Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/69

Rh You see, my father had always been a very silent man, and though he used sometimes to tell us yarns about scrapes he'd got into as a boy; how his father was a very stern man, and had sent him to a public school, because his tutor found him unmanageable, we never thought that he'd been anything very much in the old days—at any rate, not one of such a family as owned this house. To tell the truth, I felt a bit doubtful as to what I'd better do.

Somehow I was rather nervous about going up to the house and introducing myself as a member of the family without any credentials to back my assertion up; and yet, on the other hand, I didn't want to go away and have it always rankling in my mind that I'd seen the old place and been afraid to go inside. My mind once made up, however, off I went, crossed the park, and made towards the front. On nearer approach, I discovered that everything wore the same air of neglect I had noticed at the lodge. The drive was overgrown with weeds; no carriage seemed to have passed along it for ages. Shutters enclosed many of the windows, and where they did not, not one but several of the panes were broken. Entering the great stone porch, in which it would have been possible to seat a score of people, I pulled the antique door-bell, and waited, while the peal re-echoed down the corridors, for the curtain to go up on the next scene in my domestic drama.

Presently I heard footsteps approaching. A lock turned, and the great door swung open. An old man, whose years could hardly have totalled less than seventy, stood before me, dressed in a suit of solemn black, almost green with age. He inquired my business in a wheezy whisper. In reply I asked if Sir William Hatteras were at home. Informing me that he would find