The Master of Greylands: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

Anthony Castlemaine departed on his mission to England, leaving his wife and little child in their home at Gap. The first letter Charlotte received from her husband told her of his arrival at Greylands, and that he had put up at the Dolphin Inn. It intimated that he might not find his course a very smooth one, and that his uncle James was in possession of Greylands' Rest. Some days further on she received a second letter from him; and following closely upon it, by the next post in fact, a third. Both these letters bore the same date. The first of them stated that he was not advancing at all; that all kinds of impediments were being placed in his way by his uncles; they appeared resolved to keep him out of the estate, refusing even to show him how it was left and it ended with an expressed conviction that his Uncle James was usurping it. The last letter told her that since posting the other letter earlier in the day, he had seen his Uncle James; that the interview, which had taken place in a meadow, was an unpleasant one, his uncle even having tried to strike him that he (Anthony) really did not know what to be at, but had resolved to try for one more conference with his uncle before proceeding to take legal measures, and that he should certainly write to her again in the course of a day or two to tell her whether matters progressed or whether they did not. In this last letter there ran a vein of sadness, very perceptible to the wife. She thought her husband must have been in very bad spirits when he wrote it: and she anxiously looked for the further news promised.

It never came. No subsequent letter ever reached her. After waiting some days, she wrote to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, but she got no answer. She wrote again, and with the like result. Then, feeling strangely uneasy, not knowing how to get tidings of him, or to whom to apply, she began to think that she would have to put in practice the suggestion he had but spoken in jest, and go over to England to look after him. A short period of vacillation--for it looked like a frightfully formidable step to the untravelled young lady--and she resolved upon it. Arranging the affairs of her petit menage, as she expressed it, she started off with her child; and in due time reached London. There she stayed one night, after sending off a note to Greylands, directed to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, to tell of her intended arrival on the following day; and in the morning she took her seat in the Stilborough coach. These three letters, the two from Gap and the one from London, were those that led to the dispute between Mr. and Mrs. Bent, which Ethel Reene had disturbed. The landlord had them safely locked up in his private archives.

Forewarned, forearmed, is an old saying. Anthony Castlemaine's wife had been warned, and she strove to be armed. She would not present herself openly and in her own name at Greylands. If the Castlemaine family were dealing hardly with her husband, it would be more prudent for her to go to work warily and appear there at first as a stranger. The worst she had feared was, that Mr. James Castlemaine might be holding her husband somewhere at bay; perhaps even had put him in a prison--she did not understand the English laws--and she must seek him out and release him. So she called herself Guise as soon as she landed in England. Her name had been Guise before her marriage, and she assumed it now. Not much of an assumption: in accordance with the French customs of her native place, she retained her maiden name as an affix to her husband's, and her cards were printed Madame Castlemaine-Guise. Had her assertion of the name wanted confirmation, there it was on the small trunk; which had GUISE studded on it in brass nails, for it had belonged to her father. Her intention had been to proceed to Stilborough, put up there, and come over to Greylands the following day. But when she found the coach passed through Greylands--which she had not known, and she first recognised the place by the sign of the famous dolphin, about which Anthony had written to her in his first letter--she resolved to alight there, the little girl's symptoms of feverish illness affording a pretext for it. And so, here she was, at the often-heard-of Dolphin Inn, inhabiting the very chamber that her ill-fated husband had occupied, and with the dread story she had listened to beating its terrors in her brain.

A gust of wind shook the white dimity curtain, drawn before the casement, and she turned to it with a shiver. What did this angry storm of wind mean? Why should it have arisen suddenly without apparent warning? Charlotte Guise was rather superstitious, and asked herself the question. When she got out of the coach at the inn door, the air and sea were calm. Could the angry disturbance have come to show her that the very elements were rising at the wrong dealt out to her husband? Some such an idea took hold of her.

"Every second minute I ask whether it can be true," she murmured in her native language; "or whether I have but dropped asleep in my own house, and am dreaming it all. It is not like reality. It is not like any story I ever heard before. Anthony comes over here, all those hundreds of weary miles, over that miserable sea, and finds himself amid his family; his family whom he had never seen. 'Greylands' Rest is mine, I think,' he says to them; 'will you give it to me?' And they deny that it is his. 'Then,' says he, 'what you say may be so; but you should just show me the deeds--the proofs that it is not mine.' And they decline to show them; and his uncle, James Castlemaine, at an interview in the field, seeks to strike him. Anthony comes home to the hotel here, and writes that last letter to me, and puts it in the post late at night. Then he and the landlord go walking out together in the moonlight, and by-and-by they see Mr. James Castlemaine go into a lonely place of cloisters called the Friar's Keep, and he, nay poor husband, runs in after him; and he never comes out of it again. The host, waiting for him outside, hears a shot and an awful cry, but he does not connect it with the cloisters; and so he promenades about till he's weary, thinking the uncle and nephew are talking together, and--and Anthony never at all comes out again! Yes, it is very plain: it is too plain to me: that shot took my dear husband's life. James Castlemaine, fearing he would make good his claim to the estate and turn him out of it, has murdered him."

The wind shrieked, as if it were singing a solemn requiem; the small panes of the casement seemed to crack, and the white curtain fluttered. Charlotte Guise hid her shrinking face for a moment, and then turned it on the shaking curtain, her white lips parting with some scarcely breathed words.

"If the spirits of the dead are permitted to hover in the air, as some people believe perhaps his spirit is here now, at this very window! Seeking to hold commune with mine; calling upon me to avenge him. Oh, Anthony, yes! I will never rest until I have found out the mystery of your fate. I will devote my days to doing it!"

As if to encourage the singular fancy, that the whispered story and the surroundings of the hour had called up in her over-strung nerves and brain, a gust wilder than any that had gone before swept past the house at the moment with a rushing moan. The casement shook; its fastenings seemed to strain: and the poor young lady, in some irrepressible freak of courage, born of desperation, drew aside the curtain and looked forth.

No, no; nothing was there but the wind. The white snow lay on the ground, and covered the cliff that skirted the beach on the right. The night was light, disclosing the foam of the waves as they rose and fell; clouds were sweeping madly across the face of the sky.

The little girl stirred in bed and threw out her arms. Her mother let fall the window curtain and softly approached her. The hot face wore its fever-crimson; the large brown eyes, so like her father's, opened the red lips parted with a cry.