CHAPTER XVIII
As the clock struck five Rainham looked up with an air of relief, flipping negligently across the table the heap of papers which had occupied him since lunch-time.
"We must go into this some other time, Bullen," he remarked with a certain petulance. "I confess things look rather bad; but I suppose they can hold over till to-morrow?"
The foreman assented dubiously, gathering together the despised sheets, and preparing for departure.
"I've done my best, sir," he said a little sullenly; "but it is difficult for things to go smoothly when the master is always away; and you never will take no notice of business letters, you know, sir."
"Yes, yes," said Rainham wearily; "I am sure you have, Bullen. If I go into the Bankruptcy Court, as you so frequently prophesy, it will be entirely my own fault. In the meantime you might tell your wife to send me up some tea—for two, Bullen, please. Mr. Oswyn will be up presently."
The man retired, shutting the door with some ardour. Rainham rose, and, with the little, expansive shrug with which he usually discarded his commercial worries, wandered towards the window. The dock was empty and desolate: the rain, which had prevailed with a persistent dreariness since the morning, built morasses at regular intervals along the dock-side, splashed unceasingly into the stagnant green water which collected in slack seasons within the dock-gates. The dockman stood, one disconsolate figure in the general blankness, with his high boots and oilskins, smoking a short clay pipe by the door of the engine-room; and further out, under the dripping dome of an umbrella, sat Oswyn in a great pea-jacket, smoking, painting the mist, the rain, the white river with its few blurred barges and its background of dreary warehouses, in a supreme disregard of the dank discomfort of his surroundings.
Rainham had tapped three times against the streaming pane before he succeeded in attracting his attention, and then the painter only responded to the wonted signal by an impatient, deprecating flourish of the hand which held the palette. The tea was already simmering on the rickety table in the bow-window, when Oswyn, staggering under his impedimenta, climbed the staircase, and shouldered his way familiarly into the room.
"How fearfully wet you must be!" said his host lazily from the depths of an arm-chair. "Help yourself to a pair of slippers and a dry coat, and have some tea. It's strong enough even for you by this time."
The other had disembarrassed himself of his dripping jacket and overalls, and now kicked off his shoes, with a short laugh. He was never a great talker in the daytime, and the dreary charm of the river world outside was still upon him. He dropped the sketch upon which he had been working rather contemptuously against the wall, where Rainham could see it, and selected a pair of slippers from quite a small heap in the corner by the fireplace.
"I don't mind your seeing my work, because you don't talk about it," he said, glancing at Rainham quickly. "I hate people who try to say complimentary things; they don't often mean them, and when they do they talk absolute rot."
"Yes," said the other sympathetically. "Shall I put a slice of lemon in your tea? I suppose I must live up to my reputation and say nothing about your sketch. But I must have it when it's finished! It's always most embarrassing to have to pay personal compliments, though I suppose some people like them."
The painter grunted inarticulately between two sips of tea.
"Like them! Don't your society artists and authors simply wallow in them? Have you got any cigarettes, or papers? I dropped mine into a puddle. Ah, thanks…. That's a pretty face. Whose is it?"
The cigarette case, which Rainham handed to his guest, was a well-worn leather one, a somewhat ladylike article, with a photograph fitted into the dividing flap inside. Before answering the question he looked at the photograph absently for a moment, when the case had been returned to him.
"It's not a very good photograph. It's meant for—for Mrs. Lightmark, when she was a little girl. She gave me the case with the portrait years ago, in Florence."
Oswyn glanced at him curiously and shrewdly through a thin haze of blue smoke, watching him restore the faded, little receptacle almost reverentially to the breast-pocket of his coat.
"Have you been to the Chamber of Horrors?" he asked suddenly, after a silent pause, broken only by the ceaseless lashing of the window by the raindrops.
Rainham looked up with a start, half puzzled, seeking and finding an explanation in the faint, conscious humour which loosened the lines about the speaker's mouth.
"The Chamber of—— Do you mean the R.A.? You do, you most irreverent of mortals! No, I have not been yet. Will you go with me?"
"Heaven forbid! I have been once."
"You have? And they didn't scalp you?"
"I didn't stay long enough, I suppose. I only went to see one picture—Lightmark's."
"Ah, that's just what I want to see! And you know I still have a weakness for the show. I expect you would like the new Salon better."
"There are good things there," said Oswyn tersely, "and a great many abominations as well. I was over in Paris last week."
Rainham glanced at him over his cup with a certain surprise.
"I didn't know you ever went there now," he remarked.
"No, I never go if I can help it. I hate Paris; it is triste as a well, and full of ghosts. Ghosts! It's a city of the dead. But I had a picture there this time, and I went to look at it."
"In the new Salon?"
"In the new Salon. It was a little gray, dusky thing, three foot by two, and their flaming miles of canvas murdered it. I am not a scene-painter," he went on a little savagely. "I don't paint with a broom, and I have no ambition to do the sun, or an eruption of Vesuvius. So I doubt if I shall exhibit there again until the vogue alters. Oh, they are clever enough, those fellows! even the trickiest of them can draw, which is the last thing they learn here, and one or two are men of genius. But I should dearly like to set them down, en plein air too, if they insist upon it, with the palette of Velasquez. I went out and wandered in the Morgue afterwards, and I confess its scheme of colour rested my eyes."
"Do I know your picture?" asked Rainham to change the subject, finding him a little grim. "Is it the thing you were doing here?"
Oswyn's head rested on one thin, colour-stained hand which shaded his eyes.
"No," he said with a suggestion of constraint, "it was an old sketch which I had worked up—not the thing you knew. I shall not finish that——"
"Not finish it!" cried Rainham. "But of course you must! why, it was superb; it promised a masterpiece!"
"To tell you the truth," said Oswyn, "I can't finish it. I have painted it out."
Rainham glanced at him with an air of consternation, of reproach.
"My dear fellow," he said, "you are impossible! What in the world possessed you to do such a mad thing?"
The painter hesitated a moment, looking at him irresolutely beneath his heavy, knitted brows.
"I meant to tell you," he said, after a while; "but on the whole I think I would rather not. It is rather an unpleasant subject, Rainham, and if you don't mind we will change it."
Oswyn had risen from his chair, with his wonted restlessness, and was gazing out upon the lazy, evening life of the great river. The monotonous accompaniment to their conversation, which had been so long sustained by the drip and splash outside, had grown intermittent, and now all but ceased; while a faint tinge of yellowish white upon the ripples, and a feathery rift in the gray dome of sky, announced a final effort on the part of the setting sun.
The yard door swung noisily on its hinges, and a light step and voice became audible, and the sound of familiar conference with the dockman. Rainham lifted his head inquiringly, and Oswyn, shrugging his shoulders, left the window and regained his seat, picking up his sketch on the way.
"Yes," he said in answer to a more direct inquiry on the other's part, "I think it was Lightmark."
Almost as he spoke there was a step on the stair, followed by a boisterous knock at the door, and Dick entered effusively.
"Well, mon vieux, how goes it? Why, you're all in the dark! They didn't tell me you were engaged…. Oh, is that you, Oswyn? How do you do?"
"Quite an unexpected pleasure?" suggested Oswyn sardonically, nodding over his shoulder at the new-comer from his seat by the fire.
Rainham's greeting had been far more cordial, and he still held his friend's hand between his own, gazing inquiringly into his face as if he wished to read something there.
"Yes, I am back, you see," he said presently, when Dick had found himself a chair. "I have been here two days, and I was just beginning to think of looking you up. I was very sorry to miss you at Bordighera. How is Eve? It's very good of you to come all this way to see me; you must be pretty busy."
"Oh, Eve is tremendously well! Thanks, no, I won't have any tea, but you might give me a whisky-and-soda. I had to come down into these wilds to look at a yacht which we think of taking for the summer. Quite a small one," he added half apologetically, as he detected the faint, amused surprise in the other's expression; "and as I found myself here, with a few minutes to spare before my train goes, I thought I would look in on the off chance of finding you. How is business just now? The dock didn't strike me as looking much like work as I came in. Pretty stagnant, eh?"
Rainham shook his head.
"Oh, it's much as usual—perhaps a little more so! Bullen continues to threaten me with bankruptcy, but I am getting used to it. Threatened men live long, you know."
"Oh, you're all right!" answered Dick genially. "As long as Bullen looks after you, you won't come to grief."
While the two were thus occupied in reuniting the chain of old associations, Oswyn had been silently, almost surreptitiously, preparing for departure; and he now came forward awkwardly, with his hat in one hand and the tools of his trade under his arm.
"May I leave some of these things, here, or will they be in your way?"
"But you're not going?" said Rainham, rising from his seat with a constraining gesture; "why, don't you remember we were going to dine together? Dick will stay too, n'est ce pas? It will be like old times. Mrs. Bullen has been preparing quite a feast, I assure you!"
Oswyn paused irresolutely.
"Don't let me drive you away," said Dick. "In any case I'm going myself in a few minutes. Yes," he added, turning to Rainham, "I'm very sorry, but I've got to take my wife out to dinner, and I shall have to catch a train in, let me see, about ten minutes."
"Really? Well, then, clearly you must sit down again, Oswyn; I won't be left alone at any price. That's right. Now, Dick, tell me what you have been doing, and especially all about your Academy picture; I haven't seen even a critique of it. Of course it's a success? Have you sold it?"
"Oh, spare my modesty!" protested Lightmark somewhat clumsily, with a quick glance at Oswyn. "It's all right, but we mustn't talk shop."
"Yes, for God's sake spare his modesty!" supplemented the other painter almost brutally. "Look at his blushes. It isn't so bad as all that, Lightmark."
"I don't even know the subject," pursued Rainham. "You might at least tell me what it was. Was it the canvas which you wouldn't show me, just before I went away—at the studio? The one about which you made such a mystery——?"
"Oh bosh, old man!" interrupted Dick hurriedly, "I never made any mystery. It—it wasn't that. It's quite an ordinary subject, one of the river scenes which I sketched here. You had better go and see it. And come and see us. You know the address. I must be off!"
"Wait a minute," interposed Oswyn, with a cadence in his voice which struck Rainham as the signal of something surpassing his wonted eccentricity. "Don't go yet. I said just now, Rainham, that I wouldn't tell you why I had painted out that picture, the picture which I had been fool enough to talk about so much, which I had intended to make a masterpiece. Well, I have changed my mind. I think you ought to know. Perhaps you would prefer to tell him?" he added, turning savagely to Lightmark, and speaking fast and loud with the curious muscular tremor which betokens difficult restraint. "No? Of course you will have the impudence to pretend that the conception was yours. Yes, curse you! you are quite capable of swearing that it was all yours—subject and treatment too…. But you can't deny that you heard me talking of the thing night after night at the club, when I have no doubt you hadn't even begun on your bastard imitation. One of the pictures of the year as they call it, as you and your damned crew of flatterers and critics call it…."
He stopped for breath, clutching at the table with one hand and letting the other, which had been upraised in denunciation, fall at his side. He had meant to be calm, to limit himself strictly to an explanation; but in the face of his wrong and the wrong-doer the man's passionate nature had broken loose. Now, when he already half repented of the violence with which he had profaned the house of his friend, his eyes fell upon Rainham, and he felt abashed before the expression of pain which he had called into the other's face.
"I don't know what all this means," said Rainham wearily, turning from Oswyn to Dick as he spoke; "but surely it is all wrong? Be quiet, Dick; you needn't say anything. If Oswyn is accusing you of plagiarism, of stealing his ideas, I can't believe it. I can't believe you meant to wrong him. The same thing must have occurred to both of you. Why, Oswyn, surely you see that? You have both been painting here, and you were both struck in the same way. Nothing could be simpler."
Now Lightmark seemed to assume a more confident attitude, to become more like himself; and he was about to break the chain of silence, which had held him almost voiceless throughout Oswyn's attack, when Rainham again interrupted him.
"I am sure you needn't say anything, Dick. We all know Oswyn; he—he wasn't serious. Go and catch your train, and forget all about it."
The first words which Rainham spoke recalled to Oswyn the powerful reason which had determined him to preserve his old neutrality, and to make an offering of silence upon the altar of his regard for the only man with whom he could feel that he had something in common. If his vengeance could have vented itself upon a single victim, it would have fallen, strong and sure; but it was clear to his calmer self that this could not be; the consequences would be too far-reaching, and might even recoil upon himself. After all, what did it matter? There was a certain luxury in submission to injustice, a pleasure in watching the bolt of Nemesis descend when his hands were guiltless of the launching. And as he struggled with himself, hunting in retrospect for some excuse for what his passion railed at as weakness, a last straw fell into the scale, for he thought of the faded portrait in the cigarette-case.