Trent laughed at the solicitor’s tone, and Selby laughed too. His friend walked to the fireplace and pensively adjusted his tie. ‘Well, I must be off,’ he announced. ‘How about dining with me on Friday at the Cactus? If by that time I’ve anything to suggest about all this, I’ll tell you. You will? All right, make it eight o’clock.’ And he hastened away.
But on the Friday he 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 achieve anything, and did not press the matter.
It was six months later, on a sunny afternoon in September, that Trent walked up the valley road at Myklebostad, looking farewell at the mountain far ahead, the white-capped mother of the torrent that roared down a twenty-foot fall beside him. He had been a week in this remote backwater of Europe, seven hours by motor-boat from the nearest place that ranked as a town. 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 worked and he had explored, and had learned as much as he could of his neighbours. It was little enough, for the postmaster, in whose house he had a room, spoke only a trifle of German, and no one else, as far as he could discover, had anything but Norwegian, of which Trent knew no more than what could be got from a traveller’s phrase-book. But he had seen every dweller in the valley, and he had paid close attention to the household of Knut Wergeland, the rich man of the valley, who had the largest farm. He and his wife, elderly and grim-faced peasants, lived with one servant in an old turf-roofed steading not far from the post office. Not another person, Trent was sure, inhabited the house.
He had decided at last 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 one day when he was sketching near the place, and they had refused with gentle firmness to take any payment. Both had made on him an impression of complete 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 sunlight against the dense growth of birches running from top to bottom of the steep cliff that walled the valley 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. He perceived that there must be a wire, and a well-used wire, which led up the precipitous hill face among the trees. Trent went on towards the spot on the road whence the wire seemed to be taken upwards. He had never been so far in this direction until now. 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 wire stretched upward through the branches in the same direction as the path.
Trent slapped the post with a resounding blow. Heavens and earth!’ he exclaimed. ‘I had forgotten the saeter!’
And at once he began to climb.
A thick carpet of rich pasture began where the deep birch-belt ended at the top of the height. It stretched away for miles over a gently sloping upland. As Trent came into the open, panting after a strenuous forty-minute climb, the heads of a score of browsing cattle were sleepily turned towards him. Beyond them wandered many more, and two hundred yards away stood a tiny hut, turf-roofed.
This plateau was the saeter; the high grassland attached to some valley farm. Trent had heard long ago, and never thought since, of this feature of Norway’s rural life. At the appointed time, the cattle would be driven up by an easier detour to the mountain pastures for their summer holiday, to be attended there by some peasant – usually a young girl – who lived solitary with the herd. Such wires as that he had seen were kept bright by the daily descent of milk churns, let down by a line from above, received by a farm-hand at the road below.
And there, at the side of the hut, a woman stood. Trent, as he 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 careworn face of this very type of the middle-aged peasant women of the region.
She ceased her task of scraping a large cake of chocolate into a bowl and straightened her tall body. Smiling, with lean hands on her hips, she spoke in Norwegian, greeting him.
Trent made the proper reply. ‘And that,’ he added in his own tongue, ‘is a large part of all the Norwegian I know. Perhaps, madam, you speak English.’ Her light-blue eyes looked puzzlement, and she spoke again, pointing down to the valley. He nodded; and she began to talk pleasantly in her unknown speech. From within the hut she brought two thick mugs; she pointed rapidly to the chocolate in the bowl, to himself and herself.
‘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 this was her dwelling, the roughest Trent had ever seen. He could discern that on two small shelves were ranged a few pieces of chipped earthenware. A wooden bed-place, with straw and two neatly folded blankets, filled a third of the space in the hut. All the carpentry was of the rudest. From a small chest in a corner she drew a biscuit tin, half-full of flat cakes of stale rye bread. There seemed to be nothing else in the tiny place but a heap of twigs for fuel.
She made chocolate in the two mugs, and then, at Trent’s insistence in dumb show, she sat on the only stool at a rude table outside the hut, while her guest made a seat of an upturned milking pail. She continued to talk amiably and unintelligibly, while he finished with difficulty the half of a bread-cake.
‘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 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 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, be
cause 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 ordered a dark-brown transformation – that is a lady’s word for wig – some stuff fur 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 goodbye to the fiction of my suicide. No; when we reached Brindisi, we had, as I knew, some hours there. We left our things at an 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’ 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’ 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 sky-line.
‘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 sea-sickness.
‘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 remai
ns,’ 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 recognised – 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 unrecognised, 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 Intervenes and Other Stories Page 22