Witching Hill

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 HouseNo 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