Harry was in the most extravagantly high spirits this morning, and at breakfast the two laughed over the most indifferent trivialities like schoolboys. Stories without wit and of the bluntest kind of point, rude personal remarks, repartees of the most obvious and futile kind, were enough to make one or other, and usually both, fit to choke with meaningless laughter. To Geoffrey, at least, there was great and conscious cause for a mounting spiritual barometer in the departure of Mr. Francis. All yesterday, since he had seen him tripping up to the ice house after Harry\'s escape, he had grown increasingly aware of a creepiness of the flesh which his neighbourhood or the thought of him produced. He had not slept well during the night, and had kept awaking from snatches of nightmare dozing, in which sometimes Mr. Francis, sometimes the figure of the portrait of old Francis, would be enticing Harry on to some dim but violent doom. Now, like some infernal piper of Hamelin, Mr. Francis would precede Harry, playing on his flute and drawing him ever nearer to a bank of lurid cloud, out of which from time to time leaped[Pg 235] crooked lightning; now he would have him affectionately by the arm, and walk with him chatting and laughing toward a little house that stood on rising ground. The house, to the tongue-tied dreamer who longed to warn his friend, but could not, kept changing in form: now it would stand alone, now it would be but one in a countless row of houses all alike, stretching to left and right, from horizon to horizon, but whether solitary or among a hundred identical with it, he knew that there lurked there a danger of vague and fatal kind. Sometimes it was the beams and very stones of it that were ready to fall as soon as the door was opened; sometimes every window of it he knew would bristle with shooting flames as soon as Harry set foot within it; sometimes he could see that it was in reality no house at all, but a black pit, infinite in depth, from which rose an icy miasma. Yet, in whatever form Harry\'s companion appeared, and in whatever form the house, when they were close to it Mr. Francis would push Harry suddenly forward with an animal cry of gratified hate, and Geoffrey would start from his dream in a sweat of terror. Then there was another shocking point: the man who walked with Harry was indefinite and changeable; he would start with him in the image of Mr. Francis, and they would yet be but a stone\'s throw on their walk, when it was Mr. Francis no more, but the old baron of the Holbein picture. Sometimes, Evie\'s face would look out in panic terror from an upper window, and the dreamer could see her[Pg 236] wave her hands and hear her scream a warnings but the two apparently could neither see nor hear her, and drew steadily nearer that house of death.
But the sanity of the morning sun, the crisp chill of his bath, above all, the departure of Mr. Francis, restored Geoffrey to his normal level, and the normal once reached, the pendulum swung over to the other side by as much as it had fallen short during these nervous terrors of the night; and he ate with a zest and appetite more than ordinary, and a keen and conscious relish for the day. Even at the end of this ridiculous meal, when he had already laughed to exhaustion, a fresh spasm suddenly seized him, and Harry paused, teacup in hand, to know the worst.
"Oh, it is nothing," said Geoffrey; "indeed, it didn\'t strike me as at all funny at the time. But as I came across the hall, there was Mr. Francis at the door, though I had heard the dogcart start. He had come back for something he had forgotten. Guess what it was—I only give you one guess."
Harry\'s hand began to tremble and the corners of his mouth to break down.
"His fl—flute!" he said in quivering tones.
"Right!" shouted Geoffrey. "And I wonder—oh, oh, I hurt!—I wonder whether he will do steps round Cavendish Square to-night, playing on it!"
Harry had begun to drink his tea a moment too soon.
They smoked a cigarette in the hall, Geoffrey[Pg 237] eager to be off; Harry, contrary to his habit, strangely inclined to loiter. Their talk had veered to the more serious subject of shooting, and Harry was expressing his old-fashioned preference for a gun with hammers to the more usual hammerless.
"I can\'t think why I do prefer it," he said, "but there it is. I put a gun at half cock instinctively if I have to jump a ditch, but I do not feel quite at home with that little disk uncovering \'safe.\' Supposing it shouldn\'t be? Come along, Geoff; we\'ll start, as you are in such a hurry. The men meet us at the lodge: we\'ll just get our guns and go!"
They went down the stone-flagged passage to the gun room, which looked out on the box hedge. There were two guns lying on the table, and Geoffrey, after looking at the other, took up his own.
"You\'re a consistent chap," he said to Harry. "After all you tell me of your preference for hammers, you shoot apparently with a hammerless."
Harry picked up the gun and looked at it.
"Not mine," he said; "Uncle Francis\'s. Ah! there\'s mine."
Another gun with hammers was leaning nearly upright in a rough gun stand, more like a stand for sticks, in the corner. Harry took hold of it some halfway up the barrels, and then seemed to Geoffrey to give a little jerk as if it had stuck. On the moment there was a loud explosion, a horrible raking scratch was torn in the wooden panelling[Pg 238] of the wall, and an irregular hole opened in the ceiling. The charge could not have missed Harry by more than three inches, but he stood there, the smoking gun in his hand, without a tremor. Then he turned to Geoffrey.
"The Luck is waking up," he said. "Frost yesterday—that was the ice house; and this looks awfully like fire."
Several panes of glass in the window had been shattered by the concussion, and Harry pointed the gun out.
"Now for the second barrel," he said, and the click of the falling trigger was the only answer. He opened the breech, and took out the smoking cartridge case.
"One cartridge only," he said; then, looking down the barrels, "and the left barrel is clean. It looks rather as if the gun had been cleaned, and a cartridge put in afterward. Odd thing to happen. Now we\'ll go shooting, Geoff!"
But Geoffrey was holding on to the table, trembling violently.
"You\'re not hurt?" he said.
"No. I shouldn\'t go shooting if I were. Come, old chap, pull yourself together: there\'s no harm done. I shall make inquiries about this. Don\'t you say anything, Geoff. I am going to look into it thoroughly, detective fashion."
"But—but aren\'t you frightened?" asked Geoffrey feebly.
"No, funnily enough, I\'m not. It\'s the Luck: I firmly believe it\'s the Luck, and the poor old[Pg 239] devil who put the curse in it is doing things in a thoroughly futile manner. I am ashamed of him."
"Ah, destroy the beastly thing!" cried Geoffrey. "Burn it, smash it, chuck it away!"
"Not I. Oh, it\'s cheap, it\'s awfully cheap! A hole in the ceiling, and a penny for the cartridge, and November coming closer."
"Do you mean to say you believe in it all?" asked Geoffrey.
"Yes, I believe in it all."
"But, good God, man! somebody put the cartridge there. Somebody told you that the summerhouse was on the left——" and he stopped suddenly.
"Yes—Uncle Francis told me that," said Harry, "and who made him forget which was which of the two houses? Why, the Luck, the blessed Luck!" he cried almost exultantly.
At this all the nightmares of the last twelve hours swarmed round Geoffrey, flapping about his head.
"And who put the cartridge in that gun?" he cried, not thinking how direct an accusation he was making.
Harry\'s face grew suddenly grave; the smile was struck from it. A flash of anger and intense surprise flamed in his eyes, and his upper lip curled back in an ugly way. Then seeing Geoffrey holding on to the table, still dazed and white, he recovered himself.
"Come, old boy," he said, "don\'t be so much[Pg 240] upset. Yet, Geoff, you shouldn\'t say that sort of thing even in jest. Have a whisky and soda before going out; you\'re all shaky. Believe in the Luck, like me, and you\'ll take things more calmly. Yes, I mean it; at last I really mean it. I am the inheritor of a curse and a blessing. So I take the good with the bad, and, oh, how much the one outweighs the other! By the way, the painters are in the house; they must patch up the paper here, and mend that hole in the ceiling. Shall I order a whisky for you at the same time?"
"No; I\'m all right," said Geoffrey, and he followed the other out.
Harry was at all times a good shot, to-day he verged on brilliancy. Geoffrey, on the other hand, who as a rule was more than good, to-day was worse than bad. His gun was a laggard; he shot behind crossing game, below anything that was flying straight away from him; he was not certain about the easiest shots, and he was only certain to miss the more difficult ones. It seemed indeed that the two had divided between them the accident in the gun room; the infinitely short moment in which Harry had felt the hot breath of the fire, sharp and agonizing like a pulled tooth, was his, but the reaction, the retarded fear, the subsequent effect on nerve and brain, were entered to Geoffrey. He was utterly unstrung by this double escape; twice during the last twenty-four hours, in this peaceful country house, had Harry looked in the very face of death; yesterday stepping gaily toward the lip of the ice tank; to-day[Pg 241] by as little a margin escaping this shattering extinction. A foot more, a foot less—and as he thought of it, Geoffrey bit his lip for fear of screaming—and brain and bone would have been shredded over the gun-room floor. Accidents would happen; there had always been accidents and there always would be, but, unlike misfortunes, they nearly always came singly. What was this malignancy that haunted Harry, dogging his steps? What dim figure, deadly and full of hate, hovered on the wing by him, ready to strike? Cartridges do not automatically find their way to guns that are cleaned and placed in the stand, as dust collects in corners. They have to be placed there, a human hand has to open the breech, stuff it with death, close it, and put the gun down again. These things must inevitably happen before a gun goes off. Who in this case did them?
They came by one o\'clock to one of the prettiest pieces of rough shooting on the ground—a long, very narrow strip of moorland country bounded on both sides by reclaimed fields, tufted thickly with heather, diversified by young clumps of fir and dense, low-growing bushes, and honey-combed with rabbit burrows. It was scarcely more than sixty yards across, but full half a mile in length, and the sport it afforded was most varied and unconjecturable. On warm days partridges would be here, covey after covey, sunning in the sandy little hollows bare of growth, or busy among the heather, and from the thickness of the[Pg 242] cover and the undulations of the ground, a big covey would seldom take the air together, but rise one by one, or in couples, without general alarm being given, to right or left of the guns, or even behind them, so close had the birds lain in the long grasses. Here and there attempts had at one time been made to bring the land into cultivation, and as you tramped through heather, you would suddenly come on a vague-edged square of potato-planting, the vegetable run riot with great wealth of thick leaf; or a strip of corn already half wild, and with a predominant ingredient of tares, would make you go slowly on the certainty of the break of brown wings, or the delayed and head-down scurry of a hare.
To those happily old-fashioned enough to care for the sober joys of walking up, it was the very poetry of sport, but to-day it appeared to Geoffrey a barren and unprofitable place. For the last hour the questions that tormented him had been volleying even more insistently; horrible doubts and suspicions, no longer quite vague, flocked round his head like a flight of unclean birds, and he desired one thing only—to get to the gun room alone and clear up a certain point.
They had to walk over a bare and depopulated stubble to get to this delectable ground, and Harry, as they neared it, looked first at Geoffrey\'s lacklustre face, then at his watch.
"I had no idea it was so late, Geoff," he said; "I think we\'ll take the rough after lunch. We\'re[Pg 243] only half a mile from the house, and you look as if lunch would do you good."
He took the cartridges carefully out of his gun.
"No mistake this time," he said. "We\'ll start over the rough at two—Kimber, meet us here. Oh, by the way, come up to the house; I want to ask you something."
Geoffrey gave up his gun with a sigh of relief.
"Yes; let\'s do that piece afterward," he said; "I can\'t hit a sitting haystack this morning, Harry."
"There\'s one; have a shot at it," said Harry. "O Geoff, don\'t look so awful! What has happened? There is a hole in the gun-room ceiling. You didn\'t do it, and I\'m not going to send the bill to you."
"But aren\'t you frightened?" asked Geoffrey. "Are you made of flesh and blood?"
"I believe so. But haven\'t you ever had a shave of being shot? I\'ll bet you didn\'t give it a thought half an hour afterward."
"I know; but it\'s more cold-blooded indoors, happening the way it did. And coming on the top of your ice-house affair yesterday!"
"It\'s the Luck!" cried Harry; "that\'s the explanation of it, and it\'s proved to the hilt. Fire and frost: they are done; scratch them out; and now there remains the rain. I\'m afraid we shall not get the rain to-day, though. If one has to go through a thing—and I certainly have—it is better to get it over quick, as I, to do me justice, am[Pg 244] getting it over. And, O Geoff, there\'s a good time coming!"
Harry had to see the foreman who was in charge of the electric light, as well as the keeper, when he got in, and Geoffrey, afte............