This Old
House, Built By Her Grandfather When There Were Few Houses In This
Suburb, She Once Liked To Visit, But Since Her Loss She Has Been But
Once In It.
That was when you saw her, when she came to spend a few
months in solitude.
She would not even allow me to come and sit and
talk to her! Think of that! She thinks nothing of her possessions and
allows us to live here rent free, to grow vegetables and raise poultry
for the market. That is what we do for a living; my husband and our
little daughter attend to these things out of doors, and I look after
the house."
When she got to the end of this long relation I rose and thanked her
for her hospitality and made my escape. But the mystery of the white,
gentle-voiced, grey-eyed girl haunted me, and from that time I made it
my custom to call at Dovecot House on every journey to town, always to
be received with open arms, so to speak, by the great fat woman. But
she always baffled me. The girl was usually to be seen, always the
same, quiet, unsmiling, silent, or else speaking in Spanish in that
gentle un-Spanish voice of some practical matter about the garden, the
poultry, and so on. I was not in love with her, but extremely curious
to know who she really was and how she came to be a "daughter," or in
the hands of these unlikely people. For it was really one of the
strangest things I had ever come across up to that early period of my
life. Since then I have met with even more curious things; but being
then of an age when strange things have a great fascination I was bent
on getting to the bottom of the mystery. However, it was in vain;
doubtless the fat woman suspected my motives in calling on her and
sipping mate and listening to her talk, for whenever I mentioned her
daughter in a tentative way, hoping it would lead to talk on that
subject, she quickly and skilfully changed it for some other subject.
And at last seeing that I was wasting my time, I dropped calling, but
to this day I am rather sorry I allowed myself to be defeated.
And now once more I must return for the space of two or three pages to
the brother white house before saying good-bye to both.
For it had come to pass that while my investigations into the mystery
of Dovecot House were in progress I had by chance got my foot in Cannon
House. And this is how it happened. When the old Admiral whose ghostly
image haunted me had received his message and vanished from this scene,
the house was sold and was bought by an Englishman, an old resident in
the town, who for thirty years had been toiling and moiling in a
business of some kind until he had built a small fortune.
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