For a moment neither of them spoke or moved. Then Frank got out of the chair where he was sitting and crossed the room to where the horrible fac-simile of himself stood against the wall, and putting himself unconsciously, Margery felt, into the same attitude, turned to her.
"I have worked quickly to-night," he said. "I have almost finished."
Margery looked suddenly back at the portrait, and noticed with a cold, growing horror that she had been the victim of some illusion. The light from the window cast no shadow at all on to it, and the shadow on the face was painted on the left side, not the right.
Frank paused, and Margery knew that her telegram would be useless. The matter was between herself and Frank. If help could reach him it must come from her. In a moment she understood all. The vague fear, the disconnected hints, the thing he had wished to tell her once at New Quay, and once again that morning, the guilty face, her own shrinking, formed links of a connected chain. She had shrunk from what was evil, as Frank had shrunk from it and loathed it when she was there; but the fascination of which, interpreted by his artistic passion, he had been unable to resist. His own skill had raised the thing that he had thought was dead into new life, and now it asserted its old supremacy.
In a few moments he spoke again.
"Do you see how like we are?" he said, speaking slowly, as if he had some difficulty in finding words. "No wonder you mistook it for me. You cannot see it properly in this light; in the daylight the likeness is even more extraordinary. Is it not clever of me to have painted such a picture? There is no picture like it in the world. It must go to the Academy next year, Margery, as a posthumous work. It is a creation. I have made a man!"
Frank paused, but Margery said nothing.
"There were some things about me you did not know before—things which were part of me, and had been vital to me," he went on. "Once or twice I wished to tell you of them, but you would not hear. Now you see them. I think you cannot help seeing them. You can see them in the portrait's face and in mine—clearest in mine; but to-morrow they will be quite as clear in the other. They say that hearing firing brings corpses to the surface. I dare say it is true—at any rate, I have brought corpses to the surface. They are not pretty; corpses seldom are."
Margery came a step nearer to him, though her flesh cried out against it.