Dennis Falconer had been alone for nearly an hour, when his solitude was
broken up by the appearance of a waiter, who presented him with a card,
and the information that the gentleman whose name it bore was in the
smoking-room. The name was Dr. Aston’s, and after a moment’s reflection
Falconer told the waiter to ask the gentleman to come upstairs. Falconer
had spent that last hour in meditation, which had grown steadily deeper
and graver. It seemed to have carried him beyond the formal and dogmatic
attitude of mind with which he had met Mrs. Romayne, back to the borders
of those larger regions he had touched when he sat looking at William
Romayne’s papers; and there was a warmth and gratitude in his reception
of Dr. Aston when that gentleman appeared, that suggested that he was
not so completely sufficient for himself as usual.
“The smoking-room is very full, I imagine?” he said, as he welcomed the
little doctor. “My cousin has gone to bed, and I thought if you didn’t
mind coming up, doctor, we should be better off here.”
Dr. Aston’s answer was characteristically hearty and alert. Knowing it
to be Falconer’s last night at Nice, he had come round, he said, just
for a farewell word, and to arrange, if possible, for a meeting later on
under happier circumstances. A quiet chat over a cigar was what he had
not hoped for, but the thing of all others he would like. He settled
himself with a genial instinct for comfort in the arm-chair Falconer
pulled round to the window for him; accepted a cigar and prepared to
light it; glancing now and again at the younger man’s face with shrewd,
kindly eyes, which had already noticed something unusual in its
expression.
Dr. Aston and Dennis Falconer had met, some six years before, in Africa,
under circumstances which had brought out all that was best in the young
man’s character; and Dr. Aston had been warmly attracted by him. Being
a particularly shrewd student of human nature, he had taken his measure
accurately enough, subsequently, and knew as certainly as one man may of
another where his weak points lay, and how time was dealing with them.
But his kindness for, and interest in, Dennis Falconer had never abated;
perhaps because his insight did not, as so much human insight does, stop
at the weak points.
Dennis Falconer, for his part, regarded Dr. Aston with an affectionate
respect which he gave to hardly any other man on earth.
There was a short silence as the two men lit their cigars, and then Dr.
Aston, with another glance at Falconer’s face, broke it with a kindly,
delicate enquiry after Mrs. Romayne. Falconer answered it almost
absently, but with an instinctive stiffening, so to speak, of his face
and voice, and there was another pause. The doctor was trying the
experiment of waiting for a lead. He was just deciding that he must make
another attempt on his own account when Falconer took his cigar from
between his lips and said, with his eyes fixed on the evening sky:
“I’m always glad to see you, doctor; but I never was more glad than
to-night.”
A sound proceeded from the doctor which might have been described as a
grunt if it had been less delicately sympathetic, and Falconer
continued:
“I’ve been trying to think out a problem, and it was one too many for
me: the origin of evil.”
He was thoroughly in earnest, and nothing was further from him than any
thought of lightness or flippancy. But there was a calm familiarity and
matter-of-course acquaintanceship with his subject about his tone that
produced a slight quiver about the corners of the little doctor’s mouth.
He did not speak, however, and the movement with which he took his cigar
from between his lips and turned to Falconer was merely sympathetic and
interested.
“Of course, I know it’s an unprofitable subject enough,” continued
Falconer almost apologetically. “We shall never be much the wiser on the
subject, struggle as we may. But still, now and then it seems to be
forced on one. It has been forced on me to-day.”
“Apropos of William Romayne?” suggested Dr. Aston, so delicately that
the words seemed rather a sympathetic comment than a question.
“Yes,” returned Falconer. “We have been looking through his private
papers.” He paused a moment, and then continued as if drawn on almost in
spite of himself. “You knew him by repute, I dare say, doctor. He had
one of those strong personalities which get conveyed even by hearsay. A
clever man, striking and dominating, universally liked and deferred to.
Yet he must have been as absolutely without principle as this table is
without feeling.”
He struck the little table between them with his open hand as he spoke;
and then, as though the expression of his feelings had begotten, as is
often the case, an irresistible desire to relieve himself further, he
answered Dr. Aston’s interested ejaculation as if it had been the
question the doctor was at once too well-bred and too full of tact to
put.
“There were no papers connected with this last disgraceful affair, of
course; those, as you know, I dare say, were all seized in London. It’s
the man’s past life that these private papers throw light on. Light, did
I say? It was a life of systematic, cold-blooded villainy, for which no
colours could be dark enough.”
He had uttered his last sentence involuntarily, as it seemed, and now he
laid down his cigar, and turning to Dr. Aston, began to speak low and
quickly.
“They are papers of all kinds,” he said. “Letters, business documents,
memoranda of every description, and two-thirds of them at least have
reference to fraud and wrong of one kind or another. Not one penny that
man possessed can have been honestly come by. His business was
swindling; every one of his business transactions was founded on fraud.
He can have had no faith or honesty of any sort or kind. He was living
with another woman before he had been married a year. All that woman’s
letters--he deceived her abominably, and it’s fortunate that she
died--are annotated and endorsed like his ‘business’ memoranda;
evidently kept deliberately as so much stored experience for future
use!”
Dr. Aston had listened with a keen, alert expression of intent
interest. His cigar was forgotten, and he laid it down now as if
impatient of any distraction, and leant forward over the table with his
shrewd, kindly little eyes fixed eagerly on Falconer. Human nature was a
hobby of his.
Falconer’s confidence, or more truly perhaps the manner of it, had swept
away all conventional barriers, and the elder man asked two or three
quick, penetrating questions.
“How far back do these records go?” he asked finally.
“They cover five-and-twenty years, I should say,” returned Falconer.
“The first note on a successful fraud must have been made when he was
about four-and-twenty. Why, even then--when he was a mere boy--he must
have been entirely without moral sense!”
“Yes!” said the doctor, with a certain dry briskness of manner which was
apt to come to him in moments of excitement. “That is exactly what he
was, my boy! It was that, in conjunction with his powerful brain, that
made him what you called, just now, dominating. It gave him
vantage-ground over his fellow-men. He was as literally without moral
sense as a colour-blind man is without a sense of colour, or a homicidal
maniac without a sense of the sanctity of human life.”
An expression of rather horrified and entirely uncomprehending protest
spread itself over Falconer’s face.
“Romayne was not mad,” he objected, with that incapacity for penetrating
beneath the surface which was characteristic of him. “I never even heard
that there was madness in the family.”
“You would find it if you looked far enough, without a doubt!” answered
the doctor decidedly. “This is a most interesting subject, Dennis, and
it’s one that it’s very difficult to look into without upsetting the
whole theory of moral responsibility, and doing more harm than enough. I
don’t say Romayne was mad, as the word is usually understood, but all
you tell me confirms a notion I have had about him ever since this
affair came out. He was what we call morally insane. I’ll tell you what
first put the idea into my head. It was the extraordinary obtuseness,
the extraordinary want of perception, of that blunder of his that burst
up the whole thing. Look at it for yourself. It was a flaw in his
comprehension of moral sense only possible in a man who knew of the
quality by hearsay alone. He must have been a very remarkable man. I
wish I had known him!”
“I have heard the term ‘moral insanity,’ of course,” said Falconer
slowly and distastefully, ignoring the doctor’s last, purely æsthetic
sentence, “but it has always seemed to me, doctor, if you’ll pardon my
saying so, a very dangerous tampering with things that should be sacred
even from science. I cannot believe that any man is actually incapable
of knowing right from wrong.”
“The difficulty is,” said the doctor drily, “that the words right and
wrong sometimes convey nothing to him, as the words red and blue convey
nothing to a colour-blind man, and the endearments of his wife convey
nothing to the lunatic who is convinced that she is trying to poison
him.” He paused a moment, and then said abruptly: “Are there any
children?”
Falconer glanced at him and changed colour slightly.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “One boy!”
The keen, shrewd face of the elder man softened suddenly and
indescribably under one of those quick sympathetic impulses which were
Dr. Aston’s great charm.
“Heaven help his mother!” he said gently.
Falconer moved quickly and protestingly, and there was a touch of
something like rebuke in his voice as he said:
“Doctor, you don’t mean to say that you think----”
“You believe in heredity, I suppose?” interrupted the doctor quickly.
“Well, at least, you believe in the heredity you can’t deny--that a
child may--or rather must--inherit, not only physical traits and
infirmities, but mental tendencies; likes, dislikes, aptitudes,
incapacities, or what not. Be consistent, man, and acknowledge the
sequel, though it’s pleasanter to shut one’s eyes to it, I admit. Put
the theory of moral insanity out of the question for the moment if you
like; say that Romayne was a pronounced specimen of the common
criminal. Why should not his child inherit his father’s tendency to
crime, his father’s aptitude for lying and thieving, as he might inherit
his father’s eyes, or his father’s liking for music--if he had had a
turn that way? You’re a religious man, Falconer, I know. You believe, I
take it, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.
How can they be visited more heavily than in their reproduction? You
mark my words, my boy, that little child of Romayne’s--unless he
inherits strong counter influences from his mother, or some far-away
ancestor--will go the way his father has gone, and may end as his father
has ended!”
There was a slight sound by the door behind the two men as Dr. Aston
finished--finished with a force and solemnity that carried a painful
thrill of conviction even through the not very penetrable outer crust of
dogma which enwrapped Dennis Falconer--and the latter turned his head
involuntarily. The next instant both men had sprung to their feet, and
were standing dumb and aghast face to face with Mrs. Romayne. She was
standing with her hand still on the lock of the door as if her attention
had been arrested just as she was entering the room; she had apparently
recoiled, for she was pressed now tightly against the door; her face was
white to the very lips, and a vague thought passed through Falconer that
he had never seen it before. It was as though the look in her eyes, as
she gazed at Dr. Aston, had changed it beyond recognition.
There was a moment’s dead silence; a moment during which Dr. Aston
turned from red to white and from white to red again, and struggled
vainly to find words; a moment during which Falconer could only stare
blankly at that unfamiliar woman’s face. Then, while the two men were
still utterly at a loss, Mrs. Romayne seemed gradually to command
herself, as if with a tremendous effort. Gradually, as he looked at her,
Falconer saw the face with which he was familiar shape itself, so to
speak, upon that other face he did not know. He saw her eyes change and
harden as if with the effort necessitated by her conventional instinct
against a scene. He saw the quivering horror of her mouth alter and
subside in the hard society smile he knew well, only rather stiffer
than usual as her face was whiter; and then he heard her speak.
With a little movement of her head in civil recognition of Dr. Aston’s
presence, she said to Falconer:
“My book is on that table. Will you give it to me, please?”
Her voice was quite steady, though thin. Almost mechanically Falconer
handed her the book she asked for, and with another slight inclination
of her head, before Dr. Aston had recovered his balance sufficiently to
speak, she was gone.
The door closed behind her, and a low ejaculation broke from the doctor.
Then he drew a long breath, and said slowly:
“That’s a remarkable woman.”
Falconer drew his hand across his forehead as though he were a little
dazed.
“I think not!” he said stupidly. “Not when you know her!”
“Ah!” returned the doctor, with a shrewd glance at him. “And you do know
her?”
If Falconer could have seen Mrs. Romayne an hour later, he would have
been more than ever convinced of the correctness of his judgement. The
preparations for departure were nearly concluded; she had dismissed her
maid and was finishing them herself with her usual quiet deliberation,
though her face was very pale and set.
But it might have perplexed him somewhat if he had seen her, when
everything was done, stop short in the middle of the room and lift her
hands to her head as though something oppressed her almost more heavily
than she could bear.
“End as his father ended!” she said below her breath. “Ruin and
disgrace!”
She turned and crossed the room to where her travelling-bag stood, and
drew from it a letter, thrust into a pocket with several others.
It was the blotted little letter which began “My dear Mamma,” and when
she returned it to the bag at last, her face was once again the face
that Dennis Falconer did not know.