At first her peculiarities defied definition. People said she was very nice, but a little queer, cracked, crazy. She was very impulsive, and sometimes incoherent. No action of hers seemed the result of forethought or preparation. She ordered the servants to bring this, that, or the other thing, and when they came with it she told them they might take it away again, as she had changed her mind. She ordered the brougham for four, went out walking at a quarter to four, and stayed out till six, without countermanding the brougham.
About the time that Mr. Grey bought the Manor House, Mrs. Grey had a difference with her cook, and her cook left her in a violent temper. The cook had been with her ever since Mrs. Grey had first come to Daneford, and was the confidential servant of her mistress. Soon after the cook had left it reached the ears of a few acquaintances of Mr. Grey that a dreadful spectre had appeared in his household. The fact that Mrs. Grey had now been married some years and was still childless had preyed very deeply on her excitable temperament, and, dreadful to say, she not unfrequently took more wine than was good for her.
Those who heard this now saw a reason, unguessed by others, why the banker bought that odious house swathed round with that fearful wood. There his wife would be secluded, free from prying eyes and guarded against any close daily contact with neighbours. How had it been kept secret so long? The cook, now discharged, had obtained for the unhappy woman what she wanted, and the poor lady was wonderfully discreet and cautious, and until that servant went no one but the cook and the afflicted husband ever dreamed of such a thing. It was dreadful.
But the most intimate friend of Grey never knew from him, by even the faintest hint, there was a single cloud over his domestic happiness.
He always spoke of his wife in terms of the most tender consideration and kindliness. He was by no means weak or uxorious; but there was a loyal trust, an ever-active sympathy in him towards her, that won greatly on the young and old men and women of Daneford.
The evil circumstance under which Mrs. Grey laboured was never an open scandal in the town. In the first place, owing to her own great prudence and circumspection, no one had any suspicion of the melancholy fact from herself. If she was the victim of a debasing weakness, she never betrayed herself publicly, and those who heard of it through indirect ways had kept the secret closely, out of respect to the man whose fame and name and popularity stood so high among his fellow-citizens. Indeed, some who heard the rumour disbelieved it wholly, and declared their conviction that it was the malicious invention of a discharged servant, based on the eccentric habits and unfamiliar ways of the poor lady.
But the fact remained that, even to the spacious Manor House, no lady guests were invited to dinner; no lady guests stayed for twenty-four hours; and, beyond a few afternoon callers, no ladies visited the house at all. But perhaps in Daneford there were not a dozen families in possession of the fact that would account for the strict retirement in which the mistress of the Manor lived, and the young and the chivalric continued to look on Grey and his wife as not only the most prosperous, but also the most happy, couple in the whole county.
Very soon after Henry Grey's marriage with Miss Muir, he found out that she did not possess the solid good sense and grave discernment essential in the confidant of a banker.
She not only lacked the golden faculty of silence, but dealt with facts communicated to her in a most imaginative and injudicious manner. He told her that a substantial and solvent merchant of the town had overdrawn his account five hundred pounds. Shortly after, the merchant's wife called on Mrs. Grey, and the latter, in a moment of communicativeness, said to the former that business was in a bad way, and that she understood the former's husband owed the Bank, over and above ordinary business, no less a sum than five thousand pounds. The merchant's wife related this to her husband, and he came in great indignation to Grey. Mr. Grey said his wife's talk had been only woman's gossip, and that he had most certainly never told his wife or any one else the merchant owed the Bank five thousand pounds over-draught.
The merchant said he was quite sure Mr. Grey had not, but urged that something of the over-draught must have been communicated to Mrs. Grey, and that a woman's gossip was quite capable of ruining a solvent man.