“Dear Romayne,” he read,—“Your friend, Compton, holds the whole affair in his hand. Marston Loring gave him the tip. You will do as you think best about meeting the shareholders. I shall not be present myself, as I am leaving England, for the present, to-night.“Yours,“Alfred Ramsay.”
“Dear Romayne,” he read,—
“Your friend, Compton, holds the whole affair in his hand. Marston Loring gave him the tip. You will do as you think best about meeting the shareholders. I shall not be present myself, as I am leaving England, for the present, to-night.
“Yours,
“Alfred Ramsay.”
The letter bore date of the previous day.
A whiteface, drawn and set into a look which pitifully travestied the calmness of despair; bloodshot eyes with something in them of the incomprehending agony of a hunted animal; quivering lips which would not take the rigid line at which they aimed, and from which seemed to radiate an indescribable suggestion of youthfulness, which made the bewildered desperation of the face infinitely piteous. Two hours had passed, and Julian was seated at his writing-table in his room at the Temple. He held a pen in his hand, and before him lay a sheet of paper bearing three words only, “My dear Clemence.” On the table behind him lay a roughly packed travelling-bag and a “Bradshaw.”
Flight, instant flight, was the one coursethat had occurred to him. Such a necessity had been present to him from the first, and in the almost insane terror which had mastered him on finding himself deserted by Ramsay, thoughts which had lain dormant in his mind during the last ten days had taken shape almost without volition on his part, and he had made his plans with wild haste. He knew nothing, he thought of nothing but that he must go at once, that at any moment he might find himself stopped, at any moment it might be too late!
No thought of that last refuge of the detected criminal, suicide, presented itself to him. The realities of life were as yet strange to him; wrenched from his moorings, tossed away to drift on the pitiless sea, he could not realise what was the depth of that sea, how futile must be his struggles to keep himself afloat. The reality of death had never touched his superficial nature.
He made his preparations with the promptitude of desperation, and as each detail was despatched, one deed that must be done began to prick into his consciousness. Some word must be sent to Clemence. With thisnecessity he found himself at last confronted with no further possibility of postponement.
But no words would come to him. Little as he understood it, all the bewildered misery of his heart was what he wanted to convey to her; all the incoherent horror which was tossing him to and fro. What words were possible where there was no reason, only blind, agonised feeling? There was one aspect of his shipwreck now in which it appeared only as the end and consummation of his ten weeks of silence towards Clemence; those ten weeks in which he saw, now, only cruelty and futility where he had seen before wisdom and necessity. His failure, his ruin, had a side on which they touched him only in his connection with her; it became the failure to keep the promise he had made her when he saw her last; the ruin of his vision of a life with her. He sat there, staring stupidly at the paper, and gradually all thoughts slipped away from him but the thought of Clemence herself. A hunger, such as his selfish young heart had never known, rose in him for her presence, her pity. His misery turned to her, stretching forth empty, despairing hands, until thesick longing dominated his whole consciousness.
Then out of the aching yearning there came to him suddenly a recollection of the letter he had received ten days before; the letter which he had thrust into a drawer, in his blind, foolhardy determination, unopened. The end on which he had set himself to wait had vanished for ever. Everything by which he had held was overturned and submerged. But the letter was there still. The letter had come from Clemence.
He unlocked with trembling eagerness the drawer in which he had placed it, drew out the envelope and tore it open. That it could bring no comfort to him, that there could, indeed, be only aggravation of his wretchedness in it, was as nothing to him. It was to touch Clemence that he wanted; Clemence, and Clemence only was the cry of his whole being. The letter was very short, a few lines only. He ran his eyes over it with hungry avidity, and then they seemed to stop suddenly, and all the quivering life seemed to freeze on his features. A moment passed and a great, dry sob broke from him; he dashedhis head down upon the table with a bitter boyish cry:
“Clemmie! Clemmie!”
Simple, beautiful with that wonderful new tenderness which comes to a woman with the consummation of her womanhood, pathetic in their gentleness beyond all words, the few brief lines brought him from Clemence the most sacred tidings that can pass between husband and wife, tidings of the birth of their child.
“Clemmie!”
The word broke from him again, a pitiful, despairing sob, and then he lay there, long, dry sobs shaking him from head to foot as that bitterest of all waves, the unavailing realisation of what might have been contrasted with what is, swept over him and overwhelmed him. The reality, touched into life by her letter as though Clemence’s voice had spoken to him, which he had thrown away; the reality on which, in doing so, he had hurled himself; stood out before him in pitiless distinctness; and in his ignorance and blindness, in his utter want of comprehension of the moral aspect of his acts and the stern justice of theretribution he was meeting, there was no light or cohesion for him anywhere in the world, and darkness and chaos had closed about him.
Nearly an hour passed before he moved, and lifted a white, haggard face, marred with the agony of impotent regret. He looked about him vaguely, pushing his hair back heavily from his forehead, and as his eye fell upon the travelling-bag that instinctive sense of the necessity upon him, which had stirred him with no consciousness on his part, deepened into a mechanically active impulse. He must go. He paused a moment, and then he drew out a fresh sheet of paper.
“Falconer!” he muttered. “Falconer will see to them. There’s no one else!”
It was as though the fire through which he was passing had burnt away from him all recollection, even, of his mother. He had thought of her for long only as the source of all that was unpleasant in his life. Now in the sharpness of his pain a haze had spread itself over the past, and all thought of the means by which the present position had been brought about was obliterated.
He wrote for a few minutes, rapidly, desperately, in a handwriting which was hardly legible; then he thrust the letter into an envelope, which he directed to Dennis Falconer; and rose. His original intention of writing to Clemence had left him. It had become an impossibility. And side by side with his sense of his utter incapacity to find any words in which to speak to her, there had risen in him a heart-broken impulse to see her face once more and for the last time.
The sunshine of the day had given place to a drizzling rain when he turned into that quiet little street which had witnessed their last meeting. The dazed sense of the necessity for flight was strong upon him. Darkness had fallen; he had left his room for the last time; in another hour he would be in the Liverpool train, a fugitive from justice; and in the terror and confusion of the realisation of that one all-absorbing fact, the only other thought that lived in him was his blind desire for one sight of Clemence. He had come to the little street unreasoningly, weighing no probabilities as to whether or no she would be at work; not even understandingthat there were probabilities to weigh; coming there simply because he had seen her there before and knew of no other chance of seeing her. He took up his position in a doorway by which she must pass, and waited. It seemed to him that he had been standing there, utterly alone, for hours, when the door, from which his haggard, sunken eyes had never stirred, opened.
As on that other occasion Clemence was the last to come out, but she came this time walking quickly and eagerly. For an instant as she passed beneath the lamp the light fell on her face, and as Julian’s eyes rested on it for that instant, he clutched at the railing by which he stood. Then she came on in the shadow, still followed by those hungry eyes.
Perhaps she felt their gaze. Perhaps her own heart felt the pang that was rending his. In the very act of passing him she stopped suddenly and turned towards him, looking into the dimness in which he was shrouded. She stretched out her hands with a low, inarticulate cry.
He had her in his arms in an instant,straining her to him with a despairing passion which he had never known before, and she clung to him half frightened by his touch.
“Julian!” she whispered. Then as no word came from him, only his burning kisses pressed upon her upturned face, she went on softly: “Dear, weren’t you going to speak to me?” Still he did not speak, and with a look and accent indescribably beautiful in their tender womanliness, she said: “You didn’t think I would reproach you?”
“It’s good-bye, Clemmie,” he muttered hoarsely. “Good-bye! I—I’m going away for—for a little while.”
He could as easily have killed her, at that moment, as have told her the truth.
“Going away!” she echoed, with a little catch in her breath. “Where, dear?”
“To—to America.” He could not tell her all the truth, but there was no power in him to originate an unnecessary lie. He felt her arms tighten about him, and he answered the appeal hoarsely, hurrying out the words. “I—I’m leaving a letter about you, and——” his voice died away in his throat as he tried to speak of his child, andthen he went on rapidly and unevenly: “It will be—all right. Clemence! Clemence! try to forgive me. Good-bye, dear, good-bye!”
He drew her hands from about his neck, kissing them wildly. Her hold tightened instinctively upon his fingers, and she was trembling very much.
“You’re not going—now?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he answered hoarsely. “Now!”
Then, as he saw the look which came over her face, the desperate necessity for reassuring her came upon him. He tried to smile.
“America is nothing nowadays, you know,” he said in a harsh, unnatural tone. “It’s no distance. I shall be—back directly. Say good-bye to me, won’t you? I must go.”
She let her face fall on his shoulder, pressing it closer and closer, as though she could never tear herself away.
“I’m frightened for you, dear,” she said. “I’m frightened. Are you sure, sure, there is nothing—wrong?”
“Quite sure—of course.”
“You will be back soon?”
“Quite soon.”
There was a moment’s quivering silence,and then Clemence slowly lifted her face. He took her in his arms again, and their lips met in one long agonised kiss. Neither spoke again. When he released her, Julian, with a face like death, turned and went away down the street, his head bent, his whole figure tense as though he were facing a blinding wind. Clemence stood for a moment still as a statue, her eyes wide, her face quite quiet. Then she too went away through the night.
Overthe country about Henley, that same day, the sun was shining gloriously.
It was about five o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a clearness about the light, a distinctness about the shadows, which, taken in conjunction with the heavy bank of clouds into which the sun would presently sink, argued coming rain. For the present, however, nature was lovely to look at; and a garden-party which was going on in the large, old-fashioned garden of a large, old-fashioned country house, about a mile from the river, had the benefit of every advantage which atmosphere and surroundings could give.
It was a large party, and the scene was very bright and animated. On the larger of the two lawns, conspicuous among thewell-dressed but by no means striking-looking women about her, stood Mrs. Romayne, talking to a local magnate.
She had arrived about half an hour before, and the politely concealed satisfaction and surprise with which she had been received had testified to the fact that her appearance at such a function was a phenomenon in the neighbourhood. Invitations had showered in on her during her residence at the “cottage,” but it had gradually become an established fact that she was “going out very little.” This was in truth the first party she had attended. It was fortunate that her hostess was not a particularly observant person. There had been something about Mrs. Romayne when she arrived which might have dashed that hostess’s personal elation with a suspicion that her guest’s appearance had been dictated by motives not wholly complimentary to the party; lines about the mouth which suggested the enforced endurance of a burden from which she was seeking temporary relief, however fictitious; a restlessness in the eyes which suggested an attempt atthe eluding of the too insistent companionship of her own thoughts.
Her eyes were painfully bright, and there was a nervous tension about her manner as she stood there on the lawn, talking and laughing. But her companion of the moment—a worthy old gentleman, with not much acquaintance among women of the world—thought her simply the most astonishingly charming woman he had ever met; and seeking in his mind for lines on which to make himself agreeable to her, he recollected to have heard something about her son.
“You have a son here, I believe?” he said, with ponderous interest. “I should greatly like to make his acquaintance.”
Mrs. Romayne laughed.
“I have a son,” she said, “but he is not here, I’m sorry to say. He is hard at work just at present. Ah!” she broke off with an exclamation of surprise. “I see a friend of mine over there! I must go and speak to her.” And with a bow and a smile to her admirer, she broke off the conversation which had, perhaps, seemed longerto one party than to the other, and moved across the lawn to where Hilda Compton was standing watching her with an uncertain but not particularly pleasant expression on her pretty face.
“Are you staying in the neighbourhood?” said Mrs. Romayne prettily, when they had shaken hands. She was apparently entirely oblivious of something cold and disagreeable in the younger woman’s manner. “Is your husband here?”
Hilda Compton glanced at her with a certain tentative triumph in her eyes.
“No!” she said. “He’s not here. I’m staying on a house-boat, but he is kept in town over some troublesome business!”
She paused, and then, as Mrs. Romayne made a rather patronising gesture of sympathy, that gleam of triumph strengthened into something distinctly malicious. Hilda Compton had never forgotten or forgiven that moment in the Norfolk garden twelve months ago. It had been no part of her policy to resent it when such resentment must necessarily have rebounded to her own disadvantage; she had accepted Mrs.Romayne’s society friendliness during the past season with just such a manner as might sting but could not, in very self-respect, be impugned by the elder woman; a manner cleverly tinged with that deference which points the sense of superiority with which a certain type of girl recognises the fact that the present is to her, and not to the previous generation. But she had hoped always that the day might come when she would find herself in a position to take more active measures, and she felt, now, that even what she knew to be a slight breach of conjugal faith would be venial, if it would straighten what she would have called her “score” against Julian Romayne’s mother.
“Yes, it’s rather a bore!” she said. “City business, you know! Don’t you think it’s very foolish of men to speculate, Mrs. Romayne? Of course I haven’t a quarter of your experience, but I think so. They always seem to get into trouble of some sort! But you know more than I do about this affair, no doubt, since Mr. Romayne is mixed up in it, and he’s sucha devoted son. Husbands don’t tell one much, I find!”
Self-command is a wonderful thing, even when it originates in no higher motive than the instinct of a woman of the world for the retention of her society demeanour. Mrs. Romayne’s lips were ashen and her fingers were clenched round the sunshade she held until her rings cut into them, but she faced Hilda Compton steadily, and with a mechanical smile, her eyes, a little dull and contracted, meeting the girl’s pretty, unfeeling ones. Hilda Compton noticed the change of colour even behind the artificial tinting, and rejoiced at the slip of the tongue by which her foolish young husband had put such a weapon into her hand. If only she had succeeded in making Howard tell her more, instead of making him lose his temper! She reflected, however, that perhaps the truth was not so very bad after all, and hints might possibly sound worse than the actual facts.
“Do tell Mr. Romayne, from me, that I hope he hasn’t done anything very shocking!”she said, with a laugh. “I wanted Howard to tell me just what it was, but he would not. Isn’t it funny how men seem to lose their heads altogether when they get on to that silly Stock Exchange? The last men one would expect, too! Who would have thought of Mr. Romayne’s getting into trouble of that kind?”
Somewhat to her disgust, Hilda Compton found as she proceeded that it was impossible to give such significance to her words as she would have wished. She realised that it would never do to allow herself to be brought to book, and consequently conventionality demanded that she should adopt a jesting tone, and trust to Mrs. Romayne’s possessing some half knowledge which should give the words the barb she wished for them. She had a pleasant conviction, as Mrs. Romayne answered her, that she had done something, at least, towards wiping out that old score. The elder woman’s words were preceded by a harsh little laugh, and there was something indistinct about their utterance.
“Just so. Who would have thought——”
Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly, and asharp, extraordinary spasm passed across her face, leaving it fixed and old.
The girl by her side could not flatter herself that the effect was produced by her words, for Mrs. Romayne was gazing to the other side of the garden, and it was evidently something she had seen there which had affected her so powerfully. Turning her own curious eyes in the same direction, Hilda Compton saw nothing calculated to account for such an effect. The crowd had drifted away to some extent to the other lawn, and the tennis-courts, and there was a considerable space, sparsely sprinkled with people, between where they stood and the last group on the lawn; a group of ladies to whom the host was introducing a little alert, elderly man with grey hair; a little man who looked to-day—though only one pair of the two pair of women’s eyes fixed upon him across the lawn recognised this—exactly as he had looked twenty years ago.
Hilda Compton did not know him, and she was wondering curiously whether Mrs. Romayne did, when she heard their hostess’svoice and turned quickly. Mrs. Romayne, roused apparently by finding herself addressed, had turned also—very quickly it seemed to Hilda Compton, and rather as though she did not wish her face to be seen by some one on the other side of the garden—and was listening with a dazed, strained expression of enforced attention.
“I want to introduce a connexion of mine, my dear Mrs. Romayne. Something of a traveller, and something of an eccentricity; but, really, worth talking to. There he is!” indicating the little alert, elderly man on the other side of the lawn. “He is a Dr. Aston. May I fetch him?”
To Hilda Compton’s astonishment Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand hurriedly in unmistakeable dissent, and it was shaking like a leaf.
“I’m afraid I must say ‘no,’” she said, in a hoarse, hurried tone which sounded as though she could hardly control it. “I have a long drive, you know, and I must run away.”
She took her leave so briefly and hurriedly that her hostess came to the conclusionthat illness must be the cause of the seclusion in which she was living, and that she must have miscalculated her strength that afternoon.
She might have thought so with even more reason if she had seen the strange collapse of her whole figure with which Mrs. Romayne sank back into the corner of her carriage as she was driven home along the country roads. If her attendance at the garden-party had been indeed a desperate attempt at finding some sort of temporary oblivion or distraction, that attempt had obviously failed. Her face was drawn and set, and in her eyes, as they stared unseeingly before her, there was a look as of a woman who is quivering still under the influence of some horrible shock.
She had, as she had said, a long drive home, and as she neared her own house that look in her eyes faded, displaced by a sick hunger of anxiety. She got out of the carriage quickly, helping herself a good deal as she rose, however, as if that shock had affected her physical strength.
“Has Mr. Julian come?” she said to theservant who opened the door; then as the woman answered in the negative, she moved swiftly on to where her letters lay waiting for her, and looked them rapidly over. There was none from Julian, and she carried them listlessly upstairs as she went to dress for her solitary dinner.
The rain, which was falling fast by this time in London, was just beginning to patter slowly on the window when she came into the dining-room; and the wind was rising and moving gustily round the house. They were dreary sounds, both of them, and Mrs. Romayne shivered a little as she sat down. Apparently the monotonous pattering, growing quicker and quicker as dinner went on, or the low howling of the wind, made her nervous. She ate nothing, and when at last, the form of dinner having been gone through with, and the servant having left the room, she rose and walked aimlessly to the fireplace, her lips were strangely compressed, and she seemed to control the expression of her eyes with a determined effort. It was as though she were controlling something within of which the tendency frightened her. Shestood there forgetting, apparently, to go into the drawing-room, her face fixed and intent as though she were reasoning or arguing with herself. At last she shivered sharply and her lips twitched. Then rousing herself forcibly, as it seemed, she rang the bell fiercely, and gave orders that a fire should be lighted in the drawing-room. It was a wretched evening, she said to the servant, as though the audible expression of a tangible reason for the nervous discomfort which seemed to be upon her was some sort of relief to her. The fire lighted, she drew a chair in front of it, and taking up a novel, set herself to read with a desperate determination in every line of her face.
Down one page, line by line, on through the next, still line by line, her eyes travelled steadily, mechanically; and then, as mechanically, her hand moved, turned the leaf, and her eyes moved on again. But unless her face greatly belied her, the sense of the words she read so intently never penetrated to her brain. By-and-by that movement of her eyes ceased; she sat staring fixedly at the page before her; then she let the hand thatheld the book sink gradually on her knee, and sat staring into space as she had sat staring at the printed words. Her face was drawn, and there was an intense, indefinite dread about it which was none the less ghastly in that it would have been impossible to say in which of her set features its shadow lurked.
The room was absolutely still. Outside the rain fell and the wind moaned. Inside the intense quiet seemed to be taking a weirdly tangible form, and to be creeping closer and closer round her motionless figure with every breath she drew.
With a sudden, sharp movement, as though, in taking a too sharply piercing point, her thoughts had roused her to a desperate resistance of them, she rose, and began to walk restlessly up and down the room.
Her brows were drawn to a concentration which made her whole face look thin and very old. There was an expression of deliberate, self-conscious self-contempt about her mouth, but in her eyes there lurked the battling horror against which all her forceseemed to be fiercely arrayed. Up and down she walked, no muscle of her set face relaxing; until, quite suddenly, there swept across it, breaking up all its rigid lines, a very agony of yearning. It was as though some sudden and most inopportune realisation, in no wise to be resisted, had shaken her through and through.
“If only I had dared to ask him! If only, if only I dared to speak!”
The words had broken from her half aloud, a sharp, low cry, and as she uttered them she stopped in her walk, gripping and clinging to a chair as if for physical support in a moment of terrible mental conflict. She was evidently fighting desperately inch by inch for the self-control which was slipping from her; the self-control which she dreaded to lose as she dreaded nothing else in life; the self-control to which she clung with the tenacity of instinctive self-preservation.
She lifted her face at last, still and hard as resolution could make it. She crossed the room with quick, resolute steps, looking neither to the right nor the left, and went rapidly upstairs to her own room. A deskcontaining a quantity of papers stood on the chest of drawers. They were old bills and receipts that needed sorting and destroying, and she had brought them into the country saying that she never had time for such work in town. She went up to this desk now, lifted it in her two hands, and placing it on the table, sat down before it and unlocked it. All her movements were the quick, concentrated movements of a woman to whom employment, close, tedious employment, has become an absolute necessity.
A telegram ten days old was not among the papers to be sorted, but Mrs. Romayne held one in her hand as she sat there at her writing-table. She had drawn it from the front of her dress and she read and re-read it, oblivious of the task she had set herself, with an intensity in her eyes which seemed as though it would wring a hidden meaning from the words. It was the telegram Julian had sent her ten days before. She folded it at last with a quick defiant gesture and drew towards her a packet of receipts.
She untied the string that fastened the papers, and out from among them there fell afolded letter, yellow with age, and crumpled. It had evidently worked its way into that packet by accident, as papers will when many are kept together, for it was obviously a letter and not a bill. Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand mechanically and picked it up and opened it. Her eyes were met by the words, written in a childish, scrawling, much blotted handwriting: “My dear mamma.”
It was the letter which she had received from Julian twenty years ago at Nice.
In an instant, even as her eyes fell on those faded baby characters, so suddenly and so utterly that she never realised her loss, the self-control to which she had clung so fiercely melted away from Mrs. Romayne. Before the flash and quiver of recognition had subsided on her face she had seized the bell-rope and was ringing furiously for her maid. The woman, appearing breathless and alarmed a moment later, found her mistress searching feverishly for bonnet and cloak.
“I am going to London, Dawson. Order the carriage at once.”
The voice was harsh, rapid, and peremptory;but the bewildered woman hesitated.
“Now, ma’am?”
Mrs. Romayne turned on her with such a face as her maid had never seen before.
“At once, I said. At once!”
The last train was just steaming into the station when Mrs. Romayne’s carriage dashed up, the horse smoking and covered with foam.
She had thrust that yellow little letter half-unconsciously into her pocket, and all through the journey she sat motionless, clasping it tightly in her hand, her eyes wild, her features forced into a quiescence which sat upon them like a mask.
That mask seemed to get thin, to break away now and again, as she drove through the London streets at last, as though the wild emotion which it hid was growing too strong for it. Her breath was coming faster and faster, until her white, parted lips took an involuntary line of physical pain.
There were no lights in the house in Chelsea as her cab drew up. It was twelveo’clock. She rang violently, and waited, her rapid breathing almost suffocating her. No one came. She rang again, pausing this time with her hand on the bell; again and again, furiously, as a wild, unreasoning horror seemed to seize upon her and tear at her heart. At last there was a sound as of the tentative undoing of bolts and turning of keys. The door was opened an inch or two, and a frightened woman’s voice said:
“Who is it?”
A moment later there was no possibility of doubt on that score. The door was hurriedly thrown open, and Mrs. Romayne moved swiftly into the hall, turning fiercely to confront the astonished, partially-dressed servant, whose bedroom candle seemed to be the only light in the house.
“Has Mr. Julian gone to bed?” she demanded, and the woman hardly recognised her mistress’s voice.
“Mr. Julian is not here, ma’am!” she answered. “He has not been here since the day before yesterday.”
“Mr. Falconer,sir! Mr. Falconer!”
Dennis Falconer was a light sleeper, and he was awake on the first call, low and hurried as it was. It must be a very bad morning, he said to himself, for the light was not nearly so strong as it usually was when he was called at eight o’clock.
“All right!” he called back.
But the retreating footsteps that usually ensued upon his answer did not follow.
“There’s a lady, sir, to see you, please. She’s waiting in the sitting-room. ‘Mrs. Romayne,’ she told me to say.”
“What!” It was a sharp exclamation of inexpressible astonishment, and as he uttered it Falconer sprang out of bed. As he did so he realised that the unusualness of the light was due to the unusualness of thehour—seven o’clock only. “Some one from Mrs. Romayne, you mean?” he called, his strong, deep voice full of incredulity and apprehension. Then, as the answer came through the door, “‘Mrs. Romayne,’ sir, the lady said,” he called back hurriedly: “Say I will be with her in a moment.”
Very few moments indeed had passed before Falconer’s bedroom door opened and he came out with a rapid step. He opened his sitting-room door and passed in, shutting the door hastily behind him, and as he did so the words of grave concern with which he had entered died upon his lips.
In the disorder and dreariness of a room from which the traces of yesterday’s usage had not yet been obliterated; in the cold grey light of the early September morning; a woman was pacing up and down with almost frenzied steps. For a moment, as he caught his first glimpse of the face, he thought vaguely that it was not Mrs. Romayne; then it turned and confronted him, and, meeting the eyes, he recognised, not the woman whom he had known during the past two years, but the woman into whose facehe had looked with so strange a shock of unfamiliarity, and for one moment only, as he and Dr. Aston had confronted it together twenty years ago in Nice. Every trace of the Mrs. Romayne of to-day seemed to have vanished, scorched away by the consuming fire which burnt in her blue eyes and seemed to be the only thing that lived behind that ghastly face; even her features were drawn and sunken almost beyond recognition.
An almost paralysing sense of unreality fell upon Dennis Falconer, for all his practical common sense; and before he could recover himself sufficiently for speech, Mrs. Romayne had crossed the room to him, attempting no greeting, swept away on a tide before which all the barriers of her life—all the safeguards, as they had seemed to her—had gone down in one common ruin.
“Dennis Falconer,” she cried hoarsely, “my boy is gone—gone! Help me to think what I must do—help me to think how I can find him! Help me! Help me!”
The words themselves were an appeal, but they rang out in that harsh, untuned voice with all the fierce peremptoriness ofa command, and as she spoke them Mrs. Romayne beat her hands one against the other, as though her agony were indeed too great to be endured. Falconer, utterly confounded—more by her manner than by her tidings, which, indeed, in his slow and bewildered sense of the extraordinarily direct communication which her words had established between herself and him, he hardly grasped—echoed the one word which seemed to contain a definite statement.
“Gone?” he said. “Gone?”
“Gone!” she returned, repeating the word as she had done before in a kind of hoarse cry. “Oh, let me try and make you understand clearly, that we may lose no time. Time! Ah! who knows how much may have been lost already? My boy! my boy!”
She strangled the cry in her very throat, and laying one hand on Falconer’s arm with a convulsive grip, as if to steady herself, she lifted the other to her head, pushing the hair back from her forehead and pressing her fingers down as though to force herself to think and speak coherently.
“I had a telegram from him,” she said,speaking in short, quick sentences with heavy, panting breaths between, “ten days ago. It said that he was going to stop in town for a few days. Yesterday I heard something that made me uneasy. I came up to speak to him late last night. I expected to find him in Queen Anne Street. He was not there. He has not been there for the last two nights. He is gone!” She stopped as though in those three words she had summed up all the horror of the situation; and with that strange sense of unreality making his voice stiff and constrained, Falconer said:
“But must you necessarily apprehend anything alarming? Some private visit, perhaps; a painful discovery, of course——”
She tore her hand away from his arm, wringing it fiercely with its fellow as she faced him, breaking in upon his words with a passionate cry.
“Apprehend! Apprehend! I know, I tell you, I know! Ah! have I been watching and fighting for so many years; have I planned and struggled and sickened with fear; not to know, now that it has overtaken me at last? Dennis Falconer, don’t palter with me.You know what lies about my boy. You know what horrible inheritance I have had to battle with for him. Good Heaven! when have you spared me your knowledge of it? When have you failed to thrust it on me, to force me to shudder and sicken even when I felt most secure?”
She paused, battling for breath; and then, as Falconer tried to speak, she put out her hand to stop him, and went on hurriedly:
“That’s all over! It’s done with! Now you must help me. Your knowledge must help me. You are a man. You will know what to do; how he can be saved! He must be saved! He must!”
She turned away from him with a wild, unconscious gesture, as though his personality had no existence for her save and except as he could serve her purpose, and began once more to pace up and down the room.
Falconer followed her with his eyes, standing motionless and confounded. The very foundation on which stood his every conception with regard to the woman before him, and the life she lived, had suddenly melted into nothingness before her passionatewords, and there seemed for the time being to be no stability anywhere about him. It was no light that her words let in upon him. Rather, they rolled over that mental tract of country which had been to him perfectly familiar and commonplace, a darkness in which every landmark was obliterated. In those first bewildered seconds his most prominent sensation was one of utter blackness—the mental counterpart of the effect produced upon the physical vision by the sudden substitution of illimitable darkness for a narrow and well-known scene.
“What do you fear?” he said. He spoke almost like an automaton, in a low, tentative tone.
“He has been speculating.” She never stopped in her rushing walk. “I have known it for months, and I have been in torment.” There was a strange, scathed look on her face which gave the words a terrible reality. “He has had some heavy anxiety on his mind all the summer—what, I don’t know. But this is the end of it. Oh, my boy, my darling, what have I done that you should shut your mother out? Ihave slaved for you! I have slaved for you, and I will slave for you as long as I live! Why have you gone away from me?”
She was not crying. To Falconer, watching her and listening to her, no tears could have been so terrible as that bitter, dry-eyed wail which seemed to him to echo in a void, where nothing answering to it could have been nurtured into life. The contrast between the artificial woman he had known hitherto, and the woman in the consuming anguish of her motherhood with whom he now found himself face to face, was so amazing that he could make no attempt to grapple with it. He took desperate and instinctive refuge in the practical.
“Do you know anything of his City associations?” he said.
She made a despairing gesture of negation.
“I did!” she said hoarsely. “I did all I knew to keep in touch with him. Two months ago Marston Loring could have told me anything. But everything failed me! Everything crumbled away! They quarrelled.”
Already, with that matter-of-fact tendencyinherent in all men—and particularly in unimaginative men—which assimilates a revelation, and reduces it involuntarily to a commonplace, Falconer had become almost accustomed to the new point of view which had been forced upon him. The darkness was lifting, and he was aware of vast tracts of mental country, destitute of those landmarks which his soul loved, but no longer enveloped in a dense atmosphere of confusion.
A man of Falconer’s narrow temperament, confirmed in his rigidity by many years of life, having his set conceptions suddenly overthrown and forcibly enlarged, will be totally incapable of any just appreciation of the new horizon then created; he will be conscious of the spaces about him only as confusing unrealities; the limitations solidified by the mental habits of years will retain some sort of ghostly influence over him long after they have ceased to have any actual existence. His first conscious and deliberate movement will be an instinctive attempt to reconcile the new condition of things with these old limitations, rather than to reconcilehimself with the new conditions. The facts which Mrs. Romayne’s words recalled to him; the character of the man whom she had encouraged as her son’s chief intimate; the character of the life to which she had bred him; gave definite force to the vague movement towards such reconciliation already stirring in Falconer’s mind. He accepted the revelation of unsuspected mother’s love and mother’s dread, and ceased to contemplate it as he concentrated his mental vision on the selfish vanity and worldliness with which Mrs. Romayne had stood endued in his thoughts for twenty years; and as his point of view readjusted itself on these lines, her present position, with all the suffering which it involved, presented itself to him solely as the inevitable climax of a simple and eminently comprehensible sequence of cause and effect.
His voice was low and stern as he said:
“Can you not think of any other friend who could give us some clue to his recent movements?”
“I can’t!” she cried, stopping in her rapid walk, and confronting him fiercely.“It is because there is no one left; because I don’t know what to do, or where to turn, that I have come to you! Should I be wasting time like this if I could think of any other means of acting? I’m tied hand and foot in the dark—tied to the rack, man! We can do nothing till we find him—till we know what has happened. Think, think, think! How are we to find him? How are we to——”
Her voice, which had risen into an agonised cry, broke suddenly; a greyish tint spread itself over her face, and all her features were contorted as if with horrible physical pain. She stretched out her hand feebly and gropingly, caught at an arm-chair, and fell into it, letting her face fall forward on its back as her nails pressed themselves pitilessly into her thin hands.
“It—it’s nothing!” she gasped, in a tight, suppressed voice, fighting desperately, as it seemed, to utter words rather than groans. “I have been ill! The night——”
The words died away, caught and strangled by the relentless, stabbing pain, and Falconer, utterly at a loss, stood for a moment helplesslywatching her, and then strode across the room meaning to call a woman to his aid. He opened the door hurriedly and then stopped short. On the shelf fixed against the wall facing him there lay his morning letters, and on the top of the pile lay one directed in Julian’s handwriting. Mrs. Romayne’s physical distress sank into insignificance for him. The physical suffering which had fallen to his lot during the past year had by no means obliterated the lifelong instinct which led him to look upon such weakness as a detail to be disregarded, and of women he knew nothing. He turned back into the room with the letter in his hand, and shutting the door again opened it hastily. It was the letter Julian had written on the previous day in his room in the Temple.