“Nobody knew about it, you see. Young Treverra’s body was never found, so the vault wasn’t opened for him. His young brother came home from school and took over the estate, but he’d never been in the secret. To him his mother and father had died and been buried, no mysteries, no tragedy but the ordinary, gentle tragedy of bereavement, that happens sooner or later to everyone. By the time he died and was buried, St. Nectan’s was already fighting a losing battle with the sand, and they’d built St. Mary’s, high up in the town, and abandoned the old graveyard by the shore. And Morwenna lay there alone, separated from her Jan, and he—God knows which was the unluckier of the two.”
Tamsin had got up from her place very quietly, and gone to her desk. She came back with the folder of the Treverra papers in her hand, and slid out upon the table the two epitaphs.
“Not that I don’t know them by heart,” she said in a low voice. “But suddenly they seem so new and so transparent, as though we ought to have been able to read the whole story in them from the beginning.”
“You think I’ve made out a case, then?” Simon’s eyes met hers down the length of the table, and there was nothing left of challenge or antagonism on her side, and nothing of pursuit or self-indulgence on his. They looked at each other with wonder and grief, and a certain frustrated helplessness, but with no doubt at all.
“I think it’s so unanswerable a case that I don’t know how we missed following the clues Jan left us. It’s all here! Don’t you hear him? He couldn’t play any game without making it dangerous to himself, there wouldn’t have been any sport. He told them just what he was about. He made his exit snapping his fingers under the nose of the law, and daring them to follow his trail if they had the wit. But they hadn’t, and neither had we.
‘Think not to find, beneath this Stone
Mute Witness, bleached, ambiguous Bone—’
You see, he told them, don’t look for me here, you won’t find me. And then, his ‘trackless maze,’ ‘the labyrinth beyond the tomb’—what was that but the real tunnel that opened beyond his tomb? He told them how he made his getaway, kicked up his heels at them and invited them to go after him if they were smart enough. And then, the last four lines, those are for her.
‘There follow, O my Soul, and find
Thy Lord as ever true and kind,
And savour, where all Travellers meet,
The last Love as the first Love sweet’.”
Simon sat looking at her with a face very still and very pale beneath its tan, and eyes that had no lustre; his voice was gentle and impersonal enough as he took up the recital from her.
“Now listen to Morwenna, and I don’t think you’ll doubt that this really was Morwenna herself speaking:
‘Carve this upon Morwenna’s Grave:
NONE BUT THE BRAVE DESERVES THE BRAVE.
Shed here no Tears. No Saint could die
More blessed and comforted than I.
For I confide I shall but rest
A Moment in this stony Nest,
Then, raised by Love, go forth to find
A Country dearer to my Mind,
And touching safe the sun-bright Shore,
Embrace my risen Lord once more.’
Well, do you hear the authentic voice?”
They heard it indeed, suddenly fierce, impious, arrogant and gay, the reverse of its own conventionally presented image. Miss Rachel stirred uneasily, unwilling to acknowledge but unable to deny what she now saw in that delicate and beautiful creature in the drawing on the wall. Not the first and not the last in history to spit unwise defiance at the lightning.
“Why, she was the wilder of the two! That’s surely more than a little blasphemous! And then such a terrible fate, poor girl. Mr. Polwhele, do you think that what happened to them was a kind of Judgment?”
“No!” said the Vicar, with large and unclerical disdain, and looked a little surprised at his own vehemence. “I should be ashamed to attribute to God a malice of which I don’t find even myself capable. And I don’t think the spectacle of two daring and exuberant children egging each other on to say outrageous things about me, in my hearing, would even drive me to knock their heads together, much less drop a mountain on them and crush them. I think I might even laugh, when they weren’t looking. It would depend on the degree of style they showed. And Morwenna certainly had style. No, I don’t think there was any rejoicing in heaven when there was nobody left to lift the stone away. Rather a terrible sense of loss. She was brave, loyal and loving, enough virtues to offset what the Authorised Version would call a froward tongue. No, I suppose one must say that they played with fire so persistently that it was inevitable they’d get burned in the end. But to them playing with fire made life doubly worth living. You can’t have it both ways.”
“If she was blasphemous,” said Phil, shivering, “she certainly paid for it. She had the more terrible fate.”
“Did she?” Simon looked up, looked round the table with a brief and contorted smile. “I wonder how long Treverra watched and waited for her, or for news of her? He couldn’t come home, you see, he couldn’t even send letters, there was no one left here who knew he was alive. He had to stay dead in his old identity, he was still a wanted man. Maybe he thought she’d changed her mind, and found it quite convenient to be a widow. Maybe he thought she’d married again. Maybe he even began to fear she’d been planning her own future and laughing at him even while she helped him to arrange his elaborate joke, She was only forty-one, and a great beauty. And he couldn’t come back and fight for her. His joke had turned against him. Oh, believe me, if there was anything he had to pay for, he paid. There was only one agony he was spared—at least he didn’t know how his darling died.”
The moon was up when they went out to the cars, not too late, because Paddy had to leave by the traditional mid-morning train, and there were still the last little things to pack. The tide was half-way out, the moonshine turned the wet beach to silver, and the scattered clouds were moist with reflected light.
“I trust,” said Simon, finding George Felse close beside him as they went down the steps to the drive, “you were duly impressed with my performance?”
The voice was deliberately cool and light, but tired. He had walked rather stiffly past Tamsin, when she hesitated and waited for him in the doorway. For several days now he had been walking past Tamsin, with aching care and reluctant resolution. It had taken her a day or so to realise it, and longer to believe in it. She had the idea now, she had betaken herself promptly where she was welcomed, between Paddy and Dominic. They stood chattering beside the Mini, all a little subdued. The soft voices had a sound of autumn in them, too, as gentle as the salt wind.
“Yes, you’re quite a detective,” conceded George. Simon’s eyes were on Paddy, and the slight, brooding smile was unwary; he had no reason to suppose that George possessed the knowledge necessary to make it significant. “Now what about tackling the only mystery that’s left? I’m sure you could put a finger just as accurately on Trethuan’s killer, if you really tried.”
The smile stiffened slightly for an instant, and then perceptibly deepened. “Maybe I will, yet,” said Simon. “But there’s just one more question I have to ask before I shall know what I’ve got to tell you about that case. Give me till to-morrow.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Can I run you back to the hotel? It isn’t too comfortable for four, but it’s bearable for that distance.”