A Comedy of Masks Part 20

Charles Sylvester bent forward with bland satisfaction; he had it so obviously on the tip of his tongue that he would be charmed to be her escort, that the girl hastened to interrupt him.

"You were not at Lady Dulminster's, Mr. Sylvester? We quite expected to see you."

"If I had known that you were to be there!" he exclaimed. Then he added: "I had a card, and, indeed, I fully intended to look in. But one is always so pressed for time just before the long vacation, and yesterday I was quite exhausted. Did you see any of my people?"

"Yes," said Mary, "Eve was there; we expected her to play. It is a very musical house."

"Ah, yes! I have heard so from my sister, and from Colonel Lightmark. He says that Lady Dulminster is really a most accomplished woman."

"He looks as if he found her charming," put in Lady Garnett with a shrug. Then she added, suppressing a yawn, her thin fingers dallying regretfully with the leaves of her novel: "I suppose your exertions are nearly over, Mr. Sylvester. You will be going away soon?"

He shook his head gravely.

"I fear not for long. I may have a week's cruise with my brother-in-law--you know, he has a yacht for the summer--but my labours are only beginning. I have the elections in view. You agree with me, no doubt, Lady Garnett, that the Government is bound to go to the country in the autumn; you know, of course, that I am thinking of standing for----"

"I congratulate you in advance, Mr. Sylvester! I am sure you will get in, especially if you have your sister down to canva.s.s."

"I am afraid Eve is not sufficiently interested in politics to be of much a.s.sistance," said the candidate. Then he went on, a little nervously, pulling at his collar: "You will wish me success, Miss Masters?"

"Oh, yes!" said the girl hastily; "I am sure we both wish you that, Mr. Sylvester. We shall be most interested, shall we not, Aunt Marcelle?"

Lady Garnett came to her a.s.sistance with smiling prompt.i.tude.

"Of course, Mr. Sylvester; we will even wear your colours, if they are becoming, you know; and I am sure you would not fight under any others. And, mind, we will have no reforms--unless you like to try your hand on the climate. But nothing else! You are so fond of reforming, you English--even the most Conservative of you--that I live in constant fear of being reformed away. I hope, Mr. Sylvester, you are more Conservative than that."

Charles Sylvester flushed a little; he cleared his throat elaborately before he replied:

"I fear I have failed to make myself understood, Lady Garnett; in no sense do I call myself a Conservative, though I am prepared to vote with the party on the Irish Question. I am a Liberal Unionist, Lady Garnett. I may almost call myself a Radical Unionist. My views on the emanc.i.p.ation of labour, for instance, are quite advanced. I am prepared----"

Mary interrupted him, absently, demurely, with a little speech that appeared to be a quotation.

"Labour is a pretty beast in its cage to the philanthropic visitor with buns; its temper is better understood of the professional keeper."

Lady Garnett arched her eyebrows pensively; Charles looked surprised, displeased; Mary hastened to explain, blus.h.i.+ng a little:

"I beg your pardon! the phrase is Mr. Rainham's. I believe it is the only political principle he has."

Charles's displeasure at the maxim cooled to lofty disdain of its author.

"Ah, yes!--pretty, but cynical, as I should say most of Mr.

Rainham's principles were."

Lady Garnett was aroused out of her state of vacant boredom for the first time into a certain interest. Mary sat, her hands clasped in her lap, the flush just dying away out of her pale cheeks, while Mr.

Sylvester embarked upon an elaborate disquisition of his principles and his programme--it might have been an expansion of his Parliamentary address--which the elder lady, whom a chance phrase had started upon a new line of thought, scarcely considered.

Does he know? she asked herself. Has this rather stupid young man grown suddenly acute enough to be jealous? Certainly there had been a flash, a trace of curious rancour in his brief mention of Rainham's name, for which it was scarcely easy to account. That the two men, in spite of their long juxtaposition, had never been more than acquaintances, had never been in the least degree friends, she was perfectly well aware; it was not in the nature of either of them to be more intimately allied.

Rainham's indolent humour and fantastic melancholy, his genial disregard of popularity or success, could not but be displeasing to a man so precise and practical as the barrister. Only now she had scented, had dimly perceived beneath his speech, something more than the indefinable aversion of incompatible tempers, a very personal and present dislike. Had things pa.s.sed between them, things of which she was ignorant? Was the sentiment, then, reciprocal? She hardly believed it: Rainham's placid temper gave to his largest hostilities the character merely of languid contempt; it was not worth the trouble to hate anyone, he had said to her so often--neither to hate nor to love. She could imagine him with infidelities on occasion to the last part of his rule; yes, she could imagine that--but for hatred, no! he had said rightly he was too indolent for that. It must be all on one side, then, as happens so frequently in life with love and hate, and the rest--all on one side. And the barrister had risen to take his leave before her reflections had brought her further than this.

CHAPTER XX

It must be admitted that when Lady Garnett insinuated, for the benefit of her half-incredulous inward counsellor, that Charles Sylvester, in spite of his almost aggressive panoply of self-a.s.surance, had been smitten by the fever of jealousy, she fully sustained her reputation for perspicacity. Her conclusions were seldom wrong, and, indeed, the barrister, although he had professional motives for endeavouring to cloak himself with something of the wisdom of the serpent, was characterized far more by the somewhat stolid innocence of that proverbially moral, but less interesting creature, the dove; and it was an easy task for a keen observer, such as her ladys.h.i.+p undoubtedly was, to read him line upon line, like the most clearly printed of books. As in the case of a book, what one read was not always intelligible, and it might even on occasion be necessary to read between the obvious lines; but in this particular instance the page contained no cryptogram, and the astute old lady had read it without her spectacles.

Charles was jealous; he had not insulted himself by admitting it even for an instant, but he was jealous; and his jealousy was more than the roving fever of all lovers, in that it had a definite, tangible object.

It would have been contrary to his nature to allow either his love or the ensuing pa.s.sion to interfere in any way with his professional duties or instincts; he was a lawyer, and an embryo Member of Parliament first, a man afterwards; and it was not until late in the afternoon of the day which followed his last recorded interview with Lady Garnett and her niece that he dismissed from his brain the complexities of "Brown and another _versus_ Johnson," and drew from an orderly mental pigeon-hole the bundle of papers bearing the neat endors.e.m.e.nt, "_Re_ Miss Masters." When, to the ecstatic joy of his clerk, he had withdrawn himself from his chambers in Paper Buildings, and was walking briskly along the dusty Embankment in the direction of his club, he found himself, by a sequence which was natural, though he would have been the last to own it, already thinking of Rainham, and wondering, with a trace of dignified self-reproach, whether he had not been guilty of some remissness in the performance of his duty towards society, in the matter of that reprehensible individual and his aberrations from the paths of virtue. He did not stop to question himself too strictly as to the connection between his matrimonial aspirations and Rainham's peccadilloes; but he was able to a.s.sure himself that the a.s.sertion of his principles demanded a closer investigation, a more crucial a.n.a.lysis of certain ambiguous episodes.

"Supposing," he argued, "supposing Rainham had given signs of a desire to marry my sister, or my cousin, or any other girl in whom I was interested, or, in short, whom I knew, it would obviously have been my duty, before giving my consent or approval, to find out all about his relations with that girl, that person whom I saw with him in the park--ah, yes! Kitty, that was her name. And, in a way, don't I owe far more to society in general than I do to any of my immediate friends in particular? Well, then I ought to know more about Kitty, so as to be prepared in case--that is, for emergencies....

Why, for all I know, I may have been suspecting Rainham all this time quite unjustly. I'm sure I hope so." Here he shook his head sorrowfully. "But I'm afraid there's not much chance of that. The question remains, how am I to find out anything? It's no good asking Rainham; that goes without saying. It would be equally useless to try Lightmark: they're as thick as thieves, and he's not the sort of man to be pumped very easily. And yet, if Rainham's friends are out of the question, what's to be done? He hasn't got any enemies--that sort of man never has, except himself. How can I get hold of the girl? I suppose some people would set a detective to watch Rainham, and so on; but that's not to be thought of, in this case." He stopped close to Cleopatra's Needle, and frowned abstractedly over the stone parapet, absently following the struggles of a boy who was laboriously working a great, empty lighter across the wide, smoke-coloured river at a narrow angle with the sh.o.r.e. An idea suggested itself in flattering colours for a moment: he might pay a visit to the little restaurant or club in Turk Street, the shady place with a foreign name which he had forgotten. At the expense of a little tact, he might very probably succeed in inducing some of the careless, disreputable young artists who formed the frequentation of the place to talk about Rainham's amours. It even occurred to him that at a late hour Kitty herself might be seen there, dancing a can-can with Rainham, or singing songs with a riotous chorus. But in spite of this prospect, the notion was not sufficiently attractive. He had not enjoyed his introduction to the eccentric fraternity, on the occasion when he had been fired by Lightmark's early enthusiasm about the place to request to take him there to dine. He had felt, almost as much as the men to whom he was introduced, that he had no business there, that he was an outsider; he had even been snubbed. "And, after all," he said impatiently, resuming his homeward direction, "though I've got enough evidence to d.a.m.n him twice over in the eyes of any man in the world, I suppose it wouldn't be enough to convince a woman, if she believed in him. I must get hold of Kitty--it's the only way to arrive at a certainty."

After much deliberation to the same effect, he determined, somewhat reluctantly, that there was nothing for it but to endeavour to enlist the sympathies of one of Rainham's more intimate friends. He had recurred by this time to the unstable hypothesis that he was acting primarily in Rainham's interest, that his real motive was to arrive at the truth on the chance that it might be favourable to his unadmitted rival. It only remained for him to select out of the limited material at his disposal the man whom he should invite to enter upon this alliance. And when he reached the gloomy library of the eminently respectable club, where he was accustomed, before dining, to study the evening papers and to write his letters, the choice had been made; and after one or two abortive efforts, he composed to his satisfaction a diplomatic epistle, which he addressed to Oswyn (with whom he enjoyed a nodding acquaintance) at the restaurant in Turk Street.

Late in the afternoon of the next day Sylvester sat alone and expectant before a pile of temporarily neglected papers, telling himself that Rainham ought to be very grateful for these strenuous efforts in the interests of his injured reputation. He was beginning to wonder nervously whether Oswyn would fail him, when he heard a knock at the outer door, followed by an unfamiliar step, and the clerk announced that a gentleman wished to see him by appointment on private business. The barrister rose from his seat with a portentous display of polite, awkward cordiality, and motioned his guest into a chair.

"It's extremely good of you to take the trouble to come," he said tentatively.

"That depends upon what you want of me," answered Oswyn shrewdly.

"You said in your note that it was on a matter of vital importance to a friend of mine. I haven't so many friends that I can afford to s.h.i.+rk a little trouble in a matter which vitally concerns one of them. May I ask, in the first place, who is the friend?"

Sylvester picked up the open brief which lay before him on the table, and folded it scrupulously.

"Philip Rainham," he answered, and then shot a quick glance at Oswyn.

"Rainham?" echoed the other with an air suggestive at once of surprise and relief, as if, perhaps, he had been expecting to hear another name. "You are right, he is a friend," he added simply.

"What can I do for him?"

"Well, the fact is, I'm afraid he's got into difficulties--a sc.r.a.pe, an imbroglio, with a woman!"

The painter lifted his expressive eyebrows incredulously.

"Since I last saw him--three days ago?"

"Oh, dear, no; the thing's been going on, I should say, for quite a long time--more than a year to my knowledge."

Oswyn reflected for a moment, gazing at Sylvester with some suspicion.

"I don't think it troubles him much," he said brusquely. "Is it any business of mine--or of yours? Has he spoken to you about it?"

Sylvester uttered a hasty negative.

"Oh, no! He is not the sort of man who would. But other people talk.

You see, I'm afraid there's some sort of black-mail going on, and he oughtn't to submit to it. His friends oughtn't to allow it. If--if one could see the woman and frighten her a little----"

"Is that what you wanted me for?" asked Oswyn impatiently. "If so, allow me----"