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Updated: July 2, 2025
The North found and gripped him; these are not the ways of the South. And in a moment the sense of contrast, thus provoked, had carried him far out of the Westmoreland night, back to London, and his shabby studio in Bernard Street. There, throned on a low platform, sat Madame de Pastourelles; and to her right, himself, sitting crouched before his easel, working with all his eyes and all his mind.
He and Phoebe had so much to do to get a house and furnish it, to pay pressing bills, to provide models for the new picture! Why, it would be all gone directly! He locked up the cheque safely, took his hat, and was just running out when his eye fell on the three-hours' sketch of Madame de Pastourelles, which had been the foundation of the portrait.
The Rue des Réservoirs 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 passers-by. They stepped within its bounds.
Connected with the pastourelles of the langue d'oïl is an isolated dramatic effort, of a primitive and naïve sort, but of singular grace and charm.
But in the middle of the sittings, Madame de Pastourelles being away, and he in a mood to destroy all that he had done, he had suddenly spent a stray earning on a railway ticket to Paris. There excitement! illumination! and a whole fresh growth of ambition!
'I must alter that fold over the arm, murmured Fenwick, stepping back, with a frown, and gazing hard at the picture on his easel 'it's too strong. Madame de Pastourelles gave a little shiver. The big bare room, with its Northern aspect and its smouldering fire, had been of a polar temperature this March afternoon. She had been sitting for an hour and a half.
'That's all very well. But many men don't know at twenty what they'll want at thirty, said Fenwick, painting fast. Madame de Pastourelles laughed. 'The doctors say nowadays it is papa's latest craze that it doesn't matter what you eat or how little if you only chew it properly. I wonder if that applies to matrimony? 'What's the chewing?
Moreover, for the first time he detected in her a slight tone of the 'schoolmarm' didactic and self-satisfied, without knowledge. The measure Madame de Pastourelles had dealt out to him, he in some sort avenged on Phoebe. At the same time there were much more serious causes of difference. Each had a secret from the other.
He put his wife aside, and sank himself in the covetous, devouring vision of his child. Next day there was great activity among the lawyers. They were confident of recovering the clue, and if Fenwick's identification was a just one, the search was near its end. Only, till they really were on the track, better say nothing to Lord Findon and Madame de Pastourelles.
She stood there, with her back to it, sharply arrested, her eyes held by the spectacle before her. Close to her, in the centre of the freest portion of the floor, rose the sketch of Eugénie de Pastourelles, lit by the two lamps, which threw a concentrated glow upon the picture, and left all the rest of the room shadowy.
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