Coplestone was the first of our tenants1 who had taken his house through me, and I was extremely proud of him. It was precisely2 the pride of the mighty3 hunter in his first kill; for Coplestone was big game in his way, and even of a leonine countenance4, with his crested5 wave of tawny6 hair and his clear sunburnt skin. In early life, as an incomparable oar7, he had made a name which still had a way of creeping into the sporting papers; and at forty the same fine figure and untarnished face were a walking advertisement of virtue8. But now he had also the grim eyes and stubborn jaw9 of the man who has faced big trouble; he wore sombre ties that suggested the kind of trouble it had been; and he settled down among us to a solitude10 only broken in the holidays of his only child, then a boy of twelve at a preparatory school.
I first heard of the boy's existence when Coplestone chose the papers for his house. Anything seemed good enough for the "three reception-rooms and usual offices"; but over a bedroom and a play room on the first floor we were an hour deciding against every pattern in the books, and then on the exact self-colour to be obtained elsewhere. It was at the end of that hour that a chance remark, about the evening paper and the latest cricket, led to a little conversation, insignificant11 in itself, yet enough to bring Coplestone and me into touch about better things than house decoration. Often after that, when he came down of an afternoon, he would look in at the office and leave me his Pall12 Mall. And he brought the boy in with him on the first day of the midsummer holidays.
"Ronnie's a keen cricketer at present," said Coplestone on that occasion. "But he's got to be a wet-bob like his old governor when he goes on to Eton. That's what we're here for, isn't it, Ronnie? We're going to take each other on the river every blessed day of the holidays."
Ronnie beamed with the brightest little face in all the world. He had bright brown eyes and dark brown hair, and his skin burnt a delicate brown instead of the paternal13 pink. His expression was his father's, but not an atom of his colouring. His mother must have been a brunette and a beautiful woman. I could not help thinking of her as I looked at the beaming boy who seemed to have forgotten his loss, if he had ever realised it. And yet it was just a touch of something in his face, a something pensive14 and constrained15, when he was not smiling, that gave him also such a look of Coplestone at times.
But as a rule Ronnie was sizzling with happiness and excitement; and it was my privilege to see a lot of him those hot holidays. Coplestone did not go away for a single night or day. Most mornings one met him and his boy in flannels16, on their way down to the river, laden17 with their lunch. But because the exclusive society of the best of boys must eventually bore the most affectionate of men, I was sometimes invited to join the picnic, and on Saturdays and Sundays I accepted more than once. Those, however, were the days on which I was nearly always bespoke19 by Uvo Delavoye, and once when I said so it ended in our all going off together in a bigger boat. That day marked a decline in Ronnie's regard for me as an ex-member of a minor20 school eleven. It was not, perhaps, that he admired me less, but that Delavoye, who played no games at all, had nevertheless a way with him that fascinated man and boy alike.
With Ronnie, it was a way of cracking jokes and telling stories, and taking an extraordinary interest in the boy's preparatory school, so that its rather small beer came bubbling out in a sparkling brew21 that Coplestone himself had failed to tap. Then Uvo could talk like an inspired professional about the games he could not play, about books like an author, and about adventures like a born adventurer. In Egypt, moreover, he had seen a little life that went a long way in the telling; conversely, one always felt that he had done a bigger thing or two out there than he pretended. To a small boy, at all events, he was irresistible22. Had he been an usher23 at a school like Ronnie's he would have had a string of them on either arm at every turn. As it was, a less sensible father might well have been jealous of him before the holidays were nearly over.
But it was just in the holidays that Coplestone was at his best; when the boy went back in September, we were to see him at his worst. In the beginning he was merely moody25 and depressed26, and morose27 towards us two as creatures who had served our turn. The more we tried to cheer his solitude, the less encouragement we received. If we cared to call again at Christmas, he hinted, we should be welcome, but not before. We watched him go off bicycling alone in the red autumn afternoons. We saw his light on half of the night; late as we were, he was always later; and now he was never to be seen at all of a morning. But his grim eyes had lost their light, his ruddy face had changed its shade, and erelong I saw him reeling in broad daylight.
Coplestone had taken to the bottle—and as a strong man takes to everything—without fear or shame. Yet somehow I felt it was for the first time in his life; so did Delavoye, but on other grounds. I did not believe he could have been the man he was when he came to us, if this curse had ever descended28 on Coplestone before. Yet he seemed to take it rather as a blessing29, as a sudden discovery which he was a fool not to have made before. This was no case of surreptitious, shamefaced tippling; it was a cynically30 open and defiant31 downfall, at once an outrage32 on a more than decent community, and a new interest in many admirable lives.
Soon there were complaints which I was requested to transmit to Coplestone in his next lucid33 interval34. But I only pretended to have done so. I thought the complainants a set of self-righteous busybodies, and I vastly preferred the good will of the delinquent35. That was partly on Ronnie's account, partly for the sake of the man's own magnificent past, but partly also because his present seemed to me a fleeting36 phase of sheer insanity37, which would end as suddenly as it had supervened. The form was too bad to be true, even if Coplestone had ever shown it before; and there was now some evidence that he had not.
Delavoye had come down from town with eyes as bright as Ronnie's.
"You remember Sawrey-Biggerstaff by name? He was second for the Diamonds the second year Coplestone won them, and he won them himself the year after. I met him to-day with a man who lunched me at the United University. I told him we had Coplestone down here, and asked him if it was true that he had ever been off the rails like this before, only without breathing a word about his being off them now. Sawrey-Biggerstaff swore that he had never heard of such a libel, or struck a more abstemious38 hound than Harry39 Coplestone, or ever heard of him being or ever having been anything else! So you must see what it all means, Gilly."
"It means that he's never got over the loss of his wife."
"But that happened nearly three years ago. Ronnie told me. Why didn't the old boy break out before? Why save it all up for Witching Hill?"
"I know what you're going to say."
"But isn't it obvious? Our wicked old man drank like an aquarium40. His vices41 are the weeds of this polluted soil; they crop up one after the other, and with inveterate42 irony43 he's allotted44 this one to the noblest creature on the place. It's for us to save him by hook or crook45—or rather it's my own hereditary46 job."
"And how do you mean to set about it?"
"You'll be angry with me, Gilly, but I shan't be happy till I see his house on your hands again. It's the only chance—to drive him into fresh woods and pastures new!"
I was angry. I declined to discuss the matter any further; but I stuck to my opinion that the cloud would vanish as quickly as it had gathered. And Coplestone of all men was man enough to stand his ground and live it down.
But first he must take himself in hand, instead of which I had to own that he was going from bad to worse. He was a man of leisure, and he drank as though he had found his vocation47 in the bottle. He was a lonely man, and he drank as though drink was a friend in need and not the deadliest foe48. He was the only drunkard I ever knew who drank with impenitent49 zest50; and I saw something of him at his worst; he was more approachable than he had been before his great surrender. All October and November he kept it up, his name a byword far beyond the confines of the Estate, and by December he must have been near the inevitable51 climax52. Then he disappeared. The servants had no idea of his whereabouts; but he had taken luggage. That was the best reason for believing him to be still alive, until he turned up with his boy for the Christmas holidays.
It would be too much to say that he looked as he had looked last holidays. The man had aged53; he seemed even a little shaken, but not more than by a moderate dose of influenza54; and to a casual eye the improvement was more astounding55 than the previous deterioration56, especially in its rapidity. His spirits were at least as good as they had been before, his hospitality in keeping with the season. I ate my Christmas dinner with father and son, and Delavoye and I first-footed them on New Year's morning. What was most remarkable57 on these occasions was the way Coplestone drank his champagne58, with the happy moderation of a man who has never exceeded in his life. There was now no shadow of excess, but neither was there any of the weakling's recourse to the opposite extreme of meticulous59 austerity. A doctor might have forbidden even a hair of the sleeping dog, but to us young fellows it was a joy to see our hero so completely his own man once more.
Early in January came a frost—a thrilling frost—with skating on the gravel-pit ponds beyond the Village. It was a pastime in which I had taken an untutored delight, all the days of my northern youth, and now I put in every hour I could at the clumsy execution of elementary figures. But Coplestone had spent some winters in Switzerland, and he was a past master in the Continental60 style. Ordinary skaters would form a ring to watch his dazzling displays, and those who had not seen him in the autumn must have found it hard to credit the whispers of those who had. His pink skin regained61 its former purity, his blue eyes shone like fairy lamps, and the whole ice rang with the music of his "edge" as he sped careening like a human yacht. It was better still to watch him patiently imparting the rudiments62 to Ronnie, who picked them up as a small boy will, and worked so hard that the perspiration63 would stand upon the smooth brown face for all that wondrous64 frost. It froze, more or less, all the rest of those holidays, and the Coplestones never missed a day until the last of all. I was hoping to find them on the ice at dusk, if only I could manage to get away in time, but early in the afternoon Uvo Delavoye came along to disabuse65 my mind.
"That young Ronnie's caught a chill," said he—"I thought he would. It'll keep him at home for another day or two, so the ill wind may blow old Coplestone a bit of good. I'm feeling a bit anxious about him, Gilly; wild horses won't drag him from this haunted hill! Just at this moment, however, he's on his way to Richmond to see if he can get Ronnie the new Wisden; and I'm sneaking66 up to town because I know it's not to be had nearer. I was wondering if you could make time to look him up while we're gone?"
I made it there and then at the risk of my place; it was not so often that I had Ronnie to myself. But at the very gate I ceased to think about the child. A Pickford van was delivering something at the house. At a glance I knew it for a six-gallon jar of whisky—to see poor Coplestone some little way into the Easter term.
Ronnie lay hot and dry in his bed, but brown and bright as he had looked upon the ice, and sizzling with the exuberance67 of a welcome that warmed my heart. He told me, of course, that it was "awful rot" losing the last day like this; but, on the other hand, he seemed delighted with his room—he always was delighted with something—and professed68 himself rather glad of an opportunity of appreciating it as it deserved. Indeed, there was not a lazy bone in his little body, and I doubt if he had spent an unnecessary minute in his bedroom all the holidays. But they really were delightful69 quarters, those two adjoining rooms for which no paper in our stock had been good enough. Both were now radiant in a sky-blue self-colour that transported one to the tropics, and certainly looked better than I thought it would when I had the trouble of procuring70 it.
In the bedroom the blue was only broken by some simple white furniture, by a row of books over the bed, and by groups of the little eleven in which Ronnie already had a place, and photographs of his father at one or two stages of his great career. I was still exploring when an eager summons brought me to the bedside.
"Let's play cricket!" cried Ronnie—"do you mind? With a pack of cards—my own invention! Everything up to six counts properly; all over six count singles, except the picture cards, and most of them get you out. King and queen are caught and bowled, but the old knave's Mr. Extras!"
"Capital, Ronnie!" said I. "Shall it be single wicket between us two, or the next test-match with Australia?"
Ronnie was all for the test, and really the rules worked very well. You shuffled71 after the fall of every wicket, and you never knew your luck. Tom Richardson, the last man in for England, made sixty-two, while some who shall be nameless went down like ninepins in the van. In the next test (at Lord's) we elaborated the laws to admit of stumping72, running out, getting leg-before and even hitting wicket. But the red kings and queens still meant a catch or what Ronnie called "a row in your timber yard." And so the afternoon wore on, until I had to mend the fire and light the gas; and then somehow the cards seemed only cards, and we put them away for that season.
I forget why it was that Ronnie suddenly wanted his knife. I rather think that he was deliberately73 rallying his possessions about him in philosophic74 preparation for a lengthy75 campaign between the sheets. In any case there was no finding that knife, but something much more interesting came to light instead.
I was conducting the search under directions from the bed, but I was out of sight behind the screen when I kicked up the corner of loose carpet and detected the loosened board. Here, thought I, was a secret repository where the missing possession might have been left by mistake; there were the actual marks of a blade upon the floor. "This looks a likely place," I said; but I did not specify76 the place I meant, and the next moment I had discovered neither knife nor pencil, but the soiled, unframed photograph of a lovely lady.
There it had lain under the movable bit of board, which had made a certain noise in the moving. That same second Ronnie bounded out of bed, and I to my feet to chase him back again.
"Who told you to look in there? Give that to me this minute! No—no—please put it back where you—where you found it!"
His momentary77 rage had already broken down in sobs78, but he stood over me while I quickly did as he begged and replaced the carpet; then I tucked him up again, but for some time the bed shook under his anguish79. I told him how sorry I was, again and yet again, and I suppose eventually my tone betrayed me.
"So you know who it is?" he asked, suddenly regarding me with dry bright eyes.
"I couldn't help seeing the likeness," I replied.
"It's my mother," he said unnecessarily.
His manner was curiously80 dogged and unlike him.
"And you keep her photograph under the floor?"
"Yes; you don't see many about, do you?" he inquired with precocious81 bitterness.
There was not one to be seen downstairs. That I knew from my glimpse of the photograph under the floor; there was nothing like it on any of the walls, nothing so beautiful, nothing with that rather wild, defiant expression which I saw again in Ronnie at this moment.
"But why under the floor?" I persisted, guessing vaguely82 though I did.
"You won't tell anybody you saw it there?"
"Not a soul."
"You promise?"
"Solemnly."
"You won't say a single word about it, if I tell you something?"
"Not a syllable83."
"Well—then—it's because I don't want Daddy to see it, for fear——"
"—it would grieve him?" I suggested as the end of his broken sentence. And I held my breath in the sudden hope that I might be right.
"For fear he tears it up!" the boy said harshly. "He did that once before, and this is the last I've got."
I made no comment, and there were no further confidences from Ronnie. So many things I wanted to know and could not ask! I could only hold my peace and Ronnie's hot hand, until it pinched mine in sudden warning, as the whole house lept under a springy step upon the stairs.
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