Geoffrey frowned.
"What does it all mean?" he asked sharply.
"I have no idea at all," said Lady Oxted. "Probably it means nothing. Things seldom do. In any case, say nothing to Harry."
Tea came in at this moment, and they talked of other matters till the man had left the room. Then:
"One thing more," said Lady Oxted, "and the last. I hardly like to say to you that I suspect nothing and nobody, because that sounds asif there was possibly something to suspect. There is nothing. But this is a curious circumstance, and it has interested me."
Geoffrey walked back to Cavendish Square, feeling vaguely sombre and depressed. A tepid drizzle of rain was falling, making the pavement slippery; the air was hot and thundery, suggestive of expectancy and unrest, and this accentuated his mood. He had no clew of any kind as to what these secret dealings could possibly mean, and nothing that his ingenuity could suggest was even a faintly satisfactory solution.
Every moment the sky seemed to be pressing more heavily on to the earth, and it was as if the very tightness of the air prevented the breaking of the storm. By the time he had reached Cavendish Square a faint, thick twilight showed overhead, the drizzle of rain had ceased, and only a few large drops fell sparingly. He let himself in with his latchkey, and found himself immediately face to face with Harry, who was just coming out. And at the sight of him he suddenly felt that his vague fear was going to be at once realized, for in his eyes sat a miserable despair.
"Harry! Harry! what is the matter?" he cried.
Harry did not look at him.
"Nothing," he said. "Where have you been?"
"Sitting with Lady Oxted."
"Then perhaps she will see me. She is better, I suppose. Tell me, Geoff," and he fidgetedwith the door handle, "did you see Miss Aylwin?"
"No. Lady Oxted does not allow her to come to her room, for fear of her getting the influenza."
"Thanks. I shall be back for dinner, I expect. But don't wait," and he opened the door.
Geoffrey laid his hand on his arm.
"You are not going to do anything foolish, Harry?" he asked, in a sudden vague spasm of alarm.
"No, you idiot! Let me go."
"Is there nothing I can do?" he asked.
"Nothing, thanks."
Geoffrey went into the smoking room and sat down in a bewilderment of distress and anxiety. What could possibly have happened? he asked himself. If anything had gone wrong at Vail, if Mr. Francis, to imagine the worst, had even died suddenly, surely Harry would have told him. Then why did he wish to see Lady Oxted, but apparently not wish to see Miss Aylwin? For the moment he thought there might be a light here: it was conceivable that he had proposed to her and been refused. But when, where? For Geoffrey had left him not two hours ago in his accustomed good spirits. Again, if he had ever felt certain of anything, it was that, unless the girl was the most infernal and finished flirt ever made for the undoing of man, the attraction between the two was deep and mutual. And no girl had ever seemed to him less like a flirt than Evie.Even if this was so, why should Harry at once wish to go to Lady Oxted? These things had no answer; there was nothing to do but wait, wait drearily, and listen to the hiss of the faster-falling rain.
Harry drove to Grosvenor Square through the blinking lightning, and was shown up. Like Geoffrey, Lady Oxted was appalled at that drawn and haggard face; like Geoffrey, too, the question whether Evie had refused him suggested itself to her, but was instantly rejected.
"My dear boy, what is the matter?" she cried. "Have you bad news from Vail?"
Harry took a letter from his pocket, and folded it down so as to leave some ten lines of large, legible hand for her to read.
"Will you read that?" he said, giving it her.
She took it from him, and he sat down in the window.
"... must prepare yourself," it ran, "for a great shock. I saw with such pleasure your intimacy with Miss Aylwin, and I know—I am afraid I know—what you hoped. Harry, dear boy, you must not allow yourself any fond feelings there. She is already engaged, so I heard this morning, from a friend near Santa Margarita, to a young Italian marchese. So make a great effort, and cut her out of your life with a brave and unfaltering hand. She has treated you ..." and the exposed page ended.
Lady Oxted read it through, and tossed it back to Harry.
"There is not a word of truth in it," she said; "though it is true enough that a certain Italian marchese, not very young, fell in love with her last winter, and was refused. I suppose your correspondent has got hold of some muddled version of that."
Harry was white to the lips, but a gleam had returned to his eye.
"Are you sure?" he asked tremulously. "Are you quite sure? I trust very deeply the person who wrote this letter."
"I don't pretend not to guess whom it is from," said Lady Oxted, "but I am quite sure. If you don't believe me, ask Evie herself. Indeed," she added, looking suddenly at him, "I think that would be a most excellent plan, Harry."
Harry got up. There was no mistaking this, and Lady Oxted had not meant that there should be. Only last night she had told her husband that the two had been philandering quite long enough, and announced her intention of pushing Harry over the edge as quickly as possible. Her opportunity had not delayed its coming, and she meant to use it.
"Where is she?" asked Harry, almost in a whisper; "perhaps, perhaps——"
"She has just come in," said Lady Oxted, feeling a violent desire to take Harry by the scruff of the neck and hurl him into Evie's presence; "she is in the drawing-room."
"Alone?" asked Harry.
"I don't know. Go and see."
Harry hesitated no longer, but left the room. Lady Oxted heard his step first of all slow on the stairs, then gradually quickening, and it would seem that he took the last six steps in a jump.
Evie was alone when he entered, seated at the far end of the room—ten miles away, it seemed to him. He felt his head swim, his knees were unloosed, his mouth was dry, and his heart hammered creakily in his throat. Then he raised his eyes again, and met her glance. And at that his courage coursed back like wine in his veins; she flooded and overflowed his heart; he was lost in an amazement of love, a man again. In two steps he covered those ten miles.
"You told me to aim at being the King of England," he said. "I have aimed far higher, and I have come to you for the crown."
Then no word was said at all about the Italian marchese, no longer young.
Lady Oxted, in spite of her husband's general reflections upon her character, could not reasonably be called an ungenerous woman; and when, ten days after these last occurrences, it was her painful duty to visit the convalescent sofa of Geoffrey Langham, she said without circumlocution, or any attempt to shirk due responsibility, that she supposed it was she from whom he had caught the influenza. Geoffrey, on his side, did not regard this as anything but a certain conclusion, but added, with the irritable resignation which accompanies convalescence, that he did not suppose she had done it on purpose. The effect of this was to make Lady Oxted wonder whether she had really given it him at all.
"You speak as if it was quite certain," she said. "But when one comes to think of it, Harry came to see me the same day, in great depression, which predisposes you to catch it, and he hasn't, so to speak, blown his nose since."
"Very well, then; you did not give it me," said Geoffrey. "Please have it your own way. It was my own idea: I evolved influenza for myself.Besides, Harry was deeply in love. You can't do two things at once."
"Hush-a-bye, baby," said Lady Oxted. "Geoffrey, I didn't come here to be contradict——"
"No, to contradict, it appears."
"Primarily, not even that, but to propose that you and I and Bob should go down to Oxted to-morrow, or rather to tell you that Bob and I are going, and propose that you should join us; we shall get well in half the time down there."
"Are you not well?" asked Geoffrey. "You look a picture."
"A picture of a boiled rag," said Lady Oxted, "treated, with extreme realism. Well, will you come?"
"Of course I will, with pleasure. I long to get out of this frouzy town. What does Miss Aylwin do?"
"She will go to the Arbuthnots while I am away, poor dear!"
"She might do worse. And Harry?"
"Harry will probably go to the Arbuthnots too, a good deal," remarked Lady Oxted.
She got up.
"I am glad you promised to come without any hesitation," she said, "because otherwise I should have had to press you, which is degrading. Harry's engagement has given me a lot to think about, and I want to express my thoughts to some very slow, ordinary person like you, in the same way as Molière used to read his plays to hishousekeeper. I have got a sort of idea in my head, and I wish to see how it impresses the completely average mind."
"I hope it is a nice idea," said Geoffrey. "But one can't tell with you. You have such an inconvenient sort of mind!"
"It isn't nice," said Lady Oxted; "in fact, it is just the opposite. However, you will hear more of it to-morrow evening. Here's Harry. I shall go. Dear me, I wonder whether Bob looked as idiotic as that when we were engaged? I don't think he can have, or I should have broken it off."
Harry's face in fact wore a smile of intensely inane radiance, but his desire to score off his aunt, as he now called her, caused it to fade off like the breath off a razor.
"No, dear aunt," he replied, "but you see he wasn't engaged to a person of—well, of the same class as Evie.—Ah! fifteen love, Geoff, old boy. That will rankle by-and-bye in the mind of our aunt."
Lady Oxted put her nose in the air, as if she had caught the whiff of a bad smell.
"Can you explain the idiocy of your smile when you entered?" she asked.
"Rather. I was just going to, when you began to be personal. Three Sundays ago, when Evie was down at Vail, she went out walking, after lunch, with Uncle Francis. Do you remember, dear aunt, and you snored loud and long under the trees on the lawn all that blessed afternoon?Yes, I see you remember. Well, they met—O Lord! you can't beat this—they met Jim and the dairymaid walking out all properly in the wood, and Evie thought, until she came back and found me on the lawn, she seriously thought Jim was me. She was furious: I got her to confess that she was furious. Great Scott! she thought I was flirting with the dairymaid. I knew a maid worth two of her!"
Lady Oxted began to attend suddenly in the middle of this.
"And what did Mr. Francis say?" she asked. "Did he also think it was you?"
"I don't know. Evie didn't mention him, and then we began talking—well, we began talking about something else.—Poor old Geoff, how goes it? If you give me the flue, I'll poison your beef-tea, and you may lay it to that. It's all the Luck."
Lady Oxted sighed.
"Jack and Jill went up the hill," she remarked.
"Yes, you may laugh if you like," said Harry, "but I'm beginning to believe in the Luck. I paid my penalty, and now I'm getting the reward. Oh, a big one! Did anybody ever hear of such Luck?" he demanded.
"Laugh?" cried Lady Oxted. "Who talked of laughing? Of course, if Evie chooses to marry a man with unmistakable signs of incipient mania, and Mrs. Aylwin doesn't object, it's her own affair. But I wish I was her mother."
"Yes, that would be something," said Harry,in a tone of extreme indulgence. "It would be charming for you, as you can't be her husband. Poor aunt!"
"Thirty love," said Geoffrey.
Lady Oxted gathered up her card case and parasol.
"You just wait, my boy, till I get you to Oxted," she said truculently.
"Is Geoff going to Oxted?" asked Harry, throwing himself extravagantly on the sofa by him. "Geoff, Geoff, would you leave me alone, alone in London, like Jessica's first prayer? I will follow you, if it be on foot and begging my bread. I can not live without you. See Wilson Barrett," he explained, sitting upright again, and smoothing his tumbled hair.
Lady Oxted shrugged her shoulders, and shook a despairing head.
"Poor Evie!" she said. "Poor, dear Evie!"
Harry sprang up and stood with his back to the door.
"Now why 'Poor Evie'?" he asked. "Explain precisely why. You don't leave the room until you have explained."
"If you don't come away from that door and let me out," said Lady Oxted, "I shall ring the bell, Harry, continuously. This sort of bully-ragging is so good for a man with a splitting headache, and shattered by influenza! I always tell everybody how considerate you are."
"Geoff, have you got a headache?" asked Harry.
"No. Fight it out."
Lady Oxted cast one baleful glance at him, advanced to the bell, and made an awkward, unconvincing movement to indicate that she was pressing it. Harry burst into loud, rude laughter.
"Try again," he said. "You have to press the button in the centre of the bell, not a spot on the wall paper. More to your left."
"Forty love," said Geoffrey.
Lady Oxted turned away from the bell with dignity.
"I don't understand the difficulty some people feel about apologizing," she said. "I apologize fully for all I have said."
"Explain it," said Harry.
"There is no explanation known to me. I spoke at random; I have not the slightest idea what I meant. Let me out, Harry."
At this he granted her liberty, saw her to the door, and ran upstairs again.
"O Geoff!" he said. "She had on a big, broad-brimmed hat and little yellow shoes. I saw them."
"That all?" said Geoffrey. "Rather South-Sea islander for the park."
Harry sighed.
"Yes, I once used to think that sort of thing funny, too," he said. "Never mind; you can't know. However, there was the hat, and her face was underneath it."
"Now that is really extraordinary," said Geoffrey.
"The face? I should just think it was. It's the most extraordinary thing in the world. And it's mine, and mine is hers. Lord! whatever can she do with such an ugly mug?"
"Is that the end?" asked Geoffrey, without any show of impatience.
"No, you blamed idiot; that's only the beginning. She was walking, do you understand, with Mrs. Arbuthnot. So I thought, 'None of that now, woman!' and I just said so flat. At least I didn't say so, but they understood what I meant, and so we sat down on two little green chairs, and I paid twopence for them. Dirt cheap!"
"You and Mrs. Arbuthnot and she. I quite follow."
"Of course; oh! I'm not sure what happened to Mrs. Arbuthnot. She didn't go to heaven; at least I didn't see her there, so I suppose—oh, well, I suppose she stopped where she was. I dare say she's there now. So I said, 'Evie.'"
"And she said 'Harry,'" remarked Geoffrey.
Long brown fingers stole round his neck.
"Now, tell me the truth, like George Washington," said Harry, "were you listening?"
"No; I guessed. Take your hand away."
"Devilish smart of you, then! She did say 'Harry,' and I won't deny it. My name, I tell you, you malingering skunk; she meant me! She called me Harry. O Lord!"
"Well, it's altogether the most remarkable thing I ever heard," said Geoffrey. "And as thebell for lunch sounded ten minutes ago, I propose that you should tell me the rest afterward."
It was Geoffrey's first attempt at stairs since he had gone to bed, and he threw an arm round Harry's neck, and leaned his weight on him.
"And ten days ago," he said, "I met death and despair in the hall, and that was you. 'This is what comes of the Luck' thought I. O Harry, if I wasn't so shaky I'd fetch you such a whack in the ribs!"
And after the manner of the British youth, they quite understood each other.
The influenza party left London next day after lunch. Lord Oxted had brought a whole library of blue-books with him, out of which he hoped to establish an array of damaging facts against the Government, and his red pencil, as they sped out of London, had no sinecure. Mile after mile of the inconceivable meanness of house-backs fell behind them, and at last Lady Oxted consented to the partial opening of one of the carriage windows.
"There, that is a proper breath of air," she said. "Sniff it in, Geoffrey. But I will have no suburban microbes flying into my face. Oh, we are wrecks, we are wrecks, but we will stop at Oxted till we are refloated."
Lord Oxted frowned heavily, and scored the offending page.
"Is the man Colonial Secretary," he asked, "or is he the autocrat of all the Englands? And it never occurred to any of them, apparently, thatthere might be something in those grand pianos. I should have thought that somebody might have guessed that this immense importation of huge cases implied something. But I am wrong; nobody guessed it. They said they could not be expected to see through stone walls. Stone walls, indeed! They couldn't see through plate-glass windows."
"So the pianos turned out to be stone walls," said his wife.
"Yes; they were put up round Pretoria."
The heat in London had been intense; perhaps it was not less at Oxted; but there was a difference in its quality unnoticed by the thermometer, and after tea the two wrecks made themselves exceedingly comfortable on the lawn, and Lady Oxted, without warning, began the statement of her idea to the very ordinary person.
"Harry's marriage is fixed for the middle of November," she said. "Evie will have to go back to Santa Margarita first, and I hope she may persuade her mother to come over for it. It is now the middle of July; there are four months before he will be married. Much may happen in four months."
"As a rule very little does," remarked Geoffrey.
"In this case I sincerely hope that very little will," said she. "Geoffrey, I am not altogether happy about it."
"Why not?" he asked. "You told me you pushed Harry till he went and asked her. Didyou mean him to be refused? Or are you afraid that either of them will think they have made a mistake? Of course, they are both young."
Lady Oxted laughed.
"You funny old maid!" she said. "No, I am not afraid of that."
"Never mind me," he said. "What are you afraid of, then?"
Lady Oxted was silent so long that Geoffrey would have repeated his question had he not felt quite certain that she had heard it. As it was, it was a full half minute, an aeon of a pause in conversation, before she replied. Then:
"Of Mr. Francis," she said.
Geoffrey had just lit a match for his cigarette, but he held it so long that it burned down, and he threw it hastily away, as the flame scorched his finger-tips. The cigarette he put very carefully and absently back in his case.
"What on earth do you mean?" he asked.
"It was to tell you that—that I particularly wanted you to come down here. Listen."
Lady Oxted felt herself suddenly nervous, even when her only audience was the very ordinary person. She had thought the matter over in her own mind so constantly that she hoped she was familiarized with it, but when it came to speaking of it, she found she was not. Thus it was that she began very haltingly, and with frequent pauses.
"I feel sure that he is essentially opposed to the marriage," she said, "for reasons which I willsoon tell you; and when he professes to be so much delighted with it I conclude he is acting a part. Now one has always to be cautious in dealing with a man who is acting, until you know both what his part is and what he himself is. As regards Mr. Francis I know neither. I feel sure, however, that he is a very clever old man. Well?"
"But is it not pure assumption that he is acting a part?" asked Geoffrey.
"No; it is reasoned truth. I will tell you how I know it. The Sunday that Evie and I were down at Vail, Mr. Francis and Evie (Evie told me this, and Harry, as you heard yesterday, corroborated a part of it) walked in the afternoon in the wood just above the house, and suddenly came on one of the grooms—Jim, yes, his name was Jim—walking out with his young woman, who is dairymaid. Now, Jim, in appearance—you have seen him many times probably—is the very spit and image of Harry. Evie (they only had the most momentary glance of him) thought it actually was Harry, till she saw him half an hour later sleeping under a tree on the lawn. But it appears that Mr. Francis also thought it was Harry, for he said to himself half aloud, 'Ah, the foolish boy!' Now you, Geoffrey, have known Harry some time, and, well—have you ever known him behave as many young men do behave: talk to barmaids, flirt with waitresses, all that kind of thing?"
"Never; he never did such a thing. At Oxford we used to call him the womanthrope."
"Then explain to me what follows. Mr. Francis begged Evie not to be too hard on him. He said that Harry was honest, that his 'previous foolishnesses'—the exact expression, Evie tells me—had never been anything serious. Now you say there never were any."
"No, never," said Geoffrey, "not to my knowledge at least. Oh, I can go much further than that: I know there can not have been. Harry simply is not that kind of fellow."
"Then it appears to me that Mr. Francis only alluded to the harmless nature of Harry's previous foolishnesses in order to set Evie against him. A nice girl, you know, does not like that sort of thing. And how was it that it never occurred to Mr. Francis that the two figures they saw were Jim and his young woman? It is impossible that it should not, it seems to me. The two are engaged, Harry tells me; they often walk out together. Mr. Francis must have known that; he must also have known of Jim's extraordinary likeness to Harry."
"But the likeness deceived Miss Aylwin. By the way, had she ever seen Jim?"
"Yes; the evening before only."
"Yet she was deceived. Why not Mr. Francis also?"
Lady Oxted paused.
"It is very unlikely, but I grant you that it is possible. Take what I have told you alone, and it proves nothing. But there is more."
She was speaking less lamely now; the words had begun to come.
"You met Harry in the hall when you came back from having tea with me a fortnight ago," she said. "How did his face strike you? Was it very happy? And do you know the cause of it?"
"No; Harry did not tell me, though I asked him."
"Then I shall tell you," said Lady Oxted. "I know how his face struck me, for he came to see me immediately afterward. I thought all was over between him and Evie. Harry thought so, too, and his reason for it was a letter he had just received, of which he showed me a piece. In it Mr. Francis—I know it was he, Harry told me so afterward—said that Evie was engaged to an Italian marchese. Here again there was a certain foundation for his thinking so. It was true at any rate that last winter an Italian in Rome fell very violently in love with her, that he proposed to her. But Evie refused him point blank. The thing was talked about, for it was a very good match. But Mr. Francis tells Harry she is engaged. He may have been told so; again it is just possible, though not more than possible. Now take these two incidents together; in each Mr. Francis made, let us say, a mistake: on one occasion he mistook the groom for Harry; on the other he says that Evie is engaged to an Italian, whereas that was never true; she refused him. Now does a common motive seem to lie behind those two mistakes? Supposing for a momentthat these mistakes were—well—deliberate mistakes, very cleverly founded on fact, I grant—can you account for both of them by supposing one desire in Mr. Francis's mind?"
"I see what you mean," said Geoffrey.
"Say it, then; I want it said."
"You mean that Mr. Francis wished to prevent their engagement. Is that bald enough?"
"Yes; that will do. It is a possibility which must not be overlooked. He has failed, but I see no reason to suppose that anything has since happened which reconciles him to their marriage. His letter to Harry in answer to the announcement of his engagement was charming, perfectly charming. But so was his letter, in which he urged him to be brave and cut Evie out of his life with a firm hand. So also, no doubt, was his manner when he begged Evie to overlook Harry's Platonic little walk with a dairymaid."
Geoffrey felt vaguely uneasy. Now that these things were said to him, he knew that somewhere in the very inmost recesses of his brain there had lurked for some time a feeling of which he was ashamed—a secret, unaccountable distrust of this kind old man. It had been emphasized by the curious adventure of Dr. Armytage's door, and since then it had grown more alert, more ready to put up its head.
"Now why," continued Lady Oxted, speaking rapidly, "should he wish to separate the two? You would have thought—Harry thought and still thinks—that by this marriage Mr. Francis willfeel that the old stain of suspicion that for so long had been on his name, ever since the Harmsworth affair, will be removed. And Harry has good reason for thinking so: Mr. Francis himself told him that Evie's coming to Vail was the happiest thing that had happened to him for years. Why, then, should they not marry?"
"Perhaps Mr. Francis finds that the continual revival of those memories, which Miss Aylwin calls up, is too painful," said Geoffrey.
"Does that seem to you reasonable?" asked Lady Oxted, "and if reasonable, can mortal mind invent a more awful piece of selfishness?"
Geoffrey considered a moment.
"No, it does not seem to me reasonable," he said; "I recant that."
"Can you think of any other motive?"
"Ah! you are monstrous," said Geoffrey suddenly; "you suggest monstrous things."
"I have suggested nothing. I want to hear your suggestion. What is it, Geoffrey?"
"You mean that Mr. Francis does not want Harry to marry at all. You remember that he is Harry's heir. Do you not see how absurd such an idea is? Who ever heard of an old man, over seventy, trying to make his grand-nephew a celibate? You might as well hope to rear a child who should never see a fire or a book."
"Ah! you are shocked," said Lady Oxted, "but wait a moment. Do you remember what you told me about Dr. Godfrey and Dr. Armytage? Geoffrey, what is that sinister man doingat Vail? He is appalling, I tell you. He is one of the black spots on the medical profession. Heart specialist! He is a surgeon of terrible dexterity—unscrupulous, venal. What does Mr. Francis want with him?"
Geoffrey got up in great excitement.
"I will hear no more," he said, in a tremulous voice. "It is you who suggest things that I have to put into words. Tell me what you mean; say straight out what you suspect?"
Lady Oxted rose too.
"If I knew what I suspected, I would tell you," she said. "But I can't make out what it is. At any rate we have talked long enough for the present."
She paused a moment, then broke out again, her own anxiety—how deep she had never known till this minute—breaking all bounds.
"Promise me this," she cried. "Promise me you will be a good friend to Harry. Be much with him, be observant—not suspicious, but observant. Remember that I am afraid, though I do not know what of. See if you can not find out what it is that I fear. There, that is enough. You promise me that, Geoffrey?"
"I will not play detective," said he. "I both like and honour that old man."
"I do not ask you to play detective," she said. "I pray that your liking and honour for Mr. Francis may never be diminished. But be much with Harry, and be full of common sense. Come!"
"Yes, I will promise that," said he.
Harry left London at the end of the month, paid a couple of visits in England, then went to Scotland for the remainder of August, and loitered there, since he was at the same two houses as Evie till September had reached its second decade of days, and then travelled south again with her. She was on her way straight to Santa Margarita to spend the remainder of the month of months with her mother, and Harry saw her off by the boat express from Victoria, she having sternly and absolutely refused to let him do anything so foolish as to travel to Dover with her.
"You would propose coming to Calais next," she said, "and Calais is but a step to Paris. I know you, Harry. And—and how I hate the journey, and how I should love it if you were with me!"
"Oh, let me come!" said he.
"Not even to Herne Hill," and the train slid out of the vaulted gloom of the station.
Geoffrey joined him late on the same day, and next afternoon they set off together down to Vail. Stock brokering, it appeared, was like pheasants,quite impossible in September, and he was going to spend the remainder of the month with Harry, unless some unforeseen urgency called him back. This, he considered, was not in the least degree likely to happen, for the unforeseen so seldom occurs.
"The house is all upside down, Geoff," said Harry to him as they drove from the station; "and all the time which you do not employ in getting severe electric shocks over unprotected wires, you will probably spend in falling into hot and cold water alternately upstairs. The housemaids' closets seem to me just now the only really important thing in England. I thought it better not to tell you all this before we started, for fear of your not coming."
"Oh, I can always go back," said Geoffrey. "Is Mr. Francis there?"
"Just now he is, but he is going away in a few days," said Harry. "In fact, he is only waiting till I come, to put the unprotected wires into my hands."
"Is he well?"
"Yes, extraordinarily well, and he asked after you in his last letter to me. Also he seems wonderfully happy at the thought of my marriage. So we are both pleased. Well, I'm sure I don't wonder; it will be a sort of death blow to that tragedy twenty years old and more now, a sort of seal and attestation of the vileness of the suspicion. Besides, you know, it's pretty nice for any one to have Evie in the house always."
"Is he going to continue being with you, then?" asked Geoffrey.
"Certainly; as much as he will. Evie and I settled all that without any disagreement, thank you. He is also thinking of having a littleventre à terre, as somebody said, in town, a sort of little independence of his own. I am delighted that he will; six months ago he couldn't bear the thought of going about among people again, but now it is all changed: he will begin to live again, after all these years. Dear old fellow, what a good friend he has been to me! Fancy caring about people of twenty or so, when you are over seventy. What wonderful vitality!"
Whatever shadow of approaching cloud, so thought Geoffrey, might darken Lady Oxted's view of the future, it was clear that to Harry there could not have been a more serene horizon. Since that first afternoon down at Oxted he had not exchanged a further word with her or any one else on the subject, and by degrees that ghastly conversation had grown gradually fainter in his mind, and it was to him now more of the texture of a remembered nightmare than an actual experience. For several days afterward, it is true, it had remained very unpleasantly vivid to him; she had been so ingenious in her presentation of undeniable facts that at the time, and perhaps for a fortnight afterward, it had nearly seemed to him that Mr. Francis had been plotting with diabolical ingenuity against this match. If such were the case, his apparent delight at it assumed an aspectinfinitely grave and portentous; his smiles would have been creditable to a fiend. But as the sharper edge of memory grew dulled, these thoughts, which had never been quite sufficiently solid to be called sober suspicions, became gradually nebulous again. Two circumstances had been the foundation of Lady Oxted's theory, each separately capable of explanation, and in making a judgment so serious it was the acme of unfairness, so it seemed to him now, to put the two together and judge. Each must be weighed and considered on its separate merits, and if neither had weight alone, then neither had weight together. There had been darker insinuations to follow; at these Geoffrey now laughed, so baseless appeared their fabric. Dr. Armytage might or might not be a reputable man, but the idea of connecting his visit to Vail, when one remembered how long he had known Mr. Francis, with something sinister and unspoken with regard to Harry, was really a triumph for the diseased imagination which is one of the sequelæ of influenza.
Oddly enough, as if by thought transference, Harry's next words bore some relation to this train of ideas which had been passing through Geoffrey's mind.
"Do you remember that evening when we went to find Dr. Godfrey, Geoff?" he said. "Well, I have so often thought about it since that I have determined to tell Uncle Francis about it, and ask him to explain it all."
This appeared an excellent plan to Geoffrey, for, little as he believed in the solidity of Lady Oxted's bubbles of imagination, it would still be a good thing to have them pricked.
"Do," he said. "Ask him some time when I am there. I should like to see his face when his littleruseis exposed. It might be a useful lesson. Personally, I never know how to look when my littlerusesare discovered."
Harry laughed.
"There's an excellent explanation behind, you may be sure of that," he said.
Accordingly, at dinner that night, in a pause in the conversation, Harry suddenly asked:
"Seen Dr. Godfrey again, Uncle Francis?"
"No, I have had no occasion to send for him, I am thankful to say," he answered. "I have been wonderfully well these last two months."
"Geoff and I went to see him one night at 32 Wimpole Street," continued Harry. "Oh, we were not going to consult him. But we just went to his house."
It would have been hard to say whether a pause followed this speech. In any case it was but a moment before Mr. Francis broke out into his hearty, cheerful laugh.
"And I'll be bound you didn't go in!" he cried. "Dear Godfrey, he would have been delighted to see you, though. Ah, Harry! what a good thing you and I are friends! We are always finding each other out. So you actually went to 32 Wimpole Street, and found not Dr. Godfrey onthe plate, but Dr. Armytage. How did you get his address, you rascal?"
"Your 'Where is it?' was lying on your table the last night I was here, when I worked at the electric-light estimates. I turned to G."
"Simple," said Mr. Francis. "Everything is simple when you know all about it. And my explanation is simple too. I didn't want you to go to Armytage, and fuss yourself about me, so, when you asked me for his name, I told you, if you remember, his Christian name—Godfrey—and I am afraid I gave you the wrong address. He is a dear fellow, a dear good fellow, but the sort of man who warns you against tetanus, if you cut yourself shaving. He would certainly have alarmed you, how unnecessarily look at me now and judge. He knows too much; I am always telling him so. He knows how many things may go wrong, and he bears them all in mind. Yes, my dear boy, I deceived you purposely. Do you acquit me? I throw myself on your mercy, but I beg you to bear in mind how kindly were my intentions."
"Without a stain on your character," said Harry.
Coffee was brought in at this moment, Templeton as usual bearing the case of the Luck, which had been the centrepiece at dinner.
"Ah! they are going to put the Luck to bed," said Harry. "I drink to the Luck. Get up, Geoff."
Geoffrey rose in obedience to the toastmaster,and, looking across at Mr. Francis, saw that his hand trembled a little. His genial smile was there, but it seemed to Geoffrey, in that momentary glance he had of him over the flowers, that it was a smile rather of habit than happiness. His glass was full, and a few drops were spilled as he raised it to his mouth. The thing, trivial as it was, struck him with a curious sense of double consciousness: it seemed to him that this was a repetition of some previous experience, exact in every particular. But it passed off immediately, and the vague, rather uncomfortable impression it made on him sank below the surface of his mind. It was already dim as soon as it was made.
"So we are together again, we three," said Mr. Francis, when he had drunk to the Luck, and carefully watched its stowage in its case. "It is like those jolly times we had last Christmas, when this dear fellow came of age. What a chapter of little misfortunes he had too! When he was not slipping on the steps, he was falling into the fire; when he was not falling into the fire, he was catching a severe chill!"
"Not my fault," said Harry. "It was all the Luck!"
"Dear boy, you are always jesting about the Luck! Do be careful, Harry; if you do not take care, some day you will find that you have fancied yourself into believing it. Six, eight months have passed since then; what have you suffered since at the hands of fire and frost and rain?"
"Ah! don't you see?" cried Harry. "Thecurse came first; then the Luck itself. I met Evie. Is not that stupendous? Perhaps the curse will wake up again, and I shall sprain my ankle worse than before, and burn my hand more seriously, before—before the middle of November. I don't care; it's cheap, and I wonder they can turn out happiness at such a trifling cost. I suspect there's no sweating commission at the place where the old scoundrel who made the Luck has gone!"
Mr. Francis looked really pained.
"Come, come, Harry," he said gravely. "Let us go, boys. They will be wanting to clear away."
This implication of rebuke nettled Harry. He was a little excited, a little intoxicated with his joy of life, a little headstrong with youth and health, and he did not quite relish being pulled up like this, even though only before Geoffrey. But he did not reply, and with a scarcely perceptible shrug of his shoulders followed Mr. Francis out. Shortly after, his uncle got out his flute, and melodies of Corelli and Baptiste tinkled merrily under the portraits of the race.
Next day uncle and nephew had estate business to occupy them; "their work," Mr. Francis gaily declared, 'twould, like topmost Jargarus, take the morning, and Geoffrey was given a dog and a keeper and a gun to amuse himself till lunch time. He wanted nothing better, and soon after breakfast he was off and away for all he could find in wood and hedgerow. The stubbles onlyand the small brown bird were dedicated for to-morrow.
Mr. Francis and Harry worked on till one, but on the striking of that hour the latter revolted.
"I can't go on any more," he said. "I simply can't. Come out till lunch, Uncle Francis; it is only an hour."
Mr. Francis smiled and shook his head.
"Not to-day, dear boy," he replied; "there is this packet of letters I have to get through before the post. But do you get out, Harry, and sweep the cobwebs away."
Harry stood up, stretching himself after the long session.
"Cobwebs—what cobwebs?" he asked.
"Those in your curly head."
"There are no such cobwebs. O Uncle Francis, as we are talking of cobwebs, I want to get that summerhouse on the knoll put in order—the one close to the ice house, I mean. Have you the keys? By the way, which is which?"
Mr. Francis was writing, and, as Harry spoke, though he did not look up, his pen ceased travelling.
"Yes, a very good idea," he said, after a moment. "The keys are in the cabinet there; two of the same, the same key fits both. Indeed"—and his pen began slowly moving again—"indeed, you will find plenty of cobwebs there. The summerhouse is the one on the left as you ascend the knoll going from the house. Don't go plunging into the ice house by mistake. They are bothshuttered on the inside; it would be a good thing if you were to open all the windows, and let them get a good blow out. Shall I—oh, no! I must stick to my work."
Harry found the keys, and as he turned to leave the room—
"The one on the left is the summerhouse?" he asked again.
"Yes, the one on the left," said Mr. Francis, again fully absorbed in his writing.
Harry, key in hand, went out whistling and hatless. The morning was a page out of heaven, and as he strolled slowly up the steep, grassy bank, where the two outhouses stood, with the scents and sounds of life and summer vivid in eye and nostril, he felt that his useful occupation of the hours since breakfast had been a terrible waste, when he might have been going quietly and alert with Geoffrey through cover and up hedgerow, to the tapping of sticks and the nosing of the spaniels. However, he had been through the farm accounts with minute care; there would be no call for such another morning till the closing of the next quarter.
The two buildings toward which he went were exactly alike, of a hybrid kiosk sort of appearance, fantastic and ridiculous, yet vaguely pleasing. Each was octagonal, with three blank sides, four windows, and a door. Still whistling and full of pleasant thoughts, he fitted the key into the lock of the one to the left hand, and turning it, walked in. The interior was dark, for, as Mr.Francis had told him, all the windows were shuttered inside, and coming out of the bright sunlight, for a moment or two he saw nothing. For the same reason, no doubt, it struck him as being very cold.
He had taken three or four rather shuffling steps across the paved floor when suddenly he stopped. Somehow, though he saw nothing, his ear instinctively, hardly consciously, warned him that the sound of his steps was not normal. There should have been—the whole feeling was not reasoned, but purely automatic and instinctive—no echo to them in so circumscribed a building, but an echo there was, faint, hollow, and remote, but audible. At this his whistling stopped, his steps also, and drawing a loose match from his trousers pocket he struck a match. Less than another pace in front of him was a black space, on which the match cast no illumination; it remained black.
Harry felt a little beady dew break out on his forehead and on the short down of his upper lip, but his nerves did not tell him that he was afraid. He waited exactly where he was, till the match had burned more bravely, and then he chucked it forward over the blackness. It went through it, and for two or three seconds no sound whatever came to him. Then he heard a little expiring hiss.
Still not conscious of fright, he went back, with the light of another match, for the door had swung shut behind him, and in another momentwas out again, with the sweet, soft sunshine round him and the firm grass beneath his feet. He looked round; yes, he had gone to the left-hand building, the one his uncle had told him was the summerhouse. He had nearly, also, not come out again.
At this sobering reflection a belated spasm of fear, for he had felt none at the moment of danger, seized him, but laying violent hold of himself he marched up to the other door, unlocked it, and throwing it open, waited on the threshold till his eyes had got accustomed to the darkness. Then seeing a couple of wicker tables and some garden chairs peer through the gloom, he went in turn to each window, unshuttered it, and threw it open.
At this moment the iron gate leading into the woods close behind clanged suddenly, and with a jump that testified to his jangled nerves he looked out. It was Geoffrey, gun on shoulder, coming back to the house. Harry leaned out of the window.
"Come in here, Geoff," he said.
Geoffrey looked round.
"Halloo; have you been opening the old summerhouse?" he asked.
"Yes," said Harry, very deliberately, "I've been opening the old summerhouse."
Geoffrey handed his gun to the keeper, who was close behind him, and vaulted in through one of the open windows.
"Rare good morning we've had," he said."You should have come, Harry. Why, you look queer! What's the matter?"
Harry had sat down in one of the garden chairs, and was leaning back, feeling suddenly faint.
"I've had the devil of a fright," he said. "I went gaily marching into the ice house by mistake, and only just stopped on the lip of the ice tank or the well—I don't know which it was. Either would probably have done."
"Lord! how can you be such an ass?" cried Geoffrey. "You knew that one of the two was an ice house, and yet you go whistling along out of the sunshine into pit-mirk, and never reflect that the chances are exactly even that next moment you will be in Kingdom Come."
"Give me a cigarette, and don't jaw," said Harry, and he smoked a minute or two without speaking.
"Say nothing about this to my uncle," he said at length. "I believe it would frighten him to death. I asked him just before I came out which was the summerhouse, and he told me the left-hand one of the two as you go up from the house. Well, he made a mistake. It turns out that the left-hand one is the ice house."
"What?" shouted Geoffrey, his whole talk with Lady Oxted suddenly springing into his mind like a Jack-in-the-box.
"Can't you hear what I say?" asked Harry, rather irritable from his fright. "Uncle Francis had forgotten which was which, and I nearly went,as you put it, in Kingdom Come in consequence. There's nothing to shout about. For God's sake, don't let him know what happened! I really believe it might be the death of him."
"It was nearly the death of you," said Geoffrey.
"Well, it wasn't quite, and so there's the end of it. Anyhow, don't tell him; I insist on your not telling him. Come, let's go down to the house. I'm steadier now; I don't remember being frightened at the moment, but when there was no longer any reason to be frightened my knees withered under me."
As they approached the house across the upper lawn, they saw Mr. Francis, some distance off, in one of the shady alleys going down to the lake, walking away from them. The Panama hat with its bright ribbon was on his head, at his mouth was the flute, and quick trills and runs of some light-hearted southern dance floated toward them. Suddenly, it would seem, the gaiety of his own music took irresistible hold on him, for, with a preliminary pirouette and a little cut in the air, his feet were taken by the infection, and the two lads lost sight of him round a bend in the path, performing brisk impromptu steps to his melody.
They looked at him, then at each other a moment, in silence, Harry with a dawning smile, Geoffrey with a deepening frown.
"I wouldn't tell him about the ice-house affair for ten thousand pounds!" said Harry."Geoff, I wonder if you and I will be as gay as that when we are over seventy years old?"
"It is highly improbable," said Geoffrey.
It still wanted a quarter of an hour to lunch time, and Harry went indoors to finish up. Geoffrey, however, remained outside, and, as soon as Harry was gone, began playing a very curious and original game by himself. This consisted in stalking Mr. Francis, and was played in the following manner: He hurried over the grass to the entrance of the path where they had last seen him, and followed cautiously from bush to bush. Soon he had the sound of the flute again to guide him, but after a little, hearing that it was getting louder, he retired on his own steps, and from the shade of certain rhododendrons observed the cheery old gentleman coming back again along the path he had taken. Mr. Francis passed not thirty yards from the stalker; then the music ceased, and he crossed the lawn in the direction of the two kiosks. At that a sudden nameless thrill of horror took hold of Geoffrey, and creeping after him till both kiosks had cleared the angle of the house, he observed his doings with a fascinated attention.
Mr. Francis went first to the ice house and turned the handle of the door, but apparently found it locked. He stood there a few seconds, flute in hand, and, taking off his Panama hat, passed a handkerchief over his forehead, for the day was very warm. Then it would seem that the open windows of the summerhouse caught hiseye, and in turn trying that door, he found it open. He did not, however, enter, but merely held the door open, standing on the threshold. Then he turned, and rather slowly—for the grass, maybe, was slippery from a long drought—began to descend again toward the house. Geoffrey, on his part, made a wide circuit through the shrubbery, and emerged on to the gravel in front of the house just as Mr. Francis entered. The latter saw him, but apparently had no word for him, and on the moment the bell for lunch rang.
Their meals usually were merry and talkative: lunch to-day, perhaps, only proved the rule, for it was eminently silent. Geoffrey was gloomy and preoccupied, his mind in an endless tangle of indecision, shocked, horrified, yet ever telling himself that this nightmare of a morning could not be true. Harry also, his nerves still on edge with the experience of the last hour, was inclined to brevity of question and answer; while the brisk cheerfulness of Mr. Francis, which as a rule would cover the paucity of two, seemed replaced by a kind of dreamy tenderness; he sighed, ate little; it was as if his mind dwelt on some regret of what might have been. Perhaps the weather was in part responsible for this marked decay of elasticity, for the clear warmth of the morning had given place to a dead sultriness of heat; the atmosphere had grown heavy and full of thunder. At last, as they rose from a very silent meal—
"I went up to the summerhouse this morning, Uncle Francis," said Harry, with the air of aman who had thought carefully over what he was going to say. "It wants putting in order, for it is damp and very cobwebby, as you warned me. But it would be worth while to do it; there is a charming view from the windows. I shall send a couple of servants up to clean it, and make it a bit more habitable."
"Do, dear boy, do," said Mr. Francis. "Dear old place, dear old place! Your father used to be so fond of it!"
The threatening of a storm grew every moment more imminent, and the two young men, who had intended to ride over the downs, decided to postpone their expedition. They stood together at the window of the smoking room, watching the awful and mysterious mobilization of cloud, the hard black edges of thunder, ragged as if bitten off some immense pall, coming up against what wind there was, and rising higher every moment toward the zenith, ready to topple and break. Once a scribble of light, some illegible, gigantic autograph was traced against the blackness, and the gongs of thunder, as yet remote, testified its authenticity. Before long a few large drops of rain jumped like frogs on the gravel path below the windows, and a hot local eddy of unaccountable wind, like a grappling iron let down from the moving vapours above, scoured across the lawn, stirring and rattling the dry-leaved laurels in the shrubbery, and expunging as it passed the reflections on the lake. It died away; the little breeze there had been drooped like abroken wing; the willows by the water were motionless as in a picture; a candle on the lawn would have burned with as steady a flame as in a glass shade within a sealed room. The fast-fading light was coppery in colour, and the darkness came on apace as the great bank of congested cloud shouldered its way over the sky, but, despite the gloom, there was a great precision of outline in hill and tree.
Harry turned from the window.
"We shall have to light the lamps," he said. "It is impossible to see indoors. Really, it looks like the day of judgment! Shall we have a game of billiards, Geoff?"
As he spoke, the door was opened with hurried stealth, and Mr. Francis, pale and strangely shrunken to the appearance, came in.
"Ah! here you are," he said; "I was afraid you had gone out, and that I was alone. Is it not horrible? We are going to have a terrific storm. What a relief to find you here! I—I should have been so anxious if you had been out in this!"
"We were just going to the billiard room," said Harry. "Come with us, Uncle Francis; we will play pool, or cut in and out."
"Thank you, dear Harry, but I could not possibly play with the storm coming on," he said. "Thunder always affects me horribly. But if you will let me, I will come with you, and perhaps mark for you. I can not bear being alone in a thunderstorm."
They went to the billiard room, and Harry litthe lamps, while Mr. Francis, creeping like a mouse round the walls, and taking advantage of the cover of the curtains, began hurriedly closing the shutters.
"Oh, why do you do that?" asked Harry. "We shall not see the lightning."
Even as he spoke a swift streamer of violet light shot down, bisecting the square of window where Mr. Francis was nervously tugging at a shutter, and for a moment showing vividly the dark and stagnant shapes of the drooping trees. Mr. Francis's hand fell from the shutter as if it had been struck, and with a little moaning sigh he covered his face with his hands. Almost simultaneously a reverberating crash, not booming or rumbling, but short and sharp, answered the lightning, and Mr. Francis hurried with crouching steps to the sofa.
"Put up all the shutters, I implore you, Harry!" he said in a stifled voice. "Shut them quickly, and draw the curtains over them. Ah!" he cried, with a whistling intake of breath, "there it is again!"
His terror was too evident and deep-seated not to be pitied, and the two young men hastily closed all the shutters, drawing the curtains over them, as Mr. Francis had requested.
"Is it done? is it done?" he asked in a muffled voice, his face half buried in a sofa cushion. "Be quick—oh, be quick!"
For an hour he sat there with closed eyes and finger-muffled ears, while the storm explodedoverhead, the picture of cowering terror, while the other two played a couple of games. From time to time, if there had been a comparatively long interval of quiet, he would begin to take a little interest in the play, and once, even when for some five minutes the steady tattoo of the rain on the leads overhead had continued unbroken by any more violent sound, he went to the marking board. But next moment a dirling peal made the rest drop from his hand, and at a shuffling run he went back to the sofa, and again hid ears and eyes.
The storm passed gradually away, the sharp crack of the overhead thunder gave place to distant and yet more distant rumblings; and the afternoon was not over when Mr. Francis, cautiously opening a chink of shutter, let in a long, dusty ray of sunshine. The heavens were clear again, washed by the rain, and of a most pellucid blue, and Mr. Francis, recovering with mercurial rapidity, went gaily from window to window, unshuttering.
"What a relief, what a blessed relief!" he cried. "How delicious is this freshness after the storm! Ah, the beauty of the world! I drink it in; it is meat and drink to me."
He nodded to the others.
"I must go out," he said; "I must go out and see if this horrible storm that is past has done any damage. I am afraid some trees may have been struck by that cruel lightning, in all their strength and beauty. It is terrible to think of, that exquisite,delicate life, rent, shattered in a moment by the flame!"
He went out, and the two others looked at each other like augurs.
"Nerves," said Harry.
"Bad conscience," said Geoffrey, and these were all the comments made by either on Mr. Francis's hour of purgatory.
It was too late when the storm was over to go the intended ride, and after tea Harry and Geoffrey sauntered aimlessly out, played red Indians again among the islands of the lake (a game which, on the present occasion, was far less delightful to Harry than when he had played it last), and finally came homeward as dusk fell. As they passed down the box hedge, it suddenly occurred to Harry (so imaginative had been the realism with which his friend had played red Indians) that Geoffrey was perhaps capable of seeing the secret of the inside passage in a suitably romantic light, and he took him round to the back of the hedge.
"A mystery, Geoff, a deep, dark mystery," he said, and shutting his eyes against the springing twigs which had overgrown the door, jumped into the hedge. The elastic fibres of the box flew back like a spring into their normal position; and Geoffrey, who for the moment had been intent, with back turned, on the lighting of a cigarette, looked up when that operation was over, and found that Harry had vanished as suddenly and as completely as any lady in the cabinet trick. In the dusk it was impossible, except to any one whoknew where to look, to see any difference of uniformity in the texture of the hedge, and the illusion of his vanishing was complete.
"Here, Geoff, come in," said Harry, still invisible, "and don't put out that match. It is darker than the plague of Egypt!"
"Come where—how? Where are you?"
Harry laughed, and held back the twigs.
"That was a great success," he said. "And—O Geoffrey—if you have a spark of the romantic left in you, and I think you have, for you were a masterly red Indian, this ought to make it blaze. Look! a tunnel right down the hedge. Isn't that secret and heavenly? Think how many plots we might overhear, if people were only kind enough to make them as they went down the road! Think of the stirring rescues you could make, hiding here till the pursuit went by!"
Geoffrey was quite suitably impressed.
"I call this really ancestral," he said. "Talk low, Harry; we may be overheard. Where does it lead to?"
"Right down to the house, and comes out by another door like the one we went in by, just opposite the gun-room window. Geoff, if you'll conceal yourself here all to-morrow I'll bring your meals when I can slip away without attracting attention. You mustn't smoke, I'm afraid."
"Oh, if only there was the smallest cause for doing so!" said Geoff. "Does no one know it, except you and me?"
"I don't think so. I daren't ask Uncle Francisif he does, for fear he does. I shall tell Evie, but no one else. Lord! what a baby one is! Why does this give me pleasure? There! just peep out at the end, Geoffrey, so that if you are pursued from the house you will know where the door is; but be cautious. Now we'll walk up again inside, and steal softly out where we came in, else some one from the house might see us. No, I think not another match. It's too risky."
"I should like to give one low whistle," said Geoffrey.
"Just as a signal. All right."
Even as the whistle was on his lips, there came from somewhere close at hand a sudden gush of notes from a flute, and the two stood there huddled against each other in the narrow passage, petrified into sudden silence and immobility, but shaken with inward laughter. Peering, on tiptoe as it were, through the hedge, they could just make out the figure of Mr. Francis, walking airily along the grass border by the edge of the drive, on his way to the house. Soon his feet sounded crisp and distant on the gravel, and the two idiots breathed again.
"A near thing," said Harry. "Let us go back. Geoff, if you had lit that match, we should almost certainly have been discovered."
Mr. Francis left early the next morning for London, to see two or three little flats, one of which he thought might perhaps be compassable by the modest sum he was prepared to give for apied-à-terrein town. None of them were in veryfashionable districts; the one which seemed to him most promising was in Wigmore Street, and this held forth the additional advantage of being near Cavendish Square. Harry had telegraphed to the care-taker there to get a couple of rooms ready for his uncle, and without his knowledge (for he would certainly have deprecated such a step) he had sent up from Vail a kitchen maid, who was also a very decent cook, in order to make him more comfortable. Mr. Francis had breakfasted, and the trap to take him to the station was already at the door when the two young men came down, and he hailed them genially from the threshold as his luggage was put up.
"Good-morning, dear boys!" he cried. "You will have a lovely day for your shoot. It is perfect after yesterday's storm. Yes, I am just off, I am sorry to say. I shall stop at least a week in town, I expect, Harry; but I will let you know when I am thinking of coming back."
Harry went out just as his uncle climbed nimbly up into the dogcart; Geoffrey had stayed in the hall, and was glancing at the paper.
"Uncle Francis," he said, "do take that more expensive flat in De Vere Gardens, if you find it suits you better. Don't consider the extra expense at all; I can manage that for you perfectly."
"You are too generous to me, dear Harry," said the other, stretching down and grasping his hand. "But no, dear boy, I could not think of it. I shall be immensely comfortable in that onein Wigmore Street. But thank you, thank you.—Luggage all in? Drive on, Jim," he said abruptly.
Harry turned indoors and went across the hall to the dining room. But Mr. Francis, after having driven not more than a couple of hundred yards, stopped the cart, and descending, began to walk toward the house. Halfway there he stopped, and stood for a moment lost in thought; then, with an air of a taken decision, went on more quickly. On the threshold again he stopped, biting his lip, and frowning heavily.
At that moment Geoffrey got up from his paper, and crossing the door into the entrance hall, on his way to join Harry in the dining room, saw him through the glass door, standing like this, and went to see why he had come back. And the face that met him was the face of old Francis—a wicked, malignant mask, even as Harry had seen it that day when the sun shone brightly on the picture. But next moment it changed and melted.
"I thought you had gone," said Geoffrey. "Have you forgotten something?"
"Yes, my flute," said Mr. Francis, not looking at him; and picking it up from where it lay on the piano, he went out again, and walked quickly up the drive to where the dogcart was waiting.
"That was not what he came for," thought Geoffrey to himself.