“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.”