Alwaysexcellently dressed, Mrs. Romayne’s appearance at that moment was brilliant; almost excessively brilliant it seemed for a small dinner-party. Her frock was of the most pronounced type of full-dress, and she wore diamonds; not many, but so disposed, as was her reddish-brown hair, as to make the greatest possible effect. But the detail which had caught her son’s experienced eye, and which had brought before him by some unaccountable law of contrast that other woman’s face, lay in the fact that to-night for the first time his mother was slightly “made up.” The colour on her cheeks, the bright effectiveness of her eyes, was the result of art. It made her look haggard, Julian decided with careless, indifferent distaste; and then he was following her into the room.
She had hardly paused to speak to him; apparently she imagined that they were late.
They were widely separated at dinner, and were not thrown together, as it happened, during the whole evening. But Mrs. Romayne’s personality was a factor in the party not to be ignored that night; she was delightful, everybody said. It was a very select little dinner, and society romps went on afterwards; romps to which Mrs. Romayne contributed her full share. And to Julian that newly acquired sense of his mother’s artificiality was accentuated as the evening passed on into something like repugnance; a repugnance which, when he was seated with her at last in the brougham and driving home, produced in him a strong disinclination to rouse himself to an assumption of vivacity, and made him occupy himself with his own thoughts so exclusively that he never noticed that his mother uttered not a single word.
“Good night, mother!” he said absently, as they stood together in the hall. He was stooping to kiss her when she stopped him with a slight, peremptory gesture.
“I want to speak to you!” she said. Hervoice was tense and a little hoarse. Without another word, without so much as glancing at him, she passed him and led the way to his smoking-room; turned up the lamp with a quick, hard gesture, and then turned and faced him.
All the colour had faded from Julian’s face, and he had followed her slowly. With the first sound of her voice the conviction had come to him that he was discovered. There were certain weaknesses in him hitherto undeveloped by the circumstances of his life, but radical factors in his character. Morally speaking he was a coward. His hour had come, and he was afraid to meet it. He came just inside the door and stood leaning against the writing-table, confronting his mother, but neither looking at her nor speaking.
“Tell me where you have been since Friday!” she said, low and peremptorily; and then she stopped herself abruptly, putting out her hand as though to prevent him from speaking, as a spasm of pain distorted her face. “No!” she said in a hoarse, breathless way. “No, don’t! You’ll tell me a lie. Don’t! I know!”
She had put out her hand and was steadying herself by the high oak mantelpiece—part of her recent present to Julian—but her face was rigid and set, and her eyes, full of a strange, indefinable agony, which she seemed to be all the while holding desperately at bay, never left the pale, downcast, almost sullen face opposite her.
With a determined wrench and setting in motion of all his faculties, Julian pulled himself together so far as to take refuge in that sure resort of the deficient in moral courage—an assumption of jaunty and light-hearted non-comprehension. Perhaps he had never in his life been more like his mother than he was at that moment as he threw back his head and answered, with an affected gaiety which was somewhat hollow and unsuccessful:
“What do you know, dear? You’re coming it rather strong, aren’t you?”
“I know that you have been living with a common work-girl somewhere in Camden Town for a month or more!”
The words were spoken in the same hoarse voice which rang now, low as it was, with an intolerable disgust. But its expressionseemed to affect Julian not at all. The words themselves were occupying all his perception. A quick frown of consideration appeared on his forehead, as though some relief or reprieve had come to him, bringing with it possibilities the skilful turning to account of which called into play his mental faculties, and in so doing strung up his nerve. He dropped his artificiality of manner, and seemed to brace himself to meet the emergency in which he found himself. The situation had evidently suddenly altered its character for him. He was no longer cowed by it.
There was a pause—a pause in which Mrs. Romayne’s eyes seemed to dilate and contract, and dilate again under the suffering to which she allowed expression in neither tone nor gesture; and then there came from Julian four awkward, hardly audible words, jerked out rather than spoken, with long pauses intervening:
“How do you know?”
A short, sharp breath came from Mrs. Romayne, and then she said, with cold decisiveness, though it seemed that nothing would take that hoarseness from her voice:
“It matters very little how I know. ThatI know by one chance; that some one else may know by another; some one else again by another—the details in each case, when the chances are innumerable, are nothing! Have you lived all this time in London not to know that discovery is inevitable—to wonder ‘how’ when it comes?”
There was a bitterness, a keenness of scorn in her voice which stung him like a lash, and he answered hotly:
“After all, mother, we are not living in Arcadia! We don’t talk about these things, and I’m awfully sorry, I’m sure, that this should have come to your knowledge; I’m awfully sorry to offend you. But, hang it all, I’m not worse than lots of fellows about!”
His tone had gathered confidence and defiance as he went on, and it seemed to shake her a little. Her hold on the mantelpiece tightened, and she spoke quickly and rather nervously.
“It’s very likely,” she said. “I don’t want to argue the principle with you. Young men have their own ideas, I know; but how many young men—drop out? How many young men, with good positions, good chances,somehow or other get into bad odour; get to be not received—or, if they are received, it is with certain reservations—through this kind of thing? Oh, of course I don’t say it’s inevitable. There are lots of men about, as you say! But it’s an awful risk. In the case of a young man like you, with no title to the position you hold in society but your—your personality, don’t you see, it is a double and treble risk. It is playing with edged tools; it is holding a knife to your own throat. You would go under so horribly easily.”
She paused abruptly, as though the image before her eyes were too terrible to her to be pursued further, and tried to moisten her dry lips, on which the touch of paint had cracked now, showing how white they were beneath. The ghastliness of the incongruity between her manner and the superficialities of which she spoke was indescribable. Julian did not speak; he was moving one foot to and fro slowly over the carpet, at which he gazed immovably, and his mother went on almost immediately:
“You must give it up, Julian,” she said incisively. “I will do anything that isnecessary in the way of money; I don’t want to be hard upon you. Anything the girl wants you shall have; but you must break with her at once.”
She paused again, but still Julian did not speak; still he did not raise his eyes. She went on with a growing insistence in her voice which went hand in hand with a growing agony of appeal:
“If you don’t see the necessity now, you must believe me when I tell you that you will—you will. Look, dear! your life is surely not so dull that you need run after such distraction as that! You shall marry if you want to. You shall marry any one you like. But you must—you must give this up. Julian——” She stopped for a moment, and her voice grew thin, almost faint, as she pressed so heavily on the carving by which she held that her hand was bruised and blackened. “Julian, I am not telling you what it has been to me to know that you have deceived me. I am not going to try and make you feel—I don’t want you to feel it, dear—what it has been to me to go over your home-life of the last few weeks and know thatyou have lied to me at every turn—to me, who have only wanted to make you happy. I won’t reproach you. Perhaps young men think it a kind of right—a kind of right——” She repeated the sentence, unfinished as it was, as though it contained an idea to which she clung. “It is not for my sake—to spare my feelings, that I tell you you must give it up. It is for your own. Julian, my boy, you must believe me.”
Her words, quivering with entreaty, died away; her eyes, full of supplication, were fixed on his; and Julian spoke—spoke without lifting his eyes from the ground.
“Suppose I married her?” he said in a low, shamefaced voice.
“What!” The monosyllable rang out sharp and vibrating, and Mrs. Romayne, all softness or relaxation struck from her face and figure in one sudden bracing of every muscle, stood staring at him out of eyes alive with horror.
“Suppose—I married—her!”
“Supposing that—I will tell you! You would have to keep her and yourself! You would have no more of my money, and youwould never be acknowledged in my house again!” Her low voice was like fine, cold steel, and she paused. Then quite suddenly, as though the horror kept at bay in her eyes had leapt up and mastered her in an instant, she flung out her hands wildly, crying: “Julian, Julian! You are not married? Tell me, tell me you are not married?”
And Julian, white to the very lips, said low and hurriedly:
“No!”
There was a long silence. With a choked, hysterical cry, Mrs. Romayne dropped into a chair near her, and covered her face with her hands. Julian drew out his pocket-handkerchief and mechanically wiped his forehead. At last he began, in a nervous, uneven voice:
“Mother, look here, I—you don’t quite understand me! I—she—it’s—it’s not the kind of girl you think!” He stopped and drew his hand desperately before his eyes. That innocent, white face, in its dingy frame, what did it want before his eyes now? How could he get on if he kept looking at it? “She—we—it was my fault! Mother, look here, I ought!”
Mrs. Romayne took her hands away from her face and clenched them together.
“You shall not,” she said in a low, steady voice.
“She—she—was an awfully good girl, don’t you know. She’s not—of course she’s not one of our sort, but—she would learn. Mother, after all, why not? Nothing else can—can make it right!”
“Nothing else can ruin you completely!” was the steady answer. “You shall never do it if I can prevent it. I have told you what I would do; think it well over. Think what it would mean to you to have not one farthing but what you can earn! To be cut by every one who knows you! To be without a chance of any kind! I told you that if you married I would disown you! Now I tell you something else! Break off this miserable connection and you shall have, as I said, anything in reason to give the girl in compensation once and for all. Refuse to do so and I will cut off your allowance until you come to your senses!”
“Mother!” he cried fiercely. “By Heaven, mother!”
“You can take your choice!” was the unmoved answer.
Her face was sharp and haggard; the artificial colour stood out on it in great patches, throwing into relief the vivid pallor beneath. She had thrown aside her cloak as though the physical oppression was unbearable to her, and the contrast between her face and her gorgeous dress with its glittering ornaments was horrible.
A smothered oath broke from the young man, and lifting his right hand, he began to rub it slowly up and down the back of his head as an expression of heavy, fierce cogitation settled down upon his face. To his unutterable surprise, as he made the gesture, there stole over his mother’s face an expression of such deadly terror as he had never before seen. He stopped involuntarily, and she staggered to her feet, holding out two quivering, imploring hands. For the first time in his life Julian was using a gesture habitual in his dead father; for the first time in his life, looking into her son’s face, Mrs. Romayne saw there the face of William Romayne.
“My boy!” she gasped. “My boy. Don’t do that! Don’t look like that, for Heaven’s sake! For Heaven’s sake!”
She swayed for a moment to and fro, and then fell heavily forward into his arms.
A bittereast wind, which was taking sufficiently depressing effect upon all London, was dealing with peculiar grimness with Redburn Street, Camden Town. The neat little houses in that dreary grey dryness looked sordidly wretched; there was something deserted and hopeless about them. No one was to be seen, except that at a first-floor window about half-way down a woman’s figure was standing; and as Dennis Falconer turned into the street his footsteps rang with heavy distinctness on the glaring pavement. He strode slowly and steadily along, and his solitary figure, as it stood out with that peculiar sharpness of outline which is a characteristic production of east wind, harmonised absolutely with the sombreness of the background. His face was full of sombre purpose, grave and stern.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon of Wednesday—two days after Julian’s return home. On the morning of the preceding day Julian and his mother had had a second interview, which had ended in his giving a sullen and reluctant assent to her demands; and in the evening Dennis Falconer had received from Mrs. Romayne a brief, almost peremptory note, begging him to come to her. He had gone to Queen Anne Street accordingly, severely unsympathetic, but also severely reliable, early on Wednesday morning.
He had found Mrs. Romayne in a feverish agony of agitation beyond even the power of her will to conceal or wholly to control. Her voice, painfully thin and sharp; her gestures restless, nervous, irritable; her utterance hard and rapid; had all testified to a strained, tense excitement before which all her artificiality was utterly submerged, and in which Falconer himself was obviously regarded by her solely as the one instrument at hand to her necessity. Her whole soul seemed to be set upon the immediate termination of “the affair,” as she called it. It affected herevidently in only one way, she looked at it from only one point of view: as something to be finished up, put away, buried out of sight. It was the thought of delay in the doing of this, only, that appeared to torture her; of the affair itself with all its terrible significance, its inevitable consequences, she had, as far as Falconer could divine, no adequate conception. The girl must be bought off; must be sent away; must be sent right out of the country, in case—and here came the one agonised sense of a possible consequence which Falconer could detect—in case Julian should marry her after all!
It was evidently the haunting terror of such a contingency which had driven her to send for Falconer. It was obvious, though she seemed to be striving hard to conceal it even from herself, that she could not trust her son; that she could find no rest in the promise she had wrung from him. What she had to say to Falconer was, in effect, that some one else must see the girl; the arrangement to be surely effected must be brought about by a third person who would set about the business promptly and act decidedly. Itwas this service which she wanted of Falconer, and Falconer, after a moment’s grave self-communing, agreed to render it. He was as far removed from sympathy with her in this her hard, agonised reality as he had been from the artificial woman of the previous months, or from the real woman of eighteen years before. He considered her point of view in the present instance absolutely revolting in her. But no man could question the practical sense of what she said, or the advisability of the course she proposed, and his conception of his obligations as her sole male relative and trustee was too intimately intertwined with his sense of duty and self-respect to allow him to entertain, even for a moment, the possibility of refusing to act for her. He had stood by her side, impelled by that sense of duty, gravely reliable, and unsympathetic, eighteen years before. The irony of fate decreed that it was for him, and for him only, to act for her now. To him it was simply the stern dictate of moral necessity to be obeyed as such.
Accordingly he had received her instructions, offering now and again a grim, practicalsuggestion, with a stern air of businesslike reserve; had undertaken—being at the bottom of her opinion as to the desirability of instant measures—to see “the girl” that same afternoon; and he was walking down Redburn Street now, in the pitiless east wind, to carry that undertaking into effect.
He reached the house, knocked, and asked briefly for Mrs. Roden. The landlady, whose sentiments towards her lodgers had developed rapidly in consequence of the enquiries which Falconer had felt it his duty to make, received his words with a sniff expressive of contempt; and then informed him, with a stare of insolent curiosity, that “she” was “hupstairs,” and led the way thither; evidently urged to that act of civility solely by a hope of finding out something. She was a coarse, vulgar-looking woman, with small red eyes, which glittered expectantly as she flung the door open and announced, in a loud and denunciatory voice, “’Ere’s a gentleman!”
But if she had hoped for startling revelations she was disappointed. Dennis Falconer advanced into the room with stern composure; the figure in the window turned quickly butquietly to meet him; and Mrs. Jackson was obliged to shut the door upon the two.
Clemence was looking very pale. The vague shadow which had fallen upon her as she journeyed up to London two days before had deepened into a wistful, questioning sadness. She had not seen Julian since she parted from him at Victoria Station. On the previous day she had received a note from him which told her that “work” kept him from her for that day, but that he would come as soon as he was able. There was nothing to distress or alarm her in the fact itself; more than once before a similar disappointment had come to her; and even though the second day brought her no letter, the blank merely meant, as she assured herself hour by hour, that she would see him before the day was done. But strive against it as she might, and did, she had spent the past twenty-four hours weighed down by a sense of trouble utterly undefined; utterly, as it seemed to her, without reason. She had borne her burden with mute patience, reproaching herself as for ingratitude and an inordinate desire for active happiness, and struggling bravely toconquer it; but neither arguing about it nor denying it, as a less simple and straightforward nature would have done. And now the appearance of Falconer seemed suddenly to focus and define her vague distress. The sudden conviction that Julian was ill, and that this gentleman had come from him to tell her so, held her still and silent in a pang of cruel realisation and anticipation.
The light, as she moved, had fallen full upon her face, and as he saw it a certain shock passed through Dennis Falconer. He had seen her figure, and even her face in the distance more than once, but he had never before seen it with any distinctness, and for the first instant the simplicity and purity of its beauty, with the expression deepened by the strange shadow through which the past two days had led her, clashed almost painfully with that idea of “the girl” which had grown, during his conversation with Mrs. Romayne, into a kind of fact for him. The next moment, however, he had reconciled appearances and realities, as he conceived them, with the grim reflection that there is no vice so vicious as that which wears an innocent face; and indoing so had quenched what might have been perception beneath a weight of narrow truism.
No greeting of any kind passed between them. All Clemence’s faculties were absorbed in her dread. Falconer was busied with the process of reconciliation. The strange little silence was broken eventually by Falconer, and he spoke with the unbending sternness and distance which that process and its conclusion had naturally accentuated.
“I am here as the representative of Julian Roden’s nearest relative and guardian,” he said. It had been arranged between himself and Mrs. Romayne, on the suggestion of the latter, that “the girl,” if she did not already know it, should be kept in ignorance of Julian’s real name.
The statement was slightly over-coloured, since Julian was of age, and his mother was no longer his guardian in any legal sense; but to stern moralists of Falconer’s type, to whom the pretty little falsenesses of life are wholly to be condemned, a slight misstatement in such a case is frequently permissible. The brief, uncompromising words had seemed tohim to set the key of the interview beyond mistake. He was consequently slightly taken aback by their effect.
Every trace of colour died out of Clemence’s face, and two great dilated eyes gazed at him for an instant in dumb agony before she whispered:
“He’s not—dead?”
Falconer made a slight, almost contemptuous, negative gesture. He had no intention of being imposed upon by theatrical arts, and as Clemence, her self-control shattered by the sudden relief, turned instinctively away, and pressed her face down on the arm with which she had caught at the curtain for support, he went on with immoveable sternness:
“My business has to do with his life, not his death. The main point is very simple, and I will put it to you at once. Absolute ruin lies before him. Is he or is he not to embrace it?”
He saw her start, and she lifted her face quickly, and turned it to him all quivering and unstrung from her recent suffering, and quite white.
“He is in trouble!” she cried, low and breathlessly. “Oh, what is it? What has happened?”
Dennis Falconer’s patience was approaching its limits, and he spoke curtly and conclusively.
“I think we may dispense with this kind of thing,” he said. “It can serve no purpose, as everything is known. I come now from his mother with full power to act for her——”
He was interrupted. A burning colour, the colour of such paralysing surprise as can take in hardly the bare statement, much less the consequent developements and inferences, had rushed suddenly over Clemence’s face, dyeing her very throat.
“His mother!” she exclaimed. “His mother!” Her tone dropped as she repeated the words into a strange, uncertain murmur, in which incredulity, acceptance—as a kind of experiment—and something that was almost fear, were inextricably blended.
The fear alone caught Falconer’s ear. His lips were parted to resume his speech with grim decisiveness in the conviction that sheunderstood at last that nothing was to be gained by trifling with him, when she said, as though he had had nothing to do with her previous words:
“Go on, please.”
He looked at her again, and was struck by a new look in her face, as he had been struck by a new tone in her voice. She was evidently going to drop all theatricalities, he told himself.
“Perhaps you were not aware that he is, practically, under the control of his mother,” he said. “That is to say, he is dependent on her for every penny he spends. It is quite out of the question that he should make money at the bar—by his own profession, that is to say—for two or three years at least. Consequently the cutting off of the allowance made him by Mrs. —— Roden will mean for him absolute penury.”
She was staring at him; staring at him out of two wide, intense brown eyes; with such a helpless bewilderment in her face that she seemed to be quite dazed. She put her hand to her head as he pausedwith a feeble, uncertain gesture; but she did not speak, and Falconer went on severely:
“I conclude that he has not represented these facts to you as they stand. They are facts, nevertheless. You will, therefore, understand that, his allowance withdrawn, he will be entirely without the means of supporting you. You may possibly consider that some shifty means might be found which, by putting him in possession of small sums of money, would enable him for a time to defy his mother. Let me point out to you something of what such a course would involve. Julian Roden is a young man with a good position in society—I mean he is accustomed to be made much of by men and women who are his equals; he has chances and opportunities of which he intends, no doubt, to avail himself. All this, in taking such a step, he would throw away for ever. Social intercourse, future career, would go with his income at his mother’s word. Now, I will ask you only how long you could hope to depend on him in such circumstances; how long it would be before his only feeling for the woman whom he hadallowed to drag him down and to destroy all his hopes in life would degenerate into sheer repugnance; and for how long he would care to keep her?”
He paused, and after a moment’s dead silence Clemence spoke in a weak, eager, almost desperate voice:
“There must be some mistake! It—it can’t be—the same!”
The words seemed to Falconer a mere miserable subterfuge, and he answered very sternly:
“There is not the faintest possibility of mistake. Julian Roden has owned the whole affair to his mother, who taxed him with it on her discovery——”
“Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute!”
There was a ring of such intolerable pain, such shame and anguish, in the voice, that Falconer’s attention, heavy and prejudiced as it was, was arrested by it. Dimly and uncertainly, and for the first time, the girl before him appeared to him, not simply as a representative of a degraded sisterhood, but as a woman. He looked at her for a moment, as she stood with her face buriedin her hands, quivering from head to foot, with a severe kind of pity.
“I will tell you, as briefly as may be, what I am charged to say,” he said gravely, but not ungently. “Mrs. —— Roden is determined to break off her son’s disgraceful connection with you at the cost of any suffering to herself or to him. She is willing to believe that her son is to be considered in some sort as the more guilty party of the two in having acted as the tempter, and she has no wish to deal otherwise than generously by you. But there are conditions.”
He paused again. Over the slender, bowed woman’s figure before him there had gradually crept, as he spoke, a stillness like the stillness of death; and now, as he waited for her to speak, Clemence slowly lifted her head and looked at him; looked at him with dull, sunken eyes, which seemed the only living points in a face out of which all life and expression seemed to have been crushed by a rigid, haggard mask.
“Conditions?” she repeated.
Her voice was hollow, and had a monotonous,far-away sound, and the word seemed to have no meaning for her.
A sense of vague discomfort took possession of Dennis Falconer. A dim sense that he was not being met as he had expected—as he had a right to expect—disturbed and annoyed him. He had no idea that what he was chiefly discomposed by was a hazy consciousness that a touch of unconscionable respect for the woman who, as he believed, was utterly unworthy of respect, was mingling with his already sufficiently unorthodox sense of pity; but he entrenched himself in a triple armour of stiffness.
“The conditions are these,” he said. “You will give your written word, as under penalties for having obtained money by false pretences, to leave England on a given date and by a given route, and not to return to England within the next ten years. Mrs. —— Roden in return will pay you the sum of five hundred pounds. If you refuse these terms, and Roden submits to his mother, you will simply be the poorer by five hundred pounds. If you induce him to defy his mother, the consequences I havealready described to you will inevitably ensue.”
He waited for her answer, steadily fortifying himself against being surprised at anything she might say; but no answer came. That strange, stricken face was still turned full towards him, but he had an uneasy sense that he was not seen by the great, dull, dark eyes. He felt, too, that as she stood there with her hands tightly clasped together, she was not thinking even remotely of the choice he had set before her, though he knew that she had heard his words and understood them. It was with an instinctive desire to rouse her, to bring back some expression to her face, that he said, with an awkward gentleness which was quite involuntary:
“There is no need for you to decide hastily. You understand the alternative thoroughly, no doubt. I will leave you my address, and you can write me your answer.”
He felt in his pocket for his card-case, and the movement seemed to rouse her. She stopped him with a slight motion of her hand.
“There’s no need,” she said. As though the act of speaking had brought her back from somewhere far away, and as though the claims of the moment were gradually becoming present to her, she paused as if to gather force, and to close upon herself a certain strangely fine reserve, which seemed at once to hedge her about and hold her aloof from the man to whom she spoke; and then she spoke very quietly. “I don’t want any money. If it is better that he should be free of me, he shall be free. That’s all.”
“You are making a mistake!” returned Falconer quickly. There was something about the dignity of her manner which made him feel curiously impotent and small, as though in the presence of an unknown power greater than himself, and the sense increased the touch of irritation he had already experienced. His tone was no longer coldly stern; it was insistent and annoyed. “You should consider your future. If you accept Mrs. Roden’s offer and leave England with a small capital you will havea chance of beginning life again. The step you have lately taken may be your first step on the downward path—I conclude that it is. You should reflect how difficult it is to pause there. With a little money you may establish yourself in a respectable business, and in the course of time you may even redeem your unfortunate past.”
Not a muscle of the still, pale face moved. It seemed to have grown strangely older and stronger in the course of the short interview, and it listened to him with an air of courteous patience which seemed to set an impassable distance between them. The perfect steadiness of her voice as she replied was the steadiness not of composure but of reserve.
“It is quite impossible!” she said.
“Then I am sorry to have to say that I consider you both foolish and ungrateful!” said Falconer with increasing severity. “You put it entirely out of our power to do anything for you. Am I to understand that you refuse to leave England?”
“I don’t know. I must think!” Still the same distant, unmoved patience.
“You will do well to think,” was Falconer’s reply, “and to put away from you in doing so a false pride, which is entirely misplaced. I will give you twenty-four hours for consideration, and to-morrow afternoon I will call and see you again.” On second thoughts it had occurred to Falconer that it would be a false step to give her his name and address. “I shall hope to find that you have come to a sensible decision.”
He paused a moment, and she made a slight gesture of acquiescence, rather as though his words were indifferent to her than in any token of assent to what he said. He added a stiff, formal “Good afternoon!” and as her lips moved mechanically as if to frame the words in answer, he turned and left the room.
As though his presence and his words had been so mere a drop in the deep waters of suffering which held her that his withdrawal affected her not at all, Clemence stood for the moment just as he left her, hardly conscious, as it seemed, that he was gone. Then, asthough the sense that she was alone had come to her gradually, she dropped feebly into a chair, and let her face fall heavily forward upon the table.
Thehand crept round the clock, the swift November twilight fell, and still she did not move; only her clasped hands stretched themselves out as if in prayer. She was not praying though. The attitude was instinctive and unconscious; a blind, mute appeal. She was simply stunned. The room grew darker and darker until its only light was a ray from the street-lamp outside falling straight across the bowed head; and then there was a ring at the bell and a slow step upon the stairs. Clemence knew the step well, though she had never before heard it fall like that. As it fell upon her ear now, a strong shiver ran all through her, and her hands were drawn sharply to cover her face. The door was opened, and her face was pressed down still more tightly.
“Clemence! What, all in the dark? Why, Clemence——” The masterful, rather aggressively cheerful young voice stopped abruptly, and Julian Romayne stood still against the door he had closed behind him, listening; listening to a low, pitiful sound, which seemed to fill the very air—the sound of a woman’s heart-broken crying. At the first tone of his voice great, scalding tears had started to Clemence’s eyes suddenly and without warning; a low, choking sob had shaken her from head to foot, and she was crying now with the hopeless abandonment of suddenly loosened grief.
There was a moment during which the only sound in the room was the sound of her quivering sobs. Julian stood quite still; on the first instant there leapt into his face such a look of fierce, vindictive anger as absolutely transformed it. The look faded slowly into a kind of bitter background, and a hard sullenness settled itself upon it—settled with some difficulty as it seemed, for his lips twitched a little. Then he advanced into the room and broke the silence, and the roughness in his tone seemed to defy something withinhimself. He made no attempt to light the gas. The lamp outside made it possible to move about, and apparently he did not care for further illumination.
“Come, Clemence,” he said, “what’s the matter?”
He had not approached her; on the contrary, he was on the other side of the room looking down at her across the lodging-house table. She did not raise her head or move as she replied; indeed, the choked, broken words were rather the expression of the mingled shame and pity with which she was crushed than a definite answer to his words.
“Oh! Julian! Julian! Julian!”
Apparently the tone of her voice affected him in spite of himself, for his face twitched again, and he spoke more harshly still.
“What’s the matter, I say?”
She stretched her hands out to him across the table, still without lifting her face, in an unconscious gesture of appeal.
“Oh, don’t!” she cried beseechingly and piteously. “Don’t, dear! Don’t pretend any more. I—I know!”
The hands thrust deep down into Julian’spockets were clenched fiercely, and his teeth were set together, as a look rose in his eyes which they had never held before.
“My mother?” he said.
She answered only with a slight shivering gesture, but it was enough. With his young face white to the lips with passionate resentment, Julian turned brusquely away and took two blind strides to the window, with a muttered oath.
There was a long silence. Julian stood at the window, staring blankly out into the darkness with hard eyes. Clemence was indeed, as she believed herself to be, his wife. How it had come about, how he had drifted into anything so far from his vague thoughts in his first meetings with her, he could not have said. What it was that had shaped and moulded his intention into something so much purer and more manly than his own nature, he only now and then felt faintly and indefinitely when he touched it, as he could touch it rarely and densely, in the woman from whose higher nature it emanated. He had married her with that reckless carelessness for the future which seems almost abnormal,but which is not an uncommon characteristic of weakness; and now he was quite incapable of facing and enduring the legitimate consequences of his action. He had lied to his mother to save himself from the heavier penalty with which she threatened him, and his suggestion as to the possibility of his marrying the girl she believed him to have ruined, had been a miserable, consciously degraded attempt at cutting the Gordian knot. He had lied to his mother again, deliberately and without compunction, at their second interview, giving her a promise which he knew to be an empty form, in his word to break with the girl who was his wife. He had come to Clemence to-day, intending to arrange for that temporary suspension of intercourse with her, which was inevitable as a blind to his mother, by telling her that he was obliged to go abroad immediately for an indefinite period.
Now as he stood there in the dark little room, with his eyes fixed on the solitary gas-lamp outside, he was gradually realising that it was all over. His mother had sent, had possibly come herself, to Clemence, he supposed,and Clemence had, of course, declared herself his wife. His plans were all upset. His carefully made calculations were no longer of any avail. It was all over. His brain gradually ceased to busy itself; he was staring darkly at penury, humiliation, ostracism—not thinking of them or feeling them, but just contemplating them with a stupid, mental gaze.
Gradually a sense of his surroundings began to return to him. He became conscious that it was a street-lamp at which he was looking; that there was a dark little street before him; that there was a dim room behind him; and then from that room a low sound came to him—faint, exhausted, long-drawn sobs, as of a woman who has wept herself into quiet. He began to listen for them and count them involuntarily. Then they began to hurt him; each one seemed to stick something into his heart. At last he walked across almost mechanically, and laid his hand tentatively on her shoulder.
“It’s all right, Clemence!” he said huskily. “It’s all right, dear. After all, you know, you are my wife all right!” Hewas conscious of a vague idea that it was the supposition he had allowed that had cut her so cruelly.
There was another moment’s pause, and then Clemence slowly lifted her head and looked at him for the first time. Her face was white and exhausted-looking with her tears, and her eyes, luminous and inexpressibly mournful, seemed to look through the pale, good-looking young features above her into the poor cramped soul they hid.
“I?” she said. “What does it matter about me, Julian? It’s you! Oh, my dear, my dear, it’s you!”
“It—it’s awkward!” returned Julian gloomily; his consciousness of the prospect before him seemed to quicken and writhe at what he supposed to be her realisation of it. “It’s loss of everything practically, of course. One will be cut right and left, and where money is to come from——”
He was interrupted by a low cry. Clemence had drawn a little back as though to see him better, and was looking up at him with her delicate eyebrows drawn together in intense, painful perplexity and wonder.
“Oh, Julian!” she said, and her low voice had for the first time a ring of reproach in it. “Oh, Julian, it isn’t that, dear! It isn’t that! What does that matter?”
“What does it matter?” echoed Julian with an angry laugh. Her words, in the total want of comprehension, the total incapacity for sympathy with his position, to which they witnessed, seemed to him to throw into sudden, glaring relief the class distinction which lay between them; and the sense of it came upon him, jarring and overwhelming, like an earnest of all he had done for himself. “It matters a good deal, let me tell you, Clemence. It matters—as you can’t understand, you know! It matters just everything!”
“But—compared!” she said in a low, quick tone, a bright, pained light in her eyes. “I know—I know, of course, that there is a great deal I can’t understand. But—compared!”
“Compared with what, in Heaven’s name?” said Julian angrily.
“Compared with—yourself, Julian!” shecried, laying a tender, clinging touch on his arm. “Compared with your own truth! Oh, don’t you know it’s that, it’s only that that has been so dreadful to me—that made me feel as if my heart was breaking! It’s thinking that you’ve been false, dear! That you’ve said what’s not true, acted what’s not true! Oh, it’s that that I can’t bear for you, my dear, my dear!”
He stood looking down, not at her face, but at the worn, trembling hand holding his in such a clasp of love and shame—shame for him as he vaguely felt; suspended between wrath and a certain cold, creeping feeling which he could not analyse, but which seemed to be gradually turning him into a horrible shadow. It was an involuntary, unwilling concession to this feeling, as one might throw a sop to an on-coming, all-threatening monster, that he muttered awkwardly:
“I—I’m sorry I deceived you, Clemence.”
“Deceived me!” There was an emphasis on the pronoun which seemed to lift her far above him in its absolute, unconscious, self-abnegation. “Me! Oh, it isn’t that! It doesn’t matter who it is or how many peopleit is! It’s the thing itself. It’s the meaning to yourself, and—and Heaven above! Julian, dear, you believe in Heaven above, don’t you?” Clemence’s creed was very simple; the attitude of the spirit which “Heaven above” had given her was not an affair of many words. “You know it’s oneself that matters. It isn’t what one has or the friends one has that make the difference—they’re not anything really. It’s oneself!”
She paused a moment, but he did not speak. He was still looking heavily down at the hand on his arm, and she went on again, her voice trembling with earnestness.
“Julian, there’s that at the bottom of everything in all kinds of life! It doesn’t matter whether one’s rich or poor, it doesn’t matter whether people think well of us—we can’t always make them, and we can’t all be rich. But we can all be good, dear. Heaven means us all to be good, don’t you think? Oh, if it didn’t, if it wasn’t that that mattered most of all down at the bottom, what would the world come to be like? And why should anybody go on living!”
Julian Romayne was very young. Fardown in his nature; in that awful inextricable tangle which, because it is so awful and so far beyond his reach, man struggles so insanely to reduce to his poor little level, to define, and label, and explain away, but which remains in spite of him a mystery of God; there was that strange affinity for noble thoughts and things which is the sign manual of His part in man, never wholly withdrawn by its Creator from the earth. It is in the young that that instinctive affinity is most easily reached and touched; and the simple, ignorant, unworldly words—words which could have touched in Julian no reasoning powers—were the medium which reached it now. Clemence had reached it more than once or twice before, and its feeble stirring in response had quickened it, and rendered it, in some poor and infinitesimal degree, sensitive to her touch.
He drew his arm sharply from those clinging, pleading hands, and turned away, leaning his arm on the mantelpiece so that she could not see his face. That cold, creeping feeling which seemed to sap all his reality had stolen over his whole personality, and he was heldnumb and paralysed in the clutch of an all-dominating question. Was it really as she said? His own life, his own world had faded into shadows as of a very dream. Strange, distorted shapes, conceptions so new to him that they wore a weird and ghostly air of unreality, seemed to be rising round him, pressing him into nothingness. Was it as she said? He did not speak, and after a moment Clemence went on; very tenderly, very delicately, as though in her intense sympathy and feeling for the suffering she ascribed to him by intuition, she dreaded to hurt him further; diffidently and with difficulty, because she was so little used to clothing in words all that to her was most real and vital in life.
“You—you must think of the future, dear. I know—I know that you can hardly bear to look at the past, but it—it is past! It hasn’t been you, really! I know it can’t have been! And—it will wear out of your life at last, dear, by—by truth. You will tell your mother that we are married”—a scarlet, agonising colour dyed her face for an instant—“perhaps you have told heralready? And perhaps, perhaps she will forgive you! If not—why if not, perhaps the—the pain will help to wear it out, my dearest.”
Her voice and the expression of the sweet, white face she lifted to him had changed subtly as she spoke. Her great pity and sorrow for him had developed a strange, new phase in her love for him. It had become tenderer, deeper. She had lost her reverence for him, but her love had triumphed over the loss, and through the pain and victory it had won higher ground, and become the love of sympathy and consolation.
But Julian hardly heard her last words. His attention had stopped, as it were, at those preceding them:
“You will tell your mother that we are married!”
Had Clemence not told, then? Was it possible that she had not mentioned it; that his mother did not know even now; that there was still hope?
The thought arrested the current of his thoughts in an instant. The possibilities the thought suggested; all the tangible, definiteadvantages it held; swept over those faintly quickened perceptions in a sudden wave of excitement, numbing them on the instant. The things which had been realities to him as long as he had had any consciousness, took to themselves substance once again and pressed about him. Life and the world resumed their normal complexion, and he lifted his head quickly and turned.
“Do you mean—have you seen my mother? Whom have you seen? Do you mean that you have said nothing?”
There was a pause as Clemence looked at him for a moment confused and startled, it seemed, by his manner. There was a wonderful, unconscious touch of dignity in her gentle manner as she answered:
“I never thought of it!”
“Was it my mother?”
“No; a gentleman.”
Julian moved abruptly with a low exclamation, and began to walk rapidly up and down the little room absorbed in eager thought. Clemence watched him with a puzzled, surprised look in her eyes, and a little touch of reserve creeping over her face.At last he stopped suddenly and began to speak, looking anywhere but on her face.
“Look here, Clemence, I’m afraid this sounds an awfully blackguardly thing to suggest, but you’ll see it’s necessary. It won’t do for me to tell my mother just yet. To tell you the truth she is frightfully set against my marrying. I am done for all round as soon as she knows, and it would be just cutting our own throats to tell her—yet, you know. You see,” he went on hurriedly, evidently anxious to prevent her speaking, “you see, as I am I’ve got very good prospects. In a few years, if all goes well, I shall be making heaps of money at the bar—a fellow that is well known, you know, can always get on—and then it will be all right and simple. Meanwhile, you see, I have plenty of money, and we can be together almost as much as we like, quietly, you know. Whereas if we burst it all up now we shall just starve and be out of it all our lives. Don’t you see?”
He stopped awkwardly, but for the moment he had no answer. Clemence had listened to him, the expression of her facechanging from wonder to incredulity, from incredulity to agony, from agony to the look of a creature stricken to death. She lifted her hand in the silence slowly and heavily to her head. Julian saw the gesture, though he could not see her face, and its heaviness somehow increased his discomfort.
“You see it’s only common sense!” he said impatiently.
“You mean that you want to go on living a double life—that you don’t want, don’t mean to try, to do right!” The voice was not like the voice of the Clemence he knew. It was low, distinct, and stern, and she spoke very slowly.
“I mean that I don’t want to ruin myself out of hand!” he said harshly. “Don’t be foolish, Clemence!”
“Ruin!” she said in the same tone. “You don’t know what real ruin means! I don’t know how to make you understand; I’m not clever enough. But I can tell you just this! I would rather die than have it as you say. For your sake, not for my own only, I would rather die. Until your mother knows the truth I won’t even see you or speakto you again. As to taking a penny of your money, I would starve first.”
Her tone, vibrating with intensity of meaning, was quite low. She was not declaiming or protesting. She was simply making her stand at a proposition so terrible to her that it had carried her beyond the bounds of emotion. For the moment Julian was startled and aghast.
“You don’t mean that!” he said. “Clemence, that’s nonsense!”
“It’s truth!” she said steadily. “You must choose!”
She was standing facing him, her slight figure erect and straight as he had never seen it. Her face was white as death, and set into strange, fine lines quite new to it; all the softness about her mouth was being gradually pressed out as the latent strength developed, as it seemed, with every breath she drew. It was as though the crisis, in its sudden demand upon her forces, was transforming her as she grappled with it; transforming her into a woman before whom Julian felt himself shrink into utter contemptibility. He took the only means heknew to reassert himself, and lost his temper deliberately.
“Well, then, I do choose!” he cried violently. “You’re a foolish girl, who doesn’t understand, Clemence, and by-and-by you’ll own I was right! As to not taking my money, that’s absurd, you know! You must! But I’m not going to ruin both of us for absurd fancies!”
He stopped, hoping she would answer and give him some advantage, but she stood silent, gazing at him with stern, searching eyes, as though she were trying in vain to reconcile the man before her with the man she loved. Julian felt her gaze though he could not see it, and he went on hotly, trying, as it were, to gather round him the rags of his old authority and superiority.
“You don’t suppose, Clemence,” he said, “that I propose this because I like it? It’s not a nice thing for a man to propose to his wife, I can tell you. I should have hoped you would have understood that. But after all it’s only for a time, and it won’t make any real difference to you—things will be just as they have been. And if youcan’t feel about it as I do, you must remember it’s because you’ve got a great deal to learn still, and you must believe that what I say is right. Anyway, you’re my wife, you know, and you’re bound to obey me!”
“I’m bound to obey you in all things that it’s right you should ask. But I’m not bound to do what would be dragging you down and me too. I can’t make you do what’s right; it wouldn’t do you any good for me to tell your mother; but until you do, it will be as I said.”
“Then it’s you who part us,” he cried passionately. “You don’t love me, Clemence! You can’t ever have loved me!”
There was a moment’s pause, and then her answer came in a strange, still voice.
“I do love you!” she said. “I love you so that I would give my life to blot out what you’ve said!”
A dead silence—a silence in which Julian Romayne seemed to feel something pulling and straining at his heart-strings. Then with a reckless, desperate effort he tore himself away from its influence and spoke.
“It can’t be helped, then,” he saidfiercely and defiantly. “You must go your own way until you come to your senses! Some day, perhaps, you’ll be grateful to me for refusing to make fools of us! I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Clemence! You make me almost sorry that I ever saw you. Now, look here; I’ve put it to you from every point of view; I’ve tried as hard as ever I can to make you understand, and if you won’t, you won’t! As to the money, of course, I can’t hear of your not taking that. I shall send you so much regularly every month—it won’t be very much either, but it’ll be enough to keep you—and, of course, you’ll have to spend it. But you need not be afraid that I shall want to see you again until you come to a more sensible frame of mind.”
He waited, but again there was no answer, and again some influence from her still presence discomfited him, and made him hurry on.
“I’m going now!” he said roughly. “Good-bye, Clemence!” He made a movement as though to go, without a tenderer farewell, but quite suddenly his heart failedhim. He turned again and took her into his arms impulsively and tenderly. “Clemmie!” he said brokenly. “I say—Clemmie!”
Her arms were round his neck pressing him closely and more closely, with a desperate, agonised pressure, and a long, clinging kiss was on his cheek.
“Don’t keep me waiting long,” she whispered hoarsely. “You will do it at last. I know, I know you will. But—don’t keep me waiting long!”
She released him and drew herself gently out of his arms, and Julian turned and stumbled out of the room and down the stairs, the most consciously contemptible young man in London, and with no strength to act upon his consciousness.
“Youadmire it, Mrs. Romayne? It strikes you as true? Ah, but that is very charming of you!”
A confused babel of voices—that curious, indefinable sound which is shrill, though its shrillness would be most difficult to trace; harsh, though it arises from the voices of well-bred men and women; and absolutely unmeaning—was filling the two rooms from end to end; and the soft light diffused by cleverly arranged lamps fell upon groups of smartly dressed women and men equally correct in their attire on male lines. It was about five o’clock, not a pleasant time on a gusty, sleety November afternoon if Nature is allowed to have her own way; but inside these rooms it was impossible to do anything but ignore nature; the air was so soft andwarm—faintly scented, too, with flowers—and the colour so rich and delicate. The rooms themselves were a curious hybrid between the fashionable and the artistic; that is to say, they were not arranged according to any conventional tenets, and there were various really beautiful hangings, “bits” of old brass, “bits” of old oak, and “bits” of old china about. But all these, though very cleverly arranged, were distinctly “posed.” The larger of the two rooms was obviously a studio; rather too obviously, perhaps, since the fact was impressed by a certain superabundance of artistic prettinesses. Charming little arrangements in hangings, palms, or what not, “composed” at every turn with the constantly shifting groups. The unconventionalism, in short, was as carefully arranged as was the attitude of the host of the hour as he stood leaning against a large easel, mysteriously curtained, talking to Mrs. Romayne. He was a painter, and a clever painter; he had married a clever wife, and as a result of the working of their respective brains towards the same goal hehad become the fashion. “Everybody” went to “the Stormont-Eades’ affairs,” whether the affair in question was a little dinner, a little “evening,” or a little tea-party—Mrs. Stormont-Eade always affixed the diminutive; consequently everybody was obliged to go; a fact which if carefully thought out, will lead to some rather curious conclusions. And the little tea-parties, particularly in the winter, were considered particularly desirable functions. One of these tea-parties was going on now.
Mr. Stormont-Eade himself was a tall, good-looking man who had nearly succeeded, by dint of careful attention to his good points, in conveying the impression that he was a handsome man. He had fine eyes, really remarkably fine, as he was well aware, when they were earnest, and they were looking now with a deep intensity of meaning, which was their normal expression, into Mrs. Romayne’s face; his mouth was not so admirable except when he smiled, and consequently his thin lips were slightly curved; his figure was too thin, and the touch ofpicturesqueness about his pose and about his velvet coat redeemed it; but his closely-curling hair was cut short and trim, and showed the excellent shape of his head to the best advantage. He had come up to Mrs. Romayne only a minute or two before at the conclusion of a song; a very little very fashionable music was always a feature of the Stormont-Eades’ entertainments, and “good people”—the phrase in this connection representing clever professionals possessed of the social ambition of the day—were glad to sing or play for them; and she had begun to speak of a little picture of his which was one of the themes of the moment.
Mrs. Romayne was dressed from head to foot in carefully harmonised shades of green—green was the colour of the season—with a good deal of soft black fur about it. Her bonnet became her to perfection; her face was so animated that in the soft light a certain haggard sharpness of contour was hardly perceptible. Her smiles and laughs as she exchanged greetings and chat were always ready; if they left her eyes quiteuntouched, her attention was apparently as free and disengaged as were the gay little gestures with which she emphasized her talk. There was absolutely nothing about her which could have suggested to the ordinary observer anything beyond the surface of finished society woman which she was presenting so brightly to the world. But on the previous evening she had had a note from Falconer, written immediately after his interview with “the girl,” telling her only that he was to have a second interview, and would see her on the following day. That day was now drawing to a close, and she had as yet heard nothing further.
“It enchanted me!” she said now. “But then your things always do enchant me, you know! By-the-bye, people say that you are going to do a big picture. I hope that is not so? Little bits are so much more fascinating.”
Mr. Stormont-Eade smiled—the tender, comprehending smile that was one of his charms.
“No, it is not true,” he said. “One isso fettered with a large work, but little things represent the inspiration, the feeling of the moment. If they have any value, it lies in that.” They had a distinct financial value, though it is doubtful whether the dealers would have recognised the source.
“Ah, the feeling of the moment!” said Mrs. Romayne with pretty fervour. “That is what one so seldom gets, isn’t it? And it is so delightful!”
Then she broke off with a charming smile to shake hands with Mrs. Halse, brought by the constant shifting of the groups into her vicinity. Mrs. Romayne was an excellent listener, and reputed a good talker, though she had probably never said a witty or a clever thing in her life; but she was never exclusive; she was always, so to speak, more or less in touch with the whole room, and ready to extend her circle.
“I’ve been making for you for hours,” she said gaily. “Ah!” The word was an exclamation of pleased surprise as she suddenly became aware of a girl’s figure behind Mrs. Halse; a girl’s figure much better dressedthan had been its wont, and very erect, with a latent touch of triumph and excitement on the pretty face. It was Miss Hilda Newton.
“I did not know you were in London,” went on Mrs. Romayne, holding out her hand with gracious cordiality.
“She is staying with me on most important business,” said Mrs. Halse. Mrs. Halse had accommodated herself to her increasing portliness by this time, and had apparently thought it necessary to increase the exuberance of her manner proportionately. Her voice, and the laugh with which she spoke, were equally loud. “Trousseau, you must know. She is to be married directly after Christmas. And when I heard it I wrote and said she’d better come straight to me, and then I could see that she got the right things. Of course, as she’s to live in town, she must have the right things, you know.”
“Of course,” assented Mrs. Romayne gaily and airily. “And you are very busy?”
The last words were addressed to Hilda Newton, whose hand Mrs. Romayne still held.There was a curious mixture of resentment, defiance, and triumph in the girl’s face as she confronted the suave, smiling countenance of the elder woman, which just touched her voice as she answered:
“Very busy indeed!”
She was conscious of a desire so to frame her answer as to suggest the position in society which was to be hers on her marriage, but she could think of no words in which to do it.
“And where is Master Julian?” broke in Mrs. Halse. Delicacy and tact had never been more than names with her; as her fibre, mental and physical, coarsened, she was beginning to think it quite unnecessary to maintain even a bowing acquaintance with these qualities; and her strident voice expressed a great deal that Hilda Newton would like to have expressed. “He must be made to come and offer his congratulations—or perhaps Hilda will compound with him for a particularly handsome wedding-present. He knows Talbot Compton, of course? Otherwise, they must be introduced.”
“He is not here this afternoon, I’m sorry to say,” returned his mother, smiling. Mr. Stormont-Eade, if he could have recognised “the feeling of the moment” in this particular crisis, might have learnt a lesson on several points. “He has turned into a tremendously hard worker, you know. An astonishing fact, isn’t it? I tell him he has secret intentions of taking the bench by storm.”
She was laughing and looking idly away across the room, when quite suddenly she stopped. Just inside the doorway, shaking hands with Mrs. Stormont-Eade, and having evidently just arrived, was Dennis Falconer, and as she caught sight of him there flashed into her eyes, through all the superficial brightness of her face, something which was like nothing but a sheer agony of hunger. It came in an instant, and it was gone in an instant. As he turned away from his hostess and caught her eye, she made him a light gesture and smile of greeting, and turned again to Mrs. Halse; and Mrs. Halse was not even conscious of a pause.
“It’s almost too astonishing, don’t you know!” said that vociferous lady with a laugh. “I don’t half believe in these sudden transformations. If I were you I should make him produce his work every night for inspection. It’s my belief he is getting into mischief. These hard-working young men are such frauds!”
She laughed loudly, and at that moment accident brought Falconer, on his way across the room, to a standstill a few paces from her. He had evidently intended to pass the little group, but Mrs. Halse frustrated his intention. With a peremptory gesture she claimed his attention, and as he drew nearer, she said boisterously:
“Now, don’t you agree with me, Mr. Falconer? Aren’t these good, hard-working boys the greatest scamps going?”
Falconer was looking very severe and impassive; he shook hands with Mrs. Halse, and then turned perforce to Mrs. Romayne, taking her hand with an almost solemn gravity, which contrasted sharply with the careless gaiety with which she extended it.
“I didn’t expect to see you this afternoon,” she said lightly. “Stupid of me, though; every one comes to the Stormont-Eades’.”
“I did not expect to meet you,” he answered sternly. “I have called at Queen Anne Street.”
He had been astounded at not finding her at home. He was distinctly of opinion that afternoon teas were not for a woman who should be sitting in sackcloth and ashes, and the sight of her had shocked not only his sense of propriety, but some deeper sense of the reality of the crisis at which he was assisting. Perhaps Mrs. Romayne understood that her presence at the “little tea-party” scandalised him, for there was a strange, bitter smile on her lips before she turned to Mrs. Halse, and said, with a rather hard, strained ring in her gay voice:
“You’ll get no support from my cousin, I assure you, Mrs. Halse. He was a most praiseworthy——”
Her voice was drowned in a ringing chord on the piano, and as the prelude to a song filled the room, she made a mockinggesture expressive of the impossibility of making herself heard; and turning her face towards the singer, as she stood by Falconer’s side, she composed herself to listen. Her face grew rather set and fixed in its lines of animated attention as the song went on, and when it ceased, her comments were of the indefinitely delighted order. She made them very easily and brightly, however, and then she turned carelessly to Falconer.
“Are you thinking of staying long?” she said lightly. “I rather want to talk to you, do you know—this unfortunate man is my man of business, you must know, Mrs. Halse—and I thought perhaps that I could drive you somewhere.”
“I shall be happy to go whenever you like,” was the grave answer.
Mrs. Romayne laughed lightly.
“Oh, I don’t want to take you away immediately!” she said. “You’ve only just come, I’m afraid. In a little while!”
She smiled and nodded to him, and to Mrs. Halse and Miss Newton, and moved away to speak to some other people.
About a quarter of an hour later Falconer,who was a somewhat grim ornament to society in the interval, saw her coming smiling towards him.