In Possession.
"Really, hardly sooner than I expected, my dear sir," said Dr.
Barford, when he came to pay his accustomed daily visit at Rowley
Court, and found his occupation gone. "A little accelerated by
nervousness about your coming home, but very little; not more than a
few hours. I quite expected the event; told the nurse as much
yesterday, in fact. Ah, well, my dear sir, it is what we must all come
to. He was a fine old gentleman, a very fine old gentleman,--has not
left many like him in Gloucestershire; more's the pity;" and Dr.
Barford continued to talk on with smooth professional glibness, by no
means unconscious of the fact that he was not listened to by Miles
Challoner with even a show of attention.
Old Mark Challoner's death was emphatically a "bad business" for Dr.
Barford, and he said so (to himself) quite frankly. The Squire had
been a very profitable and by no means a troublesome or exacting
patient to the worthy doctor for a considerable time, and it was not
pleasant to him to know that the attendance which brought much that
was agreeable with it, in addition to liberal and regularly-paid fees,
was at an end. Dr. Barford looked at Miles Challoner, and a mild
despondency possessed itself of his soul. Miles was a model of health
and strength; his complexion indicated unconsciousness of the presence
of bile in his system, and he looked as little like a man troubled, or
likely to be troubled, with nerves, or fancied ailments of any kind,
as need be. So Dr. Barford felt his footing at Rowley Court was a
thing of the past, and mentally bade it farewell with a plaintive
sigh. He was an honest little man, and kind-hearted too, though he did
think of the event, as we all think of every event in which we are
concerned, from a selfish standpoint; and he was frankly, genuinely
sorry for his old friend; and Miles recognised the sincerity of
feeling in him, and threw off his absence of mind, and shook hands
with him over again, thanking him for the skill and care that had
availed so long, none the less warmly that it could avail no longer.
Miles Challoner's grief for his father was very deep and poignant. His
nature was acutely sensitive, and he had the power of feeling sorrow
more intensely than most men, while he lacked the faculty for shaking
it off, and betaking himself to the way of life which had been his
before the trouble came upon him, which most men possess, and find
very useful in a world which affords little time and has not much
toleration for sentiment. Loneliness fell heavily upon him, and the
society which in the winter would have been within his reach was not
available now. The season was well on in London, and most of the
people who formed the not very extensive neighbourhood of Rowley Court
were in town; so that Miles Challoner was all uncheered by neighbourly
kindness, and his evenings were especially solitary.
Incidental to his position as sole heir to the diminished but still
respectable possessions of the Challoners, a great deal of business
had to be gone through which was particularly distasteful to Miles.
The family lawyer lived in London, of course, but his personal
services had not been needed. Old Mark Challoner had set his house
very thoroughly in order; no rents were in arrear, the debts were few,
and the tenants were orderly and well-behaved. They had liked their
old landlord well enough, and had been somewhat afraid of him. They
were not quite sure whether they should approve altogether so much of
the new one. Not that Miles had done anything to offend his father's
people; not that he had saliently departed from, or violently
transgressed, the traditions of conduct of the foregone Challoners;
not that there was the slightest suspicion of milk-sopism attaching to
Miles; but there was an uneasy notion abroad that Miles did not take
much interest in the old place, that he cared over-much for books and
"Lunnon," and was rather degenerately ignorant in matters appertaining
to agriculture. On the whole, though there was no disaffection among
the Rowley-Court tenantry, there was not much enthusiasm. Men who
would have thought it a desperate hardship, an entirely unnatural and
unheard-of slight indeed, if they had not been, whenever they desired
it, immediately admitted to an interview with old Mark Challoner, were
perfectly satisfied to transact their business with Mr. Styles the
steward, and displayed to the deputy very little curiosity respecting
his principal. They talked about Miles a little among themselves,
wondering whether he would not marry soon, and supposing, in rather
depreciatory accents, that he would bring a lady from "Lunnon."
"Glo'ster won't do for him, depend on it," said farmer Bewlay to the
buxom wife of farmer Oliver; "he'll be having a fine madam, what'll
want to be six months among the furriners, and save all she can at
home the other six. Times have changed since the old Squire brought
his pretty little wife home, and she shook hands with us all in the
churchyard, after morning prayers, her first Sunday here, and told us
how she knew us all already, from her husband's talk."
"I don't remember it myself," said farmer Oliver's buxom wife; "but
I've heard Tummas talk of it, and how she looked up at the old Squire
when she said, 'my husband,' and smiled just like a summer morning."
"Ay, indeed she did," assented farmer Bewlay; "but he wasn't the old
Squire then, but a brave and good-looking gentleman; and she was a
pretty girl, was madam, when she came to Rowley Court, and pretty up
to the time they carried her out of it. I helped in that job; and the
Squire had nowt but his little boys left."
"Has anybody heerd tell anything about Master Geoffrey?" said farmer
Oliver's wife, dropping her voice, and looking round her, as people
look who are talking of things which are not, or should not be,
generally mentioned. "Does Mr. Styles say anything about him? Does Mr.
Styles know where he is?"
"Mr. Styles never mentions him. I don't believe he knows any more than
we do where he is, or what has become of him. A handsome child he was,
and a handsome boy, though small and sly and cruel in his ways, and no
more like the Squire, nor madam neither, than I am. You remember
Master Geoffrey, surely?"
"O yes, I remember him. How the Squire changed after he went away! He
ran away to sea, didn't he?"
"Some folk said so; but for my part I don't believe it. The sea, from
all I've ever heard tell of it, ain't an easy life, nor a gay life,
for the matter o' that; and wherever Master Geoffrey run to--and it's
certain sure he can somewheres--it wasn't to sea, in my opinion. I
don't know; I only have my own thoughts about it; and I ha'n't no
means of knowin'. Anyhow he went, and Squire was never the same man
after; he were always good, and fond of the place, and that he were to
the last; but he never had the same smile again, and I never see him
talking to the children about, or patting them on the head, or doing
anything like what he used."
The honest dark eyes of Polly Oliver filled with tears. "It's all
true," she said, "and more than that. When our Johnny were lying in
the measles, and very near his end, the Squire came down one day along
with Dr. Barford, the physician, you know. He thought there ought to
be someone beside the doctor to see the child; and when Dr. Barford
told us--very kind and feeling like, I must say--as the child couldn't
be left with us any longer, and I began to cry, as was only natural,
and made no difference to me who was there, Squire or no Squire, he
says to me, quiet like, but I can hear the words now, 'You won't
believe me, Mrs. Oliver, and it would be hard to expect you should;
but there are worse things in life than seeing your boy die;' and then
he went away. And when Johnny was buried, and I had time to think of
anything else, I thought of the Squire's words; and many a time I
wondered what was the meaning that was in them, and knew it must be
Master Geoffrey's doing somehow, but how I did not know, and I suppose
no one knows."
"I don't know about that," said farmer Bewlay; "it's likely as Mr.
Miles knows, and Mr. Geoffrey; but I'm sure Styles doesn't: and
outside them two, and the Squire in his grave, I daresay nobody in
this world knows the rights of the story."
While the people over whom Miles Challoner had come to reign in the
course of nature thus curiously, but not unkindly or with any lack of
feeling, discussed the actualities and the probabilities of his life,
and raked up the memory of that mysterious family secret, strongly
suspected to be of a calamitous nature, which had long been hidden by
the impenetrable silence of the Squire, and now lay buried in his
grave, Miles Challoner himself was much occupied with the selfsame
subject. The unanswered question which he had asked his father in his
last moments,--the unsolved enigma which had disturbed his mind for
years, which haunted him now, and made all his life seem unreal,
wrong, and out of joint,--. rose up before him, and engaged his
thoughts constantly, almost to the exclusion of every other matter for
reflection except his father's death. The two linked themselves
together in a strong bond of pain, and held him in their withes. This
time was a very heavy one to the new master of Rowley Court.
His position was irksome to him. The privileges of proprietorship had
no charms for Miles Challoner. He disliked the business details in
which it involved him; he shrunk from the keenly painful associations
it produced; he suffered much from his loneliness,--from the
loneliness of the Court generally. Hitherto, whenever he had been
away, he had returned to enjoy the tranquillity--tranquillity which,
when it was tasted as a change, he appreciated very highly, but which
as the normal state of things wearied him rapidly and excessively. He
had had much companionship, in and since his boyhood, with his father,
and the blank left by the old Squire's death was indeed complete.
Miles Challoner, without deserving precisely the appellation of a
student, was fond of books. He was well-educated, not in a very
profound, but in a tolerably extensive and various sense; and his
taste took a literary turn early in life, which, wholly unshared by
his father, had been encouraged, fostered, and directed by his
father's friend, Lord Sandilands. Miles was a man of few intimacies.
He liked society; but no one would ever have called him sociable: he
had much more the air of frequenting general, in order to keep clear
of particular society; and this really was the case. Upon his
sensitive disposition the family secret, concerning which he had
vainly questioned his father on his death-bed, weighed heavily. It set
him apart, and kept him apart from anything like intimacy with young
men of his own age, because he felt that they too would be always
trying to find out that of which he himself was ignorant; and he was
not at ease with the older people, his father's contemporaries and
neighbours, because he was not sure whether they had any inkling or
certain knowledge of the family secret,--whether they were all in a
conspiracy to keep him in the darkness to which his father had
condemned him from the period of his brother's disappearance. Would
Mark Challoner have at last confided the truth to his son, had a
little more life, a little longer time, been accorded to him? This was
the vain question which Miles asked himself as he sat moodily in the
library after his solitary dinner, and watched the sun go down in a
sea of gold and azure behind the grand old woods of Rowley Court, or
strolled about the terrace listlessly, until the night fell. He could
never answer it--no one could ever answer it; but this did not keep
Miles Challoner from pondering upon it. He felt quite certain that
there was but one man in the world who could resolve his doubts, who
could tell him the worst,--might it not rather be the best--of this
matter, which so sorely perplexed him. That man was Lord Sandilands.
If anyone knew the truth, it was he; but whether Miles would ever hear
it from him depended, as he felt, entirely on the terms on which the
communication had been made, if it had been made at all, by his father
to Lord Sandilands. That the family lawyer knew nothing of it, Miles
felt confident; that Mr. Styles, the steward, was as ignorant and as
curious, if not as anxious, as himself, he had no doubt whatever.
There was no one to share, no one to aid, his mental inquietude. Was
his brother living, or was he the only--the last--one bearing the old
name left?
Very shortly after Mark Challoner's funeral had taken place, his son
had instituted the strictest possible search among the documents of
all kinds which the house contained, for any letters or papers bearing
upon the mysterious occurrences which had changed the aspect of
affairs at Rowley Court while the old Squire's sons were yet boys, and
had shut the younger out from his father's house into banishment and
oblivion. This search, which Miles had conducted quite alone, and had
been careful to keep from the knowledge of the servants, had been
entirely unrewarded by success, and had only revealed to Miles a
circumstance which still further deepened the mystery which tormented
him, and increased its distressing effect. Not only did there not
exist among the Squire's papers any memoranda, letters, or documents
of any description bearing upon, or having any reference to, the
period at which Geoffrey Challoner had left Rowley Court, but none
existed in any way, directly or indirectly, relating to him. Not a
scrap of his writing as a child, though Miles found his own little
letters to his father and mother carefully treasured up, with the
correct dates noted upon each packet; and his portrait, as a baby of
three years old, hung over the mantelpiece of his father's bedroom.
But there was no likeness of Geoffrey. By an effort of memory Miles
recalled the taking of that little portrait; he remembered how he
had sat upon his father's knee, and played with the heavy gold
hunting-watch, which was his especial delight--it was ticking away
still in a watch-stand in the library--while the artist did his work.
He remembered how his hair had been additionally brushed and curled for
the occasion; and--yes, now he distinctly remembered that Geoffrey's
portrait had also been painted. Where was it? What had been done with
it?
All the circumstances returned to Miles Challoner's memory. The two
pictures had hung side by side for years. Where was that of the
younger son? The Squire had gone abroad for a short time, and the
brothers had remained at Rowley Court under the care of their tutor.
They had both written regularly to their father; and Miles found all
his own letters of that period carefully preserved, arranged according
to their dates, and indorsed, in his father's hand, "My Son's Letters,
18-." But there was no scrap of Geoffrey's writing, there was no trace
that he had ever lived, to be found within the walls of Rowley Court.
Only when Miles went into the room which had been the brothers' study,
only when he entered and looked round the long-unused apartments which
had been their nursery and play-room, could he realise that there had
been two in that stately old house eleven years ago. The room which
had been his wife's had always been occupied by the Squire after her
death; otherwise Miles would have hoped to find some little memento of
his brother there,--there, where he could dimly remember--or was it
fancy, and not memory?--- a gentle pale face turned wistfully towards
him when, a very little child, he was brought to see the fading mother
who had been early and mercifully taken away from the evil to come.
From evil indeed, from terrible and irremediable evil Miles Challoner
felt it must have been; else why the hopeless banishment, why the
impenetrable silence, why the apparently complete oblivion? He brooded
upon these things in the solitude to which the first few weeks of his
proprietorship of Rowley Court were devoted, almost to the exclusion
of every other subject of thought; and Mr. Styles found him singularly
inattentive and indifferent to the details of his property and his
squirearchical duties, as that experienced person laid them before
him.
"I can't make him out, and that's the truth," Mr. Styles remarked to
Dr. Barford one day that the steward met the doctor taking his gig by
a short cut through a lane which formed the boundary of Rowley Court
on one side,--"I really can't make him out. He cares for nothing; and
it is not natural for a young gentleman like him. I was talking to him
this morning about the likely look of the turnips on the Lea Farm, and
I'm blessed if he heard one word in ten; and when I asked him a
question, just to rouse him up like, he said, 'O, ah! turnips, I think
you said? Of course do as you think best;' which was altogether
complete nonsense. Of course he's cut up about the Squire; and very
natural and right it is he should be so; but it ain't natural and it
ain't right to go on as he's going. And it's my belief," said Mr.
Styles, as he removed his hat, took his checked pocket-handkerchief
out of the crown, gave his face a desponding wipe with it, and
replaced it,--"it's my belief as he don't know the difference between
turnips and pine-apples; and there's a fine promise too, such as a man
might look to getting some credit along of."
"That's bad, Styles; that's bad," said Dr. Barford; "I don't like to
hear that my old friend's son is taking to moping. I'll call up at the
Court and see him to-morrow. Good-day, Styles;" and the Doctor drove
on, thinking gravely of the changes he had seen at Rowley Court,
though he knew as little of their origin as everybody else knew.
On the following day, as Miles Challoner and the Doctor walked
together upon the stone terrace, Miles stopped on the very spot
whence his father had taken his last look at the lands which had
called him master so long; and, looking full and earnestly at his
companion, asked him: "Dr. Barford, do you know why my brother left
his home? Do you know what that grief was which my father had on his
mind while he lived, and when he died?"
Dr. Barford hesitated for a moment before he replied to Miles
Challoner's question, but his hesitation arose from surprise, not from
uncertainty. There was not the least tone of doubt or reserve in his
voice and manner as he answered: "No, Mr. Challoner, your question
surprises me very much; but I can assure you most positively I know
nothing of the matter."
"Did my father never mention it to you? Never, even at the last, when
he knew--for he told me so--he was dying?"
"Never," said Dr. Barford; then he added, after a momentary pause, "he
did say something to me, on the last occasion when I had any talk with
him, which may have had some reference to your brother; but if it had
any, it was only incidental, and quite unexplained. He said something
about his sharing in the common lot--having a skeleton in the
cupboard; but that was all. Nothing more explicit ever passed his lips
to me."
"Then, or at any time?" asked Miles.
"Then, or at any time, Mr. Challoner," repeated Dr. Barford gravely;
and the two fell into silence, which lasted for several minutes.
At length Miles spoke:
"You really advise me to leave Rowley Court?" he said.
"Certainly I do; if not as a physician--in which capacity you do not
require my services, happily--as a friend. You are not naturally of a
very active temperament; and moping about here, in a place which is
necessarily gloomy just now, and where you have no congenial
occupation, will not improve you in that respect. Go up to town for
the remainder of the season, and then go abroad for a few months; and
you will find that you will come back wonderfully reconciled to being
master of Rowley Court."
"I like your advice," said Miles with unusual briskness of tone; "and
I think I will take it; at least I will take it so far as going up to
town is concerned. As for the rest--"
"As for the rest, you can think of it when the time comes," said the
Doctor. "And now I must bid you good-bye, and be off. I have to call
at Dale and Stourton before I go home to dinner."
As Dr. Barford drove down the wide smooth avenue, between the ranks of
tall stately elms which bordered the well-kept road, he thought:
"That's a fine young fellow, but of rather a gloomy turn of mind. I
hope he may fall in love and marry up in London, and bring a new
mistress to the Court."
Miles walked up and down the terrace long after the Doctor had left
him, and his face wore a brighter and more serene expression than it
had been used to wear of late. He had remained at Rowley Court long
enough; he knew how his affairs stood now; he had really nothing to
keep him there. He could only learn what he most desired to know, if
indeed it were possible to learn it at all, from Lord Sandilands, who
was just then at his house in London. He would go and stay with Lord
Sandilands. Having come to this decision, he turned into the house
with a brisker step, and felt the evening which ensued the least
dreary through which he had lived since the Squire died.
Had Mark Challoner been of a less autocratic disposition it would have
been very difficult, if not impossible, for him to have carried into
execution the absolute taboo under which he had placed the subject of
Geoffrey's disappearance. But the Squire had been a man of inexorable
determination of character; and as he was not at all capricious, and
exerted this resolution only when and where it was necessary, he had
never met with rebellion on the part of his elder son. What the story
of the younger had been, no one knew; no one had any certain
indication by which to guess. The tutor to whom the education of the
two boys had been intrusted was absent from Rowley Court when the
separation intended by Mark Challoner, and destined by Providence, to
be final, had taken place; and there was no reason to suppose that Mr.
Mordaunt had ever received any information concerning his former pupil
from the Squire. Had Miles Challoner been either older or younger at
the time of the occurrence, he might have been unable to observe his
father's peremptory command with the reluctant obedience he had
manifested until the end, when his pent-up anxiety had found vent in
his useless appeal to the dying Squire. But he had outlived the
restless irrepressible curiosity of the child, and he had not reached
the calm deliberative reasoning of the man. Now that the latter mode
of thought had fully come to him, he suffered keenly, as only such
sensitive natures have the gift to suffer, from his helpless ignorance
of his brother's fate. The thought haunted him. As children, he and
Geoffrey had loved each other well enough, after the childish fashion
which includes any amount of quarrelling and making-up again; but as
boys they had never got on very well together. They were essentially
different, with the difference which makes discord, not with the
contrast which produces harmony. Miles had always had an
unacknowledged consciousness that Geoffrey cared very little about
him, and this had had its influence upon the sensitive boy, an
influence even stronger than that of the want of accord in the tastes
and pursuits of the brothers. As Miles had advanced into manhood, he
had come to understand all the appalling gravity of such a sentence as
that which his father had passed upon his brother when he forbade the
mention of his name in the house where he had been born and bred. With
this comprehension came an intense yearning to know the meaning of the
sentence,--to be enabled to estimate its justice; a kind of revolt on
behalf of the banished brother, in which affection had less share than
an abstract love of right, happily strong in the nature of the young
man. And now there was no means of satisfying this yearning; the
secret had to all appearance died with the Squire, but its
consequences remained, to become an almost intolerable burden to Miles
Challoner.
Lord Sandilands received his young friend's letter with sincere
pleasure. He liked Miles; he liked his ideas and "ways;" he liked his
society The young man had a happy faculty for creating this kind of
liking among his fellows. He was large-minded and unselfish, and so he
did not neglect or trample upon the feelings of other people, or try
their tempers much or often. He was not a brilliant person, and
therefore could afford to be good-natured and unaffected; and though
he possessed rather more than an average amount of information upon
most subjects of general interest and importance, there were few men
less inclined to display their knowledge than Miles Challoner. He was
disposed to accord to everybody his or her fair share of conversation,
and had an acquiescent uncritical way with him which made friends for
him, particularly among women. Without being in the least deserving of
that truly opprobrious epithet, a lady's man, Miles had strong
partisans among "the conflicting gender;" and women who found him a
very impracticable subject for flirtation were ready to acknowledge
that his notions of friendship were peculiarly exalted and practical.
People who knew him, but had never troubled themselves to think about
him particularly, would nevertheless have answered promptly to any
question respecting him, that he was a fine honourably-minded fellow,
and rather clever than otherwise; and the few who knew him well would
have said substantially the same thing in more numerous and perhaps
stronger words. The truth is, it was about all that could be said of
Miles Challoner at the important period of his life which witnessed
his father's death and his own succession to the family property, with
its penalties and privileges of squiredom. He had reached man's estate
some years before; but there had been nothing in the course and manner
of his life previously to develop his character strongly,--to bring
its good or evil traits into prominence. It had been an even,
prosperous, happy life, on which he had entered with all the
advantages of high animal spirits and unblemished health. Whether he
had in him the stuff which either defies or moulds destiny, the
courage which is matured in suffering, the truth and steadfastness of
character which are at once weapons and armour in the strife of human
existence, it was for time to tell.
Time did tell.
"I'm uncommonly glad you have made up your mind to come to town,"
wrote Lord Sandilands to Miles Challoner; "it is the best thing you
can do; and so far from being disrespectful to your father's memory,
it is your best way of avoiding what might even appear disrespectful
to those who are no doubt watching you pretty closely. You have not a
taste for the things the Squire (God bless him!) delighted in, and you
cannot affect to have; because, in the first place, it is not in you
to affect, and, in the second, you would certainly be found out by
Mr. Styles. (Ceres and Pomona! shall I ever forget a dialogue between
your father and him about the best crop for the Bayhamsfields?) You
will offend your new people much less by absence than by indifference,
depend upon it. Then you can thoroughly depend on Styles; and you can
always put agricultural enthusiasm on paper. So come up, my dear boy;
and the sooner the better."
Miles Challoner went to London, and very soon after he arrived there
"time" began "to tell."