The Luck of the Vails: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

Harry laughed.

"I would not change places with him," he said; "I will take my chance as Harry Vail. I have done nothing to myself, if you ask, but I have found many friends. But I do not forget, Uncle Francis, that the first friend I found was you, and I do not think I shall find a better."

They turned into the blare of the white high road, and Mr. Francis, who, while they were in the shadow of the deep lane banks, had carried his hat on his knee, letting the wind blow refreshingly through his thick white hair, put it on again.

"Ah, Harry, I hope you will some time, and soon, find a friend, and dearer than a friend, for life," he said, "who will speedily make you forget your old uncle. But give him a seat in the chimney corner, that he asks, though he asks no more, and let him nurse your children on his knee. He has a way with children; they never cry with him. I pray, I often pray," he said, lifting his hat as he spoke, with a gesture touching and solemn, "that I may do that. That, dear Harry, would be the crowning happiness of many happy days."

The words died gently on the air; no direct reply was needed. For a moment Harry was half determined to tell his uncle of his dream and his hope—longing, with the generous warmth of youth, for the sympathy which he knew would so fully be his; and the words were even on the threshold of his lips, when Mr. Francis suddenly straightened himself from his attitude of musing and plunged into less intimate talk.

"I have not been idle, dear Harry," he said, "while you have been away, charging about the world, as youth should. I think you will find—I may say it without undue complacence—that the home farm is in better order and is more profitable than it has ever been. There is no credit due to me; it is simply the work of a bailiff I had the luck to find an invaluable man; and in the autumn I can promise you better pheasant-shooting than there has been for many years."

"I am sure it is so," said Harry, "and we will prove it together, Uncle Francis. Really I can not thank you enough; it is too good of you to devote yourself as you have been doing to the estate. Dear me, it is four months since I was here! I am an absentee landlord, but a better landlord than I has been on the spot, and I am not afraid that I shall be shot at."

They turned in at the lodge gates and bowled swiftly along under the huge trees. The hay was standing high in the fields to the left; on the right the pasturage of the park was grazed by sleek kine, already beginning to leave the midday shadows of the trees for their evening feed in the cool; and the senses of smell and sight alike drank deep of the plentiful and luxuriant summer. Rooks held parliament in their debating houses in the high elms, round the coops of the pheasant-rearing hens cheeped innumerable young birds, and the breeze that should blow at sundown was already stirring to try its wings. Extraordinarily pleasant to Harry was the sense that all this was his, yet there was neither vainglory nor selfishness in his delight, for he valued his own not for the thought of what it was to him, but for the joy another, perhaps, should take in it. Then, emerging from the mile-long avenue, they came to the shining lake, and the sound of coolness from the splashing sluice. Swans and water lily repeated themselves on the surface, and, as they turned the corner, a moor-hen made its water-legged scurry to the cover of the reed beds. Then, with a hollow note from the wheels, they rolled over the bridge and turned in under the monstrous shapes of the cut-box hedge to the gravel sweep in front of the house. There it stood, the shadow of one of the wings fallen half across the courtyard, stately and grave, full of dignity and grave repose, surely no unworthy gift to offer to any. And at that thought a sudden pulse leaped within him.

"It is all unworthy," Harry said to himself, banishing with an effort that irrepressible thrill of joy, "and I the unworthiest of all."

He lingered a moment at the door, and then followed Mr. Francis into the house. Again the joy of possession seized him: his were the tall, faint tapestries of armoured knights and garlanded lovers, his the rows of serious portraits which seemed to-day to his eye to have a freshness and welcome for him which had never been there before. He contrasted, with keen relish of the change, his last home-coming and this. What a curious, dreamlike month that had been which he had spent here at his coming-of-age. How gray and colourless life seemed then if looked at in the light of all that had passed since! He had pictured himself, he remembered, slowly putting spadeful after spadeful of time, heaped gradually from month to year, on the grave of his youth, spending a quiet, often solitary existence here in the house of his fathers. Uncle Francis—so he had planned it in those days when he had been alone here, before his arrival and Geoffrey's—no doubt would be glad to come here sometimes; Geoffrey, too, would very likely spend a week with him now and again in the shooting season. Otherwise, it would be natural for him to be much alone, and the prospect had called up in him no emotion even so lively as dislike. He would be out of doors a good deal, pottering and poking about the woods; he would read a good deal, and no doubt the years would slip away not unpleasantly. In course of time the portrait of Henry Vail, twelfth baron, and of seemingly morose tendencies, would gloom from the wall, for that series must not be broken; a little longer, and moss would be green in the lettering of his tombstone.