Fenwick's Career Part 11

She pointed out the president of the Academy, a sculptor, and an art-critic, at whose name Fenwick curled his lip, full of the natural animosity of the painter to the writer.

'And, of course, you know my neighbour?'

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

'I took Madame de Pastourelles to see it to-day,' the youth was saying. 'She thought it as glorious as I did.'

'Oh! you are a pair of enthusiasts,' said Lord Findon. 'I keep my head.'

The 'it' turned out to be a t.i.tian portrait from the collection of an old Roman family, lately brought to London and under offer to the National Gallery, of which Lord Findon was a trustee.

Madame de Pastourelles looked towards her father, confirming what the unknown youth had said. Her eyes had kindled. She began to talk rapidly in defence of her opinion. Between her, Lord Findon, and her neighbour there arose a conversation which made Fenwick's ears tingle.

How many things and persons and places it touched upon that were wholly unknown to him! Pictures in foreign museums--Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg--the names of French or German experts--quotations from Italian books or newspapers--the three dealt lightly and familiarly with a world in which Fenwick had scarcely a single landmark. How clever she was! how charming! What knowledge without a touch of pedantry! And how the handsome youth kept up with her--nay, rather, led her, with a mastery, a resource, to which she always yielded in case of any serious difference of opinion! It seemed that they had been abroad together--had seen many sights in each other's company--had many common friends.

Fenwick felt himself strangely sore and jealous as he listened. Who was this man? Some young aristocrat, no doubt, born silver spoon in mouth--one of your idle, insolent rich, with nothing to do but make a hobby of art, and patronise artists. He loathed the breed.

Her voice startled him back from these unspoken tirades, and once more he found her eyes fixed upon him. It provoked him to feel that their scrutiny made him self-conscious--anxious to please. They were so gentle, so gay!--and yet behind the first expression there sat what seemed to him the real personality, shrewd, critical, and remote.

'You must see this picture,' she said, kindly. 'It's glorious!'

'Where is it?'

'In a house near here. But father could get you in.'

He hesitated, then laughed, ungraciously.

'I don't seem to have finished yet with the National Gallery.

Who--please--is the gentleman on your right?'

She smiled.

'Oh! don't you know him? You must let me introduce him. It is Mr.

Arthur Welby. Doesn't he talk well?'

She introduced them. Welby received the introduction with a readiness--a touch of eagerness indeed--which seemed to show a mind favourably prepared for it.

'Lord Findon tells me you're sending in a most awfully jolly thing to the Academy!' he said, bending across Madame de Pastourelles, his musical voice full of cordiality. Fenwick made a muttered reply. It might have been thought he disliked being talked to about his own work. Welby accordingly changed the subject at once; he returned to the picture he had been pressing on Lord Findon.

'Haven't you seen it? You really should.' But this elicited even less response. Fenwick glared at him--apparently tongue-tied. Then Madame de Pastourelles and her neighbour talked to each other, endeavouring to draw in the stranger. In vain. They fell back, naturally, into the talk of intimates, implying a thousand common memories and experiences; and Fenwick found himself left alone.

His mind burned with annoyance and self-disgust. Why did he let these people intimidate him? Why was he so ridiculously self-conscious?--so incapable of holding his own? He knew all about Arthur Welby; his name and fame were in all the studios. The author of the picture of the year--in the opinion, at least, of the cultivated minority for whom rails and policemen were not the final arbiters of merit; glorified in the speeches at the Academy banquet; and already overwhelmed with more commissions than he could take--Welby should have been one of the best hated of men. On the contrary, his mere temperament had drawn the teeth of that wild beast, Success. Well-born, rich, a social favourite, trained in Paris and Italy, an archaeologist and student as well as a painter, he commanded the world as he pleased. Society asked him to dinners, and he gave himself no professional airs and went when he could. But among his fellows he lived a happy comrade's life, spending his gifts and his knowledge without reserve, always ready to help a man in a tight place, to praise a friend's picture, to take up a friend's quarrel. He took his talent and his good-fortune so simply that the world must needs insist upon them, instead of contesting them.

As for his pictures, they were based on the Italian tradition--rich, accurate, learned, full of literary allusion and reminiscence. In Fenwick's eyes, young as was their author, they were of the past rather than of the future. He contemptuously thought of them as belonging to a dead _genre_. But the man who painted them could _draw_.

Meanwhile he seemed to have lost Madame de Pastourelles, and must needs fall back on the private secretary beside him. This gentleman, who had already entered him on the tablets of the mind as a mannerless outsider, was not particularly communicative. But at least Fenwick learned the names of the other guests. The well-known Amba.s.sador beside Lady Findon, with a shrewd, thin, sulky face, and very black eyes under whitish hair--eyes turned much more frequently on the pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet Minister--of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the Cabinet--and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;--all these he learned gradually to discriminate.

So this was the great world. He was stormily pleased to be in it, and at the same time scornful of it. It seemed to contain not a few ancient shams and hollow pretenders--

Ah! once more the soft, ingratiating voice beside him. Madame de Pastourelles was expressing a flattering wish to see his picture, of which her father had talked so much.

'And he says you have found such a beautiful model--or, rather, better than beautiful--characteristic.'

Fenwick stared at her. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'She is my wife.' But he did not say it. He imagined her look of surprise--'Ah, my father had no idea!'--imagined it with a morbid intensity, and saw no way of confronting or getting round it; not at the dinner-table, anyway--with all these eyes and ears about him--above all, with Lord Findon opposite. Why, they might think he had been ashamed of Phoebe!--that there was some reason for hiding her away. It was ridiculous--most annoying and absurd; but now that the thing had happened, he must really choose his own moment for unravelling the coil.

So he stammered something unintelligible about a 'Westmoreland type,'

and then hastily led the talk to some other schemes he had in mind.

With the sense of having escaped a danger he found his tongue for the first time, and the power of expressing himself.

Madame de Pastourelles listened attentively--drew him out, indeed--made him show himself to the best advantage. And presently, at a moment of pause, she said, with a smile and a shrug, 'How happy you are to have an art! Now I--'

She let her hand fall with a little plaintive movement.

'I am sure you paint,' said Fenwick, eagerly.

'No.'

'Then you are musical?'

'Not at all. I embroider--'

'All women should,' said Fenwick, trying for a free and careless air.

'I read--'

'You do not need to say it.'

She opened her eyes at this readiness of reply; but still pursued:

'And I have a Chinese pug.'

'And no children?' The words rose to Fenwick's lips, but remained unspoken. Perhaps she divined them, for she began hastily to describe her dog--its tricks and fidelities. Fenwick could meet her here; for a mongrel fox-terrier--taken, a starving waif, out of the streets--had been his companion since almost the first month of his solitude. Each stimulated the other, and they fell into those legends of dog-life in which every dog-lover believes, however sceptical he may be in other directions. Till presently she said, with a sigh and a stiffening of her delicate features:

'But mine shows some symptoms of paralysis. He was run over last summer. I'm afraid it will be long and painful.'

Fenwick replied that she should send for the vet. and have the dog painlessly killed.

'No. I shall nurse him.'

'Why should you look on at suffering?'

'Why not--if sometimes he enjoys life?'

'I am thinking of the mistress.'

'Oh, for us,' she said, quickly, 'for me--it is good to be with suffering.'

As she spoke, she drew herself slightly more erect. Neither tone nor manner showed softness, made any appeal. The words seemed to have dropped from her, and the strange pride and dignity she at once threw around them made a veiling cloud through which only a man entirely without the finer perceptions would have tried to penetrate. Fenwick, for all his surface _gaucherie_, did not attempt it. But he attacked her generalisation. With some vehemence he developed against it a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy--love of the earth and its natural pleasures--courage to take and dare--avoidance of suffering--and war on asceticism. He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality, whatever value they might have as a philosophy.