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.