The long railway journey from Paris to Nice was nearly over. The
passengers, jaded and tired out, for the most part, after a night in the
train, were beginning to rouse to a languid interest in the landscape;
to become aware that dawn and the uncomfortable and unfamiliar early day
had some time since given place to a fuller and maturer light; and to
consult their watches, reminding themselves--or one another, as the case
might be--that they were due at Nice at twelve-fifteen.
Alone in one of the first-class carriages was a passenger who had
accepted the situation with the most matter-of-fact indifference from
first to last. He had made his arrangements for the night, with the
skill and deliberation of an experienced traveller; and as the morning
advanced he had composed himself, as comfortably as circumstances
permitted, in a corner of his carriage, now and then casting a keen,
comprehensive glance at the country through which he was being carried.
These glances, however, were evidently instinctive and almost
unconscious. For the most part he gazed straight before him with a
preoccupied frown and a grave and anxious expression in marked contrast
with his physical imperturbability. He was a man of apparently three or
four-and-thirty; tall; rather lean than thin; and very muscular-looking.
His face, and the right hand from which he had pulled off the glove,
were bronzed a deep red-brown, and he wore a long brown beard; but he
was not otherwise remarkable-looking. His eyes, indeed, were very keen
and steady, but the rest of his face conveyed the impression that he
owed these characteristics rather to trained habits of material
observation than to general intellectual depths; the mouth was firm and
strong, but neither sensitive nor sympathetic, and the straight,
well-cut nose was as distinctly too thin as the rather high forehead was
too narrow. On a much-worn travelling-bag on the seat beside him, was
the name Dennis Falconer.
The train steamed slowly into the station at Nice at last; the traveller
stepped out on to the platform, and the shade of grave preoccupation
which had touched him seemed to descend on him more heavily and
all-absorbingly as he did so. He was walking down the platform, looking
neither to the right nor the left, when he was stopped by a quick
exclamation from a little wiry man with a shrewd, clever face who had
just come into the station.
“Falconer, as I’m alive,” he cried. “Well met, my boy!”
The gravity of the younger man’s face relaxed for the moment into a
smile of well-pleased astonishment.
“Dr. Aston!” he exclaimed. “Why, I was thinking of looking you up in
London! I’d no idea you were abroad!”
The other man laughed, a very pleasant, jovial laugh.
“I’m taking a holiday,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve any particular
right to it! But I don’t know these places, and I took it into my head
that I should like to have a look at a carnival in Nice. And you, my
boy? Just back from Africa, you are, I know. You’ve come for the
carnival by way of a change, eh?”
Falconer’s face altered.
“No!” he said gravely, and with a good deal of restraint. “I’ve not come
for pleasure. Very much the reverse, I’m sorry to say.”
He paused, apparently intending to say no more on the subject. But the
keen, kindly interest in his hearer’s face, or something magnetic about
the man, influenced him in spite of himself.
“I don’t know whether the facts about this bank business are known here
yet,” he said, “but if they are you’ll understand, Aston, when I tell
you that I and my old uncle are the only male relations of William
Romayne’s wife.”
A quick flash of grave intelligence passed across Dr. Aston’s face. He
hesitated, and glanced dubiously at the younger man.
“When did you leave London?” he said abruptly.
“Yesterday morning,” was the somewhat surprised reply.
“You’ve come in good time, my boy,” said Dr. Aston very gravely. “Mrs.
Romayne wants a relation with her if ever she did in her life. Was her
husband ever a friend of yours, Dennis?”
“I have never met him. I know very little even of his wife. What is it,
doctor?”
“William Romayne shot himself yesterday morning!”
A short, sharp exclamation broke from Falconer, and then there was a
moment’s total silence between the two men as the sudden, unspeakable
horror in Falconer’s face resolved itself into a shocked, almost
awestruck gravity.
“I am thankful to have met you,” he said at last in a low, stern voice;
“and I am more than thankful that I came.”
He held out his hand as he spoke, as though what he had heard impelled
him to go on his way, and Dr. Aston wrung it with warm sympathy.
“We shall meet again,” he said. “Let me know if I can be of any use. I
am staying at the Français.”
Grave and stern, but not apparently shaken or rendered nervous by the
news he had heard, or by the prospect of the meeting before him, as a
sympathetic or emotional man must have been, Dennis Falconer strode out
of the station. Grave and stern he reached his destination, and enquired
for Mrs. Romayne. His question was answered by the proprietor himself,
supplemented by half-audible ejaculations from attendant waiters, in a
tone in which sympathetic interest, familiarity, and even a certain
amount of resentment were inextricably blended.
Monsieur would see Madame Romayne--_cette pauvre madame_, of a demeanour
so beautiful, yes, even in these frightful circumstances, so beautiful
and so distinguished? Monsieur had but just arrived from
England--monsieur had then perhaps not heard? Monsieur was aware? He was
a kinsman of madame? Monsieur would then doubtless appreciate the so
great inconvenience occasioned, the hardly-to-be-reckoned damage
sustained by one of the first hotels in Nice, by the event? Monsieur
would see madame at once? But yes, madame was visible. There was, in
fact, a monsieur with her even now--an English monsieur from the
English Scotland Yard. Madame had sent---- But monsieur was indeed in
haste.
Monsieur left no possibility of doubt on that score. The waiter, told
off by a wave of the proprietor’s hand on the vigorous demonstration to
that effect evoked by the mention of the monsieur from Scotland Yard,
had to hasten his usual pace considerably to keep ahead of those quick,
firm footsteps, and it was almost breathlessly that he at last threw
open a door at the end of a long corridor.
“Mr. Romayne’s name is public property in connection with the affair,
then, in London, since yesterday morning?”
The words, spoken in a hard, thin, woman’s voice, came to Falconer’s ear
as the door opened; and the waiter’s announcement, “A kinsman of
madame,” passed unheeded as he moved hastily forward into the room.
It was a small private sitting-room, evidently by no means the best in
the hotel. With his back to the door stood a young man in an attitude of
professional calm, rather belied by a certain nervous fingering of the
hat he held, which seemed to say that he found his position a somewhat
embarrassing one. Facing him, and indirectly facing the door, stood Mrs.
Romayne.
She was dressed in black from head to foot, but the gown she wore was
one that she had had in her wardrobe--very fashionably made, with no
trace of mourning about it other than its hue.
Emphasized, perhaps, by the incongruity of her conventional smartness,
but a result of the past twenty-four hours independent of any such
emphasis, all the more salient points of her demeanour of the day before
seemed to be accentuated into hardness. Her perfect self-possession, as
she faced the young man before her--it was the man she had noticed on
the previous morning questioning the waiter--was hard; her perfect
freedom from any touch of emotion or agitation was hard; her face, a
little sharpened and haggard, and reddened slightly about the eyelids,
apparently rather from want of sleep than from tears, was very hard; her
eyes, brighter than usual, and her rather thin mouth, were eloquent of
bitterness, rather than desolation, of spirit.
She turned quickly towards the door as Falconer entered, and looked at
him for an instant with an unrecognising stare. Then, as he advanced to
her without speaking, and with outstretched hand, something that was
almost a spasm of comprehension passed across her face, settling into a
stiff little society smile.
“It is Dennis Falconer, isn’t it?” she said, holding out her hand to
him. “I ought to have known you at once. I am very glad to see you.”
“My uncle thought---- We decided yesterday morning----”
Dennis Falconer hesitated and stopped. He was thrown out of his
reckoning, taken hopelessly aback, as it were, by something so entirely
unlike what he had expected as was her whole bearing; though, indeed, he
had been quite unconscious of expecting anything. But Mrs. Romayne
remained completely mistress of the situation.
“It is very kind of you,” she said, with the same hard composure. “It
was very kind of my uncle.” She hesitated, hardly perceptibly, and then
said, the lines about her mouth growing more bitter, “You have heard?”
Falconer bowed his head in assent, and she turned toward the young man,
who had drawn a little apart during this colloquy.
“This gentleman comes from Scotland Yard,” she said. “Perhaps you will
be so kind as to go into matters with him. I do not understand business
or legal details. Mr. Falconer will represent me,” she added to the
young man, who bowed with an alacrity that suggested, as did his glance
at Falconer, that the prospect of conferring with a man rather than a
woman was a distinct relief to him. Then, before Falconer’s not very
rapid mind had adjusted itself to the situation, she had bowed slightly
to the young man and left the room.