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Updated: June 17, 2025
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.
The meal went on rather silently. Fenwick's conscience said to him, 'Take her back with you! whatever happens, take her to London she's moping her life out here. And an inner voice clamoured in reply 'Take her to those rooms? in the very middle of the struggle with those two pictures? go through all the agitation and discomfort of explanations with Lord Findon and Madame de Pastourelles? run the risk of estranging them, and of distracting your own mind from your work at this critical moment? the further risk, moreover, of Phoebe's jealousy?
Welby had been then deeply in love; Eugénie in her first maiden bloom had been difficult to read, but a word from the father she adored would probably have been enough to incline her towards her lover, to transform and fire a friendship which was already more romantic than she knew. But Lord Findon could not make up his mind to it.
Lord Findon restrained himself. In his eyes there was no excuse whatever for his scoundrel of a son-in-law, who after six years of marriage had left his wife for an actress, and was now living with another woman of his own class, a Comtesse S., ten years older than himself. He knew that Eugénie believed her husband to be insane; as for him, he had never admitted anything of the kind.
He triumphed in the remembrance that she and Lord Findon had found the sketch so remarkable that, when he had timidly proposed a portrait in oils, Lord Findon himself had persuaded her to sit.
'But don't let us in if you don't want to. 'Turn me out, please, at once, if I'm in the way, said Welby. 'Lord Findon made me come up. It was the first time that Welby had visited the Bernard Street studio. Fenwick's conceit had sometimes resented the fact. Yet now that Welby was there he was unwilling to show his work. He muttered something about there being 'more to see in a day or two.
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.
The obscure causes of it were hidden from her; she could only pity and grieve; and Fenwick, unable to satisfy her, unable to re-establish his own equilibrium, full of remorse towards her, and of despair about his art, whereof the best forces and inspirations seemed to have withered within him like a gourd in the night, went from one folly to another, while his pictures steadily deteriorated, his affairs became involved, and a shrewd observer like Lord Findon wondered who or what the deuce had got hold of him whether he had begun to take morphia or had fallen into the clutches of a woman.
And that passionate spiritual life of hers, the ideas of which Lord Findon only half understood, forbade her, it seemed, any step which would finally bar the way of that return; unless Albert should himself ask her to take it. But the Comte had never made a sign.
The gentlemen walked off, and a sharp sensation impressed upon Madame de Pastourelles that Arthur was only allowed to go with Lord Findon, because she was not of the party. A sudden colour rose into her cheeks. For the hour that followed, she devoted herself to her cousin. But Mrs. Welby was difficult and querulous.
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