“Gilbert,” she said, turning to him, “you’ve not met Mr Ridgeway before, I believe. Allow me to introduce you—Mr Gilbert Sternroyd, Mr Stuart Ridgeway, one of my oldest friends.”
We uttered mutual conventionalities, but an instant later, when my eyes met his, the words froze upon my lips. The Countess’s companion was the original of the photograph that had been exhibited at my dead love’s request in the same frame as her own.
Of what words I uttered I have no remembrance. Bewildered by this strange and unexpected encounter, on the very threshold of the mysterious house that for months I had been striving in vain to discover, I felt my senses whirl. Only by dint of summoning all my self-possession I preserved a calm demeanour. That Mabel should have admitted acquaintance with the strange and rather shady person who had met me at Richmond was curious enough, but her friendship with Sybil’s whilom companion was a fact even more incomprehensible.
An hour ago I had discovered the picture of this man called Sternroyd, yet here he stood before me in the flesh, accompanied by the one person of my acquaintance who knew that nameless man who had inveigled me to this house of shadows. Heedless of Mabel’s amusing gossip, I surveyed her companion’s face calmly, satisfying myself that every feature agreed with the counterfeit presentment I carried in my pocket. The portrait was strikingly accurate, even his curiously-shaped scarf-pin in the form of a pair of crossed daggers with diamond hilts being shown in the picture. He was tall, fair, of fresh complexion, aged about twenty-four, with grey eyes rather deeply set, and a scanty moustache a little ragged. Lithe, active, and upright, his bearing was distinctly athletic, although his speech was a trifle languid and affected. What, I wondered, had been the nature of his relations with Sybil? The horrifying thought flashed across my mind that he might have been her lover, but next second I scorned such a suggestion, convinced that she had been devoted to me alone.
Yet how could I reconcile the statement of the photographer that the portrait had only been taken a few weeks with my own personal investigation that she at that time was dead? Had I not, alas! kissed her cold brow and chafed her thin dead hands, hoping to bring back to them the glow of life? Had I not raised her gloved arm only to find it stiffening in death? The remembrance of that fateful night chilled my blood.
“Who are you calling upon, Stuart?” the Countess asked, her light words bringing me at last back to consciousness of my surroundings.
“Upon—upon friends,” I stammered.
“Friends! Well, they can’t live here,” she observed incredulously.
“They do,” I answered. “This is number seventy-nine.”
“True, but the place is empty.” She laughed.