The hand crept round the clock, the swift November twilight fell, and
still she did not move; only her clasped hands stretched themselves out
as if in prayer. She was not praying though. The attitude was
instinctive and unconscious; a blind, mute appeal. She was simply
stunned. The room grew darker and darker until its only light was a ray
from the street-lamp outside falling straight across the bowed head; and
then there was a ring at the bell and a slow step upon the stairs.
Clemence knew the step well, though she had never before heard it fall
like that. As it fell upon her ear now, a strong shiver ran all through
her, and her hands were drawn sharply to cover her face. The door was
opened, and her face was pressed down still more tightly.
“Clemence! What, all in the dark? Why, Clemence----” The masterful,
rather aggressively cheerful young voice stopped abruptly, and Julian
Romayne stood still against the door he had closed behind him,
listening; listening to a low, pitiful sound, which seemed to fill the
very air--the sound of a woman’s heart-broken crying. At the first tone
of his voice great, scalding tears had started to Clemence’s eyes
suddenly and without warning; a low, choking sob had shaken her from
head to foot, and she was crying now with the hopeless abandonment of
suddenly loosened grief.
There was a moment during which the only sound in the room was the sound
of her quivering sobs. Julian stood quite still; on the first instant
there leapt into his face such a look of fierce, vindictive anger as
absolutely transformed it. The look faded slowly into a kind of bitter
background, and a hard sullenness settled itself upon it--settled with
some difficulty as it seemed, for his lips twitched a little. Then he
advanced into the room and broke the silence, and the roughness in his
tone seemed to defy something within himself. He made no attempt to
light the gas. The lamp outside made it possible to move about, and
apparently he did not care for further illumination.
“Come, Clemence,” he said, “what’s the matter?”
He had not approached her; on the contrary, he was on the other side of
the room looking down at her across the lodging-house table. She did not
raise her head or move as she replied; indeed, the choked, broken words
were rather the expression of the mingled shame and pity with which she
was crushed than a definite answer to his words.
“Oh! Julian! Julian! Julian!”
Apparently the tone of her voice affected him in spite of himself, for
his face twitched again, and he spoke more harshly still.
“What’s the matter, I say?”
She stretched her hands out to him across the table, still without
lifting her face, in an unconscious gesture of appeal.
“Oh, don’t!” she cried beseechingly and piteously. “Don’t, dear! Don’t
pretend any more. I--I know!”
The hands thrust deep down into Julian’s pockets were clenched
fiercely, and his teeth were set together, as a look rose in his eyes
which they had never held before.
“My mother?” he said.
She answered only with a slight shivering gesture, but it was enough.
With his young face white to the lips with passionate resentment, Julian
turned brusquely away and took two blind strides to the window, with a
muttered oath.
There was a long silence. Julian stood at the window, staring blankly
out into the darkness with hard eyes. Clemence was indeed, as she
believed herself to be, his wife. How it had come about, how he had
drifted into anything so far from his vague thoughts in his first
meetings with her, he could not have said. What it was that had shaped
and moulded his intention into something so much purer and more manly
than his own nature, he only now and then felt faintly and indefinitely
when he touched it, as he could touch it rarely and densely, in the
woman from whose higher nature it emanated. He had married her with that
reckless carelessness for the future which seems almost abnormal, but
which is not an uncommon characteristic of weakness; and now he was
quite incapable of facing and enduring the legitimate consequences of
his action. He had lied to his mother to save himself from the heavier
penalty with which she threatened him, and his suggestion as to the
possibility of his marrying the girl she believed him to have ruined,
had been a miserable, consciously degraded attempt at cutting the
Gordian knot. He had lied to his mother again, deliberately and without
compunction, at their second interview, giving her a promise which he
knew to be an empty form, in his word to break with the girl who was his
wife. He had come to Clemence to-day, intending to arrange for that
temporary suspension of intercourse with her, which was inevitable as a
blind to his mother, by telling her that he was obliged to go abroad
immediately for an indefinite period.
Now as he stood there in the dark little room, with his eyes fixed on
the solitary gas-lamp outside, he was gradually realising that it was
all over. His mother had sent, had possibly come herself, to Clemence,
he supposed, and Clemence had, of course, declared herself his wife.
His plans were all upset. His carefully made calculations were no longer
of any avail. It was all over. His brain gradually ceased to busy
itself; he was staring darkly at penury, humiliation, ostracism--not
thinking of them or feeling them, but just contemplating them with a
stupid, mental gaze.
Gradually a sense of his surroundings began to return to him. He became
conscious that it was a street-lamp at which he was looking; that there
was a dark little street before him; that there was a dim room behind
him; and then from that room a low sound came to him--faint, exhausted,
long-drawn sobs, as of a woman who has wept herself into quiet. He began
to listen for them and count them involuntarily. Then they began to hurt
him; each one seemed to stick something into his heart. At last he
walked across almost mechanically, and laid his hand tentatively on her
shoulder.
“It’s all right, Clemence!” he said huskily. “It’s all right, dear.
After all, you know, you are my wife all right!” He was conscious of a
vague idea that it was the supposition he had allowed that had cut her
so cruelly.
There was another moment’s pause, and then Clemence slowly lifted her
head and looked at him for the first time. Her face was white and
exhausted-looking with her tears, and her eyes, luminous and
inexpressibly mournful, seemed to look through the pale, good-looking
young features above her into the poor cramped soul they hid.
“I?” she said. “What does it matter about me, Julian? It’s you! Oh, my
dear, my dear, it’s you!”
“It--it’s awkward!” returned Julian gloomily; his consciousness of the
prospect before him seemed to quicken and writhe at what he supposed to
be her realisation of it. “It’s loss of everything practically, of
course. One will be cut right and left, and where money is to come
from----”
He was interrupted by a low cry. Clemence had drawn a little back as
though to see him better, and was looking up at him with her delicate
eyebrows drawn together in intense, painful perplexity and wonder.
“Oh, Julian!” she said, and her low voice had for the first time a ring
of reproach in it. “Oh, Julian, it isn’t that, dear! It isn’t that! What
does that matter?”
“What does it matter?” echoed Julian with an angry laugh. Her words, in
the total want of comprehension, the total incapacity for sympathy with
his position, to which they witnessed, seemed to him to throw into
sudden, glaring relief the class distinction which lay between them; and
the sense of it came upon him, jarring and overwhelming, like an earnest
of all he had done for himself. “It matters a good deal, let me tell
you, Clemence. It matters--as you can’t understand, you know! It matters
just everything!”
“But--compared!” she said in a low, quick tone, a bright, pained light
in her eyes. “I know--I know, of course, that there is a great deal I
can’t understand. But--compared!”
“Compared with what, in Heaven’s name?” said Julian angrily.
“Compared with--yourself, Julian!” she cried, laying a tender, clinging
touch on his arm. “Compared with your own truth! Oh, don’t you know it’s
that, it’s only that that has been so dreadful to me--that made me feel
as if my heart was breaking! It’s thinking that you’ve been false, dear!
That you’ve said what’s not true, acted what’s not true! Oh, it’s that
that I can’t bear for you, my dear, my dear!”
He stood looking down, not at her face, but at the worn, trembling hand
holding his in such a clasp of love and shame--shame for him as he
vaguely felt; suspended between wrath and a certain cold, creeping
feeling which he could not analyse, but which seemed to be gradually
turning him into a horrible shadow. It was an involuntary, unwilling
concession to this feeling, as one might throw a sop to an on-coming,
all-threatening monster, that he muttered awkwardly:
“I--I’m sorry I deceived you, Clemence.”
“Deceived me!” There was an emphasis on the pronoun which seemed to lift
her far above him in its absolute, unconscious, self-abnegation. “Me!
Oh, it isn’t that! It doesn’t matter who it is or how many people it
is! It’s the thing itself. It’s the meaning to yourself, and--and Heaven
above! Julian, dear, you believe in Heaven above, don’t you?” Clemence’s
creed was very simple; the attitude of the spirit which “Heaven above”
had given her was not an affair of many words. “You know it’s oneself
that matters. It isn’t what one has or the friends one has that make the
difference--they’re not anything really. It’s oneself!”
She paused a moment, but he did not speak. He was still looking heavily
down at the hand on his arm, and she went on again, her voice trembling
with earnestness.
“Julian, there’s that at the bottom of everything in all kinds of life!
It doesn’t matter whether one’s rich or poor, it doesn’t matter whether
people think well of us--we can’t always make them, and we can’t all be
rich. But we can all be good, dear. Heaven means us all to be good,
don’t you think? Oh, if it didn’t, if it wasn’t that that mattered most
of all down at the bottom, what would the world come to be like? And why
should anybody go on living!”
Julian Romayne was very young. Far down in his nature; in that awful
inextricable tangle which, because it is so awful and so far beyond his
reach, man struggles so insanely to reduce to his poor little level, to
define, and label, and explain away, but which remains in spite of him a
mystery of God; there was that strange affinity for noble thoughts and
things which is the sign manual of His part in man, never wholly
withdrawn by its Creator from the earth. It is in the young that that
instinctive affinity is most easily reached and touched; and the simple,
ignorant, unworldly words--words which could have touched in Julian no
reasoning powers--were the medium which reached it now. Clemence had
reached it more than once or twice before, and its feeble stirring in
response had quickened it, and rendered it, in some poor and
infinitesimal degree, sensitive to her touch.
He drew his arm sharply from those clinging, pleading hands, and turned
away, leaning his arm on the mantelpiece so that she could not see his
face. That cold, creeping feeling which seemed to sap all his reality
had stolen over his whole personality, and he was held numb and
paralysed in the clutch of an all-dominating question. Was it really as
she said? His own life, his own world had faded into shadows as of a
very dream. Strange, distorted shapes, conceptions so new to him that
they wore a weird and ghostly air of unreality, seemed to be rising
round him, pressing him into nothingness. Was it as she said? He did not
speak, and after a moment Clemence went on; very tenderly, very
delicately, as though in her intense sympathy and feeling for the
suffering she ascribed to him by intuition, she dreaded to hurt him
further; diffidently and with difficulty, because she was so little used
to clothing in words all that to her was most real and vital in life.
“You--you must think of the future, dear. I know--I know that you can
hardly bear to look at the past, but it--it is past! It hasn’t been you,
really! I know it can’t have been! And--it will wear out of your life at
last, dear, by--by truth. You will tell your mother that we are
married”--a scarlet, agonising colour dyed her face for an
instant--“perhaps you have told her already? And perhaps, perhaps she
will forgive you! If not--why if not, perhaps the--the pain will help to
wear it out, my dearest.”
Her voice and the expression of the sweet, white face she lifted to him
had changed subtly as she spoke. Her great pity and sorrow for him had
developed a strange, new phase in her love for him. It had become
tenderer, deeper. She had lost her reverence for him, but her love had
triumphed over the loss, and through the pain and victory it had won
higher ground, and become the love of sympathy and consolation.
But Julian hardly heard her last words. His attention had stopped, as it
were, at those preceding them:
“You will tell your mother that we are married!”
Had Clemence not told, then? Was it possible that she had not mentioned
it; that his mother did not know even now; that there was still hope?
The thought arrested the current of his thoughts in an instant. The
possibilities the thought suggested; all the tangible, definite
advantages it held; swept over those faintly quickened perceptions in a
sudden wave of excitement, numbing them on the instant. The things which
had been realities to him as long as he had had any consciousness, took
to themselves substance once again and pressed about him. Life and the
world resumed their normal complexion, and he lifted his head quickly
and turned.
“Do you mean--have you seen my mother? Whom have you seen? Do you mean
that you have said nothing?”
There was a pause as Clemence looked at him for a moment confused and
startled, it seemed, by his manner. There was a wonderful, unconscious
touch of dignity in her gentle manner as she answered:
“I never thought of it!”
“Was it my mother?”
“No; a gentleman.”
Julian moved abruptly with a low exclamation, and began to walk rapidly
up and down the little room absorbed in eager thought. Clemence watched
him with a puzzled, surprised look in her eyes, and a little touch of
reserve creeping over her face. At last he stopped suddenly and began
to speak, looking anywhere but on her face.
“Look here, Clemence, I’m afraid this sounds an awfully blackguardly
thing to suggest, but you’ll see it’s necessary. It won’t do for me to
tell my mother just yet. To tell you the truth she is frightfully set
against my marrying. I am done for all round as soon as she knows, and
it would be just cutting our own throats to tell her--yet, you know. You
see,” he went on hurriedly, evidently anxious to prevent her speaking,
“you see, as I am I’ve got very good prospects. In a few years, if all
goes well, I shall be making heaps of money at the bar--a fellow that is
well known, you know, can always get on--and then it will be all right
and simple. Meanwhile, you see, I have plenty of money, and we can be
together almost as much as we like, quietly, you know. Whereas if we
burst it all up now we shall just starve and be out of it all our lives.
Don’t you see?”
He stopped awkwardly, but for the moment he had no answer. Clemence had
listened to him, the expression of her face changing from wonder to
incredulity, from incredulity to agony, from agony to the look of a
creature stricken to death. She lifted her hand in the silence slowly
and heavily to her head. Julian saw the gesture, though he could not see
her face, and its heaviness somehow increased his discomfort.
“You see it’s only common sense!” he said impatiently.
“You mean that you want to go on living a double life--that you don’t
want, don’t mean to try, to do right!” The voice was not like the voice
of the Clemence he knew. It was low, distinct, and stern, and she spoke
very slowly.
“I mean that I don’t want to ruin myself out of hand!” he said harshly.
“Don’t be foolish, Clemence!”
“Ruin!” she said in the same tone. “You don’t know what real ruin means!
I don’t know how to make you understand; I’m not clever enough. But I
can tell you just this! I would rather die than have it as you say. For
your sake, not for my own only, I would rather die. Until your mother
knows the truth I won’t even see you or speak to you again. As to
taking a penny of your money, I would starve first.”
Her tone, vibrating with intensity of meaning, was quite low. She was
not declaiming or protesting. She was simply making her stand at a
proposition so terrible to her that it had carried her beyond the bounds
of emotion. For the moment Julian was startled and aghast.
“You don’t mean that!” he said. “Clemence, that’s nonsense!”
“It’s truth!” she said steadily. “You must choose!”
She was standing facing him, her slight figure erect and straight as he
had never seen it. Her face was white as death, and set into strange,
fine lines quite new to it; all the softness about her mouth was being
gradually pressed out as the latent strength developed, as it seemed,
with every breath she drew. It was as though the crisis, in its sudden
demand upon her forces, was transforming her as she grappled with it;
transforming her into a woman before whom Julian felt himself shrink
into utter contemptibility. He took the only means he knew to reassert
himself, and lost his temper deliberately.
“Well, then, I do choose!” he cried violently. “You’re a foolish girl,
who doesn’t understand, Clemence, and by-and-by you’ll own I was right!
As to not taking my money, that’s absurd, you know! You must! But I’m
not going to ruin both of us for absurd fancies!”
He stopped, hoping she would answer and give him some advantage, but she
stood silent, gazing at him with stern, searching eyes, as though she
were trying in vain to reconcile the man before her with the man she
loved. Julian felt her gaze though he could not see it, and he went on
hotly, trying, as it were, to gather round him the rags of his old
authority and superiority.
“You don’t suppose, Clemence,” he said, “that I propose this because I
like it? It’s not a nice thing for a man to propose to his wife, I can
tell you. I should have hoped you would have understood that. But after
all it’s only for a time, and it won’t make any real difference to
you--things will be just as they have been. And if you can’t feel about
it as I do, you must remember it’s because you’ve got a great deal to
learn still, and you must believe that what I say is right. Anyway,
you’re my wife, you know, and you’re bound to obey me!”
“I’m bound to obey you in all things that it’s right you should ask. But
I’m not bound to do what would be dragging you down and me too. I can’t
make you do what’s right; it wouldn’t do you any good for me to tell
your mother; but until you do, it will be as I said.”
“Then it’s you who part us,” he cried passionately. “You don’t love me,
Clemence! You can’t ever have loved me!”
There was a moment’s pause, and then her answer came in a strange, still
voice.
“I do love you!” she said. “I love you so that I would give my life to
blot out what you’ve said!”
A dead silence--a silence in which Julian Romayne seemed to feel
something pulling and straining at his heart-strings. Then with a
reckless, desperate effort he tore himself away from its influence and
spoke.
“It can’t be helped, then,” he said fiercely and defiantly. “You must
go your own way until you come to your senses! Some day, perhaps, you’ll
be grateful to me for refusing to make fools of us! I wouldn’t have
believed it of you, Clemence! You make me almost sorry that I ever saw
you. Now, look here; I’ve put it to you from every point of view; I’ve
tried as hard as ever I can to make you understand, and if you won’t,
you won’t! As to the money, of course, I can’t hear of your not taking
that. I shall send you so much regularly every month--it won’t be very
much either, but it’ll be enough to keep you--and, of course, you’ll
have to spend it. But you need not be afraid that I shall want to see
you again until you come to a more sensible frame of mind.”
He waited, but again there was no answer, and again some influence from
her still presence discomfited him, and made him hurry on.
“I’m going now!” he said roughly. “Good-bye, Clemence!” He made a
movement as though to go, without a tenderer farewell, but quite
suddenly his heart failed him. He turned again and took her into his
arms impulsively and tenderly. “Clemmie!” he said brokenly. “I
say--Clemmie!”
Her arms were round his neck pressing him closely and more closely, with
a desperate, agonised pressure, and a long, clinging kiss was on his
cheek.
“Don’t keep me waiting long,” she whispered hoarsely. “You will do it at
last. I know, I know you will. But--don’t keep me waiting long!”
She released him and drew herself gently out of his arms, and Julian
turned and stumbled out of the room and down the stairs, the most
consciously contemptible young man in London, and with no strength to
act upon his consciousness.