"Lady Oxted. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt."
"He has led a life of continuous and most unmerited misfortune," said Harry, "and when I began just now 'I wonder,' I was going to say, I wonder whether the Luck will come to him? Yousee it is a family thing. He, one would think, might get the good, not I. And I honestly assure you that I should be more than delighted if he did."
"It is about him you would tell me?" asked Evie.
"About him. I need not give you the smaller details. His unhappy marriage, his sudden poverty, his bankruptcy even, for there is one thing in his life so terrible that it seems to me to overshadow everything else."
They had come to a garden seat at the far end of the orchard, and here Evie sat down. Harry stood beside her, one foot on the bench, looking not at her, but out over the creamy, sleeping landscape.
"It is nearly twenty-two years ago," he said, "that my uncle was staying down at an estate we used to have in Derbyshire, which has since been sold. The place next us belonged to some people called Harmsworth— What?"
An involuntary exclamation had come to Evie's lips, but she checked it before it was speech.
"Nothing," she said, quietly. "Please go on.
"And young Harmsworth," continued Harry, "who had just come of age, was a great friend with my uncle, who was as kind to him as he is to all young people, as kind as he always is, and that I hope you will soon know for yourself. Well, one day the two were out shooting together——"
Evie made a sudden, quick movement.
"And Harold Harmsworth accidentally shot himself," she said.
Harry paused in utter surprise.
"You know the story?" he said.
"Yes, I know it."
"You, too!" he cried. "Good God, the thing is past this more than twenty years; and people still talk of it. Oh, it is monstrous! So I need not tell you the rest."
"No," said Evie quietly. "Your uncle was unjustly—for so I fully believe—unjustly suspected of having shot him. It is monstrous, I quite agree with you. But I am not so monstrous as you think," she added, rather faintly.
In a moment Harry's heightened colour died from his face.
"Miss Aylwin, I did not say that!" he exclaimed earnestly. "Forgive me if I have said anything that hurt you. But, indeed, I did not say that."
Evie looked at him a moment. She knew the thing which she had so much desired not to know, but the knowledge, strangely enough, did not frighten or affect her.
"No; in justice to you, I will say that you did not. But you broke out, 'It is monstrous,' when I told you I knew the story."
Again the colour rose to his face, but now not vehement, only ashamed.
"I did," he said; "it is quite true. I spoke violently and unjustifiably. But if you knew mypoor uncle, Miss Aylwin, I do not think you would find it hard to forgive me; you would see at once why I spoke so hastily. He is the kindest and best of men, and the most soft-hearted. Think what that suspicion must have been to him, the years, so many of them and all so bitter, in which it has never been cleared up!"
"I do think," she said softly, "and I like you for your violence, Lord Vail. You are loyal; it is no bad thing to be loyal. But——" and she looked up at him, "but you must not think that I am a willing listener to gossip and old scandal that does not concern me."
"I do not think that," cried Harry. "Indeed, I never thought that."
His words rang out and died on the hot air, and still the girl made no answer. This way and that was her mind divided: should she tell him all, should she tell him nothing? The latter was the easier path, for his last words had the ring of truth in them, convincing, unmistakable, and she, so to speak, was acquitted without a stain on her character, did she decide not to speak. But something within her, intangible and imperative, urged other counsels. Her reason gave her no account of these, but simple instinct only called to her. What prompted that instinct, from what deep and vital source it rose, she did not pause to consider. Simply, it was there, with reason warring on the other side. The battle was brief and momentous. Immediately, almost, she spoke.
"I am sure you never thought that," she said,"but I wish"—and her pulse ticked full and rapid—"I wish to prove to you how it was not through gossip that the knowledge came to me, for this is how I heard it: My mother was Harold Harmsworth's mother."
Harold drew a long breath which hung suspended in his lungs. His eye was fixed on the eyes of the girl in a long glance of sheer astonishment, and hers were not withdrawn. At last—
"God forgive us all!" he said. "And do you forgive me?"
Evie got up quickly, with a glowing face.
"Forgive you? What is there for which I can forgive you, Lord Vail?" she said. "And I honour you for your championship of your kinsman, who has suffered, as I believe, unmeritedly and most cruelly," and her heart spoke the words which her lips framed.
They walked back in silence toward the house, for to each the moment was too good to spoil by further speech, and the silence was spontaneous and desired, the distance of the poles away from awkwardness. To Harry, at any rate, it seemed too precious to risk of it the loss of a moment; he would not have opened his lips, except that one word should issue therefrom, for all his Luck could bring him, and that word he dared not utter yet; he scarcely even knew if, so to speak, it was there yet. And in Evie the triumph of her just speech over a more conventional reticence filled her with a deep and secret joy. She ought to have said what she had said, she could have saidno less, and she felt it in every beat and leaping pulse of her body. The recognised and proper reserve of a girl to a young man meant to her at that moment less than nothing; her words, she knew, had put her on to a new and more intimate footing with him, but she could not have spoken otherwise, or have spoken not at all. She had said what was due from one human being, be he boy or girl, or man or woman, to another human being, king or peasant. She had said no more than she need, but, humanly speaking, she could not have said less. The thing had been well done.
But just before they reached the lawn again she spoke.
"My mother, of course, told me the story," she said. "I asked her for the name of—for your uncle's name, but she would not tell me. It is better," and again her blood spoke, "it is better thus."
Next moment they turned the corner, and found the party as they had left it, for they had been gone scarcely ten minutes. Mrs. Antrobus was lighting one cigarette from the stump of another.
It was the day following Lady Oxted's return to London from the Sunday in the country that she received the expected letter from Mrs. Aylwin, in answer to her own. The opening of it, it would be idle to deny, was made with an anxious and apprehensive hand. Already it was plain to her with how swift and strong a movement, as of flood water hastening toward sluice-gates, the first attraction between the two was speeding into intimacy; and had she known what had passed between them in the orchard, she would have guessed that its swiftness had outrun her eye. Already it would have been far better that, if the girl was to know the name her mother had refused to tell her, she should have known it on the night of her arrival. But these things were past prayer, and Lady Oxted drew the sheet of paper from its envelope and found, at any rate, that the communication was short.
"I leave it entirely to your judgment," wrote Mrs. Aylwin, "whether you tell Evie or not. You say that you have promised not to: in that case, supposing at some future time you consider it advisable, and you can accept this quibble,tell it her not in your name, but in mine. My reason for not telling it her you may easily have guessed: the knowledge, or so I thought it, that Harold was murdered, has poisoned my life, and now I question myself as to whether I have been certainly right about it. But remember this: if there arises between the two—the thing is possible, as evidently you foresee—a friendship which develops, as is natural between a man and a maid, it is certain that some time Evie will know. I leave it to you to decide whether it is better that she should know now or later. I thank you, dear Violet, for your care for her."
"Dear Violet" heaved a sigh of relief. Mrs. Aylwin had been known to stagger those who were dear to her by sending them letters which partook of the nature of an ultimatum. But there was no ultimatum here; she was willing to treat, and this letter, though couched with the precision of an official despatch, was not without amenity.
She hurried downstairs to join Evie, for they were going out to lunch, with the sense of a burden removed. Such being the attitude of Mrs. Aylwin, she determined that her own promise to the girl should certainly stand; and she thought, with scornful wonder of her husband's diagnosis, that at the very back of her mind she would reserve to herself the right to break it. Men's idea of women, she told herself, was incredibly crude and elementary. They reserved for themselves a monopoly of certain qualities, like courage, justice, and honour, and simply took it for grantedthat such things did not exist for women. Poor, dear Bob, and after so many years, too!
Evie was somewhat silent as they drove down Bond Street, and though her gaze at the jostling crowds was not less intent than usual, it seemed to have lost the sparkle of its avidity, and to dwell rather than alight and be gone again. She looked this morning at the seedy toy sellers and flower vendors more than at their fragrant or painted wares, and, instead of finding fascination in the little tin figures that moved their scythes over the surface of an absolutely smooth pavement, with the industry of those who reap the whirlwind, or commenting on the phenomenal cheapness of collar studs, it was rather the tragic meanness of their exhibitors which to-day attracted her.
"How do you suppose they live, Aunt Violet?" she asked. "Look at that man with studs: six a penny. I know, because I bought six on Saturday. Well, supposing he sold sixty a day, which I imagine he does not, and that they cost him absolutely nothing, in the evening he would have tenpence. Yet they are not beggars; they work for their bread. Now, in Italy, we have nothing like them; their place is taken by the smiling, picturesquelazzaroni, who would not stir a finger to help themselves. They just sit in the sun and smile, and get fed. Oh, dear!"
"What is it now, Evie?" asked Lady Oxted.
"Nothing. I suppose I am just realizing that it takes all sorts to make a world, and that extremes meet, and so on. Look at me now: heream I in this comfortable victoria, much more like thelazzaronithan the toy sellers, and who shall say how far the toy sellers are above thelazzaroni? I sit in the sun, and if there is no sun I sit by the fire, and, to do me justice, I generally smile. Yet, supposing I had to work for my bread, should I do it cheerfully, do you think? Should I maintain even a low average of industry? Supposing there came some great call on me for courage or resolution, should I respond to it? I have no reason whatever for assuring you, or myself either, that I should."
Lady Oxted's mind flew back with an inward smirk of satisfaction to her own heroic determination to keep the promise she had made to Evie.
"Probably you would," she said. "Probably we are not so bad, when it comes to—when we have an opportunity for behaving abominably, as we thought we were going to be. The thought of the dentist poisons my life for days beforehand, yet I go all the same, and ring the dreary bell, and behave, I believe, with average courage under the wheel. Morally, too, I suspect, we are better when a thing has to be done than we were afraid we were going to be. Also, on the whole, one is more honourable than one thinks—more honourable certainly," she added, with a sudden, irrepressible spurt of indignation against her husband—"than those who know us best believe us to be."
Evie laughed.
"Dear aunt, have you been very honourablelately?" she asked. "Or has Uncle Bob been doubting your fine qualities?"
"Cynicism always ends in disappointment," remarked Lady Oxted, leaping a conversational chasm, "but since it is cynical, I suppose it expects it."
"Is Uncle Bob a cynic?" asked Evie, dragging her back over the chasm again.
"Well, I made a promise the other day," said Lady Oxted, "and asked him his advice about it. He told me that I should probably reserve to myself the right to break it." Evie sat up suddenly, and toy makers andlazzaroniwere swept from her mind.
"A promise?" she said. "Not the promise you made me?"
Lady Oxted looked up in surprise.
"Yes, the same. Why, dear?"
Evie deliberated with herself for a moment.
"For this reason," she said slowly: "because I now know what I asked you not to tell me. Your promise has had the kernel taken out of it."
"You know? Who told you?"
"Lord Vail," she replied.
Lady Oxted looked at the girl's heightened colour, wondering what emotion flew that beautiful standard there.
"I will never waste a dram of resolution again in determining to abide by my word," she announced.
Evie laughed again, with a great ring of happiness in the note.
"Then you will confirm Uncle Bob in his cynicism," she replied, "and disappoint him of all his pleasant little disappointments."
It was not long before Lady Oxted found that to be chaperon to a very considerable heiress could not be regarded, even by the most negligent, as a sinecure, while to fulfil its duties at all adequately cost a vast deal of time and thought. Had the girl been dull, heavy, serious, or plain, her task would have been lighter; but as it was, Lady Oxted became, before a fortnight was past, a really hard-worked woman. Evie's appetite for gaiety was insatiable; she took to London like a bird to the air; found everybody charming, and everybody returned the compliment. Indeed, the girl seemed to bring, wherever she went, a breath of spring and morning, so utterly sincere and spontaneous was the pleasure that bubbled from her; and, since nothing pleases people so much as to find themselves pleasing, London in general was exceedingly glad that Santa Margarita was the poorer for Evie's presence here. With the eager avidity of youth, and with youth's serene digestion, she gathered and devoured the heaped-up feast of daily and nightly gaiety. Self-consciousness for once seemed to have been left out of the composition of a human being, and she played, and laughed, and enjoyed herself among these crowds as a child may play with daisies by itself in some spring meadow, not brooding and reflecting on its happiness, but simply happy. Parsifal with the flower maidens was not more unreflectivethan she, surrounded by the well-dressed hosts, her charm in the mouths of all.
It might have been hoped, thought Lady Oxted, that since so large a ring was always assembled to see her smile, the smiles would have been, considering the number and variety of the circle, distributed with moderate evenness. In this she was not disappointed, but a thing far more disconcerting to the responsible chaperon. Evie's seriousness certainly was not impartial. For all the world but one she seemed to have no seriousness, but about that one there could be no mistake. For already, between her and Harry, there existed a relation, clear and indefinable, to be dwelt on with silent wonder. Some alchemy, secret and subtle, untraceable as the curves of the swallow's flight, was at work; an effervescence already had begun to stir, brightening the dark well of destiny within them by a hundred points of light; a mysterious luminosity was growing in tremulous flame.
Until the receipt of Mrs. Aylwin's letter, Lady Oxted had felt a little uncertain as to whether she could accept Harry's invitation for herself and the girl to Vail. In any case the next two Sundays were impossible, and the matter had been left undecided. But now that all restriction was withdrawn, she arranged to take Evie down in three weeks' time, at the end of the month. Harry himself, however, had business at his home which could not be postponed, and toward the end of the week he went down there with the intentionof clearing it off as quickly as might be, and returning again to London.
Mr. Francis had been at Vail almost continuously since the winter, and Harry found him in the enjoyment of his usual merry spirits. He looked even better in health and younger to the eye than when his nephew had seen him last, and the briskness of his movements, the clear, scarcely wrinkled skin of his face, were indeed surprising in one of his years. He had driven to the station to meet Harry, and the train being stopped on an inside curve just before reaching the platform, the lad, leaning out of the window, saw him standing there. Mr. Francis caught sight of the face, and pulling out his handkerchief continued to wave it till the train finally drew up at the platform.
"And how are you, my dearest boy?" he cried effusively, before Harry was out of the carriage. "How late your train is! It is scandalous and abominable! I should have found two sharp words for the station-master, I suspect, if I had not been so happy to think you were coming. How well you look, Harry! London seems to suit you as much as the country suits me."
"Indeed, that is saying a great deal," said Harry, looking at that cheerful, healthy face. "I have never seen you looking better, Uncle Francis."
A smile of great tenderness played round the old man's mouth.
"And for that I have to thank you, my dear boy," he said, "in that it is to you I owe my quietretreat, my days of busy tranquility. Ah, Harry, it has been worth while to grow old, if at the end you find such peace as is mine."
They drove briskly up the mile of deep country lane which separated the station from the high road, and Harry found an unlooked-for pleasure in the wreaths of honeysuckle which embowered the hedge in their fragrant curves, and in the clean, vigorous tendrils of the dog-rose starred with the delicacy of its pink blossom. Something in that young unfolding of simple loveliness, which had never really struck him before, now smote on his heart with a pang of exquisite pleasure. How wonderful was youth and the growth of young things; how like, in some subtle and intimate way, were the springing sprigs of blossoms to a girl on the verge of womanhood! For instance—and he turned to his uncle again.
"Yes, London suits me," he said, the thrill and surprise of his thoughts glowing in his handsome face. "People are so kind, so friendly! Oh, it is a warm, nice world!" and his hand shook the two horses to a swifter trot.
"You will always find people kind and friendly to you, Harry," said Mr. Francis, "if you look at them as you looked at me just now. Men and women know nothing so attractive as happiness. My dear boy, what have you been doing to yourself? You are more radiant than Apollo!"
Harry laughed.
"I would not change places with him," he said; "I will take my chance as Harry Vail. Ihave done nothing to myself, if you ask, but I have found many friends. But I do not forget, Uncle Francis, that the first friend I found was you, and I do not think I shall find a better."
They turned into the blare of the white high road, and Mr. Francis, who, while they were in the shadow of the deep lane banks, had carried his hat on his knee, letting the wind blow refreshingly through his thick white hair, put it on again.
"Ah, Harry, I hope you will some time, and soon, find a friend, and dearer than a friend, for life," he said, "who will speedily make you forget your old uncle. But give him a seat in the chimney corner, that he asks, though he asks no more, and let him nurse your children on his knee. He has a way with children; they never cry with him. I pray, I often pray," he said, lifting his hat as he spoke, with a gesture touching and solemn, "that I may do that. That, dear Harry, would be the crowning happiness of many happy days."
The words died gently on the air; no direct reply was needed. For a moment Harry was half determined to tell his uncle of his dream and his hope—longing, with the generous warmth of youth, for the sympathy which he knew would so fully be his; and the words were even on the threshold of his lips, when Mr. Francis suddenly straightened himself from his attitude of musing and plunged into less intimate talk.
"I have not been idle, dear Harry," he said, "while you have been away, charging about theworld, as youth should. I think you will find—I may say it without undue complacence—that the home farm is in better order and is more profitable than it has ever been. There is no credit due to me; it is simply the work of a bailiff I had the luck to find an invaluable man; and in the autumn I can promise you better pheasant-shooting than there has been for many years."
"I am sure it is so," said Harry, "and we will prove it together, Uncle Francis. Really I can not thank you enough; it is too good of you to devote yourself as you have been doing to the estate. Dear me, it is four months since I was here! I am an absentee landlord, but a better landlord than I has been on the spot, and I am not afraid that I shall be shot at."
They turned in at the lodge gates and bowled swiftly along under the huge trees. The hay was standing high in the fields to the left; on the right the pasturage of the park was grazed by sleek kine, already beginning to leave the midday shadows of the trees for their evening feed in the cool; and the senses of smell and sight alike drank deep of the plentiful and luxuriant summer. Rooks held parliament in their debating houses in the high elms, round the coops of the pheasant-rearing hens cheeped innumerable young birds, and the breeze that should blow at sundown was already stirring to try its wings. Extraordinarily pleasant to Harry was the sense that all this was his, yet there was neither vainglory nor selfishness in his delight, for he valued his own not forthe thought of what it was to him, but for the joy another, perhaps, should take in it. Then, emerging from the mile-long avenue, they came to the shining lake, and the sound of coolness from the splashing sluice. Swans and water lily repeated themselves on the surface, and, as they turned the corner, a moor-hen made its water-legged scurry to the cover of the reed beds. Then, with a hollow note from the wheels, they rolled over the bridge and turned in under the monstrous shapes of the cut-box hedge to the gravel sweep in front of the house. There it stood, the shadow of one of the wings fallen half across the courtyard, stately and grave, full of dignity and grave repose, surely no unworthy gift to offer to any. And at that thought a sudden pulse leaped within him.
"It is all unworthy," Harry said to himself, banishing with an effort that irrepressible thrill of joy, "and I the unworthiest of all."
He lingered a moment at the door, and then followed Mr. Francis into the house. Again the joy of possession seized him: his were the tall, faint tapestries of armoured knights and garlanded lovers, his the rows of serious portraits which seemed to-day to his eye to have a freshness and welcome for him which had never been there before. He contrasted, with keen relish of the change, his last home-coming and this. What a curious, dreamlike month that had been which he had spent here at his coming-of-age. How gray and colourless life seemed then if looked at in thelight of all that had passed since! He had pictured himself, he remembered, slowly putting spadeful after spadeful of time, heaped gradually from month to year, on the grave of his youth, spending a quiet, often solitary existence here in the house of his fathers. Uncle Francis—so he had planned it in those days when he had been alone here, before his arrival and Geoffrey's—no doubt would be glad to come here sometimes; Geoffrey, too, would very likely spend a week with him now and again in the shooting season. Otherwise, it would be natural for him to be much alone, and the prospect had called up in him no emotion even so lively as dislike. He would be out of doors a good deal, pottering and poking about the woods; he would read a good deal, and no doubt the years would slip away not unpleasantly. In course of time the portrait of Henry Vail, twelfth baron, and of seemingly morose tendencies, would gloom from the wall, for that series must not be broken; a little longer, and moss would be green in the lettering of his tombstone.
But now he could scarcely believe that the lad who had meditated thus six months ago, not dismally but without joy, could be the same as he who stood with a kindled eye beneath old Francis's picture. He looked at his own hand as he raised his teacup, he looked at his boots and his trousers. Yes, they were certainly his, and he it had been who had drunk tea here before. What then had happened, he asked himself? He had discovered the world, that was all; and Columbushad only discovered America. And the world was quite full of charming things and people in particular; to descend to details, or to generalize on the whole, he hardly knew which was which; it was full of one person.
Mr. Francis soon joined him for tea, and, after proposing a stroll in ten minutes' time, had gone to his room to answer an urgent letter. Harry was well content to wait, for nothing could come amiss to a mood so harmonious as his, and, lighting a cigarette, he strolled round the walls, beholding his forbears. Opposite the portrait of old Francis, second baron, he stood long, and his eye sought and dwelt on the Luck as a familiar object. The sun, streaming through the western windows, fell full on to the picture, and the jewels, so cunning and exact was their portrayal, sparkled with an extraordinary vividness in the gleam. The Luck! Was it the Luck which had given him these days of wonderful happiness, with so great and unspeakable a hope for the days to come? Was this the huge reward it granted him, for which he had paid but with a cold in the head, a burn on the hand, a sprain of the foot? How curious, at the least, those three coincidences following so immediately on the finding of the Luck had been. How curious, also, this awakening of his (dating from the same time) from the solitary lethargy of his first twenty-one years! For theawakening had come with the coming of Uncle Francis, and his own instant attachment to him. It was indeed he—he and Geoffrey, at any rate, between them on their visit here—who had started him on the voyage which had already resulted in the discovery of the world. It was then that his potential self had begun to rustle and stir in the chrysalis of isolation which had grown up round it, very feebly and tentatively indeed at first, but by degrees cracking and bursting its brown bark, then standing with quivering and momently expanding wings, which gradually unfolded and grew strong for flight. The Luck! Was it indeed the gems and the gold which had done this for him? It was much, it was very much, but to him now how infinitely more than he had, did he desire! Six months ago he had desired nothing, for he was dead; but now, being alive, how he yearned for more, one thing more!
A sudden idea seized him, and he rang the bell, and, until it was answered, looked again at the picture. Old Francis's face, he thought, and old Francis's hands, did not fare so well in the sunlight as the glorious jewel which he held. The hands clutched rather than held the cup; the lines of them were greedy and grasping, they gripped the treasure with nervous tension, and in the face there were ugly lines which he had never noticed before, but which bore out the evidence of the hands; avarice sat on that throne, and cunning as deep as the sea, and cruelty and evil mastery. Still looking and wondering, he suddenlysaw the face in a different light; it was no longer a vile soul that looked from those eyes, but the kind, cheerful spirit of his own uncle. He started, for the change had the vividness of actuality, and at the moment the bell was answered by the old butler.
"Ah, Templeton," he cried, "I am glad to see you. All well? That's right. I rang to say that I wanted you to get out the Luck—the big cup, you know, which you and I found in the attic last Christmas, and put it on the table to-night as a centrepiece."
"Mr. Francis has the key, my lord," said Templeton. "It is on his private bunch."
"Ask him to give it you, then. Say it was by my order. Oh, here he is!—Uncle Francis, I want the key of the case in which is the Luck. I want to have it on the table to-night."
"Dear boy, is it wise?" said Mr. Francis. "Supposing the house was broken into: you know the thing is priceless."
"But burglars can not take it from under our noses while we sit at dinner," said Harry, "and, as soon as dinner is over, even before we leave the room, it shall be put back again.—See to that, Templeton. That is the key, is it?—Why, it is gold, too! Old Francis knew how to do things thoroughly."
Uncle and nephew strolled out together, Harry with his head high and leading the way. An extraordinary elation was on him.
"I have a feeling that the Luck is bringingme luck," he said. "Oh, I don't seriously believe it, but think how strange the coincidences have been! Fire, and frost, and rain! I had a turn with all of them. And you know, Uncle Francis, since I found it, I have had more happiness than in the whole of my life before."
"What happiness, Harry?"
"Friends, you the first; the joy of my life; the conscious feeling that one is alive, which I suppose is the same thing. All, all," he cried, "the world, men, women, things—all!"
Mr. Francis did not reply at once, but went forward a few steps, his eyes on the ground.
"Don't believe it, Harry," he said. "I would never have told you about the foolish old tale if I had thought that there was the slightest chance of your paying more attention to it than one gives to a fairy story. My dear boy, you are really quite silly. You caught cold because you would not listen to my excellent advice and change your clothes when you got in from shooting; you sprained your ankle because you did not look where you were going, and see that the steps were covered with ice; you burned yourself because a careless housemaid had forgotten to tack down the carpet! I do not believe in magic at all; there is, I assert, no such thing; but even if one did, it would be a very childish, weak kind of spell that could only bring curses of that sort."
"That is just what I think," said Harry; "the evil, perhaps, has run down, so to speak; it is nearly impotent. Oh, I am only joking. But ifthat is the price I have paid for my present happiness, I consider it dirt cheap. And if the Luck can give me more happiness, I hereby declare to the powers that work it that I will take any amount more on the same scale of charges."
Mr. Francis laughed, and took Harry's arm affectionately.
"Dear lad, you were only jesting, I know," he said. "But it is not well to dwell on such fantastic things too much, though we constantly remind ourselves that they are nonsense. The human mind is a very wonderful and delicate piece of mechanism, and if once we begin playing experiments with a thing of which we understand so little, it may get out of order, and strike the wrong hour, and fail to keep time. Lead your wholesome, honourable life, dear boy, and take gratefully what happiness comes in your way, and do not forget where it comes from. Then you will have nothing to fear from the Luck."
"No, and nothing to gain from it," said Harry, "for I suspect magic can not touch those who do not believe in it."
"Dear boy, enough," said Mr. Francis, with a certain earnestness. "You have told me you do not believe in it. Ah, what a wonderful evening! Look at those pink fleeces of cloud in the west, softer than sleep, softer than sleep, as Theocritus says. How I wish I was a painter! Think of the privilege of being able to show those sunset glories; to show, too, as the true artist can, the feelings, infinite and subtle, which those roseclouds against the pale blue of the sky produce in one, to show them to the toiler of the London streets. Ah, Harry, what a wealth of senses has been given us, what diverse-facing windows to our souls, and how little we trouble to look out of any, or to keep bright and clean even one! The gourmet even, the man who eats his dinner, using his palate with intelligence, is a step above most people. He has trained a sense, and what exquisite pleasure that sense, even though it be the most animal of all, gives him! And who can say that each sense was not given us in order that we should cultivate it to the fullest?"
Suddenly he raised his hat, and in a low, clear voice he cried:
"O world as God has made it, all in beauty,And knowing this is love, and love is duty,What further can be sought for or declared?"
For a long moment he stood there, his face irradiated by the fires of sunset, his eyes soft with gentle, unshed tears, his hair stirred by the caress of the evening breeze, with who knows what early dreams and cool reveries of boyhood reminiscent within him? His harsh, untoward past had gone from him; he had lived backward in that moment to the days before troubles and darkness came about his path; aspirations seemed to have taken the place of memory; he was a youth again, and Harry's face, as he looked at him, was loving and reverent.
It was already deep dusk when they turnedback, and only the faint reflections of the fires of sunset lingered in the sky. The green of grass and tree had faded to a sombre gray, and the green of the fantastically cut box hedge had deepened to black when they again passed under its misshapen shapes and monstrous prodigies. Somehow the look of it, cut out against the unspeakable softness and distance of the sky, struck Harry with something of an ominous touch.
"That must be seen to," he said, pointing to it. "Look at the horror of its shapes; it is like a collection of feverish dreams!"
"The old box hedge?" asked Mr. Francis. "If I were you I should not have it touched. See how Nature is striving to obliterate the intruding hand of man. How grotesque and quaint it appears in this light! How delightfully horrible!"
"Horrible, certainly," said Harry, "but I do not find delight there. Come, Uncle Francis, let us go in. It is already close upon dinner time, and one has to dress."
But the box hedge seemed to have a strange fascination for Mr. Francis, and he still lingered there, standing in the road, with his eye wandering down the lines of that nightmare silhouette.
"Indeed, I would not touch it, dear Harry," he said; "it is so grotesque and Gothic. What a thickness the hedge must be—eight feet at the least!"
"But it is hideous," replied the lad. "It is enough to frighten anybody."
"But it does not frighten you and me, or the gardeners either, we may suppose. At least, I have heard of no hysterics."
"That is probably true, but—— Well, come in, Uncle Francis. We shall be so late for dinner, and I am dying for it."
An hour later the two had finished dinner, and were waiting for coffee to be brought. Harry, after finishing his wine, had lit a cigarette, which had been the occasion of some playful strictures from his uncle, who still held his unkindled in his soft, plump fingers.
"One sip, only one sip of coffee, first, Harry," he said. "It is almost wicked to light your cigarette till you have had one sip of coffee. That is the psychological moment. Ah, that dazzling thing! How it sparkles! It was a good idea of yours to have it on the table, Harry. It makes a noonday in the room. How the Luck welcomes you home, my dear boy! But though I can not sparkle like that, not less do I welcome you."
Indeed, that winking splendour in the centre of the table was enough to strike sight into blind eyeballs. The candles that lit the table, though shaded from the eye of the diner, poured their unobtruded rays on to it from fifty angles, and each stone glowed with an inward and ever-varying light. The slightest movement of the head was sufficient to turn the blue lights of the diamonds into an incandescent red; again, a movement, and the burning danger signals were changed to a living green. The pearls shone witha steady lustre, like moons through mist; but even the sober emeralds caught something of the madness of the diamond-studded handles, and glowed with colours not their own. The thing had fascinated Harry all dinner time, and the spell seemed to grow, for suddenly he filled his glass again.
"The Luck," he said; "I drink to the Luck," and he put down an empty glass.
An affectionate remonstrance with his folly was on Mr. Francis's lips, when the servants entered with coffee. Behind the footman, who carried it, walked a man with liqueurs, whom Harry could not remember having seen before. He looked at him a moment, wondering who he was, when he recollected that his uncle had spoken to him about his own man, whom he proposed should wait on him at Vail. Last came Templeton, carrying the leather case of the Luck.
Harry took coffee and liqueur, and had another look at his uncle's valet. The man wore the immovable mask of the well-trained servant; he was no more than a machine for handing things.
"Yes, take the cup, Templeton," said Harry. "Have you the key of it?"
"No, my lord; it is on Mr. Francis's bunch."
"Would you give me the key, Uncle Francis? I will lock it myself, and keep the key."
Mr. Francis did not at once answer, but continued sipping his coffee, and Harry, thinking he had not heard, repeated his request. On the repetition,Mr. Francis instantly took the key off his bunch.
"By all means, dear boy," he said. "It is much better so, that you should have it."
Templeton packed the jewel in its case, and Harry turned the key on it.
"Lock it up yourself, Templeton," he said, "in one of the chests. I must have a new case made for it, I think. This is very old, and it would be much too easily carried away—eh, Uncle Francis?" and he swung the locked case lightly in his hand.
"It is the original case, Harry," he said. "I should be sorry to change it."
The men left the room, Templeton going last, with the case containing the Luck. The candles still burned brightly, but half the light seemed to have been withdrawn from the room, now that the great jewel no longer gleamed on the table; it was as if a cloud had hidden the sun. Harry still held the key in his hand, looking curiously at its chased and intricate wards, and for a few moments neither spoke. Then he put it into his pocket, and, pushing his chair a little farther from the table, flung one leg over the other.
"I propose to stop here four or five days, Uncle Francis," he said, "but not more, unless we can not get through our business. But, indeed, I can not see what there is to do. The place looks in admirable order, thanks to you. There is the box hedge; that is positively all I can see that wants looking to."
Mr. Francis laughed gaily.
"Dear Harry," he said, "if you are not careful you will become as absurd on the subject of this box hedge as you are in danger of becoming about the Luck. The dear, quaint, picturesque thing! How can you want it trimmed and cut?"
Harry laughed.
"As you say, it does not frighten you or me, or the gardeners," he said; "but, as I was about to tell you as we drove from the station, when something put it out of my head, I shall have to consider others as well."
Suddenly he stopped. In the intense pleasure with which he had looked forward to the visit of Evie and Lady Oxted—which should be, so he had figured it, hardly less welcome to his uncle, as a sign, visible and pertinent, of how utterly dead and discredited was the lying rumour which at one time had so blackened him—he had not consciously reckoned with the moment of telling him. But he went on almost without a pause:
"At the end of the month Lady Oxted has promised to come and spend a Sunday here, and with her will come—O Uncle Francis, how long this or something of the sort has been delayed, and how patiently you have waited for it!—with her will come her niece, Miss Aylwin, who has just come to England from Italy."
He looked not at his uncle as he spoke, but, with a delicacy unconscious and instinctive, kept his eyes on the ground. Such an announcement as the visit of Harold Harmsworth's sister must,he knew, be momentous to the old man, and perhaps would give rise to an emotion which it was not fit that other eyes should see. His uncle would know that in the mind of one at least most intimately connected with the tragedy, suspicion was not. This visit would be a reconciliation, formal though silent. It was right that the hearer should have as great a privacy as might be, and so, both when he spoke and after he had finished speaking, Harry kept his eyes on the ground.
There was a moment's silence, broken by the crash of breaking china, and, looking quickly up, Harry saw the coffee cup fallen from his uncle's hand, and the brown stains leaping over the white tablecloth. The spoon clattered metallic in the shattered saucer and jumped to the floor, and Mr. Francis's hand dropped like lead on the edge of the table. The candles were between him and his uncle; he could see no more; and he sprang up with a sudden pang of horror insurgent within him.
There, with his head fallen over the back of the chair, lay Mr. Francis, sprawling and inert. His face was of a deadly, strangled white, the wholesome colour had fled his cheeks, and only on the lips and below the eyes lingered a mottled purple. His breathing was heavy and stertorous; you would have said he snored, and from the corner of the slack mouth lolled the protruding tongue. His hands lay limp upon his lap, gray and purple.
Harry made one step of it to the bell, andrang peal after violent peal, scarce daring to look, yet scarce able not to look at that masklike horror of a face at the end of the table. "What had he done? What if he had killed him? Death could not be more ghastly!" ran the shrill voice of terror-stricken thought through his head. His instinct was to go to him, though his flesh shrank and shivered at the thought of approaching that, to do something, but he knew not what, yet meddling might only cause damage irreparable, instead of giving relief. Still he did not cease ringing, and it seemed to him that the muffled clanging of the bell he rang had sounded for years, when steps came along the passage and burst into the room.
"There, there! look to him! What is the matter?" cried Harry, still working on the bell like a man demented. "Send for the doctor. Send for his servant; perhaps he knows what to do. Ah, there he is!" and he dropped the bell handle.
Mr. Francis's valet, of the masklike face, had gone straight to his master, and, lifting him bodily from the chair, laid him flat on the floor. Then with deft fingers he untied his cravat and collar, and told them to open all doors and windows wide. He tore open his shirt and vest so as to leave his breathing absolutely free, and then paused. The great rush of warm summer air that poured in gently stirred the hair on Mr. Francis's head, and rustled the folds of the tablecloth, yet, in spite of this, and the heavy, stertorousbreathing of the stricken man, it seemed to Harry that an immense silence reigned everywhere—the silence of waiting. Maid servants had gathered in the doorway, but Templeton, with a guttural word, sent them scurrying down the passages, and the three watched and waited round the one.
Then, by blessed degrees, the breathing grew less drawn and laboured, and by the light of the candles which Mr. Francis's man had placed on the floor near the body it was possible to see that the colour of the face was less patched. Then the valet turned to Harry, who, white-faced and awe-struck, stood at his shoulder.
"He will do well now, my lord," said Sanders. "It was lucky you did not touch him. Mr. Francis has had these fits before; cardiac, the doctors say; but the right thing is to lay him flat."
"He is not dead? He will not die?" cried Harry, shaking the man by the shoulder, as if to make him hear.
"Lord bless you! no, my lord," he said. "As like as not he'll be dressed to-morrow before you are awake. Cardiac weakness," he repeated, as if the words were a prescription, "and all agitation to be avoided."
"Oh, my God! I never meant to agitate him," cried Harry. "I told him something which I should have thought he would have given his right hand to hear."
The man smiled.
"Just the sort of thing which would agitatehim, my lord," he said, "if you'll excuse my saying so.—And now, Mr. Templeton, if you'll be so kind as to get a shutter or something, we'll move him up to bed, keeping him flat. I'll sit up with him to-night."
"You're a good fellow, an awfully good fellow!" cried Harry. "And there is no further anxiety. Shall I not send for the doctor?"
"Quite unnecessary, my lord. See how quiet his breathing has become. As like as not he will sleep like a child. He's had these attacks before, and I know well when the danger is over—cardiac. You can go to sleep yourself, my lord, as if nothing had happened."
The cheerful optimism of Sanders was borne out by events, if not in letter at any rate in spirit, and Harry, on waking, received the most encouraging reports from the sick-room. Mr. Francis had slept well for the greater part of the night, and though he would take his breakfast in bed, he expected to be down by the middle of the morning. He particularly desired that Harry should be told, as soon as he woke, how completely he had recovered from his attack, and sent him his dear love.
Here, at any rate, was great good news. Again and again during the night Harry had woke from anxious, feverish dreams of that ghastly, masklike face and sonorous breathing; all the earlier hours seemed a constant succession of agonized awakenings. Now it would be the white, mottled face which grew ever larger and nearer to his own, that tore him almost with a shriek from his uneasy slumber, after long, paralyzed attempts to move; now it would be the breathing that got louder and yet more guttural till the air reverberated with it. Again and again he had sat up in bed with flying pulse and damp forehead, and lit a matchto see how much more of the night there was still to run; or looking for any sound of movement from his uncle's room at the end of the passage, he would think he heard steps along the corridor, and a stealthy opening or shutting of midnight doors. Once it was a spray of jasmine tapping at his window which woke him with a start, and thinking that some evil news was knocking at his door, it was with an effort that he controlled his throat sufficiently to bid the knocker enter. But about the time of the first hint of the mid-summer dawn, when birds were beginning to tune their notes for the day, and the bushes and eaves grew merry with chirrupings, he fell into a more peaceful sleep, and woke only on the rattle of his blinds being rolled up.
His heart leaped as he received his uncle's message, and he got up immediately, and putting on only a dressing gown and slippers, went out with a rough towel over his arm for a dip in the lake before breakfast. The sluice at the lower end of it, where a cool ten feet of water invited him, lay not more than a couple of hundred yards from the house, across a stretch of nearly level lawn, and hidden from both road and house by a screen of bushes. Sleep still lingered like cobwebs in drowsy corners of his brain, but all the horror of the evening and its almost more horrible repetitions during the earlier hours of the night had been swept away by the news of the morning, and it was with a thrill of pleasure, as indescribable as the scent itself of this clean morning,that he drank deep of the freshness of the young day. The sun was already high, but the grass that lay in the shadow of house and bush was still not dry of its night dews, and a thousand liquid gems brushed his bare ankle. The gentle thunder of the sluice made a soft low bass to the treble of birds and the hum of country sounds, that summer symphony which pauses only for the solo of the nightingale during the short, dark hours. The lightest of breezes ruffled the lake, scarcely shattering the mirrored trees and sky that leaned over it, and Harry stood for a moment, white and bare to the soft wind, with the sun warm on his shoulders, wondering at the beauty of his bath. Then, with arms shot out above his head, and his body braced to a line, he sprang off the stone slab of the sluice and disappeared in a soda water of bubbles and flying spray.
Surely that moment, he thought, as he rose again to the surface, was the crown and acme of bodily sensation. The sleep had been swept from him; house, bed, pillows, and darkness had gone; he was renewed, starting fresh again, cool and clean, with all the beautiful round world waiting for him. Expectancy and hope of happiness, interest, awakening love, were all strung to their highest pitch in his completeness of bodily well-being; his soul was moulded in every part to its environment, freed of its bodily burden, and with a song in his mouth he stepped out of the water for the glow of the towel.
He sauntered leisurely back to the house,purring to himself at the delight which the moment gave him. How could there be men who found their pleasure in eating and drinking, in the life of crowded rooms and smoky towns, when in half the acres of all England and round all its coasts were such possibilities? How, above all, was it possible to exist for a moment, if one had not the privilege of being violently in love? Then, with a laugh at himself, he suddenly found that he was hungry, ravenous, and his step quickened.
Half an hour later he was seated at breakfast, but already the first mood of the day was past. He had for an hour gone free, untrammelled by all the obligations which events and circumstances entail, but now he was captured again. One thing in particular wove a heavy chain round him. He had seen with amazed horror the effect on his uncle of that news that he had thought would be so welcome. Was it reasonable to suppose, then, that if a name alone produced so ill-starred a result, he could bear the sight of the girl? After the catastrophe of the night before it would be cruelty of a kind not to be contemplated to return again to the subject. The disappointment was grievous. That visit of Lady Oxted's and Evie's, so bright in anticipation that his mind's eye could scarcely look on it undazzled, must be given up. Plain, simple duty, the ordinary, incontrovertible demands of blood and kinship, compelled him to it. His own happiness could not be purchased at the cost ofsuffering to that kindly old man; and who knew how much he might be suffering even now?
Then, with the mercurial fluctuation of those in love, he fell from the sky-scraping summits into a black, bottomless gulf of despondency. Evie could not come here, she could never come here, he told himself. And at that, and all which that implied, he pushed his chair quickly back from the table, and left a half-eaten breakfast. His reasonable mind could not make itself heard; it told him that he was pushing things comically far; that he was imagining an inconceivable situation, when he concluded that a young man must not marry because of the feeling of his great-uncle on the subject; but his mood was not amenable to reason. The world had gone as black as an east wind, and all the flowers were withered.
He heaved a lover's sigh, and, going out of the glass door into the garden, walked moodily up and down the lawn for a space, consumed with pity, half for himself, half for his uncle. Directly above were the windows of his own bedroom, wide open, and a housemaid within was singing at her work. Farther on were the two rooms in which his uncle chiefly lived, a big-sized dressing room in which he slept, and next door the bedroom which he had turned into a sitting room. These windows were also open, and Harry, even on the noiseless grass, trod gently as he passed them, with that instinct for hushed quiet which all feel in the presence of suffering. "Poor old fellow! poor, dear old fellow!" he thought tohimself, with a pang of compunction at the shock he had so unwittingly caused that cheerful, suffering spirit.
Then, suddenly, as he passed softly below, there came from the windows, mingling in unspeakable discord with the housemaid's song, a quick shower of notes from a flute.
Harry paused. The player was evidently feeling his fingers in the execution of a run, and a moment afterward the dainty, tripping air of "La Donna é mobile" came dancing out into the sunlight like a summer gnat. Twice the delicate tune was played with great precision and admirable light-heartedness, which contrasted vividly with the listener's mood, and was instantly succeeded by some other Italian air, unknown to the lad, but as gay as a French farce.
Harry had paused, open-mouthed, with astonishment. His own thoughts about his kinsman, sombre and full of tenderness, were all sent flying by the cheerful measure which the kinsman was executing so delightfully. A smile began to dawn in the corners of his mouth, enlightenment returned to his eye, and, standing out on the gravel path, he shouted up.
"Uncle Francis!" he cried; "Uncle Francis!"
The notes of the flute wabbled and ceased.
"Yes, my dearest fellow," came cheerfully from above.
"I am so glad you are so much better! May I come up and see you?"
"By all means, by all means. I was just on the point of sending Sanders down to see if you would."
Harry went up the stairs three at a time, and fairly danced down the corridor. Sanders, faithful and foxlike, was outside, his hand on the latch.
"You will be very careful, my lord," he said. "We mustn't have Mr. Francis agitated again."
"Of course not," said Harry, and was admitted.
Mr. Francis was lying high in bed, propped up on pillows. The remains of his breakfast, including a hot dish, of which no part remained, stood on a side table; on his bed lay the case of the beloved flute.
"Ah, my dear boy!" he cried, "I owe you a thousand and one apologies for my conduct last night. Sanders tells me I gave you a terrible fright. You must think no more of it, you must promise me to think no more of it, Harry. I have had such seizures many times before, and of late, thank God, they have become much rarer. I had not told you about them on purpose. I did not see the use of telling you."
"Dear Uncle Francis, it is a relief to find you so well," said Harry. "Sanders told me last night that he knew how to deal with these attacks, which was a little comfort. But I insist on your seeing a really first-rate doctor from town."
Mr. Francis shook his head.
"Quite useless, dear Harry;" he said, "though it is like you to suggest it. Before now I haveseen an excellent man on the subject. It is true that the attack itself is dangerous, but when it passes off it passes off altogether, and during it Sanders knows very well what to do. Besides, in all ordinary probability, it will not recur. But now, my dear boy, as you are here, I will say something I have got to say at once, and get it off my mind."
Harry held up his hand.
"If it will agitate you in the least degree, Uncle Francis," he said, "I will not hear it. Unless you can promise me that it will not, you open your mouth and I leave the room."
"It will not, it will not," said the old man; "I give you my word upon it. It is this: That moment last night when you told me what you told me was the happiest moment I have had for years. What induced my wretched old cab horse of a constitution to play that trick I can not imagine. The news was a shock to me, I suppose—ah! certainly it was a shock, but of pure joy. And I wanted to tell you this at once, because I was afraid, you foolish, unselfish fellow, that you might blame yourself for having told me; that you might think it would pain or injure me to speak of it again. You might even have been intending to tell Miss Aylwin that you must revoke your invitation. Was it not so, Harry?" and he waited for an answer.
Harry was sitting on the window sill playing with a tendril of intruding rose, and his profile was dark against the radiance of the sky outside.But when on the pause he turned and went across to the bedside, Mr. Francis was amazed, for his face seemed, like Moses's, to have drunk of some splendour, and to be visibly giving it out. He bent over the bed, leaning on it with both hands.
"Ah! how could I do anything else?" he cried. "I could not bear to be so happy at the cost of your suffering. But now, oh, now——" And he stopped, for he saw that he had told his secret, and there was no more to say.
Mr. Francis, seeing that the lad did not go on with the sentence, the gist of which was so clear, said nothing to press him, for he understood, and turned from the seriousness of the subject.
"So that is settled," he said, "and they are coming, you tell me, at the end of the month. That is why you want the box hedge cut, you rascal. You are afraid of the ladies being frightened. I almost suspected something of the kind. And now, my dear boy, you must leave me. I shall get up at once and be down in half an hour. Ah, my dear Harry, my dear Harry!" and he grasped the hand long and firmly.
Harry left him without more words, and strolled out again into the sunlight, which had recaptured all its early brilliance. Had ever a man been so ready and eager to spoil his own happiness, he wondered. Half an hour ago he had blackened the world by his utterly unfounded fears, all built on a fabric of nothingness, and in a moment reared to such a height that they hadblotted the very sun from the sky, and like a vampire sucked the beauty from all that was fair. A thought had built them, a word now had dispelled them.
He went round to the front of the house, where he found a gardener busy among the flower beds, and they went together to examine the great hedge. It would be a week's work, the man said, to restore it to its proper shape, and Harry answering that it must therefore be begun without delay, he went off after a ladder and pruning tools. Then, poking idly at its compacted wall with his stick as he walked along it, Harry found that after overcoming the first resistance, the stick seemed to penetrate into emptiness, though the whole hedge could not have been less than six or eight feet thick. This presented points of interest, and he walked up to the end, far away from the house, and, pushing through a belt of trees into which the hedge ran, proceeded to examine it from the other side. Here, at once, he found the key to this strange thing, for, half overgrown with young shoots, stood an opening some five feet high, leading into the centre of the hedge, down which ran a long passage. More correctly speaking, indeed, the hedge was not one, but two, planted some three feet apart, and this corridor of gloomy green lights led straight down it toward the house. At the far end, again, was a similar half-overgrown door, coming out of which one turned the corner of the hedge and emerged on to the gravel sweepclose by the house, immediately below the windows of the gun room.
To Harry there was something mysterious and delightful about this discovery, which gave him a keen, childlike sense of pleasure. To judge from the growth over the entrances to the passage, it must have been long undiscovered, and he determined to ask his uncle whether he remembered it. Then, suddenly and unreasonably, he changed his mind; the charm of this mystery would be gone if he shared it with another, even if he suspected that another already knew it, and, smiling at himself for his childish secrecy and reserve, he strolled back again to meet the gardener to whom he had given orders to clip it. There must be no possibility of his discovery of the secret doors; the box hedge should be clipped only with a view to the road; the other side should not be touched—a whited sepulchre. These orders given, he went back to the house to wait for the appearance of Mr. Francis.
The latter soon came downstairs, with a great Panama hat on his head, round which was tacked a gaudy ribbon; he hummed a cheerful little tune as he came.
"Ah, Harry!" he said, "I did not mean you to wait in for me on this glorious morning, for I think I will not go fast or far. Long-limbed, lazy fellow," he said, looking at him as he sat in the low chair.
Harry got up, stretching his long limbs.
"Lazy I am not," he said; "I have done a world full of things this morning. I have bathed, I have breakfasted, I have listened to your music, I have given a hundred orders to the gardeners, at least I gave one, and I have read the papers. Where shall we go, Uncle Francis?"
"Where you please, as long as we go together, and you will consent to go slowly and talk to me. I am a little shaky still, I find, now that I try my legs; but, Harry, there is a lightness about my heart from your news of last night."
"It is good to hear you say that, for I can not convey to you how I looked forward to telling you. And you feel, you really feel, all you said to me?"
Mr. Francis paused.
"All, all," he said earnestly. "The past has been expunged with a word. That burden which so long I have carried about is gone, like the burden of Christian's. Ah! you do not know what it was! But now, if she—Miss Aylwin—believed it, she would not come within a mile of me; if her mother still believed it, she would not let her, and Lady Oxted would not let her. A hard, strange woman, was Mrs. Aylwin, Harry. I told you, I remember, what passed between us. But it is over, over. Yes, yes, the healing comes late, and the recompense; but it comes—it has come."
"I do not know Mrs. Aylwin," said Harry. "I have never ever seen her. But I can answerfor it that Miss Aylwin believes utterly and entirely in your innocence."
"How is that? How is that?" asked Mr. Francis.
"She told me so herself," said Harry. "How strange it all is, and how it all works together! I told her, you must know, the first evening I met her, about the Luck, and last week, when I was down with the Oxteds, I told her, Uncle Francis, about the awful troubles you had been through, particularly—particularly that one. At the moment I did not know that she was in any way connected with the Harmsworths. I knew of her only what I had seen of her. And then, in the middle, she stopped me, saying she knew all, saying also that she entirely believed in you."
Mr. Francis walked on a few steps in silence, and Harry spoke again.
"Perhaps I ought not to have told her," he said, "but the Luck held. She was the right person, you see. And somehow, you will agree with me, I think, when you see her, she is a person to whom it is natural to tell things. She is so sympathetic—I have no words—so eager to know what interests and is important to her friends. Yes, already I count myself a friend of hers."
"Then her mother had not told her all?" asked Mr. Francis, with the air of one deliberating.
"Not all; not your name. She had no ideathat she was talking to the nephew of the man about whom she had heard from her mother."
Mr. Francis quickened his pace, like a man who has made up his mind.
"You did quite right to tell her, Harry," he said, "quite right. It would come to her better from you than from any one else. Also, it is far better that she should know before she came here, and before you get to know each other better. I have always a dread of the chance word, so dear to novelists, which leads to suspicion or revelations. How intolerable the fear of that would have been! We should all have been in a false position. But now she knows; we have no longer any fear as to how she may take the knowledge; and thank you, dear Harry, for telling her."
The next two or three days passed quietly and busily. There were many questions of farm and sport to be gone into, many balancings of expenditure and income to be adjusted, and their talk, at any rate, if not their more secret thoughts, was spread over a hundred necessary but superficial channels. Among such topics were a host of businesses for which Mr. Francis required Harry's sanction before he put them in hand; a long section of park paling required repair, some design of planting must be constructed in order to replace the older trees in the park, against the time that decay and rending should threaten them. All these things and many more, so submitted Mr. Francis, were desirable, but it wouldbe well if Harry looked at certain tables of estimates which he had caused to be drawn up before he decided, as he was inclined to do, that everything his uncle recommended should be done without delay. Items, inconsiderable singly, he would find, ran to a surprising total when taken together, and he must mention a definite sum which he was prepared to spend, say, before the end of the year, on outdoor improvements. Things in the house, too, required careful consideration; the installation of the electric light, for instance, would run away with no negligible sum. How did Harry rank the urgency of indoor luxuries with regard to outdoor improvements? If he intended to entertain at all extensively during the next winter, he would no doubt be inclined to give precedence to affairs under the roof; if not, there were things out of doors which could be mended now at a less cost than their completer repair six months hence would require.
Mr. Francis put these things to his nephew with great lucidity and patient impartiality, and Harry, heavily frowning, would wrestle with figures that continually tripped and threw him, and in his mind label all these things as sordid. But the money which he could immediately afford to spend on the house and place was limited, and he had the sense to apply himself to the balancing. At length, after an ink-stained and arithmetical morning, he threw down his pen.