A bitter east wind, which was taking sufficiently depressing effect upon
all London, was dealing with peculiar grimness with Redburn Street,
Camden Town. The neat little houses in that dreary grey dryness looked
sordidly wretched; there was something deserted and hopeless about them.
No one was to be seen, except that at a first-floor window about
half-way down a woman’s figure was standing; and as Dennis Falconer
turned into the street his footsteps rang with heavy distinctness on the
glaring pavement. He strode slowly and steadily along, and his solitary
figure, as it stood out with that peculiar sharpness of outline which is
a characteristic production of east wind, harmonised absolutely with the
sombreness of the background. His face was full of sombre purpose, grave
and stern.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon of Wednesday--two days after
Julian’s return home. On the morning of the preceding day Julian and his
mother had had a second interview, which had ended in his giving a
sullen and reluctant assent to her demands; and in the evening Dennis
Falconer had received from Mrs. Romayne a brief, almost peremptory note,
begging him to come to her. He had gone to Queen Anne Street
accordingly, severely unsympathetic, but also severely reliable, early
on Wednesday morning.
He had found Mrs. Romayne in a feverish agony of agitation beyond even
the power of her will to conceal or wholly to control. Her voice,
painfully thin and sharp; her gestures restless, nervous, irritable; her
utterance hard and rapid; had all testified to a strained, tense
excitement before which all her artificiality was utterly submerged, and
in which Falconer himself was obviously regarded by her solely as the
one instrument at hand to her necessity. Her whole soul seemed to be set
upon the immediate termination of “the affair,” as she called it. It
affected her evidently in only one way, she looked at it from only one
point of view: as something to be finished up, put away, buried out of
sight. It was the thought of delay in the doing of this, only, that
appeared to torture her; of the affair itself with all its terrible
significance, its inevitable consequences, she had, as far as Falconer
could divine, no adequate conception. The girl must be bought off; must
be sent away; must be sent right out of the country, in case--and here
came the one agonised sense of a possible consequence which Falconer
could detect--in case Julian should marry her after all!
It was evidently the haunting terror of such a contingency which had
driven her to send for Falconer. It was obvious, though she seemed to be
striving hard to conceal it even from herself, that she could not trust
her son; that she could find no rest in the promise she had wrung from
him. What she had to say to Falconer was, in effect, that some one else
must see the girl; the arrangement to be surely effected must be brought
about by a third person who would set about the business promptly and
act decidedly. It was this service which she wanted of Falconer, and
Falconer, after a moment’s grave self-communing, agreed to render it. He
was as far removed from sympathy with her in this her hard, agonised
reality as he had been from the artificial woman of the previous months,
or from the real woman of eighteen years before. He considered her point
of view in the present instance absolutely revolting in her. But no man
could question the practical sense of what she said, or the advisability
of the course she proposed, and his conception of his obligations as her
sole male relative and trustee was too intimately intertwined with his
sense of duty and self-respect to allow him to entertain, even for a
moment, the possibility of refusing to act for her. He had stood by her
side, impelled by that sense of duty, gravely reliable, and
unsympathetic, eighteen years before. The irony of fate decreed that it
was for him, and for him only, to act for her now. To him it was simply
the stern dictate of moral necessity to be obeyed as such.
Accordingly he had received her instructions, offering now and again a
grim, practical suggestion, with a stern air of businesslike reserve;
had undertaken--being at the bottom of her opinion as to the
desirability of instant measures--to see “the girl” that same afternoon;
and he was walking down Redburn Street now, in the pitiless east wind,
to carry that undertaking into effect.
He reached the house, knocked, and asked briefly for Mrs. Roden. The
landlady, whose sentiments towards her lodgers had developed rapidly in
consequence of the enquiries which Falconer had felt it his duty to
make, received his words with a sniff expressive of contempt; and then
informed him, with a stare of insolent curiosity, that “she” was
“hupstairs,” and led the way thither; evidently urged to that act of
civility solely by a hope of finding out something. She was a coarse,
vulgar-looking woman, with small red eyes, which glittered expectantly
as she flung the door open and announced, in a loud and denunciatory
voice, “‘Ere’s a gentleman!”
But if she had hoped for startling revelations she was disappointed.
Dennis Falconer advanced into the room with stern composure; the figure
in the window turned quickly but quietly to meet him; and Mrs. Jackson
was obliged to shut the door upon the two.
Clemence was looking very pale. The vague shadow which had fallen upon
her as she journeyed up to London two days before had deepened into a
wistful, questioning sadness. She had not seen Julian since she parted
from him at Victoria Station. On the previous day she had received a
note from him which told her that “work” kept him from her for that day,
but that he would come as soon as he was able. There was nothing to
distress or alarm her in the fact itself; more than once before a
similar disappointment had come to her; and even though the second day
brought her no letter, the blank merely meant, as she assured herself
hour by hour, that she would see him before the day was done. But strive
against it as she might, and did, she had spent the past twenty-four
hours weighed down by a sense of trouble utterly undefined; utterly, as
it seemed to her, without reason. She had borne her burden with mute
patience, reproaching herself as for ingratitude and an inordinate
desire for active happiness, and struggling bravely to conquer it; but
neither arguing about it nor denying it, as a less simple and
straightforward nature would have done. And now the appearance of
Falconer seemed suddenly to focus and define her vague distress. The
sudden conviction that Julian was ill, and that this gentleman had come
from him to tell her so, held her still and silent in a pang of cruel
realisation and anticipation.
The light, as she moved, had fallen full upon her face, and as he saw it
a certain shock passed through Dennis Falconer. He had seen her figure,
and even her face in the distance more than once, but he had never
before seen it with any distinctness, and for the first instant the
simplicity and purity of its beauty, with the expression deepened by the
strange shadow through which the past two days had led her, clashed
almost painfully with that idea of “the girl” which had grown, during
his conversation with Mrs. Romayne, into a kind of fact for him. The
next moment, however, he had reconciled appearances and realities, as he
conceived them, with the grim reflection that there is no vice so
vicious as that which wears an innocent face; and in doing so had
quenched what might have been perception beneath a weight of narrow
truism.
No greeting of any kind passed between them. All Clemence’s faculties
were absorbed in her dread. Falconer was busied with the process of
reconciliation. The strange little silence was broken eventually by
Falconer, and he spoke with the unbending sternness and distance which
that process and its conclusion had naturally accentuated.
“I am here as the representative of Julian Roden’s nearest relative and
guardian,” he said. It had been arranged between himself and Mrs.
Romayne, on the suggestion of the latter, that “the girl,” if she did
not already know it, should be kept in ignorance of Julian’s real name.
The statement was slightly over-coloured, since Julian was of age, and
his mother was no longer his guardian in any legal sense; but to stern
moralists of Falconer’s type, to whom the pretty little falsenesses of
life are wholly to be condemned, a slight misstatement in such a case is
frequently permissible. The brief, uncompromising words had seemed to
him to set the key of the interview beyond mistake. He was consequently
slightly taken aback by their effect.
Every trace of colour died out of Clemence’s face, and two great dilated
eyes gazed at him for an instant in dumb agony before she whispered:
“He’s not--dead?”
Falconer made a slight, almost contemptuous, negative gesture. He had no
intention of being imposed upon by theatrical arts, and as Clemence, her
self-control shattered by the sudden relief, turned instinctively away,
and pressed her face down on the arm with which she had caught at the
curtain for support, he went on with immoveable sternness:
“My business has to do with his life, not his death. The main point is
very simple, and I will put it to you at once. Absolute ruin lies before
him. Is he or is he not to embrace it?”
He saw her start, and she lifted her face quickly, and turned it to him
all quivering and unstrung from her recent suffering, and quite white.
“He is in trouble!” she cried, low and breathlessly. “Oh, what is it?
What has happened?”
Dennis Falconer’s patience was approaching its limits, and he spoke
curtly and conclusively.
“I think we may dispense with this kind of thing,” he said. “It can
serve no purpose, as everything is known. I come now from his mother
with full power to act for her----”
He was interrupted. A burning colour, the colour of such paralysing
surprise as can take in hardly the bare statement, much less the
consequent developements and inferences, had rushed suddenly over
Clemence’s face, dyeing her very throat.
“His mother!” she exclaimed. “His mother!” Her tone dropped as she
repeated the words into a strange, uncertain murmur, in which
incredulity, acceptance--as a kind of experiment--and something that was
almost fear, were inextricably blended.
The fear alone caught Falconer’s ear. His lips were parted to resume his
speech with grim decisiveness in the conviction that she understood at
last that nothing was to be gained by trifling with him, when she said,
as though he had had nothing to do with her previous words:
“Go on, please.”
He looked at her again, and was struck by a new look in her face, as he
had been struck by a new tone in her voice. She was evidently going to
drop all theatricalities, he told himself.
“Perhaps you were not aware that he is, practically, under the control
of his mother,” he said. “That is to say, he is dependent on her for
every penny he spends. It is quite out of the question that he should
make money at the bar--by his own profession, that is to say--for two or
three years at least. Consequently the cutting off of the allowance made
him by Mrs. ---- Roden will mean for him absolute penury.”
She was staring at him; staring at him out of two wide, intense brown
eyes; with such a helpless bewilderment in her face that she seemed to
be quite dazed. She put her hand to her head as he paused with a
feeble, uncertain gesture; but she did not speak, and Falconer went on
severely:
“I conclude that he has not represented these facts to you as they
stand. They are facts, nevertheless. You will, therefore, understand
that, his allowance withdrawn, he will be entirely without the means of
supporting you. You may possibly consider that some shifty means might
be found which, by putting him in possession of small sums of money,
would enable him for a time to defy his mother. Let me point out to you
something of what such a course would involve. Julian Roden is a young
man with a good position in society--I mean he is accustomed to be made
much of by men and women who are his equals; he has chances and
opportunities of which he intends, no doubt, to avail himself. All this,
in taking such a step, he would throw away for ever. Social intercourse,
future career, would go with his income at his mother’s word. Now, I
will ask you only how long you could hope to depend on him in such
circumstances; how long it would be before his only feeling for the
woman whom he had allowed to drag him down and to destroy all his hopes
in life would degenerate into sheer repugnance; and for how long he
would care to keep her?”
He paused, and after a moment’s dead silence Clemence spoke in a weak,
eager, almost desperate voice:
“There must be some mistake! It--it can’t be--the same!”
The words seemed to Falconer a mere miserable subterfuge, and he
answered very sternly:
“There is not the faintest possibility of mistake. Julian Roden has
owned the whole affair to his mother, who taxed him with it on her
discovery----”
“Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute!”
There was a ring of such intolerable pain, such shame and anguish, in
the voice, that Falconer’s attention, heavy and prejudiced as it was,
was arrested by it. Dimly and uncertainly, and for the first time, the
girl before him appeared to him, not simply as a representative of a
degraded sisterhood, but as a woman. He looked at her for a moment, as
she stood with her face buried in her hands, quivering from head to
foot, with a severe kind of pity.
“I will tell you, as briefly as may be, what I am charged to say,” he
said gravely, but not ungently. “Mrs. ---- Roden is determined to break
off her son’s disgraceful connection with you at the cost of any
suffering to herself or to him. She is willing to believe that her son
is to be considered in some sort as the more guilty party of the two in
having acted as the tempter, and she has no wish to deal otherwise than
generously by you. But there are conditions.”
He paused again. Over the slender, bowed woman’s figure before him there
had gradually crept, as he spoke, a stillness like the stillness of
death; and now, as he waited for her to speak, Clemence slowly lifted
her head and looked at him; looked at him with dull, sunken eyes, which
seemed the only living points in a face out of which all life and
expression seemed to have been crushed by a rigid, haggard mask.
“Conditions?” she repeated.
Her voice was hollow, and had a monotonous, far-away sound, and the
word seemed to have no meaning for her.
A sense of vague discomfort took possession of Dennis Falconer. A dim
sense that he was not being met as he had expected--as he had a right to
expect--disturbed and annoyed him. He had no idea that what he was
chiefly discomposed by was a hazy consciousness that a touch of
unconscionable respect for the woman who, as he believed, was utterly
unworthy of respect, was mingling with his already sufficiently
unorthodox sense of pity; but he entrenched himself in a triple armour
of stiffness.
“The conditions are these,” he said. “You will give your written word,
as under penalties for having obtained money by false pretences, to
leave England on a given date and by a given route, and not to return to
England within the next ten years. Mrs. ---- Roden in return will pay
you the sum of five hundred pounds. If you refuse these terms, and Roden
submits to his mother, you will simply be the poorer by five hundred
pounds. If you induce him to defy his mother, the consequences I have
already described to you will inevitably ensue.”
He waited for her answer, steadily fortifying himself against being
surprised at anything she might say; but no answer came. That strange,
stricken face was still turned full towards him, but he had an uneasy
sense that he was not seen by the great, dull, dark eyes. He felt, too,
that as she stood there with her hands tightly clasped together, she was
not thinking even remotely of the choice he had set before her, though
he knew that she had heard his words and understood them. It was with an
instinctive desire to rouse her, to bring back some expression to her
face, that he said, with an awkward gentleness which was quite
involuntary:
“There is no need for you to decide hastily. You understand the
alternative thoroughly, no doubt. I will leave you my address, and you
can write me your answer.”
He felt in his pocket for his card-case, and the movement seemed to
rouse her. She stopped him with a slight motion of her hand.
“There’s no need,” she said. As though the act of speaking had brought
her back from somewhere far away, and as though the claims of the moment
were gradually becoming present to her, she paused as if to gather
force, and to close upon herself a certain strangely fine reserve, which
seemed at once to hedge her about and hold her aloof from the man to
whom she spoke; and then she spoke very quietly. “I don’t want any
money. If it is better that he should be free of me, he shall be free.
That’s all.”
“You are making a mistake!” returned Falconer quickly. There was
something about the dignity of her manner which made him feel curiously
impotent and small, as though in the presence of an unknown power
greater than himself, and the sense increased the touch of irritation he
had already experienced. His tone was no longer coldly stern; it was
insistent and annoyed. “You should consider your future. If you accept
Mrs. Roden’s offer and leave England with a small capital you will have
a chance of beginning life again. The step you have lately taken may be
your first step on the downward path--I conclude that it is. You should
reflect how difficult it is to pause there. With a little money you may
establish yourself in a respectable business, and in the course of time
you may even redeem your unfortunate past.”
Not a muscle of the still, pale face moved. It seemed to have grown
strangely older and stronger in the course of the short interview, and
it listened to him with an air of courteous patience which seemed to set
an impassable distance between them. The perfect steadiness of her voice
as she replied was the steadiness not of composure but of reserve.
“It is quite impossible!” she said.
“Then I am sorry to have to say that I consider you both foolish and
ungrateful!” said Falconer with increasing severity. “You put it
entirely out of our power to do anything for you. Am I to understand
that you refuse to leave England?”
“I don’t know. I must think!” Still the same distant, unmoved patience.
“You will do well to think,” was Falconer’s reply, “and to put away from
you in doing so a false pride, which is entirely misplaced. I will give
you twenty-four hours for consideration, and to-morrow afternoon I will
call and see you again.” On second thoughts it had occurred to Falconer
that it would be a false step to give her his name and address. “I shall
hope to find that you have come to a sensible decision.”
He paused a moment, and she made a slight gesture of acquiescence,
rather as though his words were indifferent to her than in any token of
assent to what he said. He added a stiff, formal “Good afternoon!” and
as her lips moved mechanically as if to frame the words in answer, he
turned and left the room.
As though his presence and his words had been so mere a drop in the deep
waters of suffering which held her that his withdrawal affected her not
at all, Clemence stood for the moment just as he left her, hardly
conscious, as it seemed, that he was gone. Then, as though the sense
that she was alone had come to her gradually, she dropped feebly into a
chair, and let her face fall heavily forward upon the table.