________________________________________________
_ As might be expected, poor Vincey's sudden death created a great stir
in the College; but, as he was known to be very ill, and a
satisfactory doctor's certificate was forthcoming, there was no
inquest. They were not so particular about inquests in those days as
they are now; indeed, they were generally disliked, because of the
scandal. Under all these circumstances, being asked no questions, I
did not feel called upon to volunteer any information about our
interview on the night of Vincey's decease, beyond saying that he had
come into my rooms to see me, as he often did. On the day of the
funeral a lawyer came down from London and followed my poor friend's
remains to the grave, and then went back with his papers and effects,
except, of course, the iron chest which had been left in my keeping.
For a week after this I heard no more of the matter, and, indeed, my
attention was amply occupied in other ways, for I was up for my
Fellowship, a fact that had prevented me from attending the funeral or
seeing the lawyer. At last, however, the examination was over, and I
came back to my rooms and sank into an easy chair with a happy
consciousness that I had got through it very fairly.
Soon, however, my thoughts, relieved of the pressure that had crushed
them into a single groove during the last few days, turned to the
events of the night of poor Vincey's death, and again I asked myself
what it all meant, and wondered if I should hear anything more of the
matter, and if I did not, what it would be my duty to do with the
curious iron chest. I sat there and thought and thought till I began
to grow quite disturbed over the whole occurrence: the mysterious
midnight visit, the prophecy of death so shortly to be fulfilled, the
solemn oath that I had taken, and which Vincey had called on me to
answer to in another world than this. Had the man committed suicide?
It looked like it. And what was the quest of which he spoke? The
circumstances were uncanny, so much so that, though I am by no means
nervous, or apt to be alarmed at anything that may seem to cross the
bounds of the natural, I grew afraid, and began to wish I had nothing
to do with them. How much more do I wish it now, over twenty years
afterwards!
As I sat and thought, there came a knock at the door, and a letter, in
a big blue envelope, was brought in to me. I saw at a glance that it
was a lawyer's letter, and an instinct told me that it was connected
with my trust. The letter, which I still have, runs thus:--
"Sir,--Our client, the late M. L. Vincey, Esq., who died on the 9th
instant in ---- College, Cambridge, has left behind him a Will, of
which you will please find copy enclosed and of which we are the
executors. Under this Will you will perceive that you take a life-
interest in about half of the late Mr. Vincey's property, now
invested in Consols, subject to your acceptance of the
guardianship of his only son, Leo Vincey, at present an infant,
aged five. Had we not ourselves drawn up the document in question
in obedience to Mr. Vincey's clear and precise instructions, both
personal and written, and had he not then assured us that he had
very good reasons for what he was doing, we are bound to tell you
that its provisions seem to us of so unusual a nature, that we
should have bound to call the attention of the Court of Chancery
to them, in order that such steps might be taken as seemed
desirable to it, either by contesting the capacity of the testator
or otherwise, to safeguard the interests of the infant. As it is,
knowing that the testator was a gentleman of the highest
intelligence and acumen, and that he has absolutely no relations
living to whom he could have confided the guardianship of the
child, we do not feel justified in taking this course.
"Awaiting such instructions as you please to send us as regards the
delivery of the infant and the payment of the proportion of the
dividends due to you,
"We remain, Sir, faithfully yours,
"Geoffrey and Jordan.
"Horace L. Holly, Esq."
I put down the letter, and ran my eye through the Will, which
appeared, from its utter unintelligibility, to have been drawn on the
strictest legal principles. So far as I could discover, however, it
exactly bore out what my friend Vincey had told me on the night of his
death. So it was true after all. I must take the boy. Suddenly I
remembered the letter which Vincey had left with the chest. I fetched
and opened it. It only contained such directions as he had already
given to me as to opening the chest on Leo's twenty-fifth birthday,
and laid down the outlines of the boy's education, which was to
include Greek, the higher Mathematics, and /Arabic/. At the end there
was a postscript to the effect that if the boy died under the age of
twenty-five, which, however, he did not believe would be the case, I
was to open the chest, and act on the information I obtained if I saw
fit. If I did not see fit, I was to destroy all the contents. On no
account was I to pass them on to a stranger.
As this letter added nothing material to my knowledge, and certainly
raised no further objection in my mind to entering on the task I had
promised my dead friend to undertake, there was only one course open
to me--namely, to write to Messrs. Geoffrey and Jordan, and express my
acceptance of the trust, stating that I should be willing to commence
my guardianship of Leo in ten days' time. This done I went to the
authorities of my college, and, having told them as much of the story
as I considered desirable, which was not very much, after considerable
difficulty succeeded in persuading them to stretch a point, and, in
the event of my having obtained a fellowship, which I was pretty
certain I had done, allow me to have the child to live with me. Their
consent, however, was only granted on the condition that I vacated my
rooms in college and took lodgings. This I did, and with some
difficulty succeeded in obtaining very good apartments quite close to
the college gates. The next thing was to find a nurse. And on this
point I came to a determination. I would have no woman to lord it over
me about the child, and steal his affections from me. The boy was old
enough to do without female assistance, so I set to work to hunt up a
suitable male attendant. With some difficulty I succeeded in hiring a
most respectable round-faced young man, who had been a helper in a
hunting-stable, but who said that he was one of a family of seventeen
and well-accustomed to the ways of children, and professed himself
quite willing to undertake the charge of Master Leo when he arrived.
Then, having taken the iron box to town, and with my own hands
deposited it at my banker's, I bought some books upon the health and
management of children and read them, first to myself, and then aloud
to Job--that was the young man's name--and waited.
At length the child arrived in the charge of an elderly person, who
wept bitterly at parting with him, and a beautiful boy he was. Indeed,
I do not think that I ever saw such a perfect child before or since.
His eyes were grey, his forehead was broad, and his face, even at that
early age, clean cut as a cameo, without being pinched or thin. But
perhaps his most attractive point was his hair, which was pure gold in
colour and tightly curled over his shapely head. He cried a little
when his nurse finally tore herself away and left him with us. Never
shall I forget the scene. There he stood, with the sunlight from the
window playing upon his golden curls, his fist screwed over one eye,
whilst he took us in with the other. I was seated in a chair, and
stretched out my hand to him to induce him to come to me, while Job,
in the corner, was making a sort of clucking noise, which, arguing
from his previous experience, or from the analogy of the hen, he
judged would have a soothing effect, and inspire confidence in the
youthful mind, and running a wooden horse of peculiar hideousness
backwards and forwards in a way that was little short of inane. This
went on for some minutes, and then all of a sudden the lad stretched
out both his little arms and ran to me.
"I like you," he said: "you is ugly, but you is good."
Ten minutes afterwards he was eating large slices of bread and butter,
with every sign of satisfaction; Job wanted to put jam on to them, but
I sternly reminded him of the excellent works that we had read, and
forbade it.
In a very little while (for, as I expected, I got my fellowship) the
boy became the favourite of the whole College--where, all orders and
regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was continually in and
out--a sort of chartered libertine, in whose favour all rules were
relaxed. The offerings made at his shrine were simply without number,
and I had serious difference of opinion with one old resident Fellow,
now long dead, who was usually supposed to be the crustiest man in the
University, and to abhor the sight of a child. And yet I discovered,
when a frequently recurring fit of sickness had forced Job to keep a
strict look-out, that this unprincipled old man was in the habit of
enticing the boy to his rooms and there feeding him upon unlimited
quantities of brandy-balls, and making him promise to say nothing
about it. Job told him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, "at his
age, too, when he might have been a grandfather if he had done what
was right," by which Job understood had got married, and thence arose
the row.
But I have no space to dwell upon those delightful years, around which
memory still fondly hovers. One by one they went by, and as they
passed we two grew dearer and yet more dear to each other. Few sons
have been loved as I love Leo, and few fathers know the deep and
continuous affection that Leo bears to me.
The child grew into the boy, and the boy into the young man, while one
by one the remorseless years flew by, and as he grew and increased so
did his beauty and the beauty of his mind grow with him. When he was
about fifteen they used to call him Beauty about the College, and me
they nicknamed the Beast. Beauty and the Beast was what they called us
when we went out walking together, as we used to do every day. Once
Leo attacked a great strapping butcher's man, twice his size, because
he sang it out after us, and thrashed him, too--thrashed him fairly. I
walked on and pretended not to see, till the combat got too exciting,
when I turned round and cheered him on to victory. It was the chaff of
the College at the time, but I could not help it. Then when he was a
little older the undergraduates found fresh names for us. They called
me Charon, and Leo the Greek god! I will pass over my own appellation
with the humble remark that I was never handsome, and did not grow
more so as I grew older. As for his, there was no doubt about its
fitness. Leo at twenty-one might have stood for a statue of the
youthful Apollo. I never saw anybody to touch him in looks, or anybody
so absolutely unconscious of them. As for his mind, he was brilliant
and keen-witted, but not a scholar. He had not the dulness necessary
for that result. We followed out his father's instructions as regards
his education strictly enough, and on the whole the results,
especially in the matters of Greek and Arabic, were satisfactory. I
learnt the latter language in order to help to teach it to him, but
after five years of it he knew it as well as I did--almost as well as
the professor who instructed us both. I always was a great sportsman--
it is my one passion--and every autumn we went away somewhere shooting
or fishing, sometimes to Scotland, sometimes to Norway, once even to
Russia. I am a good shot, but even in this he learnt to excel me.
When Leo was eighteen I moved back into my rooms, and entered him at
my own College, and at twenty-one he took his degree--a respectable
degree, but not a very high one. Then it was that I, for the first
time, told him something of his own story, and of the mystery that
loomed ahead. Of course he was very curious about it, and of course I
explained to him that his curiosity could not be gratified at present.
After that, to pass the time away, I suggested that he should get
himself called to the Bar; and this he did, reading at Cambridge, and
only going up to London to eat his dinners.
I had only one trouble about him, and that was that every young woman
who came across him, or, if not every one, nearly so, would insist on
falling in love with him. Hence arose difficulties which I need not
enter into here, though they were troublesome enough at the time. On
the whole, he behaved fairly well; I cannot say more than that.
And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth
birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history
really begins. _
Read next: CHAPTER III - THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS
Read previous: CHAPTER I - MY VISITOR
Table of content of She
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
