Witching Hill/The Temple of Bacchus
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 sha'n'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 horse-whip 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