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
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.