A Valiant Ignorance; vol. 2 of 3: A Novel in Three VolumesDickens, Mary Angela
General
A Valiant Ignorance; vol. 2 of 3: A Novel in Three Volumes
Dickens, Mary Angela
Fiction
His face as he went would have been a curious study to any onlooker
possessed of the key to its expression; to any onlooker who could have
detected the constant struggle for dominance between something that
seemed to lie behind its new artificiality and that artificiality
itself, evidently maintained under an instinctive sense of the chances
of observation. It was not until he turned his key in the lock of a set
of chambers in the Temple that the boyish vivacity died wholly out of
his face; he went into his room--he shared the chambers with another
embryo barrister--shutting the door behind him; and as he did so he
seemed to have shut in, not the light-hearted young fellow who had paid
the cabman in the street below, but another man altogether. No one
looking at him now could doubt that this was the real Julian Romayne of
to-day, as certainly as that light-hearted young fellow had been the
real Julian Romayne of a year ago. This was a man with a hard, angry
face; a face on which the anger stood revealed, not as the expression of
the moment, but as the normal expression of a mind always sore, always
at war, always fiercely implacable.
The room was plainly, almost barely furnished, and there was no trace of
any of the luxury that surrounded him in Queen Anne Street. His smart,
carefully got-up figure looked absolutely incongruous among such unusual
surroundings, as he crossed to the window, and flinging himself down in
a shabby easy-chair, lighted a cigarette. He threw his cigarette-case on
the table, and then drew out of the breast-pocket of his coat a couple
of letters.
He had read them before, evidently, but as evidently they had lost none
of their interest for him. He read them both through attentively, and as
he did so there came to his mouth a set which his mother, could she have
seen it, would have recognised instantly; which any one, indeed, must
have recognised who had ever seen his dead father. Both the letters
dealt with money matters; one was from a bookmaker, the other from a
broker whose name was far from bearing an unblemished character in the
City; and both referred to large sums of money recently made on the
turf and on the Stock Exchange by Julian Romayne.
He flung the last on the table as he finished it, and there was an
expression in his eyes of reckless, rebellious triumph not good to see.
“It’s a good haul!” he said, half aloud. “A good haul! Now, with what
I’ve got already----” He rose and went across to the writing-table,
unlocked a drawer, and taking out various papers, began to make rapid
calculations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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