Waynflete. Christabel R. Coleridge
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