"Ah, he'll never get out of practice in that line," returned Laurence, with the same quizzical laugh.
"What a lot of adventures you must have had, father," went on Fay wistfully; for this was a sore subject both with herself and her brothers. They had expected tale upon tale of hair-raising peril—of lions and crocodiles and snakes and fighting Zulus. But woeful disappointment awaited. The last topic the returned wanderer seemed to care to talk upon was that of his wanderings.
Before they regained the house they were joined by the two boys, happy and healthy with their recent gallop, and full of the trout they were going to catch on the morrow under the tuition of the keeper. Laurence, dismissing them for a while, entered quietly by a back way. The post had come in, and with it an African mail letter. This he carried into his private sanctum. It was from Holmes.
"I hope the fellow isn't going to make trouble," he said to himself with a slight clouding of the brow. "He's idiot enough to turn pious—repentant, I suppose, they would call it—and give the whole thing away. 'Nothing but a curse can come of it,—the curse of blood,' the young fool said, or words to that effect. I wonder what sort of a 'curse' it is that puts one in possession of all this," looking out upon the soft, peaceful English landscape, hayfield and wooded hill, slumbering in the gathering dusk. "As if there could be a greater curse anyhow than being condemned to go through life that most pitiable object—a pauper with sixteen quarterings. No—no!"
He tore open the envelope, and in the fading light ran rapidly over its contents. Hazon had returned to Johannesburg, and had wound up all their affairs, and each of them was in possession of more than a small fortune. There was nothing, however, of the remorseful or the morbid about the writer now, and, turning over the page, Laurence broke into a short half laugh, for there followed the announcement of Holmes' engagement to Mabel Falkner of the blue eyes, and the usual transports and rhapsodies attendant upon such a communication. Skipping the bulk of this, Laurence returned the missive to his pocket with another sneering laugh.
"We shall hear no more about a 'curse' on our good fortune now, friend Holmes," he said to himself, "for you are entering upon an institution calculated to knock out all such Quixotic niceties. Ha, ha! I shouldn't be in the least surprised if in a little while you didn't hanker to start up-country again upon another 'ivory' trade."
But Holmes' letter had, as it were, let in a waft of the dark cloud of the Past upon the fair and smiling peacefulness of the Present, and he fell to thinking on what strange experiences had been his—of the consistent and unswerving irony of life as he had known it. Every conventionality violated—every rule of morality, each set aside, had brought him nothing but good—had brought nothing but good to him and his. Had he grovelled on in humdrum poverty-stricken respectability, what would have befallen him—and them? For him the stereotyped "temporary insanity" verdict of a coroner's jury—for them, well, Heaven only knew. Whereas now?
At this stage an impulse moved him, and opening a locked cabinet he took forth something, and as he examined it the associations of the thing, and the fast darkening room, brought back the vision of glooming rock walls and a perfectly defenceless man weighed down with horror and dread.
"May I come in, father? But you are in the dark."
It was Fay's voice. He half started, so rapt was he in his meditations.