Aura and the summer-colony were heartily glad to have Thaxton Vail back again. He was the sort of youth who is liked very much by nine acquaintances in ten and disliked by fewer than one in ninety. But there was no such majority opinion as to the return of the two young Creedes.
The twins, from babyhood, had been so alike in looks and in outward mannerisms that not five per cent of their neighbors could tell them apart. But there all resemblance ceased.
Clive Creed was of the same general type as young Vail, who was his lifelong chum. They were much alike in traits and in tastes. They even shared—that last year before the war cut a hole in the routine of their pleasant lives—a mutual ardor for Doris Lane, who, with her old aunt, Miss Gregg, spent her summers at Stormcrest, across the valley from Vailholme. It was the first shadow of rivalry in their chumship.
Clive and Thaxton had the same pleasantly easy-going ways, the same unforced likableness. They were as popular as any men in the hill-country’s big summer-colony. Their wartime absence had been a theme for genuine regret to Aura Valley.
Except in looks, Osmun Creede was as unlike his twin brother as any one could well have been. The man had every Scotch flaw and crotchet, without a single Scotch virtue. Old Osmun Vail had sized up the lad’s character years earlier, when he had said in confidence to Thaxton:
“There’s a white man and a cur in all of us, Thax. And some psychologist sharps say twins are really one person with two bodies. Clive got all the White Man part of that ‘one person,’ and my lamentable namesake got all the Cur. At times I find myself wishing he were ‘the lamented Osmun Creede,’ instead of only ‘the lamentable Osmun Creede.’ Hester Gregg says he behaves as if Edgar Allan Poe had written him and Berlioz had set him to music.”
From childhood, Thaxton and this Creede twin had clashed. In the honest days of boyhood they had taken no pains to mask their dislike. In the more civil years of adolescence they had been at much pains to be courteous to each other when they met, but they tried not to meet. This avoidance was not easy; in such a close corporation as the Aura set, especially after both of them began calling over-often on Doris Lane.
Back to the Berkshires, from overseas, came the two Creedes. The community prepared to welcome Clive with open arms; and to tolerate Osmun, as of old, for the sake of his brother and for the loved memory of his father. At once Aura was relieved of one of its former perplexities. For no longer were the twins impossible to tell apart.
They still bore the most amazing likeness to each other, of course. But a long siege of trench fever had left Osmun slightly bald on the forehead and had put lines and hollows in his good-looking face and had given his wide shoulders a marked stoop. Also, a fragment of shell in the leg had left him with a slight limp. The fever, too, had weakened his eyes; and had forced him to adopt spectacles with a faintly smoked tinge to their lenses. Altogether, he was plainly discernible, now, from his erect brother, and looked nine years older.
There was another change, too, in the brethren. Hitherto they had lived together at Canobie. On their return from the war they astonished Aura by separating. Osmun lived on at the big house. But Clive took his belongings to Rackrent Farm; and set up housekeeping there; attended by an old negro and his wife, who had worked for his father. He even transported thither the amateur laboratory wherewith he and Osmun had always delighted to putter; and he set it up in a vacant back room of the farmhouse.