One afternoon, three months later, Rainham, finding himself in the
neighbourhood of Parton Street, took the occasion of knocking at
Lady Garnett's door, and found, somewhat to his surprise, that the
two ladies were returned. Introduced into their presence--they were
sitting in the library, in close proximity to a considerable
fire--he learnt that their summer wanderings that year had been of
no extensive nature, and that they had come into residence a week
ago.
They had spent a month in a country house in Berkshire, the old lady
told him presently, adding, with an explanatory grimace, that it was
a house which belonged to a relation--the sort of place where one
had to visit now and again; where a month went a very long way;
where one had to draw largely on one's courtesy--on one's hypocrisy
(if he preferred the word), not to throw up the cards at once, and
retire after the first week.
Rainham gathered from her resigned animadversions that the relations
must be by marriage only: there was no Gallic quality in the
atmosphere she described.
It was a very nice house--Jacobean, she believed--or, rather, it
would have been nice if they had had it to themselves. Unfortunately,
it was very full: there were a great many stupid men who shot all
day, and as many stupid women who talked scandal and went to
sleep after dinner; also there were several pairs--or did one say
"brace"?--of young people who flirted, but they lived in the
conservatories. When one did not go to sleep after dinner, one
played round games, or baccarat. She herself had refused to play,
although they had wished to make her; personally, she preferred to
go to sleep, or to listen to Mary's music. Yes, Mary was more
fortunate: they had a very good piano, and an organ. Mary's music
was a great success, although her admirers were apt to confuse
Offenbach with Chopin; and some of the women appeared to think it
was not quite ladylike to play so well, with such a professional
manner. Still, Mary's music was a success, and that was more than
could be said of her own conversation. That had been a distinct
failure! They seemed to think she wished to make fun of things--of
sacred things, the game laws, and agriculture, and the Established
Church. Of course, she had no such intention: it was only that she
wished for information, for instruction in these difficult national
institutions, which, long as she had made her home in England, she
feared she would never thoroughly comprehend.
Mary had sat silently, with her hands clasped across her knees,
while her aunt placidly poured forth these and similar comments
(which were interspersed by questions and sympathetic monosyllables
from Rainham), not so much acrimoniously, as in the tone of the
humorous reporter, who is too indifferent to be actuated by a sense
of injury.
The girl struck him as having grown tired and listless--more
listless than a merely physical fatigue would warrant. He
interrupted now to ask her with a touch of compassion if she too had
been very much bored.
Her fine eyes were averted as she answered him, smiling a little:
"I am rather glad to be back. It was a pretty place, and the gardens
were charming, when it did not rain."
Lady Garnett was overheard to murmur into the black ear of
Mefistofèle that it always rained.
"But on the whole--yes, I was rather bored," the girl continued
abruptly.
"The rain and the round games and the people?" Rainham echoed. "You
have my sympathy."
"I believe I rather liked the round games," said Mary, with a little
laugh. "They were less tiresome than the rest; and the organ was a
great solace; it was very perfect."
"Ah, yes, she liked the round games," put in Lady Garnett; "and if
two of her admirers had played them more, and turned over her music
less, the organ might have been a greater solace."
"They were very foolish," sighed the girl rather wearily.
"Mr. Sylvester was there for the last fortnight," continued Lady
Garnett, with some malice. "He succeeded Lord Overstock, as Mary's
musical acolyte. In revenge, Lord Overstock wished to teach her
baccarat, and Mr. Sylvester remonstrated. It was sublime! It was the
one moment of amusement vouchsafed me."
Mary flushed, locking her hands together nervously, with a trace of
passion.
"It was ridiculous! intolerable! He had no right----!"
Lady Garnett bent forward, taking her hand.
"Forgive me, _chérie_! I did not mean to annoy you.... You can imagine
how glad we were to see you," she added, with a sudden turn to
Rainham. "It was charming of you to call so soon; you could hardly
have expected to find us."
"You must not give me too much credit. I happened to be quite near,
in Harley Street. I could not pass without inquiring."
"Ah, well," she said, "since you are here----"
She was looking absently away from him into an antique, silver
basket which lay on the little table by her side, in which were
miscellaneous trifles, odd pieces of lace, thimbles which she never
used, a broken fan, a box of chocolates.
"Mary, my dear," she said quickly, "I am so stupid! The old
_bonbonnière_, with the brilliants? I must have left it on my
dressing-table, or somewhere. That new housemaid--we really know
nothing about her--it would be such a temptation. Would you
mind----"
"Is this----" Rainham began, and stopped short.
Lady Garnett's brilliant eyes, and a little admonitory gesture of
one hand, restrained him. When the girl had shut the door behind
her, the elder lady turned to him with a quaint smile.
"Is that it? Of course it is, my friend. You are singularly obtuse:
a woman would have seen through me at once."
"I beg your pardon," said Rainham, somewhat mystified. "You mean it
was a pretext?"
"It was for you that I made it," she replied with dignity. "What was
it you came to say?"
The other was silent for a moment, cogitating. When he looked up at
last, meeting her eyes, it was with something like a shiver, in a
tone of genuine dismay, that he remarked:
"Dear lady, there are times when you terrify me. You see too much.
It is not--no, it is not human. I had meant to tell you nothing."
He stopped short, lowering his voice, and looking from the depths of
his low chair into the red fire.
"It is not necessary, Philip," she continued presently, "that you
should tell me; only, if you will be so secret, you should wear
smoked glasses. Your eyes were so speaking that I was afraid--yes,
afraid--when you came into the room. They looked haunted; they had
the air of having seen a ghost!"
"It was a very respectable ghost," he said grimly, "with a
frock-coat and a bald head. You know Sir Egbert, I suppose?"
"Only by name. I imagined that he was your spectre, when you spoke
of Harley Street. Does he send you South again?"
"No," said Rainham shortly; "he thinks it would be inexpedient--that
was his phrase, inexpedient--in an hotel, you know, and all that....
I was obliged to him, because in any case it would have been
inconvenient to me to be abroad this year. I suppose, though, that
if it would have done me any good I should have gone; but I have a
great deal to arrange."
He went on composedly to tell her of the most important of these
arrangements--the disposal of his business. He had systematically
neglected it for years, he explained, and it had ended by going to
the dogs. So long as his foreman was there, that had not mattered so
much; but Bullen had decided to desert him, and very wisely. He had
accepted an offer to manage the works of a firm of North-Country
shipbuilders; he was to shake the dust of Blackpool from off his
feet in a very few months, and would probably make his fortune. And
as he himself was not equal to bearing his incubus alone, he had put
it in the market. A brand new company had bought it--that is to say,
they had made him an offer--a ridiculously inadequate one, he was
told, but which he was determined to accept; at any rate, it would
leave him enough, when everything was paid, to live upon, for the
rest of his life. The legal preliminaries were now being settled:
they appeared to be interminable; but as in the meantime the
dock-gates were shut, and the clerks had departed, he could not, so
far as he saw, be losing money; that was a consolation.
He had not come to the end of his disquisition before he discovered
that he spoke to deaf ears. The old lady for once was inattentive:
she had sat screening her face from the fire with a large palm fan
while he unburdened himself, and she began now with a certain
hesitation:
"My pretext, Philip! When I said that I made it for you it was
only half true. In effect, my dear, I had something to tell
you--something disagreeable."
"Concerning me?" he asked.
"Certainly," she said--"something I have heard."
He looked vaguely across at her, finding her obscurity a little
strained, waiting for her to speak. The silence that intervened was
beginning to harass him, when she said suddenly:
"I will be quite plain. I think you ought to know. There is a
scandal abroad about you--about you and some woman."
"Some woman!" he repeated blankly. "What woman?" He leant back in
his chair, laughing his pleasant, low laugh. "I am sorry," he said,
"I can't be as seriously annoyed as I ought; it is too foolish. My
conscience really does not help me to discover her--this woman. Do
you know any more?"
She shook her head.
"It is not a nice story," she said. "No, I have heard no name; only
the story is current. I have heard it from three sources. I thought
you had better know of it."
"Thank you," he answered, rising to go. "Yes, it is a thing one may
as well know. It is very kind of them, these people, to take such
trouble, to be sufficiently interested. Upon my honour, I do not
know that I very much care. After all, what does it matter?"
"Nothing to me," said Lady Garnett, with a little shrug of
disdain--"nothing, _Dieu me pardonne_! even if it were true."
"Well, good-bye," he said.
As he held her hand for a moment between his own he thought it
trembled slightly.
"Ah, no!" she said quickly; "it is a phrase I decline. Come and see
me soon. I am an old woman, my friend, and I have outlived my
generation. I have said too many good-byes in my time. It is _au
revoir_."
"With all my heart," he said, smiling. "_Au revoir_."
Her quaint intimation--that was the manner in which he characterized
it--was already dismissed from his mind when he emerged into the
street.
He had too many graver preoccupations to be greatly troubled by this
grotesque slander. Going on his way, however--a temporary cessation
of the soft, persistent rain which had been falling for most of the
day suggested a walk--a chance recollection brought him to a sudden
stop, changing his indifference for a moment into the shadow of pale
indignation. How dull of him not to have guessed at once! it must be
that unfortunate girl, Kitty Crichton, with whom busybodies were
associating his name. He wondered how they had discovered her, and
by whom the stupid story had been set afloat. The baselessness of
the scandal, conjoined with his immense apathy just then as to
anything more that the malice of men could do, inclined him to
amusement, the more so as he reflected how many months it was since
the girl and her wretched history had passed from his ken. He had
found her gone on his return from Italy in the spring, leaving no
address and but the briefest acknowledgment of his good-will in a
note, which stated that she had no longer any excuse for imposing on
his kindness--had found friends. The letter closed, as he imagined,
a painful history, which, since his service had been, after all, so
fruitless, he could see ended with relief. To his interpretation,
the girl had recovered her scoundrel journalist, or at least
compelled him to contribute to her support; and after all, as it
seemed, he had not done with her yet, though the fashion of her
return was ghostly and immaterial enough. The subject galled him;
there were always dim possibilities lurking in the background of it
which he refused to contemplate; he dismissed it. His meditation had
carried him through the bustle of Oxford Street to the Marble Arch,
and, the weather still encouraging him, he decided to turn into the
Park. Many rainy days had made the air exceedingly soft, and in his
enjoyment of this unusual quality, and of the strangely sweet odour
of the wet earth and mildewing leaves, he forgot for a while a
certain momentous sentence of Sir Egbert Rome's, which had jingled
in his head all that afternoon. Presently it tripped him up again,
like the gross melody of a music-hall song, and caused him to drop
absently upon the first seat, quite unconscious that it was in an
unwholesome condition of moisture. He had turned his back on the
brilliant patches of yellow and copper-coloured chrysanthemums on
the flower-plots facing Park Lane, and he looked westwards over a
wider expanse of grass and trees: the grass bestrewed with bright
autumnal leaves, the trees obscured and formless, in a rising white
mist, through which a pale sun struggled and was vanquished. He had
never been in a fitter mood to appreciate the decay of the year, and
suddenly he was seized, in the midst of his depression, with an
immense thrill, almost causing him to throw out his arms with an
embracing gesture to the autumn, the very personal charm, the
mysterious and pitiful fascination of the season whose visible
beauty seems to include all spiritual things. It cast a spell over
him of a long mental silence, as one might say, in which all
definite thought expired, from which he aroused himself at last with
a shrug of self-contempt, to find inexplicable tears in his eyes.
And just then an interruption came, not altogether unwelcome, in the
greeting of a familiar voice. It was Lightmark, who had discovered
him in the course of a rapid walk down the Row, and had crossed over
the small patch of intervening grass to make his salutations.
"I knew you by your back," he remarked, after they had shaken
hands--"the ineffable languor of it; and, besides, who else but you
would sit for choice on an October evening in such a wretched
place?"
He looked down ruefully at his patent leather shoes, which the damp
grass had dulled.
Rainham smiled vaguely; he needed an effort to pull himself
together, to collect his energies sufficiently to meet the
commonplace of conversation, after the curious detachment into which
he had fallen; and he wondered aimlessly how long he had been there.
"I suppose, like everyone else, Dick," he remarked after a while,
"it is the weather which has brought you home at such an
unfashionable date."
"Yes," answered Lightmark; "it was very poor fun yachting. I shall
stay in town altogether next year, I think. And you--you are not
looking particularly fit; what have you done with yourself?"
"Oh, I am fit enough," said Rainham lightly; "I have been in London,
you see."
"Well, I can't let you go now you are here. Won't you dine with us?
Or rather--no, I believe we dine out. Come back and have some tea;
Eve will be enchanted. I really decline to sit in that puddle."
Rainham rose slowly.
"Perhaps I will," he said. "I would have called before, if I had
thought there was the least chance of finding you. And how do things
go?"
As they strolled along through the deserted Park, and Lightmark
entertained his friend with an extravagant narration of their
miseries on the _Lucifer_, the chronic sea-sickness of the ladies, the
incapacity and intoxication of the steward, and the discontent of
everybody on board--he spoke as if they had entertained a
considerable party--Rainham's interested eyes had leisure to note a
change in him, not altogether unexpected. He presented the same
handsome, well-dressed, prosperous figure; and yet prosperity had
in some degree coarsened him. The old charm of his boyish
carelessness had been succeeded by a certain hard assurance, an air
of mundane, if not almost commercial shrewdness, which gave him less
the note of an artist than of a successful man of business. And
where the old Lightmark, the Lightmark of the Café Grecco days,
broke out at times, it was less pleasantly than of old, in a curious
recklessness, a tendency, which jarred on Rainham's susceptible
nerves, to dilate with a vanity which would have been vulgar, had it
not been almost childish, on his lavish living, the magnitude of his
expenditure.
"You must find that sort of thing rather a tax?" he asked
tentatively, after a description which struck him as unnecessarily
exuberant of a hospitality in the summer.
"Oh, it pays in the long run," remarked the other easily, "to keep
open house and go everywhere. Thank Heaven, the uncle is liberal! I
admit we have been going at rather a pace lately. But, then, I can
knock off a couple of pictures as soon as I have a little time,
which will raise the wind again. I know what the public wants, bless
it!"
Rainham shrugged his shoulders rather wearily.
"Poor public! If it wants art made in that spirit, it is worse than
I believed."
Lightmark looked askance at him, frowning a little, pulling at his
long moustache. He was absorbed for some time--they had turned into
the Edgware Road, and the soft rain had begun again--in ineffectual
pursuit of cabs. When at last he had caught a driver's eye, and they
had settled themselves on the cushions of a hansom, he turned
abruptly to his companion to ask him if he had seen the Academy
before it closed.
"You recognised your domain?" he asked lightly, when the other had
responded in the affirmative--"in my picture, I mean?"
He spoke quickly, in his accustomed blithe habit; it might have been
merely a morbid fancy of Rainham's which traced a note of anxiety,
of concealed uneasiness, in his accent, that the bare question
scarcely justified.
Rainham paused a moment: it was not only a passing thought of
Oswyn's acrimony, and of the difficult minutes during which he had
been thrown across Lightmark at the Dock, that constrained him; it
was rather the recollection of his own careful scrutiny of the
disputed canvas, when he had at last dragged himself with a
disagreeable sense of moral responsibility into Burlington House,
and had come away at last strangely dissatisfied. Acquitting Dick of
any conscious plagiarism, of a breach of common honesty, he was
disagreeably filled with a sense of the work's immeasurable
inferiority to Oswyn's ruined masterpiece. It was clever, and
audacious, and striking; it had had the fortune to be splendidly
hung, and that was all, for all his goodwill, he could say. And
since, after all, that was so little, would strike his friend as but
a cold tribute after the panegyrics of the morning papers, he
preferred to say nothing, deftly dropping the subject, and
responding to the first half of his friend's question alone.
"My domain, Dick? Ah, I forgot; you can hardly have heard that it is
my domain no longer--or ceases to be very shortly. That has come to
an end; I have sold it."
Lightmark whistled softly.
"Well, you surprise me! Of course I am glad; we will be glad too. We
shall see more of you now, I suppose? or will you live abroad?"
"Abroad?" echoed Rainham absently. "Oh, yes, very probably. But tell
me, how is--Eve?"
"As we seem to be arriving, I think I will let her tell you
herself."
They descended, and Rainham waited silently while his friend
discharged the cabman, and let him in with his latch-key into the
bright, spacious hall. Then, after glancing into the empty
drawing-room, Lightmark preceded him up the thick carpeted stairs,
on which their footsteps scarcely sounded, and stopped at the door
of Eve's boudoir, through which a woman's voice, speaking rather
rapidly, and, as it struck him, in a key of agitation, fell upon
Rainham's ear with a certain familiarity, though he was sure it was
not Eve's, and could not remember when or where he might have heard
it. After a moment they went in.