Lucian arrived at the old vicarage towards the close of the afternoon. He had driven over from Oakborough through a wintry land, and every minute spent in the keen air had added to the buoyancy of his spirits. Never, he thought as he was driven along the valley, did Simonstower look so well as under its first coating of snow, and on the rising ground above the village he made his driver stop so that he might drink in the charm of the winter sunset. At the western extremity of the valley a shelving hill closed the view; on its highest point a long row of gaunt fir-trees showed black and spectral against the molten red of the setting sun and the purpled sky into which it was sinking; nearer, the blue smoke of the village chimneys curled into the clear, frosty air—it seemed to Lucian that he could almost smell the fires of fragrant wood which burned on the hearths. He caught a faint murmur of voices from the village street: it was four o’clock, and the children were being released from school. Somewhere along the moorland side a dog was barking; in the windows of his uncle’s farmhouse, high above the river and the village, lights were already gleaming; a spark of bright light amongst the pine and fir trees near the church told him that Mr. Chilverstone had already lit his study-lamp. Every sound, every sight was familiar—they brought the old days back to him. And there, keeping stern watch over the village at its foot, stood the old Norman castle, its square keep towering to the sky, as massive and formidable as when Lucian had first looked upon it from his chamber window the morning after Simpson Pepperdine had brought him to Simonstower.

He bade the man drive on to the vicarage. He had sent no word of his coming; he had more than once{198} descended upon his friends at Simonstower without warning, and had always found a welcome. The vicar came bustling into the hall to him, with no sign of surprise.

‘I did not know they had wired to you, my boy,’ he said, greeting him in the old affectionate way, ‘but it was good of you to come so quickly.’

Lucian recognised that something had happened.

‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘No one wired to me; I came down on my own initiative—I wanted to see my uncle on business.’

‘Ah!’ said the vicar, shaking his head. ‘Then you do not know?—your uncle is ill. He had a stroke—a fit—you know what I mean—this very morning. Your Aunt Judith is across at the farm now. But come in, my dear boy—how cold you must be.’

Lucian went out to the conveyance which had brought him over, paid the driver, and bade him refresh himself at the inn, and then joined the vicar in his study. There again were the familiar objects which spelled Home. It suddenly occurred to him that he was much more at home here or in the farmhouse parlour along the roadside than in his own house in London, and he wondered in vague, indirect fashion why that should be so.

‘Is my uncle dangerously ill, then?’ he asked, looking at the vicar, who was fidgeting about with the fire-irons and repeating his belief that Lucian must be very cold.

‘I fear so, I fear so,’ answered Mr. Chilverstone. ‘It is, I think, an apoplectic seizure—he was rather inclined to that, if you come to think of it. Your aunt has just gone across there. It was early this morning that it happened, and she has been over to the farm several times during the day, but this time I think she will find a specialist there—Dr. Matthews wished for advice and wired to Smokeford for some great man who was to arrive an hour ago. I am glad you have come, Lucian. Did you see Sprats before leaving?’

Lucian replied that he had seen Sprats on the previous day. He sat down, answering the vicar’s questions{199} respecting his daughter in mechanical fashion—he was thinking of the various events of the past twenty-four hours, and wondering if Mr. Pepperdine’s illness was likely to result in death. Mr. Chilverstone turned from Sprats to the somewhat sore question of the tragedy. It was to him a sad sign of the times that the public had neglected such truly good work, and he went on to express his own opinion of the taste of the age. Lucian listened absent-mindedly until Mrs. Chilverstone returned with news of the sick man. She was much troubled; the specialist gave little hope of Simpson’s recovery. He might linger for some days, but it was almost certain that a week would see the end of him. But in spite of her trouble Aunt Judith was practical. Keziah, she said, must not be left alone that night, and she herself was going back to the farm as soon as she had seen that the vicar was properly provided for in respect of his sustenance and comfort. Ever since her marriage Mrs. Chilverstone had felt that her main object in life was the pleasing of her lord; she had put away all thought of the dead hussar, and her romantic disposition had bridled itself with the reins of chastened affection. Thus the vicar, who under Sprats’s régime had neither been pampered nor coddled, found himself indulged in many modes hitherto unknown to him, and he accepted all that was showered upon him with modest thankfulness. He thought his wife a kindly and considerate soul, and did not realise, being a truly simple man, that Judith was pouring out upon him the resources of a treasury which she had been stocking all her life. He was the first thing she had the chance of loving in a practical fashion; hence he began to live among rose-leaves. He protested now that Lucian and himself wanted for nothing. Mrs. Chilverstone, however, took the reins in hand, saw that the traveller was properly attended to and provided for, and did not leave the vicarage until the two men were comfortably seated at the dinner-table, the maids admonished as to lighting a fire in Mr. Damerel’s room, and the vicar warned of{200} the necessity of turning out the lamps and locking the doors. Then she returned to her brother’s house, and for an hour or two Lucian and his old tutor talked of things nearest to their hearts, and the feelings of home came upon the younger man more strongly than ever. He began to wonder how it was that he had settled down in London when he might have lived in the country; the atmosphere of this quiet, book-lined room in a village parsonage was, he thought just then, much more to his true taste than that in which he had spent the last few years of his life. At Oxford Lucian had lived the life of a book-worm and a dreamer: he was not a success in examinations, and he brought no great honour upon his tutor. In most respects he had lived apart from other men, and it was not until the publication of his first volume had drawn the eyes of the world upon him that he had been swept out of the peaceful backwater of a student’s existence into the swirling tides of the full river of life. Then had followed Lord Simonstower’s legacy, and then the runaway marriage with Haidee, and then four years of butterfly existence. He began to wonder, as he ate the vicar’s well-kept mutton, fed on the moorlands close by, and sipped the vicar’s old claret, laid down many a year before, whether his recent life had not been a feverish dream. Looked at from this peaceful retreat, its constant excitement and perpetual rush and movement seemed to have lost whatever charm they once had for him. Unconsciously Lucian was suffering from reaction: his moral as well as his physical nature was crying for rest, and the first oasis in the desert assumed the delightful colours and soft air of Paradise.

Later in the evening he walked over to the farmhouse, through softly falling snow, to inquire after his uncle’s condition. Mrs. Chilverstone was in the sick man’s room and did not come downstairs; Miss Pepperdine received him in the parlour. In spite of the trouble that had fallen upon the house and of the busy day which she had spent, Keziah was robed in state for the evening, and she sat bolt upright in her chair plying her knitting-needles{201} as vigorously as in the old days which Lucian remembered so well. He sat down and glanced at Simpson Pepperdine’s chair, and wished the familiar figure were occupying it, and he talked to his aunt of her brother’s illness, and the cloud which hung over the house weighed heavily upon both.

‘I am glad you came down, Lucian,’ said Miss Pepperdine, after a time. ‘I have been wanting to talk to you.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What about?’

Keziah’s needles clicked with unusual vigour for a moment or two.

‘Simpson,’ she said at last, ‘was always a soft-hearted man. If he had been harder of heart, he would have been better off.’

Lucian, puzzled by this ambiguous remark, stared at Miss Pepperdine in a fashion indicative of his amazement.

‘I think,’ continued Miss Pepperdine, with pointed emphasis, ‘I think it is time you knew more than you know at present, Lucian. When all is said and done, you are the nearest of kin in the male line, and after hearing the doctors to-night I’m prepared for Simpson’s death at any moment. It’s a very bad attack of apoplexy—if he lived he’d be a poor invalid all his life. Better that he should be taken while in the full possession of his faculties.’

Lucian gazed at the upright figure before him with mingled feelings. Miss Pepperdine used to sit like that, and knit like that, and talk like that, in the old days—especially when she felt it to be her duty to reprimand him for some offence. So far as he could tell, she was wearing the same stiff and crackly silk gown, she held her elbows close to her side and in just the same fashion, she spoke with the same precision as in the time of Lucian’s youth. The sight of her prim figure, the sound of her precise voice, blotted out half a score of years: Lucian felt very young again.{202}

‘It may not be so bad as you think,’ he said. ‘Even the best doctors may err.’

Miss Pepperdine shook her head.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s all over with Simpson. And I think you ought to know, Lucian, how things are with him. Simpson has been a close man, he has kept things to himself all his life; and of late he has been obliged to confide in me, and I know a great deal that I did not know.’

‘Yes?’ said Lucian.

‘Simpson,’ she continued, ‘has not done well in business for some time. He had a heavy loss some years ago through a rascally lawyer whom he trusted—he always was one of those easy-going men that will trust anybody—and although the old Lord Simonstower helped him out of the difficulty, it ultimately fell on his own shoulders, and of late he has had hard work to keep things going. Simpson will die a poor man. Not that that matters—Judith and myself are provided for. I shall leave here, afterwards. Judith, of course, is married. But as regards you, Lucian, you lent Simpson some money a few months ago, didn’t you?’

‘My dear aunt!’ exclaimed Lucian, ‘I——’

‘I know all about it,’ she said, ‘though it’s only recently that I have known. Well, you mustn’t be surprised if you have to lose it, Lucian. When all is settled up, I don’t think there will be much, if anything, over; and of course everybody must be paid before a member of the family. The Pepperdines have always had their pride, and as your mother was a Pepperdine, Lucian, you must have a share of it in you.’

‘I have my father’s pride as well,’ answered Lucian. ‘Of course I shall not expect the money. I was glad to be able to lend it.’

‘Well,’ said Miss Pepperdine, with the air of one who deals out justice impartially, ‘in one way you were only paying Simpson back for what he had laid out on you. He spent a good deal of money on you, Lucian, when you were a boy.’{203}

Lucian heard this news with astonished feelings.

‘I did not know that,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I am careless about these things, but I have always thought that my father left money for me.’

‘I thought so too, until recently,’ replied Miss Pepperdine. ‘Your father thought that he did, too, and he made Simpson executor and trustee. But the money was badly invested. It was in a building society in Rome, and it was all lost. There was never a penny piece from it, from the time of your father’s death to this.’

Lucian listened in silence.

‘Then,&rsquo............