Not many days after Frampton had imparted to us his sensational story, we were told to expect a visit from the family lawyer. Ronald and I always hailed his visits with delight. He was one of those cheery individuals whom boys can chum with. In age he must have been nearly seventy-five, but hale and hearty still: entering into our amusements, never minding our noise, and tipping us when he left with a liberality that appalled our uncle. Ronald and I would have put him down for fifty. But boys do not recognise the gradations of age. To them a man seems definitely old at fifty, and live as long as he may after that, years will add nothing to the mystery of his age, if only he keeps young in heart and interests. At sixty, seventy, or even eighty, he will in their eyes be fifty still.
As a matter of course Ronald and I were told to put in an appearance on the day of his arrival. The unvarying order of the programme was that, after he had had a few words with our uncle, we two should form his escort in a progress round the park and outlying farms.
“So your uncle still cherishes the old Crofton coach,” he said, as we passed the outhouse tenanted by the family ghost. “I wonder he cares to keep it,”—almost Ronald’s own words to Frampton, the coachman—from which it was clear he had never heard of our uncle’s visitant, nor did we venture to enlighten him.
“Do you know anything about it, Sir?” asked Ronald, in the eager tone of one who had by no means lost hope of solving the mystery.
“My boy, I’ve ridden in it.”
Ronald’s face was a study. “Ridden in it? actually ridden in that coach? And did you, Sir, did you see the devil?” he continued anxiously. “Frampton says he always drives it.”
“Not exactly, Ronald. And, by the way, my lad, I wouldn’t, if I were you, introduce his name quite so familiarly into your conversation. Frampton must be cautioned, Fred, as to what he tells the boy.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly say that, Sir,” continued Ronald, willing to justify his friend. “He called him old Nick.”
“That’s a trifle better. Anyhow, I didn’t see him, though I can’t say honestly that my ride was a pleasant one. I’d been staying here with old Crofton, just before he sold the place to your uncle, and I had business too to transact with Thorpe of Thorpe Hill. As luck would have it, all the carriages here were in use but this one. It wasn’t in the state it is now, but it was out of date and uncomfortable even then. However, it took me there all right. It was on the way back that I had my adventure.
“I had barely composed myself to sleep with the consciousness of having dined too well—Thorpe never stinted his guests—when I was roused by an uneasy feeling that I was not the sole occupant of the carriage. The interior was lit up by a weird, fantastic light that came and went, rose and fell, like the glow that throbs over a brick-kiln or a blast furnace. After all, it may have been only the reflection of my own cigar which I had instinctively kept alight during my short nap. From out the border-land which separates sleep from waking, I saw two figures on the opposite seat. For a time I studied them with hardly more interest than I should the figures in a pantomime, till it was forced upon me by their wild gesticulation that this was no pantomime enacting for my benefit, but a veritable tragedy of life and death. The one figure shrank cowering in a corner of the carriage; the other stood over it with uplifted hand. But no voice or sound proceeded from them. Only on the hand of one, the figure that crouched and trembled, I recognised the famous Thorpe emerald—as the family lawyer I knew it well—while the other that stormed and threatened might have passed for old Crofton himself, in so far as youth of twenty can anticipate the form and lineaments of seventy-five.