The ground sloped steeply away to the left, and slowly mounting the hillside came mildly on an old lady he knew, a Miss Sinnet, an old friend of his mother’s. There was just such a little seat as that other he knew so well, on the brow of the hill. He made his way to it, intending to sit quietly there until the little old lady had passed by. Up and up she came. Her large bonnet appeared, and then her mild white face, inclined a little towards him as she ascended. Evidently this very seat was her goal; and evasion was impossible. Evasion! … Memory rushed back and set his pulses beating. He turned boldly to the sun, and the old lady, with a brief glance into his face, composed herself at the other end of the little seat. She gazed out of a gentle reverie into the golden valley. And so they sat a while. And almost as if she had felt the bond of acquaintance between them, she presently sighed, and addressed him: “A very, very, beautiful view, sir.”
Lawford paused, then turned a gloomy, earnest face, gilded with sunshine. “Beautiful, indeed,” he said, “but not for me. No, Miss Sinnet, not for me.”
The old lady gravely turned and examined the aquiline profile. “Well, I confess,” she remarked urbanely, “you have the advantage of me.”
Lawford smiled uneasily. “Believe me, it is little advantage.”
“My sight,” said Miss Sinnet precisely, “is not so good as I might wish; though better perhaps than I might have hoped; I fear I am not much wiser; your face is still unfamiliar to me.”
“It is not unfamiliar to me,” said Lawford. Whose trickery was this? he thought, putting such affected stuff into his mouth.
A faint lightening of pity came into the silvery and scrupulous countenance. “Ah, dear me, yes,” she said courteously.
Lawford rested a lean hand on the seat. “And have you,” he asked, “not the least recollection in the world of my face?”
“Now really,” she said, smiling blandly, “is that quite fair? Think of all the scores and scores of faces in seventy long years; and how very treacherous memory is. You shall do me the service of reminding me of one whose name has for the moment escaped me.”
“I am the son of a very old friend of yours, Miss Sinnet,” said Lawford quietly, “a friend that was once your schoolfellow at Brighton.”
“Well, now,” said the old lady, grasping her umbrella, “that is undoubtedly a clue; but then, you see, all but one of the friends of my girlhood are dead; and if I have never had the pleasure of meeting her son, unless there is a decided resemblance, how am I to recollect her by looking at him?”
“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
