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Title: A Valiant Ignorance; vol 3 of 3 A Novel in Three Volumes Author: Mary Angela Dickens Release Date: September 14, 2017 [EBook #55550] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A VALIANT IGNORANCE; VOL 3 OF 3 *** Produced by MFR and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) 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. III. London MACMILLAN & CO. AND NEW YORK 1894 Chapter I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI. A VALIANT IGNORANCE CHAPTER I It was not generally known among his acquaintances that Marston Loring had come back from Africa accompanied by a new friend; this new friend was not introduced by Loring at either of his clubs, and yet the two met at least once every day. He was a man named Alfred Ramsay; a small, insignificant-looking man, with sandy hair, which had turned—in streaks—the peculiar grey which such hair assumes, and small, dull eyes that never seemed to move in his head. It was nearly three o’clock on the afternoon following that on which Loring had called on Mrs. Romayne, and he and his new friend were together in his chambers in the Temple. Mr. Ramsay had been there several times before, and he was sitting now in an arm-chair in the sunshine with an air of total want of interest in his surroundings, which was characteristic of him. Loring was walking up and down the room thoughtfully. “Romayne!” observed Ramsay. “Not a particularly good name on the market! It belonged to a first-class swindler twenty years ago —William Romayne. This young gentleman is no connexion, I suppose?” The remark broke a short silence, and Loring stopped in his walk and leant back against the mantelpiece as he answered. “Yes,” he said tersely, “he’s his son. He has never been in his father’s line, though—I doubt whether he knows anything about him, though it’s an odd thing that he shouldn’t! As to the name, why, it’s an old story, and won’t affect any one nowadays, I take it. The point is that he has this respectable capital, and is—exceedingly keen on increasing it.” There was a dryness in Loring’s voice as he said the last words, which implied a great deal more than did his words. And it was apparently to that significance that the other man replied. “A chip of the old block,” said Ramsay musingly. “I wonder, now, how far it goes?” The last words were spoken very slowly, and the dull eyes looked straight before them. Loring looked down at him with a cynical smile just touching his lips. He knew considerably more about his new friend’s character than he would have chosen to put into words, and he could guess, not inaccurately, what was passing in his mind at the moment. And the realisation of the shadowy possibilities with which Ramsay was occupied was no part of Marston Loring’s designs. He made no direct answer. “He should be here by this time,” he said carelessly. And as he spoke there was a sharp, cheery rap at the door; it opened quickly, and Julian Romayne appeared, very boyish, very good-looking, and with a curious, veiled keenness in his eyes. “We were just expecting you,” said Loring, greeting him with a friendly nod. “Let me introduce you to Mr. Alfred Ramsay.” Mr. Alfred Ramsay had risen to honour the introduction, turning his whole head slowly round as he looked at Julian, so that his eyes still gazed straight before them as they rested on the young man’s face. “Pleased to know you,” he said indifferently. {1} {2} {3} {4} “Very glad to make your acquaintance,” responded Julian pleasantly. “I hope I’m not behind time?” “Pretty fair,” said Loring, laying his hand on the young man’s shoulder with kindly patronage. “But Ramsay is a busy man, you know, so suppose we get to business at once. Ramsay,” he continued, in a brisk, businesslike voice, as the three sat down about the table, “Romayne knows nothing of the affair whatever. I shall begin by running over the preliminaries with him. And, first of all,” he went on, turning to Julian, “of course it is understood, Romayne, that we keep the matter to ourselves.” He spoke in a curt, off-hand manner, and as Julian made a quick gesture of acquiescence, he went on in the same businesslike tone. “I don’t know whether you know anything about the Welcome Diamond Mining Company?” he said. “Probably not. It was floated about this time last year, and the greater part of the business came into my hands. The shares were taken up all right, but—well, it didn’t come to anything, and its affairs had something to do with my going out to the Cape. It was in connection with those same affairs that I and Ramsay met.” Julian had listened so far with a clouded countenance, and now, as Loring paused, he leant back in his chair with a movement of irrepressible disappointment. “Oh!” he said shortly. “It’s a mine, then?” “There is a mine in connection with it,” replied Loring imperturbably. “But you need not trouble yourself about the mine. That is only the figure-head, you understand. The affair itself is a matter of—arrangement. Look here, Romayne,” he went on, as Julian leant suddenly forward across the table, “shares in the Welcome Diamond Mining Company are at this moment worth about five shillings each.” He paused. He had been leaning carelessly back in his chair, and now he moved, uncrossing his legs, and leaning one arm on the table. “In a few days,” he went on deliberately and significantly, “they will fall to two shillings.” He paused again, with a slight, matter-of- course gesture. “That will be worked, of course,” he said. Julian nodded comprehension. “Yes?” he said. “At that price,” continued Loring, “all the shares will be bought up by two or three men, in consequence of private information received from the Cape.” The last words came from Loring slowly and deliberately, and his eyes met Julian’s significantly. A quick flash of understanding passed across Julian’s face, and Loring continued easily: “Reports to this effect will get about. The fact of the presence in London of a mining engineer from the vicinity of the Welcome will also get about. Perhaps he may allow himself to be interviewed, you know—nothing definite, of course. The shares will go up with a run.” He paused, and Julian threw himself back in his chair, tapping the table meditatively with one hand. His gaze was fixed upon the wall just over Loring’s head, and there was a curious expression on his face which combined the keen matter-of-fact calculation of the habitual speculator with a certain unconscious gleam of hungry excitement which was eloquent of youth and inexperience. A minute or two passed, during which Mr. Ramsay’s eyes rested indifferently on the young man’s face, and then Julian spoke. His voice, also, in spite of his evident attempt at emulation of Loring’s businesslike nonchalance, was just touched by that youthful incapacity for holding keen personal interest in abeyance. “And the private information received from the Cape will be supplied——?” he said interrogatively. “Will be supplied by Ramsay,” returned Loring. The words were spoken with the slightest possible movement of the eyelids. Julian made a quick gesture of comprehension, and there was a moment’s silence. Then Loring went on crisply, darting a quick glance at Julian’s face in its calculating eagerness. “In a private speculation of this kind, of course, it is a case of working together and share and share alike. Now, we propose— Ramsay and I, you understand—to make up a joint capital for the purchase of these shares. We are prepared to put into it fifteen thousand pounds between us, and we want another ten thousand at least. If you are prepared to put in that sum, or more, on the understanding that the profits—after each man has received back his original investment—are divided into three equal shares, we are willing to take you in with us.” Julian looked up at him quickly. “Into three equal shares?” he said, with a stress on the adjective. “Into three equal shares,” returned Loring drily. “Capital is not the sole requisite in this affair, and the other factors are supplied by Ramsay and myself.” A dark flush mounted to Julian’s forehead, and the avidity in his eyes developed. “It’s a large order, though,” he said. “I don’t quite see where I come in at that rate, after all.” Loring leant back in his chair and looked him full in the face. “You can please yourself, of course,” he said. “Take it or leave it. You will come in to the tune of something like thirty thousand. If you see your way to trebling your capital by any other means, do so. Lots of fellows will be glad to take your place with us.” Julian’s eyes gleamed greedily, and he wavered obviously. {5} {6} {7} {8} {9} “Those are your final terms?” he said. “Our final terms,” said Loring concisely, looking at Ramsay, who nodded nonchalantly in confirmation of the words. A silence ensued. Julian sat staring down at the table, his brows knit, evidently in close thought. At last he glanced up suddenly at the two men who had been waiting carelessly for his decision. “I call it rather rough,” he said brusquely; “but—all right. If the thing looks all right when you’ve trotted it out, I accept.” He passed on instantly, with a brief, telling question, to the inner working of the scheme. There is perhaps nothing by which self-revelation is more frankly and unconsciously made than through the means by which a man may be most easily roused to enthusiasm. Enthusiasm—a genuine quickening of his mental pulses, even—had been a condition of things practically unknown to the easy-going, commonplace Julian Romayne of a year before; but in the course of the last two months he had experienced it often. To hear of large sums of money, large profits, rapid returns on striking investments, touched him, instinctively, as a record of artistic achievements will touch an artist, as triumphs of research will touch an historian, as prodigies of physical prowess will touch an athlete. And as Loring answered him now, and went on with fuller and more technical detail, his face changed strikingly. His eyes brightened, and an eager, fascinated light came into them; he leant farther forward, listening, commenting, questioning, with quick and always increasing excitement. Half an hour passed, and still the three men sat about the table, talking in terse, businesslike fashion; three-quarters of an hour, an hour. At the end of that time, Julian, his face flushed and eager, his eyes glistening and sparkling, his hand absolutely shaking with excitement, was holding that hand out to Mr. Ramsay with a gesture which witnessed to the work of that hour, as volumes could not have done. As far as words went, he and Mr. Ramsay had hardly exchanged three sentences; it was the bond that lay behind the words that had drawn them together. Mr. Ramsay had spoken very little, indeed, but his silent presence had never for a moment seemed superfluous, or without a certain indefinite weight; and there was a dull approval in his slow eyes now as he turned them on the young man. “We’ve settled so much, then,” said Julian, in a quick, familiar way, “and we meet here on Thursday at two. Until then——” He turned to Loring, and stretched out his hand eagerly. “Thanks, old man,” he said in a low, quick voice. “Thanks.” CHAPTER II Miss Pomeroy’s visit to Mrs. Romayne was postponed for a fortnight. At one time, indeed, it seemed not impossible that Mrs. Pomeroy’s visit to her sister in Devonshire might be postponed indefinitely, and Mrs. Romayne was charmingly inconsolable over her prospective disappointment. It was a delightful thing to have a girl in the house! Mrs. Romayne made the discovery and the statement as the very first evening of Miss Pomeroy’s stay with her drew to a close. And certainly, the evening, signalised by a little dinner-party, had been pleasant enough to warrant satisfaction. Julian had been in the best possible spirits, elated apparently by the presence of his mother’s visitor, at whose side he was to be found whenever his duties as host allowed such concentration of his attention. Miss Pomeroy herself had been a model of gentle amiability, and had looked more than usually bright and pretty. Loring, who had made one of the dinner guests, had also been at his best and most amusing. No conversation of any length had, of course, been possible between him and his hostess; but a quick, low-toned word or two passed between them in the movement that ensued upon the reappearance of the men in the drawing- room after dinner. And on the tone of that first evening, that of the fortnight into which Miss Pomeroy’s stay lengthened itself was modelled. They were very dissipated, Mrs. Romayne asserted laughingly; and she further declared that she had never enjoyed dissipation so much. Julian’s hard-working impulses seemed to be in partial abeyance for the time being; their demands on him, though peremptory when they did occur, did not prevent a great deal of attendance on his mother and her guest. Loring also seemed hardly to have settled back into his usual routine, and frequently made one of the party. His appearance on the scene, and the recognition of that compact between them which he never failed to make, either by a glance or a few quiet words, were never without a certain effect on Mrs. Romayne; not on her spirits, for they never varied in their gaiety; but on a hard restlessness in her eyes, always lessened for the moment by that look or word from Loring. The last day of June was also the last day of Mrs. Pomeroy’s absence from London, and it was, moreover, the day fixed for a certain dance which was to stand out from all the other dances of the season. The givers of this dance were parvenus of the most pronounced type, and during the past three seasons, they had paid their way into London society by spending fortunes on the entertainments they gave. This season they had issued cards of invitation, on which each guest was requested to wear mediæval Florentine dress, and it had been whispered abroad that thousands were to be spent in providing such a setting for these costumes as should eclipse anything hitherto seen. Fortunately for the projectors—and nobody knew better than they how absolutely impossible it was to calculate in such a matter—the idea caught society’s fancy; it was taken up with the wild enthusiasm which alternates in the modern mind with blank indifference; and as every one with an invitation had spent some three weeks in ardent consideration of his or her dress for the occasion, that occasion had acquired a fictitious importance of a colossal nature, and was absolutely looked forward to as promising something quite unusual—and equally indefinite—in the way of amusement. The whole thing had evidently been arranged, Mrs. Romayne declared gaily, to give a final touch of triumph to the end of Maud Pomeroy’s visit to her. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon of the day in question, and she and Miss Pomeroy, with Julian as escort, were taking what she described as “a little turn” in the Park when she expressed this opinion. It was a perfect June afternoon, the Park was very full, and all three seemed to be exhilarated either by the sunshine, the movement, or the prospect of the evening. The fortnight’s intimate association with her present companions had apparently had no effect whatever upon Miss Pomeroy’s demure {10} {11} {12} {13} {14} {15} {16} conventionality of manner, but her word was readier than usual, and her expression was brighter; Mrs. Romayne talked and laughed and kept the ball of chatter going; and about Julian’s hilarity there was a touch of excitement which was a characteristic which had grown upon him markedly in the course of the last month. He turned upon his mother, protesting gaily. “That’s much too depressing a point of view,” he said. “It forces on us exactly what we want to forget—that it is the end. Now, I’ve made up my mind to cut the connection between to-night and both yesterday and to-morrow, and enjoy myself tremendously.” “And is ‘cutting the connection’—it sounds as if something might blow up—an indispensable preliminary?” laughed Mrs. Romayne. “Why, of course.” He glanced at Miss Pomeroy as he spoke, and the colour deepened in her cheeks by just a shade as she turned to Mrs. Romayne and said, with one of her little smiles and a rather poor attempt at mock confidence: “Mr. Romayne wants to forget the terrific anxiety which he has already suffered over that gorgeous dress of his, and the terrific bill from which he has still to suffer.” Julian’s protestations were as eager and boyish in manner as they were delicate and skilful in matter, and Mrs. Romayne broke in upon them with a laughing apology and a request that Julian would tell the coachman to turn out into Piccadilly and drive to a house in Grosvenor Place. Julian gave the order, and added to it: “You can pull up when you get out of the Park.” Mrs. Romayne took up the words instantly. “Are you not coming with us, bad boy?” she said. “Come and help us pay one call, at any rate. We are going straight home after that to prepare ourselves for the triumphs of the evening by a little refreshing laziness, are we not, Maud?” “I should like to immensely!” returned Julian ardently as Miss Pomeroy smiled a response. “But I’m afraid I must go down to the club. I promised to meet Loring there! Dinner at eight, I suppose?” he added as the carriage drew up and he jumped out. He stepped back on the pavement, lifting his hat as the carriage drove off. Then he jumped into a hansom and gave the word to drive, not to the club but to the Temple. Arrived there he ran upstairs, the excitement about him gaining ground moment by moment, to Marston Loring’s rooms. Loring was there alone. He was seated at the writing-table writing rapidly, his face keen and intent, and he suspended his work for an instant only as he glanced up on the opening of the door and nodded a greeting. Julian’s life for the last month had been lived at that high pressure which is only produced in a man by the consciousness that he has burnt his ships. Every shilling that he had accumulated during the previous six months was invested in the scheme propounded to him a month ago by Marston Loring; and the history of his real life during the interval would have been a history of the stages through which that scheme had passed. The affairs of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company had followed precisely the course indicated by Loring during that first interview on the subject between Loring, Ramsay, and Julian. Shortly after that interview “Welcomes” had fallen to a nominal price; they had then been bought up according to arrangement. A slight rise had followed as a matter of course, followed by an interval of vacillation, and a slow succession of trifling advances, which had again been succeeded by a period of quiet. So far the excitement with which every hour had been instinct for Julian had been the excitement of preparation solely; the ground had been tilled and the seed sown. And what that soil was in which he had sown his seed; what were the characteristics that were to prove so stimulating; it was not in him to consider. He was perfectly well aware of the nature of the transaction in which he was engaged; he had understood at the outset that the “private information received from the Cape” on which the shares were to be bought up was a “put up thing,” as he would have expressed it, between Ramsay and Marston Loring; and the knowledge affected him not at all. That black thread in the warp of his character was running strong and deep now, and to such considerations his sensibilities were absolutely dormant. “Well?” The monosyllable broke from him eager and impetuous, as though it contained the pent-up suspense and excitement of hours. He had come up rapidly to Loring’s side, and the latter, without lifting his eyes, signed to an evening paper which lay on the table as he said briefly: “All right!” Julian’s face turned quite white; he snatched up the paper and turned with breathless eagerness to the column devoted to the money market. “Welcome Diamond Company Shares.” The blue eyes seemed to leap at the line and fasten on it with a hungry avidity pitiful to see, and he stood there gazing at it with glittering, fascinated eyes, with a curious stillness upon him from head to foot, as though all remembrance of his actual surroundings, all thought even of Loring, had faded. Nearly five minutes had passed when Loring laid down his pen and leant back in his chair, turning a little that he might fix his eyes on Julian as he stood rather behind him. “Pretty fair?” he said carelessly. Julian lifted his eyes from the paper and turned his white face to Loring. He nodded as though the feelings of the moment were not to be put into speech, and then the slow, deep colour of excitement began to creep over his features. “Have you seen Ramsay?” he said in a low, quick voice. “Saw him this morning. He told me things were beginning to move. It was that paragraph yesterday that did it!” “And what about keeping it up?” said Julian. “This is the ticklish moment, I take it! What’s the next move?” He had thrown himself into a chair as he spoke; his voice was jerking with eagerness, as though some of his excitement were finding expression. Loring looked at him for an instant before he answered. He was asking himself a question which had formulated itself in his {17} {18} {19} {20} {21} {22} mind more than once in the last month; namely, was it merely the influence of his blood which made young Romayne so keen a speculator; or was there something concealed in the background of his life which made money a desperate necessity with him? “This is the next move,” he answered, indicating the sheets of manuscript paper which lay before him. “This will be in one or two of the papers to-morrow, and if I’m not mistaken it will have a big effect!” Julian stretched out his hand impulsively for the sheets and ran through them, now and then breaking into an eager comment; and as he finished he rose impetuously and began to pace excitedly up and down the room. His face was flushed now, and his eyes glowing. “Yes, that ought to take us a long way!” he said. “And Ramsay backing it up all the while, of course? Loring, what do you make of it? An affair of—weeks?” “An affair of two or three weeks, all told!” returned Loring nonchalantly. “The inside of a month ought to put the best part of thirty thousand into each of our pockets, my boy.” He rose as he spoke, and gathered together the sheets of manuscript, but as he did so his quick ear caught a strange, sharp catch in Julian’s breath. He fastened up the papers, and directed them with another of those slight smiles, and then turned again to the younger man. Julian was standing at the window staring almost stupidly out. “I’m going to turn you out now!” said Loring lightly. “Coming down to the club with me?” Julian turned round, but the words seemed to penetrate slowly to his consciousness. “No!” he said at last. “No, thanks, old man. I—I’m going to get home.” He had to go to his own chambers first, it appeared, however, and Loring left him with a careless “All right! See you to-night, of course!” The sunshine had left Julian’s room, bright as it still was outside, and it looked, perhaps, the darker by contrast as he opened the door and shut himself in alone. He paused a moment, with his hand on the lock, and then walked aimlessly across to the writing-table and sat down. There was a pale, dazed look about him. The line in the evening paper at which he had gazed with such devouring eyes had chronicled the first important rise of those shares on which his hopes were staked; chronicled, in fact, the beginning of the end. As he sat there alone, the words seemed to stand out all about him; to meet his eyes in every direction; and it was little wonder that, as he realised that the seed so eagerly sown had indeed broken ground at last, the perfect fruit seemed to be already in his hand, and he was dazed and intoxicated with anticipated triumph. He had the blood of a speculator and a gambler in his veins, and as he sprang up suddenly from his chair and began to pace up and down the room, it was the surging of the speculator’s instinct that flushed his face and glittered in his eyes; the rioting of that money passion which, to the man who has never felt its fever, is the strangest and most repulsive—as it is the most abnormal—of all passions. But little by little, without volition or even consciousness on his part, the current of his thoughts changed. Gradually that greedy, tumultuous contemplation of money as an end wavered, altered into a contemplation of money as a means, into a passing over of that means in the realisation of the end which it was to bring about. He was thinking of Clemence, thinking of her in a tumult of excitement in which the goading of that two-edged dart of love and shame which quivered always in his better nature was absolutely unfelt; thinking of her in a very hallucination of intoxicated triumph. He was living out with her a future life of triumphant satisfaction; a life so utterly incompatible with the facts of the case, with all that had come and gone, and must still come and go, as to be a most pathetic imagining; when the sound of a clock striking brought him suddenly to himself. His first conscious thought was a certain vague surprise at his surroundings; as far as externals went he had left Loring’s room and had come to his own like a man walking in his sleep. Then he realised the nature of the sound that had roused him, and drew out his watch to see what hour it was that had struck. It was seven, and the fact, with the pressing necessity for his return home which it involved, gave a turn to the current of his thoughts by which, without changing their main character, they were blended in with the actual practicalities of the moment. He thought of his mother with a certain bitter triumph. “It’s not for long,” he said to himself, “not for long now.” His mind ran on over the details of the evening before him; the little dinner—“only ourselves,” Mrs. Romayne had said gaily; the artificialities that would pass between himself and his mother; the effective flirtation which he would have to keep up with Miss Pomeroy—the flirtation which in the excitement of the past month he had carried on recklessly. And then with his hand on the door he stopped abruptly—stopped and stood quite still with a strange, defiant recklessness growing in his face. Whether it was some curious effect of the tumult through which he had passed, whether it originated in those jubilant visions of Clemence from which he had so recently awakened, it is not possible to say. But on that instant there had risen within him an impulse of fierce, overmastering repulsion against his mother, against Miss Pomeroy, against the part he had chosen to play. Almost before he had realised the sudden sense of overwhelming revolt and distaste which had seized him, its obverse was upon him. Clemence! To see Clemence! To speak to Clemence! To satisfy the hungry longing which, for the moment, seemed absolutely to possess him! Such a longing, in various forms and degrees, had shaken and torn him often before, but hitherto something—some influence from Clemence’s own words, some jarring and throbbing of that better nature in himself—had held him back. But now, strung up and carried out of himself by his excitement, he was impervious to all considerations save that of his own overmastering craving. The end was very near now, he told himself. It was a question of a week or two only. He must see her; she herself would see that it was only reasonable that he should see her! His plans were laid in the passing of a few seconds. The only address Clemence had given him was that of the house of business where she worked—where she had worked when he met her first—his only chance of seeing her lay in meeting her when she left her work at night. He would not go home to dinner, he decided; he would telegraph to his mother, and dine at a quiet restaurant. That would bring him, as he knew well enough, to the earliest hour at which the “hands,” of whom Clemence made one, were likely to be released, and he would wait in the little by-street in which the “hands’” entrance was situated until she came. {23} {24} {25} {26} {27} {28} He went out of the room with a quick, assured step, sent off his telegram—a brief “Detained. Inconsolable”—from an office in Fleet Street, and then, carefully avoiding the fashionable resorts, he walked to the restaurant he had mentally selected. The little street which, for some scores of men and women, formed the picture evoked by a name which, for the shopping population of London, involved a mental vision of a busy thoroughfare and a considerable expanse of plate-glass windows, ran parallel to that thoroughfare, divided from it only by a long block of buildings; and bearing in mind the slight nature of the division between the two, the contrast presented was almost startling. The little street was a thoroughfare inasmuch as it led from one side-street to another; but these streets were very little frequented, and the connecting-link between them was a short cut to nowhere. It represented simply so many back entrances to places of business, and these being to a great extent monopolised by a single firm, the comings and goings at stated times of the hands employed by that firm was often the only movement that broke the quiet from morning until night. In the intervals between these comings and goings there brooded over the street such a silence and stillness as seemed strangely incompatible with the thought of all the labour and effort that it held; with the hard day’s work towards which those coming footsteps in the morning were bent; with the hard day’s work which lay behind those departing footsteps in the evening. The street itself had a squalid, neglected look, too, as though life and activity had passed it by. The day’s work was not over yet, though the evening light was making long shadows, and the setting sun was turning the upper windows of the opposite houses into ruddy fire; the street was absolutely silent and deserted when Julian turned quickly into it. He pulled up and surveyed his surroundings with a rapid, comprehensive glance. It was too early yet. He looked at his watch and told himself so with somewhat over-elaborated carelessness, and took out his cigarette-case. He lighted a cigarette; and pacing slowly up and down the pavement on the opposite side of the street to that on which he expected Clemence to emerge, he began to reckon with himself the chances for and against her speedy or tardy appearance. But such practical, matter-of-fact considerations involved a deliberate mental action on his part, and having gone through it, urged by that curious instinct under which intense excitement always desires to assert itself as absolute calm and sanity, he gradually let himself slip away again from the practical and the actual, and gave himself up to the tide of his exhilarated imaginings. There is nothing more exciting, nothing that sooner quickens the mental pulses into a very fever of confusion, than the sudden indulgence of an impulse long resisted. The hour that had passed since the idea, of which his presence in that quiet little street was the outcome, had flashed into Julian’s mind and dominated it, had carried him as completely out of himself, and out of touch with realities, as is a man under the influence of absinthe. As a man so exhilarated will be impervious to a considerable amount of physical pain, so Julian was for the time being absolutely unconscious of anything painful or shameful in his position. The circumstances under which he had parted from Clemence; all the bitter pain and longing under which he had smarted and writhed with such fierce rebellion; the attitude towards himself which his conduct might only too justly have created in his wife; were absolutely obliterated from his mind. He was waiting now—husband, master, altogether the superior; triumphant, successful, self-assured—for his mistaken but doubtless submissive wife; conscious, and rather pleased with the consciousness, that he loved her in spite of her faults. One quarter after another chimed out from a neighbouring clock. He had been waiting nearly an hour, oblivious, in his elation, of tedium or weariness; oblivious of the claim upon him of the life of Queen Anne Street as though it had no existence for him. The slight feeling of impatience with which he realised that the fourth quarter was chiming was entirely unconnected with such externals; and it was an eloquent testimony to his mental attitude that it took the form of a faint sense of irritation with Clemence for delaying so long. A vague feeling of lordly disapproval of her conduct stirred in him, as he paused at the top of the street and glanced across at the still fast-closed doors. He was just looking dubiously at his cigarette-case when the click of a latch, instantly followed by the sound of girls’ voices, made him start violently. He thrust the case hastily into his pocket and walked quickly down the street, until he was standing just opposite the door from which a little stream of girls and women was pouring forth. Several figures had already detached themselves from the stream and were moving rapidly away, either singly or in pairs; but one quick glance told him that neither of these was Clemence, and he fixed his eyes with eager confidence on the doorway through which she had still to pass. His face was flushed with intense excitement. On came the stream, girls and women following one another in unbroken succession; pretty girls, plain girls, shabby girls, smart girls, some arm in arm, some laughing and talking in loud-voiced groups; several of these groups noticed his waiting figure and commented upon it in giggling whispers, turning back as they passed down the street to look at it again, but Julian only saw that none of these was Clemence. The stream was beginning to dwindle; stragglers followed one another now at irregular intervals; the two girls who had been the last to appear had nearly reached the end of the street, and still Julian’s eyes were riveted on the open doorway. The girls turned the corner, and down the dim passage into which he was looking there came slowly another figure quite alone. Before it had emerged into the light Julian was across the road, as though that one great throb with which his heart leapt up to meet her had impelled him physically, and as Clemence passed out into the soft dusk of the June evening he spoke her name, eagerly at first, then with a strange break in his voice: “Clemence! Clemence!” At the first sound of his voice—evidently the first sign to her that he was near—a low, indescribable cry broke from Clemence; she turned towards him trembling, swaying as she stood, and Julian caught her in his arms lest she should fall. “You’ve come!” she cried, and before the exquisite rapture and relief of her faint, quivering voice, with all that it implied of suffering past, a harder man than Julian might have melted. “My dear, my dear, I knew you’d come! I knew! I knew!” But that pathetic voice had not been needed. The first sight of her face as she turned it upon him with that wonderful irradiation of joy upon it, had shrivelled into nothingness all the exultation, all the triumph and self-satisfaction of the past few hours, and Julian held her in his arms, his trance over, self-convicted, self-condemned; his whole consciousness absorbed in that heavy, throbbing agony of his better nature which had leapt into sudden relentless life. What it was that so penetrated him he could not have defined. Where and {29} {30} {31} {32} {33} {34} {35} in what proportion old influence revived, touched, and was blended with a heart-piercing sense of the change in her, he could not have said; he did not even know that these were indeed the powers that had struck him. The change in her, even as he gazed down at her face with agonised, remorseful eyes, as it rested for one moment on his shoulder, he rather felt than traced and understood. That change was very great. Those past six months had dealt heavily with that thin, white face, and the marks of their passing were plain to see, even in that moment of absolute transfiguration. Every curve, every suggestion of girlishness seemed to have been worn away; worn away by those cruel twin refiners, never so pitiless as when they work together—physical suffering and mental distress. The outline of her features had lost some of its beauty in that intense accentuation; the colourless lips were slightly drawn, and under the sunken eyes were heavy shadows. But no remembrance of the physical loveliness which she had lost could stand for an instant before the spiritual loveliness which she had gained. It was as though those twin refiners, before whom nothing earthly or external can stand and flourish, had strengthened that which lay behind the externals with which they had dealt so ruthlessly. The eyes, so indescribably beautiful as they looked now into Julian’s, had been beautiful even in that moment before she realised his presence; beautiful in their heaviness as no brightness, as no common happiness could have made them; beautiful with the perfect patience and dignity of accepted suffering. The tired mouth had been beautiful in its repose, as it was beautiful now in its tremulous rapture; beautiful in its quiet constancy and self-abnegation. She let herself rest for a moment in his arms; clinging to him with something in her touch which he had never felt before; looking up into his face as her head lay back against his shoulder with a strange, tremulous, tender light quivering on every feature, shaken from head to foot by little tremulous, tearless sobs—the sobs of utter relief and peace. Then she disengaged herself gently, and drew herself away, something of that first ecstasy dying out of her face to leave it soft and happy beyond all words. That strange light still shone in her eyes, and, as she moved, one thin hand retained its clinging hold on his arm, as though some instinct of dependence influenced her involuntarily. She was dressed, not as the other girls had been, in a light summer jacket, but in a long cloak, and as she drew it about her with the other hand, the softest touch of colour came into her white cheek. “My dear!” she said softly. “My dear!” And Julian whispered hoarsely as he had whispered again and again: “Clemmie! Clemmie!” He made no attempt to take her in his arms again. Even the gesture with which he laid his hand upon those clinging fingers on his sleeve was diffident and almost tremulous; tender and reverent as no gesture of his had ever been in all his life before. He could find no words. In her presence everything—all the triumph, all that had seemed to him the necessities and realities of life—seemed to have fallen away from him. He was nothing. He had nothing! He could say nothing to her. There was a silence; silence which for Clemence as her fingers closed round his, and that soft colour came and went in her cheeks, breathed an ineffable content; silence which for Julian held the blackest depths of self-revelation and self-contempt. It was broken at last by Clemence. “Is it done, dear?” she said gently. Julian’s hand turned cold in hers, and his eyes fell away from her face. “Not—not yet, Clemmie!” he faltered wretchedly. “I—I came to tell you—to tell you that——” “That you are going to do it? That you are going to do it? My dear, my dear, you mean that? Oh, you mean that, don’t you?” She had not raised her voice or changed her pose, but that touch upon his arm had become a close, convulsive grip, and even the clutch of the worn, blanched hand upon her cloak witnessed to the agony of supplication with which every nerve was strained and quivering. Her low voice thrilled and vibrated with it; her white face, to which his first words had brought a look of heart-sick disappointment, was an embodied prayer. He could not answer on the instant; it cut him like a lash; and she went on rapidly, her low, beseeching voice breaking and trembling with the intense feeling that flickered on her face like a light. “Julian, for my sake, for your wife’s sake, dear! I love you so! I—I need you so! Don’t part us any longer! If it was for your good, if it was to make you happy, there’s nothing I would not face, and face cheerfully—ah, you know that, don’t you? But you’re doing wrong, and I think of it always, and it makes the loneliness so that I can’t bear it. Oh, I can’t bear it!” She broke suddenly into low shuddering sobs and tears, and her head fell forward helplessly on to his breast, though she still kept her convulsive hold upon his arm. He put his other arm round her and drew her towards him, and as he did so he seemed to realise with a kind of double consciousness the course he would take and its utter contemptibility. “Don’t, Clemmie dear! Don’t! don’t!” he said in a broken, uneven voice. “It’s all right, dear! I’m going to do it! I came to tell you so! It’s all right!” “You’re going to—tell her?” “I am, Clemence! I promise you I am! Only—only not for a week or two. There’s—there’s something I must wait for!” “But you are going to? You are? You are?” “On my—on my soul, yes, Clemence!” There was a moment’s silence, broken only by her low, tremulous sobs; then these too died away. At last, with a long sighing breath, she raised herself and looked into his pale, miserable face, with her own quiet and exhausted. “Must you wait?” she said, with an indescribable accent on the first bitter word. “Must you?” “I—I must, dear!” he said desperately, his eyes trying wretchedly to avoid hers. “It shan’t be long, I promise you; but I must wait {36} {37} {38} {39} {40} {41} just a little longer!” She paused a moment, still looking into his face. Then, with a sudden light in her eyes, she made a slight movement as though she would have bent his head down that she might murmur in his ear. She stopped herself, however, and there settled down upon her face a look of unutterable sadness. By Julian, in his helpless misery of self-contempt, the gesture had passed utterly unheeded. “Don’t let it be much longer, dear!” she said. “Good night!” Julian caught at the last word as though it gave him some sort of chance of restoring his writhing self-respect. “Good night!” he echoed. “Not yet, Clemence! I’m going to see you home, of course!” But Clemence shook her head. “No!” she said steadfastly, “no, dear!” Something in her tone, something in the touch she laid upon him, took from him all power of self-assertion, all power of resistance to her will. She drew his head towards her now, kissed him softly on the forehead, and then turned and went away down the street, leaving him alone. CHAPTER III “Romayne, at last! By Jove, old man, we thought you were going to throw us over!” The voice, a young man’s voice, struck out, as it were, from an indescribable medley of incongruous sound. The background was formed by the lightest and most melodious dance music, produced solely from stringed instruments; lutes and guitars seemed to predominate, and the result had a character and rhythm of its own which was essentially graceful, picturesque, and Italian; against the background, a high-pitched discord compounded of every imaginable key, there clashed a very Babel of tongues—the eminently unmusical voice of modern society, with all its faults of modulation and pronunciation, blended into a whole full of a character absolutely incompatible with the old-time southern harmonies with which it mingled. The speaker’s figure, as he stopped suddenly in a hurried passage across the room, stood out from a blaze of colour, light, and gorgeousness of every description, which fell without pause or cessation into ever fresh combination, as the beautifully dressed crowd moved to and fro in its magnificent setting. And the spectacle presented to the eye was as curiously jarring, as strikingly suggestive of the ludicrous inconsistencies of dreamland, as were the sounds that saluted the ear. There was hardly a man or woman to be seen whose dress was not as faithful a copy of the costume prevalent among the Florentine nobles under the magnificent rule of the Medici as time and money could make it. There was not a false note in the surroundings; money had been poured out like water in order that a perfect reproduction of an old Florentine palace might be achieved; and as far as art could go nothing was left to be desired. The fault lay with nature. The old Italians doubtless had their own mannerisms, possibly their own vulgarities, of carriage, gesture, and general demeanour; but theirs were not the mannerisms and vulgarities of modern “smart” society. The young man who had greeted Julian exemplified in his own person all the preposterous incongruity of the whole. His dress was a marvel of correctness to the minutest detail. Its wearer’s face was of the heavy, inanimate, bull-dog type; his movement as he shook hands with Julian was an exaggerated specimen of the approved affectation of the moment; his speech was clipped and drawled after the most approved model among “mashers.” He was the son of the house, and there was a kind of slow excitement about his manner, struggling with a nonchalant carelessness which he evidently wished to present to the world as his mental attitude of the moment. There was a note of excitement also in the medley of voices about him. The “affair” was “a huge go”—as the young man himself would have expressed it. And neither he nor any one of his father’s guests was troubled for one instant by any sense of the ludicrousness of the effect produced. Julian had that instant entered the room and had paused on the threshold. There is perhaps no type of costume more picturesque in its magnificence than that of the Italian noble of the Middle Ages—this is perhaps the reason why it has been so extensively vulgarised —and Julian’s dress was an admirable specimen of its kind, rich, graceful, and becoming. There was a subtle difference between his bearing and that of his host, though Julian’s demeanour, too, was modern to the finest shade. He wore the dress well, with none of the other man’s awkwardness, but on the contrary with an absolute ease and unconsciousness which implied a certain excited tension of nerve. His face was colourless and very hard; but upon the hardness there was a mask of animation and gaiety which was all-sufficient for the present occasion. “I’m awfully sorry, dear boy!” he said now, lightly and eagerly, and with an exaggerated gesture of deprecation. “It’s horribly late, I know! Give you my word I couldn’t help it! By Jove, what a magnificent thing you’ve made of this!” The other glanced round with a satisfaction which he tried in vain to repress. “Not so bad, is it?” he said carelessly. “Only these fellows are such fools, even the best of them; they always blunder if they can.” With this wholesale condemnation of the workmen among whom, some fifty years ago, his grandfather might have been found, he screwed his eyeglass into his eye, serenely unconscious of the comic effect produced, for the better contemplation of a pretty girl at the farther end of the room. “Lady Pamela looks awfully fit, doesn’t she?” he observed parenthetically; continuing almost in the same breath: “The gardens are the best part, seems to me. Awfully like the real thing, don’t you know!” Julian’s only direct answer was an expressive gesture of appreciation and apology. “Awfully well done!” he said. “Excuse me, dear boy, I see my mother, and she’ll want to know why I’ve not turned up before. I must go and explain.” His companion laughed; the laugh was rather derisive, and the glance he cast on Julian through his eyeglass was stupidly inquisitive and incredulous. {42} {43} {44} {45} {46} {47} {48} “What a fellow you are, Romayne!” he said. “They ought to put you in a glass case and label you the model son.” Another gay, expressive gesture from Julian. “Why not?” he said lightly. “We’re a model pair, you know.” And the next moment he was threading his way quickly across the room. A sudden movement of the crowd had shown him his mother’s figure, and he had realised instinctively that she had seen him. He came up to her with a manner about which there was something indescribably reckless, and made her a low bow of gay and abject apology. “I beg ten thousand million pardons!” he said. “Language fails to express my feelings.” Mrs. Romayne’s dress was not a success—that is to say, it was perfect in itself, and failed only as a setting for its wearer; to deprive her appearance of any possibility of “chic” or...