Onfinding himself condemned to twelve months in London, Dennis Falconer had debated the question of where he should live at some length; and had finally decided on returning to some rooms in the neighbourhood of the Strand, in which he had been wont to establish himself during his temporary residences in London for the past fifteen years. It was not a fashionable part of London. Falconer was a richer man now than he had been fifteen years before, and there were sundry luxuries to be had in those quarters of London where wealthy bachelors congregate, which were not recognised so far south of Piccadilly. It was also natural to him to think twice before he abandoned the idea of living where it was “the proper thing”—of the hour—to live. But he was known andrespected in his old rooms; he would be received there with deferential delight; he would be of the first importance in his landlady’s estimation; and these things, little as he knew it, had a distinct influence on his decision.
The two rooms which he occupied, on the first floor, bore a strong likeness to the majority of first-floor rooms in the same street, occupied by single gentlemen. These gentlemen were not, as a rule, of the class who think it worth while to impress their artistic character upon the room in which they live; as a whole, indeed, they might have been said to lack artistic character. Here and there was a more inveterate smoker, newspaper-reader, or novel-reader, as the case might be, the sign manual of whose tastes was not to be obliterated. But as a rule it was the landlady’s taste that reigned supreme and monotonous.
Dennis Falconer’s rooms were no exception to the rule. The furniture was very comfortable, very solid, and very ugly, in the style of thirty years ago; an artistic temperament would have modified the whole appearance of the room, insensibly and necessarily,in the course of a week. But Falconer was not even conscious that anything was wrong. He was as nearly devoid of æsthetic sense, even on its broadest lines, as it is possible for a civilised man to be; and the state of mind which takes pleasure in the tone of curtains and carpets, and the form of tables, chairs, or china, was to him incomprehensible, and consequently a little contemptible.
On a November morning, with an incipient yellow fog hanging about, the appearance of the room in which breakfast was waiting for him was calculated to cast a gloom over a temperament never so little open to such influences; and Dennis Falconer as he opened his bedroom door and came slowly out, looked as though his mental atmosphere was already sufficiently heavy. He always breakfasted punctually at nine o’clock, and he never went to bed before one; it simply never occurred to him to make any concession to the emptiness of his present life by spending more than seven hours out of the twenty-four in sleep, even if he had been physically able to do so. And there were days when the intervening seventeen hours hung on his hands with analmost unendurable weight. He had never been a man who readily made friends, and his tendency in this direction had steadily decreased as he grew older, so that the few men with whom he was intimate were friends of his early manhood; and, as it happened, none of these intimates were in England at the moment. He was absolutely incapable of forming those cheery, unmeaning acquaintanceships which make the savour of life to so many unoccupied men. He was one of those men with whom no one thinks of becoming familiar; who is vaguely supposed either to have a private and select circle of friends, or to be sufficient for himself; whose demeanour, correct, self-contained, and a trifle formal, seems to hold the world at a distance. Consequently his intercourse with his fellow-creatures was limited by his present life to slight conversation on the topics of the day at his club, or in various drawing-rooms where he paid grave, stiff calls, or attended stately functions. Cut off from his own particular work he had no interests and no pursuits.
It was a dreary life in truth, and it was little wonder that Falconer’s expression grewrather more austere with every week. The sentiments of a man of his temperament towards a world in which there seemed so little place for him, and from which he could derive so little satisfaction, would inevitably tend towards stern disapproval.
On this particular morning the sense of dreariness was very heavy upon him. On the previous day he had had an interview with the great doctor to whose fiat he owed his detention in London. The great doctor had been indefinite and unsatisfactory; had looked grave and talked vaguely about troublesome complications and a possible necessity of complete repose. Falconer had made no sign of discomposure, had taken his leave with his usual courteous gravity, and had left the consulting-room with a cold chill at his heart. The cold chill was about it still this morning as he walked to his window before going to the breakfast-table, and stood there looking blankly out. What he was really looking at was the prospect before him if, as the doctor had hinted, he should have to lie up for a time. A lodging and a nurse, or a hospital; solitude and confinement in either case.
He sighed heavily, and turning as though with the instinct to turn away from his troubles, he sat down to the table, poured out his coffee, and took up the letters lying by his plate. There were only two—one in a common-looking envelope directed in an illiterate hand, the other in a clear, characteristic man’s hand, at the sight of which his face brightened perceptibly.
“Aston,” he said to himself, and opened it quickly.
His friendship for the little doctor, which time had only served to strengthen, was, perhaps, the most genial sentiment of Dennis Falconer’s life, and Dr. Aston’s absence in India at this particular period had been a bitter disappointment to him. He had hoped for some time that the doctor’s plans—always of a somewhat erratic nature—might bring him back to London shortly; and as his eyes fell on the first sentence of the letter a slight sound of intense relief escaped him; an eloquent testimony to his present loneliness. Dr. Aston began by telling him that he would be in England before Christmas.
The letter was long and interesting; itabounded in bits of vivid description and shrewd observation, and its comments on Falconer’s proceedings were keen and kindly. Its recipient allowed himself to become absorbed in it to the total neglect of his breakfast, and his expression was lighter than it had been for weeks when he came upon these sentences towards the close of the letter:
“By-the-bye, in the ‘latest intelligence’ of London society—all is fish in the shape of human nature that comes to my net, as you know, and I study that curious institution carefully whenever I get the chance—I constantly, nowadays, come across the name of a Mrs. Romayne. ‘The charming Mrs. Romayne and her good-looking son’ is the usual formula. It is not by any chance the little woman with whom I got myself and you into such a terrible fix years and years ago at Nice—William Romayne’s widow? Is it any relation? I should like to know what became of that little woman, if you can tell me; she had stuff in her. And whether the boy has dreed his weird yet?”
Falconer laid down the letter abruptly, and turned to his breakfast, his face stern anduncompromising. His interview with Mrs. Romayne, now a fortnight old, had accentuated markedly his grim disapprobation of her; and the strong feeling of reprobation that stirred him then had so little subsided that the least touch was enough to re-endow it with vigorous life.
“Stuff in her!” he muttered, with a world of contempt in the curt ejaculation. “Stuff in her! If Aston only knew!”
He glanced at the letter again, and a certain disapproval, personal to the writer, expressed itself in the grave set of his lips as he re-read the words about Julian; his whole mental and moral attitude was antagonistic to, and inclined to condemn, what he characterised, now, as “Aston’s dangerous theories.” He passed with what seemed to him practical sense from “Aston’s extravagance” to a stern consideration of the heinousness of such a life and education as Julian’s for a young man in Julian’s position. Julian’s position, rightly considered, involved in his eyes a reaping in obscurity, humility, and sombreness of life of the harvest of shame and disgrace which his father had sown; and thatthere was anything inconsistent between this view of the case and his condemnation of Dr. Aston’s theories he was utterly unaware.
He applied himself to his breakfast, still meditating on Mrs. Romayne and the probable consequences of her callousness; and then he took up the other letter and opened it.
At the opening of his last expedition, one of the men attached to it had met with a disabling accident, and had been sent home. The man had been with Falconer on a previous expedition, and when the latter returned to England he had made enquiries about him, and had finally, and with no little difficulty, traced him out to find him crippled for life, and in a state of abject poverty. Falconer, according to his narrow and orthodox lights, as strictly conventional in their way as were Mrs. Romayne’s in hers, was a good man. The letter he was reading now, from the wife of this man, was written by a woman by whom he was regarded as a kind of Providence; to be reverenced indeed, not loved, but to be reverenced with all her heart. She and her husband had beenrescued by him from despair; all that medical skill could do for the man had been done at his expense. The pair had been settled by him in a small house in Camden Town, where Mrs. Dixon, a brisk, capable woman, was to let lodgings. To this house Falconer had been once or twice to see the crippled man; and he was not now surprised to receive from the wife the information—conveyed in a style in which natural loquacity struggled with awe of her correspondent—that the husband had had one of the bad attacks of suffering to which he was liable, and that if Mr. Falconer could spare half an hour, Dixon would “take it very kind with his duty.”
Falconer smiled grimly at the words “if Mr. Falconer could spare half an hour.” His whole day was practically at Dixon’s disposal. He would go up to Camden Town that afternoon, he decided; he almost wished he had thought of going before, and as the thought crossed his mind, the remembrance of what might possibly be lying in wait for himself in the not very distant future made him rise abruptly and thrust his letters into his pocket.
It was about twelve o’clock when he left his rooms and walked slowly away in the direction of club-land. He usually got through an hour or so at his club before lunch, reading the papers and so forth. The threatening fog of three hours earlier had rolled away, and there were gleams of wintry sunshine about which made walking pleasant. Dr. Aston’s letter had cheered Falconer considerably; the feeling, too, that he had a definite occupation for his afternoon, and an occupation which was not invented, was invigorating; and altogether he was in better spirits than he had been for many a day. He was walking up Waterloo Place, when his eyes, which could not forego, even in a London street, their trained habits of keen, accurate observation, lighted on Marston Loring, who was coming down Waterloo Place on the opposite side of the road. Loring was a man Dennis Falconer particularly disliked, and after one disapproving glance he was looking away, when he saw the other suddenly stop with a movement—and evidently an exclamation—of surprise and welcome. In the same instant he became aware that Julian Romayne had turned out ofa side-street, and was greeting his friend apparently with effusion. Falconer’s brow clouded involuntarily. The instinct of kin was so strong in him that there was a certain touch of personal feeling, little as he wished it, in his connection with the Romaynes, which made the thought of them particularly disagreeable to him; and here, for the second time to-day, the young man and his mother were forced upon his notice. He pursued his way up the street, watching Julian grimly, and as he passed, still on the opposite pavement, the corner where the two young men were standing, Julian happened to look across, saw him, and made a ready, courteous gesture of salutation. Falconer returned it stiffly enough, and walked on.
Julian turned to Loring with a laugh.
“Old bear!” he said; “I wish he’d take himself off to Africa or somewhere. He’s a regular wet blanket to have about! Well, old fellow, and what’s the news?”
Julian was looking very fresh, vigorous, and full of life. There was a curious suggestion about him of alertness which was not without a certain excitement; and his toneand manner as he spoke were almost superabundantly frank and loquacious.
Ten days before, Loring had received a note from Mrs. Romayne telling him that Julian was going for a week’s holiday to Brighton, and that the alteration in his room must be completed if possible in his absence. “It is a sudden idea with him, apparently,” she had written; “but do let us take advantage of it.”
If Loring had had his own private notion on the subject of this sudden idea on Julian’s part he had made no sign to Julian’s mother; he had paid, in silence, his cynical tribute to the maternal wisdom which had presumably recognised the fact that if freedom is not granted it will be snatched.
Three days had now passed since Julian’s return, but it had happened—he himself could perhaps have told how—that until this Saturday afternoon he and Loring had not met. There was nothing in his face and manner at this moment, however, but the most lively, even demonstrative satisfaction; and without giving Loring time to answer his question he went on, with an ease andgaiety which were very like, and yet unlike, his mother.
“Where were you off to? The club? Come and have some lunch with me, do! I want to tell you how first-rate I think my room. I hear you’ve taken no end of trouble over it. It was awfully jolly of you, old man!”
“Glad you like it,” returned Loring nonchalantly. “Yes, I think it’s nice. But it was Mrs. Romayne who took the trouble.”
He was studying Julian keenly, though quite imperceptibly, as he spoke. The young man’s manner was assumed—of that Loring was quite aware. But what, exactly, did it hide? What exactly was the secret?
He debated this question calmly with himself throughout the lunch which they took together a little later on; interposing question and remarks the while into Julian’s flow of fluent talk and laughter. About Brighton, in particular, Julian was full of chatter; and as he wound up a vivacious description of his doings there, Loring commented mentally:
“He hasn’t been to Brighton at all!”
Aloud he said, as genially as nature ever allowed him to speak:
“Well, it’s very jolly to see you back again, my boy. Do you know we’ve seen next to nothing of one another lately, and I vote we turn over a new leaf, eh? What are you going to do this afternoon, now?”
He was leaning back in his chair lighting a cigarette as he spoke, and apparently his attention was wholly claimed by the process; as a matter of fact, however, he was studying Julian’s face intently, and his sense of annoyance was not untinged with admiration when not a muscle of that good-looking face moved. Julian leant back and crossed his legs airily.
“I promised to go to the Eastons’, I’m sorry to say!” he said. “It’s an awful bore! We might have done a theatre together!”
Now, the Eastons were mutual acquaintances of the two men, but it so happened that they had taken irremediable offence against Loring over some detail connected with the bazaar, and it was no longer possible for him to call upon them. Julian was of course awareof the fact, and Loring smiled cynically at what he recognised as a very clever move.
“A pity!” he said composedly. “Better luck another time. Well, you’re not in any hurry, anyway.”
“Not a bit!” assented Julian, cheerfully disposing of himself in a most comfortable and stationary attitude. But a moment later he sprang to his feet. “By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I nearly forgot! I’ve got a commission to do for my mother in Bond Street—shop closes at two. Can I do it?”
A hurried reference to his watch assured him that he would just do it, and with a hasty farewell he dashed out of the room. Loring did not propose to accompany him. It was not worth while, he told himself; and he smiled sardonically as Julian departed.
“I shall find out,” he said to himself. “Of course I shall find out! The question is, is it worth while to wait, or shall I play my game with what I know? The attached friend of the boy warning his mother in time”—he smiled again very unpleasantly—“or the sympathising friend of the mother having madea terrible discovery! Which is the better pose? The latter, I think. Yes, the latter! I’ll wait until I’ve made my discovery.”
He dropped the end of his cigarette into an ash-tray, sat for a moment more in deep thought, and then rose and strolled slowly away.
Julian, meanwhile, hailed a passing hansom, sprang into it, and told the man to drive, not to Bond Street but to the Athenæum, Camden Town. There was an air about him as of one who plumes himself on having done a clever thing, and as he settled himself for his long drive there was a curious excitement and radiance in his face. When the cab reached its destination at last he jumped out and walked rapidly and eagerly away.
It was not a neighbourhood likely to be familiar to a young man about town, but Julian pursued his way with the certainty of a man who had followed it several times before. In about ten minutes he turned into a neat and respectable little street, consisting of two short rows of small houseswith diminutive bow windows to the first-floor rooms. About half-way down he stopped at a house on the right-hand side and knocked with a quick, decided touch. He was an object of the deepest interest as he stood upon the little doorstep to a brisk, curious-looking woman who was standing in the ground-floor window of the house opposite, but her opportunity for observation was brief. The door was opened almost immediately, and with a pleasant greeting to the woman, who stood aside, he passed her and ran upstairs—a course of action evidently expected of him. He opened the door of the front room on the first floor and went eagerly in.
“Here I am!” he cried. “Did you expect me so soon?”
Standing in the middle of the room, as though she had suddenly started from her chair, with her hands outstretched towards him, was Clemence; and on the third finger of that thin, left hand there shone a bright gold ring.
Her face was a delicate rosy red, as though with sudden joy just touched withshyness, and all the beauty which had been latent in her tired, work-worn face seemed to have been touched into vivid, almost startling life, by the hand of a great magician. By contrast with the face she turned to Julian now, the large eyes deep and glowing, the mouth trembling a little with tenderness, the face of a month ago, pure and sweet as it had been, would have looked like the inanimate mask of a dormant soul. The soul was awake now, quivering with consciousness; womanhood had come with a purity and beauty beyond any possibility of girlhood. Looking at her face now, it was easy to see by what means alone the latent strength of her character might be developed.
He drew her into his arms with an eager, confident touch, and she yielded to him completely, clinging to him with the colour deepening in her face as he kissed it boyishly again and again. It was a fortnight only since he had kissed her first.
“I was watching for you,” she said softly. “I heard your step.”
He laughed exultantly and kissed her again.
“I thought you’d be watching!” he said. “Though I’m earlier than I told you, do you know? Much earlier! I say, Clemence, how jolly the room looks!”
It was a small room, furnished and decorated in the simplest and cheapest style; as great a contrast as could well be imagined to the rooms to which he was accustomed. But it was very clean and very comfortable-looking; and there was a homelike, restful atmosphere about it which might well have radiated from the slender figure in the plain dress, with that shining wedding-ring and lovely, flushing face. She smiled, a very sweet, pleased little smile.
“Do you think so really?” she said. “I am so glad. It is that beautiful basket-chair you sent, and the flowers.” She glanced as she spoke at a pot of chrysanthemums standing on a little table in the window. Then she turned to him again, her eyes a little deprecating. “Do you think you ought to spend so much money?” she said shyly.
Julian laughed, and flung his arm round her, as he surveyed the little room with a vivid air of proprietorship. Here he was master. Here his word was law. Here he was in a world of his own making, and his only fellow-creature was his subject.
“It looks jolly!” he pronounced again as a final dictum. “Now, come and sit down, Clemence, and tell me what you’ve been doing since yesterday!” He settled himself into the arm-chair by the fire with a lordly air as he spoke, adding: “Come and sit on this stool by me, like the sweetest girl in the world.”
Clemence hesitated, hardly perceptibly. Hers was a nature to which trivial endearments came strangely, almost painfully. She had not yet learned to caress in play; and there was an innate, unconscious, personal dignity about her to which trivial self-abasement was unnatural. But almost before she was conscious of her reluctance there swept over her, like a great wave of hot sweetness, the remembrance that she was his wife! It was her duty to do as he wished. She came softly across the room,sat down on the stool he had drawn out, and laid her cheek against his arm.
It was a trivial action, very quietly performed, but it was instinct with the beauty of absolute self-abnegation; and as if, as her physical presence touched him, something of her spirit touched him too, a sudden quiet fell upon the exultant, self-satisfied boy at whose feet she sat. Not for the first time, by any means, there stole over Julian a vague uneasiness; a vague realisation of something beyond his ken; something in the light of which he shrank, unaccountably, from himself. His hand closed round the woman’s hand lying in his with a touch very different from the boyish passion of his previous caresses, and for a moment he did not speak. Then he said slowly and in a low, dreamy voice:
“Clemence, I can’t think why you should ever have loved me!”
The hand in his thrilled slightly, and the head on his shoulder was just shaken. Clemence could not tell him why she loved him. The bald outline she could trace as most women can trace it. She could lookback upon her first sense of reliance, her pity, her admiration, her sense of strange, delightful companionship; but the why and wherefore of it, the mystery which had given to this young man and no other the key of her soul, this was to her as a miracle; as, indeed, there is always something miraculous in it, even when it seems most natural. To account for love; to say that in this case it is natural, in this case it is unnatural; is to confess ignorance of the first great attribute of love—that it is supernatural and divine.
There was another silence, a longer one this time, and the strange spell sank deeper into Julian’s spirit. He said nothing. It would have been a relief to him to speak; to reduce to words, or, indeed, to definite consciousness, the vague trouble that oppressed him; but its outlines were too large and too vague for him. It was in truth a sense of total moral insolvency, but he could not understand it as such, having no moral standpoint. Clemence neither moved nor spoke; her hand lay motionless in his; her cheek rested against him; her beautiful eyeslooked straight before them with a dreamy, almost awestruck gaze.
At last, with a desperate determination to thrust away so unusual an oppression, Julian moved slightly and began to talk. He wanted to get back his sense of superiority, and his voice accordingly took its most boyish and masterful tone.
“You haven’t told me what you’ve been doing, Clemence?” he said. “Have you given notice at your bonnet shop as I told you?”
Clemence lifted her head and sat up, clasping her hands lightly on the arm of his chair.
“No!” she said gently. “I thought I would ask you to think about it again. I would so much rather go on if you didn’t mind. For one thing, what could I do all day?” She looked up into his face as she spoke with deprecating, pleading eyes, which were full of submission, too; and the submission was very pleasant to Julian.
“I do mind,” he said authoritatively. “I can’t have it, Clemence. I can’t always see you home, don’t you see, and I won’thave you about at night alone. Besides, I don’t choose that you should work.”
“But I do so want to!” she said, laying her hand timidly and beseechingly on his. “It will be so difficult for you to keep us both; you will overwork yourself, I’m so afraid. Oh, won’t you let me help? I’ve always worked, you know; it doesn’t hurt me. You don’t want to forget that you’ve married a work-girl, do you?”
She smiled at him as she spoke, one of her sweet, rare smiles, and he kissed her impetuously.
“Don’t talk nonsense!” he said imperiously. “I can’t allow it, and that’s all about it. How do you suppose I could attend to my work when I’m kept at the hospital in the evening, if I were thinking all the time of you alone in the streets! No, you must give notice on Monday!”
She looked at him wistfully for a moment. He was condemning her to long days of idleness, to constant uneasiness and self-reproach on his behalf, to a certain loss of self-respect. But self-sacrifice was instinctive with her.
“Very well!” she said simply.
The little victory, the assertion of authority restored Julian’s spirits completely, and he plunged into discursive talk; more or less egotistical. It was all, necessarily, founded on falsehood, and it would have been a delicate question to decide when his talk ceased to be consciously untruthful, and became the expression of a fictitious Julian in whom the real Julian absolutely believed.
The afternoon wore on; the winter twilight fell, bringing with it a slight return of the fog of the morning; two hours had passed before Julian moved reluctantly, and said that he must go.
“I shall come to-morrow!” he said, taking her face between his hands and kissing it. “We’ll go out into the country if it’s fine. I wish it were summer-time! Have you ever seen the river, Clemence?”
“Not in the country,” she said. “It must be nice! How much you’ve seen! Do you know I often think that you must wish sometimes I was a lady! I don’t know anything and I haven’t seen anything, and——” she faltered, and he rose, laughing and drawing her up into his arms.
“Any one can know things,” he said lightly, “and any one can see things. But no one but you can be Clemence! Do you see? Oh, what a bore it is to have to go!”
He was lingering, undecidedly, as though a little pressure would have scattered his resolution to the winds, and seated him once more in the chair he had just quitted. But, since he had said that he must go, it never occurred to Clemence to ask him to stay. If it were not his duty he would never leave her. If it was his duty now, how could she hold him back!
“To-morrow will come!” she said, looking into his face with a brave smile.
“I don’t believe you want me to stay!” he returned, half laughing, half vexed.
“Don’t I?” she said simply, and he caught her in his arms again.
“What a shame!” he said. “There, good-bye! Are you coming to the door?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll stay here,” she said, “and watchyou from the window. I see you farther so. Ah, it’s rather foggy! I’m so sorry! You’ll look up? Good-bye!”
She lifted her face to his and kissed him tenderly and shyly, and he left her standing by the window.
Julian ran downstairs, let himself out, and stood for a moment on the doorstep as he realised the disagreeable nature of the atmosphere. At the same instant the door of the house opposite opened, and a man came out, attended to the threshold by a woman. She caught sight of Julian instantly, and said something to the man, as he stood in the shadow, in a deferential whisper. Julian shook himself, confounded the fog, and then glanced up at the window from which the light streamed on his face. He waved his hand, turned away, and walked rapidly down the street, pulling up his coat collar as he went.
As he went, Dennis Falconer slowly descended the two steps of that opposite house, and slowly—very slowly—followed him.
>“Good-bye! So glad to have seen you! What, dear Mrs. Ponsonby, are you going to run away too? So kind of you to come out on such an afternoon! Good-bye!”
It was a Friday afternoon, and Friday was Mrs. Romayne’s “day.” This particular Friday had been about as unpleasant, atmospherically, as it is possible for even a November day to be, short of actual dense fog; it had been very dark, and a drizzling rain—a dirty rain too—had fallen unceasingly. Under these circumstances it was rather surprising that any one should have ventured out, even in the most luxurious brougham, than that Mrs. Romayne’s visitors should have been comparatively few in number.
The departure of the ladies to whom herfarewells had been spoken, and with whom she had been exchanging social commonplaces for the last quarter of an hour, left her alone; and as she returned to her chair by the dainty tea-table and poured herself out a cup of tea, she had apparently very little expectation of further callers, though it was only just past five o’clock; for when the door-bell rang a few minutes later she paused, and a look of surprise crossed her face. She put down her cup with a little sigh, which was more a concession made to the dictum of conventionality that callers are a bore than an expression of real feeling; and then, as the door opened, she rose with a touch of genuine satisfaction.
“My dear Mrs. Pomeroy!” she exclaimed. “How sweet of you to come out on such a shocking day! Really, you must have had an intuition of my forlorn condition, I think! Maud, dear, how are you?”
She had given her left hand to the girl in a familiar, caressing way as she retained Mrs. Pomeroy’s right hand, and now she drew the elder lady with charming insistence towards a large, inviting-looking chair, indicating to thedaughter with a pretty gesture that she was to take a low seat near the table.
“It is an ill wind that blows no one any good!” she continued gaily, as Mrs. Pomeroy greeted her placidly. “It is really too delightful to get you all to myself like this! How seldom one gets the chance of a cosy chat! And how very seldom it comes with the people of all others with whom one would thoroughly enjoy it! You’ll have some tea, won’t you—oh, yes, you really must; it is so much more friendly!” She laughed as she spoke, and turned to the girl sitting demurely on the low seat near her with a tacit claim on her sympathy and comprehension which was very fascinating. Miss Pomeroy’s pretty, expressionless lips smiled sweetly, and her mother, who was always ready to yield to pressure where a cup of tea was concerned—that soothing beverage being forbidden her by her medical authorities—answered contentedly:
“Well, thanks, yes! I think I will! One really wants a cup of tea on a day like this, doesn’t one?” Mrs. Pomeroy had rarely been known to leave a statement unqualifiedby a question. “It is really very disagreeable weather, isn’t it? Not that it seems to trouble you at all.” Mrs. Pomeroy smiled one of her slow, amiable smiles as she spoke. “I am so glad to see you looking so much better!”
Mrs. Romayne laughed.
“I am very well indeed, thanks,” she said. “But I’ve not been ill that I know of, dear Mrs. Pomeroy.”
Mrs. Pomeroy shook her head gently.
“I thought, do you know, when I first came home, that you looked as though your holiday had been a little too much for you—so many people’s holiday is a little too much for them, don’t you think? And how is your boy? Very hard at work, we hear.”
Mrs. Romayne smiled.
Mrs. Pomeroy’s opinion as to her looks had been quite correct; and it was only within the last fortnight that they had altered for the better. Within that fortnight her brightness and vivacity had ceased to be—as they had been for weeks before—wholly artificial; something of the look of nervous strain had gone out of her eyes, and her face was altogether less sharpened. Her smile now wasgenuine; and her voice was strangely tender and contented.
“Very hard,” she said. “I have had to get used to a great deal of absence on his part. He has gone down to Brighton to-day, until Monday; he needs a little fresh air, of course. It is so long since he has been shut up as he is now.”
“You must miss him very much,” said Mrs. Pomeroy placidly.
Mrs. Romayne did not answer directly, except with a laugh.
“I am almost inclined to envy mothers with daughters,” she said, smiling at Miss Pomeroy again. “I wonder, now”—a sudden idea had apparently struck Mrs. Romayne—“I wonder whether you would lend me your daughter now and then, and I wonder whether she would consent to be lent.”
“I should be delighted,” said Mrs. Pomeroy, with vague amiability, and an equally vague glance at her daughter. “And I’m sure Maud will be delighted, too, won’t you, Maud?”
“Delighted!” assented Maud, with pretty promptitude.
“Well, then, we must arrange it some time or other,” declared Mrs. Romayne gaily. “Perhaps you would come and spend a week with me, Maud—that would be charming!”
But she did not press the point, letting the subject drop with apparent carelessness, and talking about other things, always keeping the girl in the conversation; turning to her now and then with a pleasant, familiar word, or a gesture which was lightly affectionate. The mother and daughter had risen to take leave when she said carelessly:
“Oh, by-the-bye, Maud, dear, have you anything to do to-morrow afternoon? I’ve been bothered into taking two tickets for a matinée, a charity affair, you know, but they say it will be rather good. It would be so nice of you to come with me!”
“It will be very nice of you to take me!” was the response. “Thank you very much!”
A minute or two more passed in the arrangement of the place and hour for meeting, and then Mrs. Pomeroy drifted blandly out of the room, followed by her daughter, and Mrs. Romayne was again alone.
She walked to the fireplace this time, and putting one foot on the fender, stood looking down, her face intent and satisfied.
“Just the right sort of girl!” she said to herself. “Just the right sort of girl!”
She was wearing the little gold bangle which Julian had given her on her birthday—the one which Miss Pomeroy had helped him to choose—and she was turning it on her wrist with tender, contemplative touches. She was so absorbed in her reflection that she did not hear the servant come into the room, or notice for the moment that the girl was standing beside her with a letter. She started at last, and looked up; took the letter, and opened it carelessly, without looking at it, as the woman took away the tea-table.
“Dear Cousin Hermia,“Unless I hear from you to the contrary, I propose to call on you to-morrow (Saturday), at three o’clock, on a matter of grave importance.“Faithfully yours,“Dennis Falconer.”
“Dear Cousin Hermia,
“Unless I hear from you to the contrary, I propose to call on you to-morrow (Saturday), at three o’clock, on a matter of grave importance.
“Faithfully yours,“Dennis Falconer.”
Mrs. Romayne’s face had changed slightly as she began to read—changed and hardened—and as she finished she drew the letter through her fingers with a gesture of mere impatience, which was somehow belied by the look in her eyes. Something of that strained look had come back into them. She could not see him to-morrow, she was saying to herself briefly; she was not going to put off Maud Pomeroy; Dennis Falconer must fix another time, and she would write him a line at once. She walked quickly across to her writing table, sat down, drew out a sheet of paper and took up a pen.
And then she paused.
Ten minutes later her note was written, and on its way to the post, but it was not directed to Dennis Falconer. It began, “My dear Maud,” and it told Miss Pomeroy that business had “turned up” which would make it impossible for Mrs. Romayne to go to the theatre on the following afternoon, and that she enclosed the tickets hoping that Maud might be able to use them.
Exactly on the stroke of three on the following afternoon the door-bell rang. Mrs.Romayne was alone in the drawing-room, apparently lazily and pleasantly enough occupied with the latest number of the latest society paper; and as the sound reached her ear her lips hardened into a thin, straight line, and her eyes flashed for a moment with a look of antagonism which was almost defiant. Then the servant announced:
“Mr. Falconer!”
Dennis Falconer was looking very pale; there was little colour even in his lips, and his face was set and stern. He took the hand Mrs. Romayne held out to him, and replied to her greeting in the briefest possible phrase, with no softening of a something curiously solemn and inexorable about his demeanour, though his eyes rested on her for an instant with a singular expression. He disliked and despised the woman before him, and yet at that moment he pitied her.
“Sit down!” she said. “I am charmed to see you, though, do you know, you have chosen an inopportune moment. I had a very pleasant engagement for this afternoon, and I nearly put you off. So I hope the business is really very grave.”
Her voice was lightness itself, and that very lightness, with the almost unusual loquacity with which she had received him, seemed to witness to the presence in her mind of a recollection which she was determined to ignore—the recollection of their last interview, in that very room. There was an air about her of having entrenched herself behind a barrier which she defied him to pass; of being resolute this time against surprise, or against any other method of attack.
“It is very grave!” said Falconer, and in contrast with her voice, his rang with stern heaviness. “I must ask you to prepare yourself for bad news!”
“Bad news!” she echoed sharply, as her eyes, fixed on his face, grew suddenly bright and keen. “Oh—money, I suppose?” Her voice jarred a little, though she spoke very lightly.
“No!” said Falconer.
His tone was absolutely uncompromising. On his unsympathetic and unimaginative mind the effect of her manner was to obliterate his sense of pity beneath a consciousnessof the retributive justice of the moment before her.
“Not money?” she said, with a little, unreal laugh. “Well, that’s a comfort, at any rate.” Her hand had clenched itself suddenly round the arm of her chair on his monosyllable, and now she paused a moment, almost as though her breath had failed her, before she said, with affected carelessness: “And if not—what?”
Her back was towards the light, and Falconer could not see her face.
“I will answer your question, if you will allow me, with another,” he said. “Have you noticed anything unusual in the course of the past month—or more—in the conduct of your son?”
In the instant’s dead silence that followed a slight creaking sound made itself audible and then died away. The clenched hand on the bar of Mrs. Romayne’s chair had passed slowly round it with such intense pressure as to produce the sound. Then she answered him, as he had previously answered her, in a monosyllable.
“No!” she said. There was a desperateeffort in her voice at carelessness, at nonchalance, at astonishment; but it was penetrated through and through with all her past antagonism towards, and defiance of, the man before her accentuated into fierce repudiation. Falconer’s voice, as he answered her, seemed to confront that defiance with inexorable fate.
“That is almost unfortunate,” he said sternly. “In that case, I fear that what I have to tell you must fall with double and treble severity, as coming upon you unawares. Will you not think again? Has he not been absent from home a good deal? Have his absences been satisfactorily accounted for? Have you ever proved”—he paused, laying stress upon the last word—“have you ever proved such accounts, as given by himself, correct?”
With a valiant effort, the power of which Falconer must have appreciated had he been able to penetrate beyond the ghastly artificiality of the result, Mrs. Romayne rallied her forces, and strove to throw his words back upon him; to defend and entrench herself once and for all with the only weaponshe knew. She broke into a thin, tuneless laugh.
“What an absolutely gruesome catechism!” she cried. “Really, it would take me weeks of solitary confinement and meditation among the tombs—isn’t there a book about that, by-the-bye?—before I could approach it in a duly sepulchral spirit. Do you know, it would be an absolute relief to me if you could come to the point? I am taking it for granted, you see, that there is a point, which is no doubt a compliment which its infinitesimal nature hardly deserves. Produce the poor little thing, for heaven’s sake!”
“The point is this,” said Falconer grimly and concisely. “Your son’s life, as you know it, is a lie. He has a sordid version of what is known as an ‘establishment.’ He is living with a work-girl in Camden Town.”
There was a choked, strangled sound, and Mrs. Romayne’s figure seemed to shrink together as though every muscle had contracted in one simultaneous throb. Her face, could Falconer have seen it, was rigid and blank, except for her eyes. For that firstinstant she looked as a patient might look who, having suspected himself of a deadly disease, having congratulated himself on the subsidence of his symptoms and known hope, learns from his physician that that subsidence of obvious symptoms was in itself only a more dangerous symptom still, and that he is indeed doomed. Her eyes were the eyes of a woman who looks despair full in the face.
But with no human being who keeps hold of life and reason can the vivid agony of such a vision endure for more than an instant. It dulls by reason of its very insupportableness. Time is an empty word where mental suffering is concerned, and the second-hand of the tall clock in the corner had traversed its dial only once before a kind of film passed over those agonised eyes, and Mrs. Romayne spoke in a thin, hoarse voice. And the man so close to her was conscious of nothing but a short pause, and was revolted accordingly.
“How do you know?” Even in that moment the instinct of defiance of him personally could not wholly yield, and lingered in her voice.
“I have an old servant who lives in Camden Town. He is an invalid, and I occasionally visit him. His wife is a garrulous woman, and thinking that I have some claim on her gratitude, considers it necessary to inform me as to all her own and her neighbours’ affairs. Visiting the husband last Friday week, I found the wife greatly excited and alarmed for the reputation of the street—in which she lets lodgings—by the appearance in the house opposite of a couple whose relations to one another had instantly been suspected by their landlady and her neighbours, though they passed as newly-made man and wife!”
With a sudden, low cry of inexpressible horror and dismay Mrs. Romayne sprang to her feet, flinging out her hands as though to keep off something intolerable to be borne.
“No! no!” she cried breathlessly. “No! no! Not that! Not married? It would be ruin! Ruin! ruin! No! no!”
Dennis Falconer paused, freezing slowly into what seemed to him surely justifiable abhorrence of the woman before him. Whatif he knew in his heart that such a marriage would indeed mean ruin to a young man? So bald a trampling down of the moral aspect of the position before the practical was not decent! It was for a woman—and that woman the young man’s mother—to be overwhelmed by the moral horror to the exclusion of every other thought! And it was the practical alone that had drawn any show of emotion from Mrs. Romayne!
“I am sorry to have agitated you!” he said, and his voice was cold and cutting as steel. “I have no doubt in my own mind that they are not married. I had better perhaps continue to give you the facts in order. Chance led to my seeing the young man in question as he was leaving the house. I recognised your son. I proceeded to make enquiries. He passes as a medical student, under the name of Roden. The girl is—or was—a hand at one of the big millinery establishments. From her affectation of innocence and simplicity, the woman who has most opportunity of observing her is inclined to think the very worst of her!”
A quick, hissing breath—an unmistakeablebreath of relief—parted Mrs. Romayne’s white lips. She had sunk down again in her chair and was grasping it now with both hands as she leant a little forward, trembling in every limb.
“Then it is not likely—it is not likely that he has married her,” she said, in a low, rapid tone to herself rather than to Falconer, as it seemed. “Go on!”
“There is very little more to be said,” returned Falconer icily. “They have occupied the rooms—that is to say, the girl has occupied them, visited every day by your son—for three weeks now. The woman has discovered that they had been somewhere in the country together for a week previously. You will, of course, be able to recall his absence from home. Yesterday he took her away into the country again; they are to return on Monday!”
He stopped; and as though she were no longer conscious of his presence, Mrs. Romayne’s head was bowed slowly lower, as if under some irresistible weight, until her forehead rested on her hand, stretched out still upon the arm of her wide chair.
She lifted her face at last, white and haggard as twenty added years of life should not have made it, and rose, helping herself feebly with the arm of her chair, like a woman whose physical strength is broken. Falconer rose also. He was utterly alienated from her; he was conscious of only the most distant pity, but he felt that it was incumbent on him to say something.
“I regret very much that it should have fallen to my lot to break this to you!” he said, stiffly and awkwardly. “I fear that coming from me——” He hesitated and paused.
From out the past, confusing, almost numbing him, a vague and ghastly influence had risen suddenly upon him to strain that strange, intangible, and awful cord of common knowledge by which he and the woman before him were bound together, revolt against it or deny its presence as they might. Under the touch of that influence his last words had come from him almost involuntarily. He had not known whither they tended; he could bring them to no conclusion.
Mrs. Romayne looked him in the eyes,holding now to a table by which she stood, but with no weakness in her ashen face. She seemed to be concentrating all her force into one final repudiation of him. She ignored his words as though he had not spoken.
“I will ask you to leave me now!” she said. And her voice, thin and toneless though it was, left her completely mistress of the situation.
She made no movement to shake hands; he hesitated a moment, then bowed and left the room.
“It’sa jolly little place enough!”
“I think it’s lovely.”
There was a certain tone of regret, of lingering, reluctant farewell, in both voices; though in Julian’s case it was light and patronising; in Clemence’s, dreamy and tender. As Julian spoke he shifted his position slightly as he leant against the iron railing by which they stood, and let his eyes wander over the scene before them with condescending approval.
They were standing on the somewhat embryonic “sea-front” of what a few years before had been a fishing village, and was now struggling, rather inefficiently, to become a watering-place. Such season as the place could boast was entirely confined to the summer months; to the frequenters of winter resortsit was absolutely unknown; consequently its intrinsic charms at the moment—in all the lassitude and monotony left by departed glory—might have been considered conspicuous by their absence. But it was a glorious winter’s day. A slight sprinkling of snow had been frozen on the roofs of the somewhat depressed-looking houses and on the unsightliness of the unfinished sea-front; and brilliant sunshine, almost warm in spite of the keen, frosty air, was glorifying alike the deserted little town, the country beyond, and the sparkling, dancing sea. The frosty, invigorating brightness found a responsive chord in Julian’s heart this morning; he was not always so susceptible to such simple, natural influences. He was in a good humour with the place; he had spent two wholly satisfactory days there—two days, moreover, which had had much the same influence upon his moral tone as a change to bracing air and simple, wholesome food would have on a physique accustomed to dissipation.
His survey ended finally with Clemence’s face. She was standing at his side lookingout over the sea, her eyes intent and full of feeling, her beautiful face flushed and still, absorbed by the mysterious charm of the ceaseless movement and trouble of the bright water stretching away before her.
“What are you looking at, Clemence?” he said, boyishly.
She lifted her eyes to his quite gravely and simply.
“Only the sea,” she said. “It is so beautiful, I feel as if I never could leave off looking at it. It makes me feel—oh, I can’t tell you, but it is like something great and strong to take away with one!” She looked away again. “Oh, I wish, I wish we need not go!” she said with a little sigh.
“I wish we needn’t,” returned Julian; he had been dimly conscious of something in her eyes and voice which made her previous words, simple as they seemed, almost unintelligible to him, and he caught at her last sentence as containing an idea to which he could respond. “It’s an awful nuisance, isn’t it? And do you know it is time we started? Never mind. We’ll come down again soon!”
They stood for another moment; Clemence looking out at the sunny sea, Julian taking another careless comprehensive view of the whole scene; and then, as though those last looks had contained their respective farewells, they turned with one accord and walked away in the direction of the railway station. And as if in turning her back upon the sunlit sea she had turned her back also upon something less definite and tangible, a certain gravity and wistfulness crept gradually over Clemence’s face as they went; crept over it to settle down into a sadness most unusual to it as the train carried them quickly away towards London. Julian, sitting opposite her, was vaguely struck by her expression.
“Are you awfully sorry to go back, Clemence?” he said.
She started slightly, and looked at him with a faint smile.
“I suppose I am!” she said. “We have been very happy, haven’t we?” There was a wistful regret in her voice which touched him somehow, and he answered her demonstratively, with a cheery and enthusiastic augury for the future. Clemence smiledagain; again rather faintly. “I know!” she said. “I mean I hope so. Only—I don’t know what’s the matter with me! I feel as if—something were finished!”
Julian broke into a boyish laugh. Her depression was by no means displeasing to him; it was a tribute to his importance, to her dependence on him; and the necessity for “cheering her up” implied the exercise of that superiority and authority in which he delighted.
“Why, what a dear little goose you are, Clemence!” he said, leaning forward to take her hands in his. “A ‘Friday to Monday’ can’t last for ever, you know, but it can be repeated again and again. Why, I shall be up every day—every single day, I promise you. I shouldn’t wonder if I found I could spend the evening with you to-morrow! Won’t that console you?”
She did not answer him, but she took one of his hands in hers and pressed it to her cheek. His consolation had hardly touched that strange oppression which weighed upon her; and Julian, in high feather, and quite unaware that only his voice was heard by her,his words passing her by unheeded, had been talking at great length about all the happiness before them, when she said, in a hesitating, far-away voice:
“Could you—could you come home with me this afternoon?”
Julian paused a moment. The question was hardly the response his words had demanded. Then he said decisively:
“Quite impossible, I am sorry to say. I would if I could, you know, dear, but it’s quite impossible!”
She gave his hand a little quick pressure.
“I know, of course!” she murmured gently. She paused a moment, and then said in a low voice, rather irrelevantly as it seemed: “Julian”—his name still came rather hesitatingly from her lips—“do you think—do you like Mrs. Jackson?”
Mrs. Jackson was the name of the woman whose rooms Julian had taken for her, and he started slightly at the question.
“She’s not a bad sort,” he said, with rather startled consideration. “At least, she seems all right. Isn’t she nice to you, Clemence? Don’t you like the rooms?”
“Oh, yes! yes!” she said quickly, almost as though she reproached herself for saying anything that could suggest to him even a shadow of discontent on her part. “I like them so very, very much. It is only—I don’t know what exactly. Somehow, I don’t think Mrs. Jackson is quite a nice woman.” She had spoken the last words hesitatingly and with difficulty, almost as though they came from her against her will.
Julian glanced at her quickly.
“What makes you think that, Clemence?” he said, with judicial masterfulness. “Have you any reason, I mean?”
But Clemence was hardly able to define, even in her own pure mind, what it was that jarred upon her in her landlady’s manner; and to Julian she was utterly unable to put her feelings into words. Her hasty disclaimer and her hesitating beginnings and falterings, however, served to remove the misgiving which had stirred him lest some knowledge of his own real life should have come to the woman’s knowledge. He was the readier to let himself be reassured and to dismiss the subject in that the train was slackening speedfor the last time before reaching London, and he intended to move into a first-class smoking carriage at the approaching station. Julian was well aware of the risks of discovery involved in these journeys with Clemence; and though he faced them nonchalantly enough, he used wits with which no one who knew him only in his capacities of man about town and budding barrister would have credited him, to reduce them to a minimum. To be seen emerging from a third-class carriage at Victoria Station was a wholly unnecessary risk to run, and he avoided it accordingly.
“You mustn’t be fanciful, Clemmie,” he said, now in a lordly and airy fashion. “I’ve no doubt Mrs. Jackson is a very jolly woman, as a matter of fact. Look here, dear, would you mind if I went and had a smoke now? It isn’t much further, you know, and one mustn’t smoke in hospital, you see!”
Clemence was very pale when he joined her on the platform at Victoria—joined her after a quick glance round to see whether he must prepare himself for an encounter with an acquaintance; and she did not speak, only looked up at him with a grave, steady smile whichmade her face sadder than before. His announcement of his intention of putting her into a hansom drew from her an absolutely horrified protest. She would go in an omnibus, she told him hurriedly, or in the Underground! She had never been in a cab! It would cost so much! But when he overruled her, a little impatiently—it was not yet dark, and he did not wish to remain longer than was necessary with her in Victoria Station—she submitted timidly, with a sudden slight flushing of her cheeks.
“A four-wheeler, Julian!” she murmured pleadingly, as they emerged into the station yard. With a lofty smile at what he supposed to be nervousness on her part, he signified assent with a little condescending gesture, and stopped before a waiting cab.
“Here you are,” he said. “Jump in!”
She got in obediently, and as he shut the door she turned to him through the open window.
“Good-bye, Julian!” she said, in a low, sweet voice.
“Good-bye!” he said cheerily, smilingat her. Her face in its dingy frame looked whiter, sweeter, and more steadfast than ever, and it made a curiously sudden and distinct impression on Julian’s mental retina. Then the cab turned lumberingly round, and he moved smartly away. He did not see that as the cab turned, that sweet, white face appeared at the other window and followed him with wide, wistful eyes until the moving life of London parted them.
Julian was on his way to the club. He had a vague disinclination to the thought of going home; the house in Chelsea was always more or less distasteful to him now, and he had no intention of going thither before it was necessary. It was nearly dark by the time his destination was reached, and as his hansom drew up a few yards from the club entrance he could only see that the way was stopped by a carriage from which two ladies and a gentleman had just emerged. It was the younger of the two ladies who glanced in his direction, and said, in a pretty, uninterested voice:
“Isn’t that Mr. Romayne?”
Marston Loring was the man addressed, and he shot a keen, considering glance at the speaker—Miss Pomeroy. The fact that her eyes had noticed Julian when his quick ones had not, trivial as it was, was not without its significance to the man whose stock-in-trade, so to speak, was founded on clever estimate and appreciation of trifles. Was Miss Pomeroy not so entirely unobservant a nonentity as she was supposed to be, he asked himself, not for the first time; or was there another reason for her quickness in this instance?
“So it is!” he said. “Hullo, old fellow!”
Julian came eagerly up to the group as it paused for him on the club steps, and shook hands in his pleasantest manner with Mrs. Pomeroy.
“I do believe it’s a ladies’ afternoon!” he exclaimed gaily. “What luck for me! How do you do?” shaking hands with Miss Pomeroy. “I’d actually forgotten all about it, and I’ve only just come up from Brighton! Loring, you must ask me to join your party, old man! Tell him so, Miss Pomeroy, please!”
Whether strict veracity is to be imputed to a young man who professes unbounded satisfaction at finding fashionable “ladies’ teas” in full swing at his club when he has just come off a journey is perhaps doubtful; but Julian threw himself into the spirit of the moment with a frank gaiety and enthusiasm which was not to be surpassed. The greater number of the ladies who were sipping club tea as if it were a hitherto untasted nectar, and gazing at club furniture as though it were provision for the comfort of some strange animal, were acquaintances of his; and as he moved about among them his passage seemed to be marked by merrier laughs, a quicker fire of the jokes of the moment, and brighter faces than prevailed elsewhere. He was enjoying himself so thoroughly, apparently, that he was unable to tear himself away, and when he left the club at last, he sprang into a hansom, and told the driver to “put the horse along.” He and his mother were dining out together, and he had left himself barely sufficient time to dress.
He ran up the steps, flinging the driver his fare, let himself in with his latchkey, andproceeded to his room up two steps at a time. When he emerged thence, twenty minutes later, in evening dress, he was congratulating himself on having “done the trick capitally, and well up to time.”
He was a little surprised, therefore, as he came downstairs, to find his mother’s maid waiting for him outside the drawing-room door with the information that Mrs. Romayne was already in the carriage; and he ran hastily downstairs, put on his overcoat, and proceeded to join her.
“I’m awfully sorry, dear,” he said, with eager apology. “I thought it was earlier. The fact is, I was awfully late getting in. I found ‘ladies’ teas’ going on at the club—so awfully stupid of me to forget—you might have liked to go—and it was rather good fun. How are you, dear?”
He had let himself into the brougham as he spoke, had shut the door, and seated himself by the figure he could only dimly see sitting rather back in the corner so that little or no light fell on the face. He had kissed his mother, hardly stemming the flood of his eloquence for the purpose; and he now hardlywaited for her word or two of reply before he plunged once more into eager, amusing talk. He did not give his mother time to do more than answer monosyllabically, and it followed that her silence did not strike him. He sprang out, when the carriage stopped, to give her his hand, but before he had given his instructions to the coachman, and followed her into the house, she had disappeared into the ladies’ cloak-room. Consequently it was not until she came to him as he waited to follow her into the drawing-room that he really saw her. As his eyes rested on the figure coming towards him, he suddenly saw, not it, but a sweet, white face with wistful eyes looking at him from out of a dingy frame.