Country homes -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Revenge -- Fiction
"I have been startled; most painfully and powerfully affected; I have
seen the most extraordinary resemblance to my beautiful, _murdered_
Guy."
She rose, and wept passionately, standing with her face buried in her
handkerchief.
Sir Jekyl frowned with closed eyes and upturned face, waiting like a
patient man bored to death, for the subsidence of the storm which he had
conjured up. Very pale, too, was that countenance, and contracted for a
few moments with intense annoyance.
"I saw the same fellow," said the Baronet, in a subdued tone, so soon as
there was a subsidence, "this evening; he's at that little inn on the
Sterndale Road. Guy Strangways he calls himself; I talked with him for a
few minutes; a gentlemanly young man; and I don't know what to make of
it. So I thought I'd ask you whether _you_ could help me to a guess;
and that's all."
The old lady shook her head.
"And I don't think you need employ quite such hard terms," he said.
"I don't want to speak of it at all," said she; "but if I do I can't say
less; nor I won't--no, never!"
"You see it's very odd, those two names," said Sir Jekyl, not minding;
"and as you say, the likeness so astonishing--I--I--what do _you_ think
of it?"
"Of course it's an accident," said the old lady.
"I'm glad you think so," said he, abruptly.
"Why, what could it be? you don't believe in apparitions?" she replied,
with an odd sort of dryness.
"I rather think not," said he; "I meant he left no very near relation,
and I fancied those Deverell people might have contrived some trick, or
intended some personation, or something, and I thought that you,
perhaps, had heard something of their movements."
"Nothing--what could they have done, or why should they have sought to
make any such impression? I don't understand it. It is very
extraordinary. But the likeness in church amazed and shocked me, and
made me ill."
"In church, you say?" repeated Sir Jekyl.
"Yes, in church," and she told him in her own way, what I shall tell in
mine, as follows:--
Last Sunday she had driven, in her accustomed state, with Beatrix, to
Wardlock church. The church was hardly five hundred yards away, and the
day bright and dry. But Lady Alice always arrived and departed in the
coach, and sat in the Redcliffe seat, in the centre of the gallery. She
and Beatrix sat face to face at opposite sides of the pew.
As Lady Alice looked with her cold and steady glance over the
congregation in the aisle, during the interval of silence that precedes
the commencement of the service, a tall and graceful young man, with an
air of semi-foreign fashion, entered the church, accompanied by an
elderly gentleman, of whom she took comparatively little note.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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