Mary Angela Dickens

“Mr. Falconer, sir! Mr. Falconer!”

Dennis Falconer was a light sleeper, and he was awake on the first call, low and hurried as it was. It must be a very bad morning, he said to himself, for the light was not nearly so strong as it usually was when he was called at eight o’clock.

“All right!” he called back.

But the retreating footsteps that usually ensued upon his answer did not follow.

“There’s a lady, sir, to see you, please. She’s waiting in the sitting-room. ‘Mrs. Romayne,’ she told me to say.”

“What!” It was a sharp exclamation of inexpressible astonishment, and as he uttered it Falconer sprang out of bed. As he did so he realised that the unusualness of the light was due to the unusualness of the hour—seven o’clock only. “Some one from Mrs. Romayne, you mean?” he called, his strong, deep voice full of incredulity and apprehension. Then, as the answer came through the door, “‘Mrs. Romayne,’ sir, the lady said,” he called back hurriedly: “Say I will be with her in a moment.”

Very few moments indeed had passed before Falconer’s bedroom door opened and he came out with a rapid step. He opened his sitting-room door and passed in, shutting the door hastily behind him, and as he did so the words of grave concern with which he had entered died upon his lips.

In the disorder and dreariness of a room from which the traces of yesterday’s usage had not yet been obliterated; in the cold grey light of the early September morning; a woman was pacing up and down with almost frenzied steps. For a moment, as he caught his first glimpse of the face, he thought vaguely that it was not Mrs. Romayne; then it turned and confronted him, and, meeting the eyes, he recognised, not the woman whom he had known during the past two years, but the woman into whose face he had looked with so strange a shock of unfamiliarity, and for one moment only, as he and Dr. Aston had confronted it together twenty years ago in Nice. Every trace of the Mrs. Romayne of to-day seemed to have vanished, scorched away by the consuming fire which burnt in her blue eyes and seemed to be the only thing that lived behind that ghastly face; even her features were drawn and sunken almost beyond recognition.

An almost paralysing sense of unreality fell upon Dennis Falconer, for all his practical common sense; and before he could recover himself sufficiently for speech, Mrs. Romayne had crossed the room to him, attempting no greeting, swept away on a tide before which all the barriers of her life—all the safeguards, as they had seemed to her—had gone down in one common ruin.

“Dennis Falconer,” she cried hoarsely, “my boy is gone—gone! Help me to think what I must do—help me to think how I can find him! Help me! Help me!”

The words themselves were an appeal, but they rang out in that harsh, untuned voice with all the fierce peremptoriness of a command, and as she spoke them Mrs. Romayne beat her hands one against the other, as though her agony were indeed too great to be endured. Falconer, utterly confounded—more by her manner than by her tidings, which, indeed, in his slow and bewildered sense of the extraordinarily direct communication which her words had established between herself and him, he hardly grasped—echoed the one word which seemed to contain a definite statement.

“Gone?” he said. “Gone?”

“Gone!” she returned, repeating the word as she had done before in a kind of hoarse cry. “Oh, let me try and make you understand clearly, that we may lose no time. Time! Ah! who knows how much may have been lost already? My boy! my boy!”

She strangled the cry in her very throat, and laying one hand on Falconer’s arm with a convulsive grip, as if to steady herself, she lifted the other to her head, pushing the hair back from her forehead and pressing her fingers down as though to force herself to think and speak coherently.

“I had a telegram from him,” she said, speaking in short, quick sentences with heavy, panting breaths between, “ten days ago. It said that he was going to stop in town for a few days. Yesterday I heard something that made me uneasy. I came up to speak to him late last night. I expected to find him in Queen Anne Street. He was not there. He has not been there for the last two nights. He is gone!” She stopped as though in those three words she had summed up all the horror of the situation; and with that strange sense of unreality making his voice stiff and constrained, Falconer said:

“But must you necessarily apprehend anything alarming? Some private visit, perhaps; a painful discovery, of course——”

She tore her hand away from his arm, wringing it fiercely with its fellow as she faced him, breaking in upon his words with a passionate cry.

“Apprehend! Apprehend! I know, I tell you, I know! Ah! have I been watching and fighting for so many years; have I planned and struggled and sickened with fear; not to know, now that it has overtaken me at last? Dennis Falconer, don’t palter with me. You know what lies about my boy. You know what horrible inheritance I have had to battle with for him. Good Heaven! when have you spared me your knowledge of it? When have you failed to thrust it on me, to force me to shudder and sicken even when I felt most secure?”

She paused, battling for breath; and then, as Falconer tried to speak, she put out her hand to stop him, and went on hurriedly:

“That’s all over! It’s done with! Now you must help me. Your knowledge must help me. You are a man. You will know what to do; how he can be saved! He must be saved! He must!”

She turned away from him with a wild, unconscious gesture, as though his personality had no existence for her save and except as he could serve her purpose, and began once more to pace up and down the room.

Falconer followed her with his eyes, standing motionless and confounded. The very foundation on which stood his every conception with regard to the woman before him, and the life she lived, had suddenly melted into nothingness before her passionate words, and there seemed for the time being to be no stability anywhere about him. It was no light that her words let in upon him. Rather, they rolled over that mental tract of country which had been to him perfectly familiar and commonplace, a darkness in which every landmark was obliterated. In those first bewildered seconds his most prominent sensation was one of utter blackness—the mental counterpart of the effect produced upon the physical vision by the sudden substitution of illimitable darkness for a narrow and well-known scene.

“What do you fear?” he said. He spoke almost like an automaton, in a low, tentative tone.

“He has been speculating.” She never stopped in her rushing walk. “I have known it for months, and I have been in torment.” There was a strange, scathed look on her face which gave the words a terrible reality. “He has had some heavy anxiety on his mind all the summer—what, I don’t know. But this is the end of it. Oh, my boy, my darling, what have I done that you should shut your mother out? I have slaved for you! I have slaved for you, and I will slave for you as long as I live! Why have you gone away from me?”

She was not crying. To Falconer, watching her and listening to her, no tears could have been so terrible as that bitter, dry-eyed wail which seemed to him to echo in a void, where nothing answering to it could have been nurtured into life. The contrast between the artificial woman he had known hitherto, and the woman in the consuming anguish of her motherhood with whom he now found himself face to face, was so amazing that he could make no attempt to grapple with it. He took desperate and instinctive refuge in the practical.

“Do you know anything of his City associations?” he said.

She made a despairing gesture of negation.

“I did!” she said hoarsely. “I did all I knew to keep in touch with him. Two months ago Marston Loring could have told me anything. But everything failed me! Everything crumbled away! They quarrelled.”

Already, with that matter-of-fact tendency inherent in all men—and particularly in unimaginative men—which assimilates a revelation, and reduces it involuntarily to a commonplace, Falconer had become almost accustomed to the new point of view which had been forced upon him. The darkness was lifting, and he was aware of vast tracts of mental country, destitute of those landmarks which his soul loved, but no longer enveloped in a dense atmosphere of confusion.

A man of Falconer’s narrow temperament, confirmed in his rigidity by many years of life, having his set conceptions suddenly overthrown and forcibly enlarged, will be totally incapable of any just appreciation of the new horizon then created; he will be conscious of the spaces about him only as confusing unrealities; the limitations solidified by the mental habits of years will retain some sort of ghostly influence over him long after they have ceased to have any actual existence. His first conscious and deliberate movement will be an instinctive attempt to reconcile the new condition of things with these old limitations, rather than to reconcile himself with the new conditions. The facts which Mrs. Romayne’s words recalled to him; the character of the man whom she had encouraged as her son’s chief intimate; the character of the life to which she had bred him; gave definite force to the vague movement towards such reconciliation already stirring in Falconer’s mind. He accepted the revelation of unsuspected mother’s love and mother’s dread, and ceased to contemplate it as he concentrated his mental vision on the selfish vanity and worldliness with which Mrs. Romayne had stood endued in his thoughts for twenty years; and as his point of view readjusted itself on these lines, her present position, with all the suffering which it involved, presented itself to him solely as the inevitable climax of a simple and eminently comprehensible sequence of cause and effect.

His voice was low and stern as he said:

“Can you not think of any other friend who could give us some clue to his recent movements?”

“I can’t!” she cried, stopping in her rapid walk, and confronting him fiercely. “It is because there is no one left; because I don’t know what to do, or where to turn, that I have come to you! Should I be wasting time like this if I could think of any other means of acting? I’m tied hand and foot in the dark—tied to the rack, man! We can do nothing till we find him—till we know what has happened. Think, think, think! How are we to find him? How are we to——”

Her voice, which had risen into an agonised cry, broke suddenly; a greyish tint spread itself over her face, and all her features were contorted as if with horrible physical pain. She stretched out her hand feebly and gropingly, caught at an arm-chair, and fell into it, letting her face fall forward on its back as her nails pressed themselves pitilessly into her thin hands.

“It—it’s nothing!” she gasped, in a tight, suppressed voice, fighting desperately, as it seemed, to utter words rather than groans. “I have been ill! The night——”

The words died away, caught and strangled by the relentless, stabbing pain, and Falconer, utterly at a loss, stood for a moment helplessly watching her, and then strode across the room meaning to call a woman to his aid. He opened the door hurriedly and then stopped short. On the shelf fixed against the wall facing him there lay his morning letters, and on the top of the pile lay one directed in Julian’s handwriting. Mrs. Romayne’s physical distress sank into insignificance for him. The physical suffering which had fallen to his lot during the past year had by no means obliterated the lifelong instinct which led him to look upon such weakness as a detail to be disregarded, and of women he knew nothing. He turned back into the room with the letter in his hand, and shutting the door again opened it hastily. It was the letter Julian had written on the previous day in his room in the Temple.

“Dear Falconer,” he read,—“I’ve done for myself all round, and by the time you get this I shall be out of England. It’s penal servitude if I stay. The smash will come in a day or two and you will understand. It’s all up with me; but there’s my wife and child—for Heaven’s sake be kind to them. This is the address.” The address followed, and then the signature.

For another moment Dennis Falconer stood motionless with his eyes fixed on the letter, so despairing in its hopeless brevity, so terribly eloquent of immeasurable disgrace and wrong. Then he lifted his head and turned towards Mrs. Romayne. She had not moved, she was apparently unconscious of his presence; the tense rigidity of her position had passed into a total collapse, in which all her figure seemed to have fallen together as if in absolute exhaustion. To Falconer she presented an appearance only of most desirable quiet, and he hesitated simply as to how he should so break to her what must be broken, as to excite her least. She would have to see the letter! He glanced at it again on the thought, and a cold shock seemed to strike him as he realised the total oblivion of his mother to which the young man’s last appeal bore witness.

“I have received some news,” he said.

His tone, as he spoke, was curiously different from any in which he had ever before addressed her. It was grave, straightforward, and not unkindly, and it very subtly—and quite unconsciously—conveyed the altered attitude of a stern and narrow moralist towards wrong-doing, no longer triumphant and serene, but writhing under its merited suffering. A certain stern compassion the new position of affairs demanded of him, and he gave it; but it was that lofty compassion which is more than half composed of a sense of the righteousness of the retribution meted out; with sympathy or respect it was utterly untouched. He was prepared to help her to the utmost; he was steady reliability itself; but his help was permeated, as was his compassion, with a superior recognition of the justice of the trouble which rendered that help necessary.

As though there was something between her and her surroundings through which his voice must penetrate before it reached her brain, a second or two elapsed before Mrs. Romayne gave any sign of having heard him. Then she moved and turned her face towards him, looking at him as though from a long way off. Her forehead and the hair about it, strangely colourless and dead-looking, were damp. Grey shadows had fallen about her mouth. There was a faint struggle in her dull eyes, as though she had heard his words and was trying to force her way to an understanding of them through overwhelming physical disabilities.

“I am sorry to say it is far from reassuring,” continued Falconer.

A sudden flash of understanding and conviction flashed across her features, and its spirit dominated her weakness as its light transfigured her face. She rose, clinging to the chair, but evidently absolutely unconscious of any physical sensation, and held out her hand, still clammy and tremulous with pain.

“Give it me,” she said, indicating the letter he held. Her voice was a thin whisper. Then, as he hesitated: “You’re wasting time. Give it me.”

He gave it her without a word and turned away. It would break her down, of course, he thought; perhaps into some wild form of hysteria at the position in which the young man confessed himself; perhaps into passionate repudiation of the son who had so deceived her, and who was leaving her without word or sign. Moments passed, three or four perhaps, and then a tense, insistent touch fell on his arm and he turned. Mrs. Romayne was standing by his side, Julian’s letter held tightly in her hand, which trembled no longer. Her eyes were bright, almost hard in their determination, and every line and muscle of her face and figure was braced and set into a vivid strength and resolution.

“We must see this woman at once,” she said, and her voice was as strange in its desperate energy as was her face. Then, as Falconer only looked at her blankly, she added, in the same absorbed, concentrated way: “You will come with me?”

“You mean you will see——”

“I must see this woman,” she repeated, tapping the paper impatiently with her hand. “Don’t you see she will probably know where he is? She must know! Let us go at once!”

“But if she does know?”

“If she does know! Why, that is everything! I can follow him. He is frightened—he has lost his head. If he goes away like this he is lost. I am going to stop him.”

“But——”

She silenced him with a movement of her hand, before which his words died on his lips.

“Dennis Falconer,” she said, “help me or refuse to help me as you like, but don’t try to stop me. The shadow of a horror such as this has haunted me for twenty years. I bring the nerve and desperation of twenty years to meet it now, and I am going to save him. Will you come?”

Dominated against his will, sternly disapproving, but powerless to assert his disapprobation in the face of the intensity of her determination, Falconer made a slight gesture of enforced assent. Mrs. Romayne hardly waited for it before she turned and went swiftly out of the room and down the stairs.

It was early still—not yet eight o’clock—and cabs were hardly to be found. They met one at last, and Falconer put her into it and looked at her, obviously with an intention of uttering the protest with which his face was full. She made a peremptory sign that he should give the address, holding out the letter containing it, and instantly reclaiming it. Her nerves were evidently strung beyond the possibility of irrelevant or unnecessary speech. A long drive followed to a dingy, poverty-stricken neighbourhood, and then, in a dreary-looking little street, the cab stopped. Mrs. Romayne got out with the same rapid, concentrated movements, signing again, with a movement of her set lips, to Falconer that he should ring and make the necessary enquiries. The bell was answered, after an appreciable interval, by a slatternly-looking girl.

“A young woman lodges here, I believe,” said Falconer sternly—“a young married woman. Mrs.—Mrs. Roden, or Romayne?”

The girl stared at him for a moment with bold, curious eyes, and then transferred the stare to Mrs. Romayne, with a coarse giggle.

“Young married woman?” she repeated, with a toss of the head. “Oh, yes; of course! Top floor back!”

Before the last words, which conveyed a general intimation that visitors for the top floor back were expected to show themselves up, were well uttered, Mrs. Romayne had crossed the dirty little passage with swift steps and was mounting the stairs. She went straight on until she reached the top landing, and then she turned sharply to Falconer, who had followed her closely. His judgement condemned her proceedings utterly, but his stern sense of her claim upon him remained untouched, and he believed himself to be merely waiting until her impulse should fail her, as it seemed to him it must before long, to take matters into his own hands.

“Knock!” she said.

Falconer obeyed her; the door was opened with a quiet, sad-toned “Yes?” and Clemence stood on the threshold.

She was looking very fragile and very white; the haggard look of suffering had left her, but it had taken with it in the passing all the physical strength from her face. Her eyes were heavy as with sleeplessness and tears, and from their depths there seemed to emanate the quiet grief which spoke in every line of her face. She held her baby in her arms, and her whole personality seemed to be touched by the mysterious influence of motherhood into a new dignity and beauty. To Falconer the change in her since he had seen her in Camden Town was so great as to give him a moment’s absolute shock; it was the same woman, and yet not the same. The difference lay, for him, rather in the evidences of long suffering which spoke so eloquently about that woman’s face and form, than in the work effected by that suffering; and the feeling that the sight of her stirred in him was one of pity; a man’s half indignant, half patronising pity for weakness and trust abused.

But Falconer she did not seem to see. Instantly, as she opened the door, her eyes had passed to where Mrs. Romayne stood confronting her, her face absorbed, concentrated, hard as steel. A faint flush of colour flooded Clemence’s face; then she lowered her eyes, and stood with her head a little bent over her child, motionless.

“You are my son’s wife?”

The words came from Mrs. Romayne quick, terse, utterly untouched and unemotional, as though the situation in itself were absolutely devoid of meaning for her.

“My husband’s name is Julian Romayne,” was the low answer.

Mrs. Romayne made a quick, imperious gesture indicative of her desire to pass into the little room, on the threshold of which Clemence was standing. Clemence made way for her with quiet dignity, and then followed her in. Falconer hesitated an instant and took up his position in the doorway, holding himself in grave, attentive readiness until the moment when his presence should be required. The little room was scrupulously neat and clean. Facing him, a strangely incongruous figure amid such poor surroundings, but apparently as absolutely unconscious of them as of the child—at which she never glanced—stood Mrs. Romayne. Facing Mrs. Romayne stood Clemence, paler now than before, and with her head bent a little lower. Falconer could see that she trembled slightly. Mrs. Romayne began to speak instantly, in the same hard, rapid tone.

“Where is my son?” she said. “You have been told, perhaps, to say you do not know—to keep his plans secret. You must give them up instantly to me. He has made a mistake, and only prompt action can redeem it. When did you see him last? What did he tell you?”

As though some subtle influence from the one woman had penetrated to the heart of the other, Clemence’s face had turned quite white. For her, too, the personal aspect of the situation seemed suddenly to sink into abeyance. Her head was lifted, and her eyes, filled with a creeping apprehension, were fixed full upon Mrs. Romayne, oblivious of anything but the one interest which they held in common.

The man watching them was vaguely conscious of something about the two women which put him quite away from them; which made him the merest spectator of something to which he had no key.

“I saw him last night,” said Clemence, hurriedly and fearfully; “he came to say good-bye!”

A kind of hoarse cry broke from Mrs. Romayne.

“Good-bye!” she cried, as though appealing to some encircling environment of fate. “And she let him go! She let him go!” She stopped herself, forcing down her passion with an iron hand, and went on in a tone only colder and more decisive in its greater rapidity than before. “He has made a mistake; you cannot understand, of course. No doubt it seems to you that everything to be desired is comprised in the miserable subterfuge of flight. No doubt——”

She was interrupted. With a low cry of unutterable horror Clemence had drawn a step nearer to her, pressing her baby passionately to her heart.

“Flight!” she cried. “Flight! Ah, I knew! I knew there was something wrong! What is it? Oh, what is it? My dear, my dear, what have you done? What have you done?”

There was an instant’s dead silence as the cry died away and Clemence stood with her beseeching eyes dark and dilated, her uplifted face white and quivering, appealing, as it seemed, for an answer, to Julian himself. Falconer was looking straight before him, his face set and grim, passive, not only with the natural passivity of a man in the presence of inevitable anguish, but with the involuntary self-forgetfulness of a man in the presence of a power greater than he can understand. Mrs. Romayne had paused as though stopped by some kind of hard, annoyed surprise.

Then Mrs. Romayne went on in a thin, tense voice:

“There is no time to waste over what has been done; the point is to retrieve it! He must come back at once. Where is he?”

With a sudden quick movement Clemence turned, crossed the room, and laid the child tenderly in the little cot standing by the fire. She pressed her face down for one instant to the tiny sleep-flushed cheek, and then rose and came back to Mrs. Romayne and Falconer, her face white and resolute, her eyes shining, glancing from one to the other as she spoke.

“Will there be time?” she said. “Can I get to him before he sails? There is a woman downstairs who will take care of my child. He is alone! He may be doing——Flight! What can flight do for him if he has done wrong? He doesn’t always know! I am his wife, and I must go and help him. Will there be time?”

It was Falconer to whom her eyes finally turned, vaguely conscious of the absence of womanly sympathy, and appealing in the void for a man’s knowledge and assistance. It was Falconer who answered her. Instinctively and involuntarily he answered her directly, the current of his thoughts seeming to submit itself to hers without an impulse to resist or control her.

“Where was he going?” he said.

“To America!” was the answer, eager and low, as though life and death hung on the response it should elicit. “He was going then, he told me. That was at nine o’clock last night! Oh, if I go at once I shall be in time? I shall be in time?”

A hard, nervous irritation was disturbing the concentration of Mrs. Romayne’s face. Futile and utterly to be ignored as seemed to her any impulse on the part of the woman to whom, in the face of the terrible issues with which she stood confronted, she gave no personal consideration whatever; the introduction of such futility seemed, in the strained, tense condition of her nerves, to involve irrelevancy and delay, which she was utterly unable to meet with any self-command. She broke in now, her voice harsh and vibrating with uncontrollable impatience.

“There is no need,” she said. “I am on my way to him now. You—there is no need for you! You can do nothing!”

“I am his wife!” said Clemence.

She did not raise her voice; no colour came to her dead, white face; only she turned to Julian’s mother, with her hands crushed tightly together against her heart, and such a light shining in her eyes as seemed to transfigure her whole face and figure. For an instant the eyes of the two women met and held one another. Then Mrs. Romayne, with a gesture which seemed to repudiate and deny the influence which nevertheless she was powerless to resist, turned to Falconer and moved swiftly towards the door. “What does it matter?” she said, in a tone of fierce impatience, which relegated Clemence to the position of the merest nonentity. “The only thing of consequence is time!”

She swept out of the room as she spoke, and Clemence turned again to Falconer, stretching out beseeching hands.

“Help me!” she said.

The movement which he had thought to guide and control so easily had passed beyond Falconer’s control, and he knew it. He could only follow it, waiting until the turn of events should throw it, as he still believed they must, upon a man’s strength and experience. But as Clemence had touched him once before against his will, she touched him now against his judgement, and he answered her in one word:

“Come!”

Throughout the terrible hours that followed; during the drive to the station, the sickening suspense, the brief interval of waiting for a train, the long journey; neither by word nor sign did Mrs. Romayne evince the slightest consciousness of Clemence’s presence. Her face, almost stony now in its set determination, never altered. After they were seated in the train she never spoke at all. She sat gazing straight before her, motionless as a statue, like a woman living only by her hold upon a moment in the future, to which each present second as it passed was bringing her nearer.

There had been no time to ascertain the probabilities as to their forestalling the sailing of the boat in which Julian had presumably intended to leave England. Falconer, while admitting to himself that the young man might have over-estimated, panic-stricken, the danger in which he had placed himself, had but faint hope that any steps other than the promotion of his speedy departure would be possible when they should be in possession of the facts; even should their arrival be in time to frustrate his original determination. But Mrs. Romayne weighed no probabilities. She looked neither to the right nor to the left. She saw before her only the climax and consummation of the struggle of twenty years, and on that consummation was concentrated her whole existence.