Witching Hill Part 6

No; there was only one mistake poor Royle made, and it _was_ unpremeditated. 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 gla.s.s, 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 ma.s.sive 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 gla.s.s, 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-t.i.tles. 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 n.o.ble 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 ign.o.ble 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 what _you_ like," 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."

CHAPTER III

A Vicious Circle

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 a.s.surance 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 the _partie carree_, 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 furnis.h.i.+ng a house," said he; "and nowadays they're so cheap. There's that new series of Victorian Cla.s.sics--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!"

_Peculiar_ was 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 furnis.h.i.+ng. On Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.s 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.