“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.”