The Grey Monk

by T. W. Speight

Whether Sir Gilbert had all along been aware of the way in which his son was being spoiled, but had his own reasons for ignoring the fact, or whether some meddler had made it his business to enlighten him, the result was the same as far as the boy was concerned. In place of good, easy-going Mr. Amor, he was now put under the charge of a tutor whose reputation as a martinet had been his chief qualification in the eyes of the baronet. Mr. Duggan’s instructions were to prepare the lad for a public school and in the meantime, as Sir Gilbert expressed it, to “break him in.”

And now for Alec began an experience which was all the harder to bear by reason of what had gone before.

The new tutor was like a baleful shadow which dogged him wherever he went. From the time he rose till the time he went to bed he could never get rid of him for more than a few minutes at a time. It was a tyranny which at length became almost unbearable and went far towards breaking the lad’s all but indomitable spirit.

One day, when he had been only a few weeks at the Chase, Mr. Duggan, with the view, perhaps, of keeping up his reputation as a martinet, chose, by way of punishment for some trifling fault, to administer a sound caning to his pupil. The lad took his punishment without a murmur, but half an hour later, he was missing; nor, when search came to be made, was he anywhere to be found.

Alec, however, was no great distance away.

Being nearly as active as a squirrel, he had climbed the bole of one of the big old trees in the park, and there, for two days and nights—the month being June—he lay perdu in his leafy shelter, being supplied with food meanwhile by Martin Rigg, who was the only person in the secret of his hiding-place. It was only his father’s threat, conveyed to him by that faithful servitor, to send for Captain Darville’s bloodhounds and so track him down, that induced him to give himself up.

For this freak he was sentenced to a week of bread-and-water in a darkened room. Even so, he was not left wholly forlorn, food and candles and books being surreptitiously conveyed to him from the servants’ hall. But Mr. Duggan never laid hands on him again.

In due course this period of his life came to an end, and it was with something of the feeling of a captive released after a long imprisonment that he one day found himself on his way to Harrow, from which place, in the natural sequence of things, he proceeded to Cambridge.

All his life Alec had stood in awe of his father. It was a feeling which, to some extent, had been fostered by his mother. To both of them it had been as a load lifted off their lives when the baronet left home on one of his excursions, and both had looked forward with dread to his return. There had been no cordiality, no sympathy, no rapprochement in any proper sense of the word, between father and son.

That, however, had been owing to no fault on the boy’s part, for Alec’s was one of those bright, open dispositions which respond readily to whatever kindly influences may be brought to bear on them. But Sir Gilbert had no liking for children, or young people, and it was not in his nature to make any exception even in the case of his own son. He had kept himself aloof from him from the first, and with the lapse of years the silent, passive breach between the two, if such it could be termed, grew gradually wider and more impossible of being bridged over. Many an hour’s heartache had the boy, more especially after his mother’s death, but there was too large a tincture of family pride in his composition to allow of even an inkling of what he felt to be visible on the surface. More than once in after-life he said bitterly to himself: “If when I was young, my father had treated me as other fathers treat their sons, I should have been a different man from what I am now.”