A Comedy of Masks Part 24

"You must find that sort of thing rather a tax?" he asked tentatively, after a description which struck him as unnecessarily exuberant of a hospitality in the summer.

"Oh, it pays in the long run," remarked the other easily, "to keep open house and go everywhere. Thank Heaven, the uncle is liberal! I admit we have been going at rather a pace lately. But, then, I can knock off a couple of pictures as soon as I have a little time, which will raise the wind again. I know what the public wants, bless it!"

Rainham shrugged his shoulders rather wearily.

"Poor public! If it wants art made in that spirit, it is worse than I believed."

Lightmark looked askance at him, frowning a little, pulling at his long moustache. He was absorbed for some time--they had turned into the Edgware Road, and the soft rain had begun again--in ineffectual pursuit of cabs. When at last he had caught a driver's eye, and they had settled themselves on the cushions of a hansom, he turned abruptly to his companion to ask him if he had seen the Academy before it closed.

"You recognised your domain?" he asked lightly, when the other had responded in the affirmative--"in my picture, I mean?"

He spoke quickly, in his accustomed blithe habit; it might have been merely a morbid fancy of Rainham's which traced a note of anxiety, of concealed uneasiness, in his accent, that the bare question scarcely justified.

Rainham paused a moment: it was not only a pa.s.sing thought of Oswyn's acrimony, and of the difficult minutes during which he had been thrown across Lightmark at the Dock, that constrained him; it was rather the recollection of his own careful scrutiny of the disputed canvas, when he had at last dragged himself with a disagreeable sense of moral responsibility into Burlington House, and had come away at last strangely dissatisfied. Acquitting d.i.c.k of any conscious plagiarism, of a breach of common honesty, he was disagreeably filled with a sense of the work's immeasurable inferiority to Oswyn's ruined masterpiece. It was clever, and audacious, and striking; it had had the fortune to be splendidly hung, and that was all, for all his goodwill, he could say. And since, after all, that was so little, would strike his friend as but a cold tribute after the panegyrics of the morning papers, he preferred to say nothing, deftly dropping the subject, and responding to the first half of his friend's question alone.

"My domain, d.i.c.k? Ah, I forgot; you can hardly have heard that it is my domain no longer--or ceases to be very shortly. That has come to an end; I have sold it."

Lightmark whistled softly.

"Well, you surprise me! Of course I am glad; we will be glad too. We shall see more of you now, I suppose? or will you live abroad?"

"Abroad?" echoed Rainham absently. "Oh, yes, very probably. But tell me, how is--Eve?"

"As we seem to be arriving, I think I will let her tell you herself."

They descended, and Rainham waited silently while his friend discharged the cabman, and let him in with his latch-key into the bright, s.p.a.cious hall. Then, after glancing into the empty drawing-room, Lightmark preceded him up the thick carpeted stairs, on which their footsteps scarcely sounded, and stopped at the door of Eve's boudoir, through which a woman's voice, speaking rather rapidly, and, as it struck him, in a key of agitation, fell upon Rainham's ear with a certain familiarity, though he was sure it was not Eve's, and could not remember when or where he might have heard it. After a moment they went in.

CHAPTER XXIII

There are occasions when thought is terribly and comprehensively sudden: the rudimentary processes of reasoning, by a.n.a.logy and syllogism, so slow and so laborious, turn to divination. We have an occult vision, immediate and complete, into the obscure manner of life, and crowd an infinity of discovery into a very few seconds. It was so with Philip Rainham now. Lightmark had scarcely closed the door, against which he now stood in a black silence, with the air of a man turned to stone; Rainham's eyes had only fallen once upon the two figures on the sofa--Eve crushed in a corner, a sorrowful, dainty shape in the silk and lace of her pretty tea-gown, with the white drawn face of a scared child; Kitty Crichton, in her cloak and hat, bending forward a little, the hectic flush of strong excitement colouring her checks, that were already branded by her malady--when he underwent a moral revolution. He had no more to learn. He glanced at Lightmark curiously, almost impartially, his loathing strangely tempered by a sort of self-contempt, that he should have been so deluded. The clumsy lies which this man had told him, and which he in his indolent charity had believed! All at once, and finally, in a flash of brutal illumination, he saw Lightmark, who had once been his friend, as he really was, naked and unclean. It stripped him of all his superficial qualities; the mask of genial good-nature, the air of good-fellowship, under which his gross egoism lay concealed that it might be more securely mischievous when it went loose. His amiability was an imposture, a dangerous harlequinade; the man was bad. It was a plausible scoundrel, a vulgar profligate with a handsome face and a few cheap talents--had he not been reduced to stealing the picture of his friend?--whom these two women had loved, to whom one of them was married. Ah, the sting of it lay there! Good or bad, he was Eve's husband, and she was his wife, bound to him until the end. And then, for the first time, seeing her there, helpless and terrified, in her forlorn prettiness, he deceived himself no longer, wrapped up his tenderness for the woman, his angry pity for her misery that was coming, in no false terms. Such self-deception, honest as it had been, was no longer possible. He knew now that he loved her, and all that his love had been--the very salt and savour of life to him, the one delicious and adorable pain relieving the gray _ennui_ of the rest of it, to remain with him always (even, as it seemed now, in the very article of death) as a reminder of the intolerable sweetness which life, under other conditions, might have contained. And inexplicably, in the midst of his desolation, his heart sang a sort of fierce paean: as a woman, delivered of a man-child, goes triumphing to meet the sordidness of death, so was there in Rainham's rapid acceptance of his fruitless and ineffectual love a distinct sense of victory, in which pain expired--victory over the meanness and triviality of modern life, which could never seem quite mean and trivial again, since he had proved it to be capable of such moments; had looked once--and could so sing his "Nunc Dimittis"--upon the face of love. And it all happened in a second, and in a further second--for his thought, quickened by the emergency, still leapt forward with incredible swiftness--a great audacity seized Philip Rainham, to save the beloved woman pain. The devil would be at him later, would beset him, hara.s.s him, madden him with hint and opportunity of profiting by Lightmark's forfeiture. But the devil's turn was not yet; he was filled only with his great and reverent love, his sublime pity for the little tragical figure in front of him, whose house of painted cards tumbled. Well! he might save it for her for a little longer--at least, there was one desperate chance which he would try.

He had lived too long, unconsciously, in the habit of seeking her happiness, that it should fail him now in her evil hour, in the first flush of his new consciousness (ah, yes, there was beauty in that, and victory!), for any base personal thought or animosity against the man. He would have given her so easily his life; should he grudge her his reputation? The reputation of a man with one foot in the grave--what did it matter? And it all came about in a few seconds.

Before any one of that strange company had found time to speak, Rainham had grasped the situation, knew himself at last and the others, and was prepared, scarcely counting the cost, with his splendid lie. He made a step forward, then stopped suddenly, as if he were bracing himself for a moral conflict. His face was very white and rigid, his mouth set firmly; and the other three watched him with a strange expectancy depicted on all their countenances, amidst the various emotions proper to each of them; for he alone had the air of being master of the situation. And his resolve had need to be very keen, for just then Eve did a thing which might have wrecked it. She rose and came straight towards him; her pretty, distressed face was raised to his, still, in spite of its womanly anguish, with some of the pleading of a frightened child, who runs instinctively in its extremity to the person whom it knows best; and she gave him her two little trembling hands, which he held for a moment silently.

"Philip," she said, in a low, constrained voice--"Philip, I have known you all my life--longer than anyone. You were always good to me. Tell me whether it's true or not what this woman has told me.

Philip, I shall die if this be true!"

He bent his head for a moment. He had a wild longing to give up, simply to clasp her in his arms and console her with kisses and incoherent words of tenderness, as he had done years ago, when she was a very small child, and ran to him with her tear-stained cheeks, after a difficulty with her governess. But he only put her away from him very quietly and sadly.

"It is not true," he said quietly, "if it is anything against your husband."

The girl on the sofa, Kitty Crichton, rose; she made a step forward irresolutely, seemed on the point of speaking, but something in Rainham's eyes coerced her, and Eve was crying. He continued very fast and low, as though he told with difficulty some shameful story, learnt by rote.

"I tell you it is not true. Lightmark," he added sternly, "there has been a mistake--you see that--for which I apologize. Wake up, for G.o.d's sake! Come and see after your wife; some slander has upset her. This woman is--mine; I will take her away."

The girl trembled violently; she appeared fascinated, terrified into a pa.s.sive obedience by Rainham's imperious eyes, which burnt in his white face like the eyes of a dying man. She followed, half unconsciously, his beckoning hand. But Eve confronted her before she reached the door.

"Whom am I to believe?" she cried scornfully. "Why did you say it?

What was the good of it--a lie like that? It is a lie, I suppose?"

"Yes, yes!" said the girl hysterically, "it seems so. Oh, let me go, madam! I'm sorry I told you. I'll trouble n.o.body much longer. Call it a lie."

She threw out her hands helplessly; she would have fallen, but Rainham caught her wrist, drew her toward him, supporting her with an arm.

"Come," he said firmly, "this is no place for us."

Eve regarded them all strangely, vaguely, the terror gradually dying out of her eyes--Lightmark expressionless and silent, as he had been all through the interview; the woman trembling on Rainham's arm, who stood beside her with his downcast eyes, the picture of conscious guilt. A curious anguish too pale to be indignation plucked at her heart-strings--anguish in which, unaccountably, the false charge against her husband was scarcely considered; that had become altogether remote and unreal, something barely historical, fading already away in the dim shadows of the past. What hurt her, with a dull pain which she could not a.n.a.lyse, was the sudden tarnishing of a scarcely-admitted ideal by Rainham's deliberate confession, making life appear for the moment intolerably sordid and mean. Would she have owned to herself that, with an almost unconscious instinct, she had judged these two men all along by a different standard? Hardly: she loved her husband, and her marriage had not yet dissipated the memory of those golden days of illusion preceding it, in which her love had been of a finer kind. Only that time, in which it would have been impossible for her to judge him, in which he could only do right in her eyes, was gone. Occasions had arrived when they had inevitably to differ, on which the girl had gently acquiesced--if not without a touch of scorn--in his action, but had not felt obliged to accept his point of view. There had been times when her pride had suffered--for underneath her childish exterior, her air of being just a dainty little figure of Watteau, she had a very sensitive and delicate pride of her own--and then, if she had succeeded in forgiving Lightmark, it had not been without an effort which had made it difficult for her to pardon herself. Sometimes, though she would scarcely have confessed it, her husband's mere approbativeness had almost shocked her. It was good, no doubt, to be popular, harmless even, to care for popularity--at least, one's traditions declared nothing to the contrary; but to care so exorbitantly as Lightmark appeared to do, to sacrifice so much to one's enthusiasm for pleasing inferior people--people whom, behind their backs, one was quite ready to tear to pieces, allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue--in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure.

Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much: not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion. And yet, now and again, when the rush and ostentation of their new life, with its monotony of dinners and dances--so little like that which she had antic.i.p.ated as the future lot of a painter's wife--had left her rather weary, a trifle sad, she had thought suddenly of her old friend Philip Rainham, and the thought had solaced her. There is a sort of pleasure, even when one is married to the most amiable of husbands, and is getting quite old--very nearly twenty--in turning from time to time to a person who has known one in the very shortest of frocks, and whose intimate connection with chocolates and "treats" is among one's earliest traditions. She made no contrasts; and yet when occasionally on one of those afternoons--there seemed to be so many of them--when she was "at home," when her bright, large drawing-room was fullest, and she was distracted to find herself confusing, amidst the clatter of teacups, dear Mrs.

Henderson, who painted wild-flowers so cleverly, with dear Lady Lorimer, who was going on the stage, she looked up and saw Rainham hovering in the near distance, or sitting with his teacup balanced in one long white hand as he turned a politely tolerant ear to the small talk of a neighbour, she felt strangely rested. Trouble or confusion might come, she told herself, and how suddenly all these charming people, who were so surprisingly alike, and whose names were so exasperatingly different, would disappear. Dear Mrs.

Henderson and dear Lady Lorimer, and that odious Mrs. Dollond--what was she saying to d.i.c.k now which had to be spoken with an air of such exaggerated intimacy in so discreet an undertone?--how swiftly they would all be gone, like the snows of last year! Only Philip Rainham, she was sure, would be there still, a little older, perhaps, with the air of being a little more tired of things, but inwardly the same, unalterably loyal and certain. The prospect was curiously sustaining, the more in that she had no tangible cause of uneasiness, was an extremely happy woman--it was so that she would have most frequently described herself--only growing at times a little weary of the fashionable tread-mill, and the daily routine of not particularly n.o.ble interests which it involved. Catching his eyes sometimes, as he sat there, looking out idly, indifferently, upon it all--this success which was the breath of life to d.i.c.k--she found him somewhat admirable; disdainful, fastidious, reserved--beneath his surface good-humour, his constant kindness, he could scarcely be a happy man. In flashes of sudden grat.i.tude, she would have been glad often to have done something for him, had there been anything in the world to do. And then she laughed at herself for such a vain imagination. Had it not been his proper charm all along that he was a man for whom one could do nothing? precisely, because he wanted nothing, was so genuinely indifferent to anything that life could offer? And now all that was at an end; by his own confession he had finished it, admitting himself, with a frankness almost brutal, a man like other men, only with pa.s.sions more sordid, and a temper more unscrupulous, in that he had ruined this wretched woman, whose coming there had left a trail of vileness over her own life.

"Ah, yes, go!" she said, after a while, answering Rainham's exclamation. "For pity's sake, go!"

Rainham bowed his head, obeyed her; as the door closed behind them he could hear that she cried softly, and that Lightmark, his silence at last broken, consoled her with inaudible words.

CHAPTER XXIV

Rainham turned at random out of Grove Road, walking aimlessly, and very fast, without considering direction. He had pa.s.sed the girl's arm through his own as they left the house; and in a sort of stupefied obedience she had submitted. To her, too, one way was the same as another, as dreary and as vain. With Rainham, indeed, after the tension of the last few minutes, into which he had crowded such a wealth of suffering and of illumination, a curious stupor had succeeded. For the moment he neither thought nor suffered: simply, it was good to be out there, in the darkness--the darkness of London--after that immense plunge, which was still too near him, that he should attempt to appreciate it in all its relations.

By-and-by would be the season of reckoning, the just and delicate a.n.a.lysis, by nicely critical nature, of all that he had deliberately lost, when he might run desperately before the whips of his own thought; now he felt only the lethargy which succeeds strenuous action, that has been, in a measure, victorious; the physical well-being of walking rapidly, vaguely, through the comfortable shadows, allowing the cold rain to pelt refreshingly upon his face and aching temples. And it was not until they had gone so through several streets, whose names were a blank to him, that Rainham bethought him, with a touch of self-reproach, of his companion, and how ill her thin garments and slender figure were calculated to suffer the downpour, which he only found consoling. He drew her into the shelter of a doorway, signalled to a pa.s.sing cab; and just then, the light of an adjacent street lamp falling upon her face, he realized for the first time in its sunken outline the progress of her malady.

"I beg your pardon," he said gently; "I did not understand that you were ill. You must tell me where you are lodging, and I will take you back." Then, as though he antic.i.p.ated her hesitation, a tribute to her old ambiguity, become so useless, he added dryly: "You can tell me your address; you have no reason to hide yourself now."

She glanced up at him furtively, shrinking back a little as though she feared his irony.

"I live in Charlotte Street, No. --. But pray let me go alone, sir!

It will not be your way."

"I have rooms in Bloomsbury," he answered. "It will be entirely on my way."

And the girl made no further protest, when he handed her into the cab, an inconvenient four-wheeler which had responded to his signal, and, after giving the driver the address which she had indicated, took his place silently beside her. Perhaps something of Rainham's own lethargy had infected her, after a scene so feverish; or perhaps she could not but feel dimly, and in a manner not to be a.n.a.lysed, how that, distant and apart as they two seemed, yet within the last hour, by Rainham's action, between her life and his a subtile, invisible chord had been stretched, so that the order of her going might well rest with him.

She cast furtive glances at him from time to time as he sat back, obscure in his corner, gazing out with eyes which saw nothing at the blurred gas-lamps, and the red flashes of the more rapid vehicles which outstripped them. And now that the first stupefying effect of his intervention was wearing away--it seemed like a mad scene in a theatre, or some monstrous dream, so surprising and unreal--her primitive consciousness awoke, and set her wondering, inquiring, with bewilderment that was akin to terror, into the motives and bearing of their joint conduct. It had seemed to her natural enough then, as do the most grotesque of our sleeping visions when they are pa.s.sing; but now that she was awake, relieved from the coercion of his eyes, she was roundly amazed at her own complicity in so stupendous a fiction. What had he made her do? Why had he taken this sin of another's on his own shoulders? Eve's piteous cry of "Philip!" at his entry recurred to her--the intimate nature of her appeal. The scent was promising; but it opened out vistas of a loyalty too fantastic and generous to be true. Her mature cynicism of a girl of the people, disillusioned and abused, flouted the idea.

Did she not know "gentlemen" and the nature of their love? The girl was hardened by ill-usage, bitter from long brooding over her shame. She was glad when he turned to her at last, breaking a silence which the sullen roar of London outside and beyond them, the dreary rattling of the cab, seemed only to heighten, with a sudden gesture of despair.

"If I had only known! If you had only told me two years ago!"

The suppressed pa.s.sion in his voice, his air, terrified the girl.

She bent forward trembling.

"Ah! what have I done, what have I done?" she moaned. "How did I know that it would all come like this? I meant no harm, sir. He persuaded me to deceive you after I had found out who he really was, to put you off the scent, keeping his name a secret. He said he had a right to ask that. He told me he was married, though he wasn't then. And afterwards he made me move, when you were abroad: he wanted my address not to be known. That was the condition he made of his seeing after the child; he swore he would provide for her then, and bring her up like a lady. And he sent me the money for a bit pretty regular. Oh, it was only for her sake, I promise you that! I wouldn't have touched a bra.s.s farthing for myself. But, after all, she _was_ his child. And then, somehow or other, the money didn't come. He went away--he was away all the summer--and he said he had so many calls on him, such expenses."

"Ah, the scoundrel!" cried Rainham, between his set teeth.