Witching Hill (10 page)

"Exactly what he did," murmured Uvo, with another look at me. It was not a look of triumph unalloyed; it was at least as full of vivid apprehension.

"I shall cross that out," said Miss Julia decidedly. "I don't know what I was thinking of to write anything like that. It really makes me almost afraid to go on."

Uvo shot out a prompt and eager hand.

"Will you let me take it away to finish by myself, Miss Brabazon?"

"I don't think I can. I must look and see if there's anything more like that."

"But it isn't your fault if there is. You've simply been inspired to write the truth."

"But I feel almost ashamed."

And the typewritten sheets rustled more than ever as she raised them once more. But Delavoye jumped up and stood over her with a stiff lip.

"Miss Brabazon, you really must let me read the rest of it to myself!"

"I must see first whether I can let anybody."

"Let me see instead!"

Heaven knows how she construed his wheedling eagerness! There was a moment when they both had hold of the MS., when I felt that my friend was going too far, that his obstinate persistence could not fail to be resented as a liberty. But it was just at such moments that there was a smack of greatness about Uvo Delavoye; given the stimulus, he could carry a thing off with a high hand and the light touch of a born leader; and so it must have been that he had Miss Julia coyly giggling when I fully expected her to stamp her foot.

"You talk about our curiosity," she rallied him. "You men are just as bad!"

"I have a right to be curious," returned Uvo, in a tone that surprised me as much as hers. "You forget that your villain was once the head of our clan, and that so far the fact is quite unmistakable."

"But that's just what I can't understand!"

"Yet the fact remains, Miss Brabazon, and I think it ought to count."

"My dear young man, that's my only excuse for this very infliction!" cried Miss Julia, with invincible jocosity. "If you'd rather it were destroyed, I shall be quite ready to destroy it, as Mr. Gillon knows. But I should like you to hear the whole of it first."

"And I could judge so much better if I read the rest to myself!"

And still he held his corner of the MS., and she hers with an equal tenacity, which I believe to have been partly reflex and instinctive, but otherwise due to the discovery that she had written quite serenely about a blasphemer and an atheist, and not for a moment to any other qualm or apprehension whatsoever. And then as I watched them their eyes looked past me with one accord; the sheaf of fastened sheets fluttered to the ground between them; and I turned to behold the Vicar standing grim and gaunt upon the threshold, with a much younger and still more scandalised face peeping over his shoulder.

"I didn't know that you were entertaining company," observed the Vicar, bowing coldly to us youths. "Are you aware that it's nearly midnight?"

Miss Julia said she never could have believed it, but that she must have lost all sense of time, as she had been reading something to us.

"I'm sure that was very kind, and has been much appreciated," said the Vicar, with his polar smile. "I suppose this was what you were reading?"

And he was swooping down on the MS., but Delavoye was quicker; and quicker yet than either hand was the foot interposed like lightning by the Vicar.

"You'll allow me?" he said, and so picked the crumpled sheets from under it. Uvo bowed, and the other returned the courtesy with ironic interest.

In quivering tones Miss Julia began, "It's only something I've been - - "

"Considering for the Parish Magazine," ejaculated Uvo. "Miss Brabazon did me the honour of consulting me about it."

"And may I ask your responsibility for the Parish Magazine, Mr. Delavoye?"

"It's a story," continued Uvo, ignoring the question and looking hard at Miss Julia - "a local story, evidently written for local publication, the scene being laid here at Witching Hill House. The principal character is the very black sheep of my family who once lived there."

"I'm aware of the relationship," said the Vicar, dryly unimpressed.

"It's not one that we boast about; hence Miss Brabazon's kindness in trying to ascertain whether my people or I were likely to object to its publication."

"Well," said the Vicar, "I'm quite sure that neither you nor your people would have any objection to Miss Brabazon's getting to bed by midnight."

He returned to the door, which he held wide open with urbane frigidity. "Now, Julia, if you'll set us an example."

And at the door he remained when the bewildered lady, delivered from an embarrassment that she could not appreciate, and committed to a subterfuge in which she could see no point, had flown none the less readily, with a hectic simper and a whistle of silk.

"Now, gentlemen," continued the Vicar, "it's nearly midnight, as I've said more than once."

"I was to take the story with me, to finish it by myself," explained Uvo, with the smile of a budding ambassador.

"Oh, very well," rejoined the Vicar, shutting the door. "Then we must keep each other a minute longer. I happen myself to constitute the final court of appeal in all matters connected with the Parish Magazine. Moreover, Mr. Delavoye, I'm a little curious to see the kind of composition that merits a midnight discussion between my sister and two young men whose acquaintance I myself have had so little opportunity of cultivating."

He dropped into a chair, merely waving to us to do the same; and Delavoye did; but I remained standing, with my eyes on the reader's face, and I saw him begin where Miss Julia had left off and the MS. had fallen open. I could not be mistaken about that; there was the mark of his own boot upon the page; but the Vicar read it without wincing at the passage which his sister had declared her intention of crossing out. His brows took a supercilious lift; his cold eyes may have grown a little harder as they read; and yet once or twice they lightened with a human relish - an icy twinkle - a gleam at least of something I had not thought to see in Mr. Brabazon. Perhaps I did not really see it now. If you look long enough at the Sphinx itself, in the end it will yield some semblance of an answering look. And I never took my eyes from the Vicar's granite features, as typewritten sheet after sheet was turned so softly by his iron hand, that it might have been some doctrinal pamphleteer who claimed his cool attention.

When he had finished he rose very quietly and put the whole MS. behind the grate. Then I remembered that Delavoye also was in the room, and I signalled to him because the Vicar was stooping over the well-laid grate and striking matches. But Delavoye only shook his head, and sat where he was when Mr. Brabazon turned and surveyed us both, with the firewood crackling behind his clerical tails.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Delavoye," said he; "but I think you will agree that this is a case for the exercise of my powers in connection with our little magazine. The stupendous production now perishing in the flames was of course intended as a practical joke at our expense."

"And I never saw it!" cried Uvo, scrambling to his feet. "Of course, if you come to think of it, that's the whole and only explanation - isn't it, Gillon? A little dig at the Delavoyes as well, by the way!"

"Chiefly at us, I imagine," said the Vicar dryly. "I rather suspect that the very style of writing is an attempt at personal caricature. The taste is execrable all through. But that is only to be expected of the anonymous lampooner."

"Was there really no name to it, Mr. Brabazon?"

The question was asked for information, but Uvo's tone was that of righteous disgust.

"No name at all. And one sheet of type-writing is exactly like another. My sister had not read it all herself, I gather?"

"Evidently not. And she only read the first half to us."

"Thank goodness for that!" cried the Vicar, off his guard. "The whole impertinence," he ran on more confidentially, "is so paltry, so vulgar, so egregiously badly done! It's all beneath contempt, and I shall not descend to the perpetrator's level by attempting to discover who he is. Neither shall I permit the matter to be mentioned again in my household. And as gentlemen I look to you both to resist the ventilation of a most ungentlemanly hoax."

But the promise that we freely gave did not preclude us from returning at once to No. 7, and there and then concocting a letter to Miss Julia, which I slipped into the letter-box of the makeshift vicarage as the birds were waking in the wood behind Mulcaster Park.

It was simply to say that Uvo was after all afraid that his kith and kin really might resent the publication of her thrilling but painful tale of their common ancestor; and therefore he had taken Miss Brabazon at her word, and the MS. was no more. Its destruction was really demanded by the inexplicable fact that the story was the true story of a discreditable case in which the infamous Lord Mulcaster had actually figured; and the further fact that Miss Brabazon had nevertheless invented it, so far as she personally was aware, would have constituted another and still more interesting case for the Psychical Research Society, but for the aforesaid objections to its publication in any shape or form.

All this made a document difficult to draw up, and none too convincing when drawn; but that was partly because the collaborators were already divided over every feature of the extraordinary affair, which indeed afforded food for argument for many a day to come. But in the meantime our dear Miss Julia accepted sentence and execution with a gentle and even a jocose resignation which made us both miserable. We did not even know that there had been any real occasion for the holocaust for which we claimed responsibility, or to what extent or lengths the unconscious plagiarism had proceeded. Delavoye, of course, took the view that coincided with his precious theory, whereas I argued from Mr. Brabazon's coolness that we had heard the worst.

But the Vicar always was cool out of the pulpit; and it was almost a pity that we rewarded his moderation by going to church the next Sunday, for I never shall forget his ferocious sermon on the modern purveyor of pernicious literature. He might have been raving from bitter experience, as Delavoye of course declared he was. But there is one redeeming point in my recollection of his tirade. And that is a vivid and consoling vision of the elder Miss Brabazon, listening with a rapt and unconscious serenity to every burning word.

CHAPTER V

The Angel of Life

Coplestone was the first of our tenants who had taken his house through me, and I was extremely proud of him. It was precisely the pride of the mighty hunter in his first kill; for Coplestone was big game in his way, and even of a leonine countenance, with his crested wave of tawny hair and his clear sunburnt skin. In early life, as an incomparable oar, he had made a name which still had a way of creeping into the sporting papers; and at forty the same fine figure and untarnished face were a walking advertisement of virtue. But now he had also the grim eyes and stubborn jaw of the man who has faced big trouble; he wore sombre ties that suggested the kind of trouble it had been; and he settled down among us to a solitude only broken in the holidays of his only child, then a boy of twelve at a preparatory school.

I first heard of the boy's existence when Coplestone chose the papers for his house. Anything seemed good enough for the "three reception-rooms and usual offices"; but over a bedroom and a play room on the first floor we were an hour deciding against every pattern in the books, and then on the exact self-colour to be obtained elsewhere. It was at the end of that hour that a chance remark, about the evening paper and the latest cricket, led to a little conversation, insignificant in itself, yet enough to bring Coplestone and me into touch about better things than house decoration. Often after that, when he came down of an afternoon, he would look in at the office and leave me his Pall Mall. And he brought the boy in with him on the first day of the midsummer holidays.

"Ronnie's a keen cricketer at present," said Coplestone on that occasion. "But he's got to be a wet-bob like his old governor when he goes on to Eton. That's what we're here for, isn't it, Ronnie? We're going to take each other on the river every blessed day of the holidays."

Ronnie beamed with the brightest little face in all the world. He had bright brown eyes and dark brown hair, and his skin burnt a delicate brown instead of the paternal pink. His expression was his father's, but not an atom of his colouring. His mother must have been a brunette and a beautiful woman. I could not help thinking of her as I looked at the beaming boy who seemed to have forgotten his loss, if he had ever realised it. And yet it was just a touch of something in his face, a something pensive and constrained, when he was not smiling, that gave him also such a look of Coplestone at times.

But as a rule Ronnie was sizzling with happiness and excitement; and it was my privilege to see a lot of him those hot holidays. Coplestone did not go away for a single night or day. Most mornings one met him and his boy in flannels, on their way down to the river, laden with their lunch. But because the exclusive society of the best of boys must eventually bore the most affectionate of men, I was sometimes invited to join the picnic, and on Saturdays and Sundays I accepted more than once. Those, however, were the days on which I was nearly always bespoke by Uvo Delavoye, and once when I said so it ended in our all going off together in a bigger boat. That day marked a decline in Ronnie's regard for me as an ex-member of a minor school eleven. It was not, perhaps, that he admired me less, but that Delavoye, who played no games at all, had nevertheless a way with him that fascinated man and boy alike.

With Ronnie, it was a way of cracking jokes and telling stories, and taking an extraordinary interest in the boy's preparatory school, so that its rather small beer came bubbling out in a sparkling brew that Coplestone himself had failed to tap. Then Uvo could talk like an inspired professional about the games he could not play, about books like an author, and about adventures like a born adventurer. In Egypt, moreover, he had seen a little life that went a long way in the telling; conversely, one always felt that he had done a bigger thing or two out there than he pretended. To a small boy, at all events, he was irresistible. Had he been an usher at a school like Ronnie's he would have had a string of them on either arm at every turn. As it was, a less sensible father might well have been jealous of him before the holidays were nearly over.

But it was just in the holidays that Coplestone was at his best; when the boy went back in September, we were to see him at his worst. In the beginning he was merely moody and depressed, and morose towards us two as creatures who had served our turn. The more we tried to cheer his solitude, the less encouragement we received. If we cared to call again at Christmas, he hinted, we should be welcome, but not before. We watched him go off bicycling alone in the red autumn afternoons. We saw his light on half of the night; late as we were, he was always later; and now he was never to be seen at all of a morning. But his grim eyes had lost their light, his ruddy face had changed its shade, and erelong I saw him reeling in broad daylight.

Coplestone had taken to the bottle - and as a strong man takes to everything - without fear or shame. Yet somehow I felt it was for the first time in his life; so did Delavoye, but on other grounds. I did not believe he could have been the man he was when he came to us, if this curse had ever descended on Coplestone before. Yet he seemed to take it rather as a blessing, as a sudden discovery which he was a fool not to have made before. This was no case of surreptitious, shamefaced tippling; it was a cynically open and defiant downfall, at once an outrage on a more than decent community, and a new interest in many admirable lives.

Soon there were complaints which I was requested to transmit to Coplestone in his next lucid interval. But I only pretended to have done so. I thought the complainants a set of self-righteous busybodies, and I vastly preferred the good will of the delinquent. That was partly on Ronnie's account, partly for the sake of the man's own magnificent past, but partly also because his present seemed to me a fleeting phase of sheer insanity, which would end as suddenly as it had supervened. The form was too bad to be true, even if Coplestone had ever shown it before; and there was now some evidence that he had not.

Delavoye had come down from town with eyes as bright as Ronnie's.

"You remember Sawrey-Biggerstaff by name? He was second for the Diamonds the second year Coplestone won them, and he won them himself the year after. I met him to-day with a man who lunched me at the United University. I told him we had Coplestone down here, and asked him if it was true that he had ever been off the rails like this before, only without breathing a word about his being off them now. Sawrey-Biggerstaff swore that he had never heard of such a libel, or struck a more abstemious hound than Harry Coplestone, or ever heard of him being or ever having been anything else! So you must see what it all means, Gilly."

"It means that he's never got over the loss of his wife."

"But that happened nearly three years ago. Ronnie told me. Why didn't the old boy break out before? Why save it all up for Witching Hill?"

"I know what you're going to say."

"But isn't it obvious? Our wicked old man drank like an aquarium. His vices are the weeds of this polluted soil; they crop up one after the other, and with inveterate irony he's allotted this one to the noblest creature on the place. It's for us to save him by hook or crook - or rather it's my own hereditary job."

"And how do you mean to set about it?"

"You'll be angry with me, Gilly, but I shan't be happy till I see his house on your hands again. It's the only chance - to drive him into fresh woods and pastures new!"

I was angry. I declined to discuss the matter any further; but I stuck to my opinion that the cloud would vanish as quickly as it had gathered. And Coplestone of all men was man enough to stand his ground and live it down.

But first he must take himself in hand, instead of which I had to own that he was going from bad to worse. He was a man of leisure, and he drank as though he had found his vocation in the bottle. He was a lonely man, and he drank as though drink was a friend in need and not the deadliest foe. He was the only drunkard I ever knew who drank with impenitent zest; and I saw something of him at his worst; he was more approachable than he had been before his great surrender. All October and November he kept it up, his name a byword far beyond the confines of the Estate, and by December he must have been near the inevitable climax. Then he disappeared. The servants had no idea of his whereabouts; but he had taken luggage. That was the best reason for believing him to be still alive, until he turned up with his boy for the Christmas holidays.

It would be too much to say that he looked as he had looked last holidays. The man had aged; he seemed even a little shaken, but not more than by a moderate dose of influenza; and to a casual eye the improvement was more astounding than the previous deterioration, especially in its rapidity. His spirits were at least as good as they had been before, his hospitality in keeping with the season. I ate my Christmas dinner with father and son, and Delavoye and I first-footed them on New Year's morning. What was most remarkable on these occasions was the way Coplestone drank his champagne, with the happy moderation of a man who has never exceeded in his life. There was now no shadow of excess, but neither was there any of the weakling's recourse to the opposite extreme of meticulous austerity. A doctor might have forbidden even a hair of the sleeping dog, but to us young fellows it was a joy to see our hero so completely his own man once more.

Early in January came a frost - a thrilling frost - with skating on the gravel-pit ponds beyond the Village. It was a pastime in which I had taken an untutored delight, all the days of my northern youth, and now I put in every hour I could at the clumsy execution of elementary figures. But Coplestone had spent some winters in Switzerland, and he was a past master in the Continental style. Ordinary skaters would form a ring to watch his dazzling displays, and those who had not seen him in the autumn must have found it hard to credit the whispers of those who had. His pink skin regained its former purity, his blue eyes shone like fairy lamps, and the whole ice rang with the music of his "edge" as he sped careening like a human yacht. It was better still to watch him patiently imparting the rudiments to Ronnie, who picked them up as a small boy will, and worked so hard that the perspiration would stand upon the smooth brown face for all that wondrous frost. It froze, more or less, all the rest of those holidays, and the Coplestones never missed a day until the last of all. I was hoping to find them on the ice at dusk, if only I could manage to get away in time, but early in the afternoon Uvo Delavoye came along to disabuse my mind.

"That young Ronnie's caught a chill," said he - "I thought he would. It'll keep him at home for another day or two, so the ill wind may blow old Coplestone a bit of good. I'm feeling a bit anxious about him, Gilly; wild horses won't drag him from this haunted hill! Just at this moment, however, he's on his way to Richmond to see if he can get Ronnie the new Wisden; and I'm sneaking up to town because I know it's not to be had nearer. I was wondering if you could make time to look him up while we're gone?"

I made it there and then at the risk of my place; it was not so often that I had Ronnie to myself. But at the very gate I ceased to think about the child. A Pickford van was delivering something at the house. At a glance I knew it for a six-gallon jar of whisky - to see poor Coplestone some little way into the Easter term.

Ronnie lay hot and dry in his bed, but brown and bright as he had looked upon the ice, and sizzling with the exuberance of a welcome that warmed my heart. He told me, of course, that it was "awful rot" losing the last day like this; but, on the other hand, he seemed delighted with his room - he always was delighted with something - and professed himself rather glad of an opportunity of appreciating it as it deserved. Indeed, there was not a lazy bone in his little body, and I doubt if he had spent an unnecessary minute in his bedroom all the holidays. But they really were delightful quarters, those two adjoining rooms for which no paper in our stock had been good enough. Both were now radiant in a sky-blue self-colour that transported one to the tropics, and certainly looked better than I thought it would when I had the trouble of procuring it.

In the bedroom the blue was only broken by some simple white furniture, by a row of books over the bed, and by groups of the little eleven in which Ronnie already had a place, and photographs of his father at one or two stages of his great career. I was still exploring when an eager summons brought me to the bedside.

"Let's play cricket!" cried Ronnie - "do you mind? With a pack of cards - my own invention! Everything up to six counts properly; all over six count singles, except the picture cards, and most of them get you out. King and queen are caught and bowled, but the old knave's Mr. Extras!"

"Capital, Ronnie!" said I. "Shall it be single wicket between us two, or the next test-match with Australia?"

Ronnie was all for the test, and really the rules worked very well. You shuffled after the fall of every wicket, and you never knew your luck. Tom Richardson, the last man in for England, made sixty-two, while some who shall be nameless went down like ninepins in the van. In the next test (at Lord's) we elaborated the laws to admit of stumping, running out, getting leg-before and even hitting wicket. But the red kings and queens still meant a catch or what Ronnie called "a row in your timber yard." And so the afternoon wore on, until I had to mend the fire and light the gas; and then somehow the cards seemed only cards, and we put them away for that season.

I forget why it was that Ronnie suddenly wanted his knife. I rather think that he was deliberately rallying his possessions about him in philosophic preparation for a lengthy campaign between the sheets. In any case there was no finding that knife, but something much more interesting came to light instead.

I was conducting the search under directions from the bed, but I was out of sight behind the screen when I kicked up the corner of loose carpet and detected the loosened board. Here, thought I, was a secret repository where the missing possession might have been left by mistake; there were the actual marks of a blade upon the floor. "This looks a likely place," I said; but I did not specify the place I meant, and the next moment I had discovered neither knife nor pencil, but the soiled, unframed photograph of a lovely lady.