passed on. Mrs. Gibbs called after her:

'So I'm to say "Mrs. Fenwick," am I, madam—when Mr. Fenwick gets back?'

She stood leaning against the banisters, one hand behind her, looking her visitor up and down with impertinent eyes.

'Certainly,' said Phoebe. Then she put her hand to her head, and said, in a low, bewildered voice, 'At least, if I'm here—if he comes back soon—but I can't stay.'

Mrs. Gibbs went downstairs again, consumed with conjecture and excitement.

'Wife indeed!—that's what they all say—bound to. But of all the cool young women! I hope I haven't done no harm, letting her into the studio. But that letter and all—it was enough to make a jelly of you things a-turnin' out like this. And me all a-tremblin', and givin' in!'

* * * * *

Phoebe opened the studio door, noticed the bright light with amazement, and shut the door behind her. She stood there, with her back to it, sharply arrested, her eyes held by the spectacle before her.

Close to her, in the centre of the freest portion of the floor, rose the sketch of Eugenie de Pastourelles, lit by the two lamps, which threw a concentrated glow upon the picture, and left all the rest of the room shadowy. Nothing could have been more strange than the aspect of the drawing, thus solitary, and brightly illuminated. Phoebe looked at it in bewilderment, then round the littered studio. Beyond the lamps, she saw the large new canvas, showing dimly the first 'laying-in' of its important subject. On the floor, and running round the walls, was a thin line of sketches and canvases. The shallow, semi-circular window at the further end of the room was not yet curtained, and the branches of the still leafless plane-tree outside showed darkly in the gathering dusk. The room, apart from its one spot of light, struck bare and chill. Except for the 'throne' and a few chairs, it contained scarcely any furniture. But, for Phoebe, it was held by two presences. Everything around her spoke of John. Here was his familiar belongings—his clothes that she had mended—his books—his painting-things. And over John's room—her husband's room—the woman in the picture held sway.

She slowly approached the drawing, while a sob mounted in her throat. She was still in the grip of that violent half-hysterical impulse which had possessed her since the evening of Bella Morrison's visit. Nights almost sleepless, arrangements made and carried out in a tumult of excitement, a sense of impending tragedy, accepted, and almost welcomed, as the end of long weeks of doubt and self-torment, which had become at last unbearable—into this fatal coil of actions and impressions, the young wife had been sinking deeper and deeper with each successive hour. She had neither friend nor adviser. Her father, a weak inarticulate man, was dying; her stepmother hated her; and she had long ceased to write to Miss Anna, because it was she who had urged John to go to London! All sane inference and normal reasoning were now indeed, and had been for some time, impossible to her. Fenwick, possessed by the imaginations of his art, had had no imagination—alack!—to spend upon his wife's case, and those morbid processes of brain developed in her by solitude, and wounded love, and mortified vanity. One hour with him!—one hour of love, scolding, tears—would have saved them both. Alone, she was incapable of the merest common sense. She came prepared to discover the worst—to find evidence for all her fears. And for the worst she had elaborately laid her plans. Only if it should turn out that she had been an unkind, unreasonable wife, wrongly suspicious of her husband, was she uncertain what she would do.

With dry, reddened eyes, she stared at the portrait of the woman who must have stolen John from her. The mere arrangement of the room seemed to her excited nerves a second outrage;—Mrs. Gibbs's reception of her and all that it had implied, had been the first. What could this strange illumination mean but that John's thoughts were taken up with his sitter in an unusual and unlawful way? For weeks he could leave his wife without a letter, a word of affection. But before going out for an hour, he must needs light these lamps and place them so—in order that this finicking lady should not feel herself deserted, that he should still seem to be admiring and adoring her!

And after all, was she so pretty? Phoebe looked at the pale and subtle face, at the hair and eyes so much less brilliant than her own, at the thin figure, and the repose of the hands. Not pretty at all!—she said to herself, violently—but selfish, and artful, and full, of course, of all the tricks and wiles of 'society people.' Didn't she know that John was married? Phoebe scornfully refused to believe it. Such women simply didn't care what stood in their way. If they took a fancy to a man, what did it matter whether he were married or no?

The poor girl stood there, seething with passion, pluming herself on a knowledge of the world which enabled her to 'see through' these abominable great ladies.

But if she didn't know, if Bella Morrison's tale were true, then it was John, on whom Phoebe's rage returned to fling itself with fresh and maddened bitterness. That he should have thus utterly ignored her in his new surroundings—have never said a word about her to the landlady with whom he had lodged for nearly a year, or to any of his new acquaintances and friends—should have deliberately hidden the very fact of his marriage—could a husband give a wife any more humiliating proof of his indifference, or of her insignificance in his life?



Meanwhile the picture possessed her more and more. Closer and closer she came, her chest heaving. Was it not as though John had foreseen her coming, her complaints—and had prepared for her this silent, this cruel answer? The big picture of course was gone in to the Academy, but his wife, if she came, was to see that he could not do without Madame de Pastourelles. So the sketch, with which he had finished, really, months ago, was dragged out, and made queen of all it surveyed, because, no doubt, he was miserable at parting with the picture. Ingenuity and self-torment grew with what they fed on. The burning lamps—the solitude—the graceful woman, with her slim, fine-lady hands—with every moment they became in Phoebe's eyes a more bitter, a more significant offence. Presently, in her foolish agony, she did actually believe that he had thought she might descend upon him, provoked beyond bearing by his silence and neglect, and had carefully planned this infamous way of telling her—what he wanted her to know!

Waves of unreasoning passion swept across her. The gentleness and docility of her youth had been perhaps mechanical, half-conscious; she came in truth of a hard stock, capable of violence. She put her hands to her face, trembled, and turned away. She began to be afraid of herself.

With a restless hand, as though she caught hold of anything that might distract her from the picture, she began to rummage among the papers on the table. Suddenly her attention pounced upon them; she bent her head, took up some and carried them to the lamp. Five or six large envelopes, bearing a crest and monogram, addressed in a clear hand, and containing each a long letter—she found a packet, of these, tied round with string. Throwing off her hat and veil, she sat down under the lamp, and, without an instant's demur, began to read.

First, indeed, she turned to the signature—'Eugenie de Pastourelles.' Why, pray, should Madame de Pastourelles write these long letters to another woman's husband? The hands which held them shook with anger and misery. These pages filled with discussion of art and books, which had seemed to the woman of European culture, and French associations, so natural to write, which had been written as the harmless and kindly occupation of an idle hour, with the shades of Madame de Sevigne and Madame du Deffand standing by, were messengers of terror and despair to this ignorant and yet sentimental Westmoreland girl. Why should they be written at all to her John, her own husband? No nice woman that she had ever known wrote long letters to married men. What could have been the object of writing these pages and pages about John's pictures and John's prospects?—affected stuff!—and what was the meaning of these appointments to see pictures, these invitations to St. James's Square, these thanks 'for the kind and charming things you say'—above all, of the constant and crying omission, throughout these delicately written sheets, of any mention whatever of Fenwick's wife and child? But of course for the two correspondents whom these letters implied, such dull, stupid creatures did not exist.

Ah! but wait a moment. Her eye caught a sentence—then fastened greedily on the following passage:

'I hardly like to repeat what I said the other day—you will think me a very intrusive person!—but when you talk of melancholy and loneliness, of feeling the strain of competition, and the nervous burden of work, so that you are sometimes tempted to give it up altogether, I can't help repeating that some day a wife will save you from all this. I have seen so much of artists!—they of all men should marry. It is quite a delusion to suppose that art—whatever art means—is enough for them, or for anybody. Imagination is the most exhausting of all professions!—and if we women are good for nothing else we can be cushions—we can "stop a chink and keep the wind away." So pay no attention, please, to my father's diatribes. You will very soon be prosperous—sooner perhaps than you think. A home is what you want.'

Kind and simple sentences!—written so innocently and interpreted so perversely! And yet the fierce and blind bewilderment with which Phoebe read or misread them was natural enough. She never doubted for a moment but that the bad woman who wrote them meant to offer herself to John. She was separated from her husband, John had said, declaring of course that it was not her fault. As if any one could be sure of that! But, at any rate, if she were separated, she might be divorced—some time. And then—then!—she would be so obliging as to make a 'cushion,' and a home, for Phoebe Fenwick's husband! As to his not being grand enough for her, that was all nonsense. When a man was as clever as John, he was anybodies equal—one saw that every day. No, this creature would make people buy his pictures—she would push him on—and after a while—

With a morbid and devastating rapidity, a whole scheme, by which the woman before her might possess herself of John, unfolded itself in Phoebe's furious mind.

Yet, surely, it would only want one word from her—from her, his wife?—

She felt herself trembling. Her limbs began to sink under her. She dropped upon a chair, sobbing. What was the use of fighting, of protesting? John had forgotten her—John's heart had grown cold to her. She might dismay and trample on her rival—how would that give her back her husband?

Oh, how could he, how could he have treated her so! 'I know I was ill-tempered and cross, John,—I couldn't write letters like that—but I did, did love you—you know, you know—I did!'

It seemed as though she twined her arms round him, and he sat rigid as a stone, with a hard, contemptuous mouth. A lonely agony, a blackness of despair, seized on Phoebe, as she crouched there, the letters on her lap, her hands hanging, her beautiful eyes, blurred with tears and sleeplessness, fixed on the picture. What she felt was absurd; but how many tragedies—aye, the deepest—are at bottom ridiculous! She had lost him; he cared no more for her; he had passed into another world out of her ken; and what was to become of her?

She started up, goaded by a blind instinct of revenge, seizing she scarcely knew what. On the table lay a palette, laden with some dark pigment with which Fenwick had just been sketching in part of his new picture. In a pot beside it were brushes.

She caught up a large brush, dipped it in the paint, and going to the picture—panting and crimson—she daubed it from top to bottom, blotting out the eyes, the mouth, the beautiful outline of the head—above all, the hands, whose delicate whiteness specially enraged her.

When the work of wreck was done, she stood a moment gazing at it. Then, violently, she looked for writing-paper. She could see none: but there was an unused half-sheet at the back of one of Madame de Pastourelles' letters, and she roughly tore it off. Making use of a book held on her knee, and finding the pen and ink with which, only half an hour before, Lord Findon had written his cheque, she began to write:

Good-bye, John,—I have found out all I want to know, and you will never see me again. I will never be a burden on a man who is ashamed of me, and has behaved as though I were dead. It is no good wasting words—you know it's true. Perhaps you may think I have no right to take Carrie. But I can't be alone—and, after all, she is more mine than yours. Don't trouble about me. I have some money, and I mean to support myself and Carrie. It was only last night this idea came to me, though it was the night before that—Never mind—I can't write about it, it would take too long, and it doesn't really matter to either of us. I don't want you to find me here; you might persuade me to come back to you, and I know it would be for the misery of both of us. What was I saying?—oh, the money—Well, last night, a cousin of mine, from Keswick, perhaps you remember him—Freddie Tolson—came to see me. Father sent him. You didn't believe what I told you about father—you thought I was making up. You'll be sorry, I think, when you read this, for by now, most likely, father has passed away. Freddie told me the doctor had given him up, and he was very near going. But he sent Freddie to me, with some money he had really left me in his will—only he was afraid Mrs. Gibson would get hold of it, and never let me have it. So he sent it by hand, with his love and blessing—and Freddie was to say he was sorry you had left me so long, and he didn't think it was a right thing for a man to do. Never mind how much it was. It's my very own, and I'm glad it comes from my father, and not from you. I have my embroidery money too, and I shall be all right—though very, very miserable. The idea of what I would do came into my head while I was talking with Freddie—and since I came into this room, I have made up my mind. I'm sorry I can't set you free altogether. There's Carrie to think of, and I must live for her sake. But at any rate you won't have to look after me, or to feel that I'm disgracing you with the smart people who have taken you up—

Don't look for us, for you will never, never find us.

Good-bye, John. Do you remember that night in the ghyll, and all the things we said?

I've spoiled your sketch—I couldn't help it—and I'm not sorry—not yet, anyway. She has everything in the world, and I had nothing—but you. Why did you leave the lamps?—just to mock at me?

Good-bye. I have left my wedding-ring on this paper. You'll know I couldn't do that, if I ever meant to come back!

She rose, and moved a small table in front of the ruined picture. On it she placed, first, the parcel she had brought with her, which contained papers and small personal possessions belonging to her husband; in front of the packet she laid the five letters of Madame de Pastourelles, her own letter in an envelope addressed to him, and upon it her ring.

Then she put on her hat and veil, tying the veil closely round her face, and, with one last look round the room, she crept to the door and unlocked it. So quietly did she descend the stairs that Mrs. Gibbs, who was listening sharply, with the kitchen door open, for any sound of her departure, heard nothing. The outer door opened and shut without the smallest noise, and the slender, veiled figure was quickly lost in the darkness and the traffic of the street.



PART III

AFTER TWELVE YEARS



'Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.'



CHAPTER IX

'Quand vous arriverez au troisieme, monsieur, montez, montez toujours! Vous trouverez un petit escalier tournant, en bois. Ca vous conduira a l'atelier.'

Thus advised by the wife of the concierge, Fenwick crossed the courtyard of an old house in the Rue du Bac, looked up a moment at the sober and distinguished charm of its architecture, at the corniced, many-paned windows, so solidly framed and plentifully lined in white, upon the stone walls, and the high roof, with its lucarne windows just touched with classical decoration; each line and tint contributing to a seemly, restrained whole, as of something much worn by time, yet merely enhanced thereby, something deliberately built, moreover, to stand the years, and abide the judgement of posterity. The house in Saint-Simon's day had belonged to one of those newly ennobled dukes, his contemporaries and would-be brethren, whose monstrous claims to rank with himself and the other real magnificences among the ducs et pairs de France drove him to distraction. It was now let out to a multitude of families, who began downstairs in affluence and ended in the genteel or artistic penury of the garrets. The first floor was occupied by a deputy and ex-minister, one of the leaders of the Centre Gauche—in the garrets it was possible for a rapin to find a bedroom at sixteen francs a month. But it was needful that he should be a seemly rapin, orderly and quietly ambitious, like the house, otherwise he would not have been long suffered within its tranquil and self-respecting walls.

Fenwick climbed and climbed, discovered the little wooden staircase, and still climbed. At the very top he found a long and narrow corridor, along which he groped in darkness. Suddenly, at the end, a door opened, and a figure appeared on the threshold.

'Fenwick!—that you? All right!—no steps! The floor was left au naturel about 1680—but you won't come to grief.'

Fenwick arrived at the open door, and Dick Watson drew him into the large studio beyond. Fenwick looked round him in astonishment. The room was a huge grenier in the roof of the old house, roughly adapted to the purposes of a studio. A large window to the north had been put in, and the walls had been rudely plastered. But all the blasts of heaven seemed still to blow through them, and through the chinks or under the eaves of the roof; while in the middle of the floor a pool of water, the remains of a recent heavy shower, testified to the ease with which the weather could enter if it chose.

'I say'—said Fenwick, pointing to the water—'can you stand this kind of thing?'

Watson shivered.

'Not in this weather. I'm off next week. In the summer it's pleasant enough. Well, it's deuced lucky I caught sight of you at that show yesterday! How are you? I believe it's nearly two years since we met last.'

'I'm all right,' said Fenwick, accepting a shaky seat and a cigarette.

Watson lighted a fresh one for himself, and then with arms akimbo surveyed his visitor.

'I've seen you look better. What's the matter? Have you been working through the summer in London?'

'I'm all right,' Fenwick repeated; then, with a little grimace—'or I should be, if I could pay my way, and paint the things I want to paint.'

He looked up.

'Well, why don't you?'

'Because—somehow—one has to live.'

Watson climbed on to his high stool, still observing his visitor. For a good many years now, Fenwick had been always well and carefully dressed—an evident Londoner, accustomed to drawing-rooms and frequenting expensive tailors. But to-day there was something in his tired, dishevelled look, and comparatively shabby coat, which reminded Watson of years long gone by—of a studio in Bernard Street, and a broad-browed, handsome fellow, with queer manners and a North-Country accent. As to good looks, Fenwick's face and head were now far finer than they had been in first youth; Watson's critical eye took note of it. The hair, touched lightly with grey, had receded slightly on the temples, and the more ample brow, heavily lined, gave a nobler shelter than of old to the still astonishing vivacity of the eyes. The carriage of the head, too, was prouder and more assured. Fenwick, indeed, as far as years went, was, as Watson knew, in the very prime of life. Nevertheless, there was in his aspect, as he sat there, a prophetic note of discouragement, of ebbing vitality which startled his friend.

'I say,' said Watson, abruptly, 'you've been over-doing it. Have you made it up with the Academy?'

Fenwick laughed.

'Goodness, no!'

'Where have you been exhibiting this year?'

'At the gallery I always take. And I sent some things to the Grosvenor.'

Watson shook his head.

'It's an awful pity. You'd got in—you should have stayed in—and made yourself a power.'

Fenwick's attitude stiffened.

'I have never regretted it for a single hour—except that the scene itself was ridiculous.'

Watson knew very well to what he referred. Some two years before, it had been the nine days wonder of artistic London. Fenwick, then a newly elected Associate of the Academy, and at what seemed to be the height of his first success as an artist, had sent in a picture to the Spring Exhibition which appeared to the Hanging Committee of the moment a perfunctory thing. They gave it a bad place, and an Academician told Fenwick what had happened. He rushed to Burlington House, tore down his picture from the wall, stormed at the astonished members of the Hanging Committee, carried off his property, and vowed that he would resign his Associateship. He was indeed called upon to do so; and he signalised his withdrawal by a furious letter to the Times in which the rancours, grievances, and contempts of ten chequered and ambitious years found full and rhetorical expression. The letter naturally made a breach between the writer and England's official art. Watson, who was abroad when the whole thing happened, had heard of it with mingled feelings. 'It will either make him—or finish him!' was his own judgement, founded on a fairly exhaustive knowledge of John Fenwick; and he had waited anxiously for results. So far no details had reached him since. Fenwick seemed to be still exhibiting, still writing to the papers, and, as far as he knew, still selling. But the aspect of the man before him was not an aspect of prosperity.

Watson, however, having started a subject which he well knew to be interminable, would instantly have liked to escape from it. He was himself nervous, critical, and easily bored. He did not know what he should do with Fenwick's outpourings when he had listened to them.

But Fenwick had come over—charged—and Watson had touched the spring. He sat there, smoking and declaiming, his eyes blazing, one hand playing with Watson's favourite dog, an Aberdeen terrier who was softly smelling and pushing against him. All that litany of mockery and bitterness, which the Comic Spirit kindles afresh on the lips of each rising generation, only to quench it again on the lips of those who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for 'arrival,' when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased by success, dismisses the revolts of his youth. But this was still the language—and the fierce language—of revolt! The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any 'school' worth the name—the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the snobbery of the rich world in its dealings with art: all these jeremiads which he recited were much the same—mutatis mutandis—as those with which, half a century before, poor Benjamin Haydon had filled the 'autobiography' which is one of the capital 'documents' of the artistic life. This very resemblance, indeed, occurred to Watson.

'Upon my word,' he said, with a queer smile, 'you remind me of Haydon.'

Fenwick started; with an impatient movement he pushed away the dog, who whimpered.

'Oh, come—I hope it's not as bad as that,' he said, roughly.

Watson sharply regretted his remark. Through the minds of both there passed the same image of Haydon lying dead by his own hand beneath the vast pictures that no one would buy.

'Why you talk like this, I'm sure I don't know,' Watson said, with an impatient laugh. 'I'm always seeing your name in the papers. You have a great reputation, and I don't expect the Academy matters to your clientele.'

Fenwick shook his head. 'I haven't sold a picture for more than a year—except a beastly portrait—one of the worst things I ever did.'

'That's bad,' said Watson. 'Of course that's my state—perennially! But you're not used to it.'

Fenwick said nothing, and the delicate sensibility of the other instantly divined that, friends as they were, the comparison with himself had not been at all welcome to his companion. And, indeed, at the time when Watson left England to begin the wandering life he had been leading for some three years, it would have been nothing less than grotesque. Fenwick was then triumphant, in what, it was supposed, would be his 'first period'—that 'young man's success,' brilliant, contested, noisy, from which, indeed, many roads lead, to many goals; but with him, at that time, the omens were of the best. His pictures were always among the events of the spring exhibitions; he had gathered round him a group of enthusiastic pupils who worked in the studio of the new house; and he had already received a good many honours at the hands of foreign juries. He was known to be on the threshold of the Academy, and to be making, besides, a good deal of money. 'Society' had first admitted him as the protege of Lord Findon and the friend of Madame de Pastourelles, and was now ready to amuse itself with him, independently, as a genius and an 'eccentric.' He had many enemies; but so have all 'fighters.' The critics spoke severely of certain radical defects in his work, due to insufficiency of early training; defects which time might correct—or stereotype. But the critics 'must be talking'; and the public, under the spell of a new and daring talent, appeared to take no notice.

As these recollections passed through Watson's mind, another expression showed itself in the hollow-cheeked, massive face. It was the look of the visionary who sees in events the strange verification of obscure instincts and divinations in which he himself perhaps has only half-believed. He and Fenwick had been friends now—in some respects, close friends—for a good many years. Of late, they had met rarely, and neither of the men was a good correspondent. But the friendship, the strong sense of congruity and liking, persisted. It had sprung, originally—unexpectedly enough—from that loan made to Fenwick in his days of stress and poverty; and there were many who prophesied that it would come to an end with Fenwick's success. Watson had no interest in and small tolerance for the prosperous. His connexion with Cuningham, in spite of occasional letters, had dropped long ago, ever since that clever Scotch painter had shown himself finally possessed of the usual Scotch power to capture London and a competence. But his liking for Fenwick had never wavered through all the blare of Fenwick's success.

Was it that the older man with his melancholy Celtic instinct had divined from the first that he and Fenwick were in truth of the same race—the race of the [Greek: dusammoroi]—the ill-fated—those for whom happiness is not written in the stars?

He sat staring at his companion, his eyes dreamily intent, taking note of the restless depression of the man before him, and of the disagreeable facts which emerged from his talk—declining reputation, money difficulties, and—last and most serious—a new doubt of himself and his powers, which Watson never remembered to have noticed in him before.

'But you must have made a great deal of money!' he said to him once, interrupting him.

Fenwick turned away uneasily.

'So I did. But there was the new house and studio. I have been trying to sell the house. But it's a white elephant.'

'Building's the deuce,' said Watson, gloomily. 'It ruins everybody from Louis Quatorze and Walter Scott downward. Have no barns—that's my principle—and then you can't pull 'em down and build greater! But, you know, it's all great nonsense, your talking like this! You're as clever as ever—cleverer. You've only got to paint—and it'll be all right. But, of course, if you will spend all your time in writing letters to the papers, and pamphlets, and that kind of thing—well!—'

He shrugged his shoulders.

Fenwick took the remark good-temperedly. 'I've finished three large pictures in eight months—if only somebody would buy 'em. And I'm in Paris now'—he hesitated a moment—'on a painting job. I've promised C——' (he named a well-known actor-manager in London) 'to help him with the production of a new play! I never did such a thing before—but—'

He looked up uncertainly, his colour rising.

'What?—scenery for The Queen's Necklace? I've seen the puffs in the papers. Why not? Hope he pays well. Then you're going to Versailles, of course?'

Fenwick replied that he had taken some rooms at the Hotel des Reservoirs and must make some sketches in the palace; also in the park, and the Trianon garden. Then he rose abruptly.

'Well, and what have you been after?'

'The same old machines,' said Watson, tranquilly, pointing to a couple of large canvases. 'My subjects are no gayer than they used to be. Except that—ah, yes—I forgot—I had a return upon myself this spring—and set to work on some Bacchantes.' He stopped, and picked up a canvas which was standing with its face to the wall.

It represented a dance of Bacchantes. Fenwick looked at it in silence. Watson replaced it with a patient sigh. 'Theophile Gautier said of some other fellow's Bacchantes that they had got drunk on "philosophical" wine. He might, I fear, have said it of mine. Anyway, I felt I was not made for Bacchantes—so I fell back on the usual thing.'

And he showed an 'Execution of a Witch'—filled with gruesome and poignant detail—excellent in some of its ideas and single figures, but as a whole crude, horrible, and weak.

'I don't improve,' he said, abruptly, turning away—'but it keeps me contented—that and my animals. Anatole!—vaurien!—ou es-tu?'

A small monkey, in a red jacket, who had been sitting unnoticed on the top of a cabinet since Fenwick's entrance, clattered down to the floor, and, running to his master, was soon sitting on his shoulder, staring at Fenwick with a pair of grave, soft eyes. Watson caressed him;—and then pointed to a wicker cage outside the window in which a pigeon was pecking at some Indian-corn. The cage door was wide open. 'She comes to feed here by day. In the morning I wake up and hear her there—the darling! In the evening she spreads her wings, and I watch her fly toward Saint-Cloud. No doubt the jade keeps a family there. Oh! some day she'll go—like the rest of them—and I shall miss her abominably.'

'You seem also to be favoured by mice?' said Fenwick, idly looking at two traps on the floor beside him.

Watson smiled.

'My femme de service sets those traps every night. She says we are overrun—the greatest nonsense! As if there wasn't enough for all of us! Then in the night—I sleep there, you see, behind that screen—I wake, and hear some little fool squeaking. So I get up, and take the trap downstairs in the dark—right away down—to the first floor. And there I let the mouse go—those folk down there are rich enough to keep him. The only drawback is that my old woman is so cross in the morning, and she spends her life thinking of new traps. Ah, ben!—Je la laisse faire!'

'And this place suits you?'

'Admirably—till the cold comes. Then I march. I must have the sun.'

He shivered again. Fenwick, struck by something in his tone, looked at him more closely.

'How are you, by the way?' he asked, repentantly, 'I ought to have inquired before. You mentioned consulting some big man here. What did he say to you?'

'Oh, that I am phthisical, and must take care,' said Watson, carelessly—'that's no news. Ah! by the way'—he hurried the change of subject—'you know, of course, that Lord Findon and madame are to be at Versailles?'

'They will be there to-night,' said Fenwick, after a moment.

'Ah! to-night. Then you meet them?'

'I shall see them, of course.'

'What a blessed thing to be rid of that fellow!—What's she been doing since?'

Fenwick replied that since the death of her husband—about a year before this date—Madame de Pastourelles, worn out with nursing, had been pursuing health—in Egypt and elsewhere. Her father, stepmother, and sister had been travelling with her. The sister and she were to stay at Versailles till Christmas. It was a place for which Madame de Pastourelles had an old affection.

'And I suppose you know that you will find the Welbys there too?'

Fenwick made a startled movement.

'The Welbys? How did you hear that?'

'I had my usual half-yearly letter from Cuningham yesterday. He's the fellow for telling you the news. Welby has begun a big picture of Marie Antoinette, at Trianon, and has taken a studio in Versailles for the winter.'

Fenwick turned away and began to pace the bare floor of the studio.

'I didn't know,' he said, evidently discomposed.

'By the way, I have often meant to ask you. I trust he wasn't mixed up in the "hanging" affair?' said Watson, with a quick look at his companion.

'He was ill the day it was done, but in my opinion he behaved in an extremely mean and ungenerous manner afterwards!' exclaimed Fenwick, suddenly flushing from brow to chin.

'You mean he didn't support you?'

'He shilly-shallied. He thought—I have very good reason to believe—that I had been badly treated—that there was personal feeling in the matter—resentment of things that I had written—and so on but he would never come out into the open and say so!'

The excitement with which Fenwick spoke made it evident that Watson had touched an extremely sore point.

Watson was silent a little, lit another cigarette, and then said, with a smile:

'Poor Madame de Pastourelles!'

Fenwick looked up with irritation.

'What on earth do you mean?'

'I am wondering how she kept the peace between you—her two great friends.'

'She sees very little of Welby.'

'Ah! Since when?'

'Oh! for a long time. Of course they meet occasionally—'

A big, kindly smile flickered over Watson's face.

'What—was little Madame Welby jealous?'

'She would be a great goose if she were,' said Fenwick, turning aside to look through some sketches that lay on a chair beside him.

Watson shook his head, still smiling, then remarked:

'By the way, I understand she has become quite an invalid.'

'Has she?' said Fenwick. 'I know nothing of them.'

Watson began to talk of other things. But as he and Fenwick discussed the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick's own projects, as they talked of Manet, and Zola's 'L'Oeuvre,' and the Goncourts, as they compared the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and tendencies—Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a passionate partisan, loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir recently opened at a Paris dealer's—Watson's inner mind was really full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that salon of hers in the old Westminster house in Dean's Yard, of which during so many years Fenwick had made one of the principal figures. It should perhaps be explained that some two years after Fenwick's arrival in London, Madame de Pastourelles had thought it best to establish a little menage of her own, distinct from the household in St. James's Square. Her friends and her stepmother's were not always congenial to each other; and in many ways both Lord Findon and she were the happier for the change. Her small panelled rooms had quickly become the meeting-place of a remarkable and attractive society. Watson himself, indeed, had never been an habitue of that or any other drawing-room. As he had told Lord Findon long ago, he was not for the world, nor the world for him. But whereas his volatile lordship could never draw him from his cell, Lord Findon's daughter was sometimes irresistible, and Watson's great shaggy head and ungainly person was occasionally to be seen beside her fire, in the years before he left London. He had, therefore, been a spectator of Fenwick's gradual transformation at the hands of a charming woman; he had marked the stages of the process; and he knew well that it had never excited a shadow of scandal in the minds of any reasonable being. All the same, the deep store of hidden sentiment which this queer idealist possessed had been touched by the position. The young woman isolated and childless, so charming, so nobly sincere, so full of heart—was she to be always Ariadne, and forsaken? The man—excitable, nervous, selfish, yet, in truth, affectionate and dependent—what folly, or what chivalry kept him unmarried? Ever since the death of M. le Comte de Pastourelles, dreams concerning these two people had been stirring in the brain of Watson, and these dreams spoke now in the dark eyes he bent on Fenwick.

Presently, Fenwick began to talk gloomily of the death of his old Bernard Street landlady, who had become his housekeeper and factotum in the new Chelsea house and studio, which he had built for himself.

'I don't know what I shall do without her. For eleven years I've never paid a bill or engaged a servant for myself. She's done everything. Every morning she used to give me my pocket-money for the day.'

'The remedy, after all, is simple,' said Watson, with a sudden turn of the head.

Fenwick raised his eyebrows interrogatively.

'I imagine that what Mrs. Gibbs did well, "Mrs. Fenwick" might do even better—n'est-ce pas?'

Fenwick sprang up.

'Mrs.—?' he repeated, vaguely.

He stood a moment bending over Watson—his eyes staring, his mouth open. Then he controlled himself.

'You talk as though she were round the corner,' he said, turning away and buttoning his coat afresh. 'But please understand, my dear fellow, that she is not round the corner, nor likely to be.'

He spoke with a hard emphasis, smiling, and slapping the breast of his coat.

Watson looked at him and said no more.

Fenwick walked rapidly along the Quai Voltaire, crossed the Pont Neuf, and found himself inside the enclosure of the Louvre. Twenty minutes to four. Some impulse, born of the seething thoughts within, took him to the door of the Musee. He mounted rapidly, and found himself in the large room devoted to the modern French school.

He went straight to two pictures by Hippolyte Flandrin—'Madame Vinet' and 'Portrait de Jeune Fille.' When, in the first year of his London life, he had made his hurried visits to Paris, these pictures, then in the Luxembourg, had been among those which had most vitally affected him. The beautiful surface and keeping which connected them with the old tradition, together with the modern spirit, the trenchant simplicity of their portraiture, had sent him back—eager and palpitating—to his own work on the picture of Madame de Pastourelles, or on the last stages of the 'Genius Loci.'

He looked into them now, sharply, intently, his heart beating to suffocation under the stress of that startling phrase of Watson's. Still tremulous—as one in flight—he made himself recognise certain details of drawing and modelling in 'Madame Vinet' which had given him hints for the improvement of the portrait of Phoebe; and, again, the ease with which the head moves on its shoulders, its relief, its refinement—how he had toiled to rival them in his picture of Madame Eugenie!—translating as he best could the cold and disagreeable colour of the Ingres school into the richer and more romantic handling of an art influenced by Watts and Burne-Jones!

Then he passed on to the young girl's portrait—the girl in white muslin, turning away her graceful head from the spectator, and showing thereby the delicacy of her profile, the wealth of her brown hair, the beauty of her young and virginal form. Suddenly, his eyes clouded; he turned abruptly away, left the room without looking at another picture, and was soon hurrying through the crowded streets northward towards the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Carrie!—his child!—his own flesh and blood. His heart cried out for her. Watson's brusquerie—the young girl of the picture—and his own bitter and disappointed temper—they had all their share in the emotion which possessed him.

The child whom he remembered, with her mother's eyes, and that light mutinous charm, which was not Phoebe's—why, she was now seventeen!—a little younger—only a little younger, than the girl of the portrait. His longing fancy pursued her—saw her a wild, pretty, laughing thing, nearly a woman—and then fell back passionately on a more familiar image!—of the baby at his knee, open-mouthed, her pink lips rounded for the tidbit just about to descend upon them, her sweet and sparkling eyes fixed upon her father.

'My God!—where are they?—are they alive, or dead? How cruel—cruel!' And he ground his teeth in one of those paroxysms which every now and then, at long intervals, represented the return upon him of the indestructible past. Often for months together it meant little or nothing to him, but the dull weight of his secret; twelve years had inevitably deadened feeling, and filled the mind with fresh interests, while of late the tumult of his Academy and Press campaign had silenced the stealing, distant voices. Yet there were moments when all was as fresh and poignant as it had been in the first hours, when Phoebe, with her golden head and her light, springing step, seemed to move beside him, and he felt the drag of a small hand in his.

He stiffened himself—like one attacked. The ghosts of dead hours came trooping and eddying round him, like the autumn leaves that had begun to strew the Paris streets—all the scenes of that first ghastly week when he had hunted in desperation for his lost wife and child. His joyous return from Chelsea, on the evening of his good-fortune—Mrs. Gibbs's half-sulky message on the door-step that 'Mrs. Fenwick' was in the studio—his wild rush upstairs—the empty room, the letter, the ring:—his hurried journey North—the arrival at the Langdale cottage, only to find on the table of the deserted parlour another letter from Phoebe, written before she left Westmoreland, in the prevision that he would come there in search of a clue, and urging him for both their sakes to make no scandal, no hue and cry, to accept the inevitable, and let her go in peace—his interview with the servant Daisy, who had waited with the child in an hotel close to Euston, while Phoebe went to Bernard Street, and had been sent back to the North immediately after Phoebe's return, without the smallest indication of what her mistress meant to do—his fruitless consultations with Anna Mason!—the whole dismal story rose before him, as it was wont to do periodically, filling him with the same rage, the same grief, the same fierce and inextinguishable resentment.

Phoebe had destroyed his life. She had not only robbed him of herself and of their child, she had forced him into an acted lie which had poisoned his whole existence, and, first and foremost, that gracious and beautiful friendship which was all, save his art, that she had left him. For, in the first moments of his despair and horror, he had remembered what it would mean to Madame de Pastourelles, did she ever know that his mad wife had left him out of jealousy of her. He was not slow to imagine the effect of Phoebe's action on that proud, pure nature and sensitive conscience; and he knew what she and her father must feel towards the deception which had led her into such a position, and made such a tragedy possible. He foresaw her recoil, her bitter condemnation, the final ruin of the relation between himself and her; and yet more than these did he dread her pain, her causeless, innocent pain. To stab the hand which had helped him, the heart which had already suffered so much, in the very first hours of his own shock and misery, he had shrunk from this, he had tried his best to protect Madame de Pastourelles.

Hence the compact with his landlady, by which he had in fact bribed her to silence, and transformed her into a devoted servant always under his eye; hence the various means by which he had found it possible to quiet the members of his own family and of Phoebe's—needy folk, most of them, cannily unwilling to make an enemy of a man who was likely, so they understood, to be rich, and who already showed a helpful disposition. When once he had convinced himself that he had no clue, and that Phoebe had disappeared, it had not been difficult indeed to keep his secret, and to hide the traces of his own wrong-doing, his own share in the catastrophe. Between Phoebe's world and the world in which he was now to live, there were few or no links. Bella Morrison might have supplied one. But she and her mother had moved to Guernsey, and a year after Phoebe's flight Fenwick ascertained that old Mrs. Morrison was dead, and that Bella had gone to South America as companion to a lady.

So in an incredibly short time the crisis was over. The last phase was connected with the cousin—Freddy Tolson—who had visited Phoebe the night before her journey to London, and was now in New South Wales.

A letter from Fenwick to this young man, containing a number of questions as to his conversation with Phoebe, and written immediately after Phoebe's flight, obtained an answer after some three or four months, but Tolson's reply was wholly unprofitable. He merely avowed that he had discovered nothing at all of Phoebe's intention, and could throw no light whatever upon her disappearance. The letter was laboriously written by a man of imperfect education, and barely covered three loosely written sides of ordinary note-paper. It arrived when Fenwick's own researches were already at a standstill, and seemed to leave nothing more to hope for. The police inquiries which had been initiated went on intermittently for a while, then ceased; the waters of life closed over Phoebe Fenwick and her child.

What was Fenwick's present feeling towards his wife? If amid this crowded Paris he had at last beheld her coming to him, had seen the tall figure and the childish look, and the lovely, pleading eyes, would his heart have leapt within him?—would his hands have been outstretched to enfold and pardon her?—or would he have looked at her sombrely, unable to pass the gulf between them—to forget what she had done?

In truth, he could not have answered the question; he was uncertain of himself. Her act, by its independence, its force of will, and the ability she had shown in planning and carrying it out, had transformed his whole conception of her. In a sense, he knew her no longer. That she could do a thing at once so violent and so final, was so wholly out of keeping with all his memories of her, that he could only think of the woman who had come in his absence to the Bernard Street studio, and defaced the sketch of Madame de Pastourelles, as in some sort a stranger—one whom, were she to step back into his life, he would have had to learn afresh. Sometimes, when anything reminded him of her suddenly—as, for instance, the vision in a shop-window of the very popular mezzotint which had been made from the 'Genius Loci' the year after its success in the Academy—the pang from which he suffered would seem to show that he still loved her, as indeed he had always loved her, through all the careless selfishness of his behaviour. But, again, there were many months when she dropped altogether—or seemed to drop—out of his mind and memory, when he was entirely absorbed in the only interests she had left him—his art, his quarrels, and his relation to Eugenie de Pastourelles.

There was a time, indeed—some two or three years after the catastrophe—when he passed through a stage of mental and moral tumult, natural to a man of strong passions and physique. Even in their first married life, Phoebe had been sometimes jealous, and with reason. It was her memory of these occasions that had predisposed her to the mad suspicion which wrecked her. And when she had deserted him, he came violently near, on one or two occasions, to things base and irreparable. But he was saved—first by the unconscious influence, the mere trust, of a good woman—and, secondly, by his keen and advancing intelligence. Dread lest he should cast himself out of Eugenie's delightful presence; and the fighting life of the mind: it was by these he was rescued, by these he ultimately conquered.

And yet, was it, perhaps, his bitterest grievance against his wife that she had, in truth, left him nothing!—not even friendship, not even art. In so wrenching herself from him, she had perpetuated in him that excitable and unstable temper it should have been her first object to allay, and had thus injured and maimed his artistic power; while at the same time she had so troubled, so falsified his whole attitude towards the woman who on his wife's disappearance from his life had become naturally and insensibly his dearest friend, that not even the charm of Madame de Pastourelles' society, of her true, delicate, and faithful affection, could give him any lasting happiness. He himself had begun the falsification, but it was Phoebe's act which had prolonged and compelled it, through twelve years.

For a long time, indeed, his success as an artist steadily developed. The very energy of his resentment—his inner denunciation—of his wife's flight, the very force of his fierce refusal to admit that he had given her the smallest real justification for such a step, had quickened in him for a time all the springs of life. Through his painting, as we have seen, he wrestled out his first battles with fate and with temptation; and those early years were the years of his artistic triumph, as they were also the years of Madame de Pastourelles' strongest influence upon him. But the concealment on which his life was based, the tragedy at the heart of it, worked like 'a worm i' the bud.' The first check to his artistic career—the 'hanging' incident and its sequel—produced an effect of shock and disintegration out of all proportion to its apparent cause—inexplicable indeed to the spectators.

Madame de Pastourelles wondered, and sorrowed. But she could do nothing to arrest the explosion of egotism, arrogance, and passion which Fenwick allowed himself, after his breach with the Academy. The obscure causes of it were hidden from her; she could only pity and grieve; and Fenwick, unable to satisfy her, unable to re-establish his own equilibrium, full of remorse towards her, and of despair about his art, whereof the best forces and inspirations seemed to have withered within him like a gourd in the night, went from one folly to another, while his pictures steadily deteriorated, his affairs became involved, and a shrewd observer like Lord Findon wondered who or what the deuce had got hold of him—whether he had begun to take morphia—or had fallen into the clutches of a woman.

In the midst of these developments, so astonishing and disappointing to Fenwick's best friends, Eugenie de Pastourelles was suddenly summoned to the death-bed of the husband from whom she had been separated for nearly fifteen years. It was now nearly twelve months since Fenwick had seen her; and it was his eagerness to meet her again, much more than the necessities of his new commission, which had brought him out post-haste to Paris and Versailles, where, indeed, Lord Findon, in a kind letter, had suggested that he should join them.

* * * * *

Amid these memories and agitations, he found himself presently at the Gare Saint-Lazare, taking his ticket at the guichet. It was characteristic of him that he bought a first-class return without thinking of it, and then, when he found himself pompously alone in his compartment, while crowds were hurrying into the second-class, he reproached himself for extravagance, and passed the whole journey in a fume of discomfort. For eight or nine years he had been rich; and he loathed the small ways of poverty.

Versailles was in the glow of an autumn sunset, as he walked from the station to the famous Hotel des Reservoirs on the edge of the Park. The white houses, the wide avenues, the chateau on its hill, were steeped in light—a light golden, lavish, and yet melancholy, as though the autumn day still remembered the October afternoon when Marie Antoinette turned to look for the last time at the lake and the woods of Trianon.

As Fenwick crossed the Rue de la Paroisse, a lady on the other side of the road, who was hurrying in the opposite direction, stopped suddenly at sight of him, and stared excitedly. She was a woman no longer young, much sunburnt, with high cheek-bones and a florid complexion. He did not notice her, and after a moment's hesitation she resumed her walk.

He went into the Park, where the statues shone flamelike amid the bronze and orange of the trees, where the water of the fountains was dyed in blue and rose, and all the faded magnificence and decaying grace of the vast incomparable scene were kindling into an hour's rich life, under the last attack of the sun. He wandered a while, restless and unhappy—yet always counting the hours till he should see the slight, worn figure which for a year had been hidden from him.

He dined in the well-known restaurant, wandered again in the mild dusk, then mounted to his room and worked a while at some of the sketches he was making for his new commission. While he was so engaged, a carriage drew up below, and two persons descended. He recognised Lord Findon, much aged and whitened in these last years. The lady in deep mourning behind him paused a moment on the broad pathway, and looked round her, at the hill of the chateau, at the bright lights in the restaurant. She threw back her veil, and Fenwick's heart leapt as he recognised the spiritual beauty, the patient sweetness of a face which through twelve troubled years had kept him from evil and held him to good—had been indeed 'the master light' of all his seeing.

And to his best and only friend he had lied, persistently and unforgiveably, for twelve years. There was the sting—and there the pity of it.



CHAPTER X

Eugenie de Pastourelles was sitting on the terrace at Versailles. Or rather she was established in one of the deep embrasures between the windows, on the western side. The wind was cold, but again a glorious sun bathed the terrace and the chateau. It was a day of splendour—a day when heaven and earth seemed to have conspired to flatter and to adorn the vast creation of Louis Quatorze, this white, flaming palace, amid the gold and bronze of its autumn trees, and the blue of its waters. Superb clouds, of a royal sweep and amplitude, sailed through the brilliant sky; the woods that girdled the horizon were painted broadly and solidly in the richest colour upon an immense canvas steeped in light. In some of the nearer alleys which branch from the terrace, the eye travelled, through a deep magnificence of shade, to an arched and framed sunlight beyond, embroidered with every radiant or sparkling colour; in others, the trees, almost bare, met lightly arched above a carpet of intensest green—a tapis vert stretching toward a vaporous distance, and broken by some god, or nymph, on whose white shoulders the autumn leaves were dropping softly one by one.

Wide horizons, infinitely clear—a blazing intensity of light, beating on the palace, the gardens, the statues, and the distant water of the 'Canal de Versailles'—each tint and outline, sharp and vehement, full-bodied and rich—the greenest greens, the bluest blues, the most dazzling gold:—this was Versailles, as Eugenie saw it, on this autumn day. And through it all, the blowing of a harsh and nipping wind sounded the first approach of winter, still defied, as it were, by these bright woods decked for a last festival.

It was the 5th of October—the very anniversary of the day when Marie Antoinette, sitting alone beside the lake at Trianon, was startled by a page from the chateau bringing the news of the arrival of the Paris mob, and the urgent summons to return at once;—the day when she passed the Temple of Love, gleaming amid the quiet streams, for the last time, and fled back through the leafy avenues leading to Versailles, under a sky—cloudy and threatening rain—which was remembered by a later generation as blending fitly with the first act of that most eminent tragedy—'The Fall of the House of France.'

Madame de Pastourelles had in her hand a recent book in which a French man of letters, both historian and poet, had told once again the most piteous of stories; a story, however, which seemed then, and still seems, to be not even yet ripe for history—so profound and living are the sympathies and the passions which to this day surround it in France.

Eugenie had closed the book, and her eyes, as they looked out upon the astonishing light and shade of the terrace and its surroundings, had filled unconsciously with tears, not so much for Marie Antoinette, as for all griefs!—for this duped, tortured, struggling life of ours—for the 'mortalia' which grip all hearts, which none escape—pain, and separation, and remorse, hopes deceived, and promise mocked, decadence in one's self, change in others, and that iron gentleness of death which closes all.

For nearly a year she had been trying to recover her forces after an experience which had shaken her being to its depths. Not because, when she went to nurse his last days, she had any love left, in the ordinary sense, for her ruined and debased husband; but because of that vast power of pity, that genius for compassion to which she was born. Not a tremor of body or soul, not a pang of physical or spiritual fear, but she had passed through them, in common with the man she upheld; a man who, like Louis the Well-Beloved, former master of the building beneath whose shadow she was sitting, was ready to grovel for her pardon, when threatened with a priest and the last terrors, and would have recalled his mistress, rejoicing, with the first day of recovered health.

He and she had asked for respite in vain, however; and M. de Pastourelles slept with his fathers.

Since his death, her strength had failed her. There had been no definite illness, but a giving way for some six or seven months of nature's resisting powers. Also—significant sign of the strength of all her personal affections!—in addition to the moral and physical strain she had undergone, she had suffered much about this time from the loss of her maid, an old servant and devoted friend, who left her shortly after M. de Pastourelles' death—incited, forced thereto by Eugenie—in order to marry and go out to Canada. Eugenie had missed her sorely; and insensibly, the struggle to get well had been the harder. The doctors ordered travel and change, and she had wandered from place to place; only half-conscious, as it often seemed to her; the most docile of patients; accompanied now by one member of the family, now by another; standing as it were, like the bather who has wandered too far from shore, between the onward current which means destruction, and that backward struggle of the will which leads to life. And little by little the tide of being had turned. After a winter in Egypt, strength had begun to come back; since then Switzerland and high air had quickened recovery; and now, physically, Eugenie was almost herself again.

But morally, she retained a deep and lasting impress of what she had gone through. More than ever was she a creature of tenderness, of the most delicate perceptions, of a sensibility, as our ancestors would have called it, too great for this hurrying world. Her unselfishness, always one of her cradle-gifts, had become almost superhuman; and had she been of another temperament, the men and women about her might have instinctively shrunk from her, as too perfect—now—for human nature's daily food. But from that she was saved by a score of most womanish, most mundane qualities. Nobody knew her, luckily, for the saint she was; she herself least of all. As her strength renewed itself, her soft fun, too, came back, her gentle, inexhaustible delight in the absurdities of men and things, which gave to her talk and her personality a kind of crackling charm, like the crispness of dry leaves upon an autumn path. Naturally, and invincibly, she loved life and living; all the high forces and emotions called to her, but also all the patches, stains, and follies of this queer world; and there is no saint, man or woman, of whom this can be said, that has ever repelled the sinners. It is the difference between St. Francis and St. Dominic!

How very little—all the same—could Eugenie feel herself with the saints, on this October afternoon! She sat, to begin with, on the threshold of Madame de Pompadour's apartment; and in the next place, she had never been more tremulously steeped in doubts and yearnings, entirely concerned with her friends and her affections. It was a re-birth; not of youth—how could that be, she herself would have asked, seeing that she was now thirty-seven?—but of the natural Eugenie, who, 'intellectual' though she were, lived really by the heart, and the heart only. And since it is the heart that makes youth and keeps it—it was a return of youth—and of beauty—that had come upon her. In her black dress and shady hat, her collar and cuffs of white lawn, she was very discreetly, quietly beautiful; the passer-by did not know what it was that had touched and delighted him, till she had gone, and he found himself, perhaps, looking after the slim yet stately figure; but it was beauty none the less. And the autumn violets, her sister's gift, that were fastened to-day in profusion at her waist, marked in truth the re-awakening of buried things, of feminine instincts long repressed. For months, her maid Fanchette had dressed her, and she had worn obediently all the long crape gowns and veils dictated by the etiquette of French mourning. But to-day she had chosen for herself; and in this more ordinary garb, she was vaguely—sometimes remorsefully—conscious of relief and deliverance.

Two subjects filled her mind. First, a conversation with Fenwick that she had held that morning, strolling through the upper alleys of the Park. Poor friend, poor artist! Often and often, during her wanderings, had her thoughts dwelt anxiously on his discontents and calamities; she had made her sister or her father write to him when she could not write herself—though Lord Findon indeed had been for long much out of patience with him; and during the last few months she herself had written every week. But she had never felt so clearly the inexorable limits of her influence with him. This morning, just as of old, he had thrown himself tempestuously upon her advice, her sympathy; and she had given him counsel as she best could. But a woman knows when her counsel is likely to be followed, or no. Eugenie had no illusions. In his sore, self-tormented state he was, she saw, at the mercy of any passing idea, of anything that seemed to offer him vengeance on his enemies, or the satisfaction of a vanity that writhed under the failure he was all the time inviting and assuring.

Yet as she thought of him, she liked him better than ever. He might be perverse, yet he appealed to her profoundly! The years of his success had refined and civilised him no doubt, but they had tended to make him like anybody else. Whereas this passionate accent of revolt—as of some fierce, helpless creature, struggling blindly in bonds of its own making—had perhaps restored to him that more dramatic element which his personality had possessed in his sulky, gifted youth. He had expressed himself with a bitter force on the decline of his inspiration and the weakening of his will. He was going to the dogs, he declared; had lost all his hold on the public; and had nothing more to say or to paint. And she had been very, very sorry for him, but conscious all the time that he had never been so eloquent, and never in such good looks, what with the angry energy of the eyes, and the sweep of grizzled hair across the powerful brow, and the lines cut by life and thought round the vigorous, impatient mouth. How could he be at once so able and so childish! Her woman's wit pondered it; while at the same time she remembered with emotion the joy with which he had greeted her, his eager, stammering sympathy, his rough grasp of her hand, his frowning scrutiny of her pale face.

Yes, he was a great, great friend—and, somehow, she must help him! Her lips parted in a sigh of aspiration. If only this unlucky thing had not happened!—this meeting of Arthur and of Fenwick, before the time, before she had prepared and engineered it.

And so she came to her second topic of meditation. Gradually as her mind pursued it, her aspect seemed to lose its new and tremulous brightness; the face became once more a little grey and pinched. They had somehow missed all the letters which should have warned them. To find Arthur established here, with his poor invalid wife—nothing had been more unexpected, and, alack, more unwelcome, considering the relations between them and John Fenwick—Fenwick who was practically her father's guest and hers.

Did Arthur think it strange, unkind? Wouldn't he really believe that it was pure accident! If so, it would be only because Elsie was there, influencing him against his old friends—poor, bitter, stricken Elsie. Eugenie's lips quivered. There flitted before her the image of the girl of eighteen—muse of laughter and delight. And she recalled the taciturn woman whom she had seen on her sofa the night before, speaking coldly, in dry, sharp sentences, to her husband, her cousin, her maid—evidently unhappy and in pain.

Eugenie shaded her eyes from the light of the terrace. Her heart seemed to be sinking, contracting. Mrs. Welby had been already ill, and therewith jealous and tyrannical, for some little time before Madame de Pastourelles had been summoned to the death-bed of her husband! But now!—Eugenie shrank aghast before what she saw and what she guessed.

And it was, too, as if the present state of things—as if the new hardness in Elsie's eyes, and the strange hostility of her manner, especially towards the Findons, and her cousin Eugenie—threw light on earlier years, on many a puzzling trait and incident of the past.

There had been a terrible confinement, at the end of years of childlessness—a still-born child—and then, after a short apparent recovery, a rapid loss of strength and power. Poor, poor Elsie! But why—why should this trouble have awakened in her this dumb tyranny towards Arthur, this alienation from Arthur's friends?

Eugenie sharply drew herself together. She banished her thoughts. Elsie was young, and would get well. And when she recovered, she would know who were her friends, and Arthur's.

A figure came towards her, crossing the parterre d'eau. She perceived her father—just released, no doubt, from two English acquaintances with whom he had been exploring the 'Bosquet d'Apollon.'

He hurried towards her—a tall Don Quixote of a man, gaunt, active, grey-haired, with a stride like a youth of eighteen, and the very minimum of flesh on his well-hung frame. Lord Findon had gone through many agitations during the last ten or twelve years. In his own opinion, he had upset a Ministry, he had recreated the army, and saved the Colonies to the Empire. That history was not as well aware of these feats as it should be, he knew; but in the memoirs, of which there were now ten volumes privately printed in his drawer, he had provided for that. Meanwhile, in the rush of his opinions and partisanships, two things at least had persisted unchanged—his adoration for Eugenie—and his belief that if only man—and much more woman—would but exchange 'gulping' for 'chewing'—would only, that is to say, reform their whole system of mastication, and thereby of digestion, the world would be another and a happier place.

He came up now, frowning, and out of temper.

'Upon my word, Eugenie, the blindness of some people is too amazing!'

'Is it? Sit down, papa, and look at that!'

She pushed a chair towards him, smiling, and pointed to the terrace, the woods, the sky.

'It's all very well, my dear,' said Lord Findon, seating himself—'but this place tries me a good deal.'

'Because the ladies in the restaurant are so stout?' said Eugenie. 'Dear papa—somebody must keep these cooks in practice!'

'Never did I see such spectacles!' said Lord Findon, fuming. 'And when one knows that the very smallest attention to their diet—and they might be sylphs again—as young as their grandchildren!—it's really disheartening.'

'It is,' said Eugenie. 'Shall we announce a little conference in the salon? I'm sure the ladies would flock.'

'The amount the French eat is appalling!' exclaimed Lord Findon—without noticing. 'And they have such ridiculous ideas about us! I said something about their gluttony to M. de Villeton this morning—and he fired up!—declared he had spent this summer in English country-houses, and we had seven meals a day—all told—and there wasn't a Frenchman in the world had more than three—counting his coffee in the morning.'

'He had us there,' said Eugenie.

'Not at all! It doesn't matter when you eat—it's what and how much you eat. We can't produce such women as one sees here. I tell you, Eugenie, we can't. It takes all the poetry out of the sex.'

Eugenie smiled.

'Haven't you been walking with Lady Marney, papa?'

Lord Findon looked a little annoyed.

'She's an exception, my dear—a hideous exception.'

'I wouldn't mind her size,' said Eugenie, softly—'if only the complexion were better done.'

Lord Findon laughed.

'Paint is on the increase,' he declared—'and gambling too. Villeton tells me there was baccarat in the Marney's' apartment last night, and Lady Marney lost enormously. Age seems to have no effect on these people. She must be nearly seventy-five.'

'You may be sure she'll play till the last trump,' said Eugenie. 'Papa!'—her tone changed—'is that Elsie's chair?'

The group to which she pointed was still distant, but Lord Findon, even at seventy, had the eyes of an eagle, and could read an affiche a mile off.

'It is.' Lord Findon looked a little disturbed, and, turning, he scanned the terrace up and down before he bent towards Eugenie.

'You know, darling, it's an awkward business about these two men. I don't believe Arthur's patience will hold out.'

'Oh yes, it will, papa. For our sakes, Arthur would keep the peace.'

'If the other will let him! I used to think, Eugenie, you had tamed the bear—but, upon my soul!'—Lord Findon threw up his hands in protest.

'He's in low spirits, papa. It will be better soon,' said Eugenie, softly, and as she spoke she rose and went down the steps to meet the Welbys.

Lord Findon followed her, tormented by a queer, unwelcome thought. Was it possible that Eugenie was now—with her widowhood—beginning to take a more than friendly interest in that strange fellow, Fenwick? If so, he would be tolerably punished for his meddling of long ago! To have snatched her from Arthur, in order to hand her to John Fenwick!—Lord Findon crimsoned hotly at the notion, all his pride of race and caste up in arms.

Of course she ought now to marry. He wished to see her before he died the wife of some good fellow, and the mistress of a great house. Why not? Eugenie's distinctions of person and family—leaving her fortune, which was considerable, out of count—were equal to any fate. 'It's all very well to despise such things—but we have to keep up the traditions,' he said to himself, testily.

And in spite of her thirty-seven years a suitable bridegroom would not be at all hard to find. Lord Findon had perceived that in Egypt, where they had spent the winter and early spring. Several of the most distinguished men then in Cairo had been her devoted slaves—ill as she was and at half-power. Alderney—almost certain to be the next Viceroy of India—one of the most charming of widowers, with an only daughter—it had been plain both to Lord Findon and his stupid wife that Eugenie had made a deep impression upon a man no less romantic than fastidious. Eugenie had but to lift her hand, and he would have followed them to Syria. On the contrary, she had taken special pains to prevent it. And General F,—and that clever fellow X,—who was now reorganising Egyptian finance—and several more—they were all under the spell.

But Eugenie had this quixotic liking for the 'intellectuals' of a particular sort, for artists and poets, and people in difficulties generally. Well, he had it himself, he reflected, frowning, as he strolled after her; but there were limits. Marriage was a thing apart; in that quarter, at any rate, it was no good supposing you could escape from the rules of the game.

Not that the rules always led you right—witness De Pastourelles and his villainies. But matrimonial anarchy was not to be justified, any more than social anarchy, by the failures and drawbacks of arrangements which were on the whole for people's good. Passe encore!—if Fenwick had only fulfilled the promise of his youth!—were at least a successful artist, instead of promising to become a quarrelsome failure!

Now if Arthur himself were free! Supposing this poor girl were to succumb?—what then?

At this point Lord Findon checked himself roughly, and a minute afterwards was shaking Welby by the hand and stooping with an old man's courtesy over the invalid carriage in which Mrs. Welby lay reclined.

Euphrosyne, indeed, had shed her laughter! A face with sunken eyes and drawn lips, and with that perpetual suspicious furrow in the brow, which meant a terror lest any movement or jar should let loose the enemy, pain; an emaciated body, from which all the soft mouldings of youth had departed; a frail hand, lying in mute appeal on the shawl with which she was covered:—this was now Elsie Welby, whose beauty in the first years of her marriage had been one of the adornments of London.

Eugenie was bending over her, and Mrs. Welby was pettishly answering.

'It's so stiff and formal. I don't admire this kind of thing. And there isn't a bit of shade on this terrace. I think it's ugly!'

Welby laid a hand on hers, smiling.

'But to-day, Bebe, you like the sun?—in October?'

Mrs. Welby was very decidedly of opinion that even in October there was a glare—and in August—she shuddered to think of it! It was so tiresome, too, to have missed the Grandes Eaux. So like French red tape, to insist on stopping them on a particular date. Why should they be stopped? As to expense, that was nonsense. How could water cost anything! It was because the French were so doctrinaire, so tyrannical—so fond of managing for managing's sake.

So the pettish voice rambled on, the others tenderly and sadly listening, till presently Lord Findon shook his gaunt shoulders.

'Upon my word, it begins to get cold. With your leave, Elsie, I could do with a little more sun! Arthur, shall we take a brisk walk round the canal before tea?'

Welby looked anxiously at his wife. She had closed her eyes, and her pale lips, tightly shut, made no movement.

'I think I promised Elsie to stay with her,' he said, uncertainly.

'Let me stay with Elsie, please,' said Eugenie.

The blue eyes unclosed.

'Don't be more than an hour, Arthur,' said the young wife, ungraciously. 'You know I asked Mrs. Westmacott to tea.'

The gentlemen walked off, and a sharp sensation impressed upon Madame de Pastourelles that Arthur was only allowed to go with Lord Findon, because she was not of the party.

A sudden colour rose into her cheeks. For the hour that followed, she devoted herself to her cousin. But Mrs. Welby was difficult and querulous. Amongst other complaints she expressed herself bitterly as to the appearance of Mr. Fenwick at Versailles. Arthur had been so taken aback—Mr. Fenwick was always so atrociously rude to him! Arthur would have never come to Versailles had he known; but of course, as Uncle Findon and Eugenie liked Mr. Fenwick, as he was their friend, Arthur couldn't now avoid meeting him. It was extremely disagreeable.

'I think they needn't meet very much,' said Eugenie, soothingly—'and papa and I will do our best to keep Mr. Fenwick in order.'

'I wonder why he came,' said Elsie, fretfully.

'He has some work to do for the production of this play on Marie Antoinette. And I suppose he wanted to meet us. You see, we didn't know about Arthur.'

'I can't think why you like him so much.'

'He is an old friend, my dear!—and just now very unhappy, and out of spirits.'

'All his own fault, Arthur says. He had the ball at his feet.'

'I know,' said Eugenie, smiling sadly. 'That's the tragedy of it!'

There was silence. Mrs. Welby still observed her companion. A variety of expressions, all irritable or hostile, passed through the large, languid eyes.

* * * * *

The afternoon faded—on the blue surface of the distant 'canal,' the great poplars that stand sentinel at the western edge of the Park, one to right, and one to left—last gardes du corps of the House of France!—threw long shadows on the water; and across the opening which they marked, drifted the smoke of burning weeds, the only but sufficient symbol, amid the splendid scene, of that peasant France which destroyed Versailles. It was four o'clock, and to their left, as they sat sheltered on the southern side of the chateau, the visitors of the day were pouring out into the gardens. The shutters of the lower rooms, in the apartments of the Dauphin and of Mesdames, were being closed one by one, by the gardiens within. Eugenie peered through the window beside her. She saw before her a long vista of darkened and solitary rooms, dim portraits of the marshals of France just visible on their walls. Suddenly—under a gleam of light from a shutter not yet fastened—there shone out amid the shadows a bust of Louis Seize! The Bourbon face, with its receding brow, its heavy, good-natured lips, its smiling incapacity, held—dominated—the palace.

Eugenie watched, holding her breath. Slowly the light died; the marble withdrew into the dark; and Louis Seize was once more with the ghosts.

Eugenie's fancy pursued him. She thought of the night of the 20th of January, 1793, when Madame Royale, in the darkness of the Temple, heard her mother turning miserably on her bed, sleepless with grief and cold, waiting for that last rendezvous of seven o'clock which the King had promised her—waiting—waiting—till the great bell of Notre Dame told her that Louis had passed to another meeting, more urgent, more peremptory still.

'Oh, poor soul!—poor soul!' she said, aloud, pressing her hands on her eyes.

'What on earth do you mean!' said Mrs. Welby's voice beside her—startled—stiff—a little suspicious.

Eugenie looked up and blushed.

'I beg your pardon!—I was thinking of Marie Antoinette.'

'I'm so tired of Marie Antoinette!' said the invalid, raising a petulant hand, and letting it fall again, inert. 'All the silly memorials of her they sell here!—and the sentimental talk about her! Arthur, of course, now—with his picture—thinks of nothing else.'

'Naturally!'

'I don't know. People are bored with Marie Antoinette. I wish he'd taken another subject. And as to her beauty—how could she have been beautiful, with those staring eyes, and that lower lip! I say so to Arthur—and he raves—and quotes Horace Walpole—and all sorts of people. But one can see for one's self. People are much prettier now than they ever were then! We should think nothing of their beauties.'

And the delicate lips of this once lovely child, this flower withered before its time, made a cold gesture of contempt.

In Eugenie's eyes, as they rested upon her companion, there was a flash—was it of horror?

Was she jealous even of the dead women whom Arthur painted?—no less than of his living friends?

Eugenie came close to her, took the irresponsive hand in hers, tucked the shawls closer round the wasted limbs, bent over her, chatting and caressing. Then, as the sun began to drop quickly, Madame de Pastourelles rose, and went to the corner of the chateau, to see if the gentlemen were in sight. But in less than a minute Mrs. Welby called her back.

'I must go in now,' she said, fretfully. 'This place is really too cold!'

'She won't let me go to meet them,' thought Eugenie, involuntarily; sharply reproaching herself, a moment afterwards, for the mere thought.

But when Elsie had been safely escorted home, Eugenie slipped back through the darkening streets, taking good care that her path should not lead her across her father and Arthur Welby.

She fled towards the western flight of the Hundred Steps, and ran down the vast staircase towards the Orangerie, and the still shining lake beyond, girdled with vaporous woods. A majesty of space and light enwrapt her, penetrated, as everywhere at Versailles, with memory, with the bitterness and the glory of human things. In the distance the voices of the children, still playing beside their nurses on the upper terrace, died away. Close by, a white Artemis on her pedestal bent forward—eager—her gleaming bow in air, watching, as it were, the arrow she had just sped toward the windows of Madame de Pompadour; and beside her, a nymph, daughter of gods, turned to the palace with a free, startled movement, shading her eyes that she might gaze the more intently on that tattered tricolour which floats above the palace of 'Le Roi Soleil.'

* * * * *

'Oh, poor Arthur—poor Arthur! And I did it!—I did it!'

It was the cry of Eugenie's inmost life.

And before she knew, she found herself enveloped in memories that rolled in upon her like waves of storm. How long it had been before she would allow herself to see anything amiss with this marriage she had herself made! And, indeed, it was only since Elsie's illness that things dimly visible before had sprung into that sharp and piteous relief in which they stood to-day. Before it, indications, waywardnesses, the faults of a young and petted wife. But since the physical collapse, the inner motives and passions had stood up bare and black, like the ribs of a wrecked ship from the sand. And as Eugenie had been gradually forced to understand them, they had worked upon her own mind as a silent, yet ever-growing accusation, against which she defended herself in vain.