“I may get as far as Norwich,” he ruminated. “I’m wanting some new flies.”
“A pleasant ride and all this evening,” the other observed. “Queer it do seem these days to think of getting to Norwich and back afore dark. Them things as you ride have made a power of difference in getting about.”
The young man smiled.
“Twenty miles to Norwich,” he remarked. “Forty minutes, taking it easy. Yes, I think I shall run over there.”
He swung on to his machine, which started at once, and in three quarters of an hour he was writing out a telegram in a post office in Norwich. Afterwards he made a pilgrimage to a sporting emporium in the main street, and with the care of an expert selected a fresh assortment of flies with which to tempt a particularly elusive but desirable trout. Eight o’clock was striking as he passed once more through the village street of Market Ballaston on his way back to his farmhouse lodgings. He dismounted outside the Ballaston Arms and stood looking about him with the air of one absorbing to the full the gentle atmosphere of peace, beauty and rustic content.
At the end of the street, a row of houses, mostly of grey stone with deep red tiles, opened out into the little market place, where an ancient covered cross stood in the centre of a cobbled space. On a stone trough three or four youths and two young women were seated in peaceful and almost aggressive silence. Mr. Houghton, the bank manager, was standing on the cool flagged pavement outside his neat little house, smoking a cigarette and chatting with Foulds, the veterinary surgeon, who had just driven up in his little two-seater car, whilst just across the way, Mr. Craske’s good-looking daughter had stepped out of the front door to water the row of geraniums in the boxes before the windows. From the Great House, set in somewhat severe isolation behind its encircling red brick wall, came the clamorous summons of a dinner gong, and almost immediately afterwards a similar invitation from the tinkling of Chinese bells sounded from the Little House. The melody from the latter had scarcely died away before, from the Hall, came the slow booming of the alarm bell, rung nightly at the dinner hour.
The young man listened and into his sleepy eyes there crept a speculative expression as they travelled beyond the village street, beyond the park, up the great grass-bordered avenue towards the windows of the Hall. It seemed almost as though he could see into the very stately and undisturbed Jacobean dining room, see the three men who sat together at the end of that desert of mahogany, frowned down upon by lines of pictured ancestors, their slightest need anticipated by Rawson and his well-trained subordinates, as though he could hear their languid and stilted efforts at conversation, as though, perhaps, he could see the ghosts behind their chairs. As though, when he swung round a moment or two later, he could see into the more modest but still impressive dining room of the Great House, where Mr. Peter Johnson sat alone, before a far simpler repast, eating and drinking with a frown upon his forehead, and lines about his mouth, no traces of which had appeared during those more genial moments of his afternoon visit to the Ballaston Arms; as though, turning still a little farther round, he could see even into that quaint low dining room of the Little House, take note of the invalid with golden hair and weary brown eyes, who lay upon her long chair, drawn up by the side of the round table, the discontented but earnest young woman who sat opposite to her, the harsh-featured maid, their sole attendant.
In the end he sighed and abandoned his reflections. He entered the inn, disturbing thereby Mr. Pank, the landlord, in the middle of his supper, and drank a glass of gin and tonic. Then the quick explosions of his bicycle disturbed once more the quiet, drowsy street, as he flashed through the village on his homeward way.
Throughout the whole of that long summer day it had scarcely seemed possible that there could be a more peaceful spot in the world than the wide street, the cobbled market place, and the winding country lanes which emptied themselves into the village of Market Ballaston. At three o’clock on the following morning there was not only peace but silence, absolute and complete. The two hundred and forty-three men, women and children who made up its inhabitants, had passed into the land of ghosts. Even the houses themselves, with their closed blinds and sightless windows, breathed the very spirit of repose. The chiming of the church clock, notwithstanding its silvery distinctness, seemed to carry with it a note almost of apology to a sleeping world. Silence more complete than ever followed the dying away of its last trembling note. For some time not even an uneasy dog or a too eager denizen of the farmyard ventured to disturb the moonlit pall of silence. Then came the first sign of human movement.