“Well,” I asked Piers, “what's your plan of campaign now we've got here?”
“Why,” said he, “what's wrong with ringing the bell and asking to see Miss Hazel?”
“Nowt. Nowt at all,” said I. “If we're lucky Dr Ravelin's old−world courtesy may extend to asking us to luncheon.”
“It can hardly not extend to asking us in to see a friend, anyway,” said Piers.
So down the hill we went. I quite forgot at the time to look out for the traces of Dr Ravelin's earthworks beside that rough, narrow lane. But as I remember the hillside now, so rough, so overgrown with bracken, ling and scrubby little thorn bushes and tufts of young birches, I doubt whether I could have succeeded in seeing any prehistoric embankment there though I had remembered and searched and stared all day. As we approached the level ground of the park it became obvious that Daphne Hazel had exercised to the full the artist's privilege of improving on nature. Like any new recruit to an order, perhaps, she had been quicker to learn its privileges than its duties. In the first place, the park was a good deal smaller than her story had led me to imagine; secondly, it was nothing like so trim and cared−for as I had pictured it. In fact, it was a sadly neglected little wilderness. Half the great trees were down, the shrubberies were scrub, the open lawns untended, rough with weeds and rushes and poached by the hooves of the red bullocks that turned their heads to follow us with slow stares as we passed. Near the bottom of the hill a tumbledown stone dyke which had once, no doubt, been the park boundary wall was sketchily mended with posts and wire, which were also strung across the road to keep the cattle from straying. We straddled over and went across the park proper towards the house. Half−way across we set up a covey of partridges from the rough grass by the side of the drive.
Once down the hill you cannot see the Hall itself until you are almost upon it, the trees having been so planted and the drive so windingly traced as to give the impression that the park is bigger than it really is. Neither of us spoke as we drew near it. We were both busy looking about us, and I, for one, was busy also adjusting my mind to the new situation, both curious and comic, which dawning suspicions, derived from the observations I had already made about the place, told me we were going to meet in a few minutes. I don't know what Piers was thinking just then. From the intentness of his expression he might have been expecting Daphne Hazel to burst from the bushes at any moment with all the hounds of Elf−land in pursuit.
Then we came out, round a belt of beech trees, and stood before the terrace of the Hall. We stood there quite a long time. The first glance at the Hall was enough, but I continued looking at it because I dared not look at Piers. When at length I did, I had to sit down on the stump of a tree and let my sense of humour have its way. I've never seen such a picture of crestfallen bewilderment as he presented. But he saw the funny side of it himself after a while and sat down beside me and laughed.
It was Ringstones Hall, all right: I hadn't the slightest doubt about that. But the place hadn't been lived in for a generation. The chimney−pots were gone, many a slab had slid from the roof and the shutters hung rotting from their hinges in front of the windows; grass and weeds grew in the cracks of the steps and tall red docks lifted their heads as high as the ground−floor windowsills. The house was not quite a ruin, but it was in the last stage of dilapidation and decay; deserted, mournful, pitiful as only an abandoned house can look.
We went up the steps and across the terrace. The front door was half−open; it had sagged on its hinges and, by the accumulation of soil at its foot, many a long year had passed since it was last shut. We went inside, into a stone−flagged hall, and looked about us. Our entry disturbed a number of jackdaws in the upper storey and their loud alarm cries echoed hollowly through the house. We heard them fluttering and scrabbling about the roof and setting up an indignant clamour as they wheeled about the place outside. The entrance hall smelt of damp and mould. From the marks on the walls it looked as if they had once been panelled; now they were stripped and the bare stone was streaked by weather. Only the lowest stair remained. All the others, with supports and balusters too, had been ripped out, and the landing that hung inaccessible above was devoid of woodwork. We wandered into the other ground−floor rooms. All were alike, stripped and empty; doors, panelling, almost every scrap of woodwork gone; the plaster had fallen from the ceilings and the fireplaces were choked with twigs and rubbish.
It had been a good old house. We admired it even in its decay: a well−built place with room to move about With a little imaginative reconstruction you could see it as it might have been a century ago: a sober, dignified, solid place wearing an air of having been there a long, long time.
“Well, well, well,” said Piers slowly when we came out on to the terrace again. “Let's go and have a look at the stables.”
We went round the end of the house and pushed our way between two broad, high yew hedges which had once bounded a short drive but now nearly blocked it; then down a flagged path, all but grassed over, to a square of buildings in much the same state of neglect as the Hall. One side of the double carriage−gate was missing. We went through into the yard. Every flag of the pavement was outlined by a little hedge of grass and weeds and the stones themselves were green with moss. Piers walked over to a stone trough that stood in the middle of the yard. Beside it leaned an iron pump, red with rust. The spout of the pump was missing; the handle lay on the flags. It ended, I observed, in some sort of scroll ornament, half rusted away.
Most of the doorways round the yard gaped open. I wandered round and poked my head into a few of them. All were empty and smelt damply of long disuse. The roofs of some of the places had fallen in, but on the ridge of the block facing the gates there were still the remains of a wooden lantern with a bit of iron−work on the top of it which had once, perhaps, supported a weather vane. I paused in my tour of the yard at one corner to fill my pipe, looking idly into a bigger place with a double doorway which seemed to have been a coach−house. I stepped inside to strike a match, and, with half an eye, as I attended to the lighting of my tobacco, I noticed that the place still contained some mouldering vehicular rubbish leaning against the walls, while odds and ends of rotting leather harness and bits of old iron were strewn about the floor. There seemed to be some sort of wide old fireplace on one side. Piers, who had followed me and gone further into the place, poked about among the rubbish while the light of my match lasted.
“Two things at any rate,” I said, as we walked back to the Hall again, “emerge from this reconnaissance. One is that we shall have to be content with our sandwiches for lunch, and the other is that we shall have to look elsewhere for your friend. Do you want to explore this place any more, or shall we have a shot at getting to Blagill before the pub shuts?”
He shook his head. He seemed quite satisfied, and in fact wore an air now of having expected the place to be like that. “There isn't a pub at Blagill,” he said. “At least, there's none marked on the map.”
He pulled the map out and thought for a time. I was a little puzzled by his manner then, but supposed that he was working out a new theory to account for Daphne Hazel's story in the fight of our discovery. I myself couldn't see what problem he could possibly find now in Daphne's bit of fiction, but, of course, we looked at the thing from different points of view.