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.
Falconer crossed the room quickly to her, and spoke as though in answer
to audible words.
“I have found him!” he said. “There has been some delay. The boat will
not leave until to-morrow, and till then he is here.”
A breath of unutterable relief and thanksgiving broke from Clemence’s
white lips, and she let her face fall forward for a moment on her hands.
Then she lifted it again, tremulous and shaken. “Is it--right--that he
should go?” she said.
“It is necessary!” returned Falconer sternly. But the sternness was not
for her.
A look of trouble and perplexity passed into her face; her lips were
parted to speak again when a door at the other end of the room opened
sharply--not the door by which Falconer had entered, but a second,
leading, presumably, into a bedroom--and Mrs. Romayne appeared. The
rigidity of her self-control had given place, apparently, to a consuming
fever. Her eyes were glittering, the dry skin seemed to be too tightly
drawn across her sharpened features. There was no paint upon her
now--no mask, less tangible but no less effective, of artificiality of
expression. It was the very woman, stripped of all the trappings of
her life, bearing the ravages of past struggles thick upon her, driven
to bay, and braced to hold the struggle on which she was entering with
the last breath in her body. She was still dressed for walking, and the
contrast between the smart, somewhat youthful, apparel which she had
always affected, and her face, was terrible to see.
She came straight up to Falconer, utterly unconscious, apparently, as
far as feeling and realisation constitute consciousness, of Clemence’s
presence. “You have found him?” she said, and the words were less a
question than an assertion. “Let us go at once. Stop, though!” she added
abruptly, laying a burning hand on Falconer’s arm, as though in the haste
and pressure of her own impulses she ascribed a similar impatience to
him. “I had better know the facts first. What has he told you?”
Falconer hesitated. His words, when he spoke, ignored her final question,
and answered the idea which vibrated behind every word of her speech. He
glanced at Clemence as he began to speak as though he wished his words to
apply to her also.
“I do not think,” he said, “that anything will be gained by your seeing
him--except extreme distress for all concerned. I fear there is nothing
to be done!”
He had spoken very firmly, as though the moment had arrived, in his
estimation, for that stand on manly judgement which he had involuntarily
postponed for so long; and he paused as though to accentuate the weight
of his words.
Mrs. Romayne, with a gesture of irrepressible, tortured impatience, but
otherwise with no recognition whatever of his having spoken, repeated her
question:
“What has he told you?”
Clemence’s eyes, fixed upon Falconer’s face, dilated slightly, and then
the shadow of a smile touched her parted lips.
“I fear there is no doubt that it is a bad affair,” continued Falconer.
“There are forged documents connected with it, and misappropriation of
money fraudulently come by; and detection seems to be inevitable. His
only hope of safety lies in flight.”
As though with the very tangibility and imminence of the danger she had
come forth to meet Mrs. Romayne’s spirit rose higher, the only sort of
change brought to her face by the words was an intensifying of all its
previous characteristics of growing courage and determination. From
Clemence’s lips the little tremulous light had died, quenched in such a
horror of vicarious shame, of pity, love, and anguish unspeakable, as
seemed to freeze her where she stood.
“The facts! The facts!” The words came from Mrs. Romayne sharp and tense,
seeming to put aside and ignore any extraneous comment or opinion.
Falconer hesitated again for a moment and scanned her face closely,
absolutely unconscious of his own incapacity for reading what was written
there. So far was he from an adequate conception of the realities of the
situation, that he thought that a plain statement of details would crush
out for ever the hope of which he was conscious in her. And he decided
that such instantaneous crushing was the only mercy he could show her.
Gravely and concisely, with no unnecessary comment, he told her the
whole story as he had gathered it half an hour earlier from Julian’s
incoherent, despairing words. He finished and paused, holding himself
braced for the outbreak of despair which he expected.
His words were followed by a dead silence. His eyes were fixed on Mrs.
Romayne with a vague fear for her reason, and he felt rather than saw
that Clemence had turned away and was standing with her face hidden in
her hands. Mrs. Romayne’s brows had contracted as if in intense thought,
and her eyes were extraordinarily bright and keen. At last, with no
slightest relaxation of the intent calculation of her face, she asked
one or two questions as to details of business procedure, the words
coming from her sharp and distinct; questions of which Falconer, as he
answered them, tried in vain to see the drift. Then she moved with a
gesture of determination, so self-absorbed that it seemed to isolate her
utterly.
“Take me to him at once!” she said.
A sharp exclamation broke from Falconer, and, as she moved towards the
door, he followed her hastily, indescribably disturbed and confused by so
entirely unexpected a course of action.
“To what purpose?” he said quickly. “I beg of you to be advised by me.
The boy must go! Nothing can be gained but a parting----”
Mrs. Romayne turned upon him and faced him suddenly.
“I am here to see my son,” she said, and there was something in her
voice--rather in what its intense restraint suggested than in its tones
themselves--absolutely dominating and conclusive. “You came to help me.
Take me to him, or tell me where to find him.”
Intensely annoyed and disapproving; keenly alive to the fear that Julian,
so taken by surprise, might impute to him some definitely treacherous
intention in withholding, as he had done, the fact that he was not
alone; Falconer yet felt himself powerless. He had no shadow of a right
to stand between mother and son. He had made his stand, and he might as
effectually have opposed himself to the wind. His words, his judgement,
were as nothing to her. That he should so far fail to carry into effect
his conception of his duty as her escort, as to let her go alone was,
of course, impossible in his eyes. He made a sternly unwilling sign to
the effect that he would perforce accompany her, and then, as she passed
quickly out of the room, he looked at Clemence. There was a stunned look
upon her face now; she did not even glance at him in answer, but she
moved mechanically, as it seemed, and like a woman walking in her sleep,
and followed Mrs. Romayne.
Not one word was spoken by either of the trio until they stood, a quarter
of an hour later, before a rather dingy door in a dreary passage of an
unpretentious and obscure private hotel. Then Falconer spoke in a low,
stern tone.
“Here!” he said, indicating the door before them.
Mrs. Romayne moved swiftly forward and turned the handle. For one
instant, as the door opened, there was a vision of a dull, bare little
sitting-room, touched with a strange glory by a red ray from the setting
sun, which slanted right across it; and in the middle of the room, in the
full light of that red ray, which fell with an almost weird effect of
irradiation upon his attitude of despair, Julian sitting by the table,
his head buried on his outstretched arms. For an instant only the picture
was visible; then Julian turned his head sharply and sprang to his feet
with a cry. His mother was advancing rapidly towards him, but it was not
his mother that he saw. It was the figure behind her with the dazed white
face all breaking up now into quivering lines. It was to that figure that
he stretched out his hands with the hoarse, heart-broken sob:
“Clemmie! Clemmie! They’ve told you!”
Before the words were uttered, Clemence had rushed past Mrs. Romayne, and
was clinging to him in such a sudden agony of sobs and tears as seemed to
rend her very heart.
Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly. Falconer, who was close to her with his
back to the door which he had shut swiftly on Julian’s cry, saw a spasm
of pain cut across the concentration of her face for an instant; and
in the flash of anger and impatience which succeeded it, she seemed to
recognise Clemence’s presence practically for the first time. She fell
back a step or two, waiting with contemptuous self-control, her eyes
fixed upon the pair before her as they clung together, and Julian tried
brokenly and despairingly to soothe the pitiful abandonment of grief
with which Clemence was shaken. His own distress increased with every
incoherent word of self-reproach he uttered; and it was a sense of his
anguish that seemed, at last, to reach Clemence, and produce in her a
woman’s instinct towards the suppression of her own pain. She disengaged
herself gently, forcing back the heavy sob that trembled on her lips,
and looked from Julian towards Mrs. Romayne with a tacit recognition of
his mother’s claims which was as beautiful as it was instinctive.
“You will listen!” she said in a choked, beseeching voice, “you will
listen and come back!”
She turned away as she spoke, making him a sign that he should not speak
to her; and as she drew away from him Mrs. Romayne advanced rapidly,
every movement, every line of her face, every tone of her voice, claiming
as an inalienable right her son’s attention. Her face was very hard, far
harder than it had been before that spasm of pain had shaken it, and
there was no touch of emotion in her hard, quick voice. She seemed to
have put all sentiment deliberately aside.
“Julian,” she said, “you have made a terrible mistake! You are taking
just the one false step that would be absolutely irretrievable. You must
come back to town at once!”
Her manner; her voice; some influence from the long past days when her
word, for all her affectation of weak indulgence, had been his law;
had arrested his attention almost without his own consent. He stood now
looking at her; looking at her across such a gulf of ignorance, mistake,
and wrong as had swallowed even that bitterness with which he had once
regarded her, leaving him absolutely cold and dead to her.
“Town and I have parted company, mother!” he said. He spoke hoarsely, but
the emotion in his tone was the reflex of that through which he had just
passed in meeting Clemence; his manner was even callous.
“That would be true indeed,” was the quick answer, “if you had succeeded
in leaving England! Not only town and you, but life and you--everything
that makes life worth living--would have parted company! To go away now
is to cut your own throat!”
Julian turned to Falconer.
“Haven’t you told them?” he said thickly. “Don’t they know that--that is
done?”
Falconer drew a step nearer.
“Your mother knows----” he began; but Mrs. Romayne interposed, lifting
her hand peremptorily without even glancing at him.
“I know everything,” she said. “I know that you are in hideous danger,
and if you run away from it it is indeed all over with you. You must face
it; you must defy it!”
As though in her last words she had touched and given form and life to
the very core of the determination which had nerved her since she had
first read Julian’s letter that morning, her voice rose as she spoke them
into a ring of indomitable courage, vibrating with the very triumph of
that defiance of which she spoke. Her slight, haggard physique seemed to
expand, to gain in dignity and power; as the whole room seemed to fill
with the magnetism of her intense resolution. There was an instant’s
pause, and then an exclamation broke alike from Julian and from Falconer.
Julian’s was almost derisive in its absolute repudiation of her words;
Falconer’s was sternly incredulous. Clemence was standing a little apart.
No sound came from her, but she lifted her face suddenly and turned it
towards Mrs. Romayne. A vague horror and confusion had dawned in her eyes.
Before the annihilating words with which Falconer obviously intended
to follow up his first ejaculation could be uttered, Mrs. Romayne was
speaking again--in a rapid, businesslike tone now, but always with that
ring of triumph behind it.
“You must come back with me to-night and take up your position as if
nothing could shake it. You must fight for your credit and your social
status tooth and nail. When you have lost them you have lost everything!
You have not lost them yet, and no risk is too great to run for their
retention.”
“Not penal servitude?” asked Julian, with a ghastly smile.
“Not penal servitude, not hanging--if that were the risk,” returned his
mother passionately. “What are you better off if you escape--disgraced,
ostracised, ruined beyond all hope of reclamation--than you would be in
a convict’s cell? What would you have to live for--to hope for? When you
have lost your position with the world you have lost everything. What
does it matter that you go down in one wave rather than another?” She
paused a moment, battling with her fierce horror and repulsion. Then she
went on again in another tone, eager and decided. “But the risk is not
so frightful after all,” she said. “Show it a bold front and we shall
triumph over it! Now, listen to me, Julian. This other man--this man
Ramsay--was the actual forger?”
She paused for an answer, and apparently the insistence of her tone
forced one from Julian in spite of himself.
“As far as the actual commission of the forgery goes--yes,” he said
sullenly. “But----”
“Then what is there to prove--to prove, mind--that you were a party to
it?”
Julian glanced round at Clemence as if involuntarily. Then he looked
recklessly back at his mother and laughed harshly.
“The facts----” he began.
His mother caught up the words.
“The facts? Yes!” she said. “But if the facts are denied? Can they be
proved? If you face this meeting and say that you yourself have been
deceived? Even if it should come to a prosecution there are always
loopholes! With good counsel and facing it out ourselves unflinchingly,
you would come through untouched! It is the only chance, Julian, and we
must dare it.”