"Come," he said firmly, "this is no place for us."
Eve regarded them all strangely, vaguely, the terror gradually dying out of her eyes—Lightmark expressionless and silent, as he had been all through the interview; the woman trembling on Rainham's arm, who stood beside her with his downcast eyes, the picture of conscious guilt. A curious anguish too pale to be indignation plucked at her heart-strings—anguish in which, unaccountably, the false charge against her husband was scarcely considered; that had become altogether remote and unreal, something barely historical, fading already away in the dim shadows of the past. What hurt her, with a dull pain which she could not analyse, was the sudden tarnishing of a scarcely-admitted ideal by Rainham's deliberate confession, making life appear for the moment intolerably sordid and mean. Would she have owned to herself that, with an almost unconscious instinct, she had judged these two men all along by a different standard? Hardly: she loved her husband, and her marriage had not yet dissipated the memory of those golden days of illusion preceding it, in which her love had been of a finer kind. Only that time, in which it would have been impossible for her to judge him, in which he could only do right in her eyes, was gone. Occasions had arrived when they had inevitably to differ, on which the girl had gently acquiesced—if not without a touch of scorn—in his action, but had not felt obliged to accept his point of view. There had been times when her pride had suffered—for underneath her childish exterior, her air of being just a dainty little figure of Watteau, she had a very sensitive and delicate pride of her own—and then, if she had succeeded in forgiving Lightmark, it had not been without an effort which had made it difficult for her to pardon herself. Sometimes, though she would scarcely have confessed it, her husband's mere approbativeness had almost shocked her. It was good, no doubt, to be popular, harmless even, to care for popularity—at least, one's traditions declared nothing to the contrary; but to care so exorbitantly as Lightmark appeared to do, to sacrifice so much to one's enthusiasm for pleasing inferior people—people whom, behind their backs, one was quite ready to tear to pieces, allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue—in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure. Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much: not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion. And yet, now and again, when the rush and ostentation of their new life, with its monotony of dinners and dances—so little like that which she had anticipated as the future lot of a painter's wife—had left her rather weary, a trifle sad, she had thought suddenly of her old friend Philip Rainham, and the thought had solaced her. There is a sort of pleasure, even when one is married to the most amiable of husbands, and is getting quite old—very nearly twenty—in turning from time to time to a person who has known one in the very shortest of frocks, and whose intimate connection with chocolates and "treats" is among one's earliest traditions. She made no contrasts; and yet when occasionally on one of those afternoons—there seemed to be so many of them—when she was "at home," when her bright, large drawing-room was fullest, and she was distracted to find herself confusing, amidst the clatter of teacups, dear Mrs. Henderson, who painted wild-flowers so cleverly, with dear Lady Lorimer, who was going on the stage, she looked up and saw Rainham hovering in the near distance, or sitting with his teacup balanced in one long white hand as he turned a politely tolerant ear to the small talk of a neighbour, she felt strangely rested. Trouble or confusion might come, she told herself, and how suddenly all these charming people, who were so surprisingly alike, and whose names were so exasperatingly different, would disappear. Dear Mrs. Henderson and dear Lady Lorimer, and that odious Mrs. Dollond—what was she saying to Dick now which had to be spoken with an air of such exaggerated intimacy in so discreet an undertone?—how swiftly they would all be gone, like the snows of last year! Only Philip Rainham, she was sure, would be there still, a little older, perhaps, with the air of being a little more tired of things, but inwardly the same, unalterably loyal and certain. The prospect was curiously sustaining, the more in that she had no tangible cause of uneasiness, was an extremely happy woman—it was so that she would have most frequently described herself—only growing at times a little weary of the fashionable tread-mill, and the daily routine of not particularly noble interests which it involved. Catching his eyes sometimes, as he sat there, looking out idly, indifferently, upon it all—this success which was the breath of life to Dick—she found him somewhat admirable; disdainful, fastidious, reserved—beneath his surface good-humour, his constant kindness, he could scarcely be a happy man. In flashes of sudden gratitude, she would have been glad often to have done something for him, had there been anything in the world to do. And then she laughed at herself for such a vain imagination. Had it not been his proper charm all along that he was a man for whom one could do nothing? precisely, because he wanted nothing, was so genuinely indifferent to anything that life could offer? And now all that was at an end; by his own confession he had finished it, admitting himself, with a frankness almost brutal, a man like other men, only with passions more sordid, and a temper more unscrupulous, in that he had ruined this wretched woman, whose coming there had left a trail of vileness over her own life.
"Ah, yes, go!" she said, after a while, answering Rainham's exclamation. "For pity's sake, go!"
Rainham bowed his head, obeyed her; as the door closed behind them he could hear that she cried softly, and that Lightmark, his silence at last broken, consoled her with inaudible words.
CHAPTER XXIV
Rainham turned at random out of Grove Road, walking aimlessly, and very fast, without considering direction. He had passed the girl's arm through his own as they left the house; and in a sort of stupefied obedience she had submitted. To her, too, one way was the same as another, as dreary and as vain. With Rainham, indeed, after the tension of the last few minutes, into which he had crowded such a wealth of suffering and of illumination, a curious stupor had succeeded. For the moment he neither thought nor suffered: simply, it was good to be out there, in the darkness—the darkness of London—after that immense plunge, which was still too near him, that he should attempt to appreciate it in all its relations. By-and-by would be the season of reckoning, the just and delicate analysis, by nicely critical nature, of all that he had deliberately lost, when he might run desperately before the whips of his own thought; now he felt only the lethargy which succeeds strenuous action, that has been, in a measure, victorious; the physical well-being of walking rapidly, vaguely, through the comfortable shadows, allowing the cold rain to pelt refreshingly upon his face and aching temples. And it was not until they had gone so through several streets, whose names were a blank to him, that Rainham bethought him, with a touch of self-reproach, of his companion, and how ill her thin garments and slender figure were calculated to suffer the downpour, which he only found consoling. He drew her into the shelter of a doorway, signalled to a passing cab; and just then, the light of an adjacent street lamp falling upon her face, he realized for the first time in its sunken outline the progress of her malady.
"I beg your pardon," he said gently; "I did not understand that you were ill. You must tell me where you are lodging, and I will take you back." Then, as though he anticipated her hesitation, a tribute to her old ambiguity, become so useless, he added dryly: "You can tell me your address; you have no reason to hide yourself now."
She glanced up at him furtively, shrinking back a little as though she feared his irony.
"I live in Charlotte Street, No. —. But pray let me go alone, sir!
It will not be your way."
"I have rooms in Bloomsbury," he answered. "It will be entirely on my way."