Falconer followed her with his eyes, standing motionless and confounded. The very foundation on which stood his every conception with regard to the woman before him, and the life she lived, had suddenly melted into nothingness before her passionate words, and there seemed for the time being to be no stability anywhere about him. It was no light that her words let in upon him. Rather, they rolled over that mental tract of country which had been to him perfectly familiar and commonplace, a darkness in which every landmark was obliterated. In those first bewildered seconds his most prominent sensation was one of utter blackness—the mental counterpart of the effect produced upon the physical vision by the sudden substitution of illimitable darkness for a narrow and well-known scene.
“What do you fear?” he said. He spoke almost like an automaton, in a low, tentative tone.
“He has been speculating.” She never stopped in her rushing walk. “I have known it for months, and I have been in torment.” There was a strange, scathed look on her face which gave the words a terrible reality. “He has had some heavy anxiety on his mind all the summer—what, I don’t know. But this is the end of it. Oh, my boy, my darling, what have I done that you should shut your mother out? I have slaved for you! I have slaved for you, and I will slave for you as long as I live! Why have you gone away from me?”
She was not crying. To Falconer, watching her and listening to her, no tears could have been so terrible as that bitter, dry-eyed wail which seemed to him to echo in a void, where nothing answering to it could have been nurtured into life. The contrast between the artificial woman he had known hitherto, and the woman in the consuming anguish of her motherhood with whom he now found himself face to face, was so amazing that he could make no attempt to grapple with it. He took desperate and instinctive refuge in the practical.
“Do you know anything of his City associations?” he said.
She made a despairing gesture of negation.
“I did!” she said hoarsely. “I did all I knew to keep in touch with him. Two months ago Marston Loring could have told me anything. But everything failed me! Everything crumbled away! They quarrelled.”
Already, with that matter-of-fact tendency inherent in all men—and particularly in unimaginative men—which assimilates a revelation, and reduces it involuntarily to a commonplace, Falconer had become almost accustomed to the new point of view which had been forced upon him. The darkness was lifting, and he was aware of vast tracts of mental country, destitute of those landmarks which his soul loved, but no longer enveloped in a dense atmosphere of confusion.
A man of Falconer’s narrow temperament, confirmed in his rigidity by many years of life, having his set conceptions suddenly overthrown and forcibly enlarged, will be totally incapable of any just appreciation of the new horizon then created; he will be conscious of the spaces about him only as confusing unrealities; the limitations solidified by the mental habits of years will retain some sort of ghostly influence over him long after they have ceased to have any actual existence. His first conscious and deliberate movement will be an instinctive attempt to reconcile the new condition of things with these old limitations, rather than to reconcile himself with the new conditions. The facts which Mrs. Romayne’s words recalled to him; the character of the man whom she had encouraged as her son’s chief intimate; the character of the life to which she had bred him; gave definite force to the vague movement towards such reconciliation already stirring in Falconer’s mind. He accepted the revelation of unsuspected mother’s love and mother’s dread, and ceased to contemplate it as he concentrated his mental vision on the selfish vanity and worldliness with which Mrs. Romayne had stood endued in his thoughts for twenty years; and as his point of view readjusted itself on these lines, her present position, with all the suffering which it involved, presented itself to him solely as the inevitable climax of a simple and eminently comprehensible sequence of cause and effect.
His voice was low and stern as he said: