Ghost stories of henry j.., p.22
Ghost Stories of Henry James, page 22
‘Oh because he’s the most formidable. He’s the one who’s sometimes seen.’
‘Seen where?’ Mrs Coyle had turned round with a jerk.
‘In the room he was found dead in – the White Room they’ve always called it.’
‘Do you mean to say the house has a proved ghost?’ Mrs Coyle almost shrieked. ‘You brought me here without telling me?’
‘Didn’t I mention it after my other visit?’
‘Not a word. You only talked about Miss Wingrave.’
‘Oh I was full of the story – you’ve simply forgotten.’
‘Then you should have reminded me!’
‘If I had thought of it, I’d have held my peace – for you wouldn’t have come.’
‘I wish indeed I hadn’t!’ cried Mrs Coyle. ‘But what,’ she immediately asked, ‘is the story?’
‘Oh a deed of violence that took place here ages ago. I think it was in George the Second’s time that Colonel Wingrave, one of their ancestors, struck in a fit of passion one of his children, a lad just growing up, a blow on the head of which the unhappy child died. The matter was hushed up for the hour and some other explanation put about. The poor boy was laid out in one of those rooms on the other side of the house, and amid strange smothered rumours the funeral was hurried on. The next morning, when the household assembled, Colonel Wingrave was missing; he was looked for vainly, and at last it occurred to someone that he might perhaps be in the room from which his child had been carried to burial. The seeker knocked without an answer – then opened the door. The poor man lay dead on the floor, in his clothes, as if he had reeled and fallen back, without a wound, without a mark, without anything in his appearance to indicate that he had either struggled or suffered. He was a strong sound man – there was nothing to account for such a stroke. He’s supposed to have gone to the room during the night, just before going to bed, in some fit of compunction or some fascination of dread. It was only after this that the truth about the boy came out. But no one ever sleeps in the room.’
Mrs Coyle had fairly turned pale. ‘I hope not indeed! Thank heaven they haven’t put us there!’
‘We’re at a comfortable distance – I know the scene of the event.’
‘Do you mean you’ve been in – ?’
‘For a few moments. They’re rather proud of the place and my young friend showed it me when I was here before.’
Mrs Coyle stared. ‘And what is it like?’
‘Simply an empty dull old-fashioned bedroom, rather big and furnished with the things of the “period”. It’s panelled from floor to ceiling, and the panels evidently, years and years ago, were painted white. But the paint has darkened with time and there are three or four quaint little ancient “samplers”, [13] framed and glazed, hung on the walls.’
Mrs Coyle looked round with a shudder. ‘I’m glad there are no samplers here! I never heard anything so jumpy! Come down to dinner.’
On the staircase as they went her husband showed her the portrait of Colonel Wingrave – a representation, with some force and style, for the place and period, of a gentleman with a hard handsome face, in a red coat and a peruke. Mrs Coyle pronounced his descendant old Sir Philip wonderfully like him; and her husband could fancy, though he kept it to himself, that if one should have the courage to walk the old corridors of Paramore at night, one might meet a figure that resembled him roaming, with the restlessness of a ghost, hand in hand with the figure of a tall boy. As he proceeded to the drawing-room with his wife he found himself suddenly wishing he had made more of a point of his pupil’s going to Eastbourne. The evening however seemed to have taken upon itself to dissipate any such whimsical forebodings, for the grimness of the family circle, as he had preconceived its composition, was mitigated by an infusion of the ‘neighbourhood’. The company at dinner was recruited by two cheerful couples, one of them the vicar and his wife, and by a silent young man who had come down to fish. This was a relief to Mr Coyle, who had begun to wonder what was after all expected of him and why he had been such a fool as to come, and who now felt that for the first hours at least the situation wouldn’t have directly to be dealt with. Indeed he found, as he had found before, sufficient occupation for his ingenuity in reading the various symptoms of which the social scene that spread about him was an expression. He should probably have a trying day on the morrow: he foresaw the difficulty of the long decorous Sunday and how dry Jane Wingrave’s ideas, elicited in strenuous conference, would taste. She and her father would make him feel they depended upon him for the impossible, and if they should try to associate him with too tactless a policy he might end by telling them what he thought of it – an accident not required to make his visit a depressed mistake. The old man’s actual design was evidently to let their friends see in it a positive mark of their being all right. The presence of the great London coach was tantamount to a profession of faith in the results of the impending examination. It had clearly been obtained from Owen, rather to the principal visitor’s surprise, that he would do nothing to interfere with the apparent concord. He let the allusions to his hard work pass and, holding his tongue about his affairs, talked to the ladies as amicably as if he hadn’t been ‘cut off’. When Mr Coyle looked at him once or twice across the table, catching his eye, which showed an indefinable passion, he found a puzzling pathos in his laughing face: one couldn’t resist a pang for a young lamb so visibly marked for sacrifice. ‘Hang him, what a pity he’s such a fighter!’ he privately sighed – and with a want of logic that was only superficial.
This idea however would have absorbed him more if so much of his attention hadn’t been for Kate Julian, who now that he had her well before him struck him as a remarkable and even as a possibly interesting young woman. The interest resided not in any extraordinary prettiness, for if she was handsome, with her long Eastern eyes, her magnificent hair and her general unabashed originality, he had seen complexions rosier and features that pleased him more: it dwelt in a strange impression that she gave of being exactly the sort of person whom, in her position, common considerations, those of prudence and perhaps even a little decorum, would have enjoined on her not to be. She was what was vulgarly termed a dependent – penniless patronised tolerated; but something in all her air conveyed that if her situation was inferior her spirit, to make up for it, was above precautions or submissions. It wasn’t in the least that she was aggressive – she was too indifferent for that; it was only as if, having nothing either to gain or to lose, she could afford to do as she liked. It occurred to Spencer Coyle that she might really have had more at stake than her imagination appeared to take account of; whatever this quantity might be, at any rate, he had never seen a young woman at less pains to keep the safe side. He wondered inevitably what terms prevailed between Jane Wingrave and such an inmate as this; but those questions of course were unfathomable deeps. Perhaps keen Kate lorded it even over her protectress. The other time he was at Paramore he had received an impression that, with Sir Philip beside her, the girl could fight with her back to the wall. She amused Sir Philip, she charmed him, and he liked people who weren’t afraid; between him and his daughter moreover there was no doubt which was the higher in command. Miss Wingrave took many things for granted, and most of all the rigour of discipline and the fate of the vanquished and the captive.
But between their clever boy and so original a companion of his childhood what odd relation would have grown up? It couldn’t be indifference, and yet on the part of happy handsome youthful creatures it was still less likely to be aversion. They weren’t Paul and Virginia, [14] but they must have had their common summer and their idyll: no nice girl could have disliked such a nice fellow for anything but not liking her, and no nice fellow could have resisted such propinquity. Mr Coyle remembered indeed that Mrs Julian had spoken to him as if the propinquity had been by no means constant, owing to her daughter’s absences at school, to say nothing of Owen’s; her visits to a few friends who were so kind as to ‘take’ her from time to time; her sojourns in London – so difficult to manage, but still managed by God’s help – for ‘advantages’, for drawing and singing, especially drawing, or rather painting in oils, for which she had gained high credit. But the good lady had also mentioned that the young people were quite brother and sister, which was a little, after all, like Paul and Virginia. Mrs Coyle had been right, and it was apparent that Virginia was doing her best to make the time pass agreeably for young Lechmere. There was no such whirl of conversation as to render it an effort for our critic to reflect on these things: the tone of the occasion, thanks principally to the other guests, was not disposed to stray – it tended to the repetition of anecdote and the discussion of rents, topics that huddled together like uneasy animals. He could judge how intensely his hosts wished the evening to pass off as if nothing had happened; and this gave him the measure of their private resentment. Before dinner was over he found himself fidgety about his second pupil. Young Lechmere, since he began to cram, had done all that might have been expected of him; but this couldn’t blind his instructor to a present perception of his being in moments of relaxation as innocent as a babe. Mr Coyle had considered that the amusements of Paramore would probably give him a fillip, and the poor youth’s manner testified to the soundness of the forecast. The fillip had been unmistakeably administered; it had come in the form of a revelation. The light on young Lechmere’s brow announced with a candour that was almost an appeal for compassion, or at least a deprecation of ridicule, that he had never seen anything like Miss Julian.
4
In the drawing-room after dinner, the girl found a chance to approach Owen’s late preceptor. She stood before him a moment, smiling while she opened and shut her fan, and then said abruptly, raising her strange eyes: ‘I know what you’ve come for, but it isn’t any use.’
‘I’ve come to look after you a little. Isn’t that any use?’
‘It’s very kind. But I’m not the question of the hour. You won’t do anything with Owen.’
Spencer Coyle hesitated a moment. ‘What will you do with his young friend?’
She stared, looked round her. ‘Mr Lechmere? Oh poor little lad! We’ve been talking about Owen. He admires him so.’
‘So do I. I should tell you that.’
‘So do we all. That’s why we’re in such despair.’
‘Personally then you’d like him to be a soldier?’ the visitor asked.
‘I’ve quite set my heart on it. I adore the army and I’m awfully fond of my old playmate,’ said Miss Julian.
Spencer recalled the young man’s own different version of her attitude; but he judged it loyal not to challenge her. ‘It’s not conceivable that your old playmate shouldn’t be fond of you. He must therefore wish to please you; and I don’t see why – between you, such clever young people as you are! – you don’t set the matter right.’
‘Wish to please me!’ Miss Julian echoed. ‘I’m sorry to say he shows no such desire. He thinks me an impudent wretch. I’ve told him what I think of him, and he simply hates me.’
‘But you think so highly! You just told me you admire him.’
‘His talents, his possibilities, yes; even his personal appearance, if I may allude to such a matter. But I don’t admire his present behaviour.’
‘Have you had the question out with him?’ Spencer asked.
‘Oh yes, I’ve ventured to be frank – the occasion seemed to excuse it. He couldn’t like what I said.’
‘What did you say?’
The girl, thinking a moment, opened and shut her fan again. ‘Why – as we’re such good old friends – that such conduct doesn’t begin to be that of a gentleman!’
After she had spoken her eyes met Mr Coyle’s, who looked into their ambiguous depths. ‘What then would you have said without that tie?’
‘How odd for you to ask that – in such a way!’ she returned with a laugh. ‘I don’t understand your position: I thought your line was to make soldiers!’
‘You should take my little joke. But, as regards Owen Wingrave, there’s no “making” needed,’ he declared. ‘To my sense’ – and the little crammer paused as with a consciousness of responsibility for his paradox – ‘to my sense he is, in a high sense of the term, a fighting man.’
‘Ah let him prove it!’ she cried with impatience and turning short off.
Spencer Coyle let her go; something in her tone annoyed and even not a little shocked him. There had evidently been a violent passage between these young persons, and the reflection that such a matter was after all none of his business but troubled him the more. It was indeed a military house, and she was at any rate a damsel who placed her ideal of manhood – damsels doubtless always had their ideals of manhood – in the type of the belted warrior. It was a taste like another; but even a quarter of an hour later, finding himself near young Lechmere, in whom this type was embodied, Spencer Coyle was still so ruffled that he addressed the innocent lad with a certain magisterial dryness. ‘You’re under no pressure to sit up late, you know. That’s not what I brought you down for.’ The dinner guests were taking leave and the bedroom candles twinkled in a monitory row. Young Lechmere however was too agreeably agitated to be accessible to a snub: he had a happy preoccupation which almost engendered a grin.
‘I’m only too eager for bedtime. Do you know there’s an awfully jolly room?’
Coyle debated a moment as to whether he should take the allusion – then spoke from his general tension. ‘Surely they haven’t put you there?’
‘No indeed: no one has passed a night in it for ages. But that’s exactly what I want to do – it would be tremendous fun.’
‘And have you been trying to get Miss Julian’s leave?’
‘Oh she can’t give it she says. But she believes in it, and she maintains that no man has ever dared.’
‘No man shall ever!’ said Spencer with decision. ‘A fellow in your critical position in particular must have a quiet night.’
Young Lechmere gave a disappointed but reasonable sigh. ‘Oh all right. But mayn’t I sit up for a little go at Wingrave? I haven’t had any yet.’
Mr Coyle looked at his watch. ‘You may smoke one cigarette.’
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned round to see his wife tilting candle grease upon his coat. The ladies were going to bed and it was Sir Philip’s inveterate hour; but Mrs Coyle confided to her husband that after the dreadful things he had told her she positively declined to be left alone, for no matter how short an interval, in any part of the house. He promised to follow her within three minutes, and after the orthodox handshakes the ladies rustled away. The forms were kept up at Paramore as bravely as if the old house had no present intensity of heartache. The only one of which Coyle noticed the drop was some salutation to himself from Kate Julian. She gave him neither a word nor a glance, but he saw her look hard at Owen. Her mother, timid and pitying, was apparently the only person from whom this young man caught an inclination of the head. Miss Wingrave marshalled the three ladies – her little procession of twinkling tapers – up the wide oaken stairs and past the watching portrait of her ill-fated ancestor. Sir Philip’s servant appeared and offered his arm to the old man, who turned a perpendicular back on poor Owen when the boy made a vague movement to anticipate this office. Mr Coyle learned later that before Owen had forfeited favour it had always, when he was at home, been his privilege at bedtime to conduct his grandfather ceremoniously to rest. Sir Philip’s habits were contemptuously different now. His apartments were on the lower floor and he shuffled stiffly off to them with his valet’s help, after fixing for a moment significantly on the most responsible of his visitors the thick red ray, like the glow of stirred embers, that always made his eyes conflict oddly with his mild manners. They seemed to say to poor Spencer ‘We’ll let the young scoundrel have it tomorrow!’ One might have gathered from them that the young scoundrel, who had now strolled to the other end of the hall, had at least forged a cheque. His friend watched him an instant, saw him drop nervously into a chair and then with a restless movement get up. The same movement brought him back to where Mr Coyle stood addressing a last injunction to young Lechmere.
‘I’m going to bed and I should like you particularly to conform to what I said to you a short time ago. Smoke a single cigarette with our host here and then go to your room. You’ll have me down on you if I hear of your having, during the night, tried any preposterous games.’ Young Lechmere, looking down with his hands in his pockets, said nothing – he only poked at the corner of a rug with his toe; so that his fellow visitor, dissatisfied with so tacit a pledge, presently went on to Owen: ‘I must request you, Wingrave, not to keep so sensitive a subject sitting up – and indeed to put him to bed and turn his key in the door.’ As Owen stared an instant, apparently not understanding the motive of so much solicitude, he added: ‘Lechmere has a morbid curiosity about one of your legends – of your historic rooms. Nip it in the bud.’
‘Oh the legend’s rather good, but I’m afraid the room’s an awful sell!’ Owen laughed.
‘You know you don’t believe that, my boy!’ young Lechmere returned.
‘I don’t think he does’ – Mr Coyle noticed Owen’s mottled flush.
‘He wouldn’t try a night there himself!’ their companion pursued.
‘I know who told you that,’ said Owen, lighting a cigarette in an embarrassed way at the candle, without offering one to either of his friends.
‘Well, what if she did?’ asked the younger of these gentlemen, rather red. ‘Do you want them all yourself?’ he continued facetiously, fumbling in the cigarette-box.
Owen Wingrave only smoked quietly; then he brought out: ‘Yes – what if she did? But she doesn’t know,’ he added.
‘She doesn’t know what?’
‘She doesn’t know anything! – I’ll tuck him in!’
Owen went on gaily to Mr Coyle, who saw that his presence, now a certain note had been struck, made the young men uncomfortable. He was curious, but there were discretions and delicacies, with his pupils, that he had always pretended to practise; scruples which however didn’t prevent, as he took his way upstairs, his recommending them not to be donkeys.
‘Seen where?’ Mrs Coyle had turned round with a jerk.
‘In the room he was found dead in – the White Room they’ve always called it.’
‘Do you mean to say the house has a proved ghost?’ Mrs Coyle almost shrieked. ‘You brought me here without telling me?’
‘Didn’t I mention it after my other visit?’
‘Not a word. You only talked about Miss Wingrave.’
‘Oh I was full of the story – you’ve simply forgotten.’
‘Then you should have reminded me!’
‘If I had thought of it, I’d have held my peace – for you wouldn’t have come.’
‘I wish indeed I hadn’t!’ cried Mrs Coyle. ‘But what,’ she immediately asked, ‘is the story?’
‘Oh a deed of violence that took place here ages ago. I think it was in George the Second’s time that Colonel Wingrave, one of their ancestors, struck in a fit of passion one of his children, a lad just growing up, a blow on the head of which the unhappy child died. The matter was hushed up for the hour and some other explanation put about. The poor boy was laid out in one of those rooms on the other side of the house, and amid strange smothered rumours the funeral was hurried on. The next morning, when the household assembled, Colonel Wingrave was missing; he was looked for vainly, and at last it occurred to someone that he might perhaps be in the room from which his child had been carried to burial. The seeker knocked without an answer – then opened the door. The poor man lay dead on the floor, in his clothes, as if he had reeled and fallen back, without a wound, without a mark, without anything in his appearance to indicate that he had either struggled or suffered. He was a strong sound man – there was nothing to account for such a stroke. He’s supposed to have gone to the room during the night, just before going to bed, in some fit of compunction or some fascination of dread. It was only after this that the truth about the boy came out. But no one ever sleeps in the room.’
Mrs Coyle had fairly turned pale. ‘I hope not indeed! Thank heaven they haven’t put us there!’
‘We’re at a comfortable distance – I know the scene of the event.’
‘Do you mean you’ve been in – ?’
‘For a few moments. They’re rather proud of the place and my young friend showed it me when I was here before.’
Mrs Coyle stared. ‘And what is it like?’
‘Simply an empty dull old-fashioned bedroom, rather big and furnished with the things of the “period”. It’s panelled from floor to ceiling, and the panels evidently, years and years ago, were painted white. But the paint has darkened with time and there are three or four quaint little ancient “samplers”, [13] framed and glazed, hung on the walls.’
Mrs Coyle looked round with a shudder. ‘I’m glad there are no samplers here! I never heard anything so jumpy! Come down to dinner.’
On the staircase as they went her husband showed her the portrait of Colonel Wingrave – a representation, with some force and style, for the place and period, of a gentleman with a hard handsome face, in a red coat and a peruke. Mrs Coyle pronounced his descendant old Sir Philip wonderfully like him; and her husband could fancy, though he kept it to himself, that if one should have the courage to walk the old corridors of Paramore at night, one might meet a figure that resembled him roaming, with the restlessness of a ghost, hand in hand with the figure of a tall boy. As he proceeded to the drawing-room with his wife he found himself suddenly wishing he had made more of a point of his pupil’s going to Eastbourne. The evening however seemed to have taken upon itself to dissipate any such whimsical forebodings, for the grimness of the family circle, as he had preconceived its composition, was mitigated by an infusion of the ‘neighbourhood’. The company at dinner was recruited by two cheerful couples, one of them the vicar and his wife, and by a silent young man who had come down to fish. This was a relief to Mr Coyle, who had begun to wonder what was after all expected of him and why he had been such a fool as to come, and who now felt that for the first hours at least the situation wouldn’t have directly to be dealt with. Indeed he found, as he had found before, sufficient occupation for his ingenuity in reading the various symptoms of which the social scene that spread about him was an expression. He should probably have a trying day on the morrow: he foresaw the difficulty of the long decorous Sunday and how dry Jane Wingrave’s ideas, elicited in strenuous conference, would taste. She and her father would make him feel they depended upon him for the impossible, and if they should try to associate him with too tactless a policy he might end by telling them what he thought of it – an accident not required to make his visit a depressed mistake. The old man’s actual design was evidently to let their friends see in it a positive mark of their being all right. The presence of the great London coach was tantamount to a profession of faith in the results of the impending examination. It had clearly been obtained from Owen, rather to the principal visitor’s surprise, that he would do nothing to interfere with the apparent concord. He let the allusions to his hard work pass and, holding his tongue about his affairs, talked to the ladies as amicably as if he hadn’t been ‘cut off’. When Mr Coyle looked at him once or twice across the table, catching his eye, which showed an indefinable passion, he found a puzzling pathos in his laughing face: one couldn’t resist a pang for a young lamb so visibly marked for sacrifice. ‘Hang him, what a pity he’s such a fighter!’ he privately sighed – and with a want of logic that was only superficial.
This idea however would have absorbed him more if so much of his attention hadn’t been for Kate Julian, who now that he had her well before him struck him as a remarkable and even as a possibly interesting young woman. The interest resided not in any extraordinary prettiness, for if she was handsome, with her long Eastern eyes, her magnificent hair and her general unabashed originality, he had seen complexions rosier and features that pleased him more: it dwelt in a strange impression that she gave of being exactly the sort of person whom, in her position, common considerations, those of prudence and perhaps even a little decorum, would have enjoined on her not to be. She was what was vulgarly termed a dependent – penniless patronised tolerated; but something in all her air conveyed that if her situation was inferior her spirit, to make up for it, was above precautions or submissions. It wasn’t in the least that she was aggressive – she was too indifferent for that; it was only as if, having nothing either to gain or to lose, she could afford to do as she liked. It occurred to Spencer Coyle that she might really have had more at stake than her imagination appeared to take account of; whatever this quantity might be, at any rate, he had never seen a young woman at less pains to keep the safe side. He wondered inevitably what terms prevailed between Jane Wingrave and such an inmate as this; but those questions of course were unfathomable deeps. Perhaps keen Kate lorded it even over her protectress. The other time he was at Paramore he had received an impression that, with Sir Philip beside her, the girl could fight with her back to the wall. She amused Sir Philip, she charmed him, and he liked people who weren’t afraid; between him and his daughter moreover there was no doubt which was the higher in command. Miss Wingrave took many things for granted, and most of all the rigour of discipline and the fate of the vanquished and the captive.
But between their clever boy and so original a companion of his childhood what odd relation would have grown up? It couldn’t be indifference, and yet on the part of happy handsome youthful creatures it was still less likely to be aversion. They weren’t Paul and Virginia, [14] but they must have had their common summer and their idyll: no nice girl could have disliked such a nice fellow for anything but not liking her, and no nice fellow could have resisted such propinquity. Mr Coyle remembered indeed that Mrs Julian had spoken to him as if the propinquity had been by no means constant, owing to her daughter’s absences at school, to say nothing of Owen’s; her visits to a few friends who were so kind as to ‘take’ her from time to time; her sojourns in London – so difficult to manage, but still managed by God’s help – for ‘advantages’, for drawing and singing, especially drawing, or rather painting in oils, for which she had gained high credit. But the good lady had also mentioned that the young people were quite brother and sister, which was a little, after all, like Paul and Virginia. Mrs Coyle had been right, and it was apparent that Virginia was doing her best to make the time pass agreeably for young Lechmere. There was no such whirl of conversation as to render it an effort for our critic to reflect on these things: the tone of the occasion, thanks principally to the other guests, was not disposed to stray – it tended to the repetition of anecdote and the discussion of rents, topics that huddled together like uneasy animals. He could judge how intensely his hosts wished the evening to pass off as if nothing had happened; and this gave him the measure of their private resentment. Before dinner was over he found himself fidgety about his second pupil. Young Lechmere, since he began to cram, had done all that might have been expected of him; but this couldn’t blind his instructor to a present perception of his being in moments of relaxation as innocent as a babe. Mr Coyle had considered that the amusements of Paramore would probably give him a fillip, and the poor youth’s manner testified to the soundness of the forecast. The fillip had been unmistakeably administered; it had come in the form of a revelation. The light on young Lechmere’s brow announced with a candour that was almost an appeal for compassion, or at least a deprecation of ridicule, that he had never seen anything like Miss Julian.
4
In the drawing-room after dinner, the girl found a chance to approach Owen’s late preceptor. She stood before him a moment, smiling while she opened and shut her fan, and then said abruptly, raising her strange eyes: ‘I know what you’ve come for, but it isn’t any use.’
‘I’ve come to look after you a little. Isn’t that any use?’
‘It’s very kind. But I’m not the question of the hour. You won’t do anything with Owen.’
Spencer Coyle hesitated a moment. ‘What will you do with his young friend?’
She stared, looked round her. ‘Mr Lechmere? Oh poor little lad! We’ve been talking about Owen. He admires him so.’
‘So do I. I should tell you that.’
‘So do we all. That’s why we’re in such despair.’
‘Personally then you’d like him to be a soldier?’ the visitor asked.
‘I’ve quite set my heart on it. I adore the army and I’m awfully fond of my old playmate,’ said Miss Julian.
Spencer recalled the young man’s own different version of her attitude; but he judged it loyal not to challenge her. ‘It’s not conceivable that your old playmate shouldn’t be fond of you. He must therefore wish to please you; and I don’t see why – between you, such clever young people as you are! – you don’t set the matter right.’
‘Wish to please me!’ Miss Julian echoed. ‘I’m sorry to say he shows no such desire. He thinks me an impudent wretch. I’ve told him what I think of him, and he simply hates me.’
‘But you think so highly! You just told me you admire him.’
‘His talents, his possibilities, yes; even his personal appearance, if I may allude to such a matter. But I don’t admire his present behaviour.’
‘Have you had the question out with him?’ Spencer asked.
‘Oh yes, I’ve ventured to be frank – the occasion seemed to excuse it. He couldn’t like what I said.’
‘What did you say?’
The girl, thinking a moment, opened and shut her fan again. ‘Why – as we’re such good old friends – that such conduct doesn’t begin to be that of a gentleman!’
After she had spoken her eyes met Mr Coyle’s, who looked into their ambiguous depths. ‘What then would you have said without that tie?’
‘How odd for you to ask that – in such a way!’ she returned with a laugh. ‘I don’t understand your position: I thought your line was to make soldiers!’
‘You should take my little joke. But, as regards Owen Wingrave, there’s no “making” needed,’ he declared. ‘To my sense’ – and the little crammer paused as with a consciousness of responsibility for his paradox – ‘to my sense he is, in a high sense of the term, a fighting man.’
‘Ah let him prove it!’ she cried with impatience and turning short off.
Spencer Coyle let her go; something in her tone annoyed and even not a little shocked him. There had evidently been a violent passage between these young persons, and the reflection that such a matter was after all none of his business but troubled him the more. It was indeed a military house, and she was at any rate a damsel who placed her ideal of manhood – damsels doubtless always had their ideals of manhood – in the type of the belted warrior. It was a taste like another; but even a quarter of an hour later, finding himself near young Lechmere, in whom this type was embodied, Spencer Coyle was still so ruffled that he addressed the innocent lad with a certain magisterial dryness. ‘You’re under no pressure to sit up late, you know. That’s not what I brought you down for.’ The dinner guests were taking leave and the bedroom candles twinkled in a monitory row. Young Lechmere however was too agreeably agitated to be accessible to a snub: he had a happy preoccupation which almost engendered a grin.
‘I’m only too eager for bedtime. Do you know there’s an awfully jolly room?’
Coyle debated a moment as to whether he should take the allusion – then spoke from his general tension. ‘Surely they haven’t put you there?’
‘No indeed: no one has passed a night in it for ages. But that’s exactly what I want to do – it would be tremendous fun.’
‘And have you been trying to get Miss Julian’s leave?’
‘Oh she can’t give it she says. But she believes in it, and she maintains that no man has ever dared.’
‘No man shall ever!’ said Spencer with decision. ‘A fellow in your critical position in particular must have a quiet night.’
Young Lechmere gave a disappointed but reasonable sigh. ‘Oh all right. But mayn’t I sit up for a little go at Wingrave? I haven’t had any yet.’
Mr Coyle looked at his watch. ‘You may smoke one cigarette.’
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned round to see his wife tilting candle grease upon his coat. The ladies were going to bed and it was Sir Philip’s inveterate hour; but Mrs Coyle confided to her husband that after the dreadful things he had told her she positively declined to be left alone, for no matter how short an interval, in any part of the house. He promised to follow her within three minutes, and after the orthodox handshakes the ladies rustled away. The forms were kept up at Paramore as bravely as if the old house had no present intensity of heartache. The only one of which Coyle noticed the drop was some salutation to himself from Kate Julian. She gave him neither a word nor a glance, but he saw her look hard at Owen. Her mother, timid and pitying, was apparently the only person from whom this young man caught an inclination of the head. Miss Wingrave marshalled the three ladies – her little procession of twinkling tapers – up the wide oaken stairs and past the watching portrait of her ill-fated ancestor. Sir Philip’s servant appeared and offered his arm to the old man, who turned a perpendicular back on poor Owen when the boy made a vague movement to anticipate this office. Mr Coyle learned later that before Owen had forfeited favour it had always, when he was at home, been his privilege at bedtime to conduct his grandfather ceremoniously to rest. Sir Philip’s habits were contemptuously different now. His apartments were on the lower floor and he shuffled stiffly off to them with his valet’s help, after fixing for a moment significantly on the most responsible of his visitors the thick red ray, like the glow of stirred embers, that always made his eyes conflict oddly with his mild manners. They seemed to say to poor Spencer ‘We’ll let the young scoundrel have it tomorrow!’ One might have gathered from them that the young scoundrel, who had now strolled to the other end of the hall, had at least forged a cheque. His friend watched him an instant, saw him drop nervously into a chair and then with a restless movement get up. The same movement brought him back to where Mr Coyle stood addressing a last injunction to young Lechmere.
‘I’m going to bed and I should like you particularly to conform to what I said to you a short time ago. Smoke a single cigarette with our host here and then go to your room. You’ll have me down on you if I hear of your having, during the night, tried any preposterous games.’ Young Lechmere, looking down with his hands in his pockets, said nothing – he only poked at the corner of a rug with his toe; so that his fellow visitor, dissatisfied with so tacit a pledge, presently went on to Owen: ‘I must request you, Wingrave, not to keep so sensitive a subject sitting up – and indeed to put him to bed and turn his key in the door.’ As Owen stared an instant, apparently not understanding the motive of so much solicitude, he added: ‘Lechmere has a morbid curiosity about one of your legends – of your historic rooms. Nip it in the bud.’
‘Oh the legend’s rather good, but I’m afraid the room’s an awful sell!’ Owen laughed.
‘You know you don’t believe that, my boy!’ young Lechmere returned.
‘I don’t think he does’ – Mr Coyle noticed Owen’s mottled flush.
‘He wouldn’t try a night there himself!’ their companion pursued.
‘I know who told you that,’ said Owen, lighting a cigarette in an embarrassed way at the candle, without offering one to either of his friends.
‘Well, what if she did?’ asked the younger of these gentlemen, rather red. ‘Do you want them all yourself?’ he continued facetiously, fumbling in the cigarette-box.
Owen Wingrave only smoked quietly; then he brought out: ‘Yes – what if she did? But she doesn’t know,’ he added.
‘She doesn’t know what?’
‘She doesn’t know anything! – I’ll tuck him in!’
Owen went on gaily to Mr Coyle, who saw that his presence, now a certain note had been struck, made the young men uncomfortable. He was curious, but there were discretions and delicacies, with his pupils, that he had always pretended to practise; scruples which however didn’t prevent, as he took his way upstairs, his recommending them not to be donkeys.
