Chapter Fourteen.
“Not Jocelyn.”
It is a great comfort in life to have to do with people whose attitude of mind, whose action even, one can predicate with an amount of probability almost amounting to certainty; whom, in other words, one can “count upon” in unforeseen circumstances or complications. And when this species of confidence, of mutual trust, founded upon mutual knowledge, exists between members of the same family, it is a great link; in some ways even a stronger one than the bond of mutual affection. This I realised fully when I received my father’s letter. It was just what I had hoped for. He said frankly that he wished I could have told him more, but cordially approved of and authorised my consulting the Paynes. Furthermore, he announced his intention of setting off for Liverpool at once, giving me an address there, at which to communicate with him.
So as I sat in the drawing-room, waiting, as in my dream, I felt fully prepared for the coming interview.
Yes, it was curiously like my dream; when the door at last opened, I would scarcely have felt surprised had it been to admit the pathetic figure of Caryll Grey. But no! the visionary picture was reversed. There entered the much more substantial person of Mr Payne the elder, followed by his son. Had I felt less intent on the business in hand, I would almost have been amused at the combination of “professionalness” and friendliness in the bearing of the former as he greeted me. He was evidently brimful of curiosity and interest, which sentiments, nevertheless, were to some extent tempered by his difficulty in believing that a young girl like myself could have much of importance to communicate, and as to how far his son had thought it well to take him into his confidence I was of course in the dark.
“You wish to see me, my dear young lady?” Mr Payne, senior, began, after we had shaken hands, “and I made a point of attending to your behest at once.”
There was a kind of “remember my time is valuable,” in the words and manner, which I was quick to recognise.
“Yes,” I said. “It is very good of you to have trusted me by doing so, and I will not lose a moment. I think the best way of coming to the point is by showing you the letter I received from my father an hour ago, and after you have read it – it contains, so to say, my credentials – I will show you his former one.”
I handed him the envelope, which he received in silence, at once drawing out the sheet it contained, which he read with the greatest attention. In this letter, curiously enough, the name of Ernest Fitzmaurice was not mentioned, my father only alluding to his relative as “that unhappy man.” So a certain perplexity naturally mingled with Mr Payne’s expression of close interest and expectation, and when he had finished reading it, he held out his hand, without speaking, for the second, that is to say for the first letter, which I had already unfolded in readiness for his perusal.
And now indeed the dramatic interest of the situation rose visibly. As his eyes fell on the words, “Ernest Fitzmaurice,” I saw the colour plainly spread over his face, though he was no longer a young, and certainly not an emotional man.
Then there came a sound like a gasp, the colour receding as quickly as it had come, leaving him almost pallid.
“Ernest Fitzmaurice!” The words, though scarcely above a murmur, caught my ears at once. “Good God! the last man, the last human being one could have suspected. Can it be?”
I, though no lawyer, nor gifted with special instinct of the detective kind, had not lost any shadow of the expressions following each other on his face, nor of the words of his almost involuntary exclamations, and of course I was much better prepared than my companions for the probable incidents of the interview, and therefore to some extent at an advantage. So I waited for a moment or two while Mr Payne handed the letters to his son, and, still without addressing me, sat motionless, save for a slightly nervous tapping of his fingers on the table, his eyes fixed before him, till Clarence, with a gleam of something almost approaching triumph, laid the papers down in front of his father, with the two words only, into which, however, his tone infused a big amount of meaning —
“Well, sir?”
Then the father turned to me.
“I am so amazed,” he said, and his voice shook a little in spite of his professional self-control, “so amazed, as to what all this points to, as to feel almost stunned for the moment. May I ask you, Miss Fitzmaurice, as to what the knowledge was which, so far, I gather by these,” and he tapped the letters as he spoke, “you have had the courage and resolution to keep to yourself? And still further, how did you come by it?”
I shook my head. I had anticipated some such inquiry as the first result of his reading the letters, and I was prepared for it.
“Mr Payne,” I said earnestly, “I have thought it well out. I do not see that it is necessary for me to tell even you what you have just asked. You see I have withheld it from my own father, and he does not press it. The whole thing is, or may be, now well in train. You and he – my father, I mean – with the benefit of your advice and experience, can follow it out to the end, without my having to tell what I should be thankful to keep silent about. The information, or the knowledge, came to me accidentally. I was never intended to hear or to know what I did hear and do know. What, in point of fact, you now know yourself. If I have been able, as I think I have been, to start things, or rather to help things on in the right direction, by doing away with the difficulty that this man, Ernest Fitzmaurice, might have had in tracing – well, you know whom – I shall feel thankful and grateful for the rest of my life.”
“As to that,” was Mr Payne’s reply, “there can be no manner of doubt; whereas, but for your intervention, time of the most precious might have been lost. The whole éclaircissement, in short, delayed till, in the eyes of those chiefly concerned, it had lost its greatest value for them! But, excuse me, I still feel almost stupefied. It will take a little time for this extraordinary aspect of things to get into focus with me.”
“Yes,” I replied, “I can understand that.”
I said no more, hoping – for of course I cannot pretend that I felt no curiosity, no legitimate interest rather, in the further unfolding of the mystery – hoping that I was going to hear more. But such for the moment was not to be, though Mr Payne seemed by instinct to guess that I might be expecting him to volunteer some explanation, for his next words were in deprecation, almost in apology, for his not offering anything of the kind.
“I wish,” he said, “that I could talk the whole thing out with you. That is not yet in my power. And,” with a resumption of his friendly, less professional manner, “if I may say so, you have shown yourself such a sensible girl that I am sure you will understand the delay, though eventually it will be only due to you to hear the whole sad history.”
At this juncture, for the first time almost, Clarence spoke.
“If you have no objection, father,” he said, “it may be as well for Miss Fitzmaurice to understand that it is only of recent date that we have again been drawn into personal relations with the – Grey family. And I myself,” and he turned to me, “have only made their acquaintance within the last year or so.”
“I thought so,” was my reply, “for however carefully they have hedged themselves round, there could not but be gossip about the Grim House. The neighbours were quite aware of your first visit there!”
Mr Payne, senior, pricked up his ears at what I said.
“Indeed!” he remarked drily. But then his tone altered again. “I think I may tell you a little more, which, if you have not already suspected it, you are sure to hear through your father; that is, that ‘Grey’ is not the real name of the family.”
I bent my head in agreement; I had thought so. “And,” resumed Clarence, “the business which has taken us down, I more frequently than my father, has no connection with the old affair.” He glanced at Mr Payne, as if for acquiescence in his continuing. “Not very long ago, they – the elder brother – came into possession of a large estate, which we manage for him. Not that for many, many years past, twenty-five or thirty, I suppose – ”
“Fully twenty-five,” interposed the elder Mr Payne.
” – They have been at all poor,” continued Clarence. “And now they are really very wealthy.”
“I am glad to hear it,” I said simply. “Then, that poor Caryll can have everything that money can do to make him well, or at least to soften his suffering?”
“Yes,” Clarence replied, with emphasis on the words, “everything that money can do, but even money cannot always buy peace of mind.”
He said no more, for at that moment his father took out his watch and consulted it with a business-like air.
“Miss Fitzmaurice will excuse us, I am sure,” he said, “if we discuss practical matters in her presence.” I half rose from my seat.
“Shall I leave you?” I said; but this they at once both negatived.
“On the contrary,” said Clarence. “We shall be very much indebted to you if you will stay while we settle what is best to be done.”
“And I should very much like to hear it,” I said, seating myself again.
“The first thing, it seems to me,” the younger man continued, “is for one of us to go down to Liverpool, and at once to see Mr Fitzmaurice – your father, of course, I mean. Shall I do so, father?”
Mr Payne considered.
“You, I think, Clarence,” he said after a moment, “can do as well as, or better than I. Can you get off this afternoon?”
“Certainly,” answered his son. “I can reach Liverpool a little before midnight I think, and if in the meantime you, Miss Fitzmaurice, will write to your father, it will help on matters greatly. Please say I will go to the same hotel that he is at, so that I shall be ready for a talk with him as early as he likes to-morrow morning. And if,” now addressing Mr Payne, “I find, as I quite expect, that things are already satisfactorily in train – ” He glanced at me as he spoke, and I replied to the tacit inquiry.
“Yes,” I said, “I am sure you will find them so. My father is not one to let the grass grow under his feet in a case like this; he is too Irish!” and I smiled. “Very likely you will find that he has had the deposition – is that the word? – formally taken, and that what will fall to your share more directly will be deciding how to act towards the other side.”
“I,” said Mr Payne, “will hold myself in readiness to go down to Millflowers at a moment’s notice from you, Clarence. Perhaps it would be best for us to meet there?”
“Just what I was going to say,” replied his son. “Poor Caryll, it is to be hoped, is not in quite such a critical state as – as the new actor in the scene, but still I own to feeling desperately anxious, most unprofessionally excited,” and he smiled, “to see the thing through for the ‘Grim House’ people!”
“Is that what you call the place?” said his father. “Humph! Not a bad idea!”
“It did not originate with me,” said Clarence.
“And certainly not with me,” I said half-laughingly. “It seems to have been the local name of the place for ever so long.”
Mr Payne glanced at me. I could feel that he was – I beg pardon of his kind memory even now, dear good man, for my disrespect – I could feel that he was dying of curiosity to learn how much I know of Millflowers and its neighbourhood, and I had a slightly mischievous satisfaction in keeping him in the dark. It was a sort of tit-for-tat; for after all, my own eagerness to hear the whole story could not but be greater than his, already in possession as he was of the main facts. And as I surreptitiously peeped from behind the drawing-room curtains at the father and son, as they walked down the street together, talking eagerly, I did wish I could hear what they were saying to each other!
But I had no time to spare for any useless conjectures of this kind. There was my father to write to, and my letter must be careful and well considered; and this done, there was my godmother’s still somewhat ruffled plumage to smoothe down, for she was not yet quite her most approving and delightful self to me. And I began to realise for almost the first time in my life that I was feeling very tired – overstrained, I think, and suffering from a sort of reaction from the too great consciousness of responsibility of the last few days.
My godmother’s instincts were as quick as her sympathy was sure. She met me as I was carrying my letter downstairs, to ask her if I might have it posted at once. I had a babyish feeling that it would be a relief to know it in the safe possession of her Majesty’s post-office, till it should reach its destination the next morning.
“Certainly,” was Lady Bretton’s reply, as she took it from me. “It shall be sent off at once.”
“It is to father,” I explained. “There is no hurry, I know. He is at Liverpool.”
“At Liverpool?” she repeated, in a tone of surprise.
“Yes,” I said, “he is there on this business that I can’t tell you about, and the younger Mr Payne is to join him there to-night.”
I was glad to be able to tell her this, and I think it thoroughly satisfied her. The kindly caressing look and tone returned to her eyes and voice.
“You’re looking tired, dear,” she said, almost tenderly, “and, dear me, yes! – you leave me the day after to-morrow. I wish this annoying business had not cropped up just at the end of your visit – you were so blooming last week, before you set off to that Granville Square.”
“I am a little tired,” I said, “but I shall be all right again now. The business is out of my hands.”
“You quaint little person,” said Lady Bretton. “You and business! It seems too absurd! Now go and lie down till luncheon-time; you know I never coddle, but there are exceptions to all rules.”
I was not sorry to do as she told me; I rather suspect I fell asleep. I know that I felt quite myself again by the afternoon, and when I said good-bye to my dear hostess on Saturday, she expressed her satisfaction at seeing me looking so well.
“So they will trust you to me again, and that before very long, I hope,” were her last words.
No letters had reached me on these intervening days; none at least, except one from mother, in which, to my great delight, she said there were good hopes of father’s return home late on that same day.
“If so,” I thought to myself, “I shall soon hear all,” and in my heart I know that, though I was by no means devoid of curiosity – curiosity, too, naturally intensified by the events of the last week or two – my deepest feeling was an earnest desire to learn that the victims of a bad man’s treachery were now in the way, so far as was still possible, of having the terrible cloud removed from their lives.
“That poor Caryll,” I said, over and over again. “I can never forget his face as I saw it in my dream.”
My home-coming was very pleasant. Mother was so delighted to have me with her again, and I to be with her.
“It seems all to have been so successful,” she said. “Regina Bretton is really a godmother worth having. You are looking so well, and your dress is so pretty.” It was one of those chosen for me in London, and I felt pleased at mother’s approval.
“I am sure you will like all I have got,” I said. “Lady Bretton has such good taste, and knows so exactly where to go for everything, and just what to get.”
There was only one little damper on the satisfaction of my return, and that but a passing one. Father was not expected till very late that night, too late for me to see him. For we were old-fashioned enough in those days to think that a railway journey, of even a few hours’ duration, must be tiring, and mother made me go to bed at least an hour sooner than my usual reasonable time. And I fell asleep almost at once.
I awoke suddenly. I had, in fact, been awakened, though I did not know it, by the sound of the carriage returning from the station, whither it had gone to fetch father, and the sound of the clock striking twelve fell on my ear a minute or two later. Then, for, as I think I have said, my hearing was very quick, I heard a little bustle in the hall, and the sort of rustle and flutter through the house which tell of an arrival. Then father’s voice, and a murmur of welcome which must have been from mother, followed by a quick run up the stairs – father had the agile movements of a much younger man – and the cheery sound of voices down the corridor. Voices, whose were they? Father’s of course I distinguished at once, but whose was the second? Certainly not our immaculate butler or either of his subordinates, who would never have ventured to laugh in the august presence of their master! But I was too sleepy to trouble myself farther.
“One of the boys must have come unexpectedly,” I thought as I composed myself again. “Perhaps Dad sent for Jocelyn to help him at Liverpool, after all; he may have needed him.”
My long night’s rest left me quite ready to get up at my usual hour, and I ran down to the dining-room, anxious to learn all I could about father’s return. This would have to be gleaned in the first place from the servants no doubt, for mother was sure to be tired, and not improbably too much so to appear at breakfast. But punctual as I was, some one was there before me, standing in the window, looking out at our pretty garden, never prettier than in the spring, above all with the early morning light. A tall, well-knit figure familiar to me somehow.
“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.