Witching Hill (12 page)

So that was it! I was delighted for Uvo's sake; I tried to feel delighted altogether. At any rate he had chosen a wonderful nurse, but really I had seen so little of the girl ... if that was the word for her. In the apparent absence of other objections, I was prepared for a distinct grievance on the score of age.

However, she was going. That was something, and Uvo did not seem particularly cut up about it after all. But he brought the cab for her himself when the time came; he did not come in; but I saw him through the window as I sat at draughts once more with Coplestone, because it was a Saturday afternoon and Ronnie was not quite so well.

"This must be for Nurse Agnes," I said innocently. "It seems a pity she should go so soon."

"But she's not going yet!" cried Coplestone, upsetting the board. "She's going this evening; the other nurse told me she was. Of course I've got to see her before she goes!"

"I fancy that's her cab," said I, unwilling to give Delavoye away, but feeling much more strongly that Nurse Agnes had saved Ronnie's life.

"I didn't hear the bell," said Coplestone.

"Still, I believe that's Nurse Agnes on the stairs."

I had heard one creak, but only one, and the nurse was on tip-toe outside the door as Coplestone opened it. She might have been a thief, she seemed so startled.

"Why, nurse, what do you mean by trying to give me the slip?" he said in his hearty voice. "Do you know they all tell me you've saved my little chap's life, and yet I've hardly seen you all the time? You'd always fixed him up for the night by the time I'd finished dinner, and I've been so late in the morning that we've kept on missing each other at both ends. You've got to spare me a moment now, you know!"

But Nurse Agnes would only stand mumbling and smiling in the half-lit hall.

"I - I mustn't lose my train," was all I heard.

And then I realised that even I had only heard her voice once before, and that now it did not sound the same voice. It was not meant to sound the same - that was why - I had it in a flash. And in that flash I saw that Nurse Agnes had been keeping out of our way all these days and nights, keeping us out of her way by a dozen tacit little regulations which had seemed only proper and professional at the time.

But a fiercer light had struck Coplestone like a lash across the eyes. And he started back as though stung and blinded, until Nurse Agnes tried to dart past the door; then his long arm shot out, and I shuddered as he dragged her in by hers.

"You!" he gasped, and his jaw worked as though he had been knocked out in the ring.

"Yes," she said coolly, facing him through her veil; "and they're quite right - I've saved your boy for you. Do you mind letting me go?"

I forced my way past the pair of them, and rushed out to Delavoye waiting with the cab.

"Who is she? Who on earth is this nurse of yours?" I cried without restraint.

He drew me out of earshot of the cab-man.

"Has Coplestone spotted her?"

"This very minute - but who is she?"

"His wife."

"I thought she was dead?"

"No; he divorced her three years ago."

"Who told you?"

"Ronnie."

"And you never told me!"

"I promised him I wouldn't tell a soul."

The little rascal! He had bound us both; but there was a characteristic difference as between Delavoye and me, and the feelings that we inspired in that gallant little heart. Whereas I had surprised its secret, Ronnie had confided in Uvo of his own free will and accord.

"And it was he who begged me to bring her, Gilly, when he was at his worst! He said it was his one hope - that she could pull him through - that he knew she could! So I found her, and she did. She wasn't really a nurse, but she was his mother; she was his Angel of Life."

"Will she be forgiven?" I asked, when we had looked askance at the study windows, that gave us back only the wavering reflection of shrubs and of the chimneys opposite.

"Will she forgive?" returned Uvo sardonically. "It's always harder for the one who's in the wrong, and there's always something to be said for him or her!"

"Does she know that her husband needs to be saved as well?"

"Hush!" said Delavoye. The door had opened. Coplestone came out upon the step, and stood there feeling in his pockets.

I held my breath; and the only creature who counted just then, in all that road of bleak red houses, and in all the wintry world beyond, was the great shaken fellow coming down the path.

"You might give this to the cabby," said he, filling my palm with loose silver. "Just tell him we shan't want him now!"

CHAPTER VI

Under Arms

It must have been in my second year of humble office that the burglary scare took possession of Witching Hill. It was certainly the burglars' month of November, and the fogs confirmed its worst traditions. On a night when the street lamps burst upon one at the last moment, like the flash of cannon through their own smoke, a house in Witching Hill Road was scientifically entered, and the silver abstracted in a style worthy of precious stones. In that instance the thieves got clear away with their modest spoil. It was as though they then made a deliberate sporting selection of the ugliest customer on the Estate. Their choice fell upon a Colonel Arthur Cheffins, who not only kept fire-arms but knew how to use them, and gave such an account of himself that it was a miracle how the rascals escaped with their lives.

The first I heard of this affair was a volley of gravel on my window at dead of night. Then came Uvo Delavoye's voice through the fog before I quite knew what I was doing at the open window. Colonel Cheffins lived in the house opposite the Delavoyes', where he had lately started a cramming establishment on a small scale; and on his rushing over the road to the rescue, at the first sound of the fusillade, poor Uvo had himself been under fire in the fog. The good colonel was in a great way about it, I gathered, although no harm had been done, and it was only one of the pupils who had loosed off in his excitement. But would I care to come along and inspect the damage then and there? If so, they would be glad to see me, and as yet there was whisky for all comers.

I turned out instantly in my dressing-gown and slippers, found Uvo shivering in his, and raced him to the scene. It took some finding in the fog, until the lighted hall flashed upon us like a dark lantern at arm's length. In the class room at the back of the house, round the gas fire which obtained in all our houses, pedagogue and pupils were still telling their tale by turns and in chaotic chorus. Their audience was smaller than I expected. A little knot of unsporting tenants seemed more disposed to complain of the disturbance than to take up the chase; but indeed that was hopeless in the fog and darkness, and before long Uvo and I were the only interlopers left. We remained by special invitation, for I had made friends with the colonel over the papering and painting of his house, while Uvo had just shown himself a would-be friend indeed.

"It's a very easy battle to reconstruct," said the crammer at the foot of his stairs. "I was up there on the landing when I took my first shot at the scoundrels. You'll find it in the lower part of the front door. One of them blazed back, and there's the hole in the landing window. I had last word from the mat, and I've been looking for it in the gate, but I begin to hope we may find a drop or two of their blood instead to-morrow morning."

Colonel Cheffins was a little bald man with a tooth-brush moustache, and bright eyes that danced with frank delight in the whole adventure. He looked every inch the old soldier, even in a Jaeger suit of bedroom overalls, and I vastly preferred him to his two young men; but scholastic connections are not formed by picking and choosing your original material. Delavoye and I, however, made as free as they with the whisky bottle as a substitute for adequate clothing, and the one who had nearly committed manslaughter had some excuse in his depression and remorse.

"If I'd hit you," he said to Uvo, "I'd have blown my own silly brains out with the next chamber. I'm not kidding. I wouldn't shoot a man for twenty thousand pounds!"

And he shuddered into the chair nearest the glowing lumps of white asbestos licked by thin blue flames.

"God bless my soul, no more would I!" cried the crammer heartily. "I aimed low on purpose not to do more than wing them; there's my bullet in the door to say so, whereas theirs fairly whistled past my head on its way through that upstairs window. They're a most desperate gang of sportsmen, I assure you."

"There's certainly something to be said for keeping a revolver," observed Uvo, eyeing the brace now lying on the cast-iron chimneypiece.

"Do you mean to say you haven't got one?" cried Colonel Cheffins.

"I do. I wouldn't keep one even out in Egypt. I hate the beastly things," said Uvo Delavoye.

"But why?"

"Oh, I don't know. There's something so uncanny about them. They lie so snug in your pocket, and you needn't even take them out to send yourself to Kingdom Come!"

"Why yourself, Mr. Delavoye?"

"You never know. You might go mad with the beastly thing about you."

"God bless my soul!" cried the colonel, with cocked eyebrows. "You might go mad while you're shaving, and cut yourself too deep, for that matter!"

"Or when you're waiting for a train, or looking out of a window!" I put in, to laugh Uvo out of the morbid vein which I understood in him but others might easily misconstrue. I could see the two young pupils exchanging glances as I spoke.

"No," he replied, laughing in his turn, to my relief; "none of those ways would come as easy, and they'd all hurt more. However, to be quite serious, I must own it isn't the time or place for these little prejudices against the only cure for the present epidemic. And yet for my part I'd always rather trust to one of my Soudanese weapons, with which you couldn't have an accident if you tried."

Over the way, his own rooms were freely hung with murderous trophies acquired in the back-blocks of the Nile; but I felt more and more that Uvo Delavoye was wilfully misrepresenting himself to these three strangers; and the best I could hope was that a certain dash of sardonic gaiety might lead them to suppose that it was all his chaff.

"Well," said the colonel, "if those are your views I only hope you haven't many "valuables" in the house."

"On the contrary, colonel, everything we've got over there is a few sizes too big for its place, and our plate-chest simply wouldn't go into the strong-room of the local bank. So where do you think we keep it?"

"I've no idea."

"In the bathroom!" cried Uvo Delavoye, with the shock of laughter which was the refreshing finish of some of his moodiest fits. But you had to know him to appreciate his subtle shades, especially to separate the tangled threads of grim fun and gay earnest, and I feared that the gallant little veteran was beginning to regard him as a harmless lunatic. A shake of his bald head was all his comment on the statement that moved Delavoye himself to sudden mirth. And on the whole I was thankful when the return of a man-servant with a nervous constable, grabbed out of the fog by a lucky dip, provided us with an excuse for groping our way across the road.

"What on earth made you talk all that rot about revolvers?" I grumbled as we struck his gate.

"It wasn't rot. I meant every word of it."

"The more shame for you, if you did; but you know very well you don't."

"My dear Gilly, I wouldn't live with one of those nasty little weapons for worlds. I - I couldn't, Gilly - not long!"

He had me quite tightly by the hand.

"I'm coming in with you," I said. "You're not fit to be alone."

"Oh, yes, I am!" he laughed. "I haven't got one of those things yet, and I shall never get one. I'd rather thieves broke in and stole every ounce of silver in the place."

So we parted for what was left of the night, instead of turning it into day as we often did with less excuse; and for once my powers of sleep deserted me. But it was not the attempted burglary, or any one of its sensational features, that kept me awake; it was the lamentable conversation of Uvo Delavoye on the subject of fire-arms, and that no longer as affecting other minds, but as revealing his own. I had often heard him indulge his morbid fancies, but never so gratuitously or before strangers. To me he could and would say anything, but of late he had been less free with me and I more anxious about him. He had now been over eighteen months on the shelf. That was his whole trouble. It was not that he was ever seriously ill, but that he was always well enough to worry because he was no better or fitter for work. His mind raced like an engine, and the futile wear and tear was beginning to tell on the whole machinery. To be sure, he had written a little in a desultory way, but I never thought his heart was in his pen, and his fastidious taste was a deterrent rather than a spur. Yet he railed about the bread of idleness, said a man should be fit or dead, and that his mother and sister would be better off without him. Those ladies were again from home, and the fact did not make it easier to dissociate such sayings from an unhealthy horror of loaded revolvers.

So you may think what I felt the very next evening - which I did insist on spending at No. 7 - when the distasteful conversation was renewed and developed to the point of outrage. Daylight and less fog had failed to reveal any trace whatever of the thieves, and it became evident that the colonel's moral victory (he had lost a few spoons) was also a regrettably bloodless one. I saw no more of him during a day of vain excitement, but at night his card was brought up to Uvo's room, and the old fellow followed like a new pin.

I was in those days none too nice about my clothes, and both of us young fellows were more or less as we had been all day; but the sight of the dapper coach in his well-cut dinner jacket, with shirt-front shining like his venerable pate, and studded with a couple of good pearls, might well have put us to the blush. Under his arm he carried a big cigar-box, and this he presented to Delavoye with a courtly sparkle.

"You rushed to our aid last night, Mr. Delavoye, and we nearly shot you for your pains!" said the colonel. "Pray accept a souvenir which in your hands, I hope, and in similar circumstances, is less likely to end in so much smoke."

Uvo lifted the lid and the gas-light flashed from the plated parts of a six-chambered revolver with a six-inch barrel. It was one of the deadly brace that we had seen on the colonel's chimneypiece in the middle of the night.

"I can't take it from you," said Delavoye, shrinking palpably from the pistol. "I really am most grateful to you, Colonel Cheffins, but I've done nothing to deserve such a handsome gift."

"I beg to differ," said the colonel, "and I shall be sorely hurt if you refuse it. You never know when your turn may come; after your own account of that plate-chest, I shan't lie easy in my bed until I feel you are properly prepared against the worst."

"But my poor mother would rather lose every salt-cellar, Colonel Cheffins, than have a man shot dead on her stairs."

"I shouldn't dream of shooting him dead," replied the colonel. "I shouldn't even go as far as I went last night, if I could help it. But with that barrel glittering in your hand, Mr. Delavoye, I fancy you'd find it easier to keep up a conversation with some intrusive connoisseur."

"Is it loaded?" I asked as Uvo took the weapon gingerly from its box.

"Not at the moment, and I fear these few cartridges are all I can spare. I only keep enough myself for an emergency. I need hardly warn you, by the way, against pistol practice in these little gardens? It would be most unsafe with a revolver of this calibre. Why, God bless my soul, you might bring down some unfortunate person in the next parish!"

I entirely agreed, but Delavoye was not attending. He was playing with the colonel's offering as a child plays with fire, with the same intent face and meddlesome maladroitness. It was a mercy it was not loaded. I saw him wince as the hammer snapped unexpectedly; then he kept on snapping it, as though the sensation fascinated ear or finger; and just as I found myself enduring an intolerable suspense, Uvo ended it with a reckless light in his sunken eyes.

"I'm a lost man, Gilly!" said he, with a grim twinkle for my benefit. "I was afraid I should be if I once felt it in my paw. It's extraordinarily kind of you, Colonel Cheffins, and you must forgive me if I seem to have been looking your gift in the barrel. But the fact is I have always been rather chary of these pretty things, and I must thank you for the chance of overcoming the weakness."

His tone was sincere enough. So was the grave face turned upon Colonel Cheffins. But its very gravity angered and alarmed me, and I was determined to have his decision in more explicit terms.

"Then the pistol's yours, is it, Uvo?" I asked, with the most disingenuous grin that I could muster.

"Till death us do part!" he answered. And his laugh jarred every fibre in my body.

I never knew how seriously to take him; that was the worst of his elusive humour, or it may be of my own deficiency in any such quality. I confess I like a man to laugh at his own jokes, and to look as though he meant the things he does mean. Uvo Delavoye would do either - or neither - as the whim took him, and I used sometimes to think he cultivated a wilful subtlety for my special bewilderment. Thus in this instance he was quite capable of assuming an alarming pose to pay me out for any undue anxiety I might betray on his behalf; therefore I had to admire the revolver in my turn, and even to acclaim it as a timely acquisition. But either Uvo was not deceived, or else I was right as to his morbid feeling about the weapon. He seemed unable to lay it down. Sometimes he did so with apparent resolution, only to pick it up again and sit twisting the empty chambers round and round, till they ticked like the speedometer of a coasting bicycle. Once he slipped in one of the cartridges. The colonel looked at me, and I perched myself on the desk at Uvo's side. But the worst thing of all was the way his hand trembled as he promptly picked that cartridge out again.

We had said not a word, but Uvo rattled on with glib vivacity and the laugh that got upon my nerves. His new possession was his only theme. He could no more drop the subject than the thing itself. It was the revolver, the whole revolver, and nothing but the revolver for Uvo Delavoye that night. He was childishly obsessed with its unpleasant possibilities, but he treated them with a grim levity not unredeemed by wit. His bloodthirsty prattle grew into a quaint and horrible harangue eked out with quotations that stuck like burs. More than once I looked to Colonel Cheffins for a disapproval which would come with more weight from him than me; but decanter and syphon had been brought up soon after his arrival, and he only sipped his whisky with an amused air that made me wonder which of us was going daft.