A Search For A Secret: A Novel. Vol. 1Henty, G. A. (George Alfred)
General
A Search For A Secret: A Novel. Vol. 1
Henty, G. A. (George Alfred)
Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Mystery fiction
"This man, Agnes, is good-looking, and yet with a bad face. It is rather
coarse perhaps, more so than it was ten years since when I first saw
him, for that sort of face, when it once begins to go off, loses its
beauty rapidly; still, I allow, much as I object to the man, that he is
handsome. It is just the sort of face likely to attract a young girl who
is new to the world. A face apparently frank and good-natured, and yet
with something--imperious and even defiant about it; very taking to the
young, who cannot help feeling flattered by seeing that the man, who
looks as if he neither cared for nor feared any other living thing,
should yet bow to them; that the fierce eye should soften, and the loud
voice become gentle when he addresses them. Altogether a dangerous man
for a young girl to know, a very dangerous one for her to love. To a man
like myself, accustomed from habit and profession to study character, he
is peculiarly repulsive. His face to me is all bad. The man is not only
a blackguard, and a handsome blackguard, but he is a clever and
determined one; his face is marked with lines of profligacy and
drunkenness, and there is a passionate, dangerous flash about his eye.
He has, too, seen the world, although only a bad side of it; but he can,
when he chooses, lay aside his roughness and rampant blackguardism, and
assume a tolerably gentlemanly, quiet demeanour, which would very well
pass muster with an inexperienced girl. In short, my dear, if I were
asked to select the man of all others, of those with whom I am
acquainted, whom I would least rather meet in any society where my
daughter, or any young girl might see him, I should unhesitatingly
say--Robert Gregory. Fortunately for society here, the man, by his
well-known drunken and bad character, has placed himself beyond its
pale, and so he can do it no great harm. It was only the last time that
I was in Canterbury that I heard, and I acknowledge that I heard with
great pleasure, that Robert Gregory was so deeply in debt that writs
were out against him; and that unless he went away he would in a short
time be consigned to a debtor's prison, so that Canterbury, at any rate
for some time, might hope to be free of him. Well, my dear, I daresay
you are wondering what all this long story about a person of whom you
know nothing can be going to end in, but you will see that it is all
very much to the point. To-day I was rather earlier than usual in my
visit to Mr. Harmer. I was driving fast, and as I turned the corner of
the road where the plantation in Mr. Harmer's ground begins, I saw a man
getting over the hedge into the road. Probably the noise he was making
breaking through the twigs, together with the turn of the road,
prevented his seeing or hearing the gig until he was fairly over; for as
he jumped into the road and looked round I was not twenty yards off, and
could hear him swear a deep oath, as he pulled his hat down over his
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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