THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Read online

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  It was fully a week before the young man realised that the vision that had sat at his bedside, administering medicine, soothing drinks, cold water spongings, and what not, was not a mere figment of his fevered imagination! Vaguely he stared at her, seeing a tall, slim girl in fresh blue-spotted linen, with brown hair wavy and crisp surrounding her charming serious face like a nimbus, and wide-set grey eyes fixed on his—stretching out a lean pallid hand, he grasped at her as if afraid she might melt into the distance before he caught her, and breathed an awestruck question.

  ‘Eve?’

  The vision nodded a grave head.

  ‘Yes. I’m Eve, and I’m real, and looking after you . . . now take this, and don’t try to talk or understand anything!’

  A glassful of cool fresh lime-juice and soda was held to his lips, and still staring, still marvelling, Tony Kenyon fell asleep clinging to the hand of the vision in blue, secretly miserably sure he was dreaming, and that she would be gone when he awoke. But she was there when he woke again hours and hours later—when he woke during the night, and cried out for her, terrified, convinced afresh that it all was a dream, lo, she crept in from the next room, more visionary than ever in boyish striped pyjamas under a loose white wrapper! She was there still when he woke in the mornings, when the sunshine crept through the close-drawn mosquito-net curtains, and the cicalas sang merrily in the bush outside, when Plumjam, beaming, brought in breakfast spread for two, with coffee, bananas, and tiny river-fish fried in oil till they curled up like the question marks to all the inquiries that Tony Kenyon longed to make, and realised that he was still too ill and weak to make. . . .

  Wisely the newcomer forbade him to ask questions until he mended—but he mended rapidly. Youth and health were on his side, and the direly needed tonic of companionship worked hand in hand with his own strong constitution to overcome his weakness, until it was only a short time before he was well enough to lie, wrapped in a light rug and dressing-gown, on a lounge chair on the veranda, beaming and cheerful, albeit white-faced, and watching his miraculously sent companion with a gaze still entirely amazed and by now abjectingly adoring. He had been, until now, far too weak to concentrate on anything but getting well, but with regained strength came overwhelming curiosity and wonder . . . it was on one cool and lovely evening about a fortnight after her arrival that Eve Dersingham, to give her full name, at last opened the subject that her companion was so longing to explore.

  They had finished dinner, and were sitting in the amber glow of the big oil-lamp upon the veranda, listening to the croak and flop of the giant frogs in the river, the soft swirl of the dark-gleaming water as it poured past the piles of the landing-stage, the occasional crash of branches overhead as a stray monkey swung its way home to bed along the tree-tops that are the highways of the world of the bandar-log. Eve sat smoking tranquilly, staring before her, her thick soft hair like a halo against the ruddy lamp-shade on the table just beyond her, a soft green muslin frock following the lines of her graceful body, one narrow hand, ringless, hanging idly over the arm of a deckchair. Tony spoke hesitatingly, struggling after a memory.

  ‘Forgive my asking . . . but didn’t you wear an engagement ring when you came first?’ he asked diffidently.

  She nodded soberly.

  ‘Yes. You see, when I came, I thought I was still engaged to Len. . . .’

  Tony bit his lip—he was faintly, wistfully jealous of the link between the shadowy long-legged man who had so long companioned him, and the girl whom he now realised he loved with all his hungry young heart. Sanders—the faint yet tangible ghost-friend that he called Sanders—seemed to have retreated somewhat since Eve’s advent, yet still stood in the offing, watching waiting, it seemed for something to happen . . . he moved uneasily, and the girl went on, speaking reflectively as she blew rings of lilac smoke up to the creeper-draped roof of the veranda.

  ‘You’re well enough now to hear everything, I think—not that I can tell you everything, I don’t understand myself, even now! Listen!’ She turned to him suddenly and threw out her hands. ‘Are you sure that Len is dead?’

  Puzzled, the young man stared at her.

  ‘Dead? Of course he is!’ he said. ‘Ask Plumjam. He saw him die, and buried him. I’ve seen his grave, poor chap, under the mangoes behind the bungalow. I’ve stuck up a cross of sorts, and tried my best to keep it decent, but the weeds grow in this swampy land like the dickens, and it is difficult. . . .’

  ‘When did he die?’ went on the girl.

  Tony hesitated a moment, then nodded.

  ‘Five or six months before I took over, and I’ve been here nearly a year now—that’s about sixteen months!’ He was not prepared for the girl’s answer, made with her eyes on his.

  ‘Tony—I know you wouldn’t lie to me! But if Len is dead, then what—who—how is it that, with the exception of the lapse of a few months, ever since he is supposed to have died, he has been writing regularly to me?’

  She fumbled in her bag, and producing a bundle of tattered letters tied with ribbons, threw them across the table to him. Kenyon’s eyes widened as he studied the postmarks on the envelopes. All dated during the past year, all posted from Lagos, whence his own mail was dispatched for home . . . he sat up, startled and vaguely disquieted.

  ‘But this is absurd!’ he ejaculated. ‘You’re sure it is his writing—that someone isn’t playing a hoax on you?’

  Eve shook her head.

  ‘Never. I know Len’s writing, his turn of phrase, the way he put things, too well! Why, he was my cousin—we were brought up together.’ She hesitated and brought out the rest of the sentence with a faint rush and deepening of her pretty colour. ‘That’s why, when he asked me to marry him, I consented. When he left England to come out here four years ago, he asked me if, when he was making enough money, I would come out and marry him, and I said yes, because . . . well, I was very fond of him, and I knew he would be good to me, and Mother was so happy to think that when she died I wouldn’t be left alone. . . .’ She twisted her hands together and stared out into the darkening bush. ‘All those reasons seem now rather mean and small for accepting a man’s love. I know now I was only giving him a rather childish sort of affection in return. But I didn’t know any better then! I didn’t know anything about love. . . .!’

  ‘Do you know—now?’ breathed Tony, vastly daring.

  She bent her head, voiceless—weak as he was, he stretched his arms out, hungry for her, joyful, as with a quick convulsive movement she slid to her knees at his side, and buried her soft brown head on his shoulder. For a few moments they were still, held close in each other’s arms, while the kindly moon that has witnessed so many love-scenes smiled down between the interlacing branches of the trees, and the bats wheeled and darted about the eaves of the veranda, curtained with starry white nipa flowers that strewed the dusk with scent. . . .

  ‘My God!’ breathed the young man at last, ecstatically. ‘I believe I fell in love with you from the first moment I saw your photograph on poor old Sanders’ desk! But that you should love me! I’m all in a muddle still as to how or why you came out here, I’m sure it’s a miracle straight from Heaven, but come close to me and explain. . . .’

  Curled at his side on a cushion thrown upon the rough board flooring of the veranda, Eve told her lover how she had lost her mother about fourteen months previously of heart-failure. Of how she had taken a course of training in the hope of getting an engagement as private secretary, only to fail ignominiously, finding her experience not sufficient for a highly paid post, and the only ones open to her so poorly salaried that it would utterly impossible to live upon her earnings. For a short time she had live precariously upon the few hundreds left her by her mother, alone and all but friendless, and deeply troubled over the fact that shortly before her mother’s death all letters from her betrothed had suddenly ceased! Ceased curiously and completely, despite the fact that she was herself writing to him as regularly as ever—she ha
d all but given up hope when lo, many weary months later, three months after Tony Kenyon’s arrival at Tinpot Landing in fact, out of the blue the letters began coming again!

  ‘The first,’ said Eve, her wide blue-grey eyes fixed on Tony’s, ‘was dated about the time you must have arrived here. Written from the old address—Tinpot Landing—same style, same affectionate way of writing and signing himself, as ever. Of course, I was frightfully hurt and angry at his leaving me so long without a word, but I was so thankful to see his writing again, and to know I wasn’t forgotten and alone in the world, that I couldn’t keep up being cross for long?.’

  ‘How did he explain his not writing?’ asked Tony, open-eyed.

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘I asked him, of course, in my very first letter back, why on earth he had kept silence for such ages, but his answer wasn’t a bit satisfactory! He only said he couldn’t explain, but it was inevitable, and some day he’d be able to tell me. The odd thing is, he seemed to know all about mother’s death and what had happened to me since. Then he went straight on to urge me to sell everything I could lay hands on and come straight out her to him . . . yet at the time, according to Plumjam, he was already dead and buried!’

  For an astonished second the two stared at each other in silence. Fear touched them with an icy finger. It sounded at once horrible and ridiculous, that a man already dead and in his grave should send a letter summoning a woman to marry him! With an involuntary shiver Tony pulled himself together, and spoke in a voice deliberately brusque and normal.

  ‘Absurd! There must be some mistake!’

  ‘There’s no mistake about these letters, anyway,’ insisted Eve. She ran her fingers through the scattered envelops in his lap. ‘Read them! All of them headed Tinpot Landing, all written at intervals over this year, all urging me to come out her as fast as I can!’

  There was no denying written facts. There they were, a whole series of letters clearly written in the upright regular hand already familiar to Tony through his perusal of Sanders’ multitudinous neatly kept records. Kindly, affectionate letters urging the girl to ‘come out, come out whatever anybody says. Sell everything you have and come, and I’ll swear you’ll never regret it. . . .’

  Tony’s brow was creased with a puzzled frown as he laid the last sheet down. It was somehow incredibly uncanny and unpleasant to read these intimate letters, and know them to be written by a man reported, as firmly and solidly as report could have it, dead sixteen months, and buried as deep as Abraham! The girl went on, hurriedly, eagerly, as he fingered the scribbled sheets.

  ‘I hesitated a bit at first . . . you see, that long silence had shaken my faith in him a little. And then, too,’ her flush deepened adorably, ‘I’d begun to have just a tiny streak of doubt as to whether I loved poor Len as he loved me! As I ought to love him if I meant to marry him . . . but . . . well, there seemed nothing else to do. I couldn’t get a job, and he wrote and wrote—so at last I managed to borrow enough money for the passage from mother’s old solicitor, and here I am!’

  Putting the letters together, Tony retied them with a firm decisive movement.

  ‘My theory is that Sanders isn’t dead at all, but hiding somewhere for some reason!’ he said firmly. ‘But if he is—why on earth should you be so brutally and horribly hoaxed? To drag you out here on a wildgoose chase . . . when did you find out Sanders was dead, or supposed to be dead?’

  ‘At the office of the Company at Lagos!’ said Eve distressfully. ‘I went there, of course, to make inquiries about getting here, and the first thing the little agent did was to ask me why. Then he began to make silly jokes about Tinpot Landing not being a health resort for young ladies. I stiffened up and said I’d come to marry Len, and he nearly fell flat—when he recovered he explained Len was dead and that you were there instead! I argued with him, of course—showed him Len’s last letter headed “Tinpot Landing”, and dated, to prove he must be mistaken, and he was completely floored, but insisted that Len was dead . . . then I got frightened and angry both, but I wasn’t turning back. I was going through with the thing by that time!’ The lift of her determined chin was a pleasant thing to see.

  ‘And when I landed—the man was right! It wasn’t Len, but you. . . . You were lying in bed raving and shouting with fever, and there was no sense to be got out of you, of course. But I felt I couldn’t turn my back and leave you there, although Captain Vechten warned me it meant my staying here three months before he could return. So he went, and I stayed behind. Not only because I couldn’t have left you like that, but because I felt it in my bones that I must stay, if only to try and find out the truth. I know old Len would want me to do that, whatever has happened to him. . . .’

  She shivered suddenly, and drew closer to her young lover. Over her head Tony glanced towards the wide-set French windows leading into the little living-room. He had a swift fleeting impression, intangible but curiously vivid, that a tall rangy figure smoking a pipe had paused in the doorway, surveyed them both with a faint wistful smile of content, and gone as swiftly as he had come. Could Sanders’ ghost . . . but of course, that was rubbish! Those odd absurd fancies that had ruled him before Eve came were mere figments of a restless, nervy brain, over-strained with work and loneliness . . . aloud he spoke, firmly and clearly, as much to steady his own nerves as to soothe hers.

  ‘Well, whatever is the explanation of the whole extraordinary business, beloved, God bless it, since it’s brought us together. We can get the captain to marry us on his next visit—or if he can’t, collar a parson as soon as may be—weather the rest of this damn’ appointment together, and then hey for a decent post nearer civilisation! But first. . . .’ his brow clouded, and he set his lips. ‘I must try to solve this infernal mystery of poor Sanders’ death. And I can only solve it one way—and that a way you may not like. . . .’

  He eyed her sideways, uncertain. She paled but nodded, clasping her hands together.

  ‘You mean—dig open the poor darling’s grave? Oh, Tony, is it necessary? It seems so horrible!’

  ‘It does,’ said Tony gloomily. ‘And I wouldn’t for a thousand pounds think of doing so if I didn’t feel it would solve one part of this problem at least, whether or not anybody is actually buried there. Plumjam swears he buried Sanders there with his own hands, but, of course, if they’re bribed heavily enough most natives will lie like troopers! I don’t want to hint at anything unpleasant, for God knows I liked the look of Sanders, and don’t believe he’d do such a thing, but it has happened before, you know, that a white man has chosen for some reason of his own to disappear into the wilds. Gone native, taken to drink or dope, lost his balance somehow. . . .’

  Eve nodded. With a soft murmur of rustling skirts she rose to her feet, and flung the stub of her last cigarette into the dark heart of the bush.

  ‘If we must, we must!’ she said reluctantly. ‘But oh, if we could only fathom it all without that! It seems so crude and horrible, and I know dear old Len would never have done anything rotten—nothing he’d need to disappear for. He was the kindest, the straightest, the most generous soul in the world.’.

  She paused with a sudden shiver, and glanced over her shoulder. ‘Odd! I felt just then as if Len was standing smiling at me. . . .’

  Rising groggily to his feet, her lover took her into his arms, and held her close as she went on, her lips against his cheek.

  ‘It’s odd, Tony, but somehow I don’t feel as if I’m playing Len false by falling in love with you. If he’d been alive I’ve have gone to him and said, “Look here, Len, I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve made a mistake. I love Tony, not you!’ He would have winced a bit, but never been bitter or mean, and he would have said, ‘I’m much older than you, child, and all I want is your happiness. If Kenyon can give you this and I can’t, I’ll stand back and wish you both all the luck in the world?’ and he’d have meant it!’

  ‘I know,’ whispered Tony to her curling hair. ‘He must have been a fine chap—a g
ood chap—I can tell that from his photographs. We’ll never forget him. For whatever the explanation is, somehow he’s brought us together?.’

  * * * * *

  Young, healthy and happier than she had ever thought to be, Eve Dersingham should, on this night of nights, have been able to sleep soundly, but for some curious reason, she found she could not. Plumjam had fitted up comfortable quarters for her out of the small room already mentioned next to the living-room. Cleared of the guns, boots, papers, all the rest of the miscellaneous stuff with which a bachelor living in the wilds inevitably surrounds himself, and provided with a camp-bed, a gilt framed wall-mirror proudly produced from the store hut, a dressing-table hastily rigged up out of sugar boxes, and a camp-stool in lieu of a chair, it made a pleasant and comfortable little den enough, and even since Tony had been well enough to leave alone during the nights, the girl had slept there in the greatest peace and tranquillity.

  But tonight she was curiously wakeful. Fidgety, restless, her mind darting from one thought to another, like a moth circling a flame, circling around the amazing mystery of her old lover’s death, or supposed death. . . . What was the explanation of the letters? Could it be as Tony had hinted, that Len Sanders, straightest and whitest of men, had, for reasons of his own, chosen to disappear into the heart of Africa, as divers men had done before him—got someone, perhaps Plumjam, perhaps some other native, to go on forwarding letters to her so as she should come out all unknowing, on a fool’s errand?

  But that was so utterly foreign to her knowledge of the man! The kindest, most gentle and generous soul in the world, as she had described him to her lover. . . . It was impossible that he should have dragged her out to this God-forsaken corner of the world, for no reason at all, as far as she could see. It seemed that the gruesome task of opening his lonely grave among the mangroves was the only way of proving the thing at least; whether or no there was a body in that grave at all, and whether, if so, that body was Sanders’ or that of some stray native, perhaps, buried as a blind. She sighed heavily, perplexed and distressed beyond measure, then started, as a soft step sounded outside upon the veranda.