“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.