Miss Pomeroy’s visit to Mrs. Romayne was postponed for a fortnight. At one time, indeed, it seemed not impossible that Mrs. Pomeroy’s visit to her sister in Devonshire might be postponed indefinitely, and Mrs. Romayne was charmingly inconsolable over her prospective disappointment. It was a delightful thing to have a girl in the house! Mrs. Romayne made the discovery and the statement as the very first evening of Miss Pomeroy’s stay with her drew to a close. And certainly, the evening, signalised by a little dinner-party, had been pleasant enough to warrant satisfaction. Julian had been in the best possible spirits, elated apparently by the presence of his mother’s visitor, at whose side he was to be found whenever his duties as host And on the tone of that first evening, that of the fortnight into which Miss Pomeroy’s stay lengthened itself was modelled. They were very dissipated, Mrs. Romayne asserted laughingly; and she further declared that she had never enjoyed dissipation so much. Julian’s hard-working impulses seemed to be in partial abeyance for the time being; their demands on him, though peremptory when they did occur, did not prevent a great deal of attendance on his mother and her guest. Loring also seemed hardly to have settled back into his usual routine, and frequently made one of the party. His The last day of June was also the last day of Mrs. Pomeroy’s absence from London, and it was, moreover, the day fixed for a certain dance which was to stand out from all the other dances of the season. The givers of this dance were parvenus of the most pronounced type, and during the past three seasons, they had paid their way into London society by spending fortunes on the entertainments they gave. This season they had issued cards of invitation, on which each guest was requested to wear mediÆval Florentine dress, and it had been whispered abroad that thousands were to be spent in providing such a setting for these costumes as should eclipse anything hitherto seen. Fortunately for the projectors—and nobody The whole thing had evidently been arranged, Mrs. Romayne declared gaily, to give a final touch of triumph to the end of Maud Pomeroy’s visit to her. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon of the day in question, and she and Miss Pomeroy, with Julian as escort, were taking what she described as “a little turn” in the Park when she expressed this opinion. It was a perfect June afternoon, the Park was very full, and all three seemed to be exhilarated either by the sunshine, the movement, or the prospect of the evening. The fortnight’s “That’s much too depressing a point of view,” he said. “It forces on us exactly what we want to forget—that it is the end. Now, I’ve made up my mind to cut the connection between to-night and both yesterday and to-morrow, and enjoy myself tremendously.” “And is ‘cutting the connection’—it sounds as if something might blow up—an indispensable preliminary?” laughed Mrs. Romayne. “Why, of course.” He glanced at Miss Pomeroy as he spoke, and the colour deepened in her cheeks by just a shade as she turned “Mr. Romayne wants to forget the terrific anxiety which he has already suffered over that gorgeous dress of his, and the terrific bill from which he has still to suffer.” Julian’s protestations were as eager and boyish in manner as they were delicate and skilful in matter, and Mrs. Romayne broke in upon them with a laughing apology and a request that Julian would tell the coachman to turn out into Piccadilly and drive to a house in Grosvenor Place. Julian gave the order, and added to it: “You can pull up when you get out of the Park.” Mrs. Romayne took up the words instantly. “Are you not coming with us, bad boy?” she said. “Come and help us pay one call, at any rate. We are going straight home after that to prepare ourselves for the triumphs of the evening by a little refreshing laziness, are we not, Maud?” “I should like to immensely!” returned He stepped back on the pavement, lifting his hat as the carriage drove off. Then he jumped into a hansom and gave the word to drive, not to the club but to the Temple. Arrived there he ran upstairs, the excitement about him gaining ground moment by moment, to Marston Loring’s rooms. Loring was there alone. He was seated at the writing-table writing rapidly, his face keen and intent, and he suspended his work for an instant only as he glanced up on the opening of the door and nodded a greeting. Julian’s life for the last month had been lived at that high pressure which is only produced in a man by the consciousness that he has burnt his ships. Every shilling that he had accumulated during the previous six months was invested in the scheme propounded to him a month ago by Marston Loring; and the history of his real life during So far the excitement with which every hour had been instinct for Julian had been the excitement of preparation solely; the ground had been tilled and the seed sown. And what that soil was in which he had sown his seed; what were the characteristics that were to prove so stimulating; it was not in him to consider. He was perfectly well aware of the nature of the transaction in which he was engaged; he had understood at the outset that the “private information received from the Cape” on which the shares “Well?” The monosyllable broke from him eager and impetuous, as though it contained the pent-up suspense and excitement of hours. He had come up rapidly to Loring’s side, and the latter, without lifting his eyes, signed to an evening paper which lay on the table as he said briefly: “All right!” Julian’s face turned quite white; he snatched up the paper and turned with breathless eagerness to the column devoted to the money market. “Welcome Diamond Company Shares.” The blue eyes seemed to leap at the line and fasten on it with a hungry avidity pitiful to see, and he stood there gazing at it with glittering, fascinated eyes, with a curious stillness upon him from head to foot, as “Pretty fair?” he said carelessly. Julian lifted his eyes from the paper and turned his white face to Loring. He nodded as though the feelings of the moment were not to be put into speech, and then the slow, deep colour of excitement began to creep over his features. “Have you seen Ramsay?” he said in a low, quick voice. “Saw him this morning. He told me things were beginning to move. It was that paragraph yesterday that did it!” “And what about keeping it up?” said Julian. “This is the ticklish moment, I take it! What’s the next move?” He had thrown himself into a chair as he spoke; his voice was jerking with eagerness, as though some of his excitement were finding expression. Loring looked at him for “This is the next move,” he answered, indicating the sheets of manuscript paper which lay before him. “This will be in one or two of the papers to-morrow, and if I’m not mistaken it will have a big effect!” Julian stretched out his hand impulsively for the sheets and ran through them, now and then breaking into an eager comment; and as he finished he rose impetuously and began to pace excitedly up and down the room. His face was flushed now, and his eyes glowing. “Yes, that ought to take us a long way!” he said. “And Ramsay backing it up all the while, of course? Loring, what do you make of it? An affair of—weeks?” “An affair of two or three weeks, all told!” returned Loring nonchalantly. “The inside of a month ought to put the best part of thirty thousand into each of our pockets, my boy.” He rose as he spoke, and gathered together the sheets of manuscript, but as he did so his quick ear caught a strange, sharp catch in Julian’s breath. He fastened up the papers, and directed them with another of those slight smiles, and then turned again to the younger man. Julian was standing at the window staring almost stupidly out. “I’m going to turn you out now!” said Loring lightly. “Coming down to the club with me?” Julian turned round, but the words seemed to penetrate slowly to his consciousness. “No!” he said at last. “No, thanks, old man. I—I’m going to get home.” He had to go to his own chambers first, it appeared, however, and Loring left him with a careless “All right! See you to-night, of course!” The sunshine had left Julian’s room, bright The line in the evening paper at which he had gazed with such devouring eyes had chronicled the first important rise of those shares on which his hopes were staked; chronicled, in fact, the beginning of the end. As he sat there alone, the words seemed to stand out all about him; to meet his eyes in every direction; and it was little wonder that, as he realised that the seed so eagerly sown had indeed broken ground at last, the perfect fruit seemed to be already in his hand, and he was dazed and intoxicated with anticipated triumph. He had the blood of a speculator and a gambler in his veins, and as he sprang up suddenly from his chair and began to pace up and down the room, it was the surging of the speculator’s instinct that flushed his face and glittered in his eyes; the rioting of that money passion which, to the But little by little, without volition or even consciousness on his part, the current of his thoughts changed. Gradually that greedy, tumultuous contemplation of money as an end wavered, altered into a contemplation of money as a means, into a passing over of that means in the realisation of the end which it was to bring about. He was thinking of Clemence, thinking of her in a tumult of excitement in which the goading of that two-edged dart of love and shame which quivered always in his better nature was absolutely unfelt; thinking of her in a very hallucination of intoxicated triumph. He was living out with her a future life of triumphant satisfaction; a life so utterly incompatible with the facts of the case, with all that had come and gone, and must still come and go, as to be a most pathetic imagining; when the sound of a clock striking brought him suddenly to himself. His first conscious thought was a certain vague surprise at his surroundings; as far Such a longing, in various forms and degrees, had shaken and torn him often before, but hitherto something—some influence from Clemence’s own words, some jarring and throbbing of that better nature in himself—had held him back. But now, strung up and carried out of himself by his excitement, he was impervious to all considerations save that of his own overmastering craving. The end was very near now, he told himself. It was a question of a week or two only. He must His plans were laid in the passing of a few seconds. The only address Clemence had given him was that of the house of business where she worked—where she had worked when he met her first—his only chance of seeing her lay in meeting her when she left her work at night. He would not go home to dinner, he decided; he would telegraph to his mother, and dine at a quiet restaurant. That would bring him, as he knew well enough, to the earliest hour at which the “hands,” of whom Clemence made one, were likely to be released, and he would wait in the little by-street in which the “hands’” entrance was situated until she came. He went out of the room with a quick, assured step, sent off his telegram—a brief “Detained. Inconsolable”—from an office in Fleet Street, and then, carefully avoiding the fashionable resorts, he walked to the restaurant he had mentally selected. The little street which, for some scores of men and women, formed the picture evoked The day’s work was not over yet, though the evening light was making long shadows, and the setting sun was turning the upper windows of the opposite houses into ruddy fire; the street was absolutely silent and deserted when Julian turned quickly into it. He pulled up and surveyed his surroundings with a rapid, comprehensive glance. It was too early yet. He looked at his watch and told himself so with somewhat over-elaborated carelessness, and took out his cigarette-case. He lighted a cigarette; and pacing slowly up and down the pavement on the opposite side of the street to that on which he expected Clemence to emerge, he began to reckon with himself the chances for and against her speedy or tardy appearance. But such practical, matter-of-fact considerations involved a deliberate mental action on his part, and having gone through it, There is nothing more exciting, nothing that sooner quickens the mental pulses into a very fever of confusion, than the sudden indulgence of an impulse long resisted. The hour that had passed since the idea, of which his presence in that quiet little street was the outcome, had flashed into Julian’s mind and dominated it, had carried him as completely out of himself, and out of touch with realities, as is a man under the influence of absinthe. As a man so exhilarated will be impervious to a considerable amount of physical pain, so Julian was for the time being absolutely unconscious of anything painful or shameful in his position. The circumstances under which he had parted from Clemence; all the bitter pain and longing under which he had smarted and writhed with such fierce rebellion; the attitude towards himself which his conduct might One quarter after another chimed out from a neighbouring clock. He had been waiting nearly an hour, oblivious, in his elation, of tedium or weariness; oblivious of the claim upon him of the life of Queen Anne Street as though it had no existence for him. The slight feeling of impatience with which he realised that the fourth quarter was chiming was entirely unconnected with such externals; and it was an eloquent testimony to his mental attitude that it took the form of a faint sense of irritation with Clemence for delaying so long. A vague feeling of lordly disapproval of her conduct stirred in him, as he paused at the top of the street and glanced across at the still fast-closed doors. He was just looking dubiously at his cigarette-case when the Several figures had already detached themselves from the stream and were moving rapidly away, either singly or in pairs; but one quick glance told him that neither of these was Clemence, and he fixed his eyes with eager confidence on the doorway through which she had still to pass. His face was flushed with intense excitement. On came the stream, girls and women following one another in unbroken succession; pretty girls, plain girls, shabby girls, smart girls, some arm in arm, some laughing and talking in loud-voiced groups; several of these groups noticed his waiting figure and commented upon it in giggling whispers, turning back as they passed down the street to look at it again, but Julian only saw that none of these was Clemence. The stream was beginning to dwindle; stragglers The girls turned the corner, and down the dim passage into which he was looking there came slowly another figure quite alone. Before it had emerged into the light Julian was across the road, as though that one great throb with which his heart leapt up to meet her had impelled him physically, and as Clemence passed out into the soft dusk of the June evening he spoke her name, eagerly at first, then with a strange break in his voice: “Clemence! Clemence!” At the first sound of his voice—evidently the first sign to her that he was near—a low, indescribable cry broke from Clemence; she turned towards him trembling, swaying as she stood, and Julian caught her in his arms lest she should fall. “You’ve come!” she cried, and before the exquisite rapture and relief of her faint, quivering voice, with all that it implied of But that pathetic voice had not been needed. The first sight of her face as she turned it upon him with that wonderful irradiation of joy upon it, had shrivelled into nothingness all the exultation, all the triumph and self-satisfaction of the past few hours, and Julian held her in his arms, his trance over, self-convicted, self-condemned; his whole consciousness absorbed in that heavy, throbbing agony of his better nature which had leapt into sudden relentless life. What it was that so penetrated him he could not have defined. Where and in what proportion old influence revived, touched, and was blended with a heart-piercing sense of the change in her, he could not have said; he did not even know that these were indeed the powers that had struck him. The change in her, even as he gazed down at her face with agonised, remorseful eyes, as it rested for one moment on his shoulder, he rather felt than traced and understood. That change was very great. Those past six months had dealt heavily with that thin, white face, and the marks of their passing were plain to see, even in that moment of absolute transfiguration. Every curve, every suggestion of girlishness seemed to have been worn away; worn away by those cruel twin refiners, never so pitiless as when they work together—physical suffering and mental distress. The outline of her features had lost some of its beauty in that intense accentuation; the colourless lips were slightly drawn, and under the sunken eyes were heavy shadows. But no remembrance of the physical loveliness which she had lost could stand for an instant before the spiritual loveliness which she had gained. It was as though those twin refiners, before whom nothing earthly or external can stand and flourish, had strengthened that which lay behind the externals with which they had dealt so ruthlessly. The eyes, so indescribably beautiful as they looked now into Julian’s, had been beautiful even in that moment before she realised his presence; beautiful in their She let herself rest for a moment in his arms; clinging to him with something in her touch which he had never felt before; looking up into his face as her head lay back against his shoulder with a strange, tremulous, tender light quivering on every feature, shaken from head to foot by little tremulous, tearless sobs—the sobs of utter relief and peace. Then she disengaged herself gently, and drew herself away, something of that first ecstasy dying out of her face to leave it soft and happy beyond all words. That strange light still shone in her eyes, and, as she moved, one thin hand retained its clinging hold on his arm, as though some instinct of dependence influenced her involuntarily. She was dressed, not as the other girls had been, in a light summer “My dear!” she said softly. “My dear!” And Julian whispered hoarsely as he had whispered again and again: “Clemmie! Clemmie!” He made no attempt to take her in his arms again. Even the gesture with which he laid his hand upon those clinging fingers on his sleeve was diffident and almost tremulous; tender and reverent as no gesture of his had ever been in all his life before. He could find no words. In her presence everything—all the triumph, all that had seemed to him the necessities and realities of life—seemed to have fallen away from him. He was nothing. He had nothing! He could say nothing to her. There was a silence; silence which for Clemence as her fingers closed round his, and that soft colour came and went in her cheeks, breathed an ineffable content; silence which for Julian held the blackest depths “Is it done, dear?” she said gently. Julian’s hand turned cold in hers, and his eyes fell away from her face. “Not—not yet, Clemmie!” he faltered wretchedly. “I—I came to tell you—to tell you that——” “That you are going to do it? That you are going to do it? My dear, my dear, you mean that? Oh, you mean that, don’t you?” She had not raised her voice or changed her pose, but that touch upon his arm had become a close, convulsive grip, and even the clutch of the worn, blanched hand upon her cloak witnessed to the agony of supplication with which every nerve was strained and quivering. Her low voice thrilled and vibrated with it; her white face, to which his first words had brought a look of heart-sick disappointment, was an embodied prayer. He could not answer on the instant; it cut him like a lash; and she went on rapidly, her low, beseeching voice breaking and trembling with the intense “Julian, for my sake, for your wife’s sake, dear! I love you so! I—I need you so! Don’t part us any longer! If it was for your good, if it was to make you happy, there’s nothing I would not face, and face cheerfully—ah, you know that, don’t you? But you’re doing wrong, and I think of it always, and it makes the loneliness so that I can’t bear it. Oh, I can’t bear it!” She broke suddenly into low shuddering sobs and tears, and her head fell forward helplessly on to his breast, though she still kept her convulsive hold upon his arm. He put his other arm round her and drew her towards him, and as he did so he seemed to realise with a kind of double consciousness the course he would take and its utter contemptibility. “Don’t, Clemmie dear! Don’t! don’t!” he said in a broken, uneven voice. “It’s all right, dear! I’m going to do it! I came to tell you so! It’s all right!” “You’re going to—tell her?” “I am, Clemence! I promise you I “But you are going to? You are? You are?” “On my—on my soul, yes, Clemence!” There was a moment’s silence, broken only by her low, tremulous sobs; then these too died away. At last, with a long sighing breath, she raised herself and looked into his pale, miserable face, with her own quiet and exhausted. “Must you wait?” she said, with an indescribable accent on the first bitter word. “Must you?” “I—I must, dear!” he said desperately, his eyes trying wretchedly to avoid hers. “It shan’t be long, I promise you; but I must wait just a little longer!” She paused a moment, still looking into his face. Then, with a sudden light in her eyes, she made a slight movement as though she would have bent his head down that she might murmur in his ear. She stopped herself, however, and there settled down upon her face a look of unutterable “Don’t let it be much longer, dear!” she said. “Good night!” Julian caught at the last word as though it gave him some sort of chance of restoring his writhing self-respect. “Good night!” he echoed. “Not yet, Clemence! I’m going to see you home, of course!” But Clemence shook her head. “No!” she said steadfastly, “no, dear!” Something in her tone, something in the touch she laid upon him, took from him all power of self-assertion, all power of resistance to her will. She drew his head towards her now, kissed him softly on the forehead, and then turned and went away down the street, leaving him alone. |