Part 24 (1/2)

”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 cus.h.i.+ons 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 pa.s.sing 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 d.i.c.k 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, d.i.c.k? 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, s.p.a.cious 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.

CHAPTER XXIII

There are occasions when thought is terribly and comprehensively sudden: the rudimentary processes of reasoning, by a.n.a.logy and syllogism, so slow and so laborious, turn to divination. We have an occult vision, immediate and complete, into the obscure manner of life, and crowd an infinity of discovery into a very few seconds. It was so with Philip Rainham now. Lightmark had scarcely closed the door, against which he now stood in a black silence, with the air of a man turned to stone; Rainham's eyes had only fallen once upon the two figures on the sofa--Eve crushed in a corner, a sorrowful, dainty shape in the silk and lace of her pretty tea-gown, with the white drawn face of a scared child; Kitty Crichton, in her cloak and hat, bending forward a little, the hectic flush of strong excitement colouring her checks, that were already branded by her malady--when he underwent a moral revolution. He had no more to learn. He glanced at Lightmark curiously, almost impartially, his loathing strangely tempered by a sort of self-contempt, that he should have been so deluded. The clumsy lies which this man had told him, and which he in his indolent charity had believed! All at once, and finally, in a flash of brutal illumination, he saw Lightmark, who had once been his friend, as he really was, naked and unclean. It stripped him of all his superficial qualities; the mask of genial good-nature, the air of good-fellows.h.i.+p, under which his gross egoism lay concealed that it might be more securely mischievous when it went loose. His amiability was an imposture, a dangerous harlequinade; the man was bad. It was a plausible scoundrel, a vulgar profligate with a handsome face and a few cheap talents--had he not been reduced to stealing the picture of his friend?--whom these two women had loved, to whom one of them was married. Ah, the sting of it lay there! Good or bad, he was Eve's husband, and she was his wife, bound to him until the end. And then, for the first time, seeing her there, helpless and terrified, in her forlorn prettiness, he deceived himself no longer, wrapped up his tenderness for the woman, his angry pity for her misery that was coming, in no false terms. Such self-deception, honest as it had been, was no longer possible. He knew now that he loved her, and all that his love had been--the very salt and savour of life to him, the one delicious and adorable pain relieving the gray _ennui_ of the rest of it, to remain with him always (even, as it seemed now, in the very article of death) as a reminder of the intolerable sweetness which life, under other conditions, might have contained. And inexplicably, in the midst of his desolation, his heart sang a sort of fierce paean: as a woman, delivered of a man-child, goes triumphing to meet the sordidness of death, so was there in Rainham's rapid acceptance of his fruitless and ineffectual love a distinct sense of victory, in which pain expired--victory over the meanness and triviality of modern life, which could never seem quite mean and trivial again, since he had proved it to be capable of such moments; had looked once--and could so sing his ”Nunc Dimittis”--upon the face of love. And it all happened in a second, and in a further second--for his thought, quickened by the emergency, still leapt forward with incredible swiftness--a great audacity seized Philip Rainham, to save the beloved woman pain. The devil would be at him later, would beset him, hara.s.s him, madden him with hint and opportunity of profiting by Lightmark's forfeiture. But the devil's turn was not yet; he was filled only with his great and reverent love, his sublime pity for the little tragical figure in front of him, whose house of painted cards tumbled. Well! he might save it for her for a little longer--at least, there was one desperate chance which he would try.

He had lived too long, unconsciously, in the habit of seeking her happiness, that it should fail him now in her evil hour, in the first flush of his new consciousness (ah, yes, there was beauty in that, and victory!), for any base personal thought or animosity against the man. He would have given her so easily his life; should he grudge her his reputation? The reputation of a man with one foot in the grave--what did it matter? And it all came about in a few seconds.

Before any one of that strange company had found time to speak, Rainham had grasped the situation, knew himself at last and the others, and was prepared, scarcely counting the cost, with his splendid lie. He made a step forward, then stopped suddenly, as if he were bracing himself for a moral conflict. His face was very white and rigid, his mouth set firmly; and the other three watched him with a strange expectancy depicted on all their countenances, amidst the various emotions proper to each of them; for he alone had the air of being master of the situation. And his resolve had need to be very keen, for just then Eve did a thing which might have wrecked it. She rose and came straight towards him; her pretty, distressed face was raised to his, still, in spite of its womanly anguish, with some of the pleading of a frightened child, who runs instinctively in its extremity to the person whom it knows best; and she gave him her two little trembling hands, which he held for a moment silently.

”Philip,” she said, in a low, constrained voice--”Philip, I have known you all my life--longer than anyone. You were always good to me. Tell me whether it's true or not what this woman has told me.

Philip, I shall die if this be true!”

He bent his head for a moment. He had a wild longing to give up, simply to clasp her in his arms and console her with kisses and incoherent words of tenderness, as he had done years ago, when she was a very small child, and ran to him with her tear-stained cheeks, after a difficulty with her governess. But he only put her away from him very quietly and sadly.

”It is not true,” he said quietly, ”if it is anything against your husband.”

The girl on the sofa, Kitty Crichton, rose; she made a step forward irresolutely, seemed on the point of speaking, but something in Rainham's eyes coerced her, and Eve was crying. He continued very fast and low, as though he told with difficulty some shameful story, learnt by rote.

”I tell you it is not true. Lightmark,” he added sternly, ”there has been a mistake--you see that--for which I apologize. Wake up, for G.o.d's sake! Come and see after your wife; some slander has upset her. This woman is--mine; I will take her away.”

The girl trembled violently; she appeared fascinated, terrified into a pa.s.sive obedience by Rainham's imperious eyes, which burnt in his white face like the eyes of a dying man. She followed, half unconsciously, his beckoning hand. But Eve confronted her before she reached the door.

”Whom am I to believe?” she cried scornfully. ”Why did you say it?

What was the good of it--a lie like that? It is a lie, I suppose?”