the short winter's day was drawing to its close, and twilight, the steel and silver twilight of a windless frost, falling in throbs of clear dusk over an ice-bound land. the sun, brilliant but cold as an electric lamp, had not in all the hours of its shining been of strength sufficient to melt the rime congealed during the night before, and each blade of grass on the lawns, each spray and sprig on the bare hedgerows, had remained a spear of crystals minute and innumerable. the roofs of house and cottage sparkled and glimmered as with a soft internal lustre in the light of the moon, which had risen an hour before sunset, and the stillness of great cold, a thing more palpably motionless than even the stricken noonday of the south, gripped all in its vice. silent, steadfast lights had sprung up and multiplied in the many-windowed village, but not a bird chirped nor dog barked. labourers were home from the iron of the frozen fields, doors were shut, and the huge night was at hand.
this sequestered village of vail lies in a wrinkle of the great wiltshire downs, and is traversed by the bath road. the big inn, the vail arms, seems to speak of the more prosperous days of coach and horn, but now its significance to the shrill greyhounds of the railway is of the smallest, and they pass for the most part without even a shriek of salute. about a mile beyond it to the outward-bound traveller stands the big house, screened by some ten furlongs of park, and entering the gate he will find himself in a noble company of secular trees, beech in the majority, and of stately growth. shortly before the house becomes visible a spacious piece of meadow land succeeds to the park; thence the road, passing over a broad stone bridge which spans the chalk stream flowing from the sheet of water above, is bounded on either side by terraced lawns of ancient and close-napped turf, intersected at intervals by gravel walks, and turning sharply to the right, follows a long box hedge once cut into tall and fantastic shapes. but it seems long to have lacked the shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night hag into things inhuman. here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings[pg 3] stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction.
the end of one of the wings of the house, which was built round three sides of a quadrangle, abutted on to this hedge so closely that a peacock with thick, bloated tail, peered into the gun-room window; in the centre of the gravel sweep rose a bronze triton fountain bearded, like an old man, with long dependence of icicle. a bitter north wind had accompanied the early days of the frost, and this icy fringe had grown out sideways from the lip of the basin, blown aside even as it congealed. flower beds, a ribbon of dark, untenanted earth, ran underneath the windows, which rose in three stories, small-paned and jacobean. as dark fell, lights sprang out in the walls as the stars in the field of heaven, but to right and left of the front door there came through a row of windows, yet uncurtained, a redder and less constant gleam than the shining of oil or wax, now growing, now diminishing, leaping out at one moment to a great vividness, at the next suddenly dying down again, so that in the corners of the room there was a continual battle of shadows. now, as the flames from the wood burning on the great open hearth grew dim, whole battalions of them would collect and gather again; with the kindling of some fresh stuff, they would be routed and disappear. this fitfulness of illumination played also strange tricks with the tapestries that hung on two of the four sides of the hall; figures started suddenly into being and were[pg 4] blotted out before the eye had clearly visualized them, and in the inconstancy of the light a nervous man might say to himself that stir and movement were going on among them; again they rode to hounds, or took the jesses off the hawk.
the present is the heir of all the achievement of former ages, and while this great house with its mile-long avenue, its tapestries, its pictures, its air of magnificent english stability, finely represented all that had gone before, all that was going on now was inclosed in the two large arm-chairs drawn close to this ideal fire, in each of which sat a young man. they talked, but in desultory fashion, with frequent but not awkward pauses of some length, for any social duty of keeping the conversation going was to them quite outside a practical call. they had been shooting all this superb, frosty day, and the return to warmth and indoors, though productive of profound content, does not conduce to loquacity.
"yes, a bath would be a very good thing," said one; "but it is perhaps a question whether in the absolutely immediate future tea would not be a better!"
this was too strong a suggestion to be merely called a hint, and the other rose.
"sorry, geoffrey," he said, "i never ordered tea. i was thinking—no, i don't think i was thinking. tea first, bath afterward," he added, meditatively.
geoffrey langham stroked an imperceptible mustache.
[pg 5]
"that's what i was thinking," he said; "and i am glad to see you appreciate the importance of little things, harry. little things like tea and baths matter far the most."
"anyhow they occur much the oftenest," said lord vail.
"i was beginning to be afraid tea wasn't going to occur at all," said geoffrey.
harry vail appeared to consider this.
"you were wrong then," he said, "and you are on the way to become a sensuous voluptuary."
"on the way?" said geoffrey. "i have arrived. ah! and tea is following my excellent example."
the advent of lamps banished the mustering and dispersal of the leaping shadows and threw the two figures seated on either side of the tea table into strong light, and, taken together, into even stronger contrast. the birthright of a good digestion, you would say, had been given to each, and for no mess of pottage had either bartered the clear eye and firm leanness of perfect health; but apart from this, and a certain lithe youthfulness, it would have been hard at first sight even, when resemblances are more obvious than differences, to see a single point of likeness between the two. geoffrey langham, that sensuous voluptuary, seemed the seat and being of serene english cheerfulness, and his face, good-looking from its very pleasantness, contrasted strongly with that of the other, which was handsome in spite of a marked and grave reserve, that a[pg 6] stranger might easily have mistaken for sullenness. indeed, many who might soon have ceased to be strangers had done so; and though harry vail had perhaps no enemies, he was in the forlorner condition of having very few friends. indeed, had he been made to enumerate them, his list would have begun with geoffrey, and it is doubtful whether it would not also have ended with him.
but these agreeable influences of tea and light seemed to produce a briskening effect on the two, and their talk, which, since they came in, had touched a subject only to dismiss it, settled down into a more marked channel.
"yes, it is a queer sort of coming-of-age party for me," said lord vail, "and it really was good of you to come, geoffrey. i wonder whether any one has ever come of age in so lonely a manner. i have only one relative in the world who can be called even distantly near. he comes this evening—oh, i told you that."
"your uncle," said geoffrey.
"great-uncle, to be accurate. he is my grandfather's youngest brother, and, what is so odd, he is my heir. one always thinks of heirs as being younger than one's self."
"cut him off with a shilling," said geoffrey.
"well, there isn't much more in any case, except this great barrack of a house. what there is, however, goes to him. and it can hardly be expected that he will marry and have children now."
[pg 7]
"how old is he?" asked geoffrey.
"something over seventy."
"and after him?"
"the lord knows! anybody; the first person you meet if you walk down piccadilly perhaps; perhaps you, perhaps the prime minister. honestly, i haven't any idea."
"marry then, at once," said geoffrey, "and disappoint the man in the street, and the prime minister, your uncle, and me."
harry vail got up and stood with his back to the fire, stretching out his long-fingered hands to the blaze behind him.
"what advice!" he said. "you might as well advise me to have a greek nose. some people have it, some do not; it is fate."
"marriage is a remarkably common fate," remarked geoffrey, "commoner than a greek nose. i have seen many married people without it."
"it is commoner for certain sorts of people," said harry; "but you know i——" and he stopped.
"well?" asked the other.
"i am not of those sorts—the sorts who go smiling through the world and are smiled on in return. it was always the same with me. i am not truculent, or savage, or sulky, i believe, but somehow i remain friendless. i should be a hermit if there were any nowadays."
"liver!" said geoffrey decidedly. "the fellow of twenty-one who says that sort of thing about himself has got liver. 'self-analysis, or[pg 8] the sedentary life,' a tract by geoffrey langham. here endeth the gospel."
harry smiled.
"i don't think about my character, as a rule," he said. "i don't lead a sedentary life, and i haven't got liver. but if one is a recluse it is as well to recognise the fact. i haven't got any real friends like everybody else."
"thank you," said geoffrey; "don't apologize."
"i shall if i like; indeed, i think i will. no one but a friend would have come down here."
"oh, i don't know about that," said the other; "i would stay with people i positively loathed for shooting no worse than we had to-day. in the matter of friends, what you said was inane. you might have heaps of friends if you chose. but you don't find friends by going into a room alone and locking the door behind you."
"ah! i do that, do i?" said harry, with a certain eager interest in his tone.
"just a shade. you might have heaps of friends."
"that may be, or may not. it is certain that i have not. oh, well, this is unprofitable. take a cigarette from the recluse."
they smoked in silence a minute or two.
"your uncle?" asked geoffrey; "he comes to-night, you said."
"yes; i expect him before dinner. you've never seen him?"
[pg 9]
"never. what is he like?"
harry pointed to a picture that hung above the fireplace.
"like that," he said—"exactly like that."
geoffrey looked at it a moment, shading his eyes from the lamp.
"fancy-dress ball, i suppose?" he said.
"no; the costume of the period," said harry. "it is not my uncle at all, but an ancestor of sorts. the picture is by holbein, but, oddly enough, it is the very image of uncle francis."
"francis vail, second baron," spelled out geoffrey, from the faded lettering on the frame.
"yes, his name was francis, too."
"what is that great cup he is holding?" asked the other.
"ah! i wondered whether you would notice that. i will show it you this evening. at least, i am certain that what i have found is it."
"it looks rather a neat thing," said geoffrey. "but i can't say as much for the second baron, harry. he seems to me a wicked old man."
"there is no doubt that he was. among other charming deeds, he almost certainly killed his own father. he was smothered in debt, came down here to try to get his father to pay up for him, and met with a pretty round refusal, it appears. that night the house was broken into, and the old man was found murdered in his bed. the burglar seems to have been a curious man; he took nothing—not a teaspoon."
[pg 10]
"good lord! i am glad i'm not of ancestral family. which is the room, the room?"
harry laughed.
"the one at the end of the passage upstairs. shall i tell them to move your things there?"
"that is true hospitality," said geoffrey; "but i won't bother you. do either of them walk?"
"francis does. so if you meet that gentleman about, and find he is unsubstantial, you will know that you have seen a ghost."
"and if substantial, it will only be your uncle."
"exactly; so you needn't faint immediately."
geoffrey got up and examined the picture with more attention.
"if your uncle is like that," he said, "i'm not so sure that i wouldn't sooner meet the ghost."
"i'm afraid it is too late to put him off now," said harry; "and, unless there is a railway accident, you will certainly meet him at dinner. but i don't understand your objection to my poor old ancestor's portrait. i have always wondered that such an awful old wretch could be made to look so charming."
"there is hell in his eyes!" said geoffrey.
harry left his chair and leaned on the chimney-piece also, looking up at the picture.
"certainly, if you think he looks wicked," he said, "you will see no resemblance between him and my uncle. uncle francis is a genial, pink-faced old fellow, with benevolent white hair.[pg 11] when i used to come down here, years ago, before my father's death, for the holidays, he always used to be awfully good to me. but he has been abroad the last three years, and i haven't seen him. but i remember him as the most charming old man."
"then, in essentials, he is not like that portrait," said geoffrey, turning away. "well, i'm for the bath."
"after you. turn on the hot water when you're out, geoff."
harry did not immediately sit down again when his friend left him, but continued for a little while to look at the second baron, trying to see in it what geoffrey had seen, what he himself had always failed to see. he moved from where he stood to where geoffrey had been standing, still looking at it, when suddenly, no doubt by some curious play of light on the canvas, there flitted across the face for a moment some expression indefinably sinister. it was there but for a flash, and vanished again, and by no change in his point of view could he recapture it. soon he gave up the attempt, and, with only an idle and fleeting wonder at the illusion, he sat down, took up a book and yawned over a page that conveyed nothing to him. then frankly and honestly he shut it up, and lay comfortably back in his chair, looking at the fire. he must even have dropped into a doze, for, apparently without transition, in the strange unformulated fashion of dreams, he thought that his uncle had come, dressed (and[pg 12] this did not seem remarkable) in the fashion of the holbein portrait, and having greeted him with his well-remembered, hearty manner, had sat down in the other of the two arm-chairs; and, though unconscious of having gone to sleep, he certainly came to himself with a start, to find the chair opposite untenanted, and the sound of his own name ringing in his ears. immediately afterward it was repeated, and, looking up to the gallery that ran across one side of the hall and communicated with certain of the bedrooms, he saw geoffrey leaning over in his dressing-gown.
"bath's ready," he said; "and the portrait is looking at you."
"thanks. i've been to sleep, i think. did you call me more than once, geoff?"
"no; the other time it was the second baron."
harry was still a little startled.
"you really only called once?" he asked again.
"yes; only once. why?"
"nothing. halloo! i hear wheels. that must be my uncle. turn the hot water off, there's a good chap. i must just see him before i come upstairs."
