A Comedy of Masks Part 23

Mary flushed, locking her hands together nervously, with a trace of pa.s.sion.

"It was ridiculous! intolerable! He had no right----!"

Lady Garnett bent forward, taking her hand.

"Forgive me, _cherie_! I did not mean to annoy you.... You can imagine how glad we were to see you," she added, with a sudden turn to Rainham. "It was charming of you to call so soon; you could hardly have expected to find us."

"You must not give me too much credit. I happened to be quite near, in Harley Street. I could not pa.s.s without inquiring."

"Ah, well," she said, "since you are here----"

She was looking absently away from him into an antique, silver basket which lay on the little table by her side, in which were miscellaneous trifles, odd pieces of lace, thimbles which she never used, a broken fan, a box of chocolates.

"Mary, my dear," she said quickly, "I am so stupid! The old _bonbonniere_, with the brilliants? I must have left it on my dressing-table, or somewhere. That new housemaid--we really know nothing about her--it would be such a temptation. Would you mind----"

"Is this----" Rainham began, and stopped short.

Lady Garnett's brilliant eyes, and a little admonitory gesture of one hand, restrained him. When the girl had shut the door behind her, the elder lady turned to him with a quaint smile.

"Is that it? Of course it is, my friend. You are singularly obtuse: a woman would have seen through me at once."

"I beg your pardon," said Rainham, somewhat mystified. "You mean it was a pretext?"

"It was for you that I made it," she replied with dignity. "What was it you came to say?"

The other was silent for a moment, cogitating. When he looked up at last, meeting her eyes, it was with something like a shiver, in a tone of genuine dismay, that he remarked:

"Dear lady, there are times when you terrify me. You see too much.

It is not--no, it is not human. I had meant to tell you nothing."

He stopped short, lowering his voice, and looking from the depths of his low chair into the red fire.

"It is not necessary, Philip," she continued presently, "that you should tell me; only, if you will be so secret, you should wear smoked gla.s.ses. Your eyes were so speaking that I was afraid--yes, afraid--when you came into the room. They looked haunted; they had the air of having seen a ghost!"

"It was a very respectable ghost," he said grimly, "with a frock-coat and a bald head. You know Sir Egbert, I suppose?"

"Only by name. I imagined that he was your spectre, when you spoke of Harley Street. Does he send you South again?"

"No," said Rainham shortly; "he thinks it would be inexpedient--that was his phrase, inexpedient--in an hotel, you know, and all that....

I was obliged to him, because in any case it would have been inconvenient to me to be abroad this year. I suppose, though, that if it would have done me any good I should have gone; but I have a great deal to arrange."

He went on composedly to tell her of the most important of these arrangements--the disposal of his business. He had systematically neglected it for years, he explained, and it had ended by going to the dogs. So long as his foreman was there, that had not mattered so much; but Bullen had decided to desert him, and very wisely. He had accepted an offer to manage the works of a firm of North-Country shipbuilders; he was to shake the dust of Blackpool from off his feet in a very few months, and would probably make his fortune. And as he himself was not equal to bearing his incubus alone, he had put it in the market. A brand new company had bought it--that is to say, they had made him an offer--a ridiculously inadequate one, he was told, but which he was determined to accept; at any rate, it would leave him enough, when everything was paid, to live upon, for the rest of his life. The legal preliminaries were now being settled: they appeared to be interminable; but as in the meantime the dock-gates were shut, and the clerks had departed, he could not, so far as he saw, be losing money; that was a consolation.

He had not come to the end of his disquisition before he discovered that he spoke to deaf ears. The old lady for once was inattentive: she had sat screening her face from the fire with a large palm fan while he unburdened himself, and she began now with a certain hesitation:

"My pretext, Philip! When I said that I made it for you it was only half true. In effect, my dear, I had something to tell you--something disagreeable."

"Concerning me?" he asked.

"Certainly," she said--"something I have heard."

He looked vaguely across at her, finding her obscurity a little strained, waiting for her to speak. The silence that intervened was beginning to hara.s.s him, when she said suddenly:

"I will be quite plain. I think you ought to know. There is a scandal abroad about you--about you and some woman."

"Some woman!" he repeated blankly. "What woman?" He leant back in his chair, laughing his pleasant, low laugh. "I am sorry," he said, "I can't be as seriously annoyed as I ought; it is too foolish. My conscience really does not help me to discover her--this woman. Do you know any more?"

She shook her head.

"It is not a nice story," she said. "No, I have heard no name; only the story is current. I have heard it from three sources. I thought you had better know of it."

"Thank you," he answered, rising to go. "Yes, it is a thing one may as well know. It is very kind of them, these people, to take such trouble, to be sufficiently interested. Upon my honour, I do not know that I very much care. After all, what does it matter?"

"Nothing to me," said Lady Garnett, with a little shrug of disdain--"nothing, _Dieu me pardonne_! even if it were true."

"Well, good-bye," he said.

As he held her hand for a moment between his own he thought it trembled slightly.

"Ah, no!" she said quickly; "it is a phrase I decline. Come and see me soon. I am an old woman, my friend, and I have outlived my generation. I have said too many good-byes in my time. It is _au revoir_."

"With all my heart," he said, smiling. "_Au revoir_."

Her quaint intimation--that was the manner in which he characterized it--was already dismissed from his mind when he emerged into the street.

He had too many graver preoccupations to be greatly troubled by this grotesque slander. Going on his way, however--a temporary cessation of the soft, persistent rain which had been falling for most of the day suggested a walk--a chance recollection brought him to a sudden stop, changing his indifference for a moment into the shadow of pale indignation. How dull of him not to have guessed at once! it must be that unfortunate girl, Kitty Crichton, with whom busybodies were a.s.sociating his name. He wondered how they had discovered her, and by whom the stupid story had been set afloat. The baselessness of the scandal, conjoined with his immense apathy just then as to anything more that the malice of men could do, inclined him to amus.e.m.e.nt, the more so as he reflected how many months it was since the girl and her wretched history had pa.s.sed from his ken. He had found her gone on his return from Italy in the spring, leaving no address and but the briefest acknowledgment of his good-will in a note, which stated that she had no longer any excuse for imposing on his kindness--had found friends. The letter closed, as he imagined, a painful history, which, since his service had been, after all, so fruitless, he could see ended with relief. To his interpretation, the girl had recovered her scoundrel journalist, or at least compelled him to contribute to her support; and after all, as it seemed, he had not done with her yet, though the fashion of her return was ghostly and immaterial enough. The subject galled him; there were always dim possibilities lurking in the background of it which he refused to contemplate; he dismissed it. His meditation had carried him through the bustle of Oxford Street to the Marble Arch, and, the weather still encouraging him, he decided to turn into the Park. Many rainy days had made the air exceedingly soft, and in his enjoyment of this unusual quality, and of the strangely sweet odour of the wet earth and mildewing leaves, he forgot for a while a certain momentous sentence of Sir Egbert Rome's, which had jingled in his head all that afternoon. Presently it tripped him up again, like the gross melody of a music-hall song, and caused him to drop absently upon the first seat, quite unconscious that it was in an unwholesome condition of moisture. He had turned his back on the brilliant patches of yellow and copper-coloured chrysanthemums on the flower-plots facing Park Lane, and he looked westwards over a wider expanse of gra.s.s and trees: the gra.s.s bestrewed with bright autumnal leaves, the trees obscured and formless, in a rising white mist, through which a pale sun struggled and was vanquished. He had never been in a fitter mood to appreciate the decay of the year, and suddenly he was seized, in the midst of his depression, with an immense thrill, almost causing him to throw out his arms with an embracing gesture to the autumn, the very personal charm, the mysterious and pitiful fascination of the season whose visible beauty seems to include all spiritual things. It cast a spell over him of a long mental silence, as one might say, in which all definite thought expired, from which he aroused himself at last with a shrug of self-contempt, to find inexplicable tears in his eyes.

And just then an interruption came, not altogether unwelcome, in the greeting of a familiar voice. It was Lightmark, who had discovered him in the course of a rapid walk down the Row, and had crossed over the small patch of intervening gra.s.s to make his salutations.

"I knew you by your back," he remarked, after they had shaken hands--"the ineffable languor of it; and, besides, who else but you would sit for choice on an October evening in such a wretched place?"

He looked down ruefully at his patent leather shoes, which the damp gra.s.s had dulled.

Rainham smiled vaguely; he needed an effort to pull himself together, to collect his energies sufficiently to meet the commonplace of conversation, after the curious detachment into which he had fallen; and he wondered aimlessly how long he had been there.

"I suppose, like everyone else, d.i.c.k," he remarked after a while, "it is the weather which has brought you home at such an unfashionable date."

"Yes," answered Lightmark; "it was very poor fun yachting. I shall stay in town altogether next year, I think. And you--you are not looking particularly fit; what have you done with yourself?"

"Oh, I am fit enough," said Rainham lightly; "I have been in London, you see."

"Well, I can't let you go now you are here. Won't you dine with us?

Or rather--no, I believe we dine out. Come back and have some tea; Eve will be enchanted. I really decline to sit in that puddle."

Rainham rose slowly.

"Perhaps I will," he said. "I would have called before, if I had thought there was the least chance of finding you. And how do things go?"

As they strolled along through the deserted Park, and Lightmark entertained his friend with an extravagant narration of their miseries on the _Lucifer_, the chronic sea-sickness of the ladies, the incapacity and intoxication of the steward, and the discontent of everybody on board--he spoke as if they had entertained a considerable party--Rainham's interested eyes had leisure to note a change in him, not altogether unexpected. He presented the same handsome, well-dressed, prosperous figure; and yet prosperity had in some degree coa.r.s.ened him. The old charm of his boyish carelessness had been succeeded by a certain hard a.s.surance, an air of mundane, if not almost commercial shrewdness, which gave him less the note of an artist than of a successful man of business. And where the old Lightmark, the Lightmark of the Cafe Grecco days, broke out at times, it was less pleasantly than of old, in a curious recklessness, a tendency, which jarred on Rainham's susceptible nerves, to dilate with a vanity which would have been vulgar, had it not been almost childish, on his lavish living, the magnitude of his expenditure.