“Nor you neither, Mr Frank, I hope. Why, I should be ashamed to see my cheerful, handsome young master, (you must forgive me, sir, for being so bold), turned into a sour-looking, turnip-faced, lantern-jawed, whining teetotaller.”
“Why, I thought you said just now,” said the other, “that they all take drink on the sly; if that’s the case, it can’t be total abstinence that spoils their beauty.”
Juniper looked a little at fault, but immediately replied,—
“Well, sir, at any rate total abstinence will never do for you. Why, you’ll have no peace up at the hall, especially in the shooting season, if you mean to take up with them exotic notions. Be a man, sir, and asseverate your independence. Show that you can take too much or too little as you have a mind. I wouldn’t be a slave, sir. ‘Britons never shall be slaves.’”
Here the conversation closed. The tempter had so far gained his end that he had made Frank disinclined to join himself at present to the body of stanch abstainers. He would wait and see—he preferred moderation, it was more manly, more self-reliant. Ah, there was his grievous mistake. Self-reliant! yes, but that self was blinded, cheated by Satan; it was already on the tempter’s side. So Frank put off, at any rate for the present, joining the abstainers. He was, however, very watchful over himself never openly to transgress. He loved Mary, and could not bear the thoughts of losing her, but in very deed he loved his own self-indulgence more. There was a constraint, however, when they met. He could not fully meet her deep truthful eyes with a steady gaze of his own. Her words would often lead him to prayer, but then he regarded iniquity in his heart—he did not wish to be taken at his prayer—he did not wish to be led into pledged abstinence, or even into undeviating moderation at all times—he wished to keep in reserve a right to fuller indulgence. Poor Mary! she was not happy; she felt there was something wrong. If she tried to draw out that something from Frank, his only reply was an assurance of ardent affection and devotion. There was no apparent evil on the surface of his life. He was regular at church, steady at home, moderate in what he drank at his father’s table and at other houses. She felt, indeed, that he had no real sympathy with her on the highest subjects, but he never refused to listen, only he turned away with evident relief from religious to other topics. Yet all this while he was getting more deeply entangled in the meshes of the net which the drink, in the skilful hands of Juniper Graves, was weaving round him. That cruel tempter was biding his time. He saw with malicious delight that the period must arrive before very long when his young master’s drinking excesses would no longer be confined to the darkness and the night, but would break out in open daylight, and then, then for his revenge.
It was now between two and three years since the harvest-home which had ended so unhappily. Frank was twenty-one and Mary Oliphant eighteen. This was in the year in which we first introduced them to our readers, the same year in which it was intended that Hubert Oliphant should join his uncle Abraham, at any rate for a time, in South Australia. For the last six months dim rumours, getting gradually more clear and decided, had found their way to the rectory that Frank Oldfield was occasionally drinking to excess. Mary grew heart-sick, and began to lose her health through anxiety and sorrow; yet there was nothing, so far, sufficiently definite to make her sure that Frank, since his promise to observe strict moderation, had ever over-passed the bounds of sobriety. He never, of course, alluded to the subject himself; and when he could not help remarking on her altered looks, he would evade any questions she put to him on the painful subject, or meet them by an appeal to her whether she could prove anything against him; and by the observation that nothing was easier than to spread rumours against a person’s character. She was thus often silenced, but never satisfied.
June had come—a bright sky remained for days with scarce a cloud; the hay-makers were everywhere busy, and the fields were fragrant with the sweet perfume of the mown grass. It was on a quiet evening that Mary was returning home from a cottage where she had been to visit a sick parishioner of her father’s. Her way lay in part through a little plantation skirting a hay-field belonging to the Greymoor estate. She had just reached the edge of the plantation, and was about to climb over a stile into a lane, when she heard loud and discordant voices, which made her blood run cold; for one of them, she could not doubt, was Frank’s.
“This way, Mr Frank, this way,” cried another voice, which she knew at once to be that of Juniper Graves.
“I tell you,” replied the first voice, thickly, “I shan’t go that way; I shall go home, I shall. Let me alone, I tell you,”—then there followed a loud imprecation.
“No, no—this way, sir—there’s Miss Mary getting over the stile; she’s waiting for you, sir, to help her over.”