“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upon it, and in the flower-beds, by which it was bordered, the summer flowers, whose day was long since done, had not been replaced by their autumn successors.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.