Fenwicks Career | Page 7

turned away. He repossessed himself of the envelope, and
buttoned his coat over it, before he replied.
'I shall, of course, consult her immediately. What shall I do with this
picture?' He pointed to the portrait on the easel.

'Take it home with you, and see if you can't beautify it a little,' said
Morrison, in a tone of good-humour. 'You've got a lot of worldly
wisdom to learn yet, my dear Fenwick. The women must be flattered.'
Fenwick repeated that he was sorry if Miss Bella was disappointed, but
the tone was no less perfunctory than before. After stooping and
looking sharply for a moment into the picture--which was a strong,
ugly thing, with some passages of remarkable technique--he put it aside,
saving that he would send for it in the evening. Then, having packed up
and shouldered the rest of his painter's gear, he stood ready to depart.
'I'm awfully obliged to you!' he said, holding out his hand.
Morrison looked at the handsome young fellow, the vivacity of the eyes,
the slight agitation of the lip.
'Don't mention it,' he said, with redoubled urbanity. 'It's my way--only
my way! When'll you be off?'
'Probably next week. I'll come and say good-bye.'
'I must have a year! But Phoebe will take it hard.' John Fenwick had
paused on his way home, and was leaning over a gate beside a stream,
now thinking anxiously of his domestic affairs, and now steeped in
waves of delight--vague, sensuous, thrilling--that flowed from the
colours and forms around him. He found himself in an intricate and
lovely valley, through which lay his path to Langdale. On either side of
the stream, wooded or craggy fells, gashed with stone-quarries,
accompanied the windings of the water, now leaving room for a scanty
field or two, and now hemming in the river with close-piled rock and
tree. Before him rose a white Westmoreland farm, with its gabled porch
and moss-grown roof, its traditional yews and sycamores; while to his
left, and above the farm, hung a mountain-face, dark with rock, and
purple under the evening shadows--a rich and noble shape, lost above
in dim heights of cloud, and, below, cleft to the heart by one deep ghyll,
whence the golden trees--in the glittering green of May--descended
single or in groups, from shelf to shelf, till their separate brilliance was
lost in the dense wood which girdled the white farmhouse.

The pleasure of which he was conscious in the purple of the mountain,
the colour of the trees, and all that magic of light and shade which
filled the valley--a pleasure involuntary, physical, automatic, depending
on certain delicacies of nerve and brain--rose and persisted, while yet
his mind was full of harassing and disagreeable thoughts.
Well, Phoebe might take her choice!--for they had come to the parting
of the ways. Either a good painter, a man on the level of the best,
trained and equipped as they, or something altogether
different--foreman, a clerk, perhaps, in his uncle's upholstery business
at Darlington, a ticket-collector on the line--anything! He could always
earn his own living and Phoebe's. There was no fear of that. But if he
was finally to be an artist, he would be a first-rate one. Let him only get
more training; give him time and opportunity; and he would be as good
as any one.
Morrison, plainly, had thought him a conceited ass. Well, let him!
What chance had he ever had of proving what was in him? As he hung
over the gate smoking, he thought of his father and mother, and of his
childhood in the little Kendal shop--the bookseller's shop which had
been the source and means of his truest education.
Not that he had been a neglected child. Far from it. He remembered his
gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing
determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to
boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father. He
remembered her death--and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted
room--effects of light and shadow--of flowers--of the grey head
uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at night,
in his own room, with chalk and paper--and then his passion with
himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were, another
self saw and approved.
Then came school-days. His father had sent him to an old endowed
school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under
discipline. There he had received a plain commercial education,
together with some Latin and Greek. His quick, restless mind had

soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he well
knew, he had done nothing supremely well. But Homer and Virgil had
been unlocked for him; and in