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.