The idea of the whole entertainment had originated, so people said, in the fact that its giver had spent enormous sums of money in the course of the past three years on the transformation of his grounds into an Italian garden, and the scene from the terrace, as Julian and Miss Pomeroy stepped out on to it, was indeed extraordinarily effective. There was no moon, and thousands of coloured lamps, skilfully disposed, shed a picturesque, uncertain light, under which the long ilex-shaded alleys, the box hedges, the fountains, and the statues produced an illusion which was almost perfect.
“By Jove!” exclaimed Julian in the same strained, excited voice. “Capital, isn’t it? It must be almost worth while to live away here in the wilds of Fulham to have a place capable of being turned into a show like this. Don’t you think so?”
Miss Pomeroy did not answer immediately. Apparently, the excitement created by their dance had rather strengthened than diminished during the interval, and she was playing almost nervously with her fan. Miss Pomeroy was not a nervous person as a rule.
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “Yes, it’s very pretty, isn’t it? But I don’t think I should much care to have a big place, do you know. I don’t think places make much difference.”
Her voice was low, and very prettily modulated, and Julian threw a quick sideways glance at her. Except for a flush, and a certain look in her eyes which he could not see, her face was as demure and placid as ever.
“Don’t you?” he said. “You are right, of course, and I am wrong. I can imagine circumstances under which all this would be a howling wilderness to me.”
He looked at her very differently this time, with his eyes recklessly eloquent. She dropped her own eyes quickly, and said softly:
“Can you?”
They had strolled down the steps as they talked, and at their right hand a picturesque little alley, with a vista of fountain and statue against a grove of ilex-trees, led away from the more open space in front of the house. Down this alley,secluded and apparently deserted, Miss Pomeroy turned, as if unconsciously, before she spoke again. Julian followed her lead with an ugly smile on his face.
Then she said in the same pretty, low voice:
“Tell me what circumstances?”
Julian laughed, and his laugh might well have been construed as a sign of extreme nervousness and agitation.
“I think not!” he said. “I might make you angry.”
“You would not make me angry!”
They came to the end of the alley as she spoke; it opened out on a quaint little corner containing a fish-pond surrounded by a stone balustrade, the fountain in the middle sparkling and dancing in the gleam of the artificial moonlight which had been arranged here and there about the grounds to give the finishing touch to sundry “bits.” Into this moonlight Maud Pomeroy stepped, and stood leaning gracefully over the balustrade gazing down into the water, as she said in a voice just low and hesitating enough to be perfectly distinct:
“Mr. Romayne, will you tell me—did you think me very angry when you came to-night?”
“I hope you are not angry now, at least!” was the answer, spoken with eager anxiety. “But I would rather think you had been angry than believe that you were quite indifferent as to whether I came or not!”
“I am not—indifferent!” Maud Pomeroy paused. There was no colour at all in her cheeks now, and her lips were drawn together in a hard, thin line such as no one had ever seen on her face before. There was a dead silence. A sudden stillness had come over Julian’s figure as he stood also leaning against the balustrade, but with his back to the water. His hand was clenched fiercely against the stone.
“I have no right to be angry with you,” Maud Pomeroy went on; her voice was thin and hard as if its steadiness was the result of deliberate effort. “I have no rights at all. If I had——” She let her voice die away again with deliberate intention.
The silence that followed had somethingghastly in it. At last, with his face as white as death, and keeping his eyes fixed steadily before him, Julian moved.
“You will catch cold, I’m afraid!” he said, a little hoarsely. “Shall we go in?”
Without a single word Miss Pomeroy moved also and retraced her steps up the alley. For one moment, and for one moment only, her face was no longer that of a gentle and amiable girl, but of a spiteful and vindictive woman.
Morethan one of the people who had talked to Mrs. Romayne in the interval had been vaguely aware of a certain incontrollable preoccupation behind her manner; though the intense, suppressed excitement in which that preoccupation originated passed undetected. Her restless eyes fastened upon Miss Pomeroy and Julian on the very instant of their reappearance in the room, and as they came towards her that excitement leapt up suddenly and lit up her whole face with a wild flash of hope and anticipation. They drew nearer and it died down again even more suddenly than it had sprung up; and in its passing it seemed to have aged her face curiously, and to have left upon it a stamp of heart-sick disappointment, touched with a creeping anxiety. Miss Pomeroy was pale, and her usual stillplacidity seemed to be accentuated into absolute stupidity. Julian’s face was quite colourless, and beneath the travesty of his usual manner which he assumed in speaking to his mother, there was an indefinable expression which made him look ten years older and twenty years harder and more bitter.
Scruples on his part as to crushing their dress prevented his going home with them. He would follow in a hansom, he said. But before he arrived Miss Pomeroy had said good night to Mrs. Romayne with a neatly-turned and quite meaningless expression of the pleasure the evening had given her, and had retired to her room. Mrs. Romayne, looking haggard and worn, lingered until Julian came in, and went out to meet him.
“Good night, mother,” he said, and went straight upstairs without pausing.
It was many, many years since he had left her at night without a kiss; and as Mrs. Romayne went slowly up to her room through the silent house, she stumbled once or twice as though her wide, dry eyes hardly saw the stairs before her.
That creeping anxiety had gained groundgreatly in her face the next morning when she came down at about half-past ten, to learn from the servant that “Mr. Julian” had already breakfasted and had gone to the Temple. Even more pathetic than the anxiety itself was the courage that battled against it; that strove so hard to become confidence as she led—and, indeed, sustained—the conversation, as she and Miss Pomeroy, who was late in putting in an appearance, breakfasted together. She talked lightly and gaily of Julian’s defection on this, their visitor’s last morning; she deplored the fact that it was indeed the last morning, talking of various half-formed schemes for such constant meetings as would be practically a continuance of the intimate association of the past fortnight. But of response she obtained little or none. An access of conventionality, demureness, and insipidity seemed to be inspiring Miss Pomeroy; an access characterised by a certain absolute obstinacy of colourlessness. She had no opinions, no sentiments of any sort or kind to offer; her expressions of regret at leaving were as unmeaning as they were correct. Mrs.Romayne’s plans seemed to wither under her little non-committal smile and comment; and she took her irreproachable leave an hour later with a vaguely expressed hope that they might meet “somewhere,” and apparently without hearing Mrs. Romayne’s parting allusion to Julian.
Each one of the days that followed seemed to leave upon Mrs. Romayne’s face some such effect as might have been produced upon a marble counterpart of that face by the delicate application of a sharp modelling tool. Every feature became a little sharper; every line a little deeper, a little harder. Nobody noticed the fact, and nobody could have traced it to its source had they done so. But there were times when she was alone; times when that chisel under which she grew more haggard every day revealed itself as heart-sick, gnawing anxiety.
For three or four days Miss Pomeroy’s hope that they might meet “somewhere” remained unfulfilled; and Mrs. Romayne made little jokes at what she assumed to be Julian’s disconsolate condition; jokes which, taken inconjunction with the look in her eyes as she spoke them, were almost ghastly. Then the meeting took place at a party from which, as it appeared, Miss Pomeroy and her mother were just departing; so that a few words of greeting on either side was all that passed.
Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter called on Mrs. Romayne a day or two later. It was Mrs. Romayne’s “day,” of course; the room was very full, and as Mrs. Pomeroy said, with an expression as near apprehension as was compatible with her placidity in the eyes which kept turning to her daughter’s demure face: “Wednesday is such a popular day, and we’ve really dozens of calls to pay, haven’t we, Maud?” Consequently they stayed barely ten minutes, and exchanged half-a-dozen sentences with their hostess. But short and formal as the call was, it was supplemented by no more intimate intercourse. They met, of course, nearly every day. That is to say, Mrs. Romayne, as she went about indefatigably from party to party, caught constant glimpses of Miss Pomeroy and her mother just arriving as she left, just leavingas she arrived, just going to supper, to tea, to fulfil some social duty or other which made it impossible that more than a word or two should pass. When Mrs. Romayne pressed Miss Pomeroy, with sprightly reproaches, to come and see her, she was met invariably with unmeaning smiles, and vague words about engagements, which, gentle as they sounded, proved as little capable of manipulation as a stone. Once or twice after such a meeting, Mrs. Romayne’s jokes at Julian’s expense, as she told him of them airily afterwards—Julian and Miss Pomeroy never seemed to meet now—took the form of hints and innuendoes as to whether he was not at the bottom of “the mystery,” as she called it; and whether he could not perhaps sweep it away. There was a terrible contrast between the casual gaiety with which such hints were dropped by her, and the something which lay behind; something which gave her voice a strange, unnatural ring, and cut her words off almost before they had any meaning; something the name of which, as it lurked in the hard, bright eyes which never met Julian’s, was nervous fear.
Such hints were always met and turned by Julian as lightly as they were uttered.
Before a fortnight had passed since Miss Pomeroy’s departure, Mrs. Romayne had acquired a habit of giving one quick, almost furtive, glance round any room she entered in which people were assembled, and that look was particularly eager and intent as she entered a drawing-room to fulfil an engagement for a luncheon-party one day at the beginning of the third week. A luncheon is by no means a bad opportunity for a “quiet chat.” She did not see the figures she was in search of, though no one could have detected that fact from her expression. Nor could any one have interpreted the sudden exclamation of surprise she uttered.
“Why, it’s Dennis Falconer!” she said prettily. “I had no idea you were in town.”
It was Dennis Falconer; not a little altered by the past eight months, and altered for the better. Six months earlier he had disappeared from the ken of his society acquaintances; disappeared quietly, almost imperceptibly. By-and-by, when his absence began to be commented upon, rumour hadwhispered it abroad that he was “laid up or something.” The fact, so lightly stated and equally lightly commented on, had meant for Falconer a realisation of the possibilities hinted at by his doctor early in November. He had passed from the dreariness of unoccupied and somewhat lonely club life into the infinitely heavier dreariness of a solitary sick-room.
Within his own limits and on his own lines Dennis Falconer was a strong man. With his dark hour absolutely upon him he braced himself to meet it with stern dignity; and he endured four months of physical suffering and mental tedium—from which that suffering, weary and unremitting as it was, was seldom acute enough to relieve him—with uncomplaining fortitude. He was quite alone. Circumstances had occurred to detain Dr. Aston in India, and his solitude was not realised by any of his club acquaintances. It was a period on which, in after life, he never willingly looked back; a dark hour, in truth. But it was lived through at last, and as it passed away it gave place to a clear and steady light, in which theshadows which had preceded it had vanished. Severe as had been the means, the end was amply attained. He emerged from his sick-room in such perfect physical health as he had not known for years. All the disabilities under which he had laboured during the preceding summer were removed, and in every nerve and muscle he was conscious of vigorous life. In May he had received his doctor’s permission to return to his work, and he was in London now to arrange the preliminaries of an expedition with which he hoped to leave England early in the autumn.
The physical change in him was conspicuous as he stepped forward to return Mrs. Romayne’s greeting. He looked ten years younger than he had been wont to look; the worn look of endurance had gone, and there was an air of strength and power about him which was very noticeable. Hardly less striking was the change in his expression. Much of the grim austerity of his demeanour during the previous summer had originated in the painful depression consequent on his state of health; much also in his realisation of his position as a man laid aside and solacinghimself as best he might. The gravity and reserve of his expression remained, but the heaviness had disappeared completely.
His manner to Mrs. Romayne, as he shook the hand she held out to him, was significant of the lighter and more tolerant point of view from which his own lighter prospects unconsciously led him to contemplate his fellow-creatures. It was neither expansive nor friendly, but it lacked that undercurrent of stiff condemnation which had previously characterised it.
“I have intended to call on you,” he said with grave directness. “I am sorry to appear negligent. But my time is no longer at my own disposal.”
Mrs. Romayne put aside the claim on his time which he imputed to her with a quick gesture and a laugh.
“You are quite recovered, I hope?” she said easily. “Tiresome business, convalescence, isn’t it?”
“I am quite recovered, I am thankful to say,” responded Falconer; he was so keenly conscious of all that the words meant for him that he was insensible even to the jarringeffect her manner had always had for him. “I hope before very long to be at work again. Indeed, I am practically at work now.”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Romayne prettily. “Are you thinking of going abroad again?”
“I am going out to Africa. I shall hardly be in England again for another five years.”
Mrs. Romayne had been looking vaguely about the room, evidently bestowing a modicum of her attention only on Falconer. But as he spoke the last words the slightest possible start passed through her frame and her wandering eyes suddenly ceased to wander. There was a moment’s pause, and then she turned them on Falconer’s face.
“Really? And when do you go?”
There was something rather odd beneath the carelessness of her voice, and her eyes, as she fixed them on Falconer’s, were odd too.
“I hope to leave England early in October.”
Mrs. Romayne made no reply. Her facesuggested curiously that the actual exigencies of the situation had faded for her, that she was not in the present at all. For the moment there was no trace of that satisfaction and relief which would have been the natural consummation, on such news, of the defiance and distaste so hardly repressed in her manner to her “connexion” during the past year. She looked, apparently unconsciously, into the grave, steady man’s face above her, and there was a vague, half-formed expression in her eyes, which might have been a suddenly-stirred sense of loneliness or foreboding.
It was gone again in an instant. And as the man who was to take her in to lunch approached her, she turned from Falconer with the lightest possible “au revoir.”
Falconer found himself very well situated at luncheon. A question came up on which his word carried weight, and the discussion which ensued brought home to him that sense of renewed power and standing in the world so grateful to him after his long period of inaction. He was full of grave content and satisfaction, when, after lunch, circumstancesthrew him again with Mrs. Romayne; and his whole mental attitude was suffused with a dignified kindliness. He began to speak at once with grave, but not unfriendly interest, and as though he were conscious of a certain remissness.
“I am glad to hear of your son! I hope it is quite satisfactory to you?”
Mrs. Romayne had acknowledged his vicinity with a conventional word and smile. Circumstances demanded of her at the moment no active exertion; she was standing aside, as it were, for the instant, and there were tired lines faintly visible about her mouth. They disappeared, however, as if by magic, beneath the hard intentness which leapt into her face as she turned sharply to Falconer on his first words. The movement was apparently involuntary, for she turned away, lifting with elaborate carelessness the long eye-glasses which she had lately adopted, as though to cover the first movement, and said, as she looked through them at something at the other end of the room:
“It’s very stupid of me, no doubt, but I must ask you to explain!”
The neutrality of her previous conversation with him had vanished as completely as the strange suggestion with which it had ended had vanished. The old defiance, apparently entirely uncalled-for, rang in her elaborately indifferent voice.
“Is it so old a story?” said Falconer. “Or is it, perhaps, a mistake?” he added with genuine regret. “I hope not. A sensible marriage is such a safeguard—a covenant with society. I heard of your son’s engagement some three weeks ago on what purported to be excellent authority.”
“Did you hear the name of the young lady by any chance?”
Mrs. Romayne achieved a harsh little laugh as she spoke.
Falconer glanced round the room and lowered his voice.
“Miss Maud Pomeroy!” he said. “A most desirable wife for him, I should have said!”
Eight months before, under the inexplicable influence of the face and manner of the pale, dignified woman who had faced him so bravely in the little lodging in Camden Town,Dennis Falconer had been almost ready to urge upon Julian Romayne marriage with the girl he was supposed to have ruined. But he would have done so convinced, in the recesses of his heart to which that woman’s influence could not penetrate, that such a course must mean ruin to the young man; and in the grim severity of his mental attitude at the time, he would have said that such ruin was the just and righteous consequence of the young man’s guilt. Clemence’s disappearance had frustrated the possibility of any such action on his part; time and the pressing actualities of his own life had obliterated the impression made on him; and the whole affair had gradually faded into the past. Insensibly to himself he looked upon it now, conventionally enough, as one of those dark episodes which are in no way to be obliterated or lightened, but which may and must be overlaid. To that end it seemed to him, in the relaxation of his sterner attitude, a thing so natural as to be necessarily condoned that Julian should marry in his own class and settle down.
A moment’s pause followed on his words.Mrs. Romayne was sweeping the room with her eye-glasses. The hand which held them shook a little, and, if the man beside her could have known it, she saw absolutely nothing.
“Maud Pomeroy!” she said at last, and she seemed to be unconscious of that moment’s interval of silence. “Ah! Well, to tell you the truth, that is not such an extraordinary report, though it hardly represents the fact—at present. Young people will be young people, you know, and they must be allowed their little wilfulnesses!”
She also had lowered her voice, though it was high-pitched, and her speech was almost exaggeratedly confidential. Influenced by the tone into which they had thus fallen, Falconer said, meaningly and not unkindly:
“You have had to make no more serious allowances, I hope—since?”
With a laugh so light and high as to be painfully out of tune, Mrs. Romayne answered him gaily in the negative. One little peccadillo, she said, was not such a very terrible thing in a young man’s record, and she was charmed to say that with that little affairof which they both knew her anxieties on Julian’s account had begun and ended. She held out her hand to Falconer as she finished her assurance, parting with him with her brightest air of society friendliness, and as he wished her good-bye, looking down into the trivial vivacity of her face, Falconer felt himself stirred for the first time by a certain touch of pity for her. Coming upon his softer mood and the comparatively friendly nature of their talk, the eager assurance with which she spoke struck him as being not without pathos. He had no confidence in Julian, and it occurred to him vaguely and with a sense of surprise that if the security so superficially founded should prove false, the blow would be somewhat disproportionate to the lightness of the nature on which it must fall. The next instant he recollected how largely her own actions would have contributed to bring about the blow, and he dismissed her sternly from his thoughts as she passed out of the room.
Mrs. Romayne went straight home, though she had numerous calls on her list for the afternoon; her eyes were even desperatelybright and defiant; and that same evening Marston Loring received a note asking him to come and see her on the following day.
He found her waiting for him in the drawing-room at the hour she had appointed, and she plunged into the matter in hand with an affectation of spontaneous confidence which was most effective.
She had sent for him in his capacity of fellow-conspirator, she told him; she was in a little perplexity and she was turning to him, as usual—this with a charming smile—to help her. From this prelude she went on to speak of the strange change which had come about in the relations between herself and Julian on the one hand, and the Pomeroys on the other. Loring’s keen eyes had detected this change some time since—by this time, indeed, it was being whispered about somewhat freely—but he only listened with grave attention. The upshot of her speech was: did Loring know anything about it? Had Julian said anything? Had he spoken of any quarrel, of any misunderstanding? Had his friend any kind of clue to give her as to his feelings on the subject?
The ease and gaiety of her manner, which strove to give to the whole thing something the air of a joke, was disturbed and broken as she came to the point by a feverishness about which there was nothing gay or light. And some uncertainty as to how far she had gone seemed to pervade her mind and to produce a feeling that some kind of explanation was necessary.
“You see,” she said, “it isn’t always safe to go to the fountain-head in these little matters! A young man doesn’t always care to be questioned by his mother! One might ‘give offence,’ you know!” Her tone was playful, but her eyes were filled with the nervous fear which lurked in them so often when she and Julian were alone together, and the look on her face as she spoke her last words seemed to give to that fear a definite object. It was the fear of “giving offence” to her son.
Loring put the explanation aside with a smile, but he had no words of enlightenment for her. Julian, he said, had preserved a total silence on the subject.
“I will see what I can do,” he said finally,with a smile that cancelled the offensiveness of the intention conveyed of “pumping” his friend. “And we will confer further. Meanwhile, I know you will like to hear that his financial proceedings are prospering exceedingly, and are discretion itself!”
But the further conference, which took place in a day or two, was entirely fruitless as far as its nominal purpose was concerned. Loring did not reveal to Mrs. Romayne the exceeding brevity and decision with which Julian had dealt with any and every attempt to lead the conversation towards the Pomeroys, but he gave her to understand that at present he had nothing to tell her.
One night, about a week later, when she and her son came home in the dawn of the July day from a series of “at homes,” Mrs. Romayne, instead of saying good night to Julian at the door of her room, as was her custom, laid her hand suddenly on his arm and drew him just across the threshold. Her face was white to the very lips, and there was a set desperation in it stronger even than the fear with which her eyes were full. Her voice, as she spoke, was breathless and uncertainas though her heart beat with painful rapidity.
“Julian,” she said, “what is it that has gone wrong between you and Maud Pomeroy?”
A flash, so quick in the passing that its intense bitterness was not to be detected, passed across Julian’s face; it seemed to leave him armed with an expression of determined brightness which defied all emotion or sentiment.
“I don’t know that anything has ‘gone wrong,’ dear,” he said lightly.
His mother’s hold on his arm tightened desperately.
“I saw what happened to-night in the supper-room,” she said. “Won’t you”—her voice broke, and there came to it a strangely beseeching note—“won’t you tell me what it is?”
Julian’s face grew rather set, and he paused a moment. Then he said, still in the same tone:
“It is nothing that I need worry you about, dear.”
“Something might be done. If I knew what it was it could be set right, I know.”
“No, dear!” The words came from Julian quickly and instantly, and there was a decision and significance behind his light tone now. Her speech had created a necessity, and he rose instinctively to meet it. “I’m awfully sorry to distress you, but I assure you nothing can be done. A girl must be allowed to know her own mind, you know. And a certain little question asked and answered, the only thing left to the fellow is to retire gracefully. I’m awfully sorry you are cut up about it; I was afraid you would be. Never mind, dear. I’m in no particular hurry.”
He had gained in fluency and expansiveness of manner as he proceeded; the expedient had only occurred to him on the spur of the moment; and as he finished he bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
“Good night,” he said. “Sleep as well as I intend to do.”
He left her with a nod and a smile, shutting the door behind him, and Mrs. Romayne stood for a moment motionless, as she had received his kiss, staring at the door through which he had disappeared.Then she began to rub her hands feebly against one another as though a great cold had seized her. She was trembling from head to foot.
“Failed!”
She spoke the word half aloud in a low, shivering tone, which gave to its isolated utterance a strangely weird effect.
MarstonLoring was sitting at his writing-table, writing with an intentness which harmonised oddly with the suggestion of his evening dress—correct and up-to-date in the minutest particular. He had come rapidly out from the inner room two or three minutes before, evidently acting upon a recently-formed determination; and he was writing now swiftly and decisively. But there was nothing of rashness or impulsiveness about his face or manner as he wrote; they were even keener, more calculating and cynical than usual. He finished his note, directed it with the same decision, pushed it aside, and, taking up an open letter which had been lying before him as he wrote, leant back in his chair, and began to re-read it. The note, on which the ink was scarcely dry, was addressed to abroker in the City. The letter which he had taken up bore the postmark of a small town in South Africa, and was marked “Private” and “Urgent.”
Three days had passed since Julian’s explanation to his mother as to his relations with Miss Pomeroy.
Marston Loring had come back from South Africa three months before, with some very excellent machinery ready to his hand for the production of what would materially simplify and embellish his future career—a large fortune. That the machinery was such as a man of honour would have hesitated to put in motion; that the hands which worked it could hardly escape unstained, affected him not at all. The stains were not such as could be pointed at; it was hardly likely that they would be detected. Certain fellow mechanics were necessary to the proceedings; one of these he had found in Ramsay; the other he had created, so to speak, in Julian Romayne.
The first noticeable production of that machinery had been that first decisive rise in “Welcomes” at the end of June; and since that time it had been worked—mainlyby the master-mechanics, Ramsay and Loring—with unceasing skill, energy, and unscrupulousness. Various causes had co-operated to prevent such a speedy consummation as Loring had anticipated when he told Julian that the inside of a month would see the end of the proceedings. The month had gone by, and the shares, though they were now worth ten times as much as had been paid for them by the three in whose hands they lay, had not yet touched the highest value to which it was proposed to raise them—to which they were rising, as a matter of fact, with ever-increasing rapidity. And yet, notwithstanding the apparent certainty that in another week his shares would have materially increased in value, the note which Loring had just written contained instructions for the disposal of all his interest in the Welcome Diamond Mining Company, without fail, on the following day.
A very small stone will put out of gear the most skilfully constructed and reliable machine. A very small modicum of fact will reduce the most skilful and elaborate fiction to its elements. The letter which Loring wasstudying now with knit brows and compressed lips brought him private information, which he knew might be public property twenty-four hours later, to the effect that the Welcome Diamond Mine was under water. As soon as that fact was generally made known, shares in the Company would be practically worthless.
He folded the letter and sat for a moment tapping it meditatively against the table. He was thinking deeply; not now about the actual contents of the letter, but of a question which they had raised in his mind; a question interwoven and complicated with other carefully-laid plans. Finally he threw the letter down on the table with a movement of sudden resolution.
“I must!” he said to himself. “It won’t do to risk a row.”
He glanced hastily at his watch, and then drew out a sheet of note-paper and wrote rapidly:
“Dear Julian,“Be here to-morrow at ten sharp. Don’t fail.“Yours,“Marston Loring.”
“Dear Julian,
“Be here to-morrow at ten sharp. Don’t fail.
“Yours,
“Marston Loring.”
He directed the letter, and then rose quickly, took up the hat and light overcoat lying on a chair near him, and went out with the letter in his hand. At the porter’s lodge he stopped. “Get this sent by hand this evening,” he said, giving the man the letter addressed to Julian. The other letter he posted himself as he passed along the Strand.
He was on his way to dine in Curzon Street, and among his subsequent engagements for the evening the Academy soirée occupied a prominent place.
It was nearly twelve o’clock when he arrived at Burlington House, and the vestibule and staircase were alike crowded with people going up and coming down; smiling, nodding, and generally obstructing the way, with a bland oblivion of any but their own individual rights to a passage.
At the foot of the stairs Loring was seized upon and absorbed in a portentous obstruction, of which the centre figure was Mrs. Halse, a truly electrifying figure in a painfully fashionable evening “frock” of a brilliant green.
“I was just looking for a man,” she said, in her usual strident tones. “They get such an extraordinary lot of people together here that picking out any one one knows is like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. I suppose nobody ever did look for a needle in a bundle of hay, by-the-bye. Mr. Halse isn’t here, of course”—Mr. Halse was seldom known to appear in public, and when he did so, his meek presence was obviously entirely devoid of interest for his wife—“and I’m looking after Hilda Compton; her husband’s coming to fetch her, but he doesn’t care about her going about alone. Quite right, too, I tell him,” she added, with a laugh. “But of course it won’t last.”
Hilda Compton, a three months’ bride, was standing by looking like a Hilda Newton who had been born and bred in the centre of London society, daring in dress, self-possessed in manner, audaciously pretty in face.
She echoed Mrs. Halse’s laugh, and the latter went on, to Loring:
“You can come upstairs with us. It’s such a bore not to have a man!” and turning, led the way.
That characteristic feature in her vociferous personality—Mrs. Halse’s hobbies—had become crystallised to a great extent since Hilda Newton’s engagement and marriage into a passion for matrimonial affairs; not necessarily for match-making; match-marring was quite as keen an interest with her.
The comments with which she beguiled their way into the first room were mainly called forth by the young men and maidens of her acquaintance who happened to catch her eye, and whom she suspected of mutual likings or loathings. They had drifted halfway across the room without coming within speaking distance of any one they knew, when Mrs. Halse broke off in an energetically-whispered account of a certain pretty young woman’s partiality for—according to Mrs. Halse—an unresponsive young man, and exclaimed suddenly:
“That’s Maud Pomeroy over there, isn’t it? It’s my belief that she wears those ridiculous white dresses so that people may have something to remember her by. There’s nothing in her face, that’s certain!”
Loring glanced through the doorway into the other room, to where Miss Pomeroy, in white silk, was smiling very prettily upon a young man who was obviously, if his countenance was to be relied upon, making inane remarks to her. He was a very rich young man, and he had lately succeeded to a title. Loring smiled rather enigmatically.
“It is surely impossible to associate two such dissimilar ideas as artifice and Miss Pomeroy—oil and water, you know.”
“Milk and water, you mean!” put in Mrs. Compton, with a laugh.
Mrs. Halse responded to the little witticism with obstreperous hilarity, and then turned suddenly and confidentially to Loring, and spoke in an eager semi-whisper:
“Now, perhaps you can tell me,” she said; “nobody who knows her seems to have been able to pick up anything—not that she has any intimate friends, that kind of girl never has. But you know him, and men gossip much more than women, when all’s said and done. Has she behaved infamously to him, or has he behaved infamously to her?”
“Has who behaved infamously to whom?” said Loring, smiling.
Mrs. Halse unfurled her fan, and began to waft it vigorously and excitedly to and fro.
“You do know something about it!” she exclaimed. “Hilda, he wouldn’t fence like that unless he knew something. But you’re not going to get out of it like that,” she continued, addressing herself again to Loring. “I’ll tell you plainly of whom I am talking, and you’ll tell me plainly what has happened. Maud Pomeroy is the she, and young Romayne is the he. Now, then.”
“I give you my word that I know nothing about it.”
“I don’t believe you,” was the answer, given with uncompromising vigour and directness. “Good heavens! Somebody must know something about it. A month ago the Romaynes and the Pomeroys were never apart. You couldn’t go into a room without seeing him making eyes at her, and her simpering up at him, and their respective mammas exchanging confidences in corners. I was within an ace of congratulating them all round heaps of times. I lived with mymouth open to do it, so to speak; they all seemed so keen about it, it was evidently a matter for fervent congratulation. Though why Mrs. Pomeroy should have cared about it I can’t think!” this parenthetically. “He won’t have anything of his own while his mother lives. I suppose Maud fancied him! It’s my belief that that poor woman daren’t call her soul her own where Miss Maud is concerned!”
Mrs. Halse paused, but only for the purpose of taking breath. That very necessary process being accomplished, she continued her summary of the position:
“Then she goes to stay with prospective mamma-in-law, and we all stand on tip-toe and hold our breath. She spends a fortnight there, and the next thing we know is that the whole affair is apparently off! Off, if you please! No more making of eyes, no more simperings, no more confidences. And no explanation of any sort or kind. Mr. Loring, I cannot stand it, and I insist on knowing what you know.”
“Mrs. Halse, you do know what I know—that is—nothing.”
If a large and smart lady could by any possibility permit herself to stamp a large and heavy foot in the midst of a crowded and fashionable assembly, Mrs. Halse stamped hers at that moment. She gazed for an instant into Loring’s imperturbable face, and then, becoming convinced of his sincerity, she turned to Mrs. Compton with a gesture of despair.
“Hilda!” she said, “if somebody doesn’t find out something soon, I shall die of suspense!”
As it seemed not improbable from her demeanour at the moment that she would obviate the chances of such a calamity by hurling herself upon one of the objects of her interest and wresting a solution of the mystery from him or her by main force, it was perhaps as well that at that moment a temporary distraction presented itself in the shape of a popular actor. Mrs. Halse was very fond of popular actors; they had been a hobby with her at one time. And in the movement and breaking up of the group which ensued, Loring drifted quietly away.
He had made his way gradually into thebig room, when he suddenly quickened his steps and began to thread his way skilfully and rapidly through the crowd. Mrs. Romayne was standing on the opposite side of the room, smiling an invitation to him to come and speak to her.
Mrs. Romayne had not been looking her best lately. Somehow the piquant style and daring colour which she affected hardly suited her as they had been wont to do. To-night there was a tired look upon her face which seemed to reveal some recently-traced lines about her mouth; lines of intense and almost dogged determination; and to her sparkling eyes, if she allowed them a moment’s repose, there came a haggard look, which had seemed for the last three days to lie only just beneath the surface. But these were subtle, hardly perceptible points, and for the rest she remained a noticeably attractive woman of the most pronounced artificial type.
“Where’s the boy?” said Loring easily, when they had shaken hands. “Is he here?”
Mrs. Romayne shook her head and laughed.
“No!” she said. “He rather bars thesoirée. A mistake, I think. One must take it for what it is, of course; an omnium-gatherum of a perfectly preposterous nature; looked at from that point of view it’s not unfunny! Do look at that girl over there! She thinks her garment is a revelation to all beholders!”
“So it is,” returned Loring drily.
Mrs. Romayne laughed, and dropped the glasses with which she had been coolly surveying the garment in question.
“That was rather obvious, wasn’t it?” she said gaily. “By-the-bye, did you want to see Julian?”
There was a moment’s pause after Loring had replied, pleasantly enough, in the negative, and then Mrs. Romayne looked up at him suddenly, and said:
“It’s frightfully hot in here, don’t you think? Suppose we try one of the less popular rooms?” She stopped a moment, and then added with her most artificial laugh: “Of course, you gather from that that I’m going to victimise you again? Yes; I do want a little quiet talk with you. Who’d be a conspirator?”
There was nothing of the unwilling victim, at least, in Loring’s tone or manner as he deprecated her words. Nor was there either reluctance or tedium in his face as he followed her through the room. On the contrary, it was almost lighted up by an expression of sudden purpose.
Mrs. Romayne led the way to the almost deserted miniature room, and they began to walk slowly up and down, to all intents and purposes alone together. There seemed to be no particular point to Mrs. Romayne’s desire for a private conference with her fellow-conspirator. She talked about Julian; talked about him carelessly, artificially, but with a persistence which only another mother could have understood; slipping in little questions now and then on all sorts of details connected with that business side of a man’s life, as to which, she said, “women are always so in the dark;” and reverting again and again to her satisfaction and reliance in his mentor.
“It’s rather absurd to quote those ridiculous old proverbs,” she said at last, laughing affectedly, “but isn’t there one, or a fable,or something, about a duck whose chickens—no, a hen whose chickens, it would be, wouldn’t it?—would take to the water, and agitated her awfully because she couldn’t go after them? That’s exactly what I feel like, I assure you. And I look upon you as an exceptionally sensible water-bird who is also at home on the land—a kind of connecting link. Humiliating similes, aren’t they?”
Loring smiled in answer to her laugh. But his tone as he answered her was rather grave.
“Not by any means humiliating as far as I am concerned,” he said; “for you assume a certain amount of sympathy between yourself and me. May I tell you what a pleasure that idea gives me?”
He spoke slowly and deliberately, and Mrs. Romayne started slightly. She glanced up at his face for an instant, unfurling her fan, and using it gently, as though the movement were an outlet for some sort of faint agitation. Loring was not looking at her, his eyes were fixed for the moment on the opposite wall, and his profile told her nothing. There was a hardly perceptible pause, andthen he went on, with an admirable mixture of deference, admiration—the depth of which seemed the greater in that it was rather suggested than expressed—and the practical confidence of a man of the world.
“Don’t think that I am underrating Julian,” he said, “or that my regard for him, personally, is anything but a very warm and sincere affair, when I tell you that it is a long time now since Julian has figured in my thoughts as anything but his mother’s son. Because he is his mother’s son there are very few things I would not do for him, very little trouble I would not take for him.”
He hardly paused. Mrs. Romayne, rather, broke in on his speech with a high-pitched laugh.
“That’s very kind and flattering,” she said, and there was something astonishingly hasty and nervous in the way she spoke.
“I hope it doesn’t come upon you quite as a surprise,” answered Loring, with the slightest suggestion of a cynical smile unseen by Mrs. Romayne. “I hope it doesn’t need any words of mine to show you what I havetried to show you in more practical ways. You have honoured me with a great deal of confidence, and you have honoured me still further by putting it in my power to be of some slight service to you. Will you not give me still further powers in that direction? Will you not make our interests practically one by becoming my wife?”
He turned to her as he finished, and in spite of the admirable composure and deference with which he had spoken, his eyes were very eager and elated, almost as though with anticipated triumph.
Mrs. Romayne met his eyes, and stood for a moment gazing into them speechless and motionless, as though the blank astonishment written on every line of her face had absolutely paralysed her.
“Mr. Loring!” she said at last, and there was an almost bewildered remonstrance in her low, astonished tone. “My dear Mr. Loring!”
“One moment,” he interposed quickly. “Of course, I don’t ask you to look upon it as anything but a question of expediency and mutual goodwill and esteem. We areboth of us very well aware that London is not Arcadia! You won’t consider it brutal frankness on my part, I’m sure, if I tell you that from a financial point of view our positions are not unequal. I have been exceptionally fortunate lately, and I can offer you an income of about five thousand a year. And if a man’s assistance and support counts for something in your life, as I hope it may——”
Mrs. Romayne interrupted him. With all the tact and practicality of a woman of the world, she had mastered her amazement and was mistress of the situation. She spoke kindly and composedly, with just that touch of delicate concern which the occasion demanded.
“Don’t say any more, please; it is really quite impossible.”
A sudden flash of surprise passed across Marston Loring’s face, and he paused a moment, his keen eyes fixed scrutinisingly on her face. He was trying to detect there some signs of that coquetry or affectation of reluctance which he believed must surely underlie her words. His scrutiny failed todetect anything of the kind, however, and an unpleasant glitter came into his eyes.
“Impossible is a rather curt word,” he said. “May I ask you to amplify it?”
He saw the colour rise beneath her paint as she answered:
“I have not the faintest intention of marrying, in the first place. And even if there were not innumerable other reasons against what you propose, I’m afraid I have no fancy for making myself ridiculous! Oh, of course I am well aware”—she laughed a little—“that in my capacity of silly old mother I am as ridiculous as any woman need be! But really, I cannot add another farcical part to that farcical rôle.”
“And that farcical part would be——?” enquired Loring.
“That of the old wife of a young husband,” she answered, with artificial mirth. “Mr. Loring, I am really sorrier, if you are indeed disappointed, than I can tell you. If you have thought that I encouraged you—— But that is too utterly preposterous! I have considered you simply as my son’s friend—almost my son’scontemporary—a young man with an exceptionally wise and reliable head. Certainly not as a young man who would be foolish enough to want to marry a woman old enough to be his mother.”
Loring’s lips were rather thin, and his eyes glittered dangerously. As she stood looking at him then, with a certain softening excitement about her face, there was no slightest suggestion of age about her; nothing but an admirably developed and preserved maturity. And Loring was a young man in nothing but years.
“That is a mere form of words, if you will pardon my saying so,” he said, and his voice was dangerously quiet and controlled. “There is difference between us in years, of course, but that goes for nothing. In experience, in knowledge of the world, if I may say so, the difference between us is practically nil. I am, as you say, your son’s friend. But is that a reason for refusing me a larger form of the right which you yourself have pressed upon me, to watch over him and to supplement your care where it must inevitably fall short? For Julian’s sake!”
He was confronting her now, looking straight down at her, and as he spoke the last words, all the concern and agitation, partly affected, partly real, with which her face had been moved, vanished before a set expression of unalterable resolution.
“For Julian’s sake,” she said, in a low, decisive voice, “it is impossible.”
He stood for a moment watching her, all the evil of his face standing out in intense relief, and then he made a slight, cold gesture of acquiescence.
“May I take you back into the large room?” he said.
She held out her hand to him with an eager gesture of apology and appeal.
“We are friends still?” she murmured. And the murmur was almost pathetically genuine in its anxiety. “It makes no difference?”
Loring’s mouth was not good to look at as he answered in a tone absolutely destitute of expression:
“Certainly not!”
Ifevil thoughts and evil passions could have a tangible effect upon the physical atmosphere, the air of Marston Loring’s room, an hour later, should have been thick and heavy. He was sitting thrown back in an easy-chair, his evening coat replaced by a smoking jacket, a glass of whisky and seltzer-water close to his hand. There were also cigars on the table, but he was not smoking. He was staring straight before him into vacancy. His face was pale and set with vindictive passion, to the existence of which in his nature the general callousness of his expression gave no clue.
It was many years since Marston Loring had felt as he felt to-night. It was many years since he had been foiled and thwarted—“made a fool of,” as he himself would havesaid; and all that was blackest and worst in the man was roused by the process. His life, ever since he had realised, at the age of twenty-five, that there were prizes in the world which some men obtained and other men failed to obtain, had been ruled by a series of carefully made and elaborately worked out calculations. Everything he had done, and everything he had not done, had been included in one or other of these calculations; carefully designed to meet certain ends, all of which met and culminated in the one great end of existence as he conceived it—material prosperity and position.
He had been, perhaps, as vicious a youth as could have been found in London, and he had not ceased to be vicious as a man. But he so managed his vices that even the reputation which clung to him had contributed to his success. The question of marriage he had discussed with himself on more than one occasion, always solely from the point of view of expediency. And just about the time when Mrs. Romayne made her appearance in London society he had come to the conclusion that, given the right sort of woman, the stepmight possibly prove advantageous. He had been considerably struck by Mrs. Romayne from the first; she was the kind of woman he greatly admired, and he was well aware that to be on terms of intimacy with such a social power was an excellent thing for a man in his position; a position which, as he was also well aware, was by no means so secure as most people supposed. It was from this point of view that he had cultivated Julian, and, at first, from this point of view only. The idea of Mrs. Romayne as a possible wife occurred to him later. But when it did occur, it developed into active intention with considerable rapidity.
He had looked at the question from every possible point of view, and decided that nothing could suit him better. He had no taste for young women. He admired Mrs. Romayne as much as it was possible to him to admire any one; she was “the kind of woman he could get on with,” he told himself. She possessed exceptional advantages in the matter of social standing, and she had money. Her eager cultivation of him during the autumn that followed her first season in townconvinced him that with a little trouble she could be brought to forget the disadvantage of his comparative poverty; and he would have proposed to her in the ensuing winter had not his voyage to the Cape prevented. He had come back with the prospect of a fortune of his own. But the fact made no difference to his matrimonial plans. Where there is money more money is always to be desired. Mrs. Romayne’s fortune was no longer absolutely necessary to him, but it had not ceased to be desirable, and her other advantages remained intact. She had received him with enthusiasm, she had cultivated him assiduously; she had absolutely led him on, as it seemed to Loring. He, in common with the rest of the world, regarded her relations with her son as the merest pose, and her appeal for his help with Julian had seemed to him simply the most transparent of subterfuges. He had no more doubted that she would accept him than he had doubted his own existence. And now his plans were frustrated, his calculations were falsified, and his very practical and material castles in the air were laid in the dust. He was refused.
He roused himself at last, and the faintest suggestion of a cruel smile curved his thin lips. He lifted the glass by his side, drank off its contents, and then turned out the lamp and went into the inner room.
His face was quite itself the next morning; the scowl and the cruelty had alike disappeared; and it was with an even less cynical smile than usual that he looked up from his morning paper at a few minutes past ten o’clock, as the door opened with a hasty knock, and Julian Romayne appeared.
“Good morning, dear boy!” said Loring pleasantly.
“Morning, old man!” responded Julian.
He was looking rather pale and anxious, and he went on quickly:
“Nothing wrong with ‘Welcomes,’ I hope?”
Loring smiled again.
“Nothing in the world, as far as I know,” he said gaily. “What a nervous fellow you are!”
“What an unreasonable fellow you are!” retorted Julian, the cloud vanishing from his face as if by magic. “What do you mean bydragging a poor wretch down here at this hour in the morning, whether he will or no? What’s up?”
It was some legal business, it appeared; and Loring proceeded to go into it with great circumstance. It sounded very important as he put it, but Julian took his leave, declaring gaily that he “didn’t see where the urgency came in.”
“You’re such an abominably hard-working fellow!” he said lightly.
“Perhaps!” returned Loring. “It’s not such a bad principle, and it’s an excellent character to have, let me tell you. By-the-bye, Julian,” he continued, as the young man turned away with a laugh, and laid his hand on the door, “how would you like to have a few more Welcomes?”
He rose as he spoke, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece with his back to the empty grate, confronting Julian as the young man turned sharply towards him.
“What do you mean?” said Julian. “Are there any in the market?”
“Well, yes,” said Loring quietly. “The fact is, there’s a certain shooting in Scotlandwhich I have coveted for years. It’s for sale now, and on uncommonly reasonable terms. Of course, it’s appalling extravagance on my part, for the shares are going up every day. But I am going to sell a thousand pounds’ worth of Welcomes to-day and buy that moor.”
“It is extravagance!” said Julian, and there was an eager light in his blue eyes.
“Like to have the shares?” said Loring imperturbably.
Julian hesitated.
“I should like them, of course,” he said, rather breathlessly. “So would lots of other fellows. But, you see, my thousands, what there were of them, are all locked up in the Welcome already.”
“You wouldn’t think it worth while to borrow, I suppose?” enquired Loring carelessly.
“There’s a little difficulty known as security.”
“For some fellows, of course,” was the answer. “But not for you. You’ve got money coming to you.”
Julian coloured a dull red, and lookeddown at the carpet, moving his foot to and fro uneasily.
The idea of raising money on a reversion for such a purpose was for the moment inexpressibly repugnant to him.
“The shares are going up every day,” said Loring; “you ought to make a good thing of it; and you’ll sell at the end of this week, I take it? However, of course, I don’t want to press you. They’ll go off fast enough.”
Julian lifted his head suddenly, and drove his clenched hand deep down into his pocket.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “All right, Loring, I’ll take them.”
“To-day?” said Loring suavely.
“To-day!” returned Julian, almost fiercely.
He turned and left the room abruptly, without another word. And Loring, with the smile of the night before touching his lips once more, took up his paper again. Apparently he had forgotten the letter he had received from South Africa on the previous day, and the news it contained.