Mrs. Humphry Ward

“ 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. ”

“ Fenwick stood there tortured by an intense and morbid distress; realising how much this rich and illustrious person had already entered into his day dream. For all his pride as an artist—and he was full of it—his trembling, crude ambition had already seized on Lord Findon as a stepping-stone. He did not know whether he could stoop to court a patron. His own temper had to be reckoned with. But to lose him at the outset by a silly falsehood would be galling. A man who has to live in the world as a married man must not begin by making a mystery of his wife. ”

“ Phoebe Fenwick, waiting and listening for the post in an upper room of Green Nab Cottage, ran hurriedly to the window several times in vain, drawn by the sound of wheels. The cart which clattered past was not that which bore Her Majesty's mails.
At the third of these false alarms she lingered beside the open casement window, looking out into the valley. It was a very weary woman who stood thus—motionless and drooping; a woman so tired, so conscious of wasted life and happiness, that although expectation held her in a grip of torture, there was in it little or nothing of hope. ”

“ 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 Québec—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. ”

“ She felt through every nerve that he was constantly aware of details of dress or ménage that jarred upon him; she suspected miserably that all her little personal ways and habits seemed to him ugly and common; and the suspicion showed itself in pride or brusquerie.
Meanwhile, if she had been restful, if he could only have forgotten his cares in her mere youth and prettiness, Fenwick would have been easily master of his discontents. For he was naturally of a warm, sensuous temper. Had the woman understood her own arts, she could have held him. ”

“ A man like that—with his weaknesses and his temperament—which are part of his gift really—its penalty—wants his wife at every turn—the woman who loves him—who understands. But to desert him for a suspicion!—a dream! Oh! Mrs. Fenwick, there are those who—who are really starved—really forsaken—really trampled under foot—by those they love!'
Her voice broke. She stood gazing straight before her, quivering with the passion of recollection. Phoebe looked up—awed—remembering what John had said, so long ago, of the unhappy marriage, the faithless and cruel husband. ”

“ For in Eugénie de Pastourelles, who is Phoebe's unconscious rival, I tried to embody, not the sensuous intoxicating power of an Emma Hamilton, but those more exquisite and spiritual influences which many women have exercised over some of the strongest and most virile of men. Fenwick indeed possesses the painter's susceptibility to beauty. Beauty comes to him and beguiles him, but it is a beauty akin to that of Michel Angelo's 'Muse and dominant Lady, spirit-wed'—which yet, for all its purity, is not, as Fenwick's case shows, without its tragic effects in the world. ”

“ The white houses, the wide avenues, the château 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. ”

“ Fenwick looked hastily, and saw a very handsome youth bending forward to answer a question which Lord Findon had addressed to him from across the table; a face in the 'grand style'—almost the face of a Greek—pure in outline, bronzed by foreign suns, and lit by eyes expressing so strong a force of personality that, but for the sweetness with which it was tempered, the spectator might have been rather repelled than won. When the young man answered Lord Findon, the voice was, like the face, charged—perhaps over-charged—with meaning and sensibility. ”

“ And that drive from Windermere, beside Miss Anna, with Carrie opposite!—Carrie excitable, happy, talkative—her father's child—now absorbed in a natural delight, exclaiming at the beauty of the mountains, the trees, the river, catching her mother's hand, to make her smile too, and then in a sudden shyness and hardness, looking with her deep jealous eyes at the unknown friend opposite, wondering clearly what it all meant, resenting that she was told so little, and too proud to insist on more—or, perhaps, afraid to pierce what might turn out to be the unhappy or shameful secret of their life? ”

“ That letter found Phoebe on a mid-March morning, when the thrushes were beginning to sing, when the larches were reddening, and only in the topmost hollows of the pikes did any snow remain, to catch the strengthening sunlight.
As she opened it, she looked at its length with astonishment. Then the tone of it brought the rushing colour to her cheek, and when it was finished she kissed it and hid it in her dress. After weeks of barrenness, of stray post-cards and perfunctory notes, these ample pages, with their rhetorical and sentimental effusion, brought new life to the fretting, lonely woman. ”

“ Phoebe had bowed her head upon the hand which held hers, and there was no spectator of the feeling in Eugénie's face. Was her pure conscience tormented with the thought that she had not told all, and could never tell it? Her innocent tempting of Fenwick—as an act, partly, of piteous self-defence against impulses of quite another quality and power—this must remain her secret to the end. Sad evasions, which life forces upon even the noblest worshippers of truth! ”

“ Only the eyes, much darker than the hair, and the rich brown of the sable cloak where it touched the white, gave accent and force to the ethereal pallor, the supreme refinement, of the rest—face, dress, hands. Nothing but civilisation in its most complex workings could have produced such a type; that was what prevailed dimly in Fenwick's mind as he wrestled with his picture. Sometimes his day's work left him exultant, sometimes in a hell of despair.
'I went to see Mr. Welby's studio yesterday,' he said, hastily, after another minute or two, seeing her droop with fatigue. ”

“ Eugénie waited—interrogatively.
'Do you know why I have never said a word to the young man about money?'
'Because you forgot it,' said Eugénie, smiling.
'Not in the least,' said Lord Findon, flushing like a school-boy found out; 'I wanted my little sensation at the end.'
'My very epicurean papa!' said Eugénie, caressing him. 'I see! Young man in a garret—starving—au désespoir. Enter Providence, alias my papa—with fame in one hand and gold in the other. Ah, que tu es comédien, mon père. ”

“ They alighted at the Haymarket, and as they walked down the street Fenwick found himself in the midst of the evening whirl of the West End. The clubs were at their busiest; men passed them in dress-suits and overcoats like themselves, and the street was full of hansoms, whence the faces of well-dressed women, enveloped in soft silks and furs, looked out.
Fenwick felt himself treading a new earth. At such an hour he was generally wending his way to a Bloomsbury eating-house, where he dined for eighteenpence; he was a part of the striving, moneyless student-world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Mrs. Flint, wavering between her dread of Fenwick's ill-humour and the impression produced upon her by the gentle decision of her visitor, retreated into the house. The lady followed.
'Well, if you'll wait there, ma'am'—the charwoman opened the door of the dismantled sitting-room—'I'll speak to Mr. Fenwick.'
She shuffled off. Eugénie de Pastourelles threw back her veil. She had arrived only that morning in London after a night journey, and her face showed deep lines of fatigue. But its beauty of expression had never been more striking. Animation—joy—spoke in the eyes, quivered in the lips. ”

“ 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. ”

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

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

“ 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. ”

“ Little as Fenwick talked about Madame de Pastourelles, Phoebe understood perfectly that she was a woman of high education and refinement, and that her stored and subtle mind was at once an attraction and a cause of humiliation to John. And through his rare stories of the Findon household and the Findon dinner-parties, the wife dimly perceived a formidable world, bristling with strange acquirements and accomplishments, in which he, perhaps, was beginning to find a place, thanks to his art ”

“ Fenwick, stifled. She had broken a sycamore twig, and was stripping it violently of its buds.
Miss Anna looked at her unmoved. The grey-haired schoolmistress was a woman of ideas and ambitions beyond her apparent scope in life. She had read her Carlyle and Ruskin, and in her calling she was an enthusiast. But, in the words of the Elizabethan poet, she was perhaps 'unacquainted still with her own soul.' She imagined herself a Radical; she was in truth a tyrant. She preached Ruskin and the simple life; no worldling ever believed more fiercely in the gospel of success. ”

“ Hence the French betrothal—the crowning point of a summer visit to a French château where Eugénie had been the spoiled child of a party containing some of the greatest names in France. It flattered both Lord Findon's vanity and imagination to find himself brought into connexion with historic families all the more attractive because of that dignified alienation from affairs, imposed on them by their common hatred of the Second Empire. Eugénie, too, had felt the romance of the milieu; had invested her French suitor with all that her own poetic youth could bring to his glorification ”

“ And, in this state, the obsession of the winter seized her again. She brooded perpetually over the doleful Romney story—the tale of a great painter, born, like her John, in this Northern air, and reared in Kendal streets, deserting his peasant wife—enslaved by Emma Hamilton through many a passionate year—and coming back at last that the drudge of his youth might nurse him through his decrepit old age. She remembered going with John in their sweetheart days to see the house where Romney died, imbecile and paralysed, with Mary Romney beside him. ”

“ If she wouldn't, was he to blame if the cottage was lonesome?
But as though she divined this secret debate she presently said:
'I went to Keswick last week.'
He looked up, startled. 'Well?'
'Father's ill—he's got a bad chest, and the doctor says he may be going into a consumption.'
'Doctors'll say anything!' cried Fenwick, wrathfully. 'If ever there was a strong man, it's your father. Don't you believe any croaking of that sort, Phoebe.'
She shook her head.
'He looks so changed,' she said; and began drawing with her finger on the tablecloth. He saw that her lips were trembling. ”

“ A pathetic face!—as of one in whom the impulse to weep is always present, yet for ever stifled. It had none of that noble intimacy with sorrow which so often dignifies a woman's whole aspect; it spoke rather of the painful, struggling, desiring will, the will of passion and regret, the will which fights equally with the past and with the future, and is, for Buddhist and Christian alike, the torment of existence.
Again a sound of wheels drew her eyes to the road. But it was only the Hawkshead butcher going his rounds. He stopped below the cottage, and Miss Anna's servant went out to him. ”