The Japanned Box

It was a curious thing, said the private tutor; one of those grotesque and whimsical incidents which occur to one as one goes through life.  I lost the best situation which I am ever likely to have through it.  But I am glad that I went to Thorpe Place, for I gained—­well, as I tell you the story you will learn what I gained.

I don’t know whether you are familiar with that part of the Midlands which is drained by the Avon.  It is the most English part of England.  Shakespeare, the flower of the whole race, was born right in the middle of it.  It is a land of rolling pastures, rising in higher folds to the westwards, until they swell into the Malvern Hills.  There are no towns, but numerous villages, each with its grey Norman church.  You have left the brick of the southern and eastern counties behind you, and everything is stone—­ stone for the walls, and lichened slabs of stone for the roofs.  It is all grim and solid and massive, as befits the heart of a great nation.

It was in the middle of this country, not very far from Evesham, that Sir John Bollamore lived in the old ancestral home of Thorpe Place, and thither it was that I came to teach his two little sons.  Sir John was a widower—­his wife had died three years before—­and he had been left with these two lads aged eight and ten, and one dear little girl of seven.  Miss Witherton, who is now my wife, was governess to this little girl.  I was tutor to the two boys.  Could there be a more obvious prelude to an engagement?  She governs me now, and I tutor two little boys of our own.  But, there—­I have already revealed what it was which I gained in Thorpe Place!

It was a very, very old house, incredibly old—­pre-Norman, some of it—­and the Bollamores claimed to have lived in that situation since long before the Conquest.  It struck a chill to my heart when first I came there, those enormously thick grey walls, the rude crumbling stones, the smell as from a sick animal which exhaled from the rotting plaster of the aged building.  But the modern wing was bright and the garden was well kept.  No house could be dismal which had a pretty girl inside it and such a show of roses in front.

Apart from a very complete staff of servants there were only four of us in the household.  These were Miss Witherton, who was at that time four-and-twenty and as pretty—­well, as pretty as Mrs. Colmore is now—­myself, Frank Colmore, aged thirty, Mrs. Stevens, the housekeeper, a dry, silent woman, and Mr. Richards, a tall military-looking man, who acted as steward to the Bollamore estates.  We four always had our meals together, but Sir John had his usually alone in the library.  Sometimes he joined us at dinner, but on the whole we were just as glad when he did not.