Valentine Williams - Dead Man Manor

The gardien extended his hand. ‘You have telegram, letter, no? I take heem after supper on my motocyclette. . .’

‘Thanks, but I’d rather go myself. I want a walk. . .’

‘Walk?’ Ange Tremblay’s smile was compassionate. ‘But, Mis’ Treadgol’, it ees eight mile!’

‘You mean by the road? I thought I’d go by the woods. . .’

A singular change came over the gardien’s heavy and rather stupid countenance. Shaking his head with owlish solemnity he said, ‘By the woods? It ees impossible!’

‘Why? There’s a trail, isn’t there?’

The man’s face was a blank. ‘Better you take your auto and go by road, I t’ink,’ he replied stubbornly.

‘I prefer to walk, I tell you. The trail’s shown on my map—it leads through those woods on the other side of the lake straight down to the village. It can’t be more than three miles at the outside!’

The Angel only shook his head. ‘Vair’ bad trell! You lose yourself in the woods, mebbe. You tell me what you want in the village and I go there now on my motocyclette, hein?’

The gardien was palpably ill at ease. He shuffled from one foot to the other, casting apprehensive glances sidelong through his glasses at the determined face at his side. It was apparent to Mr. Treadgold that, for some obscure reason, Tremblay was determined he should not take the path through the woods. Opposition always made him stubborn, and without more ado he said firmly: ‘I’m going to walk and I’m going through the woods. How do I get across the lake? There’s a boat, I suppose?’

There was a boat, the gardien admitted sulkily, but no one available to row the gentleman.

‘And what’s wrong with my rowing myself?’ Mr. Treadgold demanded crisply. ‘I’m not so young as I was, but at least I can still pull a pair of sculls. I’ve been sitting in a car for the past three days and a bout of rowing exercise is the very thing to loosen me up!’

A quarter of an hour later he was tying up the boat on the far side of the lake. Following the Angel’s reluctant directions he crossed a trestle bridge that spanned a river flowing into the lake and saw the trail before him. An instant later he was in the woods.

The trail was narrow but clearly marked—too deeply rutted for a car, maybe, but quite practical for a farm cart. Fringed with a vivid mass of wild flowers, it wound its way ever deeper among the trees. Notwithstanding the heat of the afternoon, Mr. Treadgold advanced at a swinging pace. Dudley Hunter’s half-sheet of paper was in his pocket, and every time he thought of it, he instinctively lengthened his stride, itching as he was to probe to the bottom Hunter’s story. The woods seemed endless and the trail ran on without the slightest obstacle—he asked himself what motive the gardien could have had in trying to dissuade him from using it. Bah! the fellow was probably paid for running messages on his motor bike to the village and was only angling for a tip. He shut the incident from his mind, his whole attention focussed on the quest which from New York, more than seven hundred miles away, had plunged him into the heart of French Canada.

His watch told him he had been walking for some twenty minutes when the trail emerged upon a narrow, stony road which presently dropped downhill to woods again with branches overhanging so that he moved in a greenish half-light. He was reflecting that he had come a good two miles without encountering a living soul or any sign of human habitation when he discerned, bathed in sunshine, at the end of the leafy tunnel he was threading, the roof of a building rising above a cluster of trees.

Even before he was clear of the trees the sound of rushing water was loud in his ears and he saw that, past the building he was approaching, a white-railed culvert carried the road over a torrent which tumbled gurgling from the hillside. The building, two stories high and solidly constructed of rough-cast masonry, with a slate roof, stood in a dip below the road. At first he thought it was a barn; but then he caught sight of the great water wheel enclosed in a cage overhanging the torrent and knew it was a mill.

There was no sign of life about it. Under the broad stone lintel the door was padlocked, the windows were blank and dusty, while the wheel, trailing streamers of moss, stood idle. Yet the mill was in good repair. The roof was intact and the upturned shafts of a cart were to be seen above the trellis-work enclosing a yard at the side. If abandoned, the place had not been abandoned long. The depression, Mr. Treadgold told himself, and passed on.

He crossed the culvert and, behind the mill, the swirling pool from which the stream, to turn the wheel, was diverted came into view, rushing through a deep crevice strewn with boulders and overhung with willows and alders. Raising his eyes from it, Mr. Treadgold caught the gleam of a long white façade among the trees. Somewhere beyond was evidently a private house, standing in its own grounds. But how silent everything was! He listened—not a sound save the sharp, metallic note of some bird and the gurgle of the water.

9

A little way along the road, where a rusty front gate tied up with wire broke the line of a high stone wall, he had a glimpse of the house. It crowned a low eminence which, screened by trees, formed a compact mass at the junction of two roads. One—that which Mr. Treadgold had been following—led down a sharply curving gradient towards where a distant spire, rising from a cluster of gray roofs, marked the site of the village of St. Florentin: the other circled the outer wall of the property. From the gate an ill-kept drive lined with some fine old walnut trees crossed the stream by a log bridge and disappeared in the direction of the house.

It was clearly an old house. Time had weathered the shingles of its immensely broad, steep roof to a rich madder brown and a row of dormer windows that marked the upper story brought to Mr. Treadgold’s mind the Old-World mansions of the Cours La Reine and other streets abutting upon the Palace of Versailles, where the Court officials used to live. From the circumstance that the front gate was wired up, he inferred that the house was unoccupied. So, to obtain a better view, he climbed over the gate and set off up the drive.

Once inside the property, he perceived that the place had not been inhabited for some considerable time. On either side of the avenue the park was a jungle of long grass which had begun to invade the roadway at the sides. The land in front of the house, traversed by the stream, had evidently, at some distant epoch, been carefully landscaped. Paths planted with bushes and flowers zigzagged their way in and out of the boulders and rocks, there was a rustic bridge, and a bench crowning a knoll. But now the garden was a wilderness, the paths half obliterated by the tangle of undergrowth, the bridge in ruins, the bench crumbling.

The house itself was in better shape, but in appearance no less forlorn. The broad platform, with its elegant balustrade that ran its length before it, like a verandah without a roof, was deep in mud and leaves. Every window was shuttered. One of the panes in the graceful, conch-shaped fanlight above the curiously wide front door was broken and a leaking gutter had dripped a slimy green blot athwart the dull cream of the façade. Boasting but a single floor, if you did not reckon the attic story above, the house was unpretentious, but, snuggled under the deep eaves of that tremendous roof, it looked spacious and warm and comfortable. ‘A grand old house,’ Mr. Treadgold murmured to himself. A stone above the front door was inscribed with the date ‘1799,’ and he could picture those hardy French settlers of more than a century since, when the first snowfall heralded the advent of the long Canadian winter, installing themselves cosily behind those massive walls, under that spreading roof-tree, to wait resignedly for spring. He wondered what the history of the old house might be and why it had been suffered to fall into abandonment and neglect.