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

are concerned, and for which there can be no foundation at all except your supposed likeness to her exiled lover. Why, you never met her until that day at the Carlton!”

“She was a complete stranger to me,” Dominey asserted.

“Then all I can say is that you have been unusually rapid if you’ve managed to create a past in something under three months!” Caroline pronounced suspiciously. “I call her coming here a most barefaced proceeding, especially as this is practically a bachelor establishment.”

They had arrived at the next stand, and conversation was temporarily suspended. A flight of wild duck were put out from a pool in the wood, and for a few minutes everyone was busy. Middleton watched his master with unabated approval.

“You’re most as good as the old Squire with them high duck, Sir Everard,” he said. “That’s true very few can touch ’em when they’re coming out nigh to the pheasants. They can’t believe in the speed of ’em.”

“Do you think Sir Everard shoots as well as he did before he went to Africa?” Caroline asked.

Middleton touched his hat and turned to Seaman, who was standing in the background.

“Better, your Grace,” he answered, “as I was saying to this gentleman here, early this morning. He’s cooler like and swings more level. I’d have known his touch on a gun anywhere, though.”

There was a glint of admiration in Seaman’s eyes. The beaters came through the wood, and the little party of guns gossiped together while the game was collected. Terniloff, his usual pallor chased away by the bracing wind and the pleasure of the sport, was affable and even loquacious. He had great estates of his own in Saxony and was explaining to the Duke his manner of shooting them. Middleton glanced at his horn-rimmed watch.

“There’s another hour’s good light, sir,” he said. “Would you care about a partridge drive, or should we do through the home copse?”

“If I might make a suggestion,” Terniloff observed diffidently, “most of the pheasants went into that gloomy-looking wood just across the marshes.”

There was a moment’s rather curious silence. Dominey had turned and was looking towards the wood in question, as though fascinated by its almost sinister-like blackness and density. Middleton had dropped some game he was carrying and was muttering to himself.

“We call that the Black Wood,” Dominey said calmly, “and I am rather afraid that the pheasants who find their way there claim sanctuary. What do you think, Middleton?”

The old man turned his head slowly and looked at his master. Somehow or other, every scrap of colour seemed to have faded out of his bronzed face. His eyes were filled with that vague horror of the supernatural common amongst the peasant folk of various localities. His voice shook. The old fear was back again.

“You wouldn’t put the beaters in there, Squire?” he faltered; “not that there’s one of them would go.”

“Have we stumbled up against a local superstition?” the Duke enquired.

“That’s not altogether local, your Grace,” Middleton replied, “as the Squire himself will tell you. I doubt whether there’s a beater in all Norfolk would go through the Black Wood, if you paid him red gold for it.⁠—Here, you lads.”

He turned to the beaters, who were standing waiting for instructions a few yards away. There were a dozen of them, stalwart men for the most part, clad in rough smocks and breeches and carrying thick sticks.

“There’s one of the gentlemen here,” Middleton announced, addressing them, “who wants to know if you’d go through the Black Wood of Dominey for a sovereign apiece?⁠—Watch their faces, your Grace.⁠—Now then, lads?”

There was no possibility of any mistake. The very suggestion seemed to have taken the healthy sunburn from their cheeks. They fumbled with their sticks uneasily. One of them touched his hat and spoke to Dominey.

“I’m one as ’as seen it, sir, as well as heard,” he said. “I’d sooner give up my farm than go nigh the place.”

Caroline suddenly passed her arm through Dominey’s. There was a note of distress in her tone.

“Henry, you’re an idiot!” she exclaimed. “It was my fault, Everard. I’m so sorry. Just for one moment I had forgotten. I ought to have stopped Henry at once. The poor man has no memory.”

Dominey’s arm responded for a moment to the pressure of her fingers. Then he turned to the beaters.

“Well, no one is going to ask you to go to the Black Wood,” he promised. “Get round to the back of Hunt’s stubbles, and bring them into the roots and then over into the park. We will line the park fence. How is that, Middleton?”

The keeper touched his hat and stepped briskly off.

“I’ll just have a walk with them myself, sir,” he said. “Them birds do break at Fuller’s corner. I’ll see if I can flank them. You’ll know where to put the guns, Squire.”

Dominey nodded. One and all the beaters were walking with most unaccustomed speed towards their destination. Their backs were towards the Black Wood. Terniloff came up to his host.

“Have I, by chance, been terribly tactless?” he asked.

Dominey shook his head.

“You asked a perfectly natural question, Prince,” he replied. “There is no reason why you should not know the truth. Near that wood occurred the tragedy which drove me from England for so many years.”

“I am deeply grieved,” the Prince began⁠—

“It is false sentiment to avoid allusions to it,” Dominey interrupted. “I was attacked there one night by a man who had some cause for offence against me. We fought, and I reached home in a somewhat alarming state. My condition terrified my wife so much that she has been an invalid ever since. But here is the point which has given birth to all these superstitions, and which made me for many years a suspected person. The man with whom I fought has never been seen since.”

Terniloff was at once too fascinated by the story and puzzled by his host’s manner of telling it to maintain his apologetic attitude.

“Never seen since!” he repeated.

“My own memory as