Читать книгу A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3) - Victorian Romance - Страница 9

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Dennis Falconer had been alone for nearly an hour, when his solitude was broken up by the appearance of a waiter, who presented him with a card, and the information that the gentleman whose name it bore was in the smoking-room. The name was Dr. Aston’s, and after a moment’s reflection Falconer told the waiter to ask the gentleman to come upstairs. Falconer had spent that last hour in meditation, which had grown steadily deeper and graver. It seemed to have carried him beyond the formal and dogmatic attitude of mind with which he had met Mrs. Romayne, back to the borders of those larger regions he had touched when he sat looking at William Romayne’s papers; and there was a warmth and gratitude in his reception of Dr. Aston when that gentleman appeared, that suggested that he was not so completely sufficient for himself as usual.

“The smoking-room is very full, I imagine?” he said, as he welcomed the little doctor. “My cousin has gone to bed, and I thought if you didn’t mind coming up, doctor, we should be better off here.”

Dr. Aston’s answer was characteristically hearty and alert. Knowing it to be Falconer’s last night at Nice, he had come round, he said, just for a farewell word, and to arrange, if possible, for a meeting later on under happier circumstances. A quiet chat over a cigar was what he had not hoped for, but the thing of all others he would like. He settled himself with a genial instinct for comfort in the arm-chair Falconer pulled round to the window for him; accepted a cigar and prepared to light it; glancing now and again at the younger man’s face with shrewd, kindly eyes, which had already noticed something unusual in its expression.

Dr. Aston and Dennis Falconer had met, some six years before, in Africa, under circumstances which had brought out all that was best in the young man’s character; and Dr. Aston had been warmly attracted by him. Being a particularly shrewd student of human nature, he had taken his measure accurately enough, subsequently, and knew as certainly as one man may of another where his weak points lay, and how time was dealing with them. But his kindness for, and interest in, Dennis Falconer had never abated; perhaps because his insight did not, as so much human insight does, stop at the weak points.

Dennis Falconer, for his part, regarded Dr. Aston with an affectionate respect which he gave to hardly any other man on earth.

There was a short silence as the two men lit their cigars, and then Dr. Aston, with another glance at Falconer’s face, broke it with a kindly, delicate enquiry after Mrs. Romayne. Falconer answered it almost absently, but with an instinctive stiffening, so to speak, of his face and voice, and there was another pause. The doctor was trying the experiment of waiting for a lead. He was just deciding that he must make another attempt on his own account when Falconer took his cigar from between his lips and said, with his eyes fixed on the evening sky:

“I’m always glad to see you, doctor; but I never was more glad than to-night.”

A sound proceeded from the doctor which might have been described as a grunt if it had been less delicately sympathetic, and Falconer continued:

“I’ve been trying to think out a problem, and it was one too many for me: the origin of evil.”

He was thoroughly in earnest, and nothing was further from him than any thought of lightness or flippancy. But there was a calm familiarity and matter-of-course acquaintanceship with his subject about his tone that produced a slight quiver about the corners of the little doctor’s mouth. He did not speak, however, and the movement with which he took his cigar from between his lips and turned to Falconer was merely sympathetic and interested.

“Of course, I know it’s an unprofitable subject enough,” continued Falconer almost apologetically. “We shall never be much the wiser on the subject, struggle as we may. But still, now and then it seems to be forced on one. It has been forced on me to-day.”

“Apropos of William Romayne?” suggested Dr. Aston, so delicately that the words seemed rather a sympathetic comment than a question.

“Yes,” returned Falconer. “We have been looking through his private papers.” He paused a moment, and then continued as if drawn on almost in spite of himself. “You knew him by repute, I dare say, doctor. He had one of those strong personalities which get conveyed even by hearsay. A clever man, striking and dominating, universally liked and deferred to. Yet he must have been as absolutely without principle as this table is without feeling.”

He struck the little table between them with his open hand as he spoke; and then, as though the expression of his feelings had begotten, as is often the case, an irresistible desire to relieve himself further, he answered Dr. Aston’s interested ejaculation as if it had been the question the doctor was at once too well-bred and too full of tact to put.

“There were no papers connected with this last disgraceful affair, of course; those, as you know, I dare say, were all seized in London. It’s the man’s past life that these private papers throw light on. Light, did I say? It was a life of systematic, cold-blooded villainy, for which no colours could be dark enough.”

He had uttered his last sentence involuntarily, as it seemed, and now he laid down his cigar, and turning to Dr. Aston, began to speak low and quickly.

“They are papers of all kinds,” he said. “Letters, business documents, memoranda of every description, and two-thirds of them at least have reference to fraud and wrong of one kind or another. Not one penny that man possessed can have been honestly come by. His business was swindling; every one of his business transactions was founded on fraud. He can have had no faith or honesty of any sort or kind. He was living with another woman before he had been married a year. All that woman’s letters—he deceived her abominably, and it’s fortunate that she died—are annotated and endorsed like his ‘business’ memoranda; evidently kept deliberately as so much stored experience for future use!”

Dr. Aston had listened with a keen, alert expression of intent interest. His cigar was forgotten, and he laid it down now as if impatient of any distraction, and leant forward over the table with his shrewd, kindly little eyes fixed eagerly on Falconer. Human nature was a hobby of his.

Falconer’s confidence, or more truly perhaps the manner of it, had swept away all conventional barriers, and the elder man asked two or three quick, penetrating questions.

“How far back do these records go?” he asked finally.

“They cover five-and-twenty years, I should say,” returned Falconer. “The first note on a successful fraud must have been made when he was about four-and-twenty. Why, even then—when he was a mere boy—he must have been entirely without moral sense!”

“Yes!” said the doctor, with a certain dry briskness of manner which was apt to come to him in moments of excitement. “That is exactly what he was, my boy! It was that, in conjunction with his powerful brain, that made him what you called, just now, dominating. It gave him vantage-ground over his fellow-men. He was as literally without moral sense as a colour-blind man is without a sense of colour, or a homicidal maniac without a sense of the sanctity of human life.”

An expression of rather horrified and entirely uncomprehending protest spread itself over Falconer’s face.

“Romayne was not mad,” he objected, with that incapacity for penetrating beneath the surface which was characteristic of him. “I never even heard that there was madness in the family.”

“You would find it if you looked far enough, without a doubt!” answered the doctor decidedly. “This is a most interesting subject, Dennis, and it’s one that it’s very difficult to look into without upsetting the whole theory of moral responsibility, and doing more harm than enough. I don’t say Romayne was mad, as the word is usually understood, but all you tell me confirms a notion I have had about him ever since this affair came out. He was what we call morally insane. I’ll tell you what first put the idea into my head. It was the extraordinary obtuseness, the extraordinary want of perception, of that blunder of his that burst up the whole thing. Look at it for yourself. It was a flaw in his comprehension of moral sense only possible in a man who knew of the quality by hearsay alone. He must have been a very remarkable man. I wish I had known him!”

“I have heard the term ‘moral insanity,’ of course,” said Falconer slowly and distastefully, ignoring the doctor’s last, purely æsthetic sentence, “but it has always seemed to me, doctor, if you’ll pardon my saying so, a very dangerous tampering with things that should be sacred even from science. I cannot believe that any man is actually incapable of knowing right from wrong.”

“The difficulty is,” said the doctor drily, “that the words right and wrong sometimes convey nothing to him, as the words red and blue convey nothing to a colour-blind man, and the endearments of his wife convey nothing to the lunatic who is convinced that she is trying to poison him.” He paused a moment, and then said abruptly: “Are there any children?”

Falconer glanced at him and changed colour slightly.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “One boy!”

The keen, shrewd face of the elder man softened suddenly and indescribably under one of those quick sympathetic impulses which were Dr. Aston’s great charm.

“Heaven help his mother!” he said gently.

Falconer moved quickly and protestingly, and there was a touch of something like rebuke in his voice as he said:

“Doctor, you don’t mean to say that you think——”

“You believe in heredity, I suppose?” interrupted the doctor quickly. “Well, at least, you believe in the heredity you can’t deny—that a child may—or rather must—inherit, not only physical traits and infirmities, but mental tendencies; likes, dislikes, aptitudes, incapacities, or what not. Be consistent, man, and acknowledge the sequel, though it’s pleasanter to shut one’s eyes to it, I admit. Put the theory of moral insanity out of the question for the moment if you like; say that Romayne was a pronounced specimen of the common criminal. Why should not his child inherit his father’s tendency to crime, his father’s aptitude for lying and thieving, as he might inherit his father’s eyes, or his father’s liking for music—if he had had a turn that way? You’re a religious man, Falconer, I know. You believe, I take it, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children. How can they be visited more heavily than in their reproduction? You mark my words, my boy, that little child of Romayne’s—unless he inherits strong counter influences from his mother, or some far-away ancestor—will go the way his father has gone, and may end as his father has ended!”

There was a slight sound by the door behind the two men as Dr. Aston finished—finished with a force and solemnity that carried a painful thrill of conviction even through the not very penetrable outer crust of dogma which enwrapped Dennis Falconer—and the latter turned his head involuntarily. The next instant both men had sprung to their feet, and were standing dumb and aghast face to face with Mrs. Romayne. She was standing with her hand still on the lock of the door as if her attention had been arrested just as she was entering the room; she had apparently recoiled, for she was pressed now tightly against the door; her face was white to the very lips, and a vague thought passed through Falconer that he had never seen it before. It was as though the look in her eyes, as she gazed at Dr. Aston, had changed it beyond recognition.

There was a moment’s dead silence; a moment during which Dr. Aston turned from red to white and from white to red again, and struggled vainly to find words; a moment during which Falconer could only stare blankly at that unfamiliar woman’s face. Then, while the two men were still utterly at a loss, Mrs. Romayne seemed gradually to command herself, as if with a tremendous effort. Gradually, as he looked at her, Falconer saw the face with which he was familiar shape itself, so to speak, upon that other face he did not know. He saw her eyes change and harden as if with the effort necessitated by her conventional instinct against a scene. He saw the quivering horror of her mouth alter and subside in the hard society smile he knew well, only rather stiffer than usual as her face was whiter; and then he heard her speak.

With a little movement of her head in civil recognition of Dr. Aston’s presence, she said to Falconer:

“My book is on that table. Will you give it to me, please?”

Her voice was quite steady, though thin. Almost mechanically Falconer handed her the book she asked for, and with another slight inclination of her head, before Dr. Aston had recovered his balance sufficiently to speak, she was gone.

The door closed behind her, and a low ejaculation broke from the doctor. Then he drew a long breath, and said slowly:

“That’s a remarkable woman.”

Falconer drew his hand across his forehead as though he were a little dazed.

“I think not!” he said stupidly. “Not when you know her!”

“Ah!” returned the doctor, with a shrewd glance at him. “And you do know her?”

If Falconer could have seen Mrs. Romayne an hour later, he would have been more than ever convinced of the correctness of his judgement. The preparations for departure were nearly concluded; she had dismissed her maid and was finishing them herself with her usual quiet deliberation, though her face was very pale and set.

But it might have perplexed him somewhat if he had seen her, when everything was done, stop short in the middle of the room and lift her hands to her head as though something oppressed her almost more heavily than she could bear.

“End as his father ended!” she said below her breath. “Ruin and disgrace!”

She turned and crossed the room to where her travelling-bag stood, and drew from it a letter, thrust into a pocket with several others.

It was the blotted little letter which began “My dear Mamma,” and when she returned it to the bag at last, her face was once again the face that Dennis Falconer did not know.