The season was still early enough in the year for the weather to be very uncertain, if indeed in this so-called “temperate” zone of ours it is ever anything else. It was chilly enough to make a little fire acceptable, particularly in the large book-lined room with its heavy furniture and hangings and northern aspect. And to this my young host had seen. The flames danced merrily upwards, and a small table and eminently comfortable leathern arm-chair were drawn up at one side of the hearth.
“Now,” said Rupert, as he stooped for a footstool,—“now, Miss Fitzmaurice, make yourself thoroughly comfortable if you can, so as the better to bear the victimising before you.”
“Nonsense!” I said, laughing. “I don’t feel the least like a victim; still less, however, like a judge! I shall just think you are giving me a pleasant morning’s entertainment. But first, before we settle down, let me make a little tour of the room. New rooms, as well as new places of every kind, interest me,” and I strolled round, glancing up at the shelves, and here and there stopping to read the title of one of the well-bound, mostly venerable-looking volumes.
“It is an ugly old room,” said Rupert. “You see, my people don’t go in for modernising in any way. But still I think there is a charm about these gloomy, stately old London rooms.”
“Of course there is,” I replied, for though the new order of things as to house decoration and so on was in its earliest infancy, on that very account perhaps its crudities were already frequently visible and jarring. “I love a room which you feel has been the same for more than one generation. Whose corner is that?” I went on, as I perceived a neat, not ugly, but very business-like writing-table with chair to match, in a nook facing the book-shelves, and near one of the windows. “Yours?”
“No,” Rupert replied. “That is where Clarence writes when he has to bring work home, as sometimes happens. Mother doesn’t approve of our sitting up in our own rooms. She never has allowed it—she’s afraid of our falling asleep and setting fire to the house, though I don’t see that the risk isn’t pretty much the same downstairs as well as upstairs.”
“Oh, I don’t know that,” I said; “it would take a good deal to make these burn,” and I touched the thick woollen draperies of the window as I spoke. Half unconsciously I had moved a little nearer to the writing-table, and the postmark of a large bluish-coloured envelope caught my eyes, which, as I have said, are, or at least were, in those days very quick. It was that of “Millflowers.” I felt myself blush, though I am quite sure Rupert did not notice it; indeed the room was too dusky for him to have done so, and a feeling of annoyance went through me. “I seem fated to do mean things,” I thought. “Eavesdropping, and now reading what I have no right to see,” though, after all, the word I had noticed did no more than confirm what I was already instinctively convinced of—that the Paynes were the legal advisers of the Grimsthorpe family.
I turned back quickly towards the fireplace.
“How hard your brother must work,” I said, as I settled myself in the roomy chair.
“Yes,” Rupert replied—by this time he was arranging a sheaf or two of papers on the small table—“yes, he does, lately especially, for father’s partner died some months ago, which has given Clarence more to do, but better position too, of course.”