A VALIANT IGNORANCE

A
VALIANT IGNORANCE

A Novel
BY
MARY ANGELA DICKENS
AUTHOR OF “CROSS CURRENTS,” “A MERE CYPHER,” ETC.

“Thy gold is brass!”
Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
London
MACMILLAN & CO.
AND NEW YORK
1894

[Chapter I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV.]

A VALIANT IGNORANCE

CHAPTER I

“My dear Mamma,

“I hope you are quite well. I am quite well, and Smut is quite well. Her tail is very fat. I hope papa is quite well. I have a box of soldiers. The captain has a horse. Uncle Richard gave them to me. There is a hole in the horse, and he sticks in tight. Auntie is quite well, and so is nurse, and so is cook.

“I am, your loving Son,
“Julian.”

It was the table d’hôte room of one of the best hotels in Nice; a large room, gay and attractive, according to its kind, as fresh paint, bright decoration, and expanse of looking-glass could make it. From end to end were ranged small tables, varying in size but uniform in the radiant spotlessness of their white cloths, and the brightness of their silver, china, or glass; and to and fro between the tables, and from the tables to the door, moved active waiters, whose one aim in life seemed to be the anticipation of the wishes of the visitors for whose pleasure alone they apparently existed.

It was early, and déjeuner proper was hardly in full swing as yet. But a good many of the tables were occupied, and a subdued hum of conversation pervaded the air; a hum compounded of the high-pitched chatter of American women and the quick, eager volubility of French tongues, backed by a less pronounced but perfectly perceptible undercurrent of German and English; the whole diversified now and then by a light laugh.

The sounds were subdued because the room was large and sparsely filled, but they were gay. The smiling alacrity of the waiters was apparently at once a symptom of, and a subtle tribute to, the humour of the hour. There were sundry strongly-marked faces here and there among the little groups; middle-aged men to whom neither ambition nor care could have been empty words; middle-aged women with lines about their faces not lightly come by; young girls with the vague desire and unrest of youth; young men with its secrets and its aspirations. But all individuality of care, anxiety, or desire seemed to be in abeyance for the time being; enjoyment—somewhat conventional, well-dressed enjoyment, of the kind that rather covers up trouble as not “the thing” than disperses it—was evidently the order of the day. It was within three days of the carnival, and the visitors who were crowding into Nice came one and all with fixedly and obviously light-hearted intention.

The link between the little letter—not little by any means in a material sense, since its capitals sprawled and staggered over a large sheet of foreign letter paper—and the smart, pleasure-seeking atmosphere of the Nice table d’hôte room, was a woman who sat at a little table by one of the open windows. And she was much more easily to be identified, arguing from her appearance and manner, with her present surroundings than with the images conjured up by the blotted letter in her hand. She was a small woman, with a very erect little figure, the trimness of which was accentuated by the conventional perfection of the dress she wore; it was not such a dress as would commend itself to the fashionable woman of to-day—at that date, eighteen hundred and seventy-two, tailor-made garments for ladies were not—but it had won a glance of respect, nevertheless, from every woman in the room in the course of the few minutes which had elapsed since its wearer had entered. Her hair was fair; very plentiful and very fashionably dressed. Her eyes were blue; her colouring pale. If she had had no other claims on a critic’s attention, no more marked characteristics, she might have been called rather pretty. She was rather pretty, as a matter of fact, but her prettiness was dwarfed, and put out of sight by the stronger influence of her manner and expression.

As she sat there reading her letter, neither moving nor speaking, she was stamped from head to foot—as far as externals went—as one of a type of woman which commands more superficial homage than perhaps any other—the woman of the world. The self-possession, the quiet, unquestioning assurance, even the superficiality of her expression in its total absence of intellectuality or emotionalism, spoke to character; the narrow character, truly, which is cognisant only of shallow waters, knows them, and reigns in them. But it was a noticeable feature about her that even this character had gone to the accentuation of the type in her. As to her age, it would have been extremely difficult to guess it from her appearance. Her face was quite unworn—evidently such emotions as she had known had gone by no means deep—and yet it was not young; there was too much knowledge of the world about it for youthfulness. As a matter of fact, she was twenty-six years old. She was sitting alone at the little table by the window, and her perfect freedom from nervousness, or even consciousness of the admiring glances cast at her, emphasized her perfect self-possession.

A waiter, smiling and assiduous even beyond the smiling assiduity with which he had waited at other tables, appeared with her breakfast, and as he arranged it on the table, she replaced the blotted letter in its envelope with a certain lingering touch that was apparently quite unconscious, and contrasted rather oddly with her self-possessed face.

The envelope was addressed in a woman’s writing to “Mrs. William Romayne, Hôtel Florian, Nice.” It was one of a pile, and she took up the others and looked them through. They all bore the same name.

“There are no letters for Mr. Romayne?” she said to the waiter carelessly.

The voice was rather thin, and, as would have been expected from her face, slightly unsympathetic, but it was refined and well modulated. Her French was excellent.

The waiter thus questioned showed a letter—a business-like looking letter in a blue envelope—which he had brought in on his tray; and presented it with a torrent of explanation and apology. It had arrived last night, before the arrival of monsieur and madame, and with unheard-of carelessness, but with quite amazing carelessness indeed, it had been placed in a private sitting-room ordered by another English monsieur, who had arrived only this morning. By the valet of this English monsieur it had been given to the waiter this moment only; by the waiter it was now given to madame with ten million desolations that such an accident should have occurred. Monsieur had seemed so anxious for letters on his arrival! If madame would have the goodness to explain!

Madame stopped the flood of protestations with a little gesture. However it might affect monsieur, the accident did not appear to disturb her greatly. Indeed, it was inconceivable that she should be easily ruffled.

“Let Mr. Romayne have the letter at once,” she said, “and send him also a cup of coffee and an English newspaper!”

The waiter signified his readiness to do her bidding with the greatest alacrity, took the letter from her with an apologetic bow, laid by her side a newspaper for madame’s own reading, as he said, and retired. Left once more alone, madame proceeded to breakfast in a dainty, leisurely fashion, ignoring the newspaper for the present, and drawing from the envelope in which she had replaced the childish little epistle, a second letter. It was a long one, and she read it placidly as she went on with her breakfast.

“My dear Hermia,” it ran, “Julian has just accomplished the enclosed with a great deal of pride and excitement. The wild scrawls that occur here and there were the result of imperative demands on his part to be allowed to write ‘all by himself’! The dear pet is very well, and grows sweeter every day, I believe. You were to meet Mr. Romayne at Mentone, on the second, I think he said, and to go on to Nice the next day, so I hope you will get this soon after you arrive there. I hope the change will do Mr. Romayne good. He came here to see Julian yesterday, and I did not think him looking well, nor did father. He only laughed when father told him so. We were so glad to get your last letter. You are not a very good correspondent, are you? But, of course, you were going out a great deal in Paris and had not much time for writing. You seem to have had a delightful time there.

“Dennis Falconer came back last week. He has been away nearly a year, you know. He is very brown, and has a long beard, which is rather becoming. The Royal Geographical are beginning to think rather highly of him, father is told, and he will probably get something important to do before long. Father wanted him to come and stay here, but he has gone back to his old chambers. Not very cousinly of him, I think!

“You don’t say whether you are coming to London for the season? I asked Mr. Romayne, but he said he did not know what your plans were. I do so hope you will come, though I am afraid I should not be pleased if the spirit should move you to settle down in England and demand Julian! However, I suppose that is not very likely?

“With much love, dear Hermia,
“Your very affectionate Cousin,
“Frances Falconer.”

Mrs. Romayne finished the letter, which she had read with leisurely calm, as though her interest in it was by no means of a thrilling nature, and then opened and glanced through, the others which were waiting their turn. They were of various natures; one or two came from villas about Nice, and consisted of more or less pressing invitations; one was from a well-known leader of society in Rome—a long, chatty letter, which the recipient read with evident amusement and interest. There were also one or two bills, at which Mrs. Romayne glanced with the composure of a woman with whom money is plentiful.

Breakfast and correspondence were alike disposed of at last, and by this time the room was nearly full. The laughter and talk was louder now, the atmosphere of gaiety was more accentuated. Outside in the sunshine in the public gardens a band was playing. Mrs. Romayne was alone, it is true, and her voice consequently added nothing to the pervading note, but her presence, solitary as it was, was no jarring element. She was not lonely; her solitude was evidently an affair of the moment merely; she was absolutely in touch with the spirit of the hour, and no laughing, excited girl there witnessed more eloquently or more unconsciously to the all-pervading dominion of the pleasures of life than did the self-possessed looking little woman, to whom its pleasures were also its businesses—the only businesses she knew.

She had gathered her letters together, and was rising from her seat with a certain amount of indecision in her face, when a waiter entered the room and came up to her. “Some ladies wishing to see madame were in the salon,” he said, and he handed her as he spoke a visiting-card bearing the name, “Lady Cloughton.” Underneath the name was written in pencil, “An unconscionable hour to invade you, but we are going this afternoon to La Turbie, and we hope we may perhaps persuade you to join us.”

“The ladies are in the salon, you say?” said Mrs. Romayne, glancing up with the careless satisfaction of a woman to whom the turn of events usually does bring satisfaction; perhaps because her demands and her experience are alike of the most superficial description.

“In the salon, madame,” returned the waiter. “Three ladies and two gentlemen.”

He was conducting her obsequiously across the room as he spoke, and a moment later he opened the door of the salon and stood aside to let her pass in.

A little well-bred clamour ensued upon her entrance; greetings, questions and answers as between acquaintances who had not met for some time, and met now with a pleasure which seemed rather part and parcel of the gaiety to which the atmosphere of the dining-room had witnessed than an affair of the feelings. All Mrs. Romayne’s five visitors were apparently under five-and-thirty, the eldest being a man of perhaps three or four-and-thirty, addressed by Mrs. Romayne as Lord Cloughton; the youngest a pretty girl who was introduced by the leader of the party, presumably Lady Cloughton, herself quite a young woman, as “my little sister.” They were all well-dressed; they were all apparently in the best possible spirits, and bent upon enjoyment; and gay little laughs interspersed the chatter, incessantly breaking from one or the other on little or no apparent provocation. Eventually Lady Cloughton’s voice detached itself and went on alone.

“We heard you were here,” she said, “from a man who is staying here. We are at the Français, you know. And we said at once, ‘Supposing Mrs. Romayne is not engaged for to-morrow’—so many people don’t come, you see, until the day before the carnival, and consequently, of course, one has fewer friends and fewer engagements, and this week is not so full, don’t you know—‘supposing she has no engagement for to-morrow,’ we said, ‘how pleasant it would be if she would come with us to La Turbie.’ We have to make Mr. Romayne’s acquaintance, you know. So charmed to have the opportunity! I hope he is well?”

“Fairly well, thanks,” replied his wife. “He has been in London all the winter—his business always seems to take him to the wrong place at the wrong time—and either the climate or his work seems to have knocked him up a little. He seems to have got into a shocking habit of sitting up all night and staying in bed all day. At least he has acted on that principle during the week we have been together. He is actually not up yet.”

Mrs. Romayne smiled as she spoke; her husband’s “shocking habits” apparently sat very lightly on her; in fact, there was something singularly disengaged and impersonal in her manner of speaking of him, altogether. Her visitor received her smile with a pretty little unmeaning laugh, and went on with much superficial eagerness:

“He may, perhaps, be up in time for our expedition, though! We thought of starting in about two hours’ time. They say the place is perfectly beautiful at this time of year. Perhaps you know it.”

“No,” returned Mrs. Romayne. “Oddly enough I have never been to Nice before. I have often talked of wintering here, but I have always eventually gone somewhere else! Are you here for the first time?” she added, turning to the young man, whom she had received as Mr. Allan, and who evidently occupied the position of mutual acquaintance between herself and her other visitors. He was answering her in the affirmative when Lord Cloughton struck in with a cheery laugh.

“He’s been here two days, and he has come to the conclusion that Nice is a beastly hole, Mrs. Romayne!” he said. “This afternoon’s expedition is really a device on our part for cheering him up. He let himself be persuaded into putting some money into a new bank, and the new bank has smashed. Have you seen the papers? Now, Allan hasn’t lost much, fortunately; it isn’t that that weighs upon him. But he is oppressed by a sense of his own imbecility, aren’t you, old fellow?”

The young man laughed, freely enough.

“Perhaps I am,” he said. “So would you be, Cloughton, wouldn’t he, Mrs. Romayne? And don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same, because any fellow would, in my place. However, if Mrs. Romayne is more likely to join us this afternoon if the proceedings are presented to her in the light of a charity, I’m quite willing to pose as an object! Take pity on me, Mrs. Romayne, do!”

“I shan’t pity you,” answered Mrs. Romayne lightly. “You don’t seem to me to be much depressed, and your misfortunes appear to be of your own making. But I shall be delighted to go with you this afternoon,” she continued, turning to Lady Cloughton. “And I feel sure that Mr. Romayne will also be delighted.”

“That is quite charming of you!” exclaimed Lady Cloughton, rising as she spoke. “Well, then, I think if we were to call for you—yes, we will call for you in two hours from now. So glad you can come! The little boy quite well? So glad. In two hours, then! Au revoir.”

There was a flutter of departure, a chorus of bright, meaningless, last words, and Mrs. Romayne stood at the head of the great staircase, waving her hand in farewell as her visitors, with a last backward glance and parting smiles and gestures, disappeared from view. She stood a moment watching some people in the hall below, whose appearance had struck her at dinner on the previous evening, and as she looked idly at them she saw a man come in—an Englishman, evidently just off a journey, and “not a gentleman” as she decided absently—and go up to a waiter who was standing in the dining-room doorway. The Englishman evidently asked a question and then another and another, and finally the waiter glanced up the stairs to where Mrs. Romayne stood carelessly watching, and obviously pointed her out to his interlocutor, asking a question in his turn. The Englishman, after looking quickly in Mrs. Romayne’s direction, shook his head in answer and walked into the dining-room.

With a vague feeling of surprise and curiosity Mrs. Romayne turned and moved away. She retraced her steps, evidently intending to go upstairs, but as she passed the open door of the drawing-room she hesitated; her eyes caught by the bright prospect visible through the open windows which looked out over the public gardens and the blue Mediterranean; her ears caught by the sounds from the band still playing outside. She re-entered the room, crossed to the window and stood there, looking out with inattentive pleasure, the dialogue she had witnessed in the hall quite forgotten as she thought of her own affairs. She thought of the immediate prospects of the next few weeks; wholly satisfactory prospects they were, to judge from her expression. She thought of the letters she had received that morning, mentally answering the invitations she had received. She thought of the acquaintances who had just left her, and of the engagement she had made for that afternoon; and then, as if the necessity for seeing her husband on the subject had by this means become freshly present to her, she turned away from the window and went out of the room and up the staircase. On her way she chanced to glance down into the hall and noticed the Englishman to whom the waiter had pointed her out, leaning in a reposeful and eminently stationary attitude against the entrance. She would ask who he was, she resolved idly. She went on until she came to a door at the end of a long corridor, outside which stood a dainty little pair of walking shoes and a pair of man’s boots. She glanced at them and lifted her eyebrows slightly—a characteristic gesture—and then opened the door.

It led into a little dressing-room, from which another doorway on the left led, evidently, into a larger room beyond. The glimpse of the latter afforded by the partly open door showed it dim and dark by contrast with the light outside; apparently the blind was but slightly raised. There was no sunshine in the dressing-room, either, though it was light enough; and as Mrs. Romayne went in and shut the door she seemed to pass into a silence that was almost oppressive. The band, the strains of which had reached her at the very threshold, was not audible in the room; in shutting the door she seemed to shut out all external sounds, and within the room was absolute stillness.

The contrast, however, made no impression whatever upon Mrs. Romayne. She was by no means sensitive, evidently, to such subtle influence. She glanced carelessly through the doorway into the dim vista of the bedroom beyond, and going to the other end of the dressing-room knelt down by a portmanteau, and began to search in it with the uncertainty of a woman whose packing is done for her by a maid. She found what she wanted; sundry dainty adjuncts to out-of-door attire, one of which, a large lace sunshade, required a little attention. She took up an elaborate little case for work implements that lay on the table, and selected a needle and thread, and a thimble; and perhaps the dead silence about her oppressed her a little, unconsciously to herself, for she hummed as she did so a bar or two of the waltz she had shut out as she shut the door. Then with the needle moving deftly to and fro in her white, well-shaped hands, she moved down the dressing-room, and standing in the light for the sake of her work, she spoke through the doorway into the still, dark bedroom.

“The Cloughtons have been here, William,” she said. “The people I met in Rome this winter; I think I told you, didn’t I? They wanted us to go to La Turbie with them this afternoon, and I said we would. That is to say, I only answered conditionally for you, of course. Will you go?”

There was no answer, no sound of any kind. Not so much as a stir or a rustle to indicate that the sleep of the man hidden in the dimness beyond—and only sleep surely could account for his silence—was even broken by the words addressed to him. Yet the voice which proceeded from the serene, well-appointed little figure standing in the sombre light of the dressing-room, with its attention more or less given to the trivial work in its hands, was penetrating in its quality, though not loud.

Mrs. Romayne paused a moment, listening. Then, with that expressive movement of her eyebrows, she went back again to the dressing-table she had left, took up a little pair of scissors which were necessary to give the finishing touch to her work, gave that finishing touch with careless deliberation, studied the effect with satisfaction, and then laid down the sunshade, and returned to the doorway into the bedroom. She stood on the threshold this time, and the darkness before her and the sombre light behind her seemed to meet upon her figure; the silence and stillness all about her seemed to claim even the space she occupied.

“William!” she said crisply. “William!”

Again there was no answer; no sound or stir of any sort or kind. And for the first time the silence seemed to strike her. She moved quickly forward into the dimness.

“William! Are you asleep——”

Her eyes had fallen on the bed, and she stopped suddenly. For it was empty. She paused an instant, and in that instant the silence seemed to rise and dominate the atmosphere as with a grim and mighty presence, before which everything shallow or superficial sank into insignificance. All that was typical and conventional about the woman standing in the midst of the stillness, arrested by she knew not what, suddenly seemed to stand out jarring and incongruous, as though unreality had been met and touched into self-revelation by a great reality. Then it subsided altogether, and only the simplest elements of womanhood were left—the womanhood common to the peasant and the princess—as the wife took two or three quick steps forward. She turned the corner of the bed that hid the greater part of the room from her, and then staggered back with a sharp cry. At her feet, partly dressed, there lay the figure of the man to whom she had been talking; his right hand, dropped straight by his side, clenched a revolver; his face—a handsome face probably an hour ago—was white and fixed; his eyes were glassy. On the floor beside him lay an open letter—a letter written on blue paper.

William Romayne was asleep indeed. His wife might tear at the bell-rope; the hotel servants might hurry and rush to and fro; even the recently-arrived Englishman might render his assistance. But it was all in vain. William Romayne was beyond their reach.

CHAPTER II

The long railway journey from Paris to Nice was nearly over. The passengers, jaded and tired out, for the most part, after a night in the train, were beginning to rouse to a languid interest in the landscape; to become aware that dawn and the uncomfortable and unfamiliar early day had some time since given place to a fuller and maturer light; and to consult their watches, reminding themselves—or one another, as the case might be—that they were due at Nice at twelve-fifteen.

Alone in one of the first-class carriages was a passenger who had accepted the situation with the most matter-of-fact indifference from first to last. He had made his arrangements for the night, with the skill and deliberation of an experienced traveller; and as the morning advanced he had composed himself, as comfortably as circumstances permitted, in a corner of his carriage, now and then casting a keen, comprehensive glance at the country through which he was being carried. These glances, however, were evidently instinctive and almost unconscious. For the most part he gazed straight before him with a preoccupied frown and a grave and anxious expression in marked contrast with his physical imperturbability. He was a man of apparently three or four-and-thirty; tall; rather lean than thin; and very muscular-looking. His face, and the right hand from which he had pulled off the glove, were bronzed a deep red-brown, and he wore a long brown beard; but he was not otherwise remarkable-looking. His eyes, indeed, were very keen and steady, but the rest of his face conveyed the impression that he owed these characteristics rather to trained habits of material observation than to general intellectual depths; the mouth was firm and strong, but neither sensitive nor sympathetic, and the straight, well-cut nose was as distinctly too thin as the rather high forehead was too narrow. On a much-worn travelling-bag on the seat beside him, was the name Dennis Falconer.

The train steamed slowly into the station at Nice at last; the traveller stepped out on to the platform, and the shade of grave preoccupation which had touched him seemed to descend on him more heavily and all-absorbingly as he did so. He was walking down the platform, looking neither to the right nor the left, when he was stopped by a quick exclamation from a little wiry man with a shrewd, clever face who had just come into the station.

“Falconer, as I’m alive,” he cried. “Well met, my boy!”

The gravity of the younger man’s face relaxed for the moment into a smile of well-pleased astonishment.

“Dr. Aston!” he exclaimed. “Why, I was thinking of looking you up in London! I’d no idea you were abroad!”

The other man laughed, a very pleasant, jovial laugh.

“I’m taking a holiday,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve any particular right to it! But I don’t know these places, and I took it into my head that I should like to have a look at a carnival in Nice. And you, my boy? Just back from Africa, you are, I know. You’ve come for the carnival by way of a change, eh?”

Falconer’s face altered.

“No!” he said gravely, and with a good deal of restraint. “I’ve not come for pleasure. Very much the reverse, I’m sorry to say.”

He paused, apparently intending to say no more on the subject. But the keen, kindly interest in his hearer’s face, or something magnetic about the man, influenced him in spite of himself.

“I don’t know whether the facts about this bank business are known here yet,” he said, “but if they are you’ll understand, Aston, when I tell you that I and my old uncle are the only male relations of William Romayne’s wife.”

A quick flash of grave intelligence passed across Dr. Aston’s face. He hesitated, and glanced dubiously at the younger man.

“When did you leave London?” he said abruptly.

“Yesterday morning,” was the somewhat surprised reply.

“You’ve come in good time, my boy,” said Dr. Aston very gravely. “Mrs. Romayne wants a relation with her if ever she did in her life. Was her husband ever a friend of yours, Dennis?”

“I have never met him. I know very little even of his wife. What is it, doctor?”

“William Romayne shot himself yesterday morning!”

A short, sharp exclamation broke from Falconer, and then there was a moment’s total silence between the two men as the sudden, unspeakable horror in Falconer’s face resolved itself into a shocked, almost awestruck gravity.

“I am thankful to have met you,” he said at last in a low, stern voice; “and I am more than thankful that I came.”

He held out his hand as he spoke, as though what he had heard impelled him to go on his way, and Dr. Aston wrung it with warm sympathy.

“We shall meet again,” he said. “Let me know if I can be of any use. I am staying at the Français.”

Grave and stern, but not apparently shaken or rendered nervous by the news he had heard, or by the prospect of the meeting before him, as a sympathetic or emotional man must have been, Dennis Falconer strode out of the station. Grave and stern he reached his destination, and enquired for Mrs. Romayne. His question was answered by the proprietor himself, supplemented by half-audible ejaculations from attendant waiters, in a tone in which sympathetic interest, familiarity, and even a certain amount of resentment were inextricably blended.

Monsieur would see Madame Romayne—cette pauvre madame, of a demeanour so beautiful, yes, even in these frightful circumstances, so beautiful and so distinguished? Monsieur had but just arrived from England—monsieur had then perhaps not heard? Monsieur was aware? He was a kinsman of madame? Monsieur would then doubtless appreciate the so great inconvenience occasioned, the hardly-to-be-reckoned damage sustained by one of the first hotels in Nice, by the event? Monsieur would see madame at once? But yes, madame was visible. There was, in fact, a monsieur with her even now—an English monsieur from the English Scotland Yard. Madame had sent—— But monsieur was indeed in haste.

Monsieur left no possibility of doubt on that score. The waiter, told off by a wave of the proprietor’s hand on the vigorous demonstration to that effect evoked by the mention of the monsieur from Scotland Yard, had to hasten his usual pace considerably to keep ahead of those quick, firm footsteps, and it was almost breathlessly that he at last threw open a door at the end of a long corridor.

“Mr. Romayne’s name is public property in connection with the affair, then, in London, since yesterday morning?”

The words, spoken in a hard, thin, woman’s voice, came to Falconer’s ear as the door opened; and the waiter’s announcement, “A kinsman of madame,” passed unheeded as he moved hastily forward into the room.

It was a small private sitting-room, evidently by no means the best in the hotel. With his back to the door stood a young man in an attitude of professional calm, rather belied by a certain nervous fingering of the hat he held, which seemed to say that he found his position a somewhat embarrassing one. Facing him, and indirectly facing the door, stood Mrs. Romayne.

She was dressed in black from head to foot, but the gown she wore was one that she had had in her wardrobe—very fashionably made, with no trace of mourning about it other than its hue.

Emphasized, perhaps, by the incongruity of her conventional smartness, but a result of the past twenty-four hours independent of any such emphasis, all the more salient points of her demeanour of the day before seemed to be accentuated into hardness. Her perfect self-possession, as she faced the young man before her—it was the man she had noticed on the previous morning questioning the waiter—was hard; her perfect freedom from any touch of emotion or agitation was hard; her face, a little sharpened and haggard, and reddened slightly about the eyelids, apparently rather from want of sleep than from tears, was very hard; her eyes, brighter than usual, and her rather thin mouth, were eloquent of bitterness, rather than desolation, of spirit.

She turned quickly towards the door as Falconer entered, and looked at him for an instant with an unrecognising stare. Then, as he advanced to her without speaking, and with outstretched hand, something that was almost a spasm of comprehension passed across her face, settling into a stiff little society smile.

“It is Dennis Falconer, isn’t it?” she said, holding out her hand to him. “I ought to have known you at once. I am very glad to see you.”

“My uncle thought—— We decided yesterday morning——”

Dennis Falconer hesitated and stopped. He was thrown out of his reckoning, taken hopelessly aback, as it were, by something so entirely unlike what he had expected as was her whole bearing; though, indeed, he had been quite unconscious of expecting anything. But Mrs. Romayne remained completely mistress of the situation.

“It is very kind of you,” she said, with the same hard composure. “It was very kind of my uncle.” She hesitated, hardly perceptibly, and then said, the lines about her mouth growing more bitter, “You have heard?”

Falconer bowed his head in assent, and she turned toward the young man, who had drawn a little apart during this colloquy.

“This gentleman comes from Scotland Yard,” she said. “Perhaps you will be so kind as to go into matters with him. I do not understand business or legal details. Mr. Falconer will represent me,” she added to the young man, who bowed with an alacrity that suggested, as did his glance at Falconer, that the prospect of conferring with a man rather than a woman was a distinct relief to him. Then, before Falconer’s not very rapid mind had adjusted itself to the situation, she had bowed slightly to the young man and left the room.

CHAPTER III

Three days before, the name of William Romayne had been widely known and respected throughout Europe as the name of a successful and distinguished financier. Now, it was the centre of a nine-days’ wonder as the name of a master swindler, detected.

A bank, established in London within the last twelve months in connection with a company offering an exceptionally high rate of interest, had suddenly suspended payment. The circumstances were so ordinary, and the explanation offered so plausible, that at first no suspicion of underhand dealings presented itself. It was in connection with the first whispers—which ran like wildfire through financial London—of something beneath the surface, that it first became known that William Romayne had some connection, as yet undefined by rumour, with the bank in question; a fact hitherto quite unknown. The whispers grew with rapidity which was almost incredible even to the whisperers, into a definite and authentic shout of accusation; and with the exposure of an outline of such daring and ingenious fraud as had not been perpetrated for many a day, another fact had become public property. The exposure had been brought about by an incredibly short-sighted blunder on the part of the master mind by which the whole affair had been conceived. William Romayne’s was the master mind, and William Romayne, in trying to overreach alike his dupes and his confederates, had overreached himself. His own hand had created the clue which had led eventually to the ruin of the scheme he had originated. His death, with the news of which the London Stock Exchange was ringing only a few hours after it was known in Nice, was the forfeit paid by a strong nature to which success in all its undertakings was the very salt of life.

Mrs. Romayne, on leaving the sitting-room, passed along the passages to her own room—not that which she had entered twenty-four hours before to consult with her husband as to the pleasure expedition of the afternoon—her face and manner altering not at all. Her composure was evidently neither forced nor unreal. The emotion created in her by the tragic circumstances through which she was living was obviously not the heartbroken shame and despair naturally to be attributed to a wife so situated, but a bitter and burning resentment. Had William Romayne passed away in the ordinary course of nature, or by any violent accident, his widow would have mourned him with conventional lamentation and with a certain amount of genuine regret. He had committed suicide, as the letter lying by his side revealed to his wife even while she hardly realised that he was indeed dead, as his only way of escape from the consequences of fraud on the brink of detection; and his widow’s attitude to his memory under these circumstances was the natural outcome of the character of their married life.

Hermia Stirling at nineteen had been a pretty, practical, matter-of-fact girl, with her rather shallow nature somewhat prematurely matured. She had been an orphan from her babyhood, and having no near relations in England, her nineteen years of life had been lived under varied auspices, resulting in more desultory education, moral as well as mental, than was good for her. The most impressionable of those years, however—those from fourteen to nineteen—had been passed with connections of her mother’s, young and wealthy society women, with no ideas beyond society life, and with little perceptible principle but that of social expediency. Hermia was just nineteen, just out, and taking to the life before her with the ease and zest of a born woman of the world, when one of these ladies died, and the other married and went away to America with her husband. At this juncture the girl’s guardian, her father’s only brother, returned from India to settle in London with his only child, a girl two years older than Hermia; and it was obvious that his home must be also Hermia’s. But neither old Mr. Falconer nor his daughter had the slightest taste or capacity for fashionable life, and before she had spent six months with them the world had become to Hermia an insufferably dull and tiresome place.

She had known William Romayne in society. He was rich, he was handsome, and he was very popular; there was that indefinable something about him, manner, magnetism, or tact, which constitutes a kind of dominating charm. He was not the less “somebody” in that he was vaguely understood to be a business man of some sort, with dealings in shares and stocks all over the world—a locality which lent a picturesque haziness to his affairs. Consequently, when he followed Hermia into her new life and asked her to marry him, she passed over the fact that he was five-and-twenty years her senior, and consented with the practical promptitude of a nature for which romance and sentiment were not. For eighteen months she and her husband had lived in a large house in Eaton Square, entertaining and being entertained through two brilliant seasons, which took away any girlishness which Hermia had ever possessed, and gave her qualities which she admired infinitely more. She found her husband very pleasant, very easy to live with, and, after the first six months, quite unexacting. His business took him into the City every day at this time, though, as his wife said, complacently, he was not the least like the ordinary City man; but at the end of the season which followed on the birth of their child he announced that he would have to spend certainly six months, possibly more, in America.

He showed no ardent desire to take his wife with him, and his wife had no desire whatever to go. She wanted to spend the rest of the summer at one of the fashionable health resorts, and to winter in Rome. Such an arrangement was accordingly made between them in the simplest, most matter-of-fact way, arguing no shadow of ill-will on either side; and during the four years which had elapsed since then, husband and wife had each gone his or her own way, meeting when occasion served for a month or two at a time, now in London, now in Paris, now in Rome; and presumably finding the arrangement mutually satisfactory. The little boy had been left for the most part to the care of Mrs. Romayne’s cousin, Frances Falconer. Mrs. Romayne regarded him with the careless, half-dormant affection of a woman to whom her child owes nothing but bare life; to whom its arrival in the world has been rather a tiresome interlude, merely, in her round of pleasures and pursuits; who has had no time since, and has seen no occasion to make time, to give it that care which other people, as it seemed to her, could give it quite as well as she; and who is waiting, vaguely, until it shall be “grown up,” to find it interesting.

That her husband’s “business” had taken him in the course of those four years into every corner of the globe where the passing of money from hand to hand is elevated into a science, Mrs. Romayne knew; and with that fact her knowledge of his affairs began and ended. He made her an ample allowance; whenever they met she found him the same handsome, rather callous, but withal fascinating man; clever with a cleverness which she could appreciate—the cleverness which made money, and held a position in society—and she had asked nothing more of him. Her regard for him, if regard that could be called which was more truly indifference, had been founded on appreciation of his success. Before failure, before the social disgrace which must be the lot of a detected swindler and suicide, it disappeared totally and instantaneously, to be replaced by a burning sense of personal outrage and insult.

It was late in the afternoon before she left her room again. Dennis Falconer received a message to the effect that Mrs. Romayne was sure that he must be tired, and begged that he would not think of her until he had lunched and rested.

When she did reappear she was in widow’s weeds, and the contrast between her dress, with its tragic significance of desolation, and her face, untouched with feeling, was inexpressible.

Dennis Falconer was in the sitting-room when she entered it. His sense of duty was largely developed, and he was also keenly sensible of the moral aspect of the affair with which he was brought into such close contact. The first of these senses kept him in waiting in anticipation of the appearance of the woman for whose assistance he was there; and the second weighed so heavily upon him that the publicity of the hotel smoking-room would have been intolerable to him under the circumstances.

He rose quickly as Mrs. Romayne came in, a look of slight constraint on his face.

Dennis Falconer had no near relation, and perhaps this absence of close ties to England had had something to do with his adoption of the life of a traveller and explorer in connection with the Royal Geographical Society. Old Mr. Falconer, Mrs. Romayne’s uncle, was his second cousin only, though the younger man had been brought up to address him as uncle; but in so small a clan distant relationship counts for more than in a family where first cousins and brothers and sisters abound, and there was nothing strange to Dennis Falconer or to Mrs. Romayne in the fact of his coming to her support, even though they hardly knew one another. But Falconer had been chilled and even repelled by her manner of the morning, and he was very conscious now of having his cousin’s acquaintance to make, and of approaching the process with a vague prejudice against her in his mind.

This prejudice was not dissipated by her first words, spoken with a suavity somewhat low in pitch, truly, but with a tacit ignoring of the significance of their meeting which seemed to the man she addressed—to whom society life with its obligations and conventionalities was practically an unknown quantity—simply jarring and unsuitable.

“I hope you are rested!” she said. “I suppose, though, that to such a traveller as you are, the journey from London to Nice is nothing. I hear from Frances constantly about your exploits, and she tells me that we are to expect great things of you. What a long time it is since we met!”

She sat down as she spoke, with a hard little smile, and Falconer murmured something almost unintelligible. Thinking that his manner arose from mere embarrassment, instinct dictated to her to set him at his ease; and with no faintest comprehension of his attitude of mind she proceeded to chat to him about his own affairs, asking him questions which elicited coherent answers indeed, but answers which grew terser and sterner until she thought indifferently that her cousin was a rather heavy person. At last there came a pause; a pause during which Falconer gazed grimly and uncomfortably at the floor. And when Mrs. Romayne broke it, it was with a different tone and manner, hard and matter-of-fact.

“The detective told you more than he told me, possibly,” she said. “If there is anything more for me to hear, I should like to hear it. You had better, I think, read this letter. Mr. Romayne received it yesterday morning.”

She handed him that letter written on blue paper which had lain by the dead man’s side, and Falconer took it in silence.

The letter was from one of William Romayne’s confederates. It was the desperate letter of a desperate man who knew himself to be addressing the man to whom he was to owe ruin and disgrace. The crisis had evidently been so wholly unexpected that detection was actually imminent before the criminals recognised it as even possible. The gist of the letter was contained in the statement that before it met the eyes of the man for whom it was intended, the whole scheme would be exploded.

Falconer read it through, his face very stern. He finished it and refolded it, still in silence, and Mrs. Romayne said in a dry, thin voice:

“It bears out, as you see, what the detective no doubt told you—that there was so little ground for suspicion three days ago that he was sent out merely to watch, and without even a warrant. He found a telegram waiting for him here from his authorities yesterday morning.”

“He told me so!” answered Falconer distantly and constrainedly, handing her back the letter as he spoke without comment.

“There is not the faintest possibility of hushing it up, I conclude?” she asked, in the same hard voice.

Falconer looked at her for a moment, the indefinite disapprobation of her, which had been growing in him almost with every word she said, taking form in his face in a distinct expression of reprobation.

“Not the faintest!” he said emphatically. “Nor do I see that such a possibility is in any way to be desired.”

She glanced at him with a quick movement of her eyebrows. She did not speak, however, and a silence ensued between them; one of those uncomfortable silences eloquent of conscious want of sympathy. It was broken this time by Falconer, who spoke with formal politeness and restraint.

“You will wish to get away from this place as soon as possible, no doubt,” he said. “There may be some slight delay before we are put into possession of the papers and other effects at present in the hands of the authorities here. But I will, of course, do all I can to hasten matters.”

“Thanks!” she said. “The papers? Oh, you mean Mr. Romayne’s papers! Are there any, do you think? A will, I suppose?”

“The will, if there is one, will be so much waste paper, I fear,” said Falconer with uncompromising sternness. “There is no chance of any property being saved, even if it was possible to wish for such a thing. But there may be papers, nevertheless; in fact, no doubt there must be; and you will, of course, wish to have them.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Romayne thoughtfully; “yes, of course.” She paused a moment, and then added in a dry, constrained voice: “Do you mean me to understand that I am absolutely penniless?”

“Was your own money in your own hands, or in Mr. Romayne’s?”

“In Mr. Romayne’s.”

“Then I fear there can be no doubt that such is the case.”

Falconer spoke very stiffly and distantly, and Mrs. Romayne rose from her chair a little abruptly, and walked to the window. When she turned to him again it was to speak of the formalities necessary with the Nice authorities, and a few moments later the interview was ended by the appearance of dinner.

During the few days that followed, the distance between them, which that first interview established so imperceptibly but so certainly, never lessened; it grew, indeed, with their contact with one another.

To Falconer Mrs. Romayne’s whole attitude of mind, her whole personality, was simply and entirely antipathetic. That a woman under such circumstances should speak, and act, and think as Mrs. Romayne spoke, and acted, and—as far as he could tell—thought; with so little sense of any but the social aspect of her husband’s crime; with so little realisation of the ruin that crime had brought to hundreds of innocent people; with so little moral feeling of any kind; was in the highest degree reprehensible to him. Having assumed a mental attitude of reprehension, he stopped short; his perceptions were not sufficiently keen to allow of his understanding that some pity might be due also.

Suffering is not always to be estimated by the worth of the object through which it is inflicted; not often, indeed, in this world, where the sum of man’s suffering is out of all proportion greater than the sum of man’s spirituality. Mrs. Romayne’s conception of life might be in the last degree narrow and selfish, and as such it might be in the highest degree to be deprecated; but such as it was it was all she had, and within its limits her life was now in ruin. Her aims and ends in life might be of the poorest, and deserving of unsparing condemnation; but she had nothing beyond, and the pain of their overthrow was to her dormant sensibility not so very disproportionate to the suffering inflicted on a more sensitive organisation by the shattering of higher hopes.

Mrs. Romayne, for her part, found her cousin, with the reserve and formality of demeanour which the situation developed in him, simply a tiresome and uncongenial companion. He was very attentive to her. His manner, as she acknowledged to herself more than once with a heavy sigh, was excellent, and he managed her difficult and painful affairs with admirable strength and tact; she learnt in the course of those few days to respect him and depend on him, in spite of herself and even against her will. But it was not surprising that the end of their enforced dual solitude should be looked for more or less eagerly by both parties. They were almost entirely dependent on one another for companionship. Falconer, it is true, saw Dr. Aston once or twice; but of Mrs. Romayne’s acquaintances not one had even left a card of condolence upon her. Neither the Cloughtons nor any other of the pleasure-seekers who had previously been so anxious for her society, showed any sign of being aware of her existence under her present circumstances.

The form taken by Falconer’s first allusion to the probable limits of their detention in Nice had created in both of them, by one of those vague chains of idea which are so unaccountable and so often experienced, a tendency to think and speak of the termination of that detention, when they did speak together on the subject, as “when the papers are given up.” There was some question, at one time, as to whether or no even the private papers of William Romayne would be returned to his widow. And these same papers, thus surrounded by an element of painful uncertainty, and at the same time elevated into a kind of order of release, obtained in the minds of both a fictitious importance on their own account. Mrs. Romayne found herself thinking about them, conjecturing about them, even dreaming about them; until at last, when they were actually placed in her hand, they possessed a curious fascination for her.

It was about midday when she and Falconer returned from their final appearance before the authorities. She stood in the middle of the room holding the large, shabby despatch-box, lately handed to her with a grave “Private papers, madame”; the noise of the carnival floated in at the window in striking contrast with the two sombre figures.

“I think I will go and look them over!” she said in a low, rather surprised voice. “You would like to go out, perhaps. Please don’t think about me. I will spend the day quietly indoors.”

He answered her courteously, and she left the room slowly, with her eyes fixed curiously on the despatch-box in her hand.

CHAPTER IV

Mrs. Romayne carried the despatch-box to her bedroom and set it down on a small table. She and Falconer were leaving Nice on the following morning, and her maid was just finishing her packing. Mrs. Romayne inspected the woman’s arrangements, gave her sundry orders, and then dismissed her. Left alone, she made one or two trifling preparations for the journey on her own account, and when these were completed to her satisfaction, she drew the table on which she had placed the despatch-box to the open window, and seated herself.

She drew the box towards her and unlocked it, and there was nothing in her face as she did so but the hard resentment which had grown upon it during the last few days, just touched by an indefinite and equally hard curiosity. The interest which those papers possessed for her had been created by purely artificial means; intrinsically they were nothing to her. The position which the possession of them had occupied in her thoughts lately was the sole source of the impulse under which she was acting now; under any other circumstances she might hardly have cared to look at them.

She raised the lid and paused a moment, looking down at the compact mass of papers within with a sudden vague touch of more personal interest. The box was nearly full. The various sets of papers were carefully and methodically fastened together, and endorsed evidently upon a system. Mrs. Romayne hesitated a moment, and then took out a packet at random.

It consisted of bills all bearing dates within the last six months; all sent in by leading London tradesmen, and all for large amounts. Mrs. Romayne glanced at the figures, and her eyebrows moved with an expression of slight surprise, which was almost immediately dominated by bitter acceptance and comprehension. She opened none, however, until she came to one bearing the name of a well-known London jeweller. She read the name and the amount of the bill, and paused; then a new curiosity came into her eyes, and she unfolded the paper quickly. The account was a very long one, and as her eyes travelled quickly down it, taking in item after item, a dull red colour crept into her face, and her eyes sparkled with contemptuous resentment. She was evidently surprised, and yet half-annoyed with herself for being surprised. Two-thirds of the items in the bill in her hand were for articles of jewellery not worn by men, and not one of these had ever been seen by William Romayne’s wife.

She stuffed the paper back into its fastening, tossed the bundle away and took another packet from the box with quickened interest. It consisted of miscellaneous documents, all, likewise, connected with her husband’s life in London during the past winter, but of no particular interest. The next packet she opened was of the same nature, and with that the top layer of the box came to an end.

The papers below were evidently older; of varying ages, indeed, to judge from their varying tints of yellow. Disarranging a lower layer in taking out the packet nearest to her hand, Mrs. Romayne saw that there were older papers still, beneath, and realised that the box before her contained the private papers of many years; probably all the private papers which William Romayne had preserved throughout his life. She opened the packet she had drawn out, hastily and with an angry glitter in her eyes. It consisted of businesslike-looking documents, not likely, as it seemed, to be of any interest to her.

She glanced through the first unheedingly enough, and then, as she reached the end, something seemed suddenly to touch her attention. She paused a moment, with a startled, incredulous expression on her face, and began to re-read it slowly and carefully. She read it to the end again, and her face, as she finished, was a little pale and chilled-looking. She freed another paper from the packet almost mechanically, with an absorbed, preoccupied look in her eyes, opened it and read it with a strained, hardly comprehending attention which grew gradually and imperceptibly, as she went on from paper to paper, into a kind of stupefied horror. She finished the thick packet in her hands, and then she paused, lifting her pale face for a moment and gazing straight before her with an indescribable expression on its shallow hardness, as though she was realising something almost incredibly bitter and repugnant to her, and was stunned by the realisation. Then her instincts and habits of life and thought seemed to assert themselves, as it were, and to dominate the situation. Her expression changed; the stupefied look gave place to what was little deeper than bitter excitement; a patch of angry colour succeeded the pallor of a moment earlier; and her eyes glittered.

Turning to the despatch-box again, she proceeded to ransack it with a hasty eagerness of touch which differed markedly from the careless composure of her earlier proceedings. Paper after paper was torn open, glanced through—sometimes even re-read with a feverish attention—and tossed aside; sometimes with a sudden deepening of that angry flush; sometimes with a movement of the lips, as though an interjection formed itself upon them; always with a heightening of her excitement; until one packet only remained at the bottom of the box. Mrs. Romayne snatched it out, and then started slightly as she saw that it did not consist, as the majority of the others had done, of business papers, but of letters in a woman’s handwriting. Nor was it so old as many of the papers she had looked at, some of which had borne dates twenty-five years back. She opened it with a sudden hardening of her excitement, which seemed to mark the change from almost impersonal to intensely personal interest. She saw that the date was that of the second year after her marriage; that each letter was annotated in her husband’s writing; and then she began deliberately to read, her lips very thin and set, her eyes cold and hard. She read the letters all through, with every comment inscribed on them, and by the time she laid the last upon the table her very lips were white with vindictive feeling strangely incongruous on her little conventional face. She sat quite still for a moment, and then rose abruptly and stood by the window with her back to the table, looking out upon the evening sky.

The strength of feeling died out of her face, however, in the course of a very few minutes, leaving it only very white and rather strange-looking, as though she had received a series of shocks which had made a mark even on material so difficult to impress as her artificial personality; and she turned, by-and-by, and contemplated the table, littered now with documents of all sorts, as though she saw, not the actual heaps of papers, but something beyond them contemptible and disgusting to her beyond expression. Then suddenly she moved forward, crammed the papers indiscriminately into the despatch-box, forced down the lid, and carried the box out of the room down the stairs towards the sitting-room where she had left Dennis Falconer.

It was an impulse not wholly consistent with the self-reliance of her ordinary manner; but that manner had been acquired in a world where shocks and difficulties were more or less disbelieved in. Face to face with so unconventional a condition of affairs Mrs. Romayne’s conventional instincts were necessarily at fault; and there being no strong motive power in her to supply their place, it was only natural that she should relieve herself by turning to the man on whom the past few days had taught her to rely.

Dennis Falconer was not in the sitting-room when she opened the door, but as she stood in the doorway contemplating the empty room, he came down the corridor behind her.

“Were you looking for me?” he said with distant courtesy as he reached her. He made a movement to relieve her of the box she carried, and as he did so he was struck by her expression. “Is there anything here you wish me to see?” he said quickly and gravely.

“Yes,” she said; she spoke in a dry, hard voice, about which there was a ring of excitement which made him look at her again, and realise vaguely that something was wrong.

He followed her into the room, and she motioned to him to put the box on the table.

“I have been looking them over,” she said, indicating the papers with a gesture, “and I have brought them to you. They are very interesting.”

She laughed a bitter, crackling little laugh, and the disapproval in ambush in Dennis Falconer’s expression developed a little.

“Do you wish me to go over them now, and with you?” he enquired stiffly.

“Not with me, I think, thank you,” she answered, the novel excitement about her manner finding expression once more in that harsh laugh. “One reading is enough. But now, if you don’t mind. There are business points on which I may possibly be mistaken”—she did not look as though she spoke from conviction—“and—I should like you to read them. I will go out into the garden; it is quite empty always at this time, and I want some air.”

Her tone and the glance she cast at the despatch-box as she spoke made it evident that it was not closeness of material atmosphere alone that had created the necessity.

“I will read them now, certainly, if you wish it,” he returned.

Then, as she took up a book which lay on a table with a mechanical gesture of acknowledgement, he opened the door for her and she went out of the room. He came back to the table, drew up a chair, and opened the despatch-box.

Two hours later Dennis Falconer was still sitting in that same chair, his right hand, which rested on the table, clenched until the knuckles were white, his face pale to the very lips beneath its tan. In his eyes, fixed in a kind of dreadful fascination on the innocent-looking piles of papers before him, there was a look of shocked, almost incredulous horror, which seemed to touch all that was narrow and dogmatic about his ordinary expression into something deep and almost solemn. The door opened, and he started painfully. It was only the waiter with preliminary preparations for dinner, and recovering himself with an effort Falconer rose, and slowly, almost as though their very touch was repugnant to him, began to replace the papers in the box. He locked it, and then left the room, carrying it with him.

Dinner was served, and Mrs. Romayne had been waiting some two or three minutes before he reappeared. He was still pale, and the horror had rather settled down on to his face than left it; but it had changed its character somewhat; the breadth was gone from it. It was as though he had passed through a moment of expansion and insight to contract again to his ordinary limits. Mrs. Romayne was standing near the window; the excitement had almost entirely subsided from her manner, leaving her only harder and more bitter in expression than she had been three hours before. She glanced sharply at Falconer as he came towards her with a constrained, conventional word or two of apology; answered him with the words his speech demanded; and they sat down to dinner.

It was a silent meal. Mrs. Romayne made two or three remarks on general topics, and asked one or two questions as to their journey of the following day; and Falconer responded as briefly as courtesy allowed. On his own account he originated no observation whatever until dinner was over, and the final disappearance of the waiter had been succeeded by a total silence.

Mrs. Romayne was still sitting opposite him, one elbow resting on the table, her head leaning on her hand as she absently played with some grapes on which her eyes were fixed. Falconer glanced across at her once or twice, evidently with a growing conviction that it was incumbent on him to speak, and with a growing uncertainty as to what he should say. This latter condition of things helped to make his tone even unusually formal and dogmatic as he said at last:

“Sympathy, I fear, must seem almost a farce!”

She glanced up quickly, her eyes very bright and hard.

“Sympathy?” she said drily. “I don’t know that there is any new call for sympathy, is there? After all, things are very much where they were!”

A kind of shock passed across Falconer’s face; a materialisation of a mental process.

“What we know now——” he began stiffly.

“What we knew before was quite enough!” interrupted Mrs. Romayne. “When one has arrived violently at the foot of the precipice, it is of no particular moment how long one has been living on the precipice’s edge. While nothing was known, Mr. Romayne was only on the precipice’s edge, and as no one knew of the precipice it was practically as though none existed. Directly one thing came out it was all over! He was over the edge. Nothing could make it either better or worse.”

She spoke almost carelessly, though very bitterly, as though she felt her words to be almost truisms, and Falconer stared at her for a moment in silence. Then he said with stern formality, as though he were making a deliberate effort to realise her point of view:

“You imply that Mr. Romayne’s fall—his going over the edge of the precipice, if I may adopt your figure—consisted in the discovery of his misdeeds. Do you mean that you think it would have been better if nothing had ever been known?”

Mrs. Romayne raised her eyebrows.

“Of course!” she said amazedly. Then catching sight of her cousin’s face she shrugged her shoulders with a little gesture of deprecating concession. “Oh, of course, I don’t mean that Mr. Romayne himself would have been any better if nothing had ever come out,” she said impatiently. “The right and wrong and all that kind of thing would have been the same, I suppose. But I don’t see how ruin and suicide improve the position.”

She rose as she spoke, and Falconer made no answer.

Mrs. Romayne had touched on the great realities of life, the everlasting mystery of the spirit of man with its unfathomable obligations and disabilities; had touched on them carelessly, patronisingly, as “all that kind of thing.” She was as absolutely blind to the depth of their significance as is a man without eyesight to the illimitable spaces of the sky above him. To Falconer her tone was simply scandalising. He did not understand her ignorance. He could not touch the pathos of its limitations and the possibilities by which it was surrounded. The grim irony of such a tone as used by the ephemeral of the immutable was beyond his ken.

“I have several things to see to upstairs,” Mrs. Romayne went on after a moment’s pause. “I shall go up now, and I think, if you will excuse me, I will not come down again. We start so early. Good night!”

“Good night!” he returned stiffly; and with a little superior, contemptuous smile on her face she went away.

CHAPTER V

Dennis Falconer had been alone for nearly an hour, when his solitude was broken up by the appearance of a waiter, who presented him with a card, and the information that the gentleman whose name it bore was in the smoking-room. The name was Dr. Aston’s, and after a moment’s reflection Falconer told the waiter to ask the gentleman to come upstairs. Falconer had spent that last hour in meditation, which had grown steadily deeper and graver. It seemed to have carried him beyond the formal and dogmatic attitude of mind with which he had met Mrs. Romayne, back to the borders of those larger regions he had touched when he sat looking at William Romayne’s papers; and there was a warmth and gratitude in his reception of Dr. Aston when that gentleman appeared, that suggested that he was not so completely sufficient for himself as usual.

“The smoking-room is very full, I imagine?” he said, as he welcomed the little doctor. “My cousin has gone to bed, and I thought if you didn’t mind coming up, doctor, we should be better off here.”

Dr. Aston’s answer was characteristically hearty and alert. Knowing it to be Falconer’s last night at Nice, he had come round, he said, just for a farewell word, and to arrange, if possible, for a meeting later on under happier circumstances. A quiet chat over a cigar was what he had not hoped for, but the thing of all others he would like. He settled himself with a genial instinct for comfort in the arm-chair Falconer pulled round to the window for him; accepted a cigar and prepared to light it; glancing now and again at the younger man’s face with shrewd, kindly eyes, which had already noticed something unusual in its expression.

Dr. Aston and Dennis Falconer had met, some six years before, in Africa, under circumstances which had brought out all that was best in the young man’s character; and Dr. Aston had been warmly attracted by him. Being a particularly shrewd student of human nature, he had taken his measure accurately enough, subsequently, and knew as certainly as one man may of another where his weak points lay, and how time was dealing with them. But his kindness for, and interest in, Dennis Falconer had never abated; perhaps because his insight did not, as so much human insight does, stop at the weak points.

Dennis Falconer, for his part, regarded Dr. Aston with an affectionate respect which he gave to hardly any other man on earth.

There was a short silence as the two men lit their cigars, and then Dr. Aston, with another glance at Falconer’s face, broke it with a kindly, delicate enquiry after Mrs. Romayne. Falconer answered it almost absently, but with an instinctive stiffening, so to speak, of his face and voice, and there was another pause. The doctor was trying the experiment of waiting for a lead. He was just deciding that he must make another attempt on his own account when Falconer took his cigar from between his lips and said, with his eyes fixed on the evening sky:

“I’m always glad to see you, doctor; but I never was more glad than to-night.”

A sound proceeded from the doctor which might have been described as a grunt if it had been less delicately sympathetic, and Falconer continued:

“I’ve been trying to think out a problem, and it was one too many for me: the origin of evil.”

He was thoroughly in earnest, and nothing was further from him than any thought of lightness or flippancy. But there was a calm familiarity and matter-of-course acquaintanceship with his subject about his tone that produced a slight quiver about the corners of the little doctor’s mouth. He did not speak, however, and the movement with which he took his cigar from between his lips and turned to Falconer was merely sympathetic and interested.

“Of course, I know it’s an unprofitable subject enough,” continued Falconer almost apologetically. “We shall never be much the wiser on the subject, struggle as we may. But still, now and then it seems to be forced on one. It has been forced on me to-day.”

“Apropos of William Romayne?” suggested Dr. Aston, so delicately that the words seemed rather a sympathetic comment than a question.

“Yes,” returned Falconer. “We have been looking through his private papers.” He paused a moment, and then continued as if drawn on almost in spite of himself. “You knew him by repute, I dare say, doctor. He had one of those strong personalities which get conveyed even by hearsay. A clever man, striking and dominating, universally liked and deferred to. Yet he must have been as absolutely without principle as this table is without feeling.”

He struck the little table between them with his open hand as he spoke; and then, as though the expression of his feelings had begotten, as is often the case, an irresistible desire to relieve himself further, he answered Dr. Aston’s interested ejaculation as if it had been the question the doctor was at once too well-bred and too full of tact to put.

“There were no papers connected with this last disgraceful affair, of course; those, as you know, I dare say, were all seized in London. It’s the man’s past life that these private papers throw light on. Light, did I say? It was a life of systematic, cold-blooded villainy, for which no colours could be dark enough.”

He had uttered his last sentence involuntarily, as it seemed, and now he laid down his cigar, and turning to Dr. Aston, began to speak low and quickly.

“They are papers of all kinds,” he said. “Letters, business documents, memoranda of every description, and two-thirds of them at least have reference to fraud and wrong of one kind or another. Not one penny that man possessed can have been honestly come by. His business was swindling; every one of his business transactions was founded on fraud. He can have had no faith or honesty of any sort or kind. He was living with another woman before he had been married a year. All that woman’s letters—he deceived her abominably, and it’s fortunate that she died—are annotated and endorsed like his ‘business’ memoranda; evidently kept deliberately as so much stored experience for future use!”

Dr. Aston had listened with a keen, alert expression of intent interest. His cigar was forgotten, and he laid it down now as if impatient of any distraction, and leant forward over the table with his shrewd, kindly little eyes fixed eagerly on Falconer. Human nature was a hobby of his.

Falconer’s confidence, or more truly perhaps the manner of it, had swept away all conventional barriers, and the elder man asked two or three quick, penetrating questions.

“How far back do these records go?” he asked finally.

“They cover five-and-twenty years, I should say,” returned Falconer. “The first note on a successful fraud must have been made when he was about four-and-twenty. Why, even then—when he was a mere boy—he must have been entirely without moral sense!”

“Yes!” said the doctor, with a certain dry briskness of manner which was apt to come to him in moments of excitement. “That is exactly what he was, my boy! It was that, in conjunction with his powerful brain, that made him what you called, just now, dominating. It gave him vantage-ground over his fellow-men. He was as literally without moral sense as a colour-blind man is without a sense of colour, or a homicidal maniac without a sense of the sanctity of human life.”

An expression of rather horrified and entirely uncomprehending protest spread itself over Falconer’s face.

“Romayne was not mad,” he objected, with that incapacity for penetrating beneath the surface which was characteristic of him. “I never even heard that there was madness in the family.”

“You would find it if you looked far enough, without a doubt!” answered the doctor decidedly. “This is a most interesting subject, Dennis, and it’s one that it’s very difficult to look into without upsetting the whole theory of moral responsibility, and doing more harm than enough. I don’t say Romayne was mad, as the word is usually understood, but all you tell me confirms a notion I have had about him ever since this affair came out. He was what we call morally insane. I’ll tell you what first put the idea into my head. It was the extraordinary obtuseness, the extraordinary want of perception, of that blunder of his that burst up the whole thing. Look at it for yourself. It was a flaw in his comprehension of moral sense only possible in a man who knew of the quality by hearsay alone. He must have been a very remarkable man. I wish I had known him!”

“I have heard the term ‘moral insanity,’ of course,” said Falconer slowly and distastefully, ignoring the doctor’s last, purely æsthetic sentence, “but it has always seemed to me, doctor, if you’ll pardon my saying so, a very dangerous tampering with things that should be sacred even from science. I cannot believe that any man is actually incapable of knowing right from wrong.”

“The difficulty is,” said the doctor drily, “that the words right and wrong sometimes convey nothing to him, as the words red and blue convey nothing to a colour-blind man, and the endearments of his wife convey nothing to the lunatic who is convinced that she is trying to poison him.” He paused a moment, and then said abruptly: “Are there any children?”

Falconer glanced at him and changed colour slightly.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “One boy!”

The keen, shrewd face of the elder man softened suddenly and indescribably under one of those quick sympathetic impulses which were Dr. Aston’s great charm.

“Heaven help his mother!” he said gently.

Falconer moved quickly and protestingly, and there was a touch of something like rebuke in his voice as he said:

“Doctor, you don’t mean to say that you think——”

“You believe in heredity, I suppose?” interrupted the doctor quickly. “Well, at least, you believe in the heredity you can’t deny—that a child may—or rather must—inherit, not only physical traits and infirmities, but mental tendencies; likes, dislikes, aptitudes, incapacities, or what not. Be consistent, man, and acknowledge the sequel, though it’s pleasanter to shut one’s eyes to it, I admit. Put the theory of moral insanity out of the question for the moment if you like; say that Romayne was a pronounced specimen of the common criminal. Why should not his child inherit his father’s tendency to crime, his father’s aptitude for lying and thieving, as he might inherit his father’s eyes, or his father’s liking for music—if he had had a turn that way? You’re a religious man, Falconer, I know. You believe, I take it, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children. How can they be visited more heavily than in their reproduction? You mark my words, my boy, that little child of Romayne’s—unless he inherits strong counter influences from his mother, or some far-away ancestor—will go the way his father has gone, and may end as his father has ended!”

There was a slight sound by the door behind the two men as Dr. Aston finished—finished with a force and solemnity that carried a painful thrill of conviction even through the not very penetrable outer crust of dogma which enwrapped Dennis Falconer—and the latter turned his head involuntarily. The next instant both men had sprung to their feet, and were standing dumb and aghast face to face with Mrs. Romayne. She was standing with her hand still on the lock of the door as if her attention had been arrested just as she was entering the room; she had apparently recoiled, for she was pressed now tightly against the door; her face was white to the very lips, and a vague thought passed through Falconer that he had never seen it before. It was as though the look in her eyes, as she gazed at Dr. Aston, had changed it beyond recognition.

There was a moment’s dead silence; a moment during which Dr. Aston turned from red to white and from white to red again, and struggled vainly to find words; a moment during which Falconer could only stare blankly at that unfamiliar woman’s face. Then, while the two men were still utterly at a loss, Mrs. Romayne seemed gradually to command herself, as if with a tremendous effort. Gradually, as he looked at her, Falconer saw the face with which he was familiar shape itself, so to speak, upon that other face he did not know. He saw her eyes change and harden as if with the effort necessitated by her conventional instinct against a scene. He saw the quivering horror of her mouth alter and subside in the hard society smile he knew well, only rather stiffer than usual as her face was whiter; and then he heard her speak.

With a little movement of her head in civil recognition of Dr. Aston’s presence, she said to Falconer:

“My book is on that table. Will you give it to me, please?”

Her voice was quite steady, though thin. Almost mechanically Falconer handed her the book she asked for, and with another slight inclination of her head, before Dr. Aston had recovered his balance sufficiently to speak, she was gone.

The door closed behind her, and a low ejaculation broke from the doctor. Then he drew a long breath, and said slowly:

“That’s a remarkable woman.”

Falconer drew his hand across his forehead as though he were a little dazed.

“I think not!” he said stupidly. “Not when you know her!”

“Ah!” returned the doctor, with a shrewd glance at him. “And you do know her?”

If Falconer could have seen Mrs. Romayne an hour later, he would have been more than ever convinced of the correctness of his judgement. The preparations for departure were nearly concluded; she had dismissed her maid and was finishing them herself with her usual quiet deliberation, though her face was very pale and set.

But it might have perplexed him somewhat if he had seen her, when everything was done, stop short in the middle of the room and lift her hands to her head as though something oppressed her almost more heavily than she could bear.

“End as his father ended!” she said below her breath. “Ruin and disgrace!”

She turned and crossed the room to where her travelling-bag stood, and drew from it a letter, thrust into a pocket with several others.

It was the blotted little letter which began “My dear Mamma,” and when she returned it to the bag at last, her face was once again the face that Dennis Falconer did not know.

CHAPTER VI

There are two diametrically opposed points of view from which London life is regarded by those who know of it only by hearsay; that from which life in the metropolis is contemplated with somewhat awestruck and dubious eyes as necessarily involving a continuous vortex of society and dissipation; and that which recognises no so-called “society life” except during the eight or ten weeks of high pressure known as the season. Both these points of view are essentially false. In no place is it possible to lead a more completely hermit-like life than in London; in no place is it possible to lead a simpler and more hard-working life. On the other hand, that feverish access of stir and movement which makes the months of May and June stand out and focus, so to speak, the attention of onlookers, is only an acceleration and accentuation of the life which is lived in certain strata of the London world for eight or nine months in the year. A large proportion of the intellectual work of the world is done in London; to be in society is a great assistance to the intellectual worker of to-day on his road to material prosperity; consequently a large section of “society” is of necessity in London from October to July; and, since people must have some occupation, even out of the season, social life, in a somewhat lower key, indeed, than the pitch of the season, but on the same artificial foundations, goes on undisturbed, gathering about it, as any institution will do, a crowd of that unattached host of idlers, male and female, whose movements are dictated solely by their own pleasure—or their own weariness.

It was the March of one of the last of the eighties. A wild March wind was taking the most radical liberties with the aristocratic neighbourhood of Grosvenor Place, racing and tearing and shrieking down the chimneys with a total absence of the respect due to wealth. If it could have got in at one in particular of the many drawing-room windows at which it rushed so vigorously, it might have swept round the room and out again with a whoop of amusement. For the room contained some twelve ladies of varying ages and demeanours, and, with perhaps one or two exceptions, each lady was talking at the top of her speed—which, in some cases, was very considerable—and of her voice—which as a rule was penetrating. Every speaker was apparently addressing the same elderly and placid lady, who sat comfortably back in an arm-chair, and made no attempt to listen to any one. Perhaps she recognised the futility of such a course.

The elderly and placid lady was the mistress of the very handsomely and fashionably furnished drawing-room and of the house to which it belonged. Her dress bore traces—so near to vanishing point that their actual presence had something a little ludicrous about it—of the last lingering stage of widow’s mourning. Her name was Pomeroy, Mrs. Robert Pomeroy, and she was presiding over the ladies’ committee for a charity bazaar.

Fashionable charities and their frequent concomitant, the fashionable bazaars which have superseded the fashionable private theatricals of some years ago, are generally and perhaps uncharitably supposed by a certain class of cynical unfashionables to have their motive power in a feminine love of excitement and desire for conspicuousness. Perhaps there is another aspect under which they may present themselves; namely, as a proof that not even a long course of society life can destroy the heaven-sent instinct for work, even though the circumstances under which it struggles may render it so mere a travesty of the real thing. From this point of view, and when the promoter of a charitable folly is a middle-aged woman, who puts into the business an almost painfully earnest enthusiasm which might have been so useful if she had only known more of any life outside her own narrow round, the situation is not without its pathos. But when, as in the present instance, a long-established, self-reliant, and venerable philanthropic institution is suddenly “discovered,” taken up, and patronised by such a woman as the secretary and treasurer of the present committee; a woman who would have been empty-headed and vociferous in any sphere, and who had been moulded by circumstances into a pronounced specimen of a certain type of fashionable woman, dashing, loud, essentially unsympathetic; the position, in the incongruities and discrepancies involved, becomes wholly humorous.

Mrs. Ralph Halse, in virtue of her office as secretary and treasurer, was sitting at Mrs. Pomeroy’s right hand; her conception as to the duties of her office seemed to be limited to a sense that it behoved her never for a single instant to leave off addressing the chair, and this duty she fulfilled with a conscientious energy worthy of the highest praise. She had “discovered” the well-known and well-to-do institution before alluded to about a month earlier.

“Such a capital time of year, you know, when one has nothing to do and can attend to things thoroughly!” she had explained to her friends. She had determined that “something must be done,” as she had rather vaguely phrased it, and she had applied herself exuberantly and forthwith to the organisation of a bazaar. The season was Lent; philanthropy was the fashion; Mrs. Halse’s scheme became the pet hobby of the moment, and the ladies’ committee was selected exclusively from among women well known in society.

The committee was tremendously in earnest; nobody could listen to it and doubt that fact for a moment. At the same time a listener would have found some difficulty in determining what was the particular point which had evoked such enthusiasm, because, as has been said, the members were all talking at once. Their eloquence was checked at last, not, as might have been the case with a cold-blooded male committee, by a few short and pithy words from the gently smiling president, but by the appearance of five o’clock tea. The torrent of declamatory enthusiasm thereupon subsided, quenched in the individual consciousness that took possession of each lady that she was “dying for her tea,” and had “really been working like a slave.” The committee broke up with charming informality into low-toned duets and trios. Even Mrs. Ralph Halse ceased to address the chair, though she could not cease to express her views on the vital point which had roused the committee to a state bordering on frenzy; she turned to her nearest neighbour. Mrs. Halse was a tall woman, good-looking in a well-developed, highly coloured style, and appearing younger than her thirty-eight years. She was dressed from head to foot in grey, and the delicate sobriety of her attire was oddly out of keeping with her florid personality. As a matter of fact, the hobby which had preceded the present all-absorbing idea of the bazaar in her mind—Mrs. Halse was a woman of hobbies—had been ritualism of an advanced type; perhaps some of the fervour with which her latest interest had been embraced was due to a certain sense of flatness in its predecessor; but be that as it may, her present very fashionable attire represented her idea of Lenten mourning.

“I don’t see myself how there can be two opinions on the subject,” she said. Mrs. Ralph Halse very seldom did see how there could be two opinions on a subject on which her own views were decided. “Fancy dress is a distinct feature, and of course there must be more effect and more variety when each woman is dressed as suits her best, than when there is any attempt at uniform. You agree with me, Lady Bracondale, I’m sure?”

The woman she addressed was of the pronounced elderly aristocratic type, tall and thin, aquiline-nosed and sallow of complexion. She seemed to be altogether superior to enthusiasm of any kind, and her manner was of that unreal kind of dignity and chilling suavity, in which nothing is genuine but its slight touch of condescension.

“Fancy dress is a pretty sight,” she said. “But it is perhaps a drawback that of course all the stall-holders cannot be expected to wear it.” The words were spoken with an emphasis which plainly conveyed the speaker’s sense that no such abrogation of dignity could by any possibility be expected of herself. “What is your opinion, Mrs. Pomeroy?” Lady Bracondale added, turning to the chairwoman of the committee.

Mrs. Pomeroy’s attention was not claimed for the moment otherwise than by her serene enjoyment of her cup of tea, which she was sipping with the air of a woman who has done, and is conscious of having done, a hard afternoon’s work. Perhaps it is somewhat fatiguing to be talked to by twelve ladies all at once. Lady Bracondale’s question was one which Mrs. Pomeroy rarely answered, however, even in her secret heart, so she only smiled now and shook her head thoughtfully.

“Miscellaneous fancy dress gives so much scope for individual taste, don’t you think?” said Mrs. Halse.

“Of course it does, my dear Mrs. Halse. Every one can wear what they like, and that is very nice,” answered Mrs. Pomeroy comfortably.

“But, on the other hand, a quiet uniform can be worn by any one,” said Lady Bracondale with explanatory condescension.

“By any one, of course. So important,” assented the chairwoman with bland cheerfulness. Then, as Mrs. Halse’s lips parted to give vent to a flood of eloquence, she continued placidly, in her gentle, contented voice: “Mrs. Romayne is not here yet. I wonder what she will say!”

“I met her at the French Embassy last night,” said Mrs. Halse, with a slightly aggressive inflection in her voice, “and she told me she meant to come if she could make time. Apparently she has not been able to!”

“Mrs. Romayne?” repeated Lady Bracondale interrogatively. “I don’t think I’ve met her? Really, one feels quite out of the world.”

There was a fine affectation of sincerity about the words which would, however, hardly have deceived the most unsophisticated hearer as to the speaker’s position in society, or her own appreciation of it. Lady Bracondale was distinctly a person to be known by anybody wishing to make good a claim to be considered in society, and she was loftily conscious of the fact. She had only just returned to town from Bracondale, where she had been spending the last two months.

“Romayne?” she repeated. “Mrs. Romayne! Ah, yes! To be sure! The name is familiar to me. I thought it was. There was a little woman, years ago, whom we met on the Continent. Her husband—dear me, now, what was it? Ah, yes! Her husband failed or—no, of course! I recollect! He was a swindler of some sort. Of course, one never met her again!”

“This Mrs. Romayne is the same, Ralph says,” said Mrs. Halse, sipping her tea. “At least, her husband was William Romayne, who was the moving spirit in a big bank swindle—and a lot of other things, I believe—years ago. She turned up about two months ago, and took a house in Chelsea. Lots of money, apparently. She has a grown-up son—he would be grown-up, of course—who is going to the bar.”

“But, dear me!” said Lady Bracondale with freezing stateliness, “does she propose to go into society? It was a most scandalous affair, my dear Mrs. Pomeroy, as far as I remember. A connection of Lord Bracondale’s lost some money, I recollect; and I think the man—Romayne, I mean, of course—poisoned himself or something. We were at Nice when it happened. He committed suicide there, and it was most unpleasant! She can’t expect one to know her!”

Eighteen years had passed since the same woman had expressed herself as eager to make the acquaintance of “the man,” and the haze which had wrapped itself in her mind about the tragedy which had frustrated her desire in that direction, was not the only outcome for her of the passing of those years. Lady Bracondale had been Lady Cloughton eighteen years ago, the wife of the eldest son of the Earl of Bracondale; poor, and with a somewhat perfunctorily yielded position. She and her husband had been, moreover, a cheery, easy-tempered pair, living chiefly on the Continent, and getting a good deal of pleasure out of life. His father’s death had given to Lord Cloughton the family title and the family lands; and with his accession to wealth, importance, and responsibilities, his wife’s whole personality had gradually seemed to become transformed. Her satisfaction in her new dignities took the form of living rigidly up to what she considered their obligations. Laxity, frivolity of any kind, seemed to her to abrogate from the importance of her position. She ranged herself on the side of strict decorum and respectability, and became more precise than the precisians. Her husband at the same time developed talents latent in his obscurity, and became a prominent politician; and the ultra-correct and exclusive Lady Bracondale was now in truth a power in society.

Consequently, the tone in which she disposed of the intruder, who had ventured unauthorised to obtain recognition during her absence, was crushing and conclusive. But Mrs. Pomeroy’s individuality was of too soft a consistency to allow of her being crushed; and she replied placidly, and with unconscious practicality.

“People do know her, dear Lady Bracondale,” she said. “She had some friends among really nice people to begin with, and every one has called on her. I really don’t know how it has happened, but it is years and years ago, you know, and she really is a delightful little woman. Quite wrapped up in her boy!”

Almost before the words were well uttered, before Lady Bracondale could translate into speech the aristocratic disapproval written stiffly on her face, the door was flung open, and the footman announced “Mrs. Romayne!”

CHAPTER VII

Eighteen years lay between the events which Lady Bracondale recalled so hazily and the Mrs. Romayne who crossed the threshold of Mrs. Pomeroy’s drawing-room as the footman spoke her name. Those eighteen years had changed her at once curiously more and curiously less than the years between six-and-twenty and four-and-forty usually change a woman. She looked at the first glance very little older than she had done eighteen years ago; younger, indeed, than she had looked during those early days of her widowhood. Such changes as time had made in her appearance seemed mainly due to the immense difference in the styles of dress now obtaining. The dainty colouring, the cut of her frock, the pose of her bonnet, the arrangement of her hair, with its fluffy curls, all seemed to accentuate her prettiness and to bring out the youthfulness which a little woman without strongly marked features may keep for so long. The fluffy hair was a red-brown now, instead of a pale yellow, and the change was becoming, although it helped greatly, though very subtly, to alter the character of her face. The outline of her features was perhaps a trifle sharper than it had been, and there were sundry lines about the mouth and eyes when it was in repose. But these were obliterated, as a rule, by a characteristic to which all the minor changes in her seemed to have more or less direct reference; a characteristic which seemed to make the very similarity between the woman of to-day and the woman of eighteen years before, seem unreal; the singular brightness and vivacity of her expression. Her features were animated, eager, almost restless; her gestures and movements were alert and quick; her voice, as she spoke to an acquaintance here and there, as she moved up Mrs. Pomeroy’s drawing-room, was brisk and laughing. Her dress and demeanour were the dress and demeanour of the day to the subtlest shade; she had been a typical woman of the world eighteen years before; she was a typical woman of the world now. But in the old days the personality of the woman had been dominated by and merged in the type. Now the type seemed to be penetrated by something from within, which was not to be wholly suppressed.

She came quickly down the long drawing-room, smiling and nodding as she came, and greeted Mrs. Pomeroy with a little exaggerated gesture of despair and apology.

“Have you really finished?” she cried. “Is everything settled? How shocking of me!” Then, as she shook hands with Mrs. Halse, she added, with a sweetness of tone which seemed to cover an underlying tendency which was not sweet: “However, we have such a host in our secretary that really one voice more or less makes very little difference.”

“Well, really, I don’t know that we have settled anything!” said Mrs. Pomeroy. “We have talked things over, you know. It is such a mistake to be in a hurry! Don’t you think so?”

“I’ve not a doubt of it,” was the answer, given with a laugh. “My dear Mrs. Pomeroy, I have been in a hurry for the last six weeks, and it’s a frightful state of things. You’ve had a capital meeting, though. Why, I believe I am actually the only defaulter!”

The hard blue eyes were moving rapidly over the room as Mrs. Romayne spoke; there was an eager comprehensive glance in them as though the survey taken was in some sense a survey of material or—at one instant—of a battle-ground; and it gave a certain unreality to their carelessness.

“The only defaulter. Yes,” agreed Mrs. Pomeroy comfortably. “And now, Mrs. Romayne, you must let me introduce you to a new member of our committee; quite an acquisition! Why, where—oh!” and serenely oblivious of the stony stare with which Lady Bracondale, a few paces off, was regarding the opposite wall of the room just over the newcomer’s bonnet, Mrs. Pomeroy, with her kind fat hand on Mrs. Romayne’s arm, approached the exclusive acquisition. “Let me introduce Mrs. Romayne, dear Lady Bracondale!” she said with unimpaired placidity.

The stony stare was lowered an inch or two until it was about on a level with Mrs. Romayne’s eyebrows, and Lady Bracondale bowed icily; but at the same moment Mrs. Romayne held out her hand with a graceful little exclamation of surprise. It was not genuine, though it sounded so; those keen, quick, blue eyes had seen Lady Bracondale and recognised her in the course of their owner’s progress up the room, and had observed her withdrawal of herself those two or three paces from Mrs. Pomeroy’s vicinity; and it was as they rested for an instant only on her in their subsequent survey of the room that that subtle change suggestive of a sense of coming battle had come to them. They looked full into Lady Bracondale’s face now with a smiling ease, which was just touched with a suggestion of pleasure in the meeting.

“I hardly know whether we require an introduction,” said Mrs. Romayne; she spoke with cordiality which was just sufficiently careless to be thoroughly “good form.” “It is so many years since we met, though, that perhaps our former acquaintanceship must be considered to have died a natural death. I am very pleased that it should have a resurrection!”

She finished with a little light laugh, and Lady Bracondale found, almost to her own surprise, that they were shaking hands. If she had been able to analyse cause and effect—which she was not—she would have known that it was that carelessness in Mrs. Romayne’s manner that influenced her. A powerful prompter to a freezing demeanour is withdrawn when the other party is obviously insensible to cold.

“It is really too bad of me to be so late!” continued Mrs. Romayne, proceeding to pass over their past acquaintance as a half forgotten recollection to which they were both indifferent, and taking up matters as they stood with the easy unconcern and casual conversationalism of a society woman. “At least it would be if my time were my own just now. But as a matter of fact my sole raison d’être for the moment is the getting ready of our little place for my boy. I ought to have shut myself up with carpenters and upholsterers until it was done! I assure you I can’t even dine out without a guilty feeling that I ought to be seeing after something or other connected with chairs and tables!”

She finished with a laugh about which there was a touch of artificiality, as there had been about her tone as she alluded to her “boy.” Perhaps the only thoroughly genuine point about her, at that moment, was a certain intent watchfulness, strongly repressed, in the eyes with which she met Lady Bracondale’s gorgon-like stare; and something about the spirited pose of her head and the lines of her face, always recalling, vaguely and indefinitely, that idea of single combat. Lady Bracondale, however, was not a judge of artificiality, and Mrs. Romayne’s manner, with its perfect assurance and careless assumption of a position and a footing in society, affected her in spite of herself. The stony stare relaxed perceptibly as she said, stiffly enough, but with condescending interest:

“You are expecting your son in town?”

“I am expecting him every day, I am delighted to say!” answered Mrs. Romayne, with a little conventional gush of superficial enthusiasm. “Really, you have no idea how forlorn I am without him! We are quite absurdly devoted to one another, as I often tell him, stupid fellow. But I always think—don’t you?—that a man is much better out of the way during the agonies of furnishing, so I insisted on his making a little tour while I plunged into the fray. He was very anxious to help, of course, dear fellow. But I told him frankly that he would be more hindrance than help, and packed him off—and made a great baby of myself when he was gone. Of course I have had to console myself by making our little place as perfect as possible, as a surprise for him! You know how these things grow! One little surprise after another comes into one’s head, and one excuses oneself for one’s extravagance when it’s for one’s boy.”

“Are you thinking of settling in London?” enquired Lady Bracondale.

She was unbending moment by moment in direct contradiction of her preconceived determination. Mrs. Romayne was so bright and so unconscious. She ran off her pretty maternal platitudes with such careless confidence, that iciness on Lady Bracondale’s part would have assumed a futile and even ridiculous appearance.

“Yes!” was the answer. “We are going to settle down a regular cosy couple. It has been our castle in the air all the time his education has been going on. He is to read for the bar, and I tell him that he will value a holiday more in another year or two, poor fellow. But I’m afraid I bore about him frightfully!” she added, with another laugh. “And it is rather hard on him, poor boy, for he really is not a bore! I think you will like him, Lady Bracondale. I remember young men always adored you!”

Lady Bracondale smiled, absolutely smiled, and said graciously—graciously for her, that is to say:

“You must bring him to see me! I should like to call upon you if you will give me your card.”

Mrs. Romayne was in the act of complying—complying with smiling indifference, which was the very perfection of society manner—when Mrs. Pomeroy, evidently moved solely by the impetus of the excited group of ladies of which she was the serenely smiling centre, bore cheerfully down upon them.

“Perhaps we ought to vote about the fancy dress before we separate this afternoon,” she suggested, “or shall we talk it over a little more at the next meeting? Perhaps that would be wiser. Mrs. Romayne——”

She looked invitingly at Mrs. Romayne as if for her opinion on the subject, and the invitation was responded to with that ever-ready little laugh.

“Oh, let us put it off until the next meeting,” she said. “I am ashamed to say that I really must run away now. But at the next meeting I promise faithfully to be here at the beginning and stay until the very end.”

Whereupon it became evident that the greater part of the committee was anxious to postpone the decision on the knotty point in question, and was conscious of more or less pressing engagements. A general exodus ensued, Mrs. Halse alone remaining to expound her views to Mrs. Pomeroy all by herself and in a higher and more conclusive tone than before.

A neat little coupé was waiting for Mrs. Romayne. She gave the coachman the order “home” at first, and then paused and told him to go to a famous cigar merchant’s. She got into the carriage with a smiling gesture of farewell to Lady Bracondale, whose brougham passed her at the moment; but as she leant back against the cushions the smile died from her lips with singular suddenness. It left her face very intent; the eyes very bright and hard, the lips set and a little compressed. The lines about them and about her eyes showed out faintly under this new aspect of her face in spite of the eager satisfaction which was its dominant expression. The battle had evidently been fought and won and the victor was ready and braced for the next.

She got out at the cigar merchant’s, and when she returned to her carriage there was that expression of elation about her which often attends the perpetration of a piece of extravagance. But as she was driven through the fading sunlight of the March afternoon towards Chelsea, her face settled once more into that intent reflection and satisfaction.

It was a narrow slip of a house at which her coupé eventually stopped, wedged in among much more imposing-looking mansions in the most fashionable part of Chelsea. But what it lacked in size it made up in brightness and general smartness. It had evidently been recently done up with all the latest improvements in paint, window-boxes, and fittings generally, and it presented a very attractive appearance indeed.

Mrs. Romayne let herself in with a latch-key, and went quickly across the prettily decorated hall into a room at the back of what was evidently the dining-room. She opened the door, and then stood still upon the threshold.

The light of the setting sun was stealing in at the window, the lower half of which was filled in with Indian blinds; and as it fell in long slanting rays across the silent room, it seemed to emphasize and, at the same time, to soften and beautify an impression of waiting and of expectancy that seemed to emanate from everything that room contained. It was furnished—it was not large—as a compromise between a smoking-room and a study, and its every item, from the bookcases and the writing-table to the bronzes on the mantelpiece, was in the most approved and latest style, and of the very best kind. Every conceivable detail had evidently been thought out and attended to; the room was obviously absolutely complete and perfect—only on the writing-table something seemed lacking, and some brown paper parcels lay there waiting to be unfastened—and it had as obviously never been lived in. It was like a body without a soul.

The lingering light stole along the wall, touching here and there those unused objects waiting, characterless, for that strange character which the personality of a man impresses always on the room in which he lives, and its last touch fell upon the face of the woman standing in the doorway. The artificiality of its expression was standing out in strong relief as if in half conscious, half instinctive struggle with something that lay behind, something which the aspect of that empty room had developed out of its previous intentness and excitement. With a little affected laugh, as though some one else had been present—or as though affectation were indeed second nature to her—Mrs. Romayne went up to the writing-table and began to undo the parcels lying there. They contained a very handsome set of fittings for a man’s writing-table, and she arranged them in their places, clearing away the paper with scrupulous care, and with another little laugh.

“What a ridiculous woman!” she said half aloud, with just the intonation she had used in speaking to Lady Bracondale of her “little surprises” for “her boy.” “And what a spoilt fellow!”

She turned away, went out of the room, with one backward glance as she closed the door, and upstairs to the drawing-room. She had just entered the room when a thought seemed to strike her.

“How utterly ridiculous!” she said to herself. “I quite forgot to notice whether there were any letters!”

She was just crossing the room to ring for a servant when the front-door bell rang vigorously and she stopped short. With an exclamation of surprise she went to the door and stood there listening, that she might prepare herself beforehand for the possible visitor, for whom she evidently had no desire. “How tiresome!” she said to herself. “Who is it, I wonder?” She heard the parlourmaid go down the hall and open the door.

“Mrs. Romayne at home?”

With a shock and convulsion, which only the wildest leap of the heart can produce, the listening face in the drawing-room doorway, with the conventional smile which might momently be called for just quivering on it, half in abeyance, half in evidence, was suddenly transformed. Every trace of artificiality fell away, blotted out utterly before the swift, involuntary flash of mother love and longing with which those hard blue eyes, those pretty, superficial little features were, in that instant, transfigured. The elaborately dressed figure caught at the door-post, as any homely drudge might have done; the woman of the world, startled out of—or into—herself, forgot the world.

“It’s Julian!” the white, trembling lips murmured. “Julian!”

As she spoke the word, up the stairs two steps at a time, there dashed a tall, fair-haired young man who caught her in his arms with a delighted laugh—her own laugh, but with a boyish ring of sincerity in it.

“I’ve taken you by surprise, mother!” he cried. “You’ve never opened my telegram!”

CHAPTER VIII

Mrs. Romayne had been left, eighteen years before, absolutely penniless. When Dennis Falconer took her back from Nice to her uncle’s home in London, she had returned to that house wholly dependent, for herself and for her little five-year-old boy, on the generosity she would meet with there. Fortunately old Mr. Falconer was a rich man. There had been a good deal of money in the Falconer family, and as its representatives decreased in number, that money had collected itself in the hands of a few survivors.

A long nervous illness, slight enough in itself, but begetting considerable restlessness and irritability, had followed on her return to London. So natural, her tender-hearted cousin and uncle had said, though, as a matter of fact, such an illness was anything but natural in such a woman as Mrs. Romayne, and anything but consistent with her demeanour during the early days of her widowhood. Partly by the advice of the doctor, partly by reason of the sense, unexpressed but shared by all concerned, that London was by no means a desirable residence for the widow of William Romayne, old Mr. Falconer and his daughter left their quiet London home and went abroad with her. No definite period was talked of for their return to England, and they settled down in a charming little house near the Lake of Geneva.

In the same house, when Julian was seven years old, Frances Falconer died. Her death was comparatively sudden, and the blow broke her father’s heart. From that time forward his only close interests in life were Mrs. Romayne and her boy. The vague expectation of a return to London at some future time faded out altogether. Mr. Falconer’s only desire was to please his niece, and she, with the same tendency towards seclusion which had dictated their first choice of a Continental home, suggested a place near Heidelberg. Here they lived for five years more, and then Mr. Falconer, also, died, leaving the bulk of his property to Mrs. Romayne. The remainder was to go to Dennis Falconer; to his only other near relation, William Romayne’s little son, he left no money.