‘Like! It’s the livin’ livid image. The livin’ image,’ he repeated, stretching out his arm, ‘as he stood there that very night.’
‘What will you say, then,’ said Sheila, quietly, ‘What will you say if I tell you that that man, Nicholas de Sabathier, has been in his grave for over a hundred years?’
Danton’s little eyes seemed, if anything, to draw back even further into his head. ‘I’d say, Mrs Lawford, if you’ll excuse the word, that it might be a damn horrible coincidence—I’d go farther, an almost incredible coincidence. But if you want the sober truth, I’d say it was nothing more than a crafty, clever, abominable piece of trickery. That’s what I’d say. Oh, you don’t know, Mrs Lovat. When a scamp’s a scamp, he’ll stop at nothing. I could tell you some tales.’
‘Ah, but that’s not all,’ said Sheila, eyeing them steadfastly one by one. ‘We all of us know that my husband’s story was that he had gone down to Widderstone—into the churchyard, for his convalescent ramble; that story’s true. We all know that he said he had had a fit, a heart attack, and that a kind of—of stupor had come over him. I believe on my honour that’s true too. But no one knows but he himself and Mr Bethany and I, that it was a wretched broken grave, quite at the bottom of the hill, that he chose for his resting place, nor—and I can’t get the scene out of my head—nor that the name on that one solitary tombstone down there was—was...this!’
Danton rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t begin to follow,’ he said stubbornly.
‘You don’t mean,’ said Mr Craik, who had not removed his gaze from Sheila’s face, ‘I am not to take it that you mean, Mrs Lawford, the—the other?’
‘Yes,’ said Sheila, ‘his’—she patted her skirts—‘Sabathier’s.’
‘You mean,’ said Mrs Lovat crisply, ‘that the man in the grave is the man in the book, and that the man in the book is—is poor Arthur’s changed face?’
Sheila nodded.
Danton rose cumbrously from his chair, looking beadily down on his three friends.