Captain Ricardo also seemed to have heard of me. He overhauled me with his peevish little eyes, and then said two or three of the bitterest things about the British forces, regular and irregular, that it ever was my lot to hear. I made no attempt to reply to them. His wife tried to present him with the rose which I fancied had been meant for one of us, and his prompt rejection of the offering only hardened me in that impression. Then Uvo asked him if he had seen good play at the Oval; and so the vitriolic stream was diverted into such congenial channels as the decadence of modern cricket and the calibre of the other members of the Surrey Club.
"But won't you come in?" concluded the captain in his most forbidding manner. "I hate this talking at the gate like a pack of servants, but my wife seems to have a mania for it."
It is only fair to state that Mrs. Ricardo had withdrawn during the denunciation of the game which her husband spent his useless days in watching, as Uvo told me when we had declined his inhospitality and were out of earshot. It was all he did say about Captain Ricardo, and I said nothing at all. The people were evidently friends of his; at least the wife was, and it was she who had set me thinking with her first smile. I was still busy wondering whether, or where, I could have seen her before.
"It's quite possible," said Uvo, when I had wondered aloud. "I wouldn't give her away if it weren't an open secret here. But Witching Hill hasn't called on Mrs. Ricardo since it found out that she was once on the stage."
"Good Lord!"
"There's another reason, to give the neighbours their due. Ricardo has insulted most of them to their faces. A bit of gossip got about, and instead of ignoring it he limped out on the war-path, cutting half the Estate and damning the other half in heaps."
"But what was her stage name?"
Delavoye gave a grim laugh as he ushered me into the garden of many memories. "You wouldn't know it, Gilly. You were never a great playgoer, you see, and Mrs. Ricardo was anything but a great actress. But she's a very great good sort, as you'll find out for yourself when you know her better."
I could quite believe it even then—but I was not so sure after a day or two with Uvo. I found him leading a lonely life, with Nettleton's old Sarah to look after him. Miss Delavoye had been wooed and married while my back was turned, and Mrs. Delavoye was on a long visit to the young couple. Uvo, however, appeared to be enjoying his solitude rather than otherwise; his health was better, he was plying his pen, things were being taken by all kinds of periodicals. And yet I was uneasy about him. Among many little changes, but more in this house than in most, the subtlest change of all was in Uvo Delavoye himself.
He could not do enough for me; from the few survivors of his father's best bins, to my breakfast served in bed by his own hands, nothing was good enough for the fraud he made me feel. Yet we were not in touch as we had been of old. I could have done with fewer deeds of unnecessary kindness and more words of unguarded intimacy. He did not trust me as he used. He had something or somebody on his mind; and I soon made up mine that it was Mrs. Ricardo, but not from anything else he told me. He never mentioned her name again. He did not tell me that, with a view to a third road, the Estate had just purchased a fresh slice of the delightful woodland behind Mulcaster Park; that in its depths was a little old ruin, just after his heart, and that this ruin was also a favourite haunt of Mrs. Ricardo's. I was left to make all these discoveries for myself, on a morning when Uvo Delavoye was expressly closeted at his desk.