Witching Hill Part 11

"My rude forefather in a Religious Tract!"

"Of course I should quite reform him in the end."

"You'd have your work cut out, Miss Brabazon."

"I ought to begin with _you_, you know!" said Miss Julia, shaking a facetious finger in Uvo's face. "I'm afraid you're rather an irreverent young man, and I don't know what the Vicar would say if he heard us."

She threw another deliciously guilty glance towards the house. "But if you really mean what you say, and you're sure Mrs. Delavoye and your sister won't mind either----"

"Mind!" he interrupted. "Forgive me, Miss Brabazon, but how _could_ they be sensitive about the last head but five of a branch of the family which doesn't even recognise our existence?"

"Very well, then! I'll take you at your word, and the--the blood and thunder," whispered Miss Julia, as though they were bad words, "be on your own head, Mr. Delavoye!"

Thereafter, in a quivering silence, Uvo took me home with him, and straight up into his own room, where he first shut door and window without a word. Never since have I heard man laugh quite so loud and long as he did then.

"But you don't see the point!" he arrogated through his tears, because I made rather less noise.

"What is it, then?"

"I told you I'd opened up a new sink to-day?"

"You said something of the sort."

"It was a sink of fresh iniquity. I came across it in an old collection of trials; it isn't as much as mentioned in any memoir of the old reprobate, nor yet in the many annals of Witching Hill. Yet he once figured in one of the most disgraceful cases on record."

The case was all that, as Delavoye summed it up for my benefit. The arch-villain of the piece was of course his scandalous progenitor, aided and abetted by a quite unspeakable crew. There was a sorely distressed heroine in humble life--a poor little milliner from Sh.o.r.editch--but because it was all too true, there had been no humble hero to wreak poetic vengeance on the miscreant.

"Not a nursery story, I grant you! But there were some good touches in the version I struck," said Delavoye, producing his museum note-book.

"One or two I couldn't help taking down. 'In obedience to the custom of the times,' for instance, 'the young lord proceeded to perform the grand tour; and it is reported that having sailed from Naples to Constantinople, he there imbibed so great an admiration for the manners of the Turks, that on his return to England in 1766, he caused an outlying portion of his family mansion to be taken down, and to be rebuilt in the form of a harem.'"

"Rot!"

"I took it down word for word. I've often wondered how the Turkish Pavilion got its name; now we know all about it, and why it had a tunnel connecting it with the house."

"Poor little milliner!"

"I believe you, Gilly. Listen to this, when she was a prisoner in his town house, before they spirited her out here--'Looking out of the window at about eight o'clock, she observed a young woman pa.s.sing, to whom she threw out her handkerchief, which was then heavy with tears, intending to attract her attention and send to her father for a.s.sistance.'"

"Because the handkerchief was marked?"

"And so heavy with her tears that she could throw it like a tennis-ball!"

The note-book was put away. There was an end also of our hilarity.

"And this dear old girl," said Uvo, with affectionate disrespect, "thinks she's a fit and proper writer to cope with that immortal skunk!

False s.e.xtus in a parish magazine! Proud Tarquin done really proud at last!"

It was on the tip of my tongue to make it quite clear to Uvo that Miss Julia had not wittingly proposed to write about his ancestor at all; that apparently she had never heard of his existence before that evening, and that it was her own original idea to make Witching Hill House the haunt of some purely imaginary scoundrel. But I knew my Uvo well enough by this time to hold my tongue, and at least postpone the tiresome discussion of a rather stale point on which we were never likely to agree.

But I stayed to supper at No. 7; and Uvo kept me till the small hours, listening to further details of his last researches, and to the farrago of acute conjecture, gay reminiscence and vivid hearsay which his reading invariably inspired. It was base subject-metal that did not gain a certain bright refinement in his fiery mind, or fall from his lips with a lively ring; and that night he was at his best about things which have an opposite effect on many young men. It must have been after one when I left him. I saw the light go out behind the cheap stained gla.s.s in the front door, and I heard Uvo going upstairs as I departed.

The next and only other light I pa.s.sed, in the houses on that side of the road, was at the top of the one which was now the Vicarage. Thence also came an only sound; it was the continuous crackle of a typewriter, through the open window of the room which I knew Miss Julia had appropriated as her own.

That end of the Estate had by this time a full team of tenants, whereas I had two sets of painters and paperhangers to keep up to the mark in Witching Hill Road. This rather came between me and my friends in Mulcaster Park, especially as my Mr. Muskett lived in their road, and his house had eyes and a tongue. So it happened that I saw no more of Miss Julia Brabazon until she paid me a queer little visit at my office one afternoon about five o'clock. She was out of breath, and her flurried manner quickened my ear to the sound of her brother's bells ringing in the distance for week-day evensong.

"I thought I'd like to have one word with you, Mr. Gillon, about my story," she panted, with a guilty shrinking from the sheet of gla.s.s behind her. "It will be finished in a few days now, I'm thankful to say.

I've been so hard at work upon it, you can't think!"

"Oh, yes, I can," said I; for there seemed to be many more lines on the simple, eager countenance; the drollery had gone out of it, and its heightened colouring had an unhealthy, bluish tinge.

"I'm afraid I have been burning the midnight oil a little," she admitted with a sort of coy bravado. "But there seems so much to do during the day, and everything is so quiet at night, unless it's that wretched typewriter of mine! But I m.u.f.fle the bell, and luckily my brother and sister are sound sleepers."

"You must be keen, Miss Brabazon, to turn night into day."

"Keen? I never enjoyed writing half so much. It's no effort; the story simply writes itself. I don't feel as if it were a story at all, but something that I see and hear and have just got to get down as fast as ever I can! I feel as if I really knew that old monster we were talking about the other day. Sometimes he quite frightens me. And that's why I've come to you, Mr. Gillon. I almost fear I'm making him too great a horror after all!"

It was impossible not to smile. "That would be a difficult matter, from all I hear, Miss Brabazon."

"I meant from the point of view of his descendants in general, and these dear Delavoyes in particular. Rather than hurt their feelings, Mr.

Gillon, I need hardly tell you I'd destroy my story in a minute."

"That would be a thousand pities," said I, honestly thinking of her wasted time.

"I'm not so sure," said Miss Julia, doubtfully. "I sometimes think, when I read the newspapers, that there are bad people enough in the world without digging up more from their graves. Yet at other times I don't feel as if I were doing that either. It's more as though this wicked old wretch had come to life of his own accord and insisted on being written about. I seem to feel him almost at my elbow, forcing me to write down I don't know what."

"But that sounds like inspiration!" I exclaimed, impressed by the good faith patent in the tired, ingenuous, serio-comic face.

"I don't know what it is," replied Miss Julia, "or whether I'm writing sense or nonsense. I never like to look next day. I only know that at the time I quite frighten myself and--make as big a fool of myself as though I were in my poor heroine's shoes--which is so absurd!" She laughed uneasily, her colour slightly heightened. "But I only meant to ask you, Mr. Gillon, whether you honestly and truly think that the Delavoyes won't mind? You see, he really was their ancestor, and I do make him a most odious creature."

"But I don't suppose you give his real name?"

"Oh, dear, no. That would never do. I call him the Duke of Doehampton, and the story is called 'His Graceless Grace.' Isn't it a good t.i.tle, Mr. Gillon?"

I lied like a man, but was still honest enough to add that I thought it even better as a disguise. "I feel sure, Miss Brabazon, that you are worrying yourself unnecessarily," I took it upon myself to a.s.sert; but indeed her t.i.tle alone would have rea.s.sured me, had I for a moment shared her conscientious qualms.

"I am so glad you think so," said Miss Julia, visibly relieved. "Still, I shall not offer the story anywhere until Mr. Delavoye has seen or heard every word of it."

"I thought it was for your own _Parish Magazine_?"

Miss Julia at last obliged me with her most facetious and most confidential smile.

"I am not tied down to the _Parish Magazine_," said she. "There are higher fields. I am not certain that 'His Graceless Grace' is altogether suited to the young--the young parishioner, Mr. Gillon! I must read it over and see. And--yes--I shall invite Mr. Delavoye to come and hear it, before I decide to send it anywhere at all."

The reading actually took place on an evening in May, when the Vicar had accompanied his younger sister up to Exeter Hall; and at the last moment I also received a verbal invitation, delivered and inspired by that rascal Uvo, who declared that I had let him in for the infliction and must bear my share. More justly, he argued that the pair of us might succeed in keeping each other awake, whereas one alone would infallibly disgrace himself; and we had solemnly agreed upon a system of watch-and-watch, by the alternate quarter-of-an-hour, before we presented ourselves at the temporary vicarage after supper.

Miss Julia received us in stiff silk that supplied a sort of sibilant obbligato to a nervous welcome; and her voice maintained a secretive pitch, even when the maid had served coffee and shut the door behind her, lending a surrept.i.tious air to the proceedings before they could be said to have begun. It was impossible not to wonder what the Vicar would have said to see his elderly sister discoursing profane fiction to a pair of heathens who seldom set foot inside his church.

He would scarcely have listened with our resignation; for poor Miss Julia read as badly as she wrote, and never was story opened with clumsier inept.i.tude than hers. We had sheet upon typewritten sheet about the early life and virtuous vicissitudes of some deplorably dull young female in the east end of London; and in my case slumber was imminent when the n.o.ble villain made his entry in the cinnamon waistcoat of the picture at Hampton Court. At that I tried to catch Uvo's eye, but it was already fixed upon the reader's face with an intensity which soon attracted her attention.

"Isn't that your idea of him, Mr. Delavoye?" asked Miss Julia, apprehensively.