A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3). Victorian Romance
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.
CHAPTER III
Three days before, the name of William Romayne had been widely known and respected throughout Europe as the name of a successful and distinguished financier. Now, it was the centre of a nine-days’ wonder as the name of a master swindler, detected.
A bank, established in London within the last twelve months in connection with a company offering an exceptionally high rate of interest, had suddenly suspended payment. The circumstances were so ordinary, and the explanation offered so plausible, that at first no suspicion of underhand dealings presented itself. It was in connection with the first whispers—which ran like wildfire through financial London—of something beneath the surface, that it first became known that William Romayne had some connection, as yet undefined by rumour, with the bank in question; a fact hitherto quite unknown. The whispers grew with rapidity which was almost incredible even to the whisperers, into a definite and authentic shout of accusation; and with the exposure of an outline of such daring and ingenious fraud as had not been perpetrated for many a day, another fact had become public property. The exposure had been brought about by an incredibly short-sighted blunder on the part of the master mind by which the whole affair had been conceived. William Romayne’s was the master mind, and William Romayne, in trying to overreach alike his dupes and his confederates, had overreached himself. His own hand had created the clue which had led eventually to the ruin of the scheme he had originated. His death, with the news of which the London Stock Exchange was ringing only a few hours after it was known in Nice, was the forfeit paid by a strong nature to which success in all its undertakings was the very salt of life.
Mrs. Romayne, on leaving the sitting-room, passed along the passages to her own room—not that which she had entered twenty-four hours before to consult with her husband as to the pleasure expedition of the afternoon—her face and manner altering not at all. Her composure was evidently neither forced nor unreal. The emotion created in her by the tragic circumstances through which she was living was obviously not the heartbroken shame and despair naturally to be attributed to a wife so situated, but a bitter and burning resentment. Had William Romayne passed away in the ordinary course of nature, or by any violent accident, his widow would have mourned him with conventional lamentation and with a certain amount of genuine regret. He had committed suicide, as the letter lying by his side revealed to his wife even while she hardly realised that he was indeed dead, as his only way of escape from the consequences of fraud on the brink of detection; and his widow’s attitude to his memory under these circumstances was the natural outcome of the character of their married life.
Hermia Stirling at nineteen had been a pretty, practical, matter-of-fact girl, with her rather shallow nature somewhat prematurely matured. She had been an orphan from her babyhood, and having no near relations in England, her nineteen years of life had been lived under varied auspices, resulting in more desultory education, moral as well as mental, than was good for her. The most impressionable of those years, however—those from fourteen to nineteen—had been passed with connections of her mother’s, young and wealthy society women, with no ideas beyond society life, and with little perceptible principle but that of social expediency. Hermia was just nineteen, just out, and taking to the life before her with the ease and zest of a born woman of the world, when one of these ladies died, and the other married and went away to America with her husband. At this juncture the girl’s guardian, her father’s only brother, returned from India to settle in London with his only child, a girl two years older than Hermia; and it was obvious that his home must be also Hermia’s. But neither old Mr. Falconer nor his daughter had the slightest taste or capacity for fashionable life, and before she had spent six months with them the world had become to Hermia an insufferably dull and tiresome place.
She had known William Romayne in society. He was rich, he was handsome, and he was very popular; there was that indefinable something about him, manner, magnetism, or tact, which constitutes a kind of dominating charm. He was not the less “somebody” in that he was vaguely understood to be a business man of some sort, with dealings in shares and stocks all over the world—a locality which lent a picturesque haziness to his affairs. Consequently, when he followed Hermia into her new life and asked her to marry him, she passed over the fact that he was five-and-twenty years her senior, and consented with the practical promptitude of a nature for which romance and sentiment were not. For eighteen months she and her husband had lived in a large house in Eaton Square, entertaining and being entertained through two brilliant seasons, which took away any girlishness which Hermia had ever possessed, and gave her qualities which she admired infinitely more. She found her husband very pleasant, very easy to live with, and, after the first six months, quite unexacting. His business took him into the City every day at this time, though, as his wife said, complacently, he was not the least like the ordinary City man; but at the end of the season which followed on the birth of their child he announced that he would have to spend certainly six months, possibly more, in America.
He showed no ardent desire to take his wife with him, and his wife had no desire whatever to go. She wanted to spend the rest of the summer at one of the fashionable health resorts, and to winter in Rome. Such an arrangement was accordingly made between them in the simplest, most matter-of-fact way, arguing no shadow of ill-will on either side; and during the four years which had elapsed since then, husband and wife had each gone his or her own way, meeting when occasion served for a month or two at a time, now in London, now in Paris, now in Rome; and presumably finding the arrangement mutually satisfactory. The little boy had been left for the most part to the care of Mrs. Romayne’s cousin, Frances Falconer. Mrs. Romayne regarded him with the careless, half-dormant affection of a woman to whom her child owes nothing but bare life; to whom its arrival in the world has been rather a tiresome interlude, merely, in her round of pleasures and pursuits; who has had no time since, and has seen no occasion to make time, to give it that care which other people, as it seemed to her, could give it quite as well as she; and who is waiting, vaguely, until it shall be “grown up,” to find it interesting.
That her husband’s “business” had taken him in the course of those four years into every corner of the globe where the passing of money from hand to hand is elevated into a science, Mrs. Romayne knew; and with that fact her knowledge of his affairs began and ended. He made her an ample allowance; whenever they met she found him the same handsome, rather callous, but withal fascinating man; clever with a cleverness which she could appreciate—the cleverness which made