Part 3, Chapter IV.
The Family Face.
Mrs John Palmer replied by a handsome subscription to the letter informing her of the condition of Waynflete church. “Miss S.J. Palmer” sent fifty pounds as a tribute to her dear aunt’s memory, from the Riviera, where she had gone with her mother; and others of the family and neighbours came forward liberally enough to put Mr Clifton in very high spirits. Miss Florella Vyner offered a modest five pounds, and, finally, Constancy sent fifteen, being the entire fruit of the story that had come into being at Moorhead. She sent it to Guy, and stated that it was a token of affection for dear Mrs Waynflete; but it was, perhaps, something of a sin-offering as well.
Godfrey beheld her contribution with strange thrills. He was pleased, and yet life was harder after he had read, and secreted her little note, on the loss of which Guy did not comment.
Life could not be very easy. Apart from his own troubles, there was a strain in living with any one in such a state of nervous tension as Guy, carefully as the elder brother controlled himself. His very reticence began to have an effect on Godfrey, and though he himself felt more and more the blessing of comparative inward peace, he could not but suffer much from the outward trial, and once his carefully maintained caution gave way, and he made a great mistake.
“Look here,” he said one morning in the early spring, as he studied his letters, “I asked Clifton to get this done for me.”
“What?” said Godfrey, looking. “A photo graph? Oh, that picture. What did you want it for?”
“You don’t mind? I wanted really to see it.”
“It’s not much like you now,” said Godfrey. Guy got up, and, unlocking a drawer, he laid a row of small objects on the table, setting the photograph of the Waynflete picture beside them.
These were the old likenesses of their father and grandfather, a handsome, well-set-up photograph of himself taken at Oxford, and another more recent one.
“Oh, I say,” said Godfrey, “why did you sit when you were looking so ill? Yes, there’s a good deal of likeness; but, oh, chuck this one with the eyes into the fire—I don’t like it. Eh! What’s this? Have you been drawing yourself? You have made yourself look quite fiendish.”
Guy had laid a rough pen-and-ink outline beside the line of photographs. They certainly formed a curious study of a persistent type, but the last photograph of the living Guy seemed to blot the others out, the mournful eyes were so full of terrible suggestion, the mocking lips were set into lines of so much stronger purpose. And the drawing repeated the photograph with a difference.
“What?” said Godfrey, as Guy’s silence suddenly suggested an idea to him. “What? Do you mean that—the ghost—your bogie—looks like that?”
“Yes,” said Guy, “I think so.”
Godfrey swept the pictures together with an angry motion. He had believed in the ghost, but somehow this definite presentment struck a sudden scepticism into him.
“Oh, come,” he said, “nonsense! You never ought to look at them. It’s very bad for you. You may get to fancy anything.”
Guy gave him an odd look of comprehension.
“Never mind,” he said quietly, “I ought not to have brought them out. They won’t hurt me. Here’s quite another matter. You’ve managed those Devonshire dyers very well. They’re coming round to our terms. See.”
In the gentle steady look with which Guy spoke these encouraging words, the likeness to these wild versions of the family face was lost; but Godfrey had received a shock. In the instinctive recoil of his being from the incredible horror, he doubted Guy’s sanity, even his truth; he shrank from him, even while he loyally obeyed him, and did all he knew for his comfort. And yet as the slow days wore on, in close contact with his brother, an awful sense of comprehension began to steal into him. He too was a son of the Waynfletes; he too had been tempted, was tempted hourly to give up the hateful drudgery, to shake off the fate to which he was bound. He began to understand Guy. And though Guy controlled not only his face and words, but his very thoughts, before Godfrey, the mischief was done. Guy’s very presence filled him with weird suggestions. It struck him that that other figure must be there too, and the longing for escape became almost irresistible, a longing much intensified when he received the following letter from Mrs Joshua Palmer, one Saturday, by the second post—
“Jeanie enjoys the new places and the amusements of hotel life, and I may say, without a mother’s vanity, that she is greatly admired; but I think she loves her old friends, and has enjoyed nothing so much as her Christmas at Raby. We are most glad to hear that the Ingleby business is prosperous, and that Guy is stronger, and we look forward to seeing you on our return from abroad, my dear Godfrey, with great pleasure. Jeanie hears from a Rilston friend, who has a cousin at Constancy Vyner’s college, that there is a very learned professor there who admires her very much, and that when she has taken her degree they will be married, a very suitable arrangement; but I am an old-fashioned, ignorant person, and I don’t think that these new studies teach girls how to make home happy, and I am glad dear Jeanie has simpler tastes.”
Godfrey flung the letter down, and tore open another. It was from a college friend in Queensland, and gave a lively picture of the life of a sheep-farmer.
“Come out and join me,” it said; “let your brother manage the business. He can buy our wool, and we’ll make a good thing of it.”
If he could but go, and escape from his misery! He looked up and started violently as he saw Guy standing beside him, watching him with his intent, searching look.
“I’ve been having a turn with Rawdie,” he said, and sat down by the fire, still looking at Godfrey, under his hand.
There was a short silence, and then suddenly, without warning, Godfrey burst out.
“I see no good in all this work, nor in anything else. I believe there is a curse upon us. We’d better cut each other’s throats.”
“That’s what I want to talk about,” said Guy; “not about cutting throats, but because I know you’re in a bad way. I’ve been thinking a great deal about you. What’s the matter?”
Then Godfrey showed his two letters, and in confused words, helped out by Guy’s questions, he told that he loved Constancy to distraction, that she had failed him in his hour of need, that Jeanie was his inevitable fate, and, finally, that he wanted to run away. He hated Waynflete—no, not only because of the way he had got it, but because—well, there was something—Waynflete took the heart out of him. Guy leant forward and looked hard into his brother’s face.
“We have got to go down to the bottom of it together,” he said. “It won’t do to be afraid of one’s thoughts. There are no other ghosts so fatal. And as for cutting one’s throat, no doubt it’s simple, but how about when it’s done?”
“Guy,” said Godfrey, hurriedly, “do you—do you really see that Thing—you showed me?”
“Yes,” said Guy, gently; “but that has nothing at all to do with you. That is only a nervous affection, wholly physical. It has no existence whatever for you.”
“But you said you had seen the ghost?”
“I believe,” said Guy, choosing his words carefully, “that I have gone through experiences, not new in our family, and to which our constitutions make us liable. It’s an unusual kind of thing, but there are other cases on record. As to what agency causes these delusions and visions—I use both words advisedly—I am not prepared to say. As to the Waynflete traditions, it is my belief that there is some connection between these experiences and the place where they occur, and the people to whom they happen, somehow, where nerves and Spirit and the hidden forces of Nature meet. I know no more, and I don’t think they’ll fall to your share.”
The definite words, the composed manner steadied Godfrey’s spirit. He had felt the brush of the unseen wings, and he was able to recognise what Guy meant.
“There is something more,” said Guy. “It is under these forms of experience that I have had to resist temptation. Temptation is common to man, but some of us are made so as to know when it tears soul and spirit—yes, and body, asunder. But it’s just as hard, no doubt, for other people to keep their heads above water as for me. But,” he paused and hesitated; then went on in still quieter tones, “whatever men, in all ages and all places, have meant by spiritual experience, what they meant when they said that they were ‘tempted of the devil,’ that I have known, and I know. And I know, also, what they meant when they said that the Lord had delivered them out of his hands. And I thank God for the knowledge, even if it came by fire! Remember that! But as for you, the devil, or what he stands for, would give you just as much trouble in Queensland as here. You’re not married to Jeanie yet, nor even engaged to her. And you promised not to leave me alone with the ghosts.”
Guy’s manner was so reticent and calm that Godfrey hardly grasped at once all the force of what he had said. He leant his head on his hands, and was silent for some minutes. Then he said, not very steadily—
“If I left you now, I should be a deserter. But I nearly did. And you know what I did do—as to you—and what a fool I was at Christmas. Some day I shall knock under.”
“No, you won’t,” said Guy; “you’ll stick to your colours. You’ll stand by me.”
Godfrey nodded; he still sat with hidden face. Guy laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Poor old lad!” he said. “I’d rather fight seven devils, more wicked than the first, than have my angel fail me! But, Godfrey, stick to this. Never mind what the fate or the curse may be. We have to fight it, and, God helping us, we can. And I’ve no reason to suppose that the fight would be over, even if we had cut our throats, and been—gathered to our fathers. If it were, it would be a dirty trick to turn tail and leave the fiends—or the bailiffs—in possession at Waynflete.”
Poor Godfrey looked hardly reassured by this suggestive speech; but suddenly Guy’s face softened, and he said, pleadingly—
“Don’t make me into a bugbear, old boy; it’s rather hard, and there’s really no occasion.”
“I should be a confounded fool if I did,” said Godfrey, with some embarrassment. “No, I’ll not turn tail. I’ll stick to the shop.”
He kept his promise manfully; but it was a relief to both brothers when Easter week brought Cuthbert Staunton for a flying visit. He was going abroad, he said, to look up materials for a set of lectures on the sources of English culture. He had set his heart on getting Guy to come with him.
“We’ll take it easy,” he said; “and drop all the bogies in the Channel as we go.”
“Paradise wouldn’t be in it,” said Guy, with a long breath. “But no; first I must go to Waynflete.”
“I don’t approve of that move.”
“I’m much better, and I mean to go.”
“That’s always conclusive.”
“Well, I know best. But by-and-by—Poor Godfrey frames very well to the business. Perhaps he would be better without me. I say, is Constancy Vyner really going to marry a learned professor?”
“Not that I know of. She is going abroad with my sisters, as soon as the term is over. She is not coming to Waynflete, and that, perhaps, is best.”
“Well, I don’t know. I think the heavens will have to fall some time.”
“Florella Vyner has a sweet little drawing, which she means for the Academy. ‘Above the Stars’—a ditch full of wide-open celandines.”
“Does she come to Waynflete?”
“I believe so—to study primroses,” said Cuthbert, sedately.
Guy pulled Rawdie’s ears, and said nothing; but Cuthbert ceased to oppose his intention of accepting Mr Clifton’s invitation, and looking after the improvements for himself.