At Lady Day, when the negotiations for the sale of his unprofitable riverside domain were finally concluded, Rainham scarcely regretted to find that an ample margin had been left before the new company took possession; and he had still several months, during which he might remain in occupation of his old habitation, and arrange leisurely for the subsequent disposition of his books and more intimate personal chattels. The dilapidated old house was to be pulled down by the new owners (the plans for an extensive warehouse, to be erected on the site of it, were already in the hands of the builders), and this also was a fact from which Rainham derived a certain satisfaction.
Insensibly, the spot had discovered a charm for him: the few rooms, which had been his for so long, although, actually, so small a proportion of his days had been spent in them, had gradually taken the impress of his personality—the faded carpets, the familiar grouping of pictures and books, the very shape of the apartment, and the discoloured paper on the walls, expressed him in a way that certainly no other abiding place, which might conceivably await him, could ever do. And he took a dreary pleasure in the consideration that, after he had gone, the rooms would know no other occupant; that from the glazed and barred windows of the dreary building, which was to take the place of the quaint old house, when it was levelled to the ground, no person would ever gaze out, exactly as he had done, at the white and melancholy river; in which, as he said to himself fantastically, he had cast, one by one, as the days lengthened, his interests, his passions, his desires.
Years before, by an accident of inheritance, he had come into the property with an immense antipathy:—a white elephant that would bring him neither profit nor honour, but which the modest competence that he had previously enjoyed did not allow him to refuse. It had altered the tenor of his existence, destroyed his youth and his ambitions, and represented for many years, more completely than anything else, the element of failure which had run through his life.
And, after all, now that deliverance was at hand, he was by no means jubilant. In escaping from this thraldom of so many years, he felt something of the chagrin with which a man witnesses the removal of some long-cherished and inveterate grievance; the more so, in that he could now remind himself impartially how small it had been, how little, after all, he had allowed it to weigh upon him. In effect, had he not always done very much as he liked, lived half his time abroad in his preferred places, chosen his own friends, and followed his own tastes without greatly considering his inherited occupation? He must look deeper than that, he reflected, within himself, or into the nature of things themselves, actually to seize and define that curious flaw which had made life seem to him at last (from what wearied psychologist, read long ago and half forgotten, did he cull the phrase?) "a long disease of the spirit."
For appreciations of this kind, he had, nowadays, ample leisure; and unprofitable as it appeared (he did not even pretend to himself that it would lead anywhere, since what faint illumination he might strike from it could only refer to the past), he was seldom tired of searching for them.
A hard March, cited generally as the coldest within the memory of a generation, following a winter of fog and rain, had made him an inveterate prisoner within the four walls of his apartment. He had, indeed, the run of others at this time, for the Bullens had left him (at the last there had been no question of little Margot's appropriation; Rainham had taken it so serenely for granted that she would remain with him), but this was a privilege of which he did not avail himself. And the place, stripped of all its commercial attributes, had fallen into an immense desuetude, to which the charm of silence, and of a deeper solitude than it had ever possessed before, was attached.
The dock gates were finally closed; a hard frost of many days' duration had almost hermetically sealed them, and the drip of Thames water through the sluices formed immediately into long, fantastic stalactites of clear ice. Rainham found it difficult to believe, at times, that the bustle of the wharves, the roar of maritime London, still went on at his elbows, the deserted yard cast such a panoply of silence round him. It was as though he had fallen suddenly from the midst of men into some wholly abandoned region, a land of perpetual snows. It symbolized well for him the fantastic separation which he had suffered from the rest of the world; so that, but for the painter Oswyn, who was a constant visitor, and had, indeed, since the departure of the Bullens, a room set apart for him in the house, he might have been already dead and buried, and his old life would not have seemed more remote. And if he found the atmosphere of Blackpool, more often than not, to be of soothing quality, or at least a harmonious setting to the long and aimless course of introspection on which he had embarked, there were also times when it had a certain terror for him.
It came upon him in the evening, as a rule, when Margot had been carried away to bed by the hard-featured old woman who had succeeded Mrs. Bullen in the superintendence of his household; for the child, with her sweet, shrill voice and her infantile chatter, had come to seem to him far more even than Oswyn, about whom there would always lurk something shadowy and unreal, a last link with the living; when the tide was nearly out, so that the stillness was not even broken by the long, lugubrious syren of a passing steamer, his isolation was borne in upon him with something of the sting of sharp, physical pain.
The dark old room, with its mildewing wainscot, became full of ghosts; and he could fancy that the spirits of his ancestors were returned from the other side of Styx to finger the pages of bygone ledgers, and to mock from between the shadows of his incongruous bookshelves, at their degenerate descendant. And these did but give place, amid strange creaking and contortions of the decaying walls, to spectres more intimate, whose reprobation moved him more: the faces of many persons whom he had known forming themselves, with extraordinary vividness, out of the darkness, and in the red embers of the fire, and each adding its item of particular scorn to the round accusation of futility brought by the rest. They were part of his introspection, all those—he was not sick enough to hold them real—but nevertheless they gave him food for much vigilant thought, which came back always to the great interest of his life. Futility! Did she too, the beloved woman, point an accusing finger, casting back at him a sacrifice which, certainly, in his then disability seemed to him vain enough? For all his goodwill, had he gained any more for her than a short respite, the temporal reconstruction of a fading illusion?—and at what a price! The irony of things was just then so present to him that he could readily believe he had done no more than that—enough merely to embitter her knowledge when it should finally come. And an old saying of Lady Garnett's returned to him, which, at the time, he had disputed; but which struck him now with the sharp stab of an intimate truth. "You could have prevented it, had you wished." Yes, he might have prevented it, if only he had foreseen; the wise old woman had not made a mistake. And yet he had wished to prevent it, in a manner, only his colder second thoughts—he made no allowance now for their generous intention—had found propriety in the match, and his long habit of spectatorship had made the personal effort, which interference would have involved, impossible.
Harking back scrupulously to the remote days of Eve's girlhood, his morbid recollection collected a variety of scattered threads, of dispersed signs and tokens, which led him to ask at last, with a gathering dread, whether he had not made a mistake, must not plead guilty to a charge of malingering, or, at least, of intellectual cowardice in acquiescing so supinely in defeat?
Was it true, then, that a man found in life very much what he brought to the search?
Certainly, the world was full of persons who had been broken on the wheel for their proper audacity, because they had sought so much more than was to be found; but might it not be equally true that one could err on the other side, expect, desire too little, less even than was there, and so reap finally, as he had done, in an immense lassitude and disgust of all things, born neither of satiety nor of disappointment, the full measure of one's reward? Perhaps success in the difficult art of life depended, almost as much as in the plastic arts, upon conviction, upon the personal enthusiasm which one brought to bear upon its conduct, and was never really compatible with that attitude of half-disdainful toleration which he had so early acquired.
Yet that was a confession of failure he was loath to make, or admit that he had been too much afraid of high passions and great affairs, had been fastidious and reserved only to dissipate his life on whims and small interests—those seemed to him now too great refusals to be contemplated without regret. His depression had reached its lowest pitch when he had asked himself whether in love, as in life, his error might not have been the same; and his passion, like the rest, a thing without conviction, and thereby foredoomed to fail. And it was a sensible alleviation of his mood when he could answer this question finally with a firm negative.
Certainly, his vain desire for her personal presence, for the consolation of her voice and eyes, was with him always, like the ache of physical hunger or thirst—the one thing real in a world of shadows.
Reaching this point one night, and relapsing, as was his wont, into a vaguer mood of reminiscence, not wholly unpleasant, which the darkness of the quiet room, lit only by the fire of logs, turned at last into drowsiness, he looked up presently, with a sudden start, to find Oswyn standing over him.
"I am sorry," said the painter; "I am afraid I have awaked you. The room was so dark that I imagined you had gone to bed. I came to warm myself before turning in."
Rainham shifted his chair a little, and watched the other as he extended his thin, nervous hands to the glow.
"Don't apologize," he said; "I haven't so many visitors that I can afford to miss the best of them. Besides, I was only half asleep, or half awake, as you like to look at it."
"Oh, look at it!" cried Oswyn. "My dear fellow, I don't, and won't."
He pointed his words, which Rainham found meaningless enough, with an impatient dig of his rusty boot against the fragrant wood, and his friend considered him curiously in the light of the blaze which his gesture had provoked.
"Is there anything wrong?" he asked. "More wrong than usual, I mean."
"As you like to look at it," echoed the other; "a mare's nest—a discovery of the blessed public—oh, but a discovery! Two or three clever young newspaper men, with a tip from Paris to help them, have made a discovery; they have unearthed a disreputable painting genius, one Oswyn, and found the inevitable Jew of culture—you know the type, all nose and shekels—to finance their boom. Oh, it's genuine! I have Mosenthal's letter in my pocket—it was handed me by McAllister—offering his gallery, the pick of Bond Street. Oswyn's Exhibition, with expurgations and reservations, of course, but an exhibition! Don't you congratulate me?"
Rainham glanced up at him, smiling; at last he said whimsically:
"If you don't want me to, of course I won't. Butaprès, where's the harm?"
"Ah, they don't understand," cried the other quickly, acridly. "They don't understand."
He had drawn his chair beside Rainham, and sat with his large, uncouth head propped on one hand, and the latter could perceive that his mouth was twisted with vague irony and some subtile emotion which eluded him.
"You are the great paradox!" he sighed at last. "For Heaven's sake, be reasonable! It is a chance, whoever makes it, and you mustn't miss it, for the sake of a few—the just, the pure, the discreet, who do know good work—as well as for your own. After all, we are not all gross, and fatuous, and vulgar; there are some of us who know, who care, who make fine distinctions. Consider us!"
"Consider you?" cried the other quickly. "Ah,mon gros, don'tI—more than anything?"
Then he continued in a lighter key:
"However, I don't refuse; you take me too literally. It was the last bitter cry of my spleen. I have put myself in Mosenthal's hands; I've sold him two pictures."
"In that case, then, why am I not to be glad?"
"Oh, it's success!" said Oswyn. He glanced contemptuously at his frayed shirt-cuff, with the broad stains of paint upon it. "Be glad, if you like; I am glad in a way. God knows, I have arrears to make up with the flesh-pots of Egypt. And I have paid my price for it. Oh, I have damnably paid my price!"
Rainham shrugged his shoulders absently.
"Yes, one pays," he agreed—"one pays, some time or other, to the last penny."
His friend rose, pushed his chair back impatiently: he had the air of suppressing some fierce emotion, of anxiously seeking self-control. At last he moved over to the black square of window, and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at nothing, at the frosty fantasies which had collected on the glass.
"If it had come ten years ago," he said in a low, constrained voice, "ten years ago, in Paris…. Oh, man, man!" he went on bitterly, "if you could know, if you could dimly imagine the horrors, the mad, furious horrors, the things I have seen and suffered, since then."
He pulled himself up sharply, and concluded with a little mirthless laugh, as though he were ashamed of his outburst.
"You would consume a great deal of raw spirit, to take the taste out of your mouth. And my 'Medusa' is to hang for the future in Mr. Mosenthal's dining-room! Will he understand her, do you think?"
Rainham was silent, wondering at his friend's departure from his wonted reticence, which, however, scarcely surprised him. He had never sought to penetrate the dark background, against which the painter's solitary figure stood. He was content to accept him as he was, asking no questions, and hardly forming, even in his own mind, conjectures as to what his previous history and relations might have been. He was not ignorant, indeed, that he was a man who had been in dark places; it had always seemed possible to account for him on the theory that he lived on the memory of an inextinguishable sorrow.
And now this possibility had received corroboration from his own words, shedding a new light, in which both his character and his genius became more intelligible. He had only stood out of the shadows which obscured him for one instant; but that instant had been enough.
And Rainham did not find the occasion less valuable, nor the impression which he had received less pitiful, because he believed it to be ultimate and unique; his friend would make no vain, elaborate confidences; he would simply step back into his old obscurity, leaving Rainham with the memory of that instructive cry which had been wrung from him by the irony of tardy recognition, when he had seen him luridly standing over the wreck of his honour and of his life. And with his pity there came to him a fresh sense of the greatness of the painter's work. His genius, so full of suffering, and of the sense of an almost fiendish cruelty in things, was, simply, his life, his experience, his remorse.
With the hand of a master, with the finest technique, which made his work admirable even to persons who misinterpreted or were revolted by its conception, he rendered the things he had known, so that his art was nothing so much as an expression of his personal pain in life.
In the light of this vision into the bottom of Oswyn's soul, Rainham's own pain seemed suddenly shallow and remote; he had gazed for a moment upon a blacker desolation than any which he could know. He felt a new, a tolerant sympathy towards his friend, and it struck him, not for the first time, but with an increased force, as he reminded himself how his days were bounded, that they had many things which they had still to say, things which must certainly be said.
In the same room one afternoon a fortnight later, Oswyn sat, absently correcting the draft catalogue of his exhibition, when he received an intimation, which for some days he had expected—his friend felt strong enough to see him. He put down his pen, glancing up inquiringly at the bearer of this message, a young woman in the neat, depressing garb of a professional nurse; but for answer she slightly shook her head with the disinterested complacency of the woman used to sickness, who would encourage no false notions.
"It is only temporary," she said with deliberation. "I fear there has been no real improvement; the patient is steadily losing strength. Only he insists on seeing you; and when they are like that, one must give them what they want. I must beg you to excite him as little as possible."
Oswyn bowed a dreary assent, and followed her up the obscure staircase, which creaked sullenly beneath his tread. And he stood for a few moments in silence, until his eyes were accustomed to the darkened room, when the nurse had gently closed the door behind him, leaving him alone with his friend.
He almost believed, at first, that Rainham must be sleeping, he lay back with such extreme quietness in the large old-fashioned bed. And seeing him there in that new helplessness, he realized, almost for the first time, how little there was to say or to hope.
He had never, indeed, been ignorant that his friend's hold on life was precarious; some such scene as this had often been in his mind before; only, insensibly, Rainham's own jesting attitude towards his disabilities had half imposed on him, and made that possibility appear intangible and remote. But now, in view of the change which the last fortnight had wrought in him, he could cherish no illusions; the worst that was possible was all now that one could expect. He was a charming, generous, clever fellow, and he was dying; that was a thing one could not get over.
He moved across to the bedside, and Rainham's eyes suddenly opened. They were immensely large, strangely brilliant; his face had fallen in, was so white and long and lean, that these tremendous eyes seemed almost all of the man that was still to be accounted.
Oswyn derived the impression from them that, while his friend's body had been failing, his mind had never been more vigorous; that, during these long nights and days, when he had lain so motionless, in so continued a silence, it had only been because he was thinking with redoubled intensity.
Presently, as Rainham's lips moved slightly, he drew nearer, and bent his head over him.
"Don't talk," he said nervously, as Rainham appeared to struggle with the difficulty of utterance; "don't tire yourself. I've only come to look at you. Wait until you are a little stronger."
Rainham raised his hand impatiently.
"It won't tire me, and tired or not there are things I must speak of. Is she in the room—the nurse?"
He spoke slowly, and with a visible effort; but his voice, although it scarcely rose above a whisper, and seemed shadowy and far away, was deliberate and distinct. Oswyn shook his head.
"She has given me half an hour; you must not abuse it. I have promised to keep you quiet. I really believe you are a little better."
"I am well enough for what I want—to talk to you. After that, I will be as quiet as you like, for as long as you like. Only I have been keeping myself for this all these last few days that I have lain here like a log, listening to the ticking of that merciless clock. They thought I was sleeping, unconscious, very likely. I have been collecting myself, thinking immensely, waiting for this."
"I have always been here," said the other simply, "in case you should send for me. I have been painting Margot. She is a dear little soul; she misses you sadly."
"It is of her partly that I must speak. I have left all I can to her. If you will sometimes give her a thought; she is absolutely without belongings. I don't wish to make it a charge on you, a burden, only sometimes it has struck me lately that you were interested in the child, that you liked her, and I have taken the liberty of making you a sort of guardian. She could live with the Bullens——"
"Oh, I like her—I like her!" cried Oswyn, with a short laugh. Then he went on more seriously, half-apologetically, as though the other might have found his mirth ill-timed: "My dear friend, it is a great honour, a great pleasure, you give me. I, too, have no belongings, no interests; this might be a great one. I never thought of it before, I must admit; but I will adopt her. She shall live with me, if it's necessary. Only, ah! let us hope still that this may not be necessary, that it is premature."
The other held up a thin hand deprecatingly.
"Ah, don't let us fence with the truth. I have always seen it coming, and why should I lie about it, now that it is come? When one is as tired as I am, there is only one other thing which happens—one dies. You don't suppose I should have sent for you like this if it hadn't been so?"
He lay very still for a moment or two with his eyes closed, as if the effort which speech cost him was considerable. At last he said abruptly:
"There are things you should know; she is Lightmark's child."
Oswyn had seated himself on a low chair by the bed; he kept his head averted, as does a priest who hears confessions; and he gazed with absent eyes at the fire which burned sulkily, at the row of medicine-bottles on the mantelpiece, at all the dreary paraphernalia of a sick-room.
"Yes, she is Lightmark's child," continued Rainham; "and the mother was that girl whom we found two years ago—do you remember?—the night of your first visit here outside the gates. She called herself Mrs. Crichton. It's a miserable story; I only discovered it quite recently."
Oswyn drew in a deep breath, which sounded like a sigh in the strangely still room.
It did not so much suggest surprise as the indefinable relief which a man feels when accident permits him to express cognizance of some fact of which he has long been inwardly assured.
"I knew that long ago," he said at last. "I suspected it when I first saw the girl; but I said nothing to you at the time; perhaps I was wrong. Afterwards, when we knew each other better, there seemed no occasion; I had almost forgotten the episode."
"Yes," went on the other faintly; "we have all made mistakes—I more than most folk, perhaps."
Then he asked suddenly:
"Had you any motive, any reason for your suspicion?"
"It was the name Crichton—the man's pseudonym on theOutcry. It flashed across me then that she was after Lightmark. He was just severing his connection with the paper. He had always kept it very close, and I dare say I was one of the few persons who were in the secret. That is why, at the bottom of his heart, he is afraid of me—afraid that I shall bring it up. It's the one thing he is ashamed of."
"I see, I see," cried Rainham wearily; "the wretched fellow!"
"Dear man, why should we think of him?" broke in Oswyn; "he isn't worth it. Now of all seasons can't we find a topic less unsavoury?"
"You don't understand," continued Rainham, after a slight pause in his thin, far-away voice. "I am not thinking of him, or only indirectly. I have found him out, and I should be content enough to forget him if it were possible. Only, unfortunately, he happens to be inextricably entangled with all that is most sacred, most important to me. It is of his wife—Mrs. Lightmark: do you know her?—that I think."
Oswyn shook his head.
"I know her only by sight, as we all do; she is very beautiful."
"I don't mind telling you that I have considered her a great deal—yes, immensely. I should not speak of it—of her—unless I were dying; but, after all, when one is dying, there are things one may say. I have held my peace so long. And since I have been lying here I have had time to ponder it, to have thought it all out. It seems to me that simply for her sake someone should know before—before the occasion passes—just the plain truth. Of course, Sylvester by rights ought to be the man, only I can't ask him to come to me—there are reasons; and, besides, he is an ass."
"Yes, he is an ass," admitted Oswyn simply; "that is reason enough."
And just then there flashed into his mind the one notable occasion on which the barrister had run across him, his intriguing letter and the ineffectual visit which had followed it—ineffectual as he had supposed, but which might nevertheless, he reflected now, have had its results, ironical and inopportune enough. It was a memory of no importance, and yet it seemed just then to be the last of a long train of small lights that led to a whole torch of illumination, in which the existence of little Margot and her quaint juxtaposition with his friend, which in his general easy attitude towards the fantastic he had not troubled to investigate, was amply and generously justified. He turned round suddenly, caught his friend's thin hand, which he held.
"Ah, don't trouble to explain, to make me understand," he murmured. "It's enough that I understand you have done something very fine, that you are the most generous of men."
Rainham was silent for a moment: he had no longer the physical capacity of smiling; but there was a gleam of the old humour in his eyes, as he replied:
"Only the most fortunate—in my friends; they are so clever, they see things so quickly. You make this very easy."
Oswyn did not shift for a while from his position: he was touched, moved more deeply than he showed; and there was a trace of emotion in his voice—of something which resembled envy.
"The happy woman! It is she who ought to know, to understand."
"It is for that I wished to tell you," went on Rainham faintly, "that she might know some day, that there might be just one person who could give her the truth in its season. Yes! I wanted her to be always in ignorance of what she had made of her life, of the kind of man she has married. She was such a child; it seemed too pitiful. It was for that I did it, damned myself in her eyes, to give her a little longer—a sort of respite. Very likely I made a mistake! Those things can't be concealed for ever, and the longer the illusion lasts, the more bitter the awakening. Only if it might serve her later, in her darkest hour, as a sort of after-thought, it won't have been quite vain. That is how I see it now: I want her to know immensely—to know that she has always been unspeakably dear to me. Ah, don't mistake me! It's not for myself, it's not yet; I shall have done with life, done with love, by that time. When one is as tired as I am, death seems very good; only it hasn't those things. Nothing can make any difference to me; I am thinking of her, that some day or other it will be for her benefit to understand, to remember——"
"To remember?"
"Yes, to remember," repeated Rainham quietly, "that her unhappiness has its compensation; if she has been bitterly wronged, she has also been fervently loved."
The other said nothing for a long time, simply considered the situation which Rainham's words, and still more even than anything that he had said, the things that he had not said, had strikingly revealed to him, leaving him, at the last, in a state of mingled emotions over which, perhaps, awe predominated.
At last he remarked abruptly:
"Itisyou who are fortunate; you are so nearly done with it all; you've such a long rest before you." Then he added with a new solemnity: "You may trust me, Rainham. When it is seasonable, Mrs. Lightmark shall know the truth. Perhaps she will come to me for it— Heaven knows!—stranger things have happened. You have my hand upon it; I think you are right."
"Right? You mean that it wasn't a mistake, abêtise?"
"Felix culpa! If it was a mistake it was a very fine one."
"Ah! I don't regret it," said Rainham, "only——"
"Only it was a mistake to suppose that life was to be arranged. That was all I meant. Yes; I don't believe in much, but I believe in necessity. You can't get over it yourself, and you can't—no, not for all your goodwill, your generosity—get over it for another. There are simply inevitable results of irrevocable causes, and no place for repentance or restitution. And yet you help her, not as you meant to, and not now; but ah, you help her!"
"So long as I do that——" murmured Rainham, with a deep inhalation, closing his eyes wearily, in a manner which revealed how severely the intimate strain of conversation had told upon him.
Oswyn waited a little longer, in half expectation of his further utterance; but Rainham made no sign, lay quite motionless and hushed, his hands clasped outside of the counterpane as if already in the imitation of death; then the other rose and made a quiet exit, imagining that his friend slept, or would soon sleep.
And yet actually, in spite of the extreme physical weariness which had gradually stolen over him, dulling his senses, so that he was hardly conscious of Oswyn's departure, or of the subdued entrance of the nurse, who had been discreetly waiting for it, Rainham's mind was still keenly vigilant; and it was in the relief of a certain new lucidity, an almost hieratic calm, that he reviewed that recent interview, in which he had so deliberately unburdened himself. It seemed as if, in his great weakness, the ache of his old desire, his fever of longing, bad suddenly left him, giving place (as though the literal wasting away of his body had really given freer access to that pure spirit, its prisoner), to a love now altogether purged of passion, and become strangely tolerable and sweet.
If Philip Rainham's name, during that long, hard winter and ungracious spring—near the close of which he turned his face, with the least little sigh of regret, to the wall—was not often mentioned in the house in Parton Street, at whose door he had formerly knocked so often, it must not be supposed that by its occupants it had been in any way forgotten. He had not committed the discourtesy of leaving Lady Garnett's note unanswered; on the contrary, he had answered it both promptly and—as it seemed to him—well, in a letter which was certainly diplomatic, suggesting as it did—at least, to Mary Masters, to whom it had been shown—that he was on the point of an immediate flight South.
Whether the elder lady was equally deceived by his ambiguous phrases, it was not so easy to declare. She had, at this time less than ever, the mode of persons who wear their hearts upon their sleeves; her mask of half-cynical good-humour was constantly up; and she met the girl's hinted interrogations—for directly the nature of their uneasiness, by a sort of tacit agreement, was not alluded to—with the same smiling indifference, the same air of bland reassurance which she brought to the discussion of a sauce or anentremetat one of those select little dinner-parties on which she piqued herself, and which latterly had been more incessant and more select than ever.
Only on Mary's sensitive ear something in the elaborately cheerful tone in which she mentioned their vanished friend would occasionally jar. It was too perfectly well done not to appear a little exaggerated; and though she could force a smile at Lady Garnett's persistent picture of the recalcitrant godson basking, with his pretext of ill-health, on the sunny terraces of Monte Carlo, she none the less cherished a suspicion that the picture was as little convincing to its author as to herself, that her aunt also had silent moments in which she credited the more depressing theory.
And the long silence simply deepened her conviction that, all the time they were imposing upon themselves with such vain conjectures, he was actually within their reach, sick and sorry and alone, in that terrible Blackpool, which she peopled, in her imagination of a young lady whose eastward wanderings had never extended beyond a flower show in the Temple Gardens, with a host of vague, inconceivable horrors.
From Bordighera, from Monaco, she argued, he would certainly have written, if it were only a line of reassurance, for there his isolation was impregnable. Only the fact that he had stayed on in London could account for the need of this second arm of silence, as well as of solitude, to enforce his complete withdrawal from the torment of tongues.
Certainly, wherever he might actually be, the girl had never realized more fully than just then what an irreparable gap estrangement from him made in her life.
There was, indeed, no pause in the stream of clever, cultivated, charming persons who rang daily at their discriminating door, who drank tea in their drawing-room, and talked felicitously for their entertainment.
It was a miscellaneous company, although the portal was difficult in a manner, and opened only on conditions of its own—conditions, it may be said, which, to the uninitiated, to the excluded, seemed fantastic enough.
One might be anything, Lady Garnett's constant practice seemed to enunciate, provided one was not a bore; one could represent anything—birth or wealth, or the conspicuous absence of these qualities—so long as one also effectively represented one's self. This was the somewhat democratic form which the old lady's aristocratic tradition assumed.
It was not, then, without a certain pang of self-reproach that Mary wondered one evening—it was at the conclusion of one of their most successful entertainments—that a company so brilliant, so distinguished, should have left her only with a nervous headache and a distinct sense of satisfaction that the last guest had gone.
Was she, then, after all an unworthy partaker of the feast which her aunt had so long and liberally spread for her delectation?
As she sat in her own room, still in her dress of the evening, before the comfortable fire, which cast vague half-lights into the dark, spacious corners—she had extinguished the illumination of candles which her maid had left her, a sort of unconscious tribute to the economical traditions of her youth—she found herself considering this question and the side issues it involved very carefully.
Was it for some flaw in her nature, some lack of subtilty, or inbred stupidity, that she found the inmates of Parton Street so uninspiring, had been so little amused?
The dozen who had dined with them to-night—how typical they might be of the rest!—original and unlike each other as they were, each having his special distinction, his particular note, were hardly separable in her mind. They were very cultivated, very subtile, very cynical. Their talk, which flashed quickest around Lady Garnett, who was the readiest of them all, could not possibly have been better; it was like the rapid passes of exquisite fencers with foils. And they all seemed to have been everywhere, to have read everything, and at the last to believe in nothing—in themselves and their own paradoxes least of all. There was nothing in the world which existed except that one might make of it an elegant joke. And yet of old, the girl reflected, she had found them stimulating enough; their limitations, at least, had not seemed to her to weigh seriously against their qualities, negative though these last might be.
Had it been, then, simply the presence of Mr. Rainham which had leavened the company, and the personal fascination of his friendship—indefinable and unobtrusive as that had been—which had enabled her to adopt for the moment their urbane, impartial point of view?
Perhaps there had been a particle of truth in the charge so solemnly levelled at her by Mr. Sylvester: it was a false position that she maintained.
The attitude of Lady Garnett and her intimates, of persons (the phrase of Steele's recurred to her as meeting it appropriately) "who had seen the world enough to undervalue it with good breeding," must seem to her at last a little sterile when she was conscious—never more than now—of how clearly and swiftly the healthy young blood coursed through her veins, dissipating any morbid imaginations that she might feel inclined to cherish. She looked out at life, in her conviction that so little of it had yet been lived, that for her it might easily be a long affair, with eyes which were still full of interest and, to a certain degree, of hope; and this did not detract from at least one "impossible loyalty," from which it seemed to her she would never waver. And Charles Sylvester's infelicitous proposal recurred to her, and she was forced to ask herself whether, after all, it was quite so infelicitous as it seemed. Might not some sort of solution to the difficulties which oppressed her be offered by that alliance? Conscientiously she considered the question, and for a long time; but with the closest consideration the prospect refused to cheer her, remained singularly uninviting. And yet, arid as the notion appeared of a procession hand-in-hand through life with a husband so soberly precise, to the tune of political music, she was still hardly decided upon her answer when she at length reluctantly left her comfortable fire and composed herself to sleep.
It was not until a day or two later that a prolonged visit from the subject of these hesitations reminded her—perhaps more forcibly than before—that, however in his absence she might oscillate, in his actual presence a firm negative was, after all, the only answer which could ever suffice.
At the close of what seemed a singularly long afternoon, during which her aunt, who was confined to her room with a bad headache, had left to her the burden of entertaining, Mary came to this conclusion.
Mr. Sylvester had come with the first of her callers, and had made no sign of moving when the last had gone. And in the silence, a little portentous, which had ensued when they were left together, the girl had read easily the reason of his protracted stay. She glanced furtively, with a suggestion of weariness in her eyes, at the little jewelled watch on her wrist, wondering if in the arrival of a belated visitor there might not still be some respite.
"You are not going out?" he asked tentatively, detecting her. "I expect my sister will be here soon."
"No, I am not going out," admitted the girl reluctantly. "I am on duty, you know. Somebody may arrive at any minute," she added, not quite ingenuously. "Let us hope it will be your sister."
"I hope not—not just yet," he protested. "It is so long, Miss Masters, since I have seen you alone. That is my excuse for having remained such an unconscionable time. I have to seize an opportunity."
She made no remark, sitting back in the chair, her fine head bent a little, thoughtfully, her hands folded quietly in her lap, in an attitude of resignation to the inevitable.
"You can't mistake me," he went on at last eagerly. "I have kept to the stipulation; I have been silent for a long time. I have been to see you, certainly, but not so often as I should have liked, and I have said nothing to you of the only thing that was in my head. Now"—he hesitated for an instant, then completed his phrase with an intonation almost passionate—"now I want my reward! Can't you—can't you give it me, Mary?"
The girl said nothing for a moment, looking away from him into the corners of the empty room, her delicate eyebrows knitted a little, as though she sought inspiration from some of Lady Garnett's choicerbibelôts, from the little rose and amber shepherdess of Watteau, who glanced out at her daintily, imperturbably from the midst of herfête galante. At last she said quietly:
"I am sorry, Mr. Sylvester, I can only say, as I said before, it is a great honour you do me, but it's impossible."
"Perhaps I should have waited longer," suggested Charles, after a moment's silence, in which he appeared to be deeply pondering her sentence. "I have taken you by surprise; you have not sufficiently considered——"
"Oh, I have considered," cried the girl quickly, with a sudden flush. "I have considered it more seriously than you may believe, more, perhaps, than I ought."
"Than you ought?" he interrupted blankly.
"Yes," she said simply. "I mean that if it could ever have been right to answer you as you wished, it would have been right all at once; thinking would not alter it. I am sorry, chiefly, that I allowed this—this procrastination; that I did not make you take my decision that night, at Lady Mallory's. Yes, for that I was to blame. Only, some day I think you will see that I was right, that it would never have done."
"Never have done!" he repeated, with an accent full of grieved resentment. "I think it would have done so admirably. I hardly understand——"
"I mean," said poor Mary helplessly, "that you estimated me wrongly.Iamfrivolous—your interests would not have been safe in my hands.You would have married me on a misunderstanding."
"No," said Charles morosely, "I can't believe that! You are not plain with me, you are not sincere. You don't really believe that you are frivolous, that we should not suit. In what way am I so impossible? Is it my politics that you object to? I shall be happy to discuss them with you. I am not intolerant; I should not expect you to agree with me in everything. You give me no reasons for this—this absurd prejudice; you are not direct; you indulge in generalizations."
He spoke in a constrained monotone, which seemed to Mary, in spite of her genuine regret for the pain she gave him, unreasonably full of reproach.
"Ah!" she cried sharply, "since I don't love you, is not that a reason? Oh, believe me," she went on rather wearily, "I have no prejudice, not a grain. I would sooner marry you than not. Only I cannot bring myself to feel towards you as a woman ought to the man she marries. Very likely I shall never marry."
He considered her, half angrily, in silence, with his unanimated eyes; his dignity suffered in discomposure, and lacking this, pretentious as it was, he seemed to lack everything, becoming unimportant and absurd.
"Oh, you will marry!" he said at last sullenly, an assertion whichMary did not trouble to refute.
He returned the next minute, with a persistency which the girl began to find irritating, to his charge.
"I don't understand it. They seem to me wilful, unworthy of you, your reasons; it's perverse—yes, that is what it is, perverse! You are not really happy here; the life doesn't suit you."
"What a discovery!" cried the girl half mockingly. "I am not really happy! Well, if I admit it?"
"I could make you so by taking you out of it. You are too good for it all, too good to sit and pour out tea for—for the sort of people who come here."
"Do you mean," she asked, with a touch of scorn in her voice, "that we are not respectable?"
"That is not you who speak," he persisted; "it is your aunt who speaks through you. I know it is the fashion now to cry out against one, even in good society, to call one straitlaced, if one respects certain conventions. There are some I respect profoundly; and not the least that one which forbids right-minded gentlewomen to receive men of notoriously disgraceful lives. One should draw the line; one should draw it at that Hungarian pianist who was here this afternoon. Your aunt, of course, is a Frenchwoman; she has different ideas. But you, I can't believe that you care for this society, for people like Kronopolski and—and Rainham. Oh, it hurts me, and I imagine how distasteful it must be to you, that you must suffer these people. I want to take you away from it all."
The girl had risen, flushing a little. She replied haughtily, with a vibration of passion in her voice:
"You are not generous, Mr. Sylvester. You are not even just. What right have I ever given you to dictate to me whom I shall know or refuse to know? I, too, have my convictions; and I think your view is narrow, and uncharitable, and false. You see, we don't agree enough…. Ah, let it end, Mr. Sylvester!" She went on more gently, but very tiredly, her pale face revealing how the interview had strained her: "I wish you all the good in the world, but I can't marry you. Let us shake hands on that, and say good-bye."
Sylvester had also risen to his feet, and he stood facing her for a moment indecisively, as though he hardly credited the finality of his rejection.
They were still in this attitude, and the fact gave a certain tinge of embarrassment to their greetings, when the door opened, and Mrs. Lightmark was announced.
"I was on the point of going," explained Charles nervously. "I thought you were not coming, you know."
Eve made no effort to detain him, half suspecting that she had appeared at a strenuous moment. When the barrister had departed (Mary had just extended to him the tips of her frigid fingers), and Eve's polite inquiries after Lady Garnett's health had been satisfied, she remarked:
"I really only came in for a cup of tea. I walked across from Dorset Square. I have sent the carriage to pick up my husband at his club: it's coming back for me. You look tired, Mary. I think I oughtn't to stay. You look as if you had been having a political afternoon. Poor Charles, since he has been in the House, can think of nothing but blue-books."
"Tired?" queried the girl listlessly; "no, not particularly.Besides, I am always glad to see you, it happens so seldom."
"Yes; except in a crowd. One has never any time. Have you heard, by the way, that my husband is one of the new Associates?"
She went on quickly, preventing Mary's murmured congratulations:
"Yes, they have elected him. I suppose it is a very good thing. He has his hands full of portraits now."
Then she remarked inconsequently—the rapidity with which she passed from topic to topic half surprised Mary, who did not remember the trait of old:
"We are going to the theatre to-night—that is to say, if my husband has been able to get seats. It's the first night of a new comedy. I meant to ask you to come with us, only it was an uncertainty. If the box is not forthcoming, you must come when we do go. Only, of course, it will not be thepremière."
"I should like to," said Mary vaguely. "I don't care so much about first nights. I like the theatre; but I go so seldom. Aunt Marcelle does not care for English plays; she says they are like stale bread-and-butter. I tell her that is not so bad."
"Themot, you mean?"
"Partly; but also the thing. Bread-and-butter is a change after a great manypetits fours."
Mrs. Lightmark smiled a little absently as she sat smoothing the creases out of her pretty, fawn-coloured gloves.
"Oh, thepetits fours," she said, "for choice. One can take more of them, and amuse one's self longer."
They heard a carriage draw up suddenly in the street below, and Eve, who had been glancing from time to time expectantly at the window, went over and looked out. She recognised her liveries and the two handsome bays.
"Perhaps I had better not let him come up," she said; "it is late already, and you will be wanting to dress."
Lightmark had just alighted from the carriage when his wife joined him in the street. He held the door for her silently, and stopped for a moment to give the direction, "Home," to the coachman before he took the place at her side.
She turned to him after a while inquiringly, finding something of unwonted gravity in his manner.
"Did you get the box?" she asked.
"The box?" he repeated blankly. Then, pulling himself up, "No," he said quickly, "I forgot all about it. The fact is, I heard something this afternoon which put it out of my head. I am afraid," he went on, with a growing hesitation, "you will be rather shocked."
"Ah," she cried quickly, catching at her breath, "something has happened. Tell me. Don't preface it; I can bear anything if you will only tell me straight out."
"It's Rainham," he murmured. "He died last night at Blackpool. I heard it from McAllister, at the club."
He looked away from her vaguely out of his window at the pale streets, where a few lamps were beginning to appear, waiting in a fever of apprehension, which he vainly sought to justify, for some word or comment on the part of his wife.
As none came, and the silence grew intolerable, he ventured at last to glance furtively across at her. Her face seemed to him a shade paler than before, but that might be exaggerated by the relief of her rich and sombre furs. Her eyes were quite expressionless and blank, although she had the air of being immensely thoughtful; her mouth was inscrutable and unmoved. And he experienced a sudden pang of horror at the anticipation of a dinner alone with her, with the ghostly presence of this news dividing them, before he reminded himself that Colonel Lightmark was to be of the party.
For, perhaps, the first time in his life the prospect of his uncle's company afforded him a sensation of relief.
When Oswyn emerged from the narrow doorway of the gallery in Bond Street, which on the morrow was to be filled with the heterogeneous presence of those who, for different reasons, are honoured with cards of invitation to private views, it was still daylight, although the lamps had been lighted; and the east wind, which during the earlier hours of the day had made the young summer seem such a mockery of flowery illusions, had taken a more genial air from the south into alliance; and there was something at once caressing and exhilarating in their united touch as they wandered in gentle eddies up the crooked thoroughfare.
Oswyn paused upon the pavement, outside the showroom which Mosenthal called a gallery, gazing up the road towards Oxford Street, with a momentary appreciation of the subtile early evening charm, which lent so real a beauty even to a vista of commonplace shop-fronts and chimney-pots, straightening his bent figure, and wondering whither to betake himself.
He had not allowed his friend's death to be an excuse for abandoning the projected exhibition; indeed, when this event occurred, he was already too far compromised; and he even found the labour involved in the preparations for the new departure a very welcome distraction—the one thing which made it possible for the desolate man to stay on in London, which, he assured himself dogmatically, was the only place on earth where he could face life with an indifference which was at least a tolerable imitation of equanimity.
To get together the materials for even a modest exhibition of the kind which he contemplated, it became necessary for him to ransack old portfolios, and to borrow from dealers, and from his few discriminating private patrons, works which had but recently left his studio and could still be traced; to utilize all the hours of daylight accorded to him by a grudging season for finishing, mounting, and retouching.
The man who made frames for Oswyn knew him of old as an exacting customer and hard to please, who insisted on a rigid adherence to his own designs, and was quick to detect inferior workmanship or material; but during the last few days he had been driven almost to rebellion by the painter's exigencies; never had such calls been made upon him for flawless glass, and delicately varied shades of gold and silver; never had artist's eye been so ruthless in the condemnation of imperfect mitres and superfluous plaster.
But now the work of preparation was at an end: the catalogues had been printed, and hisimpresariohad judiciously circulated invitations to press and public: the work was done, and the workman felt only weary and indifferent. If the public howled, what did it matter? Their hostility would be for him a corroboration, for his Jew an invaluable advertisement. If they fawned, so much the better: it would not hurt him, and Mosenthal would still have his advertisement. If they were indifferent, well, so was he.
The question of pecuniary profit troubled him not at all (though here his Jew joined issue): what in the world could he do with money, now? He could paint a picture in a month which would keep him for six, and the dealer who bought it probably for a year.
Margot was already provided for, even handsomely: in that respect, at least, her first adopted father had left no void for his successor to fill.
So again he shrugged his shoulders. And upon that evening, for the first time since Rainham's death, he dined, more solitary and more silent than ever, at his familiar table at Brodonowski's. He found that, after all, his nervous anticipation of inconvenient protestations of sympathy was not fulfilled; there were not many men who knew him more than by sight at Brodonowski's, and the few of his old associates who were there had the good sense to exhibit nothing extraordinary in their demeanour towards him. Only they were a little less wildly humorous than of old, and more forbearing in their sallies; the conversation died out for an instant as he made his way quickly, with the faintest sign of recognition, through their midst—and that was all.
Rainham's death had affected some of them for a few days perhaps, but it had not the shock of the unexpected; they chiefly wondered that he had dragged his life through so cruel a winter. And his close alliance with Oswyn had, as a natural consequence, debarred him from a real intimacy with any of the other men, who, for the most part younger, cultivated different friendships and different pursuits.
They had missed Oswyn during his seclusion of the last few weeks; he was so essentially the presiding, silent genius of the place—a man to be pointed out to new-comers, half ironically, as the greatest, most deeply injured, of them all; the possessor of a talent unapproached and unappreciated. They felt that his presence lent a distinction to the dingy resort which it otherwise frequently lacked: and he had come to be so far regarded as a permanent institution, of an almost official nature, that even on the coldest nights his chair by the fireside had remained untenanted.
When the next morning came, Oswyn felt desperately inclined to break the promise which Mosenthal had, with some difficulty, exacted from him, and to keep far from Bond Street and the crowd who even then were assembling to cast their careless glances and light words at the work of his life; it was only the fear of the taint of cowardice, and a certain perversity, which induced him eventually to present himself within the gallery rather late in the afternoon.
As he entered the room, looking about him with a kind of challenge, many eyes were turned upon him (for people go to private views not to see pictures—that is generally impossible—but to see and be seen of men), but few had any suspicion that this strange man, with the shabby, old-fashioned apparel, and expression half nervous, half defiant, was the painter whose pictures they were pretending to criticise.
Very few of those present—hardly half a dozen perhaps—knew him even by sight; and while his evident disregard for social convention marked him, for the discerning observer, as a person of probably artistic distinction, the general conjecture set him down, not as a painter—he did not seem to be of that type—but as a man of letters—probably a maker of obscure verse.
When he had mastered the first wild impulse which prompted him to tear his pictures down, to turn their faces to the wall—anything to hide them from this smiling, languid, well-dressed crowd—and resigned himself to observation, he saw that Mosenthal was beaming at him complacently, through the massive gold spectacles which adorned and modified the bridge of his compromising nose, from his seat behind the table, where information as to the prices of the exhibits could be obtained.
There were exactly forty drawings and paintings to be seen upon the sparsely-covered walls, which had been draped for the occasion with coarsely-woven linen of a dull olive-green, and about half of these were drawings and studies, small in point of size, executed in chalk and pastels.
The greater part of these represented ordinary scenes of London outdoor life—a deserted corner of Kensington Gardens, with tall soot-blackened trees lifting their stately tracery of dark branches into the sky; a reach of the wide, muddy river, with a gaunt bridge looming through the fog; a gin-palace at night time, with garish lamps shining out upon the wet streets and crouching beggars.
Of the remainder, which included a few portraits and some imaginative subjects, the greater number were painted in oils, and the largest canvas would not have seemed out of place on the walls of an ordinary room.
Oswyn smiled grimly as he noticed that the portrait of Margot, which he had begun for Rainham and finished for himself, was a considerable centre of attraction; there was quite a dense crowd in the vicinity of this canvas (it is true, it was near the tea-table), and it included two bishops, a duke, and an actress, of whom the last-named was certainly more stared at than the picture.
It irritated him, in spite of his contempt for the throng, to see people standing, chatting, with their backs turned towards his creations; and when Mosenthal informed him in a triumphant stage-whisper, leaning across the table littered with catalogues, that nine of the pictures had already found purchasers, he was almost inclined to rebel, to refuse to ratify the sales.
The only friendly face which he encountered during the afternoon was that of McAllister, who presently brought his congratulations and conspicuous presence to the corner to which Oswyn had betaken himself; and for a time he found himself listening, while the Scotchman enlightened him, somewhat against his will, as to the names and celebrity of the distinguished visitors whom he was supposed to be receiving.
He was assured that the press notices could not fail to be favourable (he mentally promised himself that nothing should induce him to read a newspaper for at least a fortnight), and the flattering comments of Mr. This and Lady That were half-apologetically retailed for his presumed delectation.
As his eyes wandered, with his attention, furtively round the room, they presently encountered, in their passage from group to group, a face which seemed vaguely familiar—the face of a woman, whom he certainly had never known, but whose beauty, he thought, was not appealing to his admiration for the first time.
She was standing with her profile turned towards him, gazing gravely at his study of a pale figure, with beautiful eyes and an armful of wonderfully coloured poppies, which he called "Thanatos, the Peace-bearer."
When she moved, presently, her gaze rested on him for a moment, with the faintest note of inquiry interrupting the smile with which she was listening to the sallies of her escort for the time being; the smile and glance revealed her more perfectly to Oswyn, and he was prepared to hear McAllister greet her as Mrs. Lightmark when, a few minutes later, she passed them on her way round the room.
Eve had spent the week which followed the afternoon upon which her husband had stunned her with the news of Philip Rainham's death almost in solitude.
Lightmark had been obliged to pay a hasty visit to Berlin, on business connected with an International Art Congress, and his wife at the last moment decided, somewhat to his relief, that she would not accompany him. A man of naturally quick perception, and with a certain vein of nervous alertness underlying his outer clothing of careless candour, he could not help feeling that when he was alone with his wife he was being watched, that traps were set for him—in short, that he was suspected. And not only when they were alone had he cause for alarm: in crowded rooms, at mammoth dinner-parties, and colossal assemblies he frequently became aware, by a sense even quicker than vision, that his wife's eyes were directed upon him from the farther side of the room, the opposite end of the dinner-table, with that wistful, childish expression in their depths, which, growing sterner and more critical of late, had ended by boring him.
Before Rainham's death, Eve, in her private discussions of the situation, had generally concluded by dismissing the subject petulantly, with a summing-up only partially convincing, that everything would come right in the end; that in time that miserable scene would be forgotten or explained away; and that the old intimacy, of which it was at once so bitter and so pleasant to dream, would be restored.
Her training—of which her mother was justly proud—had endowed her with a respect for social convention too great to allow her to think of rebelling against the existing order of things. She consoled herself by the reflection that at least she had committed no fault, and that no active discipline of penitence could justly be expected of her.
Concerning the truth of Rainham's story she could not fail to harbour doubts; that her husband was concealing something was daily more plainly revealed to her.
It was hard that she should suffer, but what could she do? At the bottom of her heart, in spite of the feeling of resentment which assailed her when—as it often did—the idea occurred to her that he had not exhibited towards her the perfect frankness which their old friendship demanded, she pitied Rainham. There were even times—such was her state of doubt—when she pitied her husband, and blamed herself for suspecting him of—she hardly owned what.
But, most of all, she pitied herself. She felt that in any case she had been wronged, whether Philip's ill-told tale was true or false.
But her pride enabled her to keep her doubts locked within her own heart, to present a smiling, if occasionally pale, face to the world, in whose doings she took so large a part, and even to deceive Mrs. Sylvester.
And now Philip was dead! The severance, which she had persuaded herself was only temporary, was on a sudden rendered inexorably complete and eternal.
The blow was a cruel one, and for a time it seemed to be succeeded by a kind of rebellious insensibility. Eve felt demoralized, and careless of the future; her frame of mind was precisely that of the man who is making his first hasty steps along the headlong road which is popularly spoken of as leading to the devil.
Later she began to reproach herself. She reflected, with a kind of scornful wonder at her weakness, that she had allowed all chance of explanation to escape; the one man whom she could trust, who would surely give her a straightforward answer if she appealed to him by the memory of the old days, was beyond the reach of her questions, silent to eternity. Her former sorrow seemed trivial by comparison with this.
On his return, Lightmark found his wife looking so pale and tired that he broke off in the middle of the story of his flattering reception at the German Court to express a suggestion for her benefit, that she had better go to Brighton or somewhere to recruit. She would never get through the season at this rate. Yes, she must certainly take a holiday, directly after the Academy Private View.
Eve caught at the idea, only she did not wait for the Academy to open. She went for a fortnight, accompanied by an old servant of the family, who regarded her mistress's birth as quite a recent event, to Mrs. Sylvester's cottage in Norfolk.
When Mrs. Lightmark came back to town her face was still pale, but her brow wore a serener air, and her eyes had lost their look of apprehension. The woman had arisen triumphant out of the ashes of her childhood, with a heart determined to know the truth, and to face it, however bitter it might prove to be. Meanwhile, she would not judge hastily.
As she drove up Bond Street one day soon after her return to town, the advertisement of Oswyn's exhibition caught her eye. She would probably have remembered a name so uncommon if she had only heard it once, and, as it was, she had heard it several times, and associated with it, moreover, a certain reticence which could not fail to arouse a woman's curiosity.
Later, when Mosenthal's card of invitation for the Private View arrived, she noted the day upon her list of engagements.
On the morning of Oswyn's ordeal, Eve sent a message to her husband, who was engaged with a model in the studio, to notify to him her intention of taking the carriage into town later in the afternoon; to which he had returned a gallant reply, expressing a hope that, if it would not bore her too much, she would pick him up somewhere and drive him home. Where and when could he meet her? The reply, "At Mosenthal's at five o'clock," did not surprise him. He did not happen to have the vaguest idea as to what was the attraction of the day at that particular gallery. It might be Burmese landscapes, or portraits of parrots; it was all one to him. It was extremely decorous in his wife to affect picture-galleries, and Mosenthal's place was conveniently near to his favourite club.
A few minutes before the appointed hour he made his way, from the new and alarmingly revolutionary club-house, where he had been indulging in afternoon tea in company with Felicia Dollond, to the gallery, outside which his horses were already waiting, and, perceiving Oswyn's name on the placards disposed on either side of the entrance, he felt only a momentary hesitation.
Oswyn would probably not be there; and, after all, why should he not inspect the man's pictures?
Before reasons had time to present themselves he had passed into the room, and had been deferentially welcomed and presented with a catalogue by the proprietor in person.
The room was still crowded, and it was oppressively warm, with an atmosphere redolent of woollen and silken fabrics, like a milliner's shop on the day of a sale.
At first he made no effort to join his wife, whom he discerned from afar talking to a pillar of the Church in gaiters and a broad-brimmed hat.
He looked at the pictures whenever there was a break in the sequence of bows and greetings which had to be exchanged with two-thirds of the people in the room; and as he looked he was smitten with a quick thrill of admiration: he was still young enough to recognise the hand of the master. And in his admiration there was a trace of a frank envy, a certain unresentful humiliation—the feeling which he could remember to have experienced many times in the old days, when he put aside the sonnet he had just finished for some fashionable magazine, and took down from his limited bookshelf the little time-worn volume which contained the almost forgotten work of a poet whose name would have fallen strangely on the editorial ear.
Before long there was a general departure, and Lightmark, flushed with the triumphs of a conversation in which, in the very centre of an admiring group of his antagonist's worshippers, he had successfully measured swords with a notorious wit, turned to look for his wife; and, for the first time, meeting Oswyn's eye, half-involuntarily advanced to greet him.
"This is an unexpected honour," said Oswyn coldly, disregarding the proffered hand; "unexpected and unwelcome!"
Then he would have turned away, leaving his contempt and hatred unspoken, but his passion was too strong.
"Have you come to seek ideas for your next Academy picture," he continued quickly, with a sneer trembling on his lips, "or for theOutcry?"
Lightmark grew a little pale, biting his lip, and frowning for a moment, before he assumed a desperate mask of good-humour.
"Hang it, man!" he answered quickly, "be reasonable! Haven't you forgiven me yet? Though what you have to forgive—— I only want to congratulate you, to tell you that I admire your work—immensely."
"I don't want your congratulations," interrupted the other hoarsely. "I might forget the wrong which, as you well know, you have done me; that is nothing! But have you forgotten your—your friend, Rainham? You had better go," he added, with a savage gesture. "Go! before I denounce you, proclaim you, you pitiful scoundrel!"