The Luck of the Vails

PART I

Chapter 1

The Shadows Dance

THE SHORT WINTER’S day was drawing to its close, and twilight, the steel and silver twilight of a windless frost, was falling in throbs of gathered dusk over an ice-bound land. The sun, brilliant, but cold as an electric lamp, had not in all its hours of shining been of strength sufficient to melt the rime congealed during the night before, and each blade of grass on the lawns, each spray and sprig on the bare hedgerows, had remained a spear of crystals minute and innumerable. The roofs of house and cottage sparkled and glimmered as with a soft internal lustre in the light of the moon, which had risen an hour before sunset, and the stillness of a great cold—a thing more palpably motionless than even the stricken noonday of the south—gripped all in its vice. Silent, steadfast lights had sprung up and multiplied in the many-windowed village, but not a bird chirped or dog barked. Labourers were home from the iron of the frozen fields, doors were shut, and the huge night was at hand.

The sequestered village of Vail lies in a wrinkle of the great Wiltshire downs, and is traversed by the Bath road. The big inn, the Vail Arms, seems to speak of the more prosperous days of coach and horn, but now its significance to the shrill greyhounds of the railway is of the smallest, and they pass for the most part without salute. About a mile beyond it to the outward-bound traveller stands the big house, screened by some ten furlongs of park, and entering the gate, he will find himself in a noble company of secular trees, beech in the majority, and of stately growth. Shortly before the house becomes visible a spacious piece of meadow-land succeeds to the park; thence the road, passing over a broad stone bridge which spans the chalk stream flowing from the sheet of water above, is bounded on either side by terraced lawns of ancient and close-napped turf, intersected at intervals by gravel walks, and turning sharply to the right, follows a long box hedge, once cut into tall and fantastic shapes. But it seems long to have lacked the shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night-hag into things inhuman. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction.

The end of one of the wings of the house, which was built round three sides of a quadrangle, abutted on to this hedge so closely that a peacock with bloated tail peered into the gun-room window, and in the centre of the gravel sweep rose a bronze Triton fountain, bearded like an old man with long dependence of icicle. A bitter north wind had accompanied the early days of the frost, and this icy fringe had grown out sideways from the lip of the basin, blown aside even as it congealed. Flower-beds, a riband of dark untenanted earth, ran underneath the windows, which rose in three stories, small-paned and Jacobean. As dark fell, light sprang out in the walls, as the stars in the field of heaven, but to right and left of the front-door there came through a row of windows yet uncurtained a redder and less constant gleam than the shining of oil or wax, now growing, now diminishing, leaping out at one moment to a great vividness, at the next suddenly dying down again, so that in the corners of the room there was a continual battle of shadows. Now, as the flames from the wood burning on the great open hearth grew dim, whole battalions of them would collect and gather, again with the kindling of some fresh stuff, they would be routed and disappear. This fitfulness of illumination played also strange tricks with the tapestries that hung on two of the four sides of the hall; figures started suddenly into being, and were blotted out before the eye had clearly visualized them, and in the inconstancy of the light a nervous man might say to himself that stir and movement was going on among them; again they rode to hounds, or took the jesses off the hawk.

The present is the heir of all the achievements of former ages, and while this great house, with its mile-long avenue, its tapestries, its pictures, its air of magnificent English stability, finely represented all that had gone before, all that was going on now was enclosed in the two large armchairs drawn close to this ideal fire, in each of which sat a young man. They talked but in desultory fashion, with frequent but not awkward pauses of some length, for any social duty of keeping the conversation going was to them quite outside a practical call. They had also been shooting all this superb frosty day, and the return to warmth and indoors, though productive of profound content, does not conduce to loquacity.

‘Yes, a bath would be a very good thing,’ said one, ‘but it is, perhaps, a question whether in the absolutely immediate future tea would not be better.’

This was too strong a suggestion to be merely called a hint, and the other rose.

‘Sorry, Geoffrey,’ he said, ‘I never ordered tea. I was thinking—no, I don’t think I was thinking. Tea first, bath afterwards,’ he added meditatively.

Geoffrey Langham stroked an imperceptible moustache.

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ he said, ‘and I’m glad to see you appreciate the importance of little things, Harry. Little things like tea and baths matter far the most.’

‘Anyhow, they occur much the oftenest,’ said Lord Vail.

‘I was beginning to be afraid tea wasn’t going to occur at all,’ said Geoffrey.

Harry Vail appeared to consider this.

‘You were wrong, then,’ he said, ‘and you are on the way to become a sensuous voluptuary.’

‘On the way?’ said Geoffrey. ‘I have arrived. Ah, and tea is following my excellent example!’

The advent of lamps banished the mustering and dispersal of the leaping shadows, and threw the two figures seated on either side of the tea-table into strong light, and, taken together, into even stronger contrast. The birth-right of a good digestion, you would say, had been given to each, and for no mess of pottage had either bartered the clear eye and firm leanness of perfect health but, apart from this and a certain lithe youthfulness, it would have been hard at first sight even, when resemblances are more obvious than differences, to see a single point of likeness between the two. Geoffrey Langham, that sensuous voluptuary, seemed the seat and being of serene English cheerfulness, and his face, good-looking from its very pleasantness, contrasted strongly with that of the other, which was handsome, in spite of a marked and grave reserve which a stranger might easily have mistaken for sullenness. Indeed, many who might soon have ceased to be strangers had done so; and though Harry Vail had perhaps no enemies, he was in the forlorner condition of having very few friends. In fact, had he been made to enumerate them, his list would have begun with Geoffrey, and it is doubtful whether it would not also have ended with him.

But these agreeable influences of tea and light seemed to produce a briskening effect on the two, and their talk, which, since they came in, had touched a subject only to dismiss it, settled down into a more marked channel.

‘Yes, it is a queer sort of coming-of-age party for me,’ said Lord Vail, ‘and it was really good of you to come, Geoffrey. I wonder whether anyone has ever come of age in so lonely a manner. I have only one relative in the world who can be called even distantly near. He comes this evening. Oh, I told you that.’

‘Your uncle,’ said Geoffrey.

‘Great-uncle, to be accurate. He is my grandfather’s youngest brother, and, what is so odd, he is my heir. One always thinks of heirs as being younger than one’s self.’

‘Cut him off with a shilling,’ said Geoffrey.

‘Well, there isn’t much more, in any case, except this great barrack of a house. What there is, however, goes to him, and it can hardly be expected that he will marry and have children now.’

‘How old is he?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘Something over seventy.’

‘And after him?’

‘The Lord knows. Anybody; the first person you meet if you walk down Piccadilly perhaps—perhaps you, perhaps the Prime Minister. Honestly, I haven’t any idea.’

‘Marry, then, at once,’ said Geoffrey, ‘and disappoint the man in the street and the Prime Minister, your uncle and me.’

Harry Vail got up, and stood with his back to the fire, stretching out his long-fingered hands to the blaze behind him.

‘What advice!’ he said. ‘You might as well advise me to have a Greek nose. Some people have it, some do not; it is fate.’

‘Marriage is a remarkably common fate,’ remarked Geoffrey; ‘commoner than a Greek nose. I have seen many married people without it.’

‘It is commoner for certain sorts of people,’ said Harry, ‘but you know, I——’ and he stopped.

‘Well?’ asked the other.

‘I am not of those sorts, the sorts who go smiling through the world, and are smiled on in return. It was always the same with me. I am not truculent, or savage, or sulky, I believe, but somehow I remain friendless. I should be a hermit, if there were any nowadays.’

‘Liver,’ said Geoffrey decidedly. ‘The fellow of twenty-one who says that sort of thing about himself has got liver. Self-Analysis, or the Sedentary Life, a tract by Geoffrey Langham. Here endeth the gospel.’

Harry smiled.

‘I don’t think about my character, as a rule,’ he said. ‘I don’t lead a sedentary life, and I haven’t got liver; but if one is a recluse it is as well to recognize the fact. I haven’t got any real friends like everybody else.’

‘Thank you,’ said Geoffrey; ‘don’t apologize.’

‘I shall if I like; indeed, I think I will. No one but a friend would have come down here.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said the other. ‘I would stay with people I positively loathed for shooting no worse than what we had today. In the matter of friends, what you said was inane. You might have heaps of friends if you choose; but you don’t find friends by going into a room alone and locking the door behind you.’

‘Ah! I do that, do I?’ said Harry, with a certain eager interest in his tone.

‘Just a shade. You might have heaps of friends.’

‘That may be or may not; it is certain that I have not. Oh, well, this is unprofitable. Take a cigarette from the recluse.’

They smoked in silence a minute or two.

‘Your uncle!’ asked Geoffrey. ‘He comes tonight, you said.’

‘Yes, I expect him before dinner. You’ve never seen him?’

‘Never. What is he like?’

Harry pointed to a picture that hung above the fireplace.

‘Like that,’ he said, ‘exactly like that.’

Geoffrey looked at it a moment, shading his eyes from the lamp.

‘Fancy dress ball, I suppose,’ he said.

‘No, the costume of the period,’ said Harry. ‘It is not my uncle at all, but an ancestor of sorts. The picture is by Holbein; but, oddly enough, it is the very image of Uncle Francis.’

‘Francis Vail, second Baron,’ spelled out Geoffrey, from the faded lettering on the frame.

‘Yes, his name was Francis, too.’

‘What is that great cup he is holding?’ asked the other.

‘Ah, I wondered whether you would notice that. I will show it you this evening—at least, I am certain that what I have found is it.’

‘It looks rather a neat thing,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But I can’t say as much for the second Baron, Harry. He seems to me a wicked old man.’

‘There is no doubt that he was. Among other charming deeds, he almost certainly killed his own father. He was smothered in debt, came down here to try to get his father to pay up for him, and met with a pretty round refusal, it appears. That night the house was broken into, and the old man was found murdered in his bed. The burglar seems to have been a curious man—he took nothing, not a teaspoon.’

‘Good Lord! I’m glad I’m not of ancestral family. Which is the room—the room?’

Harry laughed.

‘The one at the end of the passage upstairs. Shall I tell them to move your things there?’

‘That is true hospitality,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But I won’t bother you. Do either of them walk?’

‘Francis does; so if you meet that gentleman about, and find he is insubstantial, you will know that you have seen a ghost.’

‘And, if substantial, it will only be your uncle?’

‘Exactly, so you needn’t faint immediately.’

Geoffrey got up and examined the picture with more attention.

‘If your uncle is like that,’ he said, ‘I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t sooner meet the ghost.’

‘I’m afraid it is too late to put him off now,’ said Harry; ‘and unless there is a railway accident, you will certainly meet him at dinner. But I don’t understand your objection to my poor old ancestor’s portrait. I have always wondered that such an awful old wretch could be made to look so charming.’

‘There is hell in his eyes,’ said Geoffrey.

Harry left his chair and leaned on the chimneypiece also, looking up at the picture.

‘Certainly, if you think he looks wicked,’ he said, ‘you will see no resemblance between him and my uncle. Uncle Francis is a genial, pink-faced old fellow, with benevolent white hair. When I used to come down here years ago, before my father’s death, for the holidays, he always used to be awfully good to me. But he has been abroad for the last three years, and I haven’t seen him. But I remember him as the most charming old man.’

‘Then in essentials he is not like that portrait,’ said Geoffrey, turning away. ‘Well, I’m for the bath.’

‘After you. Turn on the hot water when you’re out, Geoff.’

Harry did not immediately sit down again when his friend left him, but continued for a little while to look at the second Baron, trying to see in it what Geoffrey had seen, what he himself had always failed to see. He moved from where he stood to where Geoffrey had been standing, still looking at it, when suddenly, no doubt by some curious play of light on the canvas, there flitted across the face for a moment some expression indefinably sinister. It was there but for a flash, and vanished again, and by no change in his point of view could he recapture it. Soon he gave up the attempt, and, with only an idle and fleeting wonder at the illusion, he sat down, took up a book, and yawned over a page that conveyed nothing to him. Then frankly and honestly he shut it up, and lay comfortably back in his chair, looking at the fire. He must even have dropped into a doze, for, apparently, without transition, in the strange, unformulated fashion of dreams, he thought that his uncle had come, dressed (and this did not seem remarkable) in the fashion of the Holbein portrait, and having greeted him with his well-remembered hearty manner, had sat down in the other of the two armchairs; and though unconscious of having gone to sleep, he certainly came to himself with a start, to find the chair opposite untenanted, and the sound of his own name ringing in his ears. Immediately afterwards it was repeated, and looking up to the gallery that ran across one side of the hall, and communicated with certain of the bedrooms, he saw Geoffrey leaning over in his dressing-gown.

‘Bath’s ready,’ he said, ‘and the portrait is looking at you.’

‘Thanks. I’ve been to sleep, I think. Did you call me more than once, Geoff?’

‘No; the other time it was the second Baron.’

Harry was still a little startled.

‘You really only called once?’ he asked again.

‘Yes, only once. Why?’

‘Nothing. Hullo! I hear wheels. That must be my uncle. Turn the hot water off, there’s a good chap. I must just see him before I come upstairs.’

Chapter 2

The Coming of The Luck

THE DINING-ROOM OF Vail was of the same antique spaciousness as the hall, and as there on the lounger, so here on the diner looked down a serious company of ancestors. For so small a party, it had been thought by the butler that conviviality would be given a better chance if, on this frosty night, he laid them a small table within range of the fire rather than that the three should be cut off, as it were, on a polar island in the centre of that vast sea of floor. And, indeed, though naturally a modest man, Templeton felt a strong self-approval at the success of his kind thought; for from the moment of sitting down a cheerful merriness had held the table, rising sometimes into loud hilarity, and never sinking into the contented slough of repletion which is held in England to be the proper equivalent for joviality. But if it was Templeton in part who was responsible for so desirable an atmosphere, there was credit to be given to at least one of the diners.

Pleasant and pink was Mr Francis’s face, his hair, though silver, still crisp and vigorous, his mouth a perpetual smile. In absolute repose even, a sunshine lingered there, as in a bottle of well-matured wine, and its repose left it but to give place to laughter. All dinner through he had been the mouthpiece of delightful anecdote, and of observations shrewd but always kindly, rising sometimes almost to the dry level of wit, and never failing in that genial humour without which all conversation, not directed to a definite end, becomes intolerable. Though talking much, he was no usurper of the inalienable right of the others to wag the tongue, and though his own wagged to vibration, he was never tedious. Even in the matter of riddles, introduced by Geoffrey, he had a contribution or two to make of so extravagant a sort that this dismal species of entertainment was for the moment rendered charming. He unbent to the level of the young men, to the futility of most disconnected conversation, without ever seeming to unbend. You would have said that his narrow, clerically opening shirt, with its large cravat and massive gold studs, covered the heart of a boy; that the brains of a clever youth lay beneath that silver hair, prematurely white indeed, yet not from grief or the conduct of a world long unkind. In person he was somewhat short, ‘without the inches of a Vail’, as he himself said, and pleasantly inclined to stoutness, but to the stoutness which may come early to a healthy appetite and a serene digestion, for it was not accompanied either by pallid flabbiness or colour unduly high, and by the artificial light scarcely a wrinkle could be scrutinized on his beaming face. His dress was precise and scrupulous, yet with a certain antique touch about it, as of one who had been something of a buck in the sixties, his linen far more than clean and fresh, and of a snowiness which certainly implied special injunctions to the washerwoman. His trouser-pockets were cut, we may elegantly say, not at the side of those indispensable coverings, but towards the front of the bow window, and there dangled from the lip of one a fob of heavy gold seals.

They had now approached the end of dinner, decanters glowed on the table, and a silver cigarette-box, waiting untouched, at Mr Francis’s request, till the more manly business of wine was off the palate, stood by Harry’s dessert-plate. Already, even in this second hour of their acquaintance, the three felt like old friends, and as the wine was on its first round, the two young men were bent eagerly forward to hear the conclusion of a most exciting little personal anecdote told them by Mr Francis. He had to perfection that great essential of the narrator, intense interest and appreciation of what he was himself saying, and the climax afforded him the most obvious satisfaction. In his right hand he held his first glass of untasted port, and after an interval accorded to laughter he suddenly rose.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘comes the pleasantest moment of our delightful evening. Harry, my dear boy, here is long life and happiness to you, from the most sincere of your well-wishers. And for myself, I pray that a very old man may some time dance your children on his knee. God bless you, my dearest fellow.’

He drank the brimming glass honestly to the last drop, and held out his hand to the young man, with a long and hearty grasp. Then with quick tact, seeing the embarrassment of remark-making in Harry’s face, he sat down again, and without pause enticed the subject off the boards.

‘How well I remember your dear father coming of age!’ he said. ‘Dear me! it must be forty years ago, nearly twice as long a time as you have lived. There’s a puzzle for Mr Langham, like the one he gave me to do. It was this very port, I should say, in which we drank his health. The yellow seal, is it not, Harry? Yes, yes; your grandfather laid it down in the year ’40, and we used to drink it only on very great occasions, for he would say to me that it was a gift he had put in entail for his grandchildren, and was not for us. And so it has turned out. He was very fond of port, too, was dear old Dennis; it was not a gift that cost him nothing. You would scarcely remember your grandfather, Harry?’

‘I just remember him, Uncle Francis,’ said the lad, ‘but only as a very old man. I don’t think he liked children, for whenever he saw me he would have no more than a word or two to say, and then he would send for you.’

‘Yes, yes, so he would—so he would,’ said Mr Francis, ‘and we used to have great games together—did we not, Harry? Games did I say? Indeed, we seemed to be real Red Indians in the wilderness and Crusaders with paper lances. Dear me! I could play such games still. Hide-and-seek, too—a grand business. It requires, as poor Antrobus used to say, all the strategy of a general directing a campaign, combined with the unflinching courage of the private, who has to go straight forward, expecting artillery to open on him every minute. Yes, and the old man felt it, too. I have seen him playing it with his grandchildren when he was Prime Minister, and, upon my word, he was more in earnest about it than the young people!’

Coffee had come in, and after a few minutes the three moved for the hall. At the door, however, Harry paused and stayed behind in the dining-room. Mr Francis took Geoffrey’s arm in his affectionate way, and the two walked into the hall.

‘It has been so pleasant to me to meet you, my dear boy,’ he was saying, ‘for years ago I knew some of your people well. No, I do not think I ever knew your father. But I must tell you I am bad at surnames; one only calls the tradespeople Mr So-and-so, and I shall call you Geoffrey. You are Harry’s best friend; I have a claim upon you. Fine hall—is it not?—and the pictures, well, they are a wonderful set. There is nothing like them for completeness in England, if one excepts the royal collections; and, indeed, I think there is less rubbish here.’

The portraits were lit by small shaded lamps, which stood beneath each, so that the whole light was thrown on to the picture, and the beholder left undazzled. Mr Francis had strolled up to the fireplace, still retaining Geoffrey’s arm, and together they looked at the picture of Francis, second Baron.

‘A wonderful example of Holbein,’ said Mr Francis; ‘I do not know a finer. They tried hard to get it for the exhibition a few years ago, but it couldn’t leave Vail. I should have been quite uncomfortable at the thought of it out of the house. Now, some people have told me—Ah! I see you have noticed it, too.’

‘Surely there is an extraordinary likeness between you and it,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Harry just pointed to it when I asked him what you were like.’

Mr Francis’s eyes pored on the picture with a sort of fascination.

‘A wonderful bit of painting,’ he said. ‘And how clearly you see not only the man’s body, but his soul! That is the true art of the portrait-painter.’

‘But not always pleasant for the sitter,’ remarked Geoffrey.

‘I am not so sure. You imply, no doubt, that it was not pleasant for this old fellow?’

‘I should not think his soul was much to be proud of,’ said Geoffrey.

‘You mean he looks wicked?’ said Mr Francis, still intent on the canvas. ‘Well—God forgive him!—I am afraid he must have been. But, that being so, I expect he was as much in love with his own soul as a good man is. For he does not look to me a weak man, one who is for ever falling and repenting. There is less of Macbeth and more of his good lady in old Francis. Infirm of purpose? No, no, I think not!’

He turned abruptly away from the picture, and broke into a laugh.

‘He was a wicked old man, we are afraid,’ he said, ‘and I am exactly like him.’

‘Ah! that is not fair,’ cried Geoffrey.

‘My dear boy, I was only chaffing. And here is Harry; what has he got?’

Harry had come after them as they spoke thus together, carrying in his hand a square leather case. The thing seemed to be of some weight.

‘I wanted to show you and Geoff what I have found, Uncle Francis,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps you could tell me about it. It was in one of the attics, of all places in the world—hidden, it seemed, behind some old pictures. Templeton and I found it.’

Mr Francis whisked round with even more than his accustomed vivacity of movement at Harry’s words.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said with some impatience. ‘Open it, then, my dear boy, open it.’

An old lock of curious work secured the leather strap which fastened the case, but this dangled loose from it, attached to its hasp.

‘We could find no key for it,’ explained Harry, ‘and had to break it open.’

As he spoke, he drew from the case an object swathed in wash-leather, but the outline was clearly visible beneath its wrappings.

‘Ah, it is so,’ said Mr Francis below his breath, and as Harry unfolded the covering they all stood silent. This done, he held up to the light what it contained. It was a large golden goblet with two handles, of a size perhaps to hold a couple of quarts of liquor, and even by lamplight it was a thing that dazzled the eye, and made the mouth to water. But, solid gold as it was, and of chaste and exquisite workmanship, there was scarce an inch of it that was not worth more than the whole value of the gold and the craft bestowed thereon, so thickly was it encrusted with large and precious stones. Just below the lip of the cup ran a ring of rubies, of notable size and wonderful depth of colour, and below, at a little interval, six emerald stars, all clear-set in the body of the cup. The lower part was chased with acanthus-leaves, each outlined in pearls, and up the fluted stem climbed lordly sapphires. Sapphires again traced the rim of the foot, and in each handle was clear-set a row of diamonds—no chips and dust, but liquid eyes and lobes of light. Half-way down the bowl of the cup, between the emerald stars and the points of the acanthus-leaves, ran a plain panel of gold, on which was engraved in small Early English characters some text that encircled the whole.

Harry was standing close under the lamp as he took off the covering, and remained there a moment, holding in his hand the gorgeous jewel, and looking at it with a curiously fixed attention, unconscious of the others. Then he handed it to his uncle.

‘Tell me about it; what is it, Uncle Francis?’ he asked, and involuntarily, as the old man took it, he glanced at the picture of Francis, second Baron, who, in the portrait, held, beyond a doubt, the same treasure that they were now examining.

Mr Francis did not at once reply, but handled the cup for a little while in silence, with awe and solemnity in his attitude and expression. As he turned it this way and that in his grasp, jewel after jewel caught the light and shone refracted in points of brilliant colour on his face. The burnished band, on which was engraved the circ1e of the text, cut a yellow line of reflection across his nose and cheeks, which remained steady, but over the rest of his face gleams of living colour shone and passed, and now as a ruby, now an emerald, sent their direct rays into his eyes, they would seem lit inside by a gleam of red or green. At length he looked up.

‘Hear what the thing says of itself,’ he said. ‘I will read it you.’

Then, turning the cup till he had found the beginning of the text, he read slowly, the cup revolving to the words:

‘When the Luck of the Vails is lost,

Fear not fire nor rain nor frost;

When the Luck is found again,

Fear both fire and frost and rain.’

‘Very pretty,’ said Geoffrey, with a critical air; but Mr Francis made no reply. His eyes were still fixed on the jewel.

‘But what is it?’ asked Harry.

‘This? The cup?’ he said. ‘It is what I have read to you. It is the Luck of the Vails.’

Geoffrey laughed.

‘You’ve got it, Harry, anyhow,’ he said, ‘for weal or woe. How does it run? Fear fire and frost and rain. Take care of yourself, old man, and don’t smoke in bed, and don’t skate over deep water.’

Mr Francis turned to him quickly, with a sudden recovery of his briskness.

‘You and I would risk all that, would we not, Geoffrey,’ he said, ‘to have found such a beautiful thing? Yes, Harry, I see you have noticed it. There it is in old Francis’s hand in the picture. Where else should it be if not there? Whether he made it or not, I can’t tell you, but that is its first appearance as far as we know.’

Still holding it, he looked at the portrait, then stretched it out to Harry.

‘There, take it,’ he said quickly.

‘But tell us all about it,’ said Harry. ‘What happened to it afterwards? How is it I never heard of it?’

‘Your father would never speak of it,’ said Mr Francis, ‘nor your grandfather either. Your father never saw it, your grandfather only once, when he was quite a little boy. Neither could bear to speak of it when it was lost. And so it was in the attic all the time!’

Harry’s eyes were sparkling; a sudden animation seemed to possess him.

‘Tell us from the beginning,’ he said.

He was already wrapping the goblet up again, and Mr Francis looked greedily at it, till the last jewel had been hidden in the wash-leather.

‘Well, it is a strange story, and a short one,’ he said, ‘for so little is known of it. It has appeared and disappeared several times since Holbein painted it there, as unaccountably as it has appeared again now. In the attic all the time!’ he exclaimed again.

‘But the legend—what does the legend mean?’ asked Harry.

‘I have no idea. Perhaps it is some old rhyme, perhaps it is a mere conceit of the goldsmith. But be that as it may,