were all agreed – with the exception of Veronica – that it was time Veronica went to bed. As chairman I took it upon myself to closure the debate.
CHAPTER II
“Do you mean, Governor, that you have actually bought the house?” demanded Dick, “or are we only talking about it?”
“This time, Dick,” I answered, “I have done it.”
Dick looked serious. “Is it what you wanted?” he asked.
“No, Dick,” I replied, “it is not what I wanted. I wanted an old-fashioned, picturesque, rambling sort of a place, all gables and ivy and oriel windows.”
“You are mixing things up,” Dick interrupted, “gables and oriel windows don’t go together.”
“I beg your pardon, Dick,” I corrected him, “in the house I wanted, they do. It is the style of house you find in the Christmas number. I have never seen it anywhere else, but I took a fancy to it from the first. It is not too far from the church, and it lights up well at night. ‘One of these days,’ I used to say to myself when a boy, ‘I’ll be a clever man and live in a house just like that.’ It was my dream.”
“And what is this place like?” demanded Robin, “this place you have bought.”
“The agent,” I explained, “claims for it that it is capable of improvement. I asked him to what school of architecture he would say it belonged; he said he thought that it must have been a local school, and pointed out – what seems to be the truth – that nowadays they do not build such houses.”
“Near to the river?” demanded Dick.
“Well, by the road,” I answered, “I daresay it may be a couple of miles.”
“And by the shortest way?” questioned Dick.
“That is the shortest way,” I explained; “there’s a prettier way through the woods, but that is about three miles and a half.”
“But we had decided it was to be near the river,” said Robin.
“We also decided,” I replied, “that it was to be on sandy soil, with a south-west aspect. Only one thing in this house has a south-west aspect, and that’s the back door. I asked the agent about the sand. He advised me, if I wanted it in any quantity, to get an estimate from the Railway Company. I wanted it on a hill. It is on a hill, with a bigger hill in front of it. I didn’t want that other hill. I wanted an uninterrupted view of the southern half of England. I wanted to take people out on the step, and cram them with stories about our being able on clear days to see the Bristol Channel. They might not have believed me, but without that hill I could have stuck to it, and they could not have been certain – not dead certain – I was lying.
“Personally, I should have liked a house where something had happened. I should have liked, myself, a blood-stain – not a fussy blood-stain, a neat unobtrusive blood-stain that would have been content, most of its time, to remain hidden under the mat, shown only occasionally as a treat to visitors. I had hopes even of a ghost. I don’t mean one of those noisy ghosts that doesn’t seem to know it is dead. A lady ghost would have been my fancy, a gentle ghost with quiet, pretty ways. This house – well, it is such a sensible-looking house, that is my chief objection to it. It has got an echo. If you go to the end of the garden and shout at it very loudly, it answers you back. This is the only bit of fun you can have with it. Even then it answers you in such a tone you feel it thinks the whole thing silly – is doing it merely to humour you. It is one of those houses that always seems to be thinking of its rates and taxes.”
“Any reason at all for your having bought it?” asked Dick.
“Yes, Dick,” I answered. “We are all of us tired of this suburb. We want to live in the country and be good. To live in the country with any comfort it is necessary to have a house there. This being admitted, it follows we must either build a house or buy one. I would rather not build a house. Talboys built himself a house. You know Talboys. When I first met him, before he started building, he was a cheerful soul with a kindly word for everyone. The builder assures him that in another twenty years, when the colour has had time to tone down, his house will be a picture. At present it makes him bilious, the mere sight of it. Year by year, they tell him, as the dampness wears itself away, he will suffer less and less from rheumatism, ague, and lumbago. He has a hedge round the garden; it is eighteen inches high. To keep the boys out he has put up barbed-wire fencing. But wire fencing affords no real privacy. When the Talboys are taking coffee on the lawn, there is generally a crowd from the village watching them. There are trees in the garden; you know they are trees – there is a label tied to each one telling you what sort of tree it is. For the moment there is a similarity about them. Thirty years hence, Talboys estimates, they will afford him shade and comfort; but by that time he hopes to be dead. I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.”
“But why this particular house?” urged Robin, “if, as you say, it is not the house you wanted.”
“Because, my dear girl,” I answered, “it is less unlike the house I wanted than other houses I have seen. When we are young we make up our minds to try and get what we want; when we have arrived at years of discretion we decide to try and want what we can get. It saves time. During the last two years I have seen about sixty houses, and out of the lot there was only one that was really the house I wanted. Hitherto I have kept the story to myself. Even now, thinking about it irritates me. It was not an agent who told me of it. I met a man by chance in a railway carriage. He had a black eye. If ever I meet him again I’ll give him another. He accounted for it by explaining that he had had trouble with a golf ball, and at the time I believed him. I mentioned to him in conversation I was looking for a house. He described this place to me, and it seemed to me hours before the train stopped at a station. When it did I got out and took the next train back. I did not even wait for lunch. I had my bicycle with me, and I went straight there. It was – well, it was the house I wanted. If it had vanished suddenly, and I had found myself in bed, the whole thing would have seemed more reasonable. The proprietor opened the door to me himself. He had the bearing of a retired military man. It was afterwards I learnt he was the proprietor.
“I said, ‘Good afternoon; if it is not troubling you, I would like to look over the house.’ We were standing in the oak-panelled hall. I noticed the carved staircase about which the man in the train had told me, also the Tudor fireplaces. That is all I had time to notice. The next moment I was lying on my back in the middle of the gravel with the door shut. I looked up. I saw the old maniac’s head sticking out of a little window. It was an evil face. He had a gun in his hand.
“‘I’m going to count twenty,’ he said. ‘If you are not the other side of the gate by then, I shoot.’
“I ran over the figures myself on my way to the gate. I made it eighteen.
“I had an hour to wait for the train. I talked the matter over with the station-master.
“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’ll be trouble up there one of these days.’
“I said, ‘It seems to me to have begun.’
“He said, ‘It’s the Indian sun. It gets into their heads. We have one or two in the neighbourhood. They are quiet enough till something happens.’
“‘If I’d been two seconds longer,’ I said, ‘I believe he’d have done it.’
“‘It’s a taking house,’
