With a sudden, low cry of inexpressible horror and dismay Mrs. Romayne sprang to her feet, flinging out her hands as though to keep off something intolerable to be borne.
“No! no!” she cried breathlessly. “No! no! Not that! Not married? It would be ruin! Ruin! ruin! No! no!”
Dennis Falconer paused, freezing slowly into what seemed to him surely justifiable abhorrence of the woman before him. What if he knew in his heart that such a marriage would indeed mean ruin to a young man? So bald a trampling down of the moral aspect of the position before the practical was not decent! It was for a woman—and that woman the young man’s mother—to be overwhelmed by the moral horror to the exclusion of every other thought! And it was the practical alone that had drawn any show of emotion from Mrs. Romayne!
“I am sorry to have agitated you!” he said, and his voice was cold and cutting as steel. “I have no doubt in my own mind that they are not married. I had better perhaps continue to give you the facts in order. Chance led to my seeing the young man in question as he was leaving the house. I recognised your son. I proceeded to make enquiries. He passes as a medical student, under the name of Roden. The girl is—or was—a hand at one of the big millinery establishments. From her affectation of innocence and simplicity, the woman who has most opportunity of observing her is inclined to think the very worst of her!”
A quick, hissing breath—an unmistakeable breath of relief—parted Mrs. Romayne’s white lips. She had sunk down again in her chair and was grasping it now with both hands as she leant a little forward, trembling in every limb.
“Then it is not likely—it is not likely that he has married her,” she said, in a low, rapid tone to herself rather than to Falconer, as it seemed. “Go on!”
“There is very little more to be said,” returned Falconer icily. “They have occupied the rooms—that is to say, the girl has occupied them, visited every day by your son—for three weeks now. The woman has discovered that they had been somewhere in the country together for a week previously. You will, of course, be able to recall his absence from home. Yesterday he took her away into the country again; they are to return on Monday!”
He stopped; and as though she were no longer conscious of his presence, Mrs. Romayne’s head was bowed slowly lower, as if under some irresistible weight, until her forehead rested on her hand, stretched out still upon the arm of her wide chair.
She lifted her face at last, white and haggard as twenty added years of life should not have made it, and rose, helping herself feebly with the arm of her chair, like a woman whose physical strength is broken. Falconer rose also. He was utterly alienated from her; he was conscious of only the most distant pity, but he felt that it was incumbent on him to say something.
“I regret very much that it should have fallen to my lot to break this to you!” he said, stiffly and awkwardly. “I fear that coming from me——” He hesitated and paused.