Mrs. Romayne carried the despatch-box to her bedroom and set it down on
a small table. She and Falconer were leaving Nice on the following
morning, and her maid was just finishing her packing. Mrs. Romayne
inspected the woman’s arrangements, gave her sundry orders, and then
dismissed her. Left alone, she made one or two trifling preparations for
the journey on her own account, and when these were completed to her
satisfaction, she drew the table on which she had placed the
despatch-box to the open window, and seated herself.
She drew the box towards her and unlocked it, and there was nothing in
her face as she did so but the hard resentment which had grown upon it
during the last few days, just touched by an indefinite and equally
hard curiosity. The interest which those papers possessed for her had
been created by purely artificial means; intrinsically they were nothing
to her. The position which the possession of them had occupied in her
thoughts lately was the sole source of the impulse under which she was
acting now; under any other circumstances she might hardly have cared to
look at them.
She raised the lid and paused a moment, looking down at the compact mass
of papers within with a sudden vague touch of more personal interest.
The box was nearly full. The various sets of papers were carefully and
methodically fastened together, and endorsed evidently upon a system.
Mrs. Romayne hesitated a moment, and then took out a packet at random.
It consisted of bills all bearing dates within the last six months; all
sent in by leading London tradesmen, and all for large amounts. Mrs.
Romayne glanced at the figures, and her eyebrows moved with an
expression of slight surprise, which was almost immediately dominated by
bitter acceptance and comprehension. She opened none, however, until
she came to one bearing the name of a well-known London jeweller. She
read the name and the amount of the bill, and paused; then a new
curiosity came into her eyes, and she unfolded the paper quickly. The
account was a very long one, and as her eyes travelled quickly down it,
taking in item after item, a dull red colour crept into her face, and
her eyes sparkled with contemptuous resentment. She was evidently
surprised, and yet half-annoyed with herself for being surprised.
Two-thirds of the items in the bill in her hand were for articles of
jewellery not worn by men, and not one of these had ever been seen by
William Romayne’s wife.
She stuffed the paper back into its fastening, tossed the bundle away
and took another packet from the box with quickened interest. It
consisted of miscellaneous documents, all, likewise, connected with her
husband’s life in London during the past winter, but of no particular
interest. The next packet she opened was of the same nature, and with
that the top layer of the box came to an end.
The papers below were evidently older; of varying ages, indeed, to judge
from their varying tints of yellow. Disarranging a lower layer in
taking out the packet nearest to her hand, Mrs. Romayne saw that there
were older papers still, beneath, and realised that the box before her
contained the private papers of many years; probably all the private
papers which William Romayne had preserved throughout his life. She
opened the packet she had drawn out, hastily and with an angry glitter
in her eyes. It consisted of businesslike-looking documents, not likely,
as it seemed, to be of any interest to her.
She glanced through the first unheedingly enough, and then, as she
reached the end, something seemed suddenly to touch her attention. She
paused a moment, with a startled, incredulous expression on her face,
and began to re-read it slowly and carefully. She read it to the end
again, and her face, as she finished, was a little pale and
chilled-looking. She freed another paper from the packet almost
mechanically, with an absorbed, preoccupied look in her eyes, opened it
and read it with a strained, hardly comprehending attention which grew
gradually and imperceptibly, as she went on from paper to paper, into a
kind of stupefied horror. She finished the thick packet in her hands,
and then she paused, lifting her pale face for a moment and gazing
straight before her with an indescribable expression on its shallow
hardness, as though she was realising something almost incredibly bitter
and repugnant to her, and was stunned by the realisation. Then her
instincts and habits of life and thought seemed to assert themselves, as
it were, and to dominate the situation. Her expression changed; the
stupefied look gave place to what was little deeper than bitter
excitement; a patch of angry colour succeeded the pallor of a moment
earlier; and her eyes glittered.
Turning to the despatch-box again, she proceeded to ransack it with a
hasty eagerness of touch which differed markedly from the careless
composure of her earlier proceedings. Paper after paper was torn open,
glanced through--sometimes even re-read with a feverish attention--and
tossed aside; sometimes with a sudden deepening of that angry flush;
sometimes with a movement of the lips, as though an interjection formed
itself upon them; always with a heightening of her excitement; until one
packet only remained at the bottom of the box. Mrs. Romayne snatched it
out, and then started slightly as she saw that it did not consist, as
the majority of the others had done, of business papers, but of letters
in a woman’s handwriting. Nor was it so old as many of the papers she
had looked at, some of which had borne dates twenty-five years back. She
opened it with a sudden hardening of her excitement, which seemed to
mark the change from almost impersonal to intensely personal interest.
She saw that the date was that of the second year after her marriage;
that each letter was annotated in her husband’s writing; and then she
began deliberately to read, her lips very thin and set, her eyes cold
and hard. She read the letters all through, with every comment inscribed
on them, and by the time she laid the last upon the table her very lips
were white with vindictive feeling strangely incongruous on her little
conventional face. She sat quite still for a moment, and then rose
abruptly and stood by the window with her back to the table, looking
out upon the evening sky.
The strength of feeling died out of her face, however, in the course of
a very few minutes, leaving it only very white and rather
strange-looking, as though she had received a series of shocks which had
made a mark even on material so difficult to impress as her artificial
personality; and she turned, by-and-by, and contemplated the table,
littered now with documents of all sorts, as though she saw, not the
actual heaps of papers, but something beyond them contemptible and
disgusting to her beyond expression. Then suddenly she moved forward,
crammed the papers indiscriminately into the despatch-box, forced down
the lid, and carried the box out of the room down the stairs towards the
sitting-room where she had left Dennis Falconer.
It was an impulse not wholly consistent with the self-reliance of her
ordinary manner; but that manner had been acquired in a world where
shocks and difficulties were more or less disbelieved in. Face to face
with so unconventional a condition of affairs Mrs. Romayne’s
conventional instincts were necessarily at fault; and there being no
strong motive power in her to supply their place, it was only natural
that she should relieve herself by turning to the man on whom the past
few days had taught her to rely.
Dennis Falconer was not in the sitting-room when she opened the door,
but as she stood in the doorway contemplating the empty room, he came
down the corridor behind her.
“Were you looking for me?” he said with distant courtesy as he reached
her. He made a movement to relieve her of the box she carried, and as he
did so he was struck by her expression. “Is there anything here you wish
me to see?” he said quickly and gravely.
“Yes,” she said; she spoke in a dry, hard voice, about which there was a
ring of excitement which made him look at her again, and realise vaguely
that something was wrong.
He followed her into the room, and she motioned to him to put the box on
the table.
“I have been looking them over,” she said, indicating the papers with a
gesture, “and I have brought them to you. They are very interesting.”
She laughed a bitter, crackling little laugh, and the disapproval in
ambush in Dennis Falconer’s expression developed a little.
“Do you wish me to go over them now, and with you?” he enquired stiffly.
“Not with me, I think, thank you,” she answered, the novel excitement
about her manner finding expression once more in that harsh laugh. “One
reading is enough. But now, if you don’t mind. There are business points
on which I may possibly be mistaken”--she did not look as though she
spoke from conviction--“and--I should like you to read them. I will go
out into the garden; it is quite empty always at this time, and I want
some air.”
Her tone and the glance she cast at the despatch-box as she spoke made
it evident that it was not closeness of material atmosphere alone that
had created the necessity.
“I will read them now, certainly, if you wish it,” he returned.
Then, as she took up a book which lay on a table with a mechanical
gesture of acknowledgement, he opened the door for her and she went out
of the room. He came back to the table, drew up a chair, and opened the
despatch-box.
Two hours later Dennis Falconer was still sitting in that same chair,
his right hand, which rested on the table, clenched until the knuckles
were white, his face pale to the very lips beneath its tan. In his eyes,
fixed in a kind of dreadful fascination on the innocent-looking piles of
papers before him, there was a look of shocked, almost incredulous
horror, which seemed to touch all that was narrow and dogmatic about his
ordinary expression into something deep and almost solemn. The door
opened, and he started painfully. It was only the waiter with
preliminary preparations for dinner, and recovering himself with an
effort Falconer rose, and slowly, almost as though their very touch was
repugnant to him, began to replace the papers in the box. He locked it,
and then left the room, carrying it with him.
Dinner was served, and Mrs. Romayne had been waiting some two or three
minutes before he reappeared. He was still pale, and the horror had
rather settled down on to his face than left it; but it had changed its
character somewhat; the breadth was gone from it. It was as though he
had passed through a moment of expansion and insight to contract again
to his ordinary limits. Mrs. Romayne was standing near the window; the
excitement had almost entirely subsided from her manner, leaving her
only harder and more bitter in expression than she had been three hours
before. She glanced sharply at Falconer as he came towards her with a
constrained, conventional word or two of apology; answered him with the
words his speech demanded; and they sat down to dinner.
It was a silent meal. Mrs. Romayne made two or three remarks on general
topics, and asked one or two questions as to their journey of the
following day; and Falconer responded as briefly as courtesy allowed. On
his own account he originated no observation whatever until dinner was
over, and the final disappearance of the waiter had been succeeded by a
total silence.
Mrs. Romayne was still sitting opposite him, one elbow resting on the
table, her head leaning on her hand as she absently played with some
grapes on which her eyes were fixed. Falconer glanced across at her once
or twice, evidently with a growing conviction that it was incumbent on
him to speak, and with a growing uncertainty as to what he should say.
This latter condition of things helped to make his tone even unusually
formal and dogmatic as he said at last:
“Sympathy, I fear, must seem almost a farce!”
She glanced up quickly, her eyes very bright and hard.
“Sympathy?” she said drily. “I don’t know that there is any new call for
sympathy, is there? After all, things are very much where they were!”
A kind of shock passed across Falconer’s face; a materialisation of a
mental process.
“What we know now----” he began stiffly.
“What we knew before was quite enough!” interrupted Mrs. Romayne. “When
one has arrived violently at the foot of the precipice, it is of no
particular moment how long one has been living on the precipice’s edge.
While nothing was known, Mr. Romayne was only on the precipice’s edge,
and as no one knew of the precipice it was practically as though none
existed. Directly one thing came out it was all over! He was over the
edge. Nothing could make it either better or worse.”
She spoke almost carelessly, though very bitterly, as though she felt
her words to be almost truisms, and Falconer stared at her for a moment
in silence. Then he said with stern formality, as though he were making
a deliberate effort to realise her point of view:
“You imply that Mr. Romayne’s fall--his going over the edge of the
precipice, if I may adopt your figure--consisted in the discovery of his
misdeeds. Do you mean that you think it would have been better if
nothing had ever been known?”
Mrs. Romayne raised her eyebrows.
“Of course!” she said amazedly. Then catching sight of her cousin’s face
she shrugged her shoulders with a little gesture of deprecating
concession. “Oh, of course, I don’t mean that Mr. Romayne himself would
have been any better if nothing had ever come out,” she said
impatiently. “The right and wrong and all that kind of thing would have
been the same, I suppose. But I don’t see how ruin and suicide improve
the position.”
She rose as she spoke, and Falconer made no answer.
Mrs. Romayne had touched on the great realities of life, the everlasting
mystery of the spirit of man with its unfathomable obligations and
disabilities; had touched on them carelessly, patronisingly, as “all
that kind of thing.” She was as absolutely blind to the depth of their
significance as is a man without eyesight to the illimitable spaces of
the sky above him. To Falconer her tone was simply scandalising. He did
not understand her ignorance. He could not touch the pathos of its
limitations and the possibilities by which it was surrounded. The grim
irony of such a tone as used by the ephemeral of the immutable was
beyond his ken.
“I have several things to see to upstairs,” Mrs. Romayne went on after a
moment’s pause. “I shall go up now, and I think, if you will excuse me,
I will not come down again. We start so early. Good night!”
“Good night!” he returned stiffly; and with a little superior,
contemptuous smile on her face she went away.