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CHAPTER V
THE INDEFINITE PRESENT
The morning after the funeral Mrs. Grant and Maud walked up and down one of the long, silent corridors for an hour. The evening before, when the widow and the young girl sat together in the firelight, Maud had told the other the main features of the facts in the interview between herself and Sir William. Beyond expressing a guarded and general approval of the baronet, Mrs. Grant said little. She had been too tired, and Maud too exhausted from fretting and anxiety, to allow of close inquiry or elaborate statement. Now they were less fatigued, the worst day of the bereavement had passed, and they were quietly discussing matters.
"You know, Maud, my dear, no matter how kind Sir William may be to you, it will not do for you to forget Mr. Grey," said Mrs. Grant, very gravely. "You must not think of defying him or going to law with him, or anything of that sort."
"Indeed, Mrs. Grant, I am thinking of nothing of the kind," replied the girl, looking with troubled eyes and anxious face at her only female friend.
"Because you know," continued the woman, without heeding the interruption or the appealing face – "you know very well the Greys have served the family faithfully for many years; and now the present Mr. Grey has sworn to serve you, and to take care of you, and to be good and kind to you; and I am sure he will; for though he is not such a gentleman by birth as your father or Sir William, still he's a most respectable man."
The widow had the feminine trick of taking the bit in her teeth and going straight on, no matter who pulled right or who pulled left.
"You may rely on my doing nothing of the kind. How can you think I would!" cried the girl fervently.
"Yes, but you mustn't," repeated the widow vehemently. "You must not throw over the friend of years for a man you never saw until yesterday."
"You ought not to say I am going to do anything so wicked – indeed you ought not. But remember that the man I met for the first time yesterday was my cousin, and the head of the Midharsts."
"But your father never liked him."
"My poor father never knew him."
"But he could have known him if he liked, and he didn't."
"That was prejudice."
"Maud!" cried the widow, in a tone of reproach.
The girl burst into tears.
"I did not mean to say anything disrespectful; but I can't bear to think my cousin insincere."
Mrs. Grant pressed the girl in her arms, and said:
"You must not cry; you must not weep, my love. I did not mean you had been disrespectful to your father's memory. Heaven forbid! But you must not be too hasty, and like everyone at first sight. That will never do for a young heiress who has no right guardian."
The girl ceased to weep, and said in an unsteady voice:
"But I never told you I liked him."
"You do like him, Maud; you know you do."
"How could I like him in one meeting?"
"But, Maud, you do like him, and that is why I feel so uneasy."
"Indeed I don't like him. I am afraid of him: he makes me feel smaller and helpless. I never feel helpless when Mr. Grey is near me, for he can always tell me what to do; but I feel as if I must do what my cousin says, and after only one meeting too. I was ashamed to confess this until you made me."
Her luminous candid spirit looked out of the large soft eyes into the eyes of the woman.
Mrs. Grant stole her arm round Maud's waist, and for a while both walked on in silence. At length Mrs. Grant spoke:
"I am glad to hear that."
"To hear what?" asked Maud, in a tone of abstraction.
"That you take no interest in Sir William."
"What!" with a start. The eyes of the girl were once more fixed on the eyes of the widow. "I did not say that. On the contrary, he does interest me."
Mrs. Grant looked bewildered, and glanced helplessly around her, as if seeking someone to bear out what she was about to say.
"Why, child, you told me a moment ago that you did not like him, and that he frightens you!"
"That is true, but a lion frightens me, and I can't say that I like lions; but they interest me more than a King Charlie."
Maud smiled at the bewilderment of the other.
"But, my dear," said Mrs. Grant, with a look of grave trouble in her eyes, "what you say about lions and King Charlie is all nonsense. When you have a King Charlie you play with him, and feed him out of your hand. When you have a lion, you look at him through the bars of a cage. Besides, Maud, it is absurd and romantic to think of an English baronet as a lion. Suppose he was a lion, and he got loose, what should you do?"
"Run away as fast as I could," answered the girl, with a faint laugh.
"But if he caught you?"
"Oh, if he caught me I don't think I could do much."
"There now, Maud, I told you so."
Mrs. Grant had not told Maud anything about her chance of not being able, single-handed, to defend herself against a lion. When she said, "I told you so," she had suddenly lost sight of the monarch of the forest, and come upon the mental image of the baronet of the Island, in whom this girl had admitted she took an interest, which, in the illustration afforded by the lion, proved to be full of the gravest danger.
Miss Midharst had forgotten the baronet in the allegory, and was thinking only of the lion; so that when Mrs. Grant triumphantly said, "I told you so," Maud believed Mrs. Grant was contemplating the same image as herself – that is, her own disappearance down the lion's throat. So that Maud smiled and said:
"Fortunately there are very few lions in this part of the world, and one very seldom gets loose."
"On the contrary, there are very many lions in this part of the country, and they all go about seeking whom they may devour."
Michael the servant entered, and announced, "Sir William Midharst and Mr. Grey."
"You will see Mr. Grey first, of course, Maud?" said Mrs. Grant, in a low voice.
Miss Midharst looked perplexed, and by way of reply said:
"Why?"
"Oh, you will surely see your guardian before a man you met only yesterday?"
"Don't you think it would look strange, Mrs. Grant, if I did not see my cousin before Mr. Grey?"
"Certainly not. Mr. Grey was appointed to take care of you. He has known you since you were a child, and you owe him every respect," said Mrs. Grant, speaking so low that Michael could not hear. Her manner was very earnest.
"But Sir William is my kinsman, and, Mrs. Grant, you and I are his guests in this place. You really would not have the owner of this place wait while I, his guest, received even my guardian? No; my cousin must come first. Michael, ask Sir William to walk this way."
As soon as the door closed on the servant, the girl turned to Mrs. Grant, and said: "Will you see Mr. Grey and apologise for delaying him? Please do, Mrs. Grant."
As the new owner of Island Castle entered the room he met Mrs. Grant going out.
When greetings and ordinary formalities had been disposed of, and the cousins were alone, the man spoke.
"I had an interview with Mr. Grey yesterday evening, and I am glad to say that I found him most reasonable and agreeable. I had two things to speak to him about, neither of which was likely to please him, and he behaved admirably."
"I am sure the more you meet him the more you will like him," said Maud, looking up thankfully to her cousin's face. She felt herself under a personal obligation to her cousin for his frank approval of so old and valuable a friend of her father and herself. The desire to be governed, common to all women, had suddenly sprung up in her nature when her cousin spoke to her last evening of his claims upon the guardianship of his only cousin, and she was now greatly relieved to find respect to the wishes of her father's successor did not clash with fealty to her father's only friend, one on whom she looked as having a strong claim upon her regard and attention.
Sir William did not seem to hear her words. He was standing at the window looking down on the Weeslade with dreamy inattentive eyes.
She was seated on a low chair at the other side of the window. Her eyes were timidly fixed on his face. He had come from Egypt, the land of the inexplicable Pyramids and the inscrutable Sphynx. To her this cousin William's inner life was as dark a mystery as the riddle of the Pyramids, and his face as baffling as the face of the Sphynx. Until now she had heard men speak, and had attended to their words. When he spoke now she regarded less the words than the unuttered thoughts attending upon them. The "How d'ye do?" of other men required only a straightforward answer, without thought beyond the scope of the question. The "How d'ye do?" of her cousin came to her attended by veiled figures of strange aspect, that gave the simple question a volume and depth the mightiest questions never had before.
Was it because he who had been the ogre of her younger years had become the protector of her orphan maidenhood, and the air of the ogre still hung vaguely around him in her mind? Was it the influence of remote consanguinity operating, as blood does, between those of the same stock who have met for the first time when grown up? Was it the background afforded by the Nile and the sacred crocodile, and the mysterious barren silent rows of the Pyramids, with those features of men and women lying hid in folds of linen and layers of asphaltum, with, save the eyes, all the features, the lips that were kissed by lover or mother, still unchanged, still the same lip, the same dimple in the cheek, the same curve in the temple as when Thebes and Memphis conned the stars, the Paris and the London of three thousand years ago, and taught the world all the world knew?
Then before her mind rolled forth the plains of purposeless white sand, overhung by the plains of unbroken blue sky, and, blazing in the blue sky, the fierce sun. And here, against the homely sash of that old familiar window, that commonplace sash and frame, down which she had seen the dreary rain of weary winter days slide to the sodden ground, he leaned; on his face and hands the brown harvest of Egyptian suns, in his dark eyes the strange knowledge of awful arts and rites wrought in labyrinth and in cave by Egypt's ancient priests, and in his tones the softness of a land where no waves beat and no winds blow loudly enough to drown the timid whispers of a maid.
"Are you thinking of Egypt?" she asked in a low voice.
"No. I am thinking of Maud," he answered, without moving. Then, rousing from his reverie, he said: "Yes, Mr. Grey was most agreeable last night, and I am sure we shall get on very well together. One of the things I had to speak to him about was a matter of business detail. The other, Maud, was of the first moment, the arrangement you and I came to yesterday about my acting as your personal guardian."
"What did he say about that?" asked Maud aloud. She thought he had not been thinking of Egypt. His mind had not been far away, as she had supposed, but close at home, near where they were, busy with thoughts of her. Was it strange a man who had that dark sad face, and those deep eyes, and those mystic memories, and so short a knowledge of her, should, while looking so out of that old familiar window, think of her, who knew nothing of the world and was so commonplace? Was that strange? No doubt, in her, in this secluded place, and with her humdrum life, the objects entering into which were all around her clad in the threadbare interest of daily use, it was not strange that, being who he was, and coming as he did, she felt a great interest in him. But that he should concern himself so much about her was inexplicable. Egypt had been to her, since first she knew how to hold a book, the land of her dreams. Her only wish for travel sprang from a desire to see the site and monuments of the race which gave the arts and sciences to Europe. And here was her cousin William come back from that land, and, while lost in a reverie which looked proper to the country of the Nile, thinking of her, Maud.
The young man paused awhile before answering her question. Still his face wore the same abstracted look as he replied:
"At first Mr. Grey seemed surprised and shocked. I think it appeared to him as if he had been slighted. I intended no slight to him, and I don't think my manner showed anything of the kind. At all events, all went well, and he seemed quite satisfied once the first surprise had passed. How did he hurt his knee, Maud?"
"I do not know. I am very sorry to hear he has hurt himself. When did it happen?"
"He said some time ago. It gave him dreadful pain last evening. I never shall forget the shout it wrung from him. It was like the shout I once heard of a man who awoke in the jaws of a crocodile."
"I never heard anything about it. I hope it is not serious, and that all he has been doing for us of late has not made it worse."
"I hope not. By-the-way, he is waiting to see you, Maud. Shall I tell him he may come up? I have told some tradesmen to be here about this time. When you have finished with Mr. Grey come into the courtyard. I shall be there. I am going to have vases for flowers put up, and I want to consult you about them."
He turned round and glanced down at her. The vacant look faded from his eyes, a deep gentleness stole into them, and from them spread like light over the rest of his features as he took her hand, and said, in tone of deep solicitude:
"Are you always so white, Maud? Are you sure you are well?"
"I am quite well," she answered.
"You must not fret, dear Maud. I will send Mr. Grey to you. You are more used to him than me. But you will get used to me some day very soon, won't you, child?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Grey and I will take great care of you. He shall act as my deputy while I am away, and when I come back I will take care of you. I will go now; I do not intend letting those tradespeople disturb anything for some time; I only want to show them what I mean to have done. For my sake, Maud, you will not brood? Promise me that."
"I promise."
"And you will show me where you would like the vases placed?"
"Yes."
He kissed her hand first and then her forehead, and left her.
CHAPTER VI
THE TYRANNICAL PAST
When Mrs. Grant went out of the drawing-room she sought and found Mr. Grey in the waiting-room off the grand entrance-hall. She closed the door, and going up to the banker in haste said:
"I want to have a few private words with you, Mr. Grey."
"I am completely at your service, Mrs. Grant," answered the banker, in his most amiable manner.
He looked worn and haggard to-day. The strain was telling on him. He now knew what sleepless nights were, and days haunted by the phantoms of memory, and slight rustling sounds of hideous import. He had learned to start suddenly and look hastily over his shoulder. It was not the dread of the hangman disordered his peace, but the faint rustle of a woman's dress, and the plunge into the darkness and the sense of suffocation under a burden, and the strange twanging of the arteries in his temples.
"You know," began Mrs. Grant in an excited manner, "that I love Miss Midharst, and would do anything I could for her."
Mrs. Grant had been very much shocked and excited by what had passed between Maud and her about Sir William, and the excitement still survived.
"I am quite confident of that," answered the banker, with a grave look. He saw Mrs. Grant had something serious to say.
"Will you promise me to keep what I say to yourself?" she asked quickly.
He paused awhile and looked down.
"My position is peculiar," he said. "Although I am not Miss Midharst's guardian in the usual signification of the word, I really feel bound by my promise to Sir Alexander to do all I can for her, and that being so I could not undertake to keep to myself anything which it might be to her advantage to disclose."
He said this in his most deliberate manner, and with his eyes fixed solemnly on the face of the widow.
"I know I may trust you, Mr. Grey. My only reason for asking you not to speak is, that if you mentioned my name in the matter I should be in an awkward position."
"I promise you not to mention your name in connection with anything you may say to me."
"That will do. I want to speak about Sir William Midharst."
"The new baronet!" cried Mr. Grey, with a start and suddenly intensified interest.
"Yes. Do you know anything of him?"
"No. Nothing. He has not yet established his identity, but there can be no doubt he is the right man. As what you have to say concerns him, and as I am under no pledge to guard his interests (though of course I should not sit still and see them injured), you may speak quite freely. I promise to mention what you say to no one."
They were sitting by the table. As Mr. Grey spoke he drew his chair closer to his companion's, and, by his manner, showed he had sincerely resolved to respect her confidence, and attend most carefully to anything she might say.
"Have you any idea that Sir William is in want of money?"
Mr. Grey started. A more unexpected or disquieting question could hardly have been addressed to him. This was the first time Mrs. Grant had mentioned the word money to him, and now she uttered it in connection with this young man who had already to a great extent come between him and the heiress. He answered:
"I may tell you in strict confidence he has applied to me for a large sum of money, and of course I promised it. May I know your reason for asking?"
"I'll tell you my reason by-and-by. The money he asked you for is not to come out of Miss Midharst's fortune?"
Again Grey started. Then he knit his brows and braced himself together, and, fixing his eyes resolutely on the carpet, answered in a firm voice:
"No; I could not think of touching Miss Midharst's money for anyone but Miss Midharst herself."
He did his best to control himself, still at the words "but Miss Midharst herself" he shuddered. Had Mrs. Grant discovered anything about the Midharst Consols? She was the last person of his acquaintance he would imagine likely to come upon a clue to the fact. But no one could tell who might pick up the thread. If he had known matters would take turns like these he should never have touched those Consols. He would have shut the door first. What a fool, what a poor fool he had been not to have taken his mother's advice and shut the door.
"But if he wants money he must be poor?"
"He will have a fine income now."
"Miss Midharst has a large fortune, Mr. Grey."
"Very large."
"And you are the guardian of it."
"Yes." What on earth was she driving at?
"Well, I think it only right to tell you that if Sir William is now in want of money which is not Miss Midharst's fortune, he will very soon be in want of the money which is." She rose and fixed her excited eyes upon him.
He rose too, passed his hand absently across his brow, grew pale, and said in a voice of perplexity:
"I forget part of it. I forget part of it. But you know I was looking at the Witch's Tower of the Castle, the Tower of Silence, when the steamboat blew up."
"So I have heard," whispered Mrs. Grant in a tone of awe. The change in his face was terrible.
"And they never found the body of Bee. They never looked in the right place. It is on the top of the Tower of Silence, blown there when the boiler of the Rodwell burst. I saw the body blown up there through the smoke and steam."
"Mr. Grey! Mr. Grey! are you ill?" said Mrs. Grant, when she could find her voice.
Gradually the fixed look left his eyes. The hands, which had been feebly beating on the table, ceased to move, the sensation of tightness left his forehead, and pale and with a gentle sigh he sank on a chair.
"Are you ill, Mr. Grey?" asked Mrs. Grant, in a less alarmed tone now that she saw his mind was clear again.
He answered feebly:
"I have not been very well, and of late I suffer from sleeplessness, a very bad thing for a business man, because when he lies awake at night he is always thinking of his business, and that wears one greatly. Did I faint?"
"No."
"Pray do not ring. I am all right now. I do not want anything. I feel quite well again. It was only a passing weakness. You would greatly oblige me if you will not speak of what has occurred to Miss Midharst, or to any one else. Did I say anything?"
"Something I did not catch. You spoke of the sad death of Mrs. Grey in the Rodwell. You said, I think, that you saw the Rodwell, in which your wife was, blow up. Really, I was too much alarmed for yourself to think of what you said."
"Ah," sighed Grey in a tone of profound relief. "You were telling me something that interested me very much when I had the misfortune to interrupt you. Let me see. What was it?"
His face was gradually regaining its ordinary look; the haggard aspect of a while ago did not come back so strongly marked, still he looked worn.
"Perhaps you are not quite well enough to-day to be troubled with what may after all be only a wrong guess of mine. But I feel it strange, when I come to think of it, that Miss Midharst should accept a man Sir Alexander did not like as a guardian, when all knew Sir Alexander wished you to have all the power he would give to any one. I spoke to Miss Midharst, and she certainly means to take the advice of Sir William in matters regarding herself. Well, then, I thought, Sir Alexander has stripped the land and the town house and this place, and has rack-rented and injured the estates, and saved up the money, with your help, for his daughter. Then I wondered to myself if Sir William was in want of money; for if he is in want of money, what could be better for him than to make himself agreeable to Miss Midharst, insist upon her staying in this place, become her guardian and – marry her."
"Aha!" exclaimed Mr. Grey in a half cough, half groan. "But do you think there is a likelihood of such a thing occurring?"
"Do you, Mr. Grey, believe in love at first sight?"
"Yes; that is, I believe in something which may grow into love."
"Well, this may be a case of it."
"But have you any reason for thinking Miss Midharst has conceived a – a tender feeling towards her cousin in so short a time?"
"No, no. I don't say Miss Midharst is in love with her cousin, but she told me this morning he interests her, and that is a good beginning. You know she has never met a young man of her own rank closely. Beyond a bow and half-hour's chat once a month when she and I slipped into town, she has met no one but you and her father. She has a craze about Egypt, and this cousin is just home from Egypt – that's another thing in his favour. I don't want any one to marry Maud for her money only, and this is the reason I speak to you. She's too good and beautiful to be married for anything but her own amiable lovely self, and I hope you will prevent any fortune-hunter from snatching her up before the grave is closed over her father."
"I – I – I," stammered Mr. Grey, "I do not feel quite well. I fear I am growing dizzy again."
The door opened.
"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Grant. Good-day, Mr. Grey, I may not meet you again to-day. You are not looking very well. Miss Midharst will be delighted to see you. She told me to tell you so. Go to her. You will find her in her own little drawing-room; the Lancaster room I think they call it. I hope your knee is better. By the way, when and how did you hurt it?"
"I – I am a little tired."
"The leg?"
"Yes."
"How did you do it?"
"Strained it."
"Long ago?"
"The night my wife was lost." He shuddered and leaned upon the back of the chair.
"It is his head that troubles him and not his knee," whispered Mrs. Grant.
"Take my arm and come into the air. The air will do you good," said the young man in a voice of grave solicitude and kindness.
"Thank you," said Grey, accepting the offer.
The two left the room together, the banker upon the baronet's arm.
Neither the knee nor the head of Grey was suffering at that moment; but he felt a deadly faintness come over him when Mrs. Grant made the appeal to him to protect Miss Midharst against fortune-hunters.
"The blows come too quickly and too heavily; too quickly and too heavily; too quickly and too heavily for me."
The open air and soothing landscape calmed Grey. He always felt better out of doors now than between walls. Rooms had furniture, and furniture cast shadows, and no matter what part of a room you sat in you could not command a view of the whole. The atmosphere indoors was heavy, depressing, and often laden with scents a man's wife might use, had used once; and these perfumes, coming suddenly upon the sense of smell, brought memories of long ago and half-awakened expectation of seeing a certain woman of pleasing aspect the love-bearer of one. But with the dying breath of the perfume the loved familiar figure of the olden time faded away, and in its place came a ghastly face with open dead eyes and open dead lips, and temples dark with the blue veins of suffocation.
When that thing came in the house no one could avoid it. It seemed in all places at the same time, and if one raised eyes no matter to what, that thing met the eyes somewhere. Even when it had not followed the dying perfume of the musk, so long as one was in the house one might come upon it anywhere, leaning against the wall in the darkness between the double doors, huddled in the shadow of the great oak chimney-piece in the hall, lying across the mat on one's bedroom-door when one was retiring for the night.
Across the threshold of that bedroom-door this jaw-dropped thing never came. That room was one's only sanctuary. The old love of the long ago never left that place with the dying of the perfume. Here one's wife moved about the room and stood by the bedside as God had made her, comely, and as love had made her, happy; not as indifference had made her, wretched, and the devil's agent had made her, dead.
And yet to live in that sanctuary for happy memories was almost worse than wandering with a dim light through corridors against the walls of which stood shrouded indictments for the intolerable crime. It was hard to wake and smell the musk, and find one's young wife standing at the glass, with the golden-topped vial in her hand, and a smile upon her face, then to see her fade slowly away, to spring up, ask why she was taken from young and loving arms, and to be able to get no answer; until one opened the door, and found there one's own middle age, and that terrible thing across the threshold.
Yes; the open air was much better than the house. Out of doors one could keep at a distance from shadows, and, when there is the rustle of a dress, soon find out it is not hers. Then, when the worst comes to the worst, one, when out of doors, could run. Indoors, you cannot run any distance, and jumping through a window would attract attention and inquiry, neither of which could be endured now.
Leaning heavily on the arm of the young baronet, Grey walked up and down the terrace in front of the northern face of the Castle. In about a quarter of an hour he said:
"I am very much obliged to you, Sir William. You have been exceedingly kind to me. May I ask you to do one more little favour for me?"
"Certainly."
"Will you kindly make my excuses to Miss Midharst, and say that I will not intrude upon her to-day. I – I – I do not feel quite equal to it. I am unstrung a little. I shall drive home; and a drive always does me good."
His voice was unsteady and his manner restless.
The baronet saw the banker safely into the ferry-boat, and then returned to the Castle with the message.
Wat Grey got into his fly, thinking, "I'll go to see my mother."
