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WITCHING HILL
BY E. W. HORNUNG
AUTHOR OF "RAFFLES"
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
_Reprinted, 1914._
[Illustration: "You won't improve his chances by keeping anything
back."]
CONTENTS
UNHALLOWED GROUND
THE HOUSE WITH RED BLINDS
A VICIOUS CIRCLE
THE LOCAL COLOUR
THE ANGEL OF LIFE
UNDER ARMS
THE LOCKED ROOM
THE TEMPLE OF BACCHUS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"YOU WON'T IMPROVE HIS CHANCES BY KEEPING ANYTHING BACK."
I SAW A BEDIZENED BEAUTY GO MAD BEFORE MY EYES.
I DROVE DELAVOYE BEFORE ME.
A HANDSOME, SINISTER CREATURE, IN A BROWN FLOWING WIG AND RAIMENT AS
FINE AS ANY ON THE WALLS.
TRYING TO TUG THE FIERCE MOUSTACHE OUT OF HIS MILD FACE.
A HEAVY BLACKTHORN HELD IN MURDEROUS POISE.
HIS THIN ARMS LOCKED ROUND THE NECK OF THE YOUNG NURSE.
DELAVOYE FIRED OVER MY HEAD.
CHAPTER I
Unhallowed Ground
The Witching Hill Estate Office was as new as the Queen Anne houses it
had to let, and about as worthy of its name. It was just a wooden box
with a veneer of rough-cast and a corrugated iron lid. Inside there was
a vast of varnish on three of the walls; but the one opposite my counter
consisted of plate-glass worth the rest of the structure put together.
It afforded a fine prospect of Witching Hill Road, from the level
crossing by the station to the second lamp-post round the curve.
Framed and glazed in the great window, this was not a picture calculated
to inspire a very young man; and yet there was little to distract a
brooding eye from its raw grass-plots and crude red bricks and tiles;
for one's chief duties were making out orders to view the still empty
houses, hearing the complaints of established tenants, and keeping such
an eye on painters and paperhangers as was compatible with "being on the
spot if anybody called." An elderly or a delicate man would have found
it nice light work; but for a hulking youth fresh from the breeziest
school in Great Britain, where they live in flannels and only work when
it is wet or dark, the post seemed death in life. My one consolation was
to watch the tenants hurrying to the same train every morning, in the
same silk hat and blacks, and crawling home with the same evening paper
every night. I at any rate enjoyed comparatively pure air all day. I had
not married and settled down in a pretentious jerry-building where
nothing interesting could possibly happen, and nothing worth doing be
ever done. For that was one's first feeling about the Witching Hill
Estate; it was a place for crabbed age and drab respectability, and a
black coat every day of the week. Then young Uvo Delavoye dropped into
the office from another hemisphere, in the white ducks and helmet of
the tropics. And life began again.
"Are you the new clerk to the Estate?" he asked if he might ask, and I
prepared myself for the usual grievance. I said I was, and he gave me
his name in exchange for mine, with his number in Mulcaster Park, which
was all but a continuation of Witching Hill Road. "There's an absolute
hole in our lawn," he complained--"and I'd just marked out a court. I do
wish you could come and have a look at it."
There was room for a full-size lawn-tennis court behind every house on
the Estate. That was one of our advertised attractions. But it was not
our business to keep the courts in order, and I rather itched to say so.
"It's early days," I ventured to suggest; "there's sure to be holes at
first, and I'm afraid there'll be nothing for it but just to fill them
in."
"Fill them in!" cried the other young man, getting quite excited. "You
don't know what a hole this is; it would take a ton of earth to fill it
in."
"You're not serious, Mr. Delavoye."
"Well, it would take a couple of barrow-loads. It's a regular depression
in the ground, and the funny thing is that it's come almost while my
back was turned. I finished marking out the court last night, and this
morning there's this huge hole bang in the middle of one of my
side-lines! If you filled it full of water it would take you over the
ankles."
"Is the grass not broken at the edges?"
"Not a bit of it; the whole thing might have been done for years."
"And what like is this hole in shape?"
Delavoye met me eye to eye. "Well, I can only say I've seen the same
sort of thing in a village churchyard, and nowhere else," he said. "It's
like a churchyard starting to yawn!" he suddenly added, and looked in
better humour for the phrase.
I pulled out my watch. "I'll come at one, when I knock off in any case,
if you can wait till then."
"Rather!" he cried quite heartily; "and I'll wait here if you don't
mind, Mr. Gillon. I've just seen my mother and sister off to town, so
it fits in rather well. I don't want them to know if it's anything
beastly. May we smoke in here? Then have one of mine."
And he perched himself on my counter, lighting the whole place up with
his white suit and animated air; for he was a very pleasant fellow from
the moment he appeared to find me one. Not much my senior, he had none
of my rude health and strength, but was drawn and yellowed by some
tropical trouble (as I rightly guessed) which had left but little of his
outer youth beyond a vivid eye and tongue. Yet I would fain have added
these to my own animal advantages. It is difficult to recapture a first
impression; but I think I felt, from the beginning, that those
twinkling, sunken eyes looked on me and all things in a light of their
own.
"Not an interesting place?" cried young Delavoye, in astonishment at a
chance remark of mine. "Why, it's one of the most interesting in
England! None of these fine old crusted country houses are half so
fascinating to me as the ones quite near London. Think of the varied
life they've seen, the bucks and bloods galore, the powder and patches,
the orgies begun in town and finished out here, the highwaymen waiting
for 'em on Turnham Green! Of course you know about the heinous Lord
Mulcaster who owned this place in the high old days? He committed every
crime in the Newgate Calendar, and now I'm just wondering whether you
and I aren't by way of bringing a fresh one home to him."
I remember feeling sorry he should talk like that, though it argued a
type of mind that rather reconciled me to my own. I was never one to
jump to gimcrack conclusions, and I said as much with perhaps more
candour than the occasion required. The statement was taken in such good
part, however, that I could not but own I had never even heard the name
of Mulcaster until the last few days, whereas Delavoye seemed to know
all about the family. Thereupon he told me he was really connected with
them, though not at all closely with the present peer. It had nothing to
do with his living on an Estate which had changed hands before it was
broken up. But I modified my remark about the ancestral acres--and made
a worse.
"I wasn't thinking of the place," I explained, "as it used to be before
half of it was built over. I was only thinking of that half and its
inhabitants--I mean--that is--the people who go up and down in top-hats
and frock-coats!"
And I was left clinging with both eyes to my companion's cool attire.
"But that's my very point," he laughed and said. "These City fellows are
the absolute salt of historic earth like this; they throw one back into
the good old days by sheer force of contrast. I never see them in their
office kit without thinking of that old rascal in his wig and ruffles,
carrying a rapier instead of an umbrella; he'd have fallen on it like
Brutus if he could have seen his grounds plastered with cheap red bricks
and mortar, and crawling with Stock Exchange ants!"
"You've got an imagination," said I, chuckling. I nearly told him he had
the gift of the gab as well.
"You must have something," he returned a little grimly, "when you're
stuck on the shelf at my age. Besides, it isn't all imagination, and you
needn't go back a hundred years for your romance. There's any amount
kicking about this Estate at the present moment; it's in the soil. These
business blokes are not all the dull dogs they look. There's a man up
our road--but he can wait. The first mystery to solve is the one that's
crying from our back garden."
I liked his way of putting things. It made one forget his yellow face,
and the broken career that his looks and hints suggested, or it made one
remember them and think the more of him. But the things themselves were
interesting, and Witching Hill had more possibilities when we sallied
forth together at one o'clock.
It was the height of such a June as the old century could produce up to
the last. The bald red houses, too young to show a shoot of creeper, or
a mellow tone from doorstep to chimney-pot, glowed like clowns' pokers
in the ruthless sun. The shade of some stately elms, on a bit of old
road between the two new ones of the Estate, appealed sharply to my
awakened sense of contrast. It was all familiar ground to me, of course,
but I had been over it hitherto with my eyes on nothing else and my
heart in the Lowlands. Now I found myself wondering what the elms had
seen in their day, and what might not be going on in the red houses even
now.
"I hope you know the proper name of our road," said Delavoye as we
turned into it. "It's Mulcaster Park, as you see, and not Mulcaster Park
Road, as it was when we came here in the spring. Our neighbours have
risen in a body against the superfluous monosyllable, and it's been
painted out for ever."
In spite of that precaution Mulcaster Park was still suspiciously like a
road. It was very long and straight, and the desired illusion had not
been promoted by the great names emblazoned on some of the little wooden
gates. Thus there was Longleat, which had just been let for £70 on a
three-year tenancy, and Chatsworth with a C. P. card in the drawing-room
window. Plain No. 7, the Delavoyes' house, was near the far end on the
left-hand side, which had the advantage of a strip of unspoilt woodland
close behind the back gardens; and just through the wood was Witching
Hill House, scene of immemorial excesses, according to this descendant
of the soil.
"But now it's in very different hands," he remarked as we reached our
destination. "Sir Christopher Stainsby is apparently all that my ignoble
kinsman was not. They say he's no end of a saint. In winter we see his
holy fane from our back windows."
It was not visible through the giant hedge of horse-chestnuts now
heavily overhanging the split fence at the bottom of the garden. I had
come out through the dining-room with a fresh sense of interest in these
Delavoyes. Their furniture was at once too massive and too good for the
house. It stood for some old home of very different type. Large
oil-paintings and marble statuettes had not been acquired to receive the
light of day through windows whose upper sashes were filled with cheap
stained glass. A tigerskin with a man-eating head, over which I tripped,
had not always been in the way before a cast-iron mantelpiece. I felt
sorry, for the moment, that Mrs. and Miss Delavoye were not at home; but
I was not so sorry when I beheld the hole in the lawn behind the house.
It had the ugly shape and appearance which had reminded young Delavoye
himself of a churchyard. I was bound to admit its likeness to some
sunken grave, and the white line bisecting it was not the only evidence
that the subsidence was of recent occurrence; the grass was newly mown
and as short inside the hole as it was all over. No machine could have
made such a job of such a surface, said the son of the house, with a
light in his eyes, but a drop in his voice, which made me wonder whether
he desired or feared the worst.
"What do you want us to do, Mr. Delavoye?" I inquired in my official
capacity.
"I want it dug up, if I can have it done now, while my mother's out of
the way."
That was all very well, but I had only limited powers. My instructions
were to attend promptly to the petty wants of tenants, but to refer any
matter of importance to our Mr. Muskett, who lived on the Estate but
spent his days at the London office. This appeared to me that kind of
matter, and little as I might like my place I could ill afford to risk
it by doing the wrong thing. I put all this as well as I could to my new
friend, but not without chafing his impetuous spirit.
"Then I'll do the thing myself!" said he, and fetched from the yard some
garden implements which struck me as further relics of more spacious
days. In his absence I had come to the same conclusion about a couple of
high-backed Dutch garden chairs and an umbrella tent; and the final bond
of fallen fortunes made me all the sorrier to have put him out. He was
not strong; no wonder he was irritable. He threw himself into his task
with a kind of feeble fury; it was more than I could stand by and watch.
He had not turned many sods when he paused to wipe his forehead, and I
seized the spade.
"If one of us is going to do this job," I cried, "it shan't be the one
who's unfit for it. You can take the responsibility, if you like, but
that's all you do between now and two o'clock!"
I should date our actual friendship from that moment. There was some
boyish bluster on his part, and on mine a dour display which he
eventually countenanced on my promising to stay to lunch. Already the
sweat was teeming off my face, but my ankles were buried in rich brown
mould. A few days before there had been a thunderstorm accompanied by
tropical rain, which had left the earth so moist underneath that one's
muscles were not taxed as much as one's skin. And I was really very glad
of the exercise, after the physical stagnation of office life.
Not that Delavoye left everything to me; he shifted the Dutch chairs and
the umbrella tent so as to screen my operations alike from the backyard
behind us and from the windows of the occupied house next door. Then he
hovered over me, with protests and apologies, until the noble
inspiration took him to inquire if I liked beer. I stood upright in my
pit, and my mouth must have watered as visibly as the rest of my
countenance. It appeared he was not allowed to touch it himself, but he
would fetch some in a jug from the Mulcaster Arms, and blow the wives of
the gentlemen who went to town!
I could no more dissuade him from this share of the proceedings than he
had been able to restrain me from mine; perhaps I did not try very hard;
but I did redouble my exertions when he was gone, burying my spade with
the enthusiasm of a golddigger working a rich claim, and yet depositing
each spadeful with some care under cover of the chairs. And I had hardly
been a minute by myself when I struck indubitable wood at the depth of
three or four feet. Decayed wood it was, too, which the first thrust of
the spade crushed in; and at that I must say the perspiration cooled
upon my skin. But I stood up and was a little comforted by the gay blue
sky and the bottle-green horse-chestnuts, if I looked rather longer at
the French window through which Delavoye had disappeared.
His wild idea had seemed to me the unwholesome fruit of a morbid
imagination, but now I prepared to find it hateful fact. Down I went on
my haunches, and groped with my hands in the mould, to learn the worst
with least delay. The spade I had left sticking in the rotten wood, and
now I ran reluctant fingers down its cold iron into the earth-warm
splinters. They were at the extreme edge of the shaft that I was
sinking, but I discovered more splinters at the same level on the
opposite side. These were not of my making; neither were they part of
any coffin, but rather of some buried floor or staging. My heart danced
as I seized the spade again. I dug another foot quickly; that brought me
to detached pieces of rotten wood of the same thickness as the jagged
edges above; evidently a flooring of some kind had fallen in--but fallen
upon what? Once more the spade struck wood, but sound wood this time.
The last foot of earth was soon taken out, and an oblong trap-door
disclosed, with a rusty ring-bolt at one end.
I tugged at the ring-bolt without stopping to think; but the trap-door
would not budge. Then I got out of the hole for a pickaxe that Delavoye
had produced with the spade, and with one point of the pick through the
ring I was able to get a little leverage. It was more difficult to
insert the spade where the old timbers had started, while still keeping
them apart, but this once done I could ply both implements together.
There was no key-hole to the trap, only the time-eaten ring and a pair
of hinges like prison bars; it could but be bolted underneath; and yet
how those old bolts and that wood of ages clung together! It was only by
getting the pick into the gap made by the spade, and prizing with each
in turn and both at once, that I eventually achieved my purpose. I heard
the bolt tinkle on hard ground beneath, and next moment saw it lying at
the bottom of a round bricked hole.
All this must have occupied far fewer minutes than it has taken to
describe; for Delavoye had not returned to peer with me into a well
which could never have been meant for water. It had neither the width
nor the depth of ordinary wells; an old ladder stood against one side,
and on the other the high sun shone clean down into the mouth of a
palpable tunnel. It opened in the direction of the horse-chestnuts, and
I was in it next moment. The air was intolerably stale without being
actually foul; a match burnt well enough to reveal a horseshoe passage
down which a man of medium stature might have walked upright. It was
bricked like the well, and spattered with some repulsive growth that
gave me a clammy daub before I realised the dimensions. I had struck a
second match on my trousers, and it had gone out as if by magic, when
Delavoye hailed me in high excitement from the lawn above.
He was less excited than I expected on hearing my experience; and he
only joined me for a minute before luncheon, which he insisted on our
still taking, to keep the servants in the dark. But it was a very
brilliant eye that he kept upon the Dutch chairs through the open
window, and he was full enough of plans and explanations. Of course we
must explore the passage, but we would give the bad air a chance of
getting out first. He spoke of some Turkish summer-house, or pavilion,
mentioned in certain annals of Witching Hill, that he had skimmed for
his amusement in the local Free Library. There was no such structure to
be seen from any point of vantage that he had discovered; possibly this
was its site; and the floor which had fallen in might have been a false
basement, purposely intended to conceal the trap-door, or else built
over it by some unworthy successor of the great gay lord.
"He was just the sort of old sportsman to have a way of his own out of
the house, Gillon! He might have wanted it at any moment; he must have
been ready for the worst most nights of his life; for I may tell you
they would have hanged him in the end if he hadn't been too quick for
them with his own horse-pistol. You didn't know he was as bad as that?
It's not a thing the family boasts about, and I don't suppose your
Estate people would hold it out as an attraction. But I've read a thing
or two about the bright old boy, and I do believe we've struck the site
of some of his brightest moments!"
"I should like to have explored that tunnel."
"So you shall."
"But when?"
We had gobbled our luncheon, and I had drained the jug that my
unconventional host had carried all the way from the Mulcaster Arms; but
already I was late for a most unlucky appointment with prospective
tenants, and it was only a last look that I could take at my not ignoble
handiwork. It was really rather a good hole for a beginner, and a
grave-digger could not have heaped his earth much more compactly. It
came hard to leave the next stage of the adventure even to as nice a
fellow as young Delavoye.
"When?" he repeated with an air of surprise. "Why to-night, of course;
you don't suppose I'm going to explore it without you, do you?"
I had already promised not to mention the matter to my Mr. Muskett when
he looked in at the office on his way from the station; but that was the
only undertaking which had passed between us.
"I thought you said you didn't want Mrs. Delavoye to see the pit's
mouth?"
It was his own expression, yet it made him smile, though it had not made
me.
"I certainly don't mean either my mother or sister to see one end till
we've seen the other," said he. "They might have a word too many to say
about it. I must cover the place up somehow before they get back; but
I'll tell them you're coming in this evening, and when they go aloft we
shall very naturally come out here for a final pipe."
"Armed with a lantern?"
"No, a pocketful of candles. And don't you dress, Gillon, because I
don't, even when I'm not bound for the bowels of the globe."
I ran to my appointment after that; but the prospective tenants broke
theirs, and kept me waiting for nothing all that fiery afternoon. I can
shut my eyes and go through it all again, and see every inch of my
sticky little prison near the station. In the heat its copious varnish
developed an adhesive quality as fatal to flies as bird-lime, and there
they stuck in death to pay me out. It was not necessary to pin any
notice to the walls; one merely laid them on the varnish; and that
morning, when young Delavoye had leant against it in his whites, he had
to peel himself off like a plaster. That morning! It seemed days ago,
not because I had met with any great adventure yet, but the whole
atmosphere of the place was changed by the discovery of a kindred
spirit. Not that we were naturally akin in temperament, tastes, or
anything else but our common youth and the want in each of a companion
approaching his own type. We saw things at a different angle, and when
he smiled I often wondered why. We might have met in town or at college
and never sought each other again; but separate adversities had driven
us both into the same dull haven--one from the Egyptian Civil, which had
nearly been the death of him; the other on a sanguine voyage (before the
mast) from the best school in Scotland to Land Agency. We were bound to
make the most of each other, and I for one looked forward to renewing
our acquaintance even more than to the sequel of our interrupted
adventure.
But I was by no means anxious to meet my new friend's womankind; never
anything of a lady's man, I was inclined rather to resent the existence
of these good ladies, partly from something he had said about them with
reference to our impending enterprise. Consequently it was rather late
in the evening when I turned out of one of the nominally empty houses,
where I had gone to lodge with a still humbler servant of the Estate,
and went down to No. 7 with some hope that its mistress at all events
might already have retired. Almost to my horror I learned that they were
all three in the back garden, whither I was again conducted through the
little dining-room with the massive furniture.
Mrs. Delavoye was a fragile woman with a kind but nervous manner; the
daughter put me more at my ease, but I could scarcely see either of them
by the dim light from the French window outside which they sat. I was
more eager, however, to see "the pit's mouth," and in the soft starlight
of a velvet night I made out the two Dutch chairs lying face downward
over the shaft.
"It's so tiresome of my brother," said Miss Delavoye, following my
glance with disconcerting celerity: "just when we want our garden
chairs he's varnished them, and there they lie unfit to use!"
I never had any difficulty in looking stolid, but for the moment I
avoided the impostor's eyes. It was trying enough to hear his impudent
defence.
"You've been at me about them all the summer, Amy, and I felt we were in
for a spell of real hot weather at last."
"I can't think why you've put them out there, Uvo," remarked his mother.
"They won't dry any better in the dew, my dear boy."
"They won't make a hopeless mess of the grass, at all events!" he
retorted. "But why varnish our dirty chairs in public? Mr. Gillon won't
be edified; he'd much rather listen to the nightingale, I'm sure."
Had they a nightingale? I had never heard one in my life. I was obliged
to say something, and this happened to be the truth; it led to a little
interchange about Scotland, in which the man Uvo assumed a Johnsonian
pose, as though he had known me as long as I felt I had known him, and
then prayed silence for the nightingale as if the suburban garden were a
banqueting hall. It was a concert hall, at any rate, and never was
sweeter solo than the invisible singer poured forth from the black and
jagged wood between glimmering lawn and starry sky. I see the picture
now, with the seated ladies dimly silhouetted against the French
windows, and our two cigarettes waxing and waning like revolving lights
seen leagues away. I hear the deep magic of those heavenly notes, as I
was to hear them more summers than one from that wild wood within a few
yards of our raw red bricks and mortar. It may be as the prelude of what
was to follow that I recall it all so clearly, down to the couplet that
Uvo could not quite remember and his sister did:
"The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown."
"That's what I meant!" he cried. "By emperor, clown, and old man
Mulcaster in his cups! Think of him carrying on in there to such a tune,
and think of pious Christopher holding family prayers to it now!"
And the bare thought dashed from my lips a magic potion compounded of
milky lawn and ebony horse-chestnuts, of an amethyst sky twinkling with
precious stars, and the low voice of a girl trying not to drown the one
in the wood; the spell was broken, and I was glad when at last we had
the garden to ourselves.
"There are two things I must tell you for your comfort," said the
incorrigible Uvo as we lifted one Dutch chair from the hole it covered
like a hatchway, but left the other pressed down over the heap of earth.
"In the first place, both my mother and sister have front rooms, so they
won't hear or bother about us again. The other thing's only that I've
been back to the Free Library in what the simple inhabitants still
insist on calling the Village, and had another look into those annals of
old Witching Hill. I can find no mention whatever of any subterranean
passage. I shouldn't wonder if good Sir Chris had never heard of it in
his life. In that case we shall rush in where neither man nor beast has
trodden for a hundred and fifty years."
We lit our candles down the shaft, and then I drew the Dutch chair over
the hole again on Delavoye's suggestion; he was certainly full of
resource, and I was only too glad to play the practical man with my
reach and strength. If he had been less impetuous and headstrong, we
should have made a strong pair of adventurers. In the tunnel he would go
first, for instance, much against my wish; but, as he put it, if the
foul air knocked him down I could carry him out under one arm, whereas
he would have to leave me to die in my tracks. So he chattered as we
crept on and on, flinging monstrous shadows into the arch behind us, and
lighting up every patch of filth ahead; for the long-drawn vault was
bearded with stalactites of crusted slime; but no living creature fled
before us; we alone breathed the impure air, encouraged by our candles,
which lit us far beyond the place where my match had been extinguished
and deeper and deeper yet without a flicker.
Then in the same second they both went out, at a point where the
overhead excrescences made it difficult to stand upright. And there we
were, like motes in a tube of lamp-black; for it was a darkness as
palpable as fog. But my leader had a reassuring explanation on the tip
of his sanguine tongue.
"It's because we stooped down," said he. "Strike a match on the roof if
it's dry enough. There! What did I tell you? The dregs of the air settle
down like other dregs. Hold on a bit! I believe we're under the house,
and that's why the arch is dry."
We continued our advance with instinctive stealth, now blackening the
roof with our candles as we went, and soon and sure enough the old tube
ended in a wad of brick and timber.
In the brickwork was a recessed square, shrouded in cobwebs which
perished at a sweep of Delavoye's candle; a wooden shutter closed the
aperture, and I had just a glimpse of an oval knob, green with
verdigris, when my companion gave it a twist and the shutter sprang open
at the base. I held it up while he crept through with his candle, and
then I followed him with mine into the queerest chamber I had ever
seen.
It was some fifteen feet square, with a rough parquet floor and panelled
walls and ceiling. All the woodwork seemed to me old oak, and reflected
our naked lights on every side in a way that bespoke attention; and
there was a tell-tale set of folding steps under an ominous square in
the ceiling, but no visible break in the four walls, nor yet another
piece of movable furniture. In one corner, however, stood a great stack
of cigar boxes whose agreeable aroma was musk and frankincense after the
penetrating humours of the tunnel. This much we had noted when we made
our first startling discovery. The panel by which we had entered had
shut again behind us; the noise it must have made had escaped us in our
excitement; there was nothing to show which panel it had been--no
semblance of a knob on this side--and soon we were not even agreed as to
the wall.
Uvo Delavoye had enough to say at most moments, but now he was a man of
action only, and I copied his proceedings without a word. Panel after
panel he rapped and sounded like any doctor, even through his fingers
to make less noise! I took the next wall, and it was I who first
detected a hollow note. I whispered my suspicion; he joined me, and was
convinced; so there we stood cheek by jowl, each with a guttering candle
in one hand, while the other felt the panel and pressed the knots. And a
knot it was that yielded under my companion's thumb. But the panel that
opened inwards was not our panel at all; instead of our earthy tunnel,
we looked into a shallow cupboard, with a little old dirty bundle lying
alone in the dust of ages. Delavoye picked it up gingerly, but at once I
saw him weighing his handful in surprise, and with one accord we sat
down to examine it, sticking our candles on the floor between us in
their own grease.
"Lace," muttered Uvo, "and something in it."
The outer folds came to shreds in his fingers; a little deeper the lace
grew firmer, and presently he was paying it out to me in fragile hanks.
I believe it was a single flounce, though yards in length. Delavoye
afterwards looked up the subject, characteristically, and declared it
Point de Venise; from what I can remember of its exquisite workmanship,
in monogram, coronet, and imperial emblems, I can believe with him that
the diamond buckle to which he came at last was less precious than its
wrapping. But by that time we were not thinking of their value; we were
screwing up our faces over a dark coagulation which caused the last yard
or so to break off in bits.
"Lace and blood and diamonds!" said Delavoye, bending over the relics in
grim absorption. "Could the priceless old sinner have left us a more
delightful legacy?"
"What are you going to do with them?" I asked rather nervously at that.
They had not been left to us. They ought surely to be delivered to their
rightful owner.
"But who does own them?" asked Delavoye. "Is it the worthy plutocrat
who's bought the show and all that in it is, or is it my own venerable
kith and kin? They wouldn't thank us for taking these rather dirty coals
to Newcastle. They might refuse delivery, or this old boy might claim
his mining rights, and where should we come in then? No, Gillon, I'm
sorry to disappoint you, but as a twig of the old tree I mean to take
the law into my own hands"--I held my breath--"and put these things back
exactly where we found them. Then we'll leave everything in plumb order,
and finish up by filling in that hole in our lawn--if ever we get out of
this one."
But small doubt on the point was implied in his buoyant tone; the way
through the panel just broached argued a similar catch in the one we
sought; meanwhile we closed up the other with much relief on my side and
an honest groan from Delavoye. It was sufficiently obvious that Sir
Christopher Stainsby had discovered neither the secret subway nor the
secret repository which we had penetrated by pure chance; on the other
hand, he made use of the chamber leading to both as a cigar cellar, and
had it kept in better order than such a purpose required. Sooner or
later somebody would touch a spring, and one discovery would lead to
another. So we consoled each other as we resumed our search, almost
forgetting that we ourselves might be discovered first.
It was in a providential pause, broken only to my ear by our quiet
movements, that Delavoye dabbed a quick hand on my candle and doused his
own against the wall. Without a whisper he drew me downward, and there
we cowered in throbbing darkness, but still not a sound that I could
hear outside my skin. Then the floor above opened a lighted mouth with a
gilded roof; black legs swung before our noses, found the step-ladder
and came running down. The cigars were on the opposite side. The man
knew all about them, found the right box without a light, and turned to
go running up.
Now he must see us, as we saw him and his smooth, smug, flunkey's face
to the whites of its upturned eyes! My fists were clenched--and often I
wonder what I meant to do. What I did was to fall forward upon oozing
palms as the trap-door was let down with a bang.
"Didn't he see us, Delavoye? Are you sure he didn't?" I chattered as he
struck a match.
"Quite. I was watching his eyes--weren't you?"
"Yes--but they got all blurred at the finish."
"Well, pull yourself together; now's our time! It's an empty room
overhead; it wasn't half lit up. But we haven't done anything, remember,
if they do catch us."
He was on the steps already, but I had no desire to argue with him. I
was as ripe for a risk as Delavoye, as anxious to escape after the one
we had already run. The trap-door went up slowly, pushing something over
it into a kind of tent.
"It's only the rug," purred Delavoye. "I heard him take it up--thank
God--as well as put it down again. Now hold the candle; now the
trap-door, till I hold it up for you."
And we squirmed up into a vast apartment, not only empty as predicted,
but left in darkness made visible by the solitary light we carried now.
The little stray flame was mirrored in a floor like black ice, then
caught the sheen of the tumbled rug that Delavoye would stay to smooth,
then twinkled in the diamond panes of bookcases like church windows,
flickered over a high altar of a mantelpiece, and finally displayed our
stealthy selves in the window by which we left the house.
"Thank God!" said Delavoye as he shut it down again. "That's something
like a breath of air!"
"Hush!" I whispered with my back to him.
"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 cluster 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 shell. 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.
[Illustration: 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
surpassed 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 ignoble 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.