Witching Hill Part 19

"No; you've got to have one out there."

"But you didn't think it worth bringing home?"

I was trying to recall his very first remarks about revolvers, after the burglary the night before. And Delavoye read the attempt with his startling insight, and helped me out with impulsive candour.

"You're quite right! I did say I hated the beastly things, but it was a weakness I always meant to get over, and now I have. Do you mind giving me my Webley?"

"What did you do with the other one, Uvo?"

"Pitched it into the Nile, since you're so beastly inquisitive. But I was full of fever at the time, and broken-hearted at cracking up. It's quite different now."

"Is it?"

"Of course it is. I'm not going to do anything rotten. I was only ragging you. Don't be a silly a.s.s, Gillon!"

He was holding out his hand. His face had darkened, but his eyes blazed.

"I'm sorry, Uvo----"

"I'll make you sorrier!" he hissed.

"I can't help it. You couldn't trust yourself in your fever. It's your own fault if I can't trust you now."

He glared at me like a caged tiger, and now I knew the wild sly look in his eyes. It was the look of the Kneller portrait at Hampton Court, but there was no time to think twice about that, with the tiger in him gnas.h.i.+ng its teeth in very impotence.

"Oh, very well! You don't get out of this, with my property, if I can help it! I know I'm no match for you in brute strength, but you lay a finger on me if you dare!"

He was almost foaming at the mouth, and the trouble was that I could understand his frenzy perfectly. I would not have stood my own behaviour from any man, and yet I could not have behaved differently if I had tried, for his insensate fury was all of a piece with his delirious talk. I kept my eye on him as on a wild beast, and I saw his roving round the uncouth weapons on the wall. He was edging nearer to them; his hand was raised to pluck one down, his worn face bloated and distorted with his pa.s.sion. Neither of us spoke; we were past the stage; but in the grate the gas fire burnt with a low reproving roar. And then all at once I saw Uvo turn his head as though his sensitive ear had caught some other sound; his raised hand swept down upon the handle of the door; and as he softly opened it, the other hand was raised in token of silence, and for one splendid second I looked into a face no longer possessed by the devil, but radiant with the keenest joy.

Then I was at his elbow, and our ears bent together at the open door.

Gas was burning on the landing as well as in the hall below; everything seemed normal to every sense. I was obliged to breathe before another sound came from any quarter but that noisy stove in the room behind us.

And then it was more a vibration of the floor, behind the curtains of the half-landing, than an actual sound. But that was enough; back we stole into Uvo's room.

"They've come," he whispered, simply. "They're in the bathroom--now!"

"I heard."

"We'll go for them!"

"Of course."

He reached down the very weapon he had meant for my skull a minute before. It was a great club, studded with bra.s.s-headed nails, and also a most murderous battle-axe, so that the same whirl might fell one foe and cleave another. I had taken it from Uvo, and his dancing eyes were thanking me as he loaded the revolver I had handed him in exchange.

There were three stairs down to the half-landing, but Uvo sat up too late at nights not to know the one that creaked. We reached the old maroon curtain without a sound; behind it was the housemaid's sink on the right, and straight in front the bathroom door with a faint light under it. But the light went out before we reached it, and then the door would not open, and with that there was a smothered hubbub of voices and of feet within. It was like the first shot from an ambuscade, but it was our ambuscade, and Uvo's voice rang out in triumph.

"Down with the door or the devils'll do us yet!"

And they sounded as though they might before bolt or hinges gave. As we brought all our weight to bear, we could hear them huddling out of the window, and somebody whispering sharply, "One at a time; one at a time!"

And at that my companion relaxed his efforts inexplicably, but I flew at the key-hole with flat foot and every ounce of my weight behind it; the crash fined off into the scream of splintered wood, and I should have entered head foremost if the man on the other side had not stemmed the torrent of torn woodwork. Even as it was I went down on all fours, and was only struggling to my feet as his figure showed dimly in the open window. Delavoye fired over my head at the same instant, but his revolver "squibbed" like that far-away Snider, and before I could hack with his battle-axe at their rope-ladder, the last of the thieves was safe and sound on _terra firma_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Delavoye fired over my head.]

"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 gra.s.s. 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 att.i.tude 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 m.u.f.fled 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 gla.s.s. "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."

"G.o.d bless my soul!" cried Colonel Cheffins, putting down his gla.s.s.

"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."