“Life!” he cried. “What can life give to me beyond what I’ve got already? I’ve got my billet! Like father like son! I’m bound for the dogs sooner or later, and I don’t care to spin out the journey. Who’s going to fight against his fate?”
“It is not fate.”
Through that little room, across and above the passion and despair that filled it, the words rang out strong and clear, and Julian turned with a convulsive start to meet them.
Clemence had come swiftly across the room and was standing beside him, facing him as he turned to her; facing Falconer, arrested in a quick movement to interpose, blindly and instinctively as it seemed, between Julian and his mother; facing Mrs. Romayne, as she stood leaning heavily on the back of a chair, her eyes strained and terrible to see, her face ghastly. All that humanity can touch of the beautiful and the inspiring; all the burning faith; the quivering personal realisation of that unseen of which each man is a part; the human love acting upon and reacted on by the divine instinct; was shining out from Clemence’s face. She paused hardly for an instant as her clear eyes, dark and deep with the intensity of her fervour, rested on Julian, as though they saw him and him only in all the world. Then her voice rang out again, sweet and full.
“There’s no such thing as fate,” she said. “Not like that! Not fate that makes us bad. There’s God, Julian! It’s trying to do right that matters; nothing else in life; and that we can all do. There’s nothing, nothing can prevent us! Oh, I don’t say”—her voice broke into a great pity and tenderness—“I don’t say that it’s not harder for some than for others. But it’s what’s hard that is best worth doing! Julian!”—she drew a step nearer to him, stretching out both her hands—“you’re looking at it wrong, dear! The things you’ve lost for good are not the things that matter. What one has, what people think of one—that’s nothing. It’s what one is, it’s oneself that’s the only thing to mind about.”
She stopped, her whole face stirred and tremulous with her conviction, and Julian, with an impulsive movement, caught her hands in his, and pressed his forehead down upon them in a blind agony of self-abasement.
“I’m a swindler, Clemmie!” he cried thickly. It was as though he had hardly taken in the full sense of her words, but was clinging to her, and confessing to her under some blunted, bewildered impetus. “A cheat and a thief all round! That’s what I am!”
“But that’s not for ever!” she cried, such love, and hope, and courage shining in her eyes as would not let her great tears fall. “You can retrieve the past! You can repent and begin again. Ah, I know, of course, that what is done can’t ever be undone! What you have done remains the same for always! But you can change! You can be different, and nothing else but you yourself matters at all! What does it matter if people think you a cheat if you are an honest man? Nothing! No more than it matters to yourself if they call you an honest man for ever, when you’re a cheat!” She paused again, but this time he did not speak; he lifted his head and drew her to him, crushing her hands against his breast, and looking into her eyes with a strange, agonised struggle towards comprehension dawning in his own.
There was a moment’s dead silence. There was that passing between Clemence and Julian which no words could have touched—the final struggle towards dominion of a man’s better nature. Falconer had fallen back. All that was narrow and conventional about his morality had shrivelled into nothingness, and stood confessed to his own consciousness for what it was. He knew that the great question now at issue was beyond the reach of his man’s practicality, and that he could only stand aside.
Mrs. Romayne was gripping heavily at the chair by which she stood; impotent, frozen despair paralysing her from head to foot, leaving alive and sentient only her eyes.