“If it is, and we can get out, you’ll show me some of your favourite scenes?” I suggested. “I could make a sketch or two.”
“Of course!” she assented. “There’s a lovely bit along the road towards Roddam. I’ll take you there as soon as the snow’s gone; you’ll be ravished with it!”
We had three days’ wait for that, and during that time, as if they felt themselves bound to compensate me for the delay, my host and hostess did all they could to amuse and interest me, though, to tell the truth, I was interested enough in them personally, and needed no other diversion. Mr. Parslewe was certainly a character, full of eccentricities, with a strong sense of humour, and a mordant wit; he had evidently seen much of men and of the world, and his comments on things in general were as interesting as they were amusing. I made out, however, that his knowledge of our own country and our own period was considerably out of date; he appeared to know little of present-day affairs, though he had a fine old store of anecdotes of a previous generation. But a chance remark of his accounted for this.
“I left England for India and the East when I was twenty-one,” he said to me one evening in casual conversation, “and I never saw its shores again until I’d turned fifty. And now that I’m back—and some years, too—I don’t want to see any more of it than I can see from the top of my dear old tower! Here I am, and here I stick!”
I wondered if he meant his young and pretty ward to stick there, too—but those were early days to put the question to him. Still, by that time I had fallen in love with Madrasia; it would have been a most unheard-of thing if I hadn’t! And already I meant to move all the powers that are in heaven and earth to win her—for which reason I was devoutly thankful when, on the fourth day of my stay, winter suddenly disappeared as if by magic, and springtide again asserted itself and flooded the hills and valleys with warmth and sunshine. For then she and I got out of the old house, leaving Mr. Parslewe with his books and papers, and began to wander abroad, improving our acquaintance—very pleasantly and successfully. There had been a comforting air of romance about our meeting which, I think, appealed to both of us; it was still there, making an atmosphere around us, and now the elements of a most puzzling and curious mystery were to be added to it.
Those elements were first introduced by a man who came along the road leading from Wooperton and Roddam, and chanced to find Madrasia and myself sitting on a shelf of rock by its side, I doing a bit of perfunctory sketching, and she watching me. He was a tourist-looking sort of man; that is to say, he wore the sort of garments affected by tourists; otherwise, I should have said that he was perhaps a commercial traveller, or a well-to-do tradesman who loved country walks—a biggish, well-fed, florid-faced man, shrewd of eye, and, as we presently discovered, very polite—too polite—of manner. He regarded us closely as he came up, and when he was abreast of us, he stopped in the centre of the road and lifted his cap; it was the latest thing in head-gear of that sort, and he raised it with something of a flourish.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, with a deprecating, ingratiating smile. “Can you tell me if, somewhere in this neighbourhood, there is a house called Kelpieshaw?”
It was Madrasia who answered—promptly.
“Two miles ahead, along the valley,” she said. “Can’t miss it.”
The man bowed, and smiled again; a little too obsequiously, I thought.