Some private Talk of Varbarriere and Lady Alice at the Dinner-table.
At dinner he was placed beside the old lady. He understood good cookery, and with him to dine was to analyse and contemplate. He was usually taciturn and absorbed during the process; but on this occasion he made an effort, and talked a good deal in a grave, but, as the old lady thought, an agreeable and kindly vein.
Oddly enough, he led the conversation to his nephew, and found his companion very ready indeed to listen, as perhaps he had anticipated, and even to question him on this theme with close but unavowed interest.
"He bears two names which, united, remind me of some of my bitterest sorrows—Guy was my dear son's Christian name, and Mr. Strangways was his most particular friend; and there is a likeness too," she continued, looking with her dim and clouded eyes upon Guy at the other side, whom fate had placed beside Miss Blunket—"a likeness so wonderful as to make me, at times, quite indescribably nervous; at times it is—how handsome! don't you consider him wonderfully handsome?—at times the likeness is so exact as to become all but insupportable."
She glanced suddenly as she spoke, and saw an expression on the countenance of M. Varbarriere, who looked for no such inspection at that moment, which she neither liked nor understood.
No, it was not pleasant, connected with the tone in which she spoke, the grief and the agitation she recounted, and above all with the sad and horrible associations connected indissolubly in her mind with those names and features. It was a face both insincere and mocking—such a countenance as has perhaps shocked us in childhood, when in some grief or lamentation, looking up for sympathy, we behold a face in which lurks a cruel enjoyment, or a sense of an undivulged joke.
Perhaps he read in the old lady's face something of the shock she experienced; for he said, to cover his indiscretion, "I was, at the moment, reminded of a strange mistake which once took place in consequence of a likeness. Some of the consequences were tragic, but the rest so ridiculous that I can never call the adventure to mind without feeling the comedy prevail. I was thinking of relating it, but, on recollection, it is too vulgar."
M. Varbarriere, I am certain, was telling fibs; but he did it well. He did not hasten to change his countenance, but allowed that expression to possess his features serenely after she had looked, and only shifted it for a grave and honest one when he added—
"You think then, perhaps, that, my nephew had formerly the honour of being a companion of Mr. Redcliffe, your son?"
"Oh, dear, no. He was about Jekyl's age. I dare say I had lost him before that young man was born."