But what tale could I tell? The truth—that I had dropped out of a balloon? Who would believe it for an instant unless I produced the hidden parachute? And if I unearthed the parachute the whole island would know in a couple of hours and the people I was after would also be convinced. And it would not be a conviction that I was a fellow Hun.
And then I chanced to turn my head and I had an inspiration. About five miles out to sea I saw a ship, quite distinctly enough to spot her as a cruiser of much the same type as the ship I had soared out of yesterday. I filled in the details of the inspiration as I walked and when at last I saw her head away into the far distance the final touch was given.
When I drew near the house the road showed a tendency to meander, and as I was getting pretty hungry and counted on luncheon with the laird, be he patriot or traitor, I left the highway and followed a path across a clover field. Though the house and its farm were so near, and I could see half a dozen other homesteads not far away, yet there was not a living soul in sight, or any sound save from the peewees and the gulls. I don't know how to convey the impression of out-of-the-worldness and back-of-beyondness produced by this sense of silence and space, and by the look of the house and its whole surroundings. The path sloped up to it through a grass paddock, rather like the approach to the doctor's house, only this grass was short and well-tended and there were one or two flower beds before the door and ivy on one of the walls (where the wind was least destructive); and though the mansion was weather-beaten and plain and grey, it had nothing of the bleak and chilly aspect of the other house. It simply looked as though it had lived a long and stormy life and had now gone to sleep.
At one side stretched a high-walled garden with the tops of a few stunted trees just showing their heads, and close at the back of the place one could see a collection of farm buildings, very like the mansion architecturally, only greyer and more weathered. A fairly steep roof, crow-stepped gables, rough-cast walls, and rather small windows seemed to my untutored eye to be the chief features of the whole stone gathering.
"Somebody very primitive obviously lives here," I said to myself as I pulled the bell.
Out it came bodily in my hand, so I carefully pushed it back, and tried a large brass knocker instead, a massive affair that looked as though it had once been part of a shipwreck. I knocked once, I knocked twice, I knocked thrice, and then the door opened and I enjoyed a fresh sensation.
Instead of the prehistoric being I had expected, a girl stood in the open door looking at me out of a quite remarkably bright pair of eyes—disconcertingly bright in fact. She was dressed in the very smartest and most-up-to-date country kit; short tweed skirt of a pleasing greenish hue, stockings to match, brown brogued shoes, and a blouse that might have come from Paris. Her hair was dressed as fashionably as the rest of her, and her face was of precisely the kind I had least expected to see, rather thin with neatly chiselled features and delicate eye-brows, and an entirely sophisticated expression. There was no doubt she was decidedly pretty, and quite delightfully fresh and trim looking. But her eyes were her best feature. As I looked straight into them for an instant I could scarcely bring myself to play the part I had arranged. They seemed as though they would be a little difficult to deceive.
However, thank Heaven I have lived down most of the virtues that embarrass the young. I had lied before, been found out, and lived through it; so I clicked my heels together, bowed, and enquired,
"Is Master Rindall in?"
(My accent wasn't really quite as bad as that, but I should have to invent fresh vowels to illustrate what it actually sounded like.)