A Comedy of Masks Part 4

If, however, a word here and there, a trait surprised, indefinable, led him on occasion to doubt of his dominant impression of Lightmark's character, these doubts were never of long duration; and he would dismiss them, barely entertained, even as a sort of disloyalty, to the limbo of stillborn fancies. And so now, with his accustomed generosity, he speedily flung himself into the breach, and did his best to drive the conversation into impersonal and presumably safer channels. He touched on the prospects of the Academy, of academic art, and art in general, and by-and-by, as Oswyn rose to the discussion, he became himself interested, and was actuated less by a wish to make conversation than to draw his new friend out. And as the artist leant forward, grew excited, with his white, lean face working into strange contortions--as he shot out his savage paradoxes, expounding the gospel of the new art a trifle thickly now, and rolling and as rapidly smoking perpetual cigarettes, he found him again strangely attractive.

He had flashes of insight, it seemed to Rainham; there was something in his caustic criticism which led him to believe that he could at another time have justified himself, defended reasonably and sanely a position that was at least tenable.

But the tide of his spleen invariably overtook him, and he abandoned exegesis for tirade. The _bourgeois_, limited scope of the art in vogue--this was the burden of his reiterated rabid attacks; art watered down to suit the public's insipid palate, and he quoted Chamfort furiously: "Combien de sots faut-il pour faire un public?"--the art of simpering prettiness, without root or fruit in life, the art of absolute convention. He ran over a list of successful names with an ever-growing rancour--artistic hacks, the crew of them, the journalists of painting--with a side glance at Lightmark, who sat pulling his flaxen moustache, looking stiff and nervous--he would hang the lot of them to-morrow if he had his way, for corrupters of taste, or, better still, condemn them to perpetual incarceration in the company of their own daubs. These people, in fine, the mutual admiration society of incompetents--where was their justification, where would they be in a decade or so? The hangers-on of the fashionable world, caring for their art as a means of success, of acquiring guineas or a baronetcy or a couple of initials, who dropped the little technique they possessed as soon as they had a competency, and foisted their pictures most on people when they had forgotten how to paint. _Pompiers_, _fumistes_, makers of respectable _pommade_--as the painter's potations increased, his English became less fluent, and he was driven back constantly to the dialect of the Paris _ateliers_, which was more familiar to him than his mother tongue. Ah! how he hated these people and their thread-paper morality, and their sordid conception of art--a prettiness that would sell!

Rainham had heard it all before; it was full of spleen and rancour, unnecessarily violent, and, conceivably, unjust. But what he could not help recognising, in spite of his repulsion, was a certain n.o.bility and singleness in the man, ruin as he was. Virtue came out of him; he had the saving quality of genius, and it was a veritable burning pa.s.sion of perfection, which masqueraded in his spleen. His conception of art for the sake of art only might be erroneous, but it was at least exalted; and the instinct which drove him always for his material directly to life, rejecting nothing as common or unclean--in the violence of his revolt, perhaps dwelling too uniformly on what was fundamentally ugly--might be disputable, but was obviously sincere. The last notion which Rainham took away with him, when they parted late in the evening (Oswyn having suddenly lapsed from the eloquence to the incoherency of drunkenness), was a wish to see more of him. He had given him his card, and he waited until he had seen him place it--after observing it for some moments attentively with lack-l.u.s.tre eyes--in the security of his waistcoat.

And as the two friends walked towards Charing Cross, Rainham observed that he hoped he would call.

"He is a disreputable fellow," said Lightmark a little sullenly, "and an unprofitable acquaintance. You will find it less difficult to persuade him to make you a visit than to finish it." At which Rainham had merely shrugged his shoulders, finding his friend, perhaps for the first time, a little _ba.n.a.l_.

CHAPTER V

A day or two later, as Rainham sat in his river-bound office struggling, by way of luncheon, with the most primitive of chops, his eyes, wandering away from a somewhat mechanic scrutiny of the _Shipping Gazette_, fell upon the shifting calendar on the mantelpiece.

The dial noted Thursday; and he reminded himself that on that day his friend, Lady Garnett, had a perennial habit of being at home to her intimates, on the list of whom Rainham could acknowledge, without undue vanity, his name occurred high. There was a touch of self-reproach in his added reminder that a week had elapsed since his return, and he had not already hastened to clasp the excellent old lady's hand. It was an unprecedented postponement and an infringement of a time-honoured habit; and Rainham had for his habit all the respect of a man who is always indolent and often ill; though it must be admitted that to his clerks, who viewed the trait complacently, and to the importunate Bullen, who resented it, he seemed to be only regular in his irregularity. He decided that at least this occasion should not be allowed to slip; a free afternoon would benefit him. He was always rather lavish of those licenses; and it seemed to him that the tintinnabulation of teacups in Lady Garnett's primrose and gray drawing-room would be a bearable change from the din of a hundred hammers, which had pelted him through the open windows all the morning. They were patching a little wooden barque with copper, and he paused a moment in the yard, leaning on his slim umbrella to admire the brilliant yellow of the renewed sheets, standing out in vivid blots against the tarnished verdigris of the old. To pa.s.s from Blackpool to the West, however, is a tardy process; and when Rainham reached the spruce, little house in one of the most select of the discreet and uniform streets which adjoin Portman Square, he found the clatter of teacups for the most part over. There were, in fact, only two persons in the long room, which, with its open Erard, and its innumerable _bibelots_, and its plenitude of quaint, impossible chairs, seemed quite cosily exiguous. An old lady with a beautiful, refined face and a wealth of white hair, which was still charming to look at, sat in an att.i.tude full of comfortable indolence, with a small pug in her lap, who bounced at Rainham with a bark of friendly recognition. A young lady, at the other side of the room (she was at least young by courtesy), who was pouring out tea, stopped short in this operation to greet the new visitor with a little soft exclamation, in which pleasure and surprise mingled equally. The old lady also looked up smiling. She seemed both good-natured and distinguished, and she had the air--a sort of tired complacency--of a person who has been saying witty things for a whole afternoon, and is at last in the enjoyment of a well-deserved rest. She extended both hands to Rainham, who held them for a minute in his own, silently smiling down at her, before he released them to greet her companion.

She was a tall, pale girl in a black dress, whom at first sight the impartial observer might easily declare to be neither pretty nor young. As a matter of fact, she was younger than she seemed, for she was barely five-and-twenty, although her face and manner belonged to a type which, even in girlhood, already forestalls some of the gravity and reserve that arrive with years. As for her beauty, there were those who disputed it altogether; and yet even when one had gone so far as to declare that Mary Masters was plain, one had, in justice, to add that she possessed none the less a distinct and delicate charm of her own. It was a daisy-like charm differing in kind from the charm of Eve Sylvester, which was that of a violet or a child, perpetually perfuming the air. It could be traced at last--for she had not a good feature--to the possession of a pair of very soft, and shy, brown eyes, and of a voice, simply agreeable in conversation, which burgeoned out in song into the richest contralto imaginable, causing her to be known widely in society as "the Miss Masters who sings." Indeed, she had a wonderful musical talent, which she had cultivated largely. Her playing had even approved itself to the difficult Rubinstein; and, although she had a certain reputation for cleverness, the loss to society when she left the music-stool to mingle in it was generally felt not to be met by a corresponding gain; and, indeed, as a rule, people did not consider her separately. The generality were inclined simply to accept her, in relation to her aunt, Lady Garnett, with whom she had lived since she was a girl of sixteen, as any other of that witty old woman's impedimenta--her pug Mefistofele, or her matchless enamels, or her Watteau fans. As she came towards him now with a cup in her hand, her pale face a little flushed, her dark hair braided very plainly and neatly above her high forehead, Rainham could not help thinking that she would make an adorable old maid.

"You look well, Mary," he remarked, holding her at arms' length critically, with the freedom of an old friend. "You look insultingly well--I hope you don't mean it."

"I am afraid I do," laughed the girl. "I wish I could say as much for you."

Rainham shook his head with burlesque solemnity, and sank down with his fragile cup into the most comfortable of the Louis Quinze chairs which he could select.

"It's delightful to be back again," he remarked, letting his eyes wander round the familiar walls. "I know your things by heart, Lady Garnett; there's not one of them I could spare. Thanks, Mary, no sugar; cream, if you please. After all, I don't know anyone who has such charming rooms. Let me see if there is anything new. Yes, those enamels; introduce me, Mary, please. Yes, they are very nice. By the way, I picked up some old point for you at Genoa, only I have not unpacked it yet. But the Gustave Moreau, where is that? Ah, I see you have shifted it over the piano. Yes, it is exactly the same; you are all precisely the same; it's delightful, such constancy--delightful! I take it as a personal compliment. But where are all the delightful people?"

Lady Garnett smiled placidly.

"The delightful people have gone. To tell you the truth, I am just a little glad, especially as you have dropped in from the clouds, or the Riviera di Ponente--which is it, Philip?"

"To be frank with you, from neither. I have it on my conscience to tell you that I have been back some days. I wanted to come here before."

"Ah well, so long as you have come now!" said the old lady.

"Your knock was mystifying, Philip," put in the girl presently; "we expected n.o.body else but the Sylvesters, and when we heard your solitary step our hearts sank. We thought that Charles Sylvester had taken it into his head to come by himself."

"He is a terrible young man," said Lady Garnett; "he is almost as limited as his mamma, and he takes himself more seriously. When he is with his sister one can tolerate him, but alone----"

She held up her thin wrinkled hands with a little gesture of elision, at which her expressive shoulders a.s.sisted. She was of French extraction, the last survivor of an ill.u.s.trious family; and reconciled as she had become to England--for years she had hardly left London--a slight and very pretty accent, and this trick of her shoulders, remained to remind people that her point of view was still essentially foreign. Rainham, who had from his boyhood found England somewhat a prison-house, adored her for this trait. The quaint old woman, indeed, with her smooth, well-bred voice, her elaborate complexion, her little, dignified incongruities, had always been the greatest solace to him. She had the charm of all rococo things; she represented so much that had pa.s.sed away, exhaling a sort of elegant wickedness to find a parallel to which one had to seek back to the days of the Regency. Of course, in society, she pa.s.sed for being very devout; and, indeed, her little pieties, her unfailing attendance at Ma.s.s on days of Obligation, at the chapel of the French Emba.s.sy hard by, struck Rainham as most edifying. Really he perceived that her devout att.i.tude was purely traditional, a form of good manners. She remained the same wicked, charming old Sadducee as before: her morocco-bound _paroissien_ might appear on festivals and occasions; she still slept as often as not of nights with "Candide" under her pillow.

The knowledge of a certain sentiment which they shared towards the limitations of London (they were both persons strikingly without prejudice) lent a certain piquancy to their old-established relations, an allusive flavour to their conversation--it was always highly seasoned with badinage--that puzzled many of their common acquaintance enormously.

Mary Masters, as a shy and serious maiden, fresh from a country parsonage, remembered well the astonishment, mingled with something not unlike awe, with which she had first heard them talk. Philip Rainham had been calling, as it might be now, when she arrived, and Lady Garnett had promptly introduced him to her as her G.o.dson, because, as she remarked lightly, if he is not, he ought to have been. To which Philip had replied, in a like humour, that it was all the same: if they hadn't that relation, at any rate their behaviour implied it.

It was a novelty in her small and serious experience to find herself in conjunction with such frivolity; she was almost inclined to be shocked. Nevertheless, in the ten years during which she had made her home in Parton Street, Mary Masters had surmounted her awe, if her astonishment still occasionally obtained. Neither her aunt nor Rainham had altered, nor had they grown perceptibly older.

Watching the latter to-day as he sat lolling back lazily, balancing his teacup, she was curiously reminded of her first impression of him; taking stock of her humorously, silently, in almost the same att.i.tude, with the same sad eyes. And since Mary, too, had remained virtually unchanged, it is to the credit of the head of a particularly serious little daughter of the Puritans that she had ended by appreciating them both. In fact, she had discovered that neither of them was so frivolous as it appeared, or, at least, that there were visitors in Parton Street who seemed less frivolous, and whose frivolity shocked her more. Her shy brown eyes were penetrative, and often saw more than one would have imagined, and at last they believed that they had seen through the philosophic indifference of Lady Garnett's shrug, the gentle irony of Rainham's perpetual smile, the various masks of tragic comedians on a stage where there is no prompter, where the footlights are most pitiless, and where the gallery is only too lavish of its cat-calls at the smallest slip. Beneath it all she saw two people who understood each other as well as any two persons in the world. Did they understand each other so well that they could afford to trifle? She had an idea that their silences were eloquent, and that they might well be lavish of the crudity of speech. Oh, they pretended very well! The young girl found something admirable in the hard, polished surface which her aunt presented to the world: her rouge and her diamonds, her little bird-like air of living only in the present, of being intensely interested, of having no regrets--a manner to which Rainham responded so fluently with an a.s.sumption that she was right, that things were an excellent joke. After all, perhaps they pretended too much; at least, she found herself often, when they were present, falling away into reveries full of conjecture, from which, as happened now, she only awoke with a slight blush to find herself directly addressed.

"Wake up, Mary! we are talking of the Sylvesters. I was telling Philip that his little friend Eve has become entirely charming."

"Yes," said Mary slowly; "she is charming, certainly. Haven't you seen her, Philip? You used to be constantly there."

Rainham a.s.sumed the air of reflection.

"Really, I believe I used, when Eve was in short frocks, and Charles conspicuously absent. Like Lady Garnett, I find the barrister exhausting. He is very unlike his father."

"We are going to Switzerland with them this summer, you know, Philip? Will you join us?"

"Ah!" he put his cup down, not responding for a moment. "It would be delightful, but I am afraid impossible. You see, there's the dock; I have been away from it six months, and I shall have to repeat the process when the fogs begin. No, Lady Garnett, I won't be tempted."

She began to press him, and they fenced rapidly for some minutes, laughing. Rainham had just been induced to promise that he would at least consider the proposition, when the footman announced Mr. and Miss Sylvester. They came in a moment later; and while the barrister, a tall well-dressed man, with the shaven upper lip and neat whisker of his cla.s.s, and a back which seemed to bend with difficulty, explained to Lady Garnett that his mother was suffering too much from neuralgia to come with them, Rainham resumed his acquaintance with the young girl. He had seen little of her during the past two years, and in the last of them, in which she had changed most, he had not seen her at all. It was with a slight shock, then, that he realized how completely she had grown up. He remembered her in so many phases of childhood and little girlhood, ranging up from a time when her speech was incoherent, and she had sat on his knee and played with his watch, to the more recent occasions when he had met her riding in the Park with her brother; and she had waved her little whip to him, looking particularly slim and pretty in the very trying costume which fashion prescribes for little girls who ride.

They had always been very good friends; she had been a most engaging little companion, and really, he reflected, he had been extremely fond of her. It gave him a distinct pain to reflect that their relation had, in the nature of things, come to an end. Gradually, as they talked, the young girl growing out of the first restraint of her shyness, and falling back into something of her old manner, the first painful impression of her entire strangeness left Rainham. In spite of her mature, little society air, her engaging attempts at worldliness, she was, after all, not so grown-up as she seemed. The child gleamed out here and there quite daintily, and as he indulged in reminiscence, and reminded her of some of their more remote adventures, her merriment found utterance very childishly.

"Our most tragical encounter, though, was with the monkey. Have you forgotten that? It was on one of your birthdays--you had a good many of them in Florence--I forget which it was. You must have been about ten. I had taken you to the Zoological Gardens, such as they were."

Her laughter rippled out softly again.

"I remember," she nodded, "it was dreadful."

"Yes," he said; "we were at the monkey-cage; you had grown tired of feeding the ostrich with _centesimi_."

"Oh, Philip!" she interrupted him; "I never, _never_ would have done such a thing. It was you who used to give the poor bird _centesimi_.

I only used to watch."

"Ah, you connived at it, anyhow," he went on. "Well, we were feeding the monkeys, this time with melon-seeds, when we somehow aroused the ire of a particularly ugly brute, who must have been distantly connected with a bull. Anyhow, he made a grab at the scarlet _berret_ you were wearing, just missed your hair, and demolished the cap."

"I remember," she laughed. "You tied your handkerchief round my head, like an old peasant woman, and took me back in a carriage. And mamma was dreadfully angry about the cap, because she had bought it at Biarritz, and couldn't replace it in Italy. She thought you ought to have taken steps to get it back."

"Dear me!" said Rainham solemnly, "why didn't I think of it before?

I wonder if it's too late to do anything now."

The girl's laughter broke out again, this time attracting the attention of her brother, who was discussing the projected travels, with the aid of Bradshaw, at Mary Masters' side. He glanced at them askance, pulling at his collar in his stiff, nervous fashion a little uneasily.

"What a long time ago all that seems, Philip!" she remarked after a while.

He was silent for a moment examining his finger-nails intently.

"Yes," he said rather sadly; "I suppose it does. I dare say you wouldn't care much for the Zoo now?"

"Oh, I shouldn't mind," she said gaily, "if you will take me."

But a move had been made opposite, and Charles Sylvester, coming up to them, overheard this last remark.

"I think we must be off," he said, consulting his watch. "Where is Rainham going to take you?"