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Old Mrs Waynflete sat in her chair in what was called the library at the Mill House, though it contained very few books. She watched the pale, slight youth before her with the most absolute want of respect for his personality, with an innate distrust for his facts and figures, and yet feeling with the first painful pangs of old age that she could not entirely grasp the argument. Guy was talking of conditions unknown to her. Surely the day had not come when she and her good old servants were unable to judge what was the best for the business. Surely this lad could not have pointed out to her what she had failed to see for herself. Surely he could not be in the right.
“Is there any other matter you want to find fault with?” she said. “I’d like to hear your true opinion.”
Guy hesitated a little; but, quiet as he looked, he had the obstinacy of his race, and he could not resist giving his true opinion.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t think the mills are as popular with the work-people as they were once. There are modern ways of attending to their health and their comfort, in which we’re deficient. Ventilation, and so on. But a small outlay would set all that to rights. One must move with the times.”
“So you think John Cooper and Jos Howarth are past their work?”
“Not exactly. I think Cooper’s a good old fellow. Howarth I’m not so sure of.”
“You seem very sure of yourself, Guy. Late hours and days away from business were not the way to make a fortune in my time.”
Guy flushed up.
“I should do my best,” he said; “and I believe – I am sure – that I am not incapable of carrying out these plans. And one thing more I wish to say, Aunt Waynflete. After Christmas, Godfrey will be coming in to the business. As things are now, there is no scope for both of us. With the scheme I propose, there would be plenty to do – if you allow us to do it.”
“You need not to think that all the ideas come first into your head, my lad. I have thought of that. There’ll be an agent wanted for Waynflete.”
Now, this was a remark which it was nearly impossible for Guy to answer. He was the natural heir of Waynflete, but Waynflete was in the old lady’s own power, and she had never dropped a word as to her intentions regarding it. He could not assume that Waynflete concerned him rather than Godfrey; and yet, if it did not, the whole principle of his aunt’s life would be falsified. Besides, the idea was most distasteful to him. He said hurriedly and unwisely —
“Waynflete is hardly enough of a place to occupy a man’s whole time, in any case.”
“Well,” said Mrs Waynflete, “you have said your say, and I’ll consider my answer. But I’ve known the business forty years before you were born, my lad, after all.”
It was the way of the Waynfletes to hide their real selves from each other as carefully as if each one had been plotting treason. They erected quickset hedges round their hearts and souls, as if to be misunderstood was needful to their self-respect. Guy said no more, and withdrew, and he never spoke a word to Godfrey of what had passed between his aunt and himself.
The next day, just before luncheon, Jeanie was gathering flowers on the lawn, when a door in the wall that led to the mills opened, and Guy dashed in, with so white and wild a look, and a step at once so hurried and so faltering, that she ran up to him, exclaiming —
“Guy! Are you ill? What is the matter?” Guy looked at her, as she said afterwards, as if he did not see her, and hurried in and upstairs without a word, and as she followed, scared and puzzled, she heard him shut and lock his bedroom door behind him. Turning away in distress and alarm, she met Godfrey strolling along in the sunshine, with Rawdie at his heels, and a book under his arm, a picture of idle holiday enjoyment.
“Oh,” he said, in answer to her appeal, “Guy is like that if he has a headache. He likes to be let alone; he never wants anything.”
Jeanie still looked doubtful.
“People don’t generally look so with a headache,” she said. “Does he often have such bad ones?”
“No,” said Godfrey; “only once in a way. He’ll be all right in an hour or two. Let him alone.”
Jeanie thought it a very odd headache; but no more was said, though, from Mrs Waynflete’s face when Guy did not appear at luncheon, it might have been argued that his sudden illness told against his plans.
She put on her bonnet, and took her way down to the mill with a step that was still firm, though slower than of old, and asked for John Cooper. She was no unusual visitor, and had never let her hold of the business drop; and as she sat down in the little office, and cast her still keen blue eyes round her, it was more than ever difficult to believe, more than ever distasteful to feel, that her day was almost done. The two old men who had long managed the business, though some years younger than herself, now seemed like contemporaries. She had worked under their fathers in her girlhood, she had seen them rise in office under her husband, she had now worked with them for many years, and with them she felt at one.
Partly from this, and partly, perhaps, from the incautiousness of old age, before many minutes had passed, she had made John Cooper aware, both of Guy’s plans and of his strictures. It was so natural to discuss the crude ideas of the youth with her experienced old friend.
John Cooper was very much taken by surprise. The reticent and cautious Guy had never betrayed how carefully he had been “takin’ notes.” Had this lad really put his finger on the weak places? John Cooper was much too careful to commit himself to a direct contradiction.
“Well, Mrs Waynflete,” he said; “Mr Guy is young, and young folks like to have something to show for their opinions. But, there’s been many new fashions since you and I began to work the business. The old master never held with following the fashion.”
“You can be making changes every year if you do.”
“So you can do, Mrs Waynflete; so you can. Eh, but I’ve seen changes.”
“Mr Guy has a notion of business, too,” said the old lady.
“Did ye see Mr Guy when he came home, ma’am?” said John Cooper, suddenly.
“No; he had a bit of headache, and went to his room. Young men aren’t as tough as they used to be.”
There was a silence. The old man watched the lady over the writing-table between them. He, too, was a vigorous old grey-head, with a hard mouth and keen eyes wrinkled up close. The little room was full of bills and letters and safes. A stray ray of afternoon sun shot through the small-paned window, and showed the dusty air and the dusty floor, and the well-arranged contents of the dusty shelves.
John Cooper crossed the little room, and stood in the streak of sunshine. It shone upon his well-known grey hair, on his shrewd, weather-beaten face, and glittered on a small key left in a little oak cupboard in the wall. John Cooper opened the cupboard, and the sun shot in and sparkled with sudden brilliant reflections on something inside.
“Eh, what have you there?” said Mrs Waynflete.
John Cooper took out a tall brandy-bottle, nearly empty, and a glass still containing some drops of spirit, and set them on the table.
“Mr Guy left the key by mistake,” he said.
“John Cooper! What do you mean?”
No asseveration could have added to the abrupt force of the intonation, as Mrs Waynflete sat upright, grasping the arms of her wooden chair, and looking straight at the manager.
“Mr Guy keeps that cupboard close locked. But to-day he left it swinging open, when he went home – with a headache.”
“Did ye see him go?”
“I came in at the door here, Mrs Waynflete, and Mr Guy staggered past me, and never saw me. He went stumbling out and up the lane. Hurrying and reeling as he went – as once and again I’ve seen him before.”
Mrs Waynflete’s brown old face grew a shade paler, she still held by the arms of the chair, as she rapidly weighed what had been said.
It seemed to her that the fact of the young man’s possessing a bottle of spirits was as nothing compared with the secrecy with which he had concealed it. Nor would he be the first in the house of Waynflete to fall a victim to such a temptation.
On the one hand, Mrs Waynflete had seen it in her father, and feared it for her brother; on the other, there was nothing in Guy’s look or ways to suggest it, save the occasional attacks of illness, as to which he was always mysterious and secretive.
“Lock up the cupboard,” she said, “and give me the key. And ye’ll not say a word of this matter.”
“Nay, not to Joshua Howarth, nor to young Jos, nor to my own John Henry. It’s no matter for talking of.”
Mrs Waynflete put the key in her pocket, rose, and standing at her full height, said – “Good day to you,” and walked away with firm, unfaltering step, across the paved entrance, up the bit of lane that led to the garden wall. She went in through the gate and across the garden, and upstairs to Guy’s room, at which she knocked sharply.
“Guy, I wish to come in.”
The door was unfastened, and Guy stood there in great surprise.
“Aunt Margaret!” he said. “What is it? I am much better. I am coming down for some tea.”
Mrs Waynflete put him aside with her hand, entered the room, and shut the door.
It was a large, comfortable room, with a bookcase and a good supply of books, a writing-table, a sofa and an armchair, besides the little iron bed in the corner, and it was brilliantly light, for there was not a curtain or a hanging of any sort in the room. Such was Guy’s taste. He looked pale still, but quite himself, and there was nothing peculiar in his manner, as he repeated —
“What is it, Aunt Margaret?”
“This,” said his aunt, as she sat down in the armchair, and held out the key.
“What is it that you mean?” said Guy, with a sudden look of being on his guard, and much in the tone of her own question to John Cooper.
“You left your cupboard open, Guy, and John Cooper, very properly, locked it up, and gave me the key. What should a lad of your age do with a bottle of brandy?”
“Confound John Cooper’s meddling impertinence!” said Guy, passionately. “It is nothing to him or to any one what I choose to keep there.”
“That depends upon the use you make of it.”
“Has John Cooper been setting it about that I’ve been drinking?” said Guy, with an angry laugh. “Is that – is that what it looks like?”
He caught himself up with a start, and turning away to the window, stood staring out of it, while his aunt said —
“It’s a matter I’ll have cleared up, Guy, before I answer all your questions of this morning. I’ve known many young fellows take a drop too much in company. That wasn’t thought so much of when I was young. But it’s different nowadays; and what that bottle of brandy means, if it means anything at all, is a very different matter again.”
Whether Guy was struggling with temper or embarrassment, or whether he really did not know what to say, he was silent for some time. At last he turned round, and said ungraciously – “On my word and honour, I don’t drink. I have never been drunk in my life – yet.”
“Then what does this mean?” still holding out the key.
“Sometimes – very seldom – I get faint or dizzy – with a headache – I hate a fuss, and I can set myself right with a little brandy.” There was something in the extreme reluctance with which the answer was given that justified suspicion.
“You ought to see a doctor, if that is so,” said Mrs Waynflete, with much reason; “and when I hear what he says, I’ll think of what you say.”
“As you please, Aunt Margaret,” said Guy. “If my word is not to be taken, I don’t care in the least to be cleared by another person’s.”
“You ought to care how your character stands in my eyes,” said Mrs Waynflete. “Take back your key. I shall judge for myself.”
She looked keenly at the young man standing in the sunlight. It was obvious that now, at any rate, he was fully master of himself, and Mrs Waynflete had lived too much with men, and knew their ways too well, not to perceive that there was nothing in his look to substantiate the charge against him.
Suddenly he looked round at her, in a curious, furtive way – a look which he withdrew at once as she met it, but which startled her. She had caught the glance of fear and suspicion.
“Time will show,” she said, as she left the room. “But I’ll have it all made clear to me, before I trust matters in your hands.”
When left alone, Guy hastily locked his door again, then flung himself down on the sofa.
“Oh, I am a fool, a fool!” he cried to himself. “God knows what will become of me!”
He turned his face downwards with a gesture of despair. There was no one to help him, and he could not help himself.
Part 1, Chapter VIII
The Skeleton in the Cupboard
After a few moments Guy recalled himself from his despair, and, turning his face to the light of the open window, began, with what courage he might, to consider the situation. A shameful charge had been brought against him, and an untrue one, and yet the truth was so inexpressibly galling to him that he could hardly bring himself to contradict the falsehood.
Drinking, especially in secret, was a degrading vice; but, however sinful, it was natural, being shared by thousands of poor miserable fellows. But the secret curse of Guy’s life was, he thought, peculiar to himself, alien from and repugnant to happier folk. It was worse than wicked, it was abnormal. He himself would have pitied, but he would not have liked, certainly not have respected, another man who – Even to himself he would not think the fact in quotable words. That he could and did bear his hard fate in secret was all that preserved for him a shadow of self-respect.
A crisis had now, however, come, and his instinctive decisions must be reconsidered. He got up, and, unlocking his desk, took from its most secret corner a little pen-and-ink drawing, and, laying it on the table, sat down, and leaning on his elbows, looked it full in the face. For it was a face “written down,” as he had phrased it to Florella Vyner, – a face almost identical with his own, and with the picture of his unhappy namesake, but neither framed by the close-cut hair of the present day nor by the powdered peruke of the Guy who was too late, but set in wild, fair locks that hung loosely round it, while, through the misery of the large, mournful eyes, there was a look of malice, fitting the Guy Waynflete who had betrayed his friend, and whose apparition had, by tradition, caused the second Guy to die disgraced and ruined. The present Guy sat and gazed at it, till the likeness grew in his own face, and he tried to force his trembling lips into the contemptuous smile which he felt himself to deserve. Once, as he believed, he had seen this fatal face with his bodily eyes, and since then the fear of it, the sense of its unseen presence, the influence of it, was enough to shake his manhood and shatter his nerves, was altogether irresistible to him. He never knew when he might wake from sleep with this awful dread upon him. Never had he been able to stand up against it.
The code of the British schoolboy, backed by the reserve of proud and canny Yorkshire, is not calculated to deal with an abnormal strain on a delicate nervous system.
When Guy first “saw the ghost,” if it may be so phrased, at Waynflete, he had felt its effect upon him simply as a disgrace; and, though he knew somewhat better now, his instincts had never allowed him to treat it otherwise. A reasonable man might have consulted a doctor, and found out how to deal with his own nerves; but down below all Guy’s opinions on the subject, all the explanations which he gave himself, there was an awful conviction of the personality and reality of this thing, which seemed half his double and half his evil genius; and what could any doctor do for that? – while he entertained the most utter disbelief in the genuineness of all modern scientific inquiries into such matters. What! analyse this frightful thing for other people’s benefit? – have his experiences printed? – be regarded as a person possessing an enviable faculty denied to others? No; no one who knew what “seeing a ghost” was like could undergo such torture! They were all humbugs. While, as for religious help or consolation, Guy feared spiritual impressions or spiritual efforts; and whether his trouble was the work of his own fancy, a possession of the devil, or a revelation from the unseen, it put him in a different relation to all supernatural questions to that of his fellows. He kept altogether apart from the subject, never joined in religious discussions, nor let himself speculate on religious questions. He feared, also, all his finer impulses; they touched on the terrible and tender point.
As he was liable to nervous headaches on other occasions than when the fear of a spiritual presence overwhelmed him, he usually attributed all disturbance that he could not conceal to such a cause. Nobody troubled about a headache. Fainting or palpitations might lead to questions, and be supposed to be dangerous. Of course all this was crude and young and foolish in the extreme; but it was instinctive to a nature, one part of which was so antagonistic to the other. It never could have continued if he had belonged to people of ordinary insight or experience; but the spiritual terrors, to which he was subject, were very uncertain in their recurrence, and, in fact, were usually apt to come upon him at some crisis which excited his nerves; and, in his ordinary life at college, he had suffered less from them than at home, when, certainly, his grand-aunt and his brother were not likely to suspect them.
But what was he to do now? If he told, if he could so far oppose his instincts, his aunt would think him a liar, like the other Guy – or mad? That last might be. It was a view of the matter which had not escaped him. As for drinking, well, he might be driven to that before the end. There were times when the brandy was tempting. That was another ancestral ghost that might be more dreadful than the first.
But he could not confute the charge, and, besides – here a much simpler part of the Waynflete nature came into play – he was not going to notice such confounded insolence on Cooper’s part, or such suspicious mistrust on that of his great-aunt.
He locked up the picture, and then, perceiving that it was still only five o’clock, and that the mill had not yet “loosed,” he took up his hat and went down there, walking in upon the astonished John Cooper, with as cool a manner as if nothing had passed.
“Step into my room, will you?” he said. “There are two or three letters that I left this morning.”
Then, as the old manager took up and turned over the letters indicated, not knowing what to say, and feeling his statements to Mrs Waynflete considerably invalidated by the young gentleman’s look and manner, Guy deliberately unlocked the cupboard, took out the brandy-bottle, and held it up to the light.
“Nearly empty,” he said, in his soft, mocking voice. “Here, Joe Cass,” to the office boy, “just run down to the Lion, and ask for a bottle of the best French brandy – for me. Bring it back with you.”
“Lord! sir!” exclaimed Cooper, as the boy departed staring; “if you do want brandy, you’d a deal better bring it down from the house yourself, than send the boy on such errands!”
“Perhaps Mrs Waynflete wouldn’t give it to me; and you see, I like to have it, to ‘put to my lips, when I feel so dispoged.’ Take half a glass of the remains of this? No? Then I will. Now, as to that colonial contract – ”
Guy poured out the remainder of the brandy and drank it off. He felt revived by it, and went on with the details of the colonial contract with the most accurate clearness, till the boy came back, when he took the bottle, locked it up, put the key in his pocket, and gave Joe the old bottle to throw away.
“Well, Mr Guy,” said Cooper, desperately; “I ask your pardon if I mistook your condition; but I’d as soon see my own son with a locked-up brandy-bottle as you – at your age. Eh, my lad, it’s a grand mistake ye’re making.”
“I shan’t let the business go to the dogs in consequence, if I’ve ever a hand in it,” said Guy, but with more softness; “but just make up your mind that I don’t care a – ” Here Guy used an expression which appeared to Cooper almost as bad a breach of business propriety as the brandy, and added with much bathos, “I don’t care a brass farthing what any one thinks.”
This act of schoolboy defiance was the refuge of Guy’s manhood, which had not learned a better mode of self-assertion. His soft eyes had a somewhat evil look as he watched his routed enemy, and then went back to the house, where he was unusually lively at dinner, and through the evening.
But either the brandy or the excitement revenged itself next day with a real headache, so violent that he could not lift up his head, and which left him pale and languid and without spirits for any more defiance of consequences. Moreover, Mrs Waynflete decreed that he was to go with her to Waynflete.
Guy resented the proposal as an act of mistrust, and dreaded it from the bottom of his soul. He resisted it, and offended his aunt more bitterly than he had ever done before, since he could only put forward indifference to and contempt of Waynflete and its interests.
And after all, Howarth, the second manager, had a violent attack of gout, and Guy’s presence at Ingleby could hardly be dispensed with. So he remained, in semi-disgrace, with Cousin Susan Joshua to keep house for him. Jeanie went up to Waynflete with the rest of the party.
He had got no answer to his proposals, and no definite authority for the mill. Nevertheless, he made his presence felt there, and people began to feel that he was master.
Part 1, Chapter IX
“Go Back, My Lord, Across the Moor.”
“Cousin Susan,” said Guy, a few days after he had been left behind at Ingleby, “I promised Miss Vyner that she and her friends should see the mills. If it suits you, I should like to ride over to Moorhead, and ask them to come down next Thursday, and have luncheon here. Then I would take them round.”
“Yes, my dear Guy; yes, certainly. I think it would be most proper, under the circumstances; and with my being here, there can be no objection. I’m glad you’ve given me the hint, my dear Guy.”
Guy thought his very straightforward request had been something more than a hint. He had made it partly because he was extremely dull, and wanted a little variety, and partly because he did not choose to acquiesce in the idea that he was out of favour. Most of Guy’s actions at this time were marked by a certain note of defiance.
He set off on a fresh breezy afternoon, when great clouds flung great shadows over the open moor, and the dark green of the bilberry and the purple of the heather were in full glory of contrast. He rode slowly uphill, over wide roads with low grey walls on either side, behind which grew oats and turnips, past strong-looking stone villages, all white and grey and wind swept, till the land grew poorer and more open, and turf, mixed with furze and heather, began to appear, and at length he turned over the top, and came out upon the great rolling moors, here clear and sunny, there veiled in the smoke and fog of distant centres of human life.
As he drew near the end of his ride, he saw a figure sitting on some rough ground by the roadside, and looking up and away at a broken hillock of rock and heather, which, owing to the falling away of the ground behind, was relieved against the sky.
By the pose of her head and the lines of her figure he at once recognised Florella Vyner, and as he came near she saw him, and rising, answered his greeting with a smile as he dismounted beside her.
“I have ridden over,” said Guy, “with a message from Mrs Joshua Palmer, to ask if your sister still cares to show Ingleby Mills to her friends. My aunt and my brother are at Waynflete, but I have been left behind. And I hope, too, that Moorhead is satisfactory?”
“Oh yes,” said Florella, “we are delighted with it. It suits us quite. The others are all very near by. Would you like to take your horse to the farm, and then come and join us? You will see them a few steps further on.”
“There’s Bill Shipley,” said Guy, looking up the road. “I’ll ask him to take Stella.”
He came back after giving his horse to the boy, with a brighter and sweeter look on his face than it often wore. “May I look first at the drawing? What have you found out about the moor flowers?”