“Professor Fortescue is always a favourite,” remarked Mrs. Walker. “It is such a pity he does not return to the Priory, is it not?—a great house like that standing empty. Of course it is very natural after the dreadful event that happened there”—Mrs. Walker lowered her voice discreetly—“but it seems a sin to leave the place untenanted.”
Lady Engleton explained that there was some prospect of the house being let at last to a friend and colleague of the Professor. Mrs. Walker doubtless would remember Professor Theobald, who used to come and stay at Craddock Place rather frequently some years ago, a big man with beard and moustache, very learned and very amusing.
Mrs. Walker remembered him perfectly. Her husband had been so much interested in his descriptions of a tour in Palestine, all through the scenes of the New Testament. He was a great archæologist. Was he really coming to the Priory? How very delightful. John would be so glad to hear it.
“Oh, it is not settled yet, but the two Professors are coming to us some time soon, I believe, and Professor Theobald will look over the house and see if he thinks it would be too unmanageably big for himself and his old mother and sister. I hope he will take the place. He would bring a new and interesting element into the village. What do you think of it, Mrs. Temperley?”
“Oh, I hope the learned and amusing Professor will come,” she said. “The worst of it is, from my point of view, that I shall have to give up my practices there. Professor Fortescue allows me to wake the old piano from its long slumbers in the drawing-room.”
“Oh, of course. Marion Jordan was telling me that she was quite startled the other day, in crossing the Priory garden, to hear music stealing out of the apparently deserted house. She had heard the country people say that the ghost of poor Mrs. Fortescue walks along the terrace in the twilight, and Marion looked quite scared when she came in, for the music seemed to come from the drawing-room, where its mistress used to play so much after she was first married. I almost wonder you can sit alone there in the dusk, considering the dreadful associations of the place.”
“I am used to it now,” Mrs. Temperley replied, “and it is so nice and quiet in the empty house. One knows one can’t be interrupted—unless by ghosts.”
“Well, that is certainly a blessing,” cried Lady Engleton. “I think I shall ask Professor Fortescue to allow me also to go to the Priory to pursue my art in peace and quietness; a truly hyperborean state, beyond the region of visitors!”
“There would be plenty of room for a dozen unsociable monomaniacs like ourselves,” said Mrs. Temperley.
“I imagine you are a God-send to poor Mrs. Williams, the caretaker,” said Joseph Fleming. “She is my gamekeeper’s sister, and I hear that she finds the solitude in that vast house almost more than she can stand.”