“Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.”
The next few days passed very pleasantly. The weather was fine though rather cold, but the fresh bracing feeling of the air seemed to suit the place, and I enjoyed its invigorating effect to the full. It was before the days of bicycles, but Isabel had a little pony-cart and a sturdy, sure-footed pony, in which we managed to get over the ground in a wonderful way. Hilly roads and rough ground were no obstacles to our progress; sometimes even, we ourselves lifted the cart over some specially awkward place, the pony seeming quite to enter into the fun of the thing.
We walked, too, quite long distances now and then, and several times, both walking and driving, we passed the high walls which surrounded Grimsthorpe House, the object of so much curiosity and speculation on my part.
As Isabel had warned me, there was but little to be seen of the house itself, except from one side, where a rise in the road enabled passers-by to look down, as it were, on the place.
And worthy of its name did it look,—“grim” indeed, as it was called.
It was a square grey building, with narrow windows in straight rows. There was nothing about it in the very least picturesque or attractive, for it was far too modern to at all suggest anything mediaeval or mysterious; it was just thoroughly ugly and forbidding. Yet to me it was full of fascination. We never passed the point of view in question without my begging Isabel to stop and have a good look at it, which at last she began to be rather unwilling to do.
“I think really it is getting on your brain, Regina,” she said. “I almost wish I had never told you anything about it.”
“As if any one could have helped noticing it,” I exclaimed. “But for the neatly kept grounds”—for neat they were, so far as one could see, though with nothing ornamental about them at this season at least—“one could be tempted to think it was a prison or a workhouse.”
“Prisons and workhouses are models of neatness, I believe,” said Isabel. “But certainly these gardens could not belong to anything of the kind. And there are flowers at one side of the house later on in the year. I have an idea that the younger brother—the cripple—looks after them.”
“Have you ever seen him gardening?” I asked eagerly.