The early sunlight of a lovely September morning was streaming into the
room through every crack and chink in the blinds and curtains, making the
light from the still burning lamp look yellow, dim, and unnatural. It was
Julian’s sitting-room in the house in Chelsea, and the light, falling
here and there, touched into distinctness many of those little luxurious
details on which the evening light had fallen on that winter day eighteen
months before, when Mrs. Romayne had stood upon the threshold and looked
round upon her completed arrangements, waiting then for the use which
was to give them life. On a chair by the writing-table, his head dropped
sideways on his arm as it rested on the table, sat Julian Romayne asleep.
He was asleep, but he was not at rest. His face was grey and drawn;
it twitched painfully, and his hand was fiercely clenched. Gradually
an expression of terror and despair gathered on his features, until
they were almost convulsed, and with a strangled, gasping cry he woke
and started to his feet, trembling in every limb, and with great drops
standing on his forehead. He stood clutching at a chair for support,
while the first poignant impression of his dream subsided, and then he
moved as though impelled by some reactionary impulse to collect himself.
He glanced at the clock and saw that the hands pointed to a quarter past
six. He was vaguely conscious of having heard it strike six, so that he
could have slept for a few moments only. His lips twitched slightly at
the thought of what those few moments had held for him. Then he realised
that he was cold, that all his limbs were stiff and aching, and he
dragged himself slowly across the room, drew the curtains and the blinds,
and stood there in the sunshine.
It was the first movement of physical consciousness which he had felt
since he left the office of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company on the
morning of the previous day.
How that day had passed he did not know. Here and there in the blackness
a picture of himself stood out with uncertain distinctness. He knew that
he had telegraphed to his mother to the effect that he might not return
to Henley for some time. He remembered writing the words though he could
recall no mental process by which the elaborate excuse he had made had
occurred to him. He knew that somewhere dinner had been placed before
him, though where, and whether he had eaten, he knew not at all. For the
rest, an impression of ceaseless walking, of interminable streets giving
place imperceptibly to the four walls of his own room, made up the only
actual background in his memory to the intense mental consciousness which
had usurped for the time being the tangibility of material things.
The favourable turn in the affairs of the Welcome Diamond Mining Company
had been founded on a deliberate system of forgery and fraud, planned by
Ramsay, subscribed to and participated in by Julian. The telegram as to
the new lead had been concocted in the office in the City; the diamonds
exhibited as earnest of the future yield of the mine had been bought
for that purpose; and not one penny of the money paid in debentures had
ever been intended for application to the working of the ruined mine. If
these facts should come to light--and hostile enquiries once instituted
on the spot, only one of those incredibly lucky chances to which gamblers
and swindlers alike owe so much could avert such a catastrophe--the
consequences were obvious. Public exposure, public ignominy and
execration, wholesale and irremediable loss of position, were absolutely
inevitable. And as inevitable if he remained in England, the dark gulf
in which his life must be swallowed up and closed--as far as everything
which constituted life for him was concerned--whether he fled from it or
whether it clutched him, was the legitimate reward of his doings; penal
servitude.
He could not realise it. He could not face it. He had beaten it back,
he had thrust it down again and again during that long day and night,
and again and again the horror had swept over him, gaining always in
certainty and reality. Struggle against it as he might and did, clutching
at his consciousness, shaking and rending it with a force not to be
resisted, and growing ever stronger and stronger, there dawned a dazed,
bewildered conviction that the end he saw before him was indeed the
inevitable end; that in that black gulf, and no other, all his efforts
and fierce strivings were to find their consummation.
He had digged it with his own hands; he had followed on towards it in
a very desperation of defiance and recklessness, goaded by a grinding
sense of failure and frustration to a wild daring which had looked like
courage and resolution. But the spirit which had stimulated him was not
in himself. All unconscious of it as he was, he had been drunk with the
thought of what lay beyond that gulf; drunk with a desperate, unreasoning
anticipation of triumph. The hideous possibility of failure confronted
him now practically for the first time, and before it all his fictitious
stamina shrivelled away, as in its very nature it was bound to do. A
vague, confounded comprehension of the consequences which he had brought
upon himself rose upon him, walling him in on every side; and about
those consequences, as connected with himself, there was all the ghastly
incongruity and unreality of a hideous nightmare. He had never understood
the realities of life. He had crushed down their impulses in his heart.
He had called superficialities essentials; selfish ignorance, practical
sense; and he had worked and fought in a false atmosphere, and for a
false aim.
And now, instead of that fictitious triumph which he had looked to grasp,
he found himself face to face with facts so sordid and so relentless that
he could hardly recognise them as facts at all. His world was tottering
into ruins all about him; the clash and crisis of imminent downfall and
disgrace was stunning him and shaking him through and through; and in the
wild tumult and confusion all the limitations of his nature seemed to
break up, as it were, into one blind chaos of protest and repudiation,
dominated only by despair. Nothing fixed or steadfast held its place.
The very passions by which he had been driven on had been borne down and
numbed. The thought of Clemence had become merely a vague element in the
confusion. Of his mother he did not think at all. Even that dark factor
in his being--the perversion of his instincts as to truth and falsehood,
honesty and dishonesty--which had asserted its grim presence with the
very awakening of his character; which had dictated the first steps along
the path of which he stood now at the end; was swept into solution,
now, with every other element in his character. It had held its place,
hitherto, side by side with the other motive powers by which his life had
been regulated; dictating the lines on which those powers should work,
strengthening and developing with the demands they put upon it. But it
had remained the servant of a stronger passion, and as far as any power
of support or guidance was concerned it had gone down in the flood. He
had no perception, truly, of the moral aspect of his position, no sense
of guilt or of remorse. He only knew that he was beaten, that it was all
over with him.
He stood there at the window staring out into the sunshine, seeing
nothing, conscious of nothing but the gulf before him; as utterly and
absolutely isolated in his misery as though he had been the only creature
living in the world. The desperate struggle with facts was sinking
into a hopeless confused acceptance of them; into a dazed, bewildered
contemplation of details which seemed to rise slowly into distinctness
out of the fog which hung about them; to rise and fade again without
volition on his part. Details connected with the future came first, and
he looked at them and understood them with stunned composure as though
they stood outside him all together. Then he found himself wondering
heavily as to the time that must pass before the certainty that was in
himself became literal knowledge. There was no sense of any possible
chance of salvation in his mind.
By-and-by he became heavily and confusedly aware that another day had
begun; another day through which he must carry his horrible, bewildering
burden--no longer in the semi-unconsciousness of yesterday, but alive now
in every fibre to its intolerable pressure.
He went out into the sunshine by-and-by, out into the streets he knew so
well; and as he walked along there came upon him a ghastly sense of being
but a shadow among shadows. The life about him seemed to have receded
to an incalculable distance, to have lost all substance. He himself, as
he appeared to other people, had no existence; and his real self had
no existence for any one but himself. He was face to face with black,
implacable reality, and before its presence all the superficialities and
conventionalities which had usurped its place vanished like the shades
they were.
He walked, always with that chill sense of isolation on him, from
Chelsea to the City; in motion, in continual motion only, was his misery
endurable. Ramsay was not at the office when he arrived, and a message
from him, left with the secretary, informed Julian that he would not be
there that day. His absence affected Julian not at all. There was no
suspense in his mental attitude to make him crave for even a blow to
end it. To his battered consciousness delay before the final agony had
something of the appearance of rest or respite. He did the work he had
come to do with a numbed comprehension of its import, and then as he
passed out again into those horribly unreal streets there came upon him a
desperate longing for human companionship; a desperate longing to break
through his solitude and touch another human creature. He would go to
the club, he thought dully. He must speak to some one; he must get some
assurance of his own identity, or its unfamiliarity would drive him mad.
There were two or three men only who were known to him in the room when
he arrived, and even as they greeted him they seemed to elude him; to
retreat and to lose all tangibility beyond the yawning gulf which lay
between himself and them. He tried to talk, he tried desperately to
bridge the gulf. In vain. He turned away and went out into the streets
again, alone with the one terrible reality which the world seemed to
contain.
The failure broke him down. An unendurable horror of himself and of the
world; a very terror of his misery; rolled down upon him and overwhelmed
him. It was one of those realisations of the impotency of humanity
before the strokes of the infinitely greater than humanity which seize
upon a man sometimes when all the wrappings of life and custom are
stripped from him, and he finds himself in primeval defencelessness. He
could only fight wildly with it. Those instincts and affinities through
which such moments work out strength and comprehension were utterly
submerged in him, now; the experience could be for him nothing but a
blind horror, giving place at last to the old stunned, hopeless confusion
and despair. And when at last he dragged himself upstairs to his room
in the Temple late at night he was utterly exhausted, mentally and
physically. He dropped into a chair and sank into a heavy sleep.
Ten days followed; ten long days giving place to heavy nights; ten nights
passing into monotonous days. By degrees Julian fell into a species of
dull routine, in which he ate and drank, and even slept; passed to and
fro along the London streets; stunned almost to stupefaction. He went
each day to the office and sat there all day long doing little; sitting,
for the most part, staring into space or walking up and down with heavy,
regular steps. He was rarely disturbed. Ramsay appeared but seldom; his
visits were brief, and he was uncommunicative.
At last there came a morning when he reached the office to find upon his
desk a letter in Ramsay’s familiar handwriting.
Julian sat down before it and looked at it for a moment, his face
twitching slightly. Then he broke the seal.
“DEAR ROMAYNE,” he read,--
“Your friend, Compton, holds the whole affair in his hand.
Marston Loring gave him the tip. You will do as you think best
about meeting the shareholders. I shall not be present myself,
as I am leaving England, for the present, to-night.
“Yours,
“ALFRED RAMSAY.”
The letter bore date of the previous day.