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CHAPTER I
THE SHADOWS DANCE
The short winter's day was drawing to its close, and twilight, the steel and silver twilight of a windless frost, falling in throbs of clear dusk over an ice-bound land. The sun, brilliant but cold as an electric lamp, had not in all the hours of its shining been of strength sufficient to melt the rime congealed during the night before, and each blade of grass on the lawns, each spray and sprig on the bare hedgerows, had remained a spear of crystals minute and innumerable. The roofs of house and cottage sparkled and glimmered as with a soft internal lustre in the light of the moon, which had risen an hour before sunset, and the stillness of great cold, a thing more palpably motionless than even the stricken noonday of the south, gripped all in its vice. Silent, steadfast lights had sprung up and multiplied in the many-windowed village, but not a bird chirped nor dog barked. Labourers were home from the iron of the frozen fields, doors were shut, and the huge night was at hand.
This sequestered 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 shrill greyhounds of the railway is of the smallest, and they pass for the most part without even a shriek of salute. 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 secular trees, beech in the majority, and of stately growth. Shortly before the house becomes visible a spacious 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 intervals by gravel 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 shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night hag into things inhuman. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction.
The end of one of the wings of the house, which was built round three sides of a quadrangle, abutted 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 dependence 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 underneath 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 hearth grew dim, whole battalions of them would collect and gather again; with the kindling of some fresh stuff, they would be routed and disappear. This fitfulness of illumination played also strange tricks with the tapestries that hung on two of the four sides of the hall; figures started suddenly into being and were blotted out before the eye had clearly visualized 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 hawk.
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 drawn close to this ideal fire, in each of which sat a young man. They talked, but in desultory 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 loquacity.
"Yes, a bath would be a very good thing," said one; "but it is perhaps a question whether in the absolutely immediate 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 afterward," he added, meditatively.
Geoffrey Langham stroked an imperceptible mustache.
"That's what I was thinking," he said; "and I am glad to see you appreciate the importance of little things, Harry. 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 sensuous voluptuary."
"On the way?" said Geoffrey. "I have arrived. Ah! and tea is following my excellent example."
The advent of lamps banished the mustering 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 digestion, you would say, had been given to each, and for no mess of pottage had either bartered the clear eye and firm leanness of perfect health; but apart from this, and a certain lithe youthfulness, it would have been hard at first sight even, when resemblances are more obvious than differences, to see a single point of likeness between the two. Geoffrey Langham, that sensuous voluptuary, seemed the seat and being of serene 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 stranger might easily have mistaken for sullenness. 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 enumerate 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,
