“Dear Falconer,” he read,—“I’ve done for myself all round, and by the time you get this I shall be out of England. It’s penal servitude if I stay. The smash will come in a day or two and you will understand. It’s all up with me; but there’s my wife and child—for Heaven’s sake be kind tothem. This is the address.” The address followed, and then the signature.
“Dear Falconer,” he read,—“I’ve done for myself all round, and by the time you get this I shall be out of England. It’s penal servitude if I stay. The smash will come in a day or two and you will understand. It’s all up with me; but there’s my wife and child—for Heaven’s sake be kind tothem. This is the address.” The address followed, and then the signature.
For another moment Dennis Falconer stood motionless with his eyes fixed on the letter, so despairing in its hopeless brevity, so terribly eloquent of immeasurable disgrace and wrong. Then he lifted his head and turned towards Mrs. Romayne. She had not moved, she was apparently unconscious of his presence; the tense rigidity of her position had passed into a total collapse, in which all her figure seemed to have fallen together as if in absolute exhaustion. To Falconer she presented an appearance only of most desirable quiet, and he hesitated simply as to how he should so break to her what must be broken, as to excite her least. She would have to see the letter! He glanced at it again on the thought, and a cold shock seemed to strike him as he realised the total oblivion of his mother to which the young man’s last appeal bore witness.
“I have received some news,” he said.
His tone, as he spoke, was curiously different from any in which he had everbefore addressed her. It was grave, straightforward, and not unkindly, and it very subtly—and quite unconsciously—conveyed the altered attitude of a stern and narrow moralist towards wrong-doing, no longer triumphant and serene, but writhing under its merited suffering. A certain stern compassion the new position of affairs demanded of him, and he gave it; but it was that lofty compassion which is more than half composed of a sense of the righteousness of the retribution meted out; with sympathy or respect it was utterly untouched. He was prepared to help her to the utmost; he was steady reliability itself; but his help was permeated, as was his compassion, with a superior recognition of the justice of the trouble which rendered that help necessary.
As though there was something between her and her surroundings through which his voice must penetrate before it reached her brain, a second or two elapsed before Mrs. Romayne gave any sign of having heard him. Then she moved and turned her face towards him, looking at him as though from along way off. Her forehead and the hair about it, strangely colourless and dead-looking, were damp. Grey shadows had fallen about her mouth. There was a faint struggle in her dull eyes, as though she had heard his words and was trying to force her way to an understanding of them through overwhelming physical disabilities.
“I am sorry to say it is far from reassuring,” continued Falconer.
A sudden flash of understanding and conviction flashed across her features, and its spirit dominated her weakness as its light transfigured her face. She rose, clinging to the chair, but evidently absolutely unconscious of any physical sensation, and held out her hand, still clammy and tremulous with pain.
“Give it me,” she said, indicating the letter he held. Her voice was a thin whisper. Then, as he hesitated: “You’re wasting time. Give it me.”
He gave it her without a word and turned away. It would break her down, of course, he thought; perhaps into some wild form of hysteria at the position in whichthe young man confessed himself; perhaps into passionate repudiation of the son who had so deceived her, and who was leaving her without word or sign. Moments passed, three or four perhaps, and then a tense, insistent touch fell on his arm and he turned. Mrs. Romayne was standing by his side, Julian’s letter held tightly in her hand, which trembled no longer. Her eyes were bright, almost hard in their determination, and every line and muscle of her face and figure was braced and set into a vivid strength and resolution.
“We must see this woman at once,” she said, and her voice was as strange in its desperate energy as was her face. Then, as Falconer only looked at her blankly, she added, in the same absorbed, concentrated way: “You will come with me?”
“You mean you will see——”
“I must see this woman,” she repeated, tapping the paper impatiently with her hand. “Don’t you see she will probably know where he is? She must know! Let us go at once!”
“But if she does know?”
“If she does know! Why, that is everything! I can follow him. He is frightened—he has lost his head. If he goes away like this he is lost. I am going to stop him.”
“But——”
She silenced him with a movement of her hand, before which his words died on his lips.
“Dennis Falconer,” she said, “help me or refuse to help me as you like, but don’t try to stop me. The shadow of a horror such as this has haunted me for twenty years. I bring the nerve and desperation of twenty years to meet it now, and I am going to save him. Will you come?”
Dominated against his will, sternly disapproving, but powerless to assert his disapprobation in the face of the intensity of her determination, Falconer made a slight gesture of enforced assent. Mrs. Romayne hardly waited for it before she turned and went swiftly out of the room and down the stairs.
It was early still—not yet eight o’clock—and cabs were hardly to be found. They met one at last, and Falconer put her into it andlooked at her, obviously with an intention of uttering the protest with which his face was full. She made a peremptory sign that he should give the address, holding out the letter containing it, and instantly reclaiming it. Her nerves were evidently strung beyond the possibility of irrelevant or unnecessary speech. A long drive followed to a dingy, poverty-stricken neighbourhood, and then, in a dreary-looking little street, the cab stopped. Mrs. Romayne got out with the same rapid, concentrated movements, signing again, with a movement of her set lips, to Falconer that he should ring and make the necessary enquiries. The bell was answered, after an appreciable interval, by a slatternly-looking girl.
“A young woman lodges here, I believe,” said Falconer sternly—“a young married woman. Mrs.—Mrs. Roden, or Romayne?”
The girl stared at him for a moment with bold, curious eyes, and then transferred the stare to Mrs. Romayne, with a coarse giggle.
“Young married woman?” she repeated, with a toss of the head. “Oh, yes; of course! Top floor back!”
Before the last words, which conveyed a general intimation that visitors for the top floor back were expected to show themselves up, were well uttered, Mrs. Romayne had crossed the dirty little passage with swift steps and was mounting the stairs. She went straight on until she reached the top landing, and then she turned sharply to Falconer, who had followed her closely. His judgement condemned her proceedings utterly, but his stern sense of her claim upon him remained untouched, and he believed himself to be merely waiting until her impulse should fail her, as it seemed to him it must before long, to take matters into his own hands.
“Knock!” she said.
Falconer obeyed her; the door was opened with a quiet, sad-toned “Yes?” and Clemence stood on the threshold.
She was looking very fragile and very white; the haggard look of suffering had left her, but it had taken with it in the passing all the physical strength from her face. Her eyes were heavy as with sleeplessness and tears, and from their depths there seemed to emanate the quiet grief which spoke in every lineof her face. She held her baby in her arms, and her whole personality seemed to be touched by the mysterious influence of motherhood into a new dignity and beauty. To Falconer the change in her since he had seen her in Camden Town was so great as to give him a moment’s absolute shock; it was the same woman, and yet not the same. The difference lay, for him, rather in the evidences of long suffering which spoke so eloquently about that woman’s face and form, than in the work effected by that suffering; and the feeling that the sight of her stirred in him was one of pity; a man’s half indignant, half patronising pity for weakness and trust abused.
But Falconer she did not seem to see. Instantly, as she opened the door, her eyes had passed to where Mrs. Romayne stood confronting her, her face absorbed, concentrated, hard as steel. A faint flush of colour flooded Clemence’s face; then she lowered her eyes, and stood with her head a little bent over her child, motionless.
“You are my son’s wife?”
The words came from Mrs. Romaynequick, terse, utterly untouched and unemotional, as though the situation in itself were absolutely devoid of meaning for her.
“My husband’s name is Julian Romayne,” was the low answer.
Mrs. Romayne made a quick, imperious gesture indicative of her desire to pass into the little room, on the threshold of which Clemence was standing. Clemence made way for her with quiet dignity, and then followed her in. Falconer hesitated an instant and took up his position in the doorway, holding himself in grave, attentive readiness until the moment when his presence should be required. The little room was scrupulously neat and clean. Facing him, a strangely incongruous figure amid such poor surroundings, but apparently as absolutely unconscious of them as of the child—at which she never glanced—stood Mrs. Romayne. Facing Mrs. Romayne stood Clemence, paler now than before, and with her head bent a little lower. Falconer could see that she trembled slightly. Mrs. Romayne began to speak instantly, in the same hard, rapid tone.
“Where is my son?” she said. “Youhave been told, perhaps, to say you do not know—to keep his plans secret. You must give them up instantly to me. He has made a mistake, and only prompt action can redeem it. When did you see him last? What did he tell you?”
As though some subtle influence from the one woman had penetrated to the heart of the other, Clemence’s face had turned quite white. For her, too, the personal aspect of the situation seemed suddenly to sink into abeyance. Her head was lifted, and her eyes, filled with a creeping apprehension, were fixed full upon Mrs. Romayne, oblivious of anything but the one interest which they held in common.
The man watching them was vaguely conscious of something about the two women which put him quite away from them; which made him the merest spectator of something to which he had no key.
“I saw him last night,” said Clemence, hurriedly and fearfully; “he came to say good-bye!”
A kind of hoarse cry broke from Mrs. Romayne.
“Good-bye!” she cried, as though appealing to some encircling environment of fate. “And she let him go! She let him go!” She stopped herself, forcing down her passion with an iron hand, and went on in a tone only colder and more decisive in its greater rapidity than before. “He has made a mistake; you cannot understand, of course. No doubt it seems to you that everything to be desired is comprised in the miserable subterfuge of flight. No doubt——”
She was interrupted. With a low cry of unutterable horror Clemence had drawn a step nearer to her, pressing her baby passionately to her heart.
“Flight!” she cried. “Flight! Ah, I knew! I knew there was something wrong! What is it? Oh, what is it? My dear, my dear, what have you done? What have you done?”
There was an instant’s dead silence as the cry died away and Clemence stood with her beseeching eyes dark and dilated, her uplifted face white and quivering, appealing, as it seemed, for an answer, to Julian himself. Falconer was looking straight before him, hisface set and grim, passive, not only with the natural passivity of a man in the presence of inevitable anguish, but with the involuntary self-forgetfulness of a man in the presence of a power greater than he can understand. Mrs. Romayne had paused as though stopped by some kind of hard, annoyed surprise.
Then Mrs. Romayne went on in a thin, tense voice:
“There is no time to waste over what has been done; the point is to retrieve it! He must come back at once. Where is he?”
With a sudden quick movement Clemence turned, crossed the room, and laid the child tenderly in the little cot standing by the fire. She pressed her face down for one instant to the tiny sleep-flushed cheek, and then rose and came back to Mrs. Romayne and Falconer, her face white and resolute, her eyes shining, glancing from one to the other as she spoke.
“Will there be time?” she said. “Can I get to him before he sails? There is a woman downstairs who will take care of my child. He is alone! He may be doing——Flight! What can flight do for him if he has done wrong? He doesn’t always know! I am hiswife, and I must go and help him. Will there be time?”
It was Falconer to whom her eyes finally turned, vaguely conscious of the absence of womanly sympathy, and appealing in the void for a man’s knowledge and assistance. It was Falconer who answered her. Instinctively and involuntarily he answered her directly, the current of his thoughts seeming to submit itself to hers without an impulse to resist or control her.
“Where was he going?” he said.
“To America!” was the answer, eager and low, as though life and death hung on the response it should elicit. “He was going then, he told me. That was at nine o’clock last night! Oh, if I go at once I shall be in time? I shall be in time?”
A hard, nervous irritation was disturbing the concentration of Mrs. Romayne’s face. Futile and utterly to be ignored as seemed to her any impulse on the part of the woman to whom, in the face of the terrible issues with which she stood confronted, she gave no personal consideration whatever; the introduction of such futility seemed, in thestrained, tense condition of her nerves, to involve irrelevancy and delay, which she was utterly unable to meet with any self-command. She broke in now, her voice harsh and vibrating with uncontrollable impatience.
“There is no need,” she said. “I am on my way to him now. You—there is no need for you! You can do nothing!”
“I am his wife!” said Clemence.
She did not raise her voice; no colour came to her dead, white face; only she turned to Julian’s mother, with her hands crushed tightly together against her heart, and such a light shining in her eyes as seemed to transfigure her whole face and figure. For an instant the eyes of the two women met and held one another. Then Mrs. Romayne, with a gesture which seemed to repudiate and deny the influence which nevertheless she was powerless to resist, turned to Falconer and moved swiftly towards the door. “What does it matter?” she said, in a tone of fierce impatience, which relegated Clemence to the position of the merest nonentity. “The only thing of consequence is time!”
She swept out of the room as she spoke, and Clemence turned again to Falconer, stretching out beseeching hands.
“Help me!” she said.
The movement which he had thought to guide and control so easily had passed beyond Falconer’s control, and he knew it. He could only follow it, waiting until the turn of events should throw it, as he still believed they must, upon a man’s strength and experience. But as Clemence had touched him once before against his will, she touched him now against his judgement, and he answered her in one word:
“Come!”
Throughout the terrible hours that followed; during the drive to the station, the sickening suspense, the brief interval of waiting for a train, the long journey; neither by word nor sign did Mrs. Romayne evince the slightest consciousness of Clemence’s presence. Her face, almost stony now in its set determination, never altered. After they were seated in the train she never spoke at all. She sat gazing straight before her, motionless as a statue, like a woman living only by her holdupon a moment in the future, to which each present second as it passed was bringing her nearer.
There had been no time to ascertain the probabilities as to their forestalling the sailing of the boat in which Julian had presumably intended to leave England. Falconer, while admitting to himself that the young man might have over-estimated, panic-stricken, the danger in which he had placed himself, had but faint hope that any steps other than the promotion of his speedy departure would be possible when they should be in possession of the facts; even should their arrival be in time to frustrate his original determination. But Mrs. Romayne weighed no probabilities. She looked neither to the right nor to the left. She saw before her only the climax and consummation of the struggle of twenty years, and on that consummation was concentrated her whole existence.
Theroom was very still; even the clock upon the mantelpiece was not going, so that not even a low tick disturbed the perfect quiet. It was a sitting-room in one of the Liverpool hotels, and quite alone in it was Clemence. She was sitting near the window, motionless, her hands clasped tightly together on her knee. Her face was lifted slightly towards the sky, and its calm, broken now and again by a slight quiver of the lips, was that of intense absorption. Clemence’s was one of those natures in which great mental suffering of any kind passes instinctively into unformed prayer; and she was praying now with her whole being, with no faintest consciousness of herself or her mental attitude.
She had been sitting there alone andmotionless for more than an hour, when a touch fell upon the handle of the door. She started violently, and rose involuntarily to her feet as it opened to admit Falconer. She did not speak; all her agony of questioning seemed to have passed into the eyes she fixed upon him, and into those tightly-clasped hands.
Falconer crossed the room quickly to her, and spoke as though in answer to audible words.
“I have found him!” he said. “There has been some delay. The boat will not leave until to-morrow, and till then he is here.”
A breath of unutterable relief and thanksgiving broke from Clemence’s white lips, and she let her face fall forward for a moment on her hands. Then she lifted it again, tremulous and shaken. “Is it—right—that he should go?” she said.
“It is necessary!” returned Falconer sternly. But the sternness was not for her.
A look of trouble and perplexity passed into her face; her lips were parted to speak again when a door at the other end of theroom opened sharply—not the door by which Falconer had entered, but a second, leading, presumably, into a bedroom—and Mrs. Romayne appeared. The rigidity of her self-control had given place, apparently, to a consuming fever. Her eyes were glittering, the dry skin seemed to be too tightly drawn across her sharpened features. There was no paint upon her now—no mask, less tangible but no less effective, of artificiality of expression. It was the very woman, stripped of all the trappings of her life, bearing the ravages of past struggles thick upon her, driven to bay, and braced to hold the struggle on which she was entering with the last breath in her body. She was still dressed for walking, and the contrast between the smart, somewhat youthful, apparel which she had always affected, and her face, was terrible to see.
She came straight up to Falconer, utterly unconscious, apparently, as far as feeling and realisation constitute consciousness, of Clemence’s presence. “You have found him?” she said, and the words were less a question than an assertion. “Let usgo at once. Stop, though!” she added abruptly, laying a burning hand on Falconer’s arm, as though in the haste and pressure of her own impulses she ascribed a similar impatience to him. “I had better know the facts first. What has he told you?”
Falconer hesitated. His words, when he spoke, ignored her final question, and answered the idea which vibrated behind every word of her speech. He glanced at Clemence as he began to speak as though he wished his words to apply to her also.
“I do not think,” he said, “that anything will be gained by your seeing him—except extreme distress for all concerned. I fear there is nothing to be done!”
He had spoken very firmly, as though the moment had arrived, in his estimation, for that stand on manly judgement which he had involuntarily postponed for so long; and he paused as though to accentuate the weight of his words.
Mrs. Romayne, with a gesture of irrepressible, tortured impatience, but otherwise with no recognition whatever of his having spoken, repeated her question:
“What has he told you?”
Clemence’s eyes, fixed upon Falconer’s face, dilated slightly, and then the shadow of a smile touched her parted lips.
“I fear there is no doubt that it is a bad affair,” continued Falconer. “There are forged documents connected with it, and misappropriation of money fraudulently come by; and detection seems to be inevitable. His only hope of safety lies in flight.”
As though with the very tangibility and imminence of the danger she had come forth to meet Mrs. Romayne’s spirit rose higher, the only sort of change brought to her face by the words was an intensifying of all its previous characteristics of growing courage and determination. From Clemence’s lips the little tremulous light had died, quenched in such a horror of vicarious shame, of pity, love, and anguish unspeakable, as seemed to freeze her where she stood.
“The facts! The facts!” The words came from Mrs. Romayne sharp and tense, seeming to put aside and ignore any extraneous comment or opinion.
Falconer hesitated again for a moment andscanned her face closely, absolutely unconscious of his own incapacity for reading what was written there. So far was he from an adequate conception of the realities of the situation, that he thought that a plain statement of details would crush out for ever the hope of which he was conscious in her. And he decided that such instantaneous crushing was the only mercy he could show her.
Gravely and concisely, with no unnecessary comment, he told her the whole story as he had gathered it half an hour earlier from Julian’s incoherent, despairing words. He finished and paused, holding himself braced for the outbreak of despair which he expected.
His words were followed by a dead silence. His eyes were fixed on Mrs. Romayne with a vague fear for her reason, and he felt rather than saw that Clemence had turned away and was standing with her face hidden in her hands. Mrs. Romayne’s brows had contracted as if in intense thought, and her eyes were extraordinarily bright and keen. At last, with no slightest relaxation of the intent calculationof her face, she asked one or two questions as to details of business procedure, the words coming from her sharp and distinct; questions of which Falconer, as he answered them, tried in vain to see the drift. Then she moved with a gesture of determination, so self-absorbed that it seemed to isolate her utterly.
“Take me to him at once!” she said.
A sharp exclamation broke from Falconer, and, as she moved towards the door, he followed her hastily, indescribably disturbed and confused by so entirely unexpected a course of action.
“To what purpose?” he said quickly. “I beg of you to be advised by me. The boy must go! Nothing can be gained but a parting——”
Mrs. Romayne turned upon him and faced him suddenly.
“I am here to see my son,” she said, and there was something in her voice—rather in what its intense restraint suggested than in its tones themselves—absolutely dominating and conclusive. “You came to help me. Take me to him, or tell me where to find him.”
Intensely annoyed and disapproving; keenly alive to the fear that Julian, so taken by surprise, might impute to him some definitely treacherous intention in withholding, as he had done, the fact that he was not alone; Falconer yet felt himself powerless. He had no shadow of a right to stand between mother and son. He had made his stand, and he might as effectually have opposed himself to the wind. His words, his judgement, were as nothing to her. That he should so far fail to carry into effect his conception of his duty as her escort, as to let her go alone was, of course, impossible in his eyes. He made a sternly unwilling sign to the effect that he would perforce accompany her, and then, as she passed quickly out of the room, he looked at Clemence. There was a stunned look upon her face now; she did not even glance at him in answer, but she moved mechanically, as it seemed, and like a woman walking in her sleep, and followed Mrs. Romayne.
Not one word was spoken by either of the trio until they stood, a quarter of an hour later, before a rather dingy door in a drearypassage of an unpretentious and obscure private hotel. Then Falconer spoke in a low, stern tone.
“Here!” he said, indicating the door before them.
Mrs. Romayne moved swiftly forward and turned the handle. For one instant, as the door opened, there was a vision of a dull, bare little sitting-room, touched with a strange glory by a red ray from the setting sun, which slanted right across it; and in the middle of the room, in the full light of that red ray, which fell with an almost weird effect of irradiation upon his attitude of despair, Julian sitting by the table, his head buried on his outstretched arms. For an instant only the picture was visible; then Julian turned his head sharply and sprang to his feet with a cry. His mother was advancing rapidly towards him, but it was not his mother that he saw. It was the figure behind her with the dazed white face all breaking up now into quivering lines. It was to that figure that he stretched out his hands with the hoarse, heart-broken sob:
“Clemmie! Clemmie! They’ve told you!”
Before the words were uttered, Clemence had rushed past Mrs. Romayne, and was clinging to him in such a sudden agony of sobs and tears as seemed to rend her very heart.
Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly. Falconer, who was close to her with his back to the door which he had shut swiftly on Julian’s cry, saw a spasm of pain cut across the concentration of her face for an instant; and in the flash of anger and impatience which succeeded it, she seemed to recognise Clemence’s presence practically for the first time. She fell back a step or two, waiting with contemptuous self-control, her eyes fixed upon the pair before her as they clung together, and Julian tried brokenly and despairingly to soothe the pitiful abandonment of grief with which Clemence was shaken. His own distress increased with every incoherent word of self-reproach he uttered; and it was a sense of his anguish that seemed, at last, to reach Clemence, and produce in her a woman’s instinct towards the suppression of her own pain. She disengaged herself gently, forcing back the heavy sob thattrembled on her lips, and looked from Julian towards Mrs. Romayne with a tacit recognition of his mother’s claims which was as beautiful as it was instinctive.
“You will listen!” she said in a choked, beseeching voice, “you will listen and come back!”
She turned away as she spoke, making him a sign that he should not speak to her; and as she drew away from him Mrs. Romayne advanced rapidly, every movement, every line of her face, every tone of her voice, claiming as an inalienable right her son’s attention. Her face was very hard, far harder than it had been before that spasm of pain had shaken it, and there was no touch of emotion in her hard, quick voice. She seemed to have put all sentiment deliberately aside.
“Julian,” she said, “you have made a terrible mistake! You are taking just the one false step that would be absolutely irretrievable. You must come back to town at once!”
Her manner; her voice; some influence from the long past days when her word, for all her affectation of weak indulgence, hadbeen his law; had arrested his attention almost without his own consent. He stood now looking at her; looking at her across such a gulf of ignorance, mistake, and wrong as had swallowed even that bitterness with which he had once regarded her, leaving him absolutely cold and dead to her.
“Town and I have parted company, mother!” he said. He spoke hoarsely, but the emotion in his tone was the reflex of that through which he had just passed in meeting Clemence; his manner was even callous.
“That would be true indeed,” was the quick answer, “if you had succeeded in leaving England! Not only town and you, but life and you—everything that makes life worth living—would have parted company! To go away now is to cut your own throat!”
Julian turned to Falconer.
“Haven’t you told them?” he said thickly. “Don’t they know that—that is done?”
Falconer drew a step nearer.
“Your mother knows——” he began;but Mrs. Romayne interposed, lifting her hand peremptorily without even glancing at him.
“I know everything,” she said. “I know that you are in hideous danger, and if you run away from it it is indeed all over with you. You must face it; you must defy it!”
As though in her last words she had touched and given form and life to the very core of the determination which had nerved her since she had first read Julian’s letter that morning, her voice rose as she spoke them into a ring of indomitable courage, vibrating with the very triumph of that defiance of which she spoke. Her slight, haggard physique seemed to expand, to gain in dignity and power; as the whole room seemed to fill with the magnetism of her intense resolution. There was an instant’s pause, and then an exclamation broke alike from Julian and from Falconer. Julian’s was almost derisive in its absolute repudiation of her words; Falconer’s was sternly incredulous. Clemence was standing a little apart. No sound came from her, but she lifted her face suddenly andturned it towards Mrs. Romayne. A vague horror and confusion had dawned in her eyes.
Before the annihilating words with which Falconer obviously intended to follow up his first ejaculation could be uttered, Mrs. Romayne was speaking again—in a rapid, businesslike tone now, but always with that ring of triumph behind it.
“You must come back with me to-night and take up your position as if nothing could shake it. You must fight for your credit and your social status tooth and nail. When you have lost them you have lost everything! You have not lost them yet, and no risk is too great to run for their retention.”
“Not penal servitude?” asked Julian, with a ghastly smile.
“Not penal servitude, not hanging—if that were the risk,” returned his mother passionately. “What are you better off if you escape—disgraced, ostracised, ruined beyond all hope of reclamation—than you would be in a convict’s cell? What would you have to live for—to hope for? When you have lost your position with the worldyou have lost everything. What does it matter that you go down in one wave rather than another?” She paused a moment, battling with her fierce horror and repulsion. Then she went on again in another tone, eager and decided. “But the risk is not so frightful after all,” she said. “Show it a bold front and we shall triumph over it! Now, listen to me, Julian. This other man—this man Ramsay—was the actual forger?”
She paused for an answer, and apparently the insistence of her tone forced one from Julian in spite of himself.
“As far as the actual commission of the forgery goes—yes,” he said sullenly. “But——”
“Then what is there to prove—to prove, mind—that you were a party to it?”
Julian glanced round at Clemence as if involuntarily. Then he looked recklessly back at his mother and laughed harshly.
“The facts——” he began.
His mother caught up the words.
“The facts? Yes!” she said. “But if the facts are denied? Can they be proved? If you face this meeting and say that youyourself have been deceived? Even if it should come to a prosecution there are always loopholes! With good counsel and facing it out ourselves unflinchingly, you would come through untouched! It is the only chance, Julian, and we must dare it.”
Thered glow from the setting sun had shifted a little. It fell now behind Julian and between him and Clemence, and its light seemed to isolate the mother and son, shutting them in alone together. Mrs. Romayne stood a few paces from Julian, not touching him or appealing to him, concentrating all her forces on the dominating of his weaker nature. Julian stood doggedly before her, his hands clenched, his face set. Near the window, looking across the shabby little room from which those two figures, eloquent of struggle and crisis, stood out so strangely, was Clemence; her eyes fixed upon Julian now as though life and death hung on his looks. Aloof alike from Clemence and from the mother and son, a grim spectator holding in reserve hisweight of condemnation until the upshot of the scene should declare itself, was Dennis Falconer.
For all answer, as though her ringing words had touched him so little that he found them not even worth the trouble of an articulate denial, Julian shook his head sullenly. The gesture witnessed to a heavy dead weight of dissent likely to be more difficult to act upon than the most vehement opposition, and Mrs. Romayne paused for a moment, looking at him, her lips taking a firmer line, her eyes flashing.
“You don’t realise the position,” she said. “Look at it and understand the choice before you. On the one hand is ignominy, ruin, the end of your career; to reach it you have only to give way to your nerves, to act under the influence of panic, to run away, in short. On the other hand,” she moved a step nearer to him with a tense, emphatic gesture, which seemed an outlet for some of the passionate urgency which she was keeping resolutely in hand; “on the other hand is the very reverse of all this. Social position, consideration, theprosperous life to which you have always looked forward—all this is to be retained by one bold stroke, by a little courage and resolution, and at the risk of what is by no means worse than the life which must inevitably be yours if you do not nerve yourself to run it. Julian, think what is at stake!”
Falconer’s eyes had been fixed on Mrs. Romayne, severe, inexorable in their condemnation. They travelled, now, to Julian.
Again Julian made that dull gesture of negation.
“It’s all over,” he said doggedly. “I’ve staked and lost.”
“You have not lost—yet,” his mother cried; the vibration in her voice was stronger now, and there were white patches coming and going faintly about her mouth. “You shall not lose while I can lift a hand to save you. Think!—think! It’s all before you still—happiness, success, life! You’ve only to grasp them instead of letting go. Think!”
Julian had been standing with his haggard young face averted from her, staring sullenlyat the ground. He turned upon her suddenly, his face quivering with an impotent misery of regret, his voice ringing with hopeless bitterness.
“They’re gone,” he said. “I’ve thrown them all away. I might as well be dead, that’s true enough. It might be possible to brazen it out—I don’t know, I don’t care! It wouldn’t give me anything worth having. Social position, credit, standing! What good would they be to me? I’m sick of the whole thing! I’ve done with it!”
His incoherent, hardly articulated words stopped abruptly, and he seemed to struggle fiercely for means of expression; so fiercely that the blind, impotent wrestle with the limitations of a lifetime seemed to dominate the situation for the moment, and in Mrs. Romayne’s agonised face, as she watched him, the life seemed arrested. It was as though he were groping and fighting among sensations and instincts so new to him that he had no words in his vocabulary in which to clothe them; and the effort to express them was instinct with the despair of conscious futility. He seemed to break awayat last and rush upon a wild, confused declaration which comprised all that he could grasp.
“Why should I fight for what I don’t want?” he cried hoarsely. “There’s nothing worth having now.”
“My boy!” The cry arrested Clemence, moving towards Julian with shining eyes and white, parted lips. It arrested Falconer, who had drawn nearer to Mrs. Romayne, with a desperate impulse to end the struggle by throwing into the scale, against Mrs. Romayne, the weight of his opinion. “My boy, my boy! don’t talk like that, for Heaven’s sake! For Heaven’s sake! Julian, my darling, if not for yourself, for your mother! I have lived for you. I have had no thought in life but you—to save you, to protect you, to keep you from ruin such as this! Don’t break my heart. Ah!” she broke into a low, wailing moan, wringing her hands together as her eyes fastened on his face, transfixed into an expression of blank surprise as his eyes met hers for the first time. “Don’t look like that! Julian, Julian! In all these years have you neverunderstood? Have you never understood how I have loved you?”
They were face to face, mother and son, all the artificialities and conventionalities of their lives scorched and burnt away. But between them lay that unbridgeable gulf of ignorance and wrong, and her outstretched hands appealed to him in vain. He looked at her coldly, uncertainly, as though she were a stranger to him.
Then, with one strange, gasping cry, she seemed to thrust all consciousness of herself fiercely on one side in her realisation of his great need. In the very crisis of her agony, in the very crisis as it seemed of her defeat, there came upon her a great dignity.
“My son,” she said, “there is something in your life of which you have never known—something which accident might have revealed to you at any time, but which I kept from you, hoping that fortune might favour me—as it has done—and preserve your ignorance; believing that in happiness and self-respect lay one of your safeguards, and dreading that knowledge might bringto you some sort of morbid temptation. Julian, it is the toil and struggle of twenty years that you are trampling on in throwing down your life like this. Twenty years ago your father died by his own hand—a swindler, liar, and thief. A few chance words brought home to me the possibility that some such dreadful taint might rest on you. To keep you from its awful consequence; to give you such a life as should obviate the possibility of temptation; to hedge you in with every security that money and position could create for you; to give you such a standing in the world as should leave you nothing to wish for; has been the one thought, the one motive of my life from that time until now.”
The speech—so terrible a declaration of a struggle foredoomed by its own essence to failure, a struggle in which the foe was real, the combatant in desperate earnest, and the weapons straws—trembled into an abrupt, palpitating silence, as though her feelings were too intense for speech. There was a moment’s stillness like the stillness of death; a stillness broken only byJulian’s long, laboured breaths as he stood facing her, his face blanched and frozen into an image of horror. Then he spoke.
“Is it true?” He had turned mechanically to Dennis Falconer, and the words came from him in a hoarse whisper.
Dennis Falconer was white to the lips. Far down in his nature, at the root of the rigid and conventional morality by which he lived, was a pulse which palpitated in harmony with the divine realities of life. And, as like answers to like, that pulse in him had recognised its counterpart at last, through all the cramped distortion that had concealed it for so long, beating full and strong, instinct with the throbbing life of the same great realities, in a dwarfed and darkened woman’s soul. Perfect mother love, absolute self-abnegation, let them clothe themselves in what mistaken form they may, are an earnest of ideal love and beauty, and in their presence condemnation must give place to reverence. Conscious, for the first time in his life, that he stood in the midst of that which was beyond his power to analyse or to estimate, he made noattempt at speech. He bowed his head in silence.
Julian looked at him for a moment longer, and then he turned his face once more upon his mother. As though what she saw there struck into her very heart, a cry of pity and tenderness broke from her. She moved swiftly to him, putting her arms about him, trying to draw him into her embrace as though he had been once more her little child.
“Julian!” she cried, “my boy! my boy! Try to understand—try to understand why I have told you this now! I don’t ask you to think of me—to think what such a repetition of the past as threatens me in you would be to me—a blow infinitely heavier, an agony infinitely crueller than what came upon me twenty years ago, because of the long struggle to which it would bring defeat, because of the long hope and resolution which it would take out of my heart, because of my love for you, my darling—my darling!” She was kissing his hands now passionately, with that oblivion of any other presence in the room which she had evinced throughout; and Falconer,watching her, fascinated, almost awestruck, saw her, as she went on, lift one of the young man’s hands and press it to her cheek, stroking it with a wild, nervous movement of her own thin fingers.
“But there’s a motive power for you in it, Julian! A lever for your own pride, your own strength of will. You are panic-stricken, unnerved, worn out. Danger is new to you, my darling! Look at your father’s fate—wholesale ruin, disgrace, and obloquy—and let it nerve you to turn away from it. Look down the precipice on the brink of which you are standing, and lay firm hold upon the only rope that can save you. Take your courage in both hands, and we will face the danger and conquer together. Oh, my boy, if it is a hot fire to pass through it won’t last long! It leads to safety, to firmer standing-ground, to a new lease of life!”
She was clinging to him convulsively, touching his hands, his hair, his face, as though speech alone afforded an all-insufficient outlet for her agonised beseeching. And as she spoke the last words he seized her hands in his and thrust her from him,not with any personal roughness, but rather unconsciously and involuntarily as in the very isolation of despair.
“Life!” he cried. “What can life give to me beyond what I’ve got already? I’ve got my billet! Like father like son! I’m bound for the dogs sooner or later, and I don’t care to spin out the journey. Who’s going to fight against his fate?”
“It is not fate.”
Through that little room, across and above the passion and despair that filled it, the words rang out strong and clear, and Julian turned with a convulsive start to meet them.
Clemence had come swiftly across the room and was standing beside him, facing him as he turned to her; facing Falconer, arrested in a quick movement to interpose, blindly and instinctively as it seemed, between Julian and his mother; facing Mrs. Romayne, as she stood leaning heavily on the back of a chair, her eyes strained and terrible to see, her face ghastly. All that humanity can touch of the beautiful and the inspiring; all the burning faith; the quivering personal realisation of that unseen of which each man is apart; the human love acting upon and reacted on by the divine instinct; was shining out from Clemence’s face. She paused hardly for an instant as her clear eyes, dark and deep with the intensity of her fervour, rested on Julian, as though they saw him and him only in all the world. Then her voice rang out again, sweet and full.
“There’s no such thing as fate,” she said. “Not like that! Not fate that makes us bad. There’s God, Julian! It’s trying to do right that matters; nothing else in life; and that we can all do. There’s nothing, nothing can prevent us! Oh, I don’t say”—her voice broke into a great pity and tenderness—“I don’t say that it’s not harder for some than for others. But it’s what’s hard that is best worth doing! Julian!”—she drew a step nearer to him, stretching out both her hands—“you’re looking at it wrong, dear! The things you’ve lost for good are not the things that matter. What one has, what people think of one—that’s nothing. It’s what one is, it’s oneself that’s the only thing to mind about.”
She stopped, her whole face stirred and tremulous with her conviction, and Julian,with an impulsive movement, caught her hands in his, and pressed his forehead down upon them in a blind agony of self-abasement.
“I’m a swindler, Clemmie!” he cried thickly. It was as though he had hardly taken in the full sense of her words, but was clinging to her, and confessing to her under some blunted, bewildered impetus. “A cheat and a thief all round! That’s what I am!”
“But that’s not for ever!” she cried, such love, and hope, and courage shining in her eyes as would not let her great tears fall. “You can retrieve the past! You can repent and begin again. Ah, I know, of course, that what is done can’t ever be undone! What you have done remains the same for always! But you can change! You can be different, and nothing else but you yourself matters at all! What does it matter if people think you a cheat if you are an honest man? Nothing! No more than it matters to yourself if they call you an honest man for ever, when you’re a cheat!” She paused again, but this time he did not speak; he lifted his head and drewher to him, crushing her hands against his breast, and looking into her eyes with a strange, agonised struggle towards comprehension dawning in his own.
There was a moment’s dead silence. There was that passing between Clemence and Julian which no words could have touched—the final struggle towards dominion of a man’s better nature. Falconer had fallen back. All that was narrow and conventional about his morality had shrivelled into nothingness, and stood confessed to his own consciousness for what it was. He knew that the great question now at issue was beyond the reach of his man’s practicality, and that he could only stand aside.
Mrs. Romayne was gripping heavily at the chair by which she stood; impotent, frozen despair paralysing her from head to foot, leaving alive and sentient only her eyes.
“You must go back, dear.” The words fell from Clemence’s lips tender, distinct, immutable as the laws of right and wrong. “You must take the consequences of what you’ve done, and through that pain and shame you’ll get above it to begin again.”
Julian’s lips, white now as ashes, moved stiffly.
“The consequences?” he whispered. “The consequences, Clemmie?”
“The consequences,” she replied, and in the ring of her voice, in the clasp with which her hands closed over his, was all the courage and conviction with which she sought to nerve him. “Ah, I don’t know—I don’t understand—but are there no innocent people who may suffer for your fault unless you are there to take it on yourself? Besides, how else, dear? How can you begin again without having made amends? How can you free yourself of the past without acknowledging what’s black and bad in it? And if you acknowledge what’s black and bad, how can you hesitate to take its punishment?”
And as if that struggling life in him were growing and stirring under her influence, a strange flickering light crept into Julian’s face and the struggle in his eyes grew into a faint suggestion of victory. He paused a moment, his breath coming thick and fast.
“But suppose—suppose it isn’t anygood?” His voice, tense, hardly audible, seemed to catch and strain like that of a man at the very crisis of his life. “Suppose it’s in me and I must——”
“It isn’t so!” she cried, and as she spoke she drew away from him as though carried beyond herself, beyond her womanly love for him, in that supreme declaration of the truth that was her very being. “You know it isn’t so! There is no ‘must’ except God’s ‘must’ to us that we should follow Him. There is no power can tear us from His hand unless we throw ourselves away by saying that His hand is without strength to save us. Good and evil lie before every one of us, and we must all choose. And nothing else is real and living in this life except that choice and the end to which it leads us!”
Through all the limitations of the phraseology in which her faith was clothed, the great truth which makes the mystery of humanity, the truth which words can only belittle and obscure, which lives not in words but in the silent consciousness of each man’s soul, rang out, all-penetrating and all-dominating.And as she faced him, her eyes shining, her whole face radiant, Julian caught her in his arms with a great cry.
“I will,” he cried. “Clemence, I choose. Help me! I will go back.”
She yielded to his touch, with a low sob, and as they stood clasped in one another’s arms, a shuddering moan rang through the room, and Mrs. Romayne fell heavily forward at their feet.
“Willshe suffer any more?”
On the upper landing of the hotel in which Falconer had found Julian, Clemence was standing, one hand resting on the handle of a door which she had just closed behind her, looking in the uncertain light of a flickering gas-jet into the face of the man to whom she spoke. He was a quick, capable-looking man, with a brisk, professional manner, evidently a doctor. Clemence’s face was pale and tired, as though with strain or watching, and her low voice shook a little. The doctor was drawing on his left-hand glove, and he paused to answer her.
“I should say that she would not,” he said. “It is practically over.” He gave a keen, rather curious look at Clemence and then added: “You are alone with the lady?”
“Yes,” said Clemence simply.
A long night and a long day had passed, and between Mrs. Romayne and the one absorbing passion of her life had fallen that solemn shadow before which all earthly passions pale and fade away; that solemn shadow before whose creeping touch not strength of will, not love itself, can stand. As she fell to the ground before her son she had loosed her hold perforce on all the struggle and burning resolution which was life to her; she had followed the guide whom none may resist into that valley through which every one must pass, and its mists had lifted from her no more. From that one long faint she had been brought back only to fall into another; in such total unconsciousness, which had yielded twice to intervals of physical pain terrible to see, the long hours had passed.
And in one of these spaces of blank unconsciousness Julian Romayne had seen his mother for the last time. The necessity for his departure was pressing and relentless. The meeting of the shareholders wasimminent, and that meeting he must face. He had left his mother’s room in the grey light of the early morning with a look on his face which Clemence, the only witness of that mute parting, never forgot; and he had gone away with Dennis Falconer to make those preparations for his surrender of himself to justice which were not to be delayed.
And now the day was drawing to a close. The doctor had paid his last visit, and the night was drawing on.
There was a moment’s pause after Clemence’s words. Then the doctor wished her a professional good-night, and, as he went downstairs, she turned and went back into the room.
It was a small room, the best which the hotel cared to place at the disposal of sudden illness, but somewhat dingy and ill-appointed. The gaslight, shaded from the face upon the bed, but shedding a garish light upon the rest of the room, touched nothing luxurious, nothing which its present occupant could have realised in connection with herself. Her very rings lying upon the dressing-table and flashingunder the gaslight, seemed to protest against such poor surroundings.
But the figure on the bed lay motionless, protesting never more. It lay in blank unconsciousness even when Clemence, crossing the room, stood for a moment looking down, her whole face tender and quivering, and then sank gently on her knees and pressed her lips, with a womanly gesture of infinite pity, to the pale, inanimate hand upon the bed. It was over now, practically, as the doctor, looking at that waning life from a purely physical point of view, had said—all the struggle and the dread, all the courage and the hope, the valiant ignorance of twenty years. And the face upon the pillow was the face of the vanquished—the face of one whose last vivid consciousness of earthly things had been the consciousness of failure.
For many minutes Clemence knelt there, all the feeling of her woman’s soul seeming to expend itself in that soft, mute pressure. Then she rose quietly and moved across the room to make some final preparation for the night. That done, she came back again to the bedside, and doing so she started. Theshadowy hands were moving feebly upon the counterpane. From out the grey, pinched face upon the pillow two glazed blue eyes were looking with a restless, searching movement as though in want of something. They rested upon Clemence with no recognition in them; but as her son’s wife drew nearer to her quickly and gently, Mrs. Romayne moved feebly and tried to turn her head upon the pillow, as though moved by some vague, indefinite, and far-away sense of dislike and repulsion. Her white lips moved uncertainly as she did so, and faint sounds came from between them. Clemence bent over her tenderly and tried to catch the words; and they grew gradually a little clearer.
“My boy!” the faint, uncertain voice muttered, “my little boy!”
A great wave of pity and yearning swept over Clemence, and she sank once more to her knees, fixing her eyes on the poor, worn face. Was it of any use to speak? Could her voice reach to those dim lands where the mother groped for her “little boy”?
“He will come!” she said. “He will come—by-and-by!”
As though the voice had roused her without penetrating to her brain, Mrs. Romayne moved again—that slight, feeble movement so eloquent of the extremity of weakness. Her eyes turned to Clemence with that glance of vague, unrecognising dislike.
“No,” she said, as though answering her—“no, he’s too little.” She paused, and again there was that groping movement of her hands. “His letter,” she muttered, “his letter! My dear mamma! my dear mamma!”
There was a restless distress in the glazed eyes now, and their glance tore Clemence’s heart. The feeble hands were moving painfully, and as she watched, with her tears falling fast in her impotent pity and longing to satisfy their craving, something in their movements, all unmeaning as they seemed at first, penetrated to Clemence’s understanding with one of those strange flashes of comprehension only possible under so tense a strain of sympathy. Those nerveless hands were feeling for a pocket! In an instant Clemence had risen, crossed the room, and put her hand into the pocket of the dress which Mrs. Romayne had worn. Her finger touched apaper, and she drew it out instantly. She saw that it was yellow and faded with age, and she moved quickly back with it to the bedside. The hands and the eyes were still moving, but the muttered words were audible no longer, and as Clemence put the paper gently between the thin fingers, she felt with a sudden thrill of awe that they were growing cold.
But the touch seemed to rouse Mrs. Romayne once more. Her fingers closed on the paper as if instinctively, and the restless distress died out of her eyes as she tried—vainly—to unfold the paper. Clemence put out her hand gently, and did the work for which the dying fingers had no strength, and on the dying face there dawned a pale, shadowy smile.
“Yes!” she said. “Yes! ‘My dear mamma!’ My dear mamma! Your loving—son—Julian!”
And with her son’s name on her lips, Mrs. Romayne left him behind, and passed from ignorance to knowledge.
The trial and conviction of Julian Romayne were a nine days’ wonder insociety. The people who had most readily and carelessly received the widow and son of William Romayne, asked one another with the martyred air of those whose charity has been abused and their feelings for morality outraged, what was to be expected after all of the son of such a father? The people whose feelings for morality had been outraged at the outset by Mrs. Romayne’s reappearance in London, and soothed subsequently by the simplicity of the position, observed sagely that they had always said so. Both parties were unanimous in the assertion that the young man’s life was practically at an end. He had forfeited his place in society for ever.
But Julian himself realised gradually and painfully during the years of his punishment; with the strength of a manhood attained through pain, when he went away to a new country with his wife and child; that his life had just begun.
THE END
F. M. EVANS & CO., LIMITED, PRINTERS, CRYSTAL PALACE, S.E.