Witching Hill (16 page)

"Why, what's the matter?" cried Nettleton, but not from the part of the room where I had heard him fumbling, neither had he yet struck a light.

"You know, you blackguard!" I roared, with a few worse words than that. "I'll sort you for this, you see if I don't! Strike a light and let me loose this instant! It's taking my foot off, I tell you!"

"Dear, dear!" he exclaimed, striking a match at once. "Why, if you haven't gone and got into my best burglar-trap!"

He stood regarding me from a safe distance, with a sly pale smile, and the wax vesta held on high. I dropped my eyes to my tortured leg: a couple of boards had opened downward on hinges, and I could see the rusty teeth of an ancient man-trap embedded in my trousers, and my trousers already darkening as though with ink, where the pierced cloth pressed into quivering flesh and bone.

"It's the very same thing that happened to that last maid of mine," continued Nettleton. "I shouldn't wonder if you'd never seen a trap like that before. There aren't so many of 'em, even in museums. I picked this one up in Wardour Street; but it was my own idea to set it like that, and I went and quite forgot I'd left it ready for the night!"

That was the most obvious lie. He had set the thing somehow when he had pretended to be going to light the gas. But I did not tell him so. I did not open my mouth - in speech. I heard him out in a dumb horror; for he had stooped, and was lighting the candles one by one.

They were all where they had always been, except one that I must have kicked over on entering. Nettleton looked at that candle wistfully, and then at me, with a maniacally sly shake of the head; for it lay within my reach, but out of his; and it lay in a pool, beneath glistening shavings, for the whole room was swimming in the stuff that stank.

The lighting of the candles - in my brain as well as on the floor - had one interesting effect. It stopped my excruciating pain for several moments. We stood looking at each other across the little low lights, like Gullivers towering over Lilliputian lamp-posts; that is, he stood, well out of arm's-length, while I leant with all my weight on one bent knee. Suddenly he gleamed and slapped his thigh.

"Why, I do believe you thought I was going to set fire to the house!" he cried.

"I knew you were."

"No - but now?"

"Yes - now - I see it in your damned face!"

"Really, Mr. Gillon!" exclaimed Nettleton, with a shake of his cracked head. "I hadn't thought of such a thing. But I am in a difficulty. The gas is on your side of the room, just out of your reach. So is the control of the very unpleasant arrangement that's got you by the heel. Is it the ankle? Oh! I'm sorry; but it's no use your looking round. I only meant the trap-door control; the trap itself has to be taken out before you can set it again, and it's a job even with the proper lever. After what's happened and the language you've been using, Mr. Gillon, I'm afraid I don't care to trust myself within reach of your very powerful arms, either to light the gas or to meddle with my little monster."

"See here," I said through the teeth that I had set against my pain. "You're as mad as a hatter; that's the only excuse for you - - "

"Thank you!" he snapped in. "Then it won't be the worse for me if I do give you a taste of hell before your death and - cremation!"

"I'm sorry for you," I went on, partly because I did not know that the insane call for more tact than the sane, and partly because I was far from sure which this man was, but had resolved in any case to appeal with all my might to his self-interest. "I'm sorry for anybody who loses his wits, but sorriest for those who get them back again and have to pay for what they did when they weren't themselves. You go mad and commit a murder, but you're dead sane when they hang you! That seems to me about the toughest luck a man could have, but it looks very like being your own."

"Which of these four candles do you back to win?" inquired Nettleton, looking at them and not at me. "I put my money on the one nearest you, and I back this one here for a place."

"Two people know all about this, I may tell you," said I with more effect. Nettleton looked up. "Uvo Delavoye's one, and your old Sarah's the other."

"That be blowed for a yarn!" he answered, after a singularly lucid interval, if he was not lucid all the time. "I think I see you walking into a trap like this if you knew it was here!"

"It's the truth!" I blustered, feeling to my horror that the truth had not rung true.

"All right! Then you deserve all you get for coming into another man's house - - "

"When your servant came for me, and when we found out together that you were trying to burn it down?"

I was doing my best to reason with him now, but he was my master, sane or crazy. His cleverness was diabolical. He took the new point out of my mouth. "Yes - for going away and standing by to see me do it!" he cried. "But that's not the only crow I've got to pluck with you, young fellow, and the other jacks-in-office behind you. Must pay your dirty extortionate rent, must I? Very last absolutely final application, was it? Going to put a man in possession, are you? Very nice - very good! You're in possession yourself, my lad, and I wish you joy of your job!"

He made for the door, hugging the wall with unnecessary caution, leaving a bookcase tottering as an emblem of his respect. But at the door he recovered both his courage and his humour.

"I always meant to give him a warm reception," he cried - "and by God you're going to get one!"

He opened the door - made me a grotesque salute - and it was all that I could do to keep a horrified face till he was gone. Never had I thought him mad enough to leave me before he was obliged. Yet the front door closed softly in its turn; now I was alone in the house, and could have clapped my hands with joy. I plunged them into my pockets instead, took out the small shot of my possessions, and fired them at the candles, even to my watch. But my hand had shaken. I was balanced on one leg and suffering torments from the other. The four flames burnt undimmed. Then I stripped to the waist, made four bundles of coat and waistcoat, shirt and vest. It was impossible to miss with these. As I flung the fourth, darkness descended like a kiss from heaven - and a loud laugh broke through the door.

Nettleton came creeping in along the wall, lit the candles one by one, and said he was indebted to me for doing exactly what he thought I would, and throwing away my own last means of meddling with his arrangements!

I went mad myself. I turned for an appreciable time into the madder man of the two; the railing and the raving were all on my side. They are not the least horrible thing that I remember. But I got through that stage, thank God! I like to think that one always must if there is time. There was time, and to spare, in my case. And there were those four calm candles waiting for me to behave myself, burning away as though they had never been out, one almost down to the shavings now, all four in their last half-inch, yet without another flicker between them of irresolution or remorse, true ecclesiastical candles to the end!

I had spat at them till my mouth was like an ash-pit; but there they burnt, corpse candles for the living who was worse than dead, mocking me with their four charmed flames. But mockery was nothing to me now. Nettleton had killed the nerve that mockery touches. When I shouted he gave me leave to go on till I was black in the face; nobody would hear me through the front of the house, and perhaps I remembered the heavy shutters he had made for the French windows at the time of the burglar scare? He went round to see if he could hear me through them, and he came back rubbing his hands. But now I took no more notice of his taunts. The last and cruellest was at the very flecks of blood on floor and shavings, flung far as froth in my demented efforts to tear either my foot from the trap or myself limb from limb.... And I had only sworn at him in my terrible preoccupation.

"No, that's where you're going, old cock!" he had answered. "And by the way, Gillon, when you get there I wish you'd ask for your friend Delavoye's old man of the soil; tell him his mantle's descended on good shoulders, will you? Tell him he's not the only pebble on the shores of Styx!"

That gave me something else to think about towards the end; but I had no longer any doubt about the man's inveterate insanity. His pale eyes had rolled and lightened with unstable fires. There had been something inconsecutive even in his taunts. Consistent only in keeping out of my way, he had explained himself once when I was trying to picture the wrath to come upon him, in the felon's dock, in the condemned cell, on the drop itself. It was only fools who looked forward or back, said Edgar Nettleton.

And I, who have done a little of both all my life, like most ordinary mortals, as I look back to the hour which I had every reason to recognise as my last on earth, the one redeeming memory is that of the complete calm which did ultimately oust my undignified despair. It may have been in answer to the prayers I uttered in the end instead of curses; that is more than man can say. I only know that I was not merely calm at the last, but immensely interested in what Nettleton would have called the winning candle. It burnt down to the last thin disk of grease, shining like a worn florin in the jungle of shavings that seemed to lean upon the flame and yet did not catch. Then the wick fell over, the last quarter-inch of it, and I thought that candle had done its worst. Head and heart almost burst with hope. No! the agony was not to be prolonged to the next candle, or the next but one. The very end of the first wick had done the business in falling over. I had forgotten that strong smell and the pools now drying on the floor.

It began in a thin blue spoonful of flame, that scooped up the worn grease coin, grew into a saucerful of violet edged with orange, and in ten or twenty seconds had the whole jungle of shavings in a blaze. But it was a violet blaze. It was not like ordinary fire. It was more like the thin blue waves that washed over the rocks of white asbestos in so many of our tenants' grates. And like a wave it passed over the surface of the floor, without eating into the wood.

There were no hangings in the room. The incendiary had relied entirely on his woodwork, and within a minute the floor was a sea of violet flames with red crests. There was one island. I had stooped after Nettleton left me for the last time, and swept the shavings clear of me on all sides, garnering as many as possible into the hole in the floor where the trap had been set, and drying the floor within reach as well as I could with the bare hand. There was this island, perhaps the size of a hearth-rug; and I cannot say that I was ever any hotter than I should have been on such a rug before a roaring fire.

But this fire did not roar, though it surged over the rest of the floor in its blue billows and its red-hot crests, flowing under the carpenter's bench as the sea flows under a pier. And the floor was not on fire; the fire was on the floor; and it was dying down! It was dying down before my starting eyes. Where the violet wave receded, it left little more mark than the waves of the sea leave on the sands. It was only the fiery crests that lingered, and crackled, and turned black and my senses left me before I saw the reason, or more than the first blinding ray of hope!

It was not Uvo Delavoye, and it was not Sarah, who was standing over me when I awoke to the physical agony on which that of the mind had acted lately as a perfect anodyne. It was the Delavoyes' doctor. Uvo had sent for him in the middle of the night, telling his poor people he felt much worse - having indeed a higher temperature - but being in reality only unbearably anxious about Nettleton and me. He wanted to know what Nettleton was doing. He wanted to be sure that I was safe in my bed. If his sister had not been nursing him, he would have made a third madman by crawling out to satisfy himself; as it was, he had sent for the doctor and told him all. And the doctor had not only come himself, but had knocked up his partner on the way, as they were both tenants on the Estate.

They might have been utter strangers to me that night, and for a little time after. Nor was it in accordance with their orders that I got to know things as soon as I did. That was where Uvo Delavoye did come in, and with him his mother's new cook, Sarah, in the bonnet with the nodding plume - just as she had been to see her pore old master.

"It's a beautiful mad-'ouse," said Sarah, with a moist twinkle in her funny old eye. "I only 'ope he won't want to burn it down!"

"I only hope you're keeping his effort to yourselves," said I. "It'll do the Estate no good, if it gets out, after all the other things that have been happening here."

"Trust us and the doctors!" said Uvo. "We're all in the same boat, Gilly, and your old Muskett's the only other soul who knows. By the way" - his glance had deepened - "both they and Sarah think it must have been coming on for a long time."

"I'm quite sure it 'as," said Sarah, earnestly. "I never did 'ear such things as Mr. Nettleton used to say to me, or to hisself, it didn't seem to matter who it was. But of course it wasn't for me to go about repeating them."

I saw Uvo's mouth twitching, for some reason, and I changed the subject to the miraculous preservation of the house in Witching Hill Road. The doctors had assured me that the very floor, which my own eyes had beheld a sea of blazing spirit, was scarcely so much as charred. And Uvo Delavoye confirmed the statement.

"It wasn't such a deep sea as you thought, Gilly. But it was the spirit that saved the show, and that's just where our poor friend overshot the mark. Spirit burns itself, not the thing you put it on. It's like the brandy and the Christmas pudding. Those shavings would have been far more dangerous by themselves, but drenched in methylated spirit they burnt like a wick, which of course hardly burns at all."

"My methylated!" Sarah chimed in. "He must have found it when he was looking for me all over my kitchens, pore gentleman, and me at my brother's all the time! I'd just took a gallon from Draytons' Stores, because you get it ever so much cheaper by the gallon, Mr. Hugo. I must remember to tell your ma."

CHAPTER VIII

The Temple of Bacchus

That spring I did what a great many young fellows were doing in those particular days. I threw up my work at short notice, and went very far afield from Witching Hill. It was a long year before I came back, unscathed as to my skin, but with its contents ignobly depreciated and reduced, on a visit to 7, Mulcaster Park.

Uvo Delavoye met me at the station, and we fled before the leisurely tide of top-hats and evening papers, while one of the porters followed with my things. There were no changes that I could see, except in myself as I caught sight of myself in my old office window. The creepers might have made a modest stride on the Queen Anne houses; brick and tile were perhaps a mellower red; and more tenants appeared to be growing better roses in their front gardens. But the place had always been at its best at the end of May: here was a giant's nosegay of apple-blossom, and there a glimpse of a horse-chestnut laden like a Christmas-tree with its cockades of pure cream. One felt the flight of time only at such homely spectacles as Shoolbred's van, delivering groceries at the house which Edgar Nettleton had tried to burn down with me in it. And an empty perambulator, over the way at Berylstow, confirmed the feeling when Delavoye informed me that the little caller was a remarkable blend of our old friend Guy Berridge and the whilom Miss Hemming.

Mulcaster Park had moved bodily with the times. It had its asphalt paths at last. Incidentally I missed some blinds which had been taken over as tenant's fixtures in my first or second year. The new ones were not red. The next house lower down had also changed hands; a very striking woman, in a garden hat, was filling a basket with roses from a William Allen Richardson which had turned the painted porch into a bower; and instead of answering a simple question, Uvo stopped and called her to the gate.

"Let me introduce you to Mrs. Ricardo, Gilly," said he, as the lady joined us with a smile that set me thinking. "Mrs. Ricardo knows all about you, and was looking forward to seeing the conquering hero come marching home."

It was not one of Uvo's happiest speeches; but Mrs. Ricardo was neither embarrassed nor embarrassing in what she found to say to me. I liked her then and there: in any case I should have admired her. She was a tall and handsome brunette, with thick eyebrows and that high yet dusky colouring which reminds one in itself of stormlight and angry skies. But Mrs. Ricardo seemed the most good-natured of women, anxious at once not to bore me about my experiences, and yet to let us both see that she thoroughly appreciated their character.

"You will always be thankful that you went, Mr. Gillon, in spite of enteric," said Mrs. Ricardo. "The people to pity were those who couldn't go, but especially the old soldiers, who would have given anything to have gone."

I had just flattered myself that she was about to give each of us a rose; she had certainly selected an obvious buttonhole, and appeared to be seeking its fellow in the basket, when suddenly I saw her looking past us both and up the road. A middle-aged man was hobbling towards us in the thinning stream of homing citizens. He did not look one of them; he wore light clothes and a straw hat which he did not remove in accosting my companions; and I thought that he looked both hot and cross as he leant hard upon a serviceable stick.

"Gossiping at the gate, as usual!" he cried, with a kind of rasping raillery. "Even Mr. Delavoye won't thank you for keeping him standing on this villainous asphalt till his feet sink in."

"That would have been one for you, Gilly, in the old days," said Uvo. "Captain Ricardo - Mr. Gillon."

Captain Ricardo also seemed to have heard of me. He overhauled me with his peevish little eyes, and then said two or three of the bitterest things about the British forces, regular and irregular, that it ever was my lot to hear. I made no attempt to reply to them. His wife tried to present him with the rose which I fancied had been meant for one of us, and his prompt rejection of the offering only hardened me in that impression. Then Uvo asked him if he had seen good play at the Oval; and so the vitriolic stream was diverted into such congenial channels as the decadence of modern cricket and the calibre of the other members of the Surrey Club.

"But won't you come in?" concluded the captain in his most forbidding manner. "I hate this talking at the gate like a pack of servants, but my wife seems to have a mania for it."

It is only fair to state that Mrs. Ricardo had withdrawn during the denunciation of the game which her husband spent his useless days in watching, as Uvo told me when we had declined his inhospitality and were out of earshot. It was all he did say about Captain Ricardo, and I said nothing at all. The people were evidently friends of his; at least the wife was, and it was she who had set me thinking with her first smile. I was still busy wondering whether, or where, I could have seen her before.

"It's quite possible," said Uvo, when I had wondered aloud. "I wouldn't give her away if it weren't an open secret here. But Witching Hill hasn't called on Mrs. Ricardo since it found out that she was once on the stage."

"Good Lord!"

"There's another reason, to give the neighbours their due. Ricardo has insulted most of them to their faces. A bit of gossip got about, and instead of ignoring it he limped out on the war-path, cutting half the Estate and damning the other half in heaps."

"But what was her stage name?"

Delavoye gave a grim laugh as he ushered me into the garden of many memories. "You wouldn't know it, Gilly. You were never a great playgoer, you see, and Mrs. Ricardo was anything but a great actress. But she's a very great good sort, as you'll find out for yourself when you know her better."

I could quite believe it even then - but I was not so sure after a day or two with Uvo. I found him leading a lonely life, with Nettleton's old Sarah to look after him. Miss Delavoye had been wooed and married while my back was turned, and Mrs. Delavoye was on a long visit to the young couple. Uvo, however, appeared to be enjoying his solitude rather than otherwise; his health was better, he was plying his pen, things were being taken by all kinds of periodicals. And yet I was uneasy about him. Among many little changes, but more in this house than in most, the subtlest change of all was in Uvo Delavoye himself.

He could not do enough for me; from the few survivors of his father's best bins, to my breakfast served in bed by his own hands, nothing was good enough for the fraud he made me feel. Yet we were not in touch as we had been of old. I could have done with fewer deeds of unnecessary kindness and more words of unguarded intimacy. He did not trust me as he used. He had something or somebody on his mind; and I soon made up mine that it was Mrs. Ricardo, but not from anything else he told me. He never mentioned her name again. He did not tell me that, with a view to a third road, the Estate had just purchased a fresh slice of the delightful woodland behind Mulcaster Park; that in its depths was a little old ruin, just after his heart, and that this ruin was also a favourite haunt of Mrs. Ricardo's. I was left to make all these discoveries for myself, on a morning when Uvo Delavoye was expressly closeted at his desk.

It was, to be sure, my old Mr. Muskett who told me about the new land, and invited me to explore it at my pleasure. On a warm morning it seemed a better scheme than going alone upon the river, as Uvo had suggested. I accordingly turned back with Mr. Muskett, who went on to speak of the ruin, and in fact set me on my way to it while I was setting him to the station. Ten minutes later, in a tangle of bush and bracken, I had found it: an ancient wall, scaled with patches of mouldy stucco, and at one end an Ionic pillar towering out of the sea of greenery like a lighthouse clear of the cliffs. Obviously, as Mr. Muskett had said, the fragments that remained of one of those toy temples which were a characteristic conceit of old Georgian grounds. But it happened to be the first that I had seen, and I proceeded to reconnoitre the position with some interest. Then it was that Mrs. Ricardo was discovered, seated on one of several stumps of similar pillars, on the far side of the wall.

Mrs. Ricardo, without her hat in the shadow of the old grey wall, but with her glossy hair and glowing colour stamped against it with rich effect: a charming picture in its greenwood frame, especially as she was looking up to greet me with a radiant smile. But I was too taken aback to be appreciative for the moment. And then I decided that the high colouring was a thought too high, and a sudden self-consciousness disappointing after her excellent composure in the much more trying circumstances of our previous meeting.

"Haven't you been here before, Mr. Gillon?" Mrs. Ricardo seemed surprised, but quite competent to play the guide. "This mossy heap's supposed to have been the roof, and these stone stumps the columns that held it up. There's just that one standing as it was. There should be a 'sylvan prospect' from where I'm sitting; but it must have been choked up for years and years."

"You do know a lot about it!" I cried, recovering my admiration for the pretty woman as she recovered her self-possession. And then she smiled again, but not quite as I had caught her smiling.

"What Mr. Delavoye's friends don't know about Witching Hill oughtn't to be worth knowing!" said Mrs. Ricardo. "I mean what he really knows, not what he makes up, Mr. Gillon. I hear you don't believe in all that any more than I do. But he does seem to have read everything that was ever written about the place. He says this was certainly the Temple of Bacchus in the good old days."

"I don't quite see where Bacchus comes in," said I, thinking that Uvo and Mrs. Ricardo must be friends indeed.

"He's supposed to have been on this old wall behind us, in a fresco or something, by Villikins or somebody. You can see where it's been gouged out, and the stucco with it."

But I had to say what was in my mind. "Is Uvo Delavoye still harping on about his bold bad ancestor, Mrs. Ricardo? Does he still call him his old man of the soil?"

To her, at any rate, yes, he did! She did not think it was a thing he talked about to everybody. But I had hoped it was an extinct folly, since he had not mentioned it as yet to me. It was almost as though Mrs. Ricardo had taken my old place. Did she discourage him as I had done? She told me it was his latest ambition to lay the ghost. And I marvelled at their intimacy, and wondered what that curmudgeon of a husband had to say to it!

Yet it seemed natural enough that we should talk about Uvo Delavoye, as I sat on another of the broken columns and lit a cigarette at Mrs. Ricardo's suggestion. Uvo was one of those people who are the first of bonds between their friends, a fruitful subject, a most human interest in common. So I found myself speaking of him in my turn, with all affection and yet some little freedom, to an almost complete stranger who was drawing me on more deliberately than I saw.

"You were great friends, Mr. Gillon, weren't you?"

"We are, and I hope we always shall be."

"It must have been everything for you to have such a friend in such a place!"

"It was so! I stayed on and on because of him. He was the life and soul of the Estate to me."

Mrs. Ricardo looked as though she could have taken the words out of my mouth. "But what a spoilt life, and what a strange soul!" said she, instead; and I saw there was something in Mrs. Ricardo, after all.

She was looking at me and yet through me, as we sat on our broken bits of Ionic columns. She had spoken in a dreamy voice, with a wonderful softening of her bold, flamboyant beauty; for I was not looking through her by any means, but staring harder than I had any business, in a fresh endeavour to remember where we had met before. And for once she had spoken without a certain intonation, which I had hardly noticed in her speech until I missed it now.

"Of course I've heard of all the extraordinary adventures you've both had here," resumed Uvo's new friend, as though to emphasise the terms that they were on.

"Not all of them?" I suggested. There were one or two affairs that he and I were to have kept to ourselves.

"Why not?" she flashed, suspiciously.

"Oh! I don't know."

"Which of them is such a secret?"

She was smiling now, but with obvious effort. Why this pressure on a pointless point? And where had I seen her before?

"Well, there was our very first adventure, for one," said I.

"Underground, you mean?"

"Yes - partly."

I could not help staring now. Mrs. Ricardo had reddened so inexplicably.

"There was no need to tell me the other part!" she said, scornfully. "I was in it - as you know very well!"

Then I did know. She was the bedizened beauty who had raked in the five-pound notes, and smashed a magnum of champagne in her excitement, at the orgy in Sir Christopher Stainsby's billiard room.

"I know it now," I stammered, "but I give you my word - - "

"Fiddle!" she interrupted. "You've known it all the time. I've seen it in your face. He gave me away to you, and I shan't forgive him!"

I found myself involved in a heated exposition of the facts. I had never recognised her until that very minute. But I had kept wondering where we had met before. And that was all that she could have seen in my face. As for Uvo Delavoye, when I had spoken to him about it, he had merely assured me that I must have seen her on the stage: so far and no further had he given her away. Mrs. Ricardo took some assuring and reassuring on the point. But the truth was in me, and in her ultimate pacification she seemed to lose sight of the fact that she herself had done what she accused Uvo of doing. Evidently the leakage of her secret mattered far less to Mrs. Ricardo than the horrible thought that Mr. Delavoye had let it out.

Of course I spoke as though there was nothing to matter in the least to anybody, and asked after Sir Christopher as if the entertainment in his billiard room had been one of the most conventional. It seemed that he had married again in his old age; he had married one of the other ladies of those very revels.

"That's really why I first thought of coming here to live," explained Mrs. Ricardo, with her fine candour. "But there have been all kinds of disagreeables."