The Great Impersonation, E. Phillips Oppenheim [finding audrey TXT] 📗

looked at him, the same smile parted her lips as the smile which had come there when she had passed away to sleep.

“I am so rested,” she murmured. “I feel so well. I have had dreams, beautiful dreams.”

The fire had burned out, and the room was chilly.

“You must go back to your own room now,” he said.

Very slowly her fingers relaxed. She held out her arms.

“Carry me,” she begged. “I am only half awake. I want to sleep again.”

He lifted her up. Her fingers closed around his neck, her head fell back with a little sigh of content. He tried the folding doors, and, finding some difficulty in opening them carried her out into the corridor, into her own room, and laid her upon the untouched bed.

“You are quite comfortable?” he asked.

“Quite,” she murmured drowsily. “Kiss me, Everard.”

Her hands drew his face down. His lips rested upon her forehead. Then he drew the bedclothes over her and fled.

XIII

There was a cloud on Seaman’s good-humoured face as, muffled up in their overcoats, he and his host walked up and down the terrace the next morning, after the departure of Mr. Mangan. He disclosed his mind a little abruptly.

“In a few minutes,” he said, “I shall come to the great purpose of my visit. I have great and wonderful news for you. But it will keep.”

“The time for action has arrived?” Dominey asked curiously. “I hope you will remember that as yet I am scarcely established here.”

“It is with regard to your establishment here,” Seaman explained drily, “that I desire to say a word. We have seen much of one another since we met in Cape Town. The passion and purpose of my life you have been able to judge. Of those interludes which are necessary to a human being, unless his system is to fall to pieces as dry dust, you have also seen something. I trust you will not misunderstand me when I say that apart from the necessities of my work, I am a man of sentiment.”

“I am prepared to admit it,” Dominey murmured a little idly.

“You have undertaken a great enterprise. It was, without a doubt, a miraculous piece of fortune which brought the Englishman, Dominey, to your camp just at the moment when you received your orders from headquarters. Your self-conceived plan has met with every encouragement from us. You will be placed in a unique position to achieve your final purpose. Now mark my words and do not misunderstand me. The very keynote of our progress is ruthlessness. To take even a single step forward towards the achievement of that purpose is worth the sacrifice of all the scruples and delicacies conceivable. But when a certain course of action is without profit to our purpose, I see ugliness in it. It distresses me.”

“What the devil do you mean?” Dominey demanded.

“I sleep with one ear open,” Seaman replied.

“Well?”

“I saw you leave your room early this morning,” Seaman continued, “carrying Lady Dominey in your arms.”

There were little streaks of pallor underneath the tan in Dominey’s face. His eyes were like glittering metal. It was only when he had breathed once or twice quickly that he could command his voice.

“What concern is this of yours?” he demanded.

Seaman gripped his companion’s arm.

“Look here,” he said, “we are too closely allied for bluff. I am here to help you fill the shoes of another man, so far as regards his estates, his position, and character, which, by the by, you are rehabilitating. I will go further. I will admit that it is not my concern to interfere in any ordinary amour you might undertake, but⁠—I shall tell you this, my friend, to your face⁠—that to deceive a lady of weak intellect, however beautiful, to make use of your position as her supposed husband, is not, save in the vital interests of his country, the action of a Prussian nobleman.”

Dominey’s passion seemed to have burned itself out without expression. He showed not the slightest resentment at his companion’s words.

“Have no fear, Seaman,” he enjoined him. “The situation is delicate, but I can deal with it as a man of honour.”

“You relieve me,” Seaman confessed. “You must admit that the spectacle of last night was calculated to inspire me with uneasiness.”

“I respect you for your plain words,” Dominey declared. “The fact is, that Lady Dominey was frightened of the storm last night and found her way into my room. You may be sure that I treated her with all the respect and sympathy which our positions demanded.”

“Lady Dominey,” Seaman remarked meditatively, “seems to be curiously falsifying certain predictions.”

“In what way?”

“The common impression in the neighbourhood here is that she is a maniac chiefly upon one subject⁠—her detestation of you. She has been known to take an oath that you should die if you slept in this house again. You naturally, being a brave man, ignored all this, yet in the morning after your first night here there was blood upon your night clothes.”

Dominey’s eyebrows were slowly raised.

“You are well served here,” he observed, with involuntary sarcasm.

“That, for your own sake as well as ours, is necessary,” was the terse reply. “To continue, people of unsound mind are remarkably tenacious of their ideas. There was certainly nothing of the murderess in her demeanour towards you last night. Cannot you see that a too friendly attitude on her part might become fatal to our schemes?”

“In what way?”

“If ever your identity is doubted,” Seaman explained, “the probability of which is, I must confess, becoming less every day, the fact that Lady Dominey seems to have so soon forgotten all her enmity towards you would be strong presumptive evidence that you are not the man you claim to be.”

“Ingenious,” Dominey assented, “and very possible. All this time, however, we speak on what you yourself admit to be a side issue.”

“You are right,” Seaman confessed. “Very well, then, listen. A great moment has arrived for you, my friend.”

“Explain if you please.”

“I shall do