Surely, surely she had done no wrong! To have allowed Arthur to go on binding his life ever more and more closely to hers, would have been a crime. What could she give him, that such a nature most deeply needed? Home, wifely love, and children—it was to these dear enwrapping powers she had committed him in what she had done. She had feared for herself indeed. But is it a sin to fear sin?—the declension of one's own best will, the staining of one's purest feeling?

On her part she could proudly answer for herself. Never since Welby's marriage, either in thought or act, had she given Arthur's wife the smallest just cause of offence. Eugenie's was often an anxious and a troubled conscience; but not here, not in this respect. She knew herself true.

But from Elsie's point of view? Had she in truth sacrificed an ignorant child to her impetuous wish for Arthur's happiness, a too scrupulous care for her own peace? How 'sacrifice'? She had given the child her heart's desire. Arthur was not in love; but Elsie Bligh would have accepted him as a husband on any terms. Tenderly, in good faith, trusting to the girl's beauty, and Arthur's rich and loving nature, Eugenie had joined their hands.

Was that in reality her offence? In spite of all the delicacy with which it had been done, had the girl's passion guessed the truth? And having guessed it, had she then failed—and failed consciously—to make the gift her own?

Eugenie had watched—often with a sinking spirit—the development of a nature, masked by youth and happiness, but essentially narrow and poor, full of mean ambitions and small antipathies. Arthur had played his part bravely, with all the chivalry and the conscience that might have been expected of him. And there had been moments—intervals—of apparent happiness, when Eugenie's own conscience had been laid to sleep.

Was there anything she might have done for those two people, that she had not done? And Elsie had seemed—she sadly remembered—to love her, to trust her—till this tragic breakdown. Indeed, so long as she could dress, dance, dine, and chatter as much as she pleased, with her husband in constant attendance, Mrs. Welby had shown no open discontent with her lot; and if her caresses often hurt Eugenie more than they pleased, there had been no outward dearth of them.

Alack!—Eugenie's heart was wrung with pity for the young maimed creature; but the peevish image of the wife was swept away by the more truly tragic image of the husband. Eugenie might try to persuade herself of the possibility of Elsie's recovery; her real instinct denied it. Yet life was not necessarily threatened, it seemed, though certain fatal accidents might end it in a week. The omens pointed to a long and fluctuating case—to years of hopeless nursing for Arthur, and complaining misery for his wife.

Years! Eugenie sat down in a corner of the Orangerie garden, locking her hands together, in a miserable pity for Arthur. She knew well what a shining pinnacle of success and fame Welby occupied in the eyes of the world; she knew how envious were the lesser men—such a man as John Fenwick, for instance—of a reputation and a success they thought overdone and undeserved. But Arthur himself! She seemed to be looking into his face, graven on the dusk, the face of a man tragically silent, patient, eternally disappointed; of an artist conscious of ideals and discontents, loftier, more poignant, far than his fellows will ever know—of a poet, alone at heart, forbidden to 'speak out,' blighted, and in pain.

'Arthur—Arthur!' She leaned her head against the pedestal of a marble vase—wrestling with herself.

Then, quick as fire, there flew through her veins the alternate possibility—Elsie's death—freedom for herself and Arthur—the power to retrace her own quixotic, fatal step....

Madame de Pastourelles rose to her feet, rigid and straight in her black dress, wrestling as though with an attacking Apollyon. She seemed to herself a murderess in thought—the lowest and vilest of human beings.

In an anguish she looked through the darkness, in a wild appeal to Heaven to save her from herself—this new self, unknown to her!—to shut down and trample on this mutiny of a sinful and selfish heart—to make it impossible—impossible!—that ever again, even without her will, against her will, a thought so hideous, so incredible, should enter and defile her mind.

She walked on blindly towards the water and the woods. Her eyes were full of tears, which she could not stop. Unconsciously, to hide them, she threw round her head a black lace scarf she had brought out with her against the evening chill, and drew it close round her face.

'How late you are!' said a joyous voice beside her.

She looked up. Fenwick emerging from the wood, towards the shelter of which she was hurrying, stood before her, bareheaded, as he often walked, his eyes unable to hide the pleasure with which he beheld her.

She gave a little gasp.

'You startled me!'

In the dim light he could only see her slight, fluttering smile; and it seemed to him that she was or had been in agitation. But at least it was nothing hostile to himself; nay, it was borne in upon him as he turned his steps, and she walked beside him with a quick yet gradually subsiding breath, that his appearance had been a relief to her, that she was glad of his companionship.

And he—miserable fellow!—to him it was peace after struggle, balm after torment. For his thoughts, as he wandered through the Satory woods alone, had been the thoughts of a hypochondriac. He hastened to leave them, now that she was near.

They wandered along the eastern edge of the 'Swiss Water,' towards the woods amid which the railway runs. Through the gold-and-purple air the thin autumn trees rose lightly into the evening sky, marching in ordered ranks beside the water. Young men were fishing in the lake; boys and children were playing near it, and sweethearts walking in the dank grass. The evening peace, with its note of decay and death, seemed to stir feeling rather than soothe it. It set the nerves trembling.

He began to talk of some pictures he had been studying in the Palace that day—Nattiers, Rigauds, Drouais—examples of that happy, sensuous, confident art, produced by a society that knew no doubts of itself, which not to have enjoyed—so the survivors of it thought—was to be for ever ignorant of what the charm of life might be.

Fenwick spoke of it with envy and astonishment. The pleasure of it had penetrated him, its gay, perpetual festa—as compared with the strain of thought and conscience under which the modern lives.

'It gives me a perfect hunger for fine clothes, and jewels, and masquerades—and "fetes de nuit"—and every sort of theatricality and expense! Nature has sent us starvelings on the scene a hundred years late. We are like children in the rain, flattening our noses against a ballroom window.'

'There were plenty of them then,' said Eugenie. 'But they broke in and sacked the ballroom.'

'Yes. What folly!' he said, bitterly. 'We are all still groping among the ruins.'

'No, no! Build a new Palace of Beauty—and bring everybody in—out of the rain.'

'Ridiculous!' he declared, with sparkling eyes. Art and pleasure were only for the few. Try and spread them, make current coin of them, and they vanished like fairy gold.

'So only the artist may be happy?'

'The artist is never happy!' he said, roughly. 'But the few people who appreciate him and rob him, enjoy themselves. By the way, I took one of your ideas this morning, and made a sketch of it. I haven't noted a composition of any sort for weeks—except for this beastly play. It came to me while we talked.'

'Ah!' Her face, turned to him, received the news with a shrinking pleasure.

He developed his idea before her, drawing it on the air with his stick, or on the sand of the alleys where the arching trees overhead seemed still to hold a golden twilight captive. The picture was to represent that fine metal-worker of the ancien regime who, when the Revolution came, took his ragged children with him and went to the palace which contained his work—work for which he had never been paid—and hammered it to pieces.

Fenwick talked himself at last into something like enthusiasm; and Eugenie listened to him with a pitiful eagerness, only anxious to lead him on, to put this friendship, and the pure sympathy and compassion of her feeling for him, between her and the ugly memory which hovered round her like a demon thing. These dreams of the intellect and of art, as they gradually rose and took shape between them, were so infinitely welcome! Clean, blameless, strengthening—they put the ghosts to flight, they gave her back herself.

'Oh, you must paint it!' she said—'you must.'

He stopped, and walked on abruptly. Then she pressed him to promise her a time and date. It must be ready for a new gallery, and a distinguished exhibition, just about to open.

He shook his head.

'I probably shan't care about it to-morrow.'

She protested.

'Just now you were so keen!'

He hesitated—then blurted out—'Because I was talking to you! When you're not there—I know very well—I shall fall back to where I was before.'

She tried to laugh at him for a too dependent friend, who must always be fed on sugar-plums of praise; but the silence with which he met her, checked her. It was too full of emotion; and she ran away from it.

She ran, however, in vain. They reached the end of the lake, and went to look at the mouldering statue of Louis Quatorze at its further end—fantastic work of the great Bernini—Louis on a vast, curly-maned beast, with flames bursting round him—flung out into the wilderness and the woods, because Louis, after adding the flames to Bernini's composition, finally pronounced the statue unworthy of himself and of the sacred enclosure of the Park. So here, on the outer edge of Versailles, the crumbling failure rises, in exile to this day, without so much as a railing to protect it from the scribbling tourist who writes his name all over it. In the realm of Art, it seemed, the King's writ still ran, and the King's doom stood.

Fenwick's rhetorical sense was touched by the statue and its history. He examined it, talking fast and well, Eugenie meanwhile winning from him all he had to give, by the simplest words and looks—he the reed, and she the player. His mind, his fancy, worked easily once more, under the stimulus of her presence. His despondency began to give way. He believed in himself—felt himself an artist—again. The relief, physical and mental, was too tempting. He flung himself upon it with reckless desire, incapable of denying himself, or of counting the cost. And meanwhile, the effect of her black scarf, loosened, and eddying round her head and face in the soft night wind, defining their small oval, and the beauty of the brow, enchanted his painter's eye. There was a moment, just as they reentered the Park, when, as she stood looking at a moon-touched vista before them, the floating scarf suddenly recalled to him the outline of that lovely hood in which Romney framed the radiant head of Lady Hamilton as 'The Sempstress.'

The recollection startled him. Romney! Involuntarily there flashed across him Phoebe's use of the Romney story—her fierce comments on the deserted wife—the lovely mistress. Perhaps, while she stood looking at the portrait in his studio, she was thinking of Lady Hamilton, and all sorts of other ludicrous and shameful things!

And this, all the while, was the reality—this pure, ethereal being, in whose presence he was already a better and a more hopeful man!—who seemed to bring a fellow comfort, and moral renewal, in the mere touch of her kind hand.

The shock of inner debate still further weakened his self-control. He slipped, hardly knowing how or why, into a far more intimate confession of himself than he had yet made to her. In the morning he had given her the outer history of his life, during the year of her absence. But this was the inner history of a man's weakness and failure—of his quarrels and hatreds, his baffled ambitions and ideals. She put it together as best she could from his hurried, excited talk—from stories half told, fierce charges against 'charlatans' and 'intriguers,' mingled with half-serious, half-comic returns upon himself, attacks on all the world, alternating with a ruthless self-analysis—the talk of a man who challenges society one moment with an angry 'J'accuse!'—and sees himself the next—sardonically—as the chief obstacle in his own way.

Then suddenly a note of intense loneliness—anguish—inexplicable despair. Eugenie could not stop it, could not withdraw herself. There was a strange feeling that it brought her the answer to her prayer.—They hurried on through the lower walks of the Park—plunging now through tunnelled depths of shade, and now emerging into spaces where sunset and moonrise rained a mingled influence on glimmering water, on the dim upturned faces of Ceres or Flora, or the limbs of flower-crowned nymphs and mermaids. It seemed impossible to turn homeward, to break off their conversation. When they reached the 'Bassin de Neptune' they left the Park, turning down the Trianon Avenue, in the growing dark, till they saw to their right, behind its iron gates, the gleaming facade of the Petit Trianon; woods all about them, and to their left, again, the shimmer of wide water. Meanwhile the dying leaves, driven by the evening wind, descended on them in a soft and ceaseless shower; the woods, so significant and human in their planned and formal beauty, brought their 'visionary majesties' of moonlight and of gloom to bear on nerve and sense, turned all that was said and all that was felt, beneath their spell, to poetry.

Suddenly, at the Trianon gate, Eugenie stopped.

'I'm very tired,' she said, faintly. 'I am afraid we must go back.'

Fenwick denounced himself for a selfish brute; and they turned homeward. But it was not physical fatigue she felt. It was rather the burden of a soul thrown headlong upon hers—the sudden appeal of a task which seemed to be given her by God—for the bridling of her own heart, and the comforting and restoring of John Fenwick. From all the conflicting emotion of an evening which changed her life, what remained—or seemed to remain—was a missionary call of duty and affection. 'Save him!—and master thyself!'

So, yet again, poor Eugenie slipped into the snare which Fate had set for one who was only too much a woman.

The Rue des Reservoirs was very empty as Fenwick and Madame de Pastourelles mounted the paved slope leading towards the hotel. The street-lamps were neither many nor bright—but from the glazed gallery of the restaurant, a broad, cheerful illumination streamed upon the passers-by. They stepped within its bounds. And at the moment, a woman who had just crossed to the opposite side of the street stopped abruptly to look at them. They paused a few minutes in the entrance, still chatting; the woman opposite made a movement as though to re-cross the street, then shook her head, laughed, and walked away. Fenwick went into the restaurant and Eugenie hurried through the courtyard to the door of the Findon's apartment.

But in her reflexions of the night, Eugenie came to the conclusion that the situation, as it then stood at Versailles, was not one to be prolonged.

Next day she proposed to her father and sister a change of plan. On the whole, she said, she was anxious to get back to London; the holiday was overspreading its due limits; and she urged pressing on and home. Lord Findon was puzzled, but submissive; the bookish sister Theresa, now a woman of thirty, welcomed anything that would bring her back to the London Library and the British Museum. But suddenly, just as the maids had been warned, and Lord Findon's man had been sent to look out trains, his master caught a chill, going obstinately, and in a mocking spirit, to see what 'Faust' might be like, as given at the Municipal Theatre of Versailles. There was fever, and a touch of bronchitis; nothing serious; but the doctor who had been summoned from Paris would not hear of travelling. Lord Findon hoarsely preached 'chewing' to him, through the greater part of his visits; he revenged himself by keeping a tight hold on his patient, in all that was not his tongue. Eugenie yielded, with what appeared to Theresa a strange amount of reluctance; and they settled down for a week or two.

In the middle of the convalescence, the elder son, Marmaduke, came over to see his father. He was a talkative Evangelical, like his mother; a partner in the brewery owned by his mother's kindred; and recently married to a Lady Louisa.

After spending three days at the hotel, he suddenly said to Lord Findon, as he was mounting guard one night, while Eugenie wrote some letters:

'I say, pater, do you want Eugenie to marry that fellow Fenwick?'

Lord Findon turned uneasily in his bed.

'What makes you say that?'

'Well, he's dreadfully gone on her—never happy except when she's there—and she—well, she encourages him a good bit, father.'

'You don't understand, Marmie. You see, you don't care for books and pictures; Eugenie does.'

'I suppose she does,' said Marmaduke, doubtfully—'but she wouldn't care so much if Fenwick wasn't there to talk about them.'

'His talk is admirable!' said Lord Findon.

'I dare say it is, but he isn't my sister's equal,' replied the son, with stolidity.

'A good artist is anybodyies equal,' cried Lord Findon, much heated.

'You don't really think it, papa,' said Marmaduke, firmly. 'Shall I give Eugenie a talking to?—as you're not in a condition.'

Lord Findon laughed, though not gaily.

'You'd better try! Or rather, I don't advise you to try!'

Marmaduke, however, did try; with the only result that Eugenie soon grew a little vexed and tremulous, and begged him to go home. He might be a master of brewing finance, and a dear, kind, well-meaning brother, but he really did not understand his sister's affairs.

Marmaduke went home, much puzzled, urgently commanding Theresa to write to him, and announcing to Arthur Welby, who listened silently, as he talked, that if Fenwick did propose, he should think it a damned impertinence.

Lord Findon meanwhile held his peace. Every day Eugenie came in from her walk with Fenwick, to sit with or read to her father. She always spoke of what she had been doing, quite naturally and simply, describing their walk and their conversation, giving the news of Fenwick's work—bringing his sketches to show. Lord Findon would lie and listen—a little suspicious and ill at ease—sometimes a little sulky. But he let his illness and his voicelessness excuse him from grappling with her. She must, of course, please herself. If she chose, as she seemed about to choose—why, they must all make the best of it!—Marmaduke might talk as he liked. Naturally, Arthur kept away from them. Poor Arthur! But what a darling she looked in her black, with this fresh touch of colour in her pale cheeks!

The Welbys certainly had but little to do with the party at the Reservoirs. Welby seemed to be absorbed in his new picture, and Mrs. Welby let it be plainly understood that at home Arthur was too busy, and she too ill, to receive visitors; while out-of-doors they neither of them wished to be thrown across Mr. Fenwick.

Every evening, after taking his wife home, Welby went out by himself for a solitary walk. He avoided the Park and the woods; chose rather the St. Cyr road, or the Avenue de Paris. He walked, wrapt, a little too picturesquely perhaps, in an old Campagna cloak, relic of his years in Rome—with a fine collie for his companion. Once or twice in the distance he caught sight of Eugenie and Fenwick—only to turn down a side street, out of their way.

His thoughts meanwhile, day by day, his silent, thronging thoughts, dealt with his own life—and theirs. Would she venture it? He discussed it calmly with himself. It presented itself to him as an act altogether unworthy of her. What hurt him most, however, at these times, was the occasional sudden memory of Eugenie's face, trembling with pain, under some slight or unkindness shown her by his wife.

One day Welby was sitting beside his wife on the sheltered side of the Terrace, when Eugenie and Fenwick came in sight, emerging from the Hundred Steps. Suddenly Welby bent over his wife.

'Elsie!—have you noticed anything?'

'Noticed what?'

He motioned towards the distant figures. His gesture was a little dry and hostile.

Elsie in amazement raised herself painfully on her elbow to look.

'Eugenie!' she said, breathlessly—'Eugenie—and Mr. Fenwick!'

Arthur Welby watched the transformation in her face. It was the first time he had seen her look happy for months.

'What an excellent thing!' she cried; all flushed and vehement. 'Arthur, you know you said how lonely she must be!'

'Is he worthy of her?' he said, slowly, finding his words with difficulty.

'Well, of course, we don't like him!—but then Uncle Findon does. And if he didn't, it's Eugenie that matters—isn't it?—only Eugenie! At her age, you can't be choosing her husband for her! Well, I never, never thought—Eugenie's so close!—she'd make up her mind to marry anybody!'

And she rattled on, in so much excitement that Welby hastily and urgently impressed discretion upon her.

But when she and Eugenie next met, Eugenie was astonished by her gaiety and good temper—her air of smiling mystery. Madame de Pastourelles hoped it meant real physical improvement, and would have liked to talk of it to Arthur; but all talk between them grew rarer and more difficult. Thus Eugenie's walks with Fenwick through the enchanted lands that surround Versailles became daily more significant, more watched. Lord Findon groaned in his sick-room, but still restrained himself.

It was a day—or rather a night—of late October—a wet and windy night, when the autumn leaves were coming down in swirling hosts on the lawns and paths of Trianon.

Fenwick was hard at work, in the small apartment which he occupied on the third floor of the Hotel des Reservoirs. It consisted of a sitting-room and two bedrooms looking on an inner cour. One of the bedrooms he had turned into a sort of studio. It was now full of drawings and designs for the sumptuous London 'production' on which he was engaged—rooms at Versailles and Trianon—views in the Trianon gardens—fragments of decoration—designs for stage grouping—for the reproduction of one of the famous fetes de nuit in the gardens of the 'Hameau'—studies of costume even.

His proud ambition hated the work; he thought it unworthy of him; only his poverty had consented. But he kept it out of sight of his companions as much as he could, and worked as much as possible at night.

And here and there, amongst the rest, were the sketches and fragments, often the grandiose fragments, which represented his 'buried life'—the life which only Eugenie de Pastourelles seemed now to have the power to evoke. When some hours of other work had weakened the impulse received from her, he would look at these things sadly, and put them aside.

To-night, as he drew, he was thinking incessantly of Eugenie; pierced often by intolerable remorse. But whose fault was it? Will you ask a man, perishing of need, to put its satisfaction from him? The tests of life are too hard. The plain, selfish man must always fail under them. Why act and speak as though he were responsible for what Nature and the flesh impose?

But how was it all to end?—that was what tormented him. His conscience shrank from the half-perceived villainies before him; but his will failed him. What was the use of talking? He was the slave of an impulse, which was not passion, which had none of the excuse of passion, but represented rather the blind search of a man who, like a child in the dark, recoils in reckless terror from loneliness and the phantoms of his own mind.

Eleven o'clock struck. He was busying himself with a cardboard model, on which he had been trying the effect of certain arrangements, when he heard a knock at his door.

'Entrez!' he said, in astonishment.

At this season of the year the hotel kept early hours, and there was not a light to be seen in the cour.

The door opened. On the threshold stood Arthur Welby. Fenwick gazed at him open-mouthed.

'You?—you came to see me?'

He advanced, head foremost, hand outstretched.

'I have something important to say to you.' Welby took no notice of the hand. 'Shall we be undisturbed?'

'I imagine so!' said Fenwick, fiercely retreating; 'but, as you see, I am extremely busy!' He pointed to the room and its contents.

'I am sorry to interrupt you'—Welby's voice was carefully controlled—'but I think you will admit that I had good reason to come and find you.' He looked round to see that the door was shut, then advanced a step nearer. 'You are, I think, acquainted with that lady?'

He handed Fenwick a card. Fenwick took it to the light. On it was lithographed 'Miss Isabel Morrison,' and a written address, 'Corso de Madrid, Buenos Ayres,' had been lightly scratched out in one corner.

Fenwick put down the card.

'Well,' he said, sharply—'and if I am—what then?'

Welby began to speak—paused—and cleared his throat. He was standing, with one hand lightly resting on the table, his eyes fixed on Fenwick. There was a moment of shock, of mutual defiance.

'This lady seems to have observed the movements of our party here,' said Welby, commanding himself. 'She followed my wife and me to-day, after we met you in the Park. She spoke to us. She gave us the astonishing news that you were a married man—that your wife—'

Fenwick rushed forward and gripped the speaker's arm.

'My God! Tell me!—is she alive?'

His eyes starting out of his head—his crimson face—his anguish, seemed to affect the other with indescribable repulsion.

Welby wrenched himself free.

'That was what Miss Morrison wished to ask you. She says that when you and she last met you were not on very good terms; she shrank, therefore, from addressing you. But she had a respect for your wife—she wished to know what had become of her—and her curiosity impelled her to speak to us. She seems to have been in Buenos Ayres for many years. This year she returned—as governess—with the family of a French engineer, who have taken an apartment in Versailles. She first saw you in the street nearly a month ago.'

Fenwick had dropped into a chair, his face in his hands. As Welby ceased speaking, he looked up.

'And she said nothing about my wife's where-abouts?'

'Nothing. She knows nothing.'

'Nor of why she left me?'

Welby hesitated.

'Miss Morrison seems to have her own ideas as to that.'

'Where is she?' Fenwick rose hurriedly.

'Rue des Ecuries, 27. Naturally, you can't see her to-night.'

'No'—said Fenwick, sitting down again, like a man in a dream—'no. Did she say anything else?'

'She mentioned something about a debt you owed her,' said Welby, coldly—'some matter that she had only just discovered. I had no concern with that.'

Fenwick's face, which had become deathly pale, was suddenly overspread with a rush of crimson. More almost than by the revelation of his long deception as to his wife was he humiliated and tortured by these words relating to his debt to Morrison on Welby's lips. This successful rival, this fine gentleman!—admitted to his sordid affairs. He rose uncertainly, pulling himself passionately together.

'Now that she has reappeared, I shall pay my debt to Miss Morrison—if it exists,' he said, haughtily; 'she need be in no fear as to that. Well, now then'—he leaned heavily on the mantelpiece, his face still twitching—'you know, Mr. Welby—by this accident—the secret of my life. My wife left me—for the maddest, emptiest reasons—and she took our child with her. I did everything I could to discover them. It was all in vain—and if Miss Morrison cannot enlighten me, I am as much in the dark to-night as I was yesterday, whether my wife is alive—or dead. Is there anything more to be said?'

'By God, yes!' cried Welby, with a sudden gesture of passion, approaching Fenwick. 'There is everything to be said!'

Fenwick was silent. Their eyes met.

'When you first made acquaintance with Lord Findon,' said Welby, controlling himself, 'you made him—you made all of us—believe that you were an unmarried man?'

'I did. It was the mistake—the awkwardness of a moment. I hadn't your easy manners! I was a raw country fellow—and I hadn't the courage, the mere self-possession, to repair it.'

'You let Madame de Pastourelles sit to you,' said Welby, steadily—'week after week, month after month—you accepted her kindness—you became her friend. Later on, you allowed her to advise you—write to you—talk to you about marrying, when your means should be sufficient—without ever allowing her to guess for a moment that you had already a wife and child!'

'That is true,' said Fenwick, nodding. 'The second false step was the consequence of the first.'

'The consequence! You had but to say a word—one honest word! Then, when your conduct, I suppose—I don't dare to judge you—had driven your wife away—for twelve years'—he dragged the words between his teeth—'you masquerade to Madame de Pastourelles—and when her long martyrdom as a wife is at last over—when in the tenderness and compassion of her heart she begins to show you a friendship which—which those who know her'—he laboured for breath and words—'can only—presently—interpret in one way—you who owe her everything—everything!—you dare to play with her innocent, her stainless life—you dare to let her approach—to let those about her approach—the thought of her marrying you—while all the time you knew—what you know! If there ever was a piece of black cruelty in this world, it is you, you that have been guilty of it!'

The form of Arthur Welby, drawn to its utmost height, towered above the man he accused. Fenwick sat, struck dumb. Welby's increasing stoop, which of late had marred his natural dignity of gait; the slight touches of affectation, of the petit-maitre, which were now often perceptible; the occasional note of littleness, or malice, such as his youth had never known:—all these defects, physical and moral, had been burnt out of the man, as he spoke these words, by the flame of his only, his inextinguishable passion. For his dear mistress—in the purest, loftiest sense of that word—he stood champion, denouncing with all his soul the liar who had deceived and endangered her; a stern, unconscious majesty expressed itself in his bearing, his voice; and the man before him—artist and poet like himself—was sensible of it in the highest, the most torturing degree.

Fenwick turned away. He stooped mechanically to the fire, put it together, lifted a log lying in front of it, laid it carefully on the others. Then he looked at Welby, who on his side had walked to the window and opened it, as though the room suffocated him.

'Everything that you say is just'—said Fenwick, slowly—'I have no answer to make—except that—No!—I have no answer to make.'

He paced once or twice up and down the length of the room, slowly, thoughtfully; then he resumed:

'I shall write to Madame de Pastourelles to-night, and by the first train to-morrow, as soon as these things'—he looked round him—'can be gathered together, I shall be gone!'

Welby moved sharply, showing a face still drawn and furrowed with emotion—'No! she will want to see you.'

Fenwick's composure broke down. 'I had better not see her'—he said—'I had better not see her!'

'You will bear that for her,' said Welby, quietly. 'The more completely you can enlighten her, the better for us all.'

Fenwick's lips moved, but without speaking. Welby's ignorance of the whole truth oppressed him; yet he could make no effort to remove it.

Welby came back towards him.

'There is no reason, I think, why we should carry this conversation further. I will let Miss Morrison know that I have communicated with you.'

'No need,' said Fenwick, interrupting him. 'I shall see her first thing in the morning—'

'And'—resumed Welby, lifting a book and letting it fall uncertainly—'if there is anything I can do—with Lord Findon—for instance—'

Fenwick had a movement of impatience. He felt his endurance giving way.

'There is nothing to do!—except to tell the truth—and to as few people as possible!'

Welby winced. Was the reference to his wife?

'I agree with you—of course.'

He paused a moment—irresolute—wondering whether he had said all he had to say. Then, involuntarily, his eyes rested questioningly, piercingly, on the man beside him. They seemed to express the marvel of his whole being that such an offence could ever be—they tried to penetrate a character, a psychology which in truth baffled them altogether.

He moved to the door, and Fenwick opened it.

As his visitor walked away, Fenwick stood motionless, listening to the retreating step, which echoed in the silence of the vast, empty hotel, once the house of Madame de Pompadour.

He looked at his watch. Past midnight. By about three o'clock, in the midst of a wild autumnal storm, he had finished his letter to Madame de Pastourelles; and he fell asleep at his table, worn out, his head on his arms.

Before ten on the following morning Fenwick had seen Bella Morrison. A woman appeared—the caricature of something he had once known, the high cheek-bones of his early picture touched with rouge, little curls of black hair plastered on her temples, with a mincing gait, and a manner now giggling and now rude. She was extremely sorry if she had put him out—really particularly sorry! She wouldn't have done so for the world; but her curiosity got the better of her. Also, she confessed, she had wished to see whether Mr. Fenwick would acknowledge his debt to her. It was only lately that she had come across a statement of it amongst her father's papers. It was funny he should have forgotten it so long; but there—she wasn't going to be nasty. As to poor Mrs. Fenwick, no, of course she knew nothing. She had inquired of some friends in the North, and they also knew nothing. They had only heard that husband and wife couldn't hit it off, and that Mrs. Fenwick had gone abroad. It was a pity—but a body might have expected it, mightn't they?

The crude conceit and violence of her girlhood had given place, under the pressure of a hard life, to something venomous and servile. She never mentioned her visit to Phoebe; but her eyes seemed to mock her visitor all the time. Fenwick cut the interview short as soon as he could, hastily paid her a hundred pounds, though it left him overdrawn and almost penniless, and then rushed back to his hotel to see what might be waiting for him.

An envelope was lying on his table. It cost him a great effort to open it.

'I have received your letter. There is nothing to say, except that I must see you. I wish to keep what you have told me from my father, for the present, at any rate. There would be no possibility of our talking here. We have only one sitting-room, and my sister is there all the time. I will be at the Bosquet d'Apollon, by 11.30.'

Only that! He stared at the delicate, almost invisible writing. The moment he had dreaded for twelve years had arrived; and the world still went on, and quiet notes like that could still be written.

Long before the hour fixed he was in the Bosquet d'Apollon, walking up and down in front of the famous grotto, on whose threshold the white Apollo, just released from the chariot of the Sun, receives the ministrations of the Muses, while his divine horses are being fed and stalled in the hollows of the rock to either side. No stranger fancy than this ever engaged the architects and squandered the finances of the Builder-King. Reared in solid masonry on bare sandy ground now entirely disguised, the artificial rock that holds the grotto towers to a great height, crowned by ancient trees, weathered by wind and rain, overgrown by leaf and grass, and laved at its base by clear water. All round, the trees stand close—the lawns spread their quiet slopes. On this sparkling autumn morning, a glory of russet, amber, and red, begirt the white figures and the gleaming grotto. The Immortals, the champing horses, locked behind their grilles lest the tourist should insult them—all the queer crumbling romance of the statuary, all the natural beauty of leaf and water, of the white clouds overhead and their reflexions below—combined to make Fenwick's guilty bewilderment more complete, to turn all life to dream, and all its figures into the puppets of a shadow-play.

A light step on the grass. A shock passed through him. He made a movement, then checked it.

Eugenie paused at some distance from him. In this autumnal moment of the year, and on week-days, scarcely any passing visitor disturbs the quiet of the Bosquet d'Apollon. In its deep dell of trees and grass, they were absolutely alone; the sunlight which dappled the white bodies of the Muses, and shone on the upstretched arm of Apollo, seemed the only thing of life besides themselves.

She threw back her veil as she came near him—her long widow's veil, which to-day she had resumed. Beneath it, framed in it, the face appeared of an ivory rigidity and pallor. The eyes only were wild and living as she came up to him, clasping her hands, evidently shrinking from him—yet composed.

'There is one thing more I want to know. If I have ever been your friend!—if you have ever felt any kindness for me, tell me—tell me frankly—why did your wife leave you?'

Fenwick's face fell. Had she come so soon to this point?—by the sureness of her own instinct?

'There were many troubles between us,' he said, hoarsely, walking on beside her, his eyes on the grass.

'Was she—was she jealous?'—she breathed with difficulty—'of any of your models?—I know that sometimes happens—or of your sitters—of me, for instance?'

The last words were scarcely audible; but her gaze enforced them.

'She was jealous of my whole life—away from her. And I was utterly blind and selfish—I ought to have known what was going on—and I had no idea.'

'And what happened? I know so little.'

Her voice so peremptorily strange—so remote—compelled him. With difficulty he gave an outline of Phoebe's tragic visit to his studio. His letter of the night before had scarcely touched on the details of the actual crisis, had dwelt rather on the months of carelessness and neglect on his own part, which had prepared it.

She interrupted.

'That was she?—the mother in the "Genius Loci"?'

He assented mutely.

She closed her eyes a moment, seeing, in her suffering, the face of the young mother and her child.

'But go on. And you were away? Please, please go on! When was it? It must have been that spring when—'

She put her hand to her head, trying to remember dates.

'It was just before the Academy,' he said, reluctantly.

'You were out?'

'I had gone to tell Watson and Cuningham the good news.'

His voice dropped.

Her hands caught each other again.

'It was that day—that very day we came to you?'

He nodded.

'But why?—what was it made her do such a thing?—go—for ever—without seeing you—without a word? She must have had some desperate reason.'

'She had none!' he said, with energy.

'But she must have thought she had. Can't—can't you explain it to me any more?'

He was almost at the end of his resistance.

'I told you—how she had resented—my concealment?'

'Yes—yes! But there must have been something more—something sudden—that maddened her?'

He was silent. She grew whiter than before.

'Mr. Fenwick—I—I have much to forgive. There is only one course of action—that can ever—make amends—and that is—an entire—an absolute frankness!'

Her terrible suspicion—her imperious will had conquered. Anything was better than to deny her, torture her—deceive her afresh.

He looked at her in a horrible indecision. Then, slowly, he put his hand within the breast of his coat.

'This is the letter she wrote me. I found it in my room.'

And he drew out the crumpled letter from his pocket-book, which he had worn thus almost from the day of Phoebe's disappearance.

Eugenie fell upon it, devoured it. Not a demur, not a doubt, as to this!—in one so strictly, so tenderly scrupulous. Even at that moment, it struck him pitifully. It seemed to give the measure of her pain.

'The picture?' she said, looking up—'I don't understand—you had sent it in.'

'Do you remember—asking me about the sketch? and I told you—it had been accidentally spoilt?'

She understood. Her lips trembled. Returning the letter, she sank upon a seat. He saw that her forces were almost failing her. And he dared not say a word or make a movement of sympathy.

For some little time she was silent. Her eyes ranged the green circuit of the hollow—the water, the reeds, the rock, and that idle god among his handmaidens. Her attitude, her look expressed a moral agony, how strangely out of place amid this setting! Through her—innocent, unconscious though she were—the young helpless wife had come to grief—a soul had been risked—perhaps lost. Only a nature trained as Eugenie's had been, by suffering and prayer and lofty living, could have felt what she felt, and as she felt it.

Fumbling, Fenwick put back the letter in his pocket-book—thrust it again into his coat. Never once did the thought cross Eugenie's mind that he had probably worn it there, through these last days, while their relation had grown so intimate, so dear. All recollection of herself had left her. She was possessed with Phoebe. Nothing else found entrance.

At last, after much more questioning—much more difficult or impetuous examination—she rose feebly.

'I think I understand. Now—we have to find her!'

She stood, her hands loosely clasped, her eyes gazing into the sunny vacancy of sky, above the rock.

Fenwick advanced a step. He felt that he must speak, must grovel to her—repeat some of the things he had said in his letter. But here, in her presence, all words seemed too crude, too monstrous. His voice died away.

So there was no repetition of the excuses, the cry for pardon he had spent the night on; and she made no reference to them.

They walked back to the hotel, talking coldly, precisely, almost as strangers, of what should be done. Fenwick—whose work indeed was finished—would return to England that night. After his departure, Madame de Pastourelles would inform her father of what had happened; a famous solicitor, Lord Findon's old friend, was to be consulted; all possible measures were to be taken once more for Phoebe's discovery.

At the door of the hotel, Fenwick raised his hat. Eugenie did not offer her hand; but her sweet face suddenly trembled afresh—before her will could master it. To hide it, she turned abruptly away; and the door closed upon her.



CHAPTER XI

After a moderately bright morning, that after-breakfast fog which we owe to the British kitchen and the domestic hearth was descending on the Strand. The stream of traffic, on the roadway and the pavements, was passing to and fro under a yellow darkness; the shop-lights were beginning to flash out here and there, but without any of their evening cheerfulness; and on the passing faces one saw written the inconvenience and annoyance of the fog—the fear, too, lest it should become worse and impenetrable.

Fenwick was groping his way along, eastward; one moment feeling and hating the depression of the February day, of the grimy, overcrowded street; the next, responsive to some dimly beautiful effect of colour or line—some quiver of light—some grouping of phantom forms in the gloom. Halfway towards the Law-Courts he was hailed and overtaken by a tall, fair-haired man.

'Hallo, Fenwick!—just the man I wanted to see!'

Fenwick, whose eyes—often very troublesome of late—were smarting with the fog, peered at the speaker, and recognised Philip Cuningham. His face darkened a little as they shook hands.

'What did you want me for?'

'Did you know that poor old Watson had come back to town—ill?'

'No!' cried Fenwick, arrested. 'I thought he was in Algiers.'

Cuningham walked on beside him, telling what he knew, Fenwick all the time dumbly vexed that this good-looking, prosperous fellow, this Academician in his new fur coat, breathing success and commissions, should know more of his best friend's doings than he.

Watson, it appeared, had been seized with hemorrhage at Marseilles, and had thereupon given up his winter plans, and crawled home to London, as soon as he was sufficiently recovered to bear the journey. Fenwick, much troubled, protested that it was madness to have come back to the English winter.

'No,' said Cuningham, looking grave. 'Better die at home than among strangers. And I'm afraid it's come to that, dear old fellow!'

Then he described—with evident self-satisfaction—how he had heard, from a common friend, of Watson's arrival, how he had rescued the invalid from a dingy Bloomsbury hotel, and settled him in some rooms in Fitzroy Square, with a landlady who could be trusted.

'We must have a nurse before long—but he won't have one yet. He wants badly to see you. I told him I'd look you up this evening. But this'll do instead, won't it? You'll remember?—23, Fitzroy Square. Shall I tell him when he may expect you? Every day we try to get him some little pleasure or other.'

Fenwick's irritation grew. Cuningham was talking as though the old relation between him and Richard Watson were still intact; while Fenwick knew well how thin and superficial the bond had grown.

'I shall go to-day,' he said, rather shortly. 'I have two or three things to do this morning, but there'll be time before my rehearsal this afternoon.'

'Your rehearsal?' Cuningham looked amiably curious.

Fenwick explained, but with fresh annoyance. The papers had been full enough of this venture on which he was engaged; Cuningham's ignorance offended him.

'Ah, indeed—very interesting,' said Cuningham, vaguely. 'Well, good-bye. I must jump into a hansom.'

'Where are you off to?'

'The Goldsmiths' Company are building a new Hall, and they want my advice about its decoration. Precious difficult, though, to get away from one's pictures, this time of year, isn't it?'

He hailed a hansom as he spoke.

'That's not a difficulty that applies to me,' said Fenwick, shortly.

Cuningham stared—frowned—and remembered.

'Oh, my dear fellow—what a mistake that was!—if you'll let me say so. Can't we put it right? Command me at any time.'

'Thank you. I prefer it as it is.'

'We'll talk it over. Well, good-bye. Don't forget old Dick.'

Fenwick walked on, fuming. Cuningham, he said to himself, was now the type of busy, pretentious mediocrity, the type which eternally keeps English art below the level of the Continent.

'I say—one moment! Have you had any news of the Findons lately?'

Fenwick turned sharply, and again saw Cuningham, whose hansom had been blocked by the traffic, close to the pavement. He was hanging over the door, and smiling.

In reply to the question, Fenwick merely shook his head.

'I had a capital letter from her ladyship a week or two ago,' said Cuningham, raising his voice, and bringing himself as near to Fenwick as his position allowed. 'The old fellow seems to be as fit as ever. But Madame de Pastourelles must be very much changed.'

Fenwick said nothing. It might have been thought that the traffic prevented his hearing Cuningham's remark. But he had heard distinctly.

'Do you know when they'll be home?' he asked, reluctantly, walking beside the hansom.

'No—haven't an idea. I believe I'm to go to them for Easter. Ah!—now we go on. Ta-ta!'

He waved his hand, and the hansom moved away.

Fenwick pursued his walk plunged in disagreeable thought. 'Much changed?' What did that mean? He had noticed no such change before the Findons left London. The words fell like a fresh blow upon a wound.

He turned north, toward Lincoln's Inn Fields, called at the offices of Messrs. Butlin & Forbes, the well-known solicitors, and remained there half an hour. When he emerged from the old house, he looked, if possible, more harried and cast down than when he had entered it.

They had had a letter to show him, but in his opinion it contributed nothing. There was no hope—and no clue! How could there be? He had never himself imagined for a moment that any gain would come of these new researches. But he had been allowed no option with regard to them. Immediately after his return to London from Versailles he had received a stern letter from Lord Findon, insisting—as his daughter had already done—that the only reparation he, Fenwick, could make to the friends he had so long and cruelly deceived, was to allow them a free hand in a fresh attempt to discover his wife, and so to clear Madame de Pastourelles from the ridiculous suspicions that Mrs. Fenwick had been led so disastrously to entertain. 'Most shamefully and indefensibly my daughter has been made to feel herself an accomplice in Mrs. Fenwick's disappearance,' wrote Lord Findon; 'the only amends you can ever make for your conduct will lie in new and vigorous efforts, even at this late hour, to find and to undeceive your wife.'

Hence, during November and December, constant meetings and consultations in the well-known offices of Lord Findon's solicitors. At these meetings both Madame de Pastourelles and her father had been often present, and she had followed the debates with a quick and strained intelligence, which often betrayed to Fenwick the suffering behind. He painfully remembered with what gentleness and chivalry Eugenie had always treated him personally on these occasions, with what anxious generosity she had tried to curb her father.

But there had been no private conversation between them. Not only did they shrink from it; Lord Findon could not have borne it. The storm of family and personal pride which the disclosure of Fenwick's story had aroused in the old man had been of a violence impossible to resist. That Fenwick's obscure and crazy wife should have dared to entertain jealousy of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugenie then was—that she should have made a ridiculous tragedy out of it—and that Fenwick should have conduced to the absurd and insulting imbroglio by his ill-bred and vulgar concealment:—these things were so irritating to Lord Findon that they first stimulated a rapid recovery from his illness at Versailles, and then led him to frantic efforts on Phoebe's behalf, which were in fact nothing but the expression of his own passionate pride and indignation—resting, no doubt ultimately, on those weeks at Versailles when even he, with all the other bystanders, had supposed that Eugenie would marry this man. His mood, indeed, had been a curious combination of wounded affection with a class arrogance stiffened by advancing age and long indulgence. When, in those days, the old man entered the room where Fenwick was, he bore his grey head and sparkling eyes with the air of a teased lion.

Fenwick, a man of violent temper, would have found much difficulty in keeping the peace under these circumstances, but for the frequent presence of Eugenie, and the pressure of his own dull remorse. 'I too—have—much to forgive!'—that, he knew well, would be the only reference involving personal reproach that he would ever hear from her lips, either to his original deceit, or to those wild weeks at Versailles (that so much ranker and sharper offence!)—when, in his loneliness and craving, he had gambled both on her ignorance and on Phoebe's death. Yet he did not deceive himself. The relation between them was broken; he had lost his friend. Her very cheerfulness and gentleness somehow enforced it. How natural!—how just! None the less his bitter realisation of it had worked with crushing effect upon a miserable man.

About Christmas, Lord Findon's health had again caused his family anxiety. He was ordered to Cannes, and Eugenie accompanied him. Before she went she had gone despairingly once more through all the ingenious but quite fruitless inquiries instituted by the lawyers; and she had written a kind letter to Fenwick begging to be kept informed, and adding at the end a few timid words expressing her old sympathy with his work, and her best wishes for the success of the pictures that she understood he was to exhibit in the spring.

Then she and her father departed. Fenwick had felt their going as perhaps the sharpest pang in this intolerable winter. But he had scarcely answered her letter. What was there to say? At least he had never asked her or her father for money—had never owed Lord Findon a penny. There was some small comfort in that.

* * * * *

Nevertheless, it was of money that he thought—and must think—night and day.

After his interview with the magnificent gentlemen in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he made his way wearily to a much humbler office in Bedford Row. Here was a small solicitor to whom he had often resorted lately, under the constant pressure of his financial difficulties. He spent an hour in this man's room. When he came out, he walked fast towards Oxford Street and the west, hardly conscious in his excitement of where he was going. The lawyer he had just seen had for the first time mentioned the word 'bankruptcy.' 'I scarcely see, Mr. Fenwick, how you can avoid it.'

Well, it might come to that—it might. But he still had his six pictures—time to finish two others that were now on hand—and the exhibition.

It was with that he was now concerned. He called on the manager of a small gallery near Hanover Square with whom he had already made an arrangement for the coming May—paying a deposit on the rent—early in the winter. In his anxiety, he wished now to make the matter still clearer, to pay down the rest of the rent if need be. He had the notes always in his breast-pocket, jealously hidden away, lest any other claim, amid the myriads which pressed upon him, should sweep them from him.

The junior partner in charge of the gallery and the shop of which it made part, received him very coldly. The firm had long since regretted their bargain with a man whose pictures were not likely to sell, especially as they could have relet the gallery to much better advantage. But their contract with Fenwick—clinched by the deposit—could not be evaded; so they were advised.

All, therefore, that the junior partner could do was to try to alarm Fenwick, as to the incidental expenses involved—hanging, printing, service, etc. But Fenwick only laughed. 'I shall see to that!' he said, contemptuously. 'And my pictures will sell, I tell you,' he added, raising his voice. 'They'll bring a profit both to you and to me.'

The individual addressed said nothing. He was a tall, well-fed young man, in a faultless frock-coat, and Fenwick, as they stood together in the office—the artist had not been offered a chair—disliked him violently.

'Well, shall I pay you the rest?' said Fenwick, abruptly, turning to go, and fumbling at the same time for the pocket-book in which he kept the notes.

The other gave a slight shrug.

'That's just as you please, Mr. Fenwick.'

'Well, here's fifty, anyway,' said Fenwick, drawing out a fifty-pound note and laying it on the table.

'We are not in any hurry, I assure you.'

The young man stood looking at the artist, in an attitude of cool indifference; but at the same time his hand secured the note, and placed it safely in the drawer of the table between them.

He wrote a receipt, and handed it to Fenwick.

'Good-day,' said Fenwick, turning to go.

The other followed him, and as they stepped out into the exhibition-rooms of the shop, hung in dark purple, Fenwick perceived in the distance what looked like a fine Corot, and a Daubigny—and paused.

'Got some good things, since I was here last?'

'Oh, we're always getting good things,' said his companion, carelessly, without the smallest motion towards the pictures.

Fenwick nodded haughtily, and walked towards the door. But his soul smarted within him. Two years before, the owners of any picture-shop in London would have received him with empressement, have shown him all they had to show, and taken flattering note of his opinion.

On the threshold he ran against the Academician with the orange hair and beard, who had been his fellow-guest at the Findon's on the night of his first dinner-party there. The orange hair was now nearly white; its owner had grown to rotundity; but the sharp, glancing eyes and pompous manner were the same as of old. Mr. Sherratt nodded curtly to Fenwick, and was then received with bows and effusion by the junior partner standing behind.

'Ah, Mr. Sherratt!—delighted to see you! Come to look at the Corot? By all means! This way, please.'

Fenwick pursued his course to Oxford Street in a morbid self-consciousness. It seemed to him that all the world knew him by now for a failure and a bankrupt; that he was stared and pointed at.

He took refuge from this nightmare in an Oxford Street restaurant, and as he ate his midday chop he asked himself, for the hundredth time, how the deuce it was that he had got into the debts which weighed him down. He had been extravagant on the building and furnishing of his house—but after all he had earned large sums of money. He sat gloomily over his meal—frowning—and trying to remember. And once, amid the foggy darkness, there opened a vision of a Westmoreland stream, and a pleading face upturned to his in the moonlight—'And then, you know, I could look after money! You're dreadfully bad about money, John!'

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

On the way his thoughts recurred to the letter he had found waiting for him at the lawyer's. It came from Phoebe's cousin, Freddy Tolson. Messrs. Butlin had traced this man anew—to a mining town in New South Wales. He had been asked to come to England and testify—no matter at what expense. In the letter just received—bearing witness in its improved writing and spelling to the prosperous development of the writer—he declined to come, repeating that he knew nothing whatever of his Cousin Phoebe's where-abouts, nor of her reasons for leaving her husband. He gave a fresh and longer account of his conversation with her, as far as he could remember it at this distance of time; and this longer account contained the remark that she had asked him questions about other colonies than Australia, to which he was himself bound. He thought Canada had been mentioned—the length of the passage there, and its cost. He had not paid much attention to it at the time. It had seemed to him that she was glad, poor thing, of some one to have a 'crack' with—'for I guess she'd been pretty lonesome up there.' But she might have had something in her head—he couldn't say. All he could declare was that if she were in Canada, or any other of the colonies, he had had no hand in it, and knew no more than a 'born baby' where she might be hidden.

So now, on this vague hint, a number of fresh inquiries were to be set on foot. Fenwick hoped nothing from them. Yet as he walked fast through the London streets, from which the fog was lifting, his mind wrestled with vague images of great lakes, and virgin forests, and rolling wheat-lands—of the streets of Montreal, or the Heights of Quebec—and amongst them, now with one background, now with another, the slender figure of a fair-haired woman with a child beside her. And through his thoughts, furies of distress and fear pursued him—now as always.

'Well, this is a queer go, isn't it?' said Watson, in a half-whispering voice. 'Nature has horrid ways of killing you. I wish she'd chosen a more expeditious one with me.'

Fenwick sat down beside his friend, the lamp-light in the old panelled room revealing, against his will, his perturbed and shaken expression.

'How did this come on?' he asked.

'Of itself, my dear fellow'—laughed Watson, in the same hoarse whisper. 'My right lung has been getting rotten for a year past, and at Marseilles it happened to break. That's my explanation, anyway, and it does as well as the doctor's.—Well, how are you?'

Fenwick shifted uneasily, and made a vague answer.

Watson turned to look at him.

'What pictures have you on hand?'

Fenwick gave a list of the completed pictures still in his studio, and described the arrangements made to exhibit them. He was not as ready as usual to speak of himself; his gaze and his attention were fixed upon his friend. But Watson probed further, into the subjects of his recent work. Fenwick was nearing the end, he explained, of a series of rustic 'Months' with their appropriate occupations—an idea which had haunted his mind for years.

'As old as the hills,' said Watson, 'but none the worse for that. You've painted them, I suppose, out-of-doors?'

Fenwick shrugged his shoulders.

'As much as possible.'

'Ah, that's where those French fellows have us,' said Watson, languidly. 'One of them said to me in Paris the other day, "It's bad enough to paint the things you've seen—it's the devil to paint the things you've not seen."'

'The usual fallacy,' said Fenwick, firing up. 'What do they mean by "seen"?'

He would have liked this time to go off at score. But a sure instinct told him that he was beside a dying man; and he held himself back, trying instead to remember what small news and gossip he could, for the amusement of his friend.

Watson sat in a deep armchair, propped up by pillows. The room in which they met had been a very distinguished room in the eighteenth century. It had still some remains of carved panelling, a graceful mantelpiece of Italian design, and a painted ceiling half-effaced. It was now part of a lodging-house, furnished with shabby cheapness; but the beauty, once infused, persisted; and it made no unworthy setting for a painter's death.

The signs of desperate illness in Richard Watson were indeed plainly visible. His shaggy hair and thick, unkempt beard brought into relief the waxen or purple tones of the skin. The breath was laboured and the cough frequent. But the eyes were still warm, living, and passionate, the eyes of a Celt, with the Celtic gifts, and those deficiencies, also, of his race, broadly and permanently expressed in the words of a great historian—'The Celts have shaken all States, and founded none!' No founder, no achiever, this—no happy, harmonious soul—but a man who had vibrated to life and Nature, in their subtler and sadder aspects, through whom the nobler thoughts and ambitions had passed, like sound through strings, wringing out some fine, tragic notes, some memorable tones. 'I can't last more than a week or two,' he said, presently, in a pause of Fenwick's talk, to which he had hardly listened—'and a good job too. But I don't find myself at all rebellious. I'm curiously content to go. I've had a good time.'

This from a man who had passed from one disappointed hope to another, brought the tears to Fenwick's eyes.

'Some of us may wish we were going with you,' he said, in a low voice, laying his hand a moment on his friend's knee.

Watson made no immediate reply. He coughed—fidgeted—and at last said:

'How's the money?'

Fenwick hastily drew himself up. 'All right.'

He reached out a hand to the tongs and put the fire together.

'Is that so?' said Watson. The slight incredulity in his voice touched some raw nerve in Fenwick.

'I don't want anything,' he said, almost angrily. 'I shall get through.'

Cuningham had been talking, no doubt. His affairs had been discussed. His morbid pride took offence at once.

'Mine'll just hold out,' said Watson, presently, with a humorous inflexion—'it'll bury me, I think—with a few shillings over. But I couldn't have afforded another year.'

There was silence a while—till a nurse came in to make up the fire. Fenwick began to talk of old friends, and current exhibitions; and presently tea made its appearance. Watson's strength seemed to revive. He sat more upright in his chair, his voice grew stronger, and he dallied with his tea, joking hoarsely with his nurse, and asking Fenwick all the questions that occurred to him. His face, in its rugged pallor and emaciation, and his great head, black or iron-grey on the white pillows, were so fine that Fenwick could not take his eyes from him; with the double sense of the artist, he saw the subject in the man; a study in black and white hovered before him.

When the nurse had withdrawn, and they were alone again, in a silence made more intimate still by the darkness of the panelled walls, which seemed to isolate them from the rest of the room, enclosing them in a glowing ring of lamp and firelight, Fenwick was suddenly seized by an impulse he could not master. He bent towards the sick man.

'Watson!—do you remember advising me to marry when we met in Paris?'

'Perfectly.'

The invalid turned his haggard eyes upon the speaker, in a sudden sharp attention.

There was a pause; then Fenwick said, with bent head, staring into the fire:

'Well—I am married.'

Watson gave a hoarse 'Phew!'—and waited.

'My wife left me twelve years ago and took our child with her. I don't know whether they are alive or dead. I thought I'd like to tell you. It would have been better if I hadn't concealed it, from you—and—and other friends.'

'Great Scott!' said Watson, slowly, bringing the points of his long, emaciated fingers together, like one trying to master a new image. 'So that's been the secret—'

'Of what?' said Fenwick, testily; but as Watson merely replied by an interrogative and attentive silence, he threw himself into his tale—headlong. He told it at far greater length than Eugenie had ever heard it; and throughout, the subtle, instinctive appeal of man to man governed the story, differentiating it altogether from the same story, told to a woman.

He spoke impetuously, with growing emotion, conscious of an infinite relief and abandonment. Watson listened with scarcely a comment. Midway a little pattering, scuffling noise startled the speaker. He looked round and saw the monkey, Anatole, who had been lying asleep in his basket. Watson nodded to Fenwick to go on, and then feebly motioned to his knee. The monkey clambered there, and Watson folded his bony arms round the creature, who lay presently with his weird face pressed against his master's dressing-gown, his melancholy eyes staring out at Fenwick.

'It was Madame she was jealous of?' said Watson, when the story came to an end.

Fenwick hesitated—then nodded reluctantly. He had spoken merely of 'one of my sitters.' But it was not possible to fence with this dying man.

'And Madame knows?'

'Yes.'

But Fenwick sharply regretted the introduction of Madame de Pastourelles' name. He had brought the story down merely to the point of Phoebe's flight and the search which followed, adding only—with vagueness—that the search had lately been renewed, without success.

Watson pondered the matter for some time. Fenwick took out his handkerchief and wiped a brow damp with perspiration. His story—added to the miseries of the day—had excited and shaken him still further.

Suddenly Watson put out a hand and seized his wrist. The grip hurt.

'Lucky dog!'

'What on earth do you mean?'

'You've lost them—but you've had a woman in your arms—a child on your knee! You don't go to your grave—[Greek: apraktos]—an ignorant, barren fool—like me!'

Fenwick looked at him in amazement. Self-scorn—bitter and passionate regret—transformed the face beside him. He pressed the fevered hand.

'Watson!—dear fellow!'

Watson withdrew his hand, and once more folded the monkey to him.

'There are plenty of men like me,' he muttered. 'We are afraid of living—and art is our refuge. Then art takes its revenge—and we are bad artists, because we are poor and sterilised human beings. But you'—he spoke with fresh energy, composing himself—'don't talk rot!—as though your chance was done. You'll find her—she'll come back to you—when she's drunk the cup. Healthy young women don't die before thirty-five;—and by your account she wasn't bad—she had a conscience. The child'll waken it. Don't you be hard on her!'—he raised himself, speaking almost fiercely—'you've no right to! Take her in—listen to her—let her cry it out. My God!'—his voice dropped, as his head fell back on the pillows—'what happiness—what happiness!'

His eyes closed. Fenwick stooped over him in alarm, but the thin hand closed again on his.

'Don't go. What was she like?'

Fenwick asked him whether he remembered the incident of the sketch-book at their first meeting—the drawing of the mother and child in the kitchen of the Westmoreland farm.

'Perfectly. And she was the model for the big picture, too? I see. A lovely creature! How old is she now?'

'Thirty-six—if she lives.'

'I tell you, she does live! Probably more beautiful now than she was then. Those Madonna-like women mellow so finely. And the child? Vois-tu, Anatole!—something superior to monkeys!'

But he pressed the little animal closer to him as he spoke. Fenwick rose to go, conscious that he had stayed too long. Watson looked up.

'Good-bye, old man—courage! Seek—till you find. She's in the world—and she's sorry. I could swear it.'

Fenwick stood beside him, quivering with emotion and despondency.

Their eyes met steadily, and Watson whispered:

'I pass from one thing to another. Sometimes it's Omar Khayyam—"One thing is certain and the rest is lies—The flower that once is born for ever dies"—and the next it's the Psalms, and I think I'm at a prayer-meeting—a Welsh Methodist again.'

He fell into a flow of Welsh, hoarsely musical. Then, with a smile, he nodded farewell; and Fenwick went.

* * * * *

Fenwick wrote that night to Eugenie de Pastourelles at Cannes, enclosing a copy of the letter received from Freddy Tolson. It meant nothing; but she had asked to be kept informed. As he entered upon the body of his letter, his eyes still recurred to its opening line:

'Dear Madame de Pastourelles.'

For many years he had never addressed her except as 'My dear friend.'

Well, that was all gone and over. The memory of her past goodness, of those walks through the Trianon woods, was constantly with him. But he had used her recklessly and selfishly, and she had done with him. He admitted it now, as often before, in a temper of dull endurance; bending himself to the task of his report.

* * * * *

Eugenie read his letter, sitting on a bench above the blue Mediterranean, in the pine woods of the Cap d'Antibes. She had torn it open in hope, and the reading of it depressed her. In the pine-scented, sun-warmed air she sat for long motionless and sad. The delicate greenish light fell on the soft brown hair, the white face and hands. Eugenie's deep black had now assumed a slight 'religious' air which disturbed Lord Findon, and kindled the Protestant wrath of her stepmother. That short moment of a revived mondanite which Versailles had witnessed, was wholly past; and for the first and only time in her marred life, Eugenie's natural gaiety was quenched. She knew well that in the burden which weighed upon her there were morbid elements; but she could only bear it; she could not smile under it.

Fenwick's letter led her thoughts back to the early incidents of this fruitless search. Especially did she recall every moment of her interview with Daisy Hewson—Phoebe Fenwick's former nursemaid, now married to a small Westmoreland farmer. One of the first acts of the lawyers had been to induce this woman to come to London to repeat once more what she knew of the catastrophe.

Then, after the examination by the lawyers, Eugenie had pleaded that she might see her—and see her alone. Accordingly, a shy and timid woman, speaking with a broad Westmoreland accent, called one morning in Dean's Yard.

Eugenie had won from her many small details the lawyers had been unable to extract. They were not, alack, of a kind to help the search for Phoebe; but, interpreted by the aid of her own quick imagination, they drew a picture of the lost mother and child, which sank deep, deep, into Eugenie's soul.

Mrs. Fenwick, said Mrs. Hewson, scarcely spoke on the journey south. She sat staring out of window, with her hands on her lap, and Daisy thought there was 'soomat wrang'—but dared not ask. In saying good-bye at Euston, Mrs. Fenwick had kissed her, and given the guard a shilling to look after her. She was holding Carrie in her arms, as the train moved away. The girl had supposed she was going to join her husband.

And barely a week later, John Fenwick had been dining in St. James's Square, looking harassed and ill indeed—it was supposed, from overwork; but, to his best friends, as silent as that grave of darkness and oblivion which had closed over his wife.

Yet, as the weeks of thought went on, Eugenie blamed him less and less. Her clear intelligence showed her all the steps of the unhappy business. She remembered the awkward, harassed youth, as she had first seen him at her father's table, with his curious mixture of arrogance and timidity; now haranguing the table, and now ready to die with confusion over some social slip. She understood what he had told her, in his first piteous letter, of his paralysed, tongue-tied states—of his fear of alienating her father and herself. And she went deeper. She confessed the hatefulness of those weakening timidities, those servile states of soul, by which our social machine balances the insolences and cruelties of the strong—its own breeding also; she felt herself guilty because of them; the whole of life seemed to her sick, because a young man, ill at ease and cowardly in a world not his own, had told or lived a foolish lie. It was as though she had forced it from him; she understood so well how it had come about. No, no!—her father might judge it as he pleased. She was angry no longer.

Nor—presently—did she even resent the treachery of those weeks at Versailles, so quick and marvellous was the play of her great gift of sympathy, which was only another aspect of imagination. In recoil from a dark moment of her own experience, of which she could never think without anguish, she had offered him a friend's hand, a friend's heart—offered them eagerly and lavishly. Had he done more than take them, with the craving of a man, for whom already the ways are darkening, who makes one last clutch at 'youth and bloom, and this delightful world'? He had been reckless and cruel indeed. But in its profound tenderness and humility and self-reproach her heart forgave him.

Yet of that forgiveness she could make no outward sign—for her own sake and Phoebe's. That old relation could never be again; the weeks at Versailles had killed it. Unless, indeed, some day it were her blessed lot to find the living Phoebe, and bring her to her husband! Then friendship, as well as love, might perhaps lift its head once more. And as during the months of winter, both before and since her departure from England, the tidings reached her of Fenwick's growing embarrassments, of his increasing coarseness and carelessness of work, his violence of temper, the friend in her suffered profoundly. She knew that she could still do much for him. Yet there, in the way, stood the image of Phoebe, as Daisy Hewson described her,—pale, weary, desperate,—making all speech, all movement, on the part of the woman, for jealousy of whom the wife had so ignorantly destroyed herself and Fenwick, a thing impossible.

Eugenie's only comfort indeed, at this time, was the comfort of religion. Her soul, sorely troubled and very stern with itself, wandered in mystical, ascetic paths out of human ken. Every morning she hurried through the woods to a little church beside the sea, filled with fishing-folk. There she heard Mass, and made the spiritual communion which sustained her.

Once, in the mediaeval siege of a Spanish fortress, so a Spanish chronicler tells us, all the defenders were slaughtered but one man; and he lay dying on the ground, across the gate. There was neither priest nor wafer; but the dying man raised a little of the soil between the stones to his lips, and so, says the chronicler, 'communicated in the earth itself,' before he passed to the Eternal Presence. Eugenie would have done the same with a like ardour and simplicity; her thought differing much, perhaps, in its perceived and logical elements, from that of the dying Spaniard, but none the less profoundly akin. The act was to her the symbol and instrument of an Inflowing Power; the details of those historical beliefs with which it was connected, mattered little. And as she thus leant upon the old, while conscious of the new, she never in truth felt herself alone. It seemed to her, often, that she clasped hands with a vast invisible multitude, in a twilight soon to be dawn.



CHAPTER XII

A fortnight later Dick Watson died. Fenwick saw him several times before the end, and was present at his last moments. The funeral was managed by Cuningham; so were the obituary notices; and Fenwick attended the funeral and read the notices, with that curious mixture of sore grief and jealous irritation into which our human nature is so often betrayed at similar moments.

Then he found himself absorbed by the later rehearsals of The Queen's Necklace; by the completion of his pictures for the May exhibition; and by the perpetual and ignominious hunt for money. As to this last, it seemed to him that each day was a battle in which he was for ever worsted. He was still trying in vain to sell his house at Chelsea, the house planned at the height of his brief prosperity, built and finely furnished on borrowed money, and now apparently unsaleable, because of certain peculiarities in it, which suited its contriver, and no one else. And meanwhile the bank from which he had borrowed most of his building money was pressing inexorably for repayment; the solicitor in Bedford Row could do nothing, and was manifestly averse to running up a longer bill on his own account; so that, instead of painting, Fenwick often spent his miserable days in rushing about London, trying to raise money by one shift after another, in an agony to get a bill accepted or postponed, borrowing from this person and that, and with every succeeding week losing more self-respect and self-control.

The situation would have been instantly changed if only his artistic power had recovered itself. And if Eugenie had been within his reach it might have done so. She had the secret of stimulating in him what was poetic, and repressing what was merely extravagant or violent. But she was far away: and as he worked at the completion of his series of 'Months,' or at various portraits which the kindness or compassion of old friends had procured for him, he fell headlong into all his worst faults.

His handling, once so distinguished through all its inequalities, grew steadily more careless and perfunctory; his drawing lost force and grip; his composition, so rich, interesting, and intelligent in his early days, now meant nothing, said nothing. The few friends who still haunted his studio during these dark months were often struck with pity; criticism or argument was useless; and some of them believed that he was suffering from defects of sight, and was no longer capable of judging his own work.

The portrait commissions, in particular, led more than once to disaster. His angry vanity suspected that while he was now thought incapable of the poetic or imaginative work in which he had once excelled, he was still considered—'like any fool'—good enough for portraits. This alone was enough to make him loathe the business. On two or three occasions he ended by quarrelling with the sitter. Then for hours he would walk restlessly about his room, smoking enormously, drinking—sometimes excessively—out of a kind of excitement and desoeuvrement—his strong, grizzled hair bristling about his head, his black eyes staring and bloodshot, and that wild gypsyish look of his youth more noticeable than ever in these surroundings of what promised soon to be a decadent middle age.

One habit of his youth had quite disappeared. The queer tendency to call on Heaven for practical aid in any practical difficulty—to make of prayer a system of 'begging-letters to the Almighty'—which had of ten quieted or distracted him in his early years of struggle, affected him no longer. His inner life seemed to himself shrouded in a sullen numbness and frost.

And the old joy in reading, the old plenitude and facility of imagination, were also in abeyance. He became the fierce critic of other men's ideas, while barren of his own. To be original, successful, happy, was now in his eyes the one dark and desperate offence. Yet every now and then he would have impulses of the largest generosity; would devote hours to the teaching of some struggling student and the correction of his work; or draw on his last remains of credit or influence—pester people with calls, or write reams to the newspapers—on behalf of some one, unduly overlooked, whose work he admired.

But through it all, the shadows deepened, and a fixed conviction that he was moving towards catastrophe. In spite of Watson's touching words to him, he did not often let himself think of Phoebe. Towards her, as towards so much else, his mind and heart were stiffened and voiceless. But for hours in the night—since sleeplessness was now added to his other torments—he would brood on the loss of his child, would try to imagine her dancing, singing, sewing—or helping her mother in the house. Seventeen! Why, soon no doubt they would be marrying her, and he, her father, would know nothing, hear nothing. And in the darkness he would feel the warm tears rise in his eyes, and hold them there, proudly arrested.

The rehearsals in which he spent many hours of the week, generally added to his distress and irritation. The play itself was, in his opinion, a poor vulgar thing, utterly unworthy of the 'spectacle' he had contrived for it. He could not hide his contempt for the piece, and indeed for most of its players; and was naturally unpopular with the management and the company. Moreover, he wanted his money desperately, seeing that the play had been postponed, first from November to February, and then from February to April; but the actor-manager concerned was in somewhat dire straits himself, and nothing could be got before production.

One afternoon, late in March, a rehearsal was nearing its completion, everybody was tired out, and everything had been going badly. One of Fenwick's most beautiful scenes—carefully studied from the Trianon gardens on the spot—had been, in his opinion, hopelessly spoilt in order to bring in some ridiculous 'business' wholly incongruous with the setting and date of the play. He had had a fierce altercation on the stage with the actor-manager. The cast, meanwhile, dispersed at the back of the stage or in the wings, looked on maliciously or chatted among themselves; while every now and then one or other of the antagonists would call up the leading lady, or the conceited gentleman who was to act Count Fersen, and hotly put a case. Fenwick was madly conscious all the time of his lessened consideration and dignity in the eyes of a band of people whom he despised. Two years before, his cooperation would have been an honour and his opinion law. Now, nothing of the kind; indeed, through the heated remarks of the actor-manager there ran the insolent implication that Mr. Fenwick's wrath was of no particular account to anybody, and that he was presuming on a commission he had been very lucky to get.