The present is the heir of all the achievement 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 inclosed in the two large arm-chairs 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 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 a 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 afterward," he added, meditatively.
Geoffrey Langham stroked an imperceptible mustache.
"That's what I was thinking," he said; "and I am 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.
"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 birthright 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, that 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. Indeed, 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.