I was not sorry for the opportunity of making this inquiry in an apparently off-hand way. I was really anxious to know about the Grim House people, and yet the feeling of our secret and the great dread of involuntarily breaking my agreement with them, made me almost nervously afraid of any mention of them.
“Yes,” said Isabel, speaking, it seemed to me, more slowly and as it were consideringly than her wont. “Yes, I have been going to tell you ever since I came, but I have got to have a perhaps exaggerated dread of gossiping about them—only, you see, you do already know all I do. Yes, we are more sorry for them than ever. The cripple one, the brother with the angelic face, has been so ill this winter. And the other three’s poor faces have got sadder and sadder, and grimmer and grimmer, Sunday after Sunday.”
“No,” I exclaimed impulsively, “not grimmer; at least not the sisters; for theirs have never been grim. I think their expression is quite sweet.”
“Do you?” said Isabel. “How do—oh, I was forgetting. Of course you saw them quite at close quarters that day they came down on a Good Samaritan visit when Moore hurt his foot I have never managed to see them very distinctly; those old-fashioned bonnets of theirs hide them so. But the elder brother—he is grim enough, at least.”
“Ye-es,” I replied half-dubiously, “I suppose so.” I had lost my nervous feeling by now, and a certain curious spirit of defiance which I have always known to be latent in me, and which, were it not kept in check, might grow into a kind of recklessness, had been aroused by a touch of “dryness” in Isabel’s tone. I felt inclined to disagree with her, to contradict her for the sake of doing so! So “ye-es,” I repeated. “Perhaps so, but there is more in his face than grimness and melancholy. I think there is dormant tenderness too.”
“Dear me!” was Isabel’s comment on this, “what good eyes you must have! I could never have detected all that.”
“I have very good eyes,” I replied, “and, naturally, your talking so much about the Greys sharpened them whenever I had a chance of using them in that quarter.”
“Good eyes, and good ears, too,” I thought to myself, and with the recollection of my eavesdropping, there awoke again the old sensation of shame, bringing with it quick repentance for my manner to Isabel, in which a rather ungenerous wish to remind her that her confidences had been the origin of my curiosity, had been a motive at work. “If she does know anything about what really happened, it is just as well for her to take some of the blame,” I had thought, “and I have been faithful to her.” But as usual, her gentleness still further disarmed me.
“I am afraid,” she said next, “that the poor things have increasing cause for anxiety and distress. Without cross-questioning Dr Meeke, which of course he wouldn’t allow, I could not but gather from him that he is very anxious about the younger brother. He, the lame Mr Grey, has not been at church for weeks past.”
This news saddened me. Surely our escapade had in no way brought fresh trouble to the Grim House, even though indirectly? It might have rendered the elder man still more anxious and uneasy, and diminished what little cheerfulness his sisters and brother had managed to preserve among them. For I had never wavered in my first intuition, that Mr Grey himself was the centre of the mystery, and the words I had overheard had deepened this impression.