CHAPTER XXXI
WHENshe was alone Joan sat and gazed not at her wall but at the pictures that came back to her out of a part of her life which seemed to have been lived centuries ago. They were the pictures that came back continually without being called, the clearness of which always startled her afresh. Sometimes she thought they sprang up to add to her torment, but sometimes it seemed as if they came to save her from herself—her mad, wicked self. After all, there were moments when to know that shehadbeen the girl whose eighteen-year-old heart had leaped so when she turned and met Jem’s eyes, as he stood gazing at her under the beech-tree, was something to cling to. She had been that girl and Jem had been—Jem. Her throat strained itself because sobs rose in it, and her eyes were hot with the swell of tears.
She could hear voices and laughter and the click of balls from the billiard-room. Her mother and Palliser laughed the most, but she knew the sound of her mother’s voice would cease soon, because she would come back to her. She knew the kind of scene they would pass through together when she returned. The old things would be said, the old arguments used, but a new one would be added. It was at once horrible and ridiculous that she must sit and listen—and stare at the growing wall. It was as she caught her breath against the choking swell of tears that she heard Lady Mallowe returning. She came in with an actual sweep across the room. Her society air had fled, and she was unadornedly furious when she stopped before Joan’s chair. For a few seconds she actually glared; then she broke forth in a suppressed undertone.
“Come into the billiard-room. I command it!”
Joan lifted her eyes from her book. Her voice was as low as her mother’s, but steadier.
“No,” she answered.
“Is this conduct to continue? Is it?” Lady Mallowe panted.
“Yes,” said Joan, and laid her book on the table near her. There was nothing else to say. Words made things worse.
Lady Mallowe had lost her head, but she still spoke in the suppressed voice.
“Youshallbehave yourself!” she cried, under her breath, and actually made a passionate half-start toward her.
“Wouldn’t it be wise to remember that you cannot make the kind of scene here that you can in your own house?” said Joan. “We are a bad-tempered pair. But when we are guests in other people’s houses—”
“You think you can take advantage of that!” she said. “Don’t trust yourself too far. Do you imagine that just when all might go well for me I will allow you to spoil everything?”
“How can I spoil everything?”
“By behaving as you have been behaving since we came here—refusing to make a home for yourself; by hanging round my neck so that it will appear that any one who takes me must take you also. I came in here to tell you,” she went on, “that this is your last chance. I shall never give you another.”
Joan remained silent, and her silence added to her mother’s helpless rage. She moved a step nearer to her and flung the javelin which she always knew would strike deep.
“You have made yourself a laughing-stock for all London for years. You are mad about a man who disgraced and ruined himself.”
She saw the javelin quiver as it struck; but Joan’s voice as it answered her had a quality of low and deadly steadiness.
“You have said that a thousand times, and you will say it another thousand—though you know the story was a lie and was proved to be one.”
Lady Mallowe knew her way thoroughly.
“Who remembers the denials? What the world remembers is that Jem Temple Barholm was stamped as a cheat and a trickster. No one has time to remember the other thing. He is dead—dead! When a man’s dead it’s too late.”
She was desperate enough to drive her javelin home deeper than she had ever chanced to drive it before. The truth—the awful truth she uttered shook Joan from head to foot. She sprang up and stood before her in heart-wrung fury.
“Oh! You are a hideously cruel woman!” she cried. “They say even tigers care for their young! But you—you can say that tome. ‘When a man’s dead, it’s too late.’”
“Itistoo late—itistoo late!” Lady Mallowe persisted. Why had not she struck this note before? It was breaking Joan’s will: “I would say anything to bring you to your senses. I came here because itisyour last chance. Palliser knew what he was saying when he made a joke of it just now. He knew it wasn’t a joke. You might have been the Duchess of Merthshire; you might have been Lady St. Maur, with a husband with millions. And here you are. You know what’s before you—when I am out of the trap.”
Joan laughed. It was a wild little laugh, and she felt there was no sense in it.
“I might apply for a place in Miss Alicia’s Home for Decayed Gentlewomen,” she said.
Lady Mallowe nodded her head fiercely.
“Apply, then. There will be no place for you in the home I am going to live in,” she retorted.
Joan ceased moving about. She was about to hear the one argument that was new.
“You may as well tell me,” she said wearily.
“I have had a letter from Sir Moses Monaldini. He is to be at Broome Haughton. He is going there purposely to meet me. What he writes can mean only one thing. He means to ask me to marry him. I’m your mother, and I’m nearly twenty years older than you; but you see that I’m out of the trap first.”
“I knew you would be,” answered Joan.
“He detests you,” Lady Mallowe went on. “He will not hear of your living with us—or even near us. He says you are old enough to take care of yourself. Take my advice. I am doing you a good turn in giving it. This New York newsboy is mad over you. If he hadn’t been we should have been bundled out of the house before this. He never has spoken to a lady before in his life, and he feels as if you were a goddess. Go into the billiard-room this instant, and do all a woman can. Go!” And she actually stamped her foot on the carpet. “You might live in the very house you would have lived in with Jem Temple Barholm, on the income he could have given you.”
She saw the crassness of her blunder the next moment. If she had had an advantage, she had lost it.
Wickedly, without a touch of mirth, Joan laughed in her face.
“Jem’s house and Jem’s money—and the New York newsboy in his shoes,” she flung at her. “T. Tembarom to live with until one’s death-bed. T. Tembarom!”
Suddenly, somethingwasgiving way in her, Lady Mallowe thought again. Joan slipped into a chair and dropped her head and hidden face on the table.
“Oh! Mother! Mother!” she ended.“Oh! Jem! Jem!”
Was she sobbing or trying to choke sobbing back? There was no time to be lost. Her mother had never known a scene to end in this way before.
“Crying!” There was absolute spite in her voice. “That shows you know what you are in for, at all events. But I’ve said my last word. What does it matter to me, after all? You’re in the trap. I’m not. Get out as best you can.”
She turned her back and went out of the room—as she had come into it—with a sweep Joan would have smiled at as rather vulgar if she had seen it. As a child in the nursery, she had often seen that her ladyship was vulgar.
But she did not see the sweep because her face was hidden. Something in her had broken this time, as her mother had felt. That bitter, sordid truth, driven home as it had been, had done it. Who had time to remember denials, or lies proved to be lies? Nobody in the world. Who had time to give to the defense of a dead man? There was not time enough to give to living ones. It was true—true! When a man is dead, it is too late. The wall had built itself until it reached her sky; but it was not the wall she bent her head and sobbed over. It was that suddenly she had seen again Jem’s face as he had stood with slow-growing pallor, and looked round at the ring of eyes which stared at him; Jem’s face as he strode by her without a glance and went out of the room. She forgot everything else on earth. She forgot where she was. She was eighteen again, and she sobbed in her arms as eighteen sobs when its heart is torn from it.
“Oh, Jem! Jem!” she cried. “If you were only in the sameworldwith me! If you were just in the sameworld!”
She had forgotten all else, indeed. She forgot too long. She did not know how long. It seemed that no more than a few minutes had passed before she was without warning struck with the shock of feeling that some one was in the room with her, standing near her, looking at her. She had been mad not to remember that exactly this thing would be sure to happen, by some abominable chance. Her movement as she rose was almost violent, she could not hold herself still, and her face was horribly wet with shameless, unconcealable tears. Shameless she felt them—indecent—a sort of nudity of the soul. If it had been a servant who had intruded, or if it had been Palliser it would have been intolerable enough. But it was T. Tembarom who confronted her with his common face, moved mysteriously by some feeling she resented even more than she resented his presence. He was too grossly ignorant to know that a man of breeding, having entered by chance, would have turned and gone away, professing not to have seen. He seemed to think—the dolt!—that he must make some apology.
“Say! Lady Joan!” he began. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to butt in.”
“Then go away,” she commanded. “Instantly—instantly!”
She knew he must see that she spoke almost through her teeth in her effort to control her sobbing breath. But he made no move toward leaving her. He even drew nearer, looking at her in a sort of meditative, obstinate way.
“N-no,” he replied deliberately. “I guess—I won’t.”
“You won’t?” Lady Joan repeated after him. “Then I will.”
He made a stride forward and laid his hand on her arm.
“No. Not on your life. You won’t, either—if I can help it. And you’re going toletme help it.”
Almost any one but herself—any one, at least, who did not resent his very existence—would have felt the drop in his voice which suddenly struck the note of boyish, friendly appeal in the last sentence. “You’re going toletme,” he repeated.
She stood looking down at the daring, unconscious hand on her arm.
“I suppose,” she said, with cutting slowness, “that you do not evenknowthat you are insolent. Take your hand away,” in arrogant command.
He removed it with an unabashed half-smile.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t even know I’d put it there. It was a break—but I wanted to keep you.”
That he not only wanted to keep her, but intended to do so, was apparent. His air was neither rough nor brutal, but he had ingeniously placed himself in the outlet between the big table and the way to the door, He put his hands in his pockets in his vulgar, unconscious way, and watched her.
“Say, Lady Joan!” he broke forth, in the frank outburst of a man who wants to get something over. “I should be a fool if I didn’t see that you’re up against it—hard! What’s the matter?” His voice dropped again.
There was something in the drop this time which—perhaps because of her recent emotion—sounded to her almost as if he were asking the question with the protecting sympathy of the tone one would use in speaking to a child. How dare he! But it came home to her that Jem had once said “What’s the matter?” to her in the same way.
“Do you think it likely that I should confide in you?” she said, and inwardly quaked at the memory as she said it.
“No,” he answered, considering the matter gravely. “It’s notlikely—the way things look to you now. But if you knew me better perhaps it would be likely.”
“I once explained to you that I do notintendto know you better,” she gave answer.
He nodded acquiescently.
“Yes. I got on to that. And it’s because it’s up to me that I came out here to tell you something I want you to know before you go away. I’m going to confide inyou.”
“Cannot evenyousee that I am not in the mood to accept confidences?” she exclaimed.
“Yes, I can. But you’re going to accept this one,” steadily. “No,” as she made a swift movement, “I’m not going to clear the way till I’ve done.”
“I insist!” she cried. “If you were—” He put out his hand, but not to touch her.
“I know what you’re going to say. If I were a gentleman—Well, I’m not laying any claims to anything—but I’m a sort of a man, anyhow, though you mayn’t think it. And you’re going to listen.”
(To be continued)
Tailpiece T. Tembarom