Witching Hill Part 24

Mrs. Ricardo, without her hat in the shadow of the old grey wall, but with her glossy hair and glowing colour stamped against it with rich effect: a charming picture in its greenwood frame, especially as she was looking up to greet me with a radiant smile. But I was too taken aback to be appreciative for the moment. And then I decided that the high colouring was a thought too high, and a sudden self-consciousness disappointing after her excellent composure in the much more trying circ.u.mstances of our previous meeting.

"Haven't you been here before, Mr. Gillon?" Mrs. Ricardo seemed surprised, but quite competent to play the guide. "This mossy heap's supposed to have been the roof, and these stone stumps the columns that held it up. There's just that one standing as it was. There should be a 'sylvan prospect' from where I'm sitting; but it must have been choked up for years and years."

"You do know a lot about it!" I cried, recovering my admiration for the pretty woman as she recovered her self-possession. And then she smiled again, but not quite as I had caught her smiling.

"What Mr. Delavoye's friends don't know about Witching Hill oughtn't to be worth knowing!" said Mrs. Ricardo. "I mean what he really knows, not what he makes up, Mr. Gillon. I hear you don't believe in all that any more than I do. But he does seem to have read everything that was ever written about the place. He says this was certainly the Temple of Bacchus in the good old days."

"I don't quite see where Bacchus comes in," said I, thinking that Uvo and Mrs. Ricardo must be friends indeed.

"He's supposed to have been on this old wall behind us, in a fresco or something, by Villikins or somebody. You can see where it's been gouged out, and the stucco with it."

But I had to say what was in my mind. "Is Uvo Delavoye still harping on about his bold bad ancestor, Mrs. Ricardo? Does he still call him his old man of the soil?"

To her, at any rate, yes, he did! She did not think it was a thing he talked about to everybody. But I had hoped it was an extinct folly, since he had not mentioned it as yet to me. It was almost as though Mrs.

Ricardo had taken my old place. Did she discourage him as I had done?

She told me it was his latest ambition to lay the ghost. And I marvelled at their intimacy, and wondered what that curmudgeon of a husband had to say to it!

Yet it seemed natural enough that we should talk about Uvo Delavoye, as I sat on another of the broken columns and lit a cigarette at Mrs.

Ricardo's suggestion. Uvo was one of those people who are the first of bonds between their friends, a fruitful subject, a most human interest in common. So I found myself speaking of him in my turn, with all affection and yet some little freedom, to an almost complete stranger who was drawing me on more deliberately than I saw.

"You were great friends, Mr. Gillon, weren't you?"

"We _are_, and I hope we always shall be."

"It must have been everything for you to have such a friend in such a place!"

"It was so! I stayed on and on because of him. He was the life and soul of the Estate to me."

Mrs. Ricardo looked as though she could have taken the words out of my mouth. "But what a spoilt life, and what a strange soul!" said she, instead; and I saw there was something in Mrs. Ricardo, after all.

She was looking at me and yet through me, as we sat on our broken bits of Ionic columns. She had spoken in a dreamy voice, with a wonderful softening of her bold, flamboyant beauty; for I was not looking through her by any means, but staring harder than I had any business, in a fresh endeavour to remember where we had met before. And for once she had spoken without a certain intonation, which I had hardly noticed in her speech until I missed it now.

"Of course I've heard of all the extraordinary adventures you've both had here," resumed Uvo's new friend, as though to emphasise the terms that they were on.

"Not all of them?" I suggested. There were one or two affairs that he and I were to have kept to ourselves.

"Why not?" she flashed, suspiciously.

"Oh! I don't know."

"Which of them is such a secret?"

She was smiling now, but with obvious effort. Why this pressure on a pointless point? And where _had_ I seen her before?

"Well, there was our very first adventure, for one," said I.

"Underground, you mean?"

"Yes--partly."

I could not help staring now. Mrs. Ricardo had reddened so inexplicably.

"There was no need to tell me the other part!" she said, scornfully. "I was in it--as you know very well!"

Then I did know. She was the bedizened beauty who had raked in the five-pound notes, and smashed a magnum of champagne in her excitement, at the orgy in Sir Christopher Stainsby's billiard room.

"I know it now," I stammered, "but I give you my word----"

"Fiddle!" she interrupted. "You've known it all the time. I've seen it in your face. He gave me away to you, and I shan't forgive him!"

I found myself involved in a heated exposition of the facts. I had never recognised her until that very minute. But I had kept wondering where we had met before. And that was all that she could have seen in my face. As for Uvo Delavoye, when I had spoken to him about it, he had merely a.s.sured me that I must have seen her on the stage: so far and no further had he given her away. Mrs. Ricardo took some a.s.suring and rea.s.suring on the point. But the truth was in me, and in her ultimate pacification she seemed to lose sight of the fact that she herself had done what she accused Uvo of doing. Evidently the leakage of her secret mattered far less to Mrs. Ricardo than the horrible thought that Mr. Delavoye had let it out.

Of course I spoke as though there was nothing to matter in the least to anybody, and asked after Sir Christopher as if the entertainment in his billiard room had been one of the most conventional. It seemed that he had married again in his old age; he had married one of the other ladies of those very revels.

"That's really why I first thought of coming here to live," explained Mrs. Ricardo, with her fine candour. "But there have been all kinds of disagreeables."

She had known about the tunnel before she had heard of it from Uvo; some member of the lively household had discovered its existence, and there had been high jinks down there on more than one occasion. But Lady Stainsby had not been the same person since her marriage. I gathered that she had put her reformed foot down on the underground orgies, but that Captain Ricardo had done his part in the subsequent disagreeables.

It further appeared that the blood-stained lace and the diamond buckle had also been discovered, and that old Sir Christopher had "behaved just like he would, and froze on to both without a word to Mr. Delavoye's grand relations."

I suggested that mining rights might have gone with the freehold, but Mrs. Ricardo quoted Uvo's opinion as to what still ailed Sir Christopher Stainsby. She made it quite clear to me that our friend, at any rate, still laboured under his old obsession, and that she herself took it more seriously than she had professed before one confidence led to another.

"But don't you tell him I told you!" she added as though we were ourselves old friends. "The less you tell Mr. Delavoye of all we've been talking about, the better turn you'll be doing me, Mr. Gillon. It was just like him not to give away ancient history even to you, and I don't think you're the one to tell him how I went and did it myself!"

I could have wished that she had taken that for granted; but at least she felt too finely to bind me down to silence. Altogether I found her a fine creature, certainly in face and form, and almost certainly at heart, if one guessed even charitably at her past, and then at her life in a hostile suburb with a neglectful churl of a husband.

But to admire the woman for her own sake was not to approve of her on all other grounds; and during our friendly and almost fascinating chat I contracted a fairly definite fear that was not removed by the manner of its conclusion. Mrs. Ricardo had looked at a watch pinned to a pretty but audacious blouse, and had risen rather hurriedly. But she had looked at her watch just a minute too late; as we turned the corner of the ruin, there was Delavoye hurrying through the brake towards us; and though he was far enough off to conceal such confusion as Mrs. Ricardo had shown at my appearance on the scene, and to come up saying that he had found me at last, I could not but remember how he had shut himself up for the morning, after advising me to go on the river.

I was uneasy about them both; but it was impossible to say a word to anybody. He never spoke of her; that was another bad sign to my suspicious mind. It was entirely from her that I had drawn my material for suspicion, or rather for anxiety. I did not for a moment suppose that there was anything more than a possibly injudicious friendship between them; it was just the possibilities that stirred my sluggish imagination; and I should not have thought twice about these but for Uvo's marked reserve in speaking of the one other person with whom I now knew that he was extremely unreserved. If only I had known it from him, I should not have deplored the mere detail that Mrs. Ricardo was in one way filling my own old place in his life.

My visit drew to an end; on the last night I simply had to dine in town with a wounded friend from the front. It would have been cruel to get out of it, though Uvo almost tempted me by his keenness that I should go. I warned him, however, that I should come back early. And I was even earlier than my word. And Uvo was not in.

"He's gone out with his pipe," said Sarah, looking gratuitously concerned. "I'm sure I don't know where you'll find him." But this sounded like an afterthought; and there was a something shifty and yet wistful in the old body's manner that inclined me to a little talk with her about the master.

"You don't think he's just gone into the wood, do you, Sarah?"

"Well, he do go there a good deal," said Sarah. "Of course he don't always go that way; but he do go there."

"Might he have gone into Captain Ricardo's, Sarah?"

"He might," said Sarah, with more than dubious emphasis.

"They're his great friends now, aren't they?" I hazarded.

"Not Captain Ricardo, sir," said Sarah. "I've only seen him in the 'ouse but once, and that was when Miss Hamy was married; but we 'ad all sorts then." And Sarah looked as though the highways and hedges had been scoured for guests.

"But do you see much more of Mrs. Ricardo, Sarah?"

"I don't, sir, but Mr. Hugo do," said Sarah, for once off her loyal guard. "He sees more of her than his ma would like."