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?”
“We are, 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 where had I 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!”
I could have wished that she had taken that for granted; but at least she felt too finely to bind me down to silence. Altogether I found her a fine creature, certainly in face and form, and almost certainly at heart, if one guessed even charitably at her past, and then at her life in a hostile suburb with a neglectful churl of a husband.
But to admire the woman for her own sake was not to approve of her on all other grounds; and during our friendly and almost fascinating chat I contracted a fairly definite fear that was not removed by the manner of its conclusion. Mrs. Ricardo had looked at a watch pinned to a pretty but audacious blouse, and had risen rather hurriedly. But she had looked at her watch just a minute too late; as we turned the corner of the ruin, there was Delavoye hurrying through the brake towards us; and though he was far enough off to conceal such confusion as Mrs. Ricardo had shown at my appearance on the scene, and to come up saying that he had found me at last, I could not but remember how he had shut himself up for the morning, after advising me to go on the river.
I was uneasy about them both; but it was impossible to say a word to anybody. He never spoke of her; that was another bad sign to my suspicious mind. It was entirely from her that I had drawn my material for suspicion, or rather for anxiety. I did not for a moment suppose that there was anything more than a possibly injudicious friendship between them; it was just the possibilities that stirred my sluggish imagination; and I should not have thought twice about these but for Uvo’s marked reserve in speaking of the one other person with whom I now knew that he was extremely unreserved. If only I had known it from him, I should not have deplored the mere detail that Mrs. Ricardo was in one way filling my own old place in his life.
My visit drew to an end; on the last night I simply had to dine in town with a wounded friend from the front. It would have been cruel to get out of it, though Uvo almost tempted me by his keenness that I should go. I warned him, however, that I should come back early. And I was even earlier than my word. And Uvo was not in.
“He’s gone out with his pipe,” said Sarah, looking gratuitously concerned. “I’m sure I don’t know where you’ll find him.” But this sounded like an afterthought; and there was a something shifty and yet wistful in the old body’s manner that inclined me to a little talk with her about the master.
“You don’t think he’s just gone into the wood, do you, Sarah?”
“Well, he do go there a good deal,” said Sarah. “Of course he don’t always go that way; but he do go there.”
“Might he have gone into Captain Ricardo’s, Sarah?”
“He might,” said Sarah, with more than dubious emphasis.
“They’re his great friends now, aren’t they?” I hazarded.
“Not Captain Ricardo, sir,” said Sarah. “I’ve only seen him in the ‘ouse but once, and that was when Miss Hamy was married; but we ‘ad all sorts then.” And Sarah looked as though the highways and hedges had been scoured for guests.
“But do you see much more of Mrs. Ricardo, Sarah?”
“I don’t, sir, but Mr. Hugo do,” said Sarah, for once off her loyal guard. “He sees more of her than his ma would like.”
“Come, come, Sarah! She’s a charming lady, and quite the belle of the Estate.”
“That may be, sir, but the Estate ain’t what it was,” declared Sarah, with pregnant superiority. “There’s some queer people come since I was with pore Mr. Nettleton.”
“What about Mr. Nettleton himself, Sarah?”
“Mr. Nettleton was always a gentleman, sir, though he did try to set fire to the ‘ouse with my methylated.”
I left the old dame bobbing in the doorway, and went to look for Uvo in the wood. I swear I had no thought of spying upon him. What could there be to spy upon, at half-past nine at night, with Captain Ricardo safe and grumbling at his own fireside? I had been wasting my last evening at a club and in the train, and I did not want to miss another minute of Uvo Delavoye’s society.
It was an exquisite night, the year near its zenith and the moon only less than full. The wood was changed from a beautiful bright picture into a beautiful black photograph; twig and leaf, and silent birds, stood out like motes in the moonbeams. But there were fine intervals of utter darkness, wide pools and high cascades of pitch, with never a bubble in the way of detail. And there was one bird to be heard, giving its own glory to the glorious night. But I was not long alive to the heavenly song, or to the beauty of the moonlit wood.
I had entered by way of a spare site a little higher up than the Delavoyes’, who, unlike some of their newer neighbours, had not a garden gate into the wood. I had penetrated some score yards into the pitch and silver of leafy tree and open space when I became aware that someone else had entered still higher up, and that our courses were converging. I thought for a moment that it might be Uvo; but there was something halt yet stealthy about the unseen advance, as of a shackled man escaping; and I knew who it was before I myself stole and dodged to get a sight of him. It was Captain Ricardo, creeping clumsily, often pausing to lean hard upon his tremendous stick. At first I thought he had two sticks; but the other was not one; the other was a hunting crop, for I saw the lash unloosed in one of the pauses, and a tree-trunk flicked again and again, about the height of a man’s shoulder, as if for practice.
When the limping, cringing figure again proceeded on its way, the big stick was in the left hand, the crop in the right, and I was a second sneak following the first, in the direction of the Temple of Bacchus.
I saw him stop and listen before I heard the voices. I saw the crop raised high in the moonlight, as if in the taking of some silent vow, and I lessened the distance between us with impunity, for he had never once looked round. And now I too heard the voices; they were on the other side of the temple wall; and this side was laved with moonlight, so that the edges of the crumbling stucco made seams of pitch, and Ricardo’s shadow crouched upon the wall for a little age before his bent person showed against it.
Now he was at one end of the wall, peeping round, listening, instead of showing himself like a man. My blood froze at his miserable tactics. I had seen men keep cover under heavy fire with less precaution than this wretch showed in spying on his guilty wife; yet there was I copying him, even as I had dogged him through the wood. Now he had wedged himself in the heavy shadow between the wall and the one whole pillar at right angles to the wall; now he was looking as well as listening. And now I was in his old place, now I was at his very elbow, eavesdropping myself in my watch and ward over the other eavesdropper.
The big stick leant against the end of the wall, just between us, nearer to my hand than his. The man himself leant hard against the pillar, the crop grasped behind him in both hands, its lash dangling like the tail of a monster rat. Those two clasped hands were the only part of him in the moonlight, and I watched them as I would have watched his eyes if we had been face to face. They were lean, distorted, twitching, itching hands. The lash was wound round one of them; there might have been more whipcord under the skin.
Meanwhile I too was listening perforce to the voices on the other side of the wall. I thought one came from the stone stump where Mrs. Ricardo had sat the other day, that she was sitting there again. The other voice came from various places. And to me the picture of Uvo Delavoye, tramping up and down in the moonlight as he talked, was as plain as though there had been no old wall between us.
“I know you have a thin time of it. But so has he!”
That was almost the first thing I heard. It made an immediate difference in my feeling towards the other eavesdropper. But I still watched his hands.
“Sitting on top of a cricket pavilion,” said the other voice, “all day long!”
“
It takes him out of himself. You must see that he is eating his heart out, with this war still on, and fellows like Gillon bringing it home to him every day.”
“I don’t see anything. He doesn’t give me much chance. If it isn’t cricket at the Oval, it’s billiards here at the George, night after night until I’m sick to death of the whole thing.”
“Are you sure he’s there now?”
“Oh, goodness, yes! He made no bones about it.”
I thought Uvo had stopped in his stride to ask the question. I knew those hands clutched the hunting crop tighter at the answer. I saw the knuckles whiten in the moonlight.
“Because we’re taking a bit of a risk,” resumed Uvo, finishing further off than he began.
“Oh, no, we’re not. Besides, what does it matter? I simply had to speak to you — and you know what happened the other morning. Mornings are the worst of all for people seeing you.”
“But not for what they think of seeing you.”
“Oh! what do I care what they think?” cried the wife of the man beside me. “I’m far past that. It’s you men who keep on thinking and thinking of what other people are going to think!”
“We sometimes have to think for two,” said Uvo — just a little less steadily, to my ear.
“You don’t see that I’m absolutely desperate, mewed up with a man who doesn’t care a rap for me!”
“I should make him care.”
“That shows all you care!” she retorted, passionately.
And then I felt that he was standing over her; there was something in the altered pose of the head near mine, something that took my eyes from the moonlit hands, and again gave me as vivid a picture as though the wall were down.
“It’s no use going back on all that,” said Uvo, and it was harder to hear him now. “I don’t want to say rotten things. You know well enough what I feel. If I felt a bit less, it would be different. It’s just because we’ve been the kind of pals we have been ... my dear ... my dear!... that we mustn’t go and spoil it now.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 394