succeeded in penetrating, was almost exclusively Victorian. The pictures, of which there were a great many, ran to nothing – Gadberry had sometimes reflected – which would have appeared out of the way to his former landlady Mrs Lapin herself. Apart from a startlingly indecent nude by Etty which hung bang over the drawing-room chimney piece, most appeared to be by Landseer in his vein as a celebrant of the indigenous fauna of Great Britain. The Abbey being, moreover, in some disrepair, and thus affording easy ingress to the actual brute creation, these mute representations were sometimes oddly reinforced from without. It was quite common to come upon an owl perched above a Monarch of the Glen, or a couple of bats depending from the frame of some murkily evoked rural scene. In places, indeed, it might have been possible to suppose that Mrs Minton had gone in for certain decorative notions of a modern and ephemeral sort, as when interior walls were discovered to be clothed in matted growths of ivy. These irruptions of wild nature were the odder when one reflected that they couldn’t conceivably be a consequence of penury. They must simply be part of Mrs Minton’s conception of a feudal order of things to which she subscribed.
In the cloisters now there was an eerie light reflected from the snow beginning to silt up outside, and through some open or broken casement flakes were floating in with sufficient freedom to be falling damply on one’s face as one walked. And everywhere there was a sufficient effect of moaning, rattling and creaking to suggest that quite a gale was blowing up.
Conducting Dr Pollock through these dismal effects, the spurious Nicholas Comberford recalled gloomily his authentic counterpart’s having remarked that Bruton Abbey enjoyed a somewhat remote situation. It was certainly true. The tiny village of Bruton was a mile away, and apart from this there was nothing within walking distance except monotonous stretches of moor. Gadberry, for long a dweller in cities, had only to think of it to feel very lonesome indeed.
But at present he had a different preoccupation. It had been strange enough that Comberford had proved totally misinformed in the matter of his great-aunt’s attitude to alcohol. It was very much stranger that he had been equally astray as to her state of health. He had declared categorically that she was in an advanced stage of heart disease – and now here was Dr Pollock, who must know, laughing such an idea out of court. But must Pollock know? Was it possible that the old lady was really very ill, and had for some reason successfully concealed the fact from the local doctor?
Gadberry, as he made a detour in search of the missing Grimble, considered this supposition on its merits. But of course it had no merits. For one thing, as soon as you really thought of the matter, you realised that a mortally sick woman was about the last thing that Aunt Prudence corresponded to. For another thing –
Here Gadberry broke off, for a consideration of the utmost simplicity had suddenly occurred to him. The real Comberford had been in no position to entertain any confident knowledge about his great-aunt’s state of health. Until the receipt of her letter proposing that he should domesticate himself at Bruton there had been no suggestion that he had held any recent communication with her. So how could he have the intimate information he had claimed?
The Abbey was not, at this time of year, a place in which it was at all easy to feel suddenly cold. But Gadberry felt just this now. For he realised – and he acknowledged to himself that it was a realisation pitifully belated – that Comberford was a shocking liar, and that the whole business of Mrs Minton’s brief expectation of life had been fed to him simply to make her relative’s extraordinary proposal appear a little more attractive than it would otherwise have been. Big money from the conspiracy, and big money in reasonable time, would
In the cloisters now there was an eerie light reflected from the snow beginning to silt up outside, and through some open or broken casement flakes were floating in with sufficient freedom to be falling damply on one’s face as one walked. And everywhere there was a sufficient effect of moaning, rattling and creaking to suggest that quite a gale was blowing up.
Conducting Dr Pollock through these dismal effects, the spurious Nicholas Comberford recalled gloomily his authentic counterpart’s having remarked that Bruton Abbey enjoyed a somewhat remote situation. It was certainly true. The tiny village of Bruton was a mile away, and apart from this there was nothing within walking distance except monotonous stretches of moor. Gadberry, for long a dweller in cities, had only to think of it to feel very lonesome indeed.
But at present he had a different preoccupation. It had been strange enough that Comberford had proved totally misinformed in the matter of his great-aunt’s attitude to alcohol. It was very much stranger that he had been equally astray as to her state of health. He had declared categorically that she was in an advanced stage of heart disease – and now here was Dr Pollock, who must know, laughing such an idea out of court. But must Pollock know? Was it possible that the old lady was really very ill, and had for some reason successfully concealed the fact from the local doctor?
Gadberry, as he made a detour in search of the missing Grimble, considered this supposition on its merits. But of course it had no merits. For one thing, as soon as you really thought of the matter, you realised that a mortally sick woman was about the last thing that Aunt Prudence corresponded to. For another thing –
Here Gadberry broke off, for a consideration of the utmost simplicity had suddenly occurred to him. The real Comberford had been in no position to entertain any confident knowledge about his great-aunt’s state of health. Until the receipt of her letter proposing that he should domesticate himself at Bruton there had been no suggestion that he had held any recent communication with her. So how could he have the intimate information he had claimed?
The Abbey was not, at this time of year, a place in which it was at all easy to feel suddenly cold. But Gadberry felt just this now. For he realised – and he acknowledged to himself that it was a realisation pitifully belated – that Comberford was a shocking liar, and that the whole business of Mrs Minton’s brief expectation of life had been fed to him simply to make her relative’s extraordinary proposal appear a little more attractive than it would otherwise have been. Big money from the conspiracy, and big money in reasonable time, would
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