A Comedy of Masks Part 18

"The Chamber of---- Do you mean the R.A.? You do, you most irreverent of mortals! No, I have not been yet. Will you go with me?"

"Heaven forbid! I have been once."

"You have? And they didn't scalp you?"

"I didn't stay long enough, I suppose. I only went to see one picture--Lightmark's."

"Ah, that's just what I want to see! And you know I still have a weakness for the show. I expect you would like the new Salon better."

"There are good things there," said Oswyn tersely, "and a great many abominations as well. I was over in Paris last week."

Rainham glanced at him over his cup with a certain surprise.

"I didn't know you ever went there now," he remarked.

"No, I never go if I can help it. I hate Paris; it is _triste_ as a well, and full of ghosts. Ghosts! It's a city of the dead. But I had a picture there this time, and I went to look at it."

"In the new Salon?"

"In the new Salon. It was a little gray, dusky thing, three foot by two, and their flaming miles of canvas murdered it. I am not a scene-painter," he went on a little savagely. "I don't paint with a broom, and I have no ambition to do the sun, or an eruption of Vesuvius. So I doubt if I shall exhibit there again until the vogue alters. Oh, they are clever enough, those fellows! even the trickiest of them can draw, which is the last thing they learn here, and one or two are men of genius. But I should dearly like to set them down, _en plein air_ too, if they insist upon it, with the palette of Velasquez. I went out and wandered in the Morgue afterwards, and I confess its scheme of colour rested my eyes."

"Do I know your picture?" asked Rainham to change the subject, finding him a little grim. "Is it the thing you were doing here?"

Oswyn's head rested on one thin, colour-stained hand which shaded his eyes.

"No," he said with a suggestion of constraint, "it was an old sketch which I had worked up--not the thing you knew. I shall not finish that----"

"Not finish it!" cried Rainham. "But of course you must! why, it was superb; it promised a masterpiece!"

"To tell you the truth," said Oswyn, "I can't finish it. I have painted it out."

Rainham glanced at him with an air of consternation, of reproach.

"My dear fellow," he said, "you are impossible! What in the world possessed you to do such a mad thing?"

The painter hesitated a moment, looking at him irresolutely beneath his heavy, knitted brows.

"I meant to tell you," he said, after a while; "but on the whole I think I would rather not. It is rather an unpleasant subject, Rainham, and if you don't mind we will change it."

Oswyn had risen from his chair, with his wonted restlessness, and was gazing out upon the lazy, evening life of the great river. The monotonous accompaniment to their conversation, which had been so long sustained by the drip and splash outside, had grown intermittent, and now all but ceased; while a faint tinge of yellowish white upon the ripples, and a feathery rift in the gray dome of sky, announced a final effort on the part of the setting sun.

The yard door swung noisily on its hinges, and a light step and voice became audible, and the sound of familiar conference with the dockman. Rainham lifted his head inquiringly, and Oswyn, shrugging his shoulders, left the window and regained his seat, picking up his sketch on the way.

"Yes," he said in answer to a more direct inquiry on the other's part, "I think it was Lightmark."

Almost as he spoke there was a step on the stair, followed by a boisterous knock at the door, and d.i.c.k entered effusively.

"Well, _mon vieux_, how goes it? Why, you're all in the dark! They didn't tell me you were engaged.... Oh, is that you, Oswyn? How do you do?"

"Quite an unexpected pleasure?" suggested Oswyn sardonically, nodding over his shoulder at the new-comer from his seat by the fire.

Rainham's greeting had been far more cordial, and he still held his friend's hand between his own, gazing inquiringly into his face as if he wished to read something there.

"Yes, I am back, you see," he said presently, when d.i.c.k had found himself a chair. "I have been here two days, and I was just beginning to think of looking you up. I was very sorry to miss you at Bordighera. How is Eve? It's very good of you to come all this way to see me; you must be pretty busy."

"Oh, Eve is tremendously well! Thanks, no, I won't have any tea, but you might give me a whisky-and-soda. I had to come down into these wilds to look at a yacht which we think of taking for the summer.

Quite a small one," he added half apologetically, as he detected the faint, amused surprise in the other's expression; "and as I found myself here, with a few minutes to spare before my train goes, I thought I would look in on the off chance of finding you. How is business just now? The dock didn't strike me as looking much like work as I came in. Pretty stagnant, eh?"

Rainham shook his head.

"Oh, it's much as usual--perhaps a little more so! Bullen continues to threaten me with bankruptcy, but I am getting used to it.

Threatened men live long, you know."

"Oh, you're all right!" answered d.i.c.k genially. "As long as Bullen looks after you, you won't come to grief."

While the two were thus occupied in reuniting the chain of old a.s.sociations, Oswyn had been silently, almost surrept.i.tiously, preparing for departure; and he now came forward awkwardly, with his hat in one hand and the tools of his trade under his arm.

"May I leave some of these things, here, or will they be in your way?"

"But you're not going?" said Rainham, rising from his seat with a constraining gesture; "why, don't you remember we were going to dine together? d.i.c.k will stay too, _n'est ce pas_? It will be like old times. Mrs. Bullen has been preparing quite a feast, I a.s.sure you!"

Oswyn paused irresolutely.

"Don't let me drive you away," said d.i.c.k. "In any case I'm going myself in a few minutes. Yes," he added, turning to Rainham, "I'm very sorry, but I've got to take my wife out to dinner, and I shall have to catch a train in, let me see, about ten minutes."

"Really? Well, then, clearly you must sit down again, Oswyn; I won't be left alone at any price. That's right. Now, d.i.c.k, tell me what you have been doing, and especially all about your Academy picture; I haven't seen even a critique of it. Of course it's a success? Have you sold it?"

"Oh, spare my modesty!" protested Lightmark somewhat clumsily, with a quick glance at Oswyn. "It's all right, but we mustn't talk shop."

"Yes, for G.o.d's sake spare his modesty!" supplemented the other painter almost brutally. "Look at his blushes. It isn't so bad as all that, Lightmark."

"I don't even know the subject," pursued Rainham. "You might at least tell me what it was. Was it the canvas which you wouldn't show me, just before I went away--at the studio? The one about which you made such a mystery----?"

"Oh bosh, old man!" interrupted d.i.c.k hurriedly, "I never made any mystery. It--it wasn't that. It's quite an ordinary subject, one of the river scenes which I sketched here. You had better go and see it. And come and see us. You know the address. I must be off!"

"Wait a minute," interposed Oswyn, with a cadence in his voice which struck Rainham as the signal of something surpa.s.sing his wonted eccentricity. "Don't go yet. I said just now, Rainham, that I wouldn't tell you why I had painted out that picture, the picture which I had been fool enough to talk about so much, which I had intended to make a masterpiece. Well, I have changed my mind. I think you ought to know. Perhaps you would prefer to tell him?" he added, turning savagely to Lightmark, and speaking fast and loud with the curious muscular tremor which betokens difficult restraint.

"No? Of course you will have the impudence to pretend that the conception was yours. Yes, curse you! you are quite capable of swearing that it was all yours--subject and treatment too.... But you can't deny that you heard me talking of the thing night after night at the club, when I have no doubt you hadn't even begun on your b.a.s.t.a.r.d imitation. One of the pictures of the year as they call it, as you and your d.a.m.ned crew of flatterers and critics call it...."

He stopped for breath, clutching at the table with one hand and letting the other, which had been upraised in denunciation, fall at his side. He had meant to be calm, to limit himself strictly to an explanation; but in the face of his wrong and the wrong-doer the man's pa.s.sionate nature had broken loose. Now, when he already half repented of the violence with which he had profaned the house of his friend, his eyes fell upon Rainham, and he felt abashed before the expression of pain which he had called into the other's face.

"I don't know what all this means," said Rainham wearily, turning from Oswyn to d.i.c.k as he spoke; "but surely it is all wrong? Be quiet, d.i.c.k; you needn't say anything. If Oswyn is accusing you of plagiarism, of stealing his ideas, I can't believe it. I can't believe you meant to wrong him. The same thing must have occurred to both of you. Why, Oswyn, surely you see that? You have both been painting here, and you were both struck in the same way. Nothing could be simpler."

Now Lightmark seemed to a.s.sume a more confident att.i.tude, to become more like himself; and he was about to break the chain of silence, which had held him almost voiceless throughout Oswyn's attack, when Rainham again interrupted him.

"I am sure you needn't say anything, d.i.c.k. We all know Oswyn; he--he wasn't serious. Go and catch your train, and forget all about it."

The first words which Rainham spoke recalled to Oswyn the powerful reason which had determined him to preserve his old neutrality, and to make an offering of silence upon the altar of his regard for the only man with whom he could feel that he had something in common. If his vengeance could have vented itself upon a single victim, it would have fallen, strong and sure; but it was clear to his calmer self that this could not be; the consequences would be too far-reaching, and might even recoil upon himself. After all, what did it matter? There was a certain luxury in submission to injustice, a pleasure in watching the bolt of Nemesis descend when his hands were guiltless of the launching. And as he struggled with himself, hunting in retrospect for some excuse for what his pa.s.sion railed at as weakness, a last straw fell into the scale, for he thought of the faded portrait in the cigarette-case.