The Luck of the Vails: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

Lady Oxted did not dream at all for a very long time that night: she was at her wits' end what to do. All Scotland Yard, with all the detectives of improbable fiction thrown in to aid, were powerless to help, for the evidence against Mr. Francis in Harry's story, though conclusive to her own mind, would weigh lighter than chaff in cross-examination. And no further evidence was procurable until Mr. Francis made another attempt, and at the thought she shuddered. What, too, was that sinister doctor doing at Vail? What was the meaning of the seeming friendliness in averting a final rupture between Harry and Geoffrey? He had written, according to his own account, a letter to Geoffrey which should avoid this, but what did his letter really contain? It was far more likely that he had told him that the rupture was final, for clearly he and Mr. Francis would not want to risk the possibility of Geoffrey, who knew all, and whose attitude was so avowedly hostile, coming down to Vail again. The only consolation was that Harry for the present was safe, and that she could go up to London next day and see Geoffrey. But what could they do even together? What defence was possible when the blow might fall at any moment from any unsuspected quarter?

By degrees, as she paced her room, a kind of clearness came to her. Mr. Francis's design was evident: he had shown his hand by the nature of his earlier attempts, in which he had tried to stop Harry's marriage. Then, in the miscarriage of that, he had turned to directer deeds—fouler they could scarcely be, but of more violent sort. There had been a species of awful art in his doings; he had taken, with a fiend's gusto and pleasure in the ingenuity of it (so she pictured), Harry's avowed superstition in the power of the Luck, to compass his ends. As a musician takes a subject, and on this theme works out a fugue; as an artist paints a portrait in a definite preconceived scheme of colour, so had Mr. Francis taken the Luck, and the dangers it was thought to bring to its possessor: these he had elaborated, put into practical shape. It must have dwelt in his mind like a lunatic's idea; not only, as in the case of the gun, did he make his opportunity, but, as in the affair of the ice house, he must have been alert, receptive, instinctively and instantaneously turning to his ends whatever chance put in his way.

This thought brought her a certain feeling of relief on the one hand, but on the other it added an indefinite terror. No man morally sane could devise and steadily prosecute so finished a scheme; the very thoroughness and consistency of the three attempts stamped them as the work of a madman. Nine tenths of the blood murderously shed on the earth was to be put down to a spasm of ungovernable anger and hate, which at the moment possessed the murderer; this long premeditation, this careful following of one idea by which frost, fire, and rain should be the direct causes of Harry's death, was not to be attributed—so devilish and so finished was the application—to a sane author. Here lay the consolation: her shuddering horror of the white-haired old gentleman, with his flute-playing and his boyish yet courtly manner, was a little assuaged, and gave way to mere human pity for a mind deranged. But simultaneously, as if with a clash of cymbals, her fear of him, defenceless, bewildered, broke out: that cunning of a madman was far more formidable than the schemings of a sane man. He would soon, maddened by failure, reck nothing of what happened to him, so that he attained his object.

What, then, looking at it thus, was his object? The mere death of Harry, merely the lust for blood? That seemed hardly possible. She could not put him down as a homicidal maniac, since it seemed that he had no desire to kill for killing's sake, and the world was not yet staggered with a catalogue of subtle, undetected murders. Nor was the explanation that he wished to inherit Vail and its somewhat insufficient revenues more satisfactory. He was old; he had, so far as any one could guess, no wish for more of this world's goods than he possessed under Harry's generosity; the motive could scarcely be here. Then in a flash a more likely solution struck her. The Luck—perhaps he wanted the Luck! A year of ownership, so she told herself, had already affected even Harry's sanity in this regard. What if here was a man, old and already poised on the edge of his dug grave, who all his life long had dreamed of and itched for it, believing God knew what was in store for its possessor? This, she guessed, was the taint of blood, the same that so mysteriously, though uncriminally, possessed Harry. Here, perhaps, was the cause, not the fire and the frost and the rain, but the belief in their perils, coupled with the belief in great and unwonted good fortune which the possession of it gave. Mr. Francis had more than once, in her hearing, laughed at Harry for his fantastic allegiance to the heirloom, but this, if anything, confirmed Lady Oxted in her theory. This cunning was of consistency with the rest.

Long since she had dismissed her maid, and tired with fruitless thought, and baffled with but dimly cipherable perils, she finished her undressing and blew out the lights. But through all the dark hours she was clutched by the night-hag. Now the Luck appeared to her like the Grail in Parsifal, emitting an unearthly radiance, but even as she gazed she would suddenly be stricken with the knowledge that the brightness of it was not of heavenly but of diabolic birth; a piercing light emanated therefrom, but of infernal red, and voices from the pit moaned round it. Then it would be gone, and for a little while a wriggling darkness succeeded, but slowly the break in the blackness which heralded its coming would begin to shine again and grow intolerably bright; faint lines where it would shortly appear, stretched themselves upon the fields of vision, growing momentarily more distinct, but instead of the Luck, there came, first in outline, then in awful and indelible vividness, the features of Mr. Francis, now very kind and gentle, now a mask of tormented fury.

Next morning she found that her resolve to see Geoffrey without delay had not been diminished by the scattered phantoms of the night, and some lame toothache excuse served her end. She did not certainly know whether he was in London or not, and for safety's sake she sent him two telegrams—the one to his father's house in Kent, the second to his lodging in Orchard Street—both bidding him come to lunch that day in Grosvenor Square without fail. The one addressed to London found him first, since, after his interview with Dr. Armytage, he had stayed on there; and this, followed after an hour's interval by the other sent on from his father's house, constituted a call of urgency. He therefore obeyed the summons, leaving a note for Dr. Armytage, as had been agreed between them, to say when he should be in again, and where he had gone.

The conference began after lunch. Each found it in a measure a relief to be able to confide the secret haunting sense of peril to another. Each, on the other hand, was horrified to find that some one else shared the apprehensions each still hoped might be phantasmal. Geoffrey, on his part, had his account of his dealings with Dr. Armytage to add to Lady Oxted's information; she her own conviction that they were dealing with a man not morally sane, whose one desire was to have and to hold the Luck. To her, this alliance with Dr. Armytage, of which Geoffrey told her, seemed but a doubtful gain.

"What does one know of him?" she asked. "Nothing that is not bad. Mr. Francis could not have chosen a more apt or a more unscrupulous tool. He got two thousand pounds, you tell me, for his services in connection with the Harmsworth case: what will he not do for ten? Oh, we may be dealing with a cunning of which we have no conception! What if all this was told you simply to blind you? Nothing can be more probable, and how admirably it has succeeded! Already you trust the man—their object, as far as you are concerned, is gained."

"I had to trust him or distrust him," said Geoffrey, "and I chose to do the former. If I had chosen the latter, the door would have closed on him, and I do not see that we should be any better off than we are now. If he is dealing straight with us, we have an immense advantage in knowing all he knows of Mr. Francis's plans; if he is not, he can, at the most, give us misleading information, which is not worse than none at all."