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Those events, as he described them, took on a new complexion to his listener, suggesting a deeper and more complex mystery than the newspaper accounts of the crime. From the first the moat-house murder had appealed to Colwyn's imagination and stimulated his intellectual curiosity. There was the pathos of the youth and sex of the victim, murdered in a peaceful country home.
Now, as I turned from the drawbridge at the moat-house of Blanchelande to go homewards the remembrance came to me of those men that I guessed were pirates digging their storehouse in mother earth in the midst of the wood. And thinking on it, though I feared them not, I had no taste to return to the vale that way.
He conveyed to Colwyn a picture of the state of things existing at the moat-house when he arrived. It was an unconscious revelation on his part of a giddy shallow girl hastily marrying a wealthy young man for his money, quickly bored by the dull decorum of English country life, sighing for her former existence for the gay distractions of her irresponsible London days.
Vincent Musard was a remarkable personality. He came of a good county family, which had settled in Sussex about the same time that the first Philip Heredith had burnt down the moat-house, but his family tree extended considerably beyond that period. If the name of Here-Deith was inscribed in the various versions of the Roll of Battle Abbey to be seen in the British Museum, the name of Musard was to be found in the French roll of "Les Compagnons de Guillaume
He married her soon afterwards, and brought her home to the moat-house. It was the young husband who had suggested that they should liven up the old moat-house by inviting some of their former London friends down to stay with them.
It had originally been the crypt of the Saxon castle which had once stood on the site where the moat-house was built, and was entered by a short flight of steps not far from the passage which led to the housekeeper's rooms. It was rectangular in shape, and, like the majority of gun-rooms in old English country mansions, contained a large assortment of ancient and modern weapons.
In this moat-house mystery, the grimmest paradox of his brilliant career, Colwyn was determined not to accept the presumption of the facts until he had satisfied himself that no other interpretation was possible.
"That is the moat-house," he said. "The carriage drive is from the village side." And with that brief indication that they were nearing their journey's end he once more settled back into silence. Colwyn brought the car down from the rise into the sleeping village, and a few minutes later he was driving up the winding carriage way between the rows of drooping trees.
Dinner at the moat-house was a solemn and ceremonious function. In accordance with the time-honoured tradition of the family, it was served at the early hour of seven o'clock in the big dining-room, an ancient chamber panelled with oak to the ceiling, with a carved buffet, an open fireplace, Jacobean mantelpiece, and old family portraits on the walls.
Musard, who assisted Miss Heredith to answer the questions, was rather impressed by the quick intelligence the detective displayed in eliciting all the known facts of the murder, but Sergeant Lumbe, who remained standing near the door, was shocked to hear Caldew cross-questioning the great folk of the moat-house with such little ceremony.
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