“You don’t realise the position,” she said. “Look at it and understand the choice before you. On the one hand is ignominy, ruin, the end of your career; to reach it you have only to give way to your nerves, to act under the influence of panic, to run away, in short. On the other hand,” she moved a step nearer to him with a tense, emphatic gesture, which seemed an outlet for some of the passionate urgency which she was keeping resolutely in hand; “on the other hand is the very reverse of all this. Social position, consideration, the prosperous life to which you have always looked forward—all this is to be retained by one bold stroke, by a little courage and resolution, and at the risk of what is by no means worse than the life which must inevitably be yours if you do not nerve yourself to run it. Julian, think what is at stake!”
Falconer’s eyes had been fixed on Mrs. Romayne, severe, inexorable in their condemnation. They travelled, now, to Julian.
Again Julian made that dull gesture of negation.
“It’s all over,” he said doggedly. “I’ve staked and lost.”
“You have not lost—yet,” his mother cried; the vibration in her voice was stronger now, and there were white patches coming and going faintly about her mouth. “You shall not lose while I can lift a hand to save you. Think!—think! It’s all before you still—happiness, success, life! You’ve only to grasp them instead of letting go. Think!”
Julian had been standing with his haggard young face averted from her, staring sullenly at the ground. He turned upon her suddenly, his face quivering with an impotent misery of regret, his voice ringing with hopeless bitterness.
“They’re gone,” he said. “I’ve thrown them all away. I might as well be dead, that’s true enough. It might be possible to brazen it out—I don’t know, I don’t care! It wouldn’t give me anything worth having. Social position, credit, standing! What good would they be to me? I’m sick of the whole thing! I’ve done with it!”
His incoherent, hardly articulated words stopped abruptly, and he seemed to struggle fiercely for means of expression; so fiercely that the blind, impotent wrestle with the limitations of a lifetime seemed to dominate the situation for the moment, and in Mrs. Romayne’s agonised face, as she watched him, the life seemed arrested. It was as though he were groping and fighting among sensations and instincts so new to him that he had no words in his vocabulary in which to clothe them; and the effort to express them was instinct with the despair of conscious futility. He seemed to break away at last and rush upon a wild, confused declaration which comprised all that he could grasp.
“Why should I fight for what I don’t want?” he cried hoarsely. “There’s nothing worth having now.”
“My boy!” The cry arrested Clemence, moving towards Julian with shining eyes and white, parted lips. It arrested Falconer, who had drawn nearer to Mrs. Romayne, with a desperate impulse to end the struggle by throwing into the scale, against Mrs. Romayne, the weight of his opinion. “My boy, my boy! don’t talk like that, for Heaven’s sake! For Heaven’s sake! Julian, my darling, if not for yourself, for your mother! I have lived for you. I have had no thought in life but you—to save you, to protect you, to keep you from ruin such as this! Don’t break my heart. Ah!” she broke into a low, wailing moan, wringing her hands together as her eyes fastened on his face, transfixed into an expression of blank surprise as his eyes met hers for the first time. “Don’t look like that! Julian, Julian! In all these years have you never understood? Have you never understood how I have loved you?”