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In the daytime there is no noisier nor livelier place than this same Quai; but nothing could be more gloomy at night-time when the shops are closed, when the few gas-lamps only increase the grimness of the shadows, and when the only sound that breaks the silence is the rippling of the water as its smooth surface is ruffled by some boatman propelling his skiff through the canal.
The silence seemed to call for a final climax. The ex-valet cleared his throat. And it was to his ex-valet that Tabs listened; he had forgotten the General. It was as though the grimness of reality had interrupted a piece of play-acting. There was less heat in Braithwaite's voice now and more reproach. "You said nothing about caste in those days, when you hurried us to the shambles.
"It wasn't like him," Lucy murmured, and a hint of a smile crossed her lips, "to have driven by us so fast." "I'd not expect it of him, certainly." "Nor I." And Lucy sighed in spite of herself. She was not very old. "Ha!" Miss Herron bestowed a lightning glance on her unconscious little passenger, and found it her turn to smile, but with a kind of grimness.
Under all the fantastic grimness, all the mysticism, all the discredited and riotous vagaries of his insubordinate soul, Franklin possessed a saving common sense; yet it was mere freakishness which led him to accept a vagrant impulse as the controlling motive at the crucial moment of his life. His nature was not more imaginative than comprehensive.
His face was grey, he looked unutterably tired, his mouth had the stark grimness of the man who endures, asking nothing of Fate. "Hullo, boy!" he said. "Why aren't you in bed?" Then seeing Robin's unmistakably hang-dog air, "Oh, I forgot! Go on upstairs! I'm coming." Robin turned about like a kicked dog. But the driving force stopped him on the threshold.
With a really wicked scowl he eyed his big, powerfully-built companion, who still had his hand as in a vice. Then seeing no resource, he answered: 'I did not! That does not mean that I won't, though! he added defiantly. To his surprise Harold suddenly released his hand. There was a grimness in his tone as he said: 'That will do! I know now that you have spoken the truth, sober as well as drunk.
Emery was one of the women who are always well served by "tradespeople," as she now called them, "and a good reason why," she was wont to explain with self-gratulatory grimness. The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable succession of purchases.
Solemn as were the words in themselves, they seemed doubly so in that lonely room; and Henry was glad to lock the door and return to the comparatively living world downstairs. But from that moment old Mr. Lingard was transfigured in his eyes. Beneath all the sternness of his exterior, the grimness of the business interests which seemed to absorb him, Henry had discovered the blessed human spring.
He had reached the stage in a young man's life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile. In France it is not uncustomary to commit suicide at this stage; in England we do much better, or much worse, as the case may be. The love between the young man and his mother was strangely invisible now.
Even its grimness and tragedy were worth while, although they hurt him terribly at times. Why, under these circumstances, he should have been so thoroughly attracted to Angela remains a mystery.
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