“Good night, dear Mrs. Romayne! Such a delightful evening! How I do envy you that dear boy of yours! It’s the greatest pleasure to see you two together.”
The speaker was a good-natured old lady, and she had thought it no harm to put into words what her fellow-guests had only thought. She was the last departure, and Mrs. Romayne followed her to the top of the stairs, with a laughing deprecation of the words which was very fascinating, and then turned back into the drawing-room with another “good night,” as Julian prepared to attend the old lady to her carriage.
The hall door shut with a bang, and then there was a moment’s pause. The mother in the drawing-room above, and the son in the hall below, stood for an instant motionless. A subtle change had come over Mrs. Romayne’s face the instant she found herself alone. It had sharpened slightly, and an eager, haggard anticipation was striving to express itself in her eyes, only to be resolutely veiled. But to Julian’s face as he stood with his hand still resting on the hall door there came a great and sudden alteration. All the light and gaiety died out of it before a wild, fierce expression of rebellion and distaste, repressed almost instantly by a pale, sullen look of determination. He moved, and Mrs. Romayne, hearing his step, moved slightly also; he came up the stairs, and as he came he seemed to force back into his face the easy smile it had worn all the evening.
“It’s been a great success, hasn’t it, dear?” he said lightly as he crossed the drawing-room threshold.
“A great success!” she said in the same tone—though in her case it rang a little thin.
An instant’s silence followed, and then she laid her hand airily on his arm. Her lips were white and dry with agitation, and she knew it; she wondered desperately whether her voice rang as unnaturally in Julian’s ears as it did in her own, as she said with what she meant for perfect ease:
“Dear boy, let us say our final words upon that wretched business to-night and wake up clear of it to-morrow. May I be happy about you? That’s all there is to be said, isn’t it?”
She tried to smile, but she knew the effort was a ghastly failure, and again she wondered whether Julian saw. She need not have feared! Julian was busy with his own histrionic difficulties, and had neither sight nor hearing for her.
“You may be quite happy, little mother!” he said, and the frank tenderness of his tone and manner were only very slightly over-accentuated. “I’ve made up my mind to do as you wish, and I won’t make such a fool of myself again!”
They were standing close together, looking each into the other’s face, and he patted her hand as it lay on his arm as he finished. Yet between them, parting them as seas of ice could not have parted them, there lay a shadow beneath which love itself survives only as the cruellest form of torture; the shadow of the unspoken with its chill, unmoveable dead weight against which no man or woman can prevail.