SIR GILBERT’S THEORY
Lady Pell sat looking at her kinsman for a little while in silence,
waiting for him to resume his narrative, and it was not till she
perceived that he had become oblivious of her presence and was on the
point of lapsing into one of his brown studies, that she spoke.
“And what happened after that, cousin?” she asked, “that is to say,
after you discovered that you had been brought indoors by the Grey
Monk?”
Sir Gilbert, who came to himself with a little start when she began to
speak, said: “I have no distinct consciousness of anything that
followed till I found Trant standing over me, looking half scared out
of his wits, and can only suppose that I must have fainted again. But
that, although only for a space of two or three seconds, my eyes beheld
a robed and cowled figure, I am as positive as that they behold you at
this moment. That it was no hallucination, no piece of visual cheatery,
I am firmly convinced.”
Some people, in Lady Pell’s place, might have said to Sir Gilbert:
“Yet, when others professed to have seen the Grey Monk, you treated
their assertions with contempt, and would have it that they were the
victims of a self-created illusion.” But Lady Pell was too wise to
venture any such observation. What she said was: “If you have told me
this, cousin, with any idea that I might perhaps be able to furnish you
with even a hint of some clue to the mystery, I must at once confess
that your expectation has been wholly in vain. You yourself cannot
possibly be more puzzled than I am.”
“I hardly expected to hear you say otherwise,” he remarked with a half
sigh; and with that he again subsided into silence.
Lady Pell resumed her knitting, only to let her hands fall idle again
at the end of a couple of minutes, while wholly unaware that she had
done so.
Nothing was heard save the monotonous ticking of the clock on the
chimney-piece and the hissing and sputtering of the half-burnt logs on
the hearth.
“Louisa,” spoke the Baronet suddenly in a voice which brought her
ladyship back with a start from the land of visions in which she had
been mentally wandering—“Louisa, for the last hour or more a very
singular idea has intruded itself persistently upon me; it is one which
I have striven in vain to get rid of; indeed, so strongly does it hold
me that it has almost assumed the proportions of an absolute
conviction. It is—that if the cowl of the Grey Monk, who for weeks past
has, so to speak, haunted the Chase, could be plucked back, there would
stand revealed the features of none other than my eldest-born—my son so
long believed to be dead—my hardly dealt-by Alec!”
“Goodness gracious! Cousin Gilbert, whatever made you get that notion
into your head?” Lady Pell was staring at him as if she already
detected symptoms of brain disease.
“It came into my mind, Louisa; I didn’t put it there, and it refuses to
be dislodged. But what if Alec be not really dead? What if the report
that he was killed by that explosion was based on some error to which
we have not the key? You remember the letter, written in an evidently
disguised hand, which was found on my study table together with the key
of the strong room?” Lady Pell nodded assent. “Who but Alec would have
been in the position to point out the fact that the child—his child—who
had died in infancy, was not a boy, but a girl? Who but Alec—my
Alec—would have cared to press a kiss on an old man’s brow?”
“There is certainly some feasibility in what you say,” remarked her
ladyship; “but if Alec were still alive he would surely have made the
fact known to you long before now.”
“You forget that he was a banished man—that it was a condition of the
agreement between us that he should never set foot in England till he
had my permission to do so. Heaven knows, permission would have been
given long ago, because long ago all his early faults and follies were
condoned and forgiven, had the faintest suspicion that he was still
among the living ever found lodgment in my mind!”
“Even granting your assumption that Alec is still alive (and with all
my heart I pray he may be), by what possible motive could he be
influenced in coming back to the Chase and allowing himself to be seen
by several people under the guise of the family spectre?”
“Ah, now you ask me a question which it is impossible to answer with
any degree of certitude. Perhaps it had somehow come to his ears that I
had adopted an impostor as my heir. In any case, I care not what may
have been the motive which brought him back, if only it were he whose
arms I felt about me three short hours ago. I am alone in the world,
Louisa, alone and old. I have just been made the victim of a most
shameful fraud, and if only, by some miracle, my eldest-born could be
restored to me, I should feel that the remnant of my days had indeed
been blessed to me far beyond my deserts!”
“Have you thought of any plan yet by which your theory can be tested
and the mystery of the Grey Monk elucidated?”
“Not yet—not yet. But I generally lie awake for several hours in the
course of the night, and I shall have time to turn the matter over in
my mind before morning.”
That evening Sir Gilbert did not make his appearance in the
drawing-room, but retired at an earlier hour than usual, to fall asleep
almost immediately, but only to awake at the end of three hours and
remain so till daybreak. During that wakeful period he formulated a
certain theory in his mind which he determined to put to the proof
immediately after breakfast.
The theory thus worked out by him, briefly stated, was to the following
purport:
Some month or more had now gone by since the Grey Monk had so startled
Bessie Ogden one evening on the terrace. So far as was known, that was
the apparition’s first appearance for upwards of twenty years. Now, it
was quite evident to Sir Gilbert that if his son had been haunting the
place for several weeks, it could only have been with the knowledge and
connivance of one or more members of his household. How otherwise could
Alec—supposing always that it were Alec—have been supplied with food
and lodging? How else could he have had the run of the house at
midnight, as the incident of the strong room proved him to have had?
Now, Sir Gilbert’s oldest dependent, and indeed the only one left whose
memory could go back to so far a period; one, too, whose company had
been much sought after by Alec as a youth, was Martin Rigg, the
ex-keeper. Martin, who was now over sixty years old, had long been
superannuated. Owing to a gunshot wound in his leg, the outcome of a
poaching affray, he was a permanent cripple. He and his widowed
daughter were now quartered in the old Tower, of which mention was made
in the early part of this narrative as being the only remaining portion
of the original Chase, the semi-ruinous rooms of which had been
specially renovated and fitted up for their occupancy by Sir Gilbert.
Linking one thing with another in his memory, the Baronet, by the time
he arose, had come to the conclusion that if anybody was more likely
than another to be cognisant of his son’s presence at the Chase, that
person was Martin Rigg.
He breakfasted in his own room, but in order to relieve the anxiety
which he knew Lady Pell would feel on his account, he wrote her a brief
note and sent it by Trant, in which he told her that, this morning, he
felt quite as well as he usually did, that he had a little special
business to transact in the course of the forenoon, but that he would
not fail to meet her at luncheon. Then after breakfast, he left the
house by the back entrance and took his way through the spinny in the
direction of the Tower.
Even at his slow rate of progression, a few minutes’ walking brought
him to it. Grey and stern as he always remembered it, it loomed before
him with no visible sign of life about it. That, however, in no wise
disturbed him. He did not doubt that he should find either Martin or
his daughter, or, more likely still, both of them at home. Going up to
the door, which, though of modern make, was of oak and studded with
huge square-headed nails, he rapped loudly at it with the ivory knob of
his cane; but to his summons even when repeated, there came no
response. Then he tried the handle, but only to find that the door was
locked. Thus, at the very outset of the inquiry he had been about to
enter upon, he found himself unaccountably baulked.