The Grey Monk

It was a wild and stormy October night. The big moon-faced clock in the entrance-hall, in its slow and solemn fashion, as of a horologe that felt the burden of its years, had just announced the hour of eleven.

In his study alone, busy among his coins and curios, sat Sir Gilbert Clare of Withington Chase, Hertfordshire, and Chase Ridings, Yorkshire, a handsome, well-preserved man, in years somewhere between fifty and sixty. He had a tall, thin, upright figure, strongly marked features of an aquiline type, a snow-white moustache, and an expression at once proud and imperious.

It would, indeed, have been difficult to find a prouder man than Sir Gilbert. He was proud of the long line of his ancestors, of the brave men and beautiful women who, from their faded frames in the picture gallery, seemed to smile approval on the latest representative of their race. He was proud of the unsullied name which had come down to him from them, on which no action of his had ever cast the shadow of a stain. He was proud of the position, which he accepted as his by right, in his native county; he was proud of his three sturdy boys, at this hour wrapped in the sleep of innocent childhood. But his pride was strictly locked up in his own bosom. No syllable ever escaped him which told of its existence. To the world at large, and even to the members of his own household, he was a man of a quick and irascible temper, of cold manners and unsympathetic ways.

Proud as Sir Gilbert had just cause for being, there was one point, and one that could in no wise be ignored, at which his pride was touched severely.

His eldest son and heir was a disappointment and a failure. He had fought against the knowledge as long as it had been possible for him to do so, but some months had now gone by since the bitter truth had forced itself upon him in a way he could no longer pretend to ignore. He had caused private inquiries to be made, the result of which had satisfied him that, from being simply a good-natured harum-scarum spendthrift, the young man was gradually degenerating into a betting man and a turf gambler of a type especially obnoxious to the fastidious baronet. He told himself that he would almost as soon have had his son become a common pickpocket.

It never entered his mind to suspect that the evidence of Alec’s delinquencies which had been laid before him, and to obtain which he had paid a heavy price, might, to some extent, have been manufactured; that the shadows of the picture might have been purposely darkened in order that he might be supplied with that which he presumably looked for. He had accepted it in full and without question.

It had been Alec’s misfortune to get mixed up with a fast set while at college, and he seemed never to have quite broken with them afterwards.

At the Chase he and his stepmother had not got on well together—for the present Lady Clare was the baronet’s second wife—and when, shortly after coming of age, he announced his intention of making his home, for a time at least, with some of his mother’s relatives in London, Sir Gilbert had offered no opposition to the arrangement, for he was wise enough to recognise that two such opposite dispositions as those of his present wife and his eldest son could not possibly agree.

Then it presently came to his ears that Alec had gone into bachelor quarters of his own, after which came a long course of extravagances and debts of various kinds, such as well-to-do fathers have had to put up with from spendthrift sons for more centuries than history can tell us of.

Twice he had paid Alec’s debts and started him afresh with a clean slate; but on the second occasion he had given him plainly to understand that he must look for no further help in that line, but confine himself strictly to the fairly liberal allowance which had been settled on him when he came of age. Despite the determination thus expressed, no very long time had elapsed before a couple of tradesmen’s accounts for considerable sums were received by the baronet, with a request for an early liquidation of the same—not, however, sent by Alec, but by the creditors themselves. Instead of returning the bills to their senders, as most parents would have done, with a curt disavowal of all liability, Sir Gilbert chose rather to confiscate his son’s allowance to the amount of the debts in question.

From that time, now upwards of half a year ago, there had been no communication of any kind between father and son. Alec, however, was not left wholly without means, he having still an income of a hundred and eighty pounds a year, derivable from funded property left him by his mother.

Sir Gilbert had had an agreeable surprise in the course of the day with the evening of which we are now concerned, and yet it was a surprise not untinged with sadness.

His old friend Mr. Jopling, like himself an ardent numismatist and collector, had died a few weeks before, much to the baronet’s regret. To-day there had reached him a tiny packet, forwarded by Mr. Jopling’s executors, containing a couple of rare coins bequeathed him by his dead friend. One of them was a gold stater of Argos, with the head of Hera, the reverse being Diomedes carrying the palladium; while the other was a scarce fifty-shilling piece of Cromwell. Sir Gilbert had long envied his friend the possession of them, and now they were his own; therefore was the feeling with which he regarded them one of mingled pleasure and pain.

He had devoted the evening to a rearrangement of the contents of some of his cases and cabinets and to deciding upon a resting-place for his newly-acquired treasures.

It had been a labour of love. But, for all that, his thoughts every now and again would keep reverting from the pleasant task he had set himself to his eldest son; for this was the latter’s birthday, a fact which the father could not forget, although he would fain have kept it in the background of his memory. On just such a wild night twenty-four years before, had John Alexander Clare been born. With what bright hopes, with what glowing expectations he had been welcomed on the stage of life, Sir Gilbert alone could have told. A groan broke involuntarily from his lips when he pictured in thought the difference between then and now. His heart was very bitter against his son.

The night was creeping on apace.

In the great house everybody was in bed save the baronet, who was addicted to solitude and late hours. Outside, at recurring intervals, the wind blew in great stormy gusts, which anon died down to an inarticulate sobbing and wailing, as it might be of some lost spirit wandering round the old mansion, seeking ingress but finding none. There were voices in the wide-mouthed chimney; the rain lashed the windows furiously; by daybreak the trees would be nearly bare and all the woodways be covered by a sodden carpet of fallen leaves. Summer was dead indeed.

Suddenly, in a lull of the gale, Sir Gilbert was startled into the most vivid wakefulness by an unmistakable tapping at one of the two long windows which lighted the room. He listened in rigid silence till the tapping came again. Then he crossed to the window whence the sound had proceeded, and after having drawn back the curtains and unbarred and opened the shutters, he demanded in his sternest tones:

“Who is there?”

“It is I—Alec, your son,” came the reply in a well-remembered voice.

Sir Gilbert drew a long breath and paused for a space of half-a-dozen seconds. Then he unhasped and flung wide the window, and John Alexander Clare, the scapegrace heir, rain-soaked and mud-bedraggled, stepped into the room.

His father closed the window after him, while Alec proceeded to relieve himself of his soft broad-brimmed hat and the long cloak which had enveloped him from head to foot.

Like his father, the heir of Withington Chase was tall and slender and as upright as a dart. He had the same aquiline, high-bred cast of features, but in his case there was lacking that expression of hauteur and domineering pride, which to a certain extent marred those of the elder man.

Sir Gilbert’s eyes in colour were a cold bluish-grey, and, though not really small, had the appearance of being so owing to their being so deep set under his heavy brows and to his habit of contracting his lids when addressing himself to anyone. Alec’s hazel eyes, inherited from his mother, were large, clear, and open as the day. The baronet’s lips under his white moustache were thin and hard-set, and his rare smile was that of a cynic and a man who loved to find food for his sardonic humour in the faults and follies of his fellow-creatures. His son’s mouth, if betraying a touch of that weakness which as often as not is the result of an overplus of good-nature, was yet an eminently pleasant one, while his smile was frankness itself. His cheeks were a little more sunken than they ought to have been at his age, and there were dark half-circles under his eyes, which seemed to hint at late hours and mornings that bring a headache. His hair, which he wore short and parted in the middle, was in colour a dark reddish-brown, as were also his short pointed beard and small moustache.

“And to what, sir, am I indebted for the honour of a visit at this untimely hour?” inquired Sir Gilbert in his most freezing accents, as his coldly critical eyes took in his son from head to foot.

Alec coloured for a moment and bit his lip, as if to keep down some rising emotion. Then, in a voice of studied calmness, he said, “Perhaps, sir, I may be permitted to take a seat; for, in point of fact, I am dead tired, and have much to say to you.”

The baronet waved his son to a chair, and took another himself some distance away.

“I am here to-night, father, to make a confession.”

“I presumed as much the moment I set eyes on you.”

“I am afraid you will term it a very disgraceful confession.”

“I have not much doubt on that point,” responded the baronet grimly. “Disgrace and you seem to have gone hand in hand for a long time past.”

“Folly, but not disgrace, father. At the worst——”

The baronet held up his hand. “I am not used to such hair-splitting distinctions. You may call it by what term you like, to my way of thinking, it is nothing less than a disgrace when a young man permits himself to contract debts which he has no reasonable prospect—nay, which, in many cases, he has no intention of liquidating. But proceed, sir.”

Apparently Alec found it no easy matter to proceed. The story he had to tell was, without doubt, a sufficiently discreditable one, and such as might well cause him to hesitate before he could summon up sufficient courage to enter on its recital. Put into the fewest possible words it came to this: he had lost heavily over a certain race, and had no means of meeting his liabilities. In three days’ time, unless his father would come to his help, he would be posted as a defaulter, which, for a man in his position, meant outlawry and social extinction. He got through his confession somehow, speaking in hard, dry tones, almost as if he were relating an incident which referred to some stranger and in which he had no personal concern. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers interlocked, and his eyes apparently intent on taking in the pattern of the carpet.