The Hand in the Dark | Page 2

place and a delight to the eye, this mediæval

moat-house of mellow brick, stone facings, high-pitched roof, with
terraced gardens and encircling moat. It had defied Time better than its
builder, albeit a little shakily, with signs of decrepitude here and there
apparent in the crow's-feet cracks of the brickwork, and decay only too
plainly visible in the crazy angles of the tiled roof. But the ivy which
covered portions of the brickwork hid some of the ravages of age, and
helped the moat-house to show a brave front to the world, a
well-preserved survivor of an ornamental period in a commonplace and
ugly generation.
The place looked as though it belonged to the past and the ghosts of the
past. To cross the moat bridge was to step backward from the twentieth
century into the seventeenth. The moss-grown moat walls enclosed an
old-world garden, most jealously guarded by high yew hedges trimmed
into fantastic shapes of birds and animals; a garden of parterres and
lawns, where tritons blew stone horns, and naked nymphs bathed in
marble fountains; with an ancient sundial on which the gay scapegrace
Suckling had once scribbled a sonnet to a pair of blue eyes--a garden
full of sequestered walks and hidden nooks where courtly cavaliers and
bewitching dames in brocades and silks, patches and powder, had
played at the great game of love in their day. That day was long since
dead. The tritons and nymphs remained, to remind humanity that stone
and marble are more durable than flesh and blood, but the lords and
ladies had gone, never to return, unless, indeed, their spirits walked the
garden in the white stillness of moonlit nights. They may well have
done so. It was easy to imagine such light-hearted beauties visiting
again the old garden to revive dead memories of love and laughter:
shadowy forms stealing forth to assignations on the blanched,
dew-laden lawn, their roguish faces and bright eyes--if ghosts have
eyes--peeping out of ghostly hoods at gay ghostly cavaliers; coquetting
and languishing behind ghostly fans; perhaps even feeding, with
ghostly little hands, the peacocks which still kept the terrace walk
above the moat.
The spectacle of a group of modern ladies laughing and chatting at tea
in the cloistered recesses of the terrace garden struck a note as sharply
incongruous as a flock of parrots chattering in a cathedral.

It was the autumn of 1918, and with one exception the ladies seated at
the tea-tables on the lawn represented the new and independent type of
womanhood called into existence by the national exigencies of war.
The elder of them looked useful rather than beautiful, as befitted
patriotic Englishwomen in war-time; the younger ones were pretty and
charming, but they were all workers, or pretended workers, in the task
of helping England win the war, and several of them wore the khaki or
blue of active service abroad. They were all very much at ease,
laughing and talking as they drank their tea and threw cake to the
peacocks perched on the high terrace walk above their heads.
The ladies were the guests of Sir Philip Heredith. Some months before,
his only son Philip, then holding a post in the War Office, had fallen in
love with the pretty face of a girl employed in one of the departments
of Whitehall. He married her soon afterwards, and brought her home to
the moat-house. It was the young husband who had suggested that they
should liven up the old moat-house by inviting some of their former
London friends down to stay with them. Violet Heredith, who found
herself bored with country life after the excitement of London war
work, caught eagerly at the idea, and the majority of the ladies at tea
were the former Whitehall acquaintances of the young wife, with whom
she had shared matinée tickets and afternoon teas in London during the
last winter of the war.
The hostess of the party, Miss Alethea Heredith, sister of the present
baronet, Sir Philip Heredith, and mistress of the moat-house since the
death of Lady Heredith, belonged to a bygone and almost extinct type
of Englishwoman, the provincial great lady, local society leader, village
patroness, sportswoman, and church-woman in one, a type exclusively
English, taking several centuries to produce in its finished form. Miss
Heredith was an excellent, if somewhat terrific, specimen of the class.
She was tall and massive, with a large-boned face, tanned red with
country air, shrewd grey eyes looking out beneath thick eyebrows
which met across her forehead in a straight line (the Heredith eyebrows)
and a strong, hooked nose (the Heredith falcon nose). But in spite of
her massive frame, red face, hooked nose, and countrified attire, she
looked more in place with the surroundings than the frailer and paler

specimens of womanhood