“A strange case,” moralized Carrados, as they walked out of the quadrangular yard into the silent lane. “Instructive, but I more than half wish I’d never heard of it.”
“The young lady seems grateful, sir,” Parkinson ventured to suggest.
“The young lady is the case, Parkinson,” replied his master rather grimly.
A few score yards farther on a swing gate gave access to a field-path, cutting off the corner that the high road made with the narrow lane. This was their way, but instead of following the brown line of trodden earth Carrados turned to the left and indicated the line of buildings that formed the back of one side of the quadrangle they had passed through.
“We will investigate here,” he said. “Can you see a way in?”
Most of the buildings opened on to the yard, but at one end of the range Parkinson discovered a door, secured only by a wooden latch. The place beyond was impenetrably dark, but the sweet, dusty smell of hay, and, from beyond, the occasional click of a horse’s shoe on stone and the rattle of a head-stall chain through the manger ring told them that they were in the chaff-pen at the back of the stable.
Carrados stretched out his hand and touched the wall with a single finger.
“We need go no farther,” he remarked, and as they resumed their way across the field he took out a handkerchief to wipe the taste of whitewash off his tongue.
Madeline had spoken of the gradual decay of High Barn, but Carrados was hardly prepared for the poverty-stricken desolation which Parkinson described as they approached the homestead on the following afternoon. He had purposely selected a way that took them across many of young Whitmarsh’s ill-stocked fields, fields in which sedge and charlock wrote an indictment of neglected drains and half-hearted tillage. On the land, the gates and hedges had been broken and unkempt; the buildings, as they passed through the farmyard, were empty and showed here and there a skeletonry of bare rafters to the sky.
“Starved,” commented the blind man, as he read the signs. “The thirsty owner and the hungry land: they couldn’t both be fed.”