The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim (books to read now txt) 📕

“My good woman!” Mangan gasped. “This is really too much!”

“I’ve not come to bandy words with lawyers,” the woman retorted. “I’ve come to speak to him. Can you face me, Everard Dominey, you who murdered my son and made a madwoman of your wife?”

The lawyer would have answered her, but Dominey waved him aside.

“Mrs. Unthank,” he said sternly, “return to your duties at once, and understand that this house is mine, to enter or leave when I choose.”

She was speechless for a moment, amazed at the firmness of his words.

“The house may be yours, Sir Everard Dominey,” she said threateningly, “but there’s one part of it at least in which you won’t dare to show yourself.”

“You forget yourself, woman,” he replied coldly. “Be so good as to return to your mistress at once, announce my coming, and say that I wait only for her permission before presenting myself in her apartments.”

The woman laughed, unpleasantly, horribly. Her eyes were fixed upon Dominey curiously.

“Those are brave words,” she said. “You’ve come back a harder man. Let me look at you.”

She moved a foot or two to where the light was better. Very slowly a frown developed upon her forehead. The longer she looked, the less assured she became.

“There are things in your face I miss,” she muttered.

Mr. Mangan was glad of an opportunity of asserting himself.

“The fact is scarcely important, Mrs. Unthank,” he said angrily. “If you will allow me to give you a word of advice, you will treat your master with the respect to which his position here entitles him.”

Once more the woman blazed up.

“Respect! What respect have I for the murderer of my son? Respect! Well, if he stays here against my bidding, perhaps her ladyship will show him what respect means.”

She turned around and disappeared. Everyone began bustling about the luggage and talking at once. Mr. Mangan took his patron’s arm and led him across the hall.

“My dear Sir Everard,” he said anxiously, “I am most distressed that this should have occurred. I thought that the woman would probably be sullen, but I had no idea that she would dare to attempt such an outrageous proceeding.”

“She is still, I presume, the only companion whom Lady Dominey will tolerate?” Dominey enquired with a sigh.

“I fear so,” the lawyer admitted. “Nevertheless we must see Doctor Harrison in the morning. It must be understood distinctly that if she is suffered to remain, she adopts an entirely different attitude. I never heard anything so preposterous in all my life. I shall pay her a visit myself after dinner.⁠—You will feel quite at home here in the library, Sir Everard,” Mr. Mangan went on, throwing open the door of a very fine apartment on the seaward side of the house. “Grand view from these windows, especially since we’ve had a few of the trees cut down. I see that Parkins has set out the sherry. Cocktails, I’m afraid, are an institution you will have to inaugurate down here. You’ll be grateful to me when I tell you one thing, Sir Everard. We’ve been hard pressed more than once, but we haven’t sold a single bottle of wine out of the cellars.”

Dominey accepted the glass of sherry which the lawyer had poured out but made no movement towards drinking it. He seemed during the last few minutes to have been wrapped in a brown study.

“Mangan,” he asked a little abruptly, “is it the popular belief down here that I killed Roger Unthank?”

The lawyer set down the decanter and coughed.

“A plain answer,” Dominey insisted.

Mr. Mangan adapted himself to the situation. He was beginning to understand his client.

“I am perfectly certain, Sir Everard,” he confessed, “that there isn’t a soul in these parts who isn’t convinced of it. They believe that there was a fight and that you had the best of it.”

“Forgive me,” Dominey continued, “if I seem to ask unnecessary questions. Remember that I spent the first portion of my exile in Africa in a very determined effort to blot out the memory of everything that had happened to me earlier in life. So that is the popular belief?”

“The popular belief seems to match fairly well with the facts,” Mr. Mangan declared, wielding the decanter again in view of his client’s more reasonable manner. “At the time of your unfortunate visit to the Hall Miss Felbrigg was living practically alone at the Vicarage after her uncle’s sudden death there, with Mrs. Unthank as housekeeper. Roger Unthank’s infatuation for her was patent to the whole neighbourhood and a source of great annoyance in Miss Felbrigg. I am convinced that at no time did Lady Dominey give the young man the slightest encouragement.”

“Has anyone ever believed the contrary?” Dominey demanded.

“Not a soul,” was the emphatic reply. “Nevertheless, when you came down, fell in love with Miss Felbrigg and carried her off, everyone felt that there would be trouble.”

“Roger Unthank was a lunatic,” Dominey pronounced deliberately. “His behaviour from the first was the behaviour of a madman.”

“The Eugene Aram type of village schoolmaster gradually drifting into positive insanity,” Mangan acquiesced. “So far, everyone is agreed. The mystery began when he came back from his holidays and heard the news.”

“The sequel was perfectly simple,” Dominey observed. “We met at the north end of the Black Wood one evening, and he attacked me like a madman. I suppose I had to some extent the best of it, but when I got back to the Hall my arm was broken, I was covered with blood, and half unconscious. By some cruel stroke of fortune, almost the first person I saw was Lady Dominey. The shock was too much for her⁠—she fainted⁠—and⁠—”

“And has never been quite herself since,” the lawyer concluded. “Most tragic!”

“The cruel part of it was,” Dominey went on, standing before the window, his hands clasped behind his back, “that my wife from that moment developed a homicidal mania against me⁠—I, who had fought in the most absolute self-defence. That was what drove me out of the country,