It was as good a likeness as the Abbey picture, only more literal, less "arranged." The Abbey picture, also by a French artist of another school, was younger, and had a fine, romantic, René-like charm. "René" had been her laughing name for him—her handsome, melancholy, eloquent poseur! Like many of his family, he was proud of his French culture, his French accent, and his knowledge of French books. The tradition that came originally from a French marriage had been kept up from father to son. They were not a learned or an industrious race, but their tongue soon caught the accent of the boulevards—of the Paris they loved and frequented. Her hand lifted the miniature the better to catch the slanting light.
As she did so she was freshly struck with a resemblance she had long ceased to be conscious of. Familiarity with a living face, as so often happens, had destroyed for her its likeness—likeness in difference—to a face of the dead. But to-night she saw it—was indeed arrested by it.
"And yet Richard was never one tenth as good-looking!"
The portrait was set in pearls, and at the foot was an inscription in blue enamel—
"A ma mie!"
But before she could see it she must with her cold, quick fingers remove the fragment of stained paper that lay upon it like a veil. The half of a page of Molière—turned down—like that famous page of Shelley's "Sophocles"—and stained with sea water, as that was stained.
She raised the picture to her lips and kissed it—not with passion—but clingingly, as though it represented her only wealth, amid so much poverty. Then her hand, holding it, dropped to her knee again; the other hand came to close over it; and her eyes shut. Tears came slowly through the lashes.
Amazing!—that that woman should have come back—and died—within a few hundred yards, and she, Alice, know nothing! In spite of all Richard's persuasions she tortured herself anew with the thought of the interview between Judith and Mr. Barron. What could they have talked about—so long? Judith was always an excitable, hot-tempered creature. Her silence had been heavily and efficiently bought for fifteen years. Then steps had been taken—insisted upon—by Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton. His wife and his sister-in-law had opposed him in vain. And Ralph had after all triumphed in Judith's apparent acquiescence.
Supposing she had now come home, perhaps on a sudden impulse, with a view to further blackmail, would not her wisest move be to risk some indiscretion, some partial disclosure, so that her renewed silence afterward might have the higher price? An hour's tete-a-tete with that shrewd, hard-souled man, Henry Barron! Alice Puttenham guessed that her own long-established dislike of him as acquaintance and neighbour was probably returned with interest; that he classed her now as one of "Meynell's lot," and would be only too glad to find himself possessed of any secret information that might, through her, annoy and harass Richard Meynell, her friend and counsellor.
Was it conceivable that nothing should have been said in that lengthy interview as to the causes for Judith's coming home?—or of the reasons for her original departure? What else could have accounted for so prolonged a conversation between two persons, so different in social grade, and absolute strangers to each other?