Tales of Terror and Mystery Story 10 - The Japanned Box

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:00)
Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle The Japanned Box This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by Jeremy Pavier Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle 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'm 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 westwards until they swell into the Malvern Hills. There are no towns but numerous villages, each with its grey Norman Church. You have left the brick of the southern and eastern counties behind you, and everything is stone. Stone for the walls and lichen 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 Evesham, 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've already revealed what it was, which I gained from Thorpe Place.
It was a very, very old house. Incredibly old. Pre-Norman, some of it. And the Bollamores claim 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 grey walls, the rude crumbling stones, the smellers 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 the 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 Colmore is now. Myself, Frank Colmore, 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 upon 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, 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 could wish to look upon. But his presence was not a cheerful one. He was always conscious, 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.