III
The London weeks went by with all their commonplaces, all their novelties. Mr. Durrant, senior, had finished his urgent business, and returned to his square and uninteresting country-house. But Jim lingered on in town, although conscious of some subtle change in himself and his view of things. He and Rosalys met whenever it was possible, which was pretty frequently. Often they contrived to do so at hastily arranged luncheons and teas in the private rooms of hotels; sometimes, when Mrs. Ambrose was suddenly called away, at Jim’s own rooms. Sometimes they adventured to queer suburban restaurants.
In the lapse of these weeks the twain began somehow to lose a little of their zest for each other’s society. Jim himself was aware of it before he had yet discovered that something of the same disappointment was dulling her heart too. On his own side it was the usual lowering of the fire—the slackening of a man’s passion for a woman when she becomes his property. On hers it was a more mixed feeling. No doubt her love for Jim had been of but little higher quality than his for her. She had thoroughly abandoned herself to his good looks, his recklessness, his eagerness; and, now that the sensuous part of her character was satisfied, her fervour also began to burn itself down. But beyond, above, this, the concealment of her marriage was repugnant to Rosalys. When the rapture of the early meetings had died away she began to loathe the sordid deceit which these involved: the secretly despatched letters, the unavoidably brazen lies to her mother, who, if she attached overmuch importance to money and birth, yet loved her daughter in all good faith and simplicity. Then once or twice Jim was late at their interviews. He seemed indifferent and preoccupied. His manner stung Rosalys into impatient utterance at the end of a particular meeting in which this mood was unduly prominent.
“You forget all I have given up for you!” she cried. “You make a fool of me in allowing me to wait here for you. It is humiliating and vulgar! I hate myself for behaving as I do!”
“The renunciations are not all on your side,” he answered caustically. “You forget all that the loss of his freedom means to a man!”
Her heart swelled, and she had great difficulty in keeping back her tears. But she took refuge in sullenness.
“Unfortunately we can’t undo our folly!” she murmured. “You will have to make the best of it as well as I. I suppose the awakening to a sense of our idiocy was bound to come sooner or later. But—I didn’t think it would come so soon! Jim, look at me! Are you really angry? Don’t for God’s sake go and leave me like this!”
He was walking slowly towards the great iron gate leading out of Kensington Gardens; a dogged cast on his now familiar countenance.
“Don’t make a scene in public, for Heaven’s sake, Rosalys!” Feeling that he had spoken too brutally he suddenly paused, and changed:
“I am sorry, little woman, if I was cross! But things have combined to harass me lately. Of course we won’t part from one another in anger.”
Jim glanced at her straight profile with its full underlip and firmly curved chin, at the lashes on either lid, and the glossy brown hair twisted in coils under her hat. But the sight of this loveliness, now all his own, failed to arouse the old emotions. He simply contemplated her approvingly from an artistic point of view.
They had reached the gateway, and she placed her hand on his arm.
“Goodbye. When shall we next meet? Today is Tuesday. Shall it be Friday?”
“I am afraid I must go out of London on Thursday for a day or two. I’ll write, dear. Let me call a hansom.”
She thanked him in a cold voice again, and with a last handshake and a smile that hovered on sorrow, left him and drove away towards Belgravia.
Once or twice later on they met; the next interview being shorter and sadder perhaps than the last. The one that followed it ended in bitterness.
“This had better be our long goodbye, I suppose?” said she.
“Perhaps it had. … You seem to be always looking out for causes of reproach, Rosalys. I don’t know what has come over you.”
“It is you who have changed!” she cried, with a little stamp. “And you are by far the most to blame of us two. You forget that I should never have contemplated marriage as a possibility! You have made me lie to my mother, do things of which I am desperately ashamed, and now you don’t attempt to disguise your weariness of me!”
It was Jim’s turn to lose his temper now. “You forget that you gave me considerable encouragement! Most girls would not have come out again and again to surreptitious meetings with a man who was in love with them—girls brought up as you have been!”
She started as in a spasm. A momentary remorse seized him. He realized that he had been betrayed into speaking as no man of kindly good-feeling could speak. He made a tardy, scarcely gracious apology, and they parted. A few days afterwards he wrote a letter full of penitence for having hurt her, and she answered almost affectionately. But each knew that their short-lived romance was dead as the windflowers that had blossomed at its untimely birth.