He saluted Selby with a little gesture of his ash-plant, inquired after the blistered heel, and then after an ailing member of the fat sow's litter. "And now, if you are ready and still of the same mind, shall we be strolling along?" he inquired.
Selby fetched his stick, and together they set out along a road made aromatic in the morning sunlight by the scents of dust and flowering hedgerow. Half a mile beyond the village the rector stopped before a gate-way. A dogcart and cob stood at the roadside, and a small boy in charge touched his cap.
"The Doctor is here, I see," said the clergyman, and opened the gate in the hedge. Selby caught a glimpse of a flagged path leading through an orchard to a whitewashed cottage. But his attention from the outset had been arrested by a most extraordinary assortment of crockery, glass and earthenware vases, busts, statuettes, and odds and ends of ironwork that occupied every available inch of space round the gateway, bordering the path, and were even cemented on to the front of the house itself. Above the gateway a defaced lion faced an equally mutilated unicorn across the Royal Arms of England. Arranged beneath, cemented into the pillars of the arch, were busts of Napoleon, Irving, Stanley, and George Washington; an earthenware jar bearing the inscription, "HOT POT"; a little group representing Leda and the Swan in white marble; and a grinning soapstone joss, such as is sold to tourists and sailors at ports on the China coast. Interspersed with these were cups without handles, segments of soup-plates, china dolls'-heads, lead soldiers, and a miscellaneous collection of tea-pot spouts, ... all firmly plastered into the ironwork of the pillars.
On each side of the path, banked up to the height of about three feet, was a further indescribable conglomeration of bric-à-brac, cemented together into a sort of hedge. The general effect was as if the knock-about comedians of a music-hall stage (who break plates and domestic crockery out of sheer joy of living) had combined with demented graveyard masons, bulls in china shops, and all the craftsmen of Murano, to produce a nightmare. A light summer breeze strayed down the valley, and scores of slips of coloured glass, hanging in groups from the apple-trees, responded with a musical tinkling. The sound brought recollections of a Japanese temple garden, and Selby paused to look about him.
"What an extraordinary place!"
The vicar, leading the way up the tiled walk, seemed suddenly to become aware of the strangeness of their surroundings. Long familiarity with the house had perhaps robbed the fantastic decorations of their incongruity. He stopped and smiled. "To be sure.... Yes, I had forgotten; to a stranger all this must seem very peculiar. I think I hinted that the old man had very curious ideas of beautifying the home. This was about his only hobby—and yet, oddly enough, he rarely spoke of it to me."
At that moment the cottage door opened and a tall florid man came out. The vicar turned. "Ah, Doctor Williams—that was his trap at the gate—let me introduce you...." The introduction accomplished, he inquired after the patient. The medical man shook his head.
"Won't last much longer, I'm afraid: a day or so at the most. No organic disease, y'know, but just"—he made a little gesture—"like a clock that's run down. Not an old man either, as men go. But these Navy men age so quickly.... Well, I must get along. I shall look in again this evening, but there is nothing one can do, really. He's quite comfortable.... Good-morning," and the Doctor passed down the path to his trap.
The vicar opened the cottage door, and stood aside to allow Selby to enter. The room was partly a kitchen, partly a bedroom; occupying the bed, with a patchwork quilt drawn up under his chin, was a shrunken little old man, with a square beard nearly white, and projecting craggy eyebrows. He turned his head to the door as they entered; in spite of the commanding brows they were dull, tired old eyes, without interest or hope, or curiosity in them.
"I've brought you a visitor, Mr Tyelake," said the vicar. "Some one you'll be glad to see: an Officer in the Navy."