“By-the-bye, in the ‘latest intelligence’ of London society—all is fish in the shape of human nature that comes to my net, as you know, and I study that curious institution carefully whenever I get the chance—I constantly, nowadays, come across the name of a Mrs. Romayne. ‘The charming Mrs. Romayne and her good-looking son’ is the usual formula. It is not by any chance the little woman with whom I got myself and you into such a terrible fix years and years ago at Nice—William Romayne’s widow? Is it any relation? I should like to know what became of that little woman, if you can tell me; she had stuff in her. And whether the boy has dreed his weird yet?”
Falconer laid down the letter abruptly, and turned to his breakfast, his face stern and uncompromising. His interview with Mrs. Romayne, now a fortnight old, had accentuated markedly his grim disapprobation of her; and the strong feeling of reprobation that stirred him then had so little subsided that the least touch was enough to re-endow it with vigorous life.
“Stuff in her!” he muttered, with a world of contempt in the curt ejaculation. “Stuff in her! If Aston only knew!”
He glanced at the letter again, and a certain disapproval, personal to the writer, expressed itself in the grave set of his lips as he re-read the words about Julian; his whole mental and moral attitude was antagonistic to, and inclined to condemn, what he characterised, now, as “Aston’s dangerous theories.” He passed with what seemed to him practical sense from “Aston’s extravagance” to a stern consideration of the heinousness of such a life and education as Julian’s for a young man in Julian’s position. Julian’s position, rightly considered, involved in his eyes a reaping in obscurity, humility, and sombreness of life of the harvest of shame and disgrace which his father had sown; and that there was anything inconsistent between this view of the case and his condemnation of Dr. Aston’s theories he was utterly unaware.
He applied himself to his breakfast, still meditating on Mrs. Romayne and the probable consequences of her callousness; and then he took up the other letter and opened it.
At the opening of his last expedition, one of the men attached to it had met with a disabling accident, and had been sent home. The man had been with Falconer on a previous expedition, and when the latter returned to England he had made enquiries about him, and had finally, and with no little difficulty, traced him out to find him crippled for life, and in a state of abject poverty. Falconer, according to his narrow and orthodox lights, as strictly conventional in their way as were Mrs. Romayne’s in hers, was a good man. The letter he was reading now, from the wife of this man, was written by a woman by whom he was regarded as a kind of Providence; to be reverenced indeed, not loved, but to be reverenced with all her heart. She and her husband had been rescued by him from despair; all that medical skill could do for the man had been done at his expense. The pair had been settled by him in a small house in Camden Town, where Mrs. Dixon, a brisk, capable woman, was to let lodgings. To this house Falconer had been once or twice to see the crippled man; and he was not now surprised to receive from the wife the information—conveyed in a style in which natural loquacity struggled with awe of her correspondent—that the husband had had one of the bad attacks of suffering to which he was liable, and that if Mr. Falconer could spare half an hour, Dixon would “take it very kind with his duty.”
Falconer smiled grimly at the words “if Mr. Falconer could spare half an hour.” His whole day was practically at Dixon’s disposal. He would go up to Camden Town that afternoon, he decided; he almost wished he had thought of going before, and as the thought crossed his mind, the remembrance of what might possibly be lying in wait for himself in the not very distant future made him rise abruptly and thrust his letters into his pocket.
It was about twelve o’clock when he left his rooms and walked slowly away in the direction of club-land. He usually got through an hour or so at his club before lunch, reading the papers and so forth. The threatening fog of three hours earlier had rolled away, and there were gleams of wintry sunshine about which made walking pleasant. Dr. Aston’s letter had cheered Falconer considerably; the feeling, too, that he had a definite occupation for his afternoon, and an occupation which was not invented, was invigorating; and altogether he was in better spirits than he had been for many a day. He was walking up Waterloo Place, when his eyes, which could not forego, even in a London street, their trained habits of keen, accurate observation, lighted on Marston Loring, who was coming down Waterloo Place on the opposite side of the road. Loring was a man Dennis Falconer particularly disliked, and after one disapproving glance he was looking away, when he saw the other suddenly stop with a movement—and evidently an exclamation—of surprise and welcome. In the same instant he became aware that Julian Romayne had turned out of a side-street, and was greeting his friend apparently with effusion. Falconer’s brow clouded involuntarily. The instinct of kin was so strong in him that there was a certain touch of personal feeling, little as he wished it, in his connection with the Romaynes, which made the thought of them particularly disagreeable to him; and here, for the second time to-day, the young man and his mother were forced upon his notice. He pursued his way up the street, watching Julian grimly, and as he passed, still on the opposite pavement, the corner where the two young men were standing, Julian happened to look across, saw him, and made a ready, courteous gesture of salutation. Falconer returned it stiffly enough, and walked on.
Julian turned to Loring with a laugh.
“Old bear!” he said; “I wish he’d take himself off to Africa or somewhere. He’s a regular wet blanket to have about! Well, old fellow, and what’s the news?”