She yielded to his touch, with a low sob, and as they stood clasped in one another’s arms, a shuddering moan rang through the room, and Mrs. Romayne fell heavily forward at their feet.
CHAPTER XVI
“Will she suffer any more?”
On the upper landing of the hotel in which Falconer had found Julian, Clemence was standing, one hand resting on the handle of a door which she had just closed behind her, looking in the uncertain light of a flickering gas-jet into the face of the man to whom she spoke. He was a quick, capable-looking man, with a brisk, professional manner, evidently a doctor. Clemence’s face was pale and tired, as though with strain or watching, and her low voice shook a little. The doctor was drawing on his left-hand glove, and he paused to answer her.
“I should say that she would not,” he said. “It is practically over.” He gave a keen, rather curious look at Clemence and then added: “You are alone with the lady?”
“Yes,” said Clemence simply.
A long night and a long day had passed, and between Mrs. Romayne and the one absorbing passion of her life had fallen that solemn shadow before which all earthly passions pale and fade away; that solemn shadow before whose creeping touch not strength of will, not love itself, can stand. As she fell to the ground before her son she had loosed her hold perforce on all the struggle and burning resolution which was life to her; she had followed the guide whom none may resist into that valley through which every one must pass, and its mists had lifted from her no more. From that one long faint she had been brought back only to fall into another; in such total unconsciousness, which had yielded twice to intervals of physical pain terrible to see, the long hours had passed.
And in one of these spaces of blank unconsciousness Julian Romayne had seen his mother for the last time. The necessity for his departure was pressing and relentless. The meeting of the shareholders was imminent, and that meeting he must face. He had left his mother’s room in the grey light of the early morning with a look on his face which Clemence, the only witness of that mute parting, never forgot; and he had gone away with Dennis Falconer to make those preparations for his surrender of himself to justice which were not to be delayed.