A Valiant Ignorance; vol. 2 of 3 A Novel in Three Volumes

The oppressive autumn weather continued for the next week and more, but the atmosphere in the house at Chelsea gradually cleared; at least, the electrical disturbances which had, as a matter of fact, culminated in Julian’s departure for the club, subsided. As the days went on, Julian gradually recovered his spirits. His temper, which had given way so suddenly and completely under the strain put upon it by the unprecedented thwarting to which he had been subjected, recovered its careless easiness. The injured expression of moodiness disappeared wholly from his face, and his manner resumed its buoyancy.

Nevertheless, the life of the present autumn was by no means the life of the past spring. Partly, of course, the different framework was responsible; life, especially at this particular moment, when winter society was as yet hardly formed, consisted by no means wholly of a social existence. It was, in fact, distinctly “slack” and heavy on social lines as compared with the high pressure of the season; and the introduction into the routine of life of a certain number of hours of regular work on Julian’s part--the first practical acknowledgement in the house in Queen Anne Street, that work had anything to do with life--could not fail to alter the tone to some extent. But there was a subtle change in Julian himself, which was hardly to be accounted for on such broad lines. He had recovered his normal mental temperature, indeed, but the interval of disturbance seemed to have had some indefinable effect upon him. He had recovered himself--but it was himself with a difference. It was almost impossible to narrow the difference into words. To say that he was colder to his mother, or that he stood deliberately aloof from her, would not have been true. But there was a touch of independence about his whole personality which was new to it; a certain suggestion of a separate life and separate interests, such as must inevitably come to a man sooner or later, which seemed to tinge his intercourse with her--superficially the same as it remained--with something of carelessness, and even a hint of unconscious patronage.

If the change was felt by Mrs. Romayne, she made no sign; or, at least, entered no protest. After the little explanation which had taken place in the railway carriage she had utterly ignored the cloud which his moodiness had created; and she ignored its passing away. When Julian was at home she was always bright and pleasant; always charmed to have him with her; always ready to let him go. Her little jokes at his expense in his new character of a worker were full of tact. Her playful allusions to her own solitary days were always light and gay. Nevertheless, the characteristics which the ten weeks of their absence from town had brought to her face grew and intensified during the ten days that followed their return. Her eyes grew more restless, her mouth more sensitive, as though the strained, sharpened look of anxiety which haunted her face during the hour which preceded Julian’s return, and during the whole evening, when, as happened several times in the course of that ten days, he dined out, went deep enough to leave lasting tokens of its presence. Her questions as to his work, and the new friends, the new haunts, consequent upon it, seemed to come from her lips--far less self-confident in expression in these days--almost in spite of herself. They were always uttered with a playfulness which hardly masked a slight nervousness underneath; a nervousness which seemed to be a reminiscence of that first evening.

She was sitting alone in her drawing-room one afternoon towards the end of the second week of their return; she had a book in her hand, and a tea-table before her. But she had neither poured herself out any tea, nor could she be said to be reading. Every two or three minutes her attention seemed to wander; her eyes would stray vaguely about the room, and she would rise and move restlessly across it, to give some wholly unnecessary touch to a drapery or a glass of flowers. Once she had seated herself at her writing-table to begin a trivial note; but the impulse had failed to carry her through, and she had returned to her chair and her book. It was half-past four, and she was expecting Julian. He had dined out on three consecutive nights, and was doing so again to-night. And in reply to her laughing protest against “never seeing him,” he had promised carelessly to come home and have afternoon tea with her.

The door-bell rang at last, and as the drawing-room door opened she lifted a smiling face with a gaily approving comment on his punctuality.

“Good boy!” she began. Then she broke off and laughed lightly, though the brightness of her face suddenly ceased to be genuine.

The figure on the threshold was that of Marston Loring.

“Thank you,” he said; “I am glad you think so!”

“The observation was not intended for you, I’m sorry to tell you,” returned Mrs. Romayne, as she rose to receive him. “And I’m afraid even if I applied it to you, you would hardly condescend to accept it. How do you do? When did you come back? Sit down and let me give you some tea.”

Loring sat down accordingly, with a mute witness in his manner of doing so to a certain amount of intimacy both with the room and its mistress; but that touch of admiring deference which had marked his demeanour during the early stages of his acquaintance with Mrs. Romayne, was still present with him, and was rendered only the more effective by the familiarity with which it was now combined.

“Thanks,” he said; “a cup of tea is a capital idea. But I don’t think it’s quite kind of you to say that I wouldn’t condescend to the epithet, ‘Good boy.’ I should like to have it applied to me of all things. It would be such a novelty, and so wholly undeserved!”

He spoke in that tone of sardonic daring on which a great deal of his social reputation rested, and Mrs. Romayne answered with a laugh.

“No doubt it would,” she said, with that very slight and unreal assumption of reproof with which such a woman invariably treats the tacit confessions of a man of Loring’s reputation. “You only want the epithet, then, because you know you don’t deserve it.”

She handed him the tea as she spoke with a shake of her head, and added:

“But tell me, now, when did you come back, and where have you been?”

“I’ve been to the Engadine,” he answered; “why, I don’t know, unless that for six weeks, at least, of my life I might fully appreciate the charms of London! I don’t admire glaciers; snow mountains bore me; altitudes are always more or less wearisome; and society au naturel is not to be tolerated. I reached town the day before yesterday.”

Marston Loring was faultlessly dressed. It was impossible to associate his attire with anything but Piccadilly and the best clubs and the best drawing-rooms. His face, with its half-cynical, half-wearied expression, was, in its less individual characteristics, one of the typical faces of the society of the day. His voice and manner, well-bred, callous, and entirely unenthusiastic, were the voice and manner of that world where emotion is so entirely out of fashion that its existence as an ineradicable factor of healthy human nature is hardly acknowledged.

His presence and his cynical, cold-blooded talk seemed to do Mrs. Romayne good. Her face and manner hardened slightly, as though her nerves were braced, and something of the pinched, restless look of anxiety faded.

“It’s very nice of you to come and see us so soon!” she exclaimed with genuine satisfaction. “Town has really been abominably empty these last ten days. I suppose we came back rather too soon, but it seemed time that Julian should get to work. Really, I’ve hardly seen a soul.”

“It is a deadly time of year,” assented Loring, with a quick look at her, “but I’m grateful to it if it makes my presence welcome to you. Of course I called at once. I was rather afraid you might be still away.”

“We came back ten days ago,” answered Mrs. Romayne, accepting and putting aside his little compliment with a mocking gesture, as a form of words entirely conventional. “Julian has been quite lost without you. He is looking very well, I think, and is working amazingly.”

The introduction of Julian’s name into the conversation had in neither case come from Julian’s friend; but this time it appeared to strike Loring as incumbent upon him to pursue the topic.

“The approving words with which you received me were intended for him, I suppose,” he said carelessly. “You’re expecting him?”

There was a moment’s pause while Mrs. Romayne turned her head, as if involuntarily, and listened intently; that haunted look coming suddenly back into her eyes. The moment passed, and she turned to Loring again with a quick, self-conscious glance, and an unreal laugh.

“I’m expecting him; yes,” she said. “I’m ridiculous enough to make that very obvious, I’m afraid! I’m so glad he won’t miss you. He doesn’t generally come in at this hour. This is a treat--for me!”

She laughed, and Loring said with mock solemnity of interest:

“Indeed!”

“I really had to be quite plaintive this morning,” she went on in the same tone, “on the subject of not seeing him for four days except at breakfast! He has made a good many new acquaintances already, it seems, and has to dine out a good deal.”

“Really!” commented Loring. His tone was quite unmoved, and Mrs. Romayne did not see the expression in his shrewd, shallow eyes, as she spoke--an expression of amused curiosity. “He dines at his club, I suppose?” he enquired indifferently after a moment.

“Yes; or at some ‘other fellow’s’ club,” laughed his mother. “Legal institutions, I suppose!”

There was a brief silence; one of those silences which come when one branch of a conversation is felt to be exhausted; and then Loring finished his tea, put down his cup, and settled himself into a comfortable attitude.

“I forget whether you were taken with the Ibsen craze last season, Mrs. Romayne?” he said. “We shall all have to tie wet towels round our heads--it won’t be becoming, I’m afraid--and give ourselves up to solitary meditation, I hear! He is to be the thing this winter, they tell me.”

“Ibsen?” repeated Mrs. Romayne reflectively; obviously searching in her memory for some ideas to attach to the name, which she was as obviously conscious of having heard before. “Ibsen? Oh, yes,” with a sudden flash of inspiration, “oh, yes, of course; that ‘Dolls’ House’ man, that everybody talked of going to see just at the end of the season.”

The first of those startling pictures of human nastiness which have since exercised criticism to so great an extent, and which may or may not be revelations, had taken a wonderful hold upon a certain section of “society,” and had become, as Mrs. Romayne’s words implied, almost the fashion in the preceding June. Society is always inclined to be literary and intellectual, or rather, to an assumption of those qualities, in the winter. It was with a sense of the absolute duty of priming herself beforehand that Mrs. Romayne continued, with every appearance of the deepest interest: