The Grey Monk. T. W. Speight

       CHAPTER I.

      ALEC'S SENTENCE.

      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