CHAPTER XIII
September set in cold, with rain and east winds, and Rainham, a naturally chilly mortal, as he handed his coat to Lady Garnett's butler, and followed him into the little library, where dinner was laid for three, congratulated himself that a seasonable fire crackled on the large hearth.
"I hardly expected you back yet," he remarked, after the first greetings, stretching out his hands to the blaze; "and your note was a welcome surprise. I almost think we are the only people in town."
Lady Garnett shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of rich tolerance, as one who acknowledged the respectability of all tastes, whilst preferring her own.
"London has its charm, to me," she remarked. "We are glad to be back. I am getting too old to travel—that terrible crossing, and the terrible people one meets!"
Rainham smiled with absent sympathy, looking into the red coals.
"You must remember, I don't know where you have been. Tell me your adventures and your news."
"I leave that to Mary, my dear," said the old lady.
And at that moment the girl came in, looking stately and older than her age in one of the dark, high-cut dresses which she affected. She shook hands with Rainham, smiling; and as they went to table he repeated his question.
"It is difficult," she said; "we seem to have been everywhere. Oh, we have been very restless this year, Philip. I think we were generally in the train. We tried Trouville——"
"Detestable!" put in Lady Garnett with genial petulance; "it was too small. Half the world was crowded into it; and it was precisely the half-world——"
"I can imagine it," interrupted Rainham, with his grave smile; "and then?"
"Then we thought of Switzerland," continued the young girl. "We went to Geneva. We were almost dead when we arrived, because we had to go a very roundabout way to avoid Paris; we could not go to Paris, because we were afraid of seeing the Republic. It was very hot in Geneva. No place ever was so hot before. We lay on the sofa for three days, and then we were strong enough to run away."
"It was purgatorial!" said the elder lady; "it was full of English governesses and Swiss pastors."
"Then we went to look for cool places, and we had a charming week at Interlaken, and looked longingly at the Jungfrau, and contemplated the ascent."
Lady Garnett laughed her quaint, little laugh.
"Interlaken might have sufficed, my dear; but, unfortunately—it was one of Mary's ridiculous economies—we went to a pension; and we fell into the hands of an extraordinary woman with a fringe and a Bible, a native of North America, who endeavoured to persuade me that I was a Jewess."
"No, no!" laughed Mary, "not quite so bad as that. It was one of the other tribes she would have us belong to—one of the lost tribes. It was not personal."
"Ah, Dieu merci! if they are lost," ejaculated her aunt; "but you are wrong; it was most personal, Mary."
"I will do her the justice to add that she only suggested it once," continued the girl with a smile of elision. "However, we had to flee from her; and so we came to Lucerne."
"That was worst of all," said Lady Garnett, arching her delicate eyebrows; "it was full of lovers."
The solemn butler had placed a pair of obdurate birds before Rainham, which engrossed him; presently he looked up, remarking quietly:
"Did you see the Sylvesters?"
"Ah yes! we saw the Sylvesters; we walked with the Sylvesters; we drank tea with the Sylvesters; we made music with the Sylvesters; we went on the lake with the Sylvesters. That handsome artist, Mr. Lightmark, is it not, Mary? was there, making the running with Miss Eve. The marriage seems to be arranged."
She shrugged her shoulders; the precise shade of meaning in the gesture escaped Rainham; he looked over to Mary inquiringly.
"They seem very much attached to each other," she remarked.
"Oh, they were imbecile!" added Lady Garnett; "try the Moselle, my dear, and leave that terrible sweet stuff to Mary. Yes, I was glad to come away from Lucerne. Everything is very bad now except my Constant's vol-au-vent, which you don't seem to have tried; but lovers are the worst of all. Though I like that young man, Lightmark; he is a type that interests me; he seems——"
She looked round the room vaguely, as if the appropriate word might be lurking in some angle of the apartment; finally, the epithet proving difficult, she abandoned the search.
"Il ira loin!" she said tersely; "he flatters me discreetly, as they did when I was young, before the Republic."
The silent, well-trained man handed round caviare and olives; Mary trifled with some grapes, her brow knitted a little, thoughtfully. Lady Garnett poured herself a glass of maraschino. When they were left alone, the girl remarked abruptly:
"I am not sure whether I quite like Mr. Lightmark; he does not seem to me sincere."
Lady Garnett lifted up her hands.
"Why should he be, my dear? sincerity is very trying. A decent hypocrisy is the secret of good society. Your good, frank people are very rude. If I am a wicked old woman, it is nobody's business to tell me so but my director's."
Mary had risen, and had come over to the old lady's side.
"But then, you are not a wicked old woman, my aunt," she observed gently.
"Ah!" she threw back, "how do you judge? Do me the justice to believe, chèrie, that, if I tell you a good deal, there is a good deal, happily, which I don't tell you."
She pushed a box of cigarettes, which the man had placed on the table, toward Rainham. He took one and lit it silently, absently, without his accustomed protests; the girl looked up smiling.
"That means that you want your tête-à-tête, Aunt Marcelle? I know the signal. Well, I will leave you. I want to try over that new march of Liszt's; and I expect, by the time I have grappled with it, you will be coming up for your coffee."
"You are a good girl," answered the elder lady, stroking her hand. "Yes, run away and make music! When Philip and I have had enough scandal and frivolity, we will come and find you; and you shall play us a little of that strange person Wagner, who fascinates me, though you may not believe it."
It was a habit of the house, on occasion of these triangular dinner-parties, that Lady Garnett should remain with Rainham in the interval which custom would have made him spend solitary over his wine. It was a habit which Mary sacredly respected, although it often amused her; and she knew it was one which her aunt valued. And, indeed, though the two made no movement, and for a while said nothing, there was an air of increased intimacy, if it were only in their silence, when the door had closed on the girl and left them together. Presently Lady Garnett began holding up her little glass of crystal maraschino that vied in the light of the candelabra with the diamonds on her fingers.
"I had a conversation with that wearisome young man Charles Sylvester at Lucerne, Philip; he tried to sound me as to Mary's prospects and the state of her affections."
Rainham looked up with quiet surprise.
"Do you mean to say——?" he queried.
"It is very obvious," she answered quickly; "I saw it long ago. But don't imagine that he got much out of me. I was as deep as a well. But what do you think of it?"
"I hope they will be happy," he answered absently. She arched her expressive brows, and he coloured, recollected himself. "I beg your pardon," he said hastily; "I confess I was thinking of something else. You were talking of Mary; why should it not do? Does she care about him?"
His companion laughed, and her laugh had more than its wonted suggestion of irony.
"My dear Philip, for a clever man you can be singularly dense! Care for him! of course she does not."
"She might do worse," he said; "Sylvester is not very bright, but he works hard, and will succeed after a fashion. His limitations dovetail conveniently with his capacities. What do you intend to do?"
"Do I ever interfere in these things? My dear, you are remarkably dull to-night. I never make marriages, nor prevent them. With all my faults, match-making is not one of them. I think too ill of life to try and arrange it. You must admit," she added, "that, long as I have known you, I have never tried to marry you?"
"Ah, that would have been too fatuous!" he remarked lightly.
They were both silent for a while, regarding each other disinterestedly; they appeared to be following a train of thought which led no whither; presently Lady Garnett asked:
"Are you going abroad this year?"
"Yes," he said, "as soon as I can—about the middle of October; to
Mentone or Bordighera, I suppose."
"Do you find them interesting? Do they do you much good?"
He smiled rather listlessly, ignoring her second question.
"I confess," he said, "it becomes rather a bore. But, I suppose, at my time of life one finds nothing very interesting. The mere act of living becomes rather a bore after a time."
"I wonder what you are thinking about, Philip?" she asked meditatively; "something has annoyed you to-night; I wonder if you are going to tell me."
He laughed.
"Do we ever tell each other our annoyances? I think we sit and look at each other, and discover them. That is much more appropriate."
"You take things too seriously," she went on; "my dear, they are really not worth it. That is my settled conviction."
She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of laughter"—a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic—in the decent drapery of her fictitious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her expressive eyebrows.
"You are wonderful," he exclaimed, after an interval, "wonderful; that was what I was thinking."
She smiled disinterestedly.
"Because you don't understand me? My dear, nothing is so easy as mystification; that is why I don't return the compliment. Yourself, you know, are not very intelligible to-night."
He looked away frowning, but without embarrassment; presently throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he remarked:
"I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can't. I am unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find Mary."
"Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary yet; smoke another cigarette."
He took one and lit it, absently, in the blue flame of the spirit-lamp, and she watched him closely with her bright, curious eyes.
"You know this Mr. Lightmark very well, don't you, Philip?"
"Intimately," he answered, nodding.
"You must be pleased," she said. "It is a great match for him, a struggling artist. Can he paint, by the way?"
"He has great talent." He held his cigarette away from him, considered the ash critically. "Yes, he can certainly paint. I suppose it is a good thing—and for Eve, too. Why should it not be?"
"He is a charming young man"—she spoke judicially—"charming! But in effect Mary was quite right; she generally is—he is not sincere."
"I think you are wrong," said Rainham after a moment. "I should be sorry to believe you were not, for the little girl's sake. And I have known him a long time; he is a good fellow at bottom."
"Ah!" cried Lady Garnett with a little, quick gesture of her right hand, "that is precisely what he is not. He exaggerates; he must be very secret; no one ever was so frank as he seems to be."
"Why are you saying all this to me?" the other asked after a moment.
"You know I should be very sorry; but what can I do? it's arranged."
"I think you might have prevented it, if you had cared; but, as you say, it is too late now."
"There was no way possible in which I could have prevented it," he said slowly, after an interval which seemed to strike them both as ponderous.
"That was an admission I wanted," she flashed back. "You would have prevented it—you would have given worlds to have prevented it."
His retort came as quickly, accented by a smile:
"Not a halfpenny. I make no admissions; and I have not the faintest idea of what you are driving at. I am a pure spectator. To quote yourself, I don't make marriages, nor mar them; I think too ill of life."
"Ah no!" she said; "it is that you are too indolent; you disappoint me."
"It is you, dear lady, who are inconsistent," he cried, laughing.
"No, you disappoint me," she resumed; "seriously, my dear, I am dissatisfied with you. You will not assert yourself; you do nothing; you have done nothing. There never was a man who made less of his life."
He protested laughingly:
"I have had no time; I have been looking after my lungs."
"Ah, you are incorrigible," she exclaimed, rising; "let us go and find Mary. I give you up; or, rather, I give myself up, as an adviser. For, after all, you are right—there is nothing worth doing in this bad world except looking after one's lung, or whatever it may be."
"Perhaps not even that," said Philip, as he followed her from the room; "even that, after a time, becomes monotonous."