Then he asked suddenly:

"Had you any motive, any reason for your suspicion?"

"It was the name Crichton--the man's pseudonym on the _Outcry_. It flashed across me then that she was after Lightmark. He was just severing his connection with the paper. He had always kept it very close, and I dare say I was one of the few persons who were in the secret. That is why, at the bottom of his heart, he is afraid of me--afraid that I shall bring it up. It's the one thing he is ashamed of."

"I see, I see," cried Rainham wearily; "the wretched fellow!"

"Dear man, why should we think of him?" broke in Oswyn; "he isn't worth it. Now of all seasons can't we find a topic less unsavoury?"

"You don't understand," continued Rainham, after a slight pause in his thin, far-away voice. "I am not thinking of him, or only indirectly. I have found him out, and I should be content enough to forget him if it were possible. Only, unfortunately, he happens to be inextricably entangled with all that is most sacred, most important to me. It is of his wife--Mrs. Lightmark: do you know her?--that I think."

Oswyn shook his head.

"I know her only by sight, as we all do; she is very beautiful."

"I don't mind telling you that I have considered her a great deal--yes, immensely. I should not speak of it--of her--unless I were dying; but, after all, when one is dying, there are things one may say. I have held my peace so long. And since I have been lying here I have had time to ponder it, to have thought it all out. It seems to me that simply for her sake someone should know before--before the occasion pa.s.ses--just the plain truth. Of course, Sylvester by rights ought to be the man, only I can't ask him to come to me--there are reasons; and, besides, he is an a.s.s."

"Yes, he is an a.s.s," admitted Oswyn simply; "that is reason enough."

And just then there flashed into his mind the one notable occasion on which the barrister had run across him, his intriguing letter and the ineffectual visit which had followed it--ineffectual as he had supposed, but which might nevertheless, he reflected now, have had its results, ironical and inopportune enough. It was a memory of no importance, and yet it seemed just then to be the last of a long train of small lights that led to a whole torch of illumination, in which the existence of little Margot and her quaint juxtaposition with his friend, which in his general easy att.i.tude towards the fantastic he had not troubled to investigate, was amply and generously justified. He turned round suddenly, caught his friend's thin hand, which he held.

"Ah, don't trouble to explain, to make me understand," he murmured.

"It's enough that I understand you have done something very fine, that you are the most generous of men."

Rainham was silent for a moment: he had no longer the physical capacity of smiling; but there was a gleam of the old humour in his eyes, as he replied:

"Only the most fortunate--in my friends; they are so clever, they see things so quickly. You make this very easy."

Oswyn did not shift for a while from his position: he was touched, moved more deeply than he showed; and there was a trace of emotion in his voice--of something which resembled envy.

"The happy woman! It is she who ought to know, to understand."

"It is for that I wished to tell you," went on Rainham faintly, "that she might know some day, that there might be just one person who could give her the truth in its season. Yes! I wanted her to be always in ignorance of what she had made of her life, of the kind of man she has married. She was such a child; it seemed too pitiful. It was for that I did it, d.a.m.ned myself in her eyes, to give her a little longer--a sort of respite. Very likely I made a mistake!

Those things can't be concealed for ever, and the longer the illusion lasts, the more bitter the awakening. Only if it might serve her later, in her darkest hour, as a sort of after-thought, it won't have been quite vain. That is how I see it now: I want her to know immensely--to know that she has always been unspeakably dear to me. Ah, don't mistake me! It's not for myself, it's not yet; I shall have done with life, done with love, by that time. When one is as tired as I am, death seems very good; only it hasn't those things.

Nothing can make any difference to me; I am thinking of her, that some day or other it will be for her benefit to understand, to remember----"

"To remember?"

"Yes, to remember," repeated Rainham quietly, "that her unhappiness has its compensation; if she has been bitterly wronged, she has also been fervently loved."

The other said nothing for a long time, simply considered the situation which Rainham's words, and still more even than anything that he had said, the things that he had not said, had strikingly revealed to him, leaving him, at the last, in a state of mingled emotions over which, perhaps, awe predominated.

At last he remarked abruptly:

"It _is_ you who are fortunate; you are so nearly done with it all; you've such a long rest before you." Then he added with a new solemnity: "You may trust me, Rainham. When it is seasonable, Mrs.

Lightmark shall know the truth. Perhaps she will come to me for it-- Heaven knows!--stranger things have happened. You have my hand upon it; I think you are right."

"Right? You mean that it wasn't a mistake, a _betise_?"

"_Felix culpa_! If it was a mistake it was a very fine one."

"Ah! I don't regret it," said Rainham, "only----"

"Only it was a mistake to suppose that life was to be arranged. That was all I meant. Yes; I don't believe in much, but I believe in necessity. You can't get over it yourself, and you can't--no, not for all your goodwill, your generosity--get over it for another.

There are simply inevitable results of irrevocable causes, and no place for repentance or rest.i.tution. And yet you help her, not as you meant to, and not now; but ah, you help her!"

"So long as I do that----" murmured Rainham, with a deep inhalation, closing his eyes wearily, in a manner which revealed how severely the intimate strain of conversation had told upon him.

Oswyn waited a little longer, in half expectation of his further utterance; but Rainham made no sign, lay quite motionless and hushed, his hands clasped outside of the counterpane as if already in the imitation of death; then the other rose and made a quiet exit, imagining that his friend slept, or would soon sleep.

And yet actually, in spite of the extreme physical weariness which had gradually stolen over him, dulling his senses, so that he was hardly conscious of Oswyn's departure, or of the subdued entrance of the nurse, who had been discreetly waiting for it, Rainham's mind was still keenly vigilant; and it was in the relief of a certain new lucidity, an almost hieratic calm, that he reviewed that recent interview, in which he had so deliberately unburdened himself. It seemed as if, in his great weakness, the ache of his old desire, his fever of longing, bad suddenly left him, giving place (as though the literal wasting away of his body had really given freer access to that pure spirit, its prisoner), to a love now altogether purged of pa.s.sion, and become strangely tolerable and sweet.

CHAPTER x.x.x

If Philip Rainham's name, during that long, hard winter and ungracious spring--near the close of which he turned his face, with the least little sigh of regret, to the wall--was not often mentioned in the house in Parton Street, at whose door he had formerly knocked so often, it must not be supposed that by its occupants it had been in any way forgotten. He had not committed the discourtesy of leaving Lady Garnett's note unanswered; on the contrary, he had answered it both promptly and--as it seemed to him--well, in a letter which was certainly diplomatic, suggesting as it did--at least, to Mary Masters, to whom it had been shown--that he was on the point of an immediate flight South.

Whether the elder lady was equally deceived by his ambiguous phrases, it was not so easy to declare. She had, at this time less than ever, the mode of persons who wear their hearts upon their sleeves; her mask of half-cynical good-humour was constantly up; and she met the girl's hinted interrogations--for directly the nature of their uneasiness, by a sort of tacit agreement, was not alluded to--with the same smiling indifference, the same air of bland rea.s.surance which she brought to the discussion of a sauce or an _entremet_ at one of those select little dinner-parties on which she piqued herself, and which latterly had been more incessant and more select than ever.

Only on Mary's sensitive ear something in the elaborately cheerful tone in which she mentioned their vanished friend would occasionally jar. It was too perfectly well done not to appear a little exaggerated; and though she could force a smile at Lady Garnett's persistent picture of the recalcitrant G.o.dson basking, with his pretext of ill-health, on the sunny terraces of Monte Carlo, she none the less cherished a suspicion that the picture was as little convincing to its author as to herself, that her aunt also had silent moments in which she credited the more depressing theory.

And the long silence simply deepened her conviction that, all the time they were imposing upon themselves with such vain conjectures, he was actually within their reach, sick and sorry and alone, in that terrible Blackpool, which she peopled, in her imagination of a young lady whose eastward wanderings had never extended beyond a flower show in the Temple Gardens, with a host of vague, inconceivable horrors.

From Bordighera, from Monaco, she argued, he would certainly have written, if it were only a line of rea.s.surance, for there his isolation was impregnable. Only the fact that he had stayed on in London could account for the need of this second arm of silence, as well as of solitude, to enforce his complete withdrawal from the torment of tongues.

Certainly, wherever he might actually be, the girl had never realized more fully than just then what an irreparable gap estrangement from him made in her life.

There was, indeed, no pause in the stream of clever, cultivated, charming persons who rang daily at their discriminating door, who drank tea in their drawing-room, and talked felicitously for their entertainment.

It was a miscellaneous company, although the portal was difficult in a manner, and opened only on conditions of its own--conditions, it may be said, which, to the uninitiated, to the excluded, seemed fantastic enough.

One might be anything, Lady Garnett's constant practice seemed to enunciate, provided one was not a bore; one could represent anything--birth or wealth, or the conspicuous absence of these qualities--so long as one also effectively represented one's self.

This was the somewhat democratic form which the old lady's aristocratic tradition a.s.sumed.

It was not, then, without a certain pang of self-reproach that Mary wondered one evening--it was at the conclusion of one of their most successful entertainments--that a company so brilliant, so distinguished, should have left her only with a nervous headache and a distinct sense of satisfaction that the last guest had gone.

Was she, then, after all an unworthy partaker of the feast which her aunt had so long and liberally spread for her delectation?

As she sat in her own room, still in her dress of the evening, before the comfortable fire, which cast vague half-lights into the dark, s.p.a.cious corners--she had extinguished the illumination of candles which her maid had left her, a sort of unconscious tribute to the economical traditions of her youth--she found herself considering this question and the side issues it involved very carefully.

Was it for some flaw in her nature, some lack of subtilty, or inbred stupidity, that she found the inmates of Parton Street so uninspiring, had been so little amused?

The dozen who had dined with them to-night--how typical they might be of the rest!--original and unlike each other as they were, each having his special distinction, his particular note, were hardly separable in her mind. They were very cultivated, very subtile, very cynical. Their talk, which flashed quickest around Lady Garnett, who was the readiest of them all, could not possibly have been better; it was like the rapid pa.s.ses of exquisite fencers with foils. And they all seemed to have been everywhere, to have read everything, and at the last to believe in nothing--in themselves and their own paradoxes least of all. There was nothing in the world which existed except that one might make of it an elegant joke. And yet of old, the girl reflected, she had found them stimulating enough; their limitations, at least, had not seemed to her to weigh seriously against their qualities, negative though these last might be.

Had it been, then, simply the presence of Mr. Rainham which had leavened the company, and the personal fascination of his friendship--indefinable and un.o.btrusive as that had been--which had enabled her to adopt for the moment their urbane, impartial point of view?