Always excellently dressed, Mrs. Romayne’s appearance at that moment was
brilliant; almost excessively brilliant it seemed for a small
dinner-party. Her frock was of the most pronounced type of full-dress,
and she wore diamonds; not many, but so disposed, as was her
reddish-brown hair, as to make the greatest possible effect. But the
detail which had caught her son’s experienced eye, and which had brought
before him by some unaccountable law of contrast that other woman’s
face, lay in the fact that to-night for the first time his mother was
slightly “made up.” The colour on her cheeks, the bright effectiveness
of her eyes, was the result of art. It made her look haggard, Julian
decided with careless, indifferent distaste; and then he was following
her into the room.
She had hardly paused to speak to him; apparently she imagined that they
were late.
They were widely separated at dinner, and were not thrown together, as
it happened, during the whole evening. But Mrs. Romayne’s personality
was a factor in the party not to be ignored that night; she was
delightful, everybody said. It was a very select little dinner, and
society romps went on afterwards; romps to which Mrs. Romayne
contributed her full share. And to Julian that newly acquired sense of
his mother’s artificiality was accentuated as the evening passed on into
something like repugnance; a repugnance which, when he was seated with
her at last in the brougham and driving home, produced in him a strong
disinclination to rouse himself to an assumption of vivacity, and made
him occupy himself with his own thoughts so exclusively that he never
noticed that his mother uttered not a single word.
“Good night, mother!” he said absently, as they stood together in the
hall. He was stooping to kiss her when she stopped him with a slight,
peremptory gesture.
“I want to speak to you!” she said. Her voice was tense and a little
hoarse. Without another word, without so much as glancing at him, she
passed him and led the way to his smoking-room; turned up the lamp with
a quick, hard gesture, and then turned and faced him.
All the colour had faded from Julian’s face, and he had followed her
slowly. With the first sound of her voice the conviction had come to him
that he was discovered. There were certain weaknesses in him hitherto
undeveloped by the circumstances of his life, but radical factors in his
character. Morally speaking he was a coward. His hour had come, and he
was afraid to meet it. He came just inside the door and stood leaning
against the writing-table, confronting his mother, but neither looking
at her nor speaking.
“Tell me where you have been since Friday!” she said, low and
peremptorily; and then she stopped herself abruptly, putting out her
hand as though to prevent him from speaking, as a spasm of pain
distorted her face. “No!” she said in a hoarse, breathless way. “No,
don’t! You’ll tell me a lie. Don’t! I know!”
She had put out her hand and was steadying herself by the high oak
mantelpiece--part of her recent present to Julian--but her face was
rigid and set, and her eyes, full of a strange, indefinable agony, which
she seemed to be all the while holding desperately at bay, never left
the pale, downcast, almost sullen face opposite her.
With a determined wrench and setting in motion of all his faculties,
Julian pulled himself together so far as to take refuge in that sure
resort of the deficient in moral courage--an assumption of jaunty and
light-hearted non-comprehension. Perhaps he had never in his life been
more like his mother than he was at that moment as he threw back his
head and answered, with an affected gaiety which was somewhat hollow and
unsuccessful:
“What do you know, dear? You’re coming it rather strong, aren’t you?”
“I know that you have been living with a common work-girl somewhere in
Camden Town for a month or more!”
The words were spoken in the same hoarse voice which rang now, low as it
was, with an intolerable disgust. But its expression seemed to affect
Julian not at all. The words themselves were occupying all his
perception. A quick frown of consideration appeared on his forehead, as
though some relief or reprieve had come to him, bringing with it
possibilities the skilful turning to account of which called into play
his mental faculties, and in so doing strung up his nerve. He dropped
his artificiality of manner, and seemed to brace himself to meet the
emergency in which he found himself. The situation had evidently
suddenly altered its character for him. He was no longer cowed by it.
There was a pause--a pause in which Mrs. Romayne’s eyes seemed to dilate
and contract, and dilate again under the suffering to which she allowed
expression in neither tone nor gesture; and then there came from Julian
four awkward, hardly audible words, jerked out rather than spoken, with
long pauses intervening:
“How do you know?”
A short, sharp breath came from Mrs. Romayne, and then she said, with
cold decisiveness, though it seemed that nothing would take that
hoarseness from her voice:
“It matters very little how I know. That I know by one chance; that
some one else may know by another; some one else again by another--the
details in each case, when the chances are innumerable, are nothing!
Have you lived all this time in London not to know that discovery is
inevitable--to wonder ‘how’ when it comes?”
There was a bitterness, a keenness of scorn in her voice which stung him
like a lash, and he answered hotly:
“After all, mother, we are not living in Arcadia! We don’t talk about
these things, and I’m awfully sorry, I’m sure, that this should have
come to your knowledge; I’m awfully sorry to offend you. But, hang it
all, I’m not worse than lots of fellows about!”
His tone had gathered confidence and defiance as he went on, and it
seemed to shake her a little. Her hold on the mantelpiece tightened, and
she spoke quickly and rather nervously.
“It’s very likely,” she said. “I don’t want to argue the principle with
you. Young men have their own ideas, I know; but how many young
men--drop out? How many young men, with good positions, good chances,
somehow or other get into bad odour; get to be not received--or, if they
are received, it is with certain reservations--through this kind of
thing? Oh, of course I don’t say it’s inevitable. There are lots of men
about, as you say! But it’s an awful risk. In the case of a young man
like you, with no title to the position you hold in society but
your--your personality, don’t you see, it is a double and treble risk.
It is playing with edged tools; it is holding a knife to your own
throat. You would go under so horribly easily.”
She paused abruptly, as though the image before her eyes were too
terrible to her to be pursued further, and tried to moisten her dry
lips, on which the touch of paint had cracked now, showing how white
they were beneath. The ghastliness of the incongruity between her manner
and the superficialities of which she spoke was indescribable. Julian
did not speak; he was moving one foot to and fro slowly over the carpet,
at which he gazed immovably, and his mother went on almost immediately:
“You must give it up, Julian,” she said incisively. “I will do anything
that is necessary in the way of money; I don’t want to be hard upon
you. Anything the girl wants you shall have; but you must break with her
at once.”
She paused again, but still Julian did not speak; still he did not raise
his eyes. She went on with a growing insistence in her voice which went
hand in hand with a growing agony of appeal:
“If you don’t see the necessity now, you must believe me when I tell you
that you will--you will. Look, dear! your life is surely not so dull
that you need run after such distraction as that! You shall marry if you
want to. You shall marry any one you like. But you must--you must give
this up. Julian----” She stopped for a moment, and her voice grew thin,
almost faint, as she pressed so heavily on the carving by which she held
that her hand was bruised and blackened. “Julian, I am not telling you
what it has been to me to know that you have deceived me. I am not going
to try and make you feel--I don’t want you to feel it, dear--what it has
been to me to go over your home-life of the last few weeks and know
that you have lied to me at every turn--to me, who have only wanted to
make you happy. I won’t reproach you. Perhaps young men think it a kind
of right--a kind of right----” She repeated the sentence, unfinished as
it was, as though it contained an idea to which she clung. “It is not
for my sake--to spare my feelings, that I tell you you must give it up.
It is for your own. Julian, my boy, you must believe me.”
Her words, quivering with entreaty, died away; her eyes, full of
supplication, were fixed on his; and Julian spoke--spoke without lifting
his eyes from the ground.
“Suppose I married her?” he said in a low, shamefaced voice.
“What!” The monosyllable rang out sharp and vibrating, and Mrs. Romayne,
all softness or relaxation struck from her face and figure in one sudden
bracing of every muscle, stood staring at him out of eyes alive with
horror.
“Suppose--I married--her!”
“Supposing that--I will tell you! You would have to keep her and
yourself! You would have no more of my money, and you would never be
acknowledged in my house again!” Her low voice was like fine, cold
steel, and she paused. Then quite suddenly, as though the horror kept at
bay in her eyes had leapt up and mastered her in an instant, she flung
out her hands wildly, crying: “Julian, Julian! You are not married? Tell
me, tell me you are not married?”
And Julian, white to the very lips, said low and hurriedly:
“No!”
There was a long silence. With a choked, hysterical cry, Mrs. Romayne
dropped into a chair near her, and covered her face with her hands.
Julian drew out his pocket-handkerchief and mechanically wiped his
forehead. At last he began, in a nervous, uneven voice:
“Mother, look here, I--you don’t quite understand me! I--she--it’s--it’s
not the kind of girl you think!” He stopped and drew his hand
desperately before his eyes. That innocent, white face, in its dingy
frame, what did it want before his eyes now? How could he get on if he
kept looking at it? “She--we--it was my fault! Mother, look here, I
ought!”
Mrs. Romayne took her hands away from her face and clenched them
together.
“You shall not,” she said in a low, steady voice.
“She--she--was an awfully good girl, don’t you know. She’s not--of
course she’s not one of our sort, but--she would learn. Mother, after
all, why not? Nothing else can--can make it right!”
“Nothing else can ruin you completely!” was the steady answer. “You
shall never do it if I can prevent it. I have told you what I would do;
think it well over. Think what it would mean to you to have not one
farthing but what you can earn! To be cut by every one who knows you! To
be without a chance of any kind! I told you that if you married I would
disown you! Now I tell you something else! Break off this miserable
connection and you shall have, as I said, anything in reason to give the
girl in compensation once and for all. Refuse to do so and I will cut
off your allowance until you come to your senses!”
“Mother!” he cried fiercely. “By Heaven, mother!”
“You can take your choice!” was the unmoved answer.
Her face was sharp and haggard; the artificial colour stood out on it in
great patches, throwing into relief the vivid pallor beneath. She had
thrown aside her cloak as though the physical oppression was unbearable
to her, and the contrast between her face and her gorgeous dress with
its glittering ornaments was horrible.
A smothered oath broke from the young man, and lifting his right hand,
he began to rub it slowly up and down the back of his head as an
expression of heavy, fierce cogitation settled down upon his face. To
his unutterable surprise, as he made the gesture, there stole over his
mother’s face an expression of such deadly terror as he had never before
seen. He stopped involuntarily, and she staggered to her feet, holding
out two quivering, imploring hands. For the first time in his life
Julian was using a gesture habitual in his dead father; for the first
time in his life, looking into her son’s face, Mrs. Romayne saw there
the face of William Romayne.
“My boy!” she gasped. “My boy. Don’t do that! Don’t look like that, for
Heaven’s sake! For Heaven’s sake!”
She swayed for a moment to and fro, and then fell heavily forward into
his arms.