Sheiks and Adders Read Online Free PDF

unexpected piece of information intimated. It tied in, no doubt, with what was going to happen at Drool Court next day. All in all, Appleby had no reason to feel that he was going to be very interested in the father of Cherry and Mark Chitfield.

 
     
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    Because we speak of the Court of St James’s or the Court of Versailles, we are inclined to suppose that when a house is called a ‘Court’ it must be very grand indeed. But for centuries the word has frequently been tacked on to the proper name of what may be quite a modest manorial dwelling or principal house in a village. And of course if you buy a couple of fields and put up a habitable structure of some sort in the middle of them you are free to call the result ‘Windsor Court’ or even ‘Plantagenet Court’ if you have a mind to it.
    Drool Court as it now existed was of no great antiquity, although something with the same name had stood on the same ground since the time of the first Elizabeth. Everything now visible was the work of Sir Guy Dawber (an architect of the present century who may be supposed to have eschewed the sister art of painting for an obvious reason) and therefore in the somewhat severe tradition associated with modern country houses in Gloucestershire. There was a great deal of it; when you got inside the principal rooms were lofty and imposing; from without, however, the entire structure had the appearance of being unkindly squashed beneath heavily impending roofs. It was all very solid and English and permanent. If you came upon it unawares during the course of a rural ramble, and took the trouble to find out to whom it belonged, you would be wholly unprompted to hurry to a telephone, call up your stockbroker, and require him to extricate you with all speed from any of the numerous concerns controlled by Mr Chitfield. On the other hand you would not be likely to feel in the presence of anything that charmed the eye or stirred the fancy. And if the occasion of your visit were different, and you were turning up in the expectation of participating in a Watteau-like fête-champêtre of easy and light-hearted divertissement , it is probable that you would judge the mise en scène not particularly appropriate to the mood required.
    There were, however, extensive lawns and gardens, with a small park beyond them, and beyond that again the wooded region of Sir John Appleby’s first entanglement with the Chitfield fortunes. Had Richard Chitfield been one of the chief noblemen of the country, and generously prompted to entertain everybody who could by any stretch of imagination claim acquaintance with him, these pleasure grounds could have accommodated the whole crowd with no difficulty at all. As it was, and at least at the time of Appleby’s fairly prompt arrival, the scene was far from thronged and little in the way of entertainment was as yet going forward.
    It was in the character of Robin Hood that Appleby presented himself at the wrought-iron gates of the mansion and handed his ticket to a young woman whom he conjectured to be the elder of the Chitfield daughters. His costume wasn’t the consequence of his having reflected, only the day before, that he must frequently have played Robin Hood games as a boy; it represented the first feasible set of garments to have turned up during a rummage of the dressing-up cupboard at Long Dream. The Appleby children having long ago abandoned that sort of entertainment, everything had smelt faintly of the moth balls of a former age, and Appleby was aware of carrying this round with him now. At least the outfit was tolerably complete. There was even a long-bow – which, however, had lost its string, with the result that it couldn’t be slung in the prescriptive manner across his shoulder and had to be treated as a walking-stick. This contributed to a faint sense of the ridiculous which he was constrained to own in himself. It was an unaccustomed feeling, and Appleby felt vaguely annoyed by it. He