“What does it matter?” echoed Julian with an angry laugh. Her words, in the total want of comprehension, the total incapacity for sympathy with his position, to which they witnessed, seemed to him to throw into sudden, glaring relief the class distinction which lay between them; and the sense of it came upon him, jarring and overwhelming, like an earnest of all he had done for himself. “It matters a good deal, let me tell you, Clemence. It matters—as you can’t understand, you know! It matters just everything!”
“But—compared!” she said in a low, quick tone, a bright, pained light in her eyes. “I know—I know, of course, that there is a great deal I can’t understand. But—compared!”
“Compared with what, in Heaven’s name?” said Julian angrily.
“Compared with—yourself, Julian!” she cried, laying a tender, clinging touch on his arm. “Compared with your own truth! Oh, don’t you know it’s that, it’s only that that has been so dreadful to me—that made me feel as if my heart was breaking! It’s thinking that you’ve been false, dear! That you’ve said what’s not true, acted what’s not true! Oh, it’s that that I can’t bear for you, my dear, my dear!”
He stood looking down, not at her face, but at the worn, trembling hand holding his in such a clasp of love and shame—shame for him as he vaguely felt; suspended between wrath and a certain cold, creeping feeling which he could not analyse, but which seemed to be gradually turning him into a horrible shadow. It was an involuntary, unwilling concession to this feeling, as one might throw a sop to an on-coming, all-threatening monster, that he muttered awkwardly:
“I—I’m sorry I deceived you, Clemence.”
“Deceived me!” There was an emphasis on the pronoun which seemed to lift her far above him in its absolute, unconscious, self-abnegation. “Me! Oh, it isn’t that! It doesn’t matter who it is or how many people it is! It’s the thing itself. It’s the meaning to yourself, and—and Heaven above! Julian, dear, you believe in Heaven above, don’t you?” Clemence’s creed was very simple; the attitude of the spirit which “Heaven above” had given her was not an affair of many words. “You know it’s oneself that matters. It isn’t what one has or the friends one has that make the difference—they’re not anything really. It’s oneself!”
She paused a moment, but he did not speak. He was still looking heavily down at the hand on his arm, and she went on again, her voice trembling with earnestness.
“Julian, there’s that at the bottom of everything in all kinds of life! It doesn’t matter whether one’s rich or poor, it doesn’t matter whether people think well of us—we can’t always make them, and we can’t all be rich. But we can all be good, dear. Heaven means us all to be good, don’t you think? Oh, if it didn’t, if it wasn’t that that mattered most of all down at the bottom, what would the world come to be like? And why should anybody go on living!”
Julian Romayne was very young. Far down in his nature; in that awful inextricable tangle which, because it is so awful and so far beyond his reach, man struggles so insanely to reduce to his poor little level, to define, and label, and explain away, but which remains in spite of him a mystery of God; there was that strange affinity for noble thoughts and things which is the sign manual of His part in man, never wholly withdrawn by its Creator from the earth. It is in the young that that instinctive affinity is most easily reached and touched; and the simple, ignorant, unworldly words—words which could have touched in Julian no reasoning powers—were the medium which reached it now. Clemence had reached it more than once or twice before, and its feeble stirring in response had quickened it, and rendered it, in some poor and infinitesimal degree, sensitive to her touch.