In the empty studio, from which, for one night, most of her
husband's impedimenta had been removed to allow place for the long
supper-table, which glistened faintly in the pale electric light,
she paused only long enough to wrap her fantastic person in the dark
cloak which she had caught up on her way.
Then she let herself out quietly by the private door into the road.
And she stood still a moment, blotted against the shadows,
hesitating, vaguely considering her next step.
The honey-coloured moon, casting its strange, silken glamour over
the white house, over the black outline of the trees in the garden,
spangled here and there with Japanese lanterns, gave an air of
immense unreality to the scene; and the tremulous notes of the
violins, which floated faintly down to her from the half-opened
windows of the ball-room, only heightened this effect, seeming just
then to be no more than the music of moonbeams to which the fairies
dance.
For a moment a sudden weakness and timidity overcame her. In a world
so transcendently unreal--had not she just seen her happiness become
the very dream of a shadow?--was it not the merest futility to take
a step so definite, to be passionate or intense? Better rather to
rest for a little in this vague world of half-lights into which she
had stepped, under the cooling stars, and then to return and take up
one's old place in the masque.
But her fantasy passed. In the distance two glowing orbs of a hansom
came slowly towards her, and her purpose grew suddenly very strong.
The man reined in his horse with an inquiring glance at the hooded
figure on the pavement, seeking a fare. And it was without
hesitation that she engaged him, giving him the number of Oswyn's
house in Frith Street, Soho, in her calm, well-bred voice, and
bidding him be quick.
But the horse was incapable--tired, perhaps (she recalled the fact
long afterwards, and the very shape and colour of the bony,
ill-groomed animal, as one remembers trivial details upon occasions
of great import); and after a while she resigned herself to a
tedious drive.
As they rattled along confusedly through the crowded streets she
caught from time to time the reflection of her own face in the two
little mirrors at each side, and wondered to find herself the same.
For she did not deceive herself, nor undervalue the crushing force
of the blow which she had received.
To her husband, when she turned scornfully from his clumsy
evasions--for a moment, perhaps, to herself--she had justified the
singular course she was taking by an overwhelming necessity of
immediately facing the truth, in which, perhaps, there still lurked
the dim possibility of explanation whereby her husband's vileness
might find the shadow of an excuse.
But with further reflection--and she was reflecting with passionate
intensity--this little glow-worm of hope expired. The truth! She
knew it already--had known before, almost instinctively--that Philip
Rainham's justification could only be the warrant of her husband's
guilt; no corroboration of Oswyn's could make that dreary fact any
plainer than it was already.
No, it was hardly the truth which she desired so much as an act of
tardy expiation which she would make. For with the bitterness of her
conviction that, for all her wealth, and her beauty, and her youth,
she had, none the less, irretrievably thrown away her life, there
mingled an immense contrition at having been so blind and hard, so
culpably unjust to the most generous of men, who had deliberately
effaced himself for her good.
And the exceeding bitterness of her self-reproach, which alone saved
her composure, forbidding the mockery of tears, was only exaggerated
when she remembered how vain her remorse must remain. It mattered no
jot that she was sorry, since death had sealed their estrangement
ironically for all time.
In her passionate recognition of his constant justice and kindness,
which of old, vainly striving to perpetuate the fading illusion of
her husband's honour (her generosity did not pause to remember how
vain these efforts had been), she had discounted for hypocrisy, she
felt that no price of personal suffering would have been too heavy
if only for one hour, one moment, she could have recalled him from
the world of shadows to her side.
She could figure to herself, refining on her misery, his attitude in
such a case: the half sad, half jesting reassurance of his gravely
pardoning eyes.
They haunted her just then, those eyes of Philip Rainham, which had
been to the last so ambiguous and so sad, and were now perpetually
closed.
And for the first time a suspicion flashed across her mind, which,
while it made her heart flutter like a frightened bird, seemed to
her the one drop hitherto lacking in the cup of her unhappiness.
Had, then, after all, that gentle indifference of her friend masked
an immense hunger, a deeply-felt need of personal tenderness, which
she might have supplied--ah, how gladly!--if she had known? Could he
have cared more deeply than people knew?
She reminded herself the next moment, as they came to a sudden
standstill before a dark-green door, how idle all such questions
were--vain beating of the hands against the shut door of death!
She alighted and dismissed her cab, and in the interval which
elapsed before her ring was answered by a slovenly little servant,
who gaped visibly at the lady's hurried request that her name should
be taken up to Mr. Oswyn, she had leisure for the first time to
realize the strangeness of her course.
Her mother, Charles, her guests--Felicia Dollond and the rest--how
would they consider the adventure if ever they should know? It was
easy to imagine their attitude of shocked disapproval, and her
brother's disgusted repudiation of the whole business as a thing,
most emphatically, which one did not do. Ah, no! it was not a
departure such as this that a well-bred society Spartan could even
decently contemplate! And it was almost with a laugh, devoid,
indeed, of merriment, that Eve tossed consideration of these
scruples contemptuously away.
At last she was in revolt against their world and the pedantry of
its little inflexible laws; and all her old traditions had become
odious to her, seeming, for the moment, deeply tainted with
dishonour, and partly the cause of her disastrous plight. A great,
ruining wave had broken over her life, and in her passionate
helplessness she cried only for some firm and absolute shore, else
the silence of the engulfing waters, not for the vain ropes of
social convention with which they would drag her back into the
perilous security from which she had been swept; and she had
forgotten everything but her imperative need, which had brought her
there, when the lodging-house drudge returned and ushered her
clumsily into Oswyn's presence.
It was a sitting-room on the second floor which the artist occupied,
by no means an uncomfortable apartment, though Eve's first
impression of it was immeasurably sordid, and she realized, with a
touch of pity, that the painter's difficult genius had no tact of
application to his surroundings.
Had, then, the painter of "Thanatos the Peacebearer"--that
incomparable work!--no personal taste, to be violated by the crude
wall-paper and the vulgar vases, containing impossible flowers,
which jostled against broken tobacco-pipes and a half empty bottle
of milk on the mantelpiece?
There was an immense untidiness everywhere; a disorder of children's
toys and torn picture-books would have prepared Eve for the
discovery of a sleeping child with brilliant hair coiled up in a rug
on the sofa, if her eyes had not been arrested by an unframed canvas
on an easel, the only picture, save some worthless prints in common
gilt frames, which was visible. It was the head of Philip Rainham,
immortalized by the brush of his friend, which awaited her--the eyes
already closed, the pale lips still smiling with that superbly
ironical smile of the dead.
She had not greeted Oswyn on her entrance, and now she had ceased to
remember that he was there, as she stood contemplating the portrait
with her rapt and sorrowful gaze, while Oswyn, leaning across the
table, implicitly accepting the situation, which had to him all the
naturalness of the unexpected, considered her in his turn.
He had never before seen her to such advantage, and, remembering
that early presentment of her which Lightmark had exhibited in the
Grosvenor, he realized how much she had developed. The singular
nobility and purity of her beauty amazed him; it shone out like the
starry night; and, standing there remote and silent (in her
abstraction she had let her cloak slide to the ground, revealing her
white arms, her fanciful, incongruous attire), she seemed, indeed, a
creature of another world.
When she turned to him at last there was an immense and solemn
entreaty in her eyes for candour and directness, an appeal to be
spared no bitter knowledge that he might possess--for the whole
truth.
"Tell me," she began slowly, calmly, though he was not ignorant that
her composure was the result of an immense inward effort. "I can't
explain why I have come to you--perhaps you yourself can explain
that better than I. I don't know what you may think of me--I am too
unhappy to care. I have no claim upon you. I only entreat you to
answer me a question which perhaps no one now living can answer but
you. Ah!"--she broke off with a gesture of sudden passion--"I have
been so cruelly kept in the dark."
Oswyn lowered his eyes for a moment, considering. A curious wave of
reminiscence swept over him, giving to this strange juxtaposition
the last touch of completion.
He remembered Rainham's long reticence, and his unburdening himself
at the last, in a conviction that there would be a season when the
truth would be best. And he said to himself that this time had come.
"Mrs. Lightmark," he said at last, in a low, constrained voice, "I
promise to answer any question that is within my knowledge."
"It is about my--my husband and Philip Rainham. What passed between
them in the autumn of last year? Who was that woman?"
He did not reply for a moment; but unconsciously his eyes met hers
full, and in their brief encounter it was possible that many truths
were silently told. Presently she continued:
"You need not tell me, Mr. Oswyn. I can see your answer as plainly
as if you had spoken. It is my husband----"
She broke off sharply, let her beautiful head droop with a movement
of deep prostration upon her hands.
"What have I done, what have I done," she moaned, "that this
dishonour should come to me?"
It was a long time before she looked up at him.
"Why did he do it?" she whispered.
"Have you never guessed?" he asked in his turn. "I will tell you,
Mrs. Lightmark. I was with him when he was dying. He wished you to
know; he had some such time as this in his mind. It was a sort of
message."
"He wished me to know--a sort of message," she repeated blankly. "He
spoke of me, then--he forgave me for my hard judgement, for knowing
him so ill?"
"It was himself that he did not forgive for not having guarded you
better, for having been deceived by your husband. He spoke of you to
me very fully at the last when we both saw that his death was merely
a question of days. I saw then what I had sometimes suspected
before, that you had absorbed his whole life, that his devotion to
you was a kind of religion."
"He loved me?" she asked at last, in a hushed, strange voice, white
to the lips.
Oswyn bowed his head.
"Ever since you were a child. It was very beautiful, and it was with
him at the last as a light. Don't reproach yourself; it was to
prevent that that he wished you to be told."
"To prevent it!" she cried, with tragical scorn. "Am I not to
reproach myself that I was hard and callous and cold; that I never
understood nor cared; that I was not with him? Not reproach myself?
Oh, Philip, Philip!" she called, breaking down utterly, laying her
face in her hands.
Oswyn averted his eyes, giving her passion time to appease itself.
When he glanced at her again, she had gathered her cloak round her,
was standing by the picture from which she seemed loath to remove
her eyes.
"You gave him great happiness," he suggested gently, "in the only
manner in which it was possible. Remember only that. He must in any
case have died."
He imagined that she hardly heard him, absorbed in the desolation of
her own thought; and when she turned to him again, quite ready for
departure now, he saw by the hard light in her eyes that she had
recurred to her husband, to the irreparable gulf which must
henceforth divide them.
"I can't go back to him," she whispered, as if she communed with
herself. "I hate him; yes, I hate him, with my whole soul. He has
lied to me too much; he has made me do such a cruel wrong. There are
things which one can't forgive. Ah, no! it's not possible."
Oswyn viewed her compassionately, while a somewhat bitter smile
played about his mouth.
"No, you will go back, Mrs. Lightmark! Forgive me," he added,
raising his hand, interrupting her, as she seemed on the point of
speech. "I don't want to intrude on you--on your thoughts, with
advice or consolation. They are articles I don't deal in. Only I
will tell you--I who know--that in revolt also there is vanity. You
are bruised and broken and disillusioned, and you want to hide away
from the world and escape into yourself, or from yourself; it's all
the same. Ah, Mrs. Lightmark, believe me, in life that is not
possible, or where it is most possible is in a crowd. Go back to
your guests; I know, you see, whence you come; take up your part in
the play, the masque; be ready with your cues. It's all masks and
dominoes; what does the form or colour of it matter? Underneath it
all you are yourself, with your beautiful sorrow, your memories,
your transcendent happiness--nothing can touch that; what does it
matter?"
"Happiness!" she ejaculated, rather in wonder than in scorn, for in
spite of her great weariness she had been struck by the genuine
accent struggling through his half ironical speech.
"Most happy," he said, with a deep inhalation. "Haven't you an ideal
which life, with its cruelties, its grossness, can never touch?"
Then he added quickly, in words of Philip Rainham, which had flashed
with sudden appositeness across his mind.
"Your misery has its compensation; you have been wronged, but you
have also been loved."
"Ah, my friend!" she cried, turning toward the picture with a new
and more beautiful illumination in her eyes, "was it for this that
you did it?"
Oswyn said nothing, and Eve moved towards the door, discovering for
the first time, on her way, the sleeping child. She stopped for a
moment, and the other watched her with breathless curiosity,
uncertain how far her knowledge might extend.
And as she stood there, wondering, a great wave of colour suffused
her white face; the next moment she was gone, but in the light of
that pure blush Oswyn seemed to have discovered that her tragical
enlightenment was complete.
When she turned once more into the street, she had already set
herself gravely, with a strange and factitious composure, to face
her life. It stretched itself out before her like a great, gray
plain, the arid desolation of the road being rendered only more
terrible by the flowers with which it would be strewn. For suddenly,
while Oswyn had been speaking, she had recognised that after all she
would go back; the other course had been merely the first bitter
cry, half hysterical, of her grief.
By her husband's side, with the semblance of amity between them
still, utterly apart and estranged as they must in reality
henceforth perpetually be, it seemed to her that she could none the
less religiously cherish the memory of her friend because she would
turn a smiling mask to the world's indifference, wearing mourning in
her heart. And deeply as she had suffered, in the midst of her
remorse she could still remind herself that in the last half hour
she had gained more than she had lost; that life, however tedious it
might be, was in a manner consecrated by this great devotion, which
death had embalmed, to be a light to her in lonely places and dark
hours, a perpetual after-thought against the cynicism or despair to
which her imitation of happiness might conduce.
The mask of a smile, and mourning in her heart! Yes, it was in some
such phrase as that that the life which began then for her must be
expressed--for her, and perhaps, she reflected sadly, for others,
for many, the justest and the best.
And in the meantime she would go back to her dancers, resume once
more her well-worn _rôle_ of the brilliant and efficient hostess. She
wondered if it would be difficult to account for herself, to explain
an absence so unprecedented, if, as was doubtless the case, her
figure had been missed. But the next moment she smiled a trifle
bitterly, for she had reminded herself of her husband's proved
facility of prevarication, which she felt certain would already have
been usefully employed.