‘The second turning on the right.’
Owen flushed a little. He fancied he had beheld the revelation he was in
search of. But had his eyes deceived him?
Once more he used the ruse, still drawing nearer and intimating by a
glance that the trouble he gave her was very distressing to him.
‘How very deaf!’ she murmured. She exclaimed loudly--
‘_The second turning to the right_.’
She had advanced her face to within a foot of his own, and in speaking
mouthed very emphatically, fixing her eyes intently upon his. And now
his first suspicion was indubitably confirmed. Her eyes were as black as
midnight.
All this feigning was most distasteful to Graye. The riddle having
been solved, he unconsciously assumed his natural look before she had
withdrawn her face. She found him to be peering at her as if he would
read her very soul--expressing with his eyes the notification of which,
apart from emotion, the eyes are more capable than any other--inquiry.
Her face changed its expression--then its colour. The natural tint of
the lighter portions sank to an ashy gray; the pink of her cheeks grew
purpler. It was the precise result which would remain after blood had
left the face of one whose skin was dark, and artificially coated with
pearl-powder and carmine.
She turned her head and moved away, murmuring a hasty reply to Owen’s
farewell remark of ‘Good-day,’ and with a kind of nervous twitch lifting
her hand and smoothing her hair, which was of a light-brown colour.
‘She wears false hair,’ he thought, ‘or has changed its colour
artificially. Her true hair matched her eyes.’
And now, in spite of what Mr. Brown’s neighbours had said about nearly
recognizing Mrs. Manston on her recent visit--which might have meant
anything or nothing; in spite of the photograph, and in spite of his
previous incredulity; in consequence of the verse, of her silence and
backwardness at the visit to Hoxton with Manston, and of her appearance
and distress at the present moment, Graye had a conviction that the
woman was an impostor.
What could be Manston’s reason for such an astounding trick he could by
no stretch of imagination divine.
He changed his direction as soon as the woman was out of sight, and
plodded along the lanes homeward to Tolchurch.
One new idea was suggested to him by his desire to allay Cytherea’s
dread of being claimed, and by the difficulty of believing that the
first Mrs. Manston lost her life as supposed, notwithstanding the
inquest and verdict. Was it possible that the real Mrs. Manston, who
was known to be a Philadelphian by birth, had returned by the train
to London, as the porter had said, and then left the country under an
assumed name, to escape that worst kind of widowhood--the misery of
being wedded to a fickle, faithless, and truant husband?
In her complicated distress at the news brought by her brother,
Cytherea’s thoughts at length reverted to her friend, the Rector of
Carriford. She told Owen of Mr. Raunham’s warm-hearted behaviour towards
herself, and of his strongly expressed wish to aid her.
‘He is not only a good, but a sensible man. We seem to want an old head
on our side.’
‘And he is a magistrate,’ said Owen in a tone of concurrence. He
thought, too, that no harm could come of confiding in the rector, but
there was a difficulty in bringing about the confidence. He wished that
his sister and himself might both be present at an interview with Mr.
Raunham, yet it would be unwise for them to call on him together, in the
sight of all the servants and parish of Carriford.
There could be no objection to their writing him a letter.
No sooner was the thought born than it was carried out. They wrote to
him at once, asking him to have the goodness to give them some advice
they sadly needed, and begging that he would accept their assurance
that there was a real justification for the additional request they
made--that instead of their calling upon him, he would any evening of
the week come to their cottage at Tolchurch.