A Third Story of Two Brothers - Page 2

between them," said my driver. "Do you know
them--you didn't nod to them nor they to you?" I said. "I know them,"
he returned, "as well as I know my own face when I look at myself in a
glass." On which I remarked that it was very wonderful. "'Tis only a
part of the wonder, and not the biggest part," he said. "You've seen
what they are like and how like they are, but if you passed a day with
them in the house you'd be able to tell one from the other; but if you
lived a year in the same house with their two brothers you'd never be
able to tell one from the other and be sure you were right. The
strangest thing is that the brothers who, like their sisters, have two
or three years between them, are not a bit like their sisters; they are
blue-eyed and seem a different race."

That, I said, made it more wonderful still. A curiously symmetrical
family. Rather awkward for their neighbours, and people who had
business relations with them.

"Yes--perhaps," he said, "but it served them very well on one occasion
to be so much alike."

I began to smell a dramatic rat and begged him to tell me all about it.

He said he didn't mind telling me. Their name was Prage--Antony and
Martin Prage, of Red Pit Farm, which they inherited from their father
and worked together. They were very united. One day one of them, when
riding six miles from home, met a girl coming along the road, and
stopped his horse to talk to her. She was a poor girl that worked at a
dairy farm near by, and lived with her mother, a poor old widow-woman,
in a cottage in the village. She was pretty, and the young man took a
liking to her and he persuaded her to come again to meet him on another
day at that spot; and there were many more meetings, and they were fond
of each other; but after she told him that something had happened to
her he never came again. When she made enquiries she found he had given
her a false name and address, and so she lost sight of him. Then her
child was born, and she lived with her mother. And you must know what
her life was--she and her old mother and her baby and nothing to keep
them. And though she was a shy ignorant girl she made up her mind to
look for him until she found him to make him pay for the child. She
said he had come on his horse so often to see her that he could not be
too far away, and every morning she would go off in search of him, and
she spent weeks and months tramping about the country, visiting all the
villages for many miles round looking for him. And one day in a small
village six miles from her home she caught sight of him galloping by on
his horse, and seeing a woman standing outside a cottage she ran to her
and asked