A VALIANT IGNORANCE

A
VALIANT IGNORANCE

A Novel
BY
MARY ANGELA DICKENS
AUTHOR OF “CROSS CURRENTS,” “A MERE CYPHER,” ETC.

“Thy gold is brass!”
Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.
London
MACMILLAN & CO.
AND NEW YORK
1894

[Chapter I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV.]

A VALIANT IGNORANCE

CHAPTER I

The oppressive autumn weather continued for the next week and more, but the atmosphere in the house at Chelsea gradually cleared; at least, the electrical disturbances which had, as a matter of fact, culminated in Julian’s departure for the club, subsided. As the days went on, Julian gradually recovered his spirits. His temper, which had given way so suddenly and completely under the strain put upon it by the unprecedented thwarting to which he had been subjected, recovered its careless easiness. The injured expression of moodiness disappeared wholly from his face, and his manner resumed its buoyancy.

Nevertheless, the life of the present autumn was by no means the life of the past spring. Partly, of course, the different framework was responsible; life, especially at this particular moment, when winter society was as yet hardly formed, consisted by no means wholly of a social existence. It was, in fact, distinctly “slack” and heavy on social lines as compared with the high pressure of the season; and the introduction into the routine of life of a certain number of hours of regular work on Julian’s part—the first practical acknowledgement in the house in Queen Anne Street, that work had anything to do with life—could not fail to alter the tone to some extent. But there was a subtle change in Julian himself, which was hardly to be accounted for on such broad lines. He had recovered his normal mental temperature, indeed, but the interval of disturbance seemed to have had some indefinable effect upon him. He had recovered himself—but it was himself with a difference. It was almost impossible to narrow the difference into words. To say that he was colder to his mother, or that he stood deliberately aloof from her, would not have been true. But there was a touch of independence about his whole personality which was new to it; a certain suggestion of a separate life and separate interests, such as must inevitably come to a man sooner or later, which seemed to tinge his intercourse with her—superficially the same as it remained—with something of carelessness, and even a hint of unconscious patronage.

If the change was felt by Mrs. Romayne, she made no sign; or, at least, entered no protest. After the little explanation which had taken place in the railway carriage she had utterly ignored the cloud which his moodiness had created; and she ignored its passing away. When Julian was at home she was always bright and pleasant; always charmed to have him with her; always ready to let him go. Her little jokes at his expense in his new character of a worker were full of tact. Her playful allusions to her own solitary days were always light and gay. Nevertheless, the characteristics which the ten weeks of their absence from town had brought to her face grew and intensified during the ten days that followed their return. Her eyes grew more restless, her mouth more sensitive, as though the strained, sharpened look of anxiety which haunted her face during the hour which preceded Julian’s return, and during the whole evening, when, as happened several times in the course of that ten days, he dined out, went deep enough to leave lasting tokens of its presence. Her questions as to his work, and the new friends, the new haunts, consequent upon it, seemed to come from her lips—far less self-confident in expression in these days—almost in spite of herself. They were always uttered with a playfulness which hardly masked a slight nervousness underneath; a nervousness which seemed to be a reminiscence of that first evening.

She was sitting alone in her drawing-room one afternoon towards the end of the second week of their return; she had a book in her hand, and a tea-table before her. But she had neither poured herself out any tea, nor could she be said to be reading. Every two or three minutes her attention seemed to wander; her eyes would stray vaguely about the room, and she would rise and move restlessly across it, to give some wholly unnecessary touch to a drapery or a glass of flowers. Once she had seated herself at her writing-table to begin a trivial note; but the impulse had failed to carry her through, and she had returned to her chair and her book. It was half-past four, and she was expecting Julian. He had dined out on three consecutive nights, and was doing so again to-night. And in reply to her laughing protest against “never seeing him,” he had promised carelessly to come home and have afternoon tea with her.

The door-bell rang at last, and as the drawing-room door opened she lifted a smiling face with a gaily approving comment on his punctuality.

“Good boy!” she began. Then she broke off and laughed lightly, though the brightness of her face suddenly ceased to be genuine.

The figure on the threshold was that of Marston Loring.

“Thank you,” he said; “I am glad you think so!”

“The observation was not intended for you, I’m sorry to tell you,” returned Mrs. Romayne, as she rose to receive him. “And I’m afraid even if I applied it to you, you would hardly condescend to accept it. How do you do? When did you come back? Sit down and let me give you some tea.”

Loring sat down accordingly, with a mute witness in his manner of doing so to a certain amount of intimacy both with the room and its mistress; but that touch of admiring deference which had marked his demeanour during the early stages of his acquaintance with Mrs. Romayne, was still present with him, and was rendered only the more effective by the familiarity with which it was now combined.

“Thanks,” he said; “a cup of tea is a capital idea. But I don’t think it’s quite kind of you to say that I wouldn’t condescend to the epithet, ‘Good boy.’ I should like to have it applied to me of all things. It would be such a novelty, and so wholly undeserved!”

He spoke in that tone of sardonic daring on which a great deal of his social reputation rested, and Mrs. Romayne answered with a laugh.

“No doubt it would,” she said, with that very slight and unreal assumption of reproof with which such a woman invariably treats the tacit confessions of a man of Loring’s reputation. “You only want the epithet, then, because you know you don’t deserve it.”

She handed him the tea as she spoke with a shake of her head, and added:

“But tell me, now, when did you come back, and where have you been?”

“I’ve been to the Engadine,” he answered; “why, I don’t know, unless that for six weeks, at least, of my life I might fully appreciate the charms of London! I don’t admire glaciers; snow mountains bore me; altitudes are always more or less wearisome; and society au naturel is not to be tolerated. I reached town the day before yesterday.”

Marston Loring was faultlessly dressed. It was impossible to associate his attire with anything but Piccadilly and the best clubs and the best drawing-rooms. His face, with its half-cynical, half-wearied expression, was, in its less individual characteristics, one of the typical faces of the society of the day. His voice and manner, well-bred, callous, and entirely unenthusiastic, were the voice and manner of that world where emotion is so entirely out of fashion that its existence as an ineradicable factor of healthy human nature is hardly acknowledged.

His presence and his cynical, cold-blooded talk seemed to do Mrs. Romayne good. Her face and manner hardened slightly, as though her nerves were braced, and something of the pinched, restless look of anxiety faded.

“It’s very nice of you to come and see us so soon!” she exclaimed with genuine satisfaction. “Town has really been abominably empty these last ten days. I suppose we came back rather too soon, but it seemed time that Julian should get to work. Really, I’ve hardly seen a soul.”

“It is a deadly time of year,” assented Loring, with a quick look at her, “but I’m grateful to it if it makes my presence welcome to you. Of course I called at once. I was rather afraid you might be still away.”

“We came back ten days ago,” answered Mrs. Romayne, accepting and putting aside his little compliment with a mocking gesture, as a form of words entirely conventional. “Julian has been quite lost without you. He is looking very well, I think, and is working amazingly.”

The introduction of Julian’s name into the conversation had in neither case come from Julian’s friend; but this time it appeared to strike Loring as incumbent upon him to pursue the topic.

“The approving words with which you received me were intended for him, I suppose,” he said carelessly. “You’re expecting him?”

There was a moment’s pause while Mrs. Romayne turned her head, as if involuntarily, and listened intently; that haunted look coming suddenly back into her eyes. The moment passed, and she turned to Loring again with a quick, self-conscious glance, and an unreal laugh.

“I’m expecting him; yes,” she said. “I’m ridiculous enough to make that very obvious, I’m afraid! I’m so glad he won’t miss you. He doesn’t generally come in at this hour. This is a treat—for me!”

She laughed, and Loring said with mock solemnity of interest:

“Indeed!”

“I really had to be quite plaintive this morning,” she went on in the same tone, “on the subject of not seeing him for four days except at breakfast! He has made a good many new acquaintances already, it seems, and has to dine out a good deal.”

“Really!” commented Loring. His tone was quite unmoved, and Mrs. Romayne did not see the expression in his shrewd, shallow eyes, as she spoke—an expression of amused curiosity. “He dines at his club, I suppose?” he enquired indifferently after a moment.

“Yes; or at some ‘other fellow’s’ club,” laughed his mother. “Legal institutions, I suppose!”

There was a brief silence; one of those silences which come when one branch of a conversation is felt to be exhausted; and then Loring finished his tea, put down his cup, and settled himself into a comfortable attitude.

“I forget whether you were taken with the Ibsen craze last season, Mrs. Romayne?” he said. “We shall all have to tie wet towels round our heads—it won’t be becoming, I’m afraid—and give ourselves up to solitary meditation, I hear! He is to be the thing this winter, they tell me.”

“Ibsen?” repeated Mrs. Romayne reflectively; obviously searching in her memory for some ideas to attach to the name, which she was as obviously conscious of having heard before. “Ibsen? Oh, yes,” with a sudden flash of inspiration, “oh, yes, of course; that ‘Dolls’ House’ man, that everybody talked of going to see just at the end of the season.”

The first of those startling pictures of human nastiness which have since exercised criticism to so great an extent, and which may or may not be revelations, had taken a wonderful hold upon a certain section of “society,” and had become, as Mrs. Romayne’s words implied, almost the fashion in the preceding June. Society is always inclined to be literary and intellectual, or rather, to an assumption of those qualities, in the winter. It was with a sense of the absolute duty of priming herself beforehand that Mrs. Romayne continued, with every appearance of the deepest interest:

“Ah, no! I’m sorry to say I was never able to spare an evening. Everybody told me all about it, though. It must have been awfully clever and interesting. But, you see, just at that time one has so much on hand! There was that dreadful bazaar, too. By-the-bye, have the Pomeroys come back yet, do you know, Mr. Loring?”

Mr. Loring believed that they had not, and after a little discussion of their probable plans, Mrs. Romayne returned to the subject of Ibsen.

“Are they going to bring out a new play of his, did you say?” she said carelessly.

“So I hear,” answered Loring. “An extraordinary piece of work, with a tremendous theory in it, of course. The idea is the influence of heredity.”

Mrs. Romayne started slightly. A strange flash leapt up in her eyes, and as it died out, quenched as it seemed by iron resolution, it left a curious expression on her face; it was an expression in which a light scorn—the normal attitude of the shallow, fashionable woman towards deep questions of any kind—seemed to be battling indomitably for a place against something which was hardly to be held at bay, by no means to be suppressed.

“Heredity!” she said; and the ring of her voice matched the expression of her face.

“It’s rather an interesting subject,” continued Loring indolently. Scientific questions in their social aspects were just becoming fashionable. “It’s wonderful how long we have stopped short at the inheritance of Roman noses, and violent tempers, and plain facts of that kind without getting to anything more subtle.”

“Yes; I suppose it is,” answered Mrs. Romayne. There was a hard restraint in her voice, which Loring took for preoccupation and laid to the account of her expectation of Julian. She was sitting with her back to the light, and he could not see the expression of her face.

“It’s awfully consoling, don’t you know,” he went on in the same tone, “to feel that one can lay all one’s little failings to the account of some dead and gone ancestor, with a scientific mind. I don’t notice, by-the-bye, that even the greatest and most enthusiastic scientists show any tendency to refer their virtues and talents back. I presume they are always self-developed.”

Mrs. Romayne laughed, as she was obviously intended to do; but her laugh was rather harsh.

“Do you know, I think scientific men are a dreadful race!” she said. “They think that they know so much better than everybody else, and that what they know is so immensely important. As a rule, you know, it’s about something that they really can’t know anything about, and if they could, it would be a great deal better not to bother about it.”

She spoke with a confident, conclusive superiority, which is only possible, perhaps, in that section of society to which knowledge and brain-power are among the minor and entirely unimportant factors of life—except when the knowledge is knowledge of the world, and the brain-power that which has adapted itself to the requirements of society. But the superiority in her tone rang strained and false. She seemed to be forcing the attitude on herself even more than on Loring; and there was a faint ring of defiance in her voice—utterly inconsistent and incompatible with the words she spoke. The combination was curiously suggestive of that consuming fear which denies the very existence of that by which it is created.

Loring, however, was too fully occupied with a cynical appreciation of the humorous aspect of the wholesale condemnation of learning by crass ignorance to detect anything beneath the surface. An enigmatical smile touched his lips.

“There’s a great deal of penetration in what you say,” he said. “Of course, there would be! But I think you’re a little sweeping, perhaps, when you say that they don’t really know anything. Take heredity, for instance; it’s an actual fact, capable of demonstration, that——”

But Loring’s eloquence was broken short off. At that moment the door opened, and Julian Romayne came into the room.

Mrs. Romayne started to her feet at the sight of him with a strange, hardly articulate sound, which was almost a gasp of relief, though it passed unnoticed by either of the two men, as Julian advanced quickly to Loring.

“How are you, old man?” he said pleasantly. “Awfully glad to see you back again.”

“This is the reward of merit, you see!” said Mrs. Romayne, as Loring replied, in the same tone. “You come home to tea with your mother, and you find a friend! Will you have some tea, sir?”

Her face was still a little odd, and unusual-looking, especially about the eyes; and the touch which she laid upon Julian, as if to enforce her words, was strangely clinging and nervous in its quick pressure.

The talk drifted in all sorts of directions after that; all more or less personal, either to the speakers, or to mutual acquaintances. As the moments passed, Loring’s eyes were fixed once or twice, with momentary intentness, on the younger man. That new touch of independence about Julian did not belong only to his manner with his mother. It was just perceptible towards the friend whom he had hitherto admired with boyish enthusiasm.

Loring rose to go at last, and as he did so he turned to Julian.

“If it were not that I don’t like to propose your deserting Mrs. Romayne,” he said, “I should ask you if you wouldn’t come and keep me company over a lonely dinner at the club, Julian? I suppose you don’t want to get rid of him, by any chance?” he continued, turning to Mrs. Romayne.

Mrs. Romayne and Julian laughed simultaneously; Julian with a little touch of embarrassment.

“I’m sure my mother has no objection to getting rid of me,” said Julian rather hastily; “but, unfortunately, I’m engaged.”

“Engaged!” said Loring. “Lucky fellow, to have engagements at this time of year!”

His tone was a little satirical, and Julian, who was following him out of the room, flushed slightly. His colour was still considerably deeper than usual when he dashed upstairs after seeing Loring out, and put his head in at the drawing-room door.

“I’m afraid I must be off directly, dear,” he said carelessly. “I was awfully sorry to get in so late, but Allardyce wanted me.”

An hour later, Julian was dining at a restaurant, dining simply, and dining alone. Having finished his dinner, and smoked a cigarette, glancing once or twice at his watch as he did so, he took his hat and coat and strolled out. It was nearly a quarter past eight, and the only light was, of course, the light of the street-lamps and the gas in the shop windows.

He passed along Piccadilly, not quickly, but with the deliberate intention of a man who has a definite destination, until he came to a certain side-street. Then he turned out of Piccadilly, and slackening his steps, sauntered slowly up on the right-hand pavement. He had walked up to the end of the street, casting sundry glances back over his shoulder as he did so, and was turning once more, as though to saunter down the street again, when the figure of a woman entered at the Piccadilly end. As soon as he saw her, Julian threw away his cigar, and quickening his steps, went to meet her.

The face she raised to his was the face of the girl on whose behalf he had interfered in Piccadilly ten days before, and her first words were uttered in the soft, musical voice that had thanked him then.

“Have you been waiting?” she said; “I’m sorry.”

The tone of the few words with which he answered, together with the expression with which he looked at her, showed as clearly as volumes of explanation could have done where and how the new Julian was being developed.

“Only a minute or two,” he said. “A lonely fellow like me doesn’t mind waiting a few minutes for the chance of a talk, as I’ve told you before.”

She looked up at him with simple, pitying eyes, and a certain wistfulness of expression, too.

“It seems so sad!” she said softly. “But you’ll make friends in London soon, I’m sure. Have you been working very hard to-day?”

“Have you been working very hard, is the more important question?” he said, turning his eyes away from those candid brown ones, with, to do him justice, a certain passing shame in his own. “I’m afraid there’s no need to ask that! You look awfully tired, Clemence!”

She shook her head with a pretty, brisk movement of reassurance.

“Oh, no!” she said, “it’s not been at all a hard day. It never seems hard, you know, when we don’t have to stay late, unless something goes wrong in the work-room; and I don’t think that happens very often.”

There was a simple, genuine content in the tone and manner in which the words were spoken, which, taken in conjunction with the colourlessness of the face, the tired look about the eyes, and the poor, worn dress, told a wonderful little story of patience and serenity of spirit.

All that Julian Romayne knew of Clemence Brymer—the brief and very simple outline of her life as she had told it to him—was comprised in a few by no means uncommon facts. She was a “hand” in one of the big millinery establishments, and had worked at the same place for the last two years. Before that time she had lived from her childhood first with a married brother, and then, when he died, with his widow and children. From a certain touch of reserve in her manner of speaking of those particular years, Julian had gathered that they had been hard ones. The marriage of the brother’s widow, and her departure to Australia, had left Clemence alone in London. Her parents, she told Julian, had come from Cambridgeshire; and one of her faint recollections of her father, who had died when she was only five years old, was of sitting on his knee in their little attic room in London, and being told by him about his country home. Her mother had died when she was a baby; and all her scanty recollections seemed to centre round the father, who, as she said simply, had been “a very good man.”

The simple trust and confidence in her face as she raised it to Julian now was a curious contrast to the nervous, half-frightened uncertainty of her glance at him on that night in the spring when they had shared for those two or three minutes the shelter of the same portico. But paradoxical as it seems at first, both expressions were the outcome, on different lines, of the same moral characteristic. Clemence, though there was that about her—as her face testified—which kept her, in all unconsciousness and innocence, strangely aloof and apart from her world, had not spent her life in London without learning to know its dangers. But the very purity which made the glances which she was forced to encounter in the streets at night a distress to her; which made the very proximity of an unknown “gentleman” an uneasiness to her; which made theoretical evil, in short, a terror to her; rendered her singularly incapable of recognising its existence on any but the baldest lines. Her confidence was quickly won because, though she was conscious of a world of evil about her, it was as a something large, and black, and obvious that she regarded it. Brought into contact with herself, anything fair-seeming was touched by the whiteness of her own temperament; and, with such unconscious extraneous aid, the thinnest veil was enough to hide from her anything behind. Her confidence once won, might be destroyed, but could hardly be shaken. Something in Julian’s face and manner had won it for him, and the outline of his circumstances which he had given her had won him something else—her pity.

Exactly by what motive he had been actuated in his statements to her, Julian would have found it rather hard to say; as a matter of fact he never asked himself the question. Before the end of their first walk together he had presented himself to her as a medical student living entirely alone in London, having no female friends, or even acquaintances, and wearying often of the rough masculine companionship of his fellows. On these grounds he had asked her when they parted at the end of a little poverty-stricken street near the farther end of the Hammersmith Road, whether he might meet her now and again and walk home with her. She had hesitated for an instant, and then had assented, very simply.

“You haven’t had to work late for four nights now,” she said, as they turned their backs upon Piccadilly and began to walk steadily in the opposite direction. “Shall you have to to-morrow night, do you think?”

She lifted her eyes to his face as she spoke, and as he looked down and met them it would have been clear to an onlooker what was the charm that those long evening walks possessed for Julian. In the girl’s clear eyes there was admiration and absolute reliance. In the look with which he answered them there was conscious superiority and protection.

Just at the moment when he was sore and smarting with a sense of humiliation and futility; when in his newly-aroused angry discontent all intercourse with women of his own class had become a farce and an inanity to him; accident had thrown it into his power to create for himself, as it were, a world in which all that had suddenly revealed itself as lacking in his actual life should be lavished upon him. For his acquaintance of Piccadilly he had absolutely no surroundings, except such as he chose to give himself. The Julian Romayne of society, the nonentity, the “figure-head,” as he had muttered angrily to himself, had no existence for her. It was Julian’s own private Julian, a personality developed side by side with the sudden and violent re-adjustment of his conception of his relations with the world, who was looked up to, listened to, respected, and deferred to during the hour’s walk which lay between that side-street out of Piccadilly and a certain little street out of the Hammersmith Road. A vague, undefined craving for pre-eminence and admiration had risen in him with his realisation of his dependence, and the reflected nature of the light with which he shone in society. To a weak nature in which that craving has once stirred it matters little by what means it is met, so that it is to some extent satisfied.

The walk of to-night was a repetition of the walks that had preceded it; the talk a little more intimate and a little more personal in tone than any of its predecessors, as that of each of the latter in its turn had been.

In the course of the day something had occurred to remind Clemence of her father and her father’s old home, and in intervals of Julian’s talk about himself, she told him a good deal about her thoughts of that little country place; of how there had been Brymers here for generations and generations.

“You must have been Puritans once,” said Julian, laughing, as he often laughed, at some little grave turn of her speech as he looked into the sweet, serious face. Work-girl as she was, she seemed to have acquired neither the talk nor the voice of her kind. The simple form of her words, her accent, and her gentle voice, seemed to belong to a past, quiet and full of a modest dignity of which the London of the nineteenth century hardly knows. “You would have made an awfully jolly little Puritan, Clemence!”

“I don’t know,” she said simply; “I was so little when father died. But he felt it dreadfully, I’ve heard, when he came to London; it nearly broke his heart.”

“Why did he do it, then?” said Julian lightly.

“He thought he ought,” returned the girl. “You see, there was nothing to do at Feldbourne—nothing but ploughing, and country things, you know. And father thought a man ought to do something—that everything was meant to go on and get better, you know—and that every man ought to help, ought to work. So, of course, he was obliged to come, you see.”

They had come to the end of the road now, where they always said good night, and as she spoke she was standing still, looking simply into his face. He looked at her for a moment with something in his eyes which seemed to be struggling vaguely into life side by side with the careless mockery of his “set.”

“He was obliged to come, because he thought he ought,” he said. “Do you always do what you think you ought, Clemence?”

“I try,” she said simply. “Every one tries, I suppose.”

He laughed—the laugh that was so like his mother’s—but not quite so freely as usual, and held out his hand.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Good night, Clemence.”

“Good night,” she said.

He hesitated a moment. He never went to meet her without a firm and definite intention of sealing their parting with a kiss. But he had never done so yet, and he did not do it now.

“Good night,” he said again, rather lamely; and then they parted, she going quickly and quietly down the street, he passing out of it into the noise and bustle of the Hammersmith Road.

Once there, he paused as though undecided.

“It’s too early to go home,” he said to himself. “I’ll go down to the club for a bit.”

There were a good many men in the club-room when he entered it half an hour later—and Julian—quite another young man to the Julian who had walked to the Hammersmith Road—was discussing the latest society topic with much animation over a whisky and seltzer, when Loring, to whom he had nodded at the other end of the room, strolled up to him, cigar in hand.

“Dinner been a failure?” he enquired.

There was nothing particular about the words; and the tone in which they were uttered was singularly, almost significantly, devoid of expression. But there was a keen, satirical expression in his eyes as he fixed them on Julian.

Julian started slightly at the words, and a curious flash of expression passed across his face.

“More or less,” he said, with a careless frankness that seemed just a trifle excessive.

“Who was the man?”

“I don’t think you know him,” said Julian, his carelessness bordering on defiance.

Loring smiled. His smile was never particularly pleasant, and at this moment it was unusually cynical.

“I know a good many men, too,” he observed.

CHAPTER II

The slight alteration in Julian of which Marston Loring was conscious, and a subtly evinced consequence of that alteration—namely, that intimacy with the son no longer involved of necessity even an introduction, far less intimacy, at the mother’s house—had no effect whatever upon Loring’s relation with Mrs. Romayne, unless, indeed, it might be said to emphasize his position as friend of the house. During the three weeks which followed immediately upon his first call after his return to town, he saw at least as much of Mrs. Romayne as he had done in the course of any previous three weeks since Julian’s first introduction of him; though the young man was no longer an obvious and tangible link between them. He dined in Queen Anne Street a few days after his return, but except on that occasion it chanced that he hardly ever met Mrs. Romayne and Julian together. He met the latter often enough at one or other of the clubs, or about town. On the former he called, as in duty bound, after the dinner, and again and yet again at short intervals. She had consulted him about a purchase of old oak, with which she wished to surprise Julian, and the purchase seemed to necessitate in his eyes frequent consultation. He also happened to meet her once or twice when she herself was paying calls.

She was always, apparently, pleased to see him. More pronounced, perhaps, when she met him among other people than when she received him alone, but still always more or less present, there was a certain eager, unconscious assertion of something like intimacy with him about her manner. Marston Loring was quick to observe the new note, and he prided himself likewise on the caution with which he refused to allow it even the value he believed it to possess. He caught her quick recognition of his presence; her tendency to draw him always into the conversation in which she happened to be engaged; the tacit assumption of mutual interests and understanding lurking in her voice; and he sifted and dismissed these things, cynically, as probably meaningless. But astute as he was, he never thought of them in connection with the constant references to Julian; the questions as to Julian’s doings; with which her conversations with him were full. Of these latter he took hardly any account—except for an occasional sardonic smile. Clever as he thought himself, there were vast tracts of human nature to which he had no clue, in the very existence of which he disbelieved; consequently, it was not surprising that he should now and then mistake cause for effect.

At about noon on a bright, cold October day he got out of a hansom at twenty-two, Queen Anne Street, with a certain cynical expectancy on his face. The weeks which had passed since Mrs. Romayne and Julian returned to town on that close September day had brought on winter, and had settled winter society fairly into its grooves; and on the previous evening Marston Loring and Mrs. Romayne had met at a dinner-party. Mrs. Romayne had been alone. To enquiries made for her son, and regrets at his absence, she had replied, with a gaiety which became absolutely feverish as the evening wore on, that he was unfortunately engaged. Throughout the evening, as though some kind of strain were acting upon her self-control, all the characteristics of her demeanour towards Loring had been slightly exaggerated. Loring had detected, before he had exchanged two sentences with her, that she was not herself; that she was unstrung and nervous; and arguing on totally false premises he had come to a totally false conclusion. She had pressed him restlessly about the commission he was doing for her, and he had twisted it this morning into an excuse for coming to see her when he knew she would be at home.

“It is an unheard-of hour, I know,” he said, as she rose to receive him with an exclamation of surprise. “But I want a little more detail, and one or two measurements, before I can execute your orders satisfactorily.”

He had seen before she spoke that the weakness of the night before, from whatever cause it had arisen, had passed away; the lines about her face were set into a determined, uncompromising cheerfulness, and her voice as she spoke conveyed the same impression.

“It is more than kind of you, and I am very glad to see you,” she said. “I’m always glad to see Julian’s friend, you know.” The last words with a laugh. “You don’t happen to have met him this morning, I suppose?”

Loring signified, without a hint of sarcasm, that it was more common not to meet the man one would wish to meet in the Temple than to meet him, and Mrs. Romayne laughed again.

“I know,” she said. “But one gets an absurd impression that men doing the same thing in the same place must be always coming across one another. It’s very ridiculous, of course. You and he have always had a knack of finding one another out, though. I suppose you are quite one another’s greatest chums, aren’t you? Is ‘chum’ still the word, by-the-bye?”

“I believe so,” returned Loring carelessly. “Yes,” he continued in a different tone, “I don’t know when I’ve taken to any one as I took to Julian.”

There was a little gesture, half-mocking, half involuntary, which accepted the words as a personal compliment, and Mrs. Romayne said with a smile:

“You are a curious pair of friends, too, are you not? Julian”—her voice in uttering the name seemed to have acquired a new tenderness in the past month, and lingered over it now, evidently unconsciously and involuntarily—“Julian is such a boy, and you are—a great deal older than you ought to be.”

She shook her head at him with a reproving laugh, and he answered in his most blasé manner:

“I’m a man of the world, you see. I knew it all through and through before Julian had left school. I hope you wouldn’t have preferred another boy for his ‘chum’!”

There was a daring and a challenge in his tone which made the question personal rather to himself than to Julian; but Mrs. Romayne took it from the other point of view.

“Quite the contrary!” she said quickly. “Another boy would not have been at all the thing for him. I am delighted to think that his mentor is a wise one. I rely on you, Mr. Loring, do you know!”

She stopped abruptly. The last words, uttered suddenly and involuntarily, had seemed curiously charged with a meaning which could not get itself expressed. She paused an instant and then, half as though she wished to laugh some impression away, half as though she wished the words to have significance, she added:

“You’ll remember that, won’t you? Shall we go down and see about the fittings?”

She rose as she spoke and led the way down to Julian’s room. The room was already as perfect as might be. Only a great restlessness, an irrepressible and incessant impulse to give pleasure to its occupant, could have dictated further improvements; and as Mrs. Romayne talked and explained, the same restless instinct of service expressed itself in sundry little involuntary touches to trifles about the room—about Julian’s chair and his writing-table.

The door-bell rang at length, and her face, over which that new and weaker expression had stolen, hardened suddenly.

“I’m afraid I must send you away now!” she said, turning to Loring. “I’ve made an appointment for this morning to get through some bothering business. You understand now just what I want, though, don’t you?”

“I think so!” answered Loring reflectively. It would have been strange indeed if he had not understood by this time. “But I’m sorry I must go!”

“I’m sorry too!” said Mrs. Romayne lightly. “I hate business, and it loses none of its solemnity, I can assure you, when it is transacted by my connexion, Dennis Falconer. He is my trustee, you know!”

Loring smiled. He did not detect anything behind her words, and it struck him always as perfectly natural that Mrs. Romayne and her “connexion” should be somewhat antagonistic. “I should imagine he would be a rather ponderous man of business!” he said.

The parlour-maid entered at this moment to announce that Mr. Dennis Falconer was in the drawing-room, and as they left the room Mrs. Romayne turned again to Loring.

“To tell you the truth I find him rather ponderous at all times!” she said with a laugh. “Didn’t you say once that altitudes were oppressive? Well, I must go and be oppressed!”

She held out her hand as she spoke, and then paused.

“Oh, by-the-bye,” she said, “Julian wants you to come and dine one day next week—only he’s so much engaged. Which day will suit you?”

“Thanks!” answered Loring. “I shall be charmed!” His face was quite impassive as he spoke, but he was wondering nevertheless whether Julian had as yet heard of the invitation. From what he had observed lately, he fancied that Julian had reasons of his own for avoiding home engagements. “I am engaged on Tuesday and Thursday,” he continued, “but on any other day I shall be delighted. Did Julian have a successful evening yesterday?”

Mrs. Romayne had explained to him on the previous night with forced merriment that her son was “dining with a fellow, he says!”

“Yes, I think so!” she answered lightly. “I don’t know which ‘fellow’ it was, you know. Well, then, I will send you a note.”

They had moved out into the hall as they talked, and now as she paused at the foot of the stairs he shook hands again, and went out of the house as she turned and went up to the drawing-room. Dennis Falconer was standing waiting by the fire.

“Most punctual of men!” she said airily as they shook hands. “How do you do?”

Dennis Falconer had by this time had five months of inaction and ill-health, and the fact that he was heartily weary of both by no means served to soften the natural tendency of his manner towards reserve and severity. In settling down to London life for the winter, too, the fact that he was no longer a new lion gave an added tinge of monotony to existence for him, honestly unconscious as he was of this truth. The days went very heavily with him; he was conscious of having come to a dreary bit of his life’s journey, and he endured it conscientiously—if with rather self-conscious self-respect. An added gravity and silence seemed to him under the circumstances by no means to be deprecated.

Under these circumstances the contrast between him and Mrs. Romayne as they exchanged the trivialities of the situation was inexpressible, and it was not surprising that they touched almost instantly upon the business which was the cause of their interview. It was not a long affair; it turned upon Mrs. Romayne’s desire to have rather more ready money at her command; and Dennis Falconer, having explained the situation to her; having stated his views, evidently conscientiously compelled thereto; and having entered a formal protest against her instructions; returned to his pocket the notebook to which he had been referring as if to emphasize the close of the matter. Then he paused.

Mrs. Romayne had drawn a quick, slight breath of relief at his action, but the breath seemed to suspend itself for an instant on this pause, and the eyes with which she watched his were very bright and intent.

“As your only near relative,” he began with formal gravity, “and as your son’s only near relative, I feel myself bound to take this opportunity of approaching a subject which has been in my thoughts for some time. Any man of ordinary knowledge and experience of the world, having regard only to the most ordinary circumstances, would tell you that so large an allowance as you make your son is not an advisable thing for any young man.”

Mrs. Romayne had listened with her expression veiled and repressed into an intent vigilance, and as he finished a dull flush—which was none the less hot and significant because it had not the vivid intensity of the angry flush of youth—crept into her face, and her eyes glittered. Her tone as she spoke witnessed to a strong self-control, and an intense determination not to abandon her position or to lessen by one jot the distance she had set between them.

“I am sorry you think so!” she said carelessly.

“I think so, emphatically,” he returned. “I should think so for any young man. For William Romayne’s son——”

Mrs. Romayne had been gathering up some papers from the table with light, careless movements; she rose now rather suddenly but still carelessly. What seemed to him almost shameful callousness quickened Falconer into what he thought a righteous disregard for all conventionality.

He too rose, but his movement was no response to hers; rather it seemed to crush and dominate its suggestion of easy dismissal with the implacable austerity of a reality not to be put aside. He stood looking at her, forcing her, by the suddenly asserted superiority of his man’s determination and mental weight, to meet his grave, condemning eyes.

“Does your son know what his father was?” he said in a low, stern voice.

He had forced down the barrier, he had annihilated the distance, and she faced him with glittering eyes, that dull flush all over her face, its mask gone.

“No!” she said, and from her hard, defiant voice, also, all artificiality had dropped away.

“He knows nothing of his danger; he has no safeguards, and he has money at his command which would be temptation to any young man. Think what you are doing!”

For a couple of seconds they confronted one another, separated by no conventionalities, man and woman, with the common memory of a common horror between them, holding them together in spite of every obstacle which temperament and habit, mental and moral, could interpose.

Then with a tremendous effort the woman’s strength reasserted itself, and by sheer force of her will she thrust away the horrible reality which he had forced upon her. She laughed.

“I really don’t know what we are talking about!” she said. “I am sure you mean most kindly as to my spoilt boy’s allowance, but we won’t trouble to discuss it! So good of you to take the trouble to think of it—and so unnecessary!”

For a moment Falconer gazed at her almost petrified with amazement and disgust. His perceptive and imaginative faculties had not developed with the passing of years; his mental processes were slow; and for all their ghastly exaggeration he accepted the careless, shallow artificiality of her tone and manner, and the smiling unfeelingness of the rebuff she had given him, exactly as they appeared upon the surface. It was some seconds, even, before he thoroughly realised how ruthlessly and completely she had imputed to him all the attributes of a meddler; and as he did so an added distance touched the uncompromising sternness which had gradually settled down upon his face.

“I beg your pardon!” he said, and the formal, unmeaning words seemed, in their enforced condescension to her level, to carry with them a lofty condemnation which was even contempt. “Good day!” he added stiffly; and then, not seeing, apparently, the hand she extended to him with a hard, smiling “Good-bye,” he left the room.

Mrs. Romayne’s face remained curiously blanched-looking all the afternoon, as though she had received some kind of shock. She spent the afternoon in paying calls, and whenever she returned alone to her carriage there crept back into her eyes—bright and eager as she talked and laughed—a certain haunting questioning, not to be driven quite away by any simulation of gaiety.

As her afternoon’s work drew to a close, her eyes were no longer quite free from it, even as she made her attractive conversation, and when she rose to bring her last visit to an end she was looking very tired. She was just shaking hands with her hostess when Mrs. Halse was announced.

To spare herself one iota of what she considered her social duty—even when that duty took the form of civility to a woman she disliked—was not Mrs. Romayne’s way. With exactly the exclamation of pleasure and surprise which the situation demanded she waited, pleasantly desirous of exchanging greetings with the new-comer, while Mrs. Halse bore down vociferously upon the mistress of the house. Mrs. Halse had only very recently returned to town, and there was all the excitement of novelty about her appearance. She was a good deal louder even than usual, partly as the result of this excitement, and partly as the result of absence from town; and she had also grown considerably stouter. Announcements of this fact, lamentations, and explanations mingled with her greetings of her hostess, and were still upon her lips when she turned to Mrs. Romayne.

“Abominable, isn’t it?” she said, pouring out her words as fast as they would come, and without waiting for any answers. “Such a trial! I suppose I shall have to go in for Turkish baths or something horrible of that sort. And how is everybody? How is that wicked young man of yours, Mrs. Romayne? I heard of his goings on at the Ponsonbys’! By-the-bye, do tell him that Hilda Newton is engaged to be married. So good for him! No doubt he thinks she is pining away. A very good match, too—young Compton; rich and good-looking; rather a fool, but don’t tell Master Julian that.”

Master Julian’s mother was smiling so charmingly that it was with some difficulty that Mrs. Halse, who, with the assistance of Miss Newton, had guessed the substance of the conversation which had actually taken place between the mother and son in the railway carriage during their journey from Norfolk, had some slight difficulty in restraining the ejaculation, “Cat!”

“Really!” was the suave answer. “Miss Newton is really engaged, and so well. So glad! Such a charming girl! Yes, I’ll tell Julian, certainly. His heart will be broken—temporarily. Fortunately his fancies are as ephemeral as they are numerous. Good-bye! So glad to have seen you.”

She pressed Mrs. Halse’s hand cordially as she spoke, and pursued her graceful way to the door.

Julian was dining out again that night, and her lonely evening apparently affected his mother’s nerves. At any rate, Julian received a message the next morning—a Sunday—to the effect that she had slept badly and was resting, but would see him at lunch, and at lunch-time accordingly she appeared.

She laughed at his half-careless, half-affectionate enquiries, calling herself quite rested and quite well. And after his first enquiries as to her health, Julian relapsed into rather moody silence—silence with which his mother had apparently nothing to do. That tone of independence which had come to him, and which was sometimes hardly perceptible, could hardly have been more strongly evidenced than by his one or two spasmodic efforts to pass out of his own life—where something was evidently not to his liking—into the life they shared.

Such a state of things is always more or less disturbing to the mental atmosphere; more or less according to the sensitiveness of the person upon whom it acts; and as Mrs. Romayne sat opposite Julian the furtive glances which she cast at his moody, preoccupied face became more and more anxious and restless. A tentative, uncertain tone in her manner of dealing with him, which had developed during the last month, increased moment by moment; and her voice and laugh as she chatted to him—ignoring his indifferent reception of her little bits of news—became moment by moment more forced and unreal. That her nerves and her self-control were not so reliable as they had once been was evident in the fact that she took refuge—as was not unusual with her in these days—in painful exaggeration.

Her bright little flow of talk stopped at last, however; and Julian making no attempt to fill the gap, there was total silence. It was broken again by Mrs. Romayne, and she was talking now, evidently, for talking’s sake, as though she was no longer capable of weighing her words; but, in her intense desire to penetrate the vague atmosphere which she could not challenge, was making her advances blindly.

“I met Mrs. Halse yesterday,” she began gaily. “Did I tell you? Fortunately I only encountered her for a few moments, or I doubt whether I should be alive to tell the tale.”

She paused, and Julian smiled absently. They had finished lunch, and he had risen and strolled to the fire with a cigarette, and he was thinking vaguely, as her voice broke in upon his meditations—or perhaps rather feeling than thinking—that his mother was rather artificial. All society women were artificial, he had thought once or twice lately; and the word was acquiring a new significance to him.

“She bestowed an immense amount of conversation upon me in the course of those few minutes!” continued Mrs. Romayne in the sprightly tone which her son was beginning to hear for the first time as something jarring. “Amongst other things she told me a little piece of news which will interest you.”

“Yes?” said Julian indifferently.

A fellow didn’t always want to be entertained, he was saying to himself irritably; it was a nuisance. His thoughts had wandered completely, and he was going over a fruitless hour which he had spent alone walking up and down a certain side-street off Piccadilly, on the previous evening—an hour which was accountable for his gloomy humour this morning—when he became aware of his mother’s voice saying with insistent gaiety:

“Well, sir, aren’t you broken-hearted?”

Julian started and made a futile effort to realise what his mother had said. The necessity for the effort and its failure proved by no means soothing to him, and he said rather impatiently:

“I’m awfully sorry, mother, but I’m afraid I didn’t hear.”

“He didn’t hear!” echoed Mrs. Romayne in mock appeal to heaven and earth to witness the fact. She, too, had made an effort and a failure, and the result with her was to increase her nervous recklessness. “Five weeks ago he was ready to eat his poor little mother because she prevented his proposing to this young woman, and now when I tell him she’s engaged he doesn’t even hear! Perhaps you’ve forgotten Hilda Newton’s very existence, my lord! Who is her successor?”

Julian flushed angrily, and his good-looking face took a sullen expression.

“She’s not likely to have a successor, as you call it,” he said. “A fellow doesn’t care to have that kind of thing happen twice.”

His mother broke into a thin, nervous laugh.

“You don’t mean to say it rankles still!” she said gaily. “Is this the reason of your devotion to work and ‘fellows’? You silly old boy, you ought to be thoroughly glad of your escape by this time! I think I shall follow Dennis Falconer’s advice, and cut down your allowance to teach you reason. Shall I?”

The jest, dragged in as it was, had a forced ring about it; perhaps it bore all-unconscious testimony to the oppressively insistent power of that haunting questioning of yesterday. But Julian, knowing nothing of this, was simply conscious of ever-increasing irritation from her voice and manner.

“I don’t see what business my allowance is of Dennis Falconer’s!” he said gruffly. And then side by side with his growing sense of his mother’s artificiality, there grew in him an overmastering desire for another woman’s presence—a simple presence, to which social subtleties and affectation were unknown. Why hadn’t Clemence met him yesterday evening? How could he tell when he would see her again? To-morrow he could not meet her. Then his reflections paused, as it were, absorbed in a vague sense of discomfort and discontent, until a fresh thought stole across them; a thought which presented itself by no means for the first time that day.

Why should he not go and see her this afternoon? After all, why should he not? He never had done such a thing, but—did it mean so much as it seemed to mean? And if it did? Why not?

“I don’t see either,” his mother said; and Julian smiled grimly as he thought how little she knew the question she was answering. “It’s our business, isn’t it? And it’s my private business to find you a nice wife—not yours at all, you understand.” These last words with a laugh. “She must be pretty, I suppose—good style at any rate—and she must be rich, and she must have the makings of a good hostess in her. Really, I think I must begin to look her out. Don’t you think——”

Julian interrupted her. He was hardly conscious that he was doing so; he had hardly heard her words; but the atmosphere of the perfectly appointed room, with its artificial mistress, had suddenly become absolutely intolerable to him, and he had answered his own question suddenly and recklessly.

“I’m going out, mother,” he said. “I’ve got some calls to make, and it’s getting late. You won’t go out this afternoon, I know. Good-bye.”

He was gone almost before she had realised that he was going.

To Mrs. Romayne it was a repetition of their first evening at home together in the autumn. The nervous excitement under which she had been acting died suddenly away, and she realised what had happened; realised it, and sat for a moment staring at it, as it were, her hands clenched on the tablecloth, her face haggard and drawn.

To Julian it was no repetition. It was a new departure, sudden and unpremeditated, and as he walked away from his mother’s house his face was alight and eager with excitement and determination.

CHAPTER III

On finding himself condemned to twelve months in London, Dennis Falconer had debated the question of where he should live at some length; and had finally decided on returning to some rooms in the neighbourhood of the Strand, in which he had been wont to establish himself during his temporary residences in London for the past fifteen years. It was not a fashionable part of London. Falconer was a richer man now than he had been fifteen years before, and there were sundry luxuries to be had in those quarters of London where wealthy bachelors congregate, which were not recognised so far south of Piccadilly. It was also natural to him to think twice before he abandoned the idea of living where it was “the proper thing”—of the hour—to live. But he was known and respected in his old rooms; he would be received there with deferential delight; he would be of the first importance in his landlady’s estimation; and these things, little as he knew it, had a distinct influence on his decision.

The two rooms which he occupied, on the first floor, bore a strong likeness to the majority of first-floor rooms in the same street, occupied by single gentlemen. These gentlemen were not, as a rule, of the class who think it worth while to impress their artistic character upon the room in which they live; as a whole, indeed, they might have been said to lack artistic character. Here and there was a more inveterate smoker, newspaper-reader, or novel-reader, as the case might be, the sign manual of whose tastes was not to be obliterated. But as a rule it was the landlady’s taste that reigned supreme and monotonous.

Dennis Falconer’s rooms were no exception to the rule. The furniture was very comfortable, very solid, and very ugly, in the style of thirty years ago; an artistic temperament would have modified the whole appearance of the room, insensibly and necessarily, in the course of a week. But Falconer was not even conscious that anything was wrong. He was as nearly devoid of æsthetic sense, even on its broadest lines, as it is possible for a civilised man to be; and the state of mind which takes pleasure in the tone of curtains and carpets, and the form of tables, chairs, or china, was to him incomprehensible, and consequently a little contemptible.

On a November morning, with an incipient yellow fog hanging about, the appearance of the room in which breakfast was waiting for him was calculated to cast a gloom over a temperament never so little open to such influences; and Dennis Falconer as he opened his bedroom door and came slowly out, looked as though his mental atmosphere was already sufficiently heavy. He always breakfasted punctually at nine o’clock, and he never went to bed before one; it simply never occurred to him to make any concession to the emptiness of his present life by spending more than seven hours out of the twenty-four in sleep, even if he had been physically able to do so. And there were days when the intervening seventeen hours hung on his hands with an almost unendurable weight. He had never been a man who readily made friends, and his tendency in this direction had steadily decreased as he grew older, so that the few men with whom he was intimate were friends of his early manhood; and, as it happened, none of these intimates were in England at the moment. He was absolutely incapable of forming those cheery, unmeaning acquaintanceships which make the savour of life to so many unoccupied men. He was one of those men with whom no one thinks of becoming familiar; who is vaguely supposed either to have a private and select circle of friends, or to be sufficient for himself; whose demeanour, correct, self-contained, and a trifle formal, seems to hold the world at a distance. Consequently his intercourse with his fellow-creatures was limited by his present life to slight conversation on the topics of the day at his club, or in various drawing-rooms where he paid grave, stiff calls, or attended stately functions. Cut off from his own particular work he had no interests and no pursuits.

It was a dreary life in truth, and it was little wonder that Falconer’s expression grew rather more austere with every week. The sentiments of a man of his temperament towards a world in which there seemed so little place for him, and from which he could derive so little satisfaction, would inevitably tend towards stern disapproval.

On this particular morning the sense of dreariness was very heavy upon him. On the previous day he had had an interview with the great doctor to whose fiat he owed his detention in London. The great doctor had been indefinite and unsatisfactory; had looked grave and talked vaguely about troublesome complications and a possible necessity of complete repose. Falconer had made no sign of discomposure, had taken his leave with his usual courteous gravity, and had left the consulting-room with a cold chill at his heart. The cold chill was about it still this morning as he walked to his window before going to the breakfast-table, and stood there looking blankly out. What he was really looking at was the prospect before him if, as the doctor had hinted, he should have to lie up for a time. A lodging and a nurse, or a hospital; solitude and confinement in either case.

He sighed heavily, and turning as though with the instinct to turn away from his troubles, he sat down to the table, poured out his coffee, and took up the letters lying by his plate. There were only two—one in a common-looking envelope directed in an illiterate hand, the other in a clear, characteristic man’s hand, at the sight of which his face brightened perceptibly.

“Aston,” he said to himself, and opened it quickly.

His friendship for the little doctor, which time had only served to strengthen, was, perhaps, the most genial sentiment of Dennis Falconer’s life, and Dr. Aston’s absence in India at this particular period had been a bitter disappointment to him. He had hoped for some time that the doctor’s plans—always of a somewhat erratic nature—might bring him back to London shortly; and as his eyes fell on the first sentence of the letter a slight sound of intense relief escaped him; an eloquent testimony to his present loneliness. Dr. Aston began by telling him that he would be in England before Christmas.

The letter was long and interesting; it abounded in bits of vivid description and shrewd observation, and its comments on Falconer’s proceedings were keen and kindly. Its recipient allowed himself to become absorbed in it to the total neglect of his breakfast, and his expression was lighter than it had been for weeks when he came upon these sentences towards the close of the letter:

“By-the-bye, in the ‘latest intelligence’ of London society—all is fish in the shape of human nature that comes to my net, as you know, and I study that curious institution carefully whenever I get the chance—I constantly, nowadays, come across the name of a Mrs. Romayne. ‘The charming Mrs. Romayne and her good-looking son’ is the usual formula. It is not by any chance the little woman with whom I got myself and you into such a terrible fix years and years ago at Nice—William Romayne’s widow? Is it any relation? I should like to know what became of that little woman, if you can tell me; she had stuff in her. And whether the boy has dreed his weird yet?”

Falconer laid down the letter abruptly, and turned to his breakfast, his face stern and uncompromising. His interview with Mrs. Romayne, now a fortnight old, had accentuated markedly his grim disapprobation of her; and the strong feeling of reprobation that stirred him then had so little subsided that the least touch was enough to re-endow it with vigorous life.

“Stuff in her!” he muttered, with a world of contempt in the curt ejaculation. “Stuff in her! If Aston only knew!”

He glanced at the letter again, and a certain disapproval, personal to the writer, expressed itself in the grave set of his lips as he re-read the words about Julian; his whole mental and moral attitude was antagonistic to, and inclined to condemn, what he characterised, now, as “Aston’s dangerous theories.” He passed with what seemed to him practical sense from “Aston’s extravagance” to a stern consideration of the heinousness of such a life and education as Julian’s for a young man in Julian’s position. Julian’s position, rightly considered, involved in his eyes a reaping in obscurity, humility, and sombreness of life of the harvest of shame and disgrace which his father had sown; and that there was anything inconsistent between this view of the case and his condemnation of Dr. Aston’s theories he was utterly unaware.

He applied himself to his breakfast, still meditating on Mrs. Romayne and the probable consequences of her callousness; and then he took up the other letter and opened it.

At the opening of his last expedition, one of the men attached to it had met with a disabling accident, and had been sent home. The man had been with Falconer on a previous expedition, and when the latter returned to England he had made enquiries about him, and had finally, and with no little difficulty, traced him out to find him crippled for life, and in a state of abject poverty. Falconer, according to his narrow and orthodox lights, as strictly conventional in their way as were Mrs. Romayne’s in hers, was a good man. The letter he was reading now, from the wife of this man, was written by a woman by whom he was regarded as a kind of Providence; to be reverenced indeed, not loved, but to be reverenced with all her heart. She and her husband had been rescued by him from despair; all that medical skill could do for the man had been done at his expense. The pair had been settled by him in a small house in Camden Town, where Mrs. Dixon, a brisk, capable woman, was to let lodgings. To this house Falconer had been once or twice to see the crippled man; and he was not now surprised to receive from the wife the information—conveyed in a style in which natural loquacity struggled with awe of her correspondent—that the husband had had one of the bad attacks of suffering to which he was liable, and that if Mr. Falconer could spare half an hour, Dixon would “take it very kind with his duty.”

Falconer smiled grimly at the words “if Mr. Falconer could spare half an hour.” His whole day was practically at Dixon’s disposal. He would go up to Camden Town that afternoon, he decided; he almost wished he had thought of going before, and as the thought crossed his mind, the remembrance of what might possibly be lying in wait for himself in the not very distant future made him rise abruptly and thrust his letters into his pocket.

It was about twelve o’clock when he left his rooms and walked slowly away in the direction of club-land. He usually got through an hour or so at his club before lunch, reading the papers and so forth. The threatening fog of three hours earlier had rolled away, and there were gleams of wintry sunshine about which made walking pleasant. Dr. Aston’s letter had cheered Falconer considerably; the feeling, too, that he had a definite occupation for his afternoon, and an occupation which was not invented, was invigorating; and altogether he was in better spirits than he had been for many a day. He was walking up Waterloo Place, when his eyes, which could not forego, even in a London street, their trained habits of keen, accurate observation, lighted on Marston Loring, who was coming down Waterloo Place on the opposite side of the road. Loring was a man Dennis Falconer particularly disliked, and after one disapproving glance he was looking away, when he saw the other suddenly stop with a movement—and evidently an exclamation—of surprise and welcome. In the same instant he became aware that Julian Romayne had turned out of a side-street, and was greeting his friend apparently with effusion. Falconer’s brow clouded involuntarily. The instinct of kin was so strong in him that there was a certain touch of personal feeling, little as he wished it, in his connection with the Romaynes, which made the thought of them particularly disagreeable to him; and here, for the second time to-day, the young man and his mother were forced upon his notice. He pursued his way up the street, watching Julian grimly, and as he passed, still on the opposite pavement, the corner where the two young men were standing, Julian happened to look across, saw him, and made a ready, courteous gesture of salutation. Falconer returned it stiffly enough, and walked on.

Julian turned to Loring with a laugh.

“Old bear!” he said; “I wish he’d take himself off to Africa or somewhere. He’s a regular wet blanket to have about! Well, old fellow, and what’s the news?”

Julian was looking very fresh, vigorous, and full of life. There was a curious suggestion about him of alertness which was not without a certain excitement; and his tone and manner as he spoke were almost superabundantly frank and loquacious.

Ten days before, Loring had received a note from Mrs. Romayne telling him that Julian was going for a week’s holiday to Brighton, and that the alteration in his room must be completed if possible in his absence. “It is a sudden idea with him, apparently,” she had written; “but do let us take advantage of it.”

If Loring had had his own private notion on the subject of this sudden idea on Julian’s part he had made no sign to Julian’s mother; he had paid, in silence, his cynical tribute to the maternal wisdom which had presumably recognised the fact that if freedom is not granted it will be snatched.

Three days had now passed since Julian’s return, but it had happened—he himself could perhaps have told how—that until this Saturday afternoon he and Loring had not met. There was nothing in his face and manner at this moment, however, but the most lively, even demonstrative satisfaction; and without giving Loring time to answer his question he went on, with an ease and gaiety which were very like, and yet unlike, his mother.

“Where were you off to? The club? Come and have some lunch with me, do! I want to tell you how first-rate I think my room. I hear you’ve taken no end of trouble over it. It was awfully jolly of you, old man!”

“Glad you like it,” returned Loring nonchalantly. “Yes, I think it’s nice. But it was Mrs. Romayne who took the trouble.”

He was studying Julian keenly, though quite imperceptibly, as he spoke. The young man’s manner was assumed—of that Loring was quite aware. But what, exactly, did it hide? What exactly was the secret?

He debated this question calmly with himself throughout the lunch which they took together a little later on; interposing question and remarks the while into Julian’s flow of fluent talk and laughter. About Brighton, in particular, Julian was full of chatter; and as he wound up a vivacious description of his doings there, Loring commented mentally:

“He hasn’t been to Brighton at all!”

Aloud he said, as genially as nature ever allowed him to speak:

“Well, it’s very jolly to see you back again, my boy. Do you know we’ve seen next to nothing of one another lately, and I vote we turn over a new leaf, eh? What are you going to do this afternoon, now?”

He was leaning back in his chair lighting a cigarette as he spoke, and apparently his attention was wholly claimed by the process; as a matter of fact, however, he was studying Julian’s face intently, and his sense of annoyance was not untinged with admiration when not a muscle of that good-looking face moved. Julian leant back and crossed his legs airily.

“I promised to go to the Eastons’, I’m sorry to say!” he said. “It’s an awful bore! We might have done a theatre together!”

Now, the Eastons were mutual acquaintances of the two men, but it so happened that they had taken irremediable offence against Loring over some detail connected with the bazaar, and it was no longer possible for him to call upon them. Julian was of course aware of the fact, and Loring smiled cynically at what he recognised as a very clever move.

“A pity!” he said composedly. “Better luck another time. Well, you’re not in any hurry, anyway.”

“Not a bit!” assented Julian, cheerfully disposing of himself in a most comfortable and stationary attitude. But a moment later he sprang to his feet. “By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I nearly forgot! I’ve got a commission to do for my mother in Bond Street—shop closes at two. Can I do it?”

A hurried reference to his watch assured him that he would just do it, and with a hasty farewell he dashed out of the room. Loring did not propose to accompany him. It was not worth while, he told himself; and he smiled sardonically as Julian departed.

“I shall find out,” he said to himself. “Of course I shall find out! The question is, is it worth while to wait, or shall I play my game with what I know? The attached friend of the boy warning his mother in time”—he smiled again very unpleasantly—“or the sympathising friend of the mother having made a terrible discovery! Which is the better pose? The latter, I think. Yes, the latter! I’ll wait until I’ve made my discovery.”

He dropped the end of his cigarette into an ash-tray, sat for a moment more in deep thought, and then rose and strolled slowly away.

CHAPTER IV

Julian, meanwhile, hailed a passing hansom, sprang into it, and told the man to drive, not to Bond Street but to the Athenæum, Camden Town. There was an air about him as of one who plumes himself on having done a clever thing, and as he settled himself for his long drive there was a curious excitement and radiance in his face. When the cab reached its destination at last he jumped out and walked rapidly and eagerly away.

It was not a neighbourhood likely to be familiar to a young man about town, but Julian pursued his way with the certainty of a man who had followed it several times before. In about ten minutes he turned into a neat and respectable little street, consisting of two short rows of small houses with diminutive bow windows to the first-floor rooms. About half-way down he stopped at a house on the right-hand side and knocked with a quick, decided touch. He was an object of the deepest interest as he stood upon the little doorstep to a brisk, curious-looking woman who was standing in the ground-floor window of the house opposite, but her opportunity for observation was brief. The door was opened almost immediately, and with a pleasant greeting to the woman, who stood aside, he passed her and ran upstairs—a course of action evidently expected of him. He opened the door of the front room on the first floor and went eagerly in.

“Here I am!” he cried. “Did you expect me so soon?”

Standing in the middle of the room, as though she had suddenly started from her chair, with her hands outstretched towards him, was Clemence; and on the third finger of that thin, left hand there shone a bright gold ring.

Her face was a delicate rosy red, as though with sudden joy just touched with shyness, and all the beauty which had been latent in her tired, work-worn face seemed to have been touched into vivid, almost startling life, by the hand of a great magician. By contrast with the face she turned to Julian now, the large eyes deep and glowing, the mouth trembling a little with tenderness, the face of a month ago, pure and sweet as it had been, would have looked like the inanimate mask of a dormant soul. The soul was awake now, quivering with consciousness; womanhood had come with a purity and beauty beyond any possibility of girlhood. Looking at her face now, it was easy to see by what means alone the latent strength of her character might be developed.

He drew her into his arms with an eager, confident touch, and she yielded to him completely, clinging to him with the colour deepening in her face as he kissed it boyishly again and again. It was a fortnight only since he had kissed her first.

“I was watching for you,” she said softly. “I heard your step.”

He laughed exultantly and kissed her again.

“I thought you’d be watching!” he said. “Though I’m earlier than I told you, do you know? Much earlier! I say, Clemence, how jolly the room looks!”

It was a small room, furnished and decorated in the simplest and cheapest style; as great a contrast as could well be imagined to the rooms to which he was accustomed. But it was very clean and very comfortable-looking; and there was a homelike, restful atmosphere about it which might well have radiated from the slender figure in the plain dress, with that shining wedding-ring and lovely, flushing face. She smiled, a very sweet, pleased little smile.

“Do you think so really?” she said. “I am so glad. It is that beautiful basket-chair you sent, and the flowers.” She glanced as she spoke at a pot of chrysanthemums standing on a little table in the window. Then she turned to him again, her eyes a little deprecating. “Do you think you ought to spend so much money?” she said shyly.

Julian laughed, and flung his arm round her, as he surveyed the little room with a vivid air of proprietorship. Here he was master. Here his word was law. Here he was in a world of his own making, and his only fellow-creature was his subject.

“It looks jolly!” he pronounced again as a final dictum. “Now, come and sit down, Clemence, and tell me what you’ve been doing since yesterday!” He settled himself into the arm-chair by the fire with a lordly air as he spoke, adding: “Come and sit on this stool by me, like the sweetest girl in the world.”

Clemence hesitated, hardly perceptibly. Hers was a nature to which trivial endearments came strangely, almost painfully. She had not yet learned to caress in play; and there was an innate, unconscious, personal dignity about her to which trivial self-abasement was unnatural. But almost before she was conscious of her reluctance there swept over her, like a great wave of hot sweetness, the remembrance that she was his wife! It was her duty to do as he wished. She came softly across the room, sat down on the stool he had drawn out, and laid her cheek against his arm.

It was a trivial action, very quietly performed, but it was instinct with the beauty of absolute self-abnegation; and as if, as her physical presence touched him, something of her spirit touched him too, a sudden quiet fell upon the exultant, self-satisfied boy at whose feet she sat. Not for the first time, by any means, there stole over Julian a vague uneasiness; a vague realisation of something beyond his ken; something in the light of which he shrank, unaccountably, from himself. His hand closed round the woman’s hand lying in his with a touch very different from the boyish passion of his previous caresses, and for a moment he did not speak. Then he said slowly and in a low, dreamy voice:

“Clemence, I can’t think why you should ever have loved me!”

The hand in his thrilled slightly, and the head on his shoulder was just shaken. Clemence could not tell him why she loved him. The bald outline she could trace as most women can trace it. She could look back upon her first sense of reliance, her pity, her admiration, her sense of strange, delightful companionship; but the why and wherefore of it, the mystery which had given to this young man and no other the key of her soul, this was to her as a miracle; as, indeed, there is always something miraculous in it, even when it seems most natural. To account for love; to say that in this case it is natural, in this case it is unnatural; is to confess ignorance of the first great attribute of love—that it is supernatural and divine.

There was another silence, a longer one this time, and the strange spell sank deeper into Julian’s spirit. He said nothing. It would have been a relief to him to speak; to reduce to words, or, indeed, to definite consciousness, the vague trouble that oppressed him; but its outlines were too large and too vague for him. It was in truth a sense of total moral insolvency, but he could not understand it as such, having no moral standpoint. Clemence neither moved nor spoke; her hand lay motionless in his; her cheek rested against him; her beautiful eyes looked straight before them with a dreamy, almost awestruck gaze.

At last, with a desperate determination to thrust away so unusual an oppression, Julian moved slightly and began to talk. He wanted to get back his sense of superiority, and his voice accordingly took its most boyish and masterful tone.

“You haven’t told me what you’ve been doing, Clemence?” he said. “Have you given notice at your bonnet shop as I told you?”

Clemence lifted her head and sat up, clasping her hands lightly on the arm of his chair.

“No!” she said gently. “I thought I would ask you to think about it again. I would so much rather go on if you didn’t mind. For one thing, what could I do all day?” She looked up into his face as she spoke with deprecating, pleading eyes, which were full of submission, too; and the submission was very pleasant to Julian.

“I do mind,” he said authoritatively. “I can’t have it, Clemence. I can’t always see you home, don’t you see, and I won’t have you about at night alone. Besides, I don’t choose that you should work.”

“But I do so want to!” she said, laying her hand timidly and beseechingly on his. “It will be so difficult for you to keep us both; you will overwork yourself, I’m so afraid. Oh, won’t you let me help? I’ve always worked, you know; it doesn’t hurt me. You don’t want to forget that you’ve married a work-girl, do you?”

She smiled at him as she spoke, one of her sweet, rare smiles, and he kissed her impetuously.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” he said imperiously. “I can’t allow it, and that’s all about it. How do you suppose I could attend to my work when I’m kept at the hospital in the evening, if I were thinking all the time of you alone in the streets! No, you must give notice on Monday!”

She looked at him wistfully for a moment. He was condemning her to long days of idleness, to constant uneasiness and self-reproach on his behalf, to a certain loss of self-respect. But self-sacrifice was instinctive with her.

“Very well!” she said simply.

The little victory, the assertion of authority restored Julian’s spirits completely, and he plunged into discursive talk; more or less egotistical. It was all, necessarily, founded on falsehood, and it would have been a delicate question to decide when his talk ceased to be consciously untruthful, and became the expression of a fictitious Julian in whom the real Julian absolutely believed.

The afternoon wore on; the winter twilight fell, bringing with it a slight return of the fog of the morning; two hours had passed before Julian moved reluctantly, and said that he must go.

“I shall come to-morrow!” he said, taking her face between his hands and kissing it. “We’ll go out into the country if it’s fine. I wish it were summer-time! Have you ever seen the river, Clemence?”

“Not in the country,” she said. “It must be nice! How much you’ve seen! Do you know I often think that you must wish sometimes I was a lady! I don’t know anything and I haven’t seen anything, and——” she faltered, and he rose, laughing and drawing her up into his arms.

“Any one can know things,” he said lightly, “and any one can see things. But no one but you can be Clemence! Do you see? Oh, what a bore it is to have to go!”

He was lingering, undecidedly, as though a little pressure would have scattered his resolution to the winds, and seated him once more in the chair he had just quitted. But, since he had said that he must go, it never occurred to Clemence to ask him to stay. If it were not his duty he would never leave her. If it was his duty now, how could she hold him back!

“To-morrow will come!” she said, looking into his face with a brave smile.

“I don’t believe you want me to stay!” he returned, half laughing, half vexed.

“Don’t I?” she said simply, and he caught her in his arms again.

“What a shame!” he said. “There, good-bye! Are you coming to the door?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll stay here,” she said, “and watch you from the window. I see you farther so. Ah, it’s rather foggy! I’m so sorry! You’ll look up? Good-bye!”

She lifted her face to his and kissed him tenderly and shyly, and he left her standing by the window.

Julian ran downstairs, let himself out, and stood for a moment on the doorstep as he realised the disagreeable nature of the atmosphere. At the same instant the door of the house opposite opened, and a man came out, attended to the threshold by a woman. She caught sight of Julian instantly, and said something to the man, as he stood in the shadow, in a deferential whisper. Julian shook himself, confounded the fog, and then glanced up at the window from which the light streamed on his face. He waved his hand, turned away, and walked rapidly down the street, pulling up his coat collar as he went.

As he went, Dennis Falconer slowly descended the two steps of that opposite house, and slowly—very slowly—followed him.

CHAPTER V

>“Good-bye! So glad to have seen you! What, dear Mrs. Ponsonby, are you going to run away too? So kind of you to come out on such an afternoon! Good-bye!”

It was a Friday afternoon, and Friday was Mrs. Romayne’s “day.” This particular Friday had been about as unpleasant, atmospherically, as it is possible for even a November day to be, short of actual dense fog; it had been very dark, and a drizzling rain—a dirty rain too—had fallen unceasingly. Under these circumstances it was rather surprising that any one should have ventured out, even in the most luxurious brougham, than that Mrs. Romayne’s visitors should have been comparatively few in number.

The departure of the ladies to whom her farewells had been spoken, and with whom she had been exchanging social commonplaces for the last quarter of an hour, left her alone; and as she returned to her chair by the dainty tea-table and poured herself out a cup of tea, she had apparently very little expectation of further callers, though it was only just past five o’clock; for when the door-bell rang a few minutes later she paused, and a look of surprise crossed her face. She put down her cup with a little sigh, which was more a concession made to the dictum of conventionality that callers are a bore than an expression of real feeling; and then, as the door opened, she rose with a touch of genuine satisfaction.

“My dear Mrs. Pomeroy!” she exclaimed. “How sweet of you to come out on such a shocking day! Really, you must have had an intuition of my forlorn condition, I think! Maud, dear, how are you?”

She had given her left hand to the girl in a familiar, caressing way as she retained Mrs. Pomeroy’s right hand, and now she drew the elder lady with charming insistence towards a large, inviting-looking chair, indicating to the daughter with a pretty gesture that she was to take a low seat near the table.

“It is an ill wind that blows no one any good!” she continued gaily, as Mrs. Pomeroy greeted her placidly. “It is really too delightful to get you all to myself like this! How seldom one gets the chance of a cosy chat! And how very seldom it comes with the people of all others with whom one would thoroughly enjoy it! You’ll have some tea, won’t you—oh, yes, you really must; it is so much more friendly!” She laughed as she spoke, and turned to the girl sitting demurely on the low seat near her with a tacit claim on her sympathy and comprehension which was very fascinating. Miss Pomeroy’s pretty, expressionless lips smiled sweetly, and her mother, who was always ready to yield to pressure where a cup of tea was concerned—that soothing beverage being forbidden her by her medical authorities—answered contentedly:

“Well, thanks, yes! I think I will! One really wants a cup of tea on a day like this, doesn’t one?” Mrs. Pomeroy had rarely been known to leave a statement unqualified by a question. “It is really very disagreeable weather, isn’t it? Not that it seems to trouble you at all.” Mrs. Pomeroy smiled one of her slow, amiable smiles as she spoke. “I am so glad to see you looking so much better!”

Mrs. Romayne laughed.

“I am very well indeed, thanks,” she said. “But I’ve not been ill that I know of, dear Mrs. Pomeroy.”

Mrs. Pomeroy shook her head gently.

“I thought, do you know, when I first came home, that you looked as though your holiday had been a little too much for you—so many people’s holiday is a little too much for them, don’t you think? And how is your boy? Very hard at work, we hear.”

Mrs. Romayne smiled.

Mrs. Pomeroy’s opinion as to her looks had been quite correct; and it was only within the last fortnight that they had altered for the better. Within that fortnight her brightness and vivacity had ceased to be—as they had been for weeks before—wholly artificial; something of the look of nervous strain had gone out of her eyes, and her face was altogether less sharpened. Her smile now was genuine; and her voice was strangely tender and contented.

“Very hard,” she said. “I have had to get used to a great deal of absence on his part. He has gone down to Brighton to-day, until Monday; he needs a little fresh air, of course. It is so long since he has been shut up as he is now.”

“You must miss him very much,” said Mrs. Pomeroy placidly.

Mrs. Romayne did not answer directly, except with a laugh.