CHAPTER XXIX
In the same room one afternoon a fortnight later, Oswyn sat, absently correcting the draft catalogue of his exhibition, when he received an intimation, which for some days he had expected—his friend felt strong enough to see him. He put down his pen, glancing up inquiringly at the bearer of this message, a young woman in the neat, depressing garb of a professional nurse; but for answer she slightly shook her head with the disinterested complacency of the woman used to sickness, who would encourage no false notions.
"It is only temporary," she said with deliberation. "I fear there has been no real improvement; the patient is steadily losing strength. Only he insists on seeing you; and when they are like that, one must give them what they want. I must beg you to excite him as little as possible."
Oswyn bowed a dreary assent, and followed her up the obscure staircase, which creaked sullenly beneath his tread. And he stood for a few moments in silence, until his eyes were accustomed to the darkened room, when the nurse had gently closed the door behind him, leaving him alone with his friend.
He almost believed, at first, that Rainham must be sleeping, he lay back with such extreme quietness in the large old-fashioned bed. And seeing him there in that new helplessness, he realized, almost for the first time, how little there was to say or to hope.
He had never, indeed, been ignorant that his friend's hold on life was precarious; some such scene as this had often been in his mind before; only, insensibly, Rainham's own jesting attitude towards his disabilities had half imposed on him, and made that possibility appear intangible and remote. But now, in view of the change which the last fortnight had wrought in him, he could cherish no illusions; the worst that was possible was all now that one could expect. He was a charming, generous, clever fellow, and he was dying; that was a thing one could not get over.
He moved across to the bedside, and Rainham's eyes suddenly opened. They were immensely large, strangely brilliant; his face had fallen in, was so white and long and lean, that these tremendous eyes seemed almost all of the man that was still to be accounted.
Oswyn derived the impression from them that, while his friend's body had been failing, his mind had never been more vigorous; that, during these long nights and days, when he had lain so motionless, in so continued a silence, it had only been because he was thinking with redoubled intensity.
Presently, as Rainham's lips moved slightly, he drew nearer, and bent his head over him.
"Don't talk," he said nervously, as Rainham appeared to struggle with the difficulty of utterance; "don't tire yourself. I've only come to look at you. Wait until you are a little stronger."
Rainham raised his hand impatiently.
"It won't tire me, and tired or not there are things I must speak of. Is she in the room—the nurse?"
He spoke slowly, and with a visible effort; but his voice, although it scarcely rose above a whisper, and seemed shadowy and far away, was deliberate and distinct. Oswyn shook his head.
"She has given me half an hour; you must not abuse it. I have promised to keep you quiet. I really believe you are a little better."
"I am well enough for what I want—to talk to you. After that, I will be as quiet as you like, for as long as you like. Only I have been keeping myself for this all these last few days that I have lain here like a log, listening to the ticking of that merciless clock. They thought I was sleeping, unconscious, very likely. I have been collecting myself, thinking immensely, waiting for this."
"I have always been here," said the other simply, "in case you should send for me. I have been painting Margot. She is a dear little soul; she misses you sadly."
"It is of her partly that I must speak. I have left all I can to her. If you will sometimes give her a thought; she is absolutely without belongings. I don't wish to make it a charge on you, a burden, only sometimes it has struck me lately that you were interested in the child, that you liked her, and I have taken the liberty of making you a sort of guardian. She could live with the Bullens——"
"Oh, I like her—I like her!" cried Oswyn, with a short laugh. Then he went on more seriously, half-apologetically, as though the other might have found his mirth ill-timed: "My dear friend, it is a great honour, a great pleasure, you give me. I, too, have no belongings, no interests; this might be a great one. I never thought of it before, I must admit; but I will adopt her. She shall live with me, if it's necessary. Only, ah! let us hope still that this may not be necessary, that it is premature."
The other held up a thin hand deprecatingly.
"Ah, don't let us fence with the truth. I have always seen it coming, and why should I lie about it, now that it is come? When one is as tired as I am, there is only one other thing which happens—one dies. You don't suppose I should have sent for you like this if it hadn't been so?"
He lay very still for a moment or two with his eyes closed, as if the effort which speech cost him was considerable. At last he said abruptly:
"There are things you should know; she is Lightmark's child."
Oswyn had seated himself on a low chair by the bed; he kept his head averted, as does a priest who hears confessions; and he gazed with absent eyes at the fire which burned sulkily, at the row of medicine-bottles on the mantelpiece, at all the dreary paraphernalia of a sick-room.
"Yes, she is Lightmark's child," continued Rainham; "and the mother was that girl whom we found two years ago—do you remember?—the night of your first visit here outside the gates. She called herself Mrs. Crichton. It's a miserable story; I only discovered it quite recently."
Oswyn drew in a deep breath, which sounded like a sigh in the strangely still room.
It did not so much suggest surprise as the indefinable relief which a man feels when accident permits him to express cognizance of some fact of which he has long been inwardly assured.
"I knew that long ago," he said at last. "I suspected it when I first saw the girl; but I said nothing to you at the time; perhaps I was wrong. Afterwards, when we knew each other better, there seemed no occasion; I had almost forgotten the episode."
"Yes," went on the other faintly; "we have all made mistakes—I more than most folk, perhaps."
Then he asked suddenly:
"Had you any motive, any reason for your suspicion?"
"It was the name Crichton—the man's pseudonym on the Outcry. It flashed across me then that she was after Lightmark. He was just severing his connection with the paper. He had always kept it very close, and I dare say I was one of the few persons who were in the secret. That is why, at the bottom of his heart, he is afraid of me—afraid that I shall bring it up. It's the one thing he is ashamed of."
"I see, I see," cried Rainham wearily; "the wretched fellow!"
"Dear man, why should we think of him?" broke in Oswyn; "he isn't worth it. Now of all seasons can't we find a topic less unsavoury?"
"You don't understand," continued Rainham, after a slight pause in his thin, far-away voice. "I am not thinking of him, or only indirectly. I have found him out, and I should be content enough to forget him if it were possible. Only, unfortunately, he happens to be inextricably entangled with all that is most sacred, most important to me. It is of his wife—Mrs. Lightmark: do you know her?—that I think."
Oswyn shook his head.
"I know her only by sight, as we all do; she is very beautiful."
"I don't mind telling you that I have considered her a great deal—yes, immensely. I should not speak of it—of her—unless I were dying; but, after all, when one is dying, there are things one may say. I have held my peace so long. And since I have been lying here I have had time to ponder it, to have thought it all out. It seems to me that simply for her sake someone should know before—before the occasion passes—just the plain truth. Of course, Sylvester by rights ought to be the man, only I can't ask him to come to me—there are reasons; and, besides, he is an ass."
"Yes, he is an ass," admitted Oswyn simply; "that is reason enough."
And just then there flashed into his mind the one notable occasion on which the barrister had run across him, his intriguing letter and the ineffectual visit which had followed it—ineffectual as he had supposed, but which might nevertheless, he reflected now, have had its results, ironical and inopportune enough. It was a memory of no importance, and yet it seemed just then to be the last of a long train of small lights that led to a whole torch of illumination, in which the existence of little Margot and her quaint juxtaposition with his friend, which in his general easy attitude towards the fantastic he had not troubled to investigate, was amply and generously justified. He turned round suddenly, caught his friend's thin hand, which he held.
"Ah, don't trouble to explain, to make me understand," he murmured. "It's enough that I understand you have done something very fine, that you are the most generous of men."
Rainham was silent for a moment: he had no longer the physical capacity of smiling; but there was a gleam of the old humour in his eyes, as he replied:
"Only the most fortunate—in my friends; they are so clever, they see things so quickly. You make this very easy."
Oswyn did not shift for a while from his position: he was touched, moved more deeply than he showed; and there was a trace of emotion in his voice—of something which resembled envy.
"The happy woman! It is she who ought to know, to understand."
"It is for that I wished to tell you," went on Rainham faintly, "that she might know some day, that there might be just one person who could give her the truth in its season. Yes! I wanted her to be always in ignorance of what she had made of her life, of the kind of man she has married. She was such a child; it seemed too pitiful. It was for that I did it, damned myself in her eyes, to give her a little longer—a sort of respite. Very likely I made a mistake! Those things can't be concealed for ever, and the longer the illusion lasts, the more bitter the awakening. Only if it might serve her later, in her darkest hour, as a sort of after-thought, it won't have been quite vain. That is how I see it now: I want her to know immensely—to know that she has always been unspeakably dear to me. Ah, don't mistake me! It's not for myself, it's not yet; I shall have done with life, done with love, by that time. When one is as tired as I am, death seems very good; only it hasn't those things. Nothing can make any difference to me; I am thinking of her, that some day or other it will be for her benefit to understand, to remember——"
"To remember?"
"Yes, to remember," repeated Rainham quietly, "that her unhappiness has its compensation; if she has been bitterly wronged, she has also been fervently loved."
The other said nothing for a long time, simply considered the situation which Rainham's words, and still more even than anything that he had said, the things that he had not said, had strikingly revealed to him, leaving him, at the last, in a state of mingled emotions over which, perhaps, awe predominated.
At last he remarked abruptly:
"It is you who are fortunate; you are so nearly done with it all; you've such a long rest before you." Then he added with a new solemnity: "You may trust me, Rainham. When it is seasonable, Mrs. Lightmark shall know the truth. Perhaps she will come to me for it— Heaven knows!—stranger things have happened. You have my hand upon it; I think you are right."
"Right? You mean that it wasn't a mistake, a bêtise?"
"Felix culpa! If it was a mistake it was a very fine one."
"Ah! I don't regret it," said Rainham, "only——"
"Only it was a mistake to suppose that life was to be arranged. That was all I meant. Yes; I don't believe in much, but I believe in necessity. You can't get over it yourself, and you can't—no, not for all your goodwill, your generosity—get over it for another. There are simply inevitable results of irrevocable causes, and no place for repentance or restitution. And yet you help her, not as you meant to, and not now; but ah, you help her!"
"So long as I do that——" murmured Rainham, with a deep inhalation, closing his eyes wearily, in a manner which revealed how severely the intimate strain of conversation had told upon him.
Oswyn waited a little longer, in half expectation of his further utterance; but Rainham made no sign, lay quite motionless and hushed, his hands clasped outside of the counterpane as if already in the imitation of death; then the other rose and made a quiet exit, imagining that his friend slept, or would soon sleep.
And yet actually, in spite of the extreme physical weariness which had gradually stolen over him, dulling his senses, so that he was hardly conscious of Oswyn's departure, or of the subdued entrance of the nurse, who had been discreetly waiting for it, Rainham's mind was still keenly vigilant; and it was in the relief of a certain new lucidity, an almost hieratic calm, that he reviewed that recent interview, in which he had so deliberately unburdened himself. It seemed as if, in his great weakness, the ache of his old desire, his fever of longing, bad suddenly left him, giving place (as though the literal wasting away of his body had really given freer access to that pure spirit, its prisoner), to a love now altogether purged of passion, and become strangely tolerable and sweet.