“Sympathy?” she said drily. “I don’t know that there is any new call for sympathy, is there? After all, things are very much where they were!”
A kind of shock passed across Falconer’s face; a materialisation of a mental process.
“What we know now——” he began stiffly.
“What we knew before was quite enough!” interrupted Mrs. Romayne. “When one has arrived violently at the foot of the precipice, it is of no particular moment how long onehas been living on the precipice’s edge. While nothing was known, Mr. Romayne was only on the precipice’s edge, and as no one knew of the precipice it was practically as though none existed. Directly one thing came out it was all over! He was over the edge. Nothing could make it either better or worse.”
She spoke almost carelessly, though very bitterly, as though she felt her words to be almost truisms, and Falconer stared at her for a moment in silence. Then he said with stern formality, as though he were making a deliberate effort to realise her point of view:
“You imply that Mr. Romayne’s fall—his going over the edge of the precipice, if I may adopt your figure—consisted in the discovery of his misdeeds. Do you mean that you think it would have been better if nothing had ever been known?”
Mrs. Romayne raised her eyebrows.
“Of course!” she said amazedly. Then catching sight of her cousin’s face she shrugged her shoulders with a little gesture of deprecating concession. “Oh, of course, I don’tmean that Mr. Romayne himself would have been any better if nothing had ever come out,” she said impatiently. “The right and wrong and all that kind of thing would have been the same, I suppose. But I don’t see how ruin and suicide improve the position.”
She rose as she spoke, and Falconer made no answer.
Mrs. Romayne had touched on the great realities of life, the everlasting mystery of the spirit of man with its unfathomable obligations and disabilities; had touched on them carelessly, patronisingly, as “all that kind of thing.” She was as absolutely blind to the depth of their significance as is a man without eyesight to the illimitable spaces of the sky above him. To Falconer her tone was simply scandalising. He did not understand her ignorance. He could not touch the pathos of its limitations and the possibilities by which it was surrounded. The grim irony of such a tone as used by the ephemeral of the immutable was beyond his ken.
“I have several things to see to upstairs,” Mrs. Romayne went on after a moment’s pause. “I shall go up now, and I think,if you will excuse me, I will not come down again. We start so early. Good night!”
“Good night!” he returned stiffly; and with a little superior, contemptuous smile on her face she went away.
Dennis Falconerhad been alone for nearly an hour, when his solitude was broken up by the appearance of a waiter, who presented him with a card, and the information that the gentleman whose name it bore was in the smoking-room. The name was Dr. Aston’s, and after a moment’s reflection Falconer told the waiter to ask the gentleman to come upstairs. Falconer had spent that last hour in meditation, which had grown steadily deeper and graver. It seemed to have carried him beyond the formal and dogmatic attitude of mind with which he had met Mrs. Romayne, back to the borders of those larger regions he had touched when he sat looking at William Romayne’s papers; and there was a warmth and gratitude in his reception of Dr. Aston when that gentleman appeared,that suggested that he was not so completely sufficient for himself as usual.
“The smoking-room is very full, I imagine?” he said, as he welcomed the little doctor. “My cousin has gone to bed, and I thought if you didn’t mind coming up, doctor, we should be better off here.”
Dr. Aston’s answer was characteristically hearty and alert. Knowing it to be Falconer’s last night at Nice, he had come round, he said, just for a farewell word, and to arrange, if possible, for a meeting later on under happier circumstances. A quiet chat over a cigar was what he had not hoped for, but the thing of all others he would like. He settled himself with a genial instinct for comfort in the arm-chair Falconer pulled round to the window for him; accepted a cigar and prepared to light it; glancing now and again at the younger man’s face with shrewd, kindly eyes, which had already noticed something unusual in its expression.
Dr. Aston and Dennis Falconer had met, some six years before, in Africa, under circumstances which had brought out all that was best in the young man’s character; andDr. Aston had been warmly attracted by him. Being a particularly shrewd student of human nature, he had taken his measure accurately enough, subsequently, and knew as certainly as one man may of another where his weak points lay, and how time was dealing with them. But his kindness for, and interest in, Dennis Falconer had never abated; perhaps because his insight did not, as so much human insight does, stop at the weak points.
Dennis Falconer, for his part, regarded Dr. Aston with an affectionate respect which he gave to hardly any other man on earth.
There was a short silence as the two men lit their cigars, and then Dr. Aston, with another glance at Falconer’s face, broke it with a kindly, delicate enquiry after Mrs. Romayne. Falconer answered it almost absently, but with an instinctive stiffening, so to speak, of his face and voice, and there was another pause. The doctor was trying the experiment of waiting for a lead. He was just deciding that he must make another attempt on his own account when Falconer took his cigar from between his lips and said, with his eyes fixed on the evening sky:
“I’m always glad to see you, doctor; but I never was more glad than to-night.”
A sound proceeded from the doctor which might have been described as a grunt if it had been less delicately sympathetic, and Falconer continued:
“I’ve been trying to think out a problem, and it was one too many for me: the origin of evil.”
He was thoroughly in earnest, and nothing was further from him than any thought of lightness or flippancy. But there was a calm familiarity and matter-of-course acquaintanceship with his subject about his tone that produced a slight quiver about the corners of the little doctor’s mouth. He did not speak, however, and the movement with which he took his cigar from between his lips and turned to Falconer was merely sympathetic and interested.
“Of course, I know it’s an unprofitable subject enough,” continued Falconer almost apologetically. “We shall never be much the wiser on the subject, struggle as we may. But still, now and then it seems to be forced on one. It has been forced on me to-day.”
“Apropos of William Romayne?” suggested Dr. Aston, so delicately that the words seemed rather a sympathetic comment than a question.
“Yes,” returned Falconer. “We have been looking through his private papers.” He paused a moment, and then continued as if drawn on almost in spite of himself. “You knew him by repute, I dare say, doctor. He had one of those strong personalities which get conveyed even by hearsay. A clever man, striking and dominating, universally liked and deferred to. Yet he must have been as absolutely without principle as this table is without feeling.”
He struck the little table between them with his open hand as he spoke; and then, as though the expression of his feelings had begotten, as is often the case, an irresistible desire to relieve himself further, he answered Dr. Aston’s interested ejaculation as if it had been the question the doctor was at once too well-bred and too full of tact to put.
“There were no papers connected with this last disgraceful affair, of course; those, as you know, I dare say, were all seized in London.It’s the man’s past life that these private papers throw light on. Light, did I say? It was a life of systematic, cold-blooded villainy, for which no colours could be dark enough.”
He had uttered his last sentence involuntarily, as it seemed, and now he laid down his cigar, and turning to Dr. Aston, began to speak low and quickly.
“They are papers of all kinds,” he said. “Letters, business documents, memoranda of every description, and two-thirds of them at least have reference to fraud and wrong of one kind or another. Not one penny that man possessed can have been honestly come by. His business was swindling; every one of his business transactions was founded on fraud. He can have had no faith or honesty of any sort or kind. He was living with another woman before he had been married a year. All that woman’s letters—he deceived her abominably, and it’s fortunate that she died—are annotated and endorsed like his ‘business’ memoranda; evidently kept deliberately as so much stored experience for future use!”
Dr. Aston had listened with a keen, alertexpression of intent interest. His cigar was forgotten, and he laid it down now as if impatient of any distraction, and leant forward over the table with his shrewd, kindly little eyes fixed eagerly on Falconer. Human nature was a hobby of his.
Falconer’s confidence, or more truly perhaps the manner of it, had swept away all conventional barriers, and the elder man asked two or three quick, penetrating questions.
“How far back do these records go?” he asked finally.
“They cover five-and-twenty years, I should say,” returned Falconer. “The first note on a successful fraud must have been made when he was about four-and-twenty. Why, even then—when he was a mere boy—he must have been entirely without moral sense!”
“Yes!” said the doctor, with a certain dry briskness of manner which was apt to come to him in moments of excitement. “That is exactly what he was, my boy! It was that, in conjunction with his powerful brain, that made him what you called, just now, dominating. It gave him vantage-groundover his fellow-men. He was as literally without moral sense as a colour-blind man is without a sense of colour, or a homicidal maniac without a sense of the sanctity of human life.”
An expression of rather horrified and entirely uncomprehending protest spread itself over Falconer’s face.
“Romayne was not mad,” he objected, with that incapacity for penetrating beneath the surface which was characteristic of him. “I never even heard that there was madness in the family.”
“You would find it if you looked far enough, without a doubt!” answered the doctor decidedly. “This is a most interesting subject, Dennis, and it’s one that it’s very difficult to look into without upsetting the whole theory of moral responsibility, and doing more harm than enough. I don’t say Romayne was mad, as the word is usually understood, but all you tell me confirms a notion I have had about him ever since this affair came out. He was what we call morally insane. I’ll tell you what first put the ideainto my head. It was the extraordinary obtuseness, the extraordinary want of perception, of that blunder of his that burst up the whole thing. Look at it for yourself. It was a flaw in his comprehension of moral sense only possible in a man who knew of the quality by hearsay alone. He must have been a very remarkable man. I wish I had known him!”
“I have heard the term ‘moral insanity,’ of course,” said Falconer slowly and distastefully, ignoring the doctor’s last, purely æsthetic sentence, “but it has always seemed to me, doctor, if you’ll pardon my saying so, a very dangerous tampering with things that should be sacred even from science. I cannot believe that any man is actually incapable of knowing right from wrong.”
“The difficulty is,” said the doctor drily, “that the words right and wrong sometimes convey nothing to him, as the words red and blue convey nothing to a colour-blind man, and the endearments of his wife convey nothing to the lunatic who is convinced that she is trying to poison him.” He paused amoment, and then said abruptly: “Are there any children?”
Falconer glanced at him and changed colour slightly.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “One boy!”
The keen, shrewd face of the elder man softened suddenly and indescribably under one of those quick sympathetic impulses which were Dr. Aston’s great charm.
“Heaven help his mother!” he said gently.
Falconer moved quickly and protestingly, and there was a touch of something like rebuke in his voice as he said:
“Doctor, you don’t mean to say that you think——”
“You believe in heredity, I suppose?” interrupted the doctor quickly. “Well, at least, you believe in the heredity you can’t deny—that a child may—or rather must—inherit, not only physical traits and infirmities, but mental tendencies; likes, dislikes, aptitudes, incapacities, or what not. Be consistent, man, and acknowledge the sequel, though it’s pleasanter to shut one’s eyes to it, I admit. Put the theory of moral insanity out of the question for the moment if you like; say thatRomayne was a pronounced specimen of the common criminal. Why should not his child inherit his father’s tendency to crime, his father’s aptitude for lying and thieving, as he might inherit his father’s eyes, or his father’s liking for music—if he had had a turn that way? You’re a religious man, Falconer, I know. You believe, I take it, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children. How can they be visited more heavily than in their reproduction? You mark my words, my boy, that little child of Romayne’s—unless he inherits strong counter influences from his mother, or some far-away ancestor—will go the way his father has gone, and may end as his father has ended!”
There was a slight sound by the door behind the two men as Dr. Aston finished—finished with a force and solemnity that carried a painful thrill of conviction even through the not very penetrable outer crust of dogma which enwrapped Dennis Falconer—and the latter turned his head involuntarily. The next instant both men had sprung to their feet, and were standing dumb and aghast face to face with Mrs. Romayne. She wasstanding with her hand still on the lock of the door as if her attention had been arrested just as she was entering the room; she had apparently recoiled, for she was pressed now tightly against the door; her face was white to the very lips, and a vague thought passed through Falconer that he had never seen it before. It was as though the look in her eyes, as she gazed at Dr. Aston, had changed it beyond recognition.
There was a moment’s dead silence; a moment during which Dr. Aston turned from red to white and from white to red again, and struggled vainly to find words; a moment during which Falconer could only stare blankly at that unfamiliar woman’s face. Then, while the two men were still utterly at a loss, Mrs. Romayne seemed gradually to command herself, as if with a tremendous effort. Gradually, as he looked at her, Falconer saw the face with which he was familiar shape itself, so to speak, upon that other face he did not know. He saw her eyes change and harden as if with the effort necessitated by her conventional instinct against a scene. He saw the quivering horror of her mouth alter and subside in thehard society smile he knew well, only rather stiffer than usual as her face was whiter; and then he heard her speak.
With a little movement of her head in civil recognition of Dr. Aston’s presence, she said to Falconer:
“My book is on that table. Will you give it to me, please?”
Her voice was quite steady, though thin. Almost mechanically Falconer handed her the book she asked for, and with another slight inclination of her head, before Dr. Aston had recovered his balance sufficiently to speak, she was gone.
The door closed behind her, and a low ejaculation broke from the doctor. Then he drew a long breath, and said slowly:
“That’s a remarkable woman.”
Falconer drew his hand across his forehead as though he were a little dazed.
“I think not!” he said stupidly. “Not when you know her!”
“Ah!” returned the doctor, with a shrewd glance at him. “And you do know her?”
If Falconer could have seen Mrs. Romayne an hour later, he would have been more thanever convinced of the correctness of his judgement. The preparations for departure were nearly concluded; she had dismissed her maid and was finishing them herself with her usual quiet deliberation, though her face was very pale and set.
But it might have perplexed him somewhat if he had seen her, when everything was done, stop short in the middle of the room and lift her hands to her head as though something oppressed her almost more heavily than she could bear.
“End as his father ended!” she said below her breath. “Ruin and disgrace!”
She turned and crossed the room to where her travelling-bag stood, and drew from it a letter, thrust into a pocket with several others.
It was the blotted little letter which began “My dear Mamma,” and when she returned it to the bag at last, her face was once again the face that Dennis Falconer did not know.
Thereare two diametrically opposed points of view from which London life is regarded by those who know of it only by hearsay; that from which life in the metropolis is contemplated with somewhat awestruck and dubious eyes as necessarily involving a continuous vortex of society and dissipation; and that which recognises no so-called “society life” except during the eight or ten weeks of high pressure known as the season. Both these points of view are essentially false. In no place is it possible to lead a more completely hermit-like life than in London; in no place is it possible to lead a simpler and more hard-working life. On the other hand, that feverish access of stir and movement which makes the months of May and June stand out and focus, so to speak, the attention of onlookers,is only an acceleration and accentuation of the life which is lived in certain strata of the London world for eight or nine months in the year. A large proportion of the intellectual work of the world is done in London; to be in society is a great assistance to the intellectual worker of to-day on his road to material prosperity; consequently a large section of “society” is of necessity in London from October to July; and, since people must have some occupation, even out of the season, social life, in a somewhat lower key, indeed, than the pitch of the season, but on the same artificial foundations, goes on undisturbed, gathering about it, as any institution will do, a crowd of that unattached host of idlers, male and female, whose movements are dictated solely by their own pleasure—or their own weariness.
It was the March of one of the last of the eighties. A wild March wind was taking the most radical liberties with the aristocratic neighbourhood of Grosvenor Place, racing and tearing and shrieking down the chimneys with a total absence of the respect due to wealth. If it could have got in at one in particular ofthe many drawing-room windows at which it rushed so vigorously, it might have swept round the room and out again with a whoop of amusement. For the room contained some twelve ladies of varying ages and demeanours, and, with perhaps one or two exceptions, each lady was talking at the top of her speed—which, in some cases, was very considerable—and of her voice—which as a rule was penetrating. Every speaker was apparently addressing the same elderly and placid lady, who sat comfortably back in an arm-chair, and made no attempt to listen to any one. Perhaps she recognised the futility of such a course.
The elderly and placid lady was the mistress of the very handsomely and fashionably furnished drawing-room and of the house to which it belonged. Her dress bore traces—so near to vanishing point that their actual presence had something a little ludicrous about it—of the last lingering stage of widow’s mourning. Her name was Pomeroy, Mrs. Robert Pomeroy, and she was presiding over the ladies’ committee for a charity bazaar.
Fashionable charities and their frequent concomitant, the fashionable bazaars which have superseded the fashionable private theatricals of some years ago, are generally and perhaps uncharitably supposed by a certain class of cynical unfashionables to have their motive power in a feminine love of excitement and desire for conspicuousness. Perhaps there is another aspect under which they may present themselves; namely, as a proof that not even a long course of society life can destroy the heaven-sent instinct for work, even though the circumstances under which it struggles may render it so mere a travesty of the real thing. From this point of view, and when the promoter of a charitable folly is a middle-aged woman, who puts into the business an almost painfully earnest enthusiasm which might have been so useful if she had only known more of any life outside her own narrow round, the situation is not without its pathos. But when, as in the present instance, a long-established, self-reliant, and venerable philanthropic institution is suddenly “discovered,” taken up, and patronised by such a woman as the secretary and treasurerof the present committee; a woman who would have been empty-headed and vociferous in any sphere, and who had been moulded by circumstances into a pronounced specimen of a certain type of fashionable woman, dashing, loud, essentially unsympathetic; the position, in the incongruities and discrepancies involved, becomes wholly humorous.
Mrs. Ralph Halse, in virtue of her office as secretary and treasurer, was sitting at Mrs. Pomeroy’s right hand; her conception as to the duties of her office seemed to be limited to a sense that it behoved her never for a single instant to leave off addressing the chair, and this duty she fulfilled with a conscientious energy worthy of the highest praise. She had “discovered” the well-known and well-to-do institution before alluded to about a month earlier.
“Such a capital time of year, you know, when one has nothing to do and can attend to things thoroughly!” she had explained to her friends. She had determined that “something must be done,” as she had rather vaguely phrased it, and she had applied herself exuberantly and forthwith to theorganisation of a bazaar. The season was Lent; philanthropy was the fashion; Mrs. Halse’s scheme became the pet hobby of the moment, and the ladies’ committee was selected exclusively from among women well known in society.
The committee was tremendously in earnest; nobody could listen to it and doubt that fact for a moment. At the same time a listener would have found some difficulty in determining what was the particular point which had evoked such enthusiasm, because, as has been said, the members were all talking at once. Their eloquence was checked at last, not, as might have been the case with a cold-blooded male committee, by a few short and pithy words from the gently smiling president, but by the appearance of five o’clock tea. The torrent of declamatory enthusiasm thereupon subsided, quenched in the individual consciousness that took possession of each lady that she was “dying for her tea,” and had “really been working like a slave.” The committee broke up with charming informality into low-toned duets and trios. Even Mrs. Ralph Halse ceased toaddress the chair, though she could not cease to express her views on the vital point which had roused the committee to a state bordering on frenzy; she turned to her nearest neighbour. Mrs. Halse was a tall woman, good-looking in a well-developed, highly coloured style, and appearing younger than her thirty-eight years. She was dressed from head to foot in grey, and the delicate sobriety of her attire was oddly out of keeping with her florid personality. As a matter of fact, the hobby which had preceded the present all-absorbing idea of the bazaar in her mind—Mrs. Halse was a woman of hobbies—had been ritualism of an advanced type; perhaps some of the fervour with which her latest interest had been embraced was due to a certain sense of flatness in its predecessor; but be that as it may, her present very fashionable attire represented her idea of Lenten mourning.
“I don’t see myself how there can be two opinions on the subject,” she said. Mrs. Ralph Halse very seldom did see how there could be two opinions on a subject on which her own views were decided. “Fancy dress isa distinct feature, and of course there must be more effect and more variety when each woman is dressed as suits her best, than when there is any attempt at uniform. You agree with me, Lady Bracondale, I’m sure?”
The woman she addressed was of the pronounced elderly aristocratic type, tall and thin, aquiline-nosed and sallow of complexion. She seemed to be altogether superior to enthusiasm of any kind, and her manner was of that unreal kind of dignity and chilling suavity, in which nothing is genuine but its slight touch of condescension.
“Fancy dress is a pretty sight,” she said. “But it is perhaps a drawback that of course all the stall-holders cannot be expected to wear it.” The words were spoken with an emphasis which plainly conveyed the speaker’s sense that no such abrogation of dignity could by any possibility be expected of herself. “What is your opinion, Mrs. Pomeroy?” Lady Bracondale added, turning to the chairwoman of the committee.
Mrs. Pomeroy’s attention was not claimed for the moment otherwise than by her sereneenjoyment of her cup of tea, which she was sipping with the air of a woman who has done, and is conscious of having done, a hard afternoon’s work. Perhaps it is somewhat fatiguing to be talked to by twelve ladies all at once. Lady Bracondale’s question was one which Mrs. Pomeroy rarely answered, however, even in her secret heart, so she only smiled now and shook her head thoughtfully.
“Miscellaneous fancy dress gives so much scope for individual taste, don’t you think?” said Mrs. Halse.
“Of course it does, my dear Mrs. Halse. Every one can wear what they like, and that is very nice,” answered Mrs. Pomeroy comfortably.
“But, on the other hand, a quiet uniform can be worn by any one,” said Lady Bracondale with explanatory condescension.
“By any one, of course. So important,” assented the chairwoman with bland cheerfulness. Then, as Mrs. Halse’s lips parted to give vent to a flood of eloquence, she continued placidly, in her gentle, contentedvoice: “Mrs. Romayne is not here yet. I wonder what she will say!”
“I met her at the French Embassy last night,” said Mrs. Halse, with a slightly aggressive inflection in her voice, “and she told me she meant to come if she could make time. Apparently she has not been able to!”
“Mrs. Romayne?” repeated Lady Bracondale interrogatively. “I don’t think I’ve met her? Really, one feels quite out of the world.”
There was a fine affectation of sincerity about the words which would, however, hardly have deceived the most unsophisticated hearer as to the speaker’s position in society, or her own appreciation of it. Lady Bracondale was distinctly a person to be known by anybody wishing to make good a claim to be considered in society, and she was loftily conscious of the fact. She had only just returned to town from Bracondale, where she had been spending the last two months.
“Romayne?” she repeated. “Mrs. Romayne! Ah, yes! To be sure! The nameis familiar to me. I thought it was. There was a little woman, years ago, whom we met on the Continent. Her husband—dear me, now, what was it? Ah, yes! Her husband failed or—no, of course! I recollect! He was a swindler of some sort. Of course, one never met her again!”
“This Mrs. Romayne is the same, Ralph says,” said Mrs. Halse, sipping her tea. “At least, her husband was William Romayne, who was the moving spirit in a big bank swindle—and a lot of other things, I believe—years ago. She turned up about two months ago, and took a house in Chelsea. Lots of money, apparently. She has a grown-up son—he would be grown-up, of course—who is going to the bar.”
“But, dear me!” said Lady Bracondale with freezing stateliness, “does she propose to go into society? It was a most scandalous affair, my dear Mrs. Pomeroy, as far as I remember. A connection of Lord Bracondale’s lost some money, I recollect; and I think the man—Romayne, I mean, of course—poisoned himself or something. We were at Nice when it happened. Hecommitted suicide there, and it was most unpleasant! She can’t expect one to know her!”
Eighteen years had passed since the same woman had expressed herself as eager to make the acquaintance of “the man,” and the haze which had wrapped itself in her mind about the tragedy which had frustrated her desire in that direction, was not the only outcome for her of the passing of those years. Lady Bracondale had been Lady Cloughton eighteen years ago, the wife of the eldest son of the Earl of Bracondale; poor, and with a somewhat perfunctorily yielded position. She and her husband had been, moreover, a cheery, easy-tempered pair, living chiefly on the Continent, and getting a good deal of pleasure out of life. His father’s death had given to Lord Cloughton the family title and the family lands; and with his accession to wealth, importance, and responsibilities, his wife’s whole personality had gradually seemed to become transformed. Her satisfaction in her new dignities took the form of living rigidly up to what she considered their obligations. Laxity, frivolity of any kind, seemedto her to abrogate from the importance of her position. She ranged herself on the side of strict decorum and respectability, and became more precise than the precisians. Her husband at the same time developed talents latent in his obscurity, and became a prominent politician; and the ultra-correct and exclusive Lady Bracondale was now in truth a power in society.
Consequently, the tone in which she disposed of the intruder, who had ventured unauthorised to obtain recognition during her absence, was crushing and conclusive. But Mrs. Pomeroy’s individuality was of too soft a consistency to allow of her being crushed; and she replied placidly, and with unconscious practicality.
“People do know her, dear Lady Bracondale,” she said. “She had some friends among really nice people to begin with, and every one has called on her. I really don’t know how it has happened, but it is years and years ago, you know, and she really is a delightful little woman. Quite wrapped up in her boy!”
Almost before the words were well uttered,before Lady Bracondale could translate into speech the aristocratic disapproval written stiffly on her face, the door was flung open, and the footman announced “Mrs. Romayne!”
Eighteenyears lay between the events which Lady Bracondale recalled so hazily and the Mrs. Romayne who crossed the threshold of Mrs. Pomeroy’s drawing-room as the footman spoke her name. Those eighteen years had changed her at once curiously more and curiously less than the years between six-and-twenty and four-and-forty usually change a woman. She looked at the first glance very little older than she had done eighteen years ago; younger, indeed, than she had looked during those early days of her widowhood. Such changes as time had made in her appearance seemed mainly due to the immense difference in the styles of dress now obtaining. The dainty colouring, the cut of her frock, the pose of her bonnet, the arrangement of her hair, with its fluffy curls, all seemed toaccentuate her prettiness and to bring out the youthfulness which a little woman without strongly marked features may keep for so long. The fluffy hair was a red-brown now, instead of a pale yellow, and the change was becoming, although it helped greatly, though very subtly, to alter the character of her face. The outline of her features was perhaps a trifle sharper than it had been, and there were sundry lines about the mouth and eyes when it was in repose. But these were obliterated, as a rule, by a characteristic to which all the minor changes in her seemed to have more or less direct reference; a characteristic which seemed to make the very similarity between the woman of to-day and the woman of eighteen years before, seem unreal; the singular brightness and vivacity of her expression. Her features were animated, eager, almost restless; her gestures and movements were alert and quick; her voice, as she spoke to an acquaintance here and there, as she moved up Mrs. Pomeroy’s drawing-room, was brisk and laughing. Her dress and demeanour were the dress and demeanour of the day to the subtlest shade; she hadbeen a typical woman of the world eighteen years before; she was a typical woman of the world now. But in the old days the personality of the woman had been dominated by and merged in the type. Now the type seemed to be penetrated by something from within, which was not to be wholly suppressed.
She came quickly down the long drawing-room, smiling and nodding as she came, and greeted Mrs. Pomeroy with a little exaggerated gesture of despair and apology.
“Have you really finished?” she cried. “Is everything settled? How shocking of me!” Then, as she shook hands with Mrs. Halse, she added, with a sweetness of tone which seemed to cover an underlying tendency which was not sweet: “However, we have such a host in our secretary that really one voice more or less makes very little difference.”
“Well, really, I don’t know that we have settled anything!” said Mrs. Pomeroy. “We have talked things over, you know. It is such a mistake to be in a hurry! Don’t you think so?”
“I’ve not a doubt of it,” was the answer, given with a laugh. “My dear Mrs. Pomeroy, I have been in a hurry for the last six weeks, and it’s a frightful state of things. You’ve had a capital meeting, though. Why, I believe I am actually the only defaulter!”
The hard blue eyes were moving rapidly over the room as Mrs. Romayne spoke; there was an eager comprehensive glance in them as though the survey taken was in some sense a survey of material or—at one instant—of a battle-ground; and it gave a certain unreality to their carelessness.
“The only defaulter. Yes,” agreed Mrs. Pomeroy comfortably. “And now, Mrs. Romayne, you must let me introduce you to a new member of our committee; quite an acquisition! Why, where—oh!” and serenely oblivious of the stony stare with which Lady Bracondale, a few paces off, was regarding the opposite wall of the room just over the newcomer’s bonnet, Mrs. Pomeroy, with her kind fat hand on Mrs. Romayne’s arm, approached the exclusive acquisition. “Let me introduce Mrs. Romayne, dear Lady Bracondale!” she said with unimpaired placidity.
The stony stare was lowered an inch or two until it was about on a level with Mrs. Romayne’s eyebrows, and Lady Bracondale bowed icily; but at the same moment Mrs. Romayne held out her hand with a graceful little exclamation of surprise. It was not genuine, though it sounded so; those keen, quick, blue eyes had seen Lady Bracondale and recognised her in the course of their owner’s progress up the room, and had observed her withdrawal of herself those two or three paces from Mrs. Pomeroy’s vicinity; and it was as they rested for an instant only on her in their subsequent survey of the room that that subtle change suggestive of a sense of coming battle had come to them. They looked full into Lady Bracondale’s face now with a smiling ease, which was just touched with a suggestion of pleasure in the meeting.
“I hardly know whether we require an introduction,” said Mrs. Romayne; she spoke with cordiality which was just sufficiently careless to be thoroughly “good form.” “It is so many years since we met, though, that perhaps our former acquaintanceship must be considered to have died a natural death. Iam very pleased that it should have a resurrection!”
She finished with a little light laugh, and Lady Bracondale found, almost to her own surprise, that they were shaking hands. If she had been able to analyse cause and effect—which she was not—she would have known that it was that carelessness in Mrs. Romayne’s manner that influenced her. A powerful prompter to a freezing demeanour is withdrawn when the other party is obviously insensible to cold.
“It is really too bad of me to be so late!” continued Mrs. Romayne, proceeding to pass over their past acquaintance as a half forgotten recollection to which they were both indifferent, and taking up matters as they stood with the easy unconcern and casual conversationalism of a society woman. “At least it would be if my time were my own just now. But as a matter of fact my soleraison d’êtrefor the moment is the getting ready of our little place for my boy. I ought to have shut myself up with carpenters and upholsterers until it was done! I assure you I can’t even dine out without a guilty feeling that I oughtto be seeing after something or other connected with chairs and tables!”
She finished with a laugh about which there was a touch of artificiality, as there had been about her tone as she alluded to her “boy.” Perhaps the only thoroughly genuine point about her, at that moment, was a certain intent watchfulness, strongly repressed, in the eyes with which she met Lady Bracondale’s gorgon-like stare; and something about the spirited pose of her head and the lines of her face, always recalling, vaguely and indefinitely, that idea of single combat. Lady Bracondale, however, was not a judge of artificiality, and Mrs. Romayne’s manner, with its perfect assurance and careless assumption of a position and a footing in society, affected her in spite of herself. The stony stare relaxed perceptibly as she said, stiffly enough, but with condescending interest:
“You are expecting your son in town?”
“I am expecting him every day, I am delighted to say!” answered Mrs. Romayne, with a little conventional gush of superficial enthusiasm. “Really, you have no idea how forlorn I am without him! We are quiteabsurdly devoted to one another, as I often tell him, stupid fellow. But I always think—don’t you?—that a man is much better out of the way during the agonies of furnishing, so I insisted on his making a little tour while I plunged into the fray. He was very anxious to help, of course, dear fellow. But I told him frankly that he would be more hindrance than help, and packed him off—and made a great baby of myself when he was gone. Of course I have had to console myself by making our little place as perfect as possible, as a surprise for him! You know how these things grow! One little surprise after another comes into one’s head, and one excuses oneself for one’s extravagance when it’s for one’s boy.”
“Are you thinking of settling in London?” enquired Lady Bracondale.
She was unbending moment by moment in direct contradiction of her preconceived determination. Mrs. Romayne was so bright and so unconscious. She ran off her pretty maternal platitudes with such careless confidence, that iciness on Lady Bracondale’s part would have assumed a futile and even ridiculous appearance.
“Yes!” was the answer. “We are going to settle down a regular cosy couple. It has been our castle in the air all the time his education has been going on. He is to read for the bar, and I tell him that he will value a holiday more in another year or two, poor fellow. But I’m afraid I bore about him frightfully!” she added, with another laugh. “And it is rather hard on him, poor boy, for he really is not a bore! I think you will like him, Lady Bracondale. I remember young men always adored you!”
Lady Bracondale smiled, absolutely smiled, and said graciously—graciously for her, that is to say:
“You must bring him to see me! I should like to call upon you if you will give me your card.”
Mrs. Romayne was in the act of complying—complying with smiling indifference, which was the very perfection of society manner—when Mrs. Pomeroy, evidently moved solely by the impetus of the excited group of ladies of which she was the serenely smiling centre, bore cheerfully down upon them.
“Perhaps we ought to vote about thefancy dress before we separate this afternoon,” she suggested, “or shall we talk it over a little more at the next meeting? Perhaps that would be wiser. Mrs. Romayne——”
She looked invitingly at Mrs. Romayne as if for her opinion on the subject, and the invitation was responded to with that ever-ready little laugh.
“Oh, let us put it off until the next meeting,” she said. “I am ashamed to say that I really must run away now. But at the next meeting I promise faithfully to be here at the beginning and stay until the very end.”
Whereupon it became evident that the greater part of the committee was anxious to postpone the decision on the knotty point in question, and was conscious of more or less pressing engagements. A general exodus ensued, Mrs. Halse alone remaining to expound her views to Mrs. Pomeroy all by herself and in a higher and more conclusive tone than before.
A neat little coupé was waiting for Mrs. Romayne. She gave the coachman theorder “home” at first, and then paused and told him to go to a famous cigar merchant’s. She got into the carriage with a smiling gesture of farewell to Lady Bracondale, whose brougham passed her at the moment; but as she leant back against the cushions the smile died from her lips with singular suddenness. It left her face very intent; the eyes very bright and hard, the lips set and a little compressed. The lines about them and about her eyes showed out faintly under this new aspect of her face in spite of the eager satisfaction which was its dominant expression. The battle had evidently been fought and won and the victor was ready and braced for the next.
She got out at the cigar merchant’s, and when she returned to her carriage there was that expression of elation about her which often attends the perpetration of a piece of extravagance. But as she was driven through the fading sunlight of the March afternoon towards Chelsea, her face settled once more into that intent reflection and satisfaction.
It was a narrow slip of a house at which hercoupé eventually stopped, wedged in among much more imposing-looking mansions in the most fashionable part of Chelsea. But what it lacked in size it made up in brightness and general smartness. It had evidently been recently done up with all the latest improvements in paint, window-boxes, and fittings generally, and it presented a very attractive appearance indeed.
Mrs. Romayne let herself in with a latch-key, and went quickly across the prettily decorated hall into a room at the back of what was evidently the dining-room. She opened the door, and then stood still upon the threshold.
The light of the setting sun was stealing in at the window, the lower half of which was filled in with Indian blinds; and as it fell in long slanting rays across the silent room, it seemed to emphasize and, at the same time, to soften and beautify an impression of waiting and of expectancy that seemed to emanate from everything that room contained. It was furnished—it was not large—as a compromise between a smoking-room and a study, and its every item, from the bookcases and thewriting-table to the bronzes on the mantelpiece, was in the most approved and latest style, and of the very best kind. Every conceivable detail had evidently been thought out and attended to; the room was obviously absolutely complete and perfect—only on the writing-table something seemed lacking, and some brown paper parcels lay there waiting to be unfastened—and it had as obviously never been lived in. It was like a body without a soul.
The lingering light stole along the wall, touching here and there those unused objects waiting, characterless, for that strange character which the personality of a man impresses always on the room in which he lives, and its last touch fell upon the face of the woman standing in the doorway. The artificiality of its expression was standing out in strong relief as if in half conscious, half instinctive struggle with something that lay behind, something which the aspect of that empty room had developed out of its previous intentness and excitement. With a little affected laugh, as though some one else had been present—or as though affectation wereindeed second nature to her—Mrs. Romayne went up to the writing-table and began to undo the parcels lying there. They contained a very handsome set of fittings for a man’s writing-table, and she arranged them in their places, clearing away the paper with scrupulous care, and with another little laugh.
“What a ridiculous woman!” she said half aloud, with just the intonation she had used in speaking to Lady Bracondale of her “little surprises” for “her boy.” “And what a spoilt fellow!”
She turned away, went out of the room, with one backward glance as she closed the door, and upstairs to the drawing-room. She had just entered the room when a thought seemed to strike her.
“How utterly ridiculous!” she said to herself. “I quite forgot to notice whether there were any letters!”
She was just crossing the room to ring for a servant when the front-door bell rang vigorously and she stopped short. With an exclamation of surprise she went to the door and stood there listening, that she might prepare herself beforehand for the possiblevisitor, for whom she evidently had no desire. “How tiresome!” she said to herself. “Who is it, I wonder?” She heard the parlourmaid go down the hall and open the door.
“Mrs. Romayne at home?”
With a shock and convulsion, which only the wildest leap of the heart can produce, the listening face in the drawing-room doorway, with the conventional smile which might momently be called for just quivering on it, half in abeyance, half in evidence, was suddenly transformed. Every trace of artificiality fell away, blotted out utterly before the swift, involuntary flash of mother love and longing with which those hard blue eyes, those pretty, superficial little features were, in that instant, transfigured. The elaborately dressed figure caught at the door-post, as any homely drudge might have done; the woman of the world, startled out of—or into—herself, forgot the world.
“It’s Julian!” the white, trembling lips murmured. “Julian!”
As she spoke the word, up the stairs two steps at a time, there dashed a tall, fair-hairedyoung man who caught her in his arms with a delighted laugh—her own laugh, but with a boyish ring of sincerity in it.
“I’ve taken you by surprise, mother!” he cried. “You’ve never opened my telegram!”
Mrs. Romaynehad been left, eighteen years before, absolutely penniless. When Dennis Falconer took her back from Nice to her uncle’s home in London, she had returned to that house wholly dependent, for herself and for her little five-year-old boy, on the generosity she would meet with there. Fortunately old Mr. Falconer was a rich man. There had been a good deal of money in the Falconer family, and as its representatives decreased in number, that money had collected itself in the hands of a few survivors.
A long nervous illness, slight enough in itself, but begetting considerable restlessness and irritability, had followed on her return to London. So natural, her tender-hearted cousin and uncle had said, though, as amatter of fact, such an illness was anything but natural in such a woman as Mrs. Romayne, and anything but consistent with her demeanour during the early days of her widowhood. Partly by the advice of the doctor, partly by reason of the sense, unexpressed but shared by all concerned, that London was by no means a desirable residence for the widow of William Romayne, old Mr. Falconer and his daughter left their quiet London home and went abroad with her. No definite period was talked of for their return to England, and they settled down in a charming little house near the Lake of Geneva.
In the same house, when Julian was seven years old, Frances Falconer died. Her death was comparatively sudden, and the blow broke her father’s heart. From that time forward his only close interests in life were Mrs. Romayne and her boy. The vague expectation of a return to London at some future time faded out altogether. Mr. Falconer’s only desire was to please his niece, and she, with the same tendency towards seclusion which had dictated their first choice of aContinental home, suggested a place near Heidelberg. Here they lived for five years more, and then Mr. Falconer, also, died, leaving the bulk of his property to Mrs. Romayne. The remainder was to go to Dennis Falconer; to his only other near relation, William Romayne’s little son, he left no money.
So seven years after her husband’s death Mrs. Romayne was a rich woman again; rich and independent as she had never been before, and practically alone in the world with her son. In her relations with her son, those seven years had brought about a curious alteration or developement.
The dawnings of this change had been observed by Frances Falconer during the early months of Mrs. Romayne’s widowhood. She had spoken to her father with tears in her eyes of her belief that her cousin was turning for consolation to her child. Blindly attached to her cousin, she had never acknowledged her previous easy indifference as a mother. She stood by while the first place in little Julian’s easy affections was gradually won away from herself not only without a thought of resentment, but without any capacity for thecriticism of Mrs. Romayne’s demeanour in her new capacity as a devoted mother. To her that devotion was the natural and beautiful outcome of the overthrow of her cousin’s married life. To sundry other people the new departure presented other aspects. Dennis Falconer, spending a few days at the house near the Lake of Geneva, regarded with eyes of stern distaste what seemed to him the most affected, superficial travesty of the maternal sentiment ever exhibited. Meditating upon the subject by himself, he referred Mrs. Romayne’s assumption of the character of devoted mother to the innate artificiality of a fashionable woman denied the legitimate outlet of society life. He went away marvelling at the blindness of his uncle and cousin, and asking himself with heavy disapprobation how long the pose would last.
Time, as a matter of fact, seemed only to confirm it. The half-laughing, wholly artificial manner with which Mrs. Romayne had alluded to her “boy” in Mrs. Pomeroy’s drawing-room was the same manner with which, in his early school-days, she had alluded to her “little boy,” only developed byyears. Mr. Falconer’s death and her own consequent independence had made no difference in her way of life. Julian’s education had been proceeded with on the Continent as had been already arranged, his mother living always near at hand that they might be together whenever it was possible. In his holidays they took little luxurious tours together. But into society Mrs. Romayne went not at all until Julian was over twenty; when the haze of fifteen years had wound itself about the memory of William Romayne and his misdeeds.
Of those misdeeds William Romayne’s son knew nothing. The one point of discord between old Mr. Falconer and his niece had been her alleged intention of keeping the truth from him, if possible, for ever. Mr. Falconer’s death removed the only creature who had a right to protest against her decision. When Julian, as he grew older, asked his first questions about his father, she told him that he had “failed,” and had died suddenly, and begged him not to question her. And the boy, careless and easy-going, had taken her at her word.
With the termination of Julian’s university career, it became necessary that some arrangement should be made for his future. As Julian grew up, the topic had come up between the mother and son with increasing frequency, introduced as a rule not, as might have been expected, by the young man, whom it most concerned, but by Mrs. Romayne. From the very first it had been presented to him as a foregone conclusion that the start in life to which he was to look forward was to be made in London. London was to be their home, and he was to read for the English bar; on these premises all Mrs. Romayne’s plans and suggestions were grounded, and Julian’s was not the nature to carve out the idea of a future for himself in opposition to that presented to him. Consequently the arrangements, of which the bright little house in Chelsea was the preliminary outcome, were matured with much gaiety and enthusiasm, in what Mrs. Romayne called merrily “a family council of two”; and a certain touch of feverish excitement which had pervaded his mother’s consideration of the subject, moved Julian to a carelessly affectionate compunctionin that it was presumably for his sake that she had remained so long away from the life she apparently preferred.
The arrangement by which Mrs. Romayne eventually came to London alone was not part of the original scheme. As the time fixed for their departure thither drew nearer, that feverish excitement increased upon her strangely. It seemed as an expression of the nervous restlessness that possessed her that she finally insisted on his joining some friends who were going for two months to Egypt, and leaving her to “struggle with the agonies of furnishing,” as she said, alone.
The arrangement had separated the mother and son for the first time within Julian’s memory. The fact had, perhaps, had little practical influence on his enjoyment in the interval, but it gave an added fervour to his boyish demonstration of delight in that first moment of meeting as he held her in his vigorous young arms, and kissed her again and again.
“To think of my having surprised you, after all!” he cried gleefully, at last. “You ought to have had my telegram this morning.Why, you’ve got nervous while you’ve been alone, mother! You’re quite trembling!”
Mrs. Romayne laughed a rather uncertain little laugh. She was indeed trembling from head to foot. Her face was very pale still, but as she raised it to her son the strange, transfigured look had passed from it utterly, and her normal expression had returned to it in all its superficial liveliness, brought back by an effort of will, conscious or instinctive, which was perceptible in the slight stiffness of all the lines. At the same moment she seemed to become aware of the close, clinging pressure with which her hand had closed upon the arm which held her, and she relaxed it in a gesture of playful rebuke and deprecation.
“What would you have, bad boy?” she said lightly. “Don’t you know I hate surprises? Oh, I suppose you want to flatter yourself that your poor little mother can’t get on without you to take care of her! Well, perhaps she can’t, very well. There’s a demoralising confession for you, sir!”
But it was not such a confession as her face had been only a few minutes before; in fact, the spoken words seemed rather tobelie that mute witness. They were spoken in her ordinary tone, and the gesture with which she laid her hand on his arm to draw him into the drawing-room was one of her usual pretty, affected gestures—as sharp a contrast as possible to the first clinging, unconscious touch.
“Let me look at you,” she said gaily, “and make sure that I have got my own bad penny back from Africa, and not somebody else’s!”
She drew him laughingly into the fullest light the fading day afforded, and proceeded to “inspect” him, as she said, her face full of a superficial vivacity, which seemed to be doing battle all the time with something behind—something which looked out of her hard, bright eyes, eager and insistent.
Julian Romayne was a tall, well-made young man—taller by a head than the mother smiling up at him; he was well developed for his twenty-three years, slight and athletic-looking, and carrying himself more gracefully than most young Englishmen. But except in this particular, and in a slight tendency towards the use of more gesture than iscommon in England, his foreign training was in no wise perceptible in his appearance. The first impression he made on people who knew them both was that he was exactly like his mother, and that his mother’s features touched into manliness were a very desirable inheritance for her son; for he was distinctly good-looking. But as a matter of fact, only the upper part of his face, and his colouring, were Mrs. Romayne’s. He had the fair hair which had been hers eighteen years ago; he had her blue eyes and her pale complexion, and his nose and the shape of his brow were hers. But his mouth was larger and rather fuller-lipped than his mother’s, and the line of the chin and jaw was totally different. No strongly-marked characteristics, either intellectual or moral, were to be read in his face; his expression was simply bright and good-tempered with the good temper which has never been tried, and is the result rather of circumstances than of principle.
That strange something in Mrs. Romayne’s face seemed to retreat into the depths from which it had come as she looked at him. Shefinished her inspection with a gay tirade against the coat which he was wearing, and Julian replied with a boyish laugh.
“I knew you’d be down upon it!” he said. “I say, does it look so very bad? I’ll get a new fit out to-morrow—two or three, in fact! Mother, what an awfully pretty little drawing-room! What an awfully clever little mother you are!”
He flung his arm round her again with the careless, affectionate demonstrativeness which her manner seemed to produce in him, and looked round the room with admiring eyes. They were the eyes of a young man who knew better than some men twice his age how a room should look, and whose appreciation was better worth having than it seemed.
“You’re quite ready for me, you see!” he declared delightedly. “What did you mean, I should like to know, by wanting to keep me away for another fortnight?”
There was a moment’s pause before Mrs. Romayne spoke. She looked up into his face with a rather strange expression in her eyes, and then looked away across the room to wherea little pile of accepted invitations lay on her writing-table. That curious light at once of battle and of triumph was strong upon her face as it had not been yet.
“Yes,” she said at last, and there was an unusual ring about her voice. “I am quite ready for you!”
Something more than the furnishing of a house had gone to the preparation of a place in society for the widow and son of William Romayne, and only the woman who had effected that preparation knew how, and how completely it had been achieved.
A moment later Mrs. Romayne’s face had changed again, and she was laughing lightly at Julian’s comments as she disengaged herself from his hold, and went towards the bell.
“Foolish boy!” she said as she rang. “I’m glad you think it’s nice. We’ll have some tea.”
She had just poured him out a cup of tea, and quick, easy question and answer as to his crossing were passing between them, when the front-door bell rang, and she broke off suddenly in her speech.
“Who can that be?” she said. “Hardly a caller; it must be six o’clock! Now, I wonder whether, if it should be a caller, Dawson will have the sense to say not at home? Perhaps I had better——” she rose as she spoke, and moved quickly across the room to the door. But she was too late! As she opened the drawing-room door she heard the street door open below, and heard the words, “At home, ma’am.” With the softest possible ejaculation of annoyance she closed the door stealthily.
“Such a nuisance!” she said rapidly. “What a time to call! I trust they won’t——” And thereupon her face changed suddenly and completely into her usual society smile as the door opened again, and she rose to receive her visitors. “My dear Mrs. Halse!” she exclaimed, “why, what a delightful surprise! Now, don’t say that you have come to tell me that anything has gone wrong about the bazaar?” she continued agitatedly. “Don’t tell me that, Miss Pomeroy!”
She was shaking hands with her younger visitor as she spoke, a girl of apparentlyabout twenty, very correctly dressed, as pretty as a girl can be with neither colour, expression, nor startlingly correct features, whose eyes are for the most part fastened on the ground. She was Mrs. Pomeroy’s only child. She did not deal Mrs. Romayne the blow which the latter appeared to anticipate, but reassured her in a neatly constructed sentence uttered in a rather demure but perfectly self-possessed voice.
Mrs. Halse had been prevented for the moment from monopolising the conversation by reason of her keen interest in the good-looking young man standing by the fireplace; but Miss Pomeroy’s words were hardly uttered before she turned excitedly to Mrs. Romayne. If she was going to make a mistake the disagreeables of the position would be with her hostess, she had decided.
“It’s your son, Mrs. Romayne?” she cried. “It must be, surely! Such a wonderful likeness! Only, really, I can hardly believe that your son—I was ridiculous enough to expect quite a boy! Oh, don’t say that he has just arrived and we are interrupting your firsttête-à-tête! How trulyfrightful! Let me tell you this moment what I came for and fly!”
Mrs. Romayne answered her with a suave smile.
“I am going to introduce my boy first, if you don’t mind,” she said, and then as Julian, in obedience to her look, came forward, with the easy alacrity of a young man whose social instincts are of the highly civilised kind, she laid her hand on his arm with an artificial air of affectionate pride, and continued lightly: “Your first London introduction, Julian. Mrs. Ralph Halse, Miss Pomeroy! He has only just arrived, as you guessed,” she added in an aside to Mrs. Halse, “and no doubt he is furiously angry with me for allowing him to be caught with the dust of his journey on him.”
But Julian’s anger was not perceptible in his face, or in his manner, which was very pleasant and ready. Even after he had handed tea and cake and subsided into conversation with Miss Pomeroy, Mrs. Halse found it difficult to concentrate herself on the business which had brought her to Chelsea. Her speech to Mrs. Romayne, asto the brilliant idea which had struck her just after the committee broke up, was as voluble as usual, certainly, but less connected than it might have been.
“That’s all right, then. Such a weight off my mind!” she said, as she copied an address into her note-book with a circumstance and importance which would have befitted the settlement of the fate of nations. “It is so important to get things settled at once, don’t you think so? The moment it occurred to me I saw how important it was that there should not be a moment’s delay, and I said to Maud Pomeroy: ‘Let us go at once to Mrs. Romayne, and she will give us the address, and then dear Mrs. Pomeroy can write the letter to-night.’”Here Mrs. Halse’s breath gave out for the moment, and she let her eyes, which had strayed constantly in the direction of Julian and Miss Pomeroy, rest on the young man’s good-looking, well-bred face. “We must have your son among the stewards, Mrs. Romayne,” she said. “So important! Now, I wonder whether it has occurred to you, as it has occurred to me, that a man or two—just a man or two”—withan impressive emphasis on the last word, as though three men would be altogether beside the mark—“would be rather an advantage on the ladies’ committee? Now, what is your opinion, Mr. Romayne? Don’t you think you could be very useful to us?”
She turned towards Julian as she spoke, quite regardless of the fact that Miss Pomeroy’s correctly modulated little voice was stopped by her tones; and Mrs. Romayne turned towards him also. He and Miss Pomeroy were sitting together on the other side of the room, and as her eye fell upon the pair, a curious little flash, as of an idea or a revelation, leaped for an instant into Mrs. Romayne’s eye.
Julian moved and transferred his attention to Mrs. Halse, with an easy courtesy which was a curiously natural reproduction of his mother’s more artificial manner, and which was at the same time very young and unassuming. He laughed lightly.
“I shall be delighted to be a steward,” he said, “or to be useful in any way. But the idea of a ladies’ committee is awe-inspiring.”
“You would make great fun of us at your horrid clubs, no doubt,” retorted Mrs. Halse. “Oh, I know what you young men are! But you can be rather useful in these cases sometimes, though, of course, it doesn’t do to tell you so.”
She laughed loudly, and then rose with a sudden access of haste.
“We must really go!” she said. “Maud”—Mrs. Halse had innumerable girl friends, all of whom she was wont to address by their Christian names—“Maud, we are behaving abominably. We mustn’t stay another moment, not another second.”
But they did stay a great many other seconds, while Mrs. Halse pressed Julian into the service of the bazaar in all sorts and kinds of capacities, and managed to find out a great deal about his past life in the process. When at last she swooped down upon Maud Pomeroy, metaphorically speaking, as though that eminently decorous young lady had been responsible for the delay, and carried her off in a very tornado of protestation, attended to the front door, as in courtesy bound, by Julian, Mrs. Romayne, left alone in the drawing-room,let her face relax suddenly from its responsive brightness into an unmistakeable expression of feminine irritation and dislike.
“Horrid woman!” she said to herself. “Patronises me! Well, she will talk about nothing but Julian all this evening, wherever she may be—and she goes everywhere—so perhaps it has been worth while to endure her.” Then, as Julian appeared again, she said gaily: “My dear boy, they’ve been here an hour, and we shall both be late for dinner! Be off with you and dress!”
It was a very cosy little dinner that followed. Mrs. Romayne, as carefully dressed for her son as she could have been for the most critical stranger, was also at her brightest and most responsive. They talked for the most part of people and their doings; society gossip. Mrs. Romayne told Julian all about Mrs. Halse’s bazaar; deriding the whole affair as an excuse for deriding its promoter, but with no realisation of its innate absurdity; and giving Julian to understand, at the same time, that it was “the thing” to be in it; an idea which he was evidently quite capable of appreciating. Dinner over, she drew his armplayfully through hers and took him all over the house.
“Let me see that you approve!” she said with a laughing assumption of burlesque suspense.
The last room into which she took him was the little room at the back of the dining-room; and as his previous tone of appreciation and pleasure developed into genuine boyish exclamations of delight at the sight of it, the instant’s intense satisfaction in her face struck oddly on her manner.