A Comedy of Masks Part 30

"Ah, Mary," he broke out, "you must not answer me like that, without consideration. Why should it be impossible?"

"Forgive me," she said gently; "only I am tired now. And consideration would not alter it. Let me go."

He put one hand out detaining her, and she sank back again wearily on her chair.

"If you are tired, so much the more reason that you should hear me.

You will not be tired if you marry me. If you are tired, it is because your life has no great interests: it's frivolous; it is dribbled away on little things. You don't really care for it--you are too good for it--the sort of life you lead."

"The sort of life I lead?"

"The ideals of your set, of the people who surround your aunt, of your aunt herself. The whole thing is barren."

"Are we more frivolous than the rest?" she asked suddenly.

"You are better than the rest," he said promptly. "That is why I want you to marry me. You were made for great interests--for a large scene."

"What are they--your great interests, your ideals?" she asked presently. "How are they so much better than ours?--though I don't know what ours may be."

"If you marry me, you will find out," he said. "Oh, you shall have them, I promise you that! I want you immensely, Mary! I am just going into public life, I mean to go far--and if I have your support, your sympathy, if you become my wife, I shall go much farther. And I want to take you away from all this littleness, and put you where you can be felt, where your character--I can't say how I admire it--may have scope."

"I am sorry," she said again; "you are very good, and you do me great honour: but I can only answer as before--it is not possible."

"Ah, but you give no reason!" he cried. "There is no reason."

"Is it not a good enough one that I do not love you?" said the girl.

"Only marry me," he persisted, "and that will come. I don't want to hurry you, you know. I would rather you would take time and consider; give me your answer in a week or two's time."

They were silent for a little; Sylvester was now perfectly composed: his own agitation seemed to have communicated itself to the girl, whom he watched intently, with his bland, impartial gaze. She had closed her eyes, was resting her chin on her bouquet, and appeared to be deeply meditating his words. She looked up at last with a little s.h.i.+ver.

"I am very tired," she said. "If I promise to think over what you have said to-night and to give you my answer in a month's time, will you try and find Lady Garnett for me now?"

"Ah, Miss Masters--Mary!" he said, "that is all I want."

"And in the meantime," she pursued gently, "to allow the subject to drop?"

"You must make your own terms," he said; "but surely I may come and see you?"

"Very well," she consented, after a moment; "if it gives you any pleasure, you may come."

At which Charles simply took her cold, irresponsive hand in his own, with a silent pressure. Irresponsive as it was, however, he reminded himself, she had made no effective protest against the gesture.

CHAPTER XXVIII

At Lady Day, when the negotiations for the sale of his unprofitable riverside domain were finally concluded, Rainham scarcely regretted to find that an ample margin had been left before the new company took possession; and he had still several months, during which he might remain in occupation of his old habitation, and arrange leisurely for the subsequent disposition of his books and more intimate personal chattels. The dilapidated old house was to be pulled down by the new owners (the plans for an extensive warehouse, to be erected on the site of it, were already in the hands of the builders), and this also was a fact from which Rainham derived a certain satisfaction.

Insensibly, the spot had discovered a charm for him: the few rooms, which had been his for so long, although, actually, so small a proportion of his days had been spent in them, had gradually taken the impress of his personality--the faded carpets, the familiar grouping of pictures and books, the very shape of the apartment, and the discoloured paper on the walls, expressed him in a way that certainly no other abiding place, which might conceivably await him, could ever do. And he took a dreary pleasure in the consideration that, after he had gone, the rooms would know no other occupant; that from the glazed and barred windows of the dreary building, which was to take the place of the quaint old house, when it was levelled to the ground, no person would ever gaze out, exactly as he had done, at the white and melancholy river; in which, as he said to himself fantastically, he had cast, one by one, as the days lengthened, his interests, his pa.s.sions, his desires.

Years before, by an accident of inheritance, he had come into the property with an immense antipathy:--a white elephant that would bring him neither profit nor honour, but which the modest competence that he had previously enjoyed did not allow him to refuse. It had altered the tenor of his existence, destroyed his youth and his ambitions, and represented for many years, more completely than anything else, the element of failure which had run through his life.

And, after all, now that deliverance was at hand, he was by no means jubilant. In escaping from this thraldom of so many years, he felt something of the chagrin with which a man witnesses the removal of some long-cherished and inveterate grievance; the more so, in that he could now remind himself impartially how small it had been, how little, after all, he had allowed it to weigh upon him. In effect, had he not always done very much as he liked, lived half his time abroad in his preferred places, chosen his own friends, and followed his own tastes without greatly considering his inherited occupation?

He must look deeper than that, he reflected, within himself, or into the nature of things themselves, actually to seize and define that curious flaw which had made life seem to him at last (from what wearied psychologist, read long ago and half forgotten, did he cull the phrase?) "a long disease of the spirit."

For appreciations of this kind, he had, nowadays, ample leisure; and unprofitable as it appeared (he did not even pretend to himself that it would lead anywhere, since what faint illumination he might strike from it could only refer to the past), he was seldom tired of searching for them.

A hard March, cited generally as the coldest within the memory of a generation, following a winter of fog and rain, had made him an inveterate prisoner within the four walls of his apartment. He had, indeed, the run of others at this time, for the Bullens had left him (at the last there had been no question of little Margot's appropriation; Rainham had taken it so serenely for granted that she would remain with him), but this was a privilege of which he did not avail himself. And the place, stripped of all its commercial attributes, had fallen into an immense desuetude, to which the charm of silence, and of a deeper solitude than it had ever possessed before, was attached.

The dock gates were finally closed; a hard frost of many days'

duration had almost hermetically sealed them, and the drip of Thames water through the sluices formed immediately into long, fantastic stalact.i.tes of clear ice. Rainham found it difficult to believe, at times, that the bustle of the wharves, the roar of maritime London, still went on at his elbows, the deserted yard cast such a panoply of silence round him. It was as though he had fallen suddenly from the midst of men into some wholly abandoned region, a land of perpetual snows. It symbolized well for him the fantastic separation which he had suffered from the rest of the world; so that, but for the painter Oswyn, who was a constant visitor, and had, indeed, since the departure of the Bullens, a room set apart for him in the house, he might have been already dead and buried, and his old life would not have seemed more remote. And if he found the atmosphere of Blackpool, more often than not, to be of soothing quality, or at least a harmonious setting to the long and aimless course of introspection on which he had embarked, there were also times when it had a certain terror for him.

It came upon him in the evening, as a rule, when Margot had been carried away to bed by the hard-featured old woman who had succeeded Mrs. Bullen in the superintendence of his household; for the child, with her sweet, shrill voice and her infantile chatter, had come to seem to him far more even than Oswyn, about whom there would always lurk something shadowy and unreal, a last link with the living; when the tide was nearly out, so that the stillness was not even broken by the long, lugubrious syren of a pa.s.sing steamer, his isolation was borne in upon him with something of the sting of sharp, physical pain.

The dark old room, with its mildewing wainscot, became full of ghosts; and he could fancy that the spirits of his ancestors were returned from the other side of Styx to finger the pages of bygone ledgers, and to mock from between the shadows of his incongruous bookshelves, at their degenerate descendant. And these did but give place, amid strange creaking and contortions of the decaying walls, to spectres more intimate, whose reprobation moved him more: the faces of many persons whom he had known forming themselves, with extraordinary vividness, out of the darkness, and in the red embers of the fire, and each adding its item of particular scorn to the round accusation of futility brought by the rest. They were part of his introspection, all those--he was not sick enough to hold them real--but nevertheless they gave him food for much vigilant thought, which came back always to the great interest of his life. Futility!

Did she too, the beloved woman, point an accusing finger, casting back at him a sacrifice which, certainly, in his then disability seemed to him vain enough? For all his goodwill, had he gained any more for her than a short respite, the temporal reconstruction of a fading illusion?--and at what a price! The irony of things was just then so present to him that he could readily believe he had done no more than that--enough merely to embitter her knowledge when it should finally come. And an old saying of Lady Garnett's returned to him, which, at the time, he had disputed; but which struck him now with the sharp stab of an intimate truth. "You could have prevented it, had you wished." Yes, he might have prevented it, if only he had foreseen; the wise old woman had not made a mistake. And yet he had wished to prevent it, in a manner, only his colder second thoughts--he made no allowance now for their generous intention--had found propriety in the match, and his long habit of spectators.h.i.+p had made the personal effort, which interference would have involved, impossible.

Harking back scrupulously to the remote days of Eve's girlhood, his morbid recollection collected a variety of scattered threads, of dispersed signs and tokens, which led him to ask at last, with a gathering dread, whether he had not made a mistake, must not plead guilty to a charge of malingering, or, at least, of intellectual cowardice in acquiescing so supinely in defeat?

Was it true, then, that a man found in life very much what he brought to the search?

Certainly, the world was full of persons who had been broken on the wheel for their proper audacity, because they had sought so much more than was to be found; but might it not be equally true that one could err on the other side, expect, desire too little, less even than was there, and so reap finally, as he had done, in an immense la.s.situde and disgust of all things, born neither of satiety nor of disappointment, the full measure of one's reward? Perhaps success in the difficult art of life depended, almost as much as in the plastic arts, upon conviction, upon the personal enthusiasm which one brought to bear upon its conduct, and was never really compatible with that att.i.tude of half-disdainful toleration which he had so early acquired.

Yet that was a confession of failure he was loath to make, or admit that he had been too much afraid of high pa.s.sions and great affairs, had been fastidious and reserved only to dissipate his life on whims and small interests--those seemed to him now too great refusals to be contemplated without regret. His depression had reached its lowest pitch when he had asked himself whether in love, as in life, his error might not have been the same; and his pa.s.sion, like the rest, a thing without conviction, and thereby foredoomed to fail.

And it was a sensible alleviation of his mood when he could answer this question finally with a firm negative.

Certainly, his vain desire for her personal presence, for the consolation of her voice and eyes, was with him always, like the ache of physical hunger or thirst--the one thing real in a world of shadows.

Reaching this point one night, and relapsing, as was his wont, into a vaguer mood of reminiscence, not wholly unpleasant, which the darkness of the quiet room, lit only by the fire of logs, turned at last into drowsiness, he looked up presently, with a sudden start, to find Oswyn standing over him.

"I am sorry," said the painter; "I am afraid I have awaked you. The room was so dark that I imagined you had gone to bed. I came to warm myself before turning in."

Rainham s.h.i.+fted his chair a little, and watched the other as he extended his thin, nervous hands to the glow.

"Don't apologize," he said; "I haven't so many visitors that I can afford to miss the best of them. Besides, I was only half asleep, or half awake, as you like to look at it."

"Oh, look at it!" cried Oswyn. "My dear fellow, I don't, and won't."

He pointed his words, which Rainham found meaningless enough, with an impatient dig of his rusty boot against the fragrant wood, and his friend considered him curiously in the light of the blaze which his gesture had provoked.

"Is there anything wrong?" he asked. "More wrong than usual, I mean."

"As you like to look at it," echoed the other; "a mare's nest--a discovery of the blessed public--oh, but a discovery! Two or three clever young newspaper men, with a tip from Paris to help them, have made a discovery; they have unearthed a disreputable painting genius, one Oswyn, and found the inevitable Jew of culture--you know the type, all nose and shekels--to finance their boom. Oh, it's genuine! I have Mosenthal's letter in my pocket--it was handed me by McAllister--offering his gallery, the pick of Bond Street. Oswyn's Exhibition, with expurgations and reservations, of course, but an exhibition! Don't you congratulate me?"

Rainham glanced up at him, smiling; at last he said whimsically:

"If you don't want me to, of course I won't. But _apres_, where's the harm?"