The
HOUSE OF ADVENTURE
By WARWICK DEEPING
Author of
“Sorrell and Son”
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with The Macmillan Company
Printed in U. S. A.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Copyright 1921 and 1922
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1922.
Reissued March, 1928.
To
Dr. BEDFORD FENWICK
IN MEMORY OF HIS GREAT KINDNESS
THE
HOUSE OF ADVENTURE
I
Two stragglers lay sleeping in an orchard near thevillage of Beaucourt, sprawling upon a grass bank underthe branches of an old apple tree. The sun had clearedthe horizon and hung as a great yellow disc in the purpleboughs of the beech trees on the other side of the stream.Overhead stretched the thin and cloudless blue of a Marchsky. The grass was silvered with hoar-frost—and in thewood across the stream a bird was singing.
The men slept, two brown figures on the green bank.One sprawled on his back; the other lay curled on hisside. Their boots were the colour of clay; so were theirfaces, the clay-coloured faces of men who had beenstarved, and who had fallen down to sleep the sleep ofexhaustion. They were dirty with the dirt of five days’fighting and foot-slogging. Their chins were paintedblack with a stubble of hair, and their noses looked pinchedand thin. They had no greatcoats, no packs, no puttees,no equipment; nothing but a rifle, a blue water-bottle, anda haversack between them. At the world’s end a mangets rid of unnecessary lumber.
The dawn was extraordinarily still. There was not asound to be heard save the singing of the bird in the woodon the other side of the stream. The country rolled intoblue-grey distances under the level sunlight and the tranquilsky, a strangely peaceful landscape, the landscape ofan unvexed and impersonal dawn. Beaucourt village slept