There were six of us there, counting Jack Drage and his wife. Bill Sibton in the Indian Civil, Armytage in the Gunners, and I—Staunton by name, and a scribbler of sorts—were the men: little Joan Neilson—Armytage’s fiancée—supported Phyllis Drage. Ostensibly we were there to shoot a few pheasants, but it was more than a mere shooting party. It was a reunion after long years of us four men who had been known at school as the Inseparables. Bill had been in India for twelve years, save for the inevitable gap in Mesopotamia; Dick Armytage had soldiered all over the place ever since he’d left the Shop. And though I’d seen Jack off and on since our school-days, I’d lost touch with him since he’d married. Wives play the deuce with bachelor friends though they indignantly deny it—God bless ’em. At least, mine always does.
It was the first time any of us had been inside Jack’s house, and undoubtedly he had the most delightful little property. The house itself was old, but comfortably modernised by an expert, so that the charm of it still remained. In fact, the only room which had been left absolutely intact was the dining-room. And to have touched that would have been sheer vandalism. The sole thing that had been done to it was to install central heating, and that had been carried out so skilfully that no trace of the work could be seen.
It was a room by itself, standing apart from the rest of the house, with a lofty vaulted roof in which one could just see the smoky old oak beams by the light of the candles on the dinner-table. A huge open fireplace jutted out from one of the longer walls; while on the opposite side a door led into the garden. And then, at one end, approached by the original staircase at least six centuries old, was the musicians’ gallery.
A wonderful room—a room in which it seemed almost sacrilege to eat and smoke and discuss present-day affairs—a room in which one felt that history had been made. Nothing softened the severe plainness of the walls save a few mediæval pikes and battleaxes. In fact, two old muskets of the Waterloo era were the most modern implements of the collection. Of pictures there was only one—a very fine painting of a man dressed in the fashion of the Tudor period—which hung facing the musicians’ gallery.