Into the Valley of Death
Read Into the Valley of Death Online
Authors: Evelyn Hervey
Evelyn Hervey
1
Miss Unwin took a hansom. If she could get to the Paddington Station in a quarter of an hour, she calculated, she might yet catch the only train that would get her before late evening on this Sunday to the Valley of Death.
She reached up with her cotton umbrella and tapped sharply on the hood of the gently swaying vehicle. From his high perch at her back, the driver opened the little communicating panel in the roof above her.
“Cannot you go at any better speed?” she asked. “There’s half a crown on top of your fare if you get me there in time.”
“I’m a-doing my best, ain’t I, miss?” the cabbie grunted, slamming the panel down again.
But Miss Unwin noted that at once he flicked his long whip onto the horse in front of her and sent their lightweight vehicle skimming through the almost deserted London streets, lapped by the soft ringing of church-bells, a great deal more quickly than before.
With a fine clatter of hooves on the cobbles at last, they drew up at the station with three or four minutes more in hand than Miss Unwin had counted on. She thrust the fare money, and that extra half-crown, up through the roof to the cabbie, pushed open the low doors in front of her, and stepped briskly down.
Quickly she looked this way and that and in a moment spotted a porter dawdling his way towards a cluster of passengers surrounded by heaps of luggage, corded trunks, valises, hatboxes, portmanteaus, bandboxes, Gladstone bags,
baskets, and parcels. She raised her umbrella high, careless of dignity, and called loudly, “Porter! Porter!”
The man, scenting a good tip, nipped round the party of travellers and came up to Miss Unwin at a trot.
He touched his uniform cap. “At your service,
miss.”
“Take my bag,” Miss Unwin said, indicating the solitary carpet-bag on the rack of the hansom, all that she had had time to pack. “First to the ticket office, and then to the train for Chipping Compton.”
“Yes, miss,” the man answered. “Platform three it is.”
At as fast a walk as was compatible with ladylike behaviour, Miss Unwin followed the porter, her bag up on his shoulder, to the ticket office, found to her relief that no other travellers were there before her, purchased a second-class ticket, and turned to go to the train.
“You’ll ’ave to hurry, miss,” the porter said. “Her’ll be off in a minute.”
“No,” she said, consulting the watch pinned to the bosom of her neat alpaca dress. “We have quite three minutes. That will be time enough.”
However urgent the need, she was not going to be bullied into more speed, and a larger tip, than was necessary.
The porter glowered. But he made no further attempt to chivvy her.
They passed the barrier at the platform, went rapidly but not over-rapidly along the length of the train towards the great steam-shrouded locomotive, and found a second-class compartment occupied by only a single, somewhat elderly, respectable-looking man. The porter entered, heaved Miss Unwin’s bag onto the rack, and stood waiting with his hand held out. Miss Unwin put into it a nicely calculated sum. The porter, with surprised gratitude, touched his cap, got down, and closed the carriage door without the heavy slam he had expected to bestow on it as a mark of disapproval.
The guard’s whistle shrilled out. The long train gave a shudder back and forwards and slowly got into motion.
Miss Unwin settled in her seat and took from her reticule the telegraphic message she had received early that morning.
Come to Valley of Death quick as you can. Help wanted. Signed Vilkins
.
She read the words over two or three times, but they meant no more to her than they had when the telegraph boy, his whistling loud in the Sunday quiet, had brought the message to the house where she was governess.
But she was still clear in her mind that the message had to be answered as quickly as possible by her own presence down in Oxfordshire. Because the call for help had come from her oldest friend in all the world, the person who as an infant only a few days old had been named by the beadle in charge of the workhouse where they had both been foundlings as “Vilkins” to follow in alphabetical order the “Unwin” he had bestowed on herself. Vilkins, who was now a housemaid in the country after twice working where Miss Unwin herself had been governess, had the right to call on her for immediate assistance if ever anyone had.
Yet it was a piece of luck that she had been in a position to go to her at once. Her present charge, the Honourable Ronald Adair, aged five, had been taken by his parents for the summer to cousins in Scotland, where she was not required. It was to provide some diversion during the long hot weeks in the airless Mayfair house with the servants on board wages as her only company that she had written just a few days before to Vilkins suggesting a visit when her friend had an afternoon off.
But instead of the expected reply, written for Vilkins by one of her better-educated fellow servants, there had come this urgent and inexplicable message.
The Valley of Death. What was that? Where was it?
She had looked in haste at the
Atlas of the English Counties
in her employer’s library when the telegram had come and there had certainly been no such name there. Monkton
Hall, where Vilkins worked, had appeared to be in a small valley. But in the atlas that had been clearly marked as the Vale of Monkton.
The only Valley of Death that Miss Unwin knew of was that in Mr. Tennyson’s famous verses.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Curious that not so long ago she had read the very poem to little Ronald. It was there in the front of the book of tales of the famous Light Brigade charge, of the smoke-shrouded Battle of the Alma and of the storming of Sebastopol which the boy had been given for his birthday,
Heroes of the Crimea
by the Rev. C. P. Wilkinson. But the Valley of Death there was in distant Russia, and the charge of the Light Brigade had taken place more than twenty years before. Nothing of that, surely, could be what had caused Vilkins to dictate that message of hers at the nearest telegraph office.
Help wanted
.
Well, if Vilkins had asked for help, help she should have, to the utmost of Miss Unwin’s abilities. But what was it that she could want help over?
Still, no amount of thinking would produce an answer now. For that she would have to wait till she reached Chipping Compton. No doubt, there she would be able to hire a fly and get herself taken to Monkton Hall. With the generous remuneration she now had, at least she was not hampered for lack of money.
From her reticule she took the only book she had had time to cram into it when she had decided, at barely a minute’s notice, to try to catch the train.
The Child’s Guide to Useful Knowledge
. She settled down to read. She must acquaint herself with what in its pages she should pass on to the young
Honourable Ronald when after the languid dog days he returned to her care.
The hours of the journey slowly passed.
The portly man in the opposite corner of the carriage emerged once from behind yesterday’s rather vulgar
Mercury
newspaper to ask whether she would mind if he lowered the window “in all this ’eat.” Miss Unwin, deciding he was probably a commercial gentleman of some sort, agreed that it was hot and that an open window would be pleasant. She resumed her study of the useful knowledge that might benefit the Honourable Ronald.
But from time to time she still could not prevent herself fruitlessly asking why Vilkins had sent her the message. And the words of Mr. Tennyson’s poem beat out then with maddening repetition in her mind.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Some one had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
The same words were still battering in her head when at length the train drew into a station and she heard the voice of a country porter calling out, “Chipping Compton, Chipping Compton! Alight here for Chipping Compton!”
The stout commercial gentleman was gallant enough to hand her down her carpet-bag, and in a few moments she was standing on the wooden platform wondering where she might find a fly to take her to Monkton Hall.
But when she asked the solitary porter for directions, she got a surprising answer.
“Ah, ’tis you’ll be the lady her’s ’specting.”
“Her? Who is this? I do not think I am expected.”
The porter shook his head cheerfully. “Oh, you be that all right,” he said. “She be along askin’ o’ me when train’s comin’ three times already this mornin’.”
“But she? Who is this?”
“Why, lass that’s helping out over at Rising Sun, now landlord’s been took away to be hanged.”
Miss Unwin found that the answer confused her even more than she had been before. She decided there was nothing else to do but wait and see who “the lass” was. Certainly it could not be Vilkins. She was in service at Monkton Hall, not a girl helping at some public house. And what was all that about the landlord? And being taken away to be hanged? Was this why there was a Valley of Death, whatever that might be?
But as she emerged from the station into the street outside, basking in the sleepy heat of summer midday, one of her questions at least was answered. There, standing in the middle of the dusty earthen road, without a bonnet, a large sacking apron hanging at her waist, red-faced and with her big dab of a nose yet redder, was none other than Vilkins.
She hurried across.
“Vilkins,” she said. “You here? How is that? And your message, what on earth did it mean?”
“Oh, Unwin, such trouble, such trouble as you ain’t never ’eard the like of. An’ only you can save ’im, Unwin. No one but you.”
“Save whom, Vilkins dear? I don’t understand a thing.”
“No more you shouldn’t, and no more do I. But come along to the Sun, that’s the first thing.”
“The Sun? The Rising Sun? A public house? And the porter at the station seemed to say you were working there? Vilkins, is that true? A public house?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you all about it, Unwin. I’ll tell you in a jiffy. Only I can’t do it ’ere, not out in the road, can I?”
“Well, no, dear, I see that. But do I have to go to a public
house? Don’t forget that, whatever I once was, I am a lady now.”
“Oh, Unwin, as if I could forget. That’s what makes me proud, that does, that you’ve risen up to be a proper lady what was my best friend in them days long ago when we ’adn’t got nothing but being friends to bless ourselves with. An’ is that your bag?”