The Luck of the Vails. E. F. Benson
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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 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?"
"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."
"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. 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 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."
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF THE LUCK
The dining room at Vail was of the same antique spaciousness as the hall, and, as there on the lounger, so here on the diner, looked down a spacious company of ancestors. For so small a party it had been thought by the butler that conviviality would be given a better chance if, on this frosty night, he laid them a small table within range of the fire rather than that the three should be cut off, as it were, on a polar island in the centre of that vast sea of floor. And, indeed, though naturally a modest man, Templeton felt a strong self-approval at the success