Part 36 (1/2)

The footman came to the carriage door, disdain perceptibly struggling through his mask of impa.s.sivity.

”Why is the shop closed?” Lady Tamworth asked.

”The name, perhaps, my lady,” he suggested. ”It is Friday.”

Lady Tamworth had forgotten the day. ”Very well,” she said sullenly.

”Home at once!” However, she corrected herself adroitly: ”I mean, of course, fetch Sir John first.”

Sir John was duly fetched and carried home jubilant at so rare an attention. The tie was presented to him on the way, and he bellowed his merriment at its shape and colour. To her surprise Lady Tamworth found herself defending the style, and inveighing against the monotony of the fas.h.i.+ons of the West End. Nor was this the only occasion on which she disagreed with her husband that evening. He launched an aphorism across the dinner-table which he had cogitated from the report of a divorce-suit in the evening papers. ”It is a strange thing,” he said, ”that the woman who knows her influence over a man usually employs it to hurt him; the woman who doesn't, employs it unconsciously for his good.”

”You don't mean that?” she asked earnestly.

”I have noticed it more than once,” he replied.

For a moment Lady Tamworth's chivalric edifice showed cracks and rents; it threatened to crumble like a house of cards; but only for a moment. For she merely considered the remark in reference to the future; she applied it to her present wish to exercise an influence over Julian. The issue of that, however, lay still in the dark, and was consequently imaginable as inclination prompted. A glance at Sir Julian sufficed to finally rea.s.sure her. He was rosy and modern, and so plainly incapable of appreciating chivalric impulses. To estimate them rightly one must have an insight into their nature, and therefore an actual experience of their fire; but such fire left traces on the person. Chivalric people were hollow-cheeked with luminous eyes; at least chivalric men were hollow-cheeked, she corrected herself with a look at the mirror. At all events Sir John and his aphorism were beneath serious reflection; and she determined to repeat her journey upon the first opportunity.

The opportunity, however, was delayed for a week and occasioned Lady Tamworth no small amount of self-pity. Here was n.o.ble work waiting for her hand, and duty kept her chained to the social oar!

On the afternoon, then, of the following Friday she dressed with what even for her was unusual care, aiming at a complex effect of daintiness and severity, and drove down in a hansom to Whitechapel.

She stopped the cab some yards from the shop and walked up to the window. Through the gla.s.s she could see Julian standing behind the counter. His hands (she noticed them particularly because he was displaying some cheap skeins of coloured wool) seemed perhaps a trifle thinner and more nervous, his features a little sharpened, and there was a sprinkling of grey in the black of his hair. For the first time since the conception of her scheme Lady Tamworth experienced a feeling of irresolution. With Fairholm in the flesh before her eyes, the task appeared difficult; its reality pressed in upon her, driving a breach through the flimsy wall of her fancies. She resolved to wait until the shop should be empty, and to that end took a few steps slowly up the street and returned yet more slowly. She looked into the window again; Julian was alone now, and still she hesitated. The admiring comments of two loungers on the kerb concerning her appearance at last determined her, and she brusquely thrust open the door. A little bell jangled shrilly above it and Julian looked up.

”Lady Tamworth!” he said after the merest pause and with no more than a natural start of surprise. Lady Tamworth, however, was too taken aback by the cool manner of his greeting to respond at once. She had forecast the commencement of the interview upon such wholly different lines that she felt lost and bewildered. An abashed confusion was the least that she expected from him, and she was prepared to increase it with a nicely-tempered indignation. Now the positions seemed actually reversed; he was looking at her with a composed attention, while she was filled with embarra.s.sment.

A suspicion flashed through her mind that she had come upon a fool's errand. ”Julian!” she said with something of humility in her voice, and she timidly reached out her little gloved hand towards him. Julian took it into the palm of his own and gazed at it with a sort of wondering tenderness, as though he had lighted upon a toy which he remembered to have prized dearly in an almost forgotten childhood.

This second blow to her pride quickened in her a feeling of exasperation. She drew her fingers quickly out of his grasp. ”What brought you down to this!” She snapped out the words at him; she had not come to Whitechapel to be slighted at all events.

”I have risen,” he answered quietly.

”Risen? And you sell baby-linen!”

Julian laughed in pure contentment. ”You don't understand,” he said.

For a moment he looked at her as one debating with himself and then: ”You have a right to understand. I will tell you.” He leaned across the counter, and as he spoke the eager pa.s.sion of a devotee began to kindle in his eyes and vibrate through the tones of his voice. ”The knowledge of a truth worked into your heart will lift you, eh, must lift you high? But base your life upon that truth, centre yourself about it, till your thoughts become instincts born from it! It must lift you still higher then; ah, how much higher! Well, I have done that. Yes, that's why I am here. And I owe it all to you.”

Lady Tamworth repeated his words in sheer bewilderment. ”You owe it all to me?”

”Yes,” he nodded, ”all to you.” And with genuine grat.i.tude he added, ”You didn't know the good that you had done.”

”Ah, don't say that!” she cried.

The bell tinkled over the shop-door and a woman entered. Lady Tamworth bent forward and said hastily, ”I must speak to you.”

”Then you must buy something; what shall it be?” Fairholm had already recovered his self-possession and was drawing out one of the shelves in the wall behind him.

”No, no!” she exclaimed, ”not here; I can't speak to you here. Come and call on me; what day will you come?”

Julian shook his head. ”Not at all, I am afraid. I have not the time.”

A boy came out from the inner room and began to get ready the shutters. ”Ah, it's Friday,” she said. ”You will be closing soon.”