"That was not what he came for," thought Geoffrey to himself.
[CHAPTER XVI]
FIRE
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 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 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.