Ten minutes after Mrs. Romayne’s departure Julian was standing before
Mrs. Pomeroy, his whole demeanour typical of the man who lingers,
knowing that he should linger no longer.
“What a nuisance appointments are!” he said, with a boyish frankness of
discontent which was irresistible. “I wish I could stay a little longer,
but I know I oughtn’t.” He laughed quite ruefully, and fixed a pair of
ardent eyes on Miss Pomeroy’s demurely averted face. “It’s been such an
awfully jolly affair, hasn’t it? And it’s so awfully jolly to have you
in town again”--this, with delightful deference, to Mrs. Pomeroy. “Well,
I really must go, you know! Good-bye! Perhaps you won’t be staying very
much longer?”
“If you stay here bemoaning yourself very much longer we shall probably
leave before you do!” suggested Miss Pomeroy, with the rather faint
smile which was the only sign of amusement she ever gave, and which
always accompanied her own mild witticisms. Julian turned to her
eagerly.
“Now, that’s awfully unkind!” he said. “You won’t bully me like that in
Queen Anne Street, will you?” The term “bullying” was so profoundly
inapplicable to Miss Pomeroy’s words that its use suggested a certain
amount of arrangement rather than absolute spontaneity about Julian’s
speech. But exaggeration was the fashion, and not to be commented on.
“Come in a very kind frame of mind, won’t you?” he went on pleadingly.
“Am I a very violent person?” the girl answered, with the same smile.
“Good-bye!” She held out her hand as she spoke, and Julian took it with
laughing reluctance.
“You are an absolutely heartless person,” he said daringly, “to dismiss
me like this! However, I suppose you are right. If you didn’t dismiss
me I probably shouldn’t go, and I really ought, you know!”
“You’ve told us that before; now do it!” was the answer. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” returned Julian, with mock meekness. He shook hands again,
which seemed hardly necessary, and then he turned away.
But the necessity which enforced his departure had apparently slackened
its pressure on him by the time he actually left the house. As he walked
away down the street there was no sign about him of that haste which
should characterise a man who has lingered to the risking of an
appointment, or who has, indeed, any engagement in immediate prospect.
The bride and bridegroom had already left, and people were beginning to
go, and until he reached the end of the street in which was Mrs. Halse’s
house, he was passed every instant by carriages to whose occupants his
hat had to be smilingly lifted. Then he turned into a main thoroughfare,
and hailed a hansom--still not in the least like a man in a hurry. He
gave the cabman an address in the Temple, and was driven away.
His face as he went would have been a curious study to any onlooker
possessed of the key to its expression; to any onlooker who could have
detected the constant struggle for dominance between something that
seemed to lie behind its new artificiality and that artificiality
itself, evidently maintained under an instinctive sense of the chances
of observation. It was not until he turned his key in the lock of a set
of chambers in the Temple that the boyish vivacity died wholly out of
his face; he went into his room--he shared the chambers with another
embryo barrister--shutting the door behind him; and as he did so he
seemed to have shut in, not the light-hearted young fellow who had paid
the cabman in the street below, but another man altogether. No one
looking at him now could doubt that this was the real Julian Romayne of
to-day, as certainly as that light-hearted young fellow had been the
real Julian Romayne of a year ago. This was a man with a hard, angry
face; a face on which the anger stood revealed, not as the expression of
the moment, but as the normal expression of a mind always sore, always
at war, always fiercely implacable.
The room was plainly, almost barely furnished, and there was no trace of
any of the luxury that surrounded him in Queen Anne Street. His smart,
carefully got-up figure looked absolutely incongruous among such unusual
surroundings, as he crossed to the window, and flinging himself down in
a shabby easy-chair, lighted a cigarette. He threw his cigarette-case on
the table, and then drew out of the breast-pocket of his coat a couple
of letters.
He had read them before, evidently, but as evidently they had lost none
of their interest for him. He read them both through attentively, and as
he did so there came to his mouth a set which his mother, could she have
seen it, would have recognised instantly; which any one, indeed, must
have recognised who had ever seen his dead father. Both the letters
dealt with money matters; one was from a bookmaker, the other from a
broker whose name was far from bearing an unblemished character in the
City; and both referred to large sums of money recently made on the
turf and on the Stock Exchange by Julian Romayne.
He flung the last on the table as he finished it, and there was an
expression in his eyes of reckless, rebellious triumph not good to see.
“It’s a good haul!” he said, half aloud. “A good haul! Now, with what
I’ve got already----” He rose and went across to the writing-table,
unlocked a drawer, and taking out various papers, began to make rapid
calculations.
Then--his eyes hard and intent on his work--he stretched out his hand
and felt in the drawer for another paper. He took out an envelope, and
drew out the letter it contained without glancing at it. A folded paper
fell out as he did so, and as though the slight sound had roused him, he
glanced at it quickly, and from it to the open letter in his hand.
Apparently it was not the letter to which he had intended to refer, for
his face changed suddenly and completely.
“I can’t take your money. Try and understand that I can’t!--Clemence.”
His fingers tightened upon the thin sheet of paper until the knuckles
whitened, and the eager calculation vanished utterly from his face,
overwhelmed as it seemed by the fierce tumult of warring passions that
struggled now in every line. Impotent anger which was the more violent
for something within itself which was not anger; reckless defiance; a
wild, raging desperation behind all, which was nearly hatred; all these
emotions were faintly shadowed forth on his face as he stared down at
the few simple words. All these emotions had been surging in his heart
during the six months that were gone, and it was their unceasing strife
and tumult which was rousing into life the new Julian Romayne, latent
for so many years.
It was to that which was least broadly painted on his face that all
these passionate forces owed their life. As with a wild animal wounded
by a dart, and feeling that dart--lodged in his side--pricking and
piercing him, who plunges wildly hither and thither, chafing and
striving in blind, brute fashion to rid himself of the sensation he
cannot understand; and in his very efforts presses in the cause of his
pain, increases his sufferings, and again redoubles his struggles and
his fury, not knowing that he is his own tormentor; so it had been, in a
sense, with Julian Romayne during the last six months. The dart in his
case was double-edged; its edges were the strange, weak reality of his
love for Clemence, and a stinging sense of shame. It had lodged in that
almost inanimate better part of his nature. He had left that little room
in Camden Town smarting and wincing under it, and it had never ceased to
prick him since. Scarcely less blind and ignorant under such
circumstances than “a beast having no understanding” in his total want
of all principle, except the principles of worldly wisdom, with his
utterly dormant moral perception--his morality, such as it was, being
the merest matter of habit and conventionality--the effect on him of the
smart was first the developement in him of a blind, unreasoning
resentment; and then, as anger proved of no avail, a passionate rousing
and rising of all his latent forces in repudiation of his discomfort.
To charge upon some one else the difficulties which he had created for
himself, to provide some object against which his blind sense of wrath
and rebellion could pit itself, was a primary instinct with such a
nature as Julian’s, so situated, and that object was ready to his hand.
The first article in the faith of the new Julian Romayne was the belief
that he had been forced into his present position by his mother; that he
had been parted from his wife by his mother; that he had been covered
with humiliation by his mother. Every fresh stab, every movement of
revolt, as that two-edged dart pressed itself deeper into his
consciousness with every struggle he made for freedom, added something
to the account he held against her; increased the bitterness of his
resentment against her and brought it one degree nearer to hatred. His
love for her, in spite of its charm of expression, had been the merest
boyish sentiment; with no roots deeper than those afforded by easy
companionship and apparent indulgence; founded on habit and expediency
rather than on respect. Real devotion would have seemed out of place in
the atmosphere of affectation and superficiality in which he had been
reared, and he had known only its travesty. On this, the first real
conflict between his will and hers, that travesty showed itself for what
it was, and shrivelled into nothingness. To free himself from her
control, became the one object and desire of his life. In doing this,
and in doing this only, to his distorted perceptions, lay release from
the stinging, goading misery of his present life, and to do this one
means only was adequate--money. With money at his command the victory,
as he conceived it, would be his. Some centre, some mainspring had
necessarily to grow up in the confused strivings and blind, desperate
impulses of a newly-awakened nature, and gradually that centre had
declared itself in an unreasoning determination to make money.
But there were in Julian Romayne tendencies, latent, or nearly so,
throughout his youth and early manhood; manifested during those easy,
untempted periods only in a slight superficiality, a slight want of
perception as to the boundary line between truth and falsehood; but
radical factors in his being. In the shock and jar of the mental
struggle and quickening involved in the continued presence in his
consciousness of that remorseless dart, these tendencies leapt into
over-stimulated life and grew, strengthened, and developed, with the
unnatural rapidity of such life, until his whole character seemed to be
over-shadowed by them. In Julian Romayne’s being, woven in and out with
the threads which had hitherto seemed so pliable and colourless; those
threads of all shades, from pure white to dark grey, which make up
character in every man; were sundry grim black threads--threads such as
are only to be plucked out when the very heart’s blood of the man has
spent itself in the struggle, and when in that struggle he has come very
near to God. It may be that the sins of the fathers are indeed visited
on the children in this sense; in the dictation of the form taken by
that struggle with evil which is every man’s portion; and sometimes--for
purposes of which no man may presume to judge--in the exceptional agony
of that struggle. Julian Romayne, the son of a liar and thief, and,
moreover, of a woman whose morality was the morality of conventionality
and nothing more, had an instinctive faculty for, an instinctive
inclination towards, dishonesty of word and deed. Such a twist of his
moral consciousness as had been predicted for him, a little child of
five years old, by Dr. Aston, had lain dormant among the possibilities
of his being throughout the nineteen years that intervened. It was this
inheritance which, in the sudden upheaval of his moral nature, had
awakened, asserted itself, and seized, as it were, the first place in
his nature.
Throughout his boyhood, easy as it had been, untouched by any strong
passion or desire, he had lied now and again, naturally and
instinctively. He had lied to save himself trouble, to save himself some
slight reproach--as he had lied to his mother on the subject of his
visit to Alexandria, to save himself from the confession of having
forgotten her commission. He had lied to Clemence from first to last,
and the first prick of that dart, which was now his constant companion,
had touched him when he first felt shame for those lies. But there was a
reckless, calculating deception about his life now which went deeper
and meant more. He lied to his mother with every word and action, and
with the unreasoning cruelty of his mental attitude towards her--there
is nothing towards which a man can be so heartless as the object to
which he has transferred his own wrong-doing--he hugged his deception of
her, and revelled in the sense of independence and power it gave him.
The endless deception which the fundamental falsity of his present life
necessitated, radiated on every side. To please his mother, as he told
himself with an ugly smile, he had flirted with Miss Pomeroy in the
early part of the winter until--a certain distance in her manner to him
melting--he had hailed her departure for Cannes as a blessed reprieve.
He had flirted with her this afternoon at Mrs. Halse’s, excited by the
news contained in the two letters he had since re-read, reckless in the
prospect of release they brought nearer to him, and with a certain
delight in the daring defiance of consequences. He had lied to Lord
Garstin when that good-natured mentor had let fall a warning word as to
the “bad form” of gambling; he lied to his coach when his frequent
absences were commented on.
In that desperate craving for money, in which all the passion of his
life was centering itself, dishonesty of deed was the natural and
inevitable corollary of dishonesty of word. The possession of money was
his one object in life; his conscience as to the means by which that
money was to be obtained he deliberately put into abeyance for the time
being. He had become possessed in the course of the last six months of
some thousands, not one of which had been earned by honest work; much of
which had come to him by more than questionable means.
That two-edged dart must have been finely tempered that it never seemed
to blunt! The dormant life in that higher part of him, to which it had
penetrated, must have been life indeed, that it should throb and quiver
stronger and stronger, side by side with all that was lowest and worst
in him, making the struggle grow always fiercer, and goading him on and
on. The dart owed its edge, the life its growing sensitiveness, to a
touch which lay always on Julian’s consciousness, haunting him night and
day. Not to be driven away or obliterated; not to be crowded out of his
soul by any stress of evil passion; a white light on the soiled, tangled
web of his life, which shone steadily in the strength of a power no
struggle of his could touch; was the thought of Clemence. Clemence, who
had trusted him; Clemence, hoping, longing, loving him, as he knew in
every wretched fibre; Clemence, for whose presence he longed at times
with a heart-sickness of longing which reacted in a very orgy of
passionate bitterness. He had received a note from her a few days after
her disappearance, telling him in a few simple words that she had got
work; that she relied on him not to drive her out of it by trying to see
her, until he “was ready,” as she phrased it. Again and again a reckless
impulse to see her, and force his will upon her, had seized him, but
something had always held him back. Again and again he had sent her
money, always to have it returned to him with a little line of hope or
patience. In the reception of those notes; in the writhing love, and
longing, and shame they stirred in him, the dart went home and tortured
him indeed.
He crushed the sheet of common note-paper almost fiercely in his hand
now, and thrust it away to the back of the drawer from which it had
come. He caught up the paper which had fallen from it--the cheque he had
sent her three days before--and tore it savagely into fragments. Then he
swept the papers on which he had been busy unheedingly into a drawer,
locked it sharply, and rose, white to the very lips.
“It can’t be long now,” he muttered. “It shan’t be! Men make their piles
in a day--in an hour; why should not I? It shan’t be long!”
He stood for a moment, his hand clenched, his features compressed, his
eyes full of a sullen fire. Then he turned sharply away and left the
room.
There was no trace of any fire about him, however, except the harmless
irradiation of youth and good spirits, when he opened the door of his
mother’s drawing-room a few minutes before their dinner-hour. He had
spent the intervening hour at his club, the most lightly good-natured,
and thoroughly easy-going and irresponsible young man there, and there
was precisely the same character about him now as he crossed the room to
his mother.