She swept out of the room as she spoke, and Clemence turned again to Falconer, stretching out beseeching hands.
“Help me!” she said.
The movement which he had thought to guide and control so easily had passed beyond Falconer’s control, and he knew it. He could only follow it, waiting until the turn of events should throw it, as he still believed they must, upon a man’s strength and experience. But as Clemence had touched him once before against his will, she touched him now against his judgement, and he answered her in one word:
“Come!”
Throughout the terrible hours that followed; during the drive to the station, the sickening suspense, the brief interval of waiting for a train, the long journey; neither by word nor sign did Mrs. Romayne evince the slightest consciousness of Clemence’s presence. Her face, almost stony now in its set determination, never altered. After they were seated in the train she never spoke at all. She sat gazing straight before her, motionless as a statue, like a woman living only by her hold upon a moment in the future, to which each present second as it passed was bringing her nearer.
There had been no time to ascertain the probabilities as to their forestalling the sailing of the boat in which Julian had presumably intended to leave England. Falconer, while admitting to himself that the young man might have over-estimated, panic-stricken, the danger in which he had placed himself, had but faint hope that any steps other than the promotion of his speedy departure would be possible when they should be in possession of the facts; even should their arrival be in time to frustrate his original determination. But Mrs. Romayne weighed no probabilities. She looked neither to the right nor to the left. She saw before her only the climax and consummation of the struggle of twenty years, and on that consummation was concentrated her whole existence.
CHAPTER XIV
The room was very still; even the clock upon the mantelpiece was not going, so that not even a low tick disturbed the perfect quiet. It was a sitting-room in one of the Liverpool hotels, and quite alone in it was Clemence. She was sitting near the window, motionless, her hands clasped tightly together on her knee. Her face was lifted slightly towards the sky, and its calm, broken now and again by a slight quiver of the lips, was that of intense absorption. Clemence’s was one of those natures in which great mental suffering of any kind passes instinctively into unformed prayer; and she was praying now with her whole being, with no faintest consciousness of herself or her mental attitude.
She had been sitting there alone and motionless for more than an hour, when a touch fell upon the handle of the door. She started violently, and rose involuntarily to her feet as it opened to admit Falconer. She did not speak; all her agony of questioning seemed to have passed into the eyes she fixed upon him, and into those tightly-clasped hands.