Читать книгу A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3) - Victorian Romance - Страница 7

Table of Contents

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 money, and held a position in society—and she had asked nothing more of him. Her regard for him, if regard that could be called which was more truly indifference, had been founded on appreciation of his success. Before failure, before the social disgrace which must be the lot of a detected swindler and suicide, it disappeared totally and instantaneously, to be replaced by a burning sense of personal outrage and insult.

It was late in the afternoon before she left her room again. Dennis Falconer received a message to the effect that Mrs. Romayne was sure that he must be tired, and begged that he would not think of her until he had lunched and rested.

When she did reappear she was in widow’s weeds, and the contrast between her dress, with its tragic significance of desolation, and her face, untouched with feeling, was inexpressible.

Dennis Falconer was in the sitting-room when she entered it. His sense of duty was largely developed, and he was also keenly sensible of the moral aspect of the affair with which he was brought into such close contact. The first of these senses kept him in waiting in anticipation of the appearance of the woman for whose assistance he was there; and the second weighed so heavily upon him that the publicity of the hotel smoking-room would have been intolerable to him under the circumstances.

He rose quickly as Mrs. Romayne came in, a look of slight constraint on his face.

Dennis Falconer had no near relation, and perhaps this absence of close ties to England had had something to do with his adoption of the life of a traveller and explorer in connection with the Royal Geographical Society. Old Mr. Falconer, Mrs. Romayne’s uncle, was his second cousin only, though the younger man had been brought up to address him as uncle; but in so small a clan distant relationship counts for more than in a family where first cousins and brothers and sisters abound, and there was nothing strange to Dennis Falconer or to Mrs. Romayne in the fact of his coming to her support, even though they hardly knew one another. But Falconer had been chilled and even repelled by her manner of the morning, and he was very conscious now of having his cousin’s acquaintance to make, and of approaching the process with a vague prejudice against her in his mind.

This prejudice was not dissipated by her first words, spoken with a suavity somewhat low in pitch, truly, but with a tacit ignoring of the significance of their meeting which seemed to the man she addressed—to whom society life with its obligations and conventionalities was practically an unknown quantity—simply jarring and unsuitable.

“I hope you are rested!” she said. “I suppose, though, that to such a traveller as you are, the journey from London to Nice is nothing. I hear from Frances constantly about your exploits, and she tells me that we are to expect great things of you. What a long time it is since we met!”

She sat down as she spoke, with a hard little smile, and Falconer murmured something almost unintelligible. Thinking that his manner arose from mere embarrassment, instinct dictated to her to set him at his ease; and with no faintest comprehension of his attitude of mind she proceeded to chat to him about his own affairs, asking him questions which elicited coherent answers indeed, but answers which grew terser and sterner until she thought indifferently that her cousin was a rather heavy person. At last there came a pause; a pause during which Falconer gazed grimly and uncomfortably at the floor. And when Mrs. Romayne broke it, it was with a different tone and manner, hard and matter-of-fact.

“The detective told you more than he told me, possibly,” she said. “If there is anything more for me to hear, I should like to hear it. You had better, I think, read this letter. Mr. Romayne received it yesterday morning.”

She handed him that letter written on blue paper which had lain by the dead man’s side, and Falconer took it in silence.

The letter was from one of William Romayne’s confederates. It was the desperate letter of a desperate man who knew himself to be addressing the man to whom he was to owe ruin and disgrace. The crisis had evidently been so wholly unexpected that detection was actually imminent before the criminals recognised it as even possible. The gist of the letter was contained in the statement that before it met the eyes of the man for whom it was intended, the whole scheme would be exploded.

Falconer read it through, his face very stern. He finished it and refolded it, still in silence, and Mrs. Romayne said in a dry, thin voice:

“It bears out, as you see, what the detective no doubt told you—that there was so little ground for suspicion three days ago that he was sent out merely to watch, and without even a warrant. He found a telegram waiting for him here from his authorities yesterday morning.”

“He told me so!” answered Falconer distantly and constrainedly, handing her back the letter as he spoke without comment.

“There is not the faintest possibility of hushing it up, I conclude?” she asked, in the same hard voice.

Falconer looked at her for a moment, the indefinite disapprobation of her, which had been growing in him almost with every word she said, taking form in his face in a distinct expression of reprobation.

“Not the faintest!” he said emphatically. “Nor do I see that such a possibility is in any way to be desired.”

She glanced at him with a quick movement of her eyebrows. She did not speak, however, and a silence ensued between them; one of those uncomfortable silences eloquent of conscious want of sympathy. It was broken this time by Falconer, who spoke with formal politeness and restraint.

“You will wish to get away from this place as soon as possible, no doubt,” he said. “There may be some slight delay before we are put into possession of the papers and other effects at present in the hands of the authorities here. But I will, of course, do all I can to hasten matters.”

“Thanks!” she said. “The papers? Oh, you mean Mr. Romayne’s papers! Are there any, do you think? A will, I suppose?”

“The will, if there is one, will be so much waste paper, I fear,” said Falconer with uncompromising sternness. “There is no chance of any property being saved, even if it was possible to wish for such a thing. But there may be papers, nevertheless; in fact, no doubt there must be; and you will, of course, wish to have them.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Romayne thoughtfully; “yes, of course.” She paused a moment, and then added in a dry, constrained voice: “Do you mean me to understand that I am absolutely penniless?”

“Was your own money in your own hands, or in Mr. Romayne’s?”

“In Mr. Romayne’s.”

“Then I fear there can be no doubt that such is the case.”

Falconer spoke very stiffly and distantly, and Mrs. Romayne rose from her chair a little abruptly, and walked to the window. When she turned to him again it was to speak of the formalities necessary with the Nice authorities, and a few moments later the interview was ended by the appearance of dinner.

During the few days that followed, the distance between them, which that first interview established so imperceptibly but so certainly, never lessened; it grew, indeed, with their contact with one another.

To Falconer Mrs. Romayne’s whole attitude of mind, her whole personality, was simply and entirely antipathetic. That a woman under such circumstances should speak, and act, and think as Mrs. Romayne spoke, and acted, and—as far as he could tell—thought; with so little sense of any but the social aspect of her husband’s crime; with so little realisation of the ruin that crime had brought to hundreds of innocent people; with so little moral feeling of any kind; was in the highest degree reprehensible to him. Having assumed a mental attitude of reprehension, he stopped short; his perceptions were not sufficiently keen to allow of his understanding that some pity might be due also.

Suffering is not always to be estimated by the worth of the object through which it is inflicted; not often, indeed, in this world, where the sum of man’s suffering is out of all proportion greater than the sum of man’s spirituality. Mrs. Romayne’s conception of life might be in the last degree narrow and selfish, and as such it might be in the highest degree to be deprecated; but such as it was it was all she had, and within its limits her life was now in ruin. Her aims and ends in life might be of the poorest, and deserving of unsparing condemnation; but she had nothing beyond, and the pain of their overthrow was to her dormant sensibility not so very disproportionate to the suffering inflicted on a more sensitive organisation by the shattering of higher hopes.

Mrs. Romayne, for her part, found her cousin, with the reserve and formality of demeanour which the situation developed in him, simply a tiresome and uncongenial companion. He was very attentive to her. His manner, as she acknowledged to herself more than once with a heavy sigh, was excellent, and he managed her difficult and painful affairs with admirable strength and tact; she learnt in the course of those few days to respect him and depend on him, in spite of herself and even against her will. But it was not surprising that the end of their enforced dual solitude should be looked for more or less eagerly by both parties. They were almost entirely dependent on one another for companionship. Falconer, it is true, saw Dr. Aston once or twice; but of Mrs. Romayne’s acquaintances not one had even left a card of condolence upon her. Neither the Cloughtons nor any other of the pleasure-seekers who had previously been so anxious for her society, showed any sign of being aware of her existence under her present circumstances.

The form taken by Falconer’s first allusion to the probable limits of their detention in Nice had created in both of them, by one of those vague chains of idea which are so unaccountable and so often experienced, a tendency to think and speak of the termination of that detention, when they did speak together on the subject, as “when the papers are given up.” There was some question, at one time, as to whether or no even the private papers of William Romayne would be returned to his widow. And these same papers, thus surrounded by an element of painful uncertainty, and at the same time elevated into a kind of order of release, obtained in the minds of both a fictitious importance on their own account. Mrs. Romayne found herself thinking about them, conjecturing about them, even dreaming about them; until at last, when they were actually placed in her hand, they possessed a curious fascination for her.

It was about midday when she and Falconer returned from their final appearance before the authorities. She stood in the middle of the room holding the large, shabby despatch-box, lately handed to her with a grave “Private papers, madame”; the noise of the carnival floated in at the window in striking contrast with the two sombre figures.

“I think I will go and look them over!” she said in a low, rather surprised voice. “You would like to go out, perhaps. Please don’t think about me. I will spend the day quietly indoors.”

He answered her courteously, and she left the room slowly, with her eyes fixed curiously on the despatch-box in her hand.