Fenwick's Career Part 32

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 companions.h.i.+p.

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 fis.h.i.+ng in the lake; boys and children were playing near it, and sweethearts walking in the dank gra.s.s. 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 friends.h.i.+p, and the pure sympathy and compa.s.sion 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 p.r.o.nounced 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-a.n.a.lysis--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 s.p.a.ces 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 'Ba.s.sin 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 Pet.i.t Trianon; woods all about them, and to their left, again, the s.h.i.+mmer 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 G.o.d--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 pa.s.sers-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 Munic.i.p.al 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 hoa.r.s.ely 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.