“It’s a jolly little place enough!”
“I think it’s lovely.”
There was a certain tone of regret, of lingering, reluctant farewell, in
both voices; though in Julian’s case it was light and patronising; in
Clemence’s, dreamy and tender. As Julian spoke he shifted his position
slightly as he leant against the iron railing by which they stood, and
let his eyes wander over the scene before them with condescending
approval.
They were standing on the somewhat embryonic “sea-front” of what a few
years before had been a fishing village, and was now struggling, rather
inefficiently, to become a watering-place. Such season as the place
could boast was entirely confined to the summer months; to the
frequenters of winter resorts it was absolutely unknown; consequently
its intrinsic charms at the moment--in all the lassitude and monotony
left by departed glory--might have been considered conspicuous by their
absence. But it was a glorious winter’s day. A slight sprinkling of snow
had been frozen on the roofs of the somewhat depressed-looking houses
and on the unsightliness of the unfinished sea-front; and brilliant
sunshine, almost warm in spite of the keen, frosty air, was glorifying
alike the deserted little town, the country beyond, and the sparkling,
dancing sea. The frosty, invigorating brightness found a responsive
chord in Julian’s heart this morning; he was not always so susceptible
to such simple, natural influences. He was in a good humour with the
place; he had spent two wholly satisfactory days there--two days,
moreover, which had had much the same influence upon his moral tone as a
change to bracing air and simple, wholesome food would have on a
physique accustomed to dissipation.
His survey ended finally with Clemence’s face. She was standing at his
side looking out over the sea, her eyes intent and full of feeling, her
beautiful face flushed and still, absorbed by the mysterious charm of
the ceaseless movement and trouble of the bright water stretching away
before her.
“What are you looking at, Clemence?” he said, boyishly.
She lifted her eyes to his quite gravely and simply.
“Only the sea,” she said. “It is so beautiful, I feel as if I never
could leave off looking at it. It makes me feel--oh, I can’t tell you,
but it is like something great and strong to take away with one!” She
looked away again. “Oh, I wish, I wish we need not go!” she said with a
little sigh.
“I wish we needn’t,” returned Julian; he had been dimly conscious of
something in her eyes and voice which made her previous words, simple as
they seemed, almost unintelligible to him, and he caught at her last
sentence as containing an idea to which he could respond. “It’s an awful
nuisance, isn’t it? And do you know it is time we started? Never mind.
We’ll come down again soon!”
They stood for another moment; Clemence looking out at the sunny sea,
Julian taking another careless comprehensive view of the whole scene;
and then, as though those last looks had contained their respective
farewells, they turned with one accord and walked away in the direction
of the railway station. And as if in turning her back upon the sunlit
sea she had turned her back also upon something less definite and
tangible, a certain gravity and wistfulness crept gradually over
Clemence’s face as they went; crept over it to settle down into a
sadness most unusual to it as the train carried them quickly away
towards London. Julian, sitting opposite her, was vaguely struck by her
expression.
“Are you awfully sorry to go back, Clemence?” he said.
She started slightly, and looked at him with a faint smile.
“I suppose I am!” she said. “We have been very happy, haven’t we?” There
was a wistful regret in her voice which touched him somehow, and he
answered her demonstratively, with a cheery and enthusiastic augury for
the future. Clemence smiled again; again rather faintly. “I know!” she
said. “I mean I hope so. Only--I don’t know what’s the matter with me! I
feel as if--something were finished!”
Julian broke into a boyish laugh. Her depression was by no means
displeasing to him; it was a tribute to his importance, to her
dependence on him; and the necessity for “cheering her up” implied the
exercise of that superiority and authority in which he delighted.
“Why, what a dear little goose you are, Clemence!” he said, leaning
forward to take her hands in his. “A ‘Friday to Monday’ can’t last for
ever, you know, but it can be repeated again and again. Why, I shall be
up every day--every single day, I promise you. I shouldn’t wonder if I
found I could spend the evening with you to-morrow! Won’t that console
you?”
She did not answer him, but she took one of his hands in hers and
pressed it to her cheek. His consolation had hardly touched that strange
oppression which weighed upon her; and Julian, in high feather, and
quite unaware that only his voice was heard by her, his words passing
her by unheeded, had been talking at great length about all the
happiness before them, when she said, in a hesitating, far-away voice:
“Could you--could you come home with me this afternoon?”
Julian paused a moment. The question was hardly the response his words
had demanded. Then he said decisively:
“Quite impossible, I am sorry to say. I would if I could, you know,
dear, but it’s quite impossible!”
She gave his hand a little quick pressure.
“I know, of course!” she murmured gently. She paused a moment, and then
said in a low voice, rather irrelevantly as it seemed: “Julian”--his
name still came rather hesitatingly from her lips--“do you think--do you
like Mrs. Jackson?”
Mrs. Jackson was the name of the woman whose rooms Julian had taken for
her, and he started slightly at the question.
“She’s not a bad sort,” he said, with rather startled consideration. “At
least, she seems all right. Isn’t she nice to you, Clemence? Don’t you
like the rooms?”
“Oh, yes! yes!” she said quickly, almost as though she reproached
herself for saying anything that could suggest to him even a shadow of
discontent on her part. “I like them so very, very much. It is only--I
don’t know what exactly. Somehow, I don’t think Mrs. Jackson is quite a
nice woman.” She had spoken the last words hesitatingly and with
difficulty, almost as though they came from her against her will.
Julian glanced at her quickly.
“What makes you think that, Clemence?” he said, with judicial
masterfulness. “Have you any reason, I mean?”
But Clemence was hardly able to define, even in her own pure mind, what
it was that jarred upon her in her landlady’s manner; and to Julian she
was utterly unable to put her feelings into words. Her hasty disclaimer
and her hesitating beginnings and falterings, however, served to remove
the misgiving which had stirred him lest some knowledge of his own real
life should have come to the woman’s knowledge. He was the readier to
let himself be reassured and to dismiss the subject in that the train
was slackening speed for the last time before reaching London, and he
intended to move into a first-class smoking carriage at the approaching
station. Julian was well aware of the risks of discovery involved in
these journeys with Clemence; and though he faced them nonchalantly
enough, he used wits with which no one who knew him only in his
capacities of man about town and budding barrister would have credited
him, to reduce them to a minimum. To be seen emerging from a third-class
carriage at Victoria Station was a wholly unnecessary risk to run, and
he avoided it accordingly.
“You mustn’t be fanciful, Clemmie,” he said, now in a lordly and airy
fashion. “I’ve no doubt Mrs. Jackson is a very jolly woman, as a matter
of fact. Look here, dear, would you mind if I went and had a smoke now?
It isn’t much further, you know, and one mustn’t smoke in hospital, you
see!”
Clemence was very pale when he joined her on the platform at
Victoria--joined her after a quick glance round to see whether he must
prepare himself for an encounter with an acquaintance; and she did not
speak, only looked up at him with a grave, steady smile which made her
face sadder than before. His announcement of his intention of putting
her into a hansom drew from her an absolutely horrified protest. She
would go in an omnibus, she told him hurriedly, or in the Underground!
She had never been in a cab! It would cost so much! But when he
overruled her, a little impatiently--it was not yet dark, and he did not
wish to remain longer than was necessary with her in Victoria
Station--she submitted timidly, with a sudden slight flushing of her
cheeks.
“A four-wheeler, Julian!” she murmured pleadingly, as they emerged into
the station yard. With a lofty smile at what he supposed to be
nervousness on her part, he signified assent with a little condescending
gesture, and stopped before a waiting cab.
“Here you are,” he said. “Jump in!”
She got in obediently, and as he shut the door she turned to him through
the open window.
“Good-bye, Julian!” she said, in a low, sweet voice.
“Good-bye!” he said cheerily, smiling at her. Her face in its dingy
frame looked whiter, sweeter, and more steadfast than ever, and it made
a curiously sudden and distinct impression on Julian’s mental retina.
Then the cab turned lumberingly round, and he moved smartly away. He did
not see that as the cab turned, that sweet, white face appeared at the
other window and followed him with wide, wistful eyes until the moving
life of London parted them.
Julian was on his way to the club. He had a vague disinclination to the
thought of going home; the house in Chelsea was always more or less
distasteful to him now, and he had no intention of going thither before
it was necessary. It was nearly dark by the time his destination was
reached, and as his hansom drew up a few yards from the club entrance he
could only see that the way was stopped by a carriage from which two
ladies and a gentleman had just emerged. It was the younger of the two
ladies who glanced in his direction, and said, in a pretty, uninterested
voice:
“Isn’t that Mr. Romayne?”
Marston Loring was the man addressed, and he shot a keen, considering
glance at the speaker--Miss Pomeroy. The fact that her eyes had noticed
Julian when his quick ones had not, trivial as it was, was not without
its significance to the man whose stock-in-trade, so to speak, was
founded on clever estimate and appreciation of trifles. Was Miss Pomeroy
not so entirely unobservant a nonentity as she was supposed to be, he
asked himself, not for the first time; or was there another reason for
her quickness in this instance?
“So it is!” he said. “Hullo, old fellow!”
Julian came eagerly up to the group as it paused for him on the club
steps, and shook hands in his pleasantest manner with Mrs. Pomeroy.
“I do believe it’s a ladies’ afternoon!” he exclaimed gaily. “What luck
for me! How do you do?” shaking hands with Miss Pomeroy. “I’d actually
forgotten all about it, and I’ve only just come up from Brighton!
Loring, you must ask me to join your party, old man! Tell him so, Miss
Pomeroy, please!”
Whether strict veracity is to be imputed to a young man who professes
unbounded satisfaction at finding fashionable “ladies’ teas” in full
swing at his club when he has just come off a journey is perhaps
doubtful; but Julian threw himself into the spirit of the moment with a
frank gaiety and enthusiasm which was not to be surpassed. The greater
number of the ladies who were sipping club tea as if it were a hitherto
untasted nectar, and gazing at club furniture as though it were
provision for the comfort of some strange animal, were acquaintances of
his; and as he moved about among them his passage seemed to be marked by
merrier laughs, a quicker fire of the jokes of the moment, and brighter
faces than prevailed elsewhere. He was enjoying himself so thoroughly,
apparently, that he was unable to tear himself away, and when he left
the club at last, he sprang into a hansom, and told the driver to “put
the horse along.” He and his mother were dining out together, and he had
left himself barely sufficient time to dress.
He ran up the steps, flinging the driver his fare, let himself in with
his latchkey, and proceeded to his room up two steps at a time. When he
emerged thence, twenty minutes later, in evening dress, he was
congratulating himself on having “done the trick capitally, and well up
to time.”
He was a little surprised, therefore, as he came downstairs, to find his
mother’s maid waiting for him outside the drawing-room door with the
information that Mrs. Romayne was already in the carriage; and he ran
hastily downstairs, put on his overcoat, and proceeded to join her.
“I’m awfully sorry, dear,” he said, with eager apology. “I thought it
was earlier. The fact is, I was awfully late getting in. I found
‘ladies’ teas’ going on at the club--so awfully stupid of me to
forget--you might have liked to go--and it was rather good fun. How are
you, dear?”
He had let himself into the brougham as he spoke, had shut the door, and
seated himself by the figure he could only dimly see sitting rather back
in the corner so that little or no light fell on the face. He had kissed
his mother, hardly stemming the flood of his eloquence for the purpose;
and he now hardly waited for her word or two of reply before he plunged
once more into eager, amusing talk. He did not give his mother time to
do more than answer monosyllabically, and it followed that her silence
did not strike him. He sprang out, when the carriage stopped, to give
her his hand, but before he had given his instructions to the coachman,
and followed her into the house, she had disappeared into the ladies’
cloak-room. Consequently it was not until she came to him as he waited
to follow her into the drawing-room that he really saw her. As his eyes
rested on the figure coming towards him, he suddenly saw, not it, but a
sweet, white face with wistful eyes looking at him from out of a dingy
frame.