He shook his head.
“This was Mrs. Eberdeen’s room,” she went on. “It has always been just like this,—at least I think it has,—always, since the house was built. I kept it as a curiosity. I called it Mrs. Eberdeen’s room because the natives said she was wicked and had brought ruin to the house. I reasoned that this was why nobody had taken these things away or changed them—the wall-paper, I mean, the bed, the carpet, the pictures. And there’s precisely one thing,” she impetuously concluded, as if she couldn’t postpone longer telling him, “that I myself have added.”
Hastings smiled wanly at her. She guided him round to the wall at the side of the door in front of which they had been standing; she started to speak again before she saw what it was to which she had referred; and so her own words prevented her from hearing the smothered sound of his recognition.
“I found this,” she said, trying to speak carelessly and forcing herself steadfastly to regard it, “in an old shop twelve miles down the Poochuck Road. Isn’t it quaint? I got it—because, Jack, it looked like you, and—and because it exactly fitted this panel!”
But her attempted gaiety sank dismally in the silence which followed. They just stood there. The minutes thudded by; the mustiness enwrapped them. Outside the window a dead piece of branch fell crackling to the ground. Gradually he grew to be unaware of her presence, so sharp and rapid were the currents which successively swept him; and her petty curiosity, all her poor need for speculation, was lost in the depth of the spell cast over him now. She dared not look at him, she dared not take her eyes off the object before them.
It was crudely painted. It was the portrait of a young man dressed a hundred or more years ago. He seemed to be walking forward out of the picture. In many places the pigment was so nearly gone that the brown fuzz of canvas showed through. The colors clung as delicate as cobwebs to the stern face and erect stalwart figure.
“Who is it?” Hastings articulated, scarce audibly. But though he had to ask, if only to save himself from going mad, his words were no more than frail signals of his distress, for he knew that he alone knew the answer. Electrically, crashingly, it had been borne in upon him at almost the first instant of his beholding them where it was that he had seen before those tightly compressed lips, with the mole still visible near the corner; he knew those calm, cruel eyes, still averted from his own; in a flash he had identified the purple satin waistcoat.
“You, Jack,”—she faced him determinedly—“you looked like him; you were like him, absolutely, in every detail, when you came into the dining-room!”
“When I came—” he repeated at a loss.
“Yes. It wasn’t here, in this room, that you fainted. You went outside, down the stairs. Elizabeth saw you. You pushed open the dining-room door. Mother, father, I—we all saw you come in, wearing clothes like these,” she pointed.