"I am extremely sorry, Mr. Fenwick, but I really know nothing about them. Oh, by the way"--he fumbled in his pocket. "Yes--one of them did give me a card--I forgot--I never saw the name before." He extracted it with difficulty and handed it to Fenwick, who stood trembling from head to foot.
Fenwick looked at it.
"Miss Larose." Nothing else. No address.
"But the other one!--the other one!" he said, beside himself.
"I never spoke to her at all," said his companion, whose name was Fison. "They came in here twenty minutes ago and asked to see me. The door-keeper told them the rehearsal was just over and they would find me on the stage. The lady I was talking to wished to know whether we had all the people we wanted for the ballroom scene. Some friend with whom she had been acting in the country had advised her to apply--"
"Acting _where_?" said Fenwick, still gripping him.
The stage-manager rubbed his nose in perplexity.
"I really can"t remember. Leeds--Newcastle--Halifax--was it? It"s altogether escaped my memory."
"For G.o.d"s sake, remember!" cried Fenwick.
The stage-manager shook his head.
"I really didn"t take notice. I liked the young lady very well. We got on, as you may say, at once. I talked to her while you were discussing over there. But I had to tell her there was no room for her--and no more there is. Her sister--or her friend--whichever it was--was an uncommonly pretty girl. I noticed that as she went out--which reminds me--she asked me to tell her who you were."
Fenwick gazed at the speaker in pa.s.sionate despair.
"And you can"t tell me any more--can"t help me?" His voice rose again into a shout, then failed him.
"No, I really can"t," said the other, decidedly, pulling himself away.
"You go and ask the door-keeper. Perhaps he"ll know something."
But the door-keeper knew only that he had been asked for "Mr. Fison"
by two nice-spoken young ladies, that he had directed them where to go, and had opened the stage-door for them. He hadn"t happened to be in his "lodge" when they went out, and couldn"t say in which direction they had gone.
"Why, lor" bless you, sir, they come here in scores every week!"
Fenwick rushed out into the Strand, and walked from end to end of the theatrical section of it several times, questioning the policemen on duty. But he could discover nothing.
Then, blindly, he made his way down a narrow street to the Embankment.
There he threw himself on a bench, almost fainting, unable to stand.
What should he do? He was absolutely convinced that he had seen Carrie--his child; his little Carrie!--his own flesh and blood. It was her face--her eyes--her movement--changed, indeed, but perfectly to be recognised by him, her father. And by the cruel, the monstrous accidents of the meeting, she had been swept away from him again into this whirlpool of London, before he had had the smallest chance of grasping at the little form as it floated past him on this aimless stream of things. His whole nature was in surging revolt against life--against men"s senseless theories of G.o.d and Providence. If it should prove that he had lost all clue again to his wife and child, he would put an end, once for all, to his share in the business--he swore, with clenched hands, that he would. The Great Potter had made sport of him long enough; it was time to break the cup and toss its fragments back into the vast common heap of ruined and wasted things.
"Some to honour--and some to dishonour"--the words rang in his ears, mingling with that deep bell of St. Paul"s, whereof the echoes were being carried up the river towards him on the light southeasterly wind.
But first--he tried to make his mind follow out the natural implications and consequences of what had happened. Carrie had asked his name. But clearly, when it was given her, it had meant nothing to her. She could not have left her father there--knowing it was her father--without a word. No; Phoebe"s first step, of course, would have been to drop her old name, and the child would have no knowledge of it.
But Phoebe? If Carrie was in England, so was Phoebe. He could not believe that she would part with the child. And supposing Carrie spoke of the prating, haranguing fellow she had seen?--mentioned the name, which the stage-manager had given her?--what then? Could Phoebe still have the cruelty, the wickedness to maintain her course of action--to keep Carrie from him? Ah! if he had been guilty towards her in the old days, she had wrung out full payment long ago; the balance of injury had long since dropped heavily on his side. But who could know how she had developed?--whether towards hardness or towards repentance.
Still--to-night, probably--she would hear what and whom Carrie had seen. Any post might bring the fruits of it. And if not--he was not without a clue. If a girl whose name is known has been playing recently at an English provincial theatre, it ought to be possible somehow to recover news of her. He looked at his watch. Too late for the lawyers. But he roused himself, hailed a cab, and went to his club, where he wrote at length to his solicitor, describing what had happened, and suggesting various lines of action.
Then he went home, got some charcoal and paper and by lamp-light began to draw the face which he had seen--a very young and still plastic face, with delicate lips open above the small teeth; and eyes--why, they were Phoebe"s eyes, of course!--no other eyes like them in the world. He drew them with an eager hand, knowing the way of them. He put the light--the smile--into them; a happy smile!--as of one to whom life has been kind. No sign of fear, distress, or cringing poverty--rather an innocent sovereignty, lovely and unashamed. Then the brow, and the curly hair in its brown profusion; and the small neck; and the thin, straight shoulders. He drew in the curve of the shady hat--the knot of lace at the throat--the spare young lines of the breast.
So it emerged; and when it was done, he put it on an easel and sat staring at it, his eyes blind with tears.
Yes, it was Carrie--he had no doubt whatever that it was Carrie.
And behind her, mingling with her image--yet distinct--a veiled, intangible presence, stood Phoebe--Phoebe so like her, and yet so different. But of Phoebe--still--he would not think. It was as when a man, mortally tired, shrinks from some fierce contest of brain and limb, which yet he knows may some day have to be faced. 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. This was the suggestion of the Findon"s solicitor, and Fenwick eagerly endorsed it.
Presently inquiry had been made from every management in London as to the touring companies of the year; confidential agents had been sent to every provincial town that possessed a theatre; long lists of names had been compiled and carefully scanned. Fenwick"s drawing of the girl whom he had seen had been photographed; and some old likenesses of Phoebe and Carrie had been reproduced and attached to it, for the use of Messrs. Butlin"s provincial correspondents. The police were appealed to; the best private detectives to be had were employed.
In vain! The smiling child of seventeen had emerged for that one appearance on the stage of her father"s life, only, it seemed, to vanish again for ever. No trace could be found anywhere of a "Miss Larose," either as a true or a theatrical name; the photographs suggested nothing to those who saw them; or if various hints and clues sometimes seemed to present themselves, they led to no result.
Meanwhile, day after day, Fenwick waited on the post, hurrying for and scanning his letters with feverish, ever-waning hope. Not a sign, not a word from Phoebe. His heart grew fierce. There were moments when he felt something not unlike hatred for this invisible woman, who was still able to lay a ghostly and sinister hand upon his life. And yet, and yet!--suppose, after all, that she were dead?
During these same weeks of torment _The Queen"s Necklace_ was produced; it was a pretentious failure, and after three weeks of difficult existence flickered to an end. The management went into bankruptcy, and the greater part of Fenwick"s payment was irrecoverable. He could hardly now meet his daily living expenses, and there was an execution in his house, put in by the last firm of builders employed.
Close upon this disaster came the opening of his private exhibition.
Grimly, in a kind of dogged abstraction, he went through with it.
He himself, with the help of a lad who was his man-of-all-work in Chelsea, nailed up the draperies, hung the pictures, and issued the invitations for the private view.
About a hundred people came to the private view. His reputation was not yet dead, and there was much curiosity about his circ.u.mstances.
But Fenwick, looking at the scanty crowd, considering the faces that were there and the faces that were not there, knew very well that it could be of no practical a.s.sistance to him. Not a picture sold; and next day there were altogether seven people in the gallery, of whom five were the relations of men to whom he had given gratuitous teaching at one period or other of his career.
And never, alack, in the case of any artist of talent, was there a worse "press" than that which dealt with his pictures on the following morning. The most venomous article of all was the work of a man whom Fenwick had treated with conceit and rudeness in the days of his success. The victim now avenged himself, with the same glee which a literary club throws into the black-balling of some evil tongue--some too harsh and too powerful critic of the moment. "Scamped and empty work," in which "ideas not worth stating" find an expression "not worth criticism." Mannerisms grown to absurdity; faults of early training writ dismally large; vulgarity of conception and carelessness of execution--no stone that could hurt or sting was left unflung, and the note of meditative pity in which the article came to an end, marked the climax of a very neat revenge. After reading it, Fenwick felt himself artistically dead and buried.
A great silence fell upon him. He spoke to no one in the gallery, and he avoided his club. Early in the afternoon he went to Lincoln"s Inn Fields--only to hear from the lawyers that they had done all they could with the new scent, and it was no use pursuing it further. He heard what they had to say in silence, and after leaving their office he visited a shop in the Strand. Just as the light was waning, about seven o"clock on a May evening, he found himself again in his studio.
It was now absolutely bare, save for a few empty easels, a chair or two, and some tattered portfolios. The two men representing the execution were in the dining-room. He could hear the voices of a charwoman and of the lad who had helped him to arrange the gallery, talking in the kitchen.
Fenwick locked himself into the studio. On his way thither he had recoiled, shivering, from the empty desolation of the house. In the general disarray of the ticketed furniture and stripped walls, all artistic charm had disappeared. And he said to himself, with a grim twist of the mouth, that if the house had grown ugly and commonplace, that only made it a better setting for the ugly and commonplace thing which he was about to do.
About half an hour later a boy, looking like the "b.u.t.tons" of a lodging-house, walked up to the side entrance of Fenwick"s ambitious mansion--which possessed a kind of courtyard, and was built round two sides of an oblong. The door was open and the charwoman just inside, so that the boy had no occasion to ring. He carried a parcel carefully wrapped in an old shawl.
"Is this Mr. Fenwick"s?" asked the boy, consulting a dirty sc.r.a.p of paper.
"Aye," said the woman. "Well, who"s it from? isn"t there no note with it?"
The boy replied that there was no note, and his instructions were to leave it.
"But what name am I to say?" the woman called after him as he went down the path.
The boy shook his head.
"Don"t know--give it up!" he said, impudently, and went off whistling.
"Silly lout," said the woman, crossly, and, taking up the package, which was not very large, she went with it to the studio, reflecting as she went that by the feel of it it was an unframed picture, and that if some one would only take away some of the beastly, dusty things that were already in the house--that wouldn"t, so the bailiffs said, fetch a halfpenny--it would be better worth while than bringing new ones where they weren"t wanted.
There was at first no answer to her knock. She tried the door, and wondered to find it locked. But presently she heard Fenwick moving about inside.