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 pass 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 attitude 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 Mefistofèle, 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 nobody 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 assisted. She was of
French extraction, the last survivor of an illustrious 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 passed 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 passed for being very devout; and, indeed, her little
pieties, her unfailing attendance at Mass on days of Obligation, at
the chapel of the French Embassy hard by, struck Rainham as most
edifying. Really he perceived that her devout attitude 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 godson,
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
attitude, 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 assumption 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 assumed 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 class, 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?"
"To Florence," she said, smiling, "to the Zoo."
"Ah, a good idea," he murmured. "Well, good-bye, Lady Garnett;
good-day, Rainham. I am sorry to see you don't seem to have
benefited much by your winter abroad. I almost wonder you came back
so soon. Was not it rather unwise? This treacherous climate, you
know."
"Yes," said Rainham; "I, too, think you are right. I think I had
much better have stayed--very much better."
"Ah, well," he said, "you must take care of yourself, and give us a
look in if you have time."
Eve looked up at him, flushing a little, as though she found her
brother's formal politeness lacking in hospitality. She was struck
then, as she had not been yet during her visit, by a curious
lassitude in her old friend's face. It affected her with an
unconscious pity, causing her to second her brother's somewhat
chilly invitation more cordially.
The humour which had shone in Rainham's eyes while they had been
talking seemed to have gone out suddenly, like a lamp, leaving them
blank and tired. It shocked her to realize how old and ill he had
become.