The Hill Part 36

Webbe's scores at Lord's. Fluff, as has been said, was too far removed from John to make him more than an occasional companion. And so, for several terms, John, for the most part, walked alone. By the time Desmond joined him, he had gleaned a knowledge which fascinated a friend of like sensibility and imagination. Together they revisited the old and explored the new. One never-to-be-forgotten day the boys discovered a deserted house of some pretensions about a mile from the Hill. Its grounds, covering several acres, were enclosed by a high oak paling, within which stood a thick belt of trees, effectually concealing what lay beyond. Grim iron gates, always locked, frowned upon the wayfarer; but John, flattening an inquisitive nose against the ironwork, could discern a carriage-drive overgrown with gra.s.s and weeds, and at the end of it a white stone portico. After this the place became to both boys a sort of Enchanted Castle. A dozen times they peered through the gates.

No one went in or out of the gra.s.s-grown drive. The gatekeeper's lodge was uninhabited; there were no adjacent cottages where information might be sought. The boys called it "The Haunted House," and peopled it with ghosts; gorgeous bucks of the Regency, languishing beauties such as Lawrence painted, fiery politicians, duellists, mysterious black-a-vised foreigners. John connected it in fancy with the days when the gorgeous Duke of Chandos (who had Handel for his chapel-organist and was a Governor of Harrow and guardian of Lord Rodney) kept court at Cannons.

He told Caesar anecdotes of Dr. Parr, with his preposterous wig, his clouds of tobacco, his sesquipedalian quotations, coming down from Stanmore; and also of the great Lord Abercorn, another Governor of the school, who used to go out shooting in the blue riband of the Garter, and who entertained Pitt and Sir Walter Scott at Bentley Priory.

"What a lot you know!" said Caesar. "And you have a memory like my father's. I'm beginning to think, Jonathan, that you'll be a swell like him some day--in the Cabinet, perhaps."

"Ah," said John, with shining eyes.

"I hope I shall live to see it," Desmond added, with feeling.

"Thanks, old chap. A crust or a triumph shared with a pal tastes twice as good."

One soft afternoon in spring, after four Bill, Desmond and John were approaching the iron gates of the Haunted House. They had not taken this particular walk since the day when Desmond got his Flannels. During the winter term, Scaife and Desmond became members of the Football Eleven.

During this term Scaife won the hundred yards and quarter-mile; Desmond won the half-mile and mile. In a word, they had done, from the athletic point of view, nearly all that could be done. A glorious victory at Lord's seemed a.s.sured. Scaife, Captain and epitome of the brains and muscles of the Eleven, had grown into a powerful man, with the mind, the tastes, the pa.s.sions of manhood. Desmond, on the other hand, while nearly as tall (and much handsomer in John's eyes), still retained the look of youth. Indeed, he looked younger than John, although a year his senior; and John knew himself to be the elder and wiser, knew that Desmond leaned upon him whenever a crutch was wanted.

The chief difficulty which besets a school friendship between two boys is that of being alone together. In Form, in the playing-fields, in the boarding-house, life is public. Even in the most secluded lane, a Harrow boy is not secure against the unwelcome salutations of heated athletes who have been taking a cross-country run, or leaping over, or into, the Pinner brook. To John the need of sanctuary had become pressing.

Upon this blessed spring afternoon--ever afterwards recalled with special affection--a retreat was suddenly provided. As the boys jumped over the last stile into the lane which led to the Haunted House, Desmond exclaimed--

"By Jove, the gates are open!"

Then they saw that a man, a sort of caretaker, was in the act of shutting them.

"May we go in?" John asked civilly.

The man hesitated, eyeing the boys. Desmond's smile melted him, as it would have melted a mummy.

"There's nothing to see," he said.

Then, in answer to a few eager questions, he told the story of the Haunted House; haunted, indeed, by the ghosts of what might have been. A city magnate owned the place. He had bought it because he wished to educate his only son at Harrow as a "Home-Boarder," or day-boy. A few weeks before the boy should have joined the school, he fell ill with diphtheria, and died. The mother, who nursed him, caught the disease and died also. The father, left alone, turned his back upon a place he loathed, resolving to hold it till building-values increased, but never to set eyes on it again. The caretaker and his wife occupied a couple of rooms in the house.

The boys glanced at the house, a common-place mansion, and began to explore the gardens. To their delight they found in the shrubberies, now a wilderness of laurel and rhododendron, a tower--what our forefathers called a "Gazebo," and their neighbours a "Folly." The top of it commanded a wide, unbroken view--

"Of all the lowland western lea, The Uxbridge flats and meadows, To where the Ruislip waters see The Oxhey lights and shadows."

"There's the Spire," said John.

The man, who had joined them, nodded. "Yes," said he, "and my mistress and her boy are buried underneath it. She wanted him to be there--at the school, I mean--and there he is."

"We're very much obliged to you," said Desmond. He slipped a shilling into the man's hand, and added, "May we stay here for a bit? and perhaps we might come again--eh?"

"Thank you, sir," the man replied, touching his hat. "Come whenever you like, sir. The gates ain't really locked. I'll show you the trick of opening 'em when you come down."

He descended the steep flight of steps after the boys had thanked him.

"Sad story," said John, staring at the distant Spire.

Desmond hesitated. At times he revealed (to John alone) a curious melancholy.

"Sad," he repeated. "I don't know about that. Sad for the father, of course, but perhaps the son is well out of it. Don't look so amazed, Jonathan. Most fellows seem to make awful muddles of their lives. You won't, of course. I see you on pinnacles, but I----" He broke off with a mirthless laugh.

John waited. The air about them was soft and moist after a recent shower. The south-west wind stirred the pulses. Earth was once more tumid, about to bring forth. Already the hedges were green under the brown; bulbs were pushing delicate spears through the sweet-smelling soil; the buds upon a clump of fine beeches had begun to open. In this solitude, alone with teeming nature, John tried to interpret his friend's mood; but the spirit of melancholy eluded him, as if it were a will-o'-the-wisp dancing over an impa.s.sable marsh. Suddenly, there came to him, as there had come to the quicker imagination of his friend, the overpowering mystery of Spring, the sense of inevitable change, the impossibility of arresting it. At the moment all things seemed unsubstantial. Even the familiar Spire, powdered with gold by the slanting rays of the sun, appeared thinly transparent against the rosy mists behind it. The Hill, the solid Hill, rose out of the valley, a lavender-coloured shade upon the horizon.

"He came here," continued Desmond, dreamily--John guessed that he was speaking of the father--"a rich, prosperous man. I dare say he worked like a slave in the city. And he wanted peace and quiet after the Stock Exchange. Who wouldn't? And he planted out these gardens, thinking that every plant would grow up and thrive, and his son with them. And then the boy died; and the wife followed; and the enchanted castle became a place of horror; and now it is a wilderness. Haunted? I should think it was--haunted! I wish we'd never set foot in it. There's a curse on it."

"Let's go," said John.

"Too late. We'll stay now, and we'll come again, every Sunday. Wild and desolate as things look, they will be lovely when we get back in summer.

Don't talk. I'm going to light a pipe."

Through the circling cloud of tobacco-smoke John stared at the face which had illumined nearly every hour of his school-life. Its peculiar vividness always amazed John, the vitality of it, and yet the perfect delicacy. Scaife's handsome features were full of vitality also, but coa.r.s.eness underlay their bold lines and peered out of the keen, flashing eyes. When the Caterpillar left Harrow he had said to John--

"Good-bye, Jonathan. Awful rot your going to such a hole as Oxford! One has had quite enough schooling after five years here. It's settled I'm going into the Guards. My father tells me that old Scaife tried to get the Demon down on the Duke's list. But we don't fancy the Scaife brand."

Often and often John wondered whether Desmond saw the brand as plainly as the Caterpillar and he did. Sometimes he felt almost sure that a word, a look, a gesture betraying the bounder, had revolted Desmond; but a few hours later the bounder bounded into favour again, captivating eye and heart by some brilliant feat. And then his brains! He was so diabolically clever. John could always recall his face as he lay back in the chair in No. 15, sick, bruised, befuddled, and yet even in that moment of extreme prostration able to "play the game," as he put it, to defeat house-master and doctor by sheer strength of will and intellect.

It was Scaife who had persuaded Desmond to smoke.... Caesar's voice broke in upon these meditations.

"I say--what are you frowning about?"

John, very red, replied nervously, "Now that you're in the Sixth, you ought to chuck smoking."

"What rot!" said Caesar. "And here, in this tower, where one couldn't possibly be nailed----"

"That's it," said John. "It's just because you can't possibly be nailed that it seems to me not quite square."

Caesar burst out laughing. "Jonathan, you _are_ a rum 'un. Anyway--here goes!"

As he spoke he flung the pipe into the bushes below.

"Thanks," said John, quietly.

"We'll come here again. I like this old tower."

"You won't come here without me?"

"Oh, ho! I'm not to let the Demon into our paradise--eh? What a jealous old bird you are! Well, I like you to be jealous." And he laughed again.

"I am jealous," said John, slowly.

The School broke up on the following Tuesday, and Desmond went home with John.

This happened to be the first time that the friends had spent Easter together. John wondered whether Caesar would take the Sacrament with his mother and him. He and Caesar had been confirmed side by side in the Chapel at Harrow. He felt sure that Desmond would not refuse if he were asked. On Easter Eve, Mrs. Verney said, in her quiet, persuasive voice--

"You will join us to-morrow morning, Harry?"

Desmond flushed, and said, "Yes."

Not remembering his own mother, who had died when he was a child, he often told John that he felt like a son to Mrs. Verney. Upon Easter morning, the three met in the hall, and Desmond asked for a Prayer-book.