Kitabı oku: «Ravensdene Court», sayfa 13

CHAPTER XIX
BLACK MEMORIES

There was so much of real importance, not only to us in our present situation, but to the trend of things in general, in Miss Raven's confident suggestion that her words immediately plunged me into a thoughtful silence. Rising from my chair at the tea-table, I walked across to the landward side of the yawl, and stood there, reflecting. But it needed little reflection to convince me that what my fellow-prisoner had just suggested was well within the bounds of possibility. I recalled all that we knew of the recent movements of Dr. Lorrimore's Chinese servant. Wing had gone to London, on the pretext of finding out something about that other problematical Chinese, Lo Chuh Fen. Since his departure, Lorrimore had had no tidings of him and his doings – in Lorrimore's opinion, he might be still in London, or he might have gone to Liverpool, or to Cardiff, to any port where his fellow-countrymen are to be found in England. Now it was well within probabilities that Wing, being in Limehouse or Poplar, and in touch with Chinese sailor-men, should, with others, have taken service with Baxter and his accomplice, and, at that very moment there, in that sheltered cove on the Northumbrian coast, be within a few yards of Miss Raven and myself, separated from us by a certain amount of deck-planking and a few bulkheads. But why? If he was there, in that yawl, in what capacity – real capacity – was he there? Ostensibly, as cook, no doubt – but that, I felt sure, would be a mere blind. Put plainly, if he was there, what game was that bland, suave, obsequious, soft-tongued Chinaman playing? Was this his way of finding out what all of us wanted to know? If it came to it, if there was occasion – such occasion as I dared not contemplate – could Miss Raven and myself count on Wing as a friend, or should we find him an adherent of the strange and curious gang, which, if the truth was to be faced, literally held not only our liberty, but our lives at its disposal? For we were in a tight place – of that there was no doubt. Up to that moment I was not unfavourably impressed by Netherfield Baxter, and, whether against my better judgment or not, I was rather more than inclined to believe him innocent of actual share or complicity in the murders of Noah and Salter Quick. But I could see that he was a queer mortal; odd, even to eccentricity; vain, candid and frank because of his very vanity; given, I thought, to talking a good deal about himself and his doings; probably a megalomaniac. He might treat us well so long as things went well with him, but supposing any situation to arise in which our presence, nay, our very existence, became a danger to him and his plans – what then? He had a laughing lip and a twinkle of sardonic humour in his eye, but I fancied that the lip could settle into ruthless resolve if need be and the eye become more stony than would be pleasant. And – we were at his mercy; the mercy of a man whose accomplice might be of a worse kidney than himself, and whose satellites were yellow-skinned slant-eyed Easterns, pirates to a man, and willing enough to slit a throat at the faintest sign from a master.

As I stood there, leaning against the side, gloomily staring at the shore, which was so near, and yet so impossible of access, I reviewed a point which was of more importance to me than may be imagined – the point of our geographical situation. I have already said that the yawl lay at anchor in a sheltered cove. The position of that cove was peculiar. It was entered from seawards by an extremely narrow inlet, across the mouth of which stretched a bar – I could realize that much by watching the breakers rolling over it; it was plain to me, a landsman, that even a small vessel could only get in or out of the cove at high water. But once across the bar, and within the narrow entry, any vessel coming in from the open sea would find itself in a natural harbour of great advantages; the cove ran inland for a good mile and was quite another mile in width; its waters were deep, rising some fifteen to twenty feet over a clear, sandy bottom, and on all sides, right down to the bar at its entrance, it was sheltered by high cliffs, covered from the tops of their headlands to the thin, pebbly stretches of shore at their feet by thick wood, mostly oak and beech. That the cove was known to the folk of that neighbourhood it was impossible to doubt, but I felt sure that any strange craft passing along the sea in front would never suspect its existence, so carefully had Nature concealed the entrance on the landward side of the bar. And there were no signs within the cove itself that any of the shore folk ever used it. There was not a vestige of a human dwelling-place to be discovered anywhere along its thickly-wooded banks; no boat lay on its white beach; no fishing-net was stretched out there to dry in the sun and wind; the entire stretch was desolate. And I knew that an equal desolation lay all over the land immediately behind the cove and its sheltering woods. That was about the loneliest part of a lonely coast – by that time I had become well acquainted with it. For some miles, north and south of that exact spot, there were no coast villages – there was nothing, save an isolated farmstead, set in deep ravines at wide distances. The only link with busier things lay in the railway – that, as I also knew, lay about two or two-and-a-half miles inland; as far as I could recollect the map which lay in my pocket, but which I did not dare to pull out, there was a small wayside station on this line, immediately behind the woods through which Miss Raven and I had unthinkingly wandered to our fate; from it, doubtless, the Frenchman, Baxter's accomplice, had taken train for Berwick, some twenty miles northward. Everything considered, Miss Raven and I were as securely trapped and as much at our captor's mercy as if we had been immured in a twentieth-century Bastille.

I went back, presently, to the tea-table and dropped into my deck-chair again. Baxter was still away from us; as far as I could see, there was no one about. I gave her a look which was intended to suggest caution, but I spoke in a purposely affected tone of carelessness.

"I shouldn't wonder if you are right in your suggestion," I said. "In that case, I think we should have a friend on board in case we need one."

"But you don't anticipate any need?" she asked quickly.

"I don't," said I. "So don't think I do."

"What do you suppose is going to happen to us?" She asked, glancing over her shoulder at the open door of the galley into which Baxter had vanished.

"I think they'll detain us until they're ready to depart, and then they'll release us," I answered. "Our host, or jailor, or whatever you like to call him, is a queer chap – he'll probably make us give him our word of honour that we'll keep close tongues."

"He could have done that without bringing us here," she remarked.

"Ah, but he wanted to make sure!" said I. "He's taking no risks. However, I'm sure he means no harm to us. Under other conditions, I shouldn't have objected to meeting him. He's – a character."

"Interesting, certainly," she agreed. "Do you think he really is a – pirate?"

"I don't think he'll have any objection to making that quite clear to us if he is," I replied, cynically. "I should say he'd be rather proud of it. But – I think we shall hear a good deal of him before we get our freedom."

I was right there. Baxter seemed almost wistfully anxiously to talk with us – he behaved like a man who for a long time had small opportunity of conversation with the people he would like to converse with, and he kept us both talking as the afternoon faded into evening and the evening fell towards night. He was a good talker, too, and knew much of books and politics and of men, and could make shrewd remarks, tinged, it seemed to me, with a little cynicism that was more good-humoured than bitter. The time passed rapidly in this fashion; supper-time arrived; the meal, as good and substantial as any dinner, was served in the little saloon-like cabin by the soft-footed Chinaman who, other than Baxter, was the only living soul we had seen since the Frenchman went away in the boat; all through it Baxter kept up his ready flow of talk while punctiliously observing his duties as host. Until then, the topics had been of a general nature, such as one might have heard dealt with at any gentleman's table, but when supper was over and the Chinaman had left us alone, he turned on us with a queer, inquisitive smile.

"You think me a strange fellow," he said. "Don't deny it! – I am, and I don't mind who thinks it. Or – who knows it."

I made no reply beyond an acquiescent nod, but Miss Raven – who, all through this adventure, showed a coolness and resourcefulness which I can never sufficiently praise – looked steadily at him.

"I think you must have seen and known some strange things," she said quietly.

"Aye – and done some!" he answered, with a laugh that had more of harshness in it than was usual with him. Then he glanced at me. "Mr. Middlebrook, there, from what he told me this afternoon, knows a bit about me and my affairs," he said. "But not much. Sufficient to whet your curiosity, eh, Middlebrook?"

"I confess I should like to know more," I replied. "I agree with Miss Raven – you must have seen a good deal of the queer side of life."

There was some fine old claret on the table between us; he pushed the bottle over to me, motioning me to refill my glass. For a moment he sat, a cigar in the corner of his lips, his hands in the armholes of his waistcoat, silently reflecting.

"What's really puzzling you this time," he said suddenly, "is that Quick affair – I know because I've not only read the newspapers, but I've picked up a good deal of local gossip – never mind how. I've heard a lot of your goings-on at Ravensdene Court, and the suspicions, and so on. And I knew the Quicks – no man better, at one time, and I'll tell you what I know. Not a nice story from any moral point of view, but though it's a story of rough men, there's nothing in it at all that need offend your ears, Miss Raven – nothing. It's just a story – an instance – of some of the things that happen to Ishmaels, outcasts, like me."

We made no answer, and he refilled his own glass, took a mouthful of its contents, and glancing from one to the other of us, went on.

"You're both aware of my youthful career at Blyth?" he said. "You, Middlebrook, are, anyway, from what you told me this afternoon, and I gather that you put Miss Raven in possession of the facts. Well, I'll start out from there – when I made the acquaintance of that temporary bank-manager chap. Mind you, I'd about come to the end of my tether at that time as regards money – I'd been pretty well fleeced by one or another, largely through carelessness, largely through sheer ignorance. I didn't lose all my money on the turf, Middlebrook, I can assure you – I was robbed by more than one worthy man of my native town – legally, of course, bless 'em! And it was that, I think, turned me into the Ishmael I've been ever since – as men had robbed me, I thought it a fair thing to get a bit of my own back. Now that bank-manager chap was one of those fellows who are born with predatory instincts – my impression of him, from what I recollect, is that he was a born thief. Anyway, he and I, getting pretty thick with each other, found out that we were just then actuated by similar ambitions – I from sheer necessity, he, as I tell you, from temperament. And to cut matters short, we determined to help ourselves out of certain things of value stored in that bank, and to clear out to far-off regions with what we got. We discovered that two chests deposited in the bank's vaults by old Lord Forestburne contained a quantity of simply invaluable monastic spoil, stolen by the good man's ancestors four centuries before: we determined to have that and to take it over to the United States, where we knew we could realize immense sums on it, from collectors, with no questions asked. There were other matters, too, which were handy – we carefully removed the lot, brought them along the coast to this very cove, and interred them in those ruins where we three foregathered this afternoon."

"And whence, I take it, you have just removed them to the deck above our heads?" I suggested.

"Right, Middlebrook, quite right – there they are!" he admitted with a laugh. "A grand collection, too – chalices, patens, reliquaries, all manner of splendid mediaeval craftsmanship – and certain other more modern things with them – all destined for the other side of the Atlantic – the market's sure and safe and ready – "

"You think you'll get them there?" I asked.

"I shall be more surprised than I ever was in my life if I don't," he answered readily, and with that note of dryness which one associates with certainty. "I'm a pretty cute hand at making and perfecting and carrying out a plan. Yes, sir, they'll be there, in good time – and they'd have been there long since if it hadn't been for an accident which I couldn't foresee – that bank-manager chap had the ill-luck to break his neck. Now that put me in a fix. I knew that the abstraction of these things would soon be discovered, and though I'd exercised great care in covering up all trace of my own share in the affair, there was always a bare possibility of something coming out. So, knowing the stuff was safely planted and very unlikely to be disturbed, I cleared out, and determined to wait a fitting opportunity of regaining possession of it. My notion at that time, I remember, was to get hold of some American millionaire collector who would give me facilities for taking up the stuff, to be handed over to him. But I didn't find one, and for the time being I had to keep quiet. Inquiries, of course, were set afoot about the missing property, but fortunately I was not suspected. And if I had been, I shouldn't have been found, for I know how to disappear as cleverly as any man who ever found that convenient."

He threw away the stump of his cigar, deliberately lighted another, and leaned across the table towards me in a more confidential manner.

"Now we're coming to the more immediately interesting part of the story," he said. "All that I've told you is, as it were, ancient history. We'll get to more modern times, affairs of yesterday, so to speak. After I cleared out of Blyth – with a certain amount of money in my pocket – I knocked about the world a good deal, doing one thing and another. I've been in every continent and in more sea-ports than I can remember. I've taken a share in all sorts of queer transactions from smuggling to slave-trading. I've been rolling in money in January and shivering in rags in June. All that was far away, in strange quarters of the world, for I never struck this country again until comparatively recently. I could tell you enough to fill a dozen fat volumes, but we'll cut all that out and get on to a certain time, now some years ago, whereat, in Hong-Kong, I and the man you saw with me this afternoon, who, if everybody had their own, is a genuine French nobleman, came across those two particularly precious villains, the brothers Noah and Salter Quick."

"Was that the first time of your meeting with them?" I asked. Now that he was evidently bent on telling me his story, I, on my part, was bent on getting out of him all that I could. "You'd never met them before – anywhere?"

"Never seen nor heard of them before," he answered. "We met in a certain house-of-call in Hong-Kong, much frequented by Englishmen and Americans; we became friendly with them; we soon found out that they, like ourselves, were adventurers, would-be pirates, buccaneers, ready for any game; we found out, too, that they had money, and could finance any desperate affair that was likely to pay handsomely. My friend and I, at that time, were also in funds – we had just had a very paying adventure in the Malay Archipelago, a bit of illicit trading, and we had got to Hong-Kong on the look-out for another opportunity. Once we had got thoroughly in with the Quicks, that was not long in coming. The Quicks were as sharp as their name – they knew the sort of men they wanted. And before long they took us into their confidence and told us what they were after and what they wanted us to do, in collaboration with them. They wanted to get hold of a ship, and to use it for certain nefarious trading purposes in the China seas – they had a plan by which the lot of us could have made a lot of money. Needless to say, we were ready enough to go in with them. Already they had a scheme of getting a ship such as they particularly needed. There was at that time lying at Hong-Kong a sort of tramp steamer, the Elizabeth Robinson, the skipper of which wanted a crew for a trip to Chemulpo, up the Yellow Sea. Salter Quick got himself into the confidence and graces of this skipper, and offered to man his ship for him, and he packed her as far as he could – with his own brother, Noah, myself, my French friend, and a certain Chinese cook of whom he knew and who could be trusted – trusted, that is, to fall in whatever we wanted."

"Am I right in supposing the name of the Chinese cook to have been Lo Chuh Fen?" I asked.

"Quite right – Lo Chuh Fen was the man," answered Baxter. "A very handy man for anything, as you'll admit, for you've already seen him – he's the man who attended on Miss Raven and who served our supper. I came across him again, in Limehouse, recently, and took him into my service once more. Very well – now you understand that there were five of us all in for the Quick's plan, and the notion was that when we'd once got safely out of Hong-Kong, Salter, who had a particularly greasy and insinuating tongue, should get round certain others of the crew by means of promises helped out by actual cash bribes. That done, we were going to put the skipper, his mates, and such of the men as wouldn't fall in with us, in a boat with provisions and let them find their way wherever they liked, while we went off with the steamer. That was the surface plan – my own belief is that if it had come to it, the two Quicks would have been quite ready to make skipper and men walk the plank, or to have settled them in any other way – both Noah and Salter, for all their respectable appearance, were born out of their due time – they were admirably qualified to have been lieutenants to Paul Jones or any other eighteenth-century pirate! But in this particular instance, their schemes went all wrong. Whether it was that the skipper of the Elizabeth Robinson, who was an American and cuter than we fancied, got wind of something, or whether somebody spilt to him, I don't know, but the fact is that one fine morning when we were in the Yellow Sea he and the rest of them set on the Quicks, my friend, myself, and the Chinaman, bundled us into a boat and landed us on a miserable island, to fend for ourselves. There we were, the five of us – a precious bad lot, to be sure – marooned!"

CHAPTER XX
THE POSSIBLE REASON

At that last word, spoken with an emphasis which showed that it awoke no very pleasant memories in the speaker, Miss Raven looked questioningly from one to the other of us.

"Marooned?" she said. "What is that, exactly?"

Baxter gave her an indulgent and me a knowing look.

"I daresay Mr. Middlebrook can give you the exact etymological meaning of the word better than I can, Miss Raven," he answered. "But I can tell you what the thing means in actual practice! It means to put a man, or men, ashore, preferably on a desert island, leaving him, or them, to fend for himself, or themselves, as best he, or they, can! It may mean slow starvation – at best it means living on what you can pick up by your own ingenuity, on shell-fish and that sort of thing, even on edible sea-weed. Marooned? Yes! that was the only experience I ever had of that – it's all very well talking of it now, as we sit here on a comfortable little vessel, with a bottle of good wine before us, but at the time – ah!"

"You'd a stiff time of it?" I suggested.

"Worse than you'd believe," he answered. "That old Yankee skipper was a vindictive chap, with method in him. He'd purposely gone off the beaten track to land us on that island, and he played his game so cleverly that not even the Quicks – who were as subtle as snakes! – knew anything of his intentions until we were all marched over the side at the point of ugly-looking revolvers. If it hadn't been for that little Chinese whom you've just seen we would have starved, for the island was little more than a reef of rock, rising to a sort of peak in its centre – worn-out volcano, I imagine – and with nothing eatable on it in the way of flesh or fruit. But Chuh was a God-send! He was clever at fishing, and he showed us an edible sea-weed out of which he made good eating, and he discovered a spring of water – altogether he kept us alive. All of which," he suddenly added, with a darkening look, "made the conduct of these two Quicks not merely inexcusable, but devilish!"

"What did they do?" I asked.

"I'm coming to it," he said. "All in due order. We were on that island several weeks, and from the time we were flung unceremoniously upon its miserable shores to the day we left it we never saw a sail nor a wisp of smoke from a steamer. And it may be that this, and our privations, made us still more birds of a feather than we were. Anyway, you, Middlebrook, know how men, thrown together in that way, will talk – nay, must talk unless they'd go mad! – talk about themselves and their doings and so on. We all talked – we used to tell tales of our doubtful pasts as we huddled together under the rocks at nights, and some nice, lurid stores there were, I can assure you. The Quicks had seen about as much of the doubtful and seamy side of seafaring life as men could, and all of us could contribute something. Also, the Quicks had money, safely stowed away in banks here and there – they used to curse their fate, left there apparently to die, when they thought of it. And it was that, I think, that led me to tell, one night, about my adventure with the naughty bank-manager at Blyth, and of the chests of old monastic treasure which I'd planted up here on this Northumbrian coast."

"Ah!" I exclaimed. "So you told Noah and Salter Quick that?"

"I told Noah and Salter Quick that," he replied slowly. "Yes – and I can now explain to you what Salter was after when he appeared in these parts. I read the newspaper accounts, of the inquest and so on, and I saw through everything, and could have thrown a lot of light on things, only I wasn't going to. But it was this way – I told the Quicks all about the Blyth affair – the truth was, I didn't believe we should ever get away from that cursed island – but I told them in a fashion which, evidently, afterwards led to considerable puzzlement on their part. I told them that I buried the chests of old silver, wherein were the other valuables taken from the vaults of the bank, in a churchyard on this coast, close to the graves of my ancestors – I described the spot and the lie of the ruins pretty accurately. Now where the Quicks – Salter, at any rate – got puzzled and mixed was over my use of the word ancestors. What I meant – but never said – was that I had planted the stuff near the graves of my maternal ancestors, the old De Knaythevilles, who were once great folk in these parts, and of whose name my own Christan name, Netherfield, is, of course, a corruption. But Salter Quick, to be sure, thought the graves would bear the name Netherfield, and when he came along this coast, it was that name he was hunting for. Do you see?"

"Then Salter Quick was after that treasure?" I said.

"Of course he was!" replied Baxter. "The wonder to me is that he and Noah hadn't been after it before. But they were men who had a good many irons in the fire – too many and some of them far too hot, as it turned out – and I suppose they left this little affair until an opportune moment. Without a doubt, not so long after I'd told them the story, Salter Quick scratched inside the lid of his tobacco-box a rough diagram of the place I'd mentioned, with the latitude and longitude approximately indicated – that's the box there's been so much fuss about, I read in the papers, and I'll tell you more about it in due process. But now about that island and the Quicks, and how they and the rest of us got out of it. I told you that the centre of this island rose to a high peak, separating one coast from the other – well, one day, when we'd been marooned for several weary weeks and there didn't seem the least chance of rescue, I, my French friend, and the Chinaman crossed the shoulder of that peak and went along the other coast, prospecting – more out of sheer desperation than in the hope of finding anything. We spent the next night on the other side of the island, and it was not until late on the following afternoon that we returned to our camp, if you can call that a camp which was nothing but a hole in the rocks. And we got back to find Noah and Salter Quick gone – and we knew how they had gone when the Chinaman's sharp eyes made out a sail vanishing over the horizon. Some Chinese fishing-boat had made that island in our absence, and these two skunks had gone away in her and left us, their companions, to shift for ourselves. That's the sort the Quicks were! – those were the sort of tricks they'd play off on so-called friends! Do you wonder, either of you, that both Noah and Salter eventually got – what they got?"

We made no answer to that beyond, perhaps, a shake of our heads. Then Miss Raven spoke.

"But – you got away, in the end?" she suggested.

"We got away in the end – some time later, when we were about done for," assented Baxter, "and in the same way – a Chinese fishing-boat that came within hail. It landed us on the Kiang-Su coast, and we had a pretty bad time of it before we made our way to Shanghai. From that port we worked our passage to Hong-Kong: I had an idea that we might strike the Quicks there, or get news of them. But we heard nothing of those two villains, at any rate. But we did hear that the Elizabeth Robinson had never reached Chemulpo – she'd presumably gone down with all hands, and we were supposed, of course, to have gone down with her. We did nothing to disabuse anybody of the notion; both I and my friend had money in Hong Kong, and we took it up and went off to Singapore. As for our Chinaman, Chuh, he said farewell to us and vanished as soon as we got back to Hong-Kong, and we never set eyes on him again until very recently, when I ran across him in a Chinese eating-house in Poplar."

"From that meeting, I suppose, the more recent chapters of your story begin?" I suggested. "Or do they begin somewhat earlier?"

"A bit earlier," he said. "My friend and I came back to England a little before that – with money in our pockets – we'd been very lucky in the East – and with a friend of ours, a Chinese gentleman, mind you, we decided to go in for a little profitable work of another sort, and to start out by lifting my concealed belongings up here. So we bought this craft in Hull – then ran her down to the Thames – then, as I say, I came across Lo Chuh Fen and got his services and those of two other compatriots of his, then in London, and – here we are! You see how candid I am – do you know why?"

"It would be interesting to know, Mr. Baxter," said Miss Raven. "Please tell us."

"Well," he said, with a queer deliberation. "Some men in my position would have thought nothing about putting bullets through both of you when we met this afternoon – you hit on our secret. But I'm not that sort – I treat you as what you are, a gentlewoman and a gentleman, and no harm whatever shall come to you. Therefore, I feel certain that all I've said and am saying to you will be treated as it ought to be – by you. I daresay you think I'm an awful scoundrel, but I told you I was an Ishmael – and I certainly haven't got the slightest compunction about appropriating the stuff in those chests on deck – one of the Forestburnes stole it from the monks – why shouldn't I steal it from his successor? It's as much mine as his – perhaps more so, for one of my ancestors, a certain Geoffrey de Knaytheville, was at one time Lord Abbot of the very house that the Forestburnes stole that stuff from! I reckon I've a prior claim, Middlebrook?"

"I should imagine," I answered, guardedly, "that it would be very difficult for anybody to substantiate a claim to ecclesiastical property – of that particular nature – which disappeared in the sixteenth century. What is certain, however, is that you've got it. Take my advice – hand it over to the authorities!"

He looked at me in blank astonishment for a moment; then laughed as a man laughs who is suddenly confronted by a good joke.

"Hah! hah! hah!" he let out at the top of his voice. "Good! you're a born humorist, friend Middlebrook!" He pushed the claret nearer. "Fill your glass again! Hand it over to the authorities? Why, that would merit a full-page cartoon in the next number of Punch. Good, good! but," he went on, suddenly becoming grave again, "we were talking of those scoundrelly Quicks. Of course we – that is, my French friend and I – have been, and are, suspected of murdering them?"

"I think that is so," I answered.

"Well, that's a very easy point to settle, if it should ever come to it," he replied. "And I'll settle it, for your edification, just now. Noah and Salter Quick were done to death, one near Saltash, in Cornwall, the other near Alnwick, in Northumberland, several hundreds of miles apart, about the same hour of the same evening. Now, my friend and I, so far from being anywhere near either Saltash or Alnwick on that particular evening and night, spent them together at the North Eastern Railway Hotel at York. I went there that afternoon from London; he joined me from Berwick. We met at the hotel about six o'clock; we dined in the hotel; we played billiards in the hotel; we slept in the hotel; we breakfasted in the hotel; the hotel folks will remember us well, and our particulars are duly registered in their books on the date in question. We had no hand whatever in the murders of Noah and Salter Quick, and I give you my word of honour – being under the firm impression that though I am a pirate, I am still a gentleman – that neither of us have the very slightest notion who had!"