own on
Rainham suddenly, unexplainedly, after his fashion, as it were from
the clouds, in the late afternoon, when the clerks had left. He
would chat there for an hour or two in his spasmodic, half-sullen
way, in which, however, an increasing cordiality mingled, making,
before he retired once more into space, some colour notes of the
yard or the river, or at times a rough sketch, which was never
without its terse originality.

Rainham began to look forward to these visits with a recurring
pleasure. Oswyn's beautiful genius and Oswyn's savage humours
fascinated him, and no less his pleasing, personal ambiguity. He
seemed to be a person without antecedents, as he was certainly
without present ties. Except that he painted, and so must have
a place to paint in, he might have lodged precariously in a
doss-house, or on door-steps, or under the Adelphi arches with those
outcasts of civilization to whom, in personal appearance, one might
not deny he bore a certain resemblance. To no one did he reveal his
abiding-place, and it was the merest tradition of little authority
that a man from Brodonowski's had once been taken to his studio. By
no means a perspicuous man, and to be approached perhaps charily;
yet Rainham, as his acquaintance progressed, found himself from time
to time brought up with a certain surprise, as he discovered, under
all his savage cynicism, his overweening devotion to a depressing
theory, a very real vein of refinement, of delicate mundane
sensibility, revealed perhaps in a chance phrase or diffidence, or
more often in some curiously fine touch to canvas of his rare,
audacious brush. The incongruities of the man, his malice, his
coarseness, his reckless generosity, gave Rainham much food for
thought. And, indeed, that parched empty August seemed full of
problematical issues; and he had, on matters of more import than the
enigmatic mind of a new friend, to be content at last to be tossed
to and fro on the winds of vain conjecture.

Lightmark and the Sylvesters occupied him much; but beyond a brief
note from Mrs. Sylvester in Lucerne, which told him nothing that he
would know, there came to him no news from Switzerland. In the
matter of the girl whom he had befriended, recklessly, he told
himself at times, difficulties multiplied. A sort of dumb devil
seemed to have entered into her, and, with the best will in the
world, it was a merely pecuniary assistance which he could give her,
half angry with himself