“Very well,” I said, “I will do it, provided there is nothing in this paper to make me change my mind,” and I touched the envelope he had put upon the table by the keys.
“Thank you, Holly, thank you. There is nothing at all. Swear to me by God that you will be a father to the boy, and follow my directions to the letter.”
“I swear it,” I answered solemnly.
“Very well; remember that perhaps one day I shall ask for the account of your oath, for though I am dead and forgotten, yet shall I live. There is no such thing as death, Holly, only a change, and, as you may perhaps learn in time to come, I believe that even here that change could under certain circumstances be indefinitely postponed,” and again he broke into one of his dreadful fits of coughing.
“There,” he said, “I must go; you have the chest, and my will can be found among my papers, under the authority of which the child will be handed over to you. You will be well paid, Holly, and I know that you are honest; but if you betray my trust, by Heaven, I will haunt you.”
I said nothing, being, indeed, too bewildered to speak.
He held up the candle, and looked at his own face in the glass. It had been a beautiful face, but disease had wrecked it. “Food for the worms,” he said. “Curious to think that in a few hours I shall be stiff and cold—the journey done, the little game played out. Ah me, Holly! life is not worth the trouble of life, except when one is in love—at least, mine has not been; but the boy Leo’s may be if he has the courage and the faith. Good-bye, my friend!” and with a sudden access of tenderness he flung his arm about me and kissed me on the forehead, and then turned to go.
“Look here, Vincey,” I said; “if you are as ill as you think, you had better let me fetch a doctor.”
“No, no,” he said earnestly. “Promise me that you won’t. I am going to die, and, like a poisoned rat, I wish to die alone.”
“I don’t believe that you are going to do anything of the sort,” I answered. He smiled, and, with the word “Remember” on his lips, was gone. As for myself, I sat down and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I had been asleep. As this idea would not bear investigation I gave it up, and began to think that Vincey must have been drinking. I knew that he was, and had been, very ill, but still it seemed impossible that he could be in such a pass as to be able to know for certain that he would not outlive the night. Had he been so near dissolution surely he would scarcely have been able to walk, and to carry a heavy iron box with him. The story, on reflection, seemed to me utterly incredible, for I was not then old enough to be aware how many things happen in this world that the common sense of the average man would set down as so improbable as to be absolutely impossible. This is a fact that I have only recently mastered. Was it likely that a man would have a son five years of age whom he had never seen since he was a tiny infant? No. Was it likely that he could foretell his own death so accurately? No. Was it likely that he could trace his pedigree for more than three centuries before Christ, or that he would suddenly confide the absolute guardianship of his child, and leave half his fortune, to a college friend? Most certainly not. Clearly Vincey was either drunk or mad. That being so, what did it mean? And what was in the sealed iron chest?
The position baffled and puzzled me to such an extent that at last I could bear the thought of it no longer, and determined to sleep over it. So having put away the keys and the letter that Vincey had left into my despatch-box, and hidden the iron chest in a large portmanteau, I went to bed, and was soon fast asleep.
As it seemed to me, I had only been asleep for a few minutes when I was awakened by somebody calling me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes; it was broad daylight—eight o’clock, in fact.
“Why, what is the matter with you, John?” I asked of the gyp who waited on Vincey and myself. “You look as though you had seen a ghost!”
“Yes, sir, and so I have,” he answered, “leastways I’ve seen a corpse, which is worse. I’ve been in to call Mr. Vincey, as usual, and there he lies stark and dead!”
*The Strong and Beautiful, or, more accurately, the Beautiful in strength.
†The Kallikrates here referred to by my friend was a Spartan, spoken of by Herodotus (Herod. ix. 72) as being remarkable for his beauty. He fell at the glorious battle of Platæa (September 22, B.C. 479), when the Lacedæmonians and Athenians under Pausanias routed the Persians, putting nearly 300,000 of them to the sword. The following is a translation of the passage: “For Kallikrates died out of the battle, he came to the army the most beautiful man of the Greeks of that day—not only of the Lacedæmonians themselves, but of the other Greeks also. He, when Pausanias was sacrificing, was wounded in the side by an arrow; and then they fought, but on being carried off he regretted his death, and said to Arimnestus, a Platæan, that he did not grieve at dying for Greece, but at not having struck a blow, or, although he desired so to do, performed any deed worthy of himself.” This Kallikrates, who appears to have been as brave as he was beautiful, is subsequently mentioned by Herodotus as having been buried among the (young commanders), apart from the other Spartans and the Helots.—L. H. H.
II
THE YEARS ROLL BY
As might be expected, poor Vincey’s sudden death created a great stir in the College; but, as he was known to be very ill, and a satisfactory doctor’s certificate was forthcoming, no inquest was held. They were not so particular about inquests in those days as we are now; indeed, they were generally disliked, because of the attendant scandal. Under these circumstances, being asked no questions, I did not feel it necessary to volunteer information about our interview on the night of Vincey’s decease, beyond saying that, as was not unusual with him, he had come into my rooms. On the day of the funeral a lawyer came down from London and followed my poor friend’s remains to the grave, and then returned with his papers and effects, except, of course, the iron chest which had been left in my keeping. For a week after this I heard no more of the matter; and, indeed, my attention was amply occupied in other ways, for I was up for my Fellowship, a fact that had prevented me from attending the funeral or seeing the lawyer. At last, however, the examination was over, and I came back to my rooms and sank into an easy chair with a happy consciousness that I had got through it very fairly.
Soon, however, my thoughts, relieved of the pressure that had crushed them into a single groove during the last few days, turned to the events of the night of poor Vincey’s death, and again I asked myself what it all meant, and wondered if I should hear anything more of the matter, and if I did not, what it would be my duty to do with the curious iron chest. I sat there and thought and thought till I began to grow seriously disturbed over the occurrence: the mysterious midnight visit, the prophecy of death so shortly to be fulfilled, the solemn oath that I had taken, and which Vincey had called on me to answer to in another world than this. Had the man committed suicide? It looked like it. And what was the quest of which he spoke? The circumstances were uncanny, so much so that, though I am by no means nervous, or apt to be alarmed at anything which may seem to cross the bounds of the natural, I grew afraid, and began to wish I had nothing to do with them. How much more do I wish it now, over twenty years afterwards!
As I sat and thought, there came a knock at the door, and a letter, in a big blue envelope, was brought to me. I saw at once that it must be a lawyer’s letter, and an instinct told me that it was connected with my trust. The letter, which I still have, runs thus:—
“SIR,—Our client, the late M. L. Vincey, Esq., who died on the 9th instant in —— College Cambridge, has left behind him a Will, of which we are the executors, whereof you will please find copy enclosed. Under this Will you will perceive that you take a life-interest in about half of the late Mr. Vincey’s property, now invested in Consols, subject to your acceptance of the guardianship of his only son, Leo Vincey, an infant, aged five. Had we not ourselves drawn up the document in question in obedience to Mr. Vincey’s clear and precise instructions, both personal and written, and had he not then assur
ed us that he had very good reasons for what he was doing, we ought to tell you that its provisions seem to us of so unusual a nature, that we should have felt bound to call the attention of the Court of Chancery to them, in order that such steps might be taken as seemed desirable to it, either by contesting the capacity of the testator or otherwise, to safeguard the interests of the infant. As it is, knowing that Mr. Vincey was a gentleman of the highest intelligence and acumen, and that he has absolutely no relations living to whom he could have confided the guardianship of the child, we do not feel justified in taking this course.
“Awaiting such instructions as you may please to send us as regards the delivery of the infant and the payment of the proportion of the dividends due to you,
“We remain, Sir, faithfully yours,
“GEOFFREY AND JORDAN.
“Horace L. Holly, Esq.”
I put down the letter, and ran my eye through the Will, which appeared, from its utter unintelligibility, to have been drawn on the strictest legal principles. So far as I could discover, however, it exactly bore out what my friend Vincey had told me on the night of his death. Then it was true after all. I must take the boy. Suddenly I remembered the letter which Vincey had left with the box. I fetched and opened it. It contained only such directions as he had already given to me as to opening the chest on Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, and laid down the outlines of the boy’s education, which was to include Greek, the higher Mathematics, and Arabic. At the end there was a postscript to the effect that if the child died under the age of twenty-five, which, however, the writer did not believe would occur, I was to open the chest, and act on the information therein contained if I saw fit. If I did not see fit, I was to destroy all the contents. On no account was I to pass them on to a stranger.
As this letter added nothing material to my knowledge, and certainly raised no further objection in my mind to entering on the task I had promised my dead friend to undertake, there was only one course open to me—namely, to write to Messrs. Geoffrey and Jordan, and express my acceptance of the trust, stating that I should be willing to commence my guardianship of Leo in ten days’ time. This done I went to the authorities of my college, and having told them as much of the story as I considered desirable, which was not very much, after some difficulty I succeeded in persuading them to stretch a point, and, in the event of my having obtained a fellowship, which I was almost certain was the case, to allow me to take the child to live with me. Their consent, however, was only granted on the condition that I vacated my rooms in college and took lodgings. This I did, and after an active search I obtained very good apartments quite close to the college gates. The next thing was to find a nurse. Now on this point I came to a decision. I would have no woman to lord it over me about the child, and steal his affections from me. The boy was old enough to do without female assistance, so I set to work to find a suitable male attendant. After some difficulty I was fortunate in hiring a most respectable round-faced young man, who had been a helper in a hunting-stable, but who said that he was one of a family of seventeen and well-accustomed to the ways of children, and professed himself quite willing to undertake the charge of Master Leo when he arrived. Then, having carried the iron box to town, and with my own hands deposited it at my banker’s, I bought some books upon the health and management of infants, and read them, first to myself, then aloud to Job—that was the young man’s name—and waited.
At length the child arrived in the charge of an elderly person, who wept bitterly at parting with him; and a beautiful boy he was. Indeed, I do not think that I ever saw such a perfect child before or since. His eyes were grey, his forehead was broad, and his face, even at that early age, clean cut as a cameo, without being pinched or thin. But perhaps his most attractive point was his hair, which was pure gold in colour and tightly curled over his shapely head. He cried a little when at last his nurse tore herself away and left him with us. Never shall I forget the scene. There he stood, with the sunlight from the window playing upon his golden curls, his fist screwed over one eye, while he took us in with the other. I was seated in a chair, and stretched out my hand to him to induce him to come to me, while Job, in the corner, made a sort of clucking noise, which, arguing from his previous experience, or from the analogy of the hen, he judged would have a soothing effect, and inspire confidence in the youthful mind, and ran a wooden horse of peculiar hideousness backwards and forwards in a way that was little short of inane. This went on for some minutes, and then all of a sudden the lad stretched out both his little arms and ran to me.
“I like you,” he said: “you is ugly, but you is good.”
Ten minutes afterwards he was eating large slices of bread-and-butter, with every sign of satisfaction; Job wanted to put jam on to them, but I sternly reminded him of the excellent works that we had read, and forbade it.
In a very little while (for, as I expected, I gained my fellowship) the boy became the favourite of the whole College—where, orders and regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was continually in and out—a sort of infant libertine, in whose favour all rules were relaxed. The offerings made at his shrine were without number, and thereon I had a serious difference of opinion with one old resident Fellow, now long dead, who was supposed to be the crustiest man in the University, and to abhor the sight of a child. And yet I discovered, when a frequently recurring fit of sickness had forced Job to keep a strict lookout, that this unprincipled old man was in the habit of enticing the boy to his rooms and there feeding him upon unlimited quantities of “brandy-balls,” and of making him promise to say nothing about it. Job told him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, “at his age, too, when he might have been a grandfather if he had done what was right,” by which Job understood had married. Thence arose the quarrel.
But I have no space to dwell upon those delightful years, around which happy memories still linger. One by one they went by, and as they passed we two grew dearer and yet more dear to each other. Few sons have been loved as I love Leo, and few fathers know the deep and continuous affection that Leo bears to me.
The child grew into the boy, and the boy into the young man, while one by one the remorseless years flew by, and as he grew and increased so did his beauty and the beauty of his mind grow with him. When he was about fifteen they christened him Beauty about the College, and me they nicknamed the Beast. Beauty and the Beast was what they called us when we went out walking together, as we were wont to do every day. Once Leo attacked a strapping butcher’s man, twice his size, because he sang it out after us, and thrashed him, too—thrashed him fairly. I walked on and pretended not to see, till the combat grew too exciting, when I turned round and cheered him on to victory. It was the chaff of the College at the time, but I could not help it. Then, when he was a little older the undergraduates found fresh names for us. They styled me Charon, and Leo the Greek god! I will pass over my own appellation with the humble remark that I was never handsome, and did not grow more so as I aged. As for his title, there was no doubt about its fitness. Leo at twenty-one might have stood for a statue of the youthful Apollo. I never saw anybody to equal him in looks, nor anybody so absolutely unconscious of them. As for his mind, he was brilliant and keen-witted, but no scholar. He had not the dulness necessary to that result. We followed out his father’s instructions as to his education strictly enough, and on the whole the results, especially with regard to Greek and Arabic, were satisfactory. I learnt the latter language in order to help to teach it to him, but after five years of it he knew it as well as I did—almost as well as the professor who instructed us both. I was always a great sportsman—it is my one passion—and every autumn we went away shooting or fishing, sometimes to Scotland, sometimes to Norway, once indeed to Russia. I am a good shot, but even in this he learnt to excel me.
When Leo was eighteen I moved back into my rooms, and entered him at my own College, and at twenty-one he took his degree—a respectable degree, but not a very high one. Then it was that, for the first time,
I told him something of his own story, and of the mystery which loomed ahead. Naturally he was very curious about it, and of course I explained to him that his curiosity could not be gratified at present. After this, to pass the time away, I suggested that he should read for the Bar; and this he did, studying at Cambridge, and going to London to eat his dinners.
I had only one trouble about Leo, and it was that every young woman whom he met, or, if not every one, most of them, insisted on falling in love with him. Hence arose difficulties into which I need not enter here, though they were troublesome enough at the time. On the whole he behaved fairly well; I cannot say more than that.
And so the years went by till at last Leo reached his twenty-fifth birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history really begins.
III
THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS
On the day preceding Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday we both journeyed to London, and extracted the mysterious chest from the bank where I had deposited it twenty years before. It was, I recollect, brought up by the same clerk who had taken it down. He perfectly remembered having hidden away the box. Had he not done so, he said, he should have had difficulty in finding it, it was so covered up with cobwebs.
In the evening we returned with our precious burden to Cambridge, and I think that we might both of us have given away all the sleep we won that night and not have been much the poorer. At daybreak Leo arrived in my room in a dressing-gown, and suggested that we should at once proceed to business, an idea which I scouted as showing an unworthy curiosity. The chest had waited twenty years, I said, so it could very well continue to wait until after breakfast. Accordingly at nine—an unusually sharp nine—we breakfasted; and so occupied was I with my own thoughts that I regret to state that I put a piece of bacon into Leo’s tea in mistake for a lump of sugar. Job, too, to whom the contagion of excitement had, of course, spread, managed to break the handle off my Sèvres china teacup, the identical one, I believe, that Marat had used just before he was stabbed in his bath.
She: A History of Adventure Page 4