"Don't do that!" cried Delavoye. "It's our one chance of nabbing 'em."
And he was out of the window and swinging down the rope-ladder while the ruffians were yet in the yard below. But they did not wait to punish his foolhardihood; the gate into the back garden banged before he reached the ground, and he hardly had it open when the last of the bunch of ropes slid hot through my hands.
"After them!" he grunted, giving chase to shadowy forms across the soaking grass. His revolver squibbed again as he ran. They did not stop to return his fire; but across the strawberry bed, at the end of the garden, the high split fence rattled and rumbled with the weight of the flying gang; and there was a dropping crackle of brushwood on the other side, as I came up with Delavoye under the overhanging branches of the horse-chestnuts.
"Going over after them?" I panted, prepared to follow where he led.
"I'm afraid it's no good now," he answered, peering at his revolver in the darkness. The chambers ticked like the reel of a rod. "Besides, there's one of them cast a shoe or something. I trod on it a moment ago." He stooped and groped in the manure of the strawberry bed. "A shoe it is, Gilly, by all that's lucky!"
"You wouldn't like to dog them a bit further?" I suggested. "The fellow with one shoe won't take much overhauling?"
"No, Gilly," said Delavoye, abandoning the chase as incontinently as he had started it, but with equal decision; "I think it's about time to see what they've taken, as well as what they've left."
Their rope-ladder was still swaying from the bathroom window, and it served our turn again since Uvo was without his key. He climbed up first, and the window flared into a square of gas-light before I gained the sill. The scene within was quite instructive. The family chest was clamped right round with iron bands, like the straps of a portmanteau, and the lock in each band had defied the ingenuity of the thieves; so they had cut a neat hole in the lid and extracted the contents piecemeal. These were not strewn broadcast about the room, but set out with some method on a dressing-table as well as in the basin and the bath. Apparently the stage of selection had been reached when we interrupted the proceedings, and the first thing that struck me was the amount of fine old plate and silver, candelabra, urns, salvers and the like, which had not been removed; but Delavoye was already up to the right armpit in the chest, and my congratulations left him grim.
"They've got my mother's jewel-case all right!" said he. "She has one or two things worth all those put together; but we shall see them again unless I'm much mistaken. Come into my room and hear the why and wherefore. Ah! I was forgetting young ambition's ladder; thanks, Gilly. I hope you see how hard it's hooked to the woodwork on this side? It's only been their emergency exit; we shall probably find that they took their tickets at the pantry window. Now for a drink in my room and a bit of Sherlock Holmes' work on the lucky slipper!"
I wish I could describe the change in Uvo Delavoye as he sat at his desk once more, his eager face illumined by the reading gas-lamp with the smelly rubber tube. Eager was not the word for it now, neither was it only the gas that lit it up. At its best, for all its bloodless bronze and premature furrows, the face of Uvo was itself a lamp, that only flickered to burn brighter, or to beam more steadily; and now he was at his best in the very chair and attitude in which I had seen him at his worst not so many minutes before. Was this the fellow who had toyed so tremulously with a deadly weapon and a deadlier idea? Was it Uvo Delavoye who had deliberately debauched his mind with the thought of his own blood, until to my eyes at least he looked capable of shedding it at the morbid prompting of a degenerate impulse? I watched him keenly examining the thing in his hands, chuckling and gloating over a trophy which I for one would have taken far more seriously; and I could not believe it was he whom I had caught with a revolver, loaded or unloaded, screwed into his ear.
It was in a silence due to two divergent lines of thought that we both at once became aware of a prolonged but muffled tattoo on the door below.
"Coppers ahoy!" cried Uvo softly. "I thought you hauled the rope-ladder up after us?"
"So I did; but how do you know it's a copper?"
"Who else could it be at this time of night? Stay where you are, Gilly. I'll go down and see." And in a moment there was a new tune from the hall below: "Why, it's Colonel Cheffins!... How sporting of you, colonel!... Yes, come on up and I'll tell you all about it."
The colonel's answers were at first inaudible up above; but on the stairs he was explaining that he had awakened about an hour ago with a conviction that yet another house had been attacked, that in his inability to get to sleep again he had ultimately risen, and seeing a light still burning across the road, had ventured to come over to inquire whether we were still all right. And with that there entered the Jaeger dressing-suit and bedroom slippers, containing a very different colonel from the dapper edition I had seen out on the other side of midnight, and for that matter but a worn and feeble copy of the one we had both admired the night before.
"That's Witching Hill all over!" cried Uvo as he ushered him in. "You dreamed of what actually happened at the very time it was actually happening. And yet our friend Gillon can't see that the whole place is haunted and enchanted from end to end!"
"I'm not sure that I should go as far as that," said the colonel, sinking into a chair, while Delavoye mixed a stiff drink for him in his old glass. "In fact, now you come to put it that way, I'm not so sure that it was a dream at all. I sleep with my window open, at the front of the house, and I rather thought I heard shots of sorts."
"Of such a sort," laughed Uvo, "that you must be a light sleeper if they woke you up. Do you mind telling me, colonel, where you used to keep those cartridges you were kind enough to give me?"
"In my washstand drawer. I hope there was nothing the matter with them?"
"They wouldn't go off. That was all."
"God bless my soul!" cried Colonel Cheffins, putting down his glass.
"The caps were all right, but I am afraid you can't have kept your powder quite dry, colonel. I expect you've been swilling out that drawer in the heat of your ablutions. Devil a bullet would leave the barrel, and I tried all three."
"But what an infernal disgrace!" cried the colonel, shuffling to his slippered feet. "Why, the damned things ought to go off if you raised them from the bottom of the sea! I'll let the makers have it in next week'sField, libel or no libel, you see if I don't! But that won't console either you or me, Mr. Delavoye, and I can't apologise enough. I only hope the scoundrels were no more successful here than they were at my house?"
"I'm afraid they didn't go quite so empty away."
"God bless my soul! Those cartridge makers ought to indemnify you. But perhaps they left some traces? That was the worst of it in my case—neither footmark nor finger-print worth anything to any body!"
"I'm afraid they left neither here."
"But you don't know that, Mr. Delavoye; you can't know it before morning. The frost broke up with the fog, you must remember, and the ground's as soft as butter. Which way did the blackguards run?"
"Through the garden and over the wall at the back into——"
"Then theymusthave left their card this time!" said Colonel Cheffins, ten years younger in his excitement, and even more alert and wide-awake than we had found him the night before. He did not conceal his anxiety to conduct immediate investigations in the garden. But Uvo persuaded him to wait till we had finished our drinks, and we got him to sit down at the desk, trembling with keenness.
"You see," said Uvo, leaning forward in the arm-chair and opening a drawer in the pedestal between them, "one of them did leave something in the shape of a card, and here it is."
And there lay the cast shoe, in the open drawer, under the colonel's eyes and mine as I looked over his shoulder.
"Why, it's an evening pump!" he exclaimed.
"Exactly."
"Made by quite a good maker, I should say. All in one piece, without a seam, I mean."
"I see. I hadn't noticed that; but then I haven't your keen eye, colonel. You really must come out into the garden with us."
"I shall be delighted, and we might take this with us to fit into any tracks——"
"Precisely; but there's just one thing I should like you to do first, if you would," said Uvo deferentially, and I bent still further over the colonel's shiny head.
"What's that, Mr. Delavoye?"
"Just to try on the glass slipper—so to speak, Colonel Cheffins—because it's so extraordinarily like the one you were wearing when you were here before!"
There was a moment's pause in which I saw myself quite plainly in the colonel's head. Then, with a grunt and a shrug, he reached out his left hand for the shoe, but his right slid inside his Jaeger jacket, and that same second my arms were round him. I felt and grabbed his revolver as soon as he did, and I held the barrel clear of our bodies while he emptied all six chambers through his garments into the floor.
Then we bound our fine fellow with his own rope-ladder, reloaded both revolvers with unexpurgated cartridges discovered upon his person, and prepared to hold a grand reception of his staff and "pupils." But those young gentlemen had not misconstrued the cannonade. And it was some days before the last of the gang was captured.
They were all tried together at the December sessions of the Central Criminal Court, when their elaborate methods were very much admired. The skilful impersonation of the typical Army coach by the head of the gang, and the adequate acting of his confederates in the subordinate posts of pupils and servants, were features which appealed to the public mind. The taking of the house in Mulcaster Park, as a base for operations throughout a promising neighbourhood, was a measure somewhat overshadowed by the brilliant blind of representing it as the scene of the first robberies. It was generally held, however, that in presenting a predestined victim with a revolver and doctored cartridges, the master thief had gone too far, and that for that alone he deserved the exemplary sentence to which he listened like the officer and gentleman he had never been. So the great actor lives the part he plays.
It is a perquisite of witnesses to hear these popular trials with a certain degree of comfort; and so it was that I was able to nudge Uvo Delavoye, at the last soldierly inclination of that bald bad head, before it disappeared from a world to which it has not yet returned.
"Well, at any rate," I whispered, "you can't claim any Witching Hill influence this time."
"I wish I couldn't," he answered in a still lower voice.
"But you've just heard that our bogus colonel has been a genuine criminal all his life."
"I wasn't thinking of him," said Uvo Delavoye. "I was thinking of a still worse character, who really did the thing I felt so like that night before we heard them in the bathroom. Not a word, Gilly! I know you've forgiven me. But I'm rather sorry for these beggars, for they came to me like flowers in May."
And as his face darkened with a shame unseen all day in that doleful dock, it was some comfort to me to feel that it had never been less like its debased image at Hampton Court.
It was no great coincidence that we should have been speaking of Edgar Nettleton that night. Uvo Delavoye was full of him just then, and I had the man on my mind for other reasons. Besides, I had to talk to Uvo about something, since he was down with a quinsy caught from the perfect sanitation in advertised vogue on the Estate, and could hardly open his own mouth. And perhaps I had to talk to somebody about the unpleasant duty hanging over me in connection with this fellow Nettleton, who had taken his house about the same time as Colonel Cheffins and his gang, had made up to Delavoye over that affair, and was himself almost as undesirable a tenant from my point of view.
"I know he's a friend of yours, and I haven't come to curse him to your face," I had been saying. "But if you would just tell Nettleton, when you see him again, that we're in dead earnest this time, you might be doing both him and us a service. I sent him a final demand yesterday; if he doesn't pay up within the week, my orders are to distrain without further notice. Muskett's furious about the whole thing. He blames me for ever having truck with such a fellow in the first instance. But when a man has been science beak in a public school—andsucha school—it sounds good enough for Witching Hill, doesn't it? Who would have thought he'd had the sack? Public-school masters don't often get it."
"They've got to do something pretty desperate first, I fancy," whispered Uvo, with a gleam in his sunken eyes. He had not denied the fact. I felt encouraged to elaborate my grievance against Edgar Nettleton.
"Besides, I had his banker's reference. That was all right; yet we had trouble to get our very first rent, more trouble over the second, and this time there's going to be a devil of a row. I shouldn't wonder if Nettleton had a bill of sale over every stick. I know he's owing all the tradesmen. He may be a very clever chap, and all that, but I can't help saying that he strikes me as a bit of a wrong 'un, Uvo."
Of course I had not started with the intention of saying quite so much. But the brunt of the unpleasantness was falling on my shoulders; and the fellow had made friends with my friend, whose shoes he was not fit to black. Uvo, moreover, was still according me a patient, interested hearing, as he lay like a bright-eyed log in his bed at the top of No. 7. Altogether it was not in my allowance of human nature to lose such an opportunity of showing him his new friend in his true colours.
"Heisclever," whispered Uvo, as though that was the bond between them. "He knows something about everything, and he's a wonderful carpenter and mechanic. You must really see the burglar-trap that he concocted after the scare. If another Cheffins paid him a visit, he'd put his foot in it with a vengeance."
"It would be six of one and very nearly half a dozen of the other," said I with hardihood. "Set a Nettleton to catch a Cheffins, as you might say, Uvo!"
But he only smiled, as though he would not have hesitated to say it in fun. "Of course you're only joking, Gilly, but I could quite understand it if you weren't. There's no vice in old Nettleton, let alone crime; but there's a chuckle-headed irresponsibility that might almost let him in for either before he knew it. He never does seem to know what he's doing, and I'm sure he never worries about anything he's once done. If he did, he'd have gone further afield from the scene of his downfall, or else taken rooms in town instead of a red elephant of a house that he evidently can't afford. As a tenant, I quite agree that he is hopeless."
"If only he hadn't come here!" I grumbled. "What on earth can have brought him to Witching Hill, of all places?"
Uvo's eyes were dancing in the light of the reading gas-lamp, with the smelly tube, which had been connected up with his bedroom bracket.
"Of course," he whispered, "you wouldn't admit for a moment that it might be the call of the soil, and all there's in it, Gilly?"
"No, I wouldn't; but I'll tell you one thing," I exclaimed, as it struck me for the first time: "the man you describe is not the man to trust with all those morbid superstitions of yours! I know he enters into them, because you told me he did, and I know how much you wanted to find some one who would. But so much the worse for you both, if he's the kind you say he is. An idle man, too, and apparently alone in the world! I don't envy you if Nettleton really does come under the influence of your old man of the soil, and plays down to him!"
"My dear Gilly, this is a great concession," whispered Uvo, on his elbow with surprise.
"I don't mean it for one," said I sturdily. "I only mean the influence of your own conception of your old man and his powers. I disbelieve in him and them as much as ever, but I don't disbelieve in your ability to make both exist in some weaker mind than your own. And where they do catch on, remember, those wild ideas of yours may always get the upper hand. It isn't everybody who can think the things you do, Uvo, and never look like doing 'em!"
"I don't agree with you a bit, Gilly. I never believe those blithering blighters who attribute their crimes to the bad example of some criminal hero of the magazines or of the stage. Villain-worship doesn't carry you to that length unless you're a bit of a villain in the first instance."
"But suppose you are?" I argued, almost before I saw the point that I was making. "Suppose you have as few scruples, principles, 'pangs and fears'—call them what you like—as this fellow Nettleton. Suppose you're full of fire of sorts, but also as irresponsible and chuckle-headed as you yourself say he is. Well, then,Isay, it's taking responsibility for two to go pumping your theories into as sensitive an engine as all that!"
Uvo clapped his thin hands softly as there came a knock at the door. "Well, he's a practical man, Gilly, I must admit, so let's leave it at that. Come in! What is it, Jane?"
"The servant from Mr. Nettleton's, sir, wants to see Mr. Gillon," said the maid.
I began by explaining why this scarcely comes into the category of Witching Hill coincidences. Yet it was rather startling at the time, and Uvo Delavoye looked as though his evil ancestor had materialised at the foot of the bed.
"All right, Jane! Mr. Gillon will be down directly."
It was the first time his voice had risen to more than a whisper, and it was shaky. The maid seemed to catch some echo of an alarm already communicated to herself, and faintly sounded in her own announcement.
"Sarah seems very anxious to see you, sir," she ventured, turning to me, and then withdrew in some embarrassment.
I rose to follow. Sarah was almost as great a character as her master, and I for one liked her the better of the two. She was a simple, faithful, incompetent old body, who once told me that she had known Mr. Nettleton, man and boy, most of his life, but without betraying a page of his past. She had come with him to Witching Hill Road as cook-general. There had been a succession of auxiliary servants who had never in any instance outstayed their month. The last of them had left precipitately, threatening a summons, to the scandal of the neighbours; but beyond that fact the matter had been hushed up, and even I only knew that Sarah was now practically single-handed through her coming to me about a charwoman. I thought I ought to see her at once, but Uvo detained me with an almost piteous face.
"Do wait a moment! Of course it's probably nothing at all; but you've given me an idea that certainly never crossed my mind before. I won't say you've put the fear of God on me, Gilly, but you have put me in rather a funk about old Nettleton! He is a rum 'un—I must admit it. If he should have done anything that could possibly be traced to ... all that.... I'll never open my mouth about it again."
"Oh, bless your life, it's only more servant troubles," I reassured him. "I shouldn't wonder if old Sarah herself finds him more than she can stick. They do say he assaulted that last girl, so that she could hardly limp into her cab!"
Uvo rolled his head on the pillow.
"It wasn't an assault, Gilly. I know what happened to her. But I must know what's happened to old Sarah, or to Nettleton himself. Will you promise to come back and tell me?"
"Certainly."
"Then off you go, my dear fellow, and I'll hang on to my soul till you get back. You may have to go along with her, if he's been doing anything very mad. Take my key, and tell them downstairs not to lock you out."
Sarah was waiting for me on the front-door mat, but she refused to make any communication before we left the house. She really was what she herself would have described as an elderly party, though it is doubtful whether even Sarah would have considered the epithet appropriate to her years. She certainly wore a rather jaunty bonnet on her walks abroad. It had a garish plume that nodded violently with her funny old head, and simply danced with mystery as she signified the utter impossibility of speech within reach of other ears.
"I'm very sorry to trouble you, sir, very," said the old lady, as she trotted beside me up Mulcaster Park. "But I never did know such a thing to 'appen before, and I don't like it, sir, not at all I don't, I'm sure."
"But what has happened, Sarah?"
As a witness Sarah would not have been a success; she believed in beginning her story very far back, in following it into every by-way and blind alley of immaterial fact, in reporting every scrap of dialogue that she could remember or improvise, and in eschewing the oblique oration as an unworthy economy of time and breath. If interrupted, she would invariably answer a question that had not been asked, and on getting up to any real point she would shy at it like a fractious old steed. It was then impossible to spur her on, and we had to retrace much ground at her pleasure. Theípsíssíma verbaof this innocent creature are therefore frankly unprintable. But towards the top of Mulcaster Park I did make out that a number of pointless speeches, delivered by Mr. Nettleton at his lunch, had culminated in the announcement that he was going to the theatre that night.
"The theatre!" I cried. "I thought he never even went up to town?"
I had gathered that from Delavoye, and Sarah confirmed it with much embroidery. I was also told his reasons for making such a sudden exception, and as given by Sarah they were certainly not convincing.
"Then he's in the theatre now, or ought to be?" I suggested; for it was then just after nine o'clock.
"Ah, that's where it is, sir!" said Sarah, weightily. "Heoughtto be, as you say, sir. But he's locked his lib'ry, and there's a light under the door, and I can't get no answer, not though I knock, knock, knock, till I'm tired of knocking!"
I now ascertained that Sarah also had been given money to make a night of it, in her case at the Parish Hall, where one of the church entertainments was going on. Sarah made mention of every item on the programme, as far as she had heard it out. But then it seemed she had become anxious about her kitchen fire, which she had been ordered to keep up for elaborate reasons connected with the master's bath. There had been no fire in the lib'ry that day; it was late in February, but exceptionally mild for the time of year. She knew her master sometimes left his lib'ry locked, after that what happened the last house-parlourmaid, and serve people right for going where they had no business. She could not say that he had left it locked on this occasion; she only knew it was so now, and a light under the door, though he had gone away in broad daylight.
This room, in which Nettleton certainly kept his books, but also his carpenter's bench, test-tubes and retorts, and a rack of stoppered bottles, was the one at the back leading into the garden. It was meant for the drawing-room in this particular type of house, was of considerable size, but only divided from the kitchen by a jerry-built wall. Sarah could not say that she had heard a sound in the lib'ry—though she often did hear master, as she was setting there of a evening—since he went away without his tea. Of course she had not noticed the light under the door till after dark; not, in fact, till she came back from her entertainment. No; she had not thought of going into the room to draw the curtains. The less she went in there, without orders, the better, Sarah always thought. And yet, when she trotted in front of me through her kitchen and scullery, and so round to the French windows of the sealed chamber, we found them closely shuttered, as they must have been left early in the afternoon, unless Nettleton had returned from his theatre and locked himself in.
It was with rather too vivid a recollection of the finding of Abercromby Royle, in a corresponding room in Mulcaster Park, that I went on to my office for an assortment of keys.
"Now, Sarah, you stand sentinel at the gate," I said on my return. "If Mr. Nettleton should come back while I'm busy, keep him in conversation while I slip out through your kitchen. I don't much like my job, Sarah, but neither do I think for a moment that there's anything wrong."
Yet there was a really bright layer of light under the door in which I now tried key after key, while the old body relieved me of her presence in order to keep a rather unwilling eye up the road.
At last a key fitted, turned, and the door was open for me to enter if I dared; and never shall I forget the scene that presented itself when I did.
The room was unoccupied. That was one thing. Neither the quick nor the dead lay in wait for me this time. A mere glance explored every corner; the scanty furniture was that of a joiner's shop and a laboratory in one; all the library to be seen was a couple of standing bookcases, not nearly full. But my eyes were rooted in horror to the floor. It also was bare, in the sense that there was no carpet, though a rug or two had been roughly folded and piled on the carpenter's bench. In their place, from skirting-board to skirting-board, the floor was ankle-deep in shavings. And among the shavings, like so many lighthouses in a yellow sea, burnt four or five fat ecclesiastical candles. They were not in candlesticks; at first I thought that they were mounted merely in their own grease. But Nettleton had run no such risk of one toppling before its time. Their innocent little flames were within an inch or so of the shavings—one was nearer still—but before I could probe the simple secret of the vile device, there was a rustle at my elbow, and there stood Sarah with her nodding plume.
"Well, I never did!" she exclaimed in a scandalised whisper. "Trying to set fire to the 'ouse—oh, fie!"
The grotesque inadequacy of these comments, taken in conjunction with her comparative composure, made me suspect for one wild moment that Sarah herself was an accomplice in the horrible design. She grasped it at a glance, much quicker than I had done, and it seemed to shock her very much less. I snatched up one of the candles—they were pinned in place with black-headed toilet pins—and I lit the gas with it before stalking through the shavings and setting a careful foot upon the rest in turn.
When I had extinguished the last of them, I turned to find my innocent old suspect snivelling on the threshold, and nodding her gay plume more emphatically than ever.
"'Ow awful!" she ejaculated in hushed tones. "Madness, I call it. Setting fire to a nice 'ouse like this! But there, he's been getting queer for a long time. I've often said so—to myself, you know, sir—I wouldn't say it to nobody else. That burgular business was the beginning."
"Well, Sarah," I said, "he's got so queer that we must think what's to be done, and think quickly, and do it double-quick! But I shall be obliged if you'll stick to your excellent rule of not talking to outsiders. We've had scenes enough at Witching Hill, without this getting about."
"Oh! I shan't say a word, sir," said Sarah, solemnly. "Even pore Mr. Nettleton, he shall never know frommehow I found him out!"
I could hardly believe my ears. "Good God, woman! Do you dream of spending another night under this maniac's roof?"
"Why, of course I do, sir," cried old Sarah, bridling. "Who's to look after him, if I go away and leave him, I should like to know? The very idea!"
"I'll see that he's looked after," said I, grimly, and went and bolted the front door, lest he should return before I had decided on my tactics.
In the few seconds that my back was turned, Sarah seemed to have acquired yet another new and novel point of view. I found the old heroine almost gloating over her master's dreadful handiwork.
"Well, there, I never did see anything so artful! Him at his theatre, to come home and look on at the fire, and me at my concert, safe and sound as if I was at church! Oh, he'd see to that, sir; he wouldn't've done it if he 'adn't've arranged to put me out of 'arm's way. That's Mr. Nettleton, every inch. Not that I say it was a right thing to do, sir, even with the 'ouse empty as it is. But what can you expect when a pore gentleman goes out of 'is 'ead? There's not many would care what 'appened to nobody else! But the artfulness of 'im: in another minute the whole 'ouse might've been blazing like a bonfire! Well, there, you do 'ear of such things, and now we know 'ow they 'appen."
To this extraordinary tune, with many such variations, I was meanwhile making up my mind. The first necessity was to place the intrepid old fool really out of harm's way, and the next was to save the house if possible, but also and at all costs the good name of the Witching Hill Estate. We had had one suicide, and it had not been hushed up quite as successfully as some of us flattered ourselves at the time; one case of gross intemperance, most scandalous while it lasted, and one gang of burglars actually established on the Estate. People were beginning to talk about us as it was; a case of attempted arson, even if the incendiary were proved a criminal lunatic, might be the end of us as a flourishing concern. It is true that I had no stake in the Company whose servant I was; but one does not follow the dullest avocation for three years without taking a certain interest of another kind. At any rate I intended the secret of this locked room to remain as much a secret as I could keep it, and this gave me an immediate leverage over Sarah. Unless she took herself off before her master returned, I assured her I would have him sent, not to an asylum, but to the felon's cell which I described as the proper place for him. I was not so sure in my own mind that I meant him to go to one or the other. But this was the bargain that I proposed to Sarah.
It came out that she had friends, in the shape of a labouring brother and his wife and family, whom I strongly suspected of having migrated on purpose to keep in touch with Sarah's kitchen, no further away than the Village. I succeeded in packing the old thing off in that direction, after making her lock her door at the top of the house. Previously I had removed the marks of my boot from the extinguished candles, and had left the locked room locked once more and in total darkness. Sarah and I quitted the house together before ten o'clock.
"I'll see that your master doesn't do himself any damage to-night," were my last words to her. "He'll think the candles have been blown out by a draught under the door—which really wouldn't catch them till they burnt quite low—and that you are asleep in your bed at the top of the house. You've left everything as though you were; and that alone, as you yourself have pointed out, is enough to guarantee his not trying it on again to-night. You see, the fire was timed to break out before you left your entertainment, as it would have done if you'd seen the programme through. Tell your people that Mr. Nettleton's away for the night, and you've gone and locked yourself out by mistake. Above all, don't come back, unless you want to give the whole show away; he'd know at once that you'd discovered everything, and even your life wouldn't be safe for another minute. Unless you promise, Sarah, I'll just wait for him myself—with a policeman!"
My reasoning was cogent enough for that simple mind; on the other hand, the word of such an obviously faithful soul was better than the bond of most; and altogether it was with considerable satisfaction that I heard old Sarah trot off into the night, and then myself ran every yard of the way back to the Delavoyes' house.
Up to this point, as I still think, I had done better than many might have done in my place. But for my promise to Uvo, and the fact that he was even then lying waiting for me to redeem it, I would not have rushed to a sick man with my tale. Yet I must say that I was thankful I had no other choice, as matters stood. And I will even own that I had formed no definite plans beyond the point at which Uvo, having heard all, was to give me the benefit of his sound judgment in any definite dilemma.
To my sorrow he took the whole thing in an absolutely different way from any that I had anticipated. He took it terribly to heart. I had entirely forgotten the gist of our conversation before I left him; he had been thinking of nothing else. The thing that I had expected to thrill him to the marrow, that would have done nothing else at any other time, simply harrowed him after what it seemed that I had said three-quarters of an hour before. Whatever I had said was overlaid in my mind, for the moment, by all that I had since seen and heard. But Uvo Delavoye might have been brooding over every syllable.
"You said you wouldn't envy me," he cried, huskily, "if poor old Nettleton fell under the influence in his turn. You spoke as if it wasmyinfluence; it isn't, but it may be that I'm a sort of medium for its transmission! Sole agent, eh, Gilly? My God, that's an awful thought, but you gave it me just now and I sha'n't get shot of it in a hurry! None of these beastly things happened beforeIcame here—I, the legitimate son of this infernal soil! I'm the lightning-conductor, I'm the middleman in every deal!"
"My dear Uvo, we've no time for all that," I said. He had started up in bed, painfully excited and distressed, and I began to fear that I might have my work cut out to keep him there. "We agreed to differ about that long ago," I reminded him.
"It's only another way of putting what you said just now," he answered. "You said you did believe in my power of infecting another fellow with my ideas; you spoke of my responsibility if the other fellow put them into practice; and now he's done this hideous thing, had done it even when we were talking!"
"He hasn't done it yet, and I mean to know the reason if he ever does," said I, perhaps with rather more confidence than I really felt. I went on to outline my various notions of prevention. Uvo found no comfort in any of them.
"You can't trust him alone there for the night, after this, Gilly! He'll pull it off, Sarah or no Sarah, if you do. And if you send him either to prison or an asylum—butyouwon't be sending him! That's just it, Gilly. He'll have been sent by me!"
It was a case of the devil quoting scripture, but I was obliged to tell Uvo, as though I had found it out for myself, that criminals and criminal lunatics were not made that way. Villain-worshippers did not go to such lengths unless they had the seeds of madness or of crime already in them. Uvo could not repudiate his own thesis, but he said that if that were so he had watered those seeds in a way that made him the worst of the two. There was no arguing with him, no taking his part against this ruthless self-criticism. He owned that in Nettleton he had found a sympathetic listener at last, that he had poured the whole virus of his ideas into those willing ears, and now here was the result. He threatened to get up and dress, and to stagger into the breach with me or instead of me. No need to recount our contest on that point. I prevailed by undertaking to do any mortal thing he liked, as long as he lay where he was with that quinsy.
"Then save the fellow somehow, Gilly," he cried, "only don't you go near Nettleton to-night! He obviously isn't safe; take the other risk instead. Since the old soul's out of the house, let him set fire to it if he likes; that's better than his murdering you on the spot. Then we must get him quietly examined, without letting him know that we know anything at all; and if a private attendant's all he wants, I swear I'm his man. It's about the least I can do for him, and it would give me a job in life at last!"
I did not smile at my dear old lad. I gave him the assurance his generosity required, and I meant to carry it out, subject to a plan of my own for watching Nettleton's house all night. But all my proposals suffered a proverbial fate within ten minutes, when I was about to pass the still dark house, and was suddenly confronted by Nettleton himself, leaning over the gate as though in wait for me.
And here I feel an almost apologetic sense of the inadequacy of Nettleton's personality to the part that he was playing that night; for there was nothing terrifying about him, nothing sinister or grotesque. The outward man was flabbily restless and ineffective, distinguished from the herd by no stronger features than a goatee beard and the light, quick, instantaneously responsive eye of an uncannily intelligent child. And no more than a child did I fear him; man to man, I could have twisted his arm out of its socket, or felled him like an ox with one blow from mine. So I thought to myself, the very moment I stopped to speak to him; and perhaps, by so thinking, recognised some subtler quality, and confessed a subtle fear.
"I was looking for my old servant," said Nettleton, after a civil greeting. "She's not come in yet."
"Oh! hasn't she?" I answered, and I liked the ring of my own voice even less than his.
"Anyhow I can't make her hear, and the old fool's left her door locked," said Nettleton.
"That's a bad plan," said I, not to score a silly point, but simply because I had to say something with conviction. It was a mistake. Nettleton peered at me by the light from the nearest lamp-post.
"Have you seen anything of her?" he asked suspiciously.
"Yes!" I answered, in obedience to the same necessity of temperament.
"Well?" he cried.
"Well, she seemed nervous about something, and I believe she has gone to her own people for the night."
We stood without speaking for nearly a minute. A soft step came marching round the asphalt curve, throwing a bright beam now upon its indigo surface, and now over the fussy fronts of the red houses, as a child plays with a bit of looking-glass in the sun. "Good-night, officer," said Nettleton as the step and the light passed on. And I caught myself thinking what an improvement the asphalt was in Witching Hill Road, and how we did want it in Mulcaster Park.
"We can't talk out here, and I wish to explain about this wretched rent," said Nettleton. "Come in—or are you nervous too?"
I gave the gate a push, and he had to lead the way. I should not have been so anxious to see a real child in front of me. But Nettleton turned his back with an absence of hesitation that reassured me as to his own suspicions, and indeed none were to be gleaned from his unthoughtful countenance when he had lit up his hall without waiting for me to shut the front door. At that I did shut it, and accepted his invitation to smoke a pipe in his den; for I thought I could see exactly how it was.
Nettleton, having found his candles out and his servant flown, having even guessed that I knew something and perhaps suspected more, was about to show me my mistake by taking me into the very room where the conflagration had been laid for lighting. Of course I should see no signs of it, and would presently depart at peace with a tenant whose worst crime was his unpunctuality over the rent. Nothing could suit me better. It would show that the house really was safe for the night, while it would give time for due consideration, and for any amount of conferences with Uvo Delavoye.
So I congratulated myself as I followed Nettleton into the room that had been locked; of course it was unlocked now that he was at home, but it was still in perfect darkness as I myself had left it. The shavings rustled about our ankles; but no doubt he would think there was nothing suspicious about the shavings in themselves. Yet there was one difference, perceptible at once and in the dark. There was a smell that I thought might have been there before, but unnoticed by Sarah and me in our excitement. It was a strong smell, however, and it reminded me of toy steamers and of picnic teas.
"One moment, and I'll light the gas. We're getting in each other's way," said Nettleton. I moved instinctively, in obedience to a light touch on the arm, and I heard him fumbling in the dark behind me. Then I let out the yell of a lifetime. I am not ashamed of it to this day. I had received a lifetime's dose of agony and amazement.
My right foot had gone through the floor, gone into the jaws of some frightful monster that bit it to the bone above the ankle!
"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 Idogive 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 whereyou'regoing, 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!"
"Ionly 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."
"Mymethylated!" 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."
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?"
"Weare, 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 wherehadI 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."
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!"