The Evil Shepherd Part 21

"Let me introduce you to The Walled House," its owner observed, "so called, I imagine, because this wall, which is a great deal older than you or I, completely encloses the estate. Of course, you remember the old house, The Walled Palace, they called it? It belonged for many years to the Lynton family, and afterwards to the Crown."

"I remember reading of your purchase," Francis said, "and of course I remember the old mansion. You seem to have wiped it out pretty effectually."

"I was obliged to play the vandal," his host confessed. "In its previous state, the house was picturesque but uninhabitable. As you see it now, it is an exact reproduction of the country home of one of the lesser known of the Borgias--Sodina, I believe the lady's name was. You will find inside some beautiful arches, and a sense of s.p.a.ce which all modern houses lack. It cost me a great deal of money, and it is inhabited, when I am in Europe, about once a fortnight. You know the river name for it?

'Timothy's Folly!"'

"But what on earth made you build it, so long as you don't care to live there?" Francis enquired.

Sir Timothy smiled reflectively.

"Well," he explained, "I like sometimes to entertain, and I like to entertain, when I do, on a grand scale. In London, if I give a party, the invitations are almost automatic. I become there a very insignificant link in the chain of what is known as Society, and Society practically helps itself to my entertainment, and sees that everything is done according to rule. Down here things are entirely different. An invitation to The Walled House is a personal matter. Society has nothing whatever to do with my functions here. The reception-rooms, too, are arranged according to my own ideas. I have, as you may have heard, the finest private gymnasium in England. The ballroom and music-room and private theatre, too, are famous."

"And do you mean to say that you keep that huge place empty?" Francis asked curiously.

"I have a suite of rooms there which I occasionally occupy," Sir Timothy replied, "and there are always thirty or forty servants and attendants of different sorts who have their quarters there. I suppose that my daughter and I would be there at the present moment but for the fact that we own this cottage. Both she and I, for residential purposes, prefer the atmosphere there."

"I scarcely wonder at it," Francis agreed.

They were surrounded now by various quadrupeds. As well as the horses, half-a-dozen of which were standing patiently by Sir Timothy's side, several dogs had made their appearance and after a little preliminary enthusiasm had settled down at his feet. He leaned over and whispered something in the ear of the mare who had come first. She trotted off, and the others followed suit in a curious little procession. Sir Timothy watched them, keeping his head turned away from Francis.

"You recognise the mare the third from the end?" he pointed out. "That is the animal I bought in Covent Garden. You see how she has filled out?"

"I should never have recognised her," the other confessed.

"Even Nero had his weaknesses," Sir Timothy remarked, waving the dogs away. "My animals' quarters are well worth a visit, if you have time.

There is a small hospital, too, which is quite up to date."

"Do any of the horses work at all?" Francis asked.

Sir Timothy smiled.

"I will tell you a very human thing about my favourites," he said. "In the gardens on the other side of the house we have very extensive lawns, and my head groom thought he would make use of one of a my horses who had recovered from a serious accident and was really quite a strong beast, for one of the machines. He found the idea quite a success, and now he no sooner appears in the park with a halter than, instead of stampeding, practically every one of those horses comes cantering up with the true volunteering spirit. The one which he selects, arches his neck and goes off to work with a whole string of the others following.

Dodsley--that is my groom's name--tells me that he does a great deal more mowing now than he need, simply because they worry him for the work. Grat.i.tude, you see, Mr. Ledsam, sheer grat.i.tude. If you were to provide a dozen alms-houses for your poor dependants, I wonder how many of them would be anxious to mow your lawn.... Come, let me show you your room now."

They pa.s.sed back through the postern-gate into the gardens of The Sanctuary. Sir Timothy led the way towards the house.

"I am glad that you decided to spend the night, Mr. Ledsam," he said.

"The river sounds a terribly hackneyed place to the Londoner, but it has beauties which only those who live with it can discover. Mind your head.

My ceilings are low."

Francis followed his host along many pa.s.sages, up and down stairs, until he reached a little suite of rooms at the extreme end of the building.

The man-servant who had unpacked his bag stood waiting. Sir Timothy glanced around critically.

"Small but compact," he remarked. "There is a little sitting-room down that stair, and a bathroom beyond. If the flowers annoy you, throw them out of the window. And if you prefer to bathe in the river to-morrow morning, Brooks here will show you the diving pool. I am wearing a short coat myself to-night, but do as you please. We dine at half-past eight."

Sir Timothy disappeared with a courteous little inclination of the head.

Francis dismissed the manservant at once as being out of keeping with his quaint and fascinating surroundings. The tiny room with its flowers, its perfume of lavender, its old-fas.h.i.+oned chintzes, and its fragrant linen, might still have been a room in a cottage. The sitting-room, with its veranda looking down upon the river, was provided with cigars, whisky and soda and cigarettes; a bookcase, with a rare copy of Rabelais, an original Surtees, a large paper Decameron, and a few other cla.s.sics. Down another couple of steps was a perfectly white bathroom, with shower and plunge. Francis wandered from room to room, and finally threw himself into a chair on the veranda to smoke a cigarette. From the river below him came now and then the sound of voices. Through the trees on his right he could catch a glimpse, here and there, of the strange pillars and green domed roof of the Borghese villa.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was one of those faultless June evenings when the only mission of the faintly stirring breeze seems to be to carry perfumes from garden to garden and to make the lightest of music amongst the rustling leaves.

The dinner-table had been set out of doors, underneath the odorous cedar-tree. Above, the sky was an arc of the deepest blue through which the web of stars had scarcely yet found its way. Every now and then came the sound of the splash of oars from the river; more rarely still, the murmur of light voices as a punt pa.s.sed up the stream. The little party at The Sanctuary sat over their coffee and liqueurs long after the fall of the first twilight, till the points of their cigarettes glowed like little specks of fire through the enveloping darkness. Conversation had been from the first curiously desultory, edited, in a way, Francis felt, for his benefit. There was an atmosphere about his host and Lady Cynthia, shared in a negative way by Margaret Hilditch, which baffled Francis. It seemed to establish more than a lack of sympathy--to suggest, even, a life lived upon a different plane. Yet every now and then their references to everyday happenings were trite enough. Sir Timothy had a.s.sailed the recent craze for drugs, a diatribe to which Lady Cynthia had listened in silence for reasons which Francis could surmise.

"If one must soothe the senses," Sir Timothy declared, "for the purpose of forgetting a distasteful or painful present, I cannot see why the average mind does not turn to the contemplation of beauty in some shape or other. A night like to-night is surely sedative enough. Watch these lights, drink in these perfumes, listen to the fall and flow of the water long enough, and you would arrive at precisely the same mental inertia as though you had taken a dose of cocaine, with far less harmful an aftermath."

Lady Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.

"Cocaine is in one's dressing-room," she objected, "and beauty is hard to seek in Grosvenor Square."

"The common mistake of all men," Sir Timothy continued, "and women, too, for the matter of that, is that we will persist in formulating doctrines for other people. Every man or woman is an ent.i.ty of humanity, with a separate heaven and a separate h.e.l.l. No two people can breathe the same air in the same way, or see the same picture with the same eyes."

Lady Cynthia rose to her feet and shook out the folds of her diaphanous gown, daring alike in its shapelessness and scantiness. She lit a cigarette and laid her hand upon Sir Timothy's arm.

"Come," she said, "must I remind you of your promise? You are to show me the stables at The Walled House before it is dark."

"You would see them better in the morning," he reminded her, rising with some reluctance to his feet.

"Perhaps," she answered, "but I have a fancy to see them now."

Sir Timothy looked back at the table.

"Margaret," he said, "will you look after Mr. Ledsam for a little time?

You will excuse us, Ledsam? We shall not be gone long."

They moved away together towards the shrubbery and the door in the wall behind. Francis resumed his seat.

"Are you not also curious to penetrate the mysteries behind the wall, Mr. Ledsam?" Margaret asked.

"Not so curious but that I would much prefer to remain here," he answered.

"With me?"

"With you."

She knocked the ash from her cigarette. She was looking directly at him, and he fancied that there was a gleam of curiosity in her beautiful eyes. There was certainly a little more abandon about her att.i.tude. She was leaning back in a corner of her high-backed chair, and her gown, although it lacked the daring of Lady Cynthia's, seemed to rest about her like a cloud of blue-grey smoke.

"What a curious meal!" she murmured. "Can you solve a puzzle for me, Mr.

Ledsam?"

"I would do anything for you that I could," he answered.

"Tell me, then, why my father asked you here to-night? I can understand his bringing you to the opera, that was just a whim of the moment, but an invitation down here savours of deliberation. Studiously polite though you are to one another, one is conscious all the time of the hostility beneath the surface."

"I think that so far as your father is concerned, it is part of his peculiar disposition," Francis replied. "You remember he once said that he was tired of entertaining his friends--that there was more pleasure in having an enemy at the board."