“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.”