Witching Hill (4 page)

"I knew it!" exclaimed Delavoye in wild excitement.

"May I ask what you knew?"

Coysh was staring, as well he might.

"Only that the whole mischief must have happened since these people came here to live!"

"Do you suggest that they've been living beyond their means?"

"I shouldn't be surprised," said Delavoye, as readily as though nothing else had been in his mind.

"Well, and I should say you were right," rejoined the engineer, "if it wasn't for the funniest part of all. When a straight man goes off the rails, there's generally some tremendous cause; but one of the surprises of this case, as my banker has managed to ascertain, is that Abercromby Royle is in a position to repay every penny. He has more than enough to do it, lying idle in his bank; so there was no apparent motive for the crime, and I for my part am prepared to treat it as a sudden aberration."

"Exactly!" cried Delavoye, as though he were the missing man's oldest friend and more eager than either of us to find excuses for him.

"Otherwise," continued Coysh, "I wouldn't have taken you gentlemen into my confidence. But the plain fact is that I'm prepared to condone the felony at my own risk in return for immediate and complete restitution." He turned his attention entirely to me. "Now, Royle can't make good unless you help him by helping me to find him. I won't be hard on him if you do, I promise you! Not a dozen men in England shall ever know. But if I have to hunt for him it'll be with detectives and a warrant, and the fat'll be in the fire for all the world to smell!"

What could I do but give in after that? I had not promised to keep any secrets, and it was clearly in the runaway's interests to disclose his destination on the conditions laid down. Of his victim's good faith I had not a moment's doubt; it was as patent as his magnanimous compassion for Abercromby Royle. He blamed himself for not looking after his own show; it was unfair to take a poor little pettifogging solicitor and turn him by degrees into one's trusted business man; it was trying him too high altogether. He spoke of the poor wretch as flying from a wrath that existed chiefly in his own imagination, and even for that he blamed himself. It appeared that Coysh had vowed to Royle that he would have no mercy on anybody who was swindling him, no matter who it might be. He had meant it as a veiled warning, but Royle might have known his bark was worse than his bite, and have made a clean breast of the whole thing there and then. If only he had! And yet I believe we all three thought the better of him because he had not.

But it was not too late, thanks to me! I could not reveal the boat or line by which Royle was travelling, because it had never occurred to me to inquire, but Coysh seemed confident of finding out. His confidence was of the childlike type which is the foible of some strong men. He knew exactly what he was going to do, and it sounded the simplest thing in the world. Royle would be met on the other side by a cable which would bring him to his senses - and by one of Pinkerton's young men who would shadow him until it did. Either he would cable back the uttermost farthing through his bank, or that young man would tap him on the shoulder without more ado. It was delightful to watch a powerful mind clearing wire entanglements of detail in its leap to a picturesque conclusion; and we had further displays for our benefit; for there was no up-train for an hour and more, and that set the inventor off upon his wonderful bicycle, which was to accumulate hill power by getting wound up automatically on the level. Nothing is so foolish as the folly of genius, and I shall never forget that great man's obstinate defence of his one supreme fiasco, or the diagram that he drew on an unpapered wall while Uvo Delavoye and I attended with insincere solemnity.

But Uvo was no better when we were at last alone. And his craze seemed to me the crazier of the two.

"It's as plain as a pikestaff, my good Gillon! This fellow Royle comes here an honest man, and instantly starts on a career of fraud - for no earthly reason whatsoever!"

"So you want to find him an unearthly one?"

"I don't; it's there - and a worse case than the last. Old Sir Christopher was the only sober man at his own orgy, but my satanic ancestor seems to have made a mighty clean job of this poor brute!"

"I'm not so sure," said I gloomily. "I'm only sure of one thing - that the dead can't lead the living astray - and you'll never convince me that they can."

It was no use arguing, for we were oil and vinegar on this matter, and were beginning to recognise the fact. But I was grateful to Uvo Delavoye for his attitude on another point. I tried to explain why I had never told him about my last meeting with Abercromby Royle. It was not necessary; there he understood me in a moment; and so it was in almost everything except this one perverse obsession, due in my opinion to a morbid imagination, which in its turn I attributed to the wretched muddle that the Egyptian climate had made of poor Uvo's inner man. While not actually an invalid, there was little hope of his being fit for work of any sort for a year or more; and I remember feeling glad when he told me he had obtained a reader's ticket for the British Museum, but very sorry when I found that his principal object was to pursue his Witching Hill will-o'-the-wisp to an extent impossible in the local library. Indeed, it was no weather for close confinement on even the healthiest intellectual quest. Yet it was on his way home from the museum that Uvo had picked up Coysh outside my office, and that was where he was when Coysh came down again before the week was out.

This time I was in, and sweltering over the schedule of finishings for the house in which he had found me before, when my glass door darkened and the whole office shook beneath his ominous tread. With his back to the light, the little round man looked perfectly black with rage; and if he did not actually shake his fist in my face, that is the impression that I still retain of his outward attitude.

His words came in a bitter torrent, but their meaning might have been stated in one breath. Royle had not gone to America at all. Neither in his own name nor any other had he booked his passage at the London office of the Tuesday, or either of the Wednesday steamers, nor as yet in any of those sailing on the following Saturday. So Coysh declared, with characteristic conviction, as proof positive that a given being could not possibly have sailed for the United States under any conceivable disguise or alias. He had himself made a round of the said London offices, armed with photographs of Abercromby Royle. That settled the matter. It also branded me in my visitor's blazing eyes as accessory before or after the flight, and the deliberate author of a false scent which had wasted a couple of invaluable days.

It was no use trying to defend myself, and Coysh told me it was none. He had no time to listen to a "jackanapes in office," as he called me to my face. I could not help laughing in his. All he wanted and intended to discover was the whereabouts of Mrs. Royle - the last thing I knew, or had thought about before that moment - but in my indignation I referred him to the post-office. By way of acknowledgment he nearly shivered my glass door behind him.

I mopped my face and awaited Delavoye with little patience, which ran out altogether when he entered with a radiant face, particularly full of his own egregious researches in Bloomsbury.

"I can't do with that rot to-night!" I cried. "Here's this fat little fool going to get on the tracks of Mrs. Royle, and all through me! The woman's an invalid; this may finish her off. If it were the man himself I wouldn't mind. Where the devil do you suppose he is?"

"I'll tell you later," said Uvo Delavoye, without moving a muscle of his mobile face.

"You'll tell me - - see here, Delavoye!" I spluttered. "This is a serious matter to me; if you're going to rot about it I'd rather you cleared out!"

"But I'm not rotting, Gilly," said he in a different tone, yet with a superior twinkle that I never liked. "I never felt less like it in my life. I really have a pretty shrewd idea of my own, but you're such an unbelieving dog that you must give me time before I tell you what it is. I should like first to know rather more about these alleged peculations and this apparent flight, and whether Mrs. Royle's in it all. I'm rather interested in the lady. But if you care to come in for supper you shall hear my views."

Of course I cared. But across the solid mahogany of more spacious days, though we had it to ourselves, we both seemed disinclined to resume the topic. Delavoye had got up some choice remnant of his father's cellar, grotesquely out of keeping with our homely meal, but avowedly in my honour, and it seemed a time to talk about matters on which we were agreed. I was afraid I knew the kind of idea he had described as "shrewd"; what I dreaded was some fresh application of his ingenious doctrine as to the local quick and dead, and a heated argument in our extravagant cups. And yet I did want to know what was in my companion's mind about the Royles; for my own was no longer free from presentiments for which there was some ground in the facts of the case. But I was not going to start the subject; and Delavoye steadily avoided it until we strolled out afterward (with humble pipes on top of that Madeira!). Then his arm slipped through mine, and it was with one accord that we drifted up the road toward the house with the drawn blinds.

All these days, on my constant perambulations, it had stared me in the face with its shut windows, its dirty step, its idle chimneys. Every morning those odious blinds had greeted me like red eyelids hiding dreadful eyes. And once I had remembered that the very letter-box was set like teeth against the outer world. But this summer evening, as the house came between us and a noble moon, all was so changed and chastened that I thought no evil until Uvo spoke.

"I can't help feeling that there's something wrong!" he exclaimed below his breath.

"If Coysh is not mistaken," I whispered back, "there's something very wrong indeed."

He looked at me as though I had missed the point, and I awaited an impatient intimation of the fact. But there had been something strange about Uvo Delavoye all the evening; he had singularly little to say for himself, and now he was saying it in so low a voice that I insensibly lowered mine, though we had the whole road almost to ourselves.

"You said you found old Royle quite alone the other night?"

"Absolutely - so he said."

"You've no reason to doubt it, have you?"

"No reason - none. Still, it did seem odd that he should hang on to the end - the master of the house - without a soul to do anything for him."

"I quite agree with you," said Delavoye emphatically. "It's very odd. It means something. I believe I know what, too!"

But he did not appear disposed to tell me, and I was not going to press him on the point. Nor did I share his confidence in his own powers of divination. What could he know of the case, that was unknown to me - unless he had some outside source of information all the time?

That, however, I did not believe; at any rate he seemed bent upon acquiring more. He pushed the gate open, and was on the doorstep before I could say a word. I had to follow in order to remind him that his proceedings might be misunderstood if they were seen.

"Not a bit of it!" he had the nerve to say as he bent over the tarnished letter-box. "You're with me, Gillon, and isn't it your job to keep an eye on these houses?"

"Yes, but - - "

"What's the matter with this letter-box? It won't open."

"That's so that letters can't be shot into the empty hall. He nailed it up on purpose before he went. I found him at it."

"And didn't it strike you as an extraordinary thing to do?" Uvo was standing upright now. "Of course it did, or you'd have mentioned it to Coysh and me the other day."

It was no use denying the fact.

"What's happening to their letters?" he went on, as though I could know.

"I expect they're being re-directed."

"To the wife?"

"I suppose so."

And my voice sank with my heart, and I felt ashamed, and repeated myself aggressively.

"Exactly!" There was no supposing about Uvo. "The wife at some mysterious address in the country - poor soul!"

"Where are you going now?"

He had dived under the front windows, muttering to himself as much as to me. I caught him up at the high side gate into the back garden.

"Lend me a hand," said Delavoye when he had tried the latch.

"You're not going over?"

"That I am, and it'll be your duty to follow. Or I could let you through. Well - if you won't!"

And in the angle between party-fence and gate he was struggling manfully when I went to his aid as a lesser evil; in a few seconds we were both in the back garden of the empty house, with the gate still bolted behind us.

"Now, if it were ours," resumed Delavoye when he had taken breath, "I should say the lavatory window was the vulnerable point. Lavatory window, please!"

"But, Delavoye, look here!"

"I'm looking," said he, and we faced each other in the broad moonlight that flooded the already ragged lawn.

"If you think I'm going to let you break into this house, you're very much mistaken."

I had my back to the windows I meant to hold inviolate. No doubt the moon revealed some resolution in my face and bearing, for I meant what I said until Delavoye spoke again.

"Oh, very well! If it's coming to brute force I have no more to say. The police will have to do it, that's all. It's their job, when you come to think of it; but it'll be jolly difficult to get them to take it on, whereas you and I - - "

And he turned away with a shrug to point his admirable aposiopesis.

"Man Uvo," I said, catching him by the arm, "what's this job you're jawing about?"

"You know well enough. You're in the whole mystery of these people far deeper than I am. I only want to find the solution."

"And you think you'll find it in their house?"

"I know I should," said Uvo with quiet confidence. "But I don't say it'll be a pleasant find. I shouldn't ask you to come in with me, but merely to accept some responsibility afterwards - to-night, if we're spotted. It will probably involve more kudos in the end. But I don't want to let you in for more than you can stand meanwhile, Gillon."