It was the first time any of us had been inside Jack’s house, and undoubtedly he had the most delightful little property. The house itself was old, but comfortably modernised by an expert, so that the charm of it still remained. In fact, the only room which had been left absolutely intact was the dining-room. And to have touched that would have been sheer vandalism. The sole thing that had been done to it was to install central heating, and that had been carried out so skilfully that no trace of the work could be seen.
It was a room by itself, standing apart from the rest of the house, with a lofty vaulted roof in which one could just see the smoky old oak beams by the light of the candles on the dinner-table. A huge open fireplace jutted out from one of the longer walls; while on the opposite side a door led into the garden. And then, at one end, approached by the original staircase at least six centuries old, was the musicians’ gallery.
A wonderful room—a room in which it seemed almost sacrilege to eat and smoke and discuss present-day affairs—a room in which one felt that history had been made. Nothing softened the severe plainness of the walls save a few mediæval pikes and battleaxes. In fact, two old muskets of the Waterloo era were the most modern implements of the collection. Of pictures there was only one—a very fine painting of a man dressed in the fashion of the Tudor period—which hung facing the musicians’ gallery.
It was that that caught my eye as we sat down to dinner, and I turned to Jack.
“An early Drage?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact—no relation at all,” he answered. “But a strong relation to this room. That’s why I hang him there.”
“Any story attached thereto?”
“There is; though I can’t really do it justice. The parson here is the only man who knows the whole yarn.—By the way, old dear,” he spoke to his wife across the table, “the reverend bird takes tea with us to-morrow. But he is the only man who has the thing at his finger tips. The previous owner was a bit vague himself, but having a sense of the fitness of things, he gave me a chance of buying the picture. Apparently it’s a painting of one Sir James Wrothley who lived round about the time of Henry VIII. He was either a rabid Protestant or a rabid Roman Catholic—I told you I was a bit vague over details—and he used this identical room as a secret meeting-place for himself and his pals to hatch plots against his enemies.”
“Jack is so illuminating, isn’t he?” laughed his wife.
“Well, I bet you can’t tell it any better yourself,” he retorted with a grin. “I admit my history is weak. But anyway, about that time, if the jolly old Protestants weren’t burning the R.C.’s, the R.C.’s were burning the Protestants. A period calling for great tact, I’ve always thought. Well, at any rate, this Sir James Wrothley—when his party was being officially burned—came here and hatched dark schemes to reverse the procedure. And then, apparently, one day somebody blew the gaff, and the whole bunch of conspirators in here were absolutely caught in the act by the other crowd, who put ’em all to death on the spot. Which is all I can tell you about it.”