Mr. Jones

Lady Jane Lynke was unlike other people: when she heard that she had
inherited Bells, the beautiful old place which had belonged to the Lynkes
of Thudeney for something like six hundred years, the fancy took her to
go and see it unannounced. She was staying at a friend's near by, in
Kent, and the next morning she borrowed a motor and slipped away alone to
Thudeney-Blazes, the adjacent village.

It was a lustrous motionless day. Autumn bloom lay on the Sussex downs,
on the heavy trees of the weald, on streams moving indolently, far off
across the marshes. Farther still, Dungeness, a fitful streak, floated on
an immaterial sky which was perhaps, after all, only sky.

In the softness Thudeney-Blazes slept: a few aged houses bowed about a
duck-pond, a silvery spire, orchards thick with dew. Did Thudeney-Blazes
ever wake?

Lady Jane left the motor to the care of the geese on a miniature common,
pushed open a white gate into a field (the griffoned portals being
padlocked), and struck across the park toward a group of carved
chimney-stacks. No one seemed aware of her.

In a dip of the land, the long low house, its ripe brick masonry
overhanging a moat deeply sunk about its roots, resembled an aged cedar
spreading immemorial red branches. Lady Jane held her breath and gazed.

A silence distilled from years of solitude lay on lawns and gardens. No
one had lived at Bells since the last Lord Thudeney, then a penniless
younger son, had forsaken it sixty years before to seek his fortune in
Canada. And before that, he and his widowed mother, distant poor
relations, were housed in one of the lodges, and the great place, even in
their day, had been as mute and solitary as the family vault.