Mother confided to her in return Moore’s prospects. Mrs Payne was a gentle, rather childish woman, of the type whom very clever men are often credited with preferring as wives, and we soon came to the conclusion that the old saying was exemplified in the present case. The sons, the elder one in particular, were decidedly intelligent above the average, and their admiration for their father and elder brother fully equalled that of their mother. Rupert, the invalid, took a great fancy to me, and before long I was the recipient of many of his secret hopes and aspirations, the most intense of which was that he should become a novelist.
“You see, Miss Fitzmaurice,” he said to me one day, “I have already, and would have increasingly, material ready to my hand. You don’t know what extraordinary stories lawyers come across! Many of them there is no breach of confidence in repeating, and my brother Clarence has told me bits of others quite as strange as any fiction.”
“Or stranger,” I remarked, for at that moment Isabel’s description of the Grim House and its inhabitants came into my mind.
“Yes,” said Rupert, “you are right. Some stories are ‘too strange not to be true.’ And you see I could piece bits together, so that nobody could possibly recognise anything. My father knows one story which he says he can’t tell us – I believe he says so partly to tantalise us – which he declares would make a first-rate sensational novel.”
“And will he never be able to tell it to you?” I inquired, more for the sake of seeming interested in poor Rupert’s conversation than because I cared to hear. The young fellow was rather of the “old-fashioned” order; there was a certain quaintness in his way of speaking which was not without its charm, though now and then he tired my patience a little. He was so unlike anything of “boy” kind I had ever come across.
“I don’t know,” he said gravely. “Perhaps, if all the people it concerns were dead. But they are none of them very old; some, I believe, still almost young.”
“Then you do know something about it, after all,” I replied, my interest increasing.
“Scarcely anything,” said Rupert; “only this much, that it is a secret which affects a whole family, and that my father and one other are the only beings who are in their confidence. He has told Clarence and me that some day he may have to tell us – when he gets very old, or if his memory were failing. Two outsiders must know it.”
“And yet it affects a whole family,” I repeated. “They must be a very reticent set of people.”
“More than that – it has darkened the life of a whole family; that, I think, was my father’s exact expression,” said Rupert eagerly. “I often and often think about it, and wonder what the secret can be.”
As he said the words there suddenly flashed across my mind the remembrance of an almost similar exclamation that I had recently heard. Yes – it was Isabel speaking of the Grim House and its inhabitants. What a strange coincidence it would be if the family Rupert was speaking of should be the same people! Too strange to be possible, I thought, for I have greater belief, now that I have seen more of life, in coincidences than I had then.
But the idea did not remain in my mind. I dismissed it as too wildly improbable, and Rupert talked on about his contemplated works of fiction and their “plots” in so interesting a way, that the “stranger than fiction” story I had come across was for the time completely forgotten by me.
Chapter Three.
Millflowers
Our “banishment,” as I sometimes, in a rather discontented mood, called our stay abroad, came to an end rather sooner than we had expected, thanks to an unusually early and genial spring, which made even father think that it would be safe for mother to return to England. Moore, by this time, was in rollicking health and quite fit for school. And to me our home-going was considerably damped by the knowledge that it meant parting with my last playfellow.
After all, the winter had passed pleasantly enough; the Paynes had helped to enliven it. But mother looked rather askance at my friendship with them.
“Boys again!” she said half-laughingly. “Always boys, Regina! I wish there had been a Miss Payne.”
“She wouldn’t have been half as nice as Isabel Wynyard,” I replied. “And Rupert is really not like a boy; his whole interest is in books and things of that kind. But you should be pleased, mamma, that I have made one real girl friend at last.”
“So I am,” was the reply – “very pleased.”
“If only they lived nearer us,” I said with a sigh. “I shall be dreadfully dull at home when Moore goes.”
“Poor Regina!” said mother. “Well, we must find something to cheer you up.”
And though I did not then know it, I believe that it was this conversation that made her determine to arrange for my promised visit to Millflowers as soon as possible. She never thought of herself, though home without any child in it seemed scarcely home to her.
The first few weeks, however, of our return were very bright and happy. It was delightful to have Moore so thoroughly his old self, and two of the other boys were with us for Easter; and best of all, the brother whom I cannot describe as a “boy,” as he was already twenty-five – Jocelyn – our “eldest,” and I must almost say “dearest.”
He was deputed to take Moore to his new school, and very proud Moore was of him as an escort.
“How I wish I could go to Winchester with you both,” I said the evening before they were to leave. “I really do think, Jocelyn,” for it was to him I was talking, “it was a great mistake that I was not a boy after all, though I have been trying my best lately to make myself into a ‘young lady’! Has mamma told you so? For every one of us, from oldest to youngest, confided in Jocelyn. I put the question with some little anxiety, for my brother’s approval was very dear to me.”
He smiled as he replied —
“Of course mother has told me of the new leaves you’ve been turning over – ever so many of them, though all in the same direction, and I intended to compliment you on the great improvement in your style of hairdressing and the general smartness of your appearance! Don’t be discouraged, my dear child. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day!’”
“And it will take a great many days, if ever, I suppose you mean,” I said rather ruefully, “to turn a tomboy into a oh! whatever she should be.”
“But by what I hear,” said Jocelyn, “you have got a first-rate model before you in the person of Miss Wynyard. I am very glad you are going to stay with them so soon.”
I opened my eyes at this.
“So soon?” I repeated. “I have not been told anything about it.”
“Well, don’t let out that I told you, then,” said Jocelyn. “I suspect mother must have been keeping it for a surprise to cheer you up after the boy and I leave to-morrow. I believe they are arranging for you to go very shortly. You will enjoy it, won’t you?”
“I hope so,” I replied. “As far as Isabel is concerned, I am sure I shall. But I have found out that I am very shy. I think I am rather afraid of Mr Wynyard. He has brought up his own daughters to be such pinks of perfection! I am sure that he won’t approve of frivolous conversation. I remember Isabel saying how he disliked gossip. And oh! by-the-bye,” I broke off, “that reminds me, Jocelyn! There is such a queer story, a regular mystery where the Wynyards live.”
“Do you mean that the house is haunted?” said Jocelyn, laughingly.
“Oh, no; it is not about their own house, but a house near, in the neighbourhood. ‘Grimsthorpe,’ I think, is its proper name. I wonder if I might tell you about it? It isn’t