The Grey Monk

by T. W. Speight

Without more ado he took his penknife, slit open the envelope, and extracted the enclosure. “Ah, as I thought. Dated from Rose Mount, that little white cottage on the Shackleford Road where I am told the spinsters have gone to reside since their come-down in the world; and signed ‘Ethel Thursby.’ I rather expected the young lady would have written long before now. Reproaching him for his silence and all that sort of thing, I don’t doubt. Well, well, poor girl, one can’t wonder at it. I wish, for all our sakes, that matters had turned out differently. But Providence orders things after its own fashion, and we can but submit.”

With that he lay back in his chair and settled his spectacles on his nose. His face was a study as he read.

“If—remembering what passed between you and me only a few hours before you left St. Oswyth’s—I were to begin by stating that during the weeks which followed your departure I did not look and expect to hear from you, nor fail to wonder at your unaccountable silence, I should be asserting that which was not the fact.

“I did look and expect to hear from you, and was wholly at a loss to understand why I failed to do so. Now, I am no longer at a loss. The motive by which you have all along been actuated has at length been made clear to me. The scales have been plucked from before my eyes.

“From what I now know of you, it is impossible for me any longer to doubt that when you asked me to become your wife, it was not because you cared for me for myself, but because you looked forward to my one day becoming the heiress of my dear aunts. When, however, on the evening of my birthday, you gathered from a certain letter which you were allowed to read that my aunts had lost the greater part of their fortune, you at once made up your mind to snap the chain by which you had bound yourself to me such a little while before. The readiest way of effecting this, as it seemed to you, was to abruptly quit St. Oswyth’s a few hours later without informing me of the place for which you were bound, and to maintain an unbroken silence from that time forward.

“I congratulate you on the success which has crowned your efforts.

“But there remains another point connected with the affair about which it is due to myself that I should say something, although it is one the particulars of which you doubtless hoped could by no possibility reach me.

“When you first induced me to promise to become your wife you begged of me to keep our engagement a secret from everyone till you should give me leave to speak of it. It was a request to which I weakly acceded, although I was made very unhappy thereby. Not that I had the faintest notion of the base advantage which you proposed to take of my silence. But I am ignorant no longer. You were afraid that if the fact of our engagement were made public it might reach the ears of one to whom you were already bound by a solemn promise of marriage. It was not that you cared in the least about your promise; your fear was lest certain compromising letters written by you from time to time might be brought up in judgment against you, and not till an opportunity should offer itself for you to regain possession of them were you willing that your engagement to me should become known.

“The wished-for opportunity came at last, and you, who doubtless would be highly indignant if anyone were to speak of you as other than a gentleman and a man of honour—you condescended to break open and rifle the workbox of her into whose ear, only a few hours before, you had been whispering false vows of love and constancy! But you had your reward; you got back your letters; you had no longer anything to fear, or so you flattered yourself. You hurried back to me and told me smilingly that the need for keeping our engagement a secret no longer existed. I have taken the trouble of writing to you at so much length in order to prove to you that the full measure of your baseness is known to me. How utterly mean and despicable you have become in my eyes, in what utter loathing and contempt I hold you, I leave you to imagine for yourself—and you could scarcely imagine anything that exceeds the reality.

“ETHEL THURSBY.”