This sequestered10 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 shrill11 greyhounds of the railway is of the smallest, and they pass for the most part without even a shriek12 of salute13. 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 secular14 trees, beech15 in the majority, and of stately growth. Shortly before the house becomes visible a spacious16 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 intervals17 by gravel18 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 shears19 and pruning20 hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled21 into monstrous22 masses of deformed23 shape, wrought24, you would think, by the imagination of a night hag into things inhuman25. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge26 into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing27 disease; here a bird with dwindled28 body and scarecrow wings[Pg 3] stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture29 would vainly seek for a reconstruction30.
The end of one of the wings of the house, which was built round three sides of a quadrangle, abutted31 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 dependence32 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 underneath33 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 hearth34 grew dim, whole battalions35 of them would collect and gather again; with the kindling36 of some fresh stuff, they would be routed and disappear. This fitfulness of illumination played also strange tricks with the tapestries37 that hung on two of the four sides of the hall; figures started suddenly into being and were[Pg 4] blotted38 out before the eye had clearly visualized39 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 hawk40.
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 drawn41 close to this ideal fire, in each of which sat a young man. They talked, but in desultory42 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 loquacity43.
"Yes, a bath would be a very good thing," said one; "but it is perhaps a question whether in the absolutely immediate44 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 afterward45," he added, meditatively46.
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, Harry47. 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 sensuous48 voluptuary."
"On the way?" said Geoffrey. "I have arrived. Ah! and tea is following my excellent example."
The advent49 of lamps banished50 the mustering51 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 digestion52, you would say, had been given to each, and for no mess of pottage had either bartered53 the clear eye and firm leanness of perfect health; but apart from this, and a certain lithe54 youthfulness, it would have been hard at first sight even, when resemblances are more obvious than differences, to see a single point of likeness55 between the two. Geoffrey Langham, that sensuous voluptuary, seemed the seat and being of serene56 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 sullenness57. 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 enumerate58 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 remarkably59 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 truculent60, or savage61, or sulky, I believe, but somehow I remain friendless. I should be a hermit62 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 tract63 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 recluse64 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 positively65 loathed66 for shooting no worse than we had to-day. In the matter of friends, what you said was inane67. 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 pointed68 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 baron69," 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 smothered70 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 teaspoon71."
[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 wretch72 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 genial73, pink-faced old fellow, with benevolent74 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 awfully75 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 sinister76. 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 fleeting77 wonder at the illusion, he sat down, took up a book and yawned over a page that conveyed nothing to him. Then frankly78 and honestly he shut it up, and lay comfortably back in his chair, looking at the fire. He must even have dropped into a doze79, for, apparently80 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, hearty81 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."
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1
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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throbs
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| 体内的跳动( throb的名词复数 ) | |
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rime
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| n.白霜；v.使蒙霜 | |
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congealed
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| v.使凝结，冻结( congeal的过去式和过去分词 )；（指血）凝结 | |
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glimmered
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| v.发闪光，发微光( glimmer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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6
lustre
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| n.光亮，光泽；荣誉 | |
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7
vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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8
steadfast
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| adj.固定的，不变的，不动摇的；忠实的；坚贞不移的 | |
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chirped
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| 鸟叫，虫鸣( chirp的过去式 ) | |
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10
sequestered
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| adj.扣押的；隐退的；幽静的；偏僻的v.使隔绝，使隔离( sequester的过去式和过去分词 )；扣押 | |
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11
shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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shriek
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| v./n.尖叫，叫喊 | |
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13
salute
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| vi.行礼，致意，问候，放礼炮；vt.向…致意，迎接，赞扬；n.招呼，敬礼，礼炮 | |
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14
secular
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| n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的 | |
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15
beech
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| n.山毛榉；adj.山毛榉的 | |
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spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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17
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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gravel
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| n.砂跞；砂砾层；结石 | |
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shears
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| n.大剪刀 | |
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pruning
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| n.修枝，剪枝，修剪v.修剪（树木等）( prune的现在分词 )；精简某事物，除去某事物多余的部分 | |
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21
swelled
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| 增强( swell的过去式和过去分词 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情） | |
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22
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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deformed
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| adj.畸形的；变形的；丑的，破相了的 | |
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24
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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25
inhuman
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| adj.残忍的，不人道的，无人性的 | |
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26
bulge
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| n.突出，膨胀，激增；vt.突出，膨胀 | |
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27
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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28
dwindled
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| v.逐渐变少或变小( dwindle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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29
conjecture
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| n./v.推测，猜测 | |
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30
reconstruction
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| n.重建，再现，复原 | |
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31
abutted
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| v.（与…）邻接( abut的过去式和过去分词 )；（与…）毗连；接触；倚靠 | |
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32
dependence
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| n.依靠，依赖；信任，信赖；隶属 | |
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underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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35
battalions
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| n.（陆军的）一营（大约有一千兵士）( battalion的名词复数 )；协同作战的部队；军队；（组织在一起工作的）队伍 | |
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36
kindling
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| n. 点火, 可燃物 动词kindle的现在分词形式 | |
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37
tapestries
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| n.挂毯( tapestry的名词复数 )；绣帷，织锦v.用挂毯（或绣帷）装饰( tapestry的第三人称单数 ) | |
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38
blotted
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| 涂污( blot的过去式和过去分词 )； （用吸墨纸）吸干 | |
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visualized
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| 直观的，直视的 | |
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hawk
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| n.鹰，骗子；鹰派成员 | |
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41
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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42
desultory
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| adj.散漫的，无方法的 | |
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43
loquacity
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| n.多话，饶舌 | |
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44
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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45
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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46
meditatively
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| adv.冥想地 | |
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47
harry
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| vt.掠夺，蹂躏，使苦恼 | |
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48
sensuous
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| adj.激发美感的；感官的，感觉上的 | |
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49
advent
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| n.(重要事件等的)到来，来临 | |
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50
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51
mustering
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| v.集合，召集，集结（尤指部队）( muster的现在分词 )；（自他人处）搜集某事物；聚集；激发 | |
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52
digestion
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| n.消化，吸收 | |
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53
bartered
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| v.作物物交换，以货换货( barter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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54
lithe
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| adj.(指人、身体)柔软的，易弯的 | |
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55
likeness
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| n.相像，相似（之处） | |
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56
serene
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| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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57
sullenness
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| n. 愠怒, 沉闷, 情绪消沉 | |
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58
enumerate
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| v.列举，计算，枚举，数 | |
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59
remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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60
truculent
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| adj.野蛮的，粗野的 | |
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61
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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62
hermit
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| n.隐士，修道者；隐居 | |
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63
tract
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| n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林) | |
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64
recluse
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| n.隐居者 | |
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65
positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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66
loathed
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| v.憎恨，厌恶( loathe的过去式和过去分词 )；极不喜欢 | |
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67
inane
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| adj.空虚的，愚蠢的，空洞的 | |
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68
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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69
baron
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| n.男爵；(商业界等)巨头，大王 | |
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70
smothered
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| （使）窒息， （使）透不过气( smother的过去式和过去分词 )； 覆盖； 忍住； 抑制 | |
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71
teaspoon
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| n.茶匙 | |
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72
wretch
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| n.可怜的人，不幸的人；卑鄙的人 | |
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73
genial
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| adj.亲切的，和蔼的，愉快的，脾气好的 | |
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74
benevolent
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| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
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75
awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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76
sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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77
fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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78
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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79
doze
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| v.打瞌睡；n.打盹，假寐 | |
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80
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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81
hearty
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| adj.热情友好的；衷心的；尽情的，纵情的 | |
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