Witching Hill (8 page)

"I think you'll be glad" - he was feeling in all his pockets - "quite glad if you do - " and his voice died away as he began feeling again.

"Lucky I wired to you to meet me at Richmond, wasn't it, Edie? Otherwise we should have been too late," said the accountant densely.

"Perhaps you are!" poor Uvo had to cry outright. "I - the fact is I - can't find it anywhere."

"You may have left it behind," suggested Berridge.

"We can call for it, if you did," said the girl.

There was something in his sudden worry that appealed to their common fund of generosity.

"No, no! I told you why I was going to Richmond. I thought I had it in my ticket pocket. In fact, I know I had; but I went with my sister this morning to get some flowers at Kingston market, and I haven't had it out since. It's been taken from me, and that was where! I wish you'd feel in my pockets for me. I've had them picked - picked of the one thing that wasn't mine, and was of value - and now you'll neither of you ever forgive me, and I don't deserve to be forgiven!"

But they did forgive him, and that handsomely - so manifest was his distress - so great their recovered happiness. It was only I who could not follow their example, when they had gone on their way, and Delavoye and I were hurrying on ours, ostensibly to get the Richmond police to telephone at once to Kingston, as the first of all the energetic steps that we were going to take. For we were still in that asphalt passage, and the couple had scarcely quitted it at the other end, when Delavoye drew off his glove and showed me the missing ring upon his little finger.

I could hardly believe my eyes, or my ears either when he roundly defended his conduct. I need not go into his defence; it was the only one it could have been; but Uvo Delavoye was the only man in England who could and would have made it with a serious face. It was no mere trinket that he had "lifted," but a curse from two innocent heads. That end justified any means, to his wild thinking. But, over and above the ethical question, he had an inherited responsibility in the matter, and had only performed a duty which had been thrust upon him.

"Nor shall they be a bit the worse off," said Uvo warmly. "I still mean to have that duplicate made, off my own bat, and when I foist it on our friends I shall simply say it turned up in the lining of my overcoat."

"Man Uvo," said I, "there are two professions waiting for you; but it would take a judge of both to choose between your fiction and your acting."

"Acting!" he cried. "Why, a blog like Guy Berridge can act when he's put to it; he did just now, and took you in, evidently! It never struck you, I suppose, that he'd wired to me this morning to say nothing to the girl, probably at the same time that he wired to her to meet him? He carried it all off like a born actor just now, and yet you curse me for going and doing likewise to save the pair of them!"

It is always futile to try to slay the bee in another's bonnet; but for once I broke my rule of never arguing with Uvo Delavoye, if I could help it, on the particular point involved. I simply could not help it, on this occasion; and when Uvo lost his temper, and said a great deal more than I would have taken from anybody else, I would not have helped it if I could. So hot had been our interchange that it was at its height when we debouched from St. Stephen's Passage into the open cross-roads beyond.

At that unlucky moment, one small suburban Arab, in full flight from another, dashed round the corner and butted into that part of Delavoye which the Egyptian climate had specially demoralised. I saw his dark face writhe with pain and fury. With one hand he caught the offending urchin, and in the other I was horrified to see his stick, a heavy blackthorn, held in murderous poise against the leaden sky, while the child was thrust out at arm's length to receive the blow. I hurled myself between them, and had such difficulty in wresting the blackthorn from the madman's grasp that his hand was bleeding, and something had tinkled on the pavement, when I tore it from him.

Panting, I looked to see what had become of the small boy. He had taken to his heels as though the foul fiend were at them; his late pursuer was now his companion in flight, and I was thankful to find we had the scene to ourselves. Delavoye was pointing to the little thing that had tinkled as it fell, and as he pointed the blood dripped from his hand, and he shuddered like a man recovering from a fit.

I had better admit plainly that the thing was that old ring with the white peacock set in red, and that Uvo Delavoye was once more as I had known him down to that hour.

"Don't touch the beastly thing!" he cried. "It's served me worse than it served poor Berridge! I shall have to think of a fresh lie to tell him - and it won't come so easy now - but I'd rather cut mine off than trust this on another human hand!"

He picked it up between his finger-nails. And there was blood on the white peacock when I saw it next on Richmond Bridge.

"Don't you worry about my hand," said Uvo as he glanced up and down the grey old bridge. "It's only a scratch from the blackthorn spikes, but I'd have given a finger to be shot of this devil!"

A flick of his wrist sent the old ring spinning; we saw it meet its own reflection in the glassy flood, like a salmon-fly beautifully thrown; and more rings came and widened on the waters, till they stirred the mirrored branches of the trees on Richmond Hill.

CHAPTER IV

The Local Colour

The Reverend Charles Brabazon, magnetic Vicar of the adjacent Village, had as strong a personality as one could wish to encounter in real life. He did what he liked with a congregation largely composed of the motley worldlings of Witching Hill. Small solicitors and west-end tradesmen, bank officials, outside brokers, first-class clerks in Government offices, they had not a Sunday soul to call their own, these hard-headed holders of season tickets to Waterloo.

Throughout the summer they flocked to church when their hearts were on the river; in the depths of winter they got up for early celebration on the one morning when they might have lain abed. Their most obsequious devotions did not temper the preacher's truculence, any more than his strongest onslaught discouraged their good works. They gave of their substance at his every call, and were even more lavish on their own initiative. Thus, in my second summer at Witching Hill, the Vicarage was practically rebuilt out of the pockets of parishioners; and we had no difficulty in providing a furnished substitute on the favourite woodland side of Mulcaster Park.

Great was the jealousy in Witching Hill Road, but futile the fluttering of our Queen Anne dovecots; for we saw very little more of the Vicar for having him in our midst. He was always either immured in his study, or else hurrying to or from some service or parochial engagement; and although he had a delightful roadside manner, and the same fine smile for high and low, he would stop to speak to neither on his way. Out of church, in fact, Mr. Brabazon preserved a wise aloofness which only served to emphasise the fierce intimacy of his pulpit utterances, and combined with his contempt of popularity to render him by far the most popular figure in the neighbourhood.

It goes without saying that this remarkable man was a High Churchman and a celibate. His house was kept, and his social short-comings made good, by two Misses Brabazon, each as unlike him as possible in her own way. Miss Ruth, who was younger, added to her brother's energy a sympathetic charm and a really good voice which made her the darling of the Parish Hall and humbler edifices. Miss Julia's activities were more sedentary and domestic, as perhaps became the least juvenile of the trio, and so it was that I saw most of her. We had a whole day together over the inventory, and it was Miss Julia who interviewed me about everything else connected with the house. She was never short with me on those occasions, never ungracious or (what is worse) unduly gracious, but she had always a pleasant word, and nearly always an innocent little joke as well. Innocence and jocosity were two of her leading characteristics; another was a genuine but ingenuous literary faculty. This she exercised in editing the Parish Magazine, and supplying it with moral serials which occasionally reached volume form under the auspices of the Religious Tract Society.

On an evening late in April, when the cuckoo was wound up in the wood behind Mulcaster Park, and most of the beds in front were flowering for the first time, a gaunt figure came to the gate of the temporary vicarage and beckoned to me passing on the other side of the road. It was Miss Julia, and I found her looking gently humorous and knowing across the gate.

"The trees are coming out so beautifully," she began, "in the grounds behind these gardens. I was wondering if it would be possible to procure a permit to go over them, Mr. Gillon."

"Do you mean for yourself, Miss Brabazon?"

"Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do."

As she spoke I could not but notice that she glanced ever so slightly towards the house behind her, and that her voice had fallen to a murmur, while a mottled colouring appeared between the lines of her guileless visage.

"I'm afraid I can't do anything," I said. "But the Vicar could, Miss Brabazon!" I added with conviction. "A line from him to Sir Christopher Stainsby - - "

I stopped because Miss Julia shook her head so decidedly.

"That would never do, Mr. Gillon. Sir Christopher is such a very rabid Dissenter."

"So I have heard," I admitted, thinking rather of what I had seen. "But I don't believe he's as narrow as you think."

"I couldn't trouble the Vicar about it, in any case," said Miss Brabazon, hurriedly. "I shouldn't even like him to know that I had troubled you, Mr. Gillon. He's such a severe critic that I never tell him what I'm writing until it's finished."

"Then you are writing something about Witching Hill House, Miss Brabazon?"

"I was thinking of it. I haven't begun. But I never saw any place that I felt such a desire to write about. The old house in the old woods, say a hundred years ago! Don't you think it an ideal scene for a story, Mr. Gillon?"

"It depends on the story you want to tell," said I, sententiously.

A strange light was burning in the weak eyes of Miss Julia. It might almost have been a flicker of the divine fire. But now she dropped her worn eyelids, and gazed into the road with the dreamy cunning of the born creator.

"I should have quite a plot," she decided. "It would be ... yes, it would be about some extraordinary person who lived in there, in the wood and the house, only of course ages and ages ago. I think I should make him - in fact I'm quite sure he would be - a very wicked person, though of course he'd have to come all right in the end."

"You must be thinking of the man who really did live there."

"Who was that?"

"The infamous Lord Mulcaster."

"Really, Mr. Gillon? I don't think I ever heard of him. Of course I know the present family by name; aren't these Delavoyes connected with them in some way?"

I explained the connection as I knew it, which was not very thoroughly. But I unfortunately said enough to cause a rapid fall in poor Miss Julia's mottled countenance.

"Then I must give up the idea of that story. They would think I meant their ancestor, and that would never do. I'm sorry, because I never felt so inclined to write anything before. But I'm very glad you told me, Mr. Gillon."

"But they wouldn't mind a bit, Miss Brabazon! They're not in the least sensitive about him," I assured her.

"I couldn't think of it," replied Miss Julia, haughtily. "It would be in the very worst of taste."

"But Uvo would love it. He's full of the old villain. He might help you if you'd let him. He's at the British Museum at this moment, getting deeper and deeper into what he calls the family mire."

"I happen to see him coming down the road," observed Miss Julia, dryly. "I must really beg that you will not refer to the subject again, Mr. Gillon."

But in her voice and manner there was a hesitating reluctance that emboldened me to use my own judgment about that, especially when Uvo Delavoye (whose mother and sister were keen Brabazonians) himself introduced the topic on joining us, with a gratuitous remark about his "unfilial excavations in Bloomsbury."

"I've opened up a new lazar-house this very day," he informed us, with shining eyes, when Miss Julia had shown an interest in spite of herself.

"By the way," I cut in, "don't you think it would all make magnificent material for a novel, Uvo?"

"If you could find anybody to publish it!" he answered, laughing.

"You wouldn't mind if he was put into a book - and the place as well?"

"I wouldn't, if nobody else didn't! Why? Who's thinking of doing us the honour?"

Dear Miss Julia coughed and laughed with delicious coyness. My liberty had been condoned.

"Was it you, Miss Brabazon?" cried Uvo, straightening his face with the nerve that never failed him at a climax.

"Well, it was and it wasn't," she replied, exceeding slyly. "I did think I should like to write a little story about Witching Hill House, and put in rather a bad character; at least he would begin by being rather undesirable, perhaps. But I was forgetting that the place had been in your family, Mr. Delavoye. I certainly never knew, until Mr. Gillon told me, that one of the Lords Mulcaster had been - er - perhaps - no better than he ought to have been."

"To put it mildly," said Delavoye, with smiling face and shrieking eyes. "You may paint the bad old hat as black as mine, Miss Brabazon, and still turn him out a saint compared with the villain of the case I've been reading up to-day. So you really needn't worry about anybody's susceptibilities. Lay on the local colour inches deep! You won't make the place as red as the old gentleman painted it in blood and wine!"

"Really, Mr. Delavoye!" cried Miss Julia, jocosely shocked. "You mustn't forget that my story would only appear in our Parish Magazine - unless the R.T.S. took it afterwards."

"My rude forefather in a Religious Tract!"

"Of course I should quite reform him in the end."

"You'd have your work cut out, Miss Brabazon."

"I ought to begin with you, you know!" said Miss Julia, shaking a facetious finger in Uvo's face. "I'm afraid you're rather an irreverent young man, and I don't know what the Vicar would say if he heard us." She threw another deliciously guilty glance towards the house. "But if you really mean what you say, and you're sure Mrs. Delavoye and your sister won't mind either - - "

"Mind!" he interrupted. "Forgive me, Miss Brabazon, but how could they be sensitive about the last head but five of a branch of the family which doesn't even recognise our existence?"

"Very well, then! I'll take you at your word, and the - the blood and thunder," whispered Miss Julia, as though they were bad words, "be on your own head, Mr. Delavoye!"

Thereafter, in a quivering silence, Uvo took me home with him, and straight up into his own room, where he first shut door and window without a word. Never since have I heard man laugh quite so loud and long as he did then.

"But you don't see the point!" he arrogated through his tears, because I made rather less noise.

"What is it, then?"

"I told you I'd opened up a new sink to-day?"

"You said something of the sort."

"It was a sink of fresh iniquity. I came across it in an old collection of trials; it isn't as much as mentioned in any memoir of the old reprobate, nor yet in the many annals of Witching Hill. Yet he once figured in one of the most disgraceful cases on record."

The case was all that, as Delavoye summed it up for my benefit. The arch-villain of the piece was of course his scandalous progenitor, aided and abetted by a quite unspeakable crew. There was a sorely distressed heroine in humble life - a poor little milliner from Shoreditch - but because it was all too true, there had been no humble hero to wreak poetic vengeance on the miscreant.

"Not a nursery story, I grant you! But there were some good touches in the version I struck," said Delavoye, producing his museum note-book. "One or two I couldn't help taking down. 'In obedience to the custom of the times,' for instance, 'the young lord proceeded to perform the grand tour; and it is reported that having sailed from Naples to Constantinople, he there imbibed so great an admiration for the manners of the Turks, that on his return to England in 1766, he caused an outlying portion of his family mansion to be taken down, and to be rebuilt in the form of a harem.'"

"Rot!"

"I took it down word for word. I've often wondered how the Turkish Pavilion got its name; now we know all about it, and why it had a tunnel connecting it with the house."

"Poor little milliner!"

"I believe you, Gilly. Listen to this, when she was a prisoner in his town house, before they spirited her out here - 'Looking out of the window at about eight o'clock, she observed a young woman passing, to whom she threw out her handkerchief, which was then heavy with tears, intending to attract her attention and send to her father for assistance.'"

"Because the handkerchief was marked?"

"And so heavy with her tears that she could throw it like a tennis-ball!"

The note-book was put away. There was an end also of our hilarity.

"And this dear old girl," said Uvo, with affectionate disrespect, "thinks she's a fit and proper writer to cope with that immortal skunk! False Sextus in a parish magazine! Proud Tarquin done really proud at last!"

It was on the tip of my tongue to make it quite clear to Uvo that Miss Julia had not wittingly proposed to write about his ancestor at all; that apparently she had never heard of his existence before that evening, and that it was her own original idea to make Witching Hill House the haunt of some purely imaginary scoundrel. But I knew my Uvo well enough by this time to hold my tongue, and at least postpone the tiresome discussion of a rather stale point on which we were never likely to agree.

But I stayed to supper at No. 7; and Uvo kept me till the small hours, listening to further details of his last researches, and to the farrago of acute conjecture, gay reminiscence and vivid hearsay which his reading invariably inspired. It was base subject-metal that did not gain a certain bright refinement in his fiery mind, or fall from his lips with a lively ring; and that night he was at his best about things which have an opposite effect on many young men. It must have been after one when I left him. I saw the light go out behind the cheap stained glass in the front door, and I heard Uvo going upstairs as I departed. The next and only other light I passed, in the houses on that side of the road, was at the top of the one which was now the Vicarage. Thence also came an only sound; it was the continuous crackle of a typewriter, through the open window of the room which I knew Miss Julia had appropriated as her own.

That end of the Estate had by this time a full team of tenants, whereas I had two sets of painters and paperhangers to keep up to the mark in Witching Hill Road. This rather came between me and my friends in Mulcaster Park, especially as my Mr. Muskett lived in their road, and his house had eyes and a tongue. So it happened that I saw no more of Miss Julia Brabazon until she paid me a queer little visit at my office one afternoon about five o'clock. She was out of breath, and her flurried manner quickened my ear to the sound of her brother's bells ringing in the distance for week-day evensong.

"I thought I'd like to have one word with you, Mr. Gillon, about my story," she panted, with a guilty shrinking from the sheet of glass behind her. "It will be finished in a few days now, I'm thankful to say. I've been so hard at work upon it, you can't think!"