THE REAL ANNE
“
It’s incredible!” I exclaimed.
“Well, it’s true, anyhow!” Jim asserted. “And I don’t see myself where the incredibility comes in.”
“You say that Mr. Pendennis wrote from Berlin not a week after I left England, and that he and Anne—Anne—are at this moment staying with you in Chelsea? When I’ve been constantly with her,—saw her murdered in the streets of Warsaw!”
“That must have been the other woman,—the woman of the portrait, whoever she may be. No one seems to know, not even Pendennis. We’ve discussed it several times,—not before Anne. We don’t think it wise to remind her of that Russian episode; it upsets her too much; for she’s not at all the thing even yet, poor girl.”
He seemed quite to have changed his mental attitude towards Anne, and spoke of her as kindly as if she had been Mary’s sister.
“It’s another case of mistaken identity based on an extraordinary likeness,” he continued. “There have been many such,—more in fact than in fiction. Look at the Bancrofts and their ‘doubles,’ for instance, a pair of them, husband and wife, who passed themselves off as Sir Squire and Lady Bancroft innumerable times a few years back, and were never discovered. And yet, though it mightn’t be difficult for a clever impersonator to make up like Bancroft, it seems incredible that he could find a woman who could pose successfully as the incomparable Marie Wilton. You should have seen her in her prime, my boy—the most fascinating little creature imaginable, and the plainest, if you only looked at her features! It must have been a jolly sight harder to represent her, than if she’d been a merely beautiful woman, like Anne. She’s an uncommon type here in England, but not on the Continent. I don’t suppose it would be difficult to find half a dozen who would answer to the same description,—if one only knew where to look for ’em.”
“It wasn’t the resemblance of a type,—eyes and hair and that sort of thing,”—I said slowly; “the voice, the manner, the soul; why—she—knew me, recognized me even with my beard—spoke of Mary—”
“She must have been an astonishingly clever woman, poor soul! And one who knew a lot more about Anne than Anne and her father know of her. Well, you’d soon be able to exchange notes with Pendennis himself, and perhaps you’ll hit on a solution of the mystery between you. What’s that?”