Richard Dowling - The Weird Sisters - A Romance. Volume 1 of 3

Mr. Henry Walter Grey sat in his dining-room sipping claret on the evening of Monday, the 27th August, 1866. His house was in the suburbs of the city of Daneford.

Mr. Grey was a man of about forty-five years of age, looking no more than thirty-eight. He was tall, broad, without the least tendency to corpulency, and yet pleasantly rounded and full. There was no angularity or harshness in his face or figure. The figure was active looking and powerful, the face open, joyous, and benignant. The hair had begun to thin at his forehead; this gave his face a soothing expression of contented calm.

His forehead was broad and white; his eyes were constant, candid, and kindly; his nose was large, with quickly-mobile sensitive nostrils; and his mouth well formed and full, having a sly uptwist at one corner, indicating strong sympathy with humour. He wore neither beard nor moustache.

His complexion was bright without being florid, fair without being white. His skin was smooth as a young girl's cheek. He stood six feet without his boots. He was this evening in the deepest mourning for his wife, whom he had lost on Friday, the 17th of that month, August.

Although he occupied one of the most important positions in Daneford, no person who knew him, or had heard of him from a Danefordian, ever called him either Henry or Walter. He was universally known as Wat Grey. Daneford believed him to be enormously rich. He was the owner of the Daneford Bank, an institution which did a large business and held its head high.

Indeed, in Daneford it was almost unnecessary to add the banker's surname to his Christian name; and if anyone said, "Wat did so-and-so," and you asked, "Wat who?" the purveyor of the news would know you for an alien or a nobody in the city.

The young men worshipped him as one of themselves, who, despite his gaiety and lightheartedness, had prospered in the world, and kept his youth and made his money, and was one of themselves still, and would continue to be one of them as long as he lived.

Elder men liked him for the solid prudence which guided all his business transactions, and which, while it enabled him to be with the young, allowed him to exercise over his juniors in years the influence of an equal combined with the authority of experience. Lads of twenty never thought of him as a fogey, and men of thirty looked upon him as a younger man, who had learned the folly of vicious vanities very much sooner than others; and consequently they confided in him, and submitted themselves to him with docility. Young men assembled at his house, but there were no orgies; elder men came, and went away cheered and diverted, and no whit the less rich or wise because discussions of important matters had been enlivened with interludes of gayer discourse.

Wat Grey was one of the most active men in Daneford. He was Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, of the Commercial Club, and of the Harbour Board.

He was Vice-chairman of the Daneford Boat Club, and Treasurer of the Poor's Christmas Coal Fund.

If he was rich, he was liberal. He subscribed splendidly to all the local charities, but never as a public man or as owner of the Daneford Bank. What he thought it wise to give he always sent from "Wat," as though he prized more highly the distinction of familiarity his town had conferred upon him than any conventional array of Christian and surnames, or any title of cold courtesy or routine right. It was not often he dropped from his cheerful level of high-spirited and rich animal enjoyment into sentimentalism, but on one occasion he said to young Feltoe: "I'd rather be 'Wat' to my friends than Sir Thingumbob Giggamarigs to all the rest of the world."

There was nothing Daneford could have refused him. He had been mayor, and could be Liberal member of Parliament for the ancient and small constituency any time he chose when the Liberal seat was vacant. Daneford was one of those constituencies which give one hand to one side and the other hand to the other, and have no hand free for action. Walter Grey had always declined the seat; he would say:

"I'm too young yet, far too young. As I grow older, I shall grow wiser and more corrupt. Then you can put me in, and I shall have great pleasure in ratting for a baronetcy. Ha, ha, ha!"

Of late, however, it had been rumoured the chance of getting the rich banker to consent to take the seat (this was the way everyone put it) had increased, and that he might be induced to stand at the next vacancy. Then all who knew of his personal qualities, his immense knowledge of finance, and his large fortune, said that if he chose he might be Chancellor of the Exchequer in time; and after his retirement from business, and purchase of an estate, the refusal of a peerage was certain to come his way.

As he sat sipping his claret that Monday evening of the 27th of August, 1866, his face was as placid as a secret well. Whether he was thinking of his dead wife and sorrowing for her, or revolving the ordinary matters of his banking business, or devising some scheme for the reduction of taxation in the city, or dallying mentally with the sirens who sought to ensnare him in parliamentary honours, could no more be gathered from his face than from the dull heavy clouds that hung low over the sultry land abroad.

It was not often he had to smoke his after-dinner cigar and sip his after-dinner claret alone; men were always glad to dine with him, and he was always glad to have them; but the newness of his black clothes and of the bands on his hats in the hall accounted for the absence of guests. He was not dressed for dinner. One of the things which had made his table so free and jovial was that a man might sit down to it in a coat of any cut or colour, and in top-boots and breeches if he liked. Before his bereavement he would say:

"Mrs. Grey – although she may not sit with us – has an antiquated objection to a man dining in his shirt-sleeves. I have often expostulated with her unreasonable prejudice, but I can't get her to concede no coat at all. You may wear your hat and your gloves if you like, but for Heaven's sake come in a coat of some kind. If you can't manage a coat, a jacket will do splendidly."

Mrs. Grey never dined out. In fact, she saw little company; tea was always sent into the dining-room.

Mr. Grey had not got more than half-way through his cigar on that evening of the 27th of August when a servant knocked and entered.

The master, whose face was towards the window, turned round his head slowly, and said in a kindly voice:

"Well, James, what is it?"

"A man, sir, wants to see you."

James was thick-set, low-sized, near-sighted, and dull. He had been a private soldier in a foot regiment, and had been obliged to leave because of his increasing near-sightedness. But he had been long enough in uniform to acquire the accomplishment of strict and literal attention to orders, and the complete suspension of his own faculties of judgment and discretion. Although his master was several inches taller than James, the latter looked in the presence of the banker like a clumsy elephant beside an elegant panther.

"A man wants to see me!" cried Mr. Grey, in astonishment, not unmixed with a sense of the ridiculous. "What kind of a man? and what is his business."

He glanced good-humouredly at James, but owing to the shortness of the servant's sight the expression of the master's face was wasted in air.

James, who had but a small stock of observation and no fancy, replied respectfully:

"He seems a common man, sir; like a man you'd see in the street."

"Ah," said Mr. Grey, with a smile; "that sort of man, is it? Ah! Which, James, do you mean: the sort of man you'd see walking in the streets, or standing at a public-house corner?"