“If you’re laughing at me,” she said, “I won’t tell it you.”
“I beg your pardon, I do really,” he said, penitently. “It was only that I did not like to see you looking so solemn about it.”
“I can’t help it,” said the girl, simply. “It always makes me a little frightened, though I know it’s silly. Winifred gets quite vexed if it is mentioned. She says it is contemptible nonsense. Louise believes it, but she is so good, it doesn’t frighten her. Still, for other reasons, we seldom allude to it. It has come so true, over and over again: I could tell you lots of things. Papa, you know, has had heaps of trouble. Poor papa, just think what a life of endurance his is! So you see if—if Winifred could have married Lennox (he is our second-cousin, you know), it would have done so well—keeping the old name, and she being the owner of the place.”
“I see,” said young Balderson.
“Or even if she could have been a more ordinary sort of girl, content to settle down at home,” Celia went on, “for—” and here the frightened look came over her face again—“there’s more in the legend: the worst luck of all is to come if a woman of the family deserts her post. And once a rather flighty great-grand-aunt of ours did—she couldn’t live at home, because she thought it was a dull part of the country, and she came up to London, and travelled about to amuse herself, and all sorts of things happened.”
“Did burglars break in, or was the house burnt down, or—?” began Eric, but Celia interrupted him.
“You are laughing at me again,” she said reproachfully. “No, it was worse than that. Her son turned out very badly, and was killed in a duel, and her daughter died, and they lost a lot of money, and in the end it came to our grandmother, you see, whose husband took the name Maryon. But the family has never been so well off since.”
“And in the face of all those warnings, your sister persists—no, what is it she wants to do or not to do?” said the young man, looking rather perplexed. “The ghost can’t bully her for not marrying a man she doesn’t care for, surely? I thought better of ghosts than that!”
“No, it’s not that. It is that she wants to leave home and make a career for herself. And I admire her for it. That’s why we were so pleased to come here: we want to find out about a lot of things.”
Eric looked really grave.