A Comedy of Masks Part 41

He imagined that she hardly heard him, absorbed in the desolation of her own thought; and when she turned to him again, quite ready for departure now, he saw by the hard light in her eyes that she had recurred to her husband, to the irreparable gulf which must henceforth divide them.

"I can't go back to him," she whispered, as if she communed with herself. "I hate him; yes, I hate him, with my whole soul. He has lied to me too much; he has made me do such a cruel wrong. There are things which one can't forgive. Ah, no! it's not possible."

Oswyn viewed her compa.s.sionately, while a somewhat bitter smile played about his mouth.

"No, you will go back, Mrs. Lightmark! Forgive me," he added, raising his hand, interrupting her, as she seemed on the point of speech. "I don't want to intrude on you--on your thoughts, with advice or consolation. They are articles I don't deal in. Only I will tell you--I who know--that in revolt also there is vanity. You are bruised and broken and disillusioned, and you want to hide away from the world and escape into yourself, or from yourself; it's all the same. Ah, Mrs. Lightmark, believe me, in life that is not possible, or where it is most possible is in a crowd. Go back to your guests; I know, you see, whence you come; take up your part in the play, the masque; be ready with your cues. It's all masks and dominoes; what does the form or colour of it matter? Underneath it all you are yourself, with your beautiful sorrow, your memories, your transcendent happiness--nothing can touch that; what does it matter?"

"Happiness!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, rather in wonder than in scorn, for in spite of her great weariness she had been struck by the genuine accent struggling through his half ironical speech.

"Most happy," he said, with a deep inhalation. "Haven't you an ideal which life, with its cruelties, its grossness, can never touch?"

Then he added quickly, in words of Philip Rainham, which had flashed with sudden appositeness across his mind.

"Your misery has its compensation; you have been wronged, but you have also been loved."

"Ah, my friend!" she cried, turning toward the picture with a new and more beautiful illumination in her eyes, "was it for this that you did it?"

Oswyn said nothing, and Eve moved towards the door, discovering for the first time, on her way, the sleeping child. She stopped for a moment, and the other watched her with breathless curiosity, uncertain how far her knowledge might extend.

And as she stood there, wondering, a great wave of colour suffused her white face; the next moment she was gone, but in the light of that pure blush Oswyn seemed to have discovered that her tragical enlightenment was complete.

When she turned once more into the street, she had already set herself gravely, with a strange and fact.i.tious composure, to face her life. It stretched itself out before her like a great, gray plain, the arid desolation of the road being rendered only more terrible by the flowers with which it would be strewn. For suddenly, while Oswyn had been speaking, she had recognised that after all she would go back; the other course had been merely the first bitter cry, half hysterical, of her grief.

By her husband's side, with the semblance of amity between them still, utterly apart and estranged as they must in reality henceforth perpetually be, it seemed to her that she could none the less religiously cherish the memory of her friend because she would turn a smiling mask to the world's indifference, wearing mourning in her heart. And deeply as she had suffered, in the midst of her remorse she could still remind herself that in the last half hour she had gained more than she had lost; that life, however tedious it might be, was in a manner consecrated by this great devotion, which death had embalmed, to be a light to her in lonely places and dark hours, a perpetual after-thought against the cynicism or despair to which her imitation of happiness might conduce.

The mask of a smile, and mourning in her heart! Yes, it was in some such phrase as that that the life which began then for her must be expressed--for her, and perhaps, she reflected sadly, for others, for many, the justest and the best.

And in the meantime she would go back to her dancers, resume once more her well-worn _role_ of the brilliant and efficient hostess. She wondered if it would be difficult to account for herself, to explain an absence so unprecedented, if, as was doubtless the case, her figure had been missed. But the next moment she smiled a trifle bitterly, for she had reminded herself of her husband's proved facility of prevarication, which she felt certain would already have been usefully employed.