The Great Impersonation

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “Bosh! Stephanie will monopolise you all the time! That’s what she’s coming for.”

  “You are not suggesting that she intends seriously to put me in the place of my double?” Dominey asked, with mock alarm.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t wonder! And she’s an extraordinarily attractive woman. I’m full of complaints, Everard. There’s that other horrible little man, Seaman. You know that the very sight of him makes Henry furious. I am quite sure that he never expected to sit down at the same table with him.”

  “I am really sorry about that,” Dominey assured her, “but you see His Excellency takes a great interest in him on account of this Friendship League, of which Seaman is secretary, and he particularly asked to have him here.”

  “Well, you must admit that the situation is a little awkward for Henry,” she complained. “Next to Lord Roberts, Henry is practically the leader of the National Service movement here; he hates Germany and distrusts every German he ever met, and in a small house party like this we meet the German Ambassador and a man who is working hard to lull to sleep the very sentiments which Henry is endeavouring to arouse.”

  “It sounds very pathetic,” Dominey admitted, with a smile, “but even Henry likes Terniloff, and after all it is stimulating to meet one’s opponents sometimes.”

  “Of course he likes Terniloff,” Caroline assented, “but he hates the things he stands for. However, I’d have forgiven you everything if only Stephanie weren’t coming. That woman is really beginning to irritate me. She always seems to be making mysterious references to some sentimental past in which you both 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 bare-faced 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 every one 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 go 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, eh?—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, eh?”

  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 to the end of our fight is uncertain,” Dominey continued. “My impression is that I left my assailant unconscious upon the ground.”

  “Then it is his ghost, I imagine, who haunts the Black Wood?”

  Dominey shook himself as one who wo
uld get rid of an unwholesome thought.

  “The wood itself, Prince,” he explained, as they walked along, “is a noisome place. There are quagmires even in the middle of it, where a man may sink in and be never heard of again. Every sort of vermin abounds there, every unclean insect and bird is to be found in the thickets. I suppose the character of the place has encouraged the local superstition in which every one of those men firmly believes.”

  “They absolutely believe the place to be haunted, then?”

  “The superstition goes further,” Dominey continued. “Our locals say that somewhere in the heart of the wood, where I believe that no human being for many years has dared to penetrate, there is living in the spiritual sense some sort of a demon who comes out only at night and howls underneath my windows.”

  “Has any one ever seen it?”

  “One or two of the villagers; to the best of my belief, no one else,” Dominey replied.

  Terniloff seemed on the point of asking more questions, but the Duke touched him on the arm and drew him on one side, as though to call his attention to the sea fogs which were rolling up from the marshes.

  “Prince,” he whispered, “the details of that story are inextricably mixed up with the insanity of Lady Dominey. I am sure you understand.”

  The Prince, a diplomatist to his fingertips, appeared shocked, although a furtive smile still lingered upon his lips.

  “I regret my faux pas most deeply,” he murmured. “Sir Everard,” he went on, “you promised to tell me of some of your days with a shotgun in South Africa. Isn’t there a bird there which corresponds with your partridges?”

  Dominey smiled.

  “If you can kill the partridges which Middleton is going to send over in the next ten minutes,” he said, “you could shoot anything of the sort that comes along in East Africa, with a catapult. If you stand just a few paces there to the left, Henry, Terniloff by the gate, Stillwell up by the left-hand corner, Mangan next, Eddy next, and I shall be just beyond towards the oak clump. Will you walk with me, Caroline?”

  His cousin took his arm as they walked off and pressed it.

  “Everard, I congratulate you,” she said. “You have conquered your nerve absolutely. You did a simple and a fine thing to tell the whole story. Why, you were almost matter-of-fact. I could even have imagined you were telling it about some one else.”

  Her host smiled enigmatically.

  “Curious that it should have struck you like that,” he remarked. “Do you know, when I was telling it I had the same feeling.—Do you mind crouching down a little now? I am going to blow the whistle.”

  Chapter XVI

  Even in the great dining-room of Dominey Hall, the mahogany table which was its great glory was stretched that evening to its extreme capacity. Besides the house party, which included the Right Honourable Gerald Watson, a recently appointed Cabinet Minister, there were several guests from the neighbourhood—the Lord Lieutenant of the County and other notabilities. Caroline, with the Lord Lieutenant on one side of her and Terniloff on the other, played the part of hostess adequately but without enthusiasm. Her eyes seldom left for long the other end of the table, where Stephanie, at Dominey’s left hand, with her crown of exquisitely coiffured red-gold hair, her marvellous jewellery, her languorous grace of manner, seemed more like one of the beauties of an ancient Venetian Court than a modern Hungarian Princess gowned in the Rue de la Paix. Conversation remained chiefly local and concerned the day’s sport and kindred topics. It was not until towards the close of the meal that the Duke succeeded in launching his favourite bubble.

  “I trust, Everard,” he said, raising his voice a little as he turned towards his host, “that you make a point of inculcating the principles of National Service into your tenantry here.”

  Dominey’s reply was a little dubious.

  “I am afraid they do not take to the idea very kindly in this part of the world,” he confessed. “Purely agricultural districts are always a little difficult.”

  “It is your duty as a landowner,” the Duke insisted, “to alter their point of view. There is not the slightest doubt,” he added, looking belligerently over the top of his pince nez at Seaman, who was seated at the opposite side of the table, “that before long we shall find ourselves—and in a shocking state of unpreparedness, mind you—at war with Germany.”

  Lady Maddeley, the wife of the Lord Lieutenant, who sat at his side, seemed a little startled. She was probably one of the only people present who was not aware of the Duke’s foible.

  “Do you really think so?” she asked. “The Germans seem such civilised people, so peaceful and domestic in their home life, and that sort of thing.”

  The Duke groaned. He glanced down the table to be sure that Prince Terniloff was out of hearing.

  “My dear Lady Maddeley,” he declared, “Germany is not governed like England. When the war comes, the people will have had nothing to do with it. A great many of them will be just as surprised as you will be, but they will fight all the same.”

  Seaman, who had kept silence during the last few moments with great difficulty, now took up the Duke’s challenge.

  “Permit me to assure you, madam,” he said, bowing across the table, “that the war with Germany of which the Duke is so afraid will never come. I speak with some amount of knowledge because I am a German by birth, although naturalised in this country. I have as many and as dear friends in Berlin as in London, and with the exception of my recent absence in Africa, where I had the pleasure to meet our host, I spend a great part of my time going back and forth between the two capitals. I have also the honour to be the secretary of a society for the promotion of a better understanding between the citizens of Germany and England.”

  “Rubbish!” the Duke exclaimed. “The Germans don’t want a better understanding. They only want to fool us into believing that they do.”

  Seaman looked a little pained. He stuck to his guns, however.

  “His Grace and I,” he observed, “are old opponents on this subject.”

  “We are indeed,” the Duke agreed. “You may be an honest man, Mr. Seaman, but you are a very ignorant one upon this particular topic.”

  “You are probably both right in your way,” Dominey intervened, very much in the manner of a well-bred host making his usual effort to smooth over two widely divergent points of view. “There is no doubt a war party in Germany and a peace party, statesmen who place economic progress first, and others who are tainted with a purely military lust for conquest. In this country it is very hard for us to strike a balance between the two.”

  Seaman beamed his thanks upon his host.

  “I have friends,” he said impressively, “in the very highest circles of Germany, who are continually encouraging my work here, and I have received the benediction of the Kaiser himself upon my efforts to promote a better feeling in this country. And if you will forgive my saying so, Duke, it is such ill-advised and ill-founded statements as you are constantly making about my country which become the only bar to a better understanding between us.”

  “I have my views,” the Duke snapped, “and they have become convictions. I shall continue to express them at all times and with all the eloquence at my command.”

  The Ambassador, to whom portions of this conversation had now become audible, leaned a little forward in his place.

  “Let me speak first as a private individual,” he begged, “and express my well-studied opinion that war between our two countries would be simply race suicide, an indescribable and an abominable crime. Then I will remember what I represent over here, and I will venture to add in my ambassadorial capacity that I come with an absolute and heartfelt mandate of peace. My task over here is to secure and ensure it.”

  Caroline flashed a warning glance at her husband.

  “How nice of you to be so frank, Prince!” she said. “The Duke sometimes forgets
, in the pursuit of his hobby, that a private dinner table is not a platform. I insist upon it that we discuss something of more genuine interest.”

  “There isn’t a more vital subject in the world,” the Duke declared, resigning himself, however, to silence.

  “We will speak,” the Ambassador suggested, “of the way in which our host brought down those tall pheasants.”

  “You will tell me, perhaps,” Seaman suggested to the lady on his right, “how you English women have been able to secure for yourselves so much more liberty than our German wives enjoy?”

  “Later on,” Stephanie whispered to her host, with a little tremble in her voice, “I have a surprise for you.”

  After dinner, Dominey’s guests passed naturally enough to the relaxations which each preferred. There were two bridge tables, Terniloff and the Cabinet Minister played billiards, and Seaman, with a touch which amazed every one, drew strange music from the yellow keys of the old-fashioned grand piano in the drawing-room. Stephanie and her host made a slow progress through the hall and picture gallery. For some time their conversation was engaged solely with the objects to which Dominey drew his companion’s attention. When they had passed out of possible hearing, however, of any of the other guests, Stephanie’s fingers tightened upon her companion’s arm.

  “I wish to speak to you alone,” she said, “without the possibility of any one overhearing.”

  Dominey hesitated and looked behind.

  “Your guests are well occupied,” she continued a little impatiently, “and in any case I am one of them. I claim your attention.”

  Dominey threw open the door of the library and turned on a couple of the electric lights. She made her way to the great open fireplace, on which a log was burning, looked down into the shadows of the room and back again into her host’s face.

  “For one moment,” she begged, “turn on all the lights. I wish to be sure that we are alone.”