Waynflete

Godfrey, hanging listlessly about, saw her tall, upright figure, walking steadily over the bridge, and then, whether she caught her foot in a stone, or lost her balance, suddenly she tripped and fell.

With a shout of dismay he rushed towards her.

“Auntie! Auntie Waynflete! Are you hurt?”

“No, my dear, no; gently, don’t be in such a hurry,” she said imperatively, having already got up on her hands and knees.

Godfrey put his strong young arms round her, and lifted her on to her feet, holding her carefully, and entreating her to tell him if she was hurt; while she told him sharply not to make a fuss about nothing, even though, to her own great vexation, she was so tremulous as to be obliged to lean on his arm, and let him lead her back to the house.

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t want to lie down, and I don’t want a glass of brandy and water, and I don’t want the doctor. I want to sit down in my chair, and see if my bones are in their right places.”

Jeanie now appeared, fussing about, and very anxious to do the right thing, but the old lady would not even have her bonnet taken off, and hunted the two young people out of sight, asking them if they thought she had had a stroke, just as they were whispering to each other that, at any rate, it was nothing of that sort. They peeped at her from behind the creepers through the open window, and discussed whether they ought to send for the doctor. But, as Godfrey said, he didn’t know if there was a doctor to send for, such a person having rarely been seen within the walls of the Mill House; and, besides, to act for Aunt Waynflete was a new departure which neither dared undertake.

In the mean time, old Margaret, to her own great annoyance, found herself shedding tears. She was more shaken than she had guessed. She dried them rapidly, and then walked cautiously round the room, to see whether she was really herself and unhurt.

“The Lord be praised, there’s no harm done!” she said. “But I’ve had a warning; and, please God, I’ll take it, and prepare for my latter end. I’m an old woman, and should mind my steps, and not be mooning over the future or the past, when I should be picking my way. If my nephew Guy, like others before him, is but poor stuff, Godfrey’s a different sort. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

She appeared to be none the worse for her accident in the anxious if inexperienced eyes of Godfrey and Jeanie, who scarcely dared to ask her how she felt.

The new will was brought to her, and was duly signed and witnessed. She locked it away with the former one, and with other business papers, in a table-drawer in her bedroom. She was prepared now for any emergency; but, in her heart, she was far from satisfied, and, in the solitude of the thoughts of age, she weighed the two young men against each other with a sincere desire to judge them aright. All the settled convictions, and all the saddest experiences of her life, told against Guy. All her affection, all her inclination, swayed towards Godfrey. And yet, angry as she was with her elder nephew, the tones of his voice, the set of his mouth when he had spoken his mind to her, recurred to her keen judgment, and she doubted still.

On the day after the signing of the new will, she received the following answer to her note to Guy.

“Mill House, Ingleby, —

“September 16.

“Dear Aunt Margaret, —

“I shall not, of course, invite my friend to stay in your house again, now that I am aware of your sentiments on the subject; but I will avail myself of your permission to leave matters as they stand for the present, as I should be unwilling to involve myself in so ludicrous an explanation. Family feuds appear to me entirely out of date. I fear I shall not be able to come over to Waynflete at present, as I cannot leave Staunton, and you probably will not care to see him there.

“Your affectionate nephew, —

“Guy Waynflete.”

This judicious and conciliatory epistle was put away by Mrs Waynflete, with the two wills in her table-drawer.

It appeared to her that Guy, with a frivolity not new in her experience, scorned the sentiments and the convictions which had ruled her life.

Part 2, Chapter III

Ministers of Grace

Cuthbert Staunton took Guy up to London to the house in Kensington to be inspected by a well-known doctor, who was also a personal friend of his own.

Guy despatched his petulant little note to his aunt before he started, and, perhaps, it was edged by his own discomfort, for he could hardly endure to be the subject of discussion and inquiry, and, the immediate effect of the night at Waynflete having passed off, held himself with difficulty to his resolution.

“You may trust me to tell him nothing against your wish,” said Staunton, beforehand.

“I don’t think you could tell him much,” said Guy, oddly. “But,” he added, “I wish to tell him that I am afraid of the brandy.”

The man of science, when told that he suffered from palpitations and exhaustion after any “nervous strain,” the expression substituted by Cuthbert for Guy’s straightforward “when I am frightened,” and also of this means of remedy, made due examination of him, and asked various questions, eliciting that he was easily tired, and that his heart did throb sometimes after over-fatigue or over-hurry, “but not to signify at all, that didn’t matter.”

And could he foretell when periods of nervous excitement were likely to occur, so as to avoid them?

“No,” said Guy; and then he added, while his lips grew a little white, “I want to be told how to deal with the effects of it so that the remedy mayn’t be worse than the thing itself. No one can help me as to the cause.”

“Ah!” said the doctor, thoughtfully. Then he gave various directions as to avoiding fatigue, worry, or excitement. A winter abroad would be good, change of scene and occupation. There was no serious mischief at work at present; but there was need of great care and consideration. And with a gravity showing that he understood one part of the matter, severe restrictions were laid on the use of brandy and everything analogous to it, and other prescriptions substituted. “Mr Waynflete mustn’t be alarmed about himself; care for a year or two would make all the difference. He would grow stronger, and the nervous strain would lessen in proportion.”

Guy looked back at him, but said nothing; and as he took leave, Cuthbert remained for a minute or two.

“That young fellow is a good deal out of health,” said the doctor. “Hasn’t he a mother or any one to look after him?”

“Not a soul capable, except me,” said Staunton. “I’m going to do it as well as I can, and he will let me.”

“Well, remember this: whether he can avoid nervous shocks or no, he must not have them. And he can’t be too much afraid of the brandy. Get him out of whatever oppresses him. It’s the only plan. The heart is weak, and the brain – excitable.”

“Should you like a spell abroad?” said Staunton, as they sat at luncheon at his club.

“I could not go,” said Guy. “That would mean giving up having any concern with the business. And I haven’t enough money.”

“But if Mrs Waynflete knew that it was a matter of health – You must really let your friends know that you have to be careful.”

It was a new idea to Guy that the effects of his attacks were of importance in themselves, and naturally an unwelcome one. He looked rather obstinate, and went on eating his salad. After a minute or two, he said —

“I will do what I come to think is right. No one else can quite know.”

“No; but don’t you see, my dear boy, that whatever strengthens your constitution altogether will help you to – to – contend with your trouble – and make it less likely to attack you?”

“Yes,” said Guy, slowly. “What other people say does help one to think.”

“Well, there’s no hurry to decide,” said Cuthbert. “You still think you would like to go down to-night? Certainly, there isn’t much on at present here. What shall we do this afternoon?”

A friend of Staunton’s here turned up and pressed on their acceptance some tickets for a morning performance of Hamlet, in which he was interested.

“Should you like to go, Guy?” said Cuthbert; “there would be plenty of time to dine afterwards, and get our train.”

Guy thought that he would like it, and it was not till they were sitting in the stalls that it struck his friend that Hamlet was not calculated to divert his mind from the subject that engrossed it. Still, it must be familiar to him.

But Cuthbert failed to realise that, though Guy believed himself to have “read Shakespeare,” it is possible for a country-bred youth, brought up in an unliterary and non-play-going family, to bring an extremely fresh interest to bear on our great dramatist, and though Guy was not quite in the condition of the lady who, in the middle of the murder scene in Macbeth, observed tearfully to her friend, “Oh dear, I am afraid this cannot end well!” he was but dimly prepared for what he was going to see. He gave an odd little laugh as the ghost crossed the stage, but watched intently and quietly.

“What do you think of it?” said Cuthbert, in a pause. “He’s not so bad, is he?”

“He says some very remarkable things,” said Guy, seriously. “Things that seem true; but I never thought of them. Don’t you suppose the ghost was there, watching for him to act, often though he couldn’t see him?”

“Well, really,” said Cuthbert; “I do think you have made a new remark on Hamlet. I never heard that suggestion. We can go, you know, if you’re bored, any time.”

“No,” said Guy; “I like it.”

Guy had the faculty of calling up distinct mental pictures. It was the method by which he thought, and the moving scene stamped itself, as plays sometimes will, both on his eyes and on his memory. When they came out into the daylight he felt bewildered as if the world outside was the unreal one.

“The ghost didn’t do much good,” he said; while Cuthbert, wishing he had had more forethought, talked lightly and critically about the acting, concerning which Guy was not critical at all.

When they set off on their night journey, Guy grew quiet, and presently fell asleep. He looked tired, and the heavy eyelashes and the wistfulness, which, in sleep, his mouth seemed to share, made him seem younger than usual, and more in need of help. Suddenly he moved and started, while a look of shrinking terror came into his face. Cuthbert roused him, and he opened his eyes and caught his breath.

“Dreaming of the play?” said Cuthbert, lightly.

“No,” said Guy. He leant back in his corner, and seemed slowly to master himself, for presently he gave a little smile, and said, “I’m all right, thank you.”

Cuthbert thought that he could see exactly what the sort of thing was now, and how it came about. Presently Guy began to talk about Hamlet, asking many well-worn questions, and a few more unexpected ones. Cuthbert, who had been working up all the criticisms for a set of lectures, felt as he answered him rather like an orthodox, but personally inexperienced professor of religion in the presence of an earnest young inquirer.

After a little while, Guy said reflectively, “It is odd that he found it so hard to obey the ghost, rather than to resist him. I don’t much think Shakespeare ever felt one himself.”

This tone of calm consideration of the psychological truth of Hamlet nearly made Cuthbert laugh, even while he was thinking of how to manage the young visionary beside him. It was years since his easy life had been invaded by so much anxiety for any one, years since he had had so lively an interest.

Guy fished out the right volume of “Shakespeare” from among the books that played propriety in a glass bookcase in the dining-room at Ingleby, when he had finished his supper at two o’clock in the morning, and took it upstairs with him.

On the next afternoon, perhaps happily to change the current of his thoughts, they were engaged to Mrs Raby’s garden party at Kirkton Hall, a big house between Ingleby and Kirk Hinton, and the source of much of the gaiety of the neighbourhood. On arriving, after the long drive, they beheld Godfrey’s flaxen head towering above the other tennis players as he prepared to play a match with Miss Raby, who was the champion lady-player of the district, against her brother and Constancy Vyner, who turned to Guy with a cordial and friendly greeting. She looked fresh and bright, and quite at her ease in Godfrey’s presence. Indeed, she had told her sister that she came on purpose to show that she could “manage the situation.” She had written Godfrey, instead of Geoffrey of Monmouth, three times in her Modern History notes that morning, and she spent much time in telling herself that she could never return his feelings.

And now, with boy and girl defiance, and yet with instincts old as the earth on which they stood, the one thing for which each of the pair longed was to conquer the other.

The play in that notable set was discussed by tennis-lovers for all the rest of the season, and the players never heeded the darkening of the sky, and the increasing weight of the air. Cosy’s hand was as steady and her aim as direct as if no inner consciousness existed, she put into her skilled play every atom of force that she possessed. As for Godfrey, he was as mad as a Berserker, and he looked like one.

The game, owing to the equality of the players, was very long, and it by-and-by became evident to Florella that Miss Raby was getting tired, and was no longer playing at her best.

They were playing the last game of the set. “Thirty all” was called as, without a moment’s warning, down fell a torrent of thunder, rain, and hail, enough to stop the most ardent players. Yet half a dozen more strokes – Miss Raby stepped back, exclaimed, “Oh, what a pity; we must declare the match drawn,” and fled to the house, while Mr Raby snatched up and held over her a lovely and useless white lace parasol.

Constancy and Godfrey stood opposite each other for a moment in the drenching rain, both at once exclaiming, “Too bad!”

Then she laughed and scudded off with lifted skirt, while Godfrey felt a sense of baffled anger which even defeat would not have brought to him.

Then he had to walk rationally back to the house, and change his things, for the notes of a waltz suddenly sprang up. A big hall with a polished floor was cleared for dancing, fruit and ice were being handed round, and nobody cared very much for the thunderstorm.

Guy, looked out for the harebell blue gown, which he always associated with Florella. It did not occur to him that she had very few smart frocks at Moorhead. He asked her to dance, and it was not till they had spun two or three times round the dark polished floor that his heart began to throb and flutter, and that it struck him that this was probably the sort of “exertion” forbidden to him. He felt miserable, and wished, not for the first time, that he had never spoken of his troubles. It was more endurable, locked up as it were in the cupboard in the wall, than now when it mixed itself up with his ordinary life. But the slight discomfort could not signify, the chief thing was to conceal it. He would go on dancing, and presently get some champagne. Florella, however, stopped of her own accord in the deep recess of a window.

“I’m not a very good dancer,” she said, in her composed way. “You know I haven’t been out very much yet.”

“Don’t you care for it?” said Guy, rather breathlessly.

“I like it a little,” she said; “and it is lovely to watch, especially on a dark floor – crumb-cloths have no beauty.”

The light was streaming in under the storm-clouds through the narrow windows in dull yellowish rays, the flying figures passed in and out of the shadow, against a background of polished oak.

“I suppose,” said Guy, “that you like painting better than dancing?”

“Oh, well,” said Florella, in a tone that showed her to be Cosy’s sister; “to say that is either a truism or a very priggish remark. You might as well ask if one liked strawberry ice best or poetry. But I like looking on best of all – feeling pictures.”

“Do tell me what you mean?” said Guy, eagerly.

Florella was always impelled to talk, or, perhaps more truly, to think by Guy. She was drifting again into talk that belonged only to him, and that she would not have held with any one else.

“I don’t quite know what else to say,” she answered. “It is not exactly seeing things or noticing them. It is feeling the picture in them. This dance has a picture in it. Often I don’t feel so about things that are very beautiful.”

“Did you ever see Hamlet?” said Guy, apparently with an abrupt change of subject.

“Oh yes, more than once. Have you seen the new Hamlet?”

“I saw it yesterday. I wish you’d tell me the meaning – what you see inside that.”

“Oh,” said Florella, laughing. “That’s what many people have tried to see.”

“I have read it all through to-day,” said Guy, naïvely. “What puzzles me is how, as the ghost was real, Hamlet had any doubt about him.”

“Why, you see he thought that it might be an evil spirit taking his father’s shape.”

“But if he had really felt it, he must have known whether it was good or evil. Seeing a ghost isn’t like seeing a person outside you. Didn’t you know that the other day when you spoke of the only thing that could have helped – Guy Waynflete?”

She flushed a deep crimson. There was something overwhelming to her in the conversation, and she could hardly speak. “That came into my mind,” she said. “I never thought of it before.”

“But you believe it?”

“Yes.”

The rain was ceasing, and the dusty, misty light grew clearer and more radiant. The waltz finished in a glow of sunshine. Somehow the ghost and his own condition went right out of Guy’s head. He took Florella to eat peaches, and began to talk to her in a more ordinary way, while the strain of their previous intercourse lifted itself from her spirit. They felt quite intimate and at home with each other, so much so that Guy explained why he did not ask her to waltz again, quite simply and without effort, admitting that he had been told to be careful. It seemed quite natural to tell her what he had been unwilling to own to himself.

He had hardly ever felt so happy, and when he was at ease, there was something sweet and bright in his face and manner which had a great charm.

Constancy, who paid him a gratifying amount of attention, told herself many times that he was much more agreeable than his brother. Certainly Godfrey looked neither sweet nor bright. He danced with Jeanie because there was no occasion to make conversation for her, and glowered at Constancy, and when Guy, certainly in rather an off-hand way, told him of his visit to London, and of the doctor’s opinion, he only looked savage, and said —

“You don’t seem as if there was much the matter with you to-day;” an answer which Cuthbert thought brutal, but which did not strike Guy as at all singular.

Godfrey had intended to say much to Guy about the advisability of coming to Waynflete, and taking his place as the elder brother, but he was unable to express it amiably, so his honourable scruples took the form of remarking —

“I can’t think why you’re such a fool as to annoy Aunt Waynflete by having Staunton with you. You ought to come over, and of course she doesn’t want to see him.”

“I am not going to make myself absurd,” said Guy, coldly. “What do I care who Staunton’s great-grandfather was? He has been very kind to me.”

“There’s a great deal in bad blood,” said Godfrey, obstinately. “It’s sure to come out. He’ll come across you somehow.”

“There’s not much to choose between our great-grandfathers,” said Guy. “I’d just as soon have his as ours.”

The agreeable little discussion was interrupted, and Guy only laughed as Godfrey was called away.

But it might have been a different person who said suddenly to Staunton, as they drove back to Ingleby in the moonlight —

“Cuthbert, the doctor thought I should get well, if I do take care, didn’t he?”

“Oh yes, certainly. But you mustn’t play tricks with yourself.”

“Well,” said Guy, seriously and cheerfully, “I mean to try; and, somehow, I think there’s a chance for me, altogether.”

Guy slept that night without dream or disturbance; but for Florella there was no sleep for a long time. A whole rush of thoughts filled her mind; of ghosts and demons, black spirits and white, bad and good angels. She did not feel “creepy,” or in any way personally concerned, but she mentally realised, or, as she called it, “saw” all sorts of eerie situations. Guy Waynflete – she did not try in her thoughts to separate the generations – seemed to have been pursued by an evil power. Was there no good angel to help him?

Florella saw – as she saw the thought in her pictures – the radiant image, all light and wings and glory, the instinctive presentment of a heavenly being which was her spiritual and artistic inheritance. Perhaps, in the light of that fair fancy, she fell asleep; but suddenly there was no outward vision any more, but a great awe and a passionate yearning within. A voice seemed to cry from the depths, “Oh, helping is so hard – so hard! There is no angelness left. It takes it all. My wings can’t be smooth and tidy!” Florella woke right up in the morning sunshine. The vision was over, but she did not forget it.

Part 2, Chapter IV

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Shortly after this day at the Rabys, Mrs Joshua Palmer went up to Waynflete ostensibly because she thought that she could be of some use to Aunt Waynflete in getting comfortably settled in there, and in finally arranging her household if, as seemed likely, she remained there for the winter, but really moved by something in her daughter’s letters which excited her anxiety. It would not do at all to have “anything” between Godfrey and Jeanie, at their age. By-and-by, if anything really came of the fancy, things might be different.

Guy and his friend were therefore left alone at Ingleby, and two or three weeks passed without much outward event, but of much inward importance.

Guy, whether wisely or unwisely, plunged into the study of such experiences as his own, and their possible explanations. He had no difficulty in these days in finding material, and he brought to bear on the subject an amount of acute intelligence and reasoning power for which Staunton had hardly given him credit. He puzzled him a good deal by his ridicule of some recorded stories, and his keen interest in others. He mastered the point of the various theories, stating and criticising them with much force, and the discussions were certainly so far good for him that he lost some of his sense of unique and shameful experience. But Cuthbert saw that he tested everything by an incommunicable and inexplicable sense, and he never uttered any definite conviction as regarded himself. He had no “nervous attacks” as Cuthbert called them; but whether the terrible night at Waynflete had done him permanent harm, or whether the strain was more continuous than appeared, he was certainly far from strong, and suffered from any extra exertion, so that the need of care was evident enough.

“I believe I was a fool to set you upon all this reading,” said Cuthbert, one day. “You’ll wear yourself out with it when I have to leave you.”

“It would be very difficult to be alone,” said Guy, thoughtfully.

“It’s out of the question. You’re not fit for the mill or for the hard winter here. You ought to have a sea-voyage, or something of that sort. Or, at any rate, come and stay on the south coast somewhere where I could make my headquarters while I’m lecturing, and see you now and then.”

“There are a great many things I can’t quite tell you,” said Guy, after a pause, “and they don’t only concern myself. It’s all right about the reading, but I’ve got something to do to-day. It’s quite simple, only rather hard. And I know ‘he’ doesn’t want me to do it.”

Guy had said nothing so personal since his first confession, and, as he got up languidly, and prepared to return to the mill for his afternoon work, giving his friend an odd, half-smiling look, as he moved away, Cuthbert felt an uncomfortable thrill.

It startled him to feel that Guy’s conviction lay absolutely untouched by all his recent study. There was something inscrutable behind the pathetic eyes, and what was it? Was the boy “mad north-north west?” or would he at last compel belief in the incredible? Horatio, Cuthbert thought, had a great advantage in having actually seen the ghost that haunted Hamlet.