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

by Mary Angela Dickens

His fingers tightened upon the thin sheet of paper until the knuckles whitened, and the eager calculation vanished utterly from his face, overwhelmed as it seemed by the fierce tumult of warring passions that struggled now in every line. Impotent anger which was the more violent for something within itself which was not anger; reckless defiance; a wild, raging desperation behind all, which was nearly hatred; all these emotions were faintly shadowed forth on his face as he stared down at the few simple words. All these emotions had been surging in his heart during the six months that were gone, and it was their unceasing strife and tumult which was rousing into life the new Julian Romayne, latent for so many years.

It was to that which was least broadly painted on his face that all these passionate forces owed their life. As with a wild animal wounded by a dart, and feeling that dart—lodged in his side—pricking and piercing him, who plunges wildly hither and thither, chafing and striving in blind, brute fashion to rid himself of the sensation he cannot understand; and in his very efforts presses in the cause of his pain, increases his sufferings, and again redoubles his struggles and his fury, not knowing that he is his own tormentor; so it had been, in a sense, with Julian Romayne during the last six months. The dart in his case was double-edged; its edges were the strange, weak reality of his love for Clemence, and a stinging sense of shame. It had lodged in that almost inanimate better part of his nature. He had left that little room in Camden Town smarting and wincing under it, and it had never ceased to prick him since. Scarcely less blind and ignorant under such circumstances than “a beast having no understanding” in his total want of all principle, except the principles of worldly wisdom, with his utterly dormant moral perception—his morality, such as it was, being the merest matter of habit and conventionality—the effect on him of the smart was first the developement in him of a blind, unreasoning resentment; and then, as anger proved of no avail, a passionate rousing and rising of all his latent forces in repudiation of his discomfort.

To charge upon some one else the difficulties which he had created for himself, to provide some object against which his blind sense of wrath and rebellion could pit itself, was a primary instinct with such a nature as Julian’s, so situated, and that object was ready to his hand. The first article in the faith of the new Julian Romayne was the belief that he had been forced into his present position by his mother; that he had been parted from his wife by his mother; that he had been covered with humiliation by his mother. Every fresh stab, every movement of revolt, as that two-edged dart pressed itself deeper into his consciousness with every struggle he made for freedom, added something to the account he held against her; increased the bitterness of his resentment against her and brought it one degree nearer to hatred. His love for her, in spite of its charm of expression, had been the merest boyish sentiment; with no roots deeper than those afforded by easy companionship and apparent indulgence; founded on habit and expediency rather than on respect. Real devotion would have seemed out of place in the atmosphere of affectation and superficiality in which he had been reared, and he had known only its travesty. On this, the first real conflict between his will and hers, that travesty showed itself for what it was, and shrivelled into nothingness. To free himself from her control, became the one object and desire of his life. In doing this, and in doing this only, to his distorted perceptions, lay release from the stinging, goading misery of his present life, and to do this one means only was adequate—money. With money at his command the victory, as he conceived it, would be his. Some centre, some mainspring had necessarily to grow up in the confused strivings and blind, desperate impulses of a newly-awakened nature, and gradually that centre had declared itself in an unreasoning determination to make money.

But there were in Julian Romayne tendencies, latent, or nearly so, throughout his youth and early manhood; manifested during those easy, untempted periods only in a slight superficiality, a slight want of perception as to the boundary line between truth and falsehood; but radical factors in his being. In the shock and jar of the mental struggle and quickening involved in the continued presence in his consciousness of that remorseless dart, these tendencies leapt into over-stimulated life and grew, strengthened, and developed, with the unnatural rapidity of such life, until his whole character seemed to be over-shadowed by them. In Julian Romayne’s being, woven in and out with the threads which had hitherto seemed so pliable and colourless; those threads of all shades, from pure white to dark grey, which make up character in every man; were sundry grim black threads—threads such as are only to be plucked out when the very heart’s blood of the man has spent itself in the struggle, and when in that struggle he has come very near to God. It may be that the sins of the fathers are indeed visited on the children in this sense; in the dictation of the form taken by that struggle with evil which is every man’s portion; and sometimes—for purposes of which no man may presume to judge—in the exceptional agony of that struggle. Julian Romayne, the son of a liar and thief, and, moreover, of a woman whose morality was the morality of conventionality and nothing more, had an instinctive faculty for, an instinctive inclination towards, dishonesty of word and deed. Such a twist of his moral consciousness as had been predicted for him, a little child of five years old, by Dr. Aston, had lain dormant among the possibilities of his being throughout the nineteen years that intervened. It was this inheritance which, in the sudden upheaval of his moral nature, had awakened, asserted itself, and seized, as it were, the first place in his nature.

Throughout his boyhood, easy as it had been, untouched by any strong passion or desire, he had lied now and again, naturally and instinctively. He had lied to save himself trouble, to save himself some slight reproach—as he had lied to his mother on the subject of his visit to Alexandria, to save himself from the confession of having forgotten her commission. He had lied to Clemence from first to last, and the first prick of that dart, which was now his constant companion, had touched him when he first felt shame for those lies. But there was a reckless, calculating deception about his life now which went deeper and meant more. He lied to his mother with every word and action, and with the unreasoning cruelty of his mental attitude towards her—there is nothing towards which a man can be so heartless as the object to which he has transferred his own wrong-doing—he hugged his deception of her, and revelled in the sense of independence and power it gave him. The endless deception which the fundamental falsity of his present life necessitated, radiated on every side. To please his mother, as he told himself with an ugly smile, he had flirted with Miss Pomeroy in the early part of the winter until—a certain distance in her manner to him melting—he had hailed her departure for Cannes as a blessed reprieve. He had flirted with her this afternoon at Mrs. Halse’s, excited by the news contained in the two letters he had since re-read, reckless in the prospect of release they brought nearer to him, and with a certain delight in the daring defiance of consequences. He had lied to Lord Garstin when that good-natured mentor had let fall a warning word as to the “bad form” of gambling; he lied to his coach when his frequent absences were commented on.

In that desperate craving for money, in which all the passion of his life was centering itself, dishonesty of deed was the natural and inevitable corollary of dishonesty of word. The possession of money was his one object in life; his conscience as to the means by which that money was to be obtained he deliberately put into abeyance for the time being. He had become possessed in the course of the last six months of some thousands, not one of which had been earned by honest work; much of which had come to him by more than questionable means.

That two-edged dart must have been finely tempered that it never seemed to blunt! The dormant life in that higher part of him, to which it had penetrated, must have been life indeed, that it should throb and quiver stronger and stronger, side by side with all that was lowest and worst in him, making the struggle grow always fiercer, and goading him on and on. The dart owed its edge, the life its growing sensitiveness, to a touch which lay always on Julian’s consciousness, haunting him night and day. Not to be driven away or obliterated; not to be crowded out of his soul by any stress of evil passion; a white light on the soiled, tangled web of his life, which shone steadily in the strength of a power no struggle of his could touch; was the thought of Clemence. Clemence, who had trusted him; Clemence, hoping, longing, loving him, as he knew in every wretched fibre; Clemence, for whose presence he longed at times with a heart-sickness of longing which reacted in a very orgy of passionate bitterness. He had received a note from her a few days after her disappearance, telling him in a few simple words that she had got work; that she relied on him not to drive her out of it by trying to see her, until he “was ready,” as she phrased it. Again and again a reckless impulse to see her, and force his will upon her, had seized him, but something had always held him back. Again and again he had sent her money, always to have it returned to him with a little line of hope or patience. In the reception of those notes; in the writhing love, and longing, and shame they stirred in him, the dart went home and tortured him indeed.

He crushed the sheet of common note-paper almost fiercely in his hand now, and thrust it away to the back of the drawer from which it had come. He caught up the paper which had fallen from it—the cheque he had sent her three days before—and tore it savagely into fragments. Then he swept the papers on which he had been busy unheedingly into a drawer, locked it sharply, and rose, white to the very lips.

“It can’t be long now,” he muttered. “It shan’t be! Men make their piles in a day—in an hour; why should not I? It shan’t be long!”

He stood for a moment, his hand clenched, his features compressed, his eyes full of a sullen fire. Then he turned sharply away and left the room.