“The jolliest week I’ve ever had in my life!”
“I wonder how often you’ve said that before?”
August had come and gone, the greater part of September had followed in
its wake, and a ruddy September sun was making the end of the summer
glorious. In the large garden of a large country house in Norfolk,
everything seen in its wonderful radiance seemed to be even overcharged
with colour, if such a thing is possible with nature; it was as though
all the beauty of the summer had been intensified and arrested in its
maturity into one final glow. The rich green of the smooth lawns, the
colours of the autumnal flowers, the tints of the foliage, the very
atmosphere, seemed all alike to be pausing for the moment at the most
perfect point of radiance. But nature never pauses; and that this was
indeed the final glow, the end of her summer beauty, was revealed here
and there by little significant touches, or written across earth and sky
in broader letters. The birds were gone or going. Even as Julian Romayne
spoke a flight of swallows overhead was wheeling and darting hither and
thither in preparation for an imminent departure; the very glory of the
trees meant decay, and in spite of all the efforts of indefatigable
gardeners, dead leaves strewed the trim lawns and gravel paths.
All these signs and tokens of the approach of the inevitable end were
particularly conspicuous about the narrow grass path shut in by high yew
hedges, up and down which Julian Romayne and Hilda Newton were
sauntering together. Fallen leaves were thick upon it, and in the
flower-beds, by which it was bordered, the summer flowers, whose day was
long since done, had not been replaced by their autumn successors.
Apparently, the walk was a secluded and little frequented one, on which
it was not worth while to spend much pains. Judging from the coquettish
toss of the head, tempered by a certain softness of tone, with which
Miss Newton replied to the insinuated regret of Julian’s words, it
seemed not improbable that those characteristics had something to do
with their selection of that particular spot for their stroll. They had
been staying in this pleasant country house together for the last week,
the hostess having taken a fancy to Mrs. Halse’s cousin in town; and now
in another hour Julian and his mother would be on their way home.
As the half-mocking, half-inviting words fell from his companion’s lips,
Julian turned impetuously towards the pretty, piquant face; it was
shaded by a bewitching garden hat.
“I never meant it so much before, on my honour,” he said impulsively;
adding with a boyish suggestion of tender reproach in his voice: “I
should have thought you might have known that. It’s awfully hard lines
to think it’s over.”
Miss Newton had a large crimson dahlia in her hand, and she was plucking
the petals slowly away and scattering them at her feet.
“Is it?” she said.
“You know it is,” he returned ardently, trying to catch a glimpse of the
dark face bent over the crimson flower. “Won’t you tell me that you’re a
little sorry, too? Miss Newton--Hilda----”
His vigorous young hand was just closing over the pretty little fingers
that held the dahlia; the dainty little figure was yielding to him
nothing loath, it seemed, when from the further end of the grass walk a
third voice broke in upon their _tête-à-tête_, and as they started
instinctively apart Mrs. Romayne, accompanied by their hostess, came
sauntering towards them.
“Taking a farewell look at the quaint old walk, Julian?” she said with
suave carelessness as she drew near them. “The garden is looking too
beautiful this morning, isn’t it, Miss Newton? What a lovely dahlia that
is you were showing Julian!”
She looked smilingly at Miss Newton as she spoke, apparently quite
unconscious that the girl’s face was white--not with embarrassment,
disappointment, or emotion, but with sheer angry resentment--and she
moved on as she spoke, tacitly compelling Miss Newton to move on at her
side, while Julian and the other lady followed, perforce together.
“We have only about ten minutes more, I’m afraid,” she said. “I was just
taking a last stroll round the place with Mrs. Ponsonby. I’m afraid we
shall find London rather unbearable to-night. The call of duty is always
so very inconvenient!”
She was leading the way toward the house, and her little high-pitched
laugh eliciting only a monosyllabic response from the girl at her side,
she resumed what was practically a monologue, carried on with a suavity
and ease which was perhaps over-elaborated by just a touch. Her
farewells, which followed almost immediately on their arrival at the
house, when a little bustle of departure ensued--in which Miss Newton
took no part, that young lady having promptly disappeared--were
characterised by the same manner, about which there was also a little
touch of suppressed excitement. It was not until she and Julian were
alone together in a first-class carriage of the London express that her
gay words and laughs ceased, and she let herself sink back in her
corner, unfolding a newspaper with a short, hardly audible sigh of
relief.
A very slight and indefinable change had come to Mrs. Romayne’s face in
the course of the last two months. It had been perceptible in her
animation, and was still more perceptible in her repose. The lines about
her face which had needed special influences to bring them into
prominence during the winter were always plainly perceptible now; and
they gave her face a very slightly careworn look, which was emphasized
by the expression of her eyes and mouth.
The eyes had always a slightly restless look in them in these days; even
now, as she read her paper, or appeared to read it, there was no
concentration in them; and every now and then they were lifted hastily,
almost furtively, over the paper’s edge. The mouth was at once weaker
and more determined; weaker, inasmuch as it had grown more sensitive,
more nervously responsive to the movements of her restless eyes; and
more determined, as though with the expression of a constant mental
attitude.
There was a good deal of indecision in her face, and its expression
varied slightly, but incessantly, as she fixed her eyes anew on the
printed words before her after each fleeting glance at the boyish face
outlined by the cushions opposite. She laid down her paper at last, with
a little deliberate rustle, apparently intended to attract attention,
and as she did so her face assumed its ordinary superficial vivacity; an
expression which harmonised less well with the rather sharpened features
than it had done three months before.
“A good novel, Julian?” she said airily, smothering a yawn as she spoke,
and indicating with a little gesture of her head the book in Julian’s
hand.
Julian had been holding the book in his hand, ever since they left the
little Norfolk station from which they had started, but he had scarcely
turned a page. His features were composed into an expression of boyish
resentment, about which there was that distinct suggestion of sullenness
which is the usual outward expression of the hauteur of youth. As his
mother spoke he flushed hotly with angry self-consciousness.
“Not particularly,” he said, without lifting his eyes.
There was a moment’s pause, during which Mrs. Romayne’s eyes were fixed
upon him with concentration enough in them now; and then she broke into
a light laugh, and leaning suddenly forward laid one of her hands on
his.
“Poor old boy!” she said, in a tone half mocking, half sympathising. “It
was very hard on you, wasn’t it? It’s a cruel fate that makes young men
so ineligible, and girls so pretty, and throws the two perversely
together! If you’ve any thought to spare from yourself, sir, though, I
think you should bestow a little gratitude upon me for my very timely
arrival!”
She laughed again, and in her laugh, as in her voice, there was the
faintest possible touch of reality, and that reality was anxiety. Then,
as Julian twisted his hand from under hers with a gruff and almost
inaudible: “I don’t see that!” she leant back in her seat again with a
smile.
“My dear boy,” she said gaily; “it’s a very sad position for you, I
admit; but for the present you’re dependent on your mother--not such a
very stingy mother, eh, sir? I think you’ll find it will be all right
for you, when the right young woman turns up, as no doubt she will some
day. Perhaps you’ll find that your mother won’t abdicate so very
ungracefully. But, you see, it must be the right young woman!”
In spite of the laugh in it, there was a ring in the tone in which the
words were spoken which was full of significance, and the significance
and the laughter seemed to be doing battle together as Mrs. Romayne went
on, ignoring Julian’s interjection:
“I don’t think you would have found it a very pleasant situation, to be
engaged to Miss Newton with the prospect before you of keeping her
waiting until you had made your fortune at the bar; and I’m sorry to say
I don’t share your conviction of the moment, that she is the right young
woman. She is very pretty, I allow, and a very nice girl, no doubt.”
Mrs. Romayne’s voice grew a little hard as she said the last words.
“But she’s not at all the sort of girl that I should like you to marry.
She has no money, in the first place.”
“I have enough for both,” said Julian impetuously, and then stopped
short and coloured crimson.
His mother broke into a merry laugh.
“No, poor boy!” she said. “I have enough for both! That’s just what I
want you to remember in your intercourse with pretty girls. After all,
you know, the position has its advantages! You may flirt as much as you
like while you’re known to be dependent on your mother, and no one will
take you too seriously.”
Julian did not echo her laugh, nor did he make any comment on her words.
He sat with his face turned away from her, and a rather strange
expression in his eyes--an expression which was at once unformed and
mutinous. His mother could not see it, but the outline of his profile
apparently disturbed her. The anxiety in her face deepened again, mixed
this time with an expression of doubt and self-distrust. As though to
emphasize the lightness of her preceding tone, she turned the
conversation into a comment on the landscape, and took up her paper
again.
The remainder of the journey passed in total silence; and the drive home
from the station was silent, too. An arrival in London at the end of
September is not a very pleasant proceeding, unless it is approached
with considerable industry, determination, and a large stock of energy.
The butterflies of society, and, indeed, a large proportion of the bees,
have not yet returned. Those who have returned have done so under stern
compulsion to begin the winter’s work; and there is a general,
all-pervading sentiment as of the end of holidays and the beginning of
term time.
The day that had been so radiantly lovely in Norfolk had evidently been
oppressively hot and airless in town, and the general air of exhaustion
and squalor, which such circumstances are apt to produce in London, did
not help to render its appearance more attractive.
Number twenty-two, Queen Anne Street, Chelsea, itself seemed to be
touched by the general depression. The summer flowers in the
window-boxes had been taken away, and their successors were apparently
waiting for orders from the mistress of the house; and as Mrs. Romayne
and Julian entered the hall, there was that indefinable atmosphere about
the house which two months’ abandonment to even the best of servants is
apt to produce--an atmosphere which is the reverse of cheerful. There
were letters lying on the hall-table, one of which Mrs. Romayne handed
to Julian with the comment: “From Mr. Allardyce, isn’t it, Julian? Will
he be ready for you to-morrow?”
Julian’s legal studies were, in fact, to begin in earnest on the
following day; and when, the next morning, he said good-bye to his
mother and set out for the Temple, she followed him to the door with a
laughing “Good speed.” That, at least, was her ostensible motive, but
there was something in her face as she laid her hand on his arm as he
turned away on the doorstep which suggested that the last words she said
to him were those that she had really followed him to say.
“What time shall you be back, Julian?”
And as he answered carelessly:
“I can’t tell; not till dinner-time, I expect,” there came into her eyes
a curious shadow of yearning anxiety.
“Take care of yourself, sir!” she said lightly, and went back into the
house.
That shadow lived in her eyes all day as she went about giving orders
and “putting things to rights,” as she said; striving in fact, with a
concealed earnestness which seemed somewhat disproportionate to its
object, to give the house that peculiar air of brightness which had been
so characteristic of it, and which somehow did not seem so easily to be
obtained as formerly.
Her face was gaiety itself, however, when she stood in the drawing-room
as the dinner-bell rang, very daintily dressed in a tea-gown which
Julian had admired, waiting for her son. A moment elapsed and Julian
dashed downstairs, breathless and apologetic, but rather sparing of his
words. His first day’s work hardly seemed to have dissipated the cloud
which had hung about him that morning at breakfast, and as his mother
slipped her hand playfully into his arm with a laughing word or two of
forgiveness, he turned and led her out of the room without the response
which would have been natural to him.
“Have you had a pleasant day?” said Mrs. Romayne lightly, as they sat
down to dinner.
“Pretty well,” returned Julian indifferently. He said no more, and Mrs.
Romayne, with one of her quick, half-furtive glances at him, began to
talk of her own day. She had paid some calls in the afternoon, and had a
great deal of news for him as to who had and who had not returned to
town; and a great deal of gossip which was both amusing in itself, and
rendered more amusing by the piquant animation with which she retailed
it. It failed to rouse much interest in Julian, apparently, however, and
after a time his mother returned to her original topic--again with a
quick, anxious glance at his face.
“Did you find Mr. Allardyce easy to work with?” she enquired,
interestedly this time.
“Yes: I suppose so,” was the unresponsive response.
“How long did he keep you?”
“I got away at four o’clock.”
Something seemed to leap in Mrs. Romayne’s eyes--to be instantly
suppressed--as she said, with an indifference which any ear keener than
Julian’s might have detected to be forced:
“Four o’clock! And what have you been doing since then, may I ask? You
did not come in till a quarter past seven.”
Perhaps Julian felt the inquisition in the question, though he was
conscious of nothing unusual in his mother’s voice; for he answered,
rather briefly:
“I went to the Garrick with a fellow.”
“What fellow?” demanded his mother in the same tone.
Julian moved impatiently.
“There’s another fellow reading with Allardyce,” he answered.
“Griffiths--he took me in.”
As though the suppressed impatience of his tone had not escaped her,
Mrs. Romayne found herself reminded at this point of something she had
heard that afternoon during one of her visits. And she proceeded to
place her little piece of news before Julian with every advantage that
narration could give it, though her face looked rather thin and sharp as
she talked. Dinner was over by this time, and as she finished with a
laugh, she rose from her seat, and put her hand on Julian’s arm. His
face was somewhat bored and dissatisfied, as though his mother’s effort
for his entertainment entirely failed to compensate him for the merry
house-parties of the last month.
“I think I shall have to come and keep you company while you smoke your
cigar,” she said lightly; adding, with an assumption of a sudden thought
on the subject which was not wholly successful: “By-the-bye, the Garrick
Club must be a most attractive spot if you stayed there from four
o’clock till seven?”
Julian took a quick step forward. The movement might have been due to
his desire to open the door for her, or it might have been an expression
of the irritation of which his face was full.
“I didn’t get there at four,” he said. “I really don’t know what time it
was, but it must have been nearly five. And I walked home; so I left
somewhere about half-past six.”
The irritation was in his voice as well as in his face; and his mother
patted him gaily on the shoulder, with her most artificially
self-deriding laugh.
“He’s quite annoyed at being asked so many questions!” she exclaimed.
“It’s a dreadful nuisance to have such a silly old mother, isn’t it? But
you haven’t told me what Mr. Griffiths is like yet?”
Julian had tried to laugh in answer to her first words; but the sound
produced had been almost as greatly wanting in reality as had been the
ease of his mother’s tone, and he answered now with undisguised
impatience.
“Like? Oh, he’s like--any other fellow, mother. Nothing particular, one
way or the other.” He paused a moment, and then added hastily: “I was
rather thinking of running down to the club this evening, dear, if you
wouldn’t mind being alone. I want to hear whether Loring has come back.
There’s just a chance he might be there, you know.”
He had said that morning that there was no likelihood of Loring’s
returning for another two or three days; but Mrs. Romayne forbore to
remind him of that fact. Nor did she allude to the conviction which had
turned her suddenly rather pale; namely, that his thoughts of going down
to the club had arisen within the last few minutes.
“Very well, dear,” she said, smiling up at him. “Go, by all means. Oh,
no! I shall be quite happy with a book.”
He did not look back at her as he left the room after another word or
two, or the expression on her face might have arrested even his
youthfully self-centred and preoccupied attention.
Loring was not at the club, nor was there any information to be obtained
there as to his movements. Julian played a game of billiards and lost it
through sheer carelessness, and then determined to go home again. He
would walk part of the way, he said to himself, though he had had one
walk that day. He wanted to “think things over.”
The phrase was serious, and by comparison with the process to which it
was attached, grandiloquent. Julian’s mental apparatus was at present as
undeveloped as that of a fashionable young man of four-and-twenty may
usually be taken to be. The process of “thinking things over,” as
conducted within his good-looking head, involved no stern process of
reasoning, no exhaustive system of logical deduction from cause to
effect, no carefully-balanced opinions of the past or decisions for the
future. When he proposed to himself to “think things over,” in short, he
simply meant that he should ring a strictly limited number of changes on
the fact that, as he expressed it vaguely to himself, it was “awfully
hard lines.”
It had taken him some time to come to this conclusion. He had flirted
with Miss Hilda Newton very happily for the last ten days, with a great
deal of wholly unnecessary assistance from that young lady herself,
without the very faintest definite intentions towards her. He had
enjoyed it, and she had enjoyed it; and the idea which had occurred to
him once or twice, that his mother did not enjoy it, had not
particularly affected him. Circumstances alone would have been
responsible for the proposal which had so nearly been an accomplished
fact on the day before. And had the speech to Miss Newton, interrupted
by Mrs. Romayne, reached its legitimate conclusion, and received its
inevitable response, it was extremely likely that he might by this time
have been the victim of a vague consciousness of having made a mistake.
But it had been interrupted; and a deeply-injured sense of having been
thwarted was consequently not unnatural in its author. That sense of
injury which might have passed away in mere sentiment, but which, on the
other hand, might, if it had been left untouched by words, have
developed into a secret breach between mother and son, had been focussed
and rendered definite and tangible, as it were, by his mother’s laughing
speeches in the train. It was as he had sat gazing blankly out of the
window during the last half-hour of their journey, that he had come to
the conclusion before mentioned that it was “awfully hard lines.”
“It makes a fellow feel such a fool!” he said to himself as morosely as
the undeveloped nature of his temperament permitted, as he issued
moodily from his club and started in the direction of Piccadilly. “It
makes a fellow feel such a confounded fool!” He could not reduce this
general principle to detail, but what he really felt was something of
the sensation of the child who realises suddenly and for the first time
the “pretence” of the fairyland of shadows in which he has been
performing prodigies of valour.
All the intercourse with the pretty girls of his “sets” which Julian had
hitherto accepted simply and unquestioningly, had suddenly become flat,
stale, and unprofitable to him. All illusions had gone from it, and the
reality was painfully unsatisfying, and wounding to his self-love. There
is all the difference in the world between a vague understanding and a
practical realisation. Julian had known, of course, from the very first
that he was dependent on his mother, but he had never felt it until the
previous day. He had known that marriage without her consent was
practically impossible for him; but the fact had never before been
brought home to him. The veto which had descended so impalpably and
decisively upon what he was now prepared to characterise as his hopes,
with regard to Miss Newton, shrivelling them to nothingness, had also
shrivelled away all the embellishing haze by which the conditions of his
life had been surrounded.
The background to all his thoughts on the subject; the background which
had grown up almost without consciousness on his own part, with his
first humiliated realisation of the facts of the case, and which
remained a vague, brooding shadow in his mind; was resentment against
his mother; a resentment which, taken in conjunction with the careless
and effusive affection of his attitude to her hitherto, threw a curious
light on his relations with her. But against this background, and
affecting him far more keenly, was a sore sense that life had suddenly
lost its savour for him. The charm of flirtation had vanished utterly
before his mother’s words as to its harmlessness. The privilege which
she assigned to him seemed to reduce him to the level of a shadow among
substances, to put him at a hopeless disadvantage with all the women of
his world, and render his intercourse with them a farce of which both
they and he must be perfectly conscious.
“It’s all such utter humbug!” he said to himself, that being the nearest
definition he could attain of the vague thoughts that were passing
through his mind. Then he ceased to express himself, even mentally, and
walked along, meditating moodily and discontentedly. He was walking
along Piccadilly when he found his thoughts gradually returning to his
actual surroundings as though something were drawing them, unconsciously
to himself, as extraneous objects which one is not even aware of
noticing will sometimes do.
It was about eleven o’clock: not a very pleasant time in Piccadilly; and
the pavement was by no means crowded. The first detail to which he awoke
was the hilarious demeanour of a young man just in front of him, who was
walking, very unsteadily, in the same direction as himself. He was a
young man of the commonest cockney type, obviously in the maudlin stage
of intoxication.
As Julian’s senses became more fully alive he noticed, a pace or two in
front of the young man, the shabbily-dressed figure of a girl. She was
walking hurriedly and nervously, and as the young man quickened his
uneven steps in response to a sudden quickening of hers, Julian saw that
the intoxicated speeches which had first grown into his own meditation
were addressed to the girl, and that she was trying in vain to escape
from them. It was not a particularly uncommon sight for a London street,
and a half-indignant, half-careless glance would naturally have been all
the attention Julian would have vouchsafed it. But as the pair preceded
him up Piccadilly; the girl shrinking and afraid; afraid to attract
attention by too rapid movements; as much afraid, as her nervous,
undecided glances around her showed, of the help a protest might attract
to her as of her pursuer; the man, sodden and brutal, absolutely
destitute for the moment of reasoning faculty; Julian found his
attention fascinated by them.
A spark of natural youthful chivalry, entirely undeveloped by his life,
stirred in him. He quickened his steps, involuntarily apparently, and
with no definite intention, for he was just passing them with a quick,
undecided glance at the girl, when he saw her stop suddenly and shrink
back against a neighbouring shop-front. Whether a faint shriek really
came from her, or not, he never knew, but her eyes met his and appealed
to him almost as if without the owner’s consciousness. The man had laid
a hot, drunken hand upon the worn, ungloved fingers.
Julian stopped.
“Let go!” he said peremptorily. His tone was so sharp, and the
interference was so sudden and unlooked-for, that the man, stupid with
drink, did as he was bidden as if involuntarily. “Be off!” continued
Julian in the same tone.
The man stared at him for a minute, and broke into a maudlin laugh, a
discordant snatch of a comic song, and staggered on his way, as though
the sudden breaking of his chain of ideas had obliterated the girl from
his memory.
She was standing, as Julian turned to her, leaning back against the
shop-front, shaking from head to foot, but evidently making a violent
effort to control herself.
“Thank you, sir,” she murmured tremulously, and was moving to go on her
way with faltering, trembling footsteps, when Julian stopped her.
“This is not a nice place for you to be alone in,” he said almost
involuntarily. “Have you far to go?”
He had looked at her for that moment during which she had stood
motionless, with her face outlined against the dark shutter, with a
strangely mingled feeling that her face was wonderfully unlike any with
which he was acquainted; and yet that he had actually seen it
before--seen it, and experienced the same half-startled, half-wondering
sensation. It was white now to the very lips, and the great, brown eyes,
dark and liquid, looked out from under their soft lashes and level
eyebrows, wide with terror and distress. Her features were beautifully
formed, though they were so thin and worn that it would never have
occurred to Julian to class her among the ranks of pretty girls. But the
real charm of her face lay about her mouth. It was very strong--though
the strength was latent and entirely unconscious; very simple, and very
sweet; and even the pallor of her lips and the slight trembling about
them could not detract from the beauty of the line they made. Her hair,
as Julian noticed, was of a soft black and very luxuriant. She was
rather tall, and her shabby jacket concealed and spoilt the outline of
her figure; but the set of her well-shaped head was full of instinctive
grace.
She paused a moment before she answered him, looking into his face with
a simple directness which had a dignity of its own.
“Yes, sir,” she said in a low voice, which shook a little in spite of
her evident efforts to steady it; “to the Hammersmith Road.”
“But you’re not going to walk, are you?” said Julian.
Apparently her glance at his face had satisfied her. She answered him
this time without hesitation.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Her voice was very musical and refined. It harmonised better with her
face than with her worn, work-girl’s dress, and the dignified deference
of her manner.
“Then you must let me see you safely part of the way, at any rate,”
said Julian impulsively.
She hesitated, and looked at him again, and this time the large eyes
grew moist with tears.
“It’s very silly of me,” she said tremulously. “I--I think it was his
touching me that upset me so.”
She had been rubbing one hand, all this time, mechanically and
involuntarily, as it seemed, over the hand on which that drunken touch
had fallen.
“I did try to get a ’bus, but they were all full. I couldn’t let you
take such trouble.”
It needed only the unconscious gratitude of those words to convince
Julian that it would be no trouble whatever. And he asserted the same
with an assumption of authority and masterfulness quite new to him.
It was an hour and a half later when his mother, sitting up, wakeful, in
her own room, caught the slight sound made by his latch-key in the door,
and noticed a moment’s pause before the door was opened. In that pause
there had come to Julian one of those sudden flashes of light which
sometimes illuminate a vainly-pondered question.
“Of course!” he said to himself, as he shut the door with a bang. “Of
course! I knew I’d seen her before! In the thunderstorm, the night I
dined with Garstin!”
END OF VOL. I
F. M. EVANS & CO., LIMITED, PRINTERS, CRYSTAL PALACE, S.E.