"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.
Isabel shook her head.
"Oh, no," she replied, "I have never seen one of the family except in
church."
"I am longing for Sunday," I said. For though I had already been more
than a week at Millflowers, I had not yet been to the village church, as
on my first Sunday there we had driven some miles in a different
direction, by Mr Wynyard's wish, to hear a noted preacher who happened
to be visiting in that neighbourhood.
We were standing just then, Isabel and I, on the rising ground I have
spoken of, and my eyes were fixed on Grimsthorpe.
"No," I went on, "I have never seen anything so strange. It might be an
enchanted--not `palace,' it is too ugly for that. I don't know what to
call it. We have stood here some minutes, and there has not been the
very slightest sign of life to be seen or heard. Not even a dog
barking. How do they manage to make even their servants as noiseless
and invisible as themselves?"
"You are drawing on your imagination a little," said Isabel, smiling.
"There _is_ a gardener mowing the grass in that corner. See!" and she
pointed it out, "and--yes! there is the baker's cart driving up the back
entrance."