THE COIL IN ITS BEGINNING
SOME twenty-eight years before the date of this tale James Randolph,
the then owner of Castle Hill, with his wife, spent a winter in the
south of France, being ordered there for health. At the same place,
staying also, was his brother-in-law, Geoffry Keith. Keith's first
wife, the sister of James, had died years earlier; and his second wife,
"née" Cecil Reeves, was an attractive young woman.
Mrs. Randolph and Mrs. Keith became warm friends. Then, unexpectedly,
Geoffry Keith died, leaving his widow totally unprovided for. Her
child, Colin, was born before arrangements for her future could be
discussed, and the Randolphs saw that she had everything she needed.
Six weeks after the birth of Colin Keith, Giles Randolph was born; and
less than a month later Mrs. Randolph died. Her husband, distracted by
the blow, decided to travel in the east. He implored the handsome young
widow to take pity on his forlorn little child, and she responded with
open arms.
"I shall be gone at least three years," he said, after explaining that,
so long as she had charge of the boy, she should have annually the sum
of eight hundred pounds. "By-and-by we must arrange something for your
future, but I have no heart now for business. If you need more, write
to Mr. Penrhyn. My boy must have the best of everything."
Mrs. Keith remained where she was till spring, then took the babes to
Switzerland. She loved the Continent, and Randolph had left her free to
follow her own devices. Mr. Penrhyn ran out to inspect the child, and
wrote a good report to the father. "A pretty intelligent little chap,
slight and pale, but healthy," he said.
Randolph never had this letter. An attack of fever carried him off, and
Giles was an orphan.
Mr. Penrhyn already held the reins of government at Castle Hill. He was
Giles' guardian, but no question existed about leaving the little boy
where his father had placed him.
A second winter was passed in the south of France, the baby-boys
flourishing. When spring arrived, they were about sixteen months old,
bonny blue-eyed children—Giles slim and active, Colin sturdy and robust.
On account of gaieties which she did not like to miss, Mrs. Keith
remained imprudently long in the south, and then she was met by the
great temptation of her life; the fiery testing of will and principle
which comes sooner or later to most, though with some it is spread,
diluted, through many years, with others is concentrated into one
tremendous pull. It came, as such trials often do, just so shaped as to
make a fall easy.
Cecil Keith had not trained herself to be habitually true in word and
deed, neither was she a woman of high integrity. James Randolph had not
discovered this.
Giles, always sensitive to heat, failed in health, and was ordered to a
cooler climate. Mrs. Keith started, travelling by easy stages for the
sake of the little invalid; and when a day or two later the nurse fell
ill, she was left behind. Mrs. Keith, feverishly anxious, would wait
for nothing, but hurried on—perhaps too fast, for Giles grew worse.
When two more stages had been accomplished, he sank so rapidly that
she summoned a local German doctor, who told her all hope was at an
end—Giles was dying.
He promised to call again in an hour or two; and she sat beside the
bed, watching the small changed face, realising what this meant to
herself. Giles dying, and the responsibility hers! For her own pleasure
she had stayed in the south, when she ought to have gone north; and
though it might be called only an error in judgment, she would be
blamed.
Worse still—if Giles died, her income ceased. While he lived, she was
comfortably off, and if he should grow to manhood, she might expect
not to be left in the lurch. But his death meant the stoppage of her
income. The estate would pass to a distant relative, and Mr. Penrhyn
would be powerless.
She shrank with bitter dread from the thought of grinding poverty, and
then came the temptation. At first a mere suggestion, almost formless,
but it grew into shape. Why not transpose the boys' names? Why not put
Colin for Giles, and Giles for Colin? If the little one recovered,
the names could be reversed. If die he must, why should not her boy,
as Giles, enjoy the wealth which otherwise must pass to strangers? It
would mean ease for herself and him. And it need not be for always.
Some day she would put things right—would slip out of it. She did not
pause to consider how this might be possible.
The change looked simple. No one here knew her or the boys. Their nurse
she could get rid of, sending a month's wages by post and dismissing
her. Except Mr. Penrhyn and Mr. Dugdale, nobody from home had seen the
children, and they not for months. Little ones alter so much in the
first year or two that the exchange would never be detected. And if
Giles got well, it would not last. It was a precautionary step only, in
view of what might happen.
To the German doctor she had not mentioned that Giles was not her
child; indeed, she recalled speaking of him as "my little boy." As to
names, no difficulty existed. She had grown into the way of calling
them "Mop" and "Top," seldom by their true names, and she could soon
teach Colin to know himself as "Giles." It was all too fatally facile.
She did not look ahead, did not realise what the burden on her own
conscience would be, but simply faced the present emergency, simply saw
"wealth" and "poverty" thrown into the balance.
For an hour she wavered, and on the doctor's return she had not
consciously made up her mind. But she had been playing with evil
possibilities, and when he asked in German whether the two were twins,
she found herself claiming the sick boy as her own, talking of the
other as "her charge."
Terror then seized her. She had committed herself to a course of
deceit, and no man could foretell whither it might lead.
Yet, when the doctor called a third time, she made no sign, took no
step to undo what she had done.
All night the child seemed to be dying, but with morning there were
tokens of a rally, and as hours passed this strengthened. The doctor
would not believe himself mistaken, and still foretold a collapse, but
he proved to be wrong. A young English doctor, Wallace by name, passing
through the place, was called in to give a second opinion, and his was
hopeful. He insisted upon a trained nurse, and telegraphed for one
known to him. Mrs. Keith would have given much to avoid both doctor and
nurse; but two or three English residents, hearing of a countrywoman in
trouble, had called, and they arranged the whole, giving her no choice.
Of course doctor, nurse, and new acquaintances all believed Giles to
be Colin, Colin to be Giles. The lie once told had to be repeated, and
would have to be repeated, times without number.
At length the boy was pronounced out of danger, and Mrs. Keith found
herself in a terrible position. It might be weeks before the little
fellow could be moved. Moreover, soon after first arrival, she had
written to Mr. Penrhyn, mentioning the severe illness of—not Giles but
"Colin." She had woven a web around her own feet, and one way only of
escape lay open, the way of confession.
To a proud nature, like hers, confession of such a deed seemed to lie
beyond possibility.
She decided to wait, to see later what could be done. If the child grew
well and strong, he must have his rights. In a few weeks she would get
away from everybody, and would reverse her own work. Meanwhile, all she
could do was to let things drift—a fatal policy!
The boy's recovery was tedious, and he clung to his new nurse,
turning fractiously from Mrs. Keith. Mr. Wallace stayed longer than
he had intended in the neighbourhood, and both he and the German
doctor insisted on the child remaining where he was. Then Mr. Penrhyn
appeared, and saw the children under their new names. He was not an
astute man, and though he remarked how differently they had developed
from what he would have expected, no suspicion entered his mind.
After this, reversion to the old order became a hundredfold more
difficult, especially when Mr. Penrhyn, with new determination,
insisted on the boy being brought to England and having a home near
Castle Hill. Since he was guardian, Mrs. Keith dared not resist. It was
evident that he no longer trusted her wisdom, after the mistake she had
made in remaining so long in the south.
And still she said to herself that it was only for a while—that in time
all must be put straight. Some way would open. Some opportunity would
turn up. Speak now she "could" not! Shame herself in the eyes of her
little world she "would" not! She did not see how perplexities would
thicken, how her little world would widen, how explanation would become
more impossible.
Thus soothing her conscience with the thought of "by-and-by," she
became in a manner used to the state of affairs, though by fits and
starts she underwent much misery. At seasons the deceit—the wrong to
one child, the false position of the other—seemed awful beyond words.
Then again for weeks she would acquiesce with a dull content, trying to
persuade herself that things were just as well so, since Colin—the real
Giles—was far from robust, and Giles—the real Colin—was vigorous in
body and mind.
The little one's severe illness had altered him. In their infancy,
though of different make, people had often said that the two might be
taken for brothers. Nobody now spoke of them as alike, and this added
to the extreme difficulty of reversion. No one who had seen them since
that illness could be a second time deceived.
To make matters worse, the young doctor, Mr. Wallace, who had been
called in to see the boy, took the practice at Castlemere, and
thenceforward was always at hand. Perhaps it was hardly surprising,
though he was not responsible, that Mrs. Keith detested him.
Thus coil within coil she was bound, and she drifted on till all idea
of restitution was put off to a dim distance. Things were thus; and
thus, she told herself, they had to remain.
In early days she had not been worried by fear of family likenesses.
That came later, when she saw "Colin" fast expanding into a
reproduction of the Randolph ancestor, inheriting the gift which she
loathed, because she knew it to be a Randolph characteristic; when,
too, she saw, year by year, her own son, known as Giles Randolph,
growing into an exact copy of her brother, Jock Reeves, like in figure,
in feature, in manner, in voice, even in handwriting. So marked was the
latter resemblance that for years she had insisted on letters from her
brother being addressed to her bankers', and forwarded to her under
cover. Jock Reeves seldom wrote more than once a year, being a bad
correspondent; and he had given in to the "whim," not troubling himself
to oppose it.
But when he came home, and discovered that for no imaginable reason
he was forbidden to present himself to her son or to Giles Randolph,
matters became serious. She and her son were his only living relatives,
and he had looked forward to being much with them. He was well off. He
had planned spending the remainder of his years with her.
He had not written to announce his return to the old country. On first
arrival in London, he learnt from her bankers that she was abroad, and
that any letter coming from him was to be forwarded to a Thun address,
there to wait till called for—a precaution doubtless taken because
he usually wrote at about this date, for her birthday. Forthwith he
travelled thither, took up his abode at Interlaken, sent a few lines
to the address specified, and awaited a reply. That he had not long to
wait was due to Mr. Forsyth's accidental discovery of his letter. It
conveyed to Mrs. Keith her first intimation that the brother, whose
advent she dreaded, was close at hand; a very "real" fainting-fit being
the result.
A telegram from her next morning appointed an immediate meeting at
Interlaken; and the outcome of this interview was that he found himself
a tabooed individual, hysterically ordered never to show his face at
Castle Hill, or to make the acquaintance of his nephew and his nephew's
friend.
He demanded reasons in vain. For a time, he submitted, then came to the
same conclusion as others—that she was "queer in the top-story;" and he
decided to go to Castle Hill. If he should find the nephew and Randolph
to be of her mind, he could but "sheer off."
With his appearance was levelled to the ground in one crash a structure
of deceit, built up through twenty-seven years.
They had not been, could not be, happy years. They were shadowed by a
perpetual dread. Hundreds of times she had bitterly regretted her own
mad folly. But no way out of the tangled web had presented itself, save
the one which she refused to face.
She did, indeed, keep in her mind a thought of final confession.
Just at the last, when she had lived the life she preferred, when
everybody would pity her, when she would not have to face earthly
consequences—"then" she would speak out. It did not occur to her that
she might not then be able to speak out, except in moments of fright,
such as during the storm on the lake; and the impression made was wont
to pass quickly.
More often she tried to think that it did not really matter; that
Giles was quite as happy under the name of Colin; that his delicacy
of health made him unfit for the position so ably filled by her son;
that practically he had all he needed, since if he named a want it was
supplied; that, after bringing up her own boy to ease and wealth, she
would wrong him by speaking out. The latter was inconsistent with her
proposed dying confession; but Mrs. Keith was not consistent. This way
or that way she always reached the same conclusion, that the fiction
must be continued.
One aim she had long had—to bring about a union between "Giles" and
Phyllys. "Colin's" health was fragile. He might not be long-lived; and
Phyllys stood next in succession. Should "Colin" die unmarried, the
estate would by right pass to her; and if she were "Giles'" wife, she
would then possess her own. It would matter little that she seemed in
the eyes of the world to do so through her husband.
The incessant strain had told upon Mrs. Keith's health; and as time
went by, hysterical tendencies amounted to something beyond hysteria.
There was, no doubt, as more than one believed, a touch of "brain" in
her excitement, in her powers of tortuous self-deception.
All these years, when recoiling with horror from the thought of
exposure, the deepest dread in her mind had been lest Giles—her own
boy, her Colin—should despise his mother. Anything rather than that!
"His" contempt she could not endure.
But the look that broke her down, the look in those sombre blue eyes,
with their drooping corners, which she loved, was not disdain. It was
the overpowering shame, the bitter sorrow, that touched her heart; for
she, his mother, had brought all this upon him, and she knew how her
tale must look in the sight of the one being for whose sake she could
almost have died. Not quite; a woman of her calibre dies—quite—for
nobody. Self always ranks first. Still, she did love him passionately;
and when she thought of her little child's clinging arms, and realised
that she might have kept his loving trust in ever-growing measure to
life's end, she could have cried with one of old, "My punishment is
greater than I can bear."