He drew his arm sharply from those clinging, pleading hands, and turned away, leaning his arm on the mantelpiece so that she could not see his face. That cold, creeping feeling which seemed to sap all his reality had stolen over his whole personality, and he was held numb and paralysed in the clutch of an all-dominating question. Was it really as she said? His own life, his own world had faded into shadows as of a very dream. Strange, distorted shapes, conceptions so new to him that they wore a weird and ghostly air of unreality, seemed to be rising round him, pressing him into nothingness. Was it as she said? He did not speak, and after a moment Clemence went on; very tenderly, very delicately, as though in her intense sympathy and feeling for the suffering she ascribed to him by intuition, she dreaded to hurt him further; diffidently and with difficulty, because she was so little used to clothing in words all that to her was most real and vital in life.
“You—you must think of the future, dear. I know—I know that you can hardly bear to look at the past, but it—it is past! It hasn’t been you, really! I know it can’t have been! And—it will wear out of your life at last, dear, by—by truth. You will tell your mother that we are married”—a scarlet, agonising colour dyed her face for an instant—“perhaps you have told her already? And perhaps, perhaps she will forgive you! If not—why if not, perhaps the—the pain will help to wear it out, my dearest.”
Her voice and the expression of the sweet, white face she lifted to him had changed subtly as she spoke. Her great pity and sorrow for him had developed a strange, new phase in her love for him. It had become tenderer, deeper. She had lost her reverence for him, but her love had triumphed over the loss, and through the pain and victory it had won higher ground, and become the love of sympathy and consolation.
But Julian hardly heard her last words. His attention had stopped, as it were, at those preceding them:
“You will tell your mother that we are married!”
Had Clemence not told, then? Was it possible that she had not mentioned it; that his mother did not know even now; that there was still hope?
The thought arrested the current of his thoughts in an instant. The possibilities the thought suggested; all the tangible, definite advantages it held; swept over those faintly quickened perceptions in a sudden wave of excitement, numbing them on the instant. The things which had been realities to him as long as he had had any consciousness, took to themselves substance once again and pressed about him. Life and the world resumed their normal complexion, and he lifted his head quickly and turned.
“Do you mean—have you seen my mother? Whom have you seen? Do you mean that you have said nothing?”
There was a pause as Clemence looked at him for a moment confused and startled, it seemed, by his manner. There was a wonderful, unconscious touch of dignity in her gentle manner as she answered:
“I never thought of it!”