There Came Both Mist and Snow Read Free

and with it some tension which it was not perhaps easy to do without.
    A man who has served an idea makes only an uneasy retreat upon practical affairs. But from youth Basil had been a scientist and he had his finger now in a number of pies – of those immaterial pies of the mind at which a man may stir to his heart’s content, disturbing nobody and without a fret or fuss. Into geographical speculations he could step like a man entering the solitude of an arctic tent. To explore with a hammer among the rocks the barren aeons of the earth gave him much the same satisfaction, I believe, as a physical vista of inviolate ice and untrodden snow. For such austerities I have myself small taste; I prefer the peopled earth – the field full of folk. Nevertheless I like to understand the ascetic type, and driving up Basil’s avenue I made my yearly resolution: to study my cousin once more with professional standards of assiduity. This perhaps has its forbiddingly austere ring. But the imaginative writer is far from living on air. He has to apply himself to his fellows very much in the spirit in which Basil was wont to apply himself to archaen schists and eruptive rocks.
    My taxi rounded a bend and the little park came into full view. It occurred to me what a remarkably valuable property it must be. Only the day before a friend had shown me a beautiful gold goblet recently excavated from some Viking hoard, an object of very considerable intrinsic worth which was yet far more precious in its character as a museum piece. Belrive was rather like that. Its position in the industrial district of a town by no means suffering from stagnation or depression must surely render every acre worth a large sum of money; at the same time it possessed high value in another and indefinable currency, that of antiquarian or sentimental regard. I recollected that Basil’s care of the Priory had always been scrupulous – but how strongly, I wondered, did he feel the responsibility of such a heritage? It came to me with something of a shock that my cousin cared nothing for the past. Or nothing for what I call the past. He would have been just the man to write that sort of outline of history which includes a great many illustrations of mammoths and pterodactyls and which relegates man to an appendix. Perhaps this sally is a little unfair. I realized that there was nothing vulgar or half-baked about Basil’s historical sense. It was simply that human institutions of a sort with which we have any connection did not interest him. To certain remote and swarming cultures – Sumerians, Babylonians, and the like – he gave, I believe, a sort of field naturalist’s attention. But at the point where real history begins – the coming of the Dorian Greeks – his interest left off. And the chronology which really held his imagination and engaged his intellect was of the sort that reckons its years by the million. Just what value, I wondered, did Basil set on a twelfth-century ruin, or on ground which ancestors had owned ever since they had successfully stolen it nearly three hundred years ago? The Tudor age must seem to Basil the merest yesterday. I glanced from my taxi and saw the iron skeleton of Cudbird’s sign just dipping behind the Priory tower. To Basil these must appear virtually contemporaneous constructions. And for the first time it occurred to me to speculate on the legal position in regard to Belrive. Was its owner entitled to do what he liked with it? Or were at least the ruins in some way protected from possible caprice?
    These reflections were interrupted by a squeal of brakes and I was astounded to see Wilfred Foxcroft skipping hastily to the side of the drive.
    Wilfred is a cousin of mine. Most of the people in this narrative are.

 
     
2
    I was astounded to see Wilfred; I got a further shock when he turned towards me and waved what was distinguishably a revolver. The taxi drew up, and despite its doing so merely because I had tapped on the