A Comedy of Masks Part 12

"I hope they will be happy," he answered absently. She arched her expressive brows, and he coloured, recollected himself. "I beg your pardon," he said hastily; "I confess I was thinking of something else. You were talking of Mary; why should it not do? Does she care about him?"

His companion laughed, and her laugh had more than its wonted suggestion of irony.

"My dear Philip, for a clever man you can be singularly dense! Care for him! of course she does not."

"She might do worse," he said; "Sylvester is not very bright, but he works hard, and will succeed after a fashion. His limitations dovetail conveniently with his capacities. What do you intend to do?"

"Do I ever interfere in these things? My dear, you are remarkably dull to-night. I never make marriages, nor prevent them. With all my faults, match-making is not one of them. I think too ill of life to try and arrange it. You must admit," she added, "that, long as I have known you, I have never tried to marry you?"

"Ah, that would have been too fatuous!" he remarked lightly.

They were both silent for a while, regarding each other disinterestedly; they appeared to be following a train of thought which led no whither; presently Lady Garnett asked:

"Are you going abroad this year?"

"Yes," he said, "as soon as I can--about the middle of October; to Mentone or Bordighera, I suppose."

"Do you find them interesting? Do they do you much good?"

He smiled rather listlessly, ignoring her second question.

"I confess," he said, "it becomes rather a bore. But, I suppose, at my time of life one finds nothing very interesting. The mere act of living becomes rather a bore after a time."

"I wonder what you are thinking about, Philip?" she asked meditatively; "something has annoyed you to-night; I wonder if you are going to tell me."

He laughed.

"Do we ever tell each other our annoyances? I think we sit and look at each other, and discover them. That is much more appropriate."

"You take things too seriously," she went on; "my dear, they are really not worth it. That is my settled conviction."

She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of laughter"--a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic--in the decent drapery of her fict.i.tious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her expressive eyebrows.

"You are wonderful," he exclaimed, after an interval, "wonderful; that was what I was thinking."

She smiled disinterestedly.

"Because you don't understand me? My dear, nothing is so easy as mystification; that is why I don't return the compliment. Yourself, you know, are not very intelligible to-night."

He looked away frowning, but without embarra.s.sment; presently throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he remarked:

"I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can't. I am unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find Mary."

"Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary yet; smoke another cigarette."

He took one and lit it, absently, in the blue flame of the spirit-lamp, and she watched him closely with her bright, curious eyes.

"You know this Mr. Lightmark very well, don't you, Philip?"

"Intimately," he answered, nodding.

"You must be pleased," she said. "It is a great match for him, a struggling artist. Can he paint, by the way?"

"He has great talent." He held his cigarette away from him, considered the ash critically. "Yes, he can certainly paint. I suppose it is a good thing--and for Eve, too. Why should it not be?"

"He is a charming young man"--she spoke judicially--"charming! But in effect Mary was quite right; she generally is--he is not sincere."

"I think you are wrong," said Rainham after a moment. "I should be sorry to believe you were not, for the little girl's sake. And I have known him a long time; he is a good fellow at bottom."

"Ah!" cried Lady Garnett with a little, quick gesture of her right hand, "that is precisely what he is not. He exaggerates; he must be very secret; no one ever was so frank as he seems to be."

"Why are you saying all this to me?" the other asked after a moment.

"You know I should be very sorry; but what can I do? it's arranged."

"I think you might have prevented it, if you had cared; but, as you say, it is too late now."

"There was no way possible in which I could have prevented it," he said slowly, after an interval which seemed to strike them both as ponderous.

"That was an admission I wanted," she flashed back. "You _would_ have prevented it--you would have given worlds to have prevented it."

His retort came as quickly, accented by a smile:

"Not a halfpenny. I make no admissions; and I have not the faintest idea of what you are driving at. I am a pure spectator. To quote yourself, I don't make marriages, nor mar them; I think too ill of life."

"Ah no!" she said; "it is that you are too indolent; you disappoint me."

"It is you, dear lady, who are inconsistent," he cried, laughing.

"No, you disappoint me," she resumed; "seriously, my dear, I am dissatisfied with you. You will not a.s.sert yourself; you do nothing; you have done nothing. There never was a man who made less of his life."

He protested laughingly:

"I have had no time; I have been looking after my lungs."

"Ah, you are incorrigible," she exclaimed, rising; "let us go and find Mary. I give you up; or, rather, I give myself up, as an adviser. For, after all, you are right--there is nothing worth doing in this bad world except looking after one's lung, or whatever it may be."

"Perhaps not even that," said Philip, as he followed her from the room; "even that, after a time, becomes monotonous."

CHAPTER XIV

It occurred to Lightmark one evening, as he groped through the gloom of his studio, on his way to bed, after a.s.sisting at a very charming social gathering at the Sylvesters', that as soon as he was married he would have to cut Brodonowski's. The reasons he gave himself were plausible enough, and, indeed, he would have found himself the only Benedict among this horde of wild bachelors. The informal circle was of such recent a.s.sociation that, so far, no precedent for matrimony had occurred, and it was more than doubtful how the experiment might be received. In any case, he told himself, he could not be expected to introduce people like Oswyn and McAllister to his wife--or, rather, to Mrs. Sylvester's daughter. Oswyn was plainly impossible, and McAllister's devotion to tobacco so inordinate that it had come to be a matter of common belief that he smoked short pipes in his sleep.

Then he had dismissed the subject; the long, pleasant holiday in Switzerland intervened, and it was only on his return, late in the autumn, that the question again presented itself, as he turned from the threshold of the house in Park Street, where he had been dining, and half unconsciously took the familiar short cut towards Turk Street. He paused for a deliberate instant when he had hailed the first pa.s.sing hansom, and then told the man to drive to Piccadilly Circus.

"I _must_ go there a few times more, if only to break it off gently,"