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 a.s.sumed 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 grat.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ciousness 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 confrere 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.