“Gone?” he said. “Gone?”
“Gone!” she returned, repeating the word as she had done before in a kind of hoarse cry. “Oh, let me try and make you understand clearly, that we may lose no time. Time! Ah! who knows how much may have been lost already? My boy! my boy!”
She strangled the cry in her very throat, and laying one hand on Falconer’s arm with a convulsive grip, as if to steady herself, she lifted the other to her head, pushing the hair back from her forehead and pressing her fingers down as though to force herself to think and speak coherently.
“I had a telegram from him,” she said, speaking in short, quick sentences with heavy, panting breaths between, “ten days ago. It said that he was going to stop in town for a few days. Yesterday I heard something that made me uneasy. I came up to speak to him late last night. I expected to find him in Queen Anne Street. He was not there. He has not been there for the last two nights. He is gone!” She stopped as though in those three words she had summed up all the horror of the situation; and with that strange sense of unreality making his voice stiff and constrained, Falconer said:
“But must you necessarily apprehend anything alarming? Some private visit, perhaps; a painful discovery, of course——”
She tore her hand away from his arm, wringing it fiercely with its fellow as she faced him, breaking in upon his words with a passionate cry.
“Apprehend! Apprehend! I know, I tell you, I know! Ah! have I been watching and fighting for so many years; have I planned and struggled and sickened with fear; not to know, now that it has overtaken me at last? Dennis Falconer, don’t palter with me. You know what lies about my boy. You know what horrible inheritance I have had to battle with for him. Good Heaven! when have you spared me your knowledge of it? When have you failed to thrust it on me, to force me to shudder and sicken even when I felt most secure?”
She paused, battling for breath; and then, as Falconer tried to speak, she put out her hand to stop him, and went on hurriedly:
“That’s all over! It’s done with! Now you must help me. Your knowledge must help me. You are a man. You will know what to do; how he can be saved! He must be saved! He must!”
She turned away from him with a wild, unconscious gesture, as though his personality had no existence for her save and except as he could serve her purpose, and began once more to pace up and down the room.