Her face was sharp and haggard; the artificial colour stood out on it in great patches, throwing into relief the vivid pallor beneath. She had thrown aside her cloak as though the physical oppression was unbearable to her, and the contrast between her face and her gorgeous dress with its glittering ornaments was horrible.
A smothered oath broke from the young man, and lifting his right hand, he began to rub it slowly up and down the back of his head as an expression of heavy, fierce cogitation settled down upon his face. To his unutterable surprise, as he made the gesture, there stole over his mother’s face an expression of such deadly terror as he had never before seen. He stopped involuntarily, and she staggered to her feet, holding out two quivering, imploring hands. For the first time in his life Julian was using a gesture habitual in his dead father; for the first time in his life, looking into her son’s face, Mrs. Romayne saw there the face of William Romayne.
“My boy!” she gasped. “My boy. Don’t do that! Don’t look like that, for Heaven’s sake! For Heaven’s sake!”
She swayed for a moment to and fro, and then fell heavily forward into his arms.
CHAPTER VIII
A bitter east wind, which was taking sufficiently depressing effect upon all London, was dealing with peculiar grimness with Redburn Street, Camden Town. The neat little houses in that dreary grey dryness looked sordidly wretched; there was something deserted and hopeless about them. No one was to be seen, except that at a first-floor window about half-way down a woman’s figure was standing; and as Dennis Falconer turned into the street his footsteps rang with heavy distinctness on the glaring pavement. He strode slowly and steadily along, and his solitary figure, as it stood out with that peculiar sharpness of outline which is a characteristic production of east wind, harmonised absolutely with the sombreness of the background. His face was full of sombre purpose, grave and stern.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon of Wednesday—two days after Julian’s return home. On the morning of the preceding day Julian and his mother had had a second interview, which had ended in his giving a sullen and reluctant assent to her demands; and in the evening Dennis Falconer had received from Mrs. Romayne a brief, almost peremptory note, begging him to come to her. He had gone to Queen Anne Street accordingly, severely unsympathetic, but also severely reliable, early on Wednesday morning.
He had found Mrs. Romayne in a feverish agony of agitation beyond even the power of her will to conceal or wholly to control. Her voice, painfully thin and sharp; her gestures restless, nervous, irritable; her utterance hard and rapid; had all testified to a strained, tense excitement before which all her artificiality was utterly submerged, and in which Falconer himself was obviously regarded by her solely as the one instrument at hand to her necessity. Her whole soul seemed to be set upon the immediate termination of “the affair,” as she called it. It affected her evidently in only one way, she looked at it from only one point of view: as something to be finished up, put away, buried out of sight. It was the thought of delay in the doing of this, only, that appeared to torture her; of the affair itself with all its terrible significance, its inevitable consequences, she had, as far as Falconer could divine, no adequate conception. The girl must be bought off; must be sent away; must be sent right out of the country, in case—and here came the one agonised sense of a possible consequence which Falconer could detect—in case Julian should marry her after all!
It was evidently the haunting terror of such a contingency which had driven her to send for Falconer. It was obvious, though she seemed to be striving hard to conceal it even from herself, that she could not trust her son; that she could find no rest in the promise she had wrung from him. What she had to say to Falconer was, in effect, that some one else must see the girl; the arrangement to be surely effected must be brought about by a third person who would set about the business promptly and act decidedly. It was this service which she wanted of Falconer, and Falconer, after a moment’s grave self-communing, agreed to render it. He was as far removed from sympathy with her in this her hard, agonised reality as he had been from the artificial woman of the previous months, or from the real woman of eighteen years before. He considered her point of view in the present instance absolutely revolting in her. But no man could question the practical sense of what she said, or the advisability of the course she proposed, and his conception of his obligations as her sole male relative and trustee was too intimately intertwined with his sense of duty and self-respect to allow him to entertain, even for a moment, the possibility of refusing to act for her. He had stood by her side, impelled by that sense of duty, gravely reliable, and unsympathetic, eighteen years before. The irony of fate decreed that it was for him, and for him only, to act for her now. To him it was simply the stern dictate of moral necessity to be obeyed as such.
Accordingly he had received her instructions, offering now and again a grim, practical suggestion, with a stern air of businesslike reserve; had undertaken—being at the bottom of her opinion as to the desirability of instant measures—to see “the girl” that same afternoon; and he was walking down Redburn Street now, in the pitiless east wind, to carry that undertaking into effect.