II

The elderly parlour-maid showed Rachel straight to her bedroom when she

arrived at Tavistock Square, indicating on the way the extensive-looking

first-floor drawing-room, in which tea and her first sight of the

wonderful aunt would await Rachel in half an hour. She had been

eager and excited. The air and promise of London had thrilled her,

but she found some influence in the atmosphere of the big house that

was vaguely repellent, almost sinister.

Her bedroom was expensively furnished and beautifully kept; some of the

pieces were, she supposed, genuine antiques, perhaps immensely

valuable. But how could she ever feel at home there? She was hampered

by the necessity for moving circumspectly among this aged delicate

stuff; so wonderfully preserved and yet surely fragile and decrepit at

the heart. That spindling escritoire, for instance, and that mincing

Louis Quinze settee, ought to be taking their well-earned leisure in

some museum. It would be indecent to write at the one or sit on the

other. They were relics of the past, foolishly pretending an ability

for service when their life had been sapped by dry-rot and their

original functions outlived.

"Well, if ever I have a house of my own," Rachel thought regarding

these ancient splendours, "I'll furnish it with something I shan't be

afraid of."

With a gesture of dismissal she turned and looked out of the window.

From the square came the sounds of a motor drawing up at a neighbouring

house; she heard the throbbing of the engine, the slam of the door, and

then the strong, sonorous tones of a man's voice. That was her proper

_milieu_, she reflected, among the strong vital things. Even after

twenty minutes in that bedroom she had begun to feel enervated, as if

she herself were also beginning to suffer from dry-rot....

She was anxious and uneasy as she went slowly downstairs to the

drawing-room. Her anticipations of this meeting with her intimidating,

wealthy aunt had changed within the last half-hour. Her first idea of

Miss Deane had been of a robust, stout woman, frank in her speech and

inclined to be very critical of the newly found niece whom she had

chosen to inspect. Now, she was prepared rather to expect a fragile,

rather querulous old lady, older even than her years; an aunt to be

talked to in a lowered voice and treated with the same delicate care

that must be extended to her furniture.

Rachel paused with her hand on the drawing-room door, and sighed at the

thought of all the repressions and nervous strains that this visit

might have in store for her.

She entered the room almost on tiptoe, and then stood stock-still,

suddenly shocked and bewildered with surprise. Whatever she had

expected, it was not this. For a moment she was unable to believe that

the sprightly, painted and bedizened figure before her could possibly

be that of her aunt. Her head was crowned with an exuberant brown wig,

her heavy eyebrows were grotesquely blackened, her hollow cheeks stiff

with powder, her lips brightened to a fantastic scarlet. And she was

posed there, standing before the tea-table with her head a little back,

looking at her niece with a tolerant condescension, with the air of a

superb young beauty, self-conscious and proud of her charms.

"Hm! So you're my semi-mythical niece," she said, putting up her

lorgnette. "I'm glad at any rate to find that you're not, after all, a

fabulous creature." She spoke in a high, rather thin voice that

produced an effect of effort, as if she were playing on the top octave

of a flute.

Rachel had never in her life felt so gauche and awkward.

"Yes--I--you know, aunt, I had begun to wonder if you were not

fabulous, too," she tried, desperately anxious to seem at ease. She was

afraid to look at that, to her, grotesque figure, afraid to show by

some unconscious reflex her dislike for its ugliness. As she took the

bony, ring-bedecked hand that was held out to her, she kept her eyes

away from her aunt's face.

Miss Deane, however, would not permit that evasion.

"Hold your head up, my dear, I want to look at you," she said, and when

Rachel reluctantly obeyed, continued, "Yes, you're more like my father

than your own, which means that you're like me, for I took after him,

too, so every one said."

Rachel drew in her breath with a little gasp. Was it possible that her

aunt could imagine for one instant that there was any likeness between

them?

"Our--our names are the same," she said nervously.

Miss Deane nodded. "There's more in it than that," she said with a

touch of complacence; "and there's no reason why there shouldn't be.

It's good Mendelism that you should take after an aunt rather than

either of your parents."

"And you really think that we are alike?" Rachel asked feebly, looking

in vain for any sign of a quizzical humour in her aunt's face.

Miss Deane looked down under her half-lowered eyelids with a proud air

of tolerance. "Ah, well, a little without doubt," she said, as though

the advantages of the difference were on her own side. "Now sit down

and have your tea, my dear."

Rachel obeyed with a vague wonder in her mind as to why that look of

tolerance should be so familiar. It seemed to her as if it was

something she had felt rather than seen; and as tea progressed she

found herself half furtively studying the raddled ugliness of her

aunt's face in the search for possible relics of a beautiful youth.

"Ah, I think you're beginning to see it, too," Miss Deane said, marking

her niece's scrutiny. "It grows on one, doesn't it?"

Rachel shivered slightly. "Yes, it does," she said experimentally,

watching her aunt's face for some indication of a malicious teasing

humour. It seemed to her so incredible that this hideous parody of her

own youth could honestly believe that any physical likeness _still_

existed.

Miss Deane, however, was faintly simpering. "I have been told that I've

changed very little," she said; and Rachel suppressed a sigh of

impatience at the reflection that she was expected to play up to this

absurd fantasy.

"Of course, I can't judge of that," she said, "as we met for the first

time five minutes ago."

"No, no, you can't judge of _that_," her aunt replied, with the

half-bashful emphasis of one who awaits a compliment.

Rachel decided to plunge. "But you do look extraordinarily young for

your age still," she lied desperately.

Miss Deane straightened her back and toyed with a teaspoon. "I have

always taken great care of myself," she said.

Unquestionably she believed it, Rachel decided. This was no pose, but a

horrible piece of self-deception. This raddled, repulsive creature had

actually persuaded herself into the delusion that she still had the

appearance of a young girl. Heaven help her if that delusion were ever

shattered!

Yet outside this one obsession Miss Deane, as Rachel soon discovered,

had a clear and well-balanced mind. For, now that she had received her

desired assurance from this new quarter, she began to talk of other

things. Her boasted "modernism," it is true, had a smack of the stiff,

broadcloth savour of the eighties, but she had a point of view that

coincided far more nearly with Rachel's own than did that of her

father. Her aunt, at least, had outlived the worst superstitions and

inanities of the mid-Victorians.

Indeed, by the time tea was finished Rachel's spirits were beginning to

revive. She would have to be very careful in her treatment of her aunt,

but on the whole it would not perhaps be so bad; and presently she

would see Adrian again. She would almost certainly get a letter from

him by the last post, making some appointment to meet her, and after

that she would introduce him to Miss Deane. She had a feeling that Miss

Deane would not raise any objection; that she might even welcome the

visit of a young man to her house.

The time was passing so easily that Rachel was surprised when she heard

the gong sound.

"Does that mean it's time to dress already?" she asked.

Miss Deane nodded. "You've an hour before dinner," she said, "but I'll

go up now. I like to be leisurely over my toilet."

She rose as she spoke, but as she crossed the room, she paused with

what seemed to be a little jerk of surprise as she caught sight of her

own reflection in a tall mirror above one of the gilt-legged console

tables against the wall. Then she deliberately stopped, turned and

surveyed herself, half contemptuously, under lowered eyelids, with a

set of her head and back that belied plainly enough the pout of her

critical lips. And having admired that haggard image, she lifted her

wasted hand and delicately touched her whitened, hollow cheeks with the

tips of her heavily jewelled fingers.

Rachel stared in horror. It seemed to her just then as if the

reflection of her aunt in the mirror was indeed that of herself grown

instantly and mysteriously old. For now, whether because the reversal

of the image by the mirror or because of that perfect duplication of

her own characteristic pose and gesture, the likeness had flashed out

clear and unmistakable. She saw that her father had been right. Once,

incalculable ages ago, this repulsive old woman might have been very

like herself.

She slipped quickly out of the room and ran upstairs. She felt that she

must instantly put that question to the test; search herself for the

signs of coming age as she had so recently searched her aunt's face for

the indications of her former youth.

But when, with an effect of challenge, she scrutinised her reflection

in the tall cheval glass, the likeness appeared to have vanished. She

saw her head thrust a little forward, her arms stiff, and in her whole

pose an air of vigorous defiance. She was prepared to admit that she

was ugly at that moment, if the ugliness was of another kind than that

she had seen downstairs. No! She drew herself up, more than a little

relieved by the result of her test. The likeness was all a fancy, the

result of suggestions, first by her father and then by Miss Deane

herself. And she need at least have no fear that she was ugly. Why....

She paused suddenly, and the light died out of her face. Her image was

looking back at her stiffly, superciliously, with, so it seemed to her,

the contemptible simper of one who still fatuously admires the thing

that has long since lost its charm. She caught her breath and clenched

her hands, drawing down her rather heavy eyebrows in an expression of

angry scorn. "Oh! never, never, never again, will I look at myself like

that," Rachel vowed fiercely.

She was to find, however, before this first evening was over, that the

mere avoidance of that one pose before the mirror would not suffice to

lay the ghost of the suspicion that was beginning to haunt her.

At the very outset a new version of the likeness was presented to her

when, during the first course of dinner, Miss Deane, with a lowering

frown of her blackened eyebrows, found occasion to reprimand the

elderly parlour-maid. For a moment Rachel was again puzzled by the

intriguing sense of the familiar, before she remembered her own scowl

at the looking-glass an hour before. "Do I really frown like that?" she

thought. And on the instant found herself _feeling_ like her aunt.

That, indeed, was the horror that, despite every effort of resistance,

deepened steadily as the evening wore on. Miss Deane had, without

question, lost every trace of her beauty; but her character, her spirit

was unchanged, and it was, so Rachel increasingly believed, the very

spit and replica of her own.

They had the same characteristic gestures and expressions; the look of

kindly tolerance with which her aunt regarded Rachel was precisely the

same as that with which Rachel regarded her father. When her aunt's

voice dropped in speaking from the rather shrill, strained tone that

was obviously not natural to her, Rachel heard the inflexions of her

own voice. And as her knowledge of Miss Deane grew, so, also, did that

haunting unpleasant feeling of looking and speaking in precisely the

same manner. It seemed to her as if she were being invaded by an alien

personality; as if the character she had known and cherished all her

life were no longer her own, but merely a casual inheritance from some

unknown ancestor. Her very integrity was threatened by her

consciousness of that likeness, her pride of individuality. She was

not, after all, a unique personality, but merely another version--if

she were even that?--of a Miss Rachel Deane born in the middle of the

previous century.

Moreover, with that growing recognition of likeness in character, there

came the thought that she in time might look even as her aunt looked at

this present moment. She also would lose her beauty, until no facial

resemblance could be traced between the hag she was and the beauty she

had once been. For, through all her torment, Rachel proudly clung to

the certainty that, physically at least, there was no sort of likeness

between her aunt and herself.

Miss Deane's belief in that matter, however, was soon proved to be

otherwise; for when they were alone together in the drawing-room after

dinner, and the topic so inevitably present to both their minds came to

the surface of conversation, she unexpectedly said: "But we're

evidently the poles apart in character and manner, my dear."

"Oh! do you think so?" Rachel exclaimed. "I--it's a queer thing to say

perhaps--but I curiously feel like you, aunt; when you speak sometimes

and--and when I watch the way you do things."

Miss Deane shook her head. "I admit the physical resemblance," she

said; "otherwise, my dear, we are utterly different."

Did she too, Rachel wondered, resent the aspersion of her integrity?

By the last post Rachel received her expected letter from Adrian

Flemming. Her aunt separated it from the others brought in by her maid

and passed it across to her niece with a slight hint of displeasure in

her face. "Miss Rachel Deane, _junior_," she said. "Really, it hadn't

occurred to me how difficult it will be to distinguish our letters. I

hope my friends won't take to addressing me as Miss Deane, _senior_.

Properly, of course, I am Miss Deane, and you Miss Rachel, but I'll

admit there's sure to be some confusion. Now, my dear, I expect you're

tired. You'd better run up to bed."

Rachel was willing enough to go. She was glad to have an opportunity to

read her letter in solitude; she was even more glad to get away from

the company of this living echo of herself. "I believe I should go mad

if I had to live with her," she reflected. "I should get into the way

of copying her. I should begin to grow old before my time."

When she reached her bedroom, she put down her letter unopened on the

toilet-table and once more stared searchingly at her own reflection in

the mirror. Was there any least trace of a physical likeness, she asked

herself; and began in imagination to follow the possible stages of the

change that time would inevitably work upon her. She shrugged her

shoulders. If there were indeed any sort of facial resemblance between

herself and her aunt, no one would ever see it except in Miss Deane,

and she was obsessed with a senile vanity. Yet was it, after all,

Rachel began to wonder, an unnatural obsession? Might she not in time

suffer from it herself? The change would be so slow, so infinitely

gradual; and always one would be cherishing the old, loved image of

youth and beauty, falling in love with it, like a deluded Hyacinth, and

coming to be deceived by the fantasy of an unchanging appearance of

youth. Looking always for the desired thing, she would suffer from the

hallucination that the thing existed in fact, and imagine that the only

artifice needed to perfect the illusion was a touch of paint and

powder. No doubt her aunt--perhaps searching her own image in the

mirror at this moment--saw not herself but a picture of her niece. She

was hypnotised by the suggestion of a pose and the desire of her own

mind. In time, Rachel herself might also become the victim of a similar

illusion!

Oh! it was horrible! With a shudder, she picked up her letter and

turned away from the looking-glass. She would forget that ghastly

warning in the thought of the joys proper to her youth. She would think

of Adrian and of her next meeting with him. She opened her letter to

find that he had, rather timorously, suggested that she should meet him

the next afternoon--at the Marble Arch at three o'clock, if he heard

nothing from her in the meantime.

For a few minutes she lost herself in delighted anticipation, and then

slowly, insidiously, a new speculation crept into her mind. What would

be the effect upon Adrian if he saw her and her aunt together? Would he

recognise the likeness and, anticipating the movement of more than half

a century, see her in one amazing moment as she would presently become?

And, in any case, what a terrible train of suggestion might not be

started in his mind by the impression left upon him by the old woman?

Once he had seen Miss Deane, Rachel's every gesture would serve to

remind him of that repulsive image of raddled, deluded age. It might

well be that, in time, he would come to see Rachel as she would

presently be rather than as she was. It would be a hideous reversal of

the old romance; instead of seeing the girl in the old woman, he would

foresee the harridan in the girl!

That picture presented itself to Rachel with a quite appalling effect

of conviction. She suddenly remembered a case she had known that had

remarkable points of resemblance--the case of a rather pretty girl with

an unpleasant younger brother who, so she had heard it said, "put men

off his sister" because of the facial likeness between them. She was

pretty and he was ugly, but they were unmistakably brother and sister.

Oh! it would be nothing less than folly to let Adrian and her aunt

meet, Rachel decided. In imagination, she could follow the process of

his growing dismay; she could see his puzzled stare as he watched Miss

Deane, and struggled to fix that tantalising suggestion of likeness to

some one he knew; his flash of illumination as he solved the puzzle and

turned with that gentle, winning smile of his to herself; and then the

progress of his disillusionment as, day by day, he realised more

plainly the intriguing similarities of expression and gesture, until he

felt that he was making love to the spirit of an aged spinster

temporarily disguised behind the appearance of beauty.