He was a very good son. I felt that her remarks and manner irritated him a little, but he never showed it, so as to chill or hurt her in the least.
“He is so deeply interested in the poor,” she continued, turning to me, “and in all the wonderful plans on foot now-a-days for improving their condition.”
At this it seemed to me that Clarence Payne got rather red.
“My dear mother,” he said, “you give me credit for far more virtues than I possess. But perhaps Miss Fitzmaurice knows already that all your home-farm poultry turn to swans, whatever they were to start with. I am afraid philanthropic schemes and I haven’t had much to say to each other of late. And after all,” here he spoke more slowly, and I knew that his words were tacitly addressed to me, “I doubt if my greatest sympathy is with the poor. It sounds hard-hearted perhaps, but there are, there must be, miseries which they could not feel in the same way as those of our own classes do,” and again it seemed to me that I caught an almost inaudible sigh. And by one of those “brain-waves,” as I believe it is now the fashion to call them, from that moment I felt convinced that he had been down at the Grim House again, and that troubles were thickening there.
There came another murmur of maternal admiration from Mrs Payne, but her son’s last words had saddened me, and a moment or two later I owned to being tired and sleepy, and we bade each other good-night.
My first waking thoughts the next morning were that something strange and unexpected had happened. For a moment or two the unfamiliar room, with its handsome but heavy furniture, very different from the light chintz-hung quarters, with their pretty little adornments, which my godmother had prepared for me, added to my confusion of mind. Then, bit by bit, the events of the day before unrolled themselves in my memory.
“What can be the matter,” I thought, “with the Greys? For I am perfectly certain that something new or worse is the matter. And how can I find out? And what could I do to help them if I knew? Would it, could it ever be right and honourable to tell what I heard—that name?”
My heart beat faster at the very idea. I felt as if I must confide my perplexities to some one; yet to do so to Clarence Payne would, I knew, be manifestly unfair, unless I could tell him the whole. Still, might there not be a sort of compromise? Under the circumstances, the very strange circumstances, of our both knowing what we did, though he little suspected the possibly vital information I possessed—under the circumstances, surely there would be no breach of etiquette or even of good taste in my asking him if he had been there, and if my intuitions as to some new cause of distress were correct? For before I could even battle out the question with myself thoroughly as to whether anything would justify me in betraying my secret, I must know if the new complications I suspected lay in that direction. And Clarence was my only possible source of information. Isabel knew nothing, I felt sure, and it was not the least use applying to her.
So by the time I was dressed I had arrived at a kind of decision. I would lead the conversation round to our former meeting, on the first possible chance that offered itself of talking privately with the younger Mr Payne; a word from him would be enough to show me my ground. If he at once appeared determined to ignore all reference to the Greys and their affairs, I should, I feared, feel compelled to give up all hope of being of use. But this I did not anticipate. The covert allusions in his remarks the night before, which had at once struck me as more or less intended, made me instinctively certain that no expression of interest in his unfortunate clients on my part would be resented; nay more, that so long as I only mentioned them to himself alone, something of the kind would seem but natural and called for. Then again, perhaps the new trouble, whose existence I so strongly suspected, might be something quite open and unmysterious, concerning the health of the cripple brother or of some other of the family perhaps, which even their confidential lawyers—and such it was impossible to doubt was the Paynes’ relation to them—might allude to, to any one who knew the Grimsthorpe people even by name only.
“It is clear that they are the originals of Rupert’s mysterious family,” I said to myself, “but I will not come within a mile of allusion to them to him. It would not be fair. I don’t believe, to begin with, that he knows anything, and I rather suspect from his manner yesterday that he is frightened at having told me the little he did. No; I can only try my ground with Clarence, no one else,” and my spirits rose as the idea took form in my imagination of my old dreams perhaps coming true—of my acting the good fairy towards these poor people, for nearly a quarter of a century immured in their gloomy dwelling, owing to the evil machinations of—I started at the thought—a member of my own family!