Before the words were uttered, Clemence had rushed past Mrs. Romayne, and was clinging to him in such a sudden agony of sobs and tears as seemed to rend her very heart.
Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly. Falconer, who was close to her with his back to the door which he had shut swiftly on Julian’s cry, saw a spasm of pain cut across the concentration of her face for an instant; and in the flash of anger and impatience which succeeded it, she seemed to recognise Clemence’s presence practically for the first time. She fell back a step or two, waiting with contemptuous self-control, her eyes fixed upon the pair before her as they clung together, and Julian tried brokenly and despairingly to soothe the pitiful abandonment of grief with which Clemence was shaken. His own distress increased with every incoherent word of self-reproach he uttered; and it was a sense of his anguish that seemed, at last, to reach Clemence, and produce in her a woman’s instinct towards the suppression of her own pain. She disengaged herself gently, forcing back the heavy sob that trembled on her lips, and looked from Julian towards Mrs. Romayne with a tacit recognition of his mother’s claims which was as beautiful as it was instinctive.
“You will listen!” she said in a choked, beseeching voice, “you will listen and come back!”
She turned away as she spoke, making him a sign that he should not speak to her; and as she drew away from him Mrs. Romayne advanced rapidly, every movement, every line of her face, every tone of her voice, claiming as an inalienable right her son’s attention. Her face was very hard, far harder than it had been before that spasm of pain had shaken it, and there was no touch of emotion in her hard, quick voice. She seemed to have put all sentiment deliberately aside.
“Julian,” she said, “you have made a terrible mistake! You are taking just the one false step that would be absolutely irretrievable. You must come back to town at once!”
Her manner; her voice; some influence from the long past days when her word, for all her affectation of weak indulgence, had been his law; had arrested his attention almost without his own consent. He stood now looking at her; looking at her across such a gulf of ignorance, mistake, and wrong as had swallowed even that bitterness with which he had once regarded her, leaving him absolutely cold and dead to her.
“Town and I have parted company, mother!” he said. He spoke hoarsely, but the emotion in his tone was the reflex of that through which he had just passed in meeting Clemence; his manner was even callous.
“That would be true indeed,” was the quick answer, “if you had succeeded in leaving England! Not only town and you, but life and you—everything that makes life worth living—would have parted company! To go away now is to cut your own throat!”
Julian turned to Falconer.