Itwas six o’clock on the following day, and in the sunset light of the July evening—a light with which the bustling, hurrying, unlovely crowd on which it fell seemed strangely out of harmony—the current of human life was setting strongly in every direction from the City. Along Cornhill, going against the stream, but driven, nevertheless, at a pace which was looked upon far from favourably by the police occupied in regulating the traffic, there came a hansom cab. In the cab, with one hand gripping the doors until the knuckles stood out white, was Julian Romayne. His hat was pulled slightly forward over his brow, as if with some half-conscious sense of the ghastliness of his face, some instinct to hide that ghastliness from casual eyes. His face was of a livid pallor. Therewere grey shadows about the mouth, which was set into hard lines of temporary and difficult self-control. His nostrils, not sensitive as a rule, quivered slightly as the pace of his horse slackened perforce now and again; he gave no other slightest sign of consciousness of his surroundings.
The cab turned out of Cornhill, and in another second pulled up suddenly. Almost before the cab had stopped, Julian flung open the doors and leapt out. He paid the man double his fare, dashed into the building before which they had stopped, and up the stairs to an office on the second floor. His hand was shaking like a leaf as he stretched it out to try the lock of the door. It yielded to his touch, and he flung it roughly open and passed rapidly in. The outer office had only one occupant, a rather feeble-looking little man, who was trying to improve the appearance of a shabby hat by a careful application of his coat-sleeve. He looked up with a start on Julian’s entrance, and an expression of comprehending concern dawned on his face. He was the messenger of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company. Before he couldspeak, however, a hoarse, peremptory question broke from Julian:
“Mr. Ramsay’s not gone?”
“Not yet, sir,” was the answer, given with timid alacrity. “He’s here later than usual to-night, you see, in consequence——”
But before the first words were fairly uttered, Julian had crossed the room, and as he reached the second door leading into the inner office, it opened quietly, and Ramsay stood on the threshold. He was looking as imperturbable and uninterested as usual, and his voice was dry indifference itself as he observed:
“I have been expecting you all day.”
Without a word Julian strode past him into the manager’s room, and then, as Ramsay shut the door calmly, he said, in a quick, unnatural tone, which also carried with it a curious suggestion that he had not even heard Ramsay’s words:
“It’s a mistake! It’s a mistake! It must be!”
Ramsay’s only answer was a slight shrug of the shoulders as his dull eyes rested, apparentlywith complete indifference, upon Julian’s face; and the latter went on, rapidly and unevenly:
“I’ve only just heard. I’ve been out of town all day. I’ve come to hear—to see what can be done.”
The last words were hardly audible, as though his mouth was so parched that he could hardly articulate. He lifted his hand as if involuntarily, and pushed back his hat, fixing a pair of fierce, burning eyes upon Ramsay.
“There’s nothing to be done, of course,” said Ramsay drily. “The thing’s collapsed.”
A harsh, wild laugh rang through the room, its faint echoes startling the little man in the outer office.
“Collapsed!” cried Julian. “Collapsed, by Heaven!”
He put out one hand gropingly, caught at a chair near him and dropped heavily into it, letting his face fall forward upon his folded arms as they rested upon its back.
Only half an hour had passed since he had gone to his rooms in the Temple aftera picnic on the river, to find waiting for him there a telegram from Ramsay. And into that half-hour had been compressed such a desperate stand against despair as is little less terrible than despair itself. The telegram had told him that on the opening of the Stock Exchange that morning it had been spread abroad on unimpeachable authority that the Welcome Diamond Mine was under water. This evening, the inevitable sequel of such a fact, as he knew too well, shares in the Welcome Diamond Mining Company were so much waste-paper.
Ramsay stood for a moment looking at him, with a rather curious expression on his inexpressive face.
“It’s a turn of the game,” he said drily. “If you stand to win, you must stand to lose, too. You hadn’t thought of that, I suppose?”
With a sudden tumultuous movement, as though his agony of mind was no longer to be endured in stillness, Julian sprang from his chair and began to walk up and down the room with hasty, uneven strides.
“Thought of it!” he cried. “What wasthere to make one think of it? It was a certainty yesterday, man; a certainty!”
A spasm passed across his face, and seemed to cut off his words, and Ramsay observed sententiously:
“It’s a mistake to reckon anything as a certainty till you hold it in your hand.”
Julian faced round suddenly and confronted him, his eyes blazing, every feature working.
“What the devil is the good of saying things like that?” he demanded. “Can’t you understand that I have reckoned on it, as you call it? Can’t you understand that it was all or nothing with me, and I am just done? Can’t you understand——”
He broke off suddenly, and, turning away with a heavy groan, flung himself into a chair, and let his face fall forward on the table. For all that he was face to face with at that moment he could have found no words. The remorse, the sense of failure and helplessness, the despair which seemed to be tearing his heart to pieces, were one intolerable anguish.
Ramsay followed him with his eyes, and then crossed the room quietly, and stood beside his bowed figure, which was shaken now and again from head to foot.
“Is it so bad as this, boy?” he said quietly. Then, as there came no answer, he went on meditatively: “Ten thousand pounds! Ten thousand isn’t so much to lose. Counters in the game, that’s all.”
He paused, and after a moment Julian lifted his face, haggard and drawn.
“It’s the stake you must look to,” he said. “My stake was heavy, Ramsay. Oh, you’re right enough. Ten thousand pounds isn’t much. I borrowed a thousand yesterday—raised it on a reversion—to get hold of some shares Loring wanted to sell. That wasn’t much either, of course.”
He had spoken in a dreary, monotonous voice, which was inexpressibly hopeless. And Ramsay’s eyes were fixed keenly on him as their owner said drily:
“You bought a thousand pounds’ worth of Loring’s shares yesterday? Did you know that he was selling out all his interest in the Welcome?”
Julian turned with a quick, startled movement, and then paused.
“All his interest?” he repeated. “He wanted a thousand to pay for a Scotch moor, that was all.”
“He sold every share he had yesterday,” returned Ramsay. “Curious coincidence.”
“You don’t mean to tell me——”
The eyes of the two men met; and Julian sprang to his feet with a fierce imprecation.
“He knew it?” he cried; “he knew it, and kept it dark, that he might keep the market to himself? It isn’t possible, Ramsay; it isn’t possible!”
“Nothing is impossible,” returned Ramsay quietly.
A savage, hissing breath came from between Julian’s set teeth, and he seemed literally alive with passion. Without a word he stretched out his hand for his hat and turned to leave the room. Ramsay quietly intercepted his passage.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“I’m going to see Mr. Loring.”
The slightest possible smile touched the elder man’s lips, and he said:
“All right. I shall have something to say to Mr. Loring, too. But listen to me, first. Was it a desperate necessity to you to pull off this affair?”
Julian did not speak. His lips twitched for a moment, then settled into a thin line; and the look in his eyes was answer enough.
“Very good, then,” said Ramsay. “Come and see me here to-morrow at six. I may be able to give you a hand.”
With a gesture of uncomprehending assent, but with no word of answer, Julian turned away and left the room.
Three-quarters of an hour later he was coming rapidly down the staircase which led from Loring’s chambers. His face was flushed and quivering, and every pulse was beating madly, like the pulses of a man who has just given unrestrained expression to furious passion. He turned on to the Embankment, and began to walk away in a headlong fashion, evidently neither knowing nor caring where he was going.
And as he walked the tumultuous life andglow of his face died slowly out, and settled into a haggard, sullen mask of dull despair. He had spoken his mind to Loring, and now there was nothing more for him to do.
“Weare all the slaves of man, my dear Lady Bracondale. You are kept in town because Parliament insists on keeping your husband; and I am kept in town because—oh, because the most capricious young man in London happens to be my son!”
An afternoon call in the first week of August is distinctly an anomaly, and seems to partake somewhat of the nature of a visit of condolence. Parliament was sitting late this year, and those hapless wives who considered it their duty to wait in town until their legislating husbands were released, visited one another, and were visited by the one or two acquaintances detained in London by other causes, in a manner which betrayed a combination of martyrdom and shamefacedness.
Lady Bracondale, who was nothing if not a personification of duty done, or in the act of doing, was being condoled with, or called upon, on this particular August afternoon, by two distinct sets of sympathising acquaintances; two sets, which, in spite of placid words and pretty speeches, seemed to be entirely incapable of amalgamation; Mrs. Romayne, and Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter, who had arrived a few minutes later. And it was to Mrs. Pomeroy that Lady Bracondale—who had a peculiar gift for saying in a stately and condescending manner the things which quicker perceptions would have recognised as not being precisely the best things to be said under the circumstances—turned, as Mrs. Romayne stopped speaking.
“I suppose Mrs. Romayne looks upon you as the exception that proves her rule,” she said. “For it is not a case of manly compulsion with you, I believe? I hope your sister goes on well?”
Mrs. Pomeroy, having neither husband nor son, was detained in town by the presence in her house of the sister whom she had visited earlier in the year, and who had spentthe last month under the care of a London doctor. But her tone was as placid as ever as she replied:
“Thank you, I believe they consider her nearly recovered, for the time being. She hopes to go home this week. And then Maud and I will go and pay some country visits. We don’t think of going abroad this year. I shouldn’t feel easy to be out of England while my sister remains in this state.”
“But that’s not compulsion at all!” exclaimed Mrs. Romayne gaily. “You are acting entirely on your own impulse. Now, just consider my hard case. We were going to Pontresina; you know I’m very fond of Pontresina; it’s such a dear, bright, amusing place. And we were to have started yesterday. Now, imagine my feelings when, two nights ago, that boy of mine came home, and said that, on the whole, he thought he’d rather not go abroad this year; he’s taken with an enthusiasm for his profession, if you please, and he must needs stay somewhere quiet—so he says—and work at it. I must do him the justice to say that he was awfully apologetic, dear fellow!” Mrs. Romayne laughedher little affected, maternal laugh. “He was very anxious that I should go without him, and even offered to give up his own plan when he found how preposterous I thought that part of his idea.”
There was not the faintest difference in Mrs. Romayne’s voice by which it would have been possible to tell that her last statement was even less veracious than any other part of her speech, and that Julian’s proposal to give up his plan was a figment of the moment only.
“And then of course I gave in,” she continued. “Of course, he knew I should—the wretch! And we’re to have a cottage on the river, and spend six weeks there.”
She finished with a little grimace, and Lady Bracondale observed politely:
“I’m afraid you will find it rather dull.”
“I shall find it very dull,” returned Mrs. Romayne with ingenuous frankness. “I shall be bored to death. But, then, you all know that I am really a very ridiculous woman, and if my lord and master is content, there is nothing more to be said. He’s kind enough to assure me that there are lots ofnice people about! I don’t know what kind of nice people one is likely to find about the river in August and September, but I take his word for it.”
“I believe the Comptons have a house-boat somewhere,” observed Miss Pomeroy.
It was her first contribution to the conversation, and it was made apparently rather because conventionality by this time demanded a remark of some sort from her, than from any interest in the subject. Before any reply could be made, the door opened, and Marston Loring was announced.
Mrs. Romayne had been looking rather sharp-featured, and there was a great restlessness in her eyes. It seemed to leap up and then settle suddenly into comparative repose as they rested on Marston Loring, and as he turned to shake hands with her she greeted him gaily. It was their first meeting since the night of the Academy soirée, but Loring’s manner was absolutely unmoved. His greeting to her differed in nowise from his greeting to the other two ladies, and if that fact in itself involved a subtle change in his demeanour towards her, thechange was observed by one pair of eyes only—a pair of demure brown eyes. Miss Pomeroy had been a good deal interested in Marston Loring’s comings and goings during the fortnight she spent in Queen Anne Street.
“I thought you were gone,” Mrs. Romayne said lightly. “What are you doing in town to-day, may one ask, when you were booked to start for Norway yesterday?”
“Business,” he returned in a tone which addressed the whole company rather than any member of it individually. “I am investing in a Scotch moor, and I can’t leave London till I have signed and sealed.”
There was a delicate implication of wealth about the statement which seemed to give a curious fillip to the conversation; and an animated discussion ensued on Scotland, its charms and its disadvantages.
Mrs. Romayne held her part in the discussion with unfailing readiness, and as the subject exhausted itself she rose to take leave. She said good-bye in her usual charming manner to her hostess, andto Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter, and then she turned to Loring.
“By-the-bye,” she said carelessly, “I’ve a piece of property of yours in the carriage. Did you know you had lost something when you called the other day? No, I shan’t tell you what it is, you very careless person! But I’ll give it you if you like to come down for it.”
She turned away; Loring followed her perforce; and there was an ugly smile on his face as he did so. At the foot of the stairs she paused; then with a quick glance towards an open door which led into a dining room, she went rapidly towards it, signing to him to follow her. Once within the room, she turned and faced him. She was smiling still, but the smile was stiff and mechanical, and her eyes, as she fixed them on his face, were desperately anxious. There was a curious ring of conscious helplessness and reliance on the man to whom she spoke, about her voice as she began to speak.
“I wanted to speak to you,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you. I’m rather perplexed.Julian has taken it into his head to stop in town, or, rather, close to town. He won’t go abroad; he won’t visit. Can you tell me the reason? Will you try and find out the reason? May I rely on you? But of course I know I may.”
There was a tone almost of relief in her voice, as if in the mere making of the confidence, in the sense of companionship and support it gave her, she found some sort of ease.
And Loring smiled again as he met her eyes.
“I’m sorry to have to dispel an illusion which is so flattering to me,” he said, with the slightest possible accentuation of his usual quiet cynicism of manner. “But it’s useless to assume that I can be of any further service to you.”
He stopped, watching with keen, relentless eyes the effect of his words. A startled look came to the face turned towards him. The eyebrows were lifted and contracted with a quick movement of perplexity. Evidently she believed that she had not fully understood him, for she did not speak, and he went on:
“Your son and I have quarrelled. He has insulted me grossly. For the future we are strangers to one another. Consequently you will see that I shall be no longer able to keep him out of mischief.”
There was an indescribable tone in his voice, ominous and vindictive. And as he spoke, Mrs. Romayne’s face seemed to grow old, and her eyes dilated.
“It can be put right,” she said, in a quick, uncertain voice. “He will apologise. You will forgive——”
Loring interrupted her, very coldly and incisively.
“He will not apologise!” he said. “And I should not accept any apology. I needn’t suggest, of course, that, under the circumstances, our acquaintance, much as I regret this, had perhaps better cease.”
They faced each other for another moment, and into Mrs. Romayne’s eyes there crept a sick despair strangely incongruous with the surface appearance of the position. Then she seemed to recover herself as if with a tremendous effort of will. She drew herself up, bowed her head with grave dignity,and moved to leave the room. He held the door open for her with an absolutely expressionless countenance. She passed down the hall to where the servant was waiting at the door, went out, and got into her carriage alone.
Loring stood at the foot of the stairs watching her, and then turned with a cruel contentment in his eyes, and went upstairs again to the drawing-room.
The two elder ladies were sitting with their heads very close together, as he opened the drawing-room door, evidently deep in some question of domestic importance. And standing by a conservatory window at the other end of the room, a rather bored-looking figure in its solitary girlishness, was Maud Pomeroy. The occasion being, as has been said, something of an anomaly, conventions were not so strict as usual. Lady Bracondale just glanced up with a vague smile as Loring reappeared, and then became absorbed in conversation as he strolled across to Maud Pomeroy. She looked up at him with a faint smile.
“Has Mrs. Romayne gone?” she said.
He signified a careless assent, and then said:
“You are looking rather bored, do you know, Miss Pomeroy? Suppose we go and look at the flowers until we’re wanted?”
She hesitated a moment, and then moved idly into the conservatory, looking back at Loring with a smile as he followed her.
“I was a little bored,” she confessed. “It is very kind of you to come and amuse me.”
For the next moment or two Loring could hardly be said to prove himself very amusing. He sauntered round the little conservatory at his companion’s side, his eyes fixed keenly upon her impassive profile with something very calculating in their depths. Miss Pomeroy also was apparently absorbed in thought, and did not notice his silence.
“You are a great friend of the Romaynes, are you not?” she said at last, in her thin, even, very “proper” tones.
Loring glanced at her again.
“Well,” he said, “that’s not a questionthat it’s particularly easy for me to answer, to-day. I have been on fairly intimate terms with them, as you know. But do you know what that kind of thing sometimes leads to?”
Miss Pomeroy shook her head.
“Well, there is such a thing as knowing people too well,” said Loring deliberately. “And then you find out little traits that don’t do. To tell you the truth, Romayne and I have quarrelled.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Miss Pomeroy softly.
He looked at her quickly, but he was not quick enough to catch the spiteful gleam in her eyes.
“Would it be inquisitive to enquire why?” he said.
“I don’t think Mr. Romayne is a nice young man,” was the answer. “I would rather people I like——” She broke off in pretty confusion. “I would rather you weren’t a friend of his, Mr. Loring. I think there’s a great deal about him that nobody knows.”
“Indeed!” said Loring, interrogatively and quietly.
“You see,” she said, with charming seriousness, “I think a girl can often feel whether a man is nice or nasty quicker than another man can. Mr. Loring, has Mr. Romayne ever said anything to you—Oh, please don’t think it’s very odd of me to say such things to you! Has he ever said anything that made you think he might be married?”
There was a hardly perceptible pause—a hardly perceptible flash of comprehension on Loring’s face, and the vindictive satisfaction in his eyes deepened.
“What makes you ask me that?” he said, in a tone which seemed to fence gravely with the suggestion rather than to repudiate it.
Miss Pomeroy responded with growing conviction.
“Because I’m quite sure that he is married. And, of course, as he doesn’t own it, there must be something—something not nice about it. And it does seem to me so wrong that people should like him so much when he isn’t a bit what they think he is.”
The man’s eyes and the girl’s eyes met at that moment for the first time. The girl’s were perfectly clear, mild, and expressionless, and into the man’s there stole a cynical tinge of admiration.
“By Jove,” he said to himself, “she is clever!”
At that instant Mrs. Pomeroy’s voice was heard from the drawing-room calling placidly for her daughter. And Miss Pomeroy moved forward with graceful promptitude into the drawing-room.
“We shall meet in Scotland by-and-by, I believe,” said Loring pleasantly, as he shook hands with Miss Pomeroy. “You were to be at the Stewarts’, I believe, in the last week of September, and so am I. I shall look forward to it. Good-bye, Miss Pomeroy.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Loring.”
A few minutes later Loring also took leave of Lady Bracondale and went away. The satisfaction was stronger than ever in his eyes. Maud Pomeroy’s words had somehow or other carried instantaneous conviction to his mind, and in the fact he believedthem to contain he saw certain social ruin for Julian Romayne.
“He’s done for himself all round,” he said to himself as he let himself into his rooms half an hour later. “That nice little house in Chelsea will be to let next season.”
At that same moment, in the manager’s room at the offices of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company, Julian Romayne was standing by the table, looking down at Ramsay as the latter sat leaning back in his chair, indifferent enough in attitude, but with a hard intensity of expression in his dull eyes. Julian had evidently just risen, pushing back his chair, the back of which he was gripping almost convulsively. His face was ashen, his eyes were dilated with an expression of desperate, intolerable temptation.
“I’ll do it,” he was saying in a harsh, unnatural voice. “I’ll do it, Ramsay. Shake hands on it.”
Thecottage which Mrs. Romayne had taken for August and September, on Julian’s refusal to go abroad, was situated a few miles above Henley. It was a very charming little house, to which the term “cottage” was applicable only in mock humility; and it was very charmingly situated. It had a delightful garden, not large, but full of “roses, and sunflowers, and all sorts of things,” as Mrs. Romayne explained to Julian after her visit of inspection. Its lawns sloped down to the river, and altogether, on the same authority, it was a wonderful chance to get hold of it.
The statement which Mrs. Romayne had made to Lady Bracondale on Julian’s authority, that there were “nice people about,” had originated, as a matter of fact,not with Julian, but with his mother herself. It was quite true, nevertheless; but apparently Julian’s sudden desire for quiet had proved infectious. The acquaintance between herself and her present neighbours being of the slightest, Mrs. Romayne made no such attempt as might have been expected of her to develope that acquaintance.
She seemed to be strangely without impetus in herself towards action of any kind. She was “resting,” some people might have said; she was pausing, certainly. But whether, as the days went on, her life did not signify rather temporary and enforced quiescence, than the peaceful and pleasant suspension of labour, might have been an open question.
It was a hot, bright August; day after day the sun shone steadily down, as Julian departed for town after an early breakfast, at which his mother never failed to appear. Day after day it shone through all the long, little-broken hours upon the quiet house and garden, about which the one woman’s figure moved in almost total solitude, until, with the evening, Julianreturned again. Evening after evening the mother and son spent alone, but by no means always together. After their dinner, during which conversation seldom flagged between them, any more than it would have flagged between two friendly and well-bred acquaintances, Mrs. Romayne would sit in the drawing-room with a bit of fashionable fancy-work in her hand, into which she only occasionally put a stitch; and sometimes Julian would spend half an hour with her there, reading the newspaper and carrying on the talk of dinner; or sometimes he would stroll out into the garden at once, and come in only just before bed-time.
Mrs. Romayne never followed him and never questioned him. Perhaps it was the curiously still life she led which brought so strange and still an expression to her face; a stillness which suggested a slow, wearing waiting, and a mingled concentration, watchfulness, and patience.
It was an evening in the second week of September, and she was walking up and down the lawn in the fading sunset light.She was moving with slow, regular steps, with the monotonous motion of a woman to whom the even movement brought some sort of relief or soothing. There was an indescribable touch of desolateness about her lonely figure as she moved up and down before the empty house.
A servant came out to her by-and-by with some newly-arrived letters. She took them, and then, her monotonous motion being perforce suspended, a sense of physical fatigue seemed to assert itself, and she sat down on a low basket-chair.
A sigh came from her as she did so, one of those sighs which in their unconsciousness are so suggestive of habitual suffering. She paused a moment, looking away into space with absent eyes. Then she seemed to rouse herself, and took up one of the letters as if forcing herself to seek relief from the current of her monotonous thoughts. She had opened the envelope and read the letter half through in a mechanical, uninterested way, when its contents seemed suddenly to arrest her attention. A change came to her expression, a change whichin its slight quickening and revival showed how dulled, almost numbed, it had been before.
She turned once more to the beginning of the letter and read it again.
“Glenfyle, Ross-shire.“Dear Mrs. Romayne,“I am so sorry to have to ask you to postpone the visit which you had promised us for the end of this month. I find that by some stupid mistake my husband and I have given separate invitations for the same date. As there is, unfortunately, no doubt that his invitation was given first, there falls upon me the very disagreeable task of explaining the situation to you and your son, and begging you to forgive me.“Yours truly,“Marion Stewart.”
“Glenfyle, Ross-shire.
“Dear Mrs. Romayne,
“I am so sorry to have to ask you to postpone the visit which you had promised us for the end of this month. I find that by some stupid mistake my husband and I have given separate invitations for the same date. As there is, unfortunately, no doubt that his invitation was given first, there falls upon me the very disagreeable task of explaining the situation to you and your son, and begging you to forgive me.
“Yours truly,
“Marion Stewart.”
Mrs. Romayne leant back in her chair, not indolently, but with an intent consideration in every line of her figure; and letting the hand that held the letter fall on her knee, she sat gazing at the written words with sharp, angrily sparkling eyes,which looked as though they were bent on piercing through the words themselves to the meaning which she believed they hid. She was evidently surprised and annoyed; as evidently she gave not an instant’s credence to the reason alleged for the postponement of the visit in question; and the slight involved in this postponement, indefinite, as she noticed with an unpleasant little smile, seemed to stimulate her.
Her face had grown even vindictive, when her eyes fell on the postmark of the second letter lying on her knee. It was that of the same little Scotch town, the name of which was stamped upon the already opened envelope. She took it up eagerly, and as she saw the handwriting, she paused for an instant, and a flash of intense consideration passed across her face. Then she tore it hastily open. It was from Mrs. Pomeroy, and it conveyed in three long-winded and incoherent sheets a piece of news which the writer was sure would delight Mrs. Romayne.
“Dear Maud,” the letter said, was just engaged to “that charming Mr. Loring.”Mrs. Pomeroy’s mind seemed to be in a state of somewhat considerable confusion between a theoretical and conventional sense that it was very sad for her to lose her daughter, and a certain practical and actual sense, which by no means harmonised with the theoretical one, and all unconsciously threw a good deal of light on the relations between the mother and daughter, as they actually existed. The coherence of the letter was further disturbed by sundry sentences, which dovetailed so oddly into the general fabric that they had somewhat the appearance of being inserted to order; sentences which conveyed various repetitions of “dear Maud’s” assurance of Mrs. Romayne’s congratulations; and various repetitions of the statement that Mr. Loring’s financial position had recently improved amazingly, and that he was sure of a seat in Parliament at the forthcoming general election.
“He has been staying with the Stewarts during the whole of our visit to them,” the letter ended. “Dear Lady Marion has been so kind about it, and taken such an interest.”
“Ah!”
The exclamation, uttered, evidently involuntarily, just above her breath, came from Mrs. Romayne’s lips sharply and bitterly. She had read the letter through with certain quick movements of her eyebrows, and mocking smiles coming and going about her thin lips, and they smiled again as she folded the letter deliberately and put it back into its envelope. She was looking thoroughly roused now, and there was a confidence in her alert, determined expression. It was the kindling up of martial spirit at a challenging trumpet-call from a well-known battlefield.
If Marston Loring and his future wife were indeed arranging their forces for the undermining of Mrs. Romayne’s social position—and Miss Pomeroy and Loring between them could have pieced out a very sufficient explanation of Lady Marion Stewart’s note—the campaign, judging from appearances at that moment, was likely to be far from a tame one.
Mrs. Romayne was still sitting with the letters in her hand, tapping one foot withimpatient vigour upon the grass, and there was the same eager intentness in her eyes, when from the house behind her the sound of a dinner-bell rang out. She started violently, and in the start something seemed to fall between her and the subject on which her thoughts had been busy. A curious shade of that new stillness replaced the energy on her face. It was the dressing-bell, and she rose mechanically; and as she turned towards the house her eyes fell upon the figure of Julian. He had evidently been standing on the verandah, and as she rose he had turned, and was disappearing into the house. Another shade of stillness fell upon her face, as though the letters she had received, and the feelings they had stirred, had receded into the distance.
It often happened that the mother and son did not meet, on Julian’s return home in the evening, until dinner-time, and it happened so this evening. The dinner-bell was ringing when Julian came downstairs with a quick word or two of apology, and followed his mother into the dining-room.
Julian looked as though his month’s hardwork had by no means agreed with him. His face was even painfully thin and worn, and there was an expression of hard concentration about it which seemed to age it strangely. His eyes were rather sunken. It was a curious feature of a change in him less easily defined, that his likeness to his mother had faded considerably. All the character of his face now seemed to originate about his mouth; that mouth of which Mrs. Romayne had been wont to say with affected gaiety that it was like nobody in particular; that mouth which had been a somewhat weak and undecided feature. There was nothing undecided about it now, and Mrs. Romayne never looked at it without a deepening of that stillness on her face. It was set into heavy, resolute lines.
No one, indeed, judging from the bare outline of Julian’s daily life during that hot August, could have wondered at the signs of physical wear and tear that he exhibited. Ten o’clock, on every one of those sultry days, found him at work, not indeed in the Temple, but in an office in the City; and it was from the same office that he would issue forth atabout five o’clock to catch the train for Henley, sometimes with sullen determination, sometimes with a pale, fierce excitement on his face.
The affairs of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company had readjusted themselves, after the blow which had threatened the company’s very existence, as hardly the most sanguine could have hoped. Ten days after the announcement of the presence of water in the mine, some of the newspapers published another telegram which had been received by the directors. The passage of the water, by which the existing mine was rendered practically useless, had revealed hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and there appeared to be little doubt that the first mine had been, as it were, only a pledge of still richer strata yet to be worked. One telegram followed another, confirming the report in greater detail. Prospectuses were issued, setting forth a proposal to utilise the opportunity thus opened, and debentures were issued for the providing of the necessary funds. These debentures were taken up somewhat slowly at first, but on the arrival in Englandof specimens of diamonds from the new lead, together with a circumstantial report, they were taken up with a rush. Works were understood to be already on foot, and dividends were looked for at an early date. The new managing director of the company was Julian Romayne.
There was a kind of dry excitement about him to-night behind the deliberate assumption of conversational interest which was his never-changing manner with his mother now, and his hand shook a little as he poured himself out more wine than usual.
He did not rejoin his mother in the drawing-room, saying something as she left him about having letters to write; and two hours afterwards he was walking up and down the lawn in the moonlight with a cigar.
There was a fierce restlessness in his step, and there was a fierce restlessness in his face, too. He had been walking there for half an hour when a shadow passed across the blind of the drawing-room window—the night was very hot and the window was wide open—and the blind was drawn up. Mrs. Romayne’sfigure stood there outlined by the lamplight within. The drawing-room window was shadowed from the moonlight by an angle of the house.
“Good night, Julian!” she called.
Julian stopped in his walk mechanically.
“Good night, mother!” he answered. The figure in the window seemed to hesitate for a moment; then Mrs. Romayne moved and drew down the blind, the lights in the room behind went out one by one, and Julian resumed his walk in the moonlight as mechanically as he had stopped it.
It was his custom to go, every morning, first to his room in the Temple in case any letters might be waiting for him there; and on the following morning, a slight accident on the line having considerably delayed his train, he paused a moment before giving his order to the cabman. He was very late, and there was a feverish impatience in every line of his face. He had almost decided that any private letters might wait until the next day, when, with a sudden, unaccountable reaction, he sprang into the cab and told the man to drive to the Temple.
He had apparently repented of the resolution by the time the cab stopped, for he sprang out with a muttered imprecation on the delay. There was only one letter waiting for him, and he caught it up fiercely. Then the handwriting in which it was directed caught his eye.
All the tumultuous heat and impatience of his face died out suddenly and utterly. He stood for a moment staring down at the letter, white to the very lips. Then he seemed absolutely and physically to set his teeth, and in the intense hardness of determination which set its mark on every muscle of his face, his whole expression would have seemed to deteriorate, markedly and terribly, but for the desperation in his eyes which was little short of agony.
He moved abruptly, crossed the room, unlocked a drawer in his writing-table, and thrust the letter in with quick, deliberate movements, unopened. He locked the drawer again sharply, and turned and went hastily out of the room.
The letter was from Clemence; it was the first sign of her existence which he hadreceived since their parting on that June evening nearly three months ago.
He was looking only older, harder, and more recklessly resolute when about a quarter of an hour later he entered the office of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company. The feeble-looking little messenger was in solitary possession, and he looked up rather uneasily as Julian wished him a brief good morning and crossed to the door of the manager’s room.
“Mr. Ramsay’s just gone out, Mr. Romayne,” he said. “I was to say he would be in again directly.”
Julian made a curt gesture of assent and went on into the private room. There was plenty of work waiting for him, it appeared, and he was still applying himself to it with dogged concentration, when, nearly an hour later, the door opened and Ramsay appeared.
“There you are!” he said indifferently. “I thought you weren’t going to turn up this morning.”
Julian had just glanced up from the letter he was writing to acknowledge the other man’s entrance, and he went on writing ashe explained briefly that his train had been delayed.
“No particular reason for wanting me, I suppose?” he said in a brief, businesslike way, as he laid down his pen.
Ramsay sat down deliberately, and put his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat.
“Well, yes,” he said. “There’s a matter here which rather calls for the attention of the managing director.”
He held out a letter as he spoke, and Julian took it and read it quickly. Then he laid it down on the table before him, and looked up slowly at Ramsay. His face was rather pale.
“A general meeting of shareholders!” he said. “Demanded!”
There was a moment’s pause, while he looked steadily into Ramsay’s immoveable face, and then he added in the same rather difficult tone:
“Did you expect this, Ramsay?”
“I never expect,” returned Ramsay drily. “Such a thing was on the cards, of course.”
Julian’s face grew dark and calculating.
“Well,” he said harshly, after anothermoment’s pause, “it must be arranged for, of course. What do you propose?”
Ramsay answered the question by another.
“Do you happen to know anything,” he said, “of a man named Compton—Howard Compton?”
Julian’s brows contracted as if with an involuntary effort to detect the relevancy of the question as he answered tersely:
“Yes. He and I belong to the same club.”
“You didn’t know, I suppose, that some shares in the Welcome have drifted into his hands?”
Julian shook his head with a quick frown of vexation.
“Ah!” observed Ramsay; “they have, though. And it has come to my knowledge that various enquiries have been made into the state of the Welcome Diamond Mine; made on the spot, and made in secret. And I’ve traced these enquiries to this Mr. Howard Compton.”
A dreadful grey pallor had begun to spread itself over Julian’s face, and the muscles seemed to have grown rigid withthe intense force with which he held them to their expression of dogged determination. He did not speak, and Ramsay went on in the same dry, indifferent way:
“He is either a very clever hand, or very cleverly advised. The one point we score, at present, is that he has not done as he intended to do, and taken us by surprise.”
“Do you mean to say——”
The words seemed to come from between Julian’s dry, white lips almost without consciousness on his part. His eyes were fixed upon Ramsay with a hard, unseeing kind of stare, his voice was hoarse, uneven, and hardly audible, and it died away, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“The meaning is obvious, of course,” returned Ramsay. “An affair of this kind is a ticklish thing to pull off, and a hitch of this kind is always possible, though I never came across an affair in which it seemed less probable. I don’t know yet exactly how much our friend knows. The meeting won’t be a particularly placid affair, of course, and you’re likely to have a warm time of it. But, of course, there’s a chancethat he mayn’t know quite enough, and we may be able to pull it through, yet.”
“And if not?”
Something seemed to rattle in Julian’s throat as he spoke the words, and they came out thick and husky.
“If not?” repeated Ramsay. “Well, if not, I think I wouldn’t go to that meeting if I were you.”
There was a moment’s dead silence, broken only by Julian’s heavy, laboured breathing. The two men sat there face to face, and their eyes met with a terrible significance of what was better unexpressed in words. Then Ramsay’s dull eyes took a deliberate survey of Julian’s face. It was drawn and livid, and the elder man rose and took from the cupboard some brandy. He poured it into a glass with a slightly contemptuous smile, and put it into Julian’s hand.
“You’re the very devil to work,” he said drily. “And for all I know you may be first-rate as a winner; but I can’t say you’re a good loser. And it’s a useful lesson to learn in this business.”
Julian drank the brandy and rose mechanically. The strong stimulant hardly seemed to touch the blanched horror of his face.
“What do you propose to do?” he said in a stiff, toneless voice.
“Personally, nothing,” returned Ramsay, “until I know more. Business will go on as usual. You’ll call the meeting, of course. I’ll tell Harrison to get the forms ready for you to sign. They must be sent out to-morrow. Going?”
“Yes,” said Julian heavily. “There’s nothing more I need do to-day.”
He took his hat and went slowly out of the office, looking straight before him like a man walking in his sleep. Ramsay looked after him, and stood for a minute rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“Not quite what I thought he was,” he said to himself; “though he has served this purpose well enough. Pity he hasn’t a little more of his father in him. Got all the makings of the right sort, but he can’t stay.”
Theearly sunlight of a lovely September morning was streaming into the room through every crack and chink in the blinds and curtains, making the light from the still burning lamp look yellow, dim, and unnatural. It was Julian’s sitting-room in the house in Chelsea, and the light, falling here and there, touched into distinctness many of those little luxurious details on which the evening light had fallen on that winter day eighteen months before, when Mrs. Romayne had stood upon the threshold and looked round upon her completed arrangements, waiting then for the use which was to give them life. On a chair by the writing-table, his head dropped sideways on his arm as it rested on the table, sat Julian Romayne asleep.
He was asleep, but he was not at rest.His face was grey and drawn; it twitched painfully, and his hand was fiercely clenched. Gradually an expression of terror and despair gathered on his features, until they were almost convulsed, and with a strangled, gasping cry he woke and started to his feet, trembling in every limb, and with great drops standing on his forehead. He stood clutching at a chair for support, while the first poignant impression of his dream subsided, and then he moved as though impelled by some reactionary impulse to collect himself. He glanced at the clock and saw that the hands pointed to a quarter past six. He was vaguely conscious of having heard it strike six, so that he could have slept for a few moments only. His lips twitched slightly at the thought of what those few moments had held for him. Then he realised that he was cold, that all his limbs were stiff and aching, and he dragged himself slowly across the room, drew the curtains and the blinds, and stood there in the sunshine.
It was the first movement of physical consciousness which he had felt since he left the office of the Welcome Diamond MiningCompany on the morning of the previous day.
How that day had passed he did not know. Here and there in the blackness a picture of himself stood out with uncertain distinctness. He knew that he had telegraphed to his mother to the effect that he might not return to Henley for some time. He remembered writing the words though he could recall no mental process by which the elaborate excuse he had made had occurred to him. He knew that somewhere dinner had been placed before him, though where, and whether he had eaten, he knew not at all. For the rest, an impression of ceaseless walking, of interminable streets giving place imperceptibly to the four walls of his own room, made up the only actual background in his memory to the intense mental consciousness which had usurped for the time being the tangibility of material things.
The favourable turn in the affairs of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company had been founded on a deliberate system of forgery and fraud, planned by Ramsay, subscribed to and participated in by Julian. The telegramas to the new lead had been concocted in the office in the City; the diamonds exhibited as earnest of the future yield of the mine had been bought for that purpose; and not one penny of the money paid in debentures had ever been intended for application to the working of the ruined mine. If these facts should come to light—and hostile enquiries once instituted on the spot, only one of those incredibly lucky chances to which gamblers and swindlers alike owe so much could avert such a catastrophe—the consequences were obvious. Public exposure, public ignominy and execration, wholesale and irremediable loss of position, were absolutely inevitable. And as inevitable if he remained in England, the dark gulf in which his life must be swallowed up and closed—as far as everything which constituted life for him was concerned—whether he fled from it or whether it clutched him, was the legitimate reward of his doings; penal servitude.
He could not realise it. He could not face it. He had beaten it back, he had thrust it down again and again during that long day and night, and again and again the horror hadswept over him, gaining always in certainty and reality. Struggle against it as he might and did, clutching at his consciousness, shaking and rending it with a force not to be resisted, and growing ever stronger and stronger, there dawned a dazed, bewildered conviction that the end he saw before him was indeed the inevitable end; that in that black gulf, and no other, all his efforts and fierce strivings were to find their consummation.
He had digged it with his own hands; he had followed on towards it in a very desperation of defiance and recklessness, goaded by a grinding sense of failure and frustration to a wild daring which had looked like courage and resolution. But the spirit which had stimulated him was not in himself. All unconscious of it as he was, he had been drunk with the thought of what lay beyond that gulf; drunk with a desperate, unreasoning anticipation of triumph. The hideous possibility of failure confronted him now practically for the first time, and before it all his fictitious stamina shrivelled away, as in its very nature it was bound to do. A vague, confounded comprehension of the consequences which he hadbrought upon himself rose upon him, walling him in on every side; and about those consequences, as connected with himself, there was all the ghastly incongruity and unreality of a hideous nightmare. He had never understood the realities of life. He had crushed down their impulses in his heart. He had called superficialities essentials; selfish ignorance, practical sense; and he had worked and fought in a false atmosphere, and for a false aim.
And now, instead of that fictitious triumph which he had looked to grasp, he found himself face to face with facts so sordid and so relentless that he could hardly recognise them as facts at all. His world was tottering into ruins all about him; the clash and crisis of imminent downfall and disgrace was stunning him and shaking him through and through; and in the wild tumult and confusion all the limitations of his nature seemed to break up, as it were, into one blind chaos of protest and repudiation, dominated only by despair. Nothing fixed or steadfast held its place. The very passions by which he had been driven on had been borne down and numbed.The thought of Clemence had become merely a vague element in the confusion. Of his mother he did not think at all. Even that dark factor in his being—the perversion of his instincts as to truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty—which had asserted its grim presence with the very awakening of his character; which had dictated the first steps along the path of which he stood now at the end; was swept into solution, now, with every other element in his character. It had held its place, hitherto, side by side with the other motive powers by which his life had been regulated; dictating the lines on which those powers should work, strengthening and developing with the demands they put upon it. But it had remained the servant of a stronger passion, and as far as any power of support or guidance was concerned it had gone down in the flood. He had no perception, truly, of the moral aspect of his position, no sense of guilt or of remorse. He only knew that he was beaten, that it was all over with him.
He stood there at the window staring out into the sunshine, seeing nothing, consciousof nothing but the gulf before him; as utterly and absolutely isolated in his misery as though he had been the only creature living in the world. The desperate struggle with facts was sinking into a hopeless confused acceptance of them; into a dazed, bewildered contemplation of details which seemed to rise slowly into distinctness out of the fog which hung about them; to rise and fade again without volition on his part. Details connected with the future came first, and he looked at them and understood them with stunned composure as though they stood outside him all together. Then he found himself wondering heavily as to the time that must pass before the certainty that was in himself became literal knowledge. There was no sense of any possible chance of salvation in his mind.
By-and-by he became heavily and confusedly aware that another day had begun; another day through which he must carry his horrible, bewildering burden—no longer in the semi-unconsciousness of yesterday, but alive now in every fibre to its intolerable pressure.
He went out into the sunshine by-and-by, out into the streets he knew so well; and as he walked along there came upon him a ghastly sense of being but a shadow among shadows. The life about him seemed to have receded to an incalculable distance, to have lost all substance. He himself, as he appeared to other people, had no existence; and his real self had no existence for any one but himself. He was face to face with black, implacable reality, and before its presence all the superficialities and conventionalities which had usurped its place vanished like the shades they were.
He walked, always with that chill sense of isolation on him, from Chelsea to the City; in motion, in continual motion only, was his misery endurable. Ramsay was not at the office when he arrived, and a message from him, left with the secretary, informed Julian that he would not be there that day. His absence affected Julian not at all. There was no suspense in his mental attitude to make him crave for even a blow to end it. To his battered consciousness delay before the final agony had something of the appearance ofrest or respite. He did the work he had come to do with a numbed comprehension of its import, and then as he passed out again into those horribly unreal streets there came upon him a desperate longing for human companionship; a desperate longing to break through his solitude and touch another human creature. He would go to the club, he thought dully. He must speak to some one; he must get some assurance of his own identity, or its unfamiliarity would drive him mad.
There were two or three men only who were known to him in the room when he arrived, and even as they greeted him they seemed to elude him; to retreat and to lose all tangibility beyond the yawning gulf which lay between himself and them. He tried to talk, he tried desperately to bridge the gulf. In vain. He turned away and went out into the streets again, alone with the one terrible reality which the world seemed to contain.
The failure broke him down. An unendurable horror of himself and of the world; a very terror of his misery; rolled down upon him and overwhelmed him. It was one of those realisations of the impotency ofhumanity before the strokes of the infinitely greater than humanity which seize upon a man sometimes when all the wrappings of life and custom are stripped from him, and he finds himself in primeval defencelessness. He could only fight wildly with it. Those instincts and affinities through which such moments work out strength and comprehension were utterly submerged in him, now; the experience could be for him nothing but a blind horror, giving place at last to the old stunned, hopeless confusion and despair. And when at last he dragged himself upstairs to his room in the Temple late at night he was utterly exhausted, mentally and physically. He dropped into a chair and sank into a heavy sleep.
Ten days followed; ten long days giving place to heavy nights; ten nights passing into monotonous days. By degrees Julian fell into a species of dull routine, in which he ate and drank, and even slept; passed to and fro along the London streets; stunned almost to stupefaction. He went each day to the office and sat there all day long doing little; sitting, for the most part, staring into spaceor walking up and down with heavy, regular steps. He was rarely disturbed. Ramsay appeared but seldom; his visits were brief, and he was uncommunicative.
At last there came a morning when he reached the office to find upon his desk a letter in Ramsay’s familiar handwriting.
Julian sat down before it and looked at it for a moment, his face twitching slightly. Then he broke the seal.