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The Best Crime Stories Ever Told Page 5
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Selby fingered his chin. “If you put it like that, I can remember a rather funny thing that I never thought of again until now. But I can’t see how it could possibly—”
“Yes, I know. But you asked me here to consider the case in my own way, didn’t you?”
“You are so jolly professional, Trent,” Selby complained. “It was simply this. Two or three days before we left Taormina I was standing in the hotel office when the mail arrived. As I was waiting to see if there was anything for me, the porter put down on the counter a rather smart-looking package that had just come—done up the way they do it at a really first-class shop, if you know what I mean. It looked like a biggish book, or box of chocolates, or something—about twelve inches by ten, at a guess—and it had French stamps on it, but the postmark I didn’t notice. And this, I saw, was addressed to Mile. Maria Krogh, if you please—Lady Aviemore’s Norwegian maid, about the plainest and stodgiest-looking girl in the world, I should say. Well, Maria was there waiting, too, and presently the man handed it to her. She showed no surprise, but went off with it, and just then her mistress came down the big stairs. She saw the parcel and just held out her hand for it as if it was a matter of course; and Maria handed it over in the same way, and the Countess went upstairs with it. But her name wasn’t on the parcel, that I’ll swear; and Maria hadn’t even cut the string. I thought it was quaint, but I forgot it almost at once, because Lady Aviemore decided that evening to leave the place, and I had plenty to attend to. And if you want to know,” added Selby, with a hint of irritation, as Trent opened his lips to speak, “where Maria Krogh is, all I can tell you is that I took her ticket for her in London to Christiansand, where her home is, because she was too much upset to do things for herself; and I never thought of her again until we sent her the fifty pounds that was left her, which she acknowledged. Now, then!”
Trent laughed at the solicitor’s tone, and Selby laughed also. His friend walked to the fireplace and pensively adjusted his tie. “Well, I must be off,” he announced, suddenly. “What do you say to dining with me on Friday? If by that time I’ve anything to suggest about this thing, I will tell you then. You will? That’s splendid.” And he hastened away.
But on Friday, Trent seemed to have nothing to suggest. He was so reluctant to approach the subject that Selby supposed him to be chagrined at his failure to accomplish anything, and did not press the matter.
It was some months later, on a day in September, that Trent walked up the valley road at Myklebostad, looking farewell at the mountain at the end of the valley, the whitecapped father of the torrent that roared down a twenty-foot fall beside him. He had been a week at this most remote backwater of Europe, three hours by steamer from the nearest place that ranked as a town, and with full sixty miles of rugged hills between him and a railway station. The savage beauty of that watery landscape, where sun and rain worked together daily to achieve an unearthly purity in the scene, had justified far better than he had hoped his story that he had come there in search of matter for his brush.
He had painted busily while the light lasted, and he had learned in the evenings as much as he could of his neighbours. It was little enough, for the postmaster, in whose cottage he had a room, spoke only an indifferent German; and no one else, so far as he could discover, had anything but Norwegian, of which Trent knew scarcely a dozen traveller’s phrases. But he had seen, he thought every man, woman, and child in the valley, and he had closely attended to the household of Knut Wergeland, the rich man of the place, who had the largest farm. He and his wife, both elderly and grim-faced peasants, lived with two servants in an old turf-roofed steading. Not another person, Trent was certain, inhabited the house. They had two sons, he learned, in America.
He had decided at length that his voyage of curiosity to Myklebostad had been ill-inspired. Knut and his wife were no more than a thrifty peasant pair. They had given him a meal at their house one day when he was sketching near the place, and they had refused with gentle firmness to take any payment. Both produced upon him an impression of illimitable trustworthiness and competency in the life they led so utterly out of the world.
That day, as Trent gazed up to the mountain, his eye was caught by a flash of the sunlight against the dense growth of birches that ran from bottom to top of the precipitous height that was the valley wall to his left.
It was a bright blink, about half a mile from where he stood; it remained steady, and at several points above and below he saw the same bright appearance. Considering it, he perceived that there must be a wire somehow led up the steep hill-face, among the trees. A merely idle curiosity drew his steps towards the spot on the road whence the wire seemed to be taken upwards. In a few minutes he came to the opening among the trees of a rough track leading upwards among rocks and roots, at such an angle that only a vigorous climber could attempt it. Close by, in the edge of the thicket, stood a tall post, from the top of which a bright wire stretched upwards through the branches in the same direction as the path.
Trent slapped the post with a sounding blow. “Heavens and earth!” he exclaimed. “I had forgotten the saeter!”
At once he began to climb.
A thicket carpet of rich pasture began where the deep birchbelt ended at the top of the height. It stretched away for miles over a gentlysloping upland. As Trent came into the open, panting, after a strenuous forty-minute climb, the heads of a few browsing cattle were sleepily turned towards him. Beyond them wandered many more, and a hundred yards away stood a tiny wooden hut, turf-roofed. This plateau was the saeter, a thing of which Trent had read in some guide-book, and never thought since; the high grass-land attached to some valley farm. The wire he had seen was stretched from bottom to top, the fall being very steep, so that the bales of the hay-crop could be slid down to the valley without carrying. At the summer’s end, cows were led by an easier detour to the uplands, there to remain grazing for six weeks or more, attended by some robust peasant-woman who lived solitary with the herd.
And there, at the side of the hut, bending over a rough table, a woman stood. Trent, as he slowly approached, noted her short, rough skirt and coarse, sack-like upper garment, her thick grey stockings and clumsy clogs. About her bare head her pale gold hair was fastened in tight plaits. As she looked up on hearing Trent’s footfall, two heavy silver ear-rings dangled about the tanned and toil-worn face of this very type of the middle-aged peasant-woman of the region.
She ceased her task of scraping a large cake of chocolate into a bowl, and straightened her tall body; smiling, with her lean hands on her hips, she spoke in Norwegian, greeting him. Trent made the proper reply. “And that,” he added, in English, “is almost all of the language I know. Perhaps, madam, you speak English?”
Her light blue eyes looked puzzlement, and she spoke again in Norwegian, pointing downward to the valley. He nodded, and she began to talk pleasantly in her unknown tongue. From within the hut she brought two thick mugs; she pointed rapidly to the chocolate in the bowl, to himself and herself, then downward again to the village.
“I should like it of all things,” he said; “you are most kind and hospitable, like all your people. What a pity it is we have no language in common!” She brought him a stool and gave him the chocolate cake and a knife, making signs that he should continue the scraping; then within the hut she kindled a fire of twigs, and began to boil water in a black pot. Plainly it was her dwelling, the roughest Trent had ever seen. On two small shelves against the rough planks of the wall were ranged a few pieces of earthenware, coarse and chipped, but clean. A wooden bedplace, with straw and two neatly-folded blankets, filled a third of the space of the hut. All the carpentering was of the rudest. From a small chest in a corner she drew a biscuit-tin, half-full of flat cakes of stale bread. There seemed to be nothing else in the tiny place save a heap of twigs for firing.
She made chocolate in the two mugs, and then, on Trent’s insistence, sat upon the only stool at the little table outside the hut, while he made a seat of
an upturned milk-pail. She continued to talk amiably, while he finished with difficulty one of the bread-cakes.
“I believe,” he said, at last, setting down his empty mug, “you are talking merely to hear the sound of your own voice, madam. It is excusable in you. You don’t understand English, so I will tell you to your face it is a most beautiful voice. I should say,” he went on, thoughtfully, “that you ought, with training, to have been one of the greatest soprano singers who ever lived.”
She heard him calmly, and shook her head, as not understanding.
“Well, don’t say I didn’t break it gently,” Trent protested. He rose to his feet. “Madam, I know that you are Lady Aviemore. I have broken in upon your solitude, and I ask your pardon for that; but I could not be sure unless I saw you. I give you my word that no one knows, and no one shall know from me, what I know.”
He made as if to return by the way he came. But the woman held up her hand. A singular change had come over her brown face. An open and lively spirit now looked out of her desolate blue eyes, and she smiled another and much more intelligent smile. After a few minutes she spoke in English, fluent but quaintly pronounced. “Sir,” she said, “you have behaved very nicely up till now. It has been amusing for me; there is not much comedy on the sater. Now will you have the goodness to explain.’’
He told her in a few words that he had suspected she was still alive; that he had thought over the facts which had come to his knowledge; and that he had been led to think she was probably in that place. “I thought you might guess that I had recognised you,” he added. “So it seemed best to assure you that your secret was safe. Was it wrong to speak?”
She shook her head, gazing at him with her chin on her hand. Presently she said, “I think you are not against me. But I do not understand why you kept my secret from others when you had found it out.”
“I sought for it because I am curious,” he answered. “I kept it, and I will always keep it, because—oh, well! because to me Lillemor Wergeland is a sort of divinity.”
She laughed suddenly. “Incense! And I in these rags, in this place, with what I can see in this little spotty piece of cheap looking-glass! Ah, well! You have come a long way. Monsieur le Curieux, and it would be a cruelty not to confide in you. After all, it was simple.
“It was only a day or two after the disaster that the resolve came to me. I never hesitated a moment. It was through me that they were in that place—you have heard that? I felt I must leave the world I knew, and that knew me. Suicide never occurred to me—what is there more contemptible? As for a convent, unhappily there is none for people with minds like mine. I meant simply to disappear, and the only way to succeed was to get the reputation of being dead. I thought it out for some days and nights. Then I wrote, in the name of my maid, to an establishment in Paris where I used to buy things for the stage. I sent money, and ordered a dark brown transformation—that is a lady’s word for a wig—some stuff for darkening the skin, various pigments and pencils, et tout le bazar. My maid did not know what I had sent for; she only handed the parcel to me when it arrived. She would have thrown herself in the fire for me, I think, my maid Maria. The day the things came I announced that I would return home by the route you know.”
“Then it was as I guessed!” Trent exclaimed. “You disguised yourself on the steamer at Brindisi, and slipped off in the dark before it started.”
“I was no such imbecile, indeed,” returned the lady, with a hint of sharpness. “How if my absence had been discovered somehow before the starting? That could happen; and then what? No; when we reached Brindisi from Taormina, I knew we had some hours there. I put on a thick veil and went out alone. At the office by the harbour I took a second-class berth for myself, Miss Julia Simms, travelling from Brindisi to Venice. I found the boat was already alongside the quay. Then I went into the poorer streets of the town and bought some clothes, very ugly ones, some shoes, some cheap toilet things.”
“Some black hair-pins,” murmured Trent.
“Naturally, black,” she assented. She looked at him inquiringly, then resumed. “I bought also a melancholy little cheap portmanteauthing, and put my purchases in it. I took it on a cab to the harbour, and gave one of the ship’s stewards a lira to put it in Miss Simms’s cabin to await her. After that I bought two other things, a long mackintosh coat and a funny little cap, the very things for Miss Simms, and at the hotel I pushed them under the things my maid had already packed in my dressing case. On the steamer, when I was locked in my cabin without danger of disturbance, I took off my fur coat, I arranged a dark, rather catty sort of face for myself, and fitted on Miss Simms’s hair. I put on her mackintosh and cap. When the boat began to move away from the quay, and people on deck were looking over the rail, I just stepped out of my cabin, shut the door, and walked straight to Miss Simms’s berth at the other end of the ship. There is not much more to say. When we reached Venice I did not look for the others, and I never saw them. I went straight on to Paris, and wrote to my brother Knut that I was alive, and told him just what I meant to do if he would help me. Such things do not seem so mad to a true child of Norway.”
“What things?” Trent asked.
“Things of deep sorrow, malady of soul, escape from the world. He and his wife have been true and good to me. I am supposed to be her cousin, Hilda Bjornstad. I left them money, more than enough to pay for me, but they did not know that when they welcomed me here.”
She ceased, and smiled vaguely at Trent, who was considering her tale with eyes that gazed fixedly at the sky-line. “Yes, of course,” he remarked, presently, in an abstracted manner. “That was it. So simple! And now may I tell you,” he went on, with a sudden change of tone, “one or two details you have forgotten?
“At Brindisi you bought, just before going on the boat, a box of the stuff called Ixtil, to prevent sea-sickness. You took a dose before going on board and another just after, as the directions prescribed. Then, as Mr. Selby happened to know you had it, you thought it best to leave it behind when you vanished. Also you left behind you, in your hurry, four black hair-pins, quite new, which had somehow, I suppose, got loose inside your little bag, and which were found there by Selby. You see, Lady Aviemore, it was Selby who brought me into this. He told me all the facts he knew. And he showed me the velvet bag and its contents. But he did not attach any importance to the two things I have just mentioned.”
Lady Aviemore raised her eyebrows perceptibly. “I cannot see why he should. And I cannot see why he should bring in anybody.”
“Because he had some vague idea of your brother-in-law having caused your death, or, at any rate, having known your intention to commit suicide. He never said it outright, but it was plain that that was in his mind. You see, Lord Aviemore stood to benefit enormously by your death; and then there was the matter of your note announcing your suicide.”
“It announced,” she remarked, “the truth: that I was leaving a world I could not bear. The words might mean one thing or another. But what of the note?”
“That truthful note,” said Trent, “was written with pen and ink, of which there was none in your cabin. It was written on paper which had been torn from a block, and no block was found. Also it was discovered that that particular make of paper is sold in Canada, but has never been sold in Europe. You had never been in Canada. Lord Aviemore had just come back from Canada. You see?”
“But did not Mr. Selby perceive that my brother-in-law is a saint?” inquired the lady, with a touch of impatience. “Surely that was plain! An evident saint!”
“In my slight knowledge of him,” admitted Trent, “he struck me in that way. But Selby is a lawyer, and lawyers don’t understand saints. Besides, Lord Aviemore disliked him, I fancy, and perhaps he felt the same way about Lord Aviemore.”
“It is true he did not approve of Mr. Selby, because he disliked all men who were smart and worldly. But now I will tell you. That evening in the hotel at Brindisi I wanted to write the note, and I asked my brother
-in-law for a sheet from a block he had in his hand and was about to write upon. That is all. I wrote it in the hotel writing-room, and took it afterwards in my bag to the cabin.”
“We supposed you had written it beforehand,” Trent observed, “and that was one of the things that led me to feel morally certain that you were still alive. I’ll explain. If, as we thought, you had written the note in the hotel, your suicide was a premeditated act. Yet Selby afterwards saw you buying that medicine, and it was plain that you had taken two doses. Now, it struck me that it was ridiculous for anyone already determined on drowning herself at sea to begin treating herself against sea-sickness. Then there were those new black hair-pins. The sight of them was a revelation to me. They meant disguise. For I knew, of course, that with that hair you had probably never used a dark hair-pin in your life.”
The Countess felt at her pale-gold plaits, and gravely extended a black hair-pin. “In the valley we all use them.”
“It is very different in the valley, I know,” he said, quietly.
The lady regarded her guest with something of respect. “It still remains,” she said, “to explain how you knew it was in Norway, and here, as a poor farm-servant, that I should hide myself. It seemed to me the last thing in the world—your world—that a woman who had lived my life would be expected to do.”
“There was no certainty about it,” he answered. “It was a strong possibility, that’s all. Your problem, you see, was just what you say—to hide yourself. And you had another, I think. You had to get your living somehow. Everything you possessed—except some small sum in cash, I suppose—you left behind you when you disappeared. Now, a woman cannot very well go on acting and disguising herself for ever. A man can grow hair on his face or shave it off; for a woman, disguise must be a perpetual anxiety. If she has to get employment, and especially if she has no references, it’s an impossibility.”