The red glow from the setting sun had shifted a little. It fell now
behind Julian and between him and Clemence, and its light seemed to
isolate the mother and son, shutting them in alone together. Mrs. Romayne
stood a few paces from Julian, not touching him or appealing to him,
concentrating all her forces on the dominating of his weaker nature.
Julian stood doggedly before her, his hands clenched, his face set. Near
the window, looking across the shabby little room from which those two
figures, eloquent of struggle and crisis, stood out so strangely, was
Clemence; her eyes fixed upon Julian now as though life and death hung on
his looks. Aloof alike from Clemence and from the mother and son, a grim
spectator holding in reserve his weight of condemnation until the upshot
of the scene should declare itself, was Dennis Falconer.
For all answer, as though her ringing words had touched him so little
that he found them not even worth the trouble of an articulate denial,
Julian shook his head sullenly. The gesture witnessed to a heavy dead
weight of dissent likely to be more difficult to act upon than the most
vehement opposition, and Mrs. Romayne paused for a moment, looking at
him, her lips taking a firmer line, her eyes flashing.
“You don’t realise the position,” she said. “Look at it and understand
the choice before you. On the one hand is ignominy, ruin, the end of your
career; to reach it you have only to give way to your nerves, to act
under the influence of panic, to run away, in short. On the other hand,”
she moved a step nearer to him with a tense, emphatic gesture, which
seemed an outlet for some of the passionate urgency which she was keeping
resolutely in hand; “on the other hand is the very reverse of all this.
Social position, consideration, the prosperous life to which you have
always looked forward--all this is to be retained by one bold stroke, by
a little courage and resolution, and at the risk of what is by no means
worse than the life which must inevitably be yours if you do not nerve
yourself to run it. Julian, think what is at stake!”
Falconer’s eyes had been fixed on Mrs. Romayne, severe, inexorable in
their condemnation. They travelled, now, to Julian.
Again Julian made that dull gesture of negation.
“It’s all over,” he said doggedly. “I’ve staked and lost.”
“You have not lost--yet,” his mother cried; the vibration in her voice
was stronger now, and there were white patches coming and going faintly
about her mouth. “You shall not lose while I can lift a hand to save
you. Think!--think! It’s all before you still--happiness, success, life!
You’ve only to grasp them instead of letting go. Think!”
Julian had been standing with his haggard young face averted from her,
staring sullenly at the ground. He turned upon her suddenly, his face
quivering with an impotent misery of regret, his voice ringing with
hopeless bitterness.
“They’re gone,” he said. “I’ve thrown them all away. I might as well be
dead, that’s true enough. It might be possible to brazen it out--I don’t
know, I don’t care! It wouldn’t give me anything worth having. Social
position, credit, standing! What good would they be to me? I’m sick of
the whole thing! I’ve done with it!”
His incoherent, hardly articulated words stopped abruptly, and he seemed
to struggle fiercely for means of expression; so fiercely that the blind,
impotent wrestle with the limitations of a lifetime seemed to dominate
the situation for the moment, and in Mrs. Romayne’s agonised face, as she
watched him, the life seemed arrested. It was as though he were groping
and fighting among sensations and instincts so new to him that he had
no words in his vocabulary in which to clothe them; and the effort to
express them was instinct with the despair of conscious futility. He
seemed to break away at last and rush upon a wild, confused declaration
which comprised all that he could grasp.
“Why should I fight for what I don’t want?” he cried hoarsely. “There’s
nothing worth having now.”
“My boy!” The cry arrested Clemence, moving towards Julian with shining
eyes and white, parted lips. It arrested Falconer, who had drawn nearer
to Mrs. Romayne, with a desperate impulse to end the struggle by throwing
into the scale, against Mrs. Romayne, the weight of his opinion. “My
boy, my boy! don’t talk like that, for Heaven’s sake! For Heaven’s sake!
Julian, my darling, if not for yourself, for your mother! I have lived
for you. I have had no thought in life but you--to save you, to protect
you, to keep you from ruin such as this! Don’t break my heart. Ah!” she
broke into a low, wailing moan, wringing her hands together as her eyes
fastened on his face, transfixed into an expression of blank surprise
as his eyes met hers for the first time. “Don’t look like that! Julian,
Julian! In all these years have you never understood? Have you never
understood how I have loved you?”
They were face to face, mother and son, all the artificialities and
conventionalities of their lives scorched and burnt away. But between
them lay that unbridgeable gulf of ignorance and wrong, and her
outstretched hands appealed to him in vain. He looked at her coldly,
uncertainly, as though she were a stranger to him.
Then, with one strange, gasping cry, she seemed to thrust all
consciousness of herself fiercely on one side in her realisation of his
great need. In the very crisis of her agony, in the very crisis as it
seemed of her defeat, there came upon her a great dignity.
“My son,” she said, “there is something in your life of which you have
never known--something which accident might have revealed to you at any
time, but which I kept from you, hoping that fortune might favour me--as
it has done--and preserve your ignorance; believing that in happiness
and self-respect lay one of your safeguards, and dreading that knowledge
might bring to you some sort of morbid temptation. Julian, it is the
toil and struggle of twenty years that you are trampling on in throwing
down your life like this. Twenty years ago your father died by his own
hand--a swindler, liar, and thief. A few chance words brought home to me
the possibility that some such dreadful taint might rest on you. To keep
you from its awful consequence; to give you such a life as should obviate
the possibility of temptation; to hedge you in with every security that
money and position could create for you; to give you such a standing
in the world as should leave you nothing to wish for; has been the one
thought, the one motive of my life from that time until now.”
The speech--so terrible a declaration of a struggle foredoomed by its own
essence to failure, a struggle in which the foe was real, the combatant
in desperate earnest, and the weapons straws--trembled into an abrupt,
palpitating silence, as though her feelings were too intense for speech.
There was a moment’s stillness like the stillness of death; a stillness
broken only by Julian’s long, laboured breaths as he stood facing her,
his face blanched and frozen into an image of horror. Then he spoke.
“Is it true?” He had turned mechanically to Dennis Falconer, and the
words came from him in a hoarse whisper.
Dennis Falconer was white to the lips. Far down in his nature, at the
root of the rigid and conventional morality by which he lived, was a
pulse which palpitated in harmony with the divine realities of life. And,
as like answers to like, that pulse in him had recognised its counterpart
at last, through all the cramped distortion that had concealed it for so
long, beating full and strong, instinct with the throbbing life of the
same great realities, in a dwarfed and darkened woman’s soul. Perfect
mother love, absolute self-abnegation, let them clothe themselves in what
mistaken form they may, are an earnest of ideal love and beauty, and in
their presence condemnation must give place to reverence. Conscious, for
the first time in his life, that he stood in the midst of that which
was beyond his power to analyse or to estimate, he made no attempt at
speech. He bowed his head in silence.
Julian looked at him for a moment longer, and then he turned his face
once more upon his mother. As though what she saw there struck into
her very heart, a cry of pity and tenderness broke from her. She moved
swiftly to him, putting her arms about him, trying to draw him into her
embrace as though he had been once more her little child.
“Julian!” she cried, “my boy! my boy! Try to understand--try to
understand why I have told you this now! I don’t ask you to think of
me--to think what such a repetition of the past as threatens me in you
would be to me--a blow infinitely heavier, an agony infinitely crueller
than what came upon me twenty years ago, because of the long struggle
to which it would bring defeat, because of the long hope and resolution
which it would take out of my heart, because of my love for you, my
darling--my darling!” She was kissing his hands now passionately, with
that oblivion of any other presence in the room which she had evinced
throughout; and Falconer, watching her, fascinated, almost awestruck,
saw her, as she went on, lift one of the young man’s hands and press it
to her cheek, stroking it with a wild, nervous movement of her own thin
fingers.
“But there’s a motive power for you in it, Julian! A lever for your own
pride, your own strength of will. You are panic-stricken, unnerved,
worn out. Danger is new to you, my darling! Look at your father’s
fate--wholesale ruin, disgrace, and obloquy--and let it nerve you to
turn away from it. Look down the precipice on the brink of which you
are standing, and lay firm hold upon the only rope that can save you.
Take your courage in both hands, and we will face the danger and conquer
together. Oh, my boy, if it is a hot fire to pass through it won’t last
long! It leads to safety, to firmer standing-ground, to a new lease of
life!”
She was clinging to him convulsively, touching his hands, his hair, his
face, as though speech alone afforded an all-insufficient outlet for
her agonised beseeching. And as she spoke the last words he seized her
hands in his and thrust her from him, not with any personal roughness,
but rather unconsciously and involuntarily as in the very isolation of
despair.
“Life!” he cried. “What can life give to me beyond what I’ve got already?
I’ve got my billet! Like father like son! I’m bound for the dogs sooner
or later, and I don’t care to spin out the journey. Who’s going to fight
against his fate?”
“It is not fate.”
Through that little room, across and above the passion and despair that
filled it, the words rang out strong and clear, and Julian turned with a
convulsive start to meet them.
Clemence had come swiftly across the room and was standing beside him,
facing him as he turned to her; facing Falconer, arrested in a quick
movement to interpose, blindly and instinctively as it seemed, between
Julian and his mother; facing Mrs. Romayne, as she stood leaning heavily
on the back of a chair, her eyes strained and terrible to see, her face
ghastly. All that humanity can touch of the beautiful and the inspiring;
all the burning faith; the quivering personal realisation of that unseen
of which each man is a part; the human love acting upon and reacted on
by the divine instinct; was shining out from Clemence’s face. She paused
hardly for an instant as her clear eyes, dark and deep with the intensity
of her fervour, rested on Julian, as though they saw him and him only in
all the world. Then her voice rang out again, sweet and full.
“There’s no such thing as fate,” she said. “Not like that! Not fate that
makes us bad. There’s God, Julian! It’s trying to do right that matters;
nothing else in life; and that we can all do. There’s nothing, nothing
can prevent us! Oh, I don’t say”--her voice broke into a great pity and
tenderness--“I don’t say that it’s not harder for some than for others.
But it’s what’s hard that is best worth doing! Julian!”--she drew a
step nearer to him, stretching out both her hands--“you’re looking at
it wrong, dear! The things you’ve lost for good are not the things that
matter. What one has, what people think of one--that’s nothing. It’s what
one is, it’s oneself that’s the only thing to mind about.”
She stopped, her whole face stirred and tremulous with her conviction,
and Julian, with an impulsive movement, caught her hands in his, and
pressed his forehead down upon them in a blind agony of self-abasement.
“I’m a swindler, Clemmie!” he cried thickly. It was as though he had
hardly taken in the full sense of her words, but was clinging to her, and
confessing to her under some blunted, bewildered impetus. “A cheat and a
thief all round! That’s what I am!”
“But that’s not for ever!” she cried, such love, and hope, and courage
shining in her eyes as would not let her great tears fall. “You can
retrieve the past! You can repent and begin again. Ah, I know, of course,
that what is done can’t ever be undone! What you have done remains the
same for always! But you can change! You can be different, and nothing
else but you yourself matters at all! What does it matter if people think
you a cheat if you are an honest man? Nothing! No more than it matters to
yourself if they call you an honest man for ever, when you’re a cheat!”
She paused again, but this time he did not speak; he lifted his head and
drew her to him, crushing her hands against his breast, and looking into
her eyes with a strange, agonised struggle towards comprehension dawning
in his own.
There was a moment’s dead silence. There was that passing between
Clemence and Julian which no words could have touched--the final struggle
towards dominion of a man’s better nature. Falconer had fallen back. All
that was narrow and conventional about his morality had shrivelled into
nothingness, and stood confessed to his own consciousness for what it
was. He knew that the great question now at issue was beyond the reach of
his man’s practicality, and that he could only stand aside.
Mrs. Romayne was gripping heavily at the chair by which she stood;
impotent, frozen despair paralysing her from head to foot, leaving alive
and sentient only her eyes.
“You must go back, dear.” The words fell from Clemence’s lips tender,
distinct, immutable as the laws of right and wrong. “You must take the
consequences of what you’ve done, and through that pain and shame you’ll
get above it to begin again.”
Julian’s lips, white now as ashes, moved stiffly.
“The consequences?” he whispered. “The consequences, Clemmie?”
“The consequences,” she replied, and in the ring of her voice, in the
clasp with which her hands closed over his, was all the courage and
conviction with which she sought to nerve him. “Ah, I don’t know--I don’t
understand--but are there no innocent people who may suffer for your
fault unless you are there to take it on yourself? Besides, how else,
dear? How can you begin again without having made amends? How can you
free yourself of the past without acknowledging what’s black and bad in
it? And if you acknowledge what’s black and bad, how can you hesitate to
take its punishment?”
And as if that struggling life in him were growing and stirring under her
influence, a strange flickering light crept into Julian’s face and the
struggle in his eyes grew into a faint suggestion of victory. He paused a
moment, his breath coming thick and fast.
“But suppose--suppose it isn’t any good?” His voice, tense, hardly
audible, seemed to catch and strain like that of a man at the very crisis
of his life. “Suppose it’s in me and I must----”
“It isn’t so!” she cried, and as she spoke she drew away from him as
though carried beyond herself, beyond her womanly love for him, in that
supreme declaration of the truth that was her very being. “You know it
isn’t so! There is no ‘must’ except God’s ‘must’ to us that we should
follow Him. There is no power can tear us from His hand unless we throw
ourselves away by saying that His hand is without strength to save us.
Good and evil lie before every one of us, and we must all choose. And
nothing else is real and living in this life except that choice and the
end to which it leads us!”
Through all the limitations of the phraseology in which her faith was
clothed, the great truth which makes the mystery of humanity, the truth
which words can only belittle and obscure, which lives not in words but
in the silent consciousness of each man’s soul, rang out, all-penetrating
and all-dominating. And as she faced him, her eyes shining, her whole
face radiant, Julian caught her in his arms with a great cry.
“I will,” he cried. “Clemence, I choose. Help me! I will go back.”
She yielded to his touch, with a low sob, and as they stood clasped in
one another’s arms, a shuddering moan rang through the room, and Mrs.
Romayne fell heavily forward at their feet.