Waynflete. Christabel R. Coleridge
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