"Don't you worry about my hand," said Uvo as he glanced up and down the grey old bridge. "It's only a scratch from the blackthorn spikes, but I'd have given a finger to be shot of this devil!"

A flick of his wrist sent the old ring spinning; we saw it meet its own reflection in the gla.s.sy flood, like a salmon-fly beautifully thrown; and more rings came and widened on the waters, till they stirred the mirrored branches of the trees on Richmond Hill.

CHAPTER IV

The Local Colour

The Reverend Charles Brabazon, magnetic Vicar of the adjacent Village, had as strong a personality as one could wish to encounter in real life.

He did what he liked with a congregation largely composed of the motley worldlings of Witching Hill. Small solicitors and west-end tradesmen, bank officials, outside brokers, first-cla.s.s clerks in Government offices, they had not a Sunday soul to call their own, these hard-headed holders of season tickets to Waterloo.

Throughout the summer they flocked to church when their hearts were on the river; in the depths of winter they got up for early celebration on the one morning when they might have lain abed. Their most obsequious devotions did not temper the preacher's truculence, any more than his strongest onslaught discouraged their good works. They gave of their substance at his every call, and were even more lavish on their own initiative. Thus, in my second summer at Witching Hill, the Vicarage was practically rebuilt out of the pockets of parishioners; and we had no difficulty in providing a furnished subst.i.tute on the favourite woodland side of Mulcaster Park.

Great was the jealousy in Witching Hill Road, but futile the fluttering of our Queen Anne dovecots; for we saw very little more of the Vicar for having him in our midst. He was always either immured in his study, or else hurrying to or from some service or parochial engagement; and although he had a delightful roadside manner, and the same fine smile for high and low, he would stop to speak to neither on his way. Out of church, in fact, Mr. Brabazon preserved a wise aloofness which only served to emphasise the fierce intimacy of his pulpit utterances, and combined with his contempt of popularity to render him by far the most popular figure in the neighbourhood.

It goes without saying that this remarkable man was a High Churchman and a celibate. His house was kept, and his social short-comings made good, by two Misses Brabazon, each as unlike him as possible in her own way. Miss Ruth, who was younger, added to her brother's energy a sympathetic charm and a really good voice which made her the darling of the Parish Hall and humbler edifices. Miss Julia's activities were more sedentary and domestic, as perhaps became the least juvenile of the trio, and so it was that I saw most of her. We had a whole day together over the inventory, and it was Miss Julia who interviewed me about everything else connected with the house. She was never short with me on those occasions, never ungracious or (what is worse) unduly gracious, but she had always a pleasant word, and nearly always an innocent little joke as well. Innocence and jocosity were two of her leading characteristics; another was a genuine but ingenuous literary faculty.

This she exercised in editing the _Parish Magazine_, and supplying it with moral serials which occasionally reached volume form under the auspices of the Religious Tract Society.

On an evening late in April, when the cuckoo was wound up in the wood behind Mulcaster Park, and most of the beds in front were flowering for the first time, a gaunt figure came to the gate of the temporary vicarage and beckoned to me pa.s.sing on the other side of the road. It was Miss Julia, and I found her looking gently humorous and knowing across the gate.

"The trees are coming out so beautifully," she began, "in the grounds behind these gardens. I was wondering if it would be possible to procure a permit to go over them, Mr. Gillon."

"Do you mean for yourself, Miss Brabazon?"

"Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do."

As she spoke I could not but notice that she glanced ever so slightly towards the house behind her, and that her voice had fallen to a murmur, while a mottled colouring appeared between the lines of her guileless visage.

"I'm afraid I can't do anything," I said. "But the Vicar could, Miss Brabazon!" I added with conviction. "A line from him to Sir Christopher Stainsby----"

I stopped because Miss Julia shook her head so decidedly.

"That would never do, Mr. Gillon. Sir Christopher is such a very rabid Dissenter."

"So I have heard," I admitted, thinking rather of what I had seen. "But I don't believe he's as narrow as you think."

"I couldn't trouble the Vicar about it, in any case," said Miss Brabazon, hurriedly. "I shouldn't even like him to know that I had troubled you, Mr. Gillon. He's such a severe critic that I never tell him what I'm writing until it's finished."

"Then you are writing something about Witching Hill House, Miss Brabazon?"

"I was thinking of it. I haven't begun. But I never saw any place that I felt such a desire to write about. The old house in the old woods, say a hundred years ago! Don't you think it an ideal scene for a story, Mr.

Gillon?"

"It depends on the story you want to tell," said I, sententiously.

A strange light was burning in the weak eyes of Miss Julia. It might almost have been a flicker of the divine fire. But now she dropped her worn eyelids, and gazed into the road with the dreamy cunning of the born creator.

"I should have quite a plot," she decided. "It would be ... yes, it would be about some extraordinary person who lived in there, in the wood and the house, only of course ages and ages ago. I think I should make him--in fact I'm quite sure he would be--a very wicked person, though of course he'd have to come all right in the end."

"You must be thinking of the man who really did live there."

"Who was that?"

"The infamous Lord Mulcaster."

"Really, Mr. Gillon? I don't think I ever heard of him. Of course I know the present family by name; aren't these Delavoyes connected with them in some way?"

I explained the connection as I knew it, which was not very thoroughly.

But I unfortunately said enough to cause a rapid fall in poor Miss Julia's mottled countenance.

"Then I must give up the idea of that story. They would think I meant their ancestor, and that would never do. I'm sorry, because I never felt so inclined to write anything before. But I'm very glad you told me, Mr.

Gillon."

"But they wouldn't mind a bit, Miss Brabazon! They're not in the least sensitive about him," I a.s.sured her.

"I couldn't think of it," replied Miss Julia, haughtily. "It would be in the very worst of taste."

"But Uvo would love it. He's full of the old villain. He might help you if you'd let him. He's at the British Museum at this moment, getting deeper and deeper into what he calls the family mire."

"I happen to see him coming down the road," observed Miss Julia, dryly.

"I must really beg that you will not refer to the subject again, Mr.

Gillon."

But in her voice and manner there was a hesitating reluctance that emboldened me to use my own judgment about that, especially when Uvo Delavoye (whose mother and sister were keen Brabazonians) himself introduced the topic on joining us, with a gratuitous remark about his "unfilial excavations in Bloomsbury."

"I've opened up a new lazar-house this very day," he informed us, with shining eyes, when Miss Julia had shown an interest in spite of herself.

"By the way," I cut in, "don't you think it would all make magnificent material for a novel, Uvo?"

"If you could find anybody to publish it!" he answered, laughing.

"You wouldn't mind if he was put into a book--and the place as well?"

"_I_ wouldn't, if n.o.body else didn't! Why? Who's thinking of doing us the honour?"

Dear Miss Julia coughed and laughed with delicious coyness. My liberty had been condoned.

"Was it you, Miss Brabazon?" cried Uvo, straightening his face with the nerve that never failed him at a climax.

"Well, it was and it wasn't," she replied, exceeding slyly. "I did think I should like to write a little story about Witching Hill House, and put in rather a bad character; at least he would begin by being rather undesirable, perhaps. But I was forgetting that the place had been in your family, Mr. Delavoye. I certainly never knew, until Mr. Gillon told me, that one of the Lords Mulcaster had been--er--perhaps--no better than he ought to have been."

"To put it mildly," said Delavoye, with smiling face and shrieking eyes.

"You may paint the bad old hat as black as mine, Miss Brabazon, and still turn him out a saint compared with the villain of the case I've been reading up to-day. So you really needn't worry about anybody's susceptibilities. Lay on the local colour inches deep! You won't make the place as red as the old gentleman painted it in blood and wine!"

"Really, Mr. Delavoye!" cried Miss Julia, jocosely shocked. "You mustn't forget that my story would only appear in our _Parish Magazine_--unless the R.T.S. took it afterwards."