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

by Mary Angela Dickens

Julian turned round, but the words seemed to penetrate slowly to his consciousness.

“No!” he said at last. “No, thanks, old man. I—I’m going to get home.”

He had to go to his own chambers first, it appeared, however, and Loring left him with a careless “All right! See you to-night, of course!”

The sunshine had left Julian’s room, bright as it still was outside, and it looked, perhaps, the darker by contrast as he opened the door and shut himself in alone. He paused a moment, with his hand on the lock, and then walked aimlessly across to the writing-table and sat down. There was a pale, dazed look about him.

The line in the evening paper at which he had gazed with such devouring eyes had chronicled the first important rise of those shares on which his hopes were staked; chronicled, in fact, the beginning of the end. As he sat there alone, the words seemed to stand out all about him; to meet his eyes in every direction; and it was little wonder that, as he realised that the seed so eagerly sown had indeed broken ground at last, the perfect fruit seemed to be already in his hand, and he was dazed and intoxicated with anticipated triumph. He had the blood of a speculator and a gambler in his veins, and as he sprang up suddenly from his chair and began to pace up and down the room, it was the surging of the speculator’s instinct that flushed his face and glittered in his eyes; the rioting of that money passion which, to the man who has never felt its fever, is the strangest and most repulsive—as it is the most abnormal—of all passions.

But little by little, without volition or even consciousness on his part, the current of his thoughts changed. Gradually that greedy, tumultuous contemplation of money as an end wavered, altered into a contemplation of money as a means, into a passing over of that means in the realisation of the end which it was to bring about. He was thinking of Clemence, thinking of her in a tumult of excitement in which the goading of that two-edged dart of love and shame which quivered always in his better nature was absolutely unfelt; thinking of her in a very hallucination of intoxicated triumph. He was living out with her a future life of triumphant satisfaction; a life so utterly incompatible with the facts of the case, with all that had come and gone, and must still come and go, as to be a most pathetic imagining; when the sound of a clock striking brought him suddenly to himself.

His first conscious thought was a certain vague surprise at his surroundings; as far as externals went he had left Loring’s room and had come to his own like a man walking in his sleep. Then he realised the nature of the sound that had roused him, and drew out his watch to see what hour it was that had struck. It was seven, and the fact, with the pressing necessity for his return home which it involved, gave a turn to the current of his thoughts by which, without changing their main character, they were blended in with the actual practicalities of the moment. He thought of his mother with a certain bitter triumph. “It’s not for long,” he said to himself, “not for long now.” His mind ran on over the details of the evening before him; the little dinner—“only ourselves,” Mrs. Romayne had said gaily; the artificialities that would pass between himself and his mother; the effective flirtation which he would have to keep up with Miss Pomeroy—the flirtation which in the excitement of the past month he had carried on recklessly. And then with his hand on the door he stopped abruptly—stopped and stood quite still with a strange, defiant recklessness growing in his face. Whether it was some curious effect of the tumult through which he had passed, whether it originated in those jubilant visions of Clemence from which he had so recently awakened, it is not possible to say. But on that instant there had risen within him an impulse of fierce, overmastering repulsion against his mother, against Miss Pomeroy, against the part he had chosen to play. Almost before he had realised the sudden sense of overwhelming revolt and distaste which had seized him, its obverse was upon him. Clemence! To see Clemence! To speak to Clemence! To satisfy the hungry longing which, for the moment, seemed absolutely to possess him!

Such a longing, in various forms and degrees, had shaken and torn him often before, but hitherto something—some influence from Clemence’s own words, some jarring and throbbing of that better nature in himself—had held him back. But now, strung up and carried out of himself by his excitement, he was impervious to all considerations save that of his own overmastering craving. The end was very near now, he told himself. It was a question of a week or two only. He must see her; she herself would see that it was only reasonable that he should see her!

His plans were laid in the passing of a few seconds. The only address Clemence had given him was that of the house of business where she worked—where she had worked when he met her first—his only chance of seeing her lay in meeting her when she left her work at night. He would not go home to dinner, he decided; he would telegraph to his mother, and dine at a quiet restaurant. That would bring him, as he knew well enough, to the earliest hour at which the “hands,” of whom Clemence made one, were likely to be released, and he would wait in the little by-street in which the “hands’” entrance was situated until she came.

He went out of the room with a quick, assured step, sent off his telegram—a brief “Detained. Inconsolable”—from an office in Fleet Street, and then, carefully avoiding the fashionable resorts, he walked to the restaurant he had mentally selected.