‘There is, I believe, a likeness,’ said Lawford.
She nodded her great bonnet at him with gentle amusement. ‘You are insistent in your fancy. Well, let me think again. The last to leave me was Fanny Urquhart, that was—let me see—last October. Now you are certainly not Fanny Urquhart’s son,’ she stooped austerely, ‘for she never had one. Last year, too, I heard that my dear, dear Mrs Jameson was dead. Her I hadn’t met for many, many years. But, if I may venture to say so, yours is not a Scottish face; and she not only married a Scottish husband, but was herself a Dunbar. No, I am still at a loss.’
A miserable strife was in her chance companion’s mind, a strife of anger and recrimination. He turned his eyes wearily to the fast declining sun. ‘You will forgive my persistency, but I assure you it is a matter of life or death to me. Is there no one my face recalls? My voice?’
Miss Sinnet drew her long lips together, her eyebrows lifted with the faintest perturbation. ‘But he certainly knows my name,’ she said to herself. She turned once more, and in the still autumnal beauty, beneath that pale blue arch of evening, these two human beings confronted one another again. She eyed him blandly, yet with a certain grave directness.
‘I don’t really think,’ she said, ‘you can be Mary Lawford’s son. I could scarcely have mistaken him.’
Lawford gulped and turned away. He hardly knew what this surge of feeling meant. Was it hope, despair, resentment; had he caught even the echo of an unholy joy? His mind for a moment became confused as if in the tumult of a struggle. He heard himself expostulate, ‘Ah, Miss Bennett, I fear I set you too difficult a task.’
The old lady drew abruptly in, like a trustful and gentle snail into its shocked house. ‘Bennett, sir; but my name is not Bennett.’
And again Lawford accepted the miserable prompting. ‘Not Bennett!... How can I ever then apologise for so frantic a mistake?’
The little old lady took firm hold of her umbrella. She did not answer him. ‘The likeness, the likeness!’ he began unctuously, and stopped, for the glance that dwelt fleetingly on him was cold with the formidable dignity and displeasure of age. He raised his hat and turned miserably home. He strode on out of the last gold into the blue twilight. What fantastic foolery of mind was mastering him? He cast a hurried look over his shoulder at the kindly and offended old figure sitting there, solitary, on the little seat, in her great bonnet, with back turned resolutely upon him—the friend of his dead mother who might have proved in his need a friend indeed to him. And he had by this insane caprice hopelessly estranged her.
She would remember this face well enough now, he thought bitterly, and would take her place among his quiet enemies, if ever the day of reckoning should come. It was scandalous, it was banal to have abused her trust and courtesy. Oh, it was hopeless to struggle any more! The fates were against him. They had played him a trick. He was to be their transitory sport, as many a better man he could himself recollect had been before him. He would go home and give in; let Sheila do with him what she pleased. No one but a lunatic could have acted as he had, with just that frantic hint of method so remarkable in the insane.