“But I was always given to understand that this child died,” said the doctor, musing. “Your father and mother always believed it dead. It’s a strange story, my dear boy, and it seems impossible that there could be such a resemblance.”
“Seems impossible, doctor, perhaps,” said Huish, smiling; “but I have looked him in the face. Thank God,” he said fervently; “the knowledge of his existence sweeps away the strange horror that has troubled me, and accounts for all the past. Doctor, it must have been he who applied to you that day while I was abroad.”
Dr Stonor’s answer was to lay his hand upon his patient’s forehead again, and John Huish smiled.
“My dear boy, it is absurd,” he exclaimed pettishly. “I could not have made such a mistake. There; I must get back to town.”
“Come and see me to-morrow,” said Huish earnestly, “and bring me back some news of—”
The doctor nodded and left; and by that time next day he had come to the conclusion that there were strange lives in this world, for he had had such information as took him to an old house in a City lane, where he had gazed upon the face of the dead semblance of the man he knew to be lying ill in the Surrey cottage. Moreover, he had found with the dead a thin, harsh-spoken woman, red-eyed and passionate with weeping, and ready on the slightest encouragement to burst into a torrent of grief and adulation of “her boy,” as she called him.
“So handsome and so brave as he was, and such a gent as he could make himself, and live with swells,” she sobbed, “though he wouldn’t know me sometimes in the street.”
“Did you know his father and mother?” said the doctor, hazarding a shot.
“I am his mother,” said the woman sharply. “Poor, brave, handsome boy! The times I’ve found him in money, and warned him about danger, and watched for him when he wanted it done. I am his mother.”
“Nonsense!” said the doctor. “You don’t know me. I attended Captain Millet after his fall in the gravel-pit near the Dingle.”