A Comedy of Masks Part 40

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

In the empty studio, from which, for one night, most of her husband's impedimenta had been removed to allow place for the long supper-table, which glistened faintly in the pale electric light, she paused only long enough to wrap her fantastic person in the dark cloak which she had caught up on her way.

Then she let herself out quietly by the private door into the road.

And she stood still a moment, blotted against the shadows, hesitating, vaguely considering her next step.

The honey-coloured moon, casting its strange, silken glamour over the white house, over the black outline of the trees in the garden, spangled here and there with j.a.panese lanterns, gave an air of immense unreality to the scene; and the tremulous notes of the violins, which floated faintly down to her from the half-opened windows of the ball-room, only heightened this effect, seeming just then to be no more than the music of moonbeams to which the fairies dance.

For a moment a sudden weakness and timidity overcame her. In a world so transcendently unreal--had not she just seen her happiness become the very dream of a shadow?--was it not the merest futility to take a step so definite, to be pa.s.sionate or intense? Better rather to rest for a little in this vague world of half-lights into which she had stepped, under the cooling stars, and then to return and take up one's old place in the masque.

But her fantasy pa.s.sed. In the distance two glowing orbs of a hansom came slowly towards her, and her purpose grew suddenly very strong.

The man reined in his horse with an inquiring glance at the hooded figure on the pavement, seeking a fare. And it was without hesitation that she engaged him, giving him the number of Oswyn's house in Frith Street, Soho, in her calm, well-bred voice, and bidding him be quick.

But the horse was incapable--tired, perhaps (she recalled the fact long afterwards, and the very shape and colour of the bony, ill-groomed animal, as one remembers trivial details upon occasions of great import); and after a while she resigned herself to a tedious drive.

As they rattled along confusedly through the crowded streets she caught from time to time the reflection of her own face in the two little mirrors at each side, and wondered to find herself the same.

For she did not deceive herself, nor undervalue the crushing force of the blow which she had received.

To her husband, when she turned scornfully from his clumsy evasions--for a moment, perhaps, to herself--she had justified the singular course she was taking by an overwhelming necessity of immediately facing the truth, in which, perhaps, there still lurked the dim possibility of explanation whereby her husband's vileness might find the shadow of an excuse.

But with further reflection--and she was reflecting with pa.s.sionate intensity--this little glow-worm of hope expired. The truth! She knew it already--had known before, almost instinctively--that Philip Rainham's justification could only be the warrant of her husband's guilt; no corroboration of Oswyn's could make that dreary fact any plainer than it was already.

No, it was hardly the truth which she desired so much as an act of tardy expiation which she would make. For with the bitterness of her conviction that, for all her wealth, and her beauty, and her youth, she had, none the less, irretrievably thrown away her life, there mingled an immense contrition at having been so blind and hard, so culpably unjust to the most generous of men, who had deliberately effaced himself for her good.

And the exceeding bitterness of her self-reproach, which alone saved her composure, forbidding the mockery of tears, was only exaggerated when she remembered how vain her remorse must remain. It mattered no jot that she was sorry, since death had sealed their estrangement ironically for all time.

In her pa.s.sionate recognition of his constant justice and kindness, which of old, vainly striving to perpetuate the fading illusion of her husband's honour (her generosity did not pause to remember how vain these efforts had been), she had discounted for hypocrisy, she felt that no price of personal suffering would have been too heavy if only for one hour, one moment, she could have recalled him from the world of shadows to her side.

She could figure to herself, refining on her misery, his att.i.tude in such a case: the half sad, half jesting rea.s.surance of his gravely pardoning eyes.

They haunted her just then, those eyes of Philip Rainham, which had been to the last so ambiguous and so sad, and were now perpetually closed.

And for the first time a suspicion flashed across her mind, which, while it made her heart flutter like a frightened bird, seemed to her the one drop hitherto lacking in the cup of her unhappiness.

Had, then, after all, that gentle indifference of her friend masked an immense hunger, a deeply-felt need of personal tenderness, which she might have supplied--ah, how gladly!--if she had known? Could he have cared more deeply than people knew?

She reminded herself the next moment, as they came to a sudden standstill before a dark-green door, how idle all such questions were--vain beating of the hands against the shut door of death!

She alighted and dismissed her cab, and in the interval which elapsed before her ring was answered by a slovenly little servant, who gaped visibly at the lady's hurried request that her name should be taken up to Mr. Oswyn, she had leisure for the first time to realize the strangeness of her course.

Her mother, Charles, her guests--Felicia Dollond and the rest--how would they consider the adventure if ever they should know? It was easy to imagine their att.i.tude of shocked disapproval, and her brother's disgusted repudiation of the whole business as a thing, most emphatically, which one did not do. Ah, no! it was not a departure such as this that a well-bred society Spartan could even decently contemplate! And it was almost with a laugh, devoid, indeed, of merriment, that Eve tossed consideration of these scruples contemptuously away.

At last she was in revolt against their world and the pedantry of its little inflexible laws; and all her old traditions had become odious to her, seeming, for the moment, deeply tainted with dishonour, and partly the cause of her disastrous plight. A great, ruining wave had broken over her life, and in her pa.s.sionate helplessness she cried only for some firm and absolute sh.o.r.e, else the silence of the engulfing waters, not for the vain ropes of social convention with which they would drag her back into the perilous security from which she had been swept; and she had forgotten everything but her imperative need, which had brought her there, when the lodging-house drudge returned and ushered her clumsily into Oswyn's presence.

It was a sitting-room on the second floor which the artist occupied, by no means an uncomfortable apartment, though Eve's first impression of it was immeasurably sordid, and she realized, with a touch of pity, that the painter's difficult genius had no tact of application to his surroundings.

Had, then, the painter of "Thanatos the Peacebearer"--that incomparable work!--no personal taste, to be violated by the crude wall-paper and the vulgar vases, containing impossible flowers, which jostled against broken tobacco-pipes and a half empty bottle of milk on the mantelpiece?

There was an immense untidiness everywhere; a disorder of children's toys and torn picture-books would have prepared Eve for the discovery of a sleeping child with brilliant hair coiled up in a rug on the sofa, if her eyes had not been arrested by an unframed canvas on an easel, the only picture, save some worthless prints in common gilt frames, which was visible. It was the head of Philip Rainham, immortalized by the brush of his friend, which awaited her--the eyes already closed, the pale lips still smiling with that superbly ironical smile of the dead.

She had not greeted Oswyn on her entrance, and now she had ceased to remember that he was there, as she stood contemplating the portrait with her rapt and sorrowful gaze, while Oswyn, leaning across the table, implicitly accepting the situation, which had to him all the naturalness of the unexpected, considered her in his turn.

He had never before seen her to such advantage, and, remembering that early presentment of her which Lightmark had exhibited in the Grosvenor, he realized how much she had developed. The singular n.o.bility and purity of her beauty amazed him; it shone out like the starry night; and, standing there remote and silent (in her abstraction she had let her cloak slide to the ground, revealing her white arms, her fanciful, incongruous attire), she seemed, indeed, a creature of another world.

When she turned to him at last there was an immense and solemn entreaty in her eyes for candour and directness, an appeal to be spared no bitter knowledge that he might possess--for the whole truth.

"Tell me," she began slowly, calmly, though he was not ignorant that her composure was the result of an immense inward effort. "I can't explain why I have come to you--perhaps you yourself can explain that better than I. I don't know what you may think of me--I am too unhappy to care. I have no claim upon you. I only entreat you to answer me a question which perhaps no one now living can answer but you. Ah!"--she broke off with a gesture of sudden pa.s.sion--"I have been so cruelly kept in the dark."

Oswyn lowered his eyes for a moment, considering. A curious wave of reminiscence swept over him, giving to this strange juxtaposition the last touch of completion.

He remembered Rainham's long reticence, and his unburdening himself at the last, in a conviction that there would be a season when the truth would be best. And he said to himself that this time had come.

"Mrs. Lightmark," he said at last, in a low, constrained voice, "I promise to answer any question that is within my knowledge."

"It is about my--my husband and Philip Rainham. What pa.s.sed between them in the autumn of last year? Who was that woman?"

He did not reply for a moment; but unconsciously his eyes met hers full, and in their brief encounter it was possible that many truths were silently told. Presently she continued:

"You need not tell me, Mr. Oswyn. I can see your answer as plainly as if you had spoken. It is my husband----"

She broke off sharply, let her beautiful head droop with a movement of deep prostration upon her hands.

"What have I done, what have I done," she moaned, "that this dishonour should come to me?"

It was a long time before she looked up at him.

"Why did he do it?" she whispered.

"Have you never guessed?" he asked in his turn. "I will tell you, Mrs. Lightmark. I was with him when he was dying. He wished you to know; he had some such time as this in his mind. It was a sort of message."

"He wished me to know--a sort of message," she repeated blankly. "He spoke of me, then--he forgave me for my hard judgement, for knowing him so ill?"

"It was himself that he did not forgive for not having guarded you better, for having been deceived by your husband. He spoke of you to me very fully at the last when we both saw that his death was merely a question of days. I saw then what I had sometimes suspected before, that you had absorbed his whole life, that his devotion to you was a kind of religion."

"He loved me?" she asked at last, in a hushed, strange voice, white to the lips.

Oswyn bowed his head.

"Ever since you were a child. It was very beautiful, and it was with him at the last as a light. Don't reproach yourself; it was to prevent that that he wished you to be told."

"To prevent it!" she cried, with tragical scorn. "Am I not to reproach myself that I was hard and callous and cold; that I never understood nor cared; that I was not with him? Not reproach myself?

Oh, Philip, Philip!" she called, breaking down utterly, laying her face in her hands.

Oswyn averted his eyes, giving her pa.s.sion time to appease itself.

When he glanced at her again, she had gathered her cloak round her, was standing by the picture from which she seemed loath to remove her eyes.

"You gave him great happiness," he suggested gently, "in the only manner in which it was possible. Remember only that. He must in any case have died."