Round the Fire Stories Chapter 5 - The Japanned Box

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:00)
Story Five of Round the Fire Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Story Five. The Japanned Box.
It was a curious thing, said the private tutor, one of those grotesque and whimsical incidents which occur to one as one goes through life. I lost the best situation which I am ever likely to have through it. But I am glad that I went to Thorpe Place, for I gained. Well, as I tell you the story, you will learn what I gained.
I don't know whether you are familiar with that part of the Midlands which is drained by the Avon. It is the most English part of England. Shakespeare, the flower of the whole race, was born right in the middle of it. It is a land of rolling pastures rising in higher folds to the westward until they swell into the Malvern Hills.
There are no towns, but numerous villages, each with its gray Norman church. You have left the brick of the southern and eastern counties behind you, and everything is stone, stone for the walls, and lichened slabs of stone for the roofs. It is all grim and solid and massive, as befits the heart of a great nation.
It was in the middle of this country, not very far from Ephsham, that Sir John Bollamore lived in the old ancestral home of Thorpe Place, and thither it was that I came to teach his two little sons. Sir John was a widower, his wife had died three years before, and he had been left with these two lads, aged eight and ten, and one dear little girl of seven. Miss Witherton, who is now my wife, was governess to this little girl. I was tutor to the two boys. Could there be a more obvious prelude to an engagement? She governs me now, and I tutor two little boys of our own. But there I have already revealed what it was which I gained in Thorpe Place. It was a very, very old house, incredibly old, pre-Norman some of it, and the Bollamores claimed to have lived in that situation since long before the Conquest.
It struck a chill to my heart when first I came there, those enormously thick gray walls, the rude crumbling stones, the smell as from a sick animal which exhaled from the rotting plaster of the aged building. But the modern wing was bright, and the garden was well kept. No house could be dismal which had a pretty girl inside it, and such a show of roses in front. Apart from a very complete staff of servants, there were only four of us in the household. These were Miss Witherton, who was at that time four and twenty, and as pretty, well, as pretty as Mrs. Calmer is now. Myself, Frank Calmer, aged thirty, Mrs. Stevens, the housekeeper, a dry, silent woman, and Mr. Richards, a tall, military-looking man, who acted as steward to the Bollamore estates. We four always had our meals together, but Sir John had his usually alone in the library. Sometimes he joined us at dinner, but on the whole we were just as glad when he did not. For he was a very formidable person. Imagine a man six feet three inches in height, majestically built, with a high-nosed aristocratic face, brindled hair, shaggy eyebrows, a small pointed Mephistophelian beard, and lines about his brow and round his eyes as deep as if they had been carved with a penknife. He had gray eyes, weary, hopeless-looking eyes, proud and yet pathetic, eyes which claimed your pity and yet dared you to show it. His back was rounded with study, but otherwise he was as fine a looking man of his age, five and fifty, perhaps, as any woman would wish to look upon. But his presence was not a cheerful one. He was always courteous, always refined, but singularly silent and retiring. I have never lived so long with any man and known so little of him. If he were indoors, he spent his time either in his own small study in the Eastern Tower or in the library in the modern wing. So regular was his routine that one could always say at any hour exactly where he would be. Twice in the day he would visit his study, once after breakfast and once about ten at night. You might set your watch by the slam of the heavy door. For the rest of the day he would be in his library, save that for an hour or two in the afternoon he would take a walk or a ride, which was solitary like the rest of his existence. He loved his children and was keenly interested in the progress of their studies, but they were a little awed by the silent, shaggy-browed figure, and they avoided him as much as they could. Indeed, we all did that. It was some time before I came to know anything about the circumstances of Sir John Bollamore's life, for Mrs. Stevens, the housekeeper, and Mr. Richards, the land steward, were too loyal to talk easily of their employer's affairs. As to the governess, she knew no more than I did, and our common interest was one of the causes which drew us together. At last, however, an incident occurred which led to a closer acquaintance with Mr. Richards, and a fuller knowledge of the life of the man whom I served. The immediate cause of this was no less than the falling of Master Percy, the youngest of my pupils, into the mill race, with eminent danger both to his life and to mine, since I had to risk myself in order to save him.