There Came Both Mist and Snow Read Free Page B

instead to give some account of those relations whom I now knew I was to meet at the Priory.
    I must be forgiven if I do not here work out a family tree; it is a writer’s instinct to stick to prose, and in plain prose I think I can make everything clear. The eldest, then, of Basil’s generation of Ropers had been his sister Margaret. She had married into the wealthy banking family of the Foxcrofts and had two sons, Wilfred and Cecil. Wilfred had gone into the banking business; Cecil, whose bent was scholastic, was now the headmaster of a public school. Both were unmarried, and both in age within ten years of their uncle Basil.
    Next to Margaret Roper had come Basil himself and a year later there had been born Hubert, the painter. Hubert’s only child, Geoffrey, also a painter, was now about twenty-five.
    Youngest of Basil’s generation was Lucy, now the widow of a certain Charles Chigwidden, an unsuccessful barrister. Lucy Chigwidden is a novelist: perhaps I may be permitted to remind the reader that the term is an elastic one.
    I am myself the only son of Basil’s aunt, Mary Roper; my relationship with Basil, Hubert, and Lucy is therefore that of first cousin. Anne Grainger, the orphan daughter and only child of my sister Jean, was now twenty-one. Jean’s marriage had been financially rash; she and her husband were drowned in a yachting accident when Anne was in infancy; the child had grown up under the legal guardianship of Wilfred Foxcroft, whose protégée she was now understood to be.
    These paragraphs, I see, cannot pretend to be prose after all. But they are clear and suit the artlessness which this narrative must have; our exact cousinly relationships – though these are scarcely relevant to what is to come – may be worked out readily enough by anyone who is interested.
    We were now nearing the house and I interrupted Wilfred to ask a question. ‘Hubert, Geoffrey, Lucy, Cecil, and Anne. Do I gather then that it is an unrelievedly family party?’
    ‘Just that. A nice old-fashioned Christmas. I am to talk climbs with Basil; Hubert is to start on a portrait of Cecil; Geoffrey and Anne are to make love; and Lucy is going to pursue you into corners and elicit your views on the interior monologue and on chapterization.’
    ‘Chapterization?’
    ‘Her new word. Why one begins a new chapter where one does.’ Wilfred chuckled at the involuntary sigh which must have escaped me. ‘When I come to think of it there is one outsider. Old Mervyn Wale.’
    ‘Sir Mervyn Wale,’ I said in surprise. ‘Surely he is the sort who never tears himself away from town and his expensive patients? And I didn’t know he was any sort of family friend?’
    ‘No more he is. But he and my brother Cecil have got uncommonly thick and Cecil seems to have persuaded Basil to ask him down. As for tearing himself away, he’s looking distinctly ill and probably feels it necessary to ease off.’
    ‘At least,’ I said lightly, ‘someone who will stand outside the family passions.’
    It was not a tactful remark and I regretted it as I spoke. But Wilfred was not disturbed. ‘Wale, my dear Arthur, has no passions anyway. Only genuine scientific curiosity. Under the fashionable leech lies a real researcher – cardiac stuff, I believe. Or if he has a passion it seems to be for poor Cecil – who has certainly never inspired romantic devotion before.’
    I had no wish to listen to Wilfred disparaging his brother, a fault in breeding I had observed in him on previous occasions. I therefore changed the subject abruptly. ‘The lethal weapon: what is the significance of that?’
    For a moment Wilfred stared blankly. Then his eye went to the revolver. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact there are several. All the fun is to be with them.’
    ‘The fun?’
    Wilfred rubbed his nose – a habit of his when about to open the lumber-room door. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that the greatest number of pistol-duels engaged in by a