"Well, sir, at any rate total abstinence will never do for you. Why,
you'll have no peace up at the hall, especially in the shooting season,
if you mean to take up with them exotic notions. Be a man, sir, and
asseverate your independence. Show that you can take too much or too
little as you have a mind. I wouldn't be a slave, sir. `Britons never
shall be slaves.'"
Here the conversation closed. The tempter had so far gained his end
that he had made Frank disinclined to join himself at present to the
body of stanch abstainers. He would wait and see--he preferred
moderation, it was more manly, more self-reliant. Ah, there was his
grievous mistake. Self-reliant! yes, but that self was blinded, cheated
by Satan; it was already on the tempter's side. So Frank put off, at
any rate for the present, joining the abstainers. He was, however, very
watchful over himself never openly to transgress. He loved Mary, and
could not bear the thoughts of losing her, but in very deed he loved his
own self-indulgence more. There was a constraint, however, when they
met. He could not fully meet her deep truthful eyes with a steady gaze
of his own. Her words would often lead him to prayer, but then he
regarded iniquity in his heart--he did not wish to be taken at his
prayer--he did not wish to be led into pledged abstinence, or even into
undeviating moderation at all times--he wished to keep in reserve a
right to fuller indulgence. Poor Mary! she was not happy; she felt
there was something wrong. If she tried to draw out that something from
Frank, his only reply was an assurance of ardent affection and devotion.
There was no apparent evil on the surface of his life. He was regular
at church, steady at home, moderate in what he drank at his father's
table and at other houses. She felt, indeed, that he had no real
sympathy with her on the highest subjects, but he never refused to
listen, only he turned away with evident relief from religious to other
topics. Yet all this while he was getting more deeply entangled in the
meshes of the net which the drink, in the skilful hands of Juniper
Graves, was weaving round him. That cruel tempter was biding his time.
He saw with malicious delight that the period must arrive before very
long when his young master's drinking excesses would no longer be
confined to the darkness and the night, but would break out in open
daylight, and then, then for his revenge.
It was now between two and three years since the harvest-home which had
ended so unhappily. Frank was twenty-one and Mary Oliphant eighteen.
This was in the year in which we first introduced them to our readers,
the same year in which it was intended that Hubert Oliphant should join
his uncle Abraham, at any rate for a time, in South Australia. For the
last six months dim rumours, getting gradually more clear and decided,
had found their way to the rectory that Frank Oldfield was occasionally
drinking to excess. Mary grew heart-sick, and began to lose her health
through anxiety and sorrow; yet there was nothing, so far, sufficiently
definite to make her sure that Frank, since his promise to observe
strict moderation, had ever over-passed the bounds of sobriety. He
never, of course, alluded to the subject himself; and when he could not
help remarking on her altered looks, he would evade any questions she
put to him on the painful subject, or meet them by an appeal to her
whether she could prove anything against him; and by the observation
that nothing was easier than to spread rumours against a person's
character. She was thus often silenced, but never satisfied.
June had come--a bright sky remained for days with scarce a cloud; the
hay-makers were everywhere busy, and the fields were fragrant with the
sweet perfume of the mown grass. It was on a quiet evening that Mary
was returning home from a cottage where she had been to visit a sick
parishioner of her father's. Her way lay in part through a little
plantation skirting a hay-field belonging to the Greymoor estate. She
had just reached the edge of the plantation, and was about to climb over
a stile into a lane, when she heard loud and discordant voices, which
made her blood run cold; for one of them, she could not doubt, was
Frank's.
"This way, Mr Frank, this way," cried another voice, which she knew at
once to be that of Juniper Graves.
"I tell you," replied the first voice, thickly, "I shan't go that way; I
shall go home, I shall. Let me alone, I tell you,"--then there followed
a loud imprecation.
"No, no--this way, sir--there's Miss Mary getting over the stile; she's
waiting for you, sir, to help her over."
"Very good, Juniper; you're a regular brick," said the other voice,
suddenly changing to a tone of maudlin affection; "where's my dear
Mary--ah, there she is!" and the speaker staggered towards the stile.
Mary saw him indistinctly through the hedge--she would have fled, but
terror and misery chained her to the spot. A few moments after and
Frank, in his shirt-sleeves, (he had been joining the hay-makers), made
his way up to her. His face was flushed, his eyes inflamed and staring
wildly, his hair disordered, and his whole appearance brutalised.
"Let me help--help--you, my beloved Mary, over shtile--ah, yes--here's
Juniper--jolly good fellow, Juniper--help her, Juniper--can't keep
shteady--for life of me."
He clutched at her dress; but now the spell was loosed, she sprang over
the stile, and cast one look back. There stood her lover, holding out
his arms with an exaggerated show of tenderness, and mumbling out words
of half-articulate fondness; and behind him, a smile of triumphant
malice on his features, which haunted her for years, was Graves, the
tempter, the destroyer of his unhappy master. She cared to see no more,
but, with a cry of bitter distress, she rushed away as though some
spirit of evil were close behind her, and never stopped till she had
gained the rectory.