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This speech showed me everything as plain as a pikestaff. I mean, of course,
the reason of the deserted and neglected house, and his extraordinary
reception of myself. I rose to my feet.
"Well, uncle for my uncle you certainly are, whatever you may say to the
contrary I must be going. I'm sorry to find you like this, and from what you
tell me I couldn't think of worrying you with my society! I
want to see the old church and have a talk with the parson, and then I shall
go off never to trouble you again."
He immediately became almost fulsome in his effort to detain me.
"No, no! You mustn't go like that. It's not hospitable. Besides, you mustn't
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talk with parson. He's a bad lot is parson a hard man with a cruel tongue.
Says terrible things about me does parson. But I'll be even with him yet.
Don't speak to him, laddie, for the honour of the family. Now ye'll stay and
take lunch with me?
potluck, of course I'm too poor to give ye much of a meal; and in the
meantime I'll show ye the house and estate."
This was just what I wanted, though I did not look forward to the prospect of
lunch in his company.
With trembling hands he took down an oldfashioned hat from a peg and turned
towards the door. When we had passed through it he carefully locked it and
dropped the key into his breeches' pocket. Then he led the way upstairs by the
beautiful oak staircase I had so much admired on entering the house.
When we reached the first landing, which was of noble proportions and must
have contained upon its walls nearly a hundred family portraits all coated
with the dust of years, he approached a door and threw it open. A
feeble light straggled in through the closed shutters, and revealed an almost
empty room. In the centre stood a large canopied bed, of antique design. The
walls were wainscotted, and the massive chimneypiece was carved with heraldic
designs. I enquired what room this might be.
"This is where all our family were born," he answered. "Twas here your father
first saw the light of day."
I looked at it with a new interest. It seemed hard to believe that this was
the birthplace of my own father, the man whom I remembered so well in a place
and life so widely different. My companion noticed the look upon my face, and,
I suppose, felt constrained to say something.
"Ah! James!" he said sorrowfully, "ye were always a giddy, roving lad. I
remember ye well." (He passed his hand across his eyes, to brush away a tear,
I thought, but his next speech disabused me of any such notion.) "I
remember that but a day or two before ye went ye blooded my nose in the
orchard, and the very morning ye decamped ye borrowed half a crown of me, and
never paid it back."
A sudden something prompted me to put my hand in my pocket. I took out half a
crown, and handed it to him without a word. He took it, looked at it
longingly, put it in his pocket, took it out again, ruminated a moment, and
then reluctantly handed it back to me.
"Nay, nay! my laddie, keep your money, keep your money. Ye can send me the
Catullus." Then to himself, unconscious that he was speaking his thoughts
aloud: "It was a good edition, and I have no doubt would bring five shillings
any day."
From one room we passed into another, and yet another. They were all alike
shut up, dustridden, and forsaken. And yet with it all what a noble place it
was one which any man might be proud to call his own.
And to think that it was all going to rack and ruin because of the miserly
nature of its owner. In the course of our ramble I discovered that he kept but
two servants, the old man who had admitted me to his presence, and his wife,
who, as that peculiar phrase has it, cooked and did for him. I discovered
later that he had not paid either of them wages for some years past, and that
they only stayed on with him because they were too poor
A BID FOR FORTUNE OR DR. NIKOLA'S VENDETTA
A BID FOR FORTUNE OR DR. NIKOLA'S VENDETTA
31
and proud to seek shelter elsewhere.
When we had inspected the house we left it by a side door, and crossed a
courtyard to the stables. There the desolation was, perhaps, even more marked
than in the house. The great clock on the tower above the main building had
stopped at a quarter to ten on some longforgotten day, and a spider now ran
his web from hand to hand.
At our feet, between the stones, grass grew luxuriantly, thick moss covered
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the coping of the well, the doors were almost off their hinges, and rats
scuttled through the empty loose boxes at our approach. So large was the
place, that thirty horses might have found a lodging comfortably, and as far
as I could gather, there was room for half as many vehicles in the coachhouses
that stood on either side. The intense quiet was only broken by the cawing of
the rooks in the giant elms overhead, the squeaking of the rats, and the low
grumbling of my uncle's voice as he pointed out the ruin that was creeping
over everything.
Before we had finished our inspection it was lunch time, and we returned to
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