Witching Hill Part 2

"What is it?"

"I thought I heard shouts of laughter."

"You're right. There they go again! I believe we've struck a heavy entertainment."

In a dell behind the house, a spreading cedar caught the light of windows that we could not see. Delavoye crept to the intermediate angle, turned round, and beckoned in silhouette against the tree.

"High jinks and junketings!" he chuckled when I joined him. "The old bloke must be away. Shall we risk a peep?"

My answer was to lead the way for once, and it was long before we exchanged another syllable. But in a few seconds, and for more minutes, we crouched together at an open window, seeing life with all our innocent eyes.

It was a billiard-room into which we gazed, but it was not being used for billiards. One end of the table was turned into a champagne bar; it bristled with bottles in all stages of depletion, with still an unopened magnum towering over pails of ice, silver dishes of bonbons, cut decanters of wine and spirits. At the other end a cl.u.s.ter of flushed faces hung over a spinning roulette wheel; nearly all young women and men, smoking fiercely in a silver haze, for the moment terribly intent; and as the ball ticked and rattled, the one pale face present, that of the melancholy croupier, showed a dry zest as he intoned the customary admonitions. They were new to me then; now I seem to recognise through the years the Anglo-French of his "_rien ne va plus_" and all the rest.

There were notes and gold among the stakes. The old rogue raked in his share without emotion; one of the ladies embraced him for hers; and one had stuck a sprig of maidenhair in his venerable locks; but there he sat, with the deferential dignity of a bygone school, the only very sober member of the party it was his shame to serve.

The din they made before the next spin! It was worse when it died down into plainer speech; playful buffets were exchanged as freely; but one young blood left the table with a deadly dose of raw spirit, and sat glowering over it on a raised settee while the wheel went round again. I did not watch the play; the wild, attentive faces were enough for me; and so it was that I saw a bedizened beauty go mad before my eyes. It was the madness of utter ecstasy--wails of laughter and happy maledictions--and then for that unopened magnum! By the neck she caught it, whirled it about her like an Indian club, then down on the table with all her might and the effect of a veritable sh.e.l.l. A ribbon of blood ran down her dress as she recoiled, and the champagne flooded the green board like bubbling ink; but the old croupier hardly looked up from the pile of notes and gold that he was counting out with his sly, wintry smile.

[Ill.u.s.tration: I saw a bedizened beauty go mad before my eyes.]

"You saw she had a fiver on the number? You may watch roulette many a long night without seeing that again!"

It was Delavoye whispering as he dragged me away. He was the cool one now. Too excitable for me in the early stages of our adventure, he was not only the very man for all the rest, but a living lesson in just that thing or two I felt at first I could have taught him. For I fear I should have felled that butler if he had seen us in the cigar cellar, and I know I shouted when the magnum burst; but fortunately so did everybody else except Delavoye and the aged croupier.

"I suppose he was the butler?" I said when we had skirted the shallow drive, avoiding a couple of hansoms that stood there with the cabmen snug inside.

"What! The old fogey? Not he!" cried Delavoye as we reached the road. "I say, don't those hansoms tell us all about his pals!"

"But who was he?"

"The man himself."

"Not Sir Christopher Stainsby?"

"I'm afraid so--the old sinner!"

"But you said he was an old saint?"

"So I thought he was; my lord warden of the Nonconformist conscience, I always heard."

"Then how do you account for it?"

"I can't. I haven't thought about it. Wait a bit!"

He stood still in the road. It was his own road. There was that hole to fill in before morning; meanwhile the sweet night air was sweeter far than we had left it hours ago; and the little new suburban houses surpa.s.sed all pleasures and palaces, behind their kindly lamps, with the clean stars watching over them and us.

"I don't want you think the worse of me," said Delavoye, slipping his arm through mine as he led me on: "but at this particular moment I should somehow think less of myself if I didn't tell you, after all we've been through together, that I was really quite severely tempted to take that lace and those diamonds!"

I knew it.

"Well," I said, with the due deliberation of my normal Northern self, "you'd have had a sort of right to them. But that's nothing! Why, man, I was as near as a toucher to laying yon butler dead at our feet!"

"Then we're all three in the same boat, Gillon."

"Which three?"

It was my turn to stand still, outside his house. And now there was excitement enough in his dark face to console me for all mine.

"You, and I, and poor old Sir Christopher."

"Poor old hypocrite! Didn't I hear that his wife died a while ago?"

"Only last year. That makes it sound worse. But in reality it's an excuse, because of course he would fall a victim all the more easily."

"A victim to what?"

"My good Gillon, don't you see that he's up to the very same games on the very same spot as my ign.o.ble kinsman a hundred and fifty years ago?

Blood, liquor, and ladies as before! We admit that between us even you and I had the makings of a thief and a murderer while we were under that haunted roof. Don't you believe in influences?"

"Not of that kind," said I heartily. "I never did, and I doubt I never shall."

Delavoye laughed in the starlight, but his lips were quivering, and his eyes were like stars themselves. But I held up my hand: the nightingale was singing in the wood exactly as when we plunged below the earth.

Somehow it brought us together again, and there we stood listening till a clock struck twelve in the distant Village.

"''Tis now the very witching time of night,'" said Uvo Delavoye, "'when church-yards yawn'--like our back garden!" I might have guessed his favourite play, but his face lit up before my memory. "And shall I tell you, Gillon, the real name of this whole infernal Hill and Estate? It's Witching Hill, my man, it's Witching Hill from this night forth!"

And Witching Hill it still remains to me.

CHAPTER II

The House with Red Blinds

Uvo Delavoye had developed a theory to match his name for the Estate.

The baleful spirit of the notorious Lord Mulcaster still brooded over Witching Hill, and the innocent occupiers of the Queen Anne houses were one and all liable to the malign influence. Such was the modest proposition, put as fairly as can be expected of one who resisted it from the first; for both by temperament and training I was perhaps unusually proof against this kind of thing. But then I always held that Delavoye himself did not begin by believing in his own idea, that he never thought of it before our subterranean adventure, and would have forgotten all about it but for the house with red blinds.

That vermilion house with the brave blinds of quite another red! I can still see them bleaching in the glare of those few August days.

It was so hot that the prematurely bronze leaves of the horse-chestnuts, behind the odd numbers in Mulcaster Park, were as crisp as tinfoil, while a tawny stubble defied the garden rollers of those tenants who had not been driven to the real country or the seaside. Half our inhabited houses were either locked up empty, or in the hands of servants who spent their time gossiping at the gate. And I personally was not surprised when the red blinds stayed down in their turn.

The Abercromby Royles were a young couple who might be expected to mobilise at short notice, in spite of the wife's poor health, for they had no other ties. The mere fact of their departure on Bank Holiday, when the rest of the Estate were on the river, meant no more to me than a sudden whim on the lady's part; but then I never liked the looks of her or her very yellow hair, least of all in a bath chair drawn by her indulgent husband after business hours. Mr. Royle was a little solicitor, who himself flouted tradition with a flower in his coat and a straw hat worn slightly on one side; but with him I had made friends over an escape of gas which he treated as a joke rather than a grievance. He seemed to me just the sort of man to humour his sort of wife, even to the extent of packing off the servants on board wages, as they were said to have done before leaving themselves. Certainly I never thought of a sinister explanation until Uvo Delavoye put one into my head, and then I had no patience with him.

"It's this heat," I declared; "it's hot enough to uproot anybody."

"I wonder," said he, "how many other places they've found too hot for them!"

"But why should you wonder any such rot, when you say yourself that you've never even nodded to Abercromby Royle?"