“What is all this about a woman?” said he. “I see no woman, I see no Miss Ford. Can’t you speak more plainly?”
Before she could answer they were all startled by a mocking, harsh laugh, and turning towards the spot whence it came, they saw, standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the small apartment adjoining, a quaint, weird figure. While the short, sparse grey hair, the hatchet face, pale, lined and wrinkled, were those of the old man they had seen huddled up in the armchair a few moments previously, the rest of the figure, now clad in a woman’s bodice and skirt of rusty black alpaca, drove home to them all with startling distinctness the fact of the fraud which had been played upon them.
“Miss Ford! It’s Miss Ford!” cried Miss Merriman, almost in a scream. “Where is my husband?”
“He’s been dead for a good many months now,” was the cool reply of the queer figure in rusty black, in the same hard, masculine tones which had so effectually helped her in her long imposture. “You’ve been a widow, my dear, ever since the early summer, ever since the night when I, his cousin and your devoted friend, was supposed to die.”
The cynical effrontery with which the old woman thus confessed the imposture she had practised had such an effect upon them all that it was some moments before they could speak. Miss Ford, meanwhile, with her faded eyes, her cadaverous hatchet face, and her attitude of callous defiance, was the only self-possessed person in the room.
“Ha! ha!” laughed she again. “To think what a pack of fools you all were, to be outwitted so easily by an old woman! Why, it’s only a chance that has found me out now; neither you,” and she looked scornfully at Bayre, “nor you,” and she looked still more scornfully at Olwen, “would have found me out but for this accident of Mrs Bayre’s turning up! Well, it doesn’t matter now; I’ve played out the game. I made up my mind I’d never be turned out of the château while I lived, and I’ve kept my word, in spite of my cousin’s intentions, in spite of everything and everybody.”
It was a shocking and pitiable spectacle, that of the fierce old woman struggling between her determined will and her physical weakness. For even as she finished speaking, her voice broke and she staggered rather than walked back to the old armchair which she had quitted in male attire a quarter of an hour before.
A glimmering of the truth as to the reason of this most singular fraud had by this time reached the minds of two out of the three persons present. Mistress of Creux Miss Ford had been during her cousin’s bachelorhood; mistress she had continued to be, at some cost of personal cruelty, during the unhappy reign of her cousin’s young wife; mistress she had contrived to be, through gross imposture, up to the end. For that the end was not very far off for her was clearly apparent to those who looked at the ash-coloured face and the sunken eyes, and who heard the broken voice and laboured breathing of the indomitable woman.
“Blaise knew you then!” cried young Bayre, suddenly. “That’s what he must have found out when he came here with me!”
Miss Ford smiled feebly.