Fenwick's Career Part 9

Cuningham explained.

'A character!--perhaps a genius?' said Findon. 'He has a clever, quarrelsome eye. Unmarried? Good Lord, I hope so, after the way I've been going on.'

Cuningham laughed. 'We've seen no sign of a wife. But I really know nothing about him.'

They were entering the upper room, and at sight of the large picture it contained, Lord Findon exclaimed:

'My goodness!--what an ambitious thing!'

The three men gathered in front of the picture. Fenwick lingered nervously behind them.

'What do you call it?' said Lord Findon, putting up his gla.s.ses.

'The "Genius Loci,"' said Fenwick, fumbling a little with the words.

It represented a young woman seated on the edge of a Westmoreland ghyll or ravine. Behind her the white water of the beck flowed steeply down from shelf to shelf; beyond the beck rose far-receding walls of mountain, purple on purple, blue on blue. Light, scantily nourished trees, sycamore or mountain-ash, climbed the green sides of the ghyll, and framed the woman's form. She sat on a stone, bending over a frail new-born lamb upon her lap, whereof the mother lay beside her. Against her knee leaned a fair-haired child. The pitiful concern in the woman's lovely eyes was reflected in the soft wonder of the child's.

Both, it seemed, were of the people. The drawing was full of rustical suggestion, touched here and there by a harsh realism that did but heighten the general harmony. The woman's grave comeliness flowered naturally, as it were, out of the scene. She was no model posing with a Westmoreland stream for background. She seemed a part of the fells; their silences, their breezes, their pure waters, had pa.s.sed into her face.

But it was the execution of the picture which perhaps specially arrested the attention of the men examining it.

'Eclectic stuff!' said Watson to himself, presently, as he turned away--'seen with other men's eyes!'

But on Lord Findon and on Cuningham the effect was of another kind.

The picture seemed to them also a combination of many things, or rather of attempts at many things--Burne-Jones' mystical colour--the rustic character of a Bastien-Lepage or a Millet--with the jewelled detail of a fourteenth-century Florentine, so wonderful were the harebells in the foreground, the lichened rocks, the dabbled fleece of the lamb: but they realised that it was a combination that only a remarkable talent could have achieved.

'By Jove!' said Findon, turning on the artist with animation, 'where did you learn all this?'

'I've been painting a good many years,' said Fenwick, his cheeks aglow. 'But I've got on a lot this last six months.'

'I suppose, in the country, you couldn't get properly at the model?'

'No. I've had no chances.'

'Let's all pray to have none,' said Cuningham, good-naturedly. 'I had no notion you were such a swell.'

But his light-blue eyes as they rested on Fenwick were less friendly.

His Scotch prudence was alarmed. Had he in truth introduced a genius unawares to his only profitable patron?

'Who is the model, if I may ask?' said Lord Findon, still examining the picture.

The reply came haltingly, after a pause.

'Oh!--some one I knew in Westmoreland.'

The speaker had turned red. Naturally no one asked any further questions. Cuningham noticed that the face was certainly from the same original as the face in the sketch-book, but he kept his observation to himself.

Lord Findon, with the eagerness of a Londoner discovering some new thing, fell into quick talk with Fenwick; looked him meanwhile up and down, his features, bearing, clothes; noticed his North-Country accent, and all the other signs of the plebeian. And presently Fenwick, placed at his ease, began for the first time to expand, became argumentative and explosive. In a few minutes he was laying down the law in his Westmoreland manner--attacking the Academy--denouncing certain pictures of the year--with a flushed, confident face and a gesticulating hand. Watson observed him with some astonishment; Lord Findon looked amused--and pulled out his watch.

'Oh, well, everybody kicks the Academy--but it's pretty strong, as you'll find when you have to do with it.'

'Have you been writing those articles in the _Mirror_?' said Watson, abruptly.

'I'm not a journalist.' The young man's tone was sulky. He got up and his loquacity disappeared.

'Well, I must be off,' said Lord Findon. 'But you're coming to dinner with me to-morrow night, Cuningham, aren't you? Will you excuse a short invitation'--he turned, after a moment's pause, to Fenwick--'and accompany him? Lady Findon would, I'm sure, be glad to make your acquaintance. St. James's Square--102. All right'--as Fenwick, colouring violently, stammered an acceptance--'we shall expect you.

Aurevoir! I'm afraid it's no good to ask _you_!' The last words were addressed smilingly to Watson, as Lord Findon, with outstretched hand, pa.s.sed through the door, which Cuningham opened for him.

'Thank you,' said Watson, with a grave inclination--'I'm a hermit.'

The door closed on a gay and handsome presence. Lord Findon could not possibly have been accused of anything so ill-mannered as patronage.

But there was in his manner a certain consciousness of power--of vantage-ground; a certain breath of autocracy. The face of Watson showed it as he returned to look closely into Fenwick's picture.

A few minutes later Fenwick found himself alone. He stood in front of the picture, staring into Phoebe's eyes. A wave of pa.s.sionate remorse broke upon him. He had as good as denied her; and she sat there before him like some wronged, helpless thing. He seemed to hear her voice, to see her lips moving.

Hastily he took her last letter out of his pocket.

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

Fenwick put up the letter. He had a sudden vision of Phoebe in her white night-dress, opening the cas.e.m.e.nt-window of the little cottage on a starry night, and listening to the sounds of distant water.

Behind her was the small room with its candle--the baby's cot--the white bed, with his vacant place. A pang of longing--of homesickness--stirred him.

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

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

Money! The very thought of it filled him with impatient worry.

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

No one could say, anyway, that he had spent money in amus.e.m.e.nt. Why, he had scarcely been out of Bloomsbury!--the rest of London might not have existed for him. A gallery-seat at the Lyceum Theatre, then in its early fame, and hot discussions of Irving and Ellen Terry with such artistic or literary acquaintance as he had made through the life-school or elsewhere--these had been his only distractions. He stood amazed before his own virtues. He drank little--smoked little.

As for women--he thought with laughter or wrath of Phoebe's touch of jealousy! There was an extremely pretty girl--a fair-haired, conscious minx--drawing in the same room with him at the British Museum.

Evidently she would have been glad to capture him; and he had loftily denied her. If he had ever been as susceptible as Phoebe thought him, he was susceptible no more. Life burned with sterner fire!

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

What then?

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

At this point he returned to his picture, grappling with it afresh in a feverish pleasure. He caught up a mirror and looked at it reversed; he put in a bold accent or two; fumed over the lack of brilliancy in some colour he had bought the day before; and ended in a fresh burst of satisfaction. By Jove, it was good! Lord Findon had been evidently 'bowled over' by it--Cuningham too. As for that sour-faced fellow, Watson, what did it matter what he thought?

It _must_ succeed! Suddenly he found himself on his knees beside his picture, praying that he might finish it prosperously, that it might be given a good place in the Academy, and bring him fame and fortune.

Then he got up sheepishly, looking furtively round the room to be sure that the door was shut, and no one had seen him. He was a good deal ashamed of himself, for he was not in truth of a religious mind, and he had, by now, few or no orthodox beliefs. But in all matters connected with his pictures the Evangelical tradition of his youth still held him. He was the descendant of generations of men and women who had prayed on all possible occasions--that customers might be plentiful and business good--that the young cattle might do well, and the hay be got in dry--that their children might prosper--and they themselves be delivered from rheumatism, or toothache, or indigestion.

Fenwick's prayer to some 'magnified non-natural man' afar off, to come and help him with his picture, was of the same kind. Only he was no longer whole-hearted and simple about it, as he had been when Phoebe married him, as she was still.

He put on his studio coat and sat down to his work again, in a very tender, repentant mood. What on earth had possessed him to make that answer to Lord Findon--to let him and those other fellows take him for unmarried? He protested, in excuse, that Westmoreland folk are 'close,' and don't like talking about their own affairs. He came of a secretive, suspicious stock; and had no mind at any time to part with unnecessary facts about himself. As talkative as you please about art and opinion; of his own concerns not a word! London had made him all the more cautious and reticent. No one knew anything about him except as an artist. He always posted his letters himself; and he believed that neither his landlady nor anybody else suspected him of a wife.

But to-day he had carried things too far--and a guilty discomfort weighed upon him. What was to be done? Should he on the first opportunity set himself right with Lord Findon--speak easily and unexpectedly of Phoebe and the child? Clearly what would have been simplicity itself at first was now an awkwardness. Lord Findon would be puzzled--chilled. He would suppose there was something to be ashamed of--some skeleton in the cupboard. And especially would he take it ill that Fenwick had allowed him to run on with his diatribes against matrimony as though he were talking to a bachelor. Then the lie about the picture. It had been the shy, foolish impulse of a moment. But how explain it to Lord Findon?

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