Part 12 (1/2)
”I hope they will be happy,” he answered absently. She arched her expressive brows, and he coloured, recollected himself. ”I beg your pardon,” he said hastily; ”I confess I was thinking of something else. You were talking of Mary; why should it not do? Does she care about him?”
His companion laughed, and her laugh had more than its wonted suggestion of irony.
”My dear Philip, for a clever man you can be singularly dense! Care for him! of course she does not.”
”She might do worse,” he said; ”Sylvester is not very bright, but he works hard, and will succeed after a fas.h.i.+on. His limitations dovetail conveniently with his capacities. What do you intend to do?”
”Do I ever interfere in these things? My dear, you are remarkably dull to-night. I never make marriages, nor prevent them. With all my faults, match-making is not one of them. I think too ill of life to try and arrange it. You must admit,” she added, ”that, long as I have known you, I have never tried to marry you?”
”Ah, that would have been too fatuous!” he remarked lightly.
They were both silent for a while, regarding each other disinterestedly; they appeared to be following a train of thought which led no whither; presently Lady Garnett asked:
”Are you going abroad this year?”
”Yes,” he said, ”as soon as I can--about the middle of October; to Mentone or Bordighera, I suppose.”
”Do you find them interesting? Do they do you much good?”
He smiled rather listlessly, ignoring her second question.
”I confess,” he said, ”it becomes rather a bore. But, I suppose, at my time of life one finds nothing very interesting. The mere act of living becomes rather a bore after a time.”
”I wonder what you are thinking about, Philip?” she asked meditatively; ”something has annoyed you to-night; I wonder if you are going to tell me.”
He laughed.
”Do we ever tell each other our annoyances? I think we sit and look at each other, and discover them. That is much more appropriate.”
”You take things too seriously,” she went on; ”my dear, they are really not worth it. That is my settled conviction.”
She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure ”in the high places of laughter”--a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic--in the decent drapery of her fict.i.tious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her expressive eyebrows.
”You are wonderful,” he exclaimed, after an interval, ”wonderful; that was what I was thinking.”
She smiled disinterestedly.
”Because you don't understand me? My dear, nothing is so easy as mystification; that is why I don't return the compliment. Yourself, you know, are not very intelligible to-night.”
He looked away frowning, but without embarra.s.sment; presently throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he remarked:
”I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can't. I am unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find Mary.”
”Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary yet; smoke another cigarette.”
He took one and lit it, absently, in the blue flame of the spirit-lamp, and she watched him closely with her bright, curious eyes.
”You know this Mr. Lightmark very well, don't you, Philip?”