With a sudden quick movement Clemence turned, crossed the room, and laid the child tenderly in the little cot standing by the fire. She pressed her face down for one instant to the tiny sleep-flushed cheek, and then rose and came back to Mrs. Romayne and Falconer, her face white and resolute, her eyes shining, glancing from one to the other as she spoke.
“Will there be time?” she said. “Can I get to him before he sails? There is a woman downstairs who will take care of my child. He is alone! He may be doing——Flight! What can flight do for him if he has done wrong? He doesn’t always know! I am his wife, and I must go and help him. Will there be time?”
It was Falconer to whom her eyes finally turned, vaguely conscious of the absence of womanly sympathy, and appealing in the void for a man’s knowledge and assistance. It was Falconer who answered her. Instinctively and involuntarily he answered her directly, the current of his thoughts seeming to submit itself to hers without an impulse to resist or control her.
“Where was he going?” he said.
“To America!” was the answer, eager and low, as though life and death hung on the response it should elicit. “He was going then, he told me. That was at nine o’clock last night! Oh, if I go at once I shall be in time? I shall be in time?”
A hard, nervous irritation was disturbing the concentration of Mrs. Romayne’s face. Futile and utterly to be ignored as seemed to her any impulse on the part of the woman to whom, in the face of the terrible issues with which she stood confronted, she gave no personal consideration whatever; the introduction of such futility seemed, in the strained, tense condition of her nerves, to involve irrelevancy and delay, which she was utterly unable to meet with any self-command. She broke in now, her voice harsh and vibrating with uncontrollable impatience.
“There is no need,” she said. “I am on my way to him now. You—there is no need for you! You can do nothing!”
“I am his wife!” said Clemence.
She did not raise her voice; no colour came to her dead, white face; only she turned to Julian’s mother, with her hands crushed tightly together against her heart, and such a light shining in her eyes as seemed to transfigure her whole face and figure. For an instant the eyes of the two women met and held one another. Then Mrs. Romayne, with a gesture which seemed to repudiate and deny the influence which nevertheless she was powerless to resist, turned to Falconer and moved swiftly towards the door. “What does it matter?” she said, in a tone of fierce impatience, which relegated Clemence to the position of the merest nonentity. “The only thing of consequence is time!”