A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3). Victorian Romance
Mrs. Romayne shook her head with another laugh.
“I saw him retire to the supper-room a little while ago with a very pretty girl,” she said. “I make it a point never to hurry him under such circumstances! But if you should meet him you might tell him that I am quite ready when he is. Good night!”
The room was not by any means crowded now; it was getting late and a great many people were in the supper-room. The corner of the room in which Mrs. Romayne was standing happened to be nearly deserted; there was no one near her, and after Lord Garstin left her, she stood still, fanning herself and looking straight before her with her bright smile and animated expression rather stereotyped on her face. Suddenly, as if involuntarily, she turned her head; she looked across to the other side of the room and met the eyes of a man standing against the wall, who had been looking fixedly at her ever since Lord Garstin joined her. For an instant not the slightest perceptible change of expression touched her face; only the very absoluteness of its immobility suggested that that immobility was the result of a sudden and tremendous effort of self-control; then the colour faded slowly from her cheeks and from her lips; the smile did not disappear but it gradually assumed a ghastly appearance of being carved in marble; her eyes widened slightly and became strangely fixed. The man was Dennis Falconer, and he and she were looking at one another across the gulf of eighteen years.
It was only for a moment. Then Mrs. Romayne, still quite colourless, lifted her eyebrows prettily and made a gesture of amazed recognition, and Falconer moved and came slowly towards her.
“What a surprising thing!” she exclaimed, holding out her hand. “I had no idea you were here to-night! How do you do? Welcome home!”
Her tone was perfectly easy and gracious; so ultra-easy, indeed, that it deprived her words of any personal or emotional significance whatever, and relegated their meeting-place with subtle skill to the most conventional of society grounds. The rather distinguished-looking man with the good reserved manner who stood before her accepted the position with grave readiness.
“Thank you,” he said. He spoke with distant courtesy, about which there was not even the suggestion of that matter-of-course friendliness, as of distant kinship, which had made her reception of him nearly perfect as a work of art. “It is a great pleasure to me to be in England again.”
“You have been away—let me see—two years?” said Mrs. Romayne, with the vivacious assumption of intelligent interest which the social situation demanded. “Five, is it? Really? And you have done wonderful things, I hear. Funnily enough, I have been hearing about you only to-night. I must congratulate you.”
He bent his head with a courteous gesture of thanks.
“You have had my note, I hope?” he said. “You are settled in London now, Thomson tells me.”
Thomson was the family lawyer, and he and Dennis Falconer himself were Mrs. Romayne’s trustees under old Mr. Falconer’s will.
“Oh, yes!” she answered suavely. “I had it to-day, just before lunch. So nice of you to write to me. Yes, we are settled——”
She had been fanning herself carelessly throughout the short colloquy, glancing at Falconer or about the room with every appearance of perfect ease; but now, as her eyes wandered to the other end of the room something seemed to catch her attention. She hesitated, appeared to forget what she had intended to say, tried to recover herself, and failed.
Julian had come into the room, and was just parting gaily from some one in the doorway. Dennis Falconer did not take up her unfinished sentence; he followed the direction of her eyes across the room until his own rested upon Julian, and then he started slightly and glanced down at the woman by his side.
Mrs. Romayne laughed a rather high, unnatural laugh. She faced him with her eyes very hard and bright, and her lips smiling; and through all the artificiality of her face and manner there was something lurking in those hard, bright eyes as she did it, something not to be caught or defined, which made the movement almost heroic.
“You recognise him?” she said lightly. “Ridiculously like me, isn’t he?”
At that moment Julian started across the room, evidently to come to his mother. He came on, stopping incessantly to exchange good-nights, laughing, bowing, and smiling; and, as though there were a fascination for them about his gay young figure, the man and woman standing together at the other end of the room watched him draw nearer and nearer. Words continued to come from Mrs. Romayne, a pretty, inconsequent flow of society chatter, but it no more tempered the strange gaze with which her eyes followed her son than did the unheeding silence with which Falconer received them as his grave eyes rested also on the young man. The whole thing was so incongruous; the expression of those two pair of eyes was so utterly out of harmony with their surroundings, and with the laughing, unconscious boy on whom they were fixed; that they seemed to draw him out from the brightly dressed, smiling groups through which he passed, and isolate him strangely in a weird atmosphere of his own.
“Here you are, sir!” cried his mother gaily, looking no longer at Julian as he stood close to her at last, but beyond him.
“Lord Garstin told me you were ready to go, dear,” said Julian pleasantly. “I hope I haven’t kept you?”
“There was no hurry,” she answered, smiling; her voice was a little thin and strained. “We will go now, I think, but I want to introduce you first to some one whose name you know. This is your cousin, Dennis Falconer.”
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