harry was sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug after dinner, poking the fire in an idiotic manner with the tongs. gun cotton would have smouldered out under so illiterate a stroke. he was also talking with about equal vivacity and vacuity to lady oxted and evie, but while his conversation was not more than difficult to bear, his poking of the fire was quite intolerable. lady oxted got swiftly and silently up from her chair, and, in the manner of a stooping hawk, took the instrument from him.
"we can attend better, dear harry," she said, "to your most interesting conversation if you do not distract our minds by making a bayonet of improper fire irons. you can do that after we have gone to bed."
"they are improper," said harry, "but my sense of delicacy forbade my telling you so. how a respectable woman like you could tolerate their presence in the house has been more than i was able to imagine. but now the ice is broken— oh, i never told you about the ice house! 'more i did."
lord oxted looked up from the evening paper[pg 358] which he was reading distractedly but diligently, and made a bee line for the door. his exit, though made without protest, was somewhat marked. he had no manners, as his wife often told him.
"the ice house," said harry, as if he were giving out a text to a diminishing congregation, and a spicy emphasis was required to retain the rest, "and the gun, and the sluice."
the shadow of lord oxted lingered a moment in the doorway at this alluring selection, but immediately disappeared on the next words: "i'll make your blood run cold!"
"has the luck been singing its nursery rhymes?" asked lady oxted, uncertain what to do with that white elephant, the tongs.
"singing!" cried harry, digging the shovel into the fire. "singing quo' she! my good woman, i can and will a tale unfold which, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now," said he, with a felicitous air.
lady oxted annexed the shovel also. thus there were two white elephants.
"i am not the washerwoman, harry," she remarked with reason.
"no, dear aunt," said he, growing suddenly grave. "and if i hadn't been so absurdly happy to-night, i shouldn't have made a joke of it, for, indeed, it was no joke. anyhow, the doctor congratulated me on my admirable nerves."
"some people when they prepare to tell a story," said lady oxted, "begin at the beginning.[pg 359] others—this is without prejudice—begin at the end and work laboriously and slowly backward. let me at least ask you, harry, not to be slow. tell us about the doctor, as we are to go backward. did his name begin with an a?"
"quite right," said harry, "and it went on with an r."
lady oxted dropped her white elephants on the carpet and sat down by evie.
"armytage?" she asked, and the fooling was gone from her voice.
"right again. you had much better tell the whole story for yourself, hadn't you?"
"no; when other people begin to talk about the luck, i take no part in the conversation," said she, "except, at least, when geoffrey is here, and then i talk of bears and bulls."
the harry who had played bayonet with the tongs had by this time vanished; vanished also were the flying skirts of farce, and in absolute silence on the part of his audience, and in gravity on his own, he told them the three adventures, narrating only the salient facts, and alluding neither directly nor otherwise to geoffrey or his uncle. but while his tale was yet young, evie crossed from the sofa where she had been sitting with lady oxted and joined harry on the hearth rug. one hand held her fan, the other was on her lap. of the latter harry easily possessed himself, and the tale of the gun was told with it in his. but as he spoke of the raking gash that riddled the cornice and ceiling of the gun[pg 360] room, it was suddenly withdrawn and laid on his shoulder.
"o harry, harry!" she murmured.
he turned and stopped, spontaneously responsive.
"my darling," he said, "i ought never to have told you. only i could not help telling you some time, and why not now? was it not better to tell you like this, making no confidence of it?"
if ever a word ought to have carried the weight of a hint, the word was here. but lady oxted showed not the slightest sign of following her husband, or saying she must write two notes.
"go on, harry," she said. "we are waiting. so the gun went off?"
but harry turned to the girl.
"it is with you," he said. "will you have the third adventure or not? simply as you wish. here am i, anyhow."
"yes, tell us," she said.
at the end lady oxted rose crisply.
"i never heard of such impotent magic in all my life," she said. "really, harry, if you must tell us supernatural experiences in the evening, we have a right to expect to be pleasantly frightened. but i have never been less frightened. you whistled your way into an ice house; you took up a gun carelessly; you stood on a piece of unsafe stonework.—if i were you, evie, i should buy him a nice leading-rein."
these brutalities were effective, and banished the subject, and, without pausing to comment or[pg 361] let others comment, lady oxted sent for her husband, and they sat down to a table of bridge.
"the only thing i insist on," he said, "is that my wife shall be my partner. her curious processes of thought, when she is engaged in this kind of brain work, are a shade less disconcerting and obscure to me than they would be to others. aimer c'est tout comprendre. and if i do not quite understand them all," he added, as he cut for deal, "i understand more than anybody else.—eh, dear violet?"
lady oxted's brow was always clouded when she played bridge, and to-night the blackness of the thunderstorm that sat there was not appreciably denser than usual. she played with a curious and unfortunate mixture of timorousness when the declaration was with her, and a lively confidence in the unparalleled strength of her partner's hand when the declaration was passed to her. thus at the end of two hours, as these methods to-night were more marked than usual, the house of oxted was sensibly impoverished. but with the rising from the card table her disquieted looks showed no betterment, and her husband offered consolation.
"we can easily sell the grosvenor square house," he said, "if it is that which is bothering you, violet; and if that is not enough we can give up coffee after dinner, and have no parties. the world is too much with us."
"and with the proceeds we can buy a handbook on bridge," said she with spirit. "i will[pg 362] give it you for a present at christmas, bob. let us go to bed."
lady oxted employed, in the almost daily conduct of her life, methods which she characterized as diplomatic. a less indulgent critic than herself might have labelled them with a shorter and directer word, yet not have felt that he was harsh, for the diplomatic methods did not exclude what we may elegantly term evasions of the truth. to-night, for instance, she talked with evie for a few minutes only in her bedroom, and exacted a promise that she would go to bed at once, for she looked very tired. for herself she would have it known that her head was splitting, that if she got influenza again she would turn atheist. with these immoderate statements she secured herself from interruption, and went, not to bed, but to the smoking room, where she found harry alone. the rustling of her dress made him look up quickly, and the most undiplomatic disappointment was evident on his face.
"no, i am not evie," remarked this clear-sighted lady. "she is tired and has gone to bed, so i came for a chat with you. dear harry, it is so nice to see you again! but what terrible adventures you have been through! i want to hear of them more particularly, but i thought it would frighten evie to talk of them longer. that is why i was abrupt to you."
"and so she is tired! diplomacy?" said harry.
"yes, just a touch of diplomacy," assented[pg 363] lady oxted, "for she looked scared and frightened. now were you alone when all these things happened, or was dr. armytage there? and how did dr. armytage come to be at vail at all?"
"he came to vail," said harry, "on the evening of the third affair, the breaking of the sluice. i telegraphed for him because i was frightened about my uncle. he is liable, you know, to cardiac attacks, and i was afraid of one coming on."
"he was naturally agitated at your series of escapes," said lady oxted.
"naturally," said harry.
lady oxted rose with some impatience, and threw diplomacy aside.
"your efforts at dissimulation are pitiable, harry," said she. "if you won't tell me what happened, say so: i am going to fish no more."
harry did not immediately reply, and lady oxted continued.
"seriously speaking," she said, "i think i ought to know. if there is nothing more, if your conscience allows you to say that there is nothing to tell, i am content. if you can not say that, i think you ought to tell me."
"do you not think that you are putting an unfair pressure on me?" asked harry.
"no, for you are no longer only your own master. you must consider not only yourself, but evie. in her mother's absence i have a certain duty toward her. i do not ask you from curiosity, but because of the relations in which both you and i stand to her. you have within[pg 364] the last few weeks been in three positions of extreme personal danger. can you, however vaguely, account for this? have there been no suspicious circumstances of any kind which might lead any one to think that these were not entirely accidents? you say that geoffrey was in the house on all these occasions. did he take it all as lightly as you seem to?"
"i would rather not bring geoffrey into it," said harry.
"have you quarrelled?"
"yes, i suppose you may say that we have quarrelled," he replied.
"harry, why will you not tell me, and save my asking you all these questions? i intend to go on asking them. was your quarrel with geoffrey connected in any way with these accidents?"
"oh, give me a minute!" cried harry. "i want to make up my mind whether i am going to tell you or not. i suppose, if i did not, you would go to geoff."
"certainly i should," said lady oxted promptly, although this had not occurred to her.
"well, it is better that i should tell you than he," said harry, and without more words he told her all that he had purposely left unsaid, from the mistaken direction which had sent him to the ice house instead of the summerhouse, down to the scene in the smoking room when he had parted with geoffrey. she heard him in silence without question or interruption, and when he had finished, still she said nothing. apt and ready as[pg 365] she was for the ordinary social emergency, she could frame nothing for this. she could not say what she thought, outspokenly like geoffrey, for harry's sake; she would not say what she did not think, in spite of her diplomatic tendencies, for her own.
at last the silence became portentous, and harry broke it.
"have i then lost another friend in addition to geoffrey?" he said, in a voice that was not very steady. he could not have given her a better lead.
"ah! do not say things like that, harry," she said. "you do not think it possible, in the first place, and even if you did it would be no part of wisdom to say it. but i tell you frankly that, though geoffrey seems to me to have spoken most hastily and unwisely, yet i can understand what he felt. there are, i don't deny that i see it, many curious circumstances about all these adventures, which lend reasonableness—pardon me—to his suspicions."
"i know—i know all that," said harry, "but i find it a sheer impossibility to believe them in any degree at all. geoffrey's suspicions are out of the question. that being so, i can not away with what he has done, with the speaking to my uncle like that; i can not away with that condition of mind to which, however plausible the idea, the idea was possible."
lady oxted was a quick thinker; she knew, moreover, that to decide wrong was better than[pg 366] not to decide at all; and before harry had finished speaking, she was determined on her line of action. geoffrey, she rightly guessed, had at least as much influence with harry as herself, yet even geoffrey, in all the heat and horror of these adventures, had been powerless to move him. her chance, then, speaking at this cooler distance, had scarcely the slightest prospect of success, and secret coalition with geoffrey was evidently preferable to open collision with harry.
"i see—i quite see," she said; "but, o harry, do not throw away a friend lightly! geoff is a good fellow, and you must remember that it was for your sake that he risked and suffered a quarrel with you. friends are not so common as sparrows! you will not find them under every house-roof. don't do anything in a hurry: wait. no situation is hopeless until you have given time a chance to work. don't write, if you have not already done so, any angry letter; or worse, any dignified, calm, world-without-end letter. it is so easy to make an estrangement permanent! you can always do that."
"i haven't written at all," said harry. "i tried to, but i could not do it. there is no hurry; besides, geoffrey will not expect to hear from me; dr. armytage wrote to tell him not to."
lady oxted just succeeded in suppressing the exclamation of surprise that was on her lips. "that was very kind of him, and wise as well," she said.
"he is both the one and the other," said[pg 367] harry. "he was down at vail a week. i liked him immensely. but i don't mind telling you that i was glad to get away, to part with him, with uncle francis, with the luck for a time. i felt as if there were some occult conjuncture against me, and i didn't like it. i had continually to keep a hold on myself, to make an effort not to be scared. but here i am being beautifully relaxed. i feel secure—yes, that's the word."
lady oxted continued her diplomatic course.
"there is nothing so catching as superstition," she said, "and all the evening, since you told evie and me about it, i have been wondering— oh, it must be all nonsense!" she cried.
"you mean the luck?" asked harry. "is saul also among the prophets?"
"yes, i mean the luck. how does the nursery rhyme go? fire and frost and rain, isn't it? well, there they all were, and it is no use denying it."
"not the slightest," said harry.
"certainly it is very strange. harry, i don't like the luck at all. it's uncanny. i wish you would smash it, or throw it into the sea. yet, somehow, i feel as if you were safe as long as you are here, away from it. i wish you would stop here till your marriage. then you go away, you see, for six weeks, and in the meantime some burglar might be kind enough to steal it."
harry shook his head.
"no, i put the good things it has brought me much higher than the evil," he said. "and it is[pg 368] going to bring me another very good thing—the best. after that, if you like, i will smash it."
"well, stay here till your marriage, anyhow."
"i must go down to vail once, to see that they have finished up. the house was upside down when i was there. but, barring a couple of days then, there is nothing i should like better. you will have nearly a month of me, though. consider well."
"then stop till i tell you i can not bear you any longer. i am a candid woman, and fond of giving pain, and i promise to speak out. dear me, it is nearly one! i must go to bed, and if i dream of the luck it will be your fault."
lady oxted did not dream at all for a very long time that night: she was at her wits' end what to do. all scotland yard, with all the detectives of improbable fiction thrown in to aid, were powerless to help, for the evidence against mr. francis in harry's story, though conclusive to her own mind, would weigh lighter than chaff in cross-examination. and no further evidence was procurable until mr. francis made another attempt, and at the thought she shuddered. what, too, was that sinister doctor doing at vail? what was the meaning of the seeming friendliness in averting a final rupture between harry and geoffrey? he had written, according to his own account, a letter to geoffrey which should avoid this, but what did his letter really contain? it was far more likely that he had told him that the rupture was final, for clearly he and mr. francis[pg 369] would not want to risk the possibility of geoffrey, who knew all, and whose attitude was so avowedly hostile, coming down to vail again. the only consolation was that harry for the present was safe, and that she could go up to london next day and see geoffrey. but what could they do even together? what defence was possible when the blow might fall at any moment from any unsuspected quarter?
by degrees, as she paced her room, a kind of clearness came to her. mr. francis's design was evident: he had shown his hand by the nature of his earlier attempts, in which he had tried to stop harry's marriage. then, in the miscarriage of that, he had turned to directer deeds—fouler they could scarcely be, but of more violent sort. there had been a species of awful art in his doings; he had taken, with a fiend's gusto and pleasure in the ingenuity of it (so she pictured), harry's avowed superstition in the power of the luck, to compass his ends. as a musician takes a subject, and on this theme works out a fugue; as an artist paints a portrait in a definite preconceived scheme of colour, so had mr. francis taken the luck, and the dangers it was thought to bring to its possessor: these he had elaborated, put into practical shape. it must have dwelt in his mind like a lunatic's idea; not only, as in the case of the gun, did he make his opportunity, but, as in the affair of the ice house, he must have been alert, receptive, instinctively and instantaneously turning to his ends whatever chance put in his way.
[pg 370]
this thought brought her a certain feeling of relief on the one hand, but on the other it added an indefinite terror. no man morally sane could devise and steadily prosecute so finished a scheme; the very thoroughness and consistency of the three attempts stamped them as the work of a madman. nine tenths of the blood murderously shed on the earth was to be put down to a spasm of ungovernable anger and hate, which at the moment possessed the murderer; this long premeditation, this careful following of one idea by which frost, fire, and rain should be the direct causes of harry's death, was not to be attributed—so devilish and so finished was the application—to a sane author. here lay the consolation: her shuddering horror of the white-haired old gentleman, with his flute-playing and his boyish yet courtly manner, was a little assuaged, and gave way to mere human pity for a mind deranged. but simultaneously, as if with a clash of cymbals, her fear of him, defenceless, bewildered, broke out: that cunning of a madman was far more formidable than the schemings of a sane man. he would soon, maddened by failure, reck nothing of what happened to him, so that he attained his object.
what, then, looking at it thus, was his object? the mere death of harry, merely the lust for blood? that seemed hardly possible. she could not put him down as a homicidal maniac, since it seemed that he had no desire to kill for killing's sake, and the world was not yet staggered with a catalogue of subtle, undetected murders. nor[pg 371] was the explanation that he wished to inherit vail and its somewhat insufficient revenues more satisfactory. he was old; he had, so far as any one could guess, no wish for more of this world's goods than he possessed under harry's generosity; the motive could scarcely be here. then in a flash a more likely solution struck her. the luck—perhaps he wanted the luck! a year of ownership, so she told herself, had already affected even harry's sanity in this regard. what if here was a man, old and already poised on the edge of his dug grave, who all his life long had dreamed of and itched for it, believing god knew what was in store for its possessor? this, she guessed, was the taint of blood, the same that so mysteriously, though uncriminally, possessed harry. here, perhaps, was the cause, not the fire and the frost and the rain, but the belief in their perils, coupled with the belief in great and unwonted good fortune which the possession of it gave. mr. francis had more than once, in her hearing, laughed at harry for his fantastic allegiance to the heirloom, but this, if anything, confirmed lady oxted in her theory. this cunning was of consistency with the rest.
long since she had dismissed her maid, and tired with fruitless thought, and baffled with but dimly cipherable perils, she finished her undressing and blew out the lights. but through all the dark hours she was clutched by the night-hag. now the luck appeared to her like the grail in parsifal, emitting an unearthly radiance, but even[pg 372] as she gazed she would suddenly be stricken with the knowledge that the brightness of it was not of heavenly but of diabolic birth; a piercing light emanated therefrom, but of infernal red, and voices from the pit moaned round it. then it would be gone, and for a little while a wriggling darkness succeeded, but slowly the break in the blackness which heralded its coming would begin to shine again and grow intolerably bright; faint lines where it would shortly appear, stretched themselves upon the fields of vision, growing momentarily more distinct, but instead of the luck, there came, first in outline, then in awful and indelible vividness, the features of mr. francis, now very kind and gentle, now a mask of tormented fury.
next morning she found that her resolve to see geoffrey without delay had not been diminished by the scattered phantoms of the night, and some lame toothache excuse served her end. she did not certainly know whether he was in london or not, and for safety's sake she sent him two telegrams—the one to his father's house in kent, the second to his lodging in orchard street—both bidding him come to lunch that day in grosvenor square without fail. the one addressed to london found him first, since, after his interview with dr. armytage, he had stayed on there; and this, followed after an hour's interval by the other sent on from his father's house, constituted a call of urgency. he therefore obeyed the summons, leaving a note for dr. armytage, as had been[pg 373] agreed between them, to say when he should be in again, and where he had gone.
the conference began after lunch. each found it in a measure a relief to be able to confide the secret haunting sense of peril to another. each, on the other hand, was horrified to find that some one else shared the apprehensions each still hoped might be phantasmal. geoffrey, on his part, had his account of his dealings with dr. armytage to add to lady oxted's information; she her own conviction that they were dealing with a man not morally sane, whose one desire was to have and to hold the luck. to her, this alliance with dr. armytage, of which geoffrey told her, seemed but a doubtful gain.
"what does one know of him?" she asked. "nothing that is not bad. mr. francis could not have chosen a more apt or a more unscrupulous tool. he got two thousand pounds, you tell me, for his services in connection with the harmsworth case: what will he not do for ten? oh, we may be dealing with a cunning of which we have no conception! what if all this was told you simply to blind you? nothing can be more probable, and how admirably it has succeeded! already you trust the man—their object, as far as you are concerned, is gained."
"i had to trust him or distrust him," said geoffrey, "and i chose to do the former. if i had chosen the latter, the door would have closed on him, and i do not see that we should be any better off than we are now. if he is dealing[pg 374] straight with us, we have an immense advantage in knowing all he knows of mr. francis's plans; if he is not, he can, at the most, give us misleading information, which is not worse than none at all."
lady oxted considered this in silence a moment.
"yes, that is true," she said; "yet, somehow, my flesh misgives me to be allied with that man. o geoffrey, is it because this awful luck has cast a spell on us that we imagine harry surrounded by these intimate and immediate perils? are our fears real? let us tell ourselves that we are ordinary people, living in an age of prose and police-men; we are not under the doges! this is the nineteenth century," she said, rising, "or the twentieth, if you will; we look out on grosvenor square—a hansom is driving by."
she stopped suddenly.
"i am wrong," she said; "it is not driving by. it has stopped at the door. and dr. armytage has rung the bell. oh, what shall i do?" she cried. "god in heaven! what are we to do? what has he come to tell us?"
geoffrey got up.
"now quietly, quietly, lady oxted," he said. "he has come on a matter of importance, or he would have waited till i returned to orchard street. i have decided to trust him, and i suggest, therefore, that we see him together. it is our best chance; it may be our only one."
"but i don't trust him," said lady oxted.[pg 375] "i distrust him from head to heels." and she bit her finger nails, a thing she had not done since the days of the schoolroom.
"very well; then i shall run on my own lines," and he got up to leave the room.
"wait, geoffrey," she said. "you are absolutely determined?"
"absolutely."
"i yield, then. you, at any rate, have some plan, and i have none.—yes, show dr. armytage in," she said to the man who had brought his card.
