The House with the Twisted Chimneys/Chapter 5

“I must and shall have this place!” Terry said, as our humble taxi drove through the glorious old park and came in sight of the house,

There were the Old World gardens; the statues; the fountains—it was a detail that they didn't fount!—there were the white peacocks, molting; there was the moat so crammed with water lilies that if the Scarletts had eaten the carp, they would never be missed! There were the “exquisite oriels,” and, above all, there was the twisted chimney!

An air of tragic neglect hung over everything. The grass needed mowing; the flowers grew as they liked. Glass was even missing from several windows! Still, it was miraculously the twin of the place we had described in our embarrassingly perfect ad.

As we stood in front of the enormous, nail-studded door, and Terry pressed again and again an electric bell—the one modern touch about the place—he had the air of waiting the onrush of a monster.

“You look fierce enough to slay a dragon,” I whispered.

“Lady Scarlett is a sort of dragoness, isn't she?” he mumbled back. And just then, after we'd rung ten times, an old woman opened the door. She was a witch of an old woman, a grotesque witch out of a child's fairy book.

The instant I saw her, I felt that there was something wrong about this house. From under wrinkled lids the woman peered out, ratlike; and though her lips were closed, leaving the first word to us, her eyes said:

“What the devil do you want? Whatever it is, you won't get it, so the sooner you go the better.”

We had planned that I should start the ball rolling by mention of my grandmother's name. But Terry was bursting with renewed interest in life, and the woman was answering his question before I had time to speak.

“Let the place? No, sir! His lordship refuses all offers. It is useless to make one. He does not see strangers.”

“We are not strangers,” I rapped out with all grandmother's haughtiness. “Tell Lord Scarlett that the Princess di Miramare, granddaughter of Mrs. Raleigh Courtenaye, wishes a few words with him.”

That was the way to manage her! She came of a breed who for centuries had been subservient to autocratic powers of life and death, and although she spoke English, it was with the precise wording of one who has learned the language painfully. In me she recognized the legitimate tyrant, and yielded.

We were admitted with reluctance into a magnificent hall which magically matched our description: stone paved, with a vaulted roof and an immense oriel window the height of two stories. While our gaze traveled from the carved-stone chimney piece to ancient suits of armor and such Tudor and Jacobean furniture as remained unsold, a slight sound attracted our attention to the “historic staircase,” with its “dog gates,”

A woman was coming down. She had knitting in her hand, and had dropped one of her needles. It was the needle which had made the slight noise we'd heard; and Terry stepped quickly forward to pick it up.

His back was turned to me as he offered the stilettolike instrument to its owner, so I could not see his face. But I could imagine that charming smile of his as he looked up at the figure on the stairs. Just so might Sir Walter Raleigh have looked when he'd neatly spread his cloak for Queen Bess; and, if he had happened to ask a favor then, it would have been hard for the sovereign to resist!

The woman coming downstairs did not resemble any portrait of the Virgin Queen. She was stout and short-necked. With her hard, dark face, her implacable eyes, and her knitting, she looked like Madame Defarge in modern dress. But even Madame Defarge was a woman! And probably she used her influence now and then in favor of some handsome male head, preferring to see female ones pop into the sawdust.

This person's face softened slightly as she accepted the needle and stiffened again as I came forward.

“My husband is occupied,” she said in much the same stilted English as that of her old servant. “He sends his compliments to the Princess de Miramare and her friend, and hopes both will excuse him. If it is an offer for our place you have come to make, I must refuse in his name. We do not wish to move.”

Her tone, her expression, gave to her words the solemnity of an oath sworn by a houseful of Medes and Persians,

It seemed that there was nothing left for us to do, save bow to Lady Scarlett's decision and retire defeated to our taxi. But I felt that my reputation as a brightener was at stake with Terry's hopes. If we failed, instead of brightening, I should have blighted him forever! That couldn't, shouldn't be!

All there was of me yearned for an inspiration, and it came.

“My friend, Captain Burns, wouldn't ask you to move,” I heard myself saying. “He's so anxious to have Dun Moat that he'd offer you any rent within reason, and would invite you to select some retired rooms for yourselves, where you might live undisturbed by the tenant. This house is so large that it occurs to me such an arrangement wouldn't be uncomfortable.”

Terry flashed me a look of amazement which turned to acquiescence. The surprise on Lady Scarlett's face was encouraging. Evidently no one else had made such a suggestion. She seemed not only astonished, but tempted.

For a moment she reflected; then admitted that my proposal was a new one. She would submit it to her husband. They would talk it over if we cared to wait. We bowed, and the lady vanished like a stout ghost into the dimness of stony shadows.

Terry said that he felt his head growing gray, hair by hair, with suspense; but when Lady Scarlett came back at last no change could be seen in it by the naked eye.

“My husband and I will consider your proposal,” she said, “provided the price is satisfactory, and taking it for granted that we agree on the rooms for our occupation. We should want those known as the “garden-court suite.” And we should ask one hundred and fifty pounds a week, for a possible term of ten weeks, on the proviso that we could terminate the tenancy with a fortnight's notice at any time after the first month.”

I was dumfounded. The place, unique and beautiful as it was, had been allowed to run down so disastrously, and everything outside and in seemed to be in such a state of disrepair, that it was worth at most a rent of thirty guineas a week. Terry might call himself rich, but surely he'd not consent to being rooked to that extent, even to be landlord to his love. I expected him to protest, to bargain, and beat the lady down. But he brushed the financial question away like a cobweb, and began to haggle about the rooms!

“The money part will be all right,” he said. “But I want a lady to come here—a lady who's been ill. She must have the prettiest rooms there are, something overlooking the moat, with jolly oriel windows and plenty of old oak.”

Lady Scarlett smiled.

“There's no obstacle to that! The suite I specify is at the far end of the house, in a comparatively modern wing, and most people would think it the least desirable. We like it because it is compact and private. We can keep it in order with one servant. It is called the 'garden-court suite' because it is built round a small square. There is a separate outside entrance, as well as one door communicating with the house. The suite has generally been occupied by a bachelor heir.”

As she talked, Terry reflected.

“Look here, Lady Scarlett!” he exclaimed, just contriving not to break in. “I've half a mind to confide in you. The truth is, I want to pose as the owner of this place. I suppose you wouldn't sell it?”

“We could not if we would,” she replied. “It is entailed.”

“That settles that! But you said beforehand nothing would induce you to turn out”

“No money you could offer—not a thousand, not ten thousand a week, at least at present. The garden-court suite is the one solution.”

“Well, so be it! But, I beg your pardon if I'm rude, could you—er—seem not to be there? Could I say I'd lent the rooms to some one I couldn't turn out? If you'd consent, I'd make it two hundred a week.”

Lady Scarlett's blackberry-and-milk eyes lit.

“You want the lady to believe that you have bought Dun Moat?”

For answer he told her of our advertisement and the result. I thought this a mistake. You'd only to look at the woman to see that she'd no sense of humor, and to confide in a person without one is courting trouble. Besides, I still had that impression of something wrong. I had no definite suspicion, but why had the Scarletts, poor as they were, determined to stick to the house? However, I could no more have stopped Terry Burns when he got going than I could have stopped a torrent by throwing in rose petals. Which shows how he had changed! The worry of a few days ago would have been to get him going.

As Lady Scarlett listened she knitted, with strong, predatory, relentless hands. Language, they say, is used to conceal thought. So, it occurred to me, is knitting. I felt, watching her as a wise mouse should watch a cat, that she was making up her mind to some action more beneficial to herself than to Terry. But for my life I couldn't guess what. She seemed to weave a knitted screen between my mind and hers!

In the end, however, she announced that for two hundred pounds a week her family could, apparently, blot itself temporarily out of existence, in the suite of the garden court. The American lady might believe them to be poor relations of Captain Burns, or even servants, for all she cared! Having arrived at this conclusion, she proposed fetching her husband, that an agreement of an informal kind might be drawn up. Again she vanished, and when Lord Scarlett appeared he was alone.

There were a number of ancestral portraits hanging on the walls of the great hall—fox-faced men, most of them, with a prevailing sharp-nosed, slant-eyed type. “Bertie” Scarlett was no exception to the rule. As he came deliberately down the stairway his wife had descended, I remembered a scandal of his youth which grandmother had sketched. He'd been in a crack regiment once and, though desperately poor, had tried to live as a smart man about town. At some country-house party he'd been accused of cheating at baccarat. The story was hushed up, but he had left the army; and people, particularly royalties, had looked down their noses at him ever since. His tweeds were shabby now, and he was growing middle-aged and bald. All the same, he had the air of the leading man in a cause célèbre. I hadn't liked his wife, and I liked him as little!

He made the same point: that the agreement might be terminated by him—not by the tenant—with a fortnight's notice given at any time after the first month. This was a queer proviso, as queer as the family resolve to remain on the spot. And it seemed to me that one was part and parcel of the other, although I couldn't see the link which united the two.

As for Terry, he puzzled over none of these things. He wanted the place even on preposterous terms. When Lord Scarlett had drawn up an agreement, his signature flashed across the paper like a streak of lightning, so wild was he to rush back to London bearing the news to his princess. Lord Scarlett, sure of his mad client, offered to have the agreement polished up in legal form without further bother for Captain Burns, and we were free to go.

Terry could talk of nothing on the way home except his marvelous luck. Hang the money! He'd have paid twice as much, if need be. The next thing was to smarten up the place, buy some more “historic” furniture to fill the gaps made by sales, send down a decorator to see what furniture needed renovating, have an expert look at the drains and the central heating, long unused, engage a staff of servants for indoors and out, get hold of two or three young peacocks whose tails hadn't molted.

“If I don't care how much I pay, don't you think we can make an earthly paradise of the place in a week?” he appealed.

“We?” I echoed. “Why, I thought my part was played!”

His dismayed eyes reproached me. What? After going so far, I was going to desert him in the midst of the woods? He begged me to stand by him until all was ready to receive the princess. If I didn't, something was sure to go wrong.

Well, once a brightener always a brightener, I suppose! And acting on this principle, I yielded. I promised to spend a week at Dawley St. Ann, a village within a mile of Dun Moat—there's a delightful old inn there! and superintend preparations for the beloved tenant. When she was safely installed, I would go home or elsewhere, and Terry could take my rooms at the inn. Being her neighbor as well as landlord, he could easily find excuses to see the princess every day.

All this was settled before we reached London, and the first thing Terry thought of on entering the flat—mine, not his!—was to ring up the Savoy. The answer came quickly, and I saw a light of rapture on his face. The princess herself was at the telephone!