Читать книгу The Grey Monk - T. W. Speight - Страница 5

It was a wild and stormy October night. The big moon-faced clock in the entrance-hall, in its slow and solemn fashion, as of a horologe that felt the burden of its years, had just announced the hour of eleven.

In his study alone, busy among his coins and curios, sat Sir Gilbert Clare of Withington Chase, Hertfordshire, and Chase Ridings, Yorkshire, a handsome, well-preserved man, in years somewhere between fifty and sixty. He had a tall, thin, upright figure, strongly marked features of an aquiline type, a snow-white moustache, and an expression at once proud and imperious.

It would, indeed, have been difficult to find a prouder man than Sir Gilbert. He was proud of the long line of his ancestors, of the brave men and beautiful women who, from their faded frames in the picture gallery, seemed to smile approval on the latest representative of their race. He was proud of the unsullied name which had come down to him from them, on which no action of his had ever cast the shadow of a stain. He was proud of the position, which he accepted as his by right, in his native county; he was proud of his three sturdy boys, at this hour wrapped in the sleep of innocent childhood. But his pride was strictly locked up in his own bosom. No syllable ever escaped him which told of its existence. To the world at large, and even to the members of his own household, he was a man of a quick and irascible temper, of cold manners and unsympathetic ways.

Proud as Sir Gilbert had just cause for being, there was one point, and one that could in no wise be ignored, at which his pride was touched severely.

His eldest son and heir was a disappointment and a failure. He had fought against the knowledge as long as it had been possible for him to do so, but some months had now gone by since the bitter truth had forced itself upon him in a way he could no longer pretend to ignore. He had caused private inquiries to be made, the result of which had satisfied him that, from being simply a good-natured harum-scarum spendthrift, the young man was gradually degenerating into a betting man and a turf gambler of a type especially obnoxious to the fastidious baronet. He told himself that he would almost as soon have had his son become a common pickpocket.

It never entered his mind to suspect that the evidence of Alec's delinquencies which had been laid before him, and to obtain which he had paid a heavy price, might, to some extent, have been manufactured; that the shadows of the picture might have been purposely darkened in order that he might be supplied with that which he presumably looked for. He had accepted it in full and without question.

It had been Alec's misfortune to get mixed up with a fast set while at college, and he seemed never to have quite broken with them afterwards.

At the Chase he and his stepmother had not got on well together--for the present Lady Clare was the baronet's second wife--and when, shortly after coming of age, he announced his intention of making his home, for a time at least, with some of his mother's relatives in London, Sir Gilbert had offered no opposition to the arrangement, for he was wise enough to recognise that two such opposite dispositions as those of his present wife and his eldest son could not possibly agree.

Then it presently came to his ears that Alec had gone into bachelor quarters of his own, after which came a long course of extravagances and debts of various kinds, such as well-to-do fathers have had to put up with from spendthrift sons for more centuries than history can tell us of.

Twice he had paid Alec's debts and started him afresh with a clean slate; but on the second occasion he had given him plainly to understand that he must look for no further help in that line, but confine himself strictly to the fairly liberal allowance which had been settled on him when he came of age. Despite the determination thus expressed, no very long time had elapsed before a couple of tradesmen's accounts for considerable sums were received by the baronet, with a request for an early liquidation of the same--not, however, sent by Alec, but by the creditors themselves. Instead of returning the bills to their senders, as most parents would have done, with a curt disavowal of all liability, Sir Gilbert chose rather to confiscate his son's allowance to the amount of the debts in question.

From that time, now upwards of half a year ago, there had been no communication of any kind between father and son. Alec, however, was not left wholly without means, he having still an income of a hundred and eighty pounds a year, derivable from funded property left him by his mother.

Sir Gilbert had had an agreeable surprise in the course of the day with the evening of which we are now concerned, and yet it was a surprise not untinged with sadness.

His old friend Mr. Jopling, like himself an ardent numismatist and collector, had died a few weeks before, much to the baronet's regret. To-day there had reached him a tiny packet, forwarded by Mr. Jopling's executors, containing a couple of rare coins bequeathed him by his dead friend. One of them was a gold stater of Argos, with the head of Hera, the reverse being Diomedes carrying the palladium; while the other was a scarce fifty-shilling piece of Cromwell. Sir Gilbert had long envied his friend the possession of them, and now they were his own; therefore was the feeling with which he regarded them one of mingled pleasure and pain.

He had devoted the evening to a rearrangement of the contents of some of his cases and cabinets and to deciding upon a resting-place for his newly-acquired treasures.

It had been a labour of love. But, for all that, his thoughts every now and again would keep reverting from the pleasant task he had set himself to his eldest son; for this was the latter's birthday, a fact which the father could not forget, although he would fain have kept it in the background of his memory. On just such a wild night twenty-four years before, had John Alexander Clare been born. With what bright hopes, with what glowing expectations he had been welcomed on the stage of life, Sir Gilbert alone could have told. A groan broke involuntarily from his lips when he pictured in thought the difference between then and now. His heart was very bitter against his son.

The night was creeping on apace.

In the great house everybody was in bed save the baronet, who was addicted to solitude and late hours. Outside, at recurring intervals, the wind blew in great stormy gusts, which anon died down to an inarticulate sobbing and wailing, as it might be of some lost spirit wandering round the old mansion, seeking ingress but finding none. There were voices in the wide-mouthed chimney; the rain lashed the windows furiously; by daybreak the trees would be nearly bare and all the woodways be covered by a sodden carpet of fallen leaves. Summer was dead indeed.

Suddenly, in a lull of the gale, Sir Gilbert was startled into the most vivid wakefulness by an unmistakable tapping at one of the two long windows which lighted the room. He listened in rigid silence till the tapping came again. Then he crossed to the window whence the sound had proceeded, and after having drawn back the curtains and unbarred and opened the shutters, he demanded in his sternest tones:

"Who is there?"

"It is I--Alec, your son," came the reply in a well-remembered voice.

Sir Gilbert drew a long breath and paused for a space of half-a-dozen seconds. Then he unhasped and flung wide the window, and John Alexander Clare, the scapegrace heir, rain-soaked and mud-bedraggled, stepped into the room.

His father closed the window after him, while Alec proceeded to relieve himself of his soft broad-brimmed hat and the long cloak which had enveloped him from head to foot.

Like his father, the heir of Withington Chase was tall and slender and as upright as a dart. He had the same aquiline, high-bred cast of features, but in his case there was lacking that expression of hauteur and domineering pride, which to a certain extent marred those of the elder man.

Sir Gilbert's eyes in colour were a cold bluish-grey, and, though not really small, had the appearance of being so owing to their being so deep set under his heavy brows and to his habit of contracting his lids when addressing himself to anyone. Alec's hazel eyes, inherited from his mother, were large, clear, and open as the day. The baronet's lips under his white moustache were thin and hard-set, and his rare smile was that of a cynic and a man who loved to find food for his sardonic humour in the faults and follies of his fellow-creatures. His son's mouth, if betraying a touch of that weakness which as often as not is the result of an overplus of good-nature, was yet an eminently pleasant one, while his smile was frankness itself. His cheeks were a little more sunken than they ought to have been at his age, and there were dark half-circles under his eyes, which seemed to hint at late hours and mornings that bring a headache. His hair, which he wore short and parted in the middle, was in colour a dark reddish-brown, as were also his short pointed beard and small moustache.

"And to what, sir, am I indebted for the honour of a visit at this untimely hour?" inquired Sir Gilbert in his most freezing accents, as his coldly critical eyes took in his son from head to foot.

Alec coloured for a moment and bit his lip, as if to keep down some rising emotion. Then, in a voice of studied calmness, he said, "Perhaps, sir, I may be permitted to take a seat; for, in point of fact, I am dead tired, and have much to say to you."

The baronet waved his son to a chair, and took another himself some distance away.

"I am here to-night, father, to make a confession."

"I presumed as much the moment I set eyes on you."

"I am afraid you will term it a very disgraceful confession."

"I have not much doubt on that point," responded the baronet grimly. "Disgrace and you seem to have gone hand in hand for a long time past."

"Folly, but not disgrace, father. At the worst----"

The baronet held up his hand. "I am not used to such hair-splitting distinctions. You may call it by what term you like, t, my way of thinking, it is nothing less than a disgrace when a young man permits himself to contract debts which he has no reasonable prospect--nay, which, in many cases, he has no intention of liquidating. But proceed, sir."

Apparently Alec found it no easy matter to proceed. The story he had to tell was, without doubt, a sufficiently discreditable one, and such as might well cause him to hesitate before he could summon up sufficient courage to enter on its recital. Put into the fewest possible words it came to this: he had lost heavily over a certain race, and had no means of meeting his liabilities. In three days' time, unless his father would come to his help, he would be posted as a defaulter, which, for a man in his position, meant outlawry and social extinction. He got through his confession somehow, speaking in hard, dry tones, almost as if he were relating an incident which referred to some stranger and in which he had no personal concern. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers interlocked, and his eyes apparently intent on taking in the pattern of the carpet.

A harsh rasping laugh broke from Sir Gilbert.

"And are you really such an imbecile as to have come all the way to Withington, and on such a night as this, indulging yourself with the hope that I would as much as lift my little finger if by so doing I could avert the disgrace--the infamy--which you have wilfully accumulated on your worthless head? If you laid any such flattering unction to your soul, you can dismiss it at once. There is the window, sir; you can depart by the way you came."

Alec drew himself up, and for the first time looked his father straight in the face with the old clear, unwavering look, which the latter remembered so well in him as a boy.

"You wrong me somewhat, sir," he said, with a bitter smile. "When I ventured to intrude upon you it was without the slightest expectation that, for my sake alone, you would move hand or foot to extricate me from the predicament in which my folly had landed me; but it seemed to me that you might, perhaps, be moved to do so by a consideration of a very different kind."

Sir Gilbert's heavy brows came together.

"I am certainly unaware of any such consideration as the one you speak of. But perhaps you will condescend to enlighten me."

"It has seemed to me, sir, that you might, for the sake of the family good name, do that which you refused to do to save the reputation of your eldest son."

An involuntary "Ah!" escaped the baronet. It was a view of the question which had not struck him before. For a minute or two he sat in frowning silence. Then he said:

"And are yours the lips that dare to put forward a plea for safeguarding that good name which you have so infamously chosen to imperil? Oh, this seems to me the vilest hypocrisy!"

Alec raised his hands with a deprecatory gesture, but did not attempt to vindicate himself by a word. Sir Gilbert rose and crossed to the window by which his son had entered. The shutters had not been replaced, and he stood gazing out into the night for what to Alec seemed a long time. The gale had temporarily abated, torn and jagged masses of cloud were hurrying across the sky as if hastening to some rendezvous, revealing translucent depths of moonlit space between their severed fringes.

"What is the sum of your liability in connection with this last most discreditable affair?" demanded Sir Gilbert, after a time, without turning his head.

"Six hundred pounds."

Again there was a space of silence.

Then the baronet said:

"If I consent to take this liability on my shoulders, it will not be for your sake--that I hope I have already made sufficiently clear--but to save the name of one of the oldest and most honoured families in the kingdom from being dragged through the mire. But not even for that will I do this thing without exacting certain terms from you in return."

"You have but to name your terms, sir, to secure for them an immediate acceptance."

He rose and crossed to the chimney-piece, and taking up a small ornament, examined it for a moment or two. Then, replacing it, he turned and confronted Sir Gilbert, who had now returned to his seat.

"Father," said Alec, and it was the first time he had uttered the word since his arrival, "although it may seem a hard thing for you to credit, I assure you most solemnly that I shall derive infinitely more pleasure from the fact that the honour of the Clares will suffer no stain through my folly, than from the knowledge that my debt has been paid, and that I shall no longer have to fear being posted as a defaulter."

Then, after a momentary pause, he resumed:

"Without wishing in the least to try to extenuate my criminal folly in your eyes, which I am quite aware would be a useless effort, I may yet be allowed to remark that when I entered upon the transaction which has landed me in my present quagmire, I had every possible assurance a man can have in a matter into which the element of chance at all enters, that, instead of being a loser to the extent of six hundred pounds, I should be in pocket to the amount of three thousand. It was one of those things, which, at the time, seemed to me almost as sure as death. The commonest justice to myself compels me to say as much as that."

He had spoken slowly and quietly, giving its due emphasis to every word, but he might have been addressing himself to a graven image for any notice his father condescended to accord his words.

He now went back to his seat. Sir Gilbert had removed his chair, so that an oblong mahogany table now divided him and his son. Resting his arms on this and leaning forward a little, Alec said:

"And now, sir, will you be good enough to specify the terms which you propose to exact from me?

"My terms are these," replied Sir Gilbert, in the same tone that he might have used had he been laying down the conditions of a lease with his land-steward: "You will at once leave England, not to return to it without my express sanction. Further, should you choose to reside on the Continent, it must be in some place out of the ordinary lines of travel, where there will be little likelihood of your being seen or recognised by anyone who has known you in England. In return, I will relieve you of your liabilities of every kind whatsoever, and will, in addition, make you an allowance of two hundred and fifty pounds per annum, which shall be remitted to you quarterly through my solicitor, Mr. Page."

By the time Sir Gilbert had finished speaking, Alec's face had paled perceptibly. He lay back in his chair, and for a few seconds his eyes, wide open though they were, saw nothing of all that was around him. His heart beat painfully; he was as a man afflicted with vertigo.

That his father's conditions would be hard, he--knowing the man--had not doubted, but the reality dumfounded him.

Sir Gilbert was toying with his watch-guard, his eyes apparently fixed on a corner of the ceiling.

"Well, sir, have you nothing to say in answer to my proposition?" at length he asked, bringing his gaze back to his son's face. "Do you agree to my terms, or do you reject them?"

"I have no option but to agree to them. Beggars cannot be choosers." The bitterness at his heart made itself apparent in his words.

"Your last statement embodies a great truth, and one which you would do well to bear in mind for the rest of your life," said the baronet, with the nearest approach to a sneer he ever permitted himself. "It may, perhaps, be as well that I should recapitulate the terms of my proposition in order that there may be no after-mistake in the matter."

When he had done so, he said:

"Do you pledge me your word to carry out the conditions as laid down by me, in their entirety?"

"I pledge you my word to that effect."

Sir Gilbert rose and pushed back his chair.

"In that case, I need not detain you further. You know Page's address. Send him at once a complete list of your liabilities, with all needful particulars to enable him to settle the same. He will receive my instructions in the course of to-morrow to advance you a hundred pounds, or rather, to make you a present of them, as I neither know, nor care to know, how you are off for ready money. As soon as you have decided where to bestow your worthless self, you will write Page to that effect. And now I am not aware that I have anything more to add."

Alec had risen by this time and had picked up his hat and cloak. His eyes sought his father's eyes and met them. They stood confronting each other thus while one might have counted six slowly. The younger man's gaze was instinct with a grave questioning wistfulness. As plainly as speech could have done, it said:

"Father, have you no word of forgiveness for me before I go?"

But in Sir Gilbert's chilly blue-grey eyes was to be read no faintest response. Had his son been a stranger, whom he had never before set eyes on, he could not have regarded him with more apparent indifference. With a heavy sigh that seemed to choke back a sob, Alec turned, and crossing to the window by which he had entered, opened it. A moment he paused on the threshold, and threw a backward glance over his shoulder.

"Goodbye, father," he said in a voice that was scarcely above a whisper.

"Goodnight and goodbye," came the response in accents clear and unmoved.

An instant later and Alec was gone. Sir Gilbert waited till the noise of his son's footsteps on the gravel had died away. Then he crossed to the window and refastened the shutters, and drew again the heavy curtains. So departed from the home of his ancestors the heir of Withington Chase.

By this time the night was fair, but although the wind had spent much of its force, it still blew in fitful gusts. Having crossed the lawn and the flower-garden, Alec leaped the sunken fence which divided the latter from the park, and then turning sharply to the right, presently struck into a footpath, well known to him of old, which wound through the belt of timber that sheltered the Chase from the north and north-east winds. Having traversed this, he emerged into a wilder part of the grounds rarely trodden by anyone save an occasional poacher, or by that law-breaker's implacable foe, the gamekeeper, in the course of his nocturnal rounds.

Alec Clare was returning by the way he had come. He had quitted the London train at Westwood station, four miles away, where there was no one who knew him, rather than go on to Mapleford, the station nearest the Chase, where, even at that late hour, he could not have made sure of not being recognised: and he had his own reasons for wishing to keep his midnight visit a secret from everybody. His intention was to climb the wall at the far corner of the park where it abutted on a narrow lane which, at a distance of a quarter of a mile, opened on to the high road that led direct to Westwood station.

He was plunging forward through the rain-soaked bracken, feeling intolerably sore at heart, wroth with himself, his father and the world at large, but most of all with himself, and the prey to a dull heavy pain, which had its origin in the knowledge that he was leaving behind him the home of his birth, his mother's grave, and all the haunts that were inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, perhaps never to see them again--when suddenly from behind the bole of a huge elm a man stepped full in his path and barred the way.

Alec fell back a step or two with an involuntary exclamation, so startled was he, and next moment the man did the same. He was a big, burly fellow, dressed in velveteens and gaiters, and carrying a stout cudgel in his right hand.

"Why, lawks-a-me, if it ain't Master Alec!" he exclaimed with a gasp of astonishment; "and just as I'd made sure I was a going to cop one o' them confounded poachers. Well, wonders will never cease. I'm mortal glad to see you, sir, anyhow."

The speaker was Martin Rigg, Sir Gilbert's gamekeeper. Alec and he had been firm allies in days gone by. Many a night had the "young master" and the keeper gone the rounds together when the former was supposed to be sound asleep in bed. Many had been their escapades, even to the extent of doing a little night-poaching on their own account. All that Alec knew of woodcraft, of the "gentle art" and of the haunts and habits of birds and animals, he owed to Martin Rigg.

"Yes, it is I, Martin," replied the young man, now thoroughly roused from his abstraction. "If you took me for a poacher, I, at the first glance, took you for a ghost, or something equally as uncanny."

"For the Grey Monk, perhaps?" suggested the keeper, with a chuckle in his voice.

"You forget that the Grey Monk wears a cowl, and not even by starlight could your wide-awake be mistaken for that."

"Wide-awake or no wide-awake, sir, I've reason to believe that more than one timid servant lass has been ready to take her affidavy that she had seen the Grey Monk, when it's only been me that she's caught sight of in the dark, prowling among the trees, on the lookout for gins and snares."

"By the way," said Alec, but with the tone of one whose mind had far more serious things to occupy it, "has anything been seen of the family spectre of late?"

"No, sir--not of late. It's nigh on for three years since it was seen last, and then it was her ladyship who was nearly frightened out of her wits by it. She was coming downstairs at the time, and had reached the lowermost landing, when she saw the Grey Monk glide across the hall in the moonlight. She shrieked out, and they do say she nearly fainted. The best of it was that up to then she had always made light of the ghost, and said its appearances were nothing more than 'lucinations, whatever they may be. But she never said so after that night. Sir Gilbert was awfully wild when he heard about it, and would fain have hushed it up; but it was too late. However, that's an old wife's tale by this time. As I said afore, sir, I'm mortal glad to see you."

"Not for one moment do I doubt you, old friend. All the same, I am sure you would like to know why I am here and where I am bound for at this hour of the night. Listen! there is the turret clock striking twelve. Well, I will tell you."

He waited till the clock had done striking; then resumed:

"I have just left my father. He and I have said goodbye to each other for a long time to come. I am on my way to Westwood station: you know the near cut. Forty-eight hours hence I shall have left England, to return I know not when."

"I am main sorry to hear that, Master Alec," remarked the keeper in a tone of real concern. In common with everybody connected with the Chase, and a good many people in no wise connected with it--for such things cannot be kept secret--he was cognisant of the breach between Sir Gilbert and his heir, and could form a pretty shrewd guess as to the origin of it.

"And I am no less sorry to have it to tell," replied Alec. "Now, when I tell you further that I don't want anyone to know of my present visit to the Chase, nor to hear from your lips that you have as much as set eyes on me, you will, I am sure, respect my wishes."

"O' course I will, sir. You may make yourself easy on that score. I dreamt as I saw you--that's all--and I don't tell my dreams to nobody."