A Comedy of Masks Part 25

The girl took him up, hardly with an echo of his own resentment, rather with a sort of crushed directness, as one who acknowledged a bare fact, making no comment, merely admitting the obscure dreariness of things.

"Yes; he was a scoundrel. He was bad all along. I think he has no heart. And he has made me bad too. I was a good enough girl of old, before I knew him. Only something came over me to-night when I found _her_ there, with that big house and the servants, and all that luxury, and thought how he couldn't spare a few pounds to bring his own child up decent. Oh, I was vile to-night. I frightened her.

Perhaps it was best as it happened. It dazed her. She'll remember less. She'll only remember your part of it, sir."

She glanced across at him with timid eyes, which asked him to be so good as to explain: all that had confused her so.

"I don't understand," she murmured helplessly--"I don't understand."

He ignored the interrogation in her eyes with a little gesture, half irritable and half entreating, which coerced her.

"How did you come there?" he asked. "What was the good----"

His question languished suddenly, and he let both hands fall slowly upon his knees. In effect, the uselessness of all argument, the futility of any recrimination in the face of what had been accomplished, was suddenly borne in upon him with irresistible force: and his momentary irritation against the malice of circ.u.mstance, the baseness of the man, was swallowed up in a rising la.s.situde which simply gave up.

The girl continued after a while, in a low, rapid voice, her eyes fixed intently upon the opal in an antique ring which shone faintly upon one of Rainham's quiet hands, as though its steady radiance helped her speech:

"It was all an accident--an accident. I was sick and tired of waiting and writing, and getting never a word in reply. My health went too, last winter, and ever since I have been getting weaker and worse. I knew what that meant: my mother died of a decline--yes, she is dead, thank G.o.d! this ten years--and it was then, when I knew I wouldn't get any better, and there was the child to think of, that I wanted to see him once more. There was a gentleman, too, who came----"

She broke off for a moment, clasping her thin hands together, which trembled as though the memory of some past, fantastic terror had recurred.

"It doesn't matter," she went on presently. "He frightened me, that was all. He had such a stern, smooth-spoken way with him; and he seemed to know so much. He said that he had heard of me and my story, and would befriend me if I would tell him the name of the man who ruined me. Yes, he would befriend me, help me to lead a respectable life."

Her sunken eyes flashed for a moment, and her lip was scornfully curled.

"G.o.d knows!" she cried, with a certain rude dignity, "I was always an honest woman but for Cyril--d.i.c.k she called him."

The intimate term, tossed so lightly from those lips, caused Rainham to quiver, as though she had rasped raw wounds. It was the concrete touch giving flesh and blood to his vision of her past. It made the girl's old relation with Eve's husband grow into a very present horror, startlingly real and distinct.

"Go on," he said at last, wearily.

"Ah, I didn't tell him, sir," she explained, misinterpreting his silence. "I wouldn't have done that. He sore angered me, though he may have meant well. He was set on seeing the child then, but I wouldn't let him. It came over me after he was gone that that, maybe, was what he came for--the child. Someone might have put him on to take her from me--some society. Oh, I was at my wits' end, sir! for, you see, she is all I have--all--all! Then I made up my mind to go and see him. Bad as he is, he wouldn't have let them do it. Oh, I would have begged and prayed to him on my knees for that."

She stopped for a moment, hectic and panting. She pressed both hands against her breast, as though she sought composure. Then she continued:

"It was all a mistake, you know, my being shown in there to-night! I would never have sought her out myself, being where she is. Oh, I have my pride! It was the servant's mistake: he took me for a fitter, no doubt, from one of the big dressmakers. Perhaps there was one expected, I don't know. But I didn't think of that when I came in and found her sitting there, so proud and soft. It all came over me--how badly he had used me, and little Meg there at home, and hard Death coming on me--and I told her. It seemed quite natural then, as though I had come for that, just for that and nothing else, though, Heaven knows, it was never in my mind before. I was sorry afterwards. Yes, before you came in with _him_ I was sorry. It wasn't as if I owed her any grudge. How could she have known? She is an innocent young thing, after all--younger than I ever was--for all her fine dresses and her grand ladyish way. It was like striking a bit of a child.... G.o.d forgive him," she added half hysterically, "if he uses her as bad as me!"

Rainham's hand stole to his side, and for a moment he averted his head. When he turned to her again she was uncertain whether it was more than a pang of sharp physical pain, such as she well knew herself, which had so suddenly blanched his lips.

"For pity's sake, girl," he whispered, "be silent."

She considered him for a moment silently in the elusive light, that matched the mental twilight in which she viewed his mood. His expression puzzled, evaded her; and she could not have explained the pity which he aroused.

"I am sorry," she broke out again, moved by an impulse which she did not comprehend. "You did it for her."

"Oh, for her! What does it matter since it is done? Say that it was an accident--a folly--that I am sorry too."

"No," said the girl softly; "you are glad."

He shrugged his shoulders with increasing weariness, an immense desire to have the subject ended and put away with forgotten things.

"I am glad, then. Have it as you like."

But she resumed with a pertinacity which his irritated nerves found malignant.

"If it was that," she said ambiguously, "you had better have held your tongue. You had only to gain---- Ah, why did you do it? What was the good?"

He made another gesture of la.s.situde; then, rousing himself, he remarked:

"It was a calculation, then, a piece of simple arithmetic. If it gives her a little peace a little longer, why should three persons suffer--be sacrificed--when two might serve?"

"Oh, him!" cried the girl scornfully; "he can't suffer--he hasn't a heart!"

Rainham looked up at her at last. His fingers ceased playing with his ring.

"Oh, let me count for a little," he murmured, with a little, ghastly laugh.

The girl's eyes looked full into his, and in a moment they shone out of her face, which was suffused with a rosy flush that made her almost beautiful, with the illumination of some transcendent idea.

"Ah, you _are_ a gentleman!" she cried.

In the tension of their nerves they were neither aware that the cab had come to a standstill, and before he could prevent her, she had stooped swiftly down and caught his hand pa.s.sionately to her lips.

"Heaven forgive me! How unhappy you must be!" she said.

CHAPTER XXV

After all, things were not so complicated as they seemed. For Kitty was nearly at the end of her troubles; her trivial little life, with its commonplace tale of careless wrong and short-lived irony of suffering, telling with the more effect on a nature at once so light and so wanting in buoyancy, was soon to be hurried away and forgotten, amid the chaos of things broken and ruined.

"I don't want to die," she said, day after day, to the sternly cheerful nurse who had her in charge at the quiet, sunny hospital in the suburbs, where Rainham had gained admission for her as in-patient. "But I don't know that I want to live, either."

And so it had been from the beginning, poor soul, poor wavering fatalist! with a nature too innately weak to make an inception either of good or evil, the predestined prey of circ.u.mstance.

As she lay in the long, white room dedicated to those stricken, like herself, with the disease that feeds on youth, her strength ebbing away quite painlessly, she often entered upon the pathless little track of introspection, a pathetic, illogical summing up of the conduct of her life, which always led so quickly to the same broad end of rea.s.surance, followed by unreasoned condemnation--the conventional judgement on her very inability to discover where she had so gravely sinned, how and when she had earned the extreme penalty of reprobation and of death. She was too wicked, she concluded hopelessly, vaguely struggling with the memories of the teaching of her Sunday-school, too wicked to find out wherein her exceeding wickedness lay.

One comfort she took to her sad heart, that Rainham had not condemned her; that he had only pitied her, while he reserved his d.a.m.nation for the iron-bound, Sabbatarian world which had ruined and spurned another helpless victim. Rainham she believed implicitly, obeyed unquestioningly, with a sense of grat.i.tude which had been largely mingled with self-reproach, until he had told her that, so far as he was concerned, she had nothing to reproach herself with.

It never occurred to her for a moment now to question or to resent the part he had made her play on that tragical afternoon in Grove Road. Why should she? The imputation of a lie, what was that to her?

Had he not taken it all, all her misery upon himself? Had he not fed, and clothed, and lodged her like the most penitent of prodigals, although she had no claim upon him until he chose to give it to her? Her benefactor could do no wrong, that was her creed; and it made things wonderfully smooth, the future on a sudden strangely simple. She had lied to him at the bidding of the other, and he had not resented it when he came to know the truth: she had brought shame on him, and he had not reproached her. A man like this was outside her experience; she regarded him with a kind of grateful amazement--a wondering veneration, which sometimes held her dumb in his presence.

If she had felt unhappy at first about the future of her child--and there had been moments when this thought had been more bitter than all the rest of her life together--this care was taken from her when Rainham promised to adopt the little girl, or, better still, to induce Mrs. Bullen to open her motherly heart to her. "They'll be only too glad to get her," he had said decisively, interrupting her awkward little speech of thanks. "That will be all right. Mrs.

Bullen hasn't known what to do with herself since her son went to sea; she wants a child to care for. You needn't worry yourself about that."

It was after this that Kitty had owned to the nurse that she had no desire to live; and though the s.h.i.+fting of this burden enabled her to carry her life for a time less wearily, the end was not far; and the news of her death came to Rainham just after the first snowfall, in the middle of a dreary, cruel December.

The winter wore on, and still Rainham was to be seen almost nightly in his now familiar corner by the fireside at Brodonowski's, in the seat next that which had become Oswyn's by right of almost immemorial occupation. His negotiations with the company who were to buy him out of his ancestral dock were still incomplete, and now he felt a strange reluctance to hurry matters, to hasten the day on which he should be forced to leave the little room looking out upon the unprofitable river which he loved.