A Comedy of Masks Part 35

Eve caught at the idea, only she did not wait for the Academy to open. She went for a fortnight, accompanied by an old servant of the family, who regarded her mistress's birth as quite a recent event, to Mrs. Sylvester's cottage in Norfolk.

When Mrs. Lightmark came back to town her face was still pale, but her brow wore a serener air, and her eyes had lost their look of apprehension. The woman had arisen triumphant out of the ashes of her childhood, with a heart determined to know the truth, and to face it, however bitter it might prove to be. Meanwhile, she would not judge hastily.

As she drove up Bond Street one day soon after her return to town, the advertis.e.m.e.nt of Oswyn's exhibition caught her eye. She would probably have remembered a name so uncommon if she had only heard it once, and, as it was, she had heard it several times, and a.s.sociated with it, moreover, a certain reticence which could not fail to arouse a woman's curiosity.

Later, when Mosenthal's card of invitation for the Private View arrived, she noted the day upon her list of engagements.

On the morning of Oswyn's ordeal, Eve sent a message to her husband, who was engaged with a model in the studio, to notify to him her intention of taking the carriage into town later in the afternoon; to which he had returned a gallant reply, expressing a hope that, if it would not bore her too much, she would pick him up somewhere and drive him home. Where and when could he meet her? The reply, "At Mosenthal's at five o'clock," did not surprise him. He did not happen to have the vaguest idea as to what was the attraction of the day at that particular gallery. It might be Burmese landscapes, or portraits of parrots; it was all one to him. It was extremely decorous in his wife to affect picture-galleries, and Mosenthal's place was conveniently near to his favourite club.

A few minutes before the appointed hour he made his way, from the new and alarmingly revolutionary club-house, where he had been indulging in afternoon tea in company with Felicia Dollond, to the gallery, outside which his horses were already waiting, and, perceiving Oswyn's name on the placards disposed on either side of the entrance, he felt only a momentary hesitation.

Oswyn would probably not be there; and, after all, why should he not inspect the man's pictures?

Before reasons had time to present themselves he had pa.s.sed into the room, and had been deferentially welcomed and presented with a catalogue by the proprietor in person.

The room was still crowded, and it was oppressively warm, with an atmosphere redolent of woollen and silken fabrics, like a milliner's shop on the day of a sale.

At first he made no effort to join his wife, whom he discerned from afar talking to a pillar of the Church in gaiters and a broad-brimmed hat.

He looked at the pictures whenever there was a break in the sequence of bows and greetings which had to be exchanged with two-thirds of the people in the room; and as he looked he was smitten with a quick thrill of admiration: he was still young enough to recognise the hand of the master. And in his admiration there was a trace of a frank envy, a certain unresentful humiliation--the feeling which he could remember to have experienced many times in the old days, when he put aside the sonnet he had just finished for some fas.h.i.+onable magazine, and took down from his limited bookshelf the little time-worn volume which contained the almost forgotten work of a poet whose name would have fallen strangely on the editorial ear.

Before long there was a general departure, and Lightmark, flushed with the triumphs of a conversation in which, in the very centre of an admiring group of his antagonist's wors.h.i.+ppers, he had successfully measured swords with a notorious wit, turned to look for his wife; and, for the first time, meeting Oswyn's eye, half-involuntarily advanced to greet him.

"This is an unexpected honour," said Oswyn coldly, disregarding the proffered hand; "unexpected and unwelcome!"

Then he would have turned away, leaving his contempt and hatred unspoken, but his pa.s.sion was too strong.

"Have you come to seek ideas for your next Academy picture," he continued quickly, with a sneer trembling on his lips, "or for the _Outcry_?"

Lightmark grew a little pale, biting his lip, and frowning for a moment, before he a.s.sumed a desperate mask of good-humour.

"Hang it, man!" he answered quickly, "be reasonable! Haven't you forgiven me yet? Though what you have to forgive---- I only want to congratulate you, to tell you that I admire your work--immensely."

"I don't want your congratulations," interrupted the other hoa.r.s.ely.

"I might forget the wrong which, as you well know, you have done me; that is nothing! But have you forgotten your--your friend, Rainham?

You had better go," he added, with a savage gesture. "Go! before I denounce you, proclaim you, you pitiful scoundrel!"

The man's forced calm had given way to a quivering pa.s.sion; his lips trembled under the stress of the words which thronged to them; and as he turned on his heel, with a glance eloquent of loathing, he did not notice that Eve was standing close behind her husband, with parted lips, and intent eyes gleaming out of a face as pale as his own.

Lightmark recovered himself quickly, shrugging his shoulders as soon as the other was out of earshot. He glanced at his wife, who was following Oswyn with her eyes; he did not dare to ask, or even to think, what she might have heard.

"The man's mad," he said lightly, "madder than ever!"

CHAPTER x.x.xII

It was Margot who gave him the letter: Oswyn remembered that afterwards with a kind of superst.i.tion. She came to meet him, wearing an air of immense importance, when his quick step fell upon the bare wooden stairway which led to his rooms.

"There's a letter for you," she said, nodding impressively, "a big letter, with a seal on it; and Mrs. Thomas had to write something on a piece of green paper before the postman would give it to her."

Then she followed him into the twilight of the attic which was his studio, and watched him gravely while he lighted the gas and, in deference to her curiosity, broke the seal.

The envelope contained a letter, and a considerable bundle of papers, folded small, and neatly tied together with red tape.

When he had read the letter, he turned the package over with a sigh, reflectively eying it for some minutes, and then put it aside.

Later, when Mrs. Thomas, his landlady, had carried the child away to bed, he took, the papers up again, and, after some hesitation, slowly untied the tape which encircled them.

The letter was from Messrs. Furnival and Co., the firm of solicitors who had acted for Rainham, and were now representing Oswyn as his friend's sole executor.

It contained a brief intimation that the grant of probate of the late Mr. Rainham's will had been duly extracted, and ended with a request that the executor would consider the inclosed bundle of doc.u.ments, which appeared to be of a private nature, and decide whether they should be preserved or destroyed.

When he had removed the tape, Oswyn noticed that a great many of the letters had the appearance of being in the same handwriting; these were tied up separately with a piece of narrow faded silk riband, and it was evident that they were arranged more or less in order of date; the writing in the case of the earliest letter being that of a child, while the most recent, dated less than a year ago, was a short note, an invitation, with the signature "Eve Lightmark."

Oswyn contemplated the little bundle with an air of indecision, falling at last into a long reverie, his thoughts wandering from the letters to the child, the woman who had written them, the woman whose name his friend so rarely breathed, whose face he had seen for the first time, proud, and cold, and beautiful, that very afternoon.

Did she, too, care? Would she guard her secret as jealously?

Suddenly he frowned; the thought of Lightmark's effrontery recurred, breaking his contemplative calm and disturbing his speculations. He laid the papers aside without further investigation, and, after gazing for a few minutes vacantly out of the uncurtained window, rolled a fresh cigarette and went out into the night.

Next morning he made an expedition to Lincoln's Inn Fields to see Messrs. Furnival and Co., taking the packet with him. The partner who had the matter in hand was engaged, and he was kept waiting for nearly half an hour, in a dusty room with an elaborately moulded ceiling, and a carved wooden chimney-piece and scrolled panelling of some beauty, both disfigured with thick layers of dingy brown paint.

A fire had just been lighted, in deference to the unseasonable coldness of the June day, and the room was full of pungent smoke.

As he waited his irritation increased. Lightmark's impertinent intrusion (such it appeared to him) and the scene which had ensued, had entirely aroused him from the state of indifference into which, when the incident occurred, he was beginning to relapse. The man was dangerous; a malign pa.s.sion, a craving for vengeance, slept in him, born of his southern blood, and glancing out now and again at his eyes, like the fire which darts from the windows of a burning building.

He wondered now, as he thought of the wrongs he had borne, as it seemed to him, so patiently; in Rainham's lifetime there had doubtless been reasons, but was he never to retaliate? Had not he considered other people enough? His forbearance struck him now as a kind of weakness, as something almost contemptible, to be thought of with a feeling akin to shame.

Finally he was ushered up into Mr. Furnival's room, a pleasant apartment on the first floor, with windows looking out upon a charming oasis of gra.s.s and trees. The lawyer apologized for keeping him waiting, intimated delicately that he had a pressing appointment in five minutes' time, and expressed his sympathy with Oswyn's difficulty as to the letters.

"It's quite a matter for you to decide," he said. "If you like to take the responsibility you may burn them forthwith, unread; or you may give them to me, to file with the other papers. But I should advise you to glance through the later letters, at all events. May I look at them? Thanks."

Oswyn had given him the packet of letters, and he spread them out on the table at which he was sitting, methodically, in little heaps, clearing a s.p.a.ce among the piles of drafts and abstracts which lay before him.

"I think we may destroy these," said Oswyn, pointing to the little bundle tied up with riband. "I think I know what they are."

"As you like," said Mr. Furnival; "they appear to be from a lady.

Yes, I don't think you need read them."

"And these," continued Oswyn. "They are all from Lady Garnett, and it is extremely unlikely that they can have any business reference."

"That disposes of nearly all," said the lawyer cheerfully. "I may put them on the fire, then?"

Oswyn bowed a grave a.s.sent, and Mr. Furnival dropped the little packets quickly into the hottest part of the fire.

"Now, here is a letter with a very recent postmark," he continued.

"A man's writing, too, I should say. Will you read this, while I go through the others? It looks like rather a long epistle."