Witching Hill (17 page)

She had known about the tunnel before she had heard of it from Uvo; some member of the lively household had discovered its existence, and there had been high jinks down there on more than one occasion. But Lady Stainsby had not been the same person since her marriage. I gathered that she had put her reformed foot down on the underground orgies, but that Captain Ricardo had done his part in the subsequent disagreeables. It further appeared that the blood-stained lace and the diamond buckle had also been discovered, and that old Sir Christopher had "behaved just like he would, and froze on to both without a word to Mr. Delavoye's grand relations."

I suggested that mining rights might have gone with the freehold, but Mrs. Ricardo quoted Uvo's opinion as to what still ailed Sir Christopher Stainsby. She made it quite clear to me that our friend, at any rate, still laboured under his old obsession, and that she herself took it more seriously than she had professed before one confidence led to another.

"But don't you tell him I told you!" she added as though we were ourselves old friends. "The less you tell Mr. Delavoye of all we've been talking about, the better turn you'll be doing me, Mr. Gillon. It was just like him not to give away ancient history even to you, and I don't think you're the one to tell him how I went and did it myself!"

I could have wished that she had taken that for granted; but at least she felt too finely to bind me down to silence. Altogether I found her a fine creature, certainly in face and form, and almost certainly at heart, if one guessed even charitably at her past, and then at her life in a hostile suburb with a neglectful churl of a husband.

But to admire the woman for her own sake was not to approve of her on all other grounds; and during our friendly and almost fascinating chat I contracted a fairly definite fear that was not removed by the manner of its conclusion. Mrs. Ricardo had looked at a watch pinned to a pretty but audacious blouse, and had risen rather hurriedly. But she had looked at her watch just a minute too late; as we turned the corner of the ruin, there was Delavoye hurrying through the brake towards us; and though he was far enough off to conceal such confusion as Mrs. Ricardo had shown at my appearance on the scene, and to come up saying that he had found me at last, I could not but remember how he had shut himself up for the morning, after advising me to go on the river.

I was uneasy about them both; but it was impossible to say a word to anybody. He never spoke of her; that was another bad sign to my suspicious mind. It was entirely from her that I had drawn my material for suspicion, or rather for anxiety. I did not for a moment suppose that there was anything more than a possibly injudicious friendship between them; it was just the possibilities that stirred my sluggish imagination; and I should not have thought twice about these but for Uvo's marked reserve in speaking of the one other person with whom I now knew that he was extremely unreserved. If only I had known it from him, I should not have deplored the mere detail that Mrs. Ricardo was in one way filling my own old place in his life.

My visit drew to an end; on the last night I simply had to dine in town with a wounded friend from the front. It would have been cruel to get out of it, though Uvo almost tempted me by his keenness that I should go. I warned him, however, that I should come back early. And I was even earlier than my word. And Uvo was not in.

"He's gone out with his pipe," said Sarah, looking gratuitously concerned. "I'm sure I don't know where you'll find him." But this sounded like an afterthought; and there was a something shifty and yet wistful in the old body's manner that inclined me to a little talk with her about the master.

"You don't think he's just gone into the wood, do you, Sarah?"

"Well, he do go there a good deal," said Sarah. "Of course he don't always go that way; but he do go there."

"Might he have gone into Captain Ricardo's, Sarah?"

"He might," said Sarah, with more than dubious emphasis.

"They're his great friends now, aren't they?" I hazarded.

"Not Captain Ricardo, sir," said Sarah. "I've only seen him in the 'ouse but once, and that was when Miss Hamy was married; but we 'ad all sorts then." And Sarah looked as though the highways and hedges had been scoured for guests.

"But do you see much more of Mrs. Ricardo, Sarah?"

"I don't, sir, but Mr. Hugo do," said Sarah, for once off her loyal guard. "He sees more of her than his ma would like."

"Come, come, Sarah! She's a charming lady, and quite the belle of the Estate."

"That may be, sir, but the Estate ain't what it was," declared Sarah, with pregnant superiority. "There's some queer people come since I was with pore Mr. Nettleton."

"What about Mr. Nettleton himself, Sarah?"

"Mr. Nettleton was always a gentleman, sir, though he did try to set fire to the 'ouse with my methylated."

I left the old dame bobbing in the doorway, and went to look for Uvo in the wood. I swear I had no thought of spying upon him. What could there be to spy upon, at half-past nine at night, with Captain Ricardo safe and grumbling at his own fireside? I had been wasting my last evening at a club and in the train, and I did not want to miss another minute of Uvo Delavoye's society.

It was an exquisite night, the year near its zenith and the moon only less than full. The wood was changed from a beautiful bright picture into a beautiful black photograph; twig and leaf, and silent birds, stood out like motes in the moonbeams. But there were fine intervals of utter darkness, wide pools and high cascades of pitch, with never a bubble in the way of detail. And there was one bird to be heard, giving its own glory to the glorious night. But I was not long alive to the heavenly song, or to the beauty of the moonlit wood.

I had entered by way of a spare site a little higher up than the Delavoyes', who, unlike some of their newer neighbours, had not a garden gate into the wood. I had penetrated some score yards into the pitch and silver of leafy tree and open space when I became aware that someone else had entered still higher up, and that our courses were converging. I thought for a moment that it might be Uvo; but there was something halt yet stealthy about the unseen advance, as of a shackled man escaping; and I knew who it was before I myself stole and dodged to get a sight of him. It was Captain Ricardo, creeping clumsily, often pausing to lean hard upon his tremendous stick. At first I thought he had two sticks; but the other was not one; the other was a hunting crop, for I saw the lash unloosed in one of the pauses, and a tree-trunk flicked again and again, about the height of a man's shoulder, as if for practice.

When the limping, cringing figure again proceeded on its way, the big stick was in the left hand, the crop in the right, and I was a second sneak following the first, in the direction of the Temple of Bacchus.

I saw him stop and listen before I heard the voices. I saw the crop raised high in the moonlight, as if in the taking of some silent vow, and I lessened the distance between us with impunity, for he had never once looked round. And now I too heard the voices; they were on the other side of the temple wall; and this side was laved with moonlight, so that the edges of the crumbling stucco made seams of pitch, and Ricardo's shadow crouched upon the wall for a little age before his bent person showed against it.

Now he was at one end of the wall, peeping round, listening, instead of showing himself like a man. My blood froze at his miserable tactics. I had seen men keep cover under heavy fire with less precaution than this wretch showed in spying on his guilty wife; yet there was I copying him, even as I had dogged him through the wood. Now he had wedged himself in the heavy shadow between the wall and the one whole pillar at right angles to the wall; now he was looking as well as listening. And now I was in his old place, now I was at his very elbow, eavesdropping myself in my watch and ward over the other eavesdropper.

The big stick leant against the end of the wall, just between us, nearer to my hand than his. The man himself leant hard against the pillar, the crop grasped behind him in both hands, its lash dangling like the tail of a monster rat. Those two clasped hands were the only part of him in the moonlight, and I watched them as I would have watched his eyes if we had been face to face. They were lean, distorted, twitching, itching hands. The lash was wound round one of them; there might have been more whipcord under the skin.

Meanwhile I too was listening perforce to the voices on the other side of the wall. I thought one came from the stone stump where Mrs. Ricardo had sat the other day, that she was sitting there again. The other voice came from various places. And to me the picture of Uvo Delavoye, tramping up and down in the moonlight as he talked, was as plain as though there had been no old wall between us.

"I know you have a thin time of it. But so has he!"

That was almost the first thing I heard. It made an immediate difference in my feeling towards the other eavesdropper. But I still watched his hands.

"Sitting on top of a cricket pavilion," said the other voice, "all day long!"

"It takes him out of himself. You must see that he is eating his heart out, with this war still on, and fellows like Gillon bringing it home to him every day."

"I don't see anything. He doesn't give me much chance. If it isn't cricket at the Oval, it's billiards here at the George, night after night until I'm sick to death of the whole thing."

"Are you sure he's there now?"

"Oh, goodness, yes! He made no bones about it."

I thought Uvo had stopped in his stride to ask the question. I knew those hands clutched the hunting crop tighter at the answer. I saw the knuckles whiten in the moonlight.

"Because we're taking a bit of a risk," resumed Uvo, finishing further off than he began.

"Oh, no, we're not. Besides, what does it matter? I simply had to speak to you - and you know what happened the other morning. Mornings are the worst of all for people seeing you."

"But not for what they think of seeing you."

"Oh! what do I care what they think?" cried the wife of the man beside me. "I'm far past that. It's you men who keep on thinking and thinking of what other people are going to think!"

"We sometimes have to think for two," said Uvo - just a little less steadily, to my ear.

"You don't see that I'm absolutely desperate, mewed up with a man who doesn't care a rap for me!"

"I should make him care."

"That shows all you care!" she retorted, passionately.

And then I felt that he was standing over her; there was something in the altered pose of the head near mine, something that took my eyes from the moonlit hands, and again gave me as vivid a picture as though the wall were down.

"It's no use going back on all that," said Uvo, and it was harder to hear him now. "I don't want to say rotten things. You know well enough what I feel. If I felt a bit less, it would be different. It's just because we've been the kind of pals we have been ... my dear ... my dear!... that we mustn't go and spoil it now."

The low voice trembled, but now hers was lower still, and I at least lost most of her answer ... "if you really cared for me ... to take me away from a man who never did!" That much I heard, and this: "But you're no better! You don't know what it is to - care!"

That brought an outburst, but not from the man beside me. He might have been turned into part of the Ionic pillar. It was Uvo who talked, and I for one who listened without another thought of the infamy of listening. I was not there to listen to anybody, but to keep an eye on Ricardo; my further action depended on his; but from the first his presence had blunted my own sense of our joint dishonour, and now the sense was simply dead. I was there with the best motives. I had even begun listening with the best motives, as it were with a watching brief for the unhappy pair. But I forgot both my behaviour and its excuse while Uvo Delavoye was delivering his fine soul; for fine it was, with one great twist in it that came out even now, when I least expected it, and to the last conceivable intent. It is the one part of all he said that I do not blush to have overheard.

"Let us help each other; for God's sake don't let us drag each other down! That's not quite what I mean. I know it sounds rotten. I wonder if I dare tell you what I do mean? It's not we who would do the dragging, don't you see? You know who it is, who's pulling at us both like the very devil that he was in life!"

Uvo laughed shortly, and now his tone was a tone I knew too well. "Nobody has stood up to him yet," he went on; "it's about time somebody did. Surely you and I can put up a bit of a fight between us? Surely we aren't such ninepins as old Stainsby, Abercromby Royle, Guy Berridge and all that lot?"

In the pause I figured her looking at him, as I had so often done when a civil answer was impossible. But Mrs. Ricardo asked another question instead.

"Is that your notion of laying the ghost?"

"Yes!" he said earnestly. "There's something not to be explained in all the things that have happened since I've been here. To be absolutely honest, I haven't always really and truly believed in all my own explanations. I'm not sure that Gilly himself - that unbelieving dog - didn't get nearer the mark on the night he was nearly burned to death. But, if it's my own ghost, all the more reason to lay it; and, if it isn't, those other poor brutes were helpless in their ignorance, but I haven't their excuse!"

"I believe every word of it," said the poor soul with a sob. "When we came here I thought we should be - well, happy enough in our way. But we haven't had a day's happiness. You, you have given me the only happiness I've ever had here, and now...."

"No; it's been the other way about," interrupted Uvo, sadly. "But that's all over. I'm going to clear out, and you'll find things far happier when I'm gone. It's I who have been the curse to you - to both of you - if not to all the rest...."

His voice failed him; but there was no mistaking its fast resolve. Its very tenderness was not more unmistakable, to me, than the fixity of a resolution which my whole heart and soul applauded. And suddenly I was flattering myself that the man by my side shared my intuitive confidence and approval. He was no longer a man of stone; he had come to life again. Those hands of his were not fiercely frozen to the crop, but turning it gently round and round. Then they stopped. Then they moved with the man's whole body. He was looking the other way, almost in the direction by which he and I had approached the temple. And as I looked, too, there were footsteps in the grass, Mrs. Ricardo passed close by us with downcast eyes, and so back into the wood, with Uvo at arm's length on the far side.