The Local Colour
The Reverend Charles Brabazon, magnetic Vicar of the adjacent Village,
had as strong a personality as one could wish to encounter in real life.
He did what he liked with a congregation largely composed of the motley
worldlings of Witching Hill. Small solicitors and west-end tradesmen,
bank officials, outside brokers, first-class clerks in Government
offices, they had not a Sunday soul to call their own, these hard-headed
holders of season tickets to Waterloo.
Throughout the summer they flocked to church when their hearts were on
the river; in the depths of winter they got up for early celebration on
the one morning when they might have lain abed. Their most obsequious
devotions did not temper the preacher's truculence, any more than his
strongest onslaught discouraged their good works. They gave of their
substance at his every call, and were even more lavish on their own
initiative. Thus, in my second summer at Witching Hill, the Vicarage was
practically rebuilt out of the pockets of parishioners; and we had no
difficulty in providing a furnished substitute on the favourite woodland
side of Mulcaster Park.
Great was the jealousy in Witching Hill Road, but futile the fluttering
of our Queen Anne dovecots; for we saw very little more of the Vicar for
having him in our midst. He was always either immured in his study, or
else hurrying to or from some service or parochial engagement; and
although he had a delightful roadside manner, and the same fine smile
for high and low, he would stop to speak to neither on his way. Out of
church, in fact, Mr. Brabazon preserved a wise aloofness which only
served to emphasise the fierce intimacy of his pulpit utterances, and
combined with his contempt of popularity to render him by far the most
popular figure in the neighbourhood.
It goes without saying that this remarkable man was a High Churchman
and a celibate. His house was kept, and his social short-comings made
good, by two Misses Brabazon, each as unlike him as possible in her own
way. Miss Ruth, who was younger, added to her brother's energy a
sympathetic charm and a really good voice which made her the darling of
the Parish Hall and humbler edifices. Miss Julia's activities were more
sedentary and domestic, as perhaps became the least juvenile of the
trio, and so it was that I saw most of her. We had a whole day together
over the inventory, and it was Miss Julia who interviewed me about
everything else connected with the house. She was never short with me on
those occasions, never ungracious or (what is worse) unduly gracious,
but she had always a pleasant word, and nearly always an innocent little
joke as well. Innocence and jocosity were two of her leading
characteristics; another was a genuine but ingenuous literary faculty.
This she exercised in editing the _Parish Magazine_, and supplying it
with moral serials which occasionally reached volume form under the
auspices of the Religious Tract Society.
On an evening late in April, when the cuckoo was wound up in the wood
behind Mulcaster Park, and most of the beds in front were flowering for
the first time, a gaunt figure came to the gate of the temporary
vicarage and beckoned to me passing on the other side of the road. It
was Miss Julia, and I found her looking gently humorous and knowing
across the gate.
"The trees are coming out so beautifully," she began, "in the grounds
behind these gardens. I was wondering if it would be possible to procure
a permit to go over them, Mr. Gillon."
"Do you mean for yourself, Miss Brabazon?"
"Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do."
As she spoke I could not but notice that she glanced ever so slightly
towards the house behind her, and that her voice had fallen to a murmur,
while a mottled colouring appeared between the lines of her guileless
visage.
"I'm afraid I can't do anything," I said. "But the Vicar could, Miss
Brabazon!" I added with conviction. "A line from him to Sir Christopher
Stainsby----"
I stopped because Miss Julia shook her head so decidedly.
"That would never do, Mr. Gillon. Sir Christopher is such a very rabid
Dissenter."
"So I have heard," I admitted, thinking rather of what I had seen. "But
I don't believe he's as narrow as you think."
"I couldn't trouble the Vicar about it, in any case," said Miss
Brabazon, hurriedly. "I shouldn't even like him to know that I had
troubled you, Mr. Gillon. He's such a severe critic that I never tell
him what I'm writing until it's finished."
"Then you are writing something about Witching Hill House, Miss
Brabazon?"
"I was thinking of it. I haven't begun. But I never saw any place that I
felt such a desire to write about. The old house in the old woods, say a
hundred years ago! Don't you think it an ideal scene for a story, Mr.
Gillon?"
"It depends on the story you want to tell," said I, sententiously.
A strange light was burning in the weak eyes of Miss Julia. It might
almost have been a flicker of the divine fire. But now she dropped her
worn eyelids, and gazed into the road with the dreamy cunning of the
born creator.
"I should have quite a plot," she decided. "It would be ... yes, it
would be about some extraordinary person who lived in there, in the wood
and the house, only of course ages and ages ago. I think I should make
him--in fact I'm quite sure he would be--a very wicked person, though of
course he'd have to come all right in the end."
"You must be thinking of the man who really did live there."
"Who was that?"
"The infamous Lord Mulcaster."
"Really, Mr. Gillon? I don't think I ever heard of him. Of course I know
the present family by name; aren't these Delavoyes connected with them
in some way?"
I explained the connection as I knew it, which was not very thoroughly.
But I unfortunately said enough to cause a rapid fall in poor Miss
Julia's mottled countenance.
"Then I must give up the idea of that story. They would think I meant
their ancestor, and that would never do. I'm sorry, because I never felt
so inclined to write anything before. But I'm very glad you told me, Mr.
Gillon."
"But they wouldn't mind a bit, Miss Brabazon! They're not in the least
sensitive about him," I assured her.
"I couldn't think of it," replied Miss Julia, haughtily. "It would be in
the very worst of taste."
"But Uvo would love it. He's full of the old villain. He might help you
if you'd let him. He's at the British Museum at this moment, getting
deeper and deeper into what he calls the family mire."
"I happen to see him coming down the road," observed Miss Julia, dryly.
"I must really beg that you will not refer to the subject again, Mr.
Gillon."
But in her voice and manner there was a hesitating reluctance that
emboldened me to use my own judgment about that, especially when Uvo
Delavoye (whose mother and sister were keen Brabazonians) himself
introduced the topic on joining us, with a gratuitous remark about his
"unfilial excavations in Bloomsbury."
"I've opened up a new lazar-house this very day," he informed us, with
shining eyes, when Miss Julia had shown an interest in spite of herself.
"By the way," I cut in, "don't you think it would all make magnificent
material for a novel, Uvo?"
"If you could find anybody to publish it!" he answered, laughing.
"You wouldn't mind if he was put into a book--and the place as well?"
"_I_ wouldn't, if nobody else didn't! Why? Who's thinking of doing us
the honour?"
Dear Miss Julia coughed and laughed with delicious coyness. My liberty
had been condoned.
"Was it you, Miss Brabazon?" cried Uvo, straightening his face with the
nerve that never failed him at a climax.
"Well, it was and it wasn't," she replied, exceeding slyly. "I did think
I should like to write a little story about Witching Hill House, and put
in rather a bad character; at least he would begin by being rather
undesirable, perhaps. But I was forgetting that the place had been in
your family, Mr. Delavoye. I certainly never knew, until Mr. Gillon told
me, that one of the Lords Mulcaster had been--er--perhaps--no better
than he ought to have been."
"To put it mildly," said Delavoye, with smiling face and shrieking eyes.
"You may paint the bad old hat as black as mine, Miss Brabazon, and
still turn him out a saint compared with the villain of the case I've
been reading up to-day. So you really needn't worry about anybody's
susceptibilities. Lay on the local colour inches deep! You won't make
the place as red as the old gentleman painted it in blood and wine!"
"Really, Mr. Delavoye!" cried Miss Julia, jocosely shocked. "You mustn't
forget that my story would only appear in our _Parish Magazine_--unless
the R.T.S. took it afterwards."
"My rude forefather in a Religious Tract!"
"Of course I should quite reform him in the end."
"You'd have your work cut out, Miss Brabazon."
"I ought to begin with _you_, you know!" said Miss Julia, shaking a
facetious finger in Uvo's face. "I'm afraid you're rather an irreverent
young man, and I don't know what the Vicar would say if he heard us."
She threw another deliciously guilty glance towards the house. "But if
you really mean what you say, and you're sure Mrs. Delavoye and your
sister won't mind either----"
"Mind!" he interrupted. "Forgive me, Miss Brabazon, but how _could_ they
be sensitive about the last head but five of a branch of the family
which doesn't even recognise our existence?"
"Very well, then! I'll take you at your word, and the--the blood and
thunder," whispered Miss Julia, as though they were bad words, "be on
your own head, Mr. Delavoye!"
Thereafter, in a quivering silence, Uvo took me home with him, and
straight up into his own room, where he first shut door and window
without a word. Never since have I heard man laugh quite so loud and
long as he did then.
"But you don't see the point!" he arrogated through his tears, because I
made rather less noise.
"What is it, then?"
"I told you I'd opened up a new sink to-day?"
"You said something of the sort."
"It was a sink of fresh iniquity. I came across it in an old collection
of trials; it isn't as much as mentioned in any memoir of the old
reprobate, nor yet in the many annals of Witching Hill. Yet he once
figured in one of the most disgraceful cases on record."
The case was all that, as Delavoye summed it up for my benefit. The
arch-villain of the piece was of course his scandalous progenitor, aided
and abetted by a quite unspeakable crew. There was a sorely distressed
heroine in humble life--a poor little milliner from Shoreditch--but
because it was all too true, there had been no humble hero to wreak
poetic vengeance on the miscreant.
"Not a nursery story, I grant you! But there were some good touches in
the version I struck," said Delavoye, producing his museum note-book.
"One or two I couldn't help taking down. 'In obedience to the custom of
the times,' for instance, 'the young lord proceeded to perform the grand
tour; and it is reported that having sailed from Naples to
Constantinople, he there imbibed so great an admiration for the manners
of the Turks, that on his return to England in 1766, he caused an
outlying portion of his family mansion to be taken down, and to be
rebuilt in the form of a harem.'"
"Rot!"
"I took it down word for word. I've often wondered how the Turkish
Pavilion got its name; now we know all about it, and why it had a tunnel
connecting it with the house."
"Poor little milliner!"
"I believe you, Gilly. Listen to this, when she was a prisoner in his
town house, before they spirited her out here--'Looking out of the
window at about eight o'clock, she observed a young woman passing, to
whom she threw out her handkerchief, which was then heavy with tears,
intending to attract her attention and send to her father for
assistance.'"
"Because the handkerchief was marked?"
"And so heavy with her tears that she could throw it like a
tennis-ball!"
The note-book was put away. There was an end also of our hilarity.
"And this dear old girl," said Uvo, with affectionate disrespect,
"thinks she's a fit and proper writer to cope with that immortal skunk!
False Sextus in a parish magazine! Proud Tarquin done really proud at
last!"
It was on the tip of my tongue to make it quite clear to Uvo that Miss
Julia had not wittingly proposed to write about his ancestor at all;
that apparently she had never heard of his existence before that
evening, and that it was her own original idea to make Witching Hill
House the haunt of some purely imaginary scoundrel. But I knew my Uvo
well enough by this time to hold my tongue, and at least postpone the
tiresome discussion of a rather stale point on which we were never
likely to agree.
But I stayed to supper at No. 7; and Uvo kept me till the small hours,
listening to further details of his last researches, and to the farrago
of acute conjecture, gay reminiscence and vivid hearsay which his
reading invariably inspired. It was base subject-metal that did not
gain a certain bright refinement in his fiery mind, or fall from his
lips with a lively ring; and that night he was at his best about things
which have an opposite effect on many young men. It must have been after
one when I left him. I saw the light go out behind the cheap stained
glass in the front door, and I heard Uvo going upstairs as I departed.
The next and only other light I passed, in the houses on that side of
the road, was at the top of the one which was now the Vicarage. Thence
also came an only sound; it was the continuous crackle of a typewriter,
through the open window of the room which I knew Miss Julia had
appropriated as her own.
That end of the Estate had by this time a full team of tenants, whereas
I had two sets of painters and paperhangers to keep up to the mark in
Witching Hill Road. This rather came between me and my friends in
Mulcaster Park, especially as my Mr. Muskett lived in their road, and
his house had eyes and a tongue. So it happened that I saw no more of
Miss Julia Brabazon until she paid me a queer little visit at my office
one afternoon about five o'clock. She was out of breath, and her
flurried manner quickened my ear to the sound of her brother's bells
ringing in the distance for week-day evensong.
"I thought I'd like to have one word with you, Mr. Gillon, about my
story," she panted, with a guilty shrinking from the sheet of glass
behind her. "It will be finished in a few days now, I'm thankful to say.
I've been so hard at work upon it, you can't think!"
"Oh, yes, I can," said I; for there seemed to be many more lines on the
simple, eager countenance; the drollery had gone out of it, and its
heightened colouring had an unhealthy, bluish tinge.
"I'm afraid I have been burning the midnight oil a little," she admitted
with a sort of coy bravado. "But there seems so much to do during the
day, and everything is so quiet at night, unless it's that wretched
typewriter of mine! But I muffle the bell, and luckily my brother and
sister are sound sleepers."
"You must be keen, Miss Brabazon, to turn night into day."
"Keen? I never enjoyed writing half so much. It's no effort; the story
simply writes itself. I don't feel as if it were a story at all, but
something that I see and hear and have just got to get down as fast as
ever I can! I feel as if I really knew that old monster we were talking
about the other day. Sometimes he quite frightens me. And that's why
I've come to you, Mr. Gillon. I almost fear I'm making him too great a
horror after all!"
It was impossible not to smile. "That would be a difficult matter, from
all I hear, Miss Brabazon."
"I meant from the point of view of his descendants in general, and these
dear Delavoyes in particular. Rather than hurt their feelings, Mr.
Gillon, I need hardly tell you I'd destroy my story in a minute."
"That would be a thousand pities," said I, honestly thinking of her
wasted time.
"I'm not so sure," said Miss Julia, doubtfully. "I sometimes think, when
I read the newspapers, that there are bad people enough in the world
without digging up more from their graves. Yet at other times I don't
feel as if I were doing that either. It's more as though this wicked old
wretch had come to life of his own accord and insisted on being written
about. I seem to feel him almost at my elbow, forcing me to write down I
don't know what."
"But that sounds like inspiration!" I exclaimed, impressed by the good
faith patent in the tired, ingenuous, serio-comic face.
"I don't know what it is," replied Miss Julia, "or whether I'm writing
sense or nonsense. I never like to look next day. I only know that at
the time I quite frighten myself and--make as big a fool of myself as
though I were in my poor heroine's shoes--which is so absurd!" She
laughed uneasily, her colour slightly heightened. "But I only meant to
ask you, Mr. Gillon, whether you honestly and truly think that the
Delavoyes won't mind? You see, he really was their ancestor, and I do
make him a most odious creature."
"But I don't suppose you give his real name?"
"Oh, dear, no. That would never do. I call him the Duke of Doehampton,
and the story is called 'His Graceless Grace.' Isn't it a good title,
Mr. Gillon?"
I lied like a man, but was still honest enough to add that I thought it
even better as a disguise. "I feel sure, Miss Brabazon, that you are
worrying yourself unnecessarily," I took it upon myself to assert; but
indeed her title alone would have reassured me, had I for a moment
shared her conscientious qualms.
"I am so glad you think so," said Miss Julia, visibly relieved. "Still,
I shall not offer the story anywhere until Mr. Delavoye has seen or
heard every word of it."
"I thought it was for your own _Parish Magazine_?"
Miss Julia at last obliged me with her most facetious and most
confidential smile.
"I am not tied down to the _Parish Magazine_," said she. "There are
higher fields. I am not certain that 'His Graceless Grace' is altogether
suited to the young--the young parishioner, Mr. Gillon! I must read it
over and see. And--yes--I shall invite Mr. Delavoye to come and hear it,
before I decide to send it anywhere at all."
The reading actually took place on an evening in May, when the Vicar had
accompanied his younger sister up to Exeter Hall; and at the last moment
I also received a verbal invitation, delivered and inspired by that
rascal Uvo, who declared that I had let him in for the infliction and
must bear my share. More justly, he argued that the pair of us might
succeed in keeping each other awake, whereas one alone would infallibly
disgrace himself; and we had solemnly agreed upon a system of
watch-and-watch, by the alternate quarter-of-an-hour, before we
presented ourselves at the temporary vicarage after supper.
Miss Julia received us in stiff silk that supplied a sort of sibilant
obbligato to a nervous welcome; and her voice maintained a secretive
pitch, even when the maid had served coffee and shut the door behind
her, lending a surreptitious air to the proceedings before they could be
said to have begun. It was impossible not to wonder what the Vicar would
have said to see his elderly sister discoursing profane fiction to a
pair of heathens who seldom set foot inside his church.
He would scarcely have listened with our resignation; for poor Miss
Julia read as badly as she wrote, and never was story opened with
clumsier ineptitude than hers. We had sheet upon typewritten sheet about
the early life and virtuous vicissitudes of some deplorably dull young
female in the east end of London; and in my case slumber was imminent
when the noble villain made his entry in the cinnamon waistcoat of the
picture at Hampton Court. At that I tried to catch Uvo's eye, but it was
already fixed upon the reader's face with an intensity which soon
attracted her attention.
"Isn't that your idea of him, Mr. Delavoye?" asked Miss Julia,
apprehensively.
"Well, yes, it is; but it was Sir Godfrey Kneller's first," said Uvo,
laughing. "So you took the trouble to go all the way over there to study
his portrait, Miss Brabazon?"
"What portrait? All the way over where, Mr. Delavoye?"
Uvo entered into particulars which left the lady's face a convincing
blank. She had seen no portrait; it was years since she had been through
the galleries at Hampton Court, and then without a catalogue. Uvo
seemed to experience so much difficulty in crediting this disclaimer,
that I asked whether cinnamon had not been a favourite colour with the
bloods of the eighteenth century. On his assent the reading proceeded in
a slightly altered voice, in which I thought I detected a note of not
unnatural umbrage.
But far greater coincidences were in store, and those of such a
character that it was certainly difficult to believe that they were
anything of the sort. Considered as an attempt at dramatic narrative,
the story was, of course, beneath criticism. It was all redundant
description, gratuitous explanations, facetious turns to serious
sentences, and declared intentions which entirely spoilt the effect of
their due fulfilment. Bored to extinction with the heroine, who only
became interesting on the villain's advent, as his predestined prey, we
thenceforth heard no more of her until his antecedents had been set
forth in solid slabs of the pluperfect tense. These dwelt with stolid
solemnity upon the distinctions and debaucheries of his University
career, and then all at once on the effect of subsequent travel upon a
cynical yet impressionable mind. In an instant both of us were
attending, and even I guessed what was coming, and what had happened.
Probably by half-forgotten hearsay, our dear good lady had tapped the
same muddy stream as Uvo Delavoye, and some of the mud had silted into a
mind too innocent to appreciate its quality.
"Debased and degraded by the wicked splendours of barbaric courts, the
unprincipled young nobleman had decided not only to 'do in Turkey as the
Turkeys did,' but to initiate the heathen institution of polygamy among
his own broad acres on his return to England, home, and only too much
beauty!... Poor, innocent, confiding Millicent; little did she dream,
when he asked her to be his, that he only meant 'one of the many'; that
the place awaiting her was but her niche in the _seraglio_ which he had
wickedly had built, in a corner of his stately grounds, on some Eastern
model."
Delavoye looked at me without a trace of amusement, but rather in
alarmed recognition of the weirdly sustained parallel between rascal
fact and foolish fiction. But as yet we had only scratched the thin ice
of the situation; soon we were almost shuddering from our knowledge of
the depths below.
The unhappy heroine had repulsed the advances of the villain in the
story as in the actual case; in both she was from the same locality
(where, however, our Vicar had held his last curacy); in both, enticed
into his lordship's coach and driven off at a great rate to his London
mansion, where the first phase of her harrowing adventures ensued. So
innocently were these described that we must have roared over them by
ourselves; but there was no temptation to smile under the rosy droll
nose of poor Miss Julia, by this time warmed to her work, and reeling
off her own interminable periods with pathetic zest. Yet even her jocose
and sidelong style could no longer conceal an interest which had become
more dramatic than she was aware. Just as it first had taken charge of
her pen, so her story had now gained undisputed command of the poor
lady's lips; and she was actually reading it far better than at first,
as if subconsciously stimulated by our rapt attention, though
mercifully ignorant of its uncomfortable quality. I speak only for
myself, and it may be that as a very young man I took the whole business
more seriously than I should to-day. But I must own there were some
beads upon my forehead when Delavoye relieved the tension by jumping to
his feet in unrestrained excitement.
"I'm glad you like that," said Miss Julia, with a pleased smile,
"because I thought it was good myself. Her handkerchief would have her
name on it, you see; and she was able to throw it out of the window like
a stone, at the feet of the first passer-by, because it was so heavy
with her tears. Of course she hoped the person who picked it up would
see the name and----"
"Of course!" cried Uvo, cavalierly. "It was an excellent idea--I always
thought so."
Miss Julia eyed him with a puzzled smirk.
"How could you always think a thing I've only just invented?" she asked
acutely.
"Well, you see, it's happened in real life before to-day," he faltered,
seeing his mistake.
"Like a good deal of my story, it appears?"
"Like something in every story that was ever written. Truth, you
know----"
"Quite so, Mr. Delavoye! But I saw you looking at Mr. Gillon a minute
ago as though something else was familiar to you both. And I should just
like to know what it was."
"I'm sure I've forgotten, Miss Brabazon."
"It wasn't the part about the--the Turkish building in the grounds--I
suppose?"
"Yes," said Uvo, turning honest in desperation.
"And where am I supposed to have read about that?"
"I'm quite certain you never read it at all, Miss Brabazon!"
Now Miss Julia had lost neither her temper nor her smile, and she had
not been more severe on Delavoye than his unsatisfactory manner invited.
But the obvious sincerity of his last answer appeased her pique, and she
leant forward in sudden curiosity.
"Then there is a book about him, Mr. Delavoye?"
"Not exactly a book."
"I know!" she cried. "It's the case you'd been reading the other
night--isn't it?"
"Perhaps it is."
"Was he actually tried--that Lord Mulcaster?"
The wretched Uvo groaned and nodded.
"What for, Mr. Delavoye?"
"His life!" exclaimed Uvo, moistening his lips. Miss Julia beamed and
puckered with excitement.
"How very dreadful, to be sure! And had he actually committed a murder?"
"I've no doubt he had," said Uvo, eagerly. "I wouldn't put anything past
him, as they say; but in those days it wasn't necessary to take life in
order to forfeit your own. There were lots of other capital offences.
The mere kidnapping of the young lady, exactly as you describe it----"
"But did he really do such a thing?" demanded Miss Julia.
And her obviously genuine amazement redoubled mine.
"Exactly as you have described it," repeated Delavoye. "He travelled in
the East, commenced Bluebeard on his return, fished his Fatima like
yours out of some little shop down Shoreditch way, and even drove her to
your own expedient of turning her tears to account!"
And he dared to give me another look--shot with triumph--while Miss
Julia supported an invidious position as best she might.
"Wait a bit!" said I, stepping in at last. "I thought I gathered from
you the other day, Miss Brabazon, that you felt the reality of your
story intensely?"
"I did indeed, Mr. Gillon."
"It distressed you very much?"
"I might have been going through the whole thing."
"It--it even moved you to tears?"
"I should be ashamed to say how many."
"I daresay," I pursued, smiling with all my might, "that even your
handkerchief was heavy with them, Miss Brabazon?"
"It was!"
"Then so much for the origin of _that_ idea! It would have occurred to
anybody under similar circumstances."
Miss Julia gave me the smile I wanted. I felt I had gone up in her
estimation, and sent Delavoye down. But I had reckoned without his
genius for taking a dilemma by the horns.
"This is an old quarrel between Gillon and me, Miss Brabazon. I hold
that all Witching Hill is more or less influenced by the wicked old
wizard of the place. Mr. Gillon says it's all my eye, and simply will
not let belief take hold of him. Yet your Turkish building actually
existed within a few feet of where we're sitting now; and suppose the
very leaves on the trees still whisper about it to those who have ears
to hear; suppose you've taken the whole thing down almost at dictation!
I don't know how your story goes on, Miss Brabazon----"
"No more do I," said Miss Brabazon, manifestly impressed and not at all
offended by his theory. "It's a queer thing--I never should have thought
of such a thing myself--but I certainly did dash it all off as if
somebody was telling me what to say, and at such a rate that my mind's
still a blank from one page to the next."
She picked the script out of her lap, and we watched her bewildered
face as it puckered to a frown over the rustling sheets.
"I shouldn't wonder," said Delavoye a little hastily, "if his next
effort wasn't to subvert her religious beliefs."
"To make game of them!" assented Miss Julia in scandalised undertones.
"'The demoniacal Duke now set himself to deface and destroy the beauty
of holiness, to cast away the armour of light, and to put upon him the
true colours of an aristocratic atheist of the deepest dye.'"
"Exactly what he did," murmured Uvo, with another look at me. It was not
a look of triumph unalloyed; it was at least as full of vivid
apprehension.
"I shall cross that out," said Miss Julia decidedly. "I don't know what
I was thinking of to write anything like that. It really makes me almost
afraid to go on."
Uvo shot out a prompt and eager hand.
"Will you let me take it away to finish by myself, Miss Brabazon?"
"I don't think I can. I must look and see if there's anything more like
that."
"But it isn't your fault if there is. You've simply been inspired to
write the truth."
"But I feel almost ashamed."
And the typewritten sheets rustled more than ever as she raised them
once more. But Delavoye jumped up and stood over her with a stiff lip.
"Miss Brabazon, you really must let me read the rest of it to myself!"
"I must see first whether I can let anybody."
"Let me see instead!"
Heaven knows how she construed his wheedling eagerness! There was a
moment when they both had hold of the MS., when I felt that my friend
was going too far, that his obstinate persistence could not fail to be
resented as a liberty. But it was just at such moments that there was a
smack of greatness about Uvo Delavoye; given the stimulus, he could
carry a thing off with a high hand and the light touch of a born leader;
and so it must have been that he had Miss Julia coyly giggling when I
fully expected her to stamp her foot.
"You talk about our curiosity," she rallied him. "You men are just as
bad!"
"I have a right to be curious," returned Uvo, in a tone that surprised
me as much as hers. "You forget that your villain was once the head of
our clan, and that so far the fact is quite unmistakable."
"But that's just what I can't understand!"
"Yet the fact remains, Miss Brabazon, and I think it ought to count."
"My dear young man, that's my only excuse for this very infliction!"
cried Miss Julia, with invincible jocosity. "If you'd rather it were
destroyed, I shall be quite ready to destroy it, as Mr. Gillon knows.
But I should like you to hear the whole of it first."
"And I could judge so much better if I read the rest to myself!"
And still he held his corner of the MS., and she hers with an equal
tenacity, which I believe to have been partly reflex and instinctive,
but otherwise due to the discovery that she had written quite serenely
about a blasphemer and an atheist, and not for a moment to any other
qualm or apprehension whatsoever. And then as I watched them their eyes
looked past me with one accord; the sheaf of fastened sheets fluttered
to the ground between them; and I turned to behold the Vicar standing
grim and gaunt upon the threshold, with a much younger and still more
scandalised face peeping over his shoulder.
"I didn't know that you were entertaining company," observed the Vicar,
bowing coldly to us youths. "Are you aware that it's nearly midnight?"
Miss Julia said she never could have believed it, but that she must have
lost all sense of time, as she had been reading something to us.
"I'm sure that was very kind, and has been much appreciated," said the
Vicar, with his polar smile. "I suppose this was what you were reading?"
And he was swooping down on the MS., but Delavoye was quicker; and
quicker yet than either hand was the foot interposed like lightning by
the Vicar.
"You'll allow me?" he said, and so picked the crumpled sheets from under
it. Uvo bowed, and the other returned the courtesy with ironic
interest.
In quivering tones Miss Julia began, "It's only something I've been----"
"Considering for the _Parish Magazine_," ejaculated Uvo. "Miss Brabazon
did me the honour of consulting me about it."
"And may I ask your responsibility for the _Parish Magazine_, Mr.
Delavoye?"
"It's a story," continued Uvo, ignoring the question and looking hard at
Miss Julia--"a local story, evidently written for local publication, the
scene being laid here at Witching Hill House. The principal character is
the very black sheep of my family who once lived there."
"I'm aware of the relationship," said the Vicar, dryly unimpressed.
"It's not one that we boast about; hence Miss Brabazon's kindness in
trying to ascertain whether my people or I were likely to object to its
publication."
"Well," said the Vicar, "I'm quite sure that neither you nor your people
would have any objection to Miss Brabazon's getting to bed by
midnight."
He returned to the door, which he held wide open with urbane frigidity.
"Now, Julia, if you'll set us an example."
And at the door he remained when the bewildered lady, delivered from an
embarrassment that she could not appreciate, and committed to a
subterfuge in which she could see no point, had flown none the less
readily, with a hectic simper and a whistle of silk.
"Now, gentlemen," continued the Vicar, "it's nearly midnight, as I've
said more than once."
"I was to take the story with me, to finish it by myself," explained
Uvo, with the smile of a budding ambassador.
"Oh, very well," rejoined the Vicar, shutting the door. "Then we must
keep each other a minute longer. I happen myself to constitute the final
court of appeal in all matters connected with the _Parish Magazine_.
Moreover, Mr. Delavoye, I'm a little curious to see the kind of
composition that merits a midnight discussion between my sister and two
young men whose acquaintance I myself have had so little opportunity of
cultivating."
He dropped into a chair, merely waving to us to do the same; and
Delavoye did; but I remained standing, with my eyes on the reader's
face, and I saw him begin where Miss Julia had left off and the MS. had
fallen open. I could not be mistaken about that; there was the mark of
his own boot upon the page; but the Vicar read it without wincing at the
passage which his sister had declared her intention of crossing out. His
brows took a supercilious lift; his cold eyes may have grown a little
harder as they read; and yet once or twice they lightened with a human
relish--an icy twinkle--a gleam at least of something I had not thought
to see in Mr. Brabazon. Perhaps I did not really see it now. If you look
long enough at the Sphinx itself, in the end it will yield some
semblance of an answering look. And I never took my eyes from the
Vicar's granite features, as typewritten sheet after sheet was turned so
softly by his iron hand, that it might have been some doctrinal
pamphleteer who claimed his cool attention.
When he had finished he rose very quietly and put the whole MS. behind
the grate. Then I remembered that Delavoye also was in the room, and I
signalled to him because the Vicar was stooping over the well-laid grate
and striking matches. But Delavoye only shook his head, and sat where he
was when Mr. Brabazon turned and surveyed us both, with the firewood
crackling behind his clerical tails.
"Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Delavoye," said he; "but I think you will
agree that this is a case for the exercise of my powers in connection
with our little magazine. The stupendous production now perishing in the
flames was of course intended as a practical joke at our expense."
"And I never saw it!" cried Uvo, scrambling to his feet. "Of course, if
you come to think of it, that's the whole and only explanation--isn't
it, Gillon? A little dig at the Delavoyes as well, by the way!"
"Chiefly at us, I imagine," said the Vicar dryly. "I rather suspect that
the very style of writing is an attempt at personal caricature. The
taste is execrable all through. But that is only to be expected of the
anonymous lampooner."
"Was there really no name to it, Mr. Brabazon?"
The question was asked for information, but Uvo's tone was that of
righteous disgust.
"No name at all. And one sheet of type-writing is exactly like another.
My sister had not read it all herself, I gather?"
"Evidently not. And she only read the first half to us."
"Thank goodness for that!" cried the Vicar, off his guard. "The whole
impertinence," he ran on more confidentially, "is so paltry, so vulgar,
so egregiously badly done! It's all beneath contempt, and I shall not
descend to the perpetrator's level by attempting to discover who he is.
Neither shall I permit the matter to be mentioned again in my household.
And as gentlemen I look to you both to resist the ventilation of a most
ungentlemanly hoax."
But the promise that we freely gave did not preclude us from returning
at once to No. 7, and there and then concocting a letter to Miss Julia,
which I slipped into the letter-box of the makeshift vicarage as the
birds were waking in the wood behind Mulcaster Park.
It was simply to say that Uvo was after all afraid that his kith and kin
really might resent the publication of her thrilling but painful tale of
their common ancestor; and therefore he had taken Miss Brabazon at her
word, and the MS. was no more. Its destruction was really demanded by
the inexplicable fact that the story was the true story of a
discreditable case in which the infamous Lord Mulcaster had actually
figured; and the further fact that Miss Brabazon had nevertheless
invented it, so far as she personally was aware, would have constituted
another and still more interesting case for the Psychical Research
Society, but for the aforesaid objections to its publication in any
shape or form.
All this made a document difficult to draw up, and none too convincing
when drawn; but that was partly because the collaborators were already
divided over every feature of the extraordinary affair, which indeed
afforded food for argument for many a day to come. But in the meantime
our dear Miss Julia accepted sentence and execution with a gentle and
even a jocose resignation which made us both miserable. We did not even
know that there had been any real occasion for the holocaust for which
we claimed responsibility, or to what extent or lengths the unconscious
plagiarism had proceeded. Delavoye, of course, took the view that
coincided with his precious theory, whereas I argued from Mr. Brabazon's
coolness that we had heard the worst.
But the Vicar always was cool out of the pulpit; and it was almost a
pity that we rewarded his moderation by going to church the next Sunday,
for I never shall forget his ferocious sermon on the modern purveyor of
pernicious literature. He might have been raving from bitter experience,
as Delavoye of course declared he was. But there is one redeeming point
in my recollection of his tirade. And that is a vivid and consoling
vision of the elder Miss Brabazon, listening with a rapt and unconscious
serenity to every burning word.