A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3). Victorian Romance
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,