Detective and mystery stories; English fiction -- 19th century
Mrs. Anderton had not been long under his care when the remonstrances
of several friends led to the cessation of the Baron's immediate
manipulations, the mesmeric fluid being now conveyed to the patient
through the intervention of a third party. Mademoiselle Rosalie, "the
medium" thus employed, was a young person regularly retained by Baron
R** for that purpose, and of her it is necessary here to say a few
words.
She appears to have been about the age of Mrs. Anderton, though looking
perhaps a little older than her years; slight in figure, with dark
hair and eyes, and in all respects but one answering precisely to the
description of that lady's lost sister. The single difference alluded
to, that of wide and clumsy feet, is amply accounted for by the nature
of her former avocation. She had been for several years a tight-rope
dancer, &c., in the employ of a travelling-circus proprietor; who, by
his own account, had purchased her for a trifling sum, of a gang of
gipsies at Lewes, just at the very time when the younger Miss Boleton
was stolen at Hastings by a gang whose course was tracked through Lewes
to the westward. Of him she was again purchased by the Baron, who
appears, even at the outset, to have exercised a singular power over
her, the fascination of his glance falling on her whilst engaged upon
the stage, having compelled her to stop short in the performance of her
part. There can, I think, be little doubt that this girl Rosalie was in
fact the lost sister of Mrs. Anderton, and of this we shall find that
the Baron R** very shortly became cognisant.
It does not appear that on the first meeting of the sisters he had
any idea of the relationship between them. He was, indeed, perfectly
ignorant of the early history of both. The extraordinary sympathy
therefore which immediately manifested itself between them was not
improbably set down by him as a mere result of the mesmeric _rapport_,
and it was not till he had been for some weeks in attendance on Mrs.
Anderton that accident led him to divine its true origin. Nor, on the
other hand, does this singular sympathy--a sympathy manifested in
a precisely similar manner to that known to have existed years ago
between the sisters--appear to have raised any suspicion of the truth
in the mind of either Mrs. Anderton or her husband. From the former,
indeed, all mention of her early life had been carefully kept till she
had probably almost, if not entirely, forgotten the event, while the
latter merely remembered it as a tale which had long since ceased to
possess any present interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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