The Lost Valley Part 3

"Well, there is something I'd like you to do, Jim," he said. "I want half-a-dozen parish maps. Here's the list of them"--he handed me a piece of paper with a few names scribbled on the back--"and here's the money.

Go down to the Lands Department and they'll fix you up. Mind that they are large scale maps, the largest they've got. You'd better take the car, and don't be any longer than you can help."

"It's a twenty minutes' run at the outside," I said. "I won't waste any time."

He nodded quite cheerfully to me and went into his room. I heard the key grate in the lock as I walked down the pa.s.sage and I remember saying to myself, "That habit's going to get him into trouble yet."

I reached the office in record time. They had some trouble in finding the maps I wanted--most of them were of parishes situated around the foot of the Grampians--but in the end they produced some that I fancied would suit my man. My twenty minutes' limit had almost expired and, as it is a matter of pride with me to be punctual, I let the car out a little. That, I suppose, was my undoing, for just as I crossed over the busiest street a motor-lorry swerved out and nearly collided with me. I did some very neat wheel-work, but my new course took me right across to the gutter, and before I had quite realised what had happened I had speared my tyre with a jagged piece of gla.s.s. The tyre popped off with a report like that of a small revolver, and the next second I was b.u.mping on the frame. I pulled up as quickly as I could, but the mischief was done and the tyre was just one great rip from end to end. Luckily I carried a spare wheel, but I am an unhandy man at the merely mechanical part of the work, and I took twice as long over it as a professional would have. By the time I was ready to start again my twenty minutes had lengthened into an hour, and somehow the knowledge of that worried me.

I packed my tools anyhow, hopped back into the car and threw over my clutch. The car started with a little jerk that I didn't quite relish, and on looking over the side I saw that the new wheel was wobbling, not very much indeed, but just enough to show me that I had bungled my work.

I immediately cut down my speed and proceeded for the rest of the journey at something closely approaching a snail's pace.

"Now," I said to myself, "if this was in a novel I'd say that the lorry cut across my path deliberately. But as this is in real life and the lorry belongs to a firm of respectable grocers it can't be anything else but just my own darned bad luck."

I dismissed the incident at that and turned my attention to my driving.

I had no intention of mixing myself up in another such accident if I could possibly avoid it, and now that I had definitely taken service with Bryce I felt I owed it to him to exercise all reasonable care.

After my first few spasmodic attempts at resistance I had succ.u.mbed rather quickly to his enticing offer. After all, I thought, I wouldn't be putting myself in any greater danger than I had been in for the past four years. I had faced sudden death in many shapes and forms during my sojourn in the strange wild lands about the Line, so much so that, once I had taken into account the money Bryce was giving me, the present adventure rather degenerated into a pleasant little game of hide-and-seek.

I was still turning this over in that portion of my mind which wasn't occupied with the sheerly mechanical side of my work when I reached the house. More from force of habit than from any other cause I cast my eyes along the road, much as if it had been a forest trail that held secrets only a woodsman could read. Plainly marked in the dust of the roadway were the tracks of a vehicle that I instinctively knew to be a cab. It had veered right in towards the kerb, and a moment's study convinced me that it had stopped at Bryce's house. Now that meant that somebody had arrived during my absence, and, as Bryce had said nothing to me about expecting a visitor, I decided that the sooner I entered the house and investigated the better for the safety of all concerned. I drove the car into the garage in record time and darted into the house as if the devil were at my heels. There wasn't a sound to be heard; even the eternal clatter of the typewriter had ceased. With a caution born of experience I tip-toed up the pa.s.sage, all my senses instinctively on the alert. The door of Bryce's room was still locked and everything, to all outward seeming, was just as I had left it. I don't know what I had expected to find in the pa.s.sage, but the very apparent quietness of the place sobered me considerably, and I realised abruptly on what a slender foundation I had based my fears. If anything had happened during my absence it was almost certain that I would have found some trace of it in the hall, a rug disarranged, or a mat kicked away from the door. All the odds were on Bryce working quietly behind the locked door. Yet of all the foolish things in the world for me to think of the idea that entered my mind just then was that something that concerned me very intimately was being worked out in the room across the pa.s.sage.

I made one step forward and then I stopped abruptly. Some one else than Bryce was in the room. Out of the silence came a voice, a woman's voice.

It was smooth and well-modulated, and there was the faintest touch of music in it. In some curious way it touched a stray chord in my memory.

I knew at once that I had heard it before, but how or where I could no more say than I could fly. Perhaps that was because its full notes were m.u.f.fled by the door that intervened.

"I'd do anything," the woman said in the quietest tones imaginable, "anything but that. You don't understand. If you knew all the circ.u.mstances, if you knew just how and why we parted you wouldn't ask me. I'm sorry for it all now, more sorry than you could believe, but you can't expect me to take up things just where they left off--as if nothing had happened."

"Bryce's got a little romance tucked away up his sleeve," I thought.

"This sort of complicates matters. Wonder who the lady is?"

"My dear girl," came the reply in Bryce's tones, softer and more persuasive than I had ever heard them, "I know more perhaps than you think. I'm doing this out of the fullness of my knowledge in the hope that when I'm gone...."

"Don't!" the woman interrupted sharply. "Don't talk like that!"

"It's one of the things we've got to face," Bryce said gently. "I won't live for ever anyway, and you know as well as I do just what chance I run of having a period put to me ... any time now." The last three words were spoken very slowly and distinctly, as if Bryce wished them to sink into the mind of his companion. "You're the only person in the world that I care a hang about," he continued with a note of indescribable pathos in his voice, "and I'm doing all this for you ... and him."

"But I tell you," the girl said with a little flash of anger, "I tell you I won't have anything to do with him. If you bring him to the house I'll cut him dead."

"And put yourself doubly in the wrong and make it all the harder for everybody," Bryce told her.

There was a dogged note in the girl's voice as she replied. "I know I was wrong, but I just can't do what you want. I can't say more than that."

"I'm sorry you look at things that way," Bryce said. "I had hoped...." I did not catch the nature of his hope, for his voice dropped an octave or so and his sentence ended in whispers.

"Jimmy Carstairs," I said to myself, "you've been eavesdropping and you know it. You mustn't be caught doing those kind of things. Get out of the way as fast as you can," and at that I twisted round on my heel and went back down the hall. I hadn't any desire to be caught listening to conversations that were obviously not intended for me and that anyway weren't of the least interest. So you can be sure that when I did return up the hall I walked fairly heavily and coughed discreetly as soon as I was within hearing distance of Bryce's room.

The key turned in the lock of a sudden and the door was flung wide open.

The girl stood in her own light so that the shadows masked her face, but the sun fell full on mine and my features must have been clearly visible to her.

"You!" she said, with a little catch in her voice.

"Shut the door, please," I said, in the most matter-of-fact tones I could muster. "Shut the door and come out here."

I knew her now. G.o.d! Could I ever forget her? In a flash my mind flew back through four years--or was it five?--to that evening when she had caused my little world to rock and tremble, and then to fall in pieces at my feet. I had loved her then--I thought I loved her more than anything or anyone in this world--but a dying father's wish had come between us. The poor old Dad had made a life study of the Islands--how monumental a study it was let his three volumes of Solomon Island Ethnology bear witness--yet he died before he had quite completed his notes. Though he had said nothing to me I knew the wish that lay nearest his heart, and I made his dying hour almost the happiest of his life by promising to carry on his work.

I remember the night I came out to tell her. The sky was streaked with dead gold and cerise and warm-tinted clouds trailed across the heavens like the ends of a scarf streaming from the neck of a hurrying woman.

All the world was gay that evening and I whistled as I went. She was waiting at the gate as always she had waited for me. She greeted me with a smile and some bright little remark that I forgot practically the instant it was uttered.

"I want to talk to you," I said; "I want to talk seriously."

She smiled up at me, a trusting little smile as I thought. She had no idea what was coming, but she always gave me my head in the things that do not matter much.

"What is it, Jim?" she asked.

"It's this," I said, and then I told what I had promised.

"But that," she protested, "means burying yourself in New Guinea and the Solomons for four whole years."

"It does," I said. "There is no other way."

I had not been looking at her face--there had been no need, for I was quite convinced that she would see things in a proper light--but now I turned on her. To my surprise there was just the least little touch of annoyance in her face.

"You don't quite relish the idea," I said.

"It's a very foolish idea," she said quite frankly. "I don't know what you could have been thinking of."

"I was thinking of my father," I told her. "I was making his last hour happy, and he died in the knowledge that I would carry his work on to the conclusion he had planned."

"Are you going to see it through?" The abruptness of the question took me aback.

"Of course," I said. "What else could I do?"

"Four years!" she said. "What is to become of me?"

"The time will soon go by," I answered, "and then I'll come back to you and everything will be right."

"You seem to think of everyone but me," she said hotly. "You promised so that your father would die easy, and that's the end of it. If you are going to be bound by such a thing as that you're nothing more than an impractical idealist."

"I pa.s.sed my word and a Carstairs never breaks a promise."

"You mean that, Jim? You mean that you are going away to ... carry out that absurd promise?"

"It's not absurd," I declared.

"I think it is," she said wilfully. "If you go, you need never come back."

"I am going," I said steadily. "As an honorable man there is no other course open to me. I'm sorry that you look at it this way, but I can't do anything else."

"At last I know how much you think of me," she said with that little touch of anger with which a woman always defends the indefensible. "You never did care for me."