Part 36 (2/2)

”In five minutes.”

”Then I will wait for you. Yes, I will wait for you.”

She paused at the door and looked at Julian. He was deferentially waiting on his customer, and Lady Tamworth noticed with a queer feeling of repugnance that he had even acquired the shopman's trick of rubbing the hands. Those five minutes proved for her a most unenviable period. Julian's sentence,--”I owe it all to you”--pressed heavily upon her conscience. Spoken bitterly, she would have given little heed to it; but there had been a convincing sincerity in the ring of his voice. The words, besides, brought back to her Sir John's uncomfortable aphorism and freighted it with an accusation. She applied it now as a search-light upon her jumbled recollections of Julian's courts.h.i.+p, and began to realise that her efforts during that time had been directed thoughtlessly towards enlarging her influence over him. If, indeed, Julian owed this change in his condition to her, then Sir John was right, and she had employed her influence to his hurt. And it only made her fault the greater that Julian was himself unconscious of his degradation. She commenced to feel a personal responsibility commanding her to rescue him from his slough, which was increased moreover by a fear that her persuasions might prove ineffectual. For Julian's manner pointed now to an utter absence of feeling so far as she was concerned.

At last Julian came out to her. ”You will leave here,” she cried impulsively. ”You will come back to us, to your friends!”

”Never,” he answered firmly.

”You must,” she pleaded; ”you said you owed it all to me.”

”Yes.”

”Well, don't you see? If you stay here, I can never forgive myself; I shall have ruined your life.”

”Ruined it?” Julian asked in a tone of wonder. ”You have made it.” He stopped and looked at Lady Tamworth in perplexity. The same perplexity was stamped upon her face. ”We are at cross-purposes, I think,” he continued. ”My rooms are close here. Let me give you some tea, and explain to you that you have no cause to blame yourself.”

Lady Tamworth a.s.sented with some relief. The speech had an odd civilised flavour which contrasted pleasantly with what she had imagined of his mode of life.

They crossed the road and turned into a narrow side-street. Julian halted before a house of a slovenly exterior, and opened the door. A bare rickety staircase rose upwards from their feet. Fairholm closed the door behind Lady Tamworth, struck a match (for it was quite dark within this pa.s.sage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece and a bra.s.s lamp in the corner of the room. Lady Tamworth fancied that unawares she had slipped into fairyland; so great was the contrast between this retreat and the sordid surroundings amidst which it was perched. It was furnished with a dainty, and almost a feminine luxury. The room, she could see, was no more than an oblong garret; but along one side mouse-coloured curtains fell to the ground in folds from the angle where the sloping roof met the wall; on the other a cheerful fire glowed from a hearth of white tiles and a kettle sang merrily upon the hob. A broad couch, piled with silk cus.h.i.+ons occupied the far end beneath the window, and the feet sank with a delicate pleasure into a thick velvety carpet. In the centre a small inlaid table of cedar wood held a silver tea-service.

The candlesticks were of silver also, and cast in a light and fantastic fas.h.i.+on. The solitary discord was a black easel funereally draped.

Julian prepared the tea, and talked while he prepared it. ”It is this way,” he began quietly. ”You know what I have always believed; that the will was the man, his soul, his life, everything. Well, in the old days thoughts and ideas commenced to make themselves felt in me, to crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas were yours; better than mine perhaps, but none the less death to me.”

Lady Tamworth stirred uneasily under a sense of guilt, and murmured a faint objection. Julian shook off the occupation of his theme and handed her some cake, and began again, standing over her with the cake in his hand, and to all seeming unconscious that there was a strain of cruelty in his words. ”I found out what that meant. My emotions were mastering me, drowning the will in me. You see, I cared for you so much--then.”

A frank contempt stressing the last word cut into his hearer with the keenness of a knife. ”You are unkind,” she said weakly.

”There's no reproach to you. I have got over it long ago,” he replied cheerily. ”And you showed me how to get over it; that's why I am grateful. For I began to wonder after that, why I, who had always been on my guard against the emotions, should become so thoroughly their slave. And at last I found out the reason; it was the work I was doing.”

”Your work?” she exclaimed.

”Exactly! You remember what Plato remarked about the actor?”

”How should I?” asked poor Lady Tamworth.

”Well, he wouldn't have him in his ideal State because acting develops the emotions, the s.h.i.+fty unstable part of a man. But that's true of art as well; to do good work in art you must feel your work as an emotion. So I cut myself clear from it all. I furnished these rooms and came down here,--to live.” And Julian drew a long breath, like a man escaped from danger.

”But why come here?” Lady Tamworth urged. ”You might have gone into the country--anywhere.”

”No, no, no!” he answered, setting down the cake and pacing about the room. ”Wherever else I went, I must have formed new ties, created new duties. I didn't want that; one's feelings form the ties, one's soul pays the duties. No, London is the only place where a man can disappear. Besides I had to do something, and I chose this work, because it didn't touch me. I could throw it off the moment it was done. In the shop I earn the means to live; I live here.”

”But what kind of a life is it?” she asked in despair.

”I will tell you,” he replied, sinking his tone to an eager whisper; ”but you mustn't repeat it, you must keep it a secret. When I am in this room alone at night, the walls widen and widen away until at last they vanish,” and he nodded mysteriously at her. ”The roof curls up like a roll of parchment, and I am left on an open platform.”

”What do you mean?” gasped Lady Tamworth.

<script>