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Julia Bride
by
“Oh, lordy, lordy!” the girl emulously groaned. It was such a relieving cry. “Well, I won’t talk to her!” she declared.
“You won’t, Julia?” he pitifully echoed. “And yet you ask of me–!”
His pang, she felt, was sincere; and even more than she had guessed, for the previous quarter of an hour he had been building up his hope, building it with her aid for a foundation. Yet was he going to see how their testimony, on each side, would, if offered, have to conflict? If he was to prove himself for her sake–or, more queerly still, for that of Basil French’s high conservatism–a person whom there had been no other way of dealing with, how could she prove him, in this other and so different interest, a mere gentle sacrifice to his wife’s perversity? She had, before him there, on the instant, all acutely, a sense of rising sickness–a wan glimmer of foresight as to the end of the fond dream. Everything else was against her, everything in her dreadful past–just as if she had been a person represented by some “emotional actress,” some desperate erring lady “hunted down” in a play; but was that going to be the case too with her own very decency, the fierce little residuum deep within her, for which she was counting, when she came to think, on so little glory or even credit? Was this also going to turn against her and trip her up–just to show she was really, under the touch and the test, as decent as any one; and with no one but herself the wiser for it meanwhile, and no proof to show but that, as a consequence, she should be unmarried to the end? She put it to Mr. Pitman quite with resentment: “Do you mean to say you’re going to be married–?”
“Oh, my dear, I too must get engaged first!”–he spoke with his inimitable grin. “But that, you see, is where you come in. I’ve told her about you. She wants awfully to meet you. The way it happens is too lovely–that I find you just in this place. She’s coming,” said Mr. Pitman–and as in all the good faith of his eagerness now; “she’s coming in about three minutes.”
“Coming here?”
“Yes, Julia–right here. It’s where we usually meet”; and he was wreathed again, this time as if for life, in his large slow smile. “She loves this place–she’s awfully keen on art. Like you, Julia, if you haven’t changed–I remember how you did love art.” He looked at her quite tenderly, as to keep her up to it. “You must still of course–from the way you’re here. Just let her feel that,” the poor man fantastically urged. And then with his kind eyes on her and his good ugly mouth stretched as for delicate emphasis from ear to ear: “Every little helps!”
He made her wonder for him, ask herself, and with a certain intensity, questions she yet hated the trouble of; as whether he were still as moneyless as in the other time–which was certain indeed, for any fortune he ever would have made. His slackness, on that ground, stuck out of him almost as much as if he had been of rusty or “seedy” aspect–which, luckily for him, he wasn’t at all: he looked, in his way, like some pleasant eccentric, ridiculous, but real gentleman, whose taste might be of the queerest, but his credit with his tailor none the less of the best. She wouldn’t have been the least ashamed, had their connection lasted, of going about with him: so that what a fool, again, her mother had been–since Mr. Connery, sorry as one might be for him, was irrepressibly vulgar. Julia’s quickness was, for the minute, charged with all this; but she had none the less her feeling of the right thing to say and the right way to say it. If he was after a future financially assured, even as she herself so frantically was, she wouldn’t cast the stone. But if he had talked about her to strange women she couldn’t be less than a little majestic. “Who then is the person in question for you–?”