City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
They went without further ceremony. As they walked through the hall and
down the corridors side by side, an imaginative person might have felt
that perhaps the eyes of an ancient darkling portrait or so looked
down at the pair curiously: the long, loosely built New Yorker rather
slouching along by the soldierly, almost romantic figure which, in a
measure, suggested that others not unlike it might have trod the same
oaken floor, wearing ruff and doublet, or lace jabot and sword. There
was a far cry between the two, but they walked closely in friendly
union. When they entered the picture-gallery Strangeways paused a moment
again, and stood peering down its length.
“It is very dimly lighted. How can we see?” he said.
“I told Pearson to leave it dim,” Tembarom answered. “I wanted it just
that way at first.”
He tried--and succeeded tolerably well--to say it casually, as he led
the way ahead of them. He and the duke had not talked the scheme over
for nothing. As his grace had said, they had “worked the thing up.” As
they moved down the gallery, the men and women in their frames looked
like ghosts staring out to see what was about to happen.
“We'll turn up the lights after a while,” T. Tembarom explained, still
casually. “There's a picture here I think a good deal of. I've stood and
looked at it pretty often. It reminded me of some one the first day I
set eyes on it; but it was quite a time before I made up my mind who it
was. It used to drive me half dotty trying to think it out.”
“Which one was it?” asked Strangeways.
“We're coming to it. I want to see if it reminds you of any one. And I
want you to see it sudden.” “It's got to be sudden,” he had said to
the duke. “If it's going to pan out, I believe it's got to be sudden.”
“That's why I had the rest of 'em left dim. I told Pearson to leave a
lamp I could turn up quick,” he said to Strangeways.
The lamp was on a table near by and was shaded by a screen. He took it
from the shadow and lifted it suddenly, so that its full gleam fell upon
the portrait of the handsome youth with the lace collar and the dark,
drooping eyes. It was done in a second, with a dramatically unexpected
swiftness. His heart jumped up and down.
“Who's that?” he demanded, with abruptness so sharp-pitched that the
gallery echoed with the sound. “Who's that?”
He heard a hard, quick gasp, a sound which was momentarily a little
horrible, as if the man's soul was being jerked out of his body's
depths.
“Who is he?” he cried again. “Tell me.”
After the gasp, Strangeways stood still and stared. His eyes were glued
to the canvas, drops of sweat came out on his forehead, and he was
shuddering. He began to back away with a look of gruesome struggle. He
backed and backed, and stared and stared. The gasp came twice again,
and then his voice seemed to tear itself loose from some power that was
holding it back.
“Th--at!” he cried. “It is--it--is Miles Hugo!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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