CHAPTER IV

THE STORY OF MR. FRANCIS

Harry Vail owned a plain, gloomy house in Cavendish Square, forbidding to those who looked at it from the street, chilling to those who looked at the street from it. It was furnished in the heavy and expensive early Victorian style, and solid mahogany frowned at its inmates. During his minority it had been let for a term of years, but on his coming of age he had taken it again himself, and here, when the gloom and darkness of February and swollen waters made Vail more suitable for the amphibious than the dry-shod, he came to receive in exchange the more sociable fogs of London. Parliament had assembled, the roadways were no longer depleted, and Harry was beginning to find that, in spite of the friendlessness which he had been afraid was his, there were many houses which willingly opened their doors and welcomed him inside. Friends of his father, acquaintances of his own, were all disposed to be pleasant toward this young man, about whom there lingered a certain vague atmosphere of romance—a thing much valued by a prosaic age. He was young, attractive to the eye; he stood utterly alone in the world, with the burden or the[Pg 43] glory of a great name on his shoulders, and people found in him a charming, youthful modesty, mixed with an independence of the sturdiest, which, while accepting a favour from none, seemed to cry aloud for friendliness and bask therein when it was found, with the mute, unmistakable gratitude of a dumb animal. His own estimate of his loneliness had probably been accentuated by the year he had spent just before he came of age in studying languages in France and Germany, but in the main it was, when he made it, correct. But at his time of life change comes quickly; the young man who does not rapidly expand and enlarge, must, it may be taken for certain, be as rapidly closing up. Within a month of his arrival in London it was beyond question that the latter morbid process was not at operation in Harry.

[Pg 43]

He and Geoffrey were seated one night in the smoking room in the Cavendish Square house talking over a glass of whisky and soda. They had dined with a friend, and Harry had inveigled Geoffrey out of his way to spend an hour with him before going home.

"No, I certainly am not superstitious," he was saying, "but if I were, I really should be very much impressed by what has happened. I never heard of a stranger series of coincidences. You remember the lines engraved round the Luck:

 "'When the Luck 

 Prev. P 30/277 next