Witching Hill Part 20

"But what an infernal disgrace!" cried the colonel, shuffling to his slippered feet. "Why, the d.a.m.ned things ought to go off if you raised them from the bottom of the sea! I'll let the makers have it in next week's _Field_, libel or no libel, you see if I don't! But that won't console either you or me, Mr. Delavoye, and I can't apologise enough. I only hope the scoundrels were no more successful here than they were at my house?"

"I'm afraid they didn't go quite so empty away."

"G.o.d bless my soul! Those cartridge makers ought to indemnify you. But perhaps they left some traces? That was the worst of it in my case--neither footmark nor finger-print worth anything to any body!"

"I'm afraid they left neither here."

"But you don't know that, Mr. Delavoye; you can't know it before morning. The frost broke up with the fog, you must remember, and the ground's as soft as b.u.t.ter. Which way did the blackguards run?"

"Through the garden and over the wall at the back into----"

"Then they _must_ have left their card this time!" said Colonel Cheffins, ten years younger in his excitement, and even more alert and wide-awake than we had found him the night before. He did not conceal his anxiety to conduct immediate investigations in the garden. But Uvo persuaded him to wait till we had finished our drinks, and we got him to sit down at the desk, trembling with keenness.

"You see," said Uvo, leaning forward in the arm-chair and opening a drawer in the pedestal between them, "one of them did leave something in the shape of a card, and here it is."

And there lay the cast shoe, in the open drawer, under the colonel's eyes and mine as I looked over his shoulder.

"Why, it's an evening pump!" he exclaimed.

"Exactly."

"Made by quite a good maker, I should say. All in one piece, without a seam, I mean."

"I see. I hadn't noticed that; but then I haven't your keen eye, colonel. You really must come out into the garden with us."

"I shall be delighted, and we might take this with us to fit into any tracks----"

"Precisely; but there's just one thing I should like you to do first, if you would," said Uvo deferentially, and I bent still further over the colonel's shiny head.

"What's that, Mr. Delavoye?"

"Just to try on the gla.s.s slipper--so to speak, Colonel Cheffins--because it's so extraordinarily like the one you were wearing when you were here before!"

There was a moment's pause in which I saw myself quite plainly in the colonel's head. Then, with a grunt and a shrug, he reached out his left hand for the shoe, but his right slid inside his Jaeger jacket, and that same second my arms were round him. I felt and grabbed his revolver as soon as he did, and I held the barrel clear of our bodies while he emptied all six chambers through his garments into the floor.

Then we bound our fine fellow with his own rope-ladder, reloaded both revolvers with unexpurgated cartridges discovered upon his person, and prepared to hold a grand reception of his staff and "pupils." But those young gentlemen had not misconstrued the cannonade. And it was some days before the last of the gang was captured.

They were all tried together at the December sessions of the Central Criminal Court, when their elaborate methods were very much admired. The skilful impersonation of the typical Army coach by the head of the gang, and the adequate acting of his confederates in the subordinate posts of pupils and servants, were features which appealed to the public mind.

The taking of the house in Mulcaster Park, as a base for operations throughout a promising neighbourhood, was a measure somewhat overshadowed by the brilliant blind of representing it as the scene of the first robberies. It was generally held, however, that in presenting a predestined victim with a revolver and doctored cartridges, the master thief had gone too far, and that for that alone he deserved the exemplary sentence to which he listened like the officer and gentleman he had never been. So the great actor lives the part he plays.

It is a perquisite of witnesses to hear these popular trials with a certain degree of comfort; and so it was that I was able to nudge Uvo Delavoye, at the last soldierly inclination of that bald bad head, before it disappeared from a world to which it has not yet returned.

"Well, at any rate," I whispered, "you can't claim any Witching Hill influence this time."

"I wish I couldn't," he answered in a still lower voice.

"But you've just heard that our bogus colonel has been a genuine criminal all his life."

"I wasn't thinking of him," said Uvo Delavoye. "I was thinking of a still worse character, who really did the thing I felt so like that night before we heard them in the bathroom. Not a word, Gilly! I know you've forgiven me. But I'm rather sorry for these beggars, for they came to me like flowers in May."

And as his face darkened with a shame unseen all day in that doleful dock, it was some comfort to me to feel that it had never been less like its debased image at Hampton Court.

CHAPTER VII

The Locked Room

It was no great coincidence that we should have been speaking of Edgar Nettleton that night. Uvo Delavoye was full of him just then, and I had the man on my mind for other reasons. Besides, I had to talk to Uvo about something, since he was down with a quinsy caught from the perfect sanitation in advertised vogue on the Estate, and could hardly open his own mouth. And perhaps I had to talk to somebody about the unpleasant duty hanging over me in connection with this fellow Nettleton, who had taken his house about the same time as Colonel Cheffins and his gang, had made up to Delavoye over that affair, and was himself almost as undesirable a tenant from my point of view.

"I know he's a friend of yours, and I haven't come to curse him to your face," I had been saying. "But if you would just tell Nettleton, when you see him again, that we're in dead earnest this time, you might be doing both him and us a service. I sent him a final demand yesterday; if he doesn't pay up within the week, my orders are to distrain without further notice. Muskett's furious about the whole thing. He blames me for ever having truck with such a fellow in the first instance. But when a man has been science beak in a public school--and _such_ a school--it sounds good enough for Witching Hill, doesn't it? Who would have thought he'd had the sack? Public-school masters don't often get it."

"They've got to do something pretty desperate first, I fancy," whispered Uvo, with a gleam in his sunken eyes. He had not denied the fact. I felt encouraged to elaborate my grievance against Edgar Nettleton.

"Besides, I had his banker's reference. That was all right; yet we had trouble to get our very first rent, more trouble over the second, and this time there's going to be a devil of a row. I shouldn't wonder if Nettleton had a bill of sale over every stick. I know he's owing all the tradesmen. He may be a very clever chap, and all that, but I can't help saying that he strikes me as a bit of a wrong 'un, Uvo."

Of course I had not started with the intention of saying quite so much.

But the brunt of the unpleasantness was falling on my shoulders; and the fellow had made friends with my friend, whose shoes he was not fit to black. Uvo, moreover, was still according me a patient, interested hearing, as he lay like a bright-eyed log in his bed at the top of No.

7. Altogether it was not in my allowance of human nature to lose such an opportunity of showing him his new friend in his true colours.

"He _is_ clever," whispered Uvo, as though that was the bond between them. "He knows something about everything, and he's a wonderful carpenter and mechanic. You must really see the burglar-trap that he concocted after the scare. If another Cheffins paid him a visit, he'd put his foot in it with a vengeance."

"It would be six of one and very nearly half a dozen of the other," said I with hardihood. "Set a Nettleton to catch a Cheffins, as you might say, Uvo!"

But he only smiled, as though he would not have hesitated to say it in fun. "Of course you're only joking, Gilly, but I could quite understand it if you weren't. There's no vice in old Nettleton, let alone crime; but there's a chuckle-headed irresponsibility that might almost let him in for either before he knew it. He never does seem to know what he's doing, and I'm sure he never worries about anything he's once done. If he did, he'd have gone further afield from the scene of his downfall, or else taken rooms in town instead of a red elephant of a house that he evidently can't afford. As a tenant, I quite agree that he is hopeless."

"If only he hadn't come here!" I grumbled. "What on earth can have brought him to Witching Hill, of all places?"

Uvo's eyes were dancing in the light of the reading gas-lamp, with the smelly tube, which had been connected up with his bedroom bracket.

"Of course," he whispered, "you wouldn't admit for a moment that it might be the call of the soil, and all there's in it, Gilly?"

"No, I wouldn't; but I'll tell you one thing," I exclaimed, as it struck me for the first time: "the man you describe is not the man to trust with all those morbid superst.i.tions of yours! I know he enters into them, because you told me he did, and I know how much you wanted to find some one who would. But so much the worse for you both, if he's the kind you say he is. An idle man, too, and apparently alone in the world! I don't envy you if Nettleton really does come under the influence of your old man of the soil, and plays down to him!"

"My dear Gilly, this is a great concession," whispered Uvo, on his elbow with surprise.

"I don't mean it for one," said I st.u.r.dily. "I only mean the influence of your own conception of your old man and his powers. I disbelieve in him and them as much as ever, but I don't disbelieve in your ability to make both exist in some weaker mind than your own. And where they do catch on, remember, those wild ideas of yours may always get the upper hand. It isn't everybody who can think the things you do, Uvo, and never look like doing 'em!"

"I don't agree with you a bit, Gilly. I never believe those blithering blighters who attribute their crimes to the bad example of some criminal hero of the magazines or of the stage. Villain-worship doesn't carry you to that length unless you're a bit of a villain in the first instance."

"But suppose you are?" I argued, almost before I saw the point that I was making. "Suppose you have as few scruples, principles, 'pangs and fears'--call them what you like--as this fellow Nettleton. Suppose you're full of fire of sorts, but also as irresponsible and chuckle-headed as you yourself say he is. Well, then, _I_ say, it's taking responsibility for two to go pumping your theories into as sensitive an engine as all that!"

Uvo clapped his thin hands softly as there came a knock at the door.

"Well, he's a practical man, Gilly, I must admit, so let's leave it at that. Come in! What is it, Jane?"

"The servant from Mr. Nettleton's, sir, wants to see Mr. Gillon," said the maid.