The Grim House

“Jocelyn!” I exclaimed, my eldest brother’s personality being the first that occurred to me, “so it was you after all! Did father send for you?”

He turned; no, it was not Jocelyn? “I am so sorry,” he said, though the regret expressed was tempered by a smile, “I am so sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t help it! You see I am only myself – not ‘Jocelyn’?”

Though I did not say so, I cannot but confess that the disappointment was scarcely worthy of the name, for the unexpected guest was Clarence Payne!

“Oh, how delightful!” was my first thought; “now I am going to hear all! And things must have gone rightly – he looks in such good spirits – Dad and he must have taken to each other.”

But even while these ideas rushed across my mind, I was conscious, simultaneously, as it were, of extreme surprise, and this, I suppose, must have been the prominent expression of my face, for the newcomer looked just a shade crestfallen.

“I am so sorry,” he began again, and this pulled me together.

“Please don’t say that,” I exclaimed; “you make me feel so rude, and indeed I don’t mean to be so. I was only, well, very surprised. But I am very pleased, for ever so many reasons. To begin with, I feel sure things went well at Liverpool, otherwise you would not be here, and – and – what about the poor Greys, and did you and father travel here together? and – oh I have such a lot of questions to ask. I feel half-choking with them,” and I sat down, really feeling almost overwhelmed with the rush of thoughts and “wonderings” in my brain.

“You shall ask what you please, and I scarcely think, that there will be anything which we – or I – will not be able to answer,” he said kindly. “Indeed, it was partly, greatly, to satisfy your most natural wish – right – to hear more, that I have come here.”

I felt my cheeks grow red.

“It is very good of you to put it in that way, Mr Payne,” I said. “I felt so ashamed when your father commended me the other day; even you do not fully know how wrong and foolish I was. No one does except Moore and myself. No, scarcely Moore. I should like you to know the whole of it, but you see I don’t want to bring in Isabel Wynyard, and possibly expose her to blame for having gossipped.” I stopped in consideration. “Perhaps,” I resumed, “no one need ever know any more,” and I looked up at him as I said so.

“I think very decidedly that no one need ever hear or think any more of that part of it,” was his reassuring reply. “I can put it all together pretty well, if it is any satisfaction to you for me to say so. And your father is content to ask you no more than the fact of certain knowledge having come to you that was not intended for you, and, after all, ‘all’s well that ends well,’” and here he smiled.

“Then it has or is going to end well?” I said eagerly.

At my words he grew grave again.

“Yes,” he replied, “though,” he hesitated a moment, “I don’t want to seem heartless, and death is always awe-inspiring, especially in such circumstances as we have just seen it – your father and I, I mean.”

“Then he is dead?” I said breathlessly. “That unhappy man, Ernest Fitzmaurice?”

Clarence bent his head.

“An hour or two after I saw him,” he replied, “he died. But – truly repentant.”

I felt shocked, and for a moment or two we did not speak.

Then “I am so glad you were in time to be with father,” I said.

“Thank you,” he replied. “I think I was of use to him, though he had done excellently. Got the deposition fully drawn out, signed and witnessed, so that there was scarcely anything for me to do at Liverpool, and therefore, armed with my full credentials, I hurried off to Millflowers, where my father met me. But as to this part of it, Mr Fitzmaurice and I must tell it to you together, more at leisure,” for just then the servant came into the room with the breakfast trays.

“Only one word,” I said eagerly. “It went off well? And that poor Caryll?”

“Wonderfully well. You would scarcely believe how wise and tender my father was.”

Dad joined us at breakfast, declaring he was not tired at all, and as soon as it was over, we three adjoined to his own den, where I learnt for the first time the details of the Grim House mystery.

Perhaps it will be best that I should give it in simple narrative style, though, as can readily be imagined, the story related to me was not uninterrupted by a good many questions on my aide.

These were the facts: —

Many years before, the elder Mr Grey, whose real name was that of a well-known Welsh family, the Gwynneths of Maerdoc, to which he belonged, had fallen into terrible trouble. He was poor at the time, though with good prospects, well-intentioned, honourable and affectionate, but dangerously reckless and impulsive, and in consequence of this, though from no actual wrong-doing of his own, seriously, considering his circumstances, in debt. The details of his position need not be entered into, as they bear little upon his history, beyond saying that they were shared, more than shared indeed, and had been greatly caused by a friend of his, the Ernest Fitzmaurice of my narrative. But Ernest was a man of very different character. He was calculating and unscrupulous, thought highly of in some quarters even, though not by his own family, as my father recollected. The two, by an unfortunate coincidence, were staying in the same house on a visit, when their troubles came to a crisis. An extraordinary robbery took place – I am not sufficiently “up” in such matters to give full particulars as to the nature of the bonds or documents stolen, but they were such as might have been utilised with safety by the thief. Such, however, was not the case. They were traced to young Gwynneth, who was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. The blow fell on his family with appalling horror. But no one, not even his devoted sisters or his boy brother Caryll, his nearest relations, felt it more terribly to all appearance than his friend, Fitzmaurice, at that time the fiancé of Jessie Gwynneth. He exerted himself frantically to have the sentence mitigated, but to no avail. And the dogged silence maintained by the prisoner, whose whole nature seemed changed, added enormously to the weight of evidence against him. What his sisters thought during the term of his imprisonment never transpired. Afterwards, I have always suspected, and as far as regards the brother I indeed know, that his family came to believe him entirely innocent.

Things grew easier for them, materially speaking, by a moderate fortune being left to them shortly before the elder brother’s imprisonment terminated. But he came back to them an utterly crushed, broken, and aged man, to find the “girls” he had left in little better case than himself. Only the youngest of the four, Caryll, despite the accident which had made him a life-long cripple, retained any cheerful or hopeful hold on life.

Then came the decision of the four to cling together at all costs; to hide themselves from the world, giving up everything but each other. Ernest Fitzmaurice had disappeared shortly after his victim’s imprisonment began, carrying with him, as was revealed by his dying deposition, a comparatively trifling portion of his theft, which he had had time to realise, and on which, thanks to his skill and adroitness, was founded the large fortune he eventually made. He was never heard of again while alive by the Gwynneths.

With Mr Payne’s help, Grimsthorpe House was taken for the brothers and sisters under the name of “Grey,” and there for twenty years they had lived their strange and isolated life, refusing even to alter its tenor when the second and much more important fortune became theirs. Why, it may be asked, did the elder brother – Justin was his name – never attempt to clear himself? I can scarcely say. Mr Payne, in lapse of time, had become convinced of his client’s innocence, and had often, but vainly, prayed for full confidence. His own opinion was, I think, that Mr Gwynneth’s brain had grown morbid on the point. Not improbably, too, the poor man’s seeing that even this old friend and adviser had not the most shadowy suspicion of the real culprit, may have helped to seal his lips.

“Poor Ernest!” Mr Payne used to say sometimes, “if he were still alive, he would have been back with us to join me in urging you to tell the whole. But he must be dead – indeed, Gwynneth, I think it broke his heart.”

“What torture it must have been to him to listen to me,” the kind-hearted man added, when he told us this. “No, Caryll was his only confidant, I feel sure.”

“And did you suspect no one else?” I remember asking.

“Yes, a certain man-servant did not escape all suspicion of collusion,” was the reply. “But he, we knew as a fact, was dead, and the mere allusion to him was enough to excite Gwynneth painfully. He swore he would never move a finger to clear himself, unless Providence itself interposed.”

“Which it did,” said Clarence. This fragment of conversation took place some time later, when I was again a guest at Granville Square.

Well, it “ended well,” as far as could be so late in the day.

The Gwynneths left Millflowers and went to live at their own beautiful house. And there, as they deserved, they were respected by all whom they allowed to know them, loved by the very few whom they admitted to intimacy. But the iron had entered too deeply into the souls of the three elder ones for them ever to be “like other people.” Caryll and the younger sister are still living, very old but very peaceful, happy in making others so.

Publicity, so far as it could serve any good purpose, was given to Ernest Fitzmaurice’s statement. But the more than a quarter of a century that had passed had almost obliterated the once famous trial from the world’s short memory – better so, perhaps.

One trivial question I remember putting to Clarence that Sunday morning. “What was the mystery of the ‘black curtain’?”

He smiled.

“Oh, an arrangement of some gymnastic kind, which it had been hoped might be of service to poor Caryll’s crippled leg.”

My next visit to London, though again under my godmother’s auspices, had a definite object – the choosing of my trousseau. Clarence has been my husband for – ah, I must not say how many years! Lady Bretton was not pleased at first, but she “came round” by degrees, and now – she is quite an old lady, but a very pretty and alert one – she is more than proud of the great name he has won for himself, and always ready to say that her godchild’s is one of the happiest marriages she has ever known.

One exception – no, one addition I may make to this. My Isabel became my sister-in-law, and Jocelyn and she are our life-long and dearest friends.