Rainham

“ CHAPTER IV When Rainham pushed back the door of the dim little restaurant in Turk Street, Soho, he stood a moment, blinking his eyes a little in the sudden change from the bright summer sunshine, before he assured himself that his friend had not yet arrived. Half a dozen men were sitting about smoking or discussing various drinks. The faces of several were familiar to him, but there were none of them whom he knew; so he took his seat at a table near the door and ordered a vermouth to occupy him until Lightmark, whose unpunctuality was notorious, should put in an appearance. ”

“ The church is secluded amid hop-kilns and fruit farms, and backed by a wooded knoll.
It is a run of seven miles from Newington to Chatham, through Rainham, identical in name with the Essex Rainham we have already passed through. One of the finest panoramas in the world lies stretched out below this road, on the right hand, the whole of the way: the panorama, that is to say, of the broad estuary of the Medway, crowded with vessels, large and small, where the Might of the Mailed Hand of England is plain to see, in the big battleships and the smart cruisers that occupy the fairway. ”

“ Rainham watched the dexterous movements of his long nervous hands—the colour of old ivory—and found them noticeable.
"You are not an artist, I think," he suggested after a moment, fixing his curiously intent eyes on Rainham.
"No," admitted the other, smiling, "I am afraid I am not. I am only here on sufferance. I am a mender of ships."
"He is a connoisseur," put in Lightmark gaily. "It's an accident that he happens to be connected with shipping—a fortunate one, though, for he owns a most picturesque old shanty in the far East. ”

“ Rainham was impressed anew by his singleness, the purity of his artistic passion. His life might be disgraceful, indescribable: his art lay apart from it; and when he took up a brush an enthusiasm, a devotion to art, almost religious, steadied his hand.
"You may think me a charlatan," he said, with the same savage earnestness, "but I can tell you I am not. I may fail or I may succeed, as the world counts those things. It is all the same: I believe in myself. ”

“ Rainham smiled vaguely; he needed an effort to pull himself together, to collect his energies sufficiently to meet the commonplace of conversation, after the curious detachment into which he had fallen; and he wondered aimlessly how long he had been there.
"I suppose, like everyone else, Dick," he remarked after a while, "it is the weather which has brought you home at such an unfashionable date."
"Yes," answered Lightmark; "it was very poor fun yachting. I shall stay in town altogether next year, I think. And you—you are not looking particularly fit; what have you done with yourself?" ”

“ 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." ”

“ But the story that interests me most is one of an incident which occurred to my father during my lifetime, and which we have always called "The Brown Lady of Rainham." I am aware that this narrative has reached the public through other sources, and I have made it the foundation of a Christmas story myself. But it is too well authenticated to be omitted here. The last fifteen years of my father's life were passed on his own estate of Langham, in Norfolk, and amongst his county friends were Sir Charles and Lady Townshend of Rainham Hall. ”

“ As he stood on the wharf, which ran down to the river-side, leaning back against a crane of ancient pattern, and viewing his easel from a few yards' distance critically, he could not contemplate the result without a certain complacency.
"It's deuced good, after all," he said to himself, with his head poised a little on one side. "Yes, old Rainham will like this. And, by Jove! what matters a good deal more, the hangers will like it, and if it's sold—and, confound it! it must be sold—it will be a case of three figures." ”

“ No one pays much attention to what he says nowadays. It's just that absinthe and the cigarettes that are the ruin of him, day and night. Poor devil! why can't he stick to whisky and a pipe, like a decent Christian!"
"His queerness is all on the surface," said Rainham gravely. "You have to dig pretty deep to find out what he's really worth."
Just then Eve hurried towards them through the trees, looking about her with an air of hesitation, carrying the train of her pale-gray brocade dress over one bare, girlish arm. ”

“ He hoisted it up to a suitable light, and Rainham stood by the bow-window, from which one almost obtained the point of view which the artist had chosen, regarding it in a critical silence.
"What do you call it?" he asked at last.
"'The Gray River,'" said Lightmark; then a little impatiently: "But how do you find it? Are you waiting for a tripod?"
"I don't think I shall tell you. By falling into personal criticism, unless one is either dishonest or trivial, one runs the risk of losing a friend."
"Oh, nonsense, man! It's not such a daub as that. I will risk your candour." ”

“ Rainham shrugged his shoulders rather wearily.
"Poor public! If it wants art made in that spirit, it is worse than
I believed."
Lightmark looked askance at him, frowning a little, pulling at his long moustache. He was absorbed for some time—they had turned into the Edgware Road, and the soft rain had begun again—in ineffectual pursuit of cabs. When at last he had caught a driver's eye, and they had settled themselves on the cushions of a hansom, he turned abruptly to his companion to ask him if he had seen the Academy before it closed. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ It's no good asking Rainham; that goes without saying. It would be equally useless to try Lightmark: they're as thick as thieves, and he's not the sort of man to be pumped very easily. And yet, if Rainham's friends are out of the question, what's to be done? He hasn't got any enemies—that sort of man never has, except himself. How can I get hold of the girl? I suppose some people would set a detective to watch Rainham, and so on ”

“ The last notion which Rainham took away with him, when they parted late in the evening (Oswyn having suddenly lapsed from the eloquence to the incoherency of drunkenness) , was a wish to see more of him. He had given him his card, and he waited until he had seen him place it—after observing it for some moments attentively with lack-lustre eyes—in the security of his waistcoat. And as the two friends walked towards Charing Cross, Rainham observed that he hoped he would call.
"He is a disreputable fellow," said Lightmark a little sullenly, "and an unprofitable acquaintance. ”

“ They were almost all of them artists; they were all of them young and ardent; and they had a habit of propounding their views, which were always of the most advanced nature, with a vehemence which to Rainham represented all the disinterestedness of youth. Very often they were exceedingly well worth knowing, though in the majority of cases the world had not found it out. He knew very few of them personally; he had been taken there first by Lightmark, when the latter was fresh from Paris, and had been himself more in touch with them. ”

“ Lady Garnett shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of rich tolerance, as one who acknowledged the respectability of all tastes, whilst preferring her own.
"London has its charm, to me," she remarked. "We are glad to be back. I am getting too old to travel—that terrible crossing, and the terrible people one meets!"
Rainham smiled with absent sympathy, looking into the red coals.
"You must remember, I don't know where you have been. Tell me your adventures and your news."
"I leave that to Mary, my dear," said the old lady. ”

“ The dial noted Thursday; and he reminded himself that on that day his friend, Lady Garnett, had a perennial habit of being at home to her intimates, on the list of whom Rainham could acknowledge, without undue vanity, his name occurred high. There was a touch of self-reproach in his added reminder that a week had elapsed since his return, and he had not already hastened to clasp the excellent old lady's hand. It was an unprecedented postponement and an infringement of a time-honoured habit; and Rainham had for his habit all the respect of a man who is always indolent and often ill ”

“ When he is with his sister one can tolerate him, but alone——"
She held up her thin wrinkled hands with a little gesture of elision, at which her expressive shoulders assisted. She was of French extraction, the last survivor of an illustrious family; and reconciled as she had become to England—for years she had hardly left London—a slight and very pretty accent, and this trick of her shoulders, remained to remind people that her point of view was still essentially foreign. Rainham, who had from his boyhood found England somewhat a prison-house, adored her for this trait. ”

“ Rainham's principles were."
Lady Garnett was aroused out of her state of vacant boredom for the first time into a certain interest. Mary sat, her hands clasped in her lap, the flush just dying away out of her pale cheeks, while Mr. Sylvester embarked upon an elaborate disquisition of his principles and his programme—it might have been an expansion of his Parliamentary address—which the elder lady, whom a chance phrase had started upon a new line of thought, scarcely considered.
Does he know? she asked herself. Has this rather stupid young man grown suddenly acute enough to be jealous? ”

“ It is only the dwellers on the confines who lose their voices in the Temple of Art—a goddess who, to judge by her votaries, is not wont to take pleasure in silence.
"Oh," said Eve, in reply to one of Rainham's remarks, "is that Bordighera? What lovely blue water! and what perfectly delicious little fishing-boats! I should like to go there. Charles is going to take us to Lucerne in a week or two, you know, when the Long Vacation begins. But I suppose we shall hardly get to Italy."
"Yes, that's Bordighera"—with a sigh—"my happy hunting-ground. ”

“ CHAPTER VI Indolence and ill-health, in the opinion of many the salient points in Philip Rainham's character, had left him at forty with little of the social habit. The circle of his intimates had sensibly narrowed, and for the rest he was becoming more and more conscious that people whom one does not know exceedingly well are not worth knowing at all. The process of dining out two or three times a week in the company of two or three persons whose claims on his attention were of the slenderest he found a process attended with less and less pleasure the older he grew. ”

“ It is, however, rather barren of mediaeval interest, little being left to us older than the change of religion. At Rainham we have a church, however, dedicated in honour of St Margaret, parts of which date from the thirteenth century, though in the main it is a Perpendicular building. Within are two ornaments of the late seventeenth century, and two brasses, one to William Bloor, who died in 1529, and the other to John Norden, who died in 1580, and to his four wives. ”

“ He wouldn't make anything pay in this world. But if a man's clever and canny, and has the sense to see on which side his bread's buttered ... why, it's just easier than nothing. And to think that the laddie isn't even an Associate."
"Yes. I suppose he's getting on pretty well," suggested Rainham, with a lazy enjoyment of this frank worldliness.
"Getting on! Doesn't it look like it? Isn't he entertaining his friends like—like a Rothschild? You know, of course, that he has sold his Academy picture, and next year's as well—and four figures for each of them?" ”

“ Rainham gathered from her resigned animadversions that the relations must be by marriage only: there was no Gallic quality in the atmosphere she described.
It was a very nice house—Jacobean, she believed—or, rather, it would have been nice if they had had it to themselves. Unfortunately, it was very full: there were a great many stupid men who shot all day, and as many stupid women who talked scandal and went to sleep after dinner ”