The Master of Greylands: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

The flush had been caused by Charlotte Guise's self-consciousness. True, she would take holiday on the morrow from her duties; that went as a matter of course; but she was purposing to use the day, or part of it, in endeavouring to make some discovery. These twelve days had she been in the house now, and she was no farther advanced than when she entered it. She had seen Mr. Castlemaine daily; she had conversed with him, dined and taken other meals in his company; but for all the enlightenment she had obtained, or the new ideas she had gathered of the doings of that ill-fated February night, he and she might as well have been far apart as are the two poles. It was not by going on in this tame way that she could hope to obtain any clue to the past: the past to which she had made a vow to devote herself.

The morning rose brightly, and the family went off after breakfast in the carriage, Harry sitting on the box with the coachman. Madame Guise was left alone.

A feverish desire had been upon her to enter Mr. Castlemaine's room upstairs; the study where he kept the accounts pertaining to the estate, and wrote his letters. In this room he passed many hours daily, sitting in it sometimes late into the night. Charlotte Guise held an impression that if she could find tokens or records of her lost husband, it would be there. But she had never yet obtained so much as a glimpse of its interior: the room was considered sacred to Mr. Castlemaine, and the family did not approach it.

Two or three of the women servants had obtained permission to absent themselves that day to visit their friends; and the house was comparatively deserted. Madame Guise, looking forth from her chamber, found all silent and still: the upstairs work was over; the servants, those who remained at home, were shut up in the remote kitchens. Now was her time; now, if ever.

The corridor was spacious. It ran along two sides of the house, and most of the bed chambers opened from it. Mr. Castlemaine's study was the middle room in the side corridor; Madame's bedroom was nearly opposite the room; the one beyond hers being Harry Castlemaine's.

Standing outside her door, in the still silence, with a flushed face and panting breath, not liking the work she was about to do, but believing it a necessity thrown upon her, she at length softly crossed the corridor and opened the outer door leading to the study. A short, dark, narrow passage not much more than a yard in length, and there was another door. This was locked, but the key was in it; she turned the key, and entered the room. Entered it with some undefined feeling of disappointment, for it was bare and empty.

We are all apt to form ideas of places and things as yet unseen. The picture of Mr. Castlemaine's study, in the mind of Charlotte Guise, had been of a spacious apartment filled with furniture, and littered with papers. What she saw was a small square room, and no earthly thing in it, papers or else, but two tables, some chairs, and a bureau against the wall: or what would have been called in her own land a large secretaire, or office desk. She gazed around her with a blank face.

The tables and chairs were bare: no opportunity there for anything concealed. The bureau was locked. She tried it; palled it, pushed it: but the closed-down lid was firm as adamant.

"If there exists any record of him, it is in here," she said, half aloud. "I must contrive means of opening it."

She could not do that to-day. It would have to be done with a false key, she supposed; and, that, she had not in her possession. Before quitting the room, she approached the window, and looked forth cautiously. At the sea rolling in the distance; at the Friars' Keep opposite; at the fair green lands lying between that and Greylands' Rest. Charlotte Guise shuddered at a thought that crossed her.