Witching Hill (6 page)

"I don't see why not."

"I had only the opposite idea to go upon, Gilly, and yet I found exactly what I expected to find. Was that a fluke?"

"Or a coincidence - call it what you like."

"Call it what you like," retorted Delavoye with great good-humour. "But if the same sort of thing happens again, will it still be a coincidence or a fluke?"

"In my view, always," I replied, hardening my heart for ever.

"That's all right, then," said he with his schoolboy laugh. "You pays your money and you takes your choice."

CHAPTER III

A Vicious Circle

The Berridges of Berylstow - a house near my office in the Witching Hill Road - were perhaps the very worthiest family on the whole Estate.

Old Mr. Berridge, by a lifetime of faithful service, had risen to a fine position in one of the oldest and most substantial assurance societies in the City of London. Mrs. Berridge, herself a woman of energetic character, devoted every minute that she could spare from household duties, punctiliously fulfilled, to the glorification of the local Vicar and the denunciation of modern ideas. There was a daughter, whose name of Beryl had inspired that of the house; she was her mother's miniature and echo, and had no desire to ride a bicycle or do anything else that Mrs. Berridge had not done before her. An only son, Guy, completed the partie carrée, and already made an admirable accountant under his father's eagle eye. He was about thirty years of age, had a mild face but a fierce moustache, was engaged to be married, and already picking up books and pictures for the new home.

As a bookman Guy Berridge stood alone.

"There's nothing like them for furnishing a house," said he; "and nowadays they're so cheap. There's that new series of Victorian Classics - one-and-tenpence-halfpenny! And those Eighteenth Century Masterpieces - I don't know when I shall get time to read them, but they're worth the money for the binding alone - especially with everything peculiar taken out!"

Peculiar was a family epithet of the widest possible significance. It was peculiar of Guy, in the eyes of the other three, to be in such a hurry to leave their comfortable home for one of his own on a necessarily much smaller scale. Miss Hemming, the future Mrs. Guy, was by no means deficient in peculiarity from his people's point of view. She affected flowing fabrics of peculiar shades, and she had still more peculiar ideas of furnishing. On Saturday afternoons she would drag poor Guy into all the second-hand furniture shops in the neighbourhood - not even to save money, as Mrs. Berridge complained to her more intimate friends - but just to be peculiar. It seemed like a judgment when Guy fell so ill with influenza, obviously contracted in one of those highly peculiar shops, that he had to mortgage his summer holiday by going away for a complete change early in the New Year.

He went to country cousins of the suburban Hemmings; his own Miss Hemming went with him, and it was on their return that a difference was first noticed in the young couple. They no longer looked radiant together, much less when apart. The good young accountant would pass my window with a quite tragic face. And one morning, when we met outside, he told me that he had not slept a wink.

That evening I went to smoke a pipe with Uvo Delavoye, who happened to have brought me into these people's ken. And we were actually talking about Guy Berridge and his affairs when the maid showed him up into Uvo's room.

I never saw a man look quite so wretched. The mild face seemed to cower behind the truculent moustache; the eyes, bright and bloodshot, winced when one met them. I got up to go, feeling instinctively that he had come to confide in Uvo. But Berridge read me as quickly as I read him.

"Don't you go on my account," said he gloomily. "I've nothing to tell Delavoye that I can't tell you, especially after giving myself away to you once already to-day. I daresay three heads will be better than two, and I know I can trust you both."

"Is anything wrong?" asked Uvo, when preliminary solicitations had reminded me that his visitor neither smoked nor drank.

"Everything!" was the reply.

"Not with your engagement, I hope?"

"That's it," said Berridge, with his eyes on the carpet.

"It isn't - off?"

"Not yet."

"I don't want to ask more than I ought," said Uvo, after a pause, "but I always imagine that, between people who're engaged, the least little thing - - "

"It isn't a little thing."

And the accountant shook his downcast head.

"I only meant, my dear chap, if you'd had some disagreement - - "

"We've never had the least little word!"

"Has she changed?" asked Uvo Delavoye.

"Not that I know of," replied Berridge; but he looked up as though it were a new idea; and there was more life in his voice.

"She'd tell you," said Uvo, "if I know her."

"Do people tell each other?" eagerly inquired our friend.

"They certainly ought, and I think Miss Hemming would."

"Ah! it's easy enough for them!" cried the miserable young man. "Women are not liars and traitors because they happen to change their minds. Nobody thinks the worse of them for that; it's their privilege, isn't it? They can break off as many engagements as they like; but if I did such a thing I should never hold up my head again!"

He buried his hot face in his hands, and Delavoye looked at me for the first time. It was a sympathetic look enough; and yet there was something in it, a lift of the eyebrow, a light in the eye, that reminded me of the one point on which we always differed.

"Better hide your head than spoil her life," said he briskly. "But how long have you felt like doing either? I used to look on you as an ideal pair."

"So we were," said poor Berridge, readily. "It's most peculiar!"

I saw a twitch at the corners of Uvo's mouth; but he was not the man for sly glances over a bowed head.

"How long have you been engaged?" he asked.

"Ever since last September."

"You were here then, if I remember?"

"Yes; it was just after my holiday."

"In fact you've been here all the time?"

"Up to these last few weeks."

Delavoye looked round his room as a cross-examining counsel surveys the court to mark a point. I felt it about time to intervene on the other side.

"But you looked perfectly happy," said I, "all the autumn?"

"So I was, God knows!"

"Everything was all right until you went away?"

"Everything."

"Then," said I, "it looks to me like the mere mental effect of influenza, and nothing else."

But that was not the sense of the glance I could not help shooting at Delavoye. And my explanation was no comfort to Guy Berridge; he had thought of it before; but then he had never felt better than the last few days in the country, yet never had he been in such despair.

"I can't go through with it," he groaned in abject unreserve. "It's making my life a hell - a living lie. I don't know how to bear it - from one meeting to the next - I dread them so! Yet I've always a sort of hope that next time everything will suddenly become as it was before Christmas. Talk of forlorn hopes! Each time's worse than the last. I've come straight from her now. I don't know what you must think of me! It's not ten minutes since we said good-night." The big moustache trembled. "I felt a Judas," he whispered - "an absolute Judas!"

"I believe it's all nerves," said Delavoye, but with so little conviction that I loudly echoed the belief.

"But I don't go in for nerves," protested Berridge; "none of us do, in our family. We don't believe in them. We think they're a modern excuse for anything you like to do or say; that's what we think about nerves. I'm not going to start them just to make myself out better than I am. It's my heart that's rotten, not my nerves."

"I admire your attitude," said Delavoye, "but I don't agree with you. It'll all come back to you in the end - everything you think you've lost - and then you'll feel as though you'd awakened from a bad dream."

"But sometimes I do wake up, as it is!" cried Berridge, catching at the idea. "Nearly every morning, when I'm dressing, things look different. I feel my old self again - the luckiest fellow alive - engaged to the sweetest girl! She's always that, you know; don't imagine for one moment that I ever think less of Edith; she always was and would be a million times too good for me. If only she'd see it for herself, and chuck me up of her own accord! I've even tried to tell her what I feel; but she won't meet me half-way; the real truth never seems to enter her head. How to tell her outright I don't know. It would have been easy enough last year, when her people wouldn't let us be properly engaged. But they gave in at Christmas when I had my rise in screw; and now she's got her ring, and given me this one - how on earth can I go and give it her back?"

"May I see?" asked Delavoye, holding out his hand; and I for one was grateful to him for the diversion of the few seconds we spent inspecting an old enamelled ring with a white peacock on a crimson ground. Berridge asked us if we thought it a very peculiar ring, as they all did at Berylstow, and he babbled on about the circumstances of its purchase by his dear, sweet, open-handed Edith. It did him good to talk. A tinge of health returned to his cadaverous cheeks, and for a time his moustache looked less out of keeping and proportion.

But it was the mere reactionary surcease of prolonged pain, and the fit came on again in uglier guise before he left.

"It isn't so much that I don't want to marry her," declared the accountant with startling abruptness, "as the awful thoughts I have as to what may happen if I do. They're too awful to describe, even to you two fellows. Of course nothing could make you think worse of me than you must already, but you'd say I was mad if you could see inside my horrible mind. I don't think she'd be safe; honestly I don't! I feel as if I might do her some injury - or - or violence!"

He was swaying about the room with wild eyes staring from one to the other of us and twitching fingers feeling in his pockets. I got up myself and stood within reach of him, for now I felt certain that love or illness had turned his brain. But it was only a very small scrap of paper that he fished out of his waistcoat pocket, and handed first to Delavoye and then to me.

"I cut it out of a review of such a peculiar poem in my evening paper," said Berridge. "I never read reviews, or poems, but those lines hit me hard."

And I read:

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!"

"But you don't feel like that!" said Delavoye, laughing at him; and the laughter rang as false as his earlier consolation; but this time I had not the presence of mind to supplement it.

Guy Berridge nodded violently as he held out his hand for the verse. I could see that his eyes had filled with tears. But Uvo rolled the scrap of paper into a pellet, which he flung among the lumps of asbestos glowing in his grate, and took the outstretched hand in his. I never saw man so gentle with another. Hardly a word more passed. But the poor devil squeezed my fingers before Uvo led him out to see him home. And it was many minutes before he returned.

"I have had a time of it!" said he, putting his feet to the gas fire. "Not with that poor old thing, but his people, all three of them! I got him up straight to bed, and then they kept me when he thought I'd gone. Of course they know there's something wrong, and of course they blame the girl; one knew they would. It seems they've never really approved of her; she's a shocking instance of all-round peculiarity. They little know the apple of their own blind eyes - eh, Gilly?"

"I hardly knew him myself," said I. "He must be daft! I never thought to hear a grown man go on like that."

"And such a man!" cried Uvo. "It's not the talk so much as the talker that surprises me; and by the way, how well he talked, for him! He was less of a bore than I've ever known him; there was passion in the fellow, confound him! Red blood in that lump of road metal! He's not only sorry for himself. He's simply heartbroken about the girl. But this maggot of morbid introspection has got into his brain and - - how did it get there, Gilly? It's no place for the little brute. What brain is there to feed it? What has he ever done, in all his dull days, to make that harmless mind a breeding-ground for every sort of degenerate idea? In mine they'd grow like mustard and cress. I'd feel just like that if I were engaged to the very nicest girl; the nicer she was, the worse I'd get; but then I'm a degenerate dog in any case. Oh, yes, I am, Gilly. But here's as faithful a hound as ever licked his lady's hand. Where's he got it from? Who's the poisoner?"

"I'm glad you ask," said I. "I was afraid you'd say you knew."

"Meaning my old man of the soil?"

"I made sure you'd put it on him."

Uvo laughed heartily.

"You don't know as much about him as I do, Gilly! He was the last old scoundrel to worry because he didn't love a woman as much as she deserved. It was quite the other way about, I can assure you."

"Yes; but what about those almost murderous inclinations?"

"I thought of them. But they only came on after our good friend had shaken this demoralising dust off his feet. As long as he stuck to Witching Hill he was as sound as a marriage bell! It's dead against my doctrine, Gillon, but I'm delighted to find that you share my disappointment."

"And I to hear you own it is one, Uvo!"

"There's another thing, now we're on the subject," he continued, for we had not been on it for weeks and months. "It seems that over at Hampton Court there's a portrait of my ignoble kinsman, by one Kneller. I only heard of it the other day, and I was rather wondering if you could get away to spin over with me and look him up. It needn't necessarily involve contentious topics, and we might lunch at the Mitre in that window looking down stream. But it ought to be to-morrow, if you could manage it, because the galleries don't open on Friday, and on Saturdays they're always crowded."

I could not manage it very well. I was supposed to spend my day on the Estate, and, though there was little doing thus early in the year, it might be the end of me if my Mr. Muskett came back before his usual time and did not find me at my post. And I was no longer indifferent as to the length of my days at Witching Hill. But I resolved to risk them for the man who had made the place what it was to me - a garden of friends - however otherwise he might people and spoil it for himself.

We started at my luncheon hour, which could not in any case count against me, and quite early in the afternoon we reckoned to be back. It was a very keen bright day, worthier of General January than his chief-of-staff. Ruts and puddles were firmly frozen; our bicycle bells rang out with a pleasing brilliance. In Bushey Park the black chestnuts stamped their filigree tops against a windless radiance. Under the trees a russet carpet still waited for March winds to take it up. The Diana pond was skinned with ice; goddess and golden nymphs caught every scintillation of cold sunlight as we trundled past. In a fine glow we entered the palace and climbed to the grim old galleries.