“Ready?” she said. “That’s very nice of you! Suppose we go, then?”
He followed her out of the room and down the stairs, her flow of comments and laughter never ceasing; put her into her carriage, and got in himself.
“Home!” she said sharply to the coachman. The door banged, they rolled away into the darkness and the wet, and her voice stopped suddenly.
They rolled along for a few minutes in total silence. Shut up alone with her like that, the isolation and quiet following so suddenly on the crowd and noise of a moment before, Falconer’s only conscious feeling was one of almost stupid discomfort. Her sudden silence, too, had an indefinable but very unpleasant effect upon him. At last he said with awkward displeasure:
“I was going to write to you! I——”
She lifted her hand quickly and stopped him.
“When we get in!” she said in a quick,tense voice. “You can come in? It is just six. It need not take long.”
“I am quite at your service.”
She leant back in her corner with a sharp breath of relief, and neither moved nor spoke again until the carriage drew up at her own door.
She opened the door with a latchkey, and moved quickly across the hall to the foot of the stairs, motioning to Falconer to follow her. Then she stopped abruptly and turned. A servant was just crossing the hall to the dining-room, where the preliminary preparation for a dinner-party could be seen.
“Is Mr. Julian in?” said Mrs. Romayne sharply.
“Not yet, ma’am.”
“If he should come in before I go to dress, tell him that I am engaged.”
She turned again and went on to the drawing-room.
“Now!” she said in a breathless peremptory monosyllable, facing Falconer as he shut the door. She did not attempt to sit down herself or to invite Falconer to do so. Allher senses seemed to be absorbed in the desperate anxiety with which her face was sharp and haggard. She looked ten years older than she had looked in Mr. Stormont-Eade’s studio. Falconer answered her directly with no preliminary formalities.
“I saw the—the young woman yesterday,” he began; “but I was unable to bring about any arrangement. I gave her twenty-four hours for consideration, and this afternoon I called to see her again.”
“Yes, yes!”
“I found that she had left the house this morning, leaving no address.”
“Left!” The erect, tense figure confronting him staggered back a step as though a heavy blow had fallen upon it, and Mrs. Romayne caught desperately at the back of a chair. “Left—and you don’t know where she is? You’ve settled nothing? We’ve no hold over her!”
The words had come from her in hoarse, gasping sentences, each one growing in intensity until the last vibrated with an agony of very despair, but Falconer’s face grewgrimmer as he listened. How it was he could not have told, but a strange, uncomfortable remembrance of the girl he had seen on the previous day, which had haunted him at more or less inopportune moments ever since, seemed to rise now and accentuate all his usual antagonism to the woman who was talking of her.
“I think you need not distress yourself,” he said stiffly. “Perhaps I had better tell you at once that your son knows no more of her whereabouts than we do.”
The drawn look of despair relaxed on Mrs. Romayne’s face; relaxed into an agony of questioning doubt.
“Doesn’t know?” she said sharply. “Julian doesn’t know?”
“The landlady of the house,” continued Falconer, “a very unpleasant and loquacious woman, was eager to inform me that on the arrival of your son yesterday afternoon, about an hour after I saw the young woman, there was a quarrel between them and that he left the house in anger. To-day, very shortly before my arrival, he returned and was astonished tofind that the young woman was gone. He demanded her address, and was furious to find that it was not known. I think there is no room for doubt that the young woman has left him!”
The colour was coming back to Mrs. Romayne’s face slowly and in burning patches, and her clutch on the chair was almost convulsive.
“Left him!” she said under her breath. “Left him!” There was a moment’s pause, and then she said in a harsh, high-pitched, concentrated tone: “Do you mean—for good? Why? Why should she?”
“I am sorry to have to say it to you,” said Falconer slowly, “but I fear the case against your son is even blacker than it appears on the surface. I think it more than possible that he deceived the young woman.”
The slowly-formed conviction—and it became conviction only as he spoke the words—was the result of that vague and disturbing impression made on Falconer on the preceding day by “the young woman.” It had worked slowly and almost without consciousness onhis part, but it had refused to die out, and it had attained the only fruition possible to it in his last words.
“And you believe that she is really gone? That there is nothing more to fear from her?”
It was the same absorbed, intent tone, and her eyes, fixed eagerly on Falconer now, were hard and glittering. The terrible significance of his words, with all the weight of tragedy they held, seemed to have passed her by, to have no existence for her. It was as though the sense in her which should have responded to it was numbed or non-existent. And Falconer, scandalised and revolted, replied sternly:
“I think you need have no anxiety on that score. She has disappeared of her own free will, and your son, upon reflection, will probably be glad to accept so easy a solution of what he doubtless recognises by this time as a troublesome complication.” There was a rigid and utterly antipathetic condemnation of Julian in his voice; he had judged the young man, and sentenced him as vicious to the core,and for all his experience, he held too rigidly to his narrow conception to consider the possible effect upon youth and passion of so sudden and total a thwarting. “My only fear,” he continued, “is that serious injustice has been done. The young woman is by no means the kind of young woman I was led to believe her. I have grave doubts as to whether it was not our duty to enforce a marriage upon your son, instead of negativing the suggestion.”
The words were probably rather more than he would have been prepared to stand to had they been put to a practical issue, and he had spoken them, though he hardly knew it, more from a severe desire to arouse what he called in his own mind “some decent feeling” in the woman to whom he spoke, than from any other reason. From that point of view they failed completely. It was a bright light of triumph that flashed into Mrs. Romayne’s eyes as she said quickly, and in an eager, vibrating tone, which seemed less an answer to him personally than to the bare fact to which he had given words:
“Fortunately there is no more fear of that.”
The tall clock standing in a corner of the room chimed the three-quarters as she spoke, and she started as she heard it.
“It is a quarter to seven,” she said. “And I have people to dinner. You have nothing else to tell me, have you? Nothing to advise?”
“Nothing,” was the grim answer.
“You do not think—would it be a good thing, do you think, to have the girl traced so that we could always be sure?”
“You need take no further trouble in the matter, in my opinion. If you should observe anything in your son’s conduct to revive your uneasiness, the question must, of course, be reconsidered. You will observe him closely, no doubt.”
There was a moment’s curiously dead silence, and then it was broken by a strange half-laugh.
“No doubt!” said Mrs. Romayne. “No doubt!”
Another pause, and then she turned and glanced at the clock.
“I must go,” she said. “Thank you.”
She held out her hand, and he just touched it as though conventionality alone compelled him.
“I have considered myself bound in duty in the matter,” he said stiffly. “Good night!”
No touch of artificiality returned to her manner even in dismissing him. It remained hard and practical. Her intense absorption in the subject of their interview did not yield by so much as a hair’s breadth, and she remained absolutely impervious to any thought of the man before her. His slight, cold touch of her hand, the sternness of his obvious condemnation of her, were evidently absolutely unobserved by her.
“Good night!” she returned; and as he left her without another word, she crossed the room rapidly and went upstairs to dress for dinner.
The dinner-party of that evening was unanimously declared by the guests to be quite the most delightful Mrs. Romayne had ever given. The dinner, the flowers, all the arrangements, were perfection, of course; buteven when this is the case the “go” of a dinner-party may be a variable or even a non-existent quality; and it was the “go” of this particular occasion that was so remarkable. All the component parts of the party seemed to be animated and fused into one harmonious whole by the spirits of the hostess and host. Mrs. Romayne was so charming, so bright, so full of vivacity; Julian, who put in his appearance only just before the announcement of dinner, was so boyish, so lively, so ingenuous. He was a little pale when he first appeared, and the lady he took down to dinner reproached him with working too hard; but as the evening wore on he gained colour. The relations between himself and his mother had always been quite one of the features of Mrs. Romayne’s entertainments, but those relations had never been more charmingly accentuated than they were to-night.
Until he came gaily in among her guests that evening, Julian and his mother had not met since that second interview which had prompted her summons to Falconer. Julian had dined out on both the intervening evenings, and it was easily to be arranged underthese circumstances, if either of the pair so willed it, that forty-eight hours should go by without their coming in contact with one another. And an onlooker aware of the circumstances of their last meeting, and watching the mother and son through the evening now, might have reflected that the laws of heredity seldom operate exclusively through one parent.
“Good night, dear Mrs. Romayne! Such a delightful evening! How I do envy you that dear boy of yours! It’s the greatest pleasure to see you two together.”
The speaker was a good-natured old lady, and she had thought it no harm to put into words what her fellow-guests had only thought. She was the last departure, and Mrs. Romayne followed her to the top of the stairs, with a laughing deprecation of the words which was very fascinating, and then turned back into the drawing-room with another “good night,” as Julian prepared to attend the old lady to her carriage.
The hall door shut with a bang, and then there was a moment’s pause. The mother inthe drawing-room above, and the son in the hall below, stood for an instant motionless. A subtle change had come over Mrs. Romayne’s face the instant she found herself alone. It had sharpened slightly, and an eager, haggard anticipation was striving to express itself in her eyes, only to be resolutely veiled. But to Julian’s face as he stood with his hand still resting on the hall door there came a great and sudden alteration. All the light and gaiety died out of it before a wild, fierce expression of rebellion and distaste, repressed almost instantly by a pale, sullen look of determination. He moved, and Mrs. Romayne, hearing his step, moved slightly also; he came up the stairs, and as he came he seemed to force back into his face the easy smile it had worn all the evening.
“It’s been a great success, hasn’t it, dear?” he said lightly as he crossed the drawing-room threshold.
“A great success!” she said in the same tone—though in her case it rang a little thin.
An instant’s silence followed, and then shelaid her hand airily on his arm. Her lips were white and dry with agitation, and she knew it; she wondered desperately whether her voice rang as unnaturally in Julian’s ears as it did in her own, as she said with what she meant for perfect ease:
“Dear boy, let us say our final words upon that wretched business to-night and wake up clear of it to-morrow. May I be happy about you? That’s all there is to be said, isn’t it?”
She tried to smile, but she knew the effort was a ghastly failure, and again she wondered whether Julian saw. She need not have feared! Julian was busy with his own histrionic difficulties, and had neither sight nor hearing for her.
“You may be quite happy, little mother!” he said, and the frank tenderness of his tone and manner were only very slightly over-accentuated. “I’ve made up my mind to do as you wish, and I won’t make such a fool of myself again!”
They were standing close together, looking each into the other’s face, and he patted her hand as it lay on his arm as he finished.Yet between them, parting them as seas of ice could not have parted them, there lay a shadow beneath which love itself survives only as the cruellest form of torture; the shadow of the unspoken with its chill, unmoveable dead weight against which no man or woman can prevail.
The hand on Julian’s arm trembled a little. The terrible presence, which is never recognised except by those to whom its chill is as the chill of death, was making itself vaguely felt about his mother’s heart. She let her eyes stray from his face with a painful, tremulous movement, and her fingers tightened round his arm.
“It is all over?” she murmured in a low voice. “It is all over, really?”
As her self-command failed her his seemed to strengthen. He patted her hand again reassuringly, and said, confidently:
“Yes, dear, indeed! I’ve only got to beg your pardon, and I do that with all my heart.”
He stooped and kissed her tenderly, and as he did so she seemed to rally her forces with a tremendous effort. She returned hiskiss with a pretty, effusive embrace, though her lips were as cold as ice.
“I grant it freely,” she said. “And if I’ve felt obliged to be—well, shall we say rather autocratic?—for once in a way, you must forgive me, too, eh?”
But the unspoken, terrible reality as it is, was to be touched by no such ghastly travesty. Julian’s laugh was only a firmer echo of his mother’s gay artificiality of tone, but as she heard it her lips turned whiter still.
“That’s of course,” he said. “Of course.”
“Then it’s all settled!” she responded gaily. “We’ll draw a veil over the past from to-night, and behave better in the future. Good night, dear boy!” She kissed him again, patted him lightly on the shoulder and moved away. On the threshold she stopped, turned, and blew him a kiss over her shoulder. “Forgiveness and oblivion from to-night,” she said; and there was a strange, defiant gaiety in her voice.
With another smile and a nod she went upstairs, and as she went her face grewlined and drawn, like the face of an old woman, and the defiance that had lurked in her voice stared out of her eyes, half-wild and reckless.
Itwas a bright spring day; one of those days on which the freshness and renewal of life which only spring knows, and for the sake of which even the cold monotony of winter is endurable, seem to be in the very air, and to radiate with the light itself. Even in London, where nature’s broadest effects, only, can be felt, there was a sense of exuberance which was almost excitement. The sun shone with a brightness which seemed to shed oblivion over past darkness. The air was quickening and stirring with vague and limitless possibilities.
It is rather a notable arrangement which makes the quickening of life in one of the least natural systems in the world, London society, simultaneous with nature’s great awakening. It presents a suggestion ofcombined travesty, patronage, and unconscious testimony to that affinity between man and nature which nothing can wholly destroy, which, if worked out with a certain amount of latitude to a fantastic imagination, will have a rather bewildering effect upon the focus of things in general. But it is nevertheless a fact that on this particular day in May very many of the impulses stirring in nature had their strangely distorted counterparts in the impulses of society. Society, like nature, had discarded its winter garments, its winter habits; society, like nature, was restless with fresh beginnings, fresh hopes, fresh tendencies. The resemblance lay on the surface; the contrast was farther to seek.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, and a certain section of society—a gathering, at least, very fairly representative of a certain section—was surging in a good-tempered, aimless, demoralised way in a very fashionable church in Kensington. Some of the demoralisation was due to the occasion—a smart wedding—but the gaiety and the general air of readiness to be pleased whichprevailed were as certainly the outcome of the wider spirit of the hour as were the smart spring gowns and the quantities of spring flowers carried or worn by the women. The bridal party had left the church and a general exodus was in progress; progress rendered rather slow by reason of the difficulties attendant on the bringing together of carriages and owners, and involving a considerable crush inside the church door. In the middle of this crush, allowing himself to be pushed and drifted along towards the door, was a man who was apparently too fully occupied in casting keen, comprehensive and reconnoitring looks about him, and in returning the gestures of greeting and welcome which returned his glances on all sides, to take much heed as to the manner or direction of the movement imposed upon him by the moving crowd. It was Marston Loring, and as he finally emerged into the air he was lightly clapped on the shoulder by Lord Garstin, who, a few yards in front of him during their compressed passage out of the building, had waited for him on the pavement.
“Glad to see you back, Loring!” he said.“Heard last night of your arrival. How are you?”
“Not sorry to be back,” returned Loring nonchalantly, as he shook hands. “I’ve come to the conclusion, though, in the course of the last half-hour, that six months is a mere nothing!”
“Are you walking round to the house?” asked Lord Garstin. “So am I. Let me have your news as we go.”
Marston Loring had spent the winter at the Cape. His departure had been alluded to among his smart acquaintances as “a sudden affair” more or less indefinitely connected in their minds with that “business” of which Loring was understood to be a devotee. To Loring himself it had been by no means a sudden thing. That is to say, the necessity for it had been gradually growing up about him in his professional life much against his will, though it had reached a crisis somewhat unexpectedly. He had been absent six months, and this was, practically, his social reappearance; but looking at him as he turned into the street with Lord Garstin, it would have been difficult to believe that he hadbeen away at all; far less that he had passed through any striking experiences of men and life. His keen, cynical, unpleasant face was entirely unaltered; his manner was perfectly calm and unmoved. If he had his observations to make on his return, if the result of those observations was rather exciting than indifferent to him, interest and emotion were still entirely outside his pose.
The talk between the two men, however, as they passed along the streets was such talk as passes when one of the two is occupied in picking up dropped threads, and the other is well calculated, and well satisfied, to help him in the process. In his heart of hearts—if such a spot could have been reached in him—Lord Garstin would probably have confessed to little personal liking for Loring; his cordiality was the result of considerably involved workings of social politics. Just at this moment in particular, with the prestige fresh upon him of sundry smart magazine articles on Cape affairs which he had sent home from time to time, and which had been a good deal talked about,Marston Loring was distinctly a man to be noticed and encouraged.
Details connected with the wedding at which they had just assisted were naturally the first topics that presented themselves. It was Hilda Newton’s wedding; she had been married with much circumstance from Mrs. Halse’s house; and, before Loring left England, it had been said that she was to be married at Christmas at her own home in Yorkshire. About a month before the day fixed for the wedding, however, the aunt with whom she lived had died; the wedding had perforce been postponed, and when it became possible to consider another date, Mrs. Halse—in the absence of any near relation to the bride-elect—had taken the matter in hand.
“A very nice affair she’s made of it!” commented the elder man, as he finished his explanation, interspersed with discursive items of news of all sorts appertaining to society and its doings. “A little loud, of course; that goes without saying; and, really, nowadays it’s rather the thing! A pretty girl in her way, Mrs. Compton. And talkingof pretty girls, Maud Pomeroy looked well. They’ve been at Cannes since the end of January; only just back, like yourself.”
“So I heard,” answered Loring indifferently. “By-the-bye, I didn’t see the Romaynes. Aren’t they in town? I’ve not had time to look any one up yet, of course, but I thought I should see Julian to-day.”
Lord Garstin paused a moment before he answered.
“They were there,” he said. “I saw them come in. You’ll see them at the house, no doubt. The little woman’s been invisible for two or three days; ill—rather bad, somebody said.”
“Ill!” echoed Loring; and there was a genuine surprise in his tone which no information yet bestowed upon him had evoked. “Really!” He paused a moment, and then said, with his own peculiar smile: “And how is Julian? Does the hard-working line hold out?”
Lord Garstin smiled, more pleasantly than Loring had done, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Pretty well, I suppose,” he said. “Imet his chief the other night, and he was not enthusiastic. He’s a nice boy, though. You’re a great chum of his, aren’t you, Loring?” Loring nodded. “Then let me give you a hint to have an eye to his proceedings at the club. Cards are all very well, you know, but a boy like that should be moderate. You might be able to talk to him about it. I gave his mother a hint a few weeks ago. She’s a nice little woman. See what you can do, will you? I’ve got an idea that the foolish fellow doesn’t play only at the club.”
They were close to Mrs. Halse’s house as Lord Garstin finished, and his last words were spoken quickly and significantly. Loring answered only by a slight movement of his eyebrows, and then they were in the hall, being swept on by a seething crowd to pay their respects to the hostess and the bride.
“Loring, old man! How are you?”
Loring and Lord Garstin had been thrown together again after offering their congratulations, and they were standing side by side. Julian Romayne was close beside them, having come up from behind through the crowd unperceived,his hand eagerly, even demonstratively, outstretched.
Thinking things over in private later on, Marston Loring thought with a cynical smile that if he had not previously realised his six months’ absence, he might have done so when young Romayne’s voice fell on his ear. The change in it, though subtle, was so marked—to the man who had not heard it in course of transition—that it seemed to place years rather than months between their last meeting and the present, and it amply prepared Loring for what he saw when he turned round.
All alteration in manner and appearance consists rather in the accentuation or modification of original characteristics than in the developement of fresh ones; consequently it is very seldom noticed by a casual observer when intercourse is unbroken. To Lord Garstin and to dozens of his other acquaintances, Julian Romayne was still a “nice boy,” just as his good-looking features were still the young features of a year ago. To Loring the difference in face was as perceptible as was the difference in the young man’s wholepersonality, and the key-note of the difference lay in the absence of genuineness in both; in the deliberate assumption in the present of what had been natural and uncalculated in the past. Julian’s face had grown thinner and harder, and the boyish smile which was in consequence no longer perfectly harmonious was a trifle over-accentuated; while the bright, ingenuous glance of his eyes had grown extraordinarily like his mother. His manner was the gay, young manner which had gained him so many friends, with just that touch of exaggeration added to it which artificiality gives.
His cordiality as he wrung Loring’s hand was rather—like the demonstrative welcome in his voice—admirably adjusted to meet the requirements of the moment than an expression of the man himself. He was very carefully dressed, with a particularly dainty flower in his buttonhole.
“Back again at last, old fellow!” he said buoyantly. “By Jove, what an age it is since you went! And have you had a good time? When did you reach home? Tell us all about it! You’ve no idea how glad I amto have him back, Lord Garstin!” he added, greeting the elder man with a boyish, half-laughing apology for his exuberance which was very effective. His manner to Lord Garstin was as charming as ever; rather more so, indeed, as its frank deference had acquired a polish derived from sundry little artistic touches such as only calculation and intention can bestow.
“You seem to have managed very well without me!” returned Loring, with good-humoured satire. “The world seems to have used you pretty fairly, I’m glad to see! I’ve only been back about forty-eight hours or I should have looked you up, of course. I hope Mrs. Romayne is here?”
“I hope she is better?” said Lord Garstin, with genuine concern. “We have all been desolated over her illness!”
Julian, who had nodded lightly to Loring, turned to Lord Garstin with a bright, affectionate laugh—also very like his mother’s—and to Loring’s quick and alert perception an added touch of artificiality became apparent in his manner as he said:
“It has been desolating, hasn’t it? It’svery good of you to say so, though! Thanks, I am delighted to say she is all right again. We had a terrific encounter as to whether she should or should not come to the affair, and she carried the day.”
“Being perfectly restored to health she didn’t see the force of allowing herself to be shut up and coddled by a silly boy.”
The light, high-pitched voice, somewhat thin, as was the characteristic laugh with which the words were spoken, came from directly behind Julian, and as Loring, who had seen her coming, stepped forward to meet her, Mrs. Romayne, with a passing shake of her son’s arm, stretched out her hand with graceful cordiality.
“Welcome back, Mr. Loring,” she said. “I thought your first visit would have been to this good-for-nothing boy, but I am very glad to meet you here all the same. Lord Garstin,” she continued, as she turned to shake hands, “I believe you were enquiring after my health? I can’t allow good breath to be wasted in that way! I assure you it has been much ado about nothing, and I am perfectly, ridiculously well!”
She laughed as she finished, but a certain strained insistence had grown in her tone as she spoke, as though her desire to impress the fact she stated was strong enough to undermine her control of her voice.
But Loring, looking at her, was too fully occupied in criticising her appearance to notice the tone of her voice. There must have been some society fraud at the bottom of her reported illness, he decided, and that was why she was so anxious to pass it over; for certainly he had never seen her look better. She was admirably dressed, and she was very slightly and skilfully “made up”; a condition new to him in her, and one of which Marston Loring emphatically approved in women past their first youth. He told himself, moreover, that either his impression of her had been fainter than the reality, or else she had actually gained in what he could only define to himself—and define roughly and inadequately as he was well aware—as “grip.” There was the faintest flavour of nerve and concentration behind her admirable society manner, which gave it a wonderful piquancy in the eyes of her observer; a flavour whichwas evidently quite unconscious and involuntary, and had its origin in ingrain character. Loring admired power—of a certain class—in women.
In his interest in her expression, and his mental comments on it—determined, as they could not fail to be, by his own character—he was deceived by her cleverly arranged colouring into ignoring the almost painful thinness of her face; nor did he understand how hollow and sunken those glittering eyes would have been less cleverly treated.
She replied gaily to Lord Garstin’s gallant reception of her assurance, and then turned again to Loring with an easy interested question on his voyage.
“You are not the only returned traveller to-day!” she said, as he answered her. “By-the-bye, Julian, I was on the way to send you into the other room. There is some one there you will like to see!”
She smiled significantly up at him, patting his arm as she spoke, and Julian answered with boyish eagerness.
“In the other room?” he said. “Well, perhaps I ought just to say how do you do,you know, oughtn’t I? Loring, old fellow, we shall meet again, of course? What are you going to do afterwards? We might go down to the club together? And he must come and dine with us, mustn’t he, mother? Suppose you arrange it!” And with a comprehensive gesture and another, “I’ll just say how do you do, I think!” he disappeared in the crowd.
Mrs. Romayne turned with a shrug of her shoulders and a pretty expressive grimace to the two men.
“Poor boy!” she laughed. “What a thing it is to be young! And what a tantalising spectacle a wedding must be under the circumstances! A pretty wedding, wasn’t it?”
“An ugly wedding would be rather a refreshing change, don’t you think?” suggested Loring. “One has seen a good many pretty ones, if you come to think of it!”
“You’re not in the least changed by six months in Africa,” returned Mrs. Romayne, shaking her head at him prettily. “Now, tell me, really, have you had a good time out there?”
The question was friendly and interested after a society fashion, but the interest was entirely on the surface, and the little talk that followed about Loring’s experiences was joined in as a matter of course by Lord Garstin. It lasted until Mrs. Romayne said lightly:
“And now, I suppose, I ought to follow Julian’s example and ‘just say how do you do, don’t you know!’ I have only seen Mrs. Pomeroy in the distance as yet.”
She nodded, and moved away, stopping constantly on her way through the rooms to exchange scraps of conversation until she came to where Mrs. Pomeroy, amiable, inert, and smiling as though she had been sitting there for the last three months, was holding a small court. She welcomed Mrs. Romayne as she had welcomed all comers.
“So glad to see you,” she said placidly. “Such a long time! And how are you?”
“So immensely pleased to have you back again,” said Mrs. Romayne enthusiastically; there was a ring of genuineness in her voice which the fashionable exaggeration of her speech hardly warranted. “And you reallyonly arrived yesterday? Miss Newton—Mrs. Compton, I mean—was in a dreadful state of mind the other day lest her bridesmaid should fail her. And how is Maud? How sweet she looked! Quite the prettiest of the six. Where is she?”
“She was here just now,” returned Maud’s mother, as though that were quite a satisfactory answer to the question, and then as an afterthought she added vaguely: “I think she went to have an ice; your son took her.”
“Ah!” said Mrs. Romayne, smiling. “Then there is one perfectly happy person in the house!”
Mrs. Pomeroy only smiled with vague blandness; evidently the relations between the Romaynes and the Pomeroys had developed extensively before the departure of the latter for Cannes; and as evidently they were quite undisturbing to Miss Pomeroy’s mother.
“The bridesmaids’ dresses were very nice, I think,” she said, with amiable irrelevancy. “I was afraid they sounded trying. But it has been very pleasant altogether, hasn’t it?I wish we were going to stay in town. We had a shocking crossing.”
A keen attention had sprung into Mrs. Romayne’s eyes, and for an instant it seemed as though all the society gaiety died from her face, leaving exposed the hard, almost fiercely determined, foundation on which it was imposed. Then the foundation disappeared again.
“To stay in town!” she echoed lightly. “Why, are you not going to stay in town, dear Mrs. Pomeroy?”
“Unfortunately not,” was the answer. “My sister who lives in Devonshire—I think you have heard me speak of her?—is ill, and has begged me to go and see her. So we are going for a week or ten days, I am sorry to say.”
“I am sorry to hear,” said Mrs. Romayne, with pretty concern. “Just at the beginning of the season, too. It’s rather hard on poor Maud, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is hard on poor Maud, isn’t it?” was the undisturbed response.
There was a moment’s pause, and then under her paint a burning colour crept upto the very roots of Mrs. Romayne’s hair, and her eyes shone.
“My dear Mrs. Pomeroy,” she began gaily, but speaking rather quickly, too, and in a higher pitch than was usual with her, “don’t you remember, months ago, promising to lend me Maud for a little while? This is the very opportunity. Of course,” she lowered her voice a little, “I wouldn’t propose it if you did not know quite as well as I do how the land lies. But, as I think we two old mothers are of one mind on that point, I shan’t scruple. Let Maud come to me, if she will, while you are in Devonshire. Oh, of course it needn’t mean anything—it’s an old promise, you know, and she and I are great friends on our own account. Talk of the angels!” she went on gaily, nodding towards a slim, white figure coming towards them with Julian in its immediate wake.
Maud Pomeroy was looking as pretty and as proper as she had looked every day since she had emerged from the school-room, but there was a little flush on her face which was not habitual to her. She returned Mrs. Romayne’s greeting with the gratefulcordiality so pretty from a girl to an older woman, evinced as was her wont more by manner than by speech; and indeed Mrs. Romayne gave her little time for speech.
“Your mother has been telling me of this dreadful Devonshire business!” she said. “And I’ve had what I flatter myself is a happy thought! I want you to come to me, Maud, dear, while your mother is away. You know you promised ages ago to let yourself be lent to me for a little while, and this is the very opportunity, isn’t it?”
It would not have been “the thing” under the circumstances that any one of the trio should glance at Julian; consequently no one noticed the curious flash of expression that passed across his face as his mother spoke. Maud Pomeroy hesitated and looked dutifully at her mother.
“It’s very kind of Mrs. Romayne, Maud, dear, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Pomeroy with noncommittal amiability.
“It is sweet of her,” responded Maud prettily.
“Well, then, do let us consider it settled.I shall enjoy it of all things. When do you go, dear Mrs. Pomeroy? To-morrow week? Oh, it will be too tantalising to whisk Maud away when she had just begun to enjoy herself; wouldn’t it, Maud?”
Miss Pomeroy hesitated again, and the colour on her cheeks deepened by just a shade. She did not glance at her mother this time.
“Thank you very much,” she said at last. “But shan’t I be a nuisance to you?”
There was just the touch of charmingly conventional demur in her tone which made her submission seem, as all her actions seemed, the result of a gentle, easily influenced temperament. Mrs. Romayne assured her merrily that she would indeed be a terrible nuisance, but that she herself would do her best to bear it, and then rose, her eyes very bright.
“I must run away now,” she said. “I’m so delighted that we’ve settled it. Let me know when to expect you, then, dear. Good-bye, Mrs. Pomeroy; I’ll take every care of your child and return her when you wanther—only don’t let it be too soon! I needn’t take you away, sir,” she continued, turning to Julian. He had been standing by ever since that flash had passed over his face with an expression of eager interest in the discussion. “I dare say you’re not in any hurry. No, you need not even come downstairs with me. I see Mr. Loring. He’ll take care of me, I’m sure.”
Mr. Loring, who was within hearing, as the tone of the words implied—indeed, they were more than half addressed to him—came up promptly.
“For how long may I have that privilege?” he said.
She explained to him lightly as he shook hands with Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter, and then with another farewell and a pretty, affectionate “Au revoir!” to Julian, she turned away with him.
He put her into her carriage and she held out her hand with a gesture of thanks and farewell.
“Thanks,” she said; her tone and manner alike were very friendly and familiar in the exaggerated style which had certainly grownon her; and they seemed to imply something beyond the superficial interest to which she had kept, perforce, in her society intercourse with him. “It is so pleasant to see you again! When will you come to see me quietly? Before you are hard at work, you know! To-morrow, now? To-morrow happens to be a free day with me. Come to tea. Good bye!”
Tenminutes after Mrs. Romayne’s departure Julian was standing before Mrs. Pomeroy, his whole demeanour typical of the man who lingers, knowing that he should linger no longer.
“What a nuisance appointments are!” he said, with a boyish frankness of discontent which was irresistible. “I wish I could stay a little longer, but I know I oughtn’t.” He laughed quite ruefully, and fixed a pair of ardent eyes on Miss Pomeroy’s demurely averted face. “It’s been such an awfully jolly affair, hasn’t it? And it’s so awfully jolly to have you in town again”—this, with delightful deference, to Mrs. Pomeroy. “Well, I really must go, you know! Good-bye! Perhaps you won’t be staying very much longer?”
“If you stay here bemoaning yourself very much longer we shall probably leave before you do!” suggested Miss Pomeroy, with the rather faint smile which was the only sign of amusement she ever gave, and which always accompanied her own mild witticisms. Julian turned to her eagerly.
“Now, that’s awfully unkind!” he said. “You won’t bully me like that in Queen Anne Street, will you?” The term “bullying” was so profoundly inapplicable to Miss Pomeroy’s words that its use suggested a certain amount of arrangement rather than absolute spontaneity about Julian’s speech. But exaggeration was the fashion, and not to be commented on. “Come in a very kind frame of mind, won’t you?” he went on pleadingly.
“Am I a very violent person?” the girl answered, with the same smile. “Good-bye!” She held out her hand as she spoke, and Julian took it with laughing reluctance.
“You are an absolutely heartless person,” he said daringly, “to dismiss me like this! However, I suppose you are right. If youdidn’t dismiss me I probably shouldn’t go, and I really ought, you know!”
“You’ve told us that before; now do it!” was the answer. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” returned Julian, with mock meekness. He shook hands again, which seemed hardly necessary, and then he turned away.
But the necessity which enforced his departure had apparently slackened its pressure on him by the time he actually left the house. As he walked away down the street there was no sign about him of that haste which should characterise a man who has lingered to the risking of an appointment, or who has, indeed, any engagement in immediate prospect. The bride and bridegroom had already left, and people were beginning to go, and until he reached the end of the street in which was Mrs. Halse’s house, he was passed every instant by carriages to whose occupants his hat had to be smilingly lifted. Then he turned into a main thoroughfare, and hailed a hansom—still not in the least like a man in a hurry. He gave the cabman an address in the Temple, and was driven away.
His face as he went would have been a curious study to any onlooker possessed of the key to its expression; to any onlooker who could have detected the constant struggle for dominance between something that seemed to lie behind its new artificiality and that artificiality itself, evidently maintained under an instinctive sense of the chances of observation. It was not until he turned his key in the lock of a set of chambers in the Temple that the boyish vivacity died wholly out of his face; he went into his room—he shared the chambers with another embryo barrister—shutting the door behind him; and as he did so he seemed to have shut in, not the light-hearted young fellow who had paid the cabman in the street below, but another man altogether. No one looking at him now could doubt that this was the real Julian Romayne of to-day, as certainly as that light-hearted young fellow had been the real Julian Romayne of a year ago. This was a man with a hard, angry face; a face on which the anger stood revealed, not as the expression of the moment, but as the normal expression ofa mind always sore, always at war, always fiercely implacable.
The room was plainly, almost barely furnished, and there was no trace of any of the luxury that surrounded him in Queen Anne Street. His smart, carefully got-up figure looked absolutely incongruous among such unusual surroundings, as he crossed to the window, and flinging himself down in a shabby easy-chair, lighted a cigarette. He threw his cigarette-case on the table, and then drew out of the breast-pocket of his coat a couple of letters.
He had read them before, evidently, but as evidently they had lost none of their interest for him. He read them both through attentively, and as he did so there came to his mouth a set which his mother, could she have seen it, would have recognised instantly; which any one, indeed, must have recognised who had ever seen his dead father. Both the letters dealt with money matters; one was from a bookmaker, the other from a broker whose name was far from bearing an unblemished character in the City; and both referred to large sums of money recently madeon the turf and on the Stock Exchange by Julian Romayne.
He flung the last on the table as he finished it, and there was an expression in his eyes of reckless, rebellious triumph not good to see.
“It’s a good haul!” he said, half aloud. “A good haul! Now, with what I’ve got already——” He rose and went across to the writing-table, unlocked a drawer, and taking out various papers, began to make rapid calculations.
Then—his eyes hard and intent on his work—he stretched out his hand and felt in the drawer for another paper. He took out an envelope, and drew out the letter it contained without glancing at it. A folded paper fell out as he did so, and as though the slight sound had roused him, he glanced at it quickly, and from it to the open letter in his hand. Apparently it was not the letter to which he had intended to refer, for his face changed suddenly and completely.
“I can’t take your money. Try and understand that I can’t!—Clemence.”
His fingers tightened upon the thin sheetof paper until the knuckles whitened, and the eager calculation vanished utterly from his face, overwhelmed as it seemed by the fierce tumult of warring passions that struggled now in every line. Impotent anger which was the more violent for something within itself which was not anger; reckless defiance; a wild, raging desperation behind all, which was nearly hatred; all these emotions were faintly shadowed forth on his face as he stared down at the few simple words. All these emotions had been surging in his heart during the six months that were gone, and it was their unceasing strife and tumult which was rousing into life the new Julian Romayne, latent for so many years.
It was to that which was least broadly painted on his face that all these passionate forces owed their life. As with a wild animal wounded by a dart, and feeling that dart—lodged in his side—pricking and piercing him, who plunges wildly hither and thither, chafing and striving in blind, brute fashion to rid himself of the sensation he cannot understand; and in his very efforts presses in the cause of his pain, increases his sufferings,and again redoubles his struggles and his fury, not knowing that he is his own tormentor; so it had been, in a sense, with Julian Romayne during the last six months. The dart in his case was double-edged; its edges were the strange, weak reality of his love for Clemence, and a stinging sense of shame. It had lodged in that almost inanimate better part of his nature. He had left that little room in Camden Town smarting and wincing under it, and it had never ceased to prick him since. Scarcely less blind and ignorant under such circumstances than “a beast having no understanding” in his total want of all principle, except the principles of worldly wisdom, with his utterly dormant moral perception—his morality, such as it was, being the merest matter of habit and conventionality—the effect on him of the smart was first the developement in him of a blind, unreasoning resentment; and then, as anger proved of no avail, a passionate rousing and rising of all his latent forces in repudiation of his discomfort.
To charge upon some one else the difficulties which he had created for himself, toprovide some object against which his blind sense of wrath and rebellion could pit itself, was a primary instinct with such a nature as Julian’s, so situated, and that object was ready to his hand. The first article in the faith of the new Julian Romayne was the belief that he had been forced into his present position by his mother; that he had been parted from his wife by his mother; that he had been covered with humiliation by his mother. Every fresh stab, every movement of revolt, as that two-edged dart pressed itself deeper into his consciousness with every struggle he made for freedom, added something to the account he held against her; increased the bitterness of his resentment against her and brought it one degree nearer to hatred. His love for her, in spite of its charm of expression, had been the merest boyish sentiment; with no roots deeper than those afforded by easy companionship and apparent indulgence; founded on habit and expediency rather than on respect. Real devotion would have seemed out of place in the atmosphere of affectation and superficiality in which he had been reared,and he had known only its travesty. On this, the first real conflict between his will and hers, that travesty showed itself for what it was, and shrivelled into nothingness. To free himself from her control, became the one object and desire of his life. In doing this, and in doing this only, to his distorted perceptions, lay release from the stinging, goading misery of his present life, and to do this one means only was adequate—money. With money at his command the victory, as he conceived it, would be his. Some centre, some mainspring had necessarily to grow up in the confused strivings and blind, desperate impulses of a newly-awakened nature, and gradually that centre had declared itself in an unreasoning determination to make money.
But there were in Julian Romayne tendencies, latent, or nearly so, throughout his youth and early manhood; manifested during those easy, untempted periods only in a slight superficiality, a slight want of perception as to the boundary line between truth and falsehood; but radical factors in his being. In the shock and jar of the mental struggle andquickening involved in the continued presence in his consciousness of that remorseless dart, these tendencies leapt into over-stimulated life and grew, strengthened, and developed, with the unnatural rapidity of such life, until his whole character seemed to be over-shadowed by them. In Julian Romayne’s being, woven in and out with the threads which had hitherto seemed so pliable and colourless; those threads of all shades, from pure white to dark grey, which make up character in every man; were sundry grim black threads—threads such as are only to be plucked out when the very heart’s blood of the man has spent itself in the struggle, and when in that struggle he has come very near to God. It may be that the sins of the fathers are indeed visited on the children in this sense; in the dictation of the form taken by that struggle with evil which is every man’s portion; and sometimes—for purposes of which no man may presume to judge—in the exceptional agony of that struggle. Julian Romayne, the son of a liar and thief, and, moreover, of a woman whose morality was the morality of conventionalityand nothing more, had an instinctive faculty for, an instinctive inclination towards, dishonesty of word and deed. Such a twist of his moral consciousness as had been predicted for him, a little child of five years old, by Dr. Aston, had lain dormant among the possibilities of his being throughout the nineteen years that intervened. It was this inheritance which, in the sudden upheaval of his moral nature, had awakened, asserted itself, and seized, as it were, the first place in his nature.
Throughout his boyhood, easy as it had been, untouched by any strong passion or desire, he had lied now and again, naturally and instinctively. He had lied to save himself trouble, to save himself some slight reproach—as he had lied to his mother on the subject of his visit to Alexandria, to save himself from the confession of having forgotten her commission. He had lied to Clemence from first to last, and the first prick of that dart, which was now his constant companion, had touched him when he first felt shame for those lies. But there was a reckless, calculating deception about his lifenow which went deeper and meant more. He lied to his mother with every word and action, and with the unreasoning cruelty of his mental attitude towards her—there is nothing towards which a man can be so heartless as the object to which he has transferred his own wrong-doing—he hugged his deception of her, and revelled in the sense of independence and power it gave him. The endless deception which the fundamental falsity of his present life necessitated, radiated on every side. To please his mother, as he told himself with an ugly smile, he had flirted with Miss Pomeroy in the early part of the winter until—a certain distance in her manner to him melting—he had hailed her departure for Cannes as a blessed reprieve. He had flirted with her this afternoon at Mrs. Halse’s, excited by the news contained in the two letters he had since re-read, reckless in the prospect of release they brought nearer to him, and with a certain delight in the daring defiance of consequences. He had lied to Lord Garstin when that good-natured mentor had let fall a warning word as to the “bad form” of gambling; he lied to his coachwhen his frequent absences were commented on.
In that desperate craving for money, in which all the passion of his life was centering itself, dishonesty of deed was the natural and inevitable corollary of dishonesty of word. The possession of money was his one object in life; his conscience as to the means by which that money was to be obtained he deliberately put into abeyance for the time being. He had become possessed in the course of the last six months of some thousands, not one of which had been earned by honest work; much of which had come to him by more than questionable means.
That two-edged dart must have been finely tempered that it never seemed to blunt! The dormant life in that higher part of him, to which it had penetrated, must have been life indeed, that it should throb and quiver stronger and stronger, side by side with all that was lowest and worst in him, making the struggle grow always fiercer, and goading him on and on. The dart owed its edge, the life its growingsensitiveness, to a touch which lay always on Julian’s consciousness, haunting him night and day. Not to be driven away or obliterated; not to be crowded out of his soul by any stress of evil passion; a white light on the soiled, tangled web of his life, which shone steadily in the strength of a power no struggle of his could touch; was the thought of Clemence. Clemence, who had trusted him; Clemence, hoping, longing, loving him, as he knew in every wretched fibre; Clemence, for whose presence he longed at times with a heart-sickness of longing which reacted in a very orgy of passionate bitterness. He had received a note from her a few days after her disappearance, telling him in a few simple words that she had got work; that she relied on him not to drive her out of it by trying to see her, until he “was ready,” as she phrased it. Again and again a reckless impulse to see her, and force his will upon her, had seized him, but something had always held him back. Again and again he had sent her money, always to have it returned to him with a little line of hope or patience. In the reception of those notes;in the writhing love, and longing, and shame they stirred in him, the dart went home and tortured him indeed.
He crushed the sheet of common note-paper almost fiercely in his hand now, and thrust it away to the back of the drawer from which it had come. He caught up the paper which had fallen from it—the cheque he had sent her three days before—and tore it savagely into fragments. Then he swept the papers on which he had been busy unheedingly into a drawer, locked it sharply, and rose, white to the very lips.
“It can’t be long now,” he muttered. “It shan’t be! Men make their piles in a day—in an hour; why should not I? It shan’t be long!”
He stood for a moment, his hand clenched, his features compressed, his eyes full of a sullen fire. Then he turned sharply away and left the room.
There was no trace of any fire about him, however, except the harmless irradiation of youth and good spirits, when he opened the door of his mother’s drawing-room a few minutes before their dinner-hour. He hadspent the intervening hour at his club, the most lightly good-natured, and thoroughly easy-going and irresponsible young man there, and there was precisely the same character about him now as he crossed the room to his mother.
Therehad been a slight, sudden movement as Julian opened the door, as though Mrs. Romayne had changed her attitude quickly. She was leaning forward now, looking at an illustrated paper, but the cushions behind her were tumbled and crushed, as if she had been leaning back on them, and leaning heavily. She was wearing a tea-gown, and she seemed to keep her face rather carefully in shadow.
“Rather an amusing party, wasn’t it?” she said lightly, looking up as he came in. “Everybody goes to that woman’s. I can’t imagine why. Well, and is there any news, sir?”
“I’m afraid not,” returned Julian gaily. “I’ve spent an hour at the club to try andpick up some crumbs for you, but there was nothing going.”
The manner of each to the other was precisely the same, now that they were alone together, as it had been when they addressed one another incidentally in the course of general conversation. The very familiarity between them had a flavour of artificiality about it, and that flavour was mainly given, strangely enough, by Mrs. Romayne rather than by Julian. It was her manner, not his, that lacked ease and overdid the spontaneity. They chatted brightly about men and things, but she never asked him a single personal question, though at any incidental allusion let fall by him as to his doings a faint contraction of the muscles about her eyes gave her a hungry, concentrated look, as of a creature catching at a crumb. It seemed to be in a great measure that tendency to keen intentness of expression which had so greatly altered her face.
“You see I’ve been lazy!” she said lightly, indicating her dress with a slight gesture as they sat down to dinner. They were going out in the evening, and sheusually dressed before dinner on such occasions. “I really couldn’t be bothered to dress before!”
The lamplight was full on her face now, and Julian, his attention drawn to her by the words, saw that she looked frightfully haggard and worn under her paint and her little air of gaiety. Paint had ceased to be an appendage of full dress with her since her three days’ illness. The combination added a touch of repulsion to his feeling towards her. But his tone as he answered her was the tone of affectionate concern, over-elaborated by the merest shade only.
“You’ve not over-tired yourself, I hope, dear?” he said. “I don’t believe you ought to go out again to-night, do you know!”
Mrs. Romayne’s thin fingers were tearing fiercely at the pocket-handkerchief in her lap as he spoke, and her eyes were bright with pain. It seemed as though her ears had caught that subtle shade of over-elaboration, though they must have been quick indeed to do so. But she answered, almost before he had finished speaking, in a rather high-pitched tone of eager determination.
“Silliest of boys,” she said; “the topic is threadbare. I am quite well! Oh, it is very evident that my retiring to bed for a day or two is an unparalleled event, or you would not be quite so slow in grasping the fact that it is possible to recover after such a terrific crisis! Now, do promise not to talk any more about what you don’t in the least understand!”
The merriment of her tone was fictitious, even to Julian’s unheeding ear, but he took it up with a mental shrug of his shoulders. It was not his fault, he told himself, if she would overdo herself for the sake of a little excitement.
He told himself the same thing, carelessly enough, when he put her into her carriage two or three hours later. It was early; Mrs. Romayne had declared the party to be insufferably dull and had stayed only half an hour, during which time she had been as vivacious and attractive as usual. But towards the end her eyes had become feverishly bright, and Julian, as he took her out, could feel that she was trembling from head to foot.
“Are you coming home?” she said to him.
“Well, if you don’t mind, dear, I was thinking of going to look up Loring at the club.”
A breath of relief parted Mrs. Romayne’s lips, and she answered hastily. Apparently she had no desire for her son’s company on her way home.
“Go, by all means!” she said. “Of course I don’t mind!”
She pulled up the window almost abruptly, nodding to him with a smile, the singular ghastliness of which was, presumably, referable to some effect of gaslight. Then as the carriage rolled away she sank back and let her face relax into an expression of utter weariness, with a little gasping catch of her breath as of deadly physical exhaustion.
His words about Loring had been a mere figure of speech on Julian’s part, but he did intend to go to the club, and he carried his intention into effect. He glanced round the smoking-room as he went in to see if Loring was there, but the fact that he was not visible in no way affected his serenity.He was so altered from the boy of a twelvemonth before, and his intercourse with Loring had been so completely suspended during the period of his developement, that their friendship seemed now to belong to some previous phase of his existence; it was his sense that he had passed utterly out of touch with the man with whom he had once been intimate, together with a conviction that Loring’s keen perceptions would be by no means a desirable factor in his surroundings at the moment, that had dictated his demonstration of delight at Loring’s reappearance. An outward show of enthusiasm was a very effective blind, in his opinion.
His manner was regulated on the same principle on Loring’s appearance in the smoking-room about half an hour later. He was on his way to the card-room, and he was anything but pleased at the frustration of his plans in that direction; but his reception of Loring indicated, rather, that he had spent the last half-hour in watching for him.
“Here you are at last, old man!” he cried. “I thought you’d turn up some time or other! What became of you this afternoon? I neversaw you after you disappeared with my mother.”
The two men had met close to the door, and they were still standing, Loring, asblaséand imperturbable-looking as usual, with his observant eyes on Julian’s face.
“I didn’t care to spoil sport!” he returned with a significant smile. “You seemed to be particularly well employed!”
Julian laughed—the conscious, not ill-pleased laugh which belonged to his part. Such contingencies were all incidental to the situation.
“Oh, come, old boy,” he said deprecatingly. Then he laughed again, and added: “I suppose my mother said something to you?”
“No!” returned Loring quietly. “I happen to have eyes, you see!”
“Don’t make magnifying glasses of them, then!” was the laughing retort. “Now then, there are several fellows here who have been asking for you.”
But as Julian glanced round he became aware that the room chanced to be almost empty. Loring understood at the same timethat he had wished to make the conversation general and impersonal, and a slight smile touched his lips.
Marston Loring had various reasons of his own for not intending to allow himself to be eluded by Julian Romayne. The change in the young man alone would have excited his curiosity; and sundry details which had already come to his knowledge, notably one across which he had stumbled in the City that morning, had quickened that curiosity. His suspicions of the preceding autumn, that there was something behind Julian’s life as it appeared on the surface, were by no means forgotten by him. His departure for Africa had taken him out of the way of the crisis, but he more than half suspected that a crisis there had been. The connection between the present and the past, and the means by which it could be most advantageously applied to the furtherance of his own ends, were the problems he had set himself to solve.
“We’re rather in luck!” he said. “We can have a quiet chat together.”
He established himself lazily and comfortablyas he spoke, as Julian with much apparent satisfaction flung himself into another chair, and took out his cigar-case.
Julian’s questions followed one another thick and fast. His interest in his friend’s life during the last six months seemed to be inexhaustible in its intelligence and sympathy. He had a great deal to tell, too; and he told it so fluently and gaily as almost to disguise the fact that the allusions to his own doings were of the most superficial type. But at last there was a pause. Julian was pulling out his watch, and saying something about going home, when Loring lighted a fresh cigar and opened the proceedings—as he conceived them.
“I heard of you in the City this morning!” he said nonchalantly.
There was no pause in the movement with which Julian returned his watch to his pocket; nothing, absolutely, to betray the fact that the words were a surprise to him. Yet they were a surprise, and an exceedingly unpleasant one. His transactions in the City he had arranged to keep secret; that their nature should become known waseminently undesirable, and he had decided that the fact itself would be inconsistent with his pose before the world. That Loring should be the man to unearth them was exceptionally unfortunate.
“Did you?” he said lightly; “and who was saying what of me in the City—a vague locality, by-the-bye.”
“The introduction of your name was accidental—accidents will happen, you know, even in Adams’s office. Is that a definite locality enough to please you?”
Julian burst into a boyish laugh and flung himself back in his chair; he carried his cigar to his lips as he did so, not noticing apparently that it had gone out. Loring noticed it, however.
“What a fellow you are, Loring!” he cried. “You’ve not been in England three days before you unearth a poor chap’s most private little games! I say, you’ll keep it dark, won’t you? I wouldn’t have it come round to my mother, you know! She’s so awfully generous to me, and it might hurt her feelings.”
There was an ingenuous frankness andconfidence in his voice which gave to the whole affair the aspect of a youthful escapade. Loring smiled as he answered:
“I wouldn’t have a hand in hurting Mrs. Romayne’s feelings for the world.” He paused a moment, and then added carelessly, as if the whole transaction was the merest matter of course: “Been doing much?”
Julian shook his head.
“No, of course not,” he said lightly. “Only a little occasional lark, don’t you know. I leave the big things to clever fellows like you. By-the-bye, Loring, I’d no idea you did anything in that way.”
Loring puffed slowly at his cigar before he answered.