"I don"t improve," he said, abruptly, turning away--"but it keeps me contented--that and my animals. Anatole!--_vaurien_!--_ou es-tu_?"
A small monkey, in a red jacket, who had been sitting unnoticed on the top of a cabinet since Fenwick"s entrance, clattered down to the floor, and, running to his master, was soon sitting on his shoulder, staring at Fenwick with a pair of grave, soft eyes. Watson caressed him;--and then pointed to a wicker cage outside the window in which a pigeon was pecking at some Indian-corn. The cage door was wide open.
"She comes to feed here by day. In the morning I wake up and hear her there--the darling! In the evening she spreads her wings, and I watch her fly toward Saint-Cloud. No doubt the jade keeps a family there.
Oh! some day she"ll go--like the rest of them--and I shall miss her abominably."
"You seem also to be favoured by mice?" said Fenwick, idly looking at two traps on the floor beside him.
Watson smiled.
"My _femme de service_ sets those traps every night. She says we are overrun--the greatest nonsense! As if there wasn"t enough for all of us! Then in the night--I sleep there, you see, behind that screen--I wake, and hear some little fool squeaking. So I get up, and take the trap downstairs in the dark--right away down--to the first floor. And there I let the mouse go--those folk down there are rich enough to keep him. The only drawback is that my old woman is so cross in the morning, and she spends her life thinking of new traps. _Ah, ben!--Je la laisse faire!_"
"And this place suits you?"
"Admirably--till the cold comes. Then I march. I must have the sun."
He shivered again. Fenwick, struck by something in his tone, looked at him more closely.
"How are you, by the way?" he asked, repentantly, "I ought to have inquired before. You mentioned consulting some big man here. What did he say to you?"
"Oh, that I am phthisical, and must take care," said Watson, carelessly--"that"s no news. Ah! by the way"--he hurried the change of subject--"you know, of course, that Lord Findon and madame are to be at Versailles?"
"They will be there to-night," said Fenwick, after a moment.
"Ah! to-night. Then you meet them?"
"I shall see them, of course."
"What a blessed thing to be rid of that fellow!--What"s she been doing since?"
Fenwick replied that since the death of her husband--about a year before this date--Madame de Pastourelles, worn out with nursing, had been pursuing health--in Egypt and elsewhere. Her father, stepmother, and sister had been travelling with her. The sister and she were to stay at Versailles till Christmas. It was a place for which Madame de Pastourelles had an old affection.
"And I suppose you know that you will find the Welbys there too?"
Fenwick made a startled movement.
"The _Welbys_? How did you hear that?"
"I had my usual half-yearly letter from Cuningham yesterday. He"s the fellow for telling you the news. Welby has begun a big picture of Marie Antoinette, at Trianon, and has taken a studio in Versailles for the winter."
Fenwick turned away and began to pace the bare floor of the studio.
"I didn"t know," he said, evidently discomposed.
"By the way, I have often meant to ask you. I trust he wasn"t mixed up in the "hanging" affair?" said Watson, with a quick look at his companion.
"He was ill the day it was done, but in my opinion he behaved in an extremely mean and ungenerous manner afterwards!" exclaimed Fenwick, suddenly flushing from brow to chin.
"You mean he didn"t support you?"
"He shilly-shallied. He thought--I have very good reason to believe--that I had been badly treated--that there was personal feeling in the matter--resentment of things that I had written--and so on but he would never come out into the open and say so!"
The excitement with which Fenwick spoke made it evident that Watson had touched an extremely sore point.
Watson was silent a little, lit another cigarette, and then said, with a smile:
"Poor Madame de Pastourelles!"
Fenwick looked up with irritation.
"What on earth do you mean?"
"I am wondering how she kept the peace between you--her two great friends."
"She sees very little of Welby."
"Ah! Since when?"
"Oh! for a long time. Of course they meet occasionally--"
A big, kindly smile flickered over Watson"s face.
"What--was little Madame Welby jealous?"
"She would be a great goose if she were," said Fenwick, turning aside to look through some sketches that lay on a chair beside him.
Watson shook his head, still smiling, then remarked:
"By the way, I understand she has become quite an invalid."
"Has she?" said Fenwick. "I know nothing of them."
Watson began to talk of other things. But as he and Fenwick discussed the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick"s own projects, as they talked of Manet, and Zola"s "L"Oeuvre," and the Goncourts, as they compared the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and tendencies--Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a pa.s.sionate partisan, loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir recently opened at a Paris dealer"s--Watson"s inner mind was really full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that _salon_ of hers in the old Westminster house in Dean"s Yard, of which during so many years Fenwick had made one of the princ.i.p.al figures. It should perhaps be explained that some two years after Fenwick"s arrival in London, Madame de Pastourelles had thought it best to establish a little _menage_ of her own, distinct from the household in St. James"s Square. Her friends and her stepmother"s were not always congenial to each other; and in many ways both Lord Findon and she were the happier for the change. Her small panelled rooms had quickly become the meeting-place of a remarkable and attractive society. Watson himself, indeed, had never been an _habitue_ of that or any other drawing-room.
As he had told Lord Findon long ago, he was not for the world, nor the world for him. But whereas his volatile lordship could never draw him from his cell, Lord Findon"s daughter was sometimes irresistible, and Watson"s great s.h.a.ggy head and ungainly person was occasionally to be seen beside her fire, in the years before he left London. He had, therefore, been a spectator of Fenwick"s gradual transformation at the hands of a charming woman; he had marked the stages of the process; and he knew well that it had never excited a shadow of scandal in the minds of any reasonable being. All the same, the deep store of hidden sentiment which this queer idealist possessed had been touched by the position. The young woman isolated and childless, so charming, so n.o.bly sincere, so full of heart--was she to be always Ariadne, and forsaken? The man--excitable, nervous, selfish, yet, in truth, affectionate and dependent--what folly, or what chivalry kept him unmarried? Ever since the death of M. le Comte de Pastourelles, dreams concerning these two people had been stirring in the brain of Watson, and these dreams spoke now in the dark eyes he bent on Fenwick.
Presently, Fenwick began to talk gloomily of the death of his old Bernard Street landlady, who had become his housekeeper and factotum in the new Chelsea house and studio, which he had built for himself.
"I don"t know what I shall do without her. For eleven years I"ve never paid a bill or engaged a servant for myself. She"s done everything.
Every morning she used to give me my pocket-money for the day."
"The remedy, after all, is simple," said Watson, with a sudden turn of the head.
Fenwick raised his eyebrows interrogatively.
"I imagine that what Mrs. Gibbs did well, "Mrs. Fenwick" might do even better--_n"est-ce pas?_"
Fenwick sprang up.
"Mrs.--?" he repeated, vaguely.