A Comedy of Masks Part 10

"I have, as you may know, spoken to Mrs. Sylvester about it, and I believe she will--that is to say, I think she has no personal objection to me."

"Oh, of course, my dear fellow, my mother and I are flattered, quite flattered; but you will understand our anxiety that we should run no risk of sacrificing any of the advantages she has enjoyed hitherto.

May I ask, er----"

"What is my income from all sources?" suggested Lightmark rather flippantly. "Well, I have to confess that my profession, in which I am said to be rising, brings me in about four hundred and fifty a year, in addition to which I have a private income, which amounts to, say, three hundred; total, seven hundred and fifty." Then, seeing that Charles looked grave, he played his trump card: "And I ought to add that my uncle, the Colonel, you know, has been good enough to talk about making me an allowance, on my marrying with his approval. In fact he is, I believe, prepared to make a settlement on my marriage with your sister."

Charles Sylvester p.r.o.nounced himself provisionally satisfied, and it was arranged that he should communicate with Colonel Lightmark, and that meanwhile the engagement should not be made public.

Eve was standing on the little balcony, appertaining to the sitting-room which had been dedicated to the ladies as a special mark of favour by the proprietor of the _pension_, and Lightmark hastened to join her there; and while Charles and his mother played a long game of chess, the two looked out at the line of moonlit Alps, and were sentimentally and absurdly happy.

"Mrs. Sylvester," said Lightmark, when that lady thought it advisable to warn her daughter that there was a cold wind blowing off the lake, "we have arranged that a certain portrait shall figure in the Academy catalogue next spring as 'Portrait of the Artist's Wife.'"

After which Mrs. Sylvester began to call him Richard, and Charles became oppressively genial: a development which led the embarra.s.sed recipient of these honours to console himself by reflecting that, after all, he was not going to marry the entire family.

"_Ma cherie_," said Lady Garnett, as the Paris train steamed out of Lucerne on the afternoon of the next day but one, "do you know that I feel a sensation of positive relief at getting away from those people? Eve is very _gentille_, but lovers are _so_ uninteresting, when they are properly engaged; and the excellent Charles! My child, I am afraid you have been very cruel."

"Cruel, aunt?" said Mary, with a demure look of astonishment. "I like Eve very much, and I suppose Mr. Lightmark must be nice, because he's such a friend of Philip's. But I don't quite like the way he talks about Philip, and ... he's very clever."

"Yes," said the old lady drowsily; "he's cleverer than Philip."

"He may be cleverer, but----" Mary began with some warmth, and paused.

Her companion opened her eyes widely, and darted a keen glance at the girl. Then, settling herself into her corner:

"My dear child, to whom do you say it?"

It was eminently characteristic of Lady Garnett that, even when she was sleepy, she understood what people were going to say long before the words were spoken, and, especially with her familiars, she had a habit of taking her antic.i.p.ations as realized.

Mary found something embarra.s.sing in the humour of the old lady's expression, and devoted herself to gazing out of the window at the mountain-bound landscape, in which houses, trees, and cattle all seemed to be in miniature, until the sound of regular breathing a.s.sured her that the inquisitive eyes were closed.

CHAPTER XII

During the long, hot August, which variously dispersed the rest of their acquaintances, the intimacy of that ill-a.s.sorted couple, the bird of pa.s.sage Rainham, and Oswyn the artist, was able to ripen.

They met occasionally at Brodonowski's, of which dingy restaurant they had now almost a monopoly; for its artistic session had been prorogued, and the "boys" were scattered, departing one by one, as their purses and inclinations prompted, to resume acquaintance with their favourite "bits" in Cornwall, or among the orchards and moors of Brittany, to study mountains in sad Merioneth, or to paint ocean rollers and Irish peasants in ultimate Galway. On the occasion of their second meeting, Rainham having (a trifle diffidently, for the painter was not a questionable man) evinced a curiosity as to his summer movements, Oswyn had scornfully repudiated such a notion.

"Thank G.o.d!" he cried, "I have outworn that mania of searching for prettiness. London is big enough for me. My work is here, and the studies I want are here, and here I stay till the end of all things.

I hate the tame country faces, the aggressive stillness and the silent noise, the sentiment and the sheep of it. Give me the streets and the yellow gas, the roar of the City, smoke, haggard faces, flaming omnibuses, parched London, and the river rolling oilily by the embankment like Styx at night when the lamps shine."

He drew in a breath thirstily, as though the picture were growing on canvas before him.

"Well, if you want river subjects you must come and find them at Blackpool," said Rainham; and Oswyn had replied abruptly that he would.

And he kept his word, not once but many times, dropping down on Rainham suddenly, unexplainedly, after his fashion, as it were from the clouds, in the late afternoon, when the clerks had left. He would chat there for an hour or two in his spasmodic, half-sullen way, in which, however, an increasing cordiality mingled, making, before he retired once more into s.p.a.ce, some colour notes of the yard or the river, or at times a rough sketch, which was never without its terse originality.

Rainham began to look forward to these visits with a recurring pleasure. Oswyn's beautiful genius and Oswyn's savage humours fascinated him, and no less his pleasing, personal ambiguity. He seemed to be a person without antecedents, as he was certainly without present ties. Except that he painted, and so must have a place to paint in, he might have lodged precariously in a doss-house, or on door-steps, or under the Adelphi arches with those outcasts of civilization to whom, in personal appearance, one might not deny he bore a certain resemblance. To no one did he reveal his abiding-place, and it was the merest tradition of little authority that a man from Brodonowski's had once been taken to his studio. By no means a perspicuous man, and to be approached perhaps charily; yet Rainham, as his acquaintance progressed, found himself from time to time brought up with a certain surprise, as he discovered, under all his savage cynicism, his overweening devotion to a depressing theory, a very real vein of refinement, of delicate mundane sensibility, revealed perhaps in a chance phrase or diffidence, or more often in some curiously fine touch to canvas of his rare, audacious brush. The incongruities of the man, his malice, his coa.r.s.eness, his reckless generosity, gave Rainham much food for thought. And, indeed, that parched empty August seemed full of problematical issues; and he had, on matters of more import than the enigmatic mind of a new friend, to be content at last to be tossed to and fro on the winds of vain conjecture.

Lightmark and the Sylvesters occupied him much; but beyond a brief note from Mrs. Sylvester in Lucerne, which told him nothing that he would know, there came to him no news from Switzerland. In the matter of the girl whom he had befriended, recklessly, he told himself at times, difficulties multiplied. A sort of dumb devil seemed to have entered into her, and, with the best will in the world, it was a merely pecuniary a.s.sistance which he could give her, half angry with himself the while that his indolent good nature (it appeared to him little else) forbade him to cast back at her what seemed a curious ingrat.i.tude almost pa.s.sing the proverbial feminine perversity, and let her go her own way as she would have it. On two occasions, since that chance meeting in the Park, he had called at the lodging in which he had helped her to install herself; and from the last he had come away with a distinct sense of failure.

Something had come between them, an alien influence was in the air, and the mystery which surrounded the girl, he saw with disappointment, she would not of her own accord a.s.sist to dissipate.

And yet there was nothing offensive in her att.i.tude, only it had changed, lacked frankness.

One afternoon, finding that he could leave the dock early, he made another effort. He stopped before one in a dingy row of small houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively. A slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for "Mrs. Crichton" by ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in black sat with her head bent over a typewriter. She rose, as he came in, a little nervously, and stood, her thin hands clasped in front of her, looking up at him with expectant, terrified eyes.

"I am sorry to alarm you," he said stiffly. "I came to see if I could do anything for you, and to tell you once more that I can do nothing for you unless you are open with me, unless you help me."

The woman looked away to where the child sat, in a corner of the small room, playing with some disused cotton reels.

"You are very kind, sir," she said in a low, uneasy voice; "but I want nothing, we want very little, the child and I; and with what your kindness in getting me the machine helps us to, we have enough."

"You don't want to be reinstated, to get back your lover, to have your child acknowledged?"

The girl flushed; her hands, which were still locked together, trembled a little.

"I don't want for nothing, sir, except to be left alone."

Then she added, looking him straight in the face now, with a certain rude dignity:

"I wouldn't seem ungrateful, sir, for your great kindness. I think you are the best man I ever met. Oh, believe me, I am not ungrateful, sir! But it is no good, not a sc.r.a.p, though once I thought it. We must get along as we can now, the child and I--shame and all."

She sighed, gazed intently for a silent minute at the keys of the elaborate machine before her, and then continued, speaking very slowly, as if she were afraid of drawing too largely on her newly-found candour.

"Why should I keep it from you? It makes me feel a liar every time I see you. I will be quite plain with you, sir; perhaps the truth's best, though it's hard enough. I've seen him; that's why I couldn't tell you any more. And it's all over and done, and G.o.d help us! We must make the best of it. You see, sir, he is married," said the girl, with a sharp intonation in her voice like a sob.

Rainham had sunk into a chair wearily; he looked up at her now, drawing a long breath, which, for some reason he could not a.n.a.lyse, was replete with relief.

"Married?" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; "are you sure?"

"Sure enough," said Kitty Crichton. "He told me so."

"Do you care for this fellow?" he asked curiously after a while.

The flush on her face had faded into two hectic spots on either cheek; there was a lack of all animation in her voice, whether of hope or indignation; she had the air of a person who gave up, who was terribly tired of things.

"Care?" she echoed. "I don't rightly know, sir; I think it's all dead together--love and anger, and my good looks and all. I care for the child, and I don't want to harry or hunt him down for the sake of what has been,--that's all."

He regarded her with the same disinterested pity which had seized him when he saw her first. There were only ruins of a beauty that must have once been striking. As he watched her a doubt a.s.sailed him, whether, after all, he had not been deceived by a bare resemblance; whether, in effect, she had ever been actually identical with that brilliant Pierrette whose likeness had so amazed him in Lightmark's rooms.

"By the way," he asked suddenly, "you told me you have been a model: did--was this man a painter? Has he ever painted you?"

The girl fell back a step or two irresolutely.

"Ah! why do you trouble so? What does it matter?" Then she added faintly, but hurriedly stumbling over her words:

"He wasn't a painter--only for amus.e.m.e.nt; he didn't exhibit. He was a newspaper writer. But he couldn't get work, and got a place in a foreign-going steamer, to keep accounts, I think. That was afterwards, and that's why I looked for him at your dock. They told me the ship had been there, but it wasn't true. Ah! let me be, sir, let me be!"

She broke off hastily, clasping her hands across her breast.