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.
