"gp46w10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parker Gilbert)

"Why, what is in you deeper than all this; with the help of some woman
probably."

She looked at him searchingly, then added:

"You seem strangely like and yet unlike your father to-night."

"I am wearing his clothes," he said.

She had plenty of nerve, but this startled her. She shrank a little: it
seemed uncanny. Now she remembered that ribbon in the button-hole.

"Poor Sophie!" she thought. "And this one will make greater mischief
here." Then, aloud to him: "Your father was a good fellow, but he did
wild things."

"I do not see the connection," he answered. "I am not a good man, and I
shall do wilder things--is that it?"

"You will do mad things," she replied hardly above a whisper, and talked
once more with Captain Maudsley. Gaston now turned to his grandfather,
who had heard a sentence here and there, and felt that the young man
carried off the situation well enough. He then began to talk in a
general way about Gaston's voyage, of the Hudson's Bay Company, and
expeditions to the Arctic, drawing Lady Dargan into the conversation.

Whatever might be said of Sir William Belward he was an excellent host.
He had a cool, unmalicious wit, but that man was unwise who offered
himself to its severity. To-night he surpassed himself in suggestive
talk, until, all at once, seeing Lady Dargan's eyes fixed on Gaston,
he went silent, sitting back in his chair abstracted. Soon, however,
a warning glance from his wife brought him back and saved Lady Dargan
from collapse; for it seemed impossible to talk alone to this ghost of
her past.

At this moment Gaston heard a voice near:

"As like as if he'd stepped out of the picture, if it weren't for the
clothes. A Gaston too!"

The speaker was Lord Dargan. He was talking to Archdeacon Varcoe.

Gaston followed Lord Dargan's glance to the portrait of that Sir Gaston
Belward whose effigy he had seen. He found himself in form, feature,
expression; the bold vigilance of eye, the primitive activity of
shoulder, the small firm foot, the nervous power of the hand. The eyes
seemed looking at him. He answered to the look. There was in him the
romantic strain, and something more! In the remote parts of his being
there was the capacity for the phenomenal, the strange. Once again, as
in the church, he saw the field of Naseby, King Charles, Ireton's men,