Trent Intervenes

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘I believe, madam,’ he said at last, setting down his empty mug, ‘you are talking simply to hear the sound of your own voice. In your case, that is excusable. You don’t understand English, so I will tell you to your face that it is a most wonderful voice. I should say,’ he went on thoughtfully, ‘that you ought to have been one of the greatest sopranos that 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 on your solitude, and I ask pardon for that; but I could not be sure unless I saw you. I give you my word that no one else knows or ever shall know from me, what I have discovered.’ He made as if to return by the way he had come.

  But the woman held up a hand. A singular change had come over her brown face. A lively spirit now looked out of her desolate blue eyes; she smiled another and a much more intelligent smile. After a few moments she spoke in English, fluent but with a slight accent of her country.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘you have behaved very nicely up till now. It has been an amusement for me; there is not much comedy on the saeter. 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 such facts as had come to his knowledge, and had been led to think she was probably in that place. ‘I thought you might guess I had recognized 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 a hand. Presently she said, ‘I think you are not against me. I can feel that, though I do not understand why you wanted to search out my secret, and why you kept it when you had dragged it into the light.’

  ‘I dragged it because I am curious,’ he answered. ‘I have kept it and will keep it because—oh well, because it is your own, and because to me Lillemor Wergeland is a sort of divinity.’

  She laughed suddenly. ‘Incense! And I in these rags, in this hovel, with what unpleasantness I can see in this little spotty piece of cheap mirror! … Ah well! You have come a long way, curious man, and it would be cruel not to gratify your curiosity a little more. Shall I tell you? After all, it was simple.

  ‘It was very soon after the disaster that the resolve came to me. I never hesitated. It was my fault that we had gone to Sicily—you have heard that? Yes, I see it in your face. I felt I must leave the world I knew, and that knew me. I never really thought of suicide. 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.’

  ‘Ha!’ Trent exclaimed. ‘I heard of that, and I guessed.’

  ‘I sent money,’ she went on, ‘and I ordered a dark-brown transformation—that is a lady’s word for wig—some stuff for darkening the skin, various pigments, pencils, et tout le bazar. My maid did not know what I had sent for; she only handed the parcel to me when it came. She would have thrown herself in the fire for me, I think, my maid Maria. When the things arrived, I announced that I would return to England by the route you have heard of, perhaps.’

  He nodded. ‘The route that gave you a night passage to Venice. And you disguised yourself in your cabin at Brindisi, and slipped off in the dark before the boat started.’

  ‘Indeed, I was not such a fool!’ she returned. ‘What if my absence had been discovered somehow before the boat left Brindisi? That could easily happen, and then good-bye to the fiction of my suicide. No; when we reached Brindisi, we had, as I knew, some hours there. We left our things at a hotel, where we were to dine, and then I put on a thick veil and went out alone. At the office near the harbour I took a second-class passage to Venice for myself, in the name of Miss Julia Simmons, in the same boat I had planned to take. It would be at the quay, they told me, in an hour. Then I went into the poorer streets of the town, and bought some clothes, very ugly ones, some shoes, toilet things—’

  ‘Some black hairpins,’ Trent murmured.

  ‘Naturally, black,’ she assented. ‘My own gilt pins would have looked queer in a dark-brown wig, and I had to have pins to fasten it properly. I bought also a little cheap portmanteau-thing, and put my purchases in it. Then I took a cab to the quay, found the boat had arrived, and gave one of the stewards a tip to show me the berth named on my ticket, and to carry my baggage there. After that I went shopping again on shore. I bought a long mackintosh coat and a funny little cap, the very things for Miss Simmons; took them to the hotel and pushed them under the things my maid had already packed in my big case.

  ‘On the steamer, when Maria had left me and I had locked the cabin door, I arranged a dark, rather catty sort of face for myself, and fitted on Miss Simmons’s hair. I put on her mackintosh coat and cap. When the boat began to move away from the quay, I opened my door an inch and peeped out. As I expected, everyone was looking over the rail, and so—the sooner the better—I just slipped out, shut the cabin door, and walked straight to Miss Simmons’s berth at the other end of the ship … There is not much more to say. At Venice, I did not look for the others, and never saw them. I went on to Paris, and wrote to my brother Knut that I was alive, telling him 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 the soul, escape from the world … He and his wife have been true and good to me. I am supposed to be her cousin, Hilda Bjoernstad. In my will 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 story with eyes that gazed fixedly at the skyline.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he remarked presently in an abstracted manner. ‘That was it. As you say, so simple. And now let me tell you,’ he went on with a change of tone, ‘one or two little details you have forgotten.

  ‘At Brindisi you bought, just before going on board with the others, a box of the stuff called Ixtil, because it looked as if there might be bad weather. You took a dose at once, and another a little later, as the directions told you. You might have needed more of it before reaching Venice, but as Mr Selby was with you when you bought it, you thought it wiser to leave it behind when you vanished. Also, you left behind you four new black hairpins, which had somehow, I suppose, got loose inside your handbag, and 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 your bag and its contents. But he didn’t attach any importance to the two things I have just mentioned.’

  She raised her eyebrows just perceptibly. ‘I cannot see why he should. And I cannot see why he should bring in you or anybody.’

  ‘Because he had some vague notion of your brother-in-law having either caused your death, or at least having known of your intention to commit suicide. He never told me so outright, but it was plain that that was in his mind. Selby wanted me to clear that up, if I could. You see, your brother-in-law stood to benefit enormously by your death, and then there was the matter of the note announcing your suicide.’

  ‘It announced,’ she remarked, ‘the truth; that I was leaving a world I could not bear any longer. The words might mean one thing or another. But what about the note?’

  ‘The perfectly truthful note 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 writing-pad, and no pad was found. Also that make of paper is sold in Canada, never in Europe. You had never been in Canada. Your brother-in-law had just come back from Canada. You see?’

  ‘But did not Selby perceive that Charles is a saint?’ inquired the lady with a touch of impatience. ‘Surely that was plain
! More Dominic than Francis, no doubt; but an evident saint.’

  ‘In my slight knowledge of him,’ Trent admitted, ‘he did strike me in that way. But Selby is a lawyer, you see, and lawyers don’t understand saints. Besides, your brother-in-law had taken a dislike to him, I think, and so perhaps he felt critical about your brother-in-law.’

  ‘It is true,’ she said, ‘he did not care about Mr Selby, because he disliked all men who were foppish and worldly. But now I will tell you. That evening in the hotel at Brindisi I wanted to write that note, and I asked Charles for a sheet from the block he had in his hand and was just going to write on. 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 said, ‘and that was one of the things that led me to feel morally certain 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 it was afterwards that Selby saw you buying that Ixtil stuff, and it was plain that you had taken two doses. And it struck me, though it didn’t seem to have struck Selby, that it was unlikely anyone already resolved to drown herself at sea would begin treating herself against seasickness.

  ‘Then there were those new black hairpins. The sight of them was a revelation to me. For I knew, of course, that with that hair of yours you had probably never used a black hairpin in your life.’

  The countess felt at her pale-gold plaits, and gravely held out to him a black hairpin. ‘In the valley we use nothing else.’

  ‘It is very different in the valley, I know,’ he said gently. ‘I was speaking of my world—the world that you have left. I was led by those hairpins to think of your having changed your appearance, and I even guessed at what was in the parcel that came for your maid, which Selby had told me about.’

  She 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.’

  ‘All the same, I thought it was a strong possibility,’ he answered. ‘Your problem, you see, was just what you say—to hide yourself. And you had another—you had to make a living somehow. Everything you possessed—except some small amount in cash, I suppose—you left behind when you disappeared. And a woman can’t 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 something very like an impossibility.’

  She nodded gravely. ‘That was how I saw it.’

  ‘So,’ he pursued, ‘it came to this: that the world-famous Lillemor Wergeland had to come to the surface again somewhere, and in no long time—Lillemor Wergeland, whose type of beauty and general appearance were so marked and unmistakable, whose photographs were known everywhere. The fact is that for some time I couldn’t see for the life of me how it could possibly have been done. There were only a few countries, I supposed, of which you knew enough of the language to attempt to live in any of them; and if you did, you would always be conspicuous by your physical type and your accent. If you attracted attention, discovery might follow at any moment. The more I thought of it, the more marvellous it seemed that you had not been recognized—assuming you were still alive—during the six years or so that had passed before I heard the full story and guessed at the truth.

  ‘And then an idea came. There was one country in which your looks and speech would not betray you as a foreigner—your own country. And if there were any corners of the world where you could go with a fair certainty of being unrecognized, the remoter villages of Norway would be among them. And at Myklebostad, on the Langfjord, which the map told me was one of the remotest, you had a brother, who was two thousand pounds richer by your supposed death. You see how it was, then, that I came to this place on a sketching holiday.’

  Trent stood up and gazed across the valley to the sunlit white peaks beyond. ‘I have visited Norway before, but never had such an interesting time. And now, before I return to the haunts of men, let me say again that I shall forget at once all that has happened today. Don’t think it was merely a vulgar curiosity that brought me here. There was once a supreme artist, whose gifts made me her debtor and servant. Anything that happened to her touched me; I had a sort of right to go seeking what it really was that had happened.’

  She stood before him in her coarse and stained clothes, her hands clasped behind her, with a face and attitude of perfect dignity. ‘Very well—you stand on your right, and I on mine—to arrange my own life, since I am alone in it. I will spend it here, where it began. My soul was born here before it went out to have adventures, and it has crept home again for comfort. Believe me, it is not only that, as you say, I am safe from discovery here. That counts for very much; but also I felt I must go and live out my life in my own place, this faraway, lonely valley, where everything is humble and unspoilt, and the hills and the fjords are as God made them before there were any men. It is all my own, own land!

  ‘And now,’ she ended suddenly, ‘we understand one another, and we can part friends.’ She extended her hand, saying, ‘I do not know your name.’

  ‘Why should you?’ he asked. He bent over the hand, then went quickly from her. At the beginning of the descent he glanced back once; she waved to him.

  Halfway down the rugged track he stopped. Far above a wonderful voice was singing to the glory of the Norse land.

  ‘Ja, herligt er mit Fodeland

  Der ewig trodser Tidens Tand’

  sang the voice.

  Trent looked out upon the wild landscape. ‘Her fatherland!’ he soliloquized. ‘Well, well! They say the strictest parents have the most devoted children.’

  XIII

  THE MINISTERING ANGEL

  ‘WHATEVER the meaning of it may be, it’s a devilish unpleasant business,’ Arthur Selby said as he and Philip Trent established themselves on a sofa in the smoking-room of the Lansdowne Club. ‘We see enough of that sort of business in the law—even firms like ours, that don’t have much to do with crime, have plenty of unpleasantness to deal with, and I don’t know that some of it isn’t worse than the general run of crime. You know what I mean. Crazy spite, that’s one thing. You wouldn’t believe what some people—people of position and education and all that—you wouldn’t believe what they are capable of when they want to do somebody a mischief. Usually it’s a blood relation. And then there’s constitutional viciousness. We had one client—he died soon after Snow took me into partnership—whose whole life had been one lascivious debauch.’

  Trent laughed. ‘That phrase doesn’t sound like your own, Arthur. It belongs to an earlier generation.’

  ‘Quite true,’ Selby admitted. ‘It was Snow told me that about old Sir William Never-mind-who, and it stuck in my memory. But come now—I’m wandering. A good lunch—by the way, I hope it was a good lunch.’

  ‘One of the very best,’ Trent said. ‘You know it was too. Ordering lunches is one of the best things you do, and you’re proud of it. That hock was a poem—a villanelle, for choice. What were you going to say about good lunches?’

  ‘Why, I was going to say that a good lunch usually makes me inclined to prattle a bit; because, you see, all I allow myself most days is a couple of apples and a glass of milk in the office. That’s the way to appreciate a thing: don’t have it too often, and take a hell of a lot of trouble about it when you do. But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about, Phil. I was saying just now that we get a lot of unpleasantness in our job. We can usually understand it when we get it, but the affair I want to tell you about is a puzzle to me; and of course you are well known to be good at puzzles. If I tell you the story, will you give me a spot of advice if you can?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, it’s about a c
lient of ours who died a fortnight ago, named Gregory Landell. You wouldn’t have heard of him, I dare say; he never did anything much outside his private hobbies, having always had money and never any desire to distinguish himself. He could have done, for he had plenty of brains—a brilliant scholar, always reading Greek. He and my partner had been friends from boyhood; at school and Cambridge together; had tastes in common; both rock-garden enthusiasts, for one thing. Landell’s was a famous rock-garden. Other amateurs used to come from all parts to visit it, and of course he loved that. Then they were both Lewis Carroll fans—when they got together, bits from the Alice books and the Snark were always coming into the conversation—both chess players, both keen cricketers when they were young enough, and never tired of watching first-class games. Snow used often to stay for weekends at Landell’s place at Cholsey Wood, in Berkshire.

  ‘When Landell was over fifty, he married for the first time. The lady was a Miss Mary Archer, daughter of a naval officer, and about twenty years younger than Landell, at a guess. He was infatuated with her, and she seemed to make a great fuss of him, though she didn’t strike me as being the warm-hearted type. She was a good-looking wench with plenty of style, and gave you the idea of being fond of her own way. We made his will for him, leaving everything to her if there were no children. Snow and I were both appointed executors. In his previous will he had left all his property to a nephew; and we were sorry the nephew wasn’t mentioned in this later will, for he is a very useful citizen—some kind of medical research worker—and he has barely enough to live on.’

  ‘Why did he make both of you executors?’ Trent wondered.

  ‘Oh, in case anything happened to one of us. And it was just as well, because early this year poor old Snow managed to fracture his thigh, and he’s been laid up ever since. But that’s getting ahead of the story. After the marriage, Snow still went down to Landell’s place from time to time, as before; but after a year or so he began to notice a great change in the couple. Landell seemed to get more and more under his wife’s thumb. Couldn’t call his soul his own.’