"I quite agree with you," said Delavoye emphatically. "It's very odd. It means something. I believe I know what, too!"
But he did not appear disposed to tell me, and I was not going to press him on the point. Nor did I share his confidence in his own powers of divination. What could he know of the case, that was unknown to me—unless he had some outside source of information all the time?
That, however, I did not believe; at any rate he seemed bent upon acquiring more. He pushed the gate open, and was on the doorstep before I could say a word. I had to follow in order to remind him that his proceedings might be misunderstood if they were seen.
"Not a bit of it!" he had the nerve to say as he bent over the tarnished letter-box. "You're with me, Gillon, and isn't it your job to keep an eye on these houses?"
"Yes, but——"
"What's the matter with this letter-box? It won't open."
"That's so that letters can't be shot into the empty hall. He nailed it up on purpose before he went. I found him at it."
"And didn't it strike you as an extraordinary thing to do?" Uvo was standing upright now. "Of course it did, or you'd have mentioned it to Coysh and me the other day."
It was no use denying the fact.
"What's happening to their letters?" he went on, as though I could know.
"I expect they're being re-directed."
"To the wife?"
"I suppose so."
And my voice sank with my heart, and I felt ashamed, and repeated myself aggressively.
"Exactly!" There was no supposing about Uvo. "The wife at some mysterious address in the country—poor soul!"
"Where are you going now?"
He had dived under the front windows, muttering to himself as much as to me. I caught him up at the high side gate into the back garden.
"Lend me a hand," said Delavoye when he had tried the latch.
"You're not going over?"
"That I am, and it'll be your duty to follow. Or I could let you through. Well—if you won't!"
And in the angle between party-fence and gate he was struggling manfully when I went to his aid as a lesser evil; in a few seconds we were both in the back garden of the empty house, with the gate still bolted behind us.
"Now, if it were ours," resumed Delavoye when he had taken breath, "I should say the lavatory window was the vulnerable point. Lavatory window, please!"
"But, Delavoye, look here!"
"I'm looking," said he, and we faced each other in the broad moonlight that flooded the already ragged lawn.
"If you think I'm going to let you break into this house, you're very much mistaken."
I had my back to the windows I meant to hold inviolate. No doubt the moon revealed some resolution in my face and bearing, for I meant what I said until Delavoye spoke again.
"Oh, very well! If it's coming to brute force I have no more to say. The police will have to do it, that's all. It's their job, when you come to think of it; but it'll be jolly difficult to get them to take it on, whereas you and I——"
And he turned away with a shrug to point his admirable aposiopesis.
"Man Uvo," I said, catching him by the arm, "what's this job you're jawing about?"
"You know well enough. You're in the whole mystery of these people far deeper than I am. I only want to find the solution."
"And you think you'll find it in their house?"
"I know I should," said Uvo with quiet confidence. "But I don't say it'll be a pleasant find. I shouldn't ask you to come in with me, but merely to accept some responsibility afterwards—to-night, if we're spotted. It will probably involve more kudos in the end. But I don't want to let you in for more than you can stand meanwhile, Gillon."
That was enough for me. I myself led the way back to the windows, angrily enough until he took my arm, and then suddenly more at one with him than I had ever been before. I had seen his set lips in the moonlight, and felt the uncontrollable tremor of the hand upon my sleeve.
It so happened that it was not necessary to break in after all. I had generally some keys about me and the variety of locks on our back doors was not inexhaustible. It was the scullery door in this case that a happy chance thus enabled me to open. But I was now more determined than Delavoye himself, and would have stuck at no burglarious excess to test his prescience, to say nothing of a secret foreboding which had been forming in my own mind.
To one who went from house to house on the Estate as I did, and knew by heart the five or six plans on which builder and architect had rung the changes, darkness should have been no hindrance to the unwarrantable exploration I was about to conduct. I knew the way through these kitchens, and found it here without a false or noisy step. But in the hall I had to contend with the furniture which makes one interior as different from another as the houses themselves may be alike. The Abercromby Royles had as much furniture as the Delavoyes, only of a different type. It was not massive and unsuitable, but only too dainty and multifarious, no doubt in accordance with the poor wife's taste. I retained an impression of artful simplicity—an enamelled drain-pipe for the umbrellas—painted tambourines and counterfeit milk-stools—which rather charmed me in those days. But I had certainly forgotten a tall flower-stand outside the kitchen door, and over it went crashing as I set foot in the tessellated hall. I doubt if either of us drew breath for some seconds after the last bit of broken plant-pot lay still upon the tiles. Then I rubbed a match on my trousers, but it did not strike. Uvo had me by the hand before I could do it again.
"Do you want to blow up the house?" he croaked. "Can't you smell it for yourself?"
Then I realised that the breath which I had just drawn was acrid with escaped gas.
"It's that asbestos stove again!" I exclaimed, recalling my first visit to the house.
"Which asbestos stove?"
"It's in the dining-room. It was leaking as far back as June."
"Well, we'd better go in there first and open the window. Stop a bit!"
The dining-room was just opposite the kitchen, and I was on the threshold when he pulled me back to tie my handkerchief across my nose and mouth. I did the same for Delavoye, and thus we crept into the room where I had been induced to drink with Royle on the night he went away.
The full moon made smouldering panels of the French window leading into the garden, but little or no light filtered through the long red blind. Delavoye went round to it on tip-toe, and I still say it was a natural instinct that kept our voices down and our movements stealthy; that any other empty house, where we had no business at dead of night, would have had the same effect upon us. Delavoye speaks differently for himself; and I certainly heard him fumbling unduly for the blind-cord while I went over to the gas-stove. At least I was going when I stumbled against a basket chair, which creaked without yielding to my weight, and creaked again as though some one had stirred in it. I recoiled, panic-stricken, and so stood until the blind flew up. Then the silence was sharply broken by a voice that I can still hear but hardly recognise as my own.
It was Abercromby Royle who was sitting in the moonlight over the escaping stove; and I shall not describe him; but a dead flower still drooped from the lapel of a flannel jacket which the dead man had horribly outgrown.
I drove Delavoye before me through the window he had just opened; it was he who insisted on returning, ostensibly to turn off the gas, and I could not let him go alone. But neither could I face the ghastly occupant of the basket chair; and again it was Uvo Delavoye who was busy disengaging something from the frozen fingers when a loud rat-tat resounded through the house.
It was grim to see how the corpse sat still and let us jump; but Uvo was himself before the knock was repeated.
"You go, Gillon!" he said. "It's only somebody who's heard or seen us. Don't you think we smelt the gas through the letter-box, and wasn't it your duty——"
The second knock cut him short, and I answered it without more ado. The night constable on the beat, who knew me well by sight, was standing on the doorstep like a man, his right hand on his hip till he had blinded me with his lantern. A grunt of relief assured me of his recognition, while his timely arrival was as promptly explained by an insensate volley in a more familiar voice.
"Don't raise the road, Mr. Coysh!" I implored. "The man you want has been here all the time, and dead for the last five days!"
That was a heavy night for me. If Coysh could have made it something worse, I think just at first he would; for he had been grossly deceived, and I had unwittingly promoted the deception. But his good sense and heart had brought him to reason before I accompanied the policeman to the station, leaving the other two on guard over a house as hermetically sealed as Delavoye and I had found it.
At the police station I was stiffly examined by the superintendent; but the explanations that I now felt justified in giving, at Delavoye's instigation, were received without demur and I was permitted to depart in outward peace. Inwardly I was not so comfortable, for Delavoye had not confined his hints to an excuse for entry, made the more convincing by the evil record of the asbestos stove. We had done some more whispering while the constable was locking up, and the impulsive Coysh had lent himself to our final counsels. The upshot was that I said nothing about my own farewell to Royle, though I dwelt upon my genuine belief that he had actually gone abroad. And I did say I was convinced that the whole affair had been an accident, due to the same loose gas-stove tap which had caused an escape six weeks before.
That was my only actual lie, and on later consideration I began to wonder whether even it was not the truth. This was in Delavoye's sanctum, on the first-floor-back at No. 7, and after midnight; for I had returned to find him in the clutches of excited neighbours, and had waited about till they all deserted him to witness the immediate removal of the remains.
"What is there, after all," I asked, "to show that it really was a suicide? He might have come back for something he'd forgotten, and kicked against the tap by accident, as somebody did in June. Why make a point of doing the deed at home?"
"Because he didn't want his wife to know."
"But she was bound to know."
"Sooner or later, of course; but the later the better from his point of view, and their own shut-up house was the one place where he might not have been found for weeks. And that would have made all the difference—in the circumstances."
"But what do you know about the circumstances, Uvo?" I could not help asking a bit grimly; for his air of omniscience always prepared me for some specious creation of his own fancy. But for once I was misled, and I knew it from his altered face before I heard his unnatural voice.
"What do I know?" repeated Uvo Delavoye. "Only that one of the neighbours has just had a wire from Mrs. Royle's people to say that she's got a son! That's all," he added, seizing a pipe, "but if you think a minute you'll see that it explains every other blessed thing."
And I saw that so it did, as far as the unfortunate Royle was concerned; and there was silence between us while I ran through my brief relations with the dead man and Delavoye filled his pipe.
"I never took to the fellow," he continued, in a callous tone that almost imposed upon me. "I didn't like his eternal buttonhole, or the hat on one side, or the awful shade of their beastly blinds, or the colour of the good lady's hair for that matter! Just the wrong red and yellow, unless you happen to wear blue spectacles; and if you'd ever seen them saying good-bye of a morning you'd have wished you were stone-blind. But if ever I marry—which God forbid—may I play the game by my wife as he has done by his! Think of his feelings—with two such things hanging over him—those African accounts on the way as well! Is he to throw himself on his old friend's mercy? No; he's too much of a man, or perhaps too big a villain—but I know which I think now. What then? If there's a hue and cry the wife'll be the first to hear it; but if he lays a strong false scent, through an honest chap like you, it may just tide over the days that matter. So it has, in point of fact; but for me, there'd have been days and days to spare. But imagine yourself creeping back into your empty hole to die like a rat, and still thinking of every little thing to prevent your being found!"
"And to keep it from looking like suicide when you were!" said I, with yet a lingering doubt in my mind.
"Well, then I say you have the finest suicide ever!" declared Uvo Delavoye. "I only wish I knew when he began to think it all out. Was it before he called you in to see the tap that didn't turn off? Or was it the defective tap that suggested the means of death? In either case, when he nailed up his letter-box, it was not, of course, to keep the postman from the door, but to keep the smell of gas inside if he or anybody else did come. That, I think, is fairly plain."
"It's ingenious," I conceded, "whether the idea's your own or Royle's."
"It must have been his," said Delavoye with conviction. "You don't engineer an elaborate fake and get in one of your best bits by accident. No; there was only one mistake poor Royle made, and itwasunpremeditated. It was rather touching too. Do you remember my trying to get something from his fingers, just when the knock came?"
I took a breath through my teeth.
"I wish I didn't. What was it?"
"A locket with yellow hair in it. And he'd broken the glass, and his thumb was on the hair itself! I don't suppose," added Delavoye, "it would have meant to anybody else what it must to you and me, Gillon; but I'm not sorry I got it out of his clutches in time."
Yet now he could shudder in his turn.
"And to think," I said at last, recalling the secret and forgotten foreboding with which I myself had entered the house of death; "only to think that at the last I was more prepared for murder than suicide! I almost suspected the poor chap of having killed his wife, and shut her up there!"
"Did you?" said Delavoye, with an untimely touch of superiority. "That never occurred to me."
"But you must have thought something was up?"
"I didn't think. I knew."
"Not what had happened?"
"More or less."
"I wish you'd tell me how!"
Uvo smiled darkly as he shook his head.
"It's no use telling certain people certain things. You shall see for yourself with your own two eyes." He got up and crossed the room. "You know what I'm up to at the British Museum; did I tell you they'd got a fine old last-century plan of the original Estate? Well, for weeks I've had a man in Holborn trying to get me a copy for love or money. He's just succeeded. Here it is."
A massive hereditary desk, as mid-Victorian as all the Delavoye possessions, stood before the open window that looked out into the moonlight; on this desk was a reading gas-lamp, with a smelly rubber tube, of the same maligned period; and there and thus was the plan spread like a tablecloth, pinned down by ash-tray, inkpot, and the lamp itself, and duly overhung by our two young heads. I carry it pretty clearly still in my mind's eye. The Estate alone, or rather the whole original property and nothing else, was outlined and filled in, and the rest left as white as age permitted. It was like a map of India upside down. The great house was curiously situated in the apex, but across the road a clump of shrubberies stood for Ceylon. Our present Estate was at the thick end, as Delavoye explained, and it was a thrilling moment when he laid his nail upon the Turkish Pavilion, actually so marked, and we looked out into the moonlit garden and beheld its indubitable site. The tunnel was not marked. But Delavoye ran his finger to the left, and stopped on an emblem illegibly inscribed in small faint ancient print.
"It's 'Steward's Lodge,'" said he as I peered in vain; "you shall have a magnifying glass, if you like, to show there's no deception. But the story I'm afraid you'll have to take on trust for the moment. If you want to see chapter and verse, apply for a reader's ticket and I'll show you both any day at the B.M. I only struck them myself this afternoon, in a hairy tome called 'The Mulcaster Peerage'—and a whole page of sub-titles. They're from one of the epistles of the dear old sinner himself, written as though other people's money had never melted in his noble fist. I won't spoil it by misquotation. But you'll find that there was once an unjust steward, who robbed the wicked lord of this very vineyard, and then locked himself into his lodge, and committed suicide rather than face the fearful music!"
I did not look at Delavoye; but I felt his face glowing like a live coal close to mine.
"This road isn't marked," I said as though I had been simply buried in the plan.
"Naturally; it wasn't made. Would you like to see where it ran?"
"I shouldn't mind," I said with the same poor quality of indifference.
He took a bit of old picture-rod, which he kept for a ruler on his desk, and ran a pair of parallel lines in blue pencil from west to east. The top line came just under the factor's cottage.
"It's in this very road!" I exclaimed.
"Not only that," returned Delavoye, "but if you go by the scale, and pace the distance, you'll find that the Steward's Lodge was on the present site of the house with red blinds!"
And he turned away to fill another pipe, as though finely determined not to crow or glow in my face. But I did not feel myself an object for magnanimity.
"I thought it was only your ignoble kinsman, as you call him," I said, "who was to haunt and influence us all. If it's to be his man-servant, his maid-servant——"
"Stop," cried Delavoye; "stop in time, my dear man, before you come to one or other of us! Can you seriously think it a mere coincidence that a thing like this should happen on the very spot where the very same thing has happened before?"
"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 whatyoulike," 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."
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 thepartie 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!"
Peculiarwas 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!"
"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.
"Talk about haunted houses!" said Uvo Delavoye. "If our patron sinner takes such a fatherly interest in the humble material at his disposal, what about that gay dog Henry and the good ladies in these apartments? I should be sorry to trust living neck to what's left of the old lady-killer." It was the famous Holbein which had set him off. "But I say, Gilly, here's a far worse face than his. It may be my rude forefather; by Jove, and so it is!"
And he took off his cap with unction to a handsome, sinister creature, in a brown flowing wig and raiment as fine as any on the walls. There was a staggering peacock-blue surtout, lined with silk of an orange scarlet, the wide sleeves turned up with the same; and a creamy cascade of lace fell from the throat over a long cinnamon waistcoat piped with silk; for you could swear to the material at sight, and the colours might have been laid on that week. They lit up the gloomy chamber, and the eyes in the periwigged head lit them up. The dark eyes at my side were not more live and liquid than the painted pair. Not that Uvo's were cynical, voluptuous, or sly; but like these they reminded me of deep waters hidden from the sun. I refrained from comment on a resemblance that went no further. I was glad I alone had seen how far it went.
"Thank goodness those lips and nostrils don't sprout on our branch!" Uvo had put up his eyebrows in a humorous way of his. "We must keep a weather eye open for the evil that they did living after them on Witching Hill! You may well stare at his hands; they probably weren't his at all, but done from a model. I hope the old Turk hadn't quite such a ladylike——"
He stopped short, as I knew he would when he saw what I was pointing out to him; for I had not been staring at the effeminate hand affectedly composed on the corner of a table, but at the enamelled ring painted like a miniature on the little finger.
"Good Lord!" cried Delavoye. "That's the very ring we saw last night!"
It was at least a perfect counterfeit; the narrow stem, the high, projecting, oval bezel—the white peacock enamelled on a crimson ground—one and all were there, as the painters of that period loved to put such things in.
"It must be the same, Gilly! There couldn't be two such utter oddities!"
"It looks like it, certainly; but how did Miss Hemming get hold of it?"
"Easily enough; she ferrets out all the old curiosity shops in the district, and didn't Berridge tell us she bought his ring in one? Obviously it's been lying there for the last century and a bit. Bear in mind that this bad old lot wasn't worth a bob towards the end; then you must see the whole thing's so plain, there's only one thing plainer."
"What's that?"
"The entire cause and origin of Guy Berridge's pangs and fears about his engagement. He never had one or the other before Christmas—when he got his ring. They've made his life a Hades ever since, every day of it and every hour of every day, except sometimes in the morning when he was getting up. Why not then? Because he took off his ring when he went to his bath! I'll go so far as to remind you that his only calm and rational moments last night were while you and I were looking at this ring and it was off his finger!"
Delavoye's strong excitement was attracting the attention of the old soldierly attendant near the window, and in a vague way that veteran attracted mine. I glanced past him, out and down into the formal grounds. Yew and cedar seemed unreal to me in the wintry sunlight; almost I wondered whether I was dreaming in my turn, and where on earth I was. It was as though a touch of the fantastic had rested for a moment even on my hard head. But I very soon shook it off, and mocked the vanquished weakness with a laugh.
"Yes, my dear fellow, that's all very well. But——"
"None of your blooming 'buts'!" cried Uvo, with almost delirious levity. "I should have thought this instance was concrete enough even for you. But we'll talk about it at the Mitre and consider what to do."
In that talk I joined, into those considerations I entered, without arguing at all. It did not commit me to a single article of a repugnant creed, but neither on the other hand did it impair the excellence of Delavoye's company at a hurried feast which still stands out in my recollection. I remember the long red wall of Hampton Court as the one warm feature of the hard-bitten landscape. I remember red wine in our glasses, a tinge of colour in the dusky face that leant toward mine, and a wondrous flow of eager talk, delightful as long as one did not take it too seriously. My own attitude I recapture most securely in Uvo's accusation that I smiled and smiled and was a sceptic. It was one of those characteristic remarks that stick for no other reason. Uvo Delavoye was not in those days at all widely read; but he had a large circle of quotations which were not altogether unfamiliar to me, and I eventually realised that he knew hisHamletalmost off by heart.
But as yet poor Berridge's "pangs and fears" was original Delavoye to my ruder culture; and the next time I saw him, on the Friday night, the pangs seemed keener and the fears even more enervating than before. Again he sat with us in Uvo's room; but he was oftener on his legs, striding up and down, muttering and gesticulating as he strode. In the end Uvo took a strong line with him. I was waiting for it. He had conceived the scheme at Hampton Court, and I was curious to see how it would be received.
"This can't go on, Berridge! I'll see you through—to the bitter end!"
Uvo was not an actor, yet here was a magnificent piece of acting, because it was more than half sincere.
"Will you really, Delavoye?" cried the accountant, shrinking a little from his luck.
"Rather! I'm not going to let you go stark mad under my nose. Give me that ring."
"My—her—ring?"
"Of course; it's your engagement ring, isn't it? And it's your duty, to yourself and her and everybody else, to break off that engagement with as little further delay as possible."
"But are you sure, Delavoye?"
"Certain. Give it to me."
"It seems such a frightful thing to do!"
"We'll see about that. Thank you; now you're your own man again."
And now I really did begin to open my eyes; for no sooner had the unfortunate accountant parted with his ring, than his ebbing affections rushed back in a miraculous flood, and he was begging for it again in five minutes, vowing that he had been mad but now was sane, and looking more himself into the bargain. But Delavoye was adamant to these hysterical entreaties. He plied Berridge with his own previous arguments against the marriage, and once at least he struck a responsive chord from those frayed nerves.
"Nobody but yourself," he pointed out, "ever said you didn't love her; but see what love makes of you! Can you dream of marriage in such a state? Is it fair to the girl, until you've really reconsidered the whole matter and learnt your own mind once for all? Could she be happy? Would she be—it was your own suggestion—but are you sure she would be even safe?"
Berridge wrung his hands in new despair; yes, he had forgotten that! Those awful instincts were the one unalterably awful feature. Not that he felt them still; but to recollect them as genuine impulses, or at best as irresistible thoughts, was to freeze his self-distrust into a cureless cancer.
"I was forgetting all that," he moaned. "And yet here in my pocket is the very book those hopeless lines are from. I bought it at Stoneham's this morning. It's the most peculiar poem I ever read. I can't quite make it out. But that bit was clear enough. Only hear how it goes on!"
And in a school-childish singsong, with no expression but that involuntarily imparted by his quavering voice, he read twelve lines aloud—
"Some kill their love when they are young,And some when they are old;Some strangle with the hands of Lust,Some with the hands of Gold:The kindest use a knife, because——"
"Some kill their love when they are young,And some when they are old;Some strangle with the hands of Lust,Some with the hands of Gold:The kindest use a knife, because——"
He shuddered horribly—