The Temple of Bacchus
That spring I did what a great many young fellows were doing in those
particular days. I threw up my work at short notice, and went very far
afield from Witching Hill. It was a long year before I came back,
unscathed as to my skin, but with its contents ignobly depreciated and
reduced, on a visit to 7, Mulcaster Park.
Uvo Delavoye met me at the station, and we fled before the leisurely
tide of top-hats and evening papers, while one of the porters followed
with my things. There were no changes that I could see, except in myself
as I caught sight of myself in my old office window. The creepers might
have made a modest stride on the Queen Anne houses; brick and tile were
perhaps a mellower red; and more tenants appeared to be growing better
roses in their front gardens. But the place had always been at its best
at the end of May: here was a giant's nosegay of apple-blossom, and
there a glimpse of a horse-chestnut laden like a Christmas-tree with its
cockades of pure cream. One felt the flight of time only at such homely
spectacles as Shoolbred's van, delivering groceries at the house which
Edgar Nettleton had tried to burn down with me in it. And an empty
perambulator, over the way at Berylstow, confirmed the feeling when
Delavoye informed me that the little caller was a remarkable blend of
our old friend Guy Berridge and the whilom Miss Hemming.
Mulcaster Park had moved bodily with the times. It had its asphalt paths
at last. Incidentally I missed some blinds which had been taken over as
tenant's fixtures in my first or second year. The new ones were not red.
The next house lower down had also changed hands; a very striking woman,
in a garden hat, was filling a basket with roses from a William Allen
Richardson which had turned the painted porch into a bower; and instead
of answering a simple question, Uvo stopped and called her to the gate.
"Let me introduce you to Mrs. Ricardo, Gilly," said he, as the lady
joined us with a smile that set me thinking. "Mrs. Ricardo knows all
about you, and was looking forward to seeing the conquering hero come
marching home."
It was not one of Uvo's happiest speeches; but Mrs. Ricardo was neither
embarrassed nor embarrassing in what she found to say to me. I liked her
then and there: in any case I should have admired her. She was a tall
and handsome brunette, with thick eyebrows and that high yet dusky
colouring which reminds one in itself of stormlight and angry skies. But
Mrs. Ricardo seemed the most good-natured of women, anxious at once not
to bore me about my experiences, and yet to let us both see that she
thoroughly appreciated their character.
"You will always be thankful that you went, Mr. Gillon, in spite of
enteric," said Mrs. Ricardo. "The people to pity were those who couldn't
go, but especially the old soldiers, who would have given anything to
have gone."
I had just flattered myself that she was about to give each of us a
rose; she had certainly selected an obvious buttonhole, and appeared to
be seeking its fellow in the basket, when suddenly I saw her looking
past us both and up the road. A middle-aged man was hobbling towards us
in the thinning stream of homing citizens. He did not look one of them;
he wore light clothes and a straw hat which he did not remove in
accosting my companions; and I thought that he looked both hot and cross
as he leant hard upon a serviceable stick.
"Gossiping at the gate, as usual!" he cried, with a kind of rasping
raillery. "Even Mr. Delavoye won't thank you for keeping him standing on
this villainous asphalt till his feet sink in."
"That would have been one for you, Gilly, in the old days," said Uvo.
"Captain Ricardo--Mr. Gillon."
Captain Ricardo also seemed to have heard of me. He overhauled me with
his peevish little eyes, and then said two or three of the bitterest
things about the British forces, regular and irregular, that it ever was
my lot to hear. I made no attempt to reply to them. His wife tried to
present him with the rose which I fancied had been meant for one of us,
and his prompt rejection of the offering only hardened me in that
impression. Then Uvo asked him if he had seen good play at the Oval; and
so the vitriolic stream was diverted into such congenial channels as the
decadence of modern cricket and the calibre of the other members of the
Surrey Club.
"But won't you come in?" concluded the captain in his most forbidding
manner. "I hate this talking at the gate like a pack of servants, but my
wife seems to have a mania for it."
It is only fair to state that Mrs. Ricardo had withdrawn during the
denunciation of the game which her husband spent his useless days in
watching, as Uvo told me when we had declined his inhospitality and were
out of earshot. It was all he did say about Captain Ricardo, and I said
nothing at all. The people were evidently friends of his; at least the
wife was, and it was she who had set me thinking with her first smile.
I was still busy wondering whether, or where, I could have seen her
before.
"It's quite possible," said Uvo, when I had wondered aloud. "I wouldn't
give her away if it weren't an open secret here. But Witching Hill
hasn't called on Mrs. Ricardo since it found out that she was once on
the stage."
"Good Lord!"
"There's another reason, to give the neighbours their due. Ricardo has
insulted most of them to their faces. A bit of gossip got about, and
instead of ignoring it he limped out on the war-path, cutting half the
Estate and damning the other half in heaps."
"But what was her stage name?"
Delavoye gave a grim laugh as he ushered me into the garden of many
memories. "You wouldn't know it, Gilly. You were never a great playgoer,
you see, and Mrs. Ricardo was anything but a great actress. But she's a
very great good sort, as you'll find out for yourself when you know her
better."
I could quite believe it even then--but I was not so sure after a day or
two with Uvo. I found him leading a lonely life, with Nettleton's old
Sarah to look after him. Miss Delavoye had been wooed and married while
my back was turned, and Mrs. Delavoye was on a long visit to the young
couple. Uvo, however, appeared to be enjoying his solitude rather than
otherwise; his health was better, he was plying his pen, things were
being taken by all kinds of periodicals. And yet I was uneasy about him.
Among many little changes, but more in this house than in most, the
subtlest change of all was in Uvo Delavoye himself.
He could not do enough for me; from the few survivors of his father's
best bins, to my breakfast served in bed by his own hands, nothing was
good enough for the fraud he made me feel. Yet we were not in touch as
we had been of old. I could have done with fewer deeds of unnecessary
kindness and more words of unguarded intimacy. He did not trust me as he
used. He had something or somebody on his mind; and I soon made up mine
that it was Mrs. Ricardo, but not from anything else he told me. He
never mentioned her name again. He did not tell me that, with a view to
a third road, the Estate had just purchased a fresh slice of the
delightful woodland behind Mulcaster Park; that in its depths was a
little old ruin, just after his heart, and that this ruin was also a
favourite haunt of Mrs. Ricardo's. I was left to make all these
discoveries for myself, on a morning when Uvo Delavoye was expressly
closeted at his desk.
It was, to be sure, my old Mr. Muskett who told me about the new land,
and invited me to explore it at my pleasure. On a warm morning it seemed
a better scheme than going alone upon the river, as Uvo had suggested. I
accordingly turned back with Mr. Muskett, who went on to speak of the
ruin, and in fact set me on my way to it while I was setting him to the
station. Ten minutes later, in a tangle of bush and bracken, I had found
it: an ancient wall, scaled with patches of mouldy stucco, and at one
end an Ionic pillar towering out of the sea of greenery like a
lighthouse clear of the cliffs. Obviously, as Mr. Muskett had said, the
fragments that remained of one of those toy temples which were a
characteristic conceit of old Georgian grounds. But it happened to be
the first that I had seen, and I proceeded to reconnoitre the position
with some interest. Then it was that Mrs. Ricardo was discovered, seated
on one of several stumps of similar pillars, on the far side of the
wall.
Mrs. Ricardo, without her hat in the shadow of the old grey wall, but
with her glossy hair and glowing colour stamped against it with rich
effect: a charming picture in its greenwood frame, especially as she was
looking up to greet me with a radiant smile. But I was too taken aback
to be appreciative for the moment. And then I decided that the high
colouring was a thought too high, and a sudden self-consciousness
disappointing after her excellent composure in the much more trying
circumstances of our previous meeting.
"Haven't you been here before, Mr. Gillon?" Mrs. Ricardo seemed
surprised, but quite competent to play the guide. "This mossy heap's
supposed to have been the roof, and these stone stumps the columns that
held it up. There's just that one standing as it was. There should be a
'sylvan prospect' from where I'm sitting; but it must have been choked
up for years and years."
"You do know a lot about it!" I cried, recovering my admiration for the
pretty woman as she recovered her self-possession. And then she smiled
again, but not quite as I had caught her smiling.
"What Mr. Delavoye's friends don't know about Witching Hill oughtn't to
be worth knowing!" said Mrs. Ricardo. "I mean what he really knows, not
what he makes up, Mr. Gillon. I hear you don't believe in all that any
more than I do. But he does seem to have read everything that was ever
written about the place. He says this was certainly the Temple of
Bacchus in the good old days."
"I don't quite see where Bacchus comes in," said I, thinking that Uvo
and Mrs. Ricardo must be friends indeed.
"He's supposed to have been on this old wall behind us, in a fresco or
something, by Villikins or somebody. You can see where it's been gouged
out, and the stucco with it."
But I had to say what was in my mind. "Is Uvo Delavoye still harping on
about his bold bad ancestor, Mrs. Ricardo? Does he still call him his
old man of the soil?"
To her, at any rate, yes, he did! She did not think it was a thing he
talked about to everybody. But I had hoped it was an extinct folly,
since he had not mentioned it as yet to me. It was almost as though Mrs.
Ricardo had taken my old place. Did she discourage him as I had done?
She told me it was his latest ambition to lay the ghost. And I marvelled
at their intimacy, and wondered what that curmudgeon of a husband had to
say to it!
Yet it seemed natural enough that we should talk about Uvo Delavoye, as
I sat on another of the broken columns and lit a cigarette at Mrs.
Ricardo's suggestion. Uvo was one of those people who are the first of
bonds between their friends, a fruitful subject, a most human interest
in common. So I found myself speaking of him in my turn, with all
affection and yet some little freedom, to an almost complete stranger
who was drawing me on more deliberately than I saw.
"You were great friends, Mr. Gillon, weren't you?"
"We _are_, and I hope we always shall be."
"It must have been everything for you to have such a friend in such a
place!"
"It was so! I stayed on and on because of him. He was the life and soul
of the Estate to me."
Mrs. Ricardo looked as though she could have taken the words out of my
mouth. "But what a spoilt life, and what a strange soul!" said she,
instead; and I saw there was something in Mrs. Ricardo, after all.
She was looking at me and yet through me, as we sat on our broken bits
of Ionic columns. She had spoken in a dreamy voice, with a wonderful
softening of her bold, flamboyant beauty; for I was not looking through
her by any means, but staring harder than I had any business, in a fresh
endeavour to remember where we had met before. And for once she had
spoken without a certain intonation, which I had hardly noticed in her
speech until I missed it now.
"Of course I've heard of all the extraordinary adventures you've both
had here," resumed Uvo's new friend, as though to emphasise the terms
that they were on.
"Not all of them?" I suggested. There were one or two affairs that he
and I were to have kept to ourselves.
"Why not?" she flashed, suspiciously.
"Oh! I don't know."
"Which of them is such a secret?"
She was smiling now, but with obvious effort. Why this pressure on a
pointless point? And where _had_ I seen her before?
"Well, there was our very first adventure, for one," said I.
"Underground, you mean?"
"Yes--partly."
I could not help staring now. Mrs. Ricardo had reddened so inexplicably.
"There was no need to tell me the other part!" she said, scornfully. "I
was in it--as you know very well!"
Then I did know. She was the bedizened beauty who had raked in the
five-pound notes, and smashed a magnum of champagne in her excitement,
at the orgy in Sir Christopher Stainsby's billiard room.
"I know it now," I stammered, "but I give you my word----"
"Fiddle!" she interrupted. "You've known it all the time. I've seen it
in your face. He gave me away to you, and I shan't forgive him!"
I found myself involved in a heated exposition of the facts. I had never
recognised her until that very minute. But I had kept wondering where we
had met before. And that was all that she could have seen in my face. As
for Uvo Delavoye, when I had spoken to him about it, he had merely
assured me that I must have seen her on the stage: so far and no further
had he given her away. Mrs. Ricardo took some assuring and reassuring on
the point. But the truth was in me, and in her ultimate pacification she
seemed to lose sight of the fact that she herself had done what she
accused Uvo of doing. Evidently the leakage of her secret mattered far
less to Mrs. Ricardo than the horrible thought that Mr. Delavoye had let
it out.
Of course I spoke as though there was nothing to matter in the least to
anybody, and asked after Sir Christopher as if the entertainment in his
billiard room had been one of the most conventional. It seemed that he
had married again in his old age; he had married one of the other ladies
of those very revels.
"That's really why I first thought of coming here to live," explained
Mrs. Ricardo, with her fine candour. "But there have been all kinds of
disagreeables."
She had known about the tunnel before she had heard of it from Uvo; some
member of the lively household had discovered its existence, and there
had been high jinks down there on more than one occasion. But Lady
Stainsby had not been the same person since her marriage. I gathered
that she had put her reformed foot down on the underground orgies, but
that Captain Ricardo had done his part in the subsequent disagreeables.
It further appeared that the blood-stained lace and the diamond buckle
had also been discovered, and that old Sir Christopher had "behaved just
like he would, and froze on to both without a word to Mr. Delavoye's
grand relations."
I suggested that mining rights might have gone with the freehold, but
Mrs. Ricardo quoted Uvo's opinion as to what still ailed Sir
Christopher Stainsby. She made it quite clear to me that our friend, at
any rate, still laboured under his old obsession, and that she herself
took it more seriously than she had professed before one confidence led
to another.
"But don't you tell him I told you!" she added as though we were
ourselves old friends. "The less you tell Mr. Delavoye of all we've been
talking about, the better turn you'll be doing me, Mr. Gillon. It was
just like him not to give away ancient history even to you, and I don't
think you're the one to tell him how I went and did it myself!"
I could have wished that she had taken that for granted; but at least
she felt too finely to bind me down to silence. Altogether I found her a
fine creature, certainly in face and form, and almost certainly at
heart, if one guessed even charitably at her past, and then at her life
in a hostile suburb with a neglectful churl of a husband.
But to admire the woman for her own sake was not to approve of her on
all other grounds; and during our friendly and almost fascinating chat I
contracted a fairly definite fear that was not removed by the manner of
its conclusion. Mrs. Ricardo had looked at a watch pinned to a pretty
but audacious blouse, and had risen rather hurriedly. But she had looked
at her watch just a minute too late; as we turned the corner of the
ruin, there was Delavoye hurrying through the brake towards us; and
though he was far enough off to conceal such confusion as Mrs. Ricardo
had shown at my appearance on the scene, and to come up saying that he
had found me at last, I could not but remember how he had shut himself
up for the morning, after advising me to go on the river.
I was uneasy about them both; but it was impossible to say a word to
anybody. He never spoke of her; that was another bad sign to my
suspicious mind. It was entirely from her that I had drawn my material
for suspicion, or rather for anxiety. I did not for a moment suppose
that there was anything more than a possibly injudicious friendship
between them; it was just the possibilities that stirred my sluggish
imagination; and I should not have thought twice about these but for
Uvo's marked reserve in speaking of the one other person with whom I now
knew that he was extremely unreserved. If only I had known it from him,
I should not have deplored the mere detail that Mrs. Ricardo was in one
way filling my own old place in his life.
My visit drew to an end; on the last night I simply had to dine in town
with a wounded friend from the front. It would have been cruel to get
out of it, though Uvo almost tempted me by his keenness that I should
go. I warned him, however, that I should come back early. And I was even
earlier than my word. And Uvo was not in.
"He's gone out with his pipe," said Sarah, looking gratuitously
concerned. "I'm sure I don't know where you'll find him." But this
sounded like an afterthought; and there was a something shifty and yet
wistful in the old body's manner that inclined me to a little talk with
her about the master.
"You don't think he's just gone into the wood, do you, Sarah?"
"Well, he do go there a good deal," said Sarah. "Of course he don't
always go that way; but he do go there."
"Might he have gone into Captain Ricardo's, Sarah?"
"He might," said Sarah, with more than dubious emphasis.
"They're his great friends now, aren't they?" I hazarded.
"Not Captain Ricardo, sir," said Sarah. "I've only seen him in the 'ouse
but once, and that was when Miss Hamy was married; but we 'ad all sorts
then." And Sarah looked as though the highways and hedges had been
scoured for guests.
"But do you see much more of Mrs. Ricardo, Sarah?"
"I don't, sir, but Mr. Hugo do," said Sarah, for once off her loyal
guard. "He sees more of her than his ma would like."
"Come, come, Sarah! She's a charming lady, and quite the belle of the
Estate."
"That may be, sir, but the Estate ain't what it was," declared Sarah,
with pregnant superiority. "There's some queer people come since I was
with pore Mr. Nettleton."
"What about Mr. Nettleton himself, Sarah?"
"Mr. Nettleton was always a gentleman, sir, though he did try to set
fire to the 'ouse with my methylated."
I left the old dame bobbing in the doorway, and went to look for Uvo in
the wood. I swear I had no thought of spying upon him. What could there
be to spy upon, at half-past nine at night, with Captain Ricardo safe
and grumbling at his own fireside? I had been wasting my last evening at
a club and in the train, and I did not want to miss another minute of
Uvo Delavoye's society.
It was an exquisite night, the year near its zenith and the moon only
less than full. The wood was changed from a beautiful bright picture
into a beautiful black photograph; twig and leaf, and silent birds,
stood out like motes in the moonbeams. But there were fine intervals of
utter darkness, wide pools and high cascades of pitch, with never a
bubble in the way of detail. And there was one bird to be heard, giving
its own glory to the glorious night. But I was not long alive to the
heavenly song, or to the beauty of the moonlit wood.
I had entered by way of a spare site a little higher up than the
Delavoyes', who, unlike some of their newer neighbours, had not a garden
gate into the wood. I had penetrated some score yards into the pitch and
silver of leafy tree and open space when I became aware that someone
else had entered still higher up, and that our courses were converging.
I thought for a moment that it might be Uvo; but there was something
halt yet stealthy about the unseen advance, as of a shackled man
escaping; and I knew who it was before I myself stole and dodged to get
a sight of him. It was Captain Ricardo, creeping clumsily, often pausing
to lean hard upon his tremendous stick. At first I thought he had two
sticks; but the other was not one; the other was a hunting crop, for I
saw the lash unloosed in one of the pauses, and a tree-trunk flicked
again and again, about the height of a man's shoulder, as if for
practice.
When the limping, cringing figure again proceeded on its way, the big
stick was in the left hand, the crop in the right, and I was a second
sneak following the first, in the direction of the Temple of Bacchus.
I saw him stop and listen before I heard the voices. I saw the crop
raised high in the moonlight, as if in the taking of some silent vow,
and I lessened the distance between us with impunity, for he had never
once looked round. And now I too heard the voices; they were on the
other side of the temple wall; and this side was laved with moonlight,
so that the edges of the crumbling stucco made seams of pitch, and
Ricardo's shadow crouched upon the wall for a little age before his bent
person showed against it.
Now he was at one end of the wall, peeping round, listening, instead of
showing himself like a man. My blood froze at his miserable tactics. I
had seen men keep cover under heavy fire with less precaution than this
wretch showed in spying on his guilty wife; yet there was I copying him,
even as I had dogged him through the wood. Now he had wedged himself in
the heavy shadow between the wall and the one whole pillar at right
angles to the wall; now he was looking as well as listening. And now I
was in his old place, now I was at his very elbow, eavesdropping myself
in my watch and ward over the other eavesdropper.
The big stick leant against the end of the wall, just between us, nearer
to my hand than his. The man himself leant hard against the pillar, the
crop grasped behind him in both hands, its lash dangling like the tail
of a monster rat. Those two clasped hands were the only part of him in
the moonlight, and I watched them as I would have watched his eyes if we
had been face to face. They were lean, distorted, twitching, itching
hands. The lash was wound round one of them; there might have been more
whipcord under the skin.
Meanwhile I too was listening perforce to the voices on the other side
of the wall. I thought one came from the stone stump where Mrs. Ricardo
had sat the other day, that she was sitting there again. The other voice
came from various places. And to me the picture of Uvo Delavoye,
tramping up and down in the moonlight as he talked, was as plain as
though there had been no old wall between us.
"I know you have a thin time of it. But so has he!"
That was almost the first thing I heard. It made an immediate difference
in my feeling towards the other eavesdropper. But I still watched his
hands.
"Sitting on top of a cricket pavilion," said the other voice, "all day
long!"
"It takes him out of himself. You must see that he is eating his heart
out, with this war still on, and fellows like Gillon bringing it home to
him every day."
"I don't see anything. He doesn't give me much chance. If it isn't
cricket at the Oval, it's billiards here at the George, night after
night until I'm sick to death of the whole thing."
"Are you sure he's there now?"
"Oh, goodness, yes! He made no bones about it."
I thought Uvo had stopped in his stride to ask the question. I knew
those hands clutched the hunting crop tighter at the answer. I saw the
knuckles whiten in the moonlight.
"Because we're taking a bit of a risk," resumed Uvo, finishing further
off than he began.
"Oh, no, we're not. Besides, what does it matter? I simply had to speak
to you--and you know what happened the other morning. Mornings are the
worst of all for people seeing you."
"But not for what they think of seeing you."
"Oh! what do I care what they think?" cried the wife of the man beside
me. "I'm far past that. It's you men who keep on thinking and thinking
of what other people are going to think!"
"We sometimes have to think for two," said Uvo--just a little less
steadily, to my ear.
"You don't see that I'm absolutely desperate, mewed up with a man who
doesn't care a rap for me!"
"I should make him care."
"That shows all _you_ care!" she retorted, passionately.
And then I felt that he was standing over her; there was something in
the altered pose of the head near mine, something that took my eyes
from the moonlit hands, and again gave me as vivid a picture as though
the wall were down.
"It's no use going back on all that," said Uvo, and it was harder to
hear him now. "I don't want to say rotten things. You know well enough
what I feel. If I felt a bit less, it would be different. It's just
because we've been the kind of pals we have been ... my dear ... my
dear!... that we mustn't go and spoil it now."
The low voice trembled, but now hers was lower still, and I at least
lost most of her answer ... "if you really cared for me ... to take me
away from a man who never did!" That much I heard, and this: "But you're
no better! You don't know what it is to--care!"
That brought an outburst, but not from the man beside me. He might have
been turned into part of the Ionic pillar. It was Uvo who talked, and I
for one who listened without another thought of the infamy of listening.
I was not there to listen to anybody, but to keep an eye on Ricardo; my
further action depended on his; but from the first his presence had
blunted my own sense of our joint dishonour, and now the sense was
simply dead. I was there with the best motives. I had even begun
listening with the best motives, as it were with a watching brief for
the unhappy pair. But I forgot both my behaviour and its excuse while
Uvo Delavoye was delivering his fine soul; for fine it was, with one
great twist in it that came out even now, when I least expected it, and
to the last conceivable intent. It is the one part of all he said that I
do not blush to have overheard.
"Let us help each other; for God's sake don't let us drag each other
down! That's not quite what I mean. I know it sounds rotten. I wonder if
I dare tell you what I do mean? It's not we who would do the dragging,
don't you see? You know who it is, who's pulling at us both like the
very devil that he was in life!"
Uvo laughed shortly, and now his tone was a tone I knew too well.
"Nobody has stood up to him yet," he went on; "it's about time somebody
did. Surely you and I can put up a bit of a fight between us? Surely we
aren't such ninepins as old Stainsby, Abercromby Royle, Guy Berridge
and all that lot?"
In the pause I figured her looking at him, as I had so often done when a
civil answer was impossible. But Mrs. Ricardo asked another question
instead.
"Is that your notion of laying the ghost?"
"Yes!" he said earnestly. "There's something not to be explained in all
the things that have happened since I've been here. To be absolutely
honest, I haven't always really and truly believed in all my own
explanations. I'm not sure that Gilly himself--that unbelieving
dog--didn't get nearer the mark on the night he was nearly burned to
death. But, if it's my own ghost, all the more reason to lay it; and, if
it isn't, those other poor brutes were helpless in their ignorance, but
I haven't their excuse!"
"I believe every word of it," said the poor soul with a sob. "When we
came here I thought we should be--well, happy enough in our way. But we
haven't had a day's happiness. You, you have given me the only happiness
I've ever had here, and now...."
"No; it's been the other way about," interrupted Uvo, sadly. "But
that's all over. I'm going to clear out, and you'll find things far
happier when I'm gone. It's I who have been the curse to you--to both of
you--if not to all the rest...."
His voice failed him; but there was no mistaking its fast resolve. Its
very tenderness was not more unmistakable, to me, than the fixity of a
resolution which my whole heart and soul applauded. And suddenly I was
flattering myself that the man by my side shared my intuitive confidence
and approval. He was no longer a man of stone; he had come to life
again. Those hands of his were not fiercely frozen to the crop, but
turning it gently round and round. Then they stopped. Then they moved
with the man's whole body. He was looking the other way, almost in the
direction by which he and I had approached the temple. And as I looked,
too, there were footsteps in the grass, Mrs. Ricardo passed close by us
with downcast eyes, and so back into the wood, with Uvo at arm's length
on the far side.
Then it was that I found myself mistaken in Ricardo. He had not taken
his eyes off the retreating pair. He was crouching to follow them, only
waiting till they were at a safe distance. I also waited--till they
disappeared--then I touched him on the shoulder.
He jumped up, gasping. I had my finger before my lips.
"Can't you trust them now?" I whispered.
"Spying!" he hissed when he could find his tongue.
"What about you, Captain Ricardo?"
"It was my wife."
"Well, it was my friend and you're his enemy. And his enemy was armed to
the teeth," I added, handing him the big stick that he had left leaning
against the wall.
"That wasn't for him. This was," muttered Ricardo, lapping the lash
round his crop. "I was going to horsewhip him within an inch of his
life. And now that you know all about it, too, I've a damned good mind
to do it still!"
"There are several reasons why you won't," I assured him.
"You're his bully, are you?" he snarled.
"I'm whatever you choose to make me, Captain Ricardo. Already you've
consoled me for doing a thing I never dreamt of doing in my life
before."
"But, good God! I never dreamt of listening either. I was prepared for a
very different scene. And then--and then I thought perhaps I'd better
not make one after all! I thought it would only make things worse.
Things might have been worse still, don't you see?"
"Exactly. I think you behaved splendidly, all the same."
"But if you heard the whole thing----"
"I couldn't help myself. I found myself following you by pure chance.
Then I saw what you had in your hand."
With a common instinct for cover, we had drifted round to the other side
of the wall. And neither of us had raised his voice. But Ricardo never
had his eyes off me, as we played our tiny scene among the broken
columns, where Uvo and Mrs. Ricardo had just played theirs.
"Well, are you going to hold your tongue?" he asked me.
"If you hold yours," I answered.
"I mean--even as between you two!"
"That's just what I mean, Ricardo. If neither of us know what's
happened, nothing else need happen. 'Least said,' you know."
"Nothing whatever must be said. I'll trust you never to tell Delavoye,
and, if it makes you happier, you can trust me to say nothing to--to
anybody. It's my only chance," said Ricardo, hoarsely. "I've not been
all I might have been. I see it now. But perhaps ... it isn't ... too
late...."
And suddenly he seized me violently by the hand. Then I found myself
alone in the shadow of the wall which had once borne a fresco by
Nollikins, and I stood like a man awakened from a dream. In the
flattering moonlight, the sham survivals of the other century might have
been thousands of years old, their suburban setting some sylvan corner
of the Roman campagna.... Then once more I heard the nightingale, and it
sang me back into contemporary realities. I wondered if it had been
singing all the time. I had not heard less of it during the hour that
Uvo and I had spent underneath this very wood, four summers ago!
That was on the first night of our life at Witching Hill, and this was
to be our last. I arranged it beautifully when I got in and had tried to
explain how entirely I had lost my bearings in the wood. I told Uvo, and
it happened to be true, that I had been wondering why on earth he would
not come up north with me next day. And before midnight he had packed.
Then we sat up together for the last time in that back room of his on
the first floor, and watched the moon set in the tree-tops, and silver
leaves twinkle as the wood sighed in its sleep. One more pipe, and the
black sky was turning grey. A few more pipes, much talk about old times,
and the wood was a wood once more; its tossing crests were tipped with
emeralds in the flashing sun; and as tree after tree broke into a merry
din, we spoke of joy-bells taken up by steeple after steeple, and Uvo
read me eight lines that he had discovered somewhere while I was away.
"Some cry up Gunnersbury,
For Sion some declare,
And some say that with Chiswick House
No villa can compare;
"But ask the beaux of Middlesex,
Who know the country well,
If Witching Hill--if Witching Hill--
Don't bear away the bell."
"I hope you agree, Beau Gillon?" said Uvo, with the old wilful smile.
"By the way, I haven't mentioned him since you've been back, but on a
last morning like this you may be glad to hear that my old ghost of the
soil is laid at last.... The rest is silence, if you don't mind, old
man."
THE END