Chapter II: The Years Roll by

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 felt 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.