harry was in the most extravagantly high spirits this morning, and at breakfast the two laughed over the most indifferent trivialities like schoolboys. stories without wit and of the bluntest kind of point, rude personal remarks, repartees of the most obvious and futile kind, were enough to make one or other, and usually both, fit to choke with meaningless laughter. to geoffrey, at least, there was great and conscious cause for a mounting spiritual barometer in the departure of mr. francis. all yesterday, since he had seen him tripping up to the ice house after harry's escape, he had grown increasingly aware of a creepiness of the flesh which his neighbourhood or the thought of him produced. he had not slept well during the night, and had kept awaking from snatches of nightmare dozing, in which sometimes mr. francis, sometimes the figure of the portrait of old francis, would be enticing harry on to some dim but violent doom. now, like some infernal piper of hamelin, mr. francis would precede harry, playing on his flute and drawing him ever nearer to a bank of lurid cloud, out of which from time to time leaped[pg 235] crooked lightning; now he would have him affectionately by the arm, and walk with him chatting and laughing toward a little house that stood on rising ground. the house, to the tongue-tied dreamer who longed to warn his friend, but could not, kept changing in form: now it would stand alone, now it would be but one in a countless row of houses all alike, stretching to left and right, from horizon to horizon, but whether solitary or among a hundred identical with it, he knew that there lurked there a danger of vague and fatal kind. sometimes it was the beams and very stones of it that were ready to fall as soon as the door was opened; sometimes every window of it he knew would bristle with shooting flames as soon as harry set foot within it; sometimes he could see that it was in reality no house at all, but a black pit, infinite in depth, from which rose an icy miasma. yet, in whatever form harry's companion appeared, and in whatever form the house, when they were close to it mr. francis would push harry suddenly forward with an animal cry of gratified hate, and geoffrey would start from his dream in a sweat of terror. then there was another shocking point: the man who walked with harry was indefinite and changeable; he would start with him in the image of mr. francis, and they would yet be but a stone's throw on their walk, when it was mr. francis no more, but the old baron of the holbein picture. sometimes, evie's face would look out in panic terror from an upper window, and the dreamer could see her[pg 236] wave her hands and hear her scream a warnings but the two apparently could neither see nor hear her, and drew steadily nearer that house of death.
but the sanity of the morning sun, the crisp chill of his bath, above all, the departure of mr. francis, restored geoffrey to his normal level, and the normal once reached, the pendulum swung over to the other side by as much as it had fallen short during these nervous terrors of the night; and he ate with a zest and appetite more than ordinary, and a keen and conscious relish for the day. even at the end of this ridiculous meal, when he had already laughed to exhaustion, a fresh spasm suddenly seized him, and harry paused, teacup in hand, to know the worst.
"oh, it is nothing," said geoffrey; "indeed, it didn't strike me as at all funny at the time. but as i came across the hall, there was mr. francis at the door, though i had heard the dogcart start. he had come back for something he had forgotten. guess what it was—i only give you one guess."
harry's hand began to tremble and the corners of his mouth to break down.
"his fl—flute!" he said in quivering tones.
"right!" shouted geoffrey. "and i wonder—oh, oh, i hurt!—i wonder whether he will do steps round cavendish square to-night, playing on it!"
harry had begun to drink his tea a moment too soon.
they smoked a cigarette in the hall, geoffrey[pg 237] eager to be off; harry, contrary to his habit, strangely inclined to loiter. their talk had veered to the more serious subject of shooting, and harry was expressing his old-fashioned preference for a gun with hammers to the more usual hammerless.
"i can't think why i do prefer it," he said, "but there it is. i put a gun at half cock instinctively if i have to jump a ditch, but i do not feel quite at home with that little disk uncovering 'safe.' supposing it shouldn't be? come along, geoff; we'll start, as you are in such a hurry. the men meet us at the lodge: we'll just get our guns and go!"
they went down the stone-flagged passage to the gun room, which looked out on the box hedge. there were two guns lying on the table, and geoffrey, after looking at the other, took up his own.
"you're a consistent chap," he said to harry. "after all you tell me of your preference for hammers, you shoot apparently with a hammerless."
harry picked up the gun and looked at it.
"not mine," he said; "uncle francis's. ah! there's mine."
another gun with hammers was leaning nearly upright in a rough gun stand, more like a stand for sticks, in the corner. harry took hold of it some halfway up the barrels, and then seemed to geoffrey to give a little jerk as if it had stuck. on the moment there was a loud explosion, a horrible raking scratch was torn in the wooden panelling[pg 238] of the wall, and an irregular hole opened in the ceiling. the charge could not have missed harry by more than three inches, but he stood there, the smoking gun in his hand, without a tremor. then he turned to geoffrey.
"the luck is waking up," he said. "frost yesterday—that was the ice house; and this looks awfully like fire."
several panes of glass in the window had been shattered by the concussion, and harry pointed the gun out.
"now for the second barrel," he said, and the click of the falling trigger was the only answer. he opened the breech, and took out the smoking cartridge case.
"one cartridge only," he said; then, looking down the barrels, "and the left barrel is clean. it looks rather as if the gun had been cleaned, and a cartridge put in afterward. odd thing to happen. now we'll go shooting, geoff!"
but geoffrey was holding on to the table, trembling violently.
"you're not hurt?" he said.
"no. i shouldn't go shooting if i were. come, old chap, pull yourself together: there's no harm done. i shall make inquiries about this. don't you say anything, geoff. i am going to look into it thoroughly, detective fashion."
"but—but aren't you frightened?" asked geoffrey feebly.
"no, funnily enough, i'm not. it's the luck: i firmly believe it's the luck, and the poor old[pg 239] devil who put the curse in it is doing things in a thoroughly futile manner. i am ashamed of him."
"ah, destroy the beastly thing!" cried geoffrey. "burn it, smash it, chuck it away!"
"not i. oh, it's cheap, it's awfully cheap! a hole in the ceiling, and a penny for the cartridge, and november coming closer."
"do you mean to say you believe in it all?" asked geoffrey.
"yes, i believe in it all."
"but, good god, man! somebody put the cartridge there. somebody told you that the summerhouse was on the left——" and he stopped suddenly.
"yes—uncle francis told me that," said harry, "and who made him forget which was which of the two houses? why, the luck, the blessed luck!" he cried almost exultantly.
at this all the nightmares of the last twelve hours swarmed round geoffrey, flapping about his head.
"and who put the cartridge in that gun?" he cried, not thinking how direct an accusation he was making.
harry's face grew suddenly grave; the smile was struck from it. a flash of anger and intense surprise flamed in his eyes, and his upper lip curled back in an ugly way. then seeing geoffrey holding on to the table, still dazed and white, he recovered himself.
"come, old boy," he said, "don't be so much[pg 240] upset. yet, geoff, you shouldn't say that sort of thing even in jest. have a whisky and soda before going out; you're all shaky. believe in the luck, like me, and you'll take things more calmly. yes, i mean it; at last i really mean it. i am the inheritor of a curse and a blessing. so i take the good with the bad, and, oh, how much the one outweighs the other! by the way, the painters are in the house; they must patch up the paper here, and mend that hole in the ceiling. shall i order a whisky for you at the same time?"
"no; i'm all right," said geoffrey, and he followed the other out.
harry was at all times a good shot, to-day he verged on brilliancy. geoffrey, on the other hand, who as a rule was more than good, to-day was worse than bad. his gun was a laggard; he shot behind crossing game, below anything that was flying straight away from him; he was not certain about the easiest shots, and he was only certain to miss the more difficult ones. it seemed indeed that the two had divided between them the accident in the gun room; the infinitely short moment in which harry had felt the hot breath of the fire, sharp and agonizing like a pulled tooth, was his, but the reaction, the retarded fear, the subsequent effect on nerve and brain, were entered to geoffrey. he was utterly unstrung by this double escape; twice during the last twenty-four hours, in this peaceful country house, had harry looked in the very face of death; yesterday stepping gaily toward the lip of the ice tank; to-day[pg 241] by as little a margin escaping this shattering extinction. a foot more, a foot less—and as he thought of it, geoffrey bit his lip for fear of screaming—and brain and bone would have been shredded over the gun-room floor. accidents would happen; there had always been accidents and there always would be, but, unlike misfortunes, they nearly always came singly. what was this malignancy that haunted harry, dogging his steps? what dim figure, deadly and full of hate, hovered on the wing by him, ready to strike? cartridges do not automatically find their way to guns that are cleaned and placed in the stand, as dust collects in corners. they have to be placed there, a human hand has to open the breech, stuff it with death, close it, and put the gun down again. these things must inevitably happen before a gun goes off. who in this case did them?
they came by one o'clock to one of the prettiest pieces of rough shooting on the ground—a long, very narrow strip of moorland country bounded on both sides by reclaimed fields, tufted thickly with heather, diversified by young clumps of fir and dense, low-growing bushes, and honey-combed with rabbit burrows. it was scarcely more than sixty yards across, but full half a mile in length, and the sport it afforded was most varied and unconjecturable. on warm days partridges would be here, covey after covey, sunning in the sandy little hollows bare of growth, or busy among the heather, and from the thickness of the[pg 242] cover and the undulations of the ground, a big covey would seldom take the air together, but rise one by one, or in couples, without general alarm being given, to right or left of the guns, or even behind them, so close had the birds lain in the long grasses. here and there attempts had at one time been made to bring the land into cultivation, and as you tramped through heather, you would suddenly come on a vague-edged square of potato-planting, the vegetable run riot with great wealth of thick leaf; or a strip of corn already half wild, and with a predominant ingredient of tares, would make you go slowly on the certainty of the break of brown wings, or the delayed and head-down scurry of a hare.
to those happily old-fashioned enough to care for the sober joys of walking up, it was the very poetry of sport, but to-day it appeared to geoffrey a barren and unprofitable place. for the last hour the questions that tormented him had been volleying even more insistently; horrible doubts and suspicions, no longer quite vague, flocked round his head like a flight of unclean birds, and he desired one thing only—to get to the gun room alone and clear up a certain point.
they had to walk over a bare and depopulated stubble to get to this delectable ground, and harry, as they neared it, looked first at geoffrey's lacklustre face, then at his watch.
"i had no idea it was so late, geoff," he said; "i think we'll take the rough after lunch. we're[pg 243] only half a mile from the house, and you look as if lunch would do you good."
he took the cartridges carefully out of his gun.
"no mistake this time," he said. "we'll start over the rough at two—kimber, meet us here. oh, by the way, come up to the house; i want to ask you something."
geoffrey gave up his gun with a sigh of relief.
"yes; let's do that piece afterward," he said; "i can't hit a sitting haystack this morning, harry."
"there's one; have a shot at it," said harry. "o geoff, don't look so awful! what has happened? there is a hole in the gun-room ceiling. you didn't do it, and i'm not going to send the bill to you."
"but aren't you frightened?" asked geoffrey. "are you made of flesh and blood?"
"i believe so. but haven't you ever had a shave of being shot? i'll bet you didn't give it a thought half an hour afterward."
"i know; but it's more cold-blooded indoors, happening the way it did. and coming on the top of your ice-house affair yesterday!"
"it's the luck!" cried harry; "that's the explanation of it, and it's proved to the hilt. fire and frost: they are done; scratch them out; and now there remains the rain. i'm afraid we shall not get the rain to-day, though. if one has to go through a thing—and i certainly have—it is better to get it over quick, as i, to do me justice, am[pg 244] getting it over. and, o geoff, there's a good time coming!"
harry had to see the foreman who was in charge of the electric light, as well as the keeper, when he got in, and geoffrey, after seeing him go upstairs, went quickly through the baize door at the end of the passage from the hall, and down to the gun room. he wanted to find out what had caused harry to give a jerk to the gun when he took it up. he had consciously seen him, the moment before it went off, put his hand to lift it out of the stand, then give an additional effort, as if it had stuck. all the morning he had been wondering about that. the obstacle, whatever it was, must, he felt certain, have been in connection with the trigger, for it was that jerk which had caused the gun to go off.
the men had already been at work over the damage, but they had gone to their dinner, and the room was empty. he went to the rack where the gun had stood, and next moment he gave a sudden little gasp, though not of surprise, for he had found only what he expected he should find, or something like it. round the post at the corner of the rack was tied a piece of cotton. two ends, each some six inches long, came out from it; the extremities were ragged, as if the piece had been broken.
another gun with hammers stood in a glazed cupboard at one side of the room; geoffrey took it out, and leaned it in the rack as nearly as possible in the position in which he remembered[pg 245] harry's gun to have stood. then kneeling down, he stretched the two broken ends of cotton in its direction. they just went round the right trigger.
he had a momentary impulse to call harry and show him this, but decided not to. harry, as he had said, was going to investigate the mysterious presence of a cartridge in a cleaned gun, and if he could trace how it got there, then would be the time to throw on this fresh evidence. till then it was far better that he should not know, for at present he was inclined to treat the affair as an accident, due no doubt to some gross negligence, but nothing worse. this matter of the looped cotton, however, gave a far more sinister aspect to the affair, and the knowledge that there was foul work here was a burden that could be spared him at any rate till further light was cast. so, very carefully he unknotted the cotton from the post of the rack and put it in his pocket. the knot, he noticed, was the ordinary reef so familiar to the fly-fisher.
somehow the certainty of what he had feared and suspected, even though the worst of his suspicions was confirmed, served to steady him. he knew now exactly what was to be faced—a deliberate and very cunningly devised attempt on harry's life. look at it which way you would, this could not conceivably be an accident. taken alone, the presence of a cartridge in a cleaned gun had been a difficult mouthful even for an imagination in favour of accident to swallow; taken in[pg 246] conjunction with the piece of looped cotton, it could not be tackled.
he went over all the circumstances slowly and carefully, as he put the piece of cotton in his cigarette case. there had been two guns on the table—his, and, as it turned out, not harry's, but mr. francis's. harry's gun, loaded, a trap of nearly certain death to any one who took it up, was leaning in the gun rack. here were the thoughts of the brain which had contrived these things.
the bell for lunch made him hurry out of the room, and in the hall he found harry.
"our reporter has been visiting the scene of the dastardly attempt," he said; "something spicy for the evening papers, geoff? oh, by the way, i asked kimber what he could tell me about that gun of mine. he could tell me a lot. come in to lunch."
"and what could he tell you?" asked geoffrey.
harry looked at the servants a moment.
"later," he said. "oh, how i bless the man who invented lunch! do you remember saying to me once that little things like baths and tea were much more important than anything else?"
"yes, and you called me a sensuous voluptuary," said geoffrey.
"i believe i did. so you are. so am i."
the sensuous voluptuaries went out again as soon as lunch was over, to shoot the rough, and[pg 247] as they walked harry told his friend what he had learned from the keeper.
"i asked him first," he said "(without telling him what had happened), who put those two guns, yours and my uncle's, on the table, and he didn't know. he had come in early to get cartridges and put the guns out, and found them there. so he took the cartridges and went. now, until this morning, i haven't shot here since last february, and i didn't take the gun that behaved so—so prematurely to-day, to scotland. so i asked whether any one had used it since i went away, and it appeared that uncle francis had several times, for his own gun, the hammerless one which we found on the table, had gone to the maker's to have a rust hole taken out. do you follow?"
"perfectly."
"well, two days ago, the day we came down here, kimber was feeding the pheasants, and he heard a shot near at hand, and a moment afterward a wounded hare ran across the clearing, followed immediately by uncle francis. he was almost crying, said kimber: do you remember how he wounded a hare last christmas, and was out for an hour trying to recover it? well, the same thing had happened, and it was his first shot, remember that; kimber was certain there had been only one. but this time the hare had run into thick cover, and there was really no chance of getting it, for it had been hit, kimber saw, only in one leg. now attend, geoff, very closely; it's quite a detective story. as they stood there,[pg 248] kimber saw uncle francis take the discharged cartridge case out of the right barrel and slip the unused cartridge from the left into it. now that bears all the stamp of truth on it. i have seen uncle francis do just that a dozen times, when he had killed with his first barrel, and does not immediately expect another shot. to continue. then he drew another cartridge from his pocket, but suddenly said, 'i can shoot no more with that poor wounded thing unfound.' and he snapped the breech to, and went home. now do you see?"
"but didn't kimber clean the gun afterward?"
"no," said harry. "uncle francis's man always cleans his gun, and he probably, seeing him return to the house almost immediately after he had set out, and go into the garden, naturally thought that he had decided not to shoot, and did not clean the gun. that is why the second barrel was clean; no shot had been fired from it, and uncle francis simply forgot that he had left one cartridge in. the whole thing hangs completely together. then came i, picked up the gun quickly, no doubt hitting the trigger against something, and there is a hole in the ceiling."
once again geoffrey thought of the looped cotton, and once again decided not to tell harry. there was no use, at present, especially since mr. francis was not here, in giving him so sinister a piece of information.
[pg 249]
"that certainly clears up a lot," he said, conscious of the deadly-double meaning of his words.
"it clears it all up," said harry, "and i'll tell you now that i felt horribly uncomfortable about it all morning, though i was not frightened. of course it was awfully careless of uncle francis to leave that cartridge in, and awfully careless of his man not to look to the gun. he thought uncle francis had not been shooting, for he must have returned to the house not more than a quarter of an hour after he set out, but he would have saved some lath and plaster if he had made sure. here we are. now for the rough!"
mr. francis, geoffrey now believed beyond doubt, in his secret mind, was no less accountable for this gun-room explosion than for the mistake about the ice house; and harry's story, proof to the other of his direct hand, was in a way a relief to him. all the morning he had feared and dreaded indications of a second hand, of a gamekeeper privy to the deed, of a servant suborned, and in particular his fancy had fixed on that dark man of mr. francis's, him with the foxlike face and tread of a cat. about him there was something secret and stealthy, so said his imagination, heated by the horrid occurrences of these two days; yet his secrecy and stealth were less abominable than the smiles of his master, his sunny cheerfulness, his playings on the flute. so lately as this morning geoffrey had laughed when he thought of that flute; flutes in connection with white hairs and[pg 250] old age had seemed to him amusing, ridiculous. but now the memory of his own merriment amazed him; no tears were bitter enough for the contemplation of this deadliness of hypocrisy and hate; and he thought of the italian airs and the tripping step of the performer with a bewilderment of horror. he had not known how finished an article could be turned out of the workshops of satan.
but at this the full relief occasioned by mr. francis's absence came upon him with a great taste of sweetness. true, this last attempt had been made when the old man was not actually in the house; but so long as he was away, geoffrey did not fear another trap. it would not be like a man of that infernal cunning to leave lying about, as it were, a series of nooses into which any one might step; his desire would not so far outstrip his prudence. it had been by the merest chance that geoffrey had noticed that slight check to the lifting of the gun from the rack, by the merest chance that he had found the looped cotton; but apart from this, had either attempt succeeded, no evidence of any kind to implicate anybody would have remained. and not the least of his cunning was shown in the way that he took advantage of harry's credulity in the power of the luck. by frost and by fire he had schemed his death, and geoffrey would have laid odds that if either by the arrow by day or the terror by night harry's life again stood in jeopardy, in some manner, vague perhaps, but simple to trace,[pg 251] rain would be the agent. here, then, he told himself was a clew of a kind. to guard against rain, it is true, was a vast and ill-defined project, for such an agency might be held to include many forms of death, from drowning to pneumonia, but it was, he felt sure, through the supposed potencies of the luck that mr. francis was striking.
they spent a most rewarding hour that afternoon over the rough, and the evening passed, as is the privilege of shooters, in lazy, dozing content. one game of billiards had been succeeded by a nominal reading of the evening papers, and harry had gone upstairs to bed at eleven, yawning fit to wrench off a jaw not firmly muscle-knit, but geoffrey, on the excuse of being too comfortable in his big chair to move just yet, had sat on in the hall, not ill pleased to be alone, for he had many things to ponder, and he had not yet made up his mind what he ought to do. conclusive as the evidence seemed to him, harry, he well knew, would not possibly listen to it; to tell harry what he believed, meant simply that he left the house. something far more conclusive must occur before he told harry, and geoffrey prayed silently that nothing more conclusive should ever be on foot: he was quite satisfied with the demonstration as it stood. and he curled himself more closely in his chair and began to think.
what, after all, if this series of events was due to the luck? certainly, immediately after its finding, three accidents, by fire and frost and rain,[pg 252] had happened to harry, for none of which could mr. francis be held remotely responsible. what if, now, these more serious accidents were to be referred to the same agency? geoffrey found himself smiling at the absurdity of the thought, yet he still continued to consider it. he did not believe it, so he told himself; his reasonable mind entirely rejected the possibility that a thing inanimate, the work of men's hands, be it made of wood and stone, or gold and precious stones, could control destiny. it mattered not, as far as the luck was concerned, how one thought of destiny: it was the laws of nature, if you will, unalterable, of an inexorable logic, or, to refer the matter one step back, it was the will of god, who had set these natural laws at work. yet were not the sins of the fathers visited on the children? was it not possible, though ever so dimly and unconjecturably, that some subtle law of this hereditary kind governed the destinies of the vails, and that without supposing that a cup of gold could be responsible for danger, sudden death, and, on the other hand, for the meting out of great happiness and prosperity, yet that the belief in some man's mind as he watched the chasing of the legend on that plaque of gold was true? he had observed, let us suppose, and correctly observed, some tide in the affairs of the vails; he had embodied it allegorically in that rhyme on the cup, and the allegory was true, because that which it illustrated was true.
indeed, he had put his allegory into a form[pg 253] extraordinarily vivid. night after night the gorgeous goblet had stood before the diners in the light of the candles, and night after night it had seemed to grow more and more alive. what if some occult force lurked there? if some unsleeping presence dwelt in those diamonds? from immemorial time men had believed that certain powers and qualities dwelt in precious stones. there was danger in opals, and warning; they turned stale and dim in the presence of an enemy, and no opal, he remarked, was set in bowl or handle or foot of the cup. else—here his thought was confused, for the luck was the potency—it might have sickened and paled when mr. francis ate his dinner near it. the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine; in diamonds there was sovereignty; sapphires conferred judgment deep and clear as themselves on their possessor. what if there was truth, however small a residuum, in these tales, and how might the potency of the stones be increased if they were put in their appointed settings with a blessing and a curse?
he sat up in his chair, conscious that he had been half dozing, for the chime of a clock lingered on the vibrating air, yet he had not heard the hour strike, and, still sleepy, he leaned back again with a strong determination to go to bed instantly. suddenly and without cause, so far as he knew, he became broad and staring awake; his eye might unconsciously have seen something, or his ear unconsciously heard a movement, yet not have[pg 254] forwarded it in full to the brain. but every sense told him that he was not alone.
he sat up hurriedly and looked around. peering cautiously into the room, round the door leading to the stairs, and barely visible in the shadow, was the face of mr. francis.
