Free The Bungalow Mystery by Annie Haynes Page A

longer; but I feel that we ought to go home—that we should not leave James any longer.”

Chapter Seven
    Oakthorpe Manor was not a building of great antiquity; there was a tradition that an older mansion had originally stood on the same ground, and that it had been in Elizabethan times the home of the Courtenays.
    The old rose-garden was still maintained in all its beauty; but Wilson, the old Scotch gardener, would tell, with a huskiness in his voice, how Sir James had promised to bring Miss Luxmore to see it the very day of the accident, and how the news was brought to Oakthorpe that Sir James would never walk again just at the moment he was expecting them. But, though Courtenay had never visited the rose-garden, the conservatory had remained one of his favourite resorts. He was there to-day, his chair wheeled close up to the fountain in the centre; his shoulders hunched up as he leant a little forward, marking the fresh green of the ferns at the water’s edge, watching the goldfish darting to and fro from their leafy shelters.
    Farther down, by the door opening on to the grassy terrace, Lavington was sitting smoking. The two men were not talking; Courtenay, who in his youth had been one of the most loquacious of mortals, had developed a curious reserve; he was given to long gloomy fits of silence, and Roger had learned that at such times he was best left alone. To-day, however, Courtenay was the first to speak.
    â€œHave you ever heard that the man who wrote the most exciting stories that have ever been penned was a hopeless invalid, Lavington?”
    Roger took out his pipe, and rapped its contents on the ash-tray before he answered.
    â€œI don’t quite know that I have, but I should believe it quite possible. Heine was a terrible sufferer, I have heard, and yet it does one good to read his poems.”
    â€œWhen I am lying here, and I realize the hopelessness of everything, or dreaming of anything better in the future, all sorts of queer fancies come crowding into my brain. Sometimes I fancy I shall put them down on paper, and see what the world will think of them. What do you say?”
    â€œSay? Why it’s a capital idea,” Roger assented heartily, as he rose and strolled over to the fountain.
    In truth, it seemed to him that the very suggestion was doing Courtenay good. His eyes looked brighter, his tone was more animated.
    â€œYour travels, too, would give freshness to the setting of your tales,” he went on.
    â€œOh, I don’t think I should go in for descriptions of scenery, and that sort of thing,” Courtenay said, a satirical smile curving his thin lips. “What I thought of trying was short stories of crime, forgery burglary, murder even, crisp and pithy, putting in the motive in a few words. Some of Maupassant’s are examples of what I mean. And I had an old seventeenth-century thing—French too. I think the name was Duvarnois. It professed to be a true and particular account of the Borgia crimes. It was not particularly fine writing, I dare say, but it made you feel Duvarnois ought to be in the library. I wonder whether I could find it?”
    He moved his chair forward as he spoke, and Roger followed.
    â€œNow, he ought to be over there on the fifth shelf. I am afraid I must trouble you to reach it down.” Roger glanced along the indicated shelf.
    Duvarnois was an unpretending little book, wedged in between two bulky volumes of memoirs. He handed it to Courtenay, and then turned back, attracted by the title of a treatise near at hand. He moved a little nearer the light. It was a work, out of print now, that he had seen referred to recently in a medical journal, and had endeavoured to get it in vain. It was curious that he should stumble across it in his friend’s library.
    A curious stifled sound roused him from his absorption in its pages. He looked up. Something had fallen from the old Duvarnois on to the foot of Courtenay’s chair, and