The Luck of the Vails. E. F. Benson
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her daughter—what does it all mean?" she asked.
"Oh, she's not mad," said Harry. "It is only a way she has. There are lots of people like her. I don't mind it myself: you only have to laugh; there is no necessity for saying anything."
"And as little opportunity," remarked Evie.
She paused, then pulled a long piece of feathery grass from its sheath.
"England is delightful," she said with decision. "I find it simply delightful, from Mrs. Antrobus upward or downward. Just think, Lord Vail, I have not been here for three years! What has happened since then?"
"To whom?"
"To anybody. You, for example."
"Have I not told you? I have come of age. I have found the Luck."
Evie threw the grass spearwise down wind. She had not exactly meant to speak so personally.
"Ah, the Luck!" she exclaimed. "Lord Vail, do promise to show it me!"
Thereat Harry again grew bold.
"Nothing easier," he said. "I have to go down to Vail next week. Persuade Lady Oxted to bring you down for a day or two. The Luck is the only inducement, I am afraid; it and some big, bare, Wiltshire downs."
"Big, large, and open?" she asked.
"All that. Does it please you?"
"Immensely. I should love to come. And the Luck is there? You must know that I am horribly inquisitive; perhaps, if you were indulgent, you would say interested, and leave out the horribly, in other people's concerns. So, tell me, what do you hope the Luck will bring you?"
"I don't dare to hope. I am inclined to wait a little."
Evie frowned.
"That would be all very well for a woman," she said, "but it won't do for a man. It is a woman's part to sit at home and wait for the luck. But it is a man's to go and seek it."
"I am on the lookout for it. I am always on the lookout for it," he said.
Some shadow passed across the brightness of Evie's eyes; again the personal note had been a little too distinct in her speech, and she replied quickly:
"That is right. I should go for the highest if I were you. I think I should plot a revolution, and make myself King of England. Something big of that sort!"
"I had not thought of that," said Harry; "and I sometimes wonder—it is all nonsense, you know, about the Luck, and of course I don't really believe in it—but I sometimes wonder——"
He paused a moment.
"I wonder whether you would care to hear some more family history?" he said at length.
"Is it as exciting as the Luck?" asked the girl.
"I don't know if you will find it so. It is certainly more tragic."
"Do tell me!" she said.
"Promise me to exercise your right of stopping me, as before."
"I never stopped you!" she exclaimed.
Harry laughed.
"No. I meant that you had the right to," he said. "Do you really want to hear it? It is intimate stuff."
"Indeed I do," she said.
Harry paused a moment, then began his story.
"There lives at Vail," he said, "a man whom I honour as much as any one in the world, my great-uncle, Francis Vail. He is old, he has led the most unhappy life, yet, if you met him casually, you would say he was a man who had never seen sorrow, so cheerful is he, so full of kindly spirits."
"He is your only relation, is he not?" asked the girl.
"He is. Who told you?"
"Lady Oxted. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt."
"He has led a life of continuous and most unmerited misfortune," said Harry, "and when I began just now 'I wonder,' I was going to say, I wonder whether the Luck will come to him? You see it is a family thing. He, one would think, might get the good, not I. And I honestly assure you that I should be more than delighted if he did."
"It is about him you would tell me?" asked Evie.
"About him. I need not give you the smaller details. His unhappy marriage, his sudden poverty, his bankruptcy even, for there is one thing in his life so terrible that it seems to me to overshadow everything else."
They had come to a garden seat at the far end of the orchard, and here Evie sat down. Harry stood beside her, one foot on the bench, looking not at her, but out over the creamy, sleeping landscape.
"It is nearly twenty-two years ago," he said, "that my uncle was staying down at an estate we used to have in Derbyshire, which has since been sold. The place next us belonged to some people called Harmsworth—What?"
An involuntary exclamation had come to Evie's lips, but she checked it before it was speech.
"Nothing," she said, quietly. "Please go on.
"And young Harmsworth," continued Harry, "who had just come of age, was a great friend with my uncle, who was as kind to him as he is to all young people, as kind as he always is, and that I hope you will soon know for yourself. Well, one day the two were out shooting together——"
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