The Old Vengeful

and a great blaze of flowers in the open fireplace, and—

And there, on a low table in front of the fireplace, was Father's Vengeful box—her Vengeful box—

The old gentleman rose slowly from an immense leather chair, his back to her, refolded his Guardian unhurriedly and placed it on the box, and turned towards her.

'Miss Loftus, I presume?'

Age . . . yet with that indefinable twinkle, not of second childhood, but of victorious longevity, a quality Elizabeth had only observed once before, in a very old lady—a great lady, who had somehow combined age with inextinguishable youth, and had made it beautiful.

'Professor Wilder?' It had never occurred to her that a man dummy3

could achieve that same beauty; but of course it had nothing to do with being a man, any more than it had to do with age—

it was the triumph of mind over both those conditions.

'Mr Aske—we meet again!' The tiniest nuance of. . . it was not distaste, for this man was long past any desire to wound any other creature, whatever his second sight saw hidden in it... it was more like sympathy neutralising the instinctive but unfair emotions which Paul had for Aske, with which he had infected her. 'What a pleasure!'

'For me too, Professor.' Aske's voice thickened, as though he was unwilling to admit his own feelings sincerely. 'But what brings you here—to us—hot-foot?'

'Hot-foot?' Wilder tested the image. 'In this age of the motor-car that is almost a contradiction— my feet become cold with inactivity when I am carried urgently from one place to another . . . not like Roger Bannister, with his four-minute mile at Iffley—or Pheidippides carrying the news of Marathon to Athens, eh?' He smiled. 'But hot-foot nevertheless—yes!' He transferred the smile to Elizabeth, and then re-edited it to seriousness. 'Miss Loftus . . . we have never met until now, but as one of your school governors I have heard of your prowess with our history scholarship girls, and I have admired your results from afar. You have a rare gift, I think—rare, because those who have it tend to gravitate to university teaching . . . But you have not, and I am glad of it.'

In that instant all Elizabeth's plans for enjoying her ill-gotten dummy3

gains as a rich woman went out of the window: if this old gentleman thought she must teach, then she must teach.

'I very much regret that circumstances have militated against our meeting until now. But that is in the past—' he twinkled at her '—and now we meet at last!' He became suddenly serious. 'I was sorry to hear about your father's death, my dear. Because ... in our time we had our differences, for which I must take my share of the blame, I fear . . . but he was a considerable scholar in his own field.'

'Differences' was an understatement, and the lion's share of the blame for them had been Father's, but he was burying the past gently and generously for her benefit.

'In the circumstances, it would not have been appropriate for me to write to you—I do not think you would have wished that. Yet... in these new circumstances, I am glad of the opportunity to be of service to you.' He frowned slightly, and cocked his head, and looked into spaccjust above her shoulder. 'You know, I have been practising that little speech in preparation for you, and it sounded perfectly admirable inside my head. But now that I've heard it... it does sound not only pompous, but thoroughly insincere.' His eyes came back to her. 'Perhaps I had better not ask you to give me the benefit of your doubt. So shall I say rather that I find your quest vastly interesting? Will that do?'

Aske advanced from behind her into the corner of her vision.

'But I didn't tell you what the quest was, Professor.'

'No . . . you didn't, Mr Aske.' Wilder bent down and lifted dummy3

the Guardian off the Vengeful box for a moment. 'But your . . . friend, Dr Audley, has rectified that omission.' He looked at Elizabeth. 'All the relevant papers your father collected are in there, Miss Loftus . . . together with photo-copies of the Irene Cookridge material.'

'And what did Audley ask you to do with it?' inquired Aske.

'To study it, Mr Aske, to study it... To let my imagination range freely over it. What else?' Professor Wilder answered inquiry with inquiry. 'When you came to ask me about the prisoner-of-war usages of the time, you indicated a certain urgency. David—Dr Audley— re-iterated that urgency. And he gave me a secretary and a young man to do my leg-work, which served to emphasise the urgency. But urgency is no friend to the historian—urgency is for the journalist, it is the necessary spur to his skill, his art . . . For the historian what is required is time and tranquillity, for the slow sifting of the facts, and for the gradual and hesitant advance towards glimpses of truth— that is the historian's art.' He smiled at Elizabeth. 'There! I'm doing it again! And all you want to know is what I can imagine for you!'

Elizabeth smiled back. 'And what can you imagine, Professor?'

He stared at her, and suddenly he was no longer smiling.

'A tragedy, I think, my dear. Or perhaps not altogether a tragedy, because if two men died for this box of your father's, two men were also saved in some sense by it.'

dummy3

'For the box?' Aske frowned at the Vengeful box.

'Two men died?' said Elizabeth.

'Lieutenant Chippcrficld and Midshipman Paget.' Wilder nodded. 'Two good and brave young men. But didn't you know that?'

'I didn't know about the midshipman, Professor. We've only traced them as far as Coucy-le-Chateau.'

'Where?'

'Coucy—' But of course he couldn't know—or Audley hadn't told him about that. 'Where Lieutenant Chipperfield