The Price of Love eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 423 pages of information about The Price of Love.

The Price of Love eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 423 pages of information about The Price of Love.

He heard movements above.  And the front gate creaked.  As if a spring had been loosed, he jumped from the chair and ran upstairs—­away from the arriving Julian and towards his wife.  Rachel was just getting up.

“Don’t trouble,” he said.  “I’ll see him.  I’ll deal with him.  Much better for you to stay in bed.”

He perceived that he did not want Rachel to hear what Julian had to say until after he had heard it himself.

Rachel hesitated.

“Do you think so?...  What have you been doing?  I thought you were coming up again at once.”

“I had one or two little things—­”

A terrific knock resounded on the front door.

“There he is!” Louis muttered, as it were aghast.

CHAPTER XI

JULIAN’S DOCUMENT

I

Julian Maldon faced Louis in the parlour.  Louis had conducted him there without the assistance of Mrs. Tams, who had been not merely advised, but commanded, to go to bed.  Julian had entered the house like an exasperated enemy—­glum, suspicious, and ferocious.  His mien seemed to say:  “You wanted me to come, and I’ve come.  But mind you don’t drive me to extremities.”  Impossible to guess from his grim face that he had asked permission to come!  Nevertheless he had shaken Louis’ hand with a ferocious sincerity which Louis felt keenly the next morning.  He was the same Julian except that he had grown a brown beard.  He had exactly the same short, thick-set figure, and the same defiant stare.  South Africa had not changed him.  No experience could change him.  He would have returned from ten years at the North Pole or at the Equator, with savages or with uncompromising intellectuals, just the same Julian.  He was one of those beings who are violently themselves all the time.  By some characteristic social clumsiness he had omitted to remove his overcoat in the lobby.  And now, in the parlour, he could not get it off.  As a man seated, engaged in conversation by a woman standing, forgets to rise at once and then cannot rise, finding himself glued to the chair, so was Julian with his overcoat; to take it off he would have had to flay himself alive.

“Won’t you take off your overcoat?” Louis suggested.

“No.”

With his instinctive politeness Louis turned to improve the fire.  And as he poked among the coals he said, in the way of amiable conversation—­

“How’s South Africa?”

“All right,” replied Julian, who hated to impart his sensations.  If Julian had witnessed Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow he would have come to the Five Towns and, if questioned—­not otherwise—­would have said that it was all right.

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The Price of Love from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.