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Updated: May 7, 2025
Lightmark had scarcely closed the door, against which he now stood in a black silence, with the air of a man turned to stone; Rainham's eyes had only fallen once upon the two figures on the sofa Eve crushed in a corner, a sorrowful, dainty shape in the silk and lace of her pretty tea-gown, with the white drawn face of a scared child; Kitty Crichton, in her cloak and hat, bending forward a little, the hectic flush of strong excitement colouring her checks, that were already branded by her malady when he underwent a moral revolution.
"You are cynical," he remarked at last. "I dare say I shall get in. Is Lightmark here?" "Yes, he is here. He has taken Mrs. Van der Gucht the American Petroleum Queen they call her, don't they? down to supper. She wants him to paint her portrait, at his own price. He will be here to fetch me at half-past eleven. I believe we have to move on then."
With Miss Sylvester he had a less easy task. She was a girl who had from a very early age been accustomed to have her impressions moulded by her self-assertive elder brother; and he, at any rate at first, had been careful to show that he regarded Lightmark as an object of his patronage rather than as a friend who could meet him on his own exalted level.
But he travelled right through from Italy, and got to London late last night. He slept at the Great Eastern, and I went up to him in the City this morning. He hasn't been here more than half an hour." "Nobody told me," said Lightmark. "Gad! I am glad. I will take him up the picture. Will you carry the other traps into the house, Bullen?"
At dinner the taciturnity, bordering on moroseness, of a talker usually so brilliant led his host to surmise that Lightmark had ruined a picture, his hostess to conclude that he had quarrelled with his wife.
Rainham paused a moment: it was not only a passing thought of Oswyn's acrimony, and of the difficult minutes during which he had been thrown across Lightmark at the Dock, that constrained him; it was rather the recollection of his own careful scrutiny of the disputed canvas, when he had at last dragged himself with a disagreeable sense of moral responsibility into Burlington House, and had come away at last strangely dissatisfied.
Eve was standing on the little balcony, appertaining to the sitting-room which had been dedicated to the ladies as a special mark of favour by the proprietor of the pension, and Lightmark hastened to join her there; and while Charles and his mother played a long game of chess, the two looked out at the line of moonlit Alps, and were sentimentally and absurdly happy. "Mrs.
"Perhaps not even that," said Philip, as he followed her from the room; "even that, after a time, becomes monotonous." It occurred to Lightmark one evening, as he groped through the gloom of his studio, on his way to bed, after assisting at a very charming social gathering at the Sylvesters', that as soon as he was married he would have to cut Brodonowski's.
And where the old Lightmark, the Lightmark of the Café Grecco days, broke out at times, it was less pleasantly than of old, in a curious recklessness, a tendency, which jarred on Rainham's susceptible nerves, to dilate with a vanity which would have been vulgar, had it not been almost childish, on his lavish living, the magnitude of his expenditure.
"If it's the Riviera, or or dry docks," added Rainham modestly. But Lightmark stepped forward hastily, after a moment's hesitation, and put his hand on the drawing just as Eve was preparing with due ceremony to unveil it. "Excuse me, I don't want to show it to Rainham yet. I I want to astonish him, you know."
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