Delavoye fired over my head.
"Don't do that!" cried Delavoye. "It's our one chance of nabbing 'em."
And he was out of the window and swinging down the rope-ladder while the ruffians were yet in the yard below. But they did not wait to punish his foolhardihood; the gate into the back garden banged before he reached the ground, and he hardly had it open when the last of the bunch of ropes slid hot through my hands.
"After them!" he grunted, giving chase to shadowy forms across the soaking grass. His revolver squibbed again as he ran. They did not stop to return his fire; but across the strawberry bed, at the end of the garden, the high split fence rattled and rumbled with the weight of the flying gang; and there was a dropping crackle of brushwood on the other side, as I came up with Delavoye under the overhanging branches of the horse-chestnuts.
"Going over after them?" I panted, prepared to follow where he led.
"I'm afraid it's no good now," he answered, peering at his revolver in the darkness. The chambers ticked like the reel of a rod. "Besides, there's one of them cast a shoe or something. I trod on it a moment ago." He stooped and groped in the manure of the strawberry bed. "A shoe it is, Gilly, by all that's lucky!"
"You wouldn't like to dog them a bit further?" I suggested. "The fellow with one shoe won't take much overhauling?"
"No, Gilly," said Delavoye, abandoning the chase as incontinently as he had started it, but with equal decision; "I think it's about time to see what they've taken, as well as what they've left."
Their rope-ladder was still swaying from the bathroom window, and it served our turn again since Uvo was without his key. He climbed up first, and the window flared into a square of gas-light before I gained the sill. The scene within was quite instructive. The family chest was clamped right round with iron bands, like the straps of a portmanteau, and the lock in each band had defied the ingenuity of the thieves; so they had cut a neat hole in the lid and extracted the contents piecemeal. These were not strewn broadcast about the room, but set out with some method on a dressing-table as well as in the basin and the bath. Apparently the stage of selection had been reached when we interrupted the proceedings, and the first thing that struck me was the amount of fine old plate and silver, candelabra, urns, salvers and the like, which had not been removed; but Delavoye was already up to the right armpit in the chest, and my congratulations left him grim.
"They've got my mother's jewel-case all right!" said he. "She has one or two things worth all those put together; but we shall see them again unless I'm much mistaken. Come into my room and hear the why and wherefore. Ah! I was forgetting young ambition's ladder; thanks, Gilly. I hope you see how hard it's hooked to the woodwork on this side? It's only been their emergency exit; we shall probably find that they took their tickets at the pantry window. Now for a drink in my room and a bit of Sherlock Holmes' work on the lucky slipper!"
I wish I could describe the change in Uvo Delavoye as he sat at his desk once more, his eager face illumined by the reading gas-lamp with the smelly rubber tube. Eager was not the word for it now, neither was it only the gas that lit it up. At its best, for all its bloodless bronze and premature furrows, the face of Uvo was itself a lamp, that only flickered to burn brighter, or to beam more steadily; and now he was at his best in the very chair and attitude in which I had seen him at his worst not so many minutes before. Was this the fellow who had toyed so tremulously with a deadly weapon and a deadlier idea? Was it Uvo Delavoye who had deliberately debauched his mind with the thought of his own blood, until to my eyes at least he looked capable of shedding it at the morbid prompting of a degenerate impulse? I watched him keenly examining the thing in his hands, chuckling and gloating over a trophy which I for one would have taken far more seriously; and I could not believe it was he whom I had caught with a revolver, loaded or unloaded, screwed into his ear.
It was in a silence due to two divergent lines of thought that we both at once became aware of a prolonged but muffled tattoo on the door below.
"Coppers ahoy!" cried Uvo softly. "I thought you hauled the rope-ladder up after us?"
"So I did; but how do you know it's a copper?"
"Who else could it be at this time of night? Stay where you are, Gilly. I'll go down and see." And in a moment there was a new tune from the hall below: "Why, it's Colonel Cheffins!... How sporting of you, colonel!... Yes, come on up and I'll tell you all about it."
The colonel's answers were at first inaudible up above; but on the stairs he was explaining that he had awakened about an hour ago with a conviction that yet another house had been attacked, that in his inability to get to sleep again he had ultimately risen, and seeing a light still burning across the road, had ventured to come over to inquire whether we were still all right. And with that there entered the Jaeger dressing-suit and bedroom slippers, containing a very different colonel from the dapper edition I had seen out on the other side of midnight, and for that matter but a worn and feeble copy of the one we had both admired the night before.
"That's Witching Hill all over!" cried Uvo as he ushered him in. "You dreamed of what actually happened at the very time it was actually happening. And yet our friend Gillon can't see that the whole place is haunted and enchanted from end to end!"
"I'm not sure that I should go as far as that," said the colonel, sinking into a chair, while Delavoye mixed a stiff drink for him in his old glass. "In fact, now you come to put it that way, I'm not so sure that it was a dream at all. I sleep with my window open, at the front of the house, and I rather thought I heard shots of sorts."
"Of such a sort," laughed Uvo, "that you must be a light sleeper if they woke you up. Do you mind telling me, colonel, where you used to keep those cartridges you were kind enough to give me?"
"In my washstand drawer. I hope there was nothing the matter with them?"
"They wouldn't go off. That was all."
"God bless my soul!" cried Colonel Cheffins, putting down his glass.
"The caps were all right, but I am afraid you can't have kept your powder quite dry, colonel. I expect you've been swilling out that drawer in the heat of your ablutions. Devil a bullet would leave the barrel, and I tried all three."
"But what an infernal disgrace!" cried the colonel, shuffling to his slippered feet. "Why, the damned 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."
"God 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 butter. 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 glass 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.