Dennis Wheatley - The Devil Rides Out

‘No—no,’ the child cried, her blue eyes, seeming enormous in that tiny face opened wide with concern. ‘Jim’s hurted hisself.’

‘Has he?’ Richard put her down. ‘Poor Jim. We must see about this.’

‘He’s hurted bad,’ Fleur went on, tugging impulsively at her mother’s skirt. ‘He’s cutted hisself on his magic sword.’

‘Dear me,’ Marie Lou ran her fingers through Fleur’s dark curls. She knew that by ‘magic sword’ Fleur meant the gardener’s scythe, for Richard always insisted that the lawn of Cardinals Folly was too old and too fine to be ruined by a mowing machine, and maintained the ancient practice of having it scythe-cut. ‘Where is he now, my sweet?’

‘Nanny binded him up and I helped a lot. Then he went wound to the kitchen.’

‘And you weren’t frightened of the blood?’ Richard asked with interest.

Fleur shook her curly head. ‘No. Fleur’s not to be frightened of anyfink, Mummy says. Why would I be frightened of the blug?’

‘Silly people are sometimes,’ her father replied. ‘But not people who know things like Mummy and you and I.’

At that moment Fleur’s nurse joined them. She had heard the last part of the conversation. ‘It’s nothing serious, Madam,’ she assured Marie Lou. ‘Jim was sharpening, his scythe and the hone slipped, but he only cut his finger.’

‘But fink if he can’t work,’ Fleur interjected in a high treble.

‘Why?’ asked her father gravely.

‘He’s poor,’ announced the child after a solemn interval for deep thought. ‘He-has-to-work-to-keep-his-children. So if he can’t work, he’ll be in a muddle—won’t he?’

Richard and Marie Lou exchanged a smiling glance as Simon’s expression for any sort of trouble came so glibly to the child’s lips.

‘Yes, that’s a serious matter,’ her father agreed gravely. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

‘We mus’ all give somefink,’ Fleur announced breathlessly.

‘Well, say I give him half a crown,’ Richard suggested. ‘How much do you think you can afford?’

‘I’ll give half a cwown too.’ Fleur was nothing if not generous.

‘But have you got it, Batuskha?’ inquired her mother.

Fleur thought for a bit, and then said doubtfully: ‘P’r’aps I haven’t. So I’ll give him a ha’penny instead.’

‘That’s splendid, darling, and I’ll contribute a shilling,’ Marie Lou declared. ‘That makes three shillings and sixpence halfpenny altogether, doesn’t it?’

‘But Nanny must give somefink,’ declared Fleur suddenly turning on her nurse who, smiling, said she thought she could manage fourpence.

‘There,’ laughed Richard. ‘Three and tenpence halfpenny! He’ll be a rich man for life, won’t he? Now you had better toddle in to lunch.’

This domestic crisis having been satisfactorily settled, Richard and Marie Lou strolled along beneath the balustraded terrace, past the low branches of the old cedar, and so to the hot-houses. Their butler, Malin, had just arrived with sugar and fresh cream, and for half an hour they made a merry meal of the early strawberries.

They had hardly finished when, to their surprise, since it was barely two o’clock, Malin returned to announce the arrival of their guests. So they hurried back to the house.

‘There they are,’ cried Marie Lou as the three friends came out from the tall windows of the drawing-room on to the terrace. ‘But, darling, look at Simon—they have gone mad,’

Well might the Eatons think so from Simon’s grotesque appearance in shorts, cycling cape and the absurd mauve and orange cricketing cap. Hurried greetings were soon exchanged and the whole party went back into the drawing-room.

‘Greyeyes, darling,’ Marie Lou exclaimed as she stood on tiptoe again to kiss De Richleau’s lean cheek. ‘We had your telegram and we are dying to know what it’s all about. Have our servants conspired to poison us or what?’

‘What,’ smiled De Richleau. ‘Definitely what, Princess. We have a very strange story to tell you, and I was most anxious you should avoid eating any meat for today at all events.’

Richard moved towards the bell. ‘Well, we’re not debarred from a glass of your favourite sherry, I trust.’

The Duke held up a restraining hand. ‘I’m afraid we are. None of us must touch alcohol under any circumstances at present.’

‘Good God!’ Richard exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean that—you can’t. You have gone crazy !’

‘I do,’ the Duke assured him with a smile. ‘Quite seriously.’

‘We’re in a muddle—a really nasty muddle,’ Simon added with a twisted grin.

‘So it appears,’ Richard laughed, a trifle uneasily. He was quite staggered by the strange appearance of his friends, the tense electric atmosphere which they had brought into the house with them, and the unnatural way in which they stood about—speaking only in short, jerky sentences.

He glanced at Rex, usually so full of gaiety, standing huge, gloomy and silent near the door, then he turned suddenly back to the Duke and demanded : ‘What is Simon doing in that absurd get-up? If it was the right season for it I should imagine that he was competing for the fool’s prize at the Three Arts’ Ball.’

‘I can quite understand your amazement,’ the Duke replied quietly, ‘but the truth is that Simon has been very seriously bewitched.’

‘It is obvious that something’s happened to him,’ agreed Richard curtly. ‘But don’t you think it would be better to stop fooling and tell us just what all this nonsense is about?’

‘I mean it,’ the Duke insisted. ‘He was sufficiently ill-advised to start dabbling in Black Magic a few months ago, and it’s only by the mercy of Providence that Rex and I were enabled to step in at a critical juncture with some hope of arresting the evil effects.’

Richard’s brown eyes held the Duke’s grey ones steadily. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I am far too fond of you ever to be rude intentionally, but hasn’t this joke gone far enough? To talk about magic in the twentieth century is absurd.’

‘All right. Call it natural science then.’ De Richleau leaned a little wearily against the mantelpiece. ‘Magic is only a name for the science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.’

‘Or, by setting natural laws in action quite inadvertently,’ added Marie Lou, to everyone’s surprise.

‘Certainly,’ the Duke agreed after a moment, ‘and Richard has practised that type of magic himself.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Richard exclaimed.

De Richleau shrugged. ‘Didn’t you tell me that you got a Diviner down from London when you were so terribly short of water here last summer, and that when you took his hazel twig from him you found out quite by accident that you could locate an underground spring in the garden without his help?’

‘Yes,’ Richard hesitated. ‘That’s true, and as a matter of fact, I’ve been successful in finding places where people could sink wells on several estates in the neighbourhood since. But surely that has something to do with electricity? It’s not magic’

‘If you were to say vibrations, you would be nearer the mark,’ De Richleau replied seriously. ‘It is an attunement of certain little-understood vibrations between the water under the ground and something in yourself which makes the forked hazel twig suddenly begin to jump and revolve in your hands when you walk over a hidden spring. That is undoubtedly a demonstration of the lesser kind of magic’

‘The miracle of Moses striking the rock in the desert from which the waters gushed forth is only another example of the same thing,’ Simon cut in.

Marie Lou was watching the Duke’s face with grave interest. ‘Everyone knows there is such a thing as magic,’ she declared, ‘and witchcraft. During those years that I lived in a little village on the borders of the Siberian Forest I saw many strange things, and the peasants went in fear and trembling of one old woman who lived in a cottage all alone outside the village. But what do you mean by lesser magic?’