“Can you not think of any other friend who could give us some clue to his recent movements?”
“I can’t!” she cried, stopping in her rapid walk, and confronting him fiercely. “It is because there is no one left; because I don’t know what to do, or where to turn, that I have come to you! Should I be wasting time like this if I could think of any other means of acting? I’m tied hand and foot in the dark—tied to the rack, man! We can do nothing till we find him—till we know what has happened. Think, think, think! How are we to find him? How are we to——”
Her voice, which had risen into an agonised cry, broke suddenly; a greyish tint spread itself over her face, and all her features were contorted as if with horrible physical pain. She stretched out her hand feebly and gropingly, caught at an arm-chair, and fell into it, letting her face fall forward on its back as her nails pressed themselves pitilessly into her thin hands.
“It—it’s nothing!” she gasped, in a tight, suppressed voice, fighting desperately, as it seemed, to utter words rather than groans. “I have been ill! The night——”
The words died away, caught and strangled by the relentless, stabbing pain, and Falconer, utterly at a loss, stood for a moment helplessly watching her, and then strode across the room meaning to call a woman to his aid. He opened the door hurriedly and then stopped short. On the shelf fixed against the wall facing him there lay his morning letters, and on the top of the pile lay one directed in Julian’s handwriting. Mrs. Romayne’s physical distress sank into insignificance for him. The physical suffering which had fallen to his lot during the past year had by no means obliterated the lifelong instinct which led him to look upon such weakness as a detail to be disregarded, and of women he knew nothing. He turned back into the room with the letter in his hand, and shutting the door again opened it hastily. It was the letter Julian had written on the previous day in his room in the Temple.
“Dear Falconer,” he read,—“I’ve done for myself all round, and by the time you get this I shall be out of England. It’s penal servitude if I stay. The smash will come in a day or two and you will understand. It’s all up with me; but there’s my wife and child—for Heaven’s sake be kind to them. This is the address.” The address followed, and then the signature.
For another moment Dennis Falconer stood motionless with his eyes fixed on the letter, so despairing in its hopeless brevity, so terribly eloquent of immeasurable disgrace and wrong. Then he lifted his head and turned towards Mrs. Romayne. She had not moved, she was apparently unconscious of his presence; the tense rigidity of her position had passed into a total collapse, in which all her figure seemed to have fallen together as if in absolute exhaustion. To Falconer she presented an appearance only of most desirable quiet, and he hesitated simply as to how he should so break to her what must be broken, as to excite her least. She would have to see the letter! He glanced at it again on the thought, and a cold shock seemed to strike him as he realised the total oblivion of his mother to which the young man’s last appeal bore witness.
“I have received some news,” he said.
His tone, as he spoke, was curiously different from any in which he had ever before addressed her. It was grave, straightforward, and not unkindly, and it very subtly—and quite unconsciously—conveyed the altered attitude of a stern and narrow moralist towards wrong-doing, no longer triumphant and serene, but writhing under its merited suffering. A certain stern compassion the new position of affairs demanded of him, and he gave it; but it was that lofty compassion which is more than half composed of a sense of the righteousness of the retribution meted out; with sympathy or respect it was utterly untouched. He was prepared to help her to the utmost; he was steady reliability itself; but his help was permeated, as was his compassion, with a superior recognition of the justice of the trouble which rendered that help necessary.
As though there was something between her and her surroundings through which his voice must penetrate before it reached her brain, a second or two elapsed before Mrs. Romayne gave any sign of having heard him. Then she moved and turned her face towards him, looking at him as though from a long way off. Her forehead and the hair about it, strangely colourless and dead-looking, were damp. Grey shadows had fallen about her mouth. There was a faint struggle in her dull eyes, as though she had heard his words and was trying to force her way to an understanding of them through overwhelming physical disabilities.