I TELL A LIE.
The police had brought the divisional surgeon with them, and he made his
brief examination while the sergeant questioned Moira and myself. My
story was the simple one that I had outlined, and I must say that Moira
played up well to my lead. She was naturally upset at what she had gone
through, and the sergeant, I fancy, made allowance for this, and
attributed any trifling discrepancies between our two stories to this
fact. He was one of the politest officials it has ever been my lot to
deal with, and he carried out his duties in a way that made me his
debtor for life. I was not as shocked by the occurrence as I might have
been. I had seen far too much of the rough side of life and the sudden
side of death to have any other feeling than a rather natural sorrow at
losing a man who had been something more than a benefactor to me; but I
did not make the radical mistake of treating Bryce's death too lightly.
I rather flatter myself that I mixed my sorrow and my common sense in
just the right proportions. It was different with Moira; she was
genuinely distressed, and made no effort to conceal it. It was the first
time for many years that I had seen her so unaffected, and natural, and
I must say that the sight brought out all that was best in me.
The sergeant took our names and then began a close personal questioning.
He enquired into my past life, asked me how long I had been with Bryce,
and then bluntly demanded to know in what capacity I was staying in the
house.
"Mr. Bryce," I said, "was an old friend of my father's, and naturally
there was always a welcome here for me."
I picked my words carefully, because I was in mortal dread that some
stray remark might put him on to that affair on the beach. I knew that
if he once got wind of that everything was up with us, and our
hastily-built castle of cards would come tumbling to the ground. While I
was thinking of this it struck me all of a heap that there was a chance
of something leaking out about the burglar of the other day. The only
thing I could see was to make a clean breast of it.
"I don't know whether this has got anything to do with the burglary the
other night," I said casually.
"What's that?" the sergeant demanded.
I repeated my remark. "This is the first I've heard of it," the man
said. "Why wasn't it reported before? It's over a week ago, you say."
"About that," I agreed, "but it was reported. Mr. Bryce went down
himself to tell you." And here I looked warningly at Moira. She gave no
sign that she had noticed my glance, but somehow I felt that she quite
understood what was required of her.
"I don't deny he might have come down," the man ran on, "but all the
same no report has reached us."
"That's mighty curious," I said with assumed thoughtfulness. "Now I come
to think of it, it struck me at the time that you people hadn't followed
the matter up. I meant to ask Mr. Bryce about it, but the matter went
clean out of my mind, and it was just this moment that I recollected it.
It does seem a bit of a puzzler."
"If you tell me all that happened, Mr. Carstairs," the sergeant
suggested, "it might help us a bit. There's something very like a motive
in this."
I gave him a rather sketchy account of the night of the burglar's visit,
but, without actually giving a false description of the burglar himself,
I so drew him that he would be difficult to recognise. I was swayed by
cautiousness more than anything else at the moment, but I fancy that
deep down in my mind was a primitive longing to settle with the man
without having recourse to the law. At any rate no policeman in the
country would have arrested him on the description I gave.
"It's a pity he got away," said the sergeant when I'd finished. "It
looks as if he's the man. What was taken, Mr. Carstairs?"
"According to Mr. Bryce there wasn't anything even touched."
"Looks as if Mr. Bryce had a past," the man said in a half-whisper meant
for my ears alone.
I regarded the suggestion with alarm. "I don't see how that could be," I
told him. "I've known him for a good many years, and my father knew him
before that. But of course I've been in the Islands for close on to four
years, and something that I am unaware of may have occurred in that
time."
"Just so," he agreed. "We'll see what Miss Drummond has to say."
"Had your uncle any enemies that you know of?" she was asked.
She answered the question with admirable adroitness. "My uncle was the
kindest of men," she said. "I can conceive of no reason why he should
have any enemies."
I suppose our very apparent frankness threw the man off his guard, for
I'm perfectly satisfied that he could have tripped us up more than once
had he had the faintest suspicion that we were not telling the exact
truth. But we strove, rather successfully as it now appears, to twist
the truth to suit ourselves without actually telling a downright lie,
and we did it in a way that seemed to satisfy him, astute though he was.
I told him but one lie that evening, though as a matter of fact it was
much nearer the truth than anything else I had said, so strangely do
things fall out.
"Miss Drummond is Mr. Bryce's niece, isn't she?" he asked.
"That's right," I said, and Moira nodded.
"Now let me see," he ran on, ticking off the points on his fingers, "you
are an old friend of the family's. That's correct, isn't it?"
"That's so," I agreed.
"Anything more?"
"I don't quite understand you," I said, with the faintest doubt at the
back of my mind. He spoke as if he knew or suspected something more than
I had told him.
He looked at Moira and then at me, and I saw that he was smiling. It was
just the sort of smile that one would expect from that portion of the
world that loves a lover.
"Oh!" I said with a relief that I made no attempt to hide, "so you've
guessed it."
"Guessed what?" Moira queried quickly, her face paling to a perceptible
degree.
I turned to her with the cheeriest smile I could muster at the moment.
"He's guessed that we're engaged, Moira," I said. And the note of
exultation in my voice was more real than I had intended.
"It's not the time to be rejoicing over such things," I rattled on,
"but--well, I suppose we're all young only once and we've got to make
the best of it."
The sergeant was a gem of his kind, and even the nearness of a tragedy
and the rigidness of the rules that governed his daily life had not
crushed out of him that little touch of Nature that makes the whole
world kin. Thanks to the easiness of my manner and his own ready
stumbling into the trap I had not set for him, he now looked upon me as
nothing more than a love-sick youth with no eyes for anyone or anything
save the girl who occupied his heart. If the man could only have seen
what was in my mind, if by any chance he had overheard our conversation
on the morning of the burglary, how quickly he would have changed his
good opinion of us both. But luckily he was no mind-reader, and my
little piece of bluff achieved more success than was its due.
"You needn't worry about anything," he said with an almost paternal note
in his voice. "We police have certain duties to carry out, but we're
human after all, and anything I can do as a man and a brother I'll be
only too pleased to have you ask."
"Thank you," I said, with gratitude that was less than half feigned.
The divisional surgeon gave it as his opinion that death had been
practically instantaneous. The bullet had entered the wall of the chest
a little too close to the heart to be pleasant. The doctor did tell me
just what else had happened, but either he did not make himself clear or
I have forgotten it.
Presently a couple of the police who had been put on the trail of the
fugitive returned and reported nothing doing. The garden just outside
the window was a good deal trampled about, and there were footmarks in
plenty on the soft soil, but, as the sergeant remarked, "Footmarks are
like finger prints--they're no use unless you know who made them." All
things considered, it looked as if our man had got clean away again. I
had a fancy that neither Moira nor I had seen the last of him. Standing
there in the very room that had witnessed the tragedy, with the body of
the murdered man hanging limply in the chair, the lifeless clay scarcely
yet cold, it came to me with something of the clearness of prophecy that
this was not the end but the beginning of the play. It was something
closely akin to second sight, and for the moment the spaciousness of the
vision that I saw but dimly thrilled me with its possibilities. I knew,
though how I knew I cannot say even at this distant date, that the calm,
silent policemen with their helmets in their hands, the earnest,
energetic divisional surgeon, and his confrère the sergeant, even the
dead man himself, were but the merest supers in the prelude to
adventure. Moira and I were the only ones who were real, the only actors
that were something more than mummers. Yet even I failed to see that
what had happened that night was something more than a queer insoluble
mystery. There was nothing in my experience to tell me that it was
vitally connected with the early history of Victoria, that it had its
being in the now far-off days before Australia became a nation. I think
if any supernatural whisper of the truth had reached me that I would not
have been surprised, but that is the most that I can say.
I came back abruptly to reality to find a cold wind blowing in through
the crack in the window. The doctor and the two policemen between them
were lifting Bryce out of the chair he would never more occupy, and I,
with my profounder knowledge of death and its consequences, saw just
what they were going to do.
"I think I'd better take Miss Drummond outside for the present," I
whispered to the sergeant. The man nodded, and, taking Moira by the arm,
I led her from the room.
"It would be better if you could go to bed," I suggested.
She shook her head wearily. "I can't, Jim. It's no good trying to
persuade me. I just couldn't."
"I think I understand," I said softly.
"I don't feel sorry a bit, Jim. I know it's a strange thing to say, but
it's the truth, and there it is. I couldn't summon a tear. But just
inside me there's a vacancy, a sense of loss. He's gone out of my life,
and I'll never meet anyone who'll quite take his place. I can't put what
I mean into so many words, but I think you can understand. You're quick
at understanding, Jim. I don't feel sorry a bit, and I don't want to
cry, somehow; but I'll miss him dreadfully. I'm hard in some ways, Jim.
I must be terribly devoid of affection."
I made no answer to that. My thoughts were on one summer's evening
four--or was it five?--years ago, and in the light of what had happened
then I could scarcely contradict her now.
"I'm sorry," I said abruptly, "that I had to tell that lie about our
being engaged. But I had to be as natural as I could, and the more
obvious an explanation I gave the better for us all."
She looked at me for a moment with unutterable things in the depths of
her golden-brown eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said slowly, "that you had to tell a lie."
I took her remark as the natural corollary of mine, but some
sub-conscious sense in me insisted that its very ambiguity was designed.
Almost at that moment I heard footsteps in the hall, and knew that the
servants had just come home. The big clock in the hall chimed ten.
"There's the women," I said. "You'd better tell them, and see they don't
make a scene."
Moira nodded and went down the hall to meet them.
There is little more to relate of this phase of my story. Naturally
there was an inquest, and just as naturally was a verdict returned of
"death at the hands of a person or persons unknown," or words to that
effect. The situation, in fine, was that Bryce was dead and buried, and
the police admitted that they held no clue to the identity of the
murderer. Motive there was none as far as they could see, and the whole
affair looked like one of these senseless crimes that from time to time
startle the city folk from their easy-going equanimity. The matter was
not even a nine-days' wonder, for other things occupied the attention of
the press, and a stickful was the most it ever got in any paper.
I stayed on in the house at Moira's request and attended to several
matters that were rather outside her province. The old man turned out
not to be as rich as we had thought, though he had money enough in
truth. The bulk of this went to Moira, with the curious proviso that she
could not invest it in any way without first submitting the proposal to
me and receiving my sanction. The will was of recent date, as a matter
of fact it had been drawn up within a few days of Moira's arrival. There
was a sum left to me, too, enough to make me independent for a good many
years to come.
Moira's mother arrived the day after the tragedy, and showed no very
evident intention of returning home. She was very nice to me, but then
there was no reason why she should have been anything else. Any strain
that there had been, and was still for that matter, was between her
daughter and myself, and, like a wise mother, she forebore from
interfering in what did not immediately concern her.
For my own sake, if for no other reason, I hurried along the winding-up
of Bryce's affairs. I saw, or fancied I saw, that the sooner I left the
house the better would Moira be pleased. For when all was said and done
there could be no denying that things were far from satisfactory.
Neither of us made any further reference to my bare-faced lying on that
ill-starred night, but the more I thought of it the more equivocal did
the present situation seem. I for one was doubly glad when at last we
finished with the lawyers, and things--blessed, indefinite word--seemed
like to settle down again.
My time of departure was no further off than twenty-four hours away when
the incident occurred that led to a hurried readjustment of my plans and
that brought us, willy-nilly, to the Valley--for so I still persist in
calling it, as if there were not another valley in the world--and the
treasure that lay there and helped us to unravel the tangled threads of
Bryce's past life.
I had my bag already packed, and had announced that I was going the next
evening, when Moira stayed me with a word.
"I've been meaning to talk to you for a long time," she said, "but
somehow I could never seem to summon up enough courage. It's about Uncle
and ... well, you know as well as I do, that there was some mystery
about him."
"Go on," I said.
"Well, he told me once that if ever anything happened to him we would
find documents in his room that would help us to take up the work where
he left off. He repeated that the very night he died. Don't you see what
that means?"
"It means that they are still there," I said soberly.