Kitabı oku: «Clutterbuck's Treasure», sayfa 15

CHAPTER XLII
ALL OVER BUT–

Then we brought the round thick logs which had formed the trunk, and which had been sawn into lengths of about four feet, and piled them one on top of another in their own order, which was obvious and unmistakable on account of the lessening girth of the trunk as it went higher. We piled three of these, fitting them one upon the other as they had stood in life, and the nail was in the fourth, with which we crowned the edifice, Jack standing upon a step-ladder and I handing up the logs.

"There!" he said, when he had built up the edifice to the height of some fifteen feet; "there's our tree as it stood in life, wobbly, no doubt, and insecure; but it will bear the picture though it wouldn't stand much of north-easter. Hand up the work of art."

We hung up the portrait, and again I lay on the ground here and there and ogled the hideous thing until I had wooed its eyes to meet my own.

Then we dug together. Jack had thrown all ridiculous fastidiousness to the winds of heaven, and helped me like a man and a sensible being.

Together we dug, and the hole rapidly grew, and with it grew also our own excitement and Ginger's, who looked on whining, as before, for the game that we were to start from our burrow for him to run away from. We had had no lunch, and the afternoon was fleeting fast; but we dug on.

Now the grave was two feet deep, and now four, now five. I had never felt so excited as this, even at that supreme moment when my fingers touched the tin box in the African veldt.

Now the hole was six feet in depth, and Jack's head, when he stood up, was just below the earth-level. Ginger, in his excitement, pulled Jack's cap off and laid it on the ground beside him, probably determined that if we were to disappear altogether, he would preserve at least a memento of us to swear by.

Six feet and a half, and now my spade (it wasmine; I am glad it was mine), my spade struck against something hard and metallic.

"Hullo!" cried Jack, who heard the sound.

"Only a stone, I'm afraid!" said I, trembling so that I could hardly raise my spade. Jack stopped work to watch.

"Your first blood!" he said. "Dig again and see; if there are honours, they shall be yours!"

There were honours. Half impotent with excitement, I dug again.

It was no stone. Trembling, I cleared the clayey soil from the object, whatever it might be, and revealed a vessel of hardware.

"Pull it out, pull it out, man!" said Jack; "don't stand quaking there!"

I made an effort, and removed the thing and handed it to Jack; I felt cold and faint with the excitement. I could only just see out of my eyes sufficiently to recognise that the object I had found was a large earthen jar, corked and sealed round.

Jack scrambled out of the hole and gave me a hand; I climbed out in a dream.

"Open it," he said.

"No—you," I gasped. I sat down and watched, only half alive.

Jack put the vessel on the ground and broke it neatly in two pieces. Inside was a small tin box, hardly larger than the envelope which Jack drew forth from it after prising it open.

"Another sickening disappointment?" I gasped.

"I don't know," said Jack; "read it, and see."

"I can't," I said; "open it and read it to me; if it's another sell, I shall curse Clutterbuck and die."

Jack—looking pale and thin—broke the seal of the envelope. I saw the colour rush back to his face.

"What is it, in Heaven's name?" I said; "don't madden me!"

"All right this time, old boy," cried Jack, handing me the paper with flashing eyes—"a cheque to bearer."

It was so. A cheque for ninety-seven thousand odd pounds!

I do not know what I did. Jack, who sometimes tells the truth, says that I deliberately stood on my head on the very top of the pile of earth we had dug out of the hole, and that Ginger licked my face just as I had reached the third bar of the National Anthem (performed then positively for the first time in that position!) and brought me down with a run. Personally I do not recollect the episode.

The cheque was duly paid, the bank manager gravely smiling as I handed it to him in his private room. He was, I found, partially in the secret. He asked for, and I gave him, a short account of my adventures, when he was kind enough to express the opinion that I deserved the money.

CHAPTER XLIII
–THE SHOUTING

That evening Jack and I gave a party. That is, we sent down to old Baines a box of cigars, a bottle of champagne, and a hamper of delicacies which—I have since reflected—must have made him very unwell, if he ate them. We did not forget Ginger; Ginger enjoyed, that night, a meal which he must, I am sure, have believed to have been cooked in the Happy Hunting Grounds, and to have been sent specially from that abode of canine bliss for the comfort of his declining years. To this day I sometimes see him, when asleep, licking his lips and going through the action of masticating imaginary food. Well, I believe he is, at such moments, enjoying once again—in the sweet glades of remembrance—the ecstasies of that gala banquet.

As for ourselves, Jack invited me and I him to a Gaudeamus, and together we celebrated the occasion in a manner befitting so glorious a finish to our wanderings and toil (not that Jack ever did much of the digging!) and sufferings and disappointments, and so on. Together we fought o'er again every encounter, whether with Strong, with elephants, with lions, or with the devils of despair and disappointment, and it was on this festive occasion that Jack made me promise to write down for your benefit, my dear reader, the record of our experiences and adventures. I may say that we drank your health, dear owner of this volume, whoever you may be, and voted you an excellent fellow for buying, or having presented to you, the book; and wished you were twins and each had a copy,—all for your own benefit, you know, because the tale is a jolly good—but perhaps I had better leave all this for others to say; only I should just like you to know that we thought of you, as of a wise person to have possessed yourself of the book, that's all. Well, among other things that night, absurd things that—in our joy and triumph—we said and did, we drank Strong's health and wished that he might escape the hangman's rope; we also breathed a fervent wish that we might never see the rascal again, and then, in more serious mood, discussed the question as to whether it was at all likely that we ever should.

We both decided that it was extremely unlikely. He certainly had audacity enough and—to do him justice—pluck enough for five men; but when a man knows that he is a murderer, and a double or treble murderer, and that if his crimes could be brought home to him he must "swing" for them, he is not likely to haunt those parts of the world where he would be most in danger. The world is big enough. He would keep away from us, at anyrate!

"I wonder what he is doing now?" said Jack with a laugh; "and where he is, and what he would say or do if he knew of to-day's little success, eh?"

"Well, I'm glad on the whole that he doesn't," I said; and in this conclusion Jack concurred; for, without being exactly afraid of the fellow, we had had enough of him, and that's the truth.

Now, the longer I live in this world the more I realise that we human beings are but a poor, blind, helpless lot of creatures; we are best pleased with ourselves when we have, in reality, little cause for satisfaction; we imagine ourselves safely out of what is familiarly termed "the wood," when, as a matter of fact, a very jungle of trouble lies immediately before us, could we but see it! Here is a case in point. We were very, very happy that night, and apparently with every legitimate reason; moreover, when I laid my head upon the pillow at about twelve o'clock, I imagined that I should awake at eight or so, ready to step into a new bright world which the sunshine of yesterday's success should have transformed for me into a very paradise of bliss. I had every reason to suppose that this would be so. I never for one moment imagined, for instance, that this might be the last time that I should lay my head to rest in this world, and that the sleep I now courted should be an endless one in so far as concerned the usual awaking to a terrestrial morrow!

And yet this came very near to being the actual and exact state of the case.

It was, I think, about two or three o'clock in the morning, when some pleasant dream I was enjoying began to be marred—I remember the feeling quite well—by a kind of choky sensation, a difficulty in breathing. I can even recall the fact that some friend—a dream-friend, I mean—made the heartless remark that prosperity was making me so fat that the function of getting breath had become a labour to me.

But the sensation became rapidly unpleasant and intolerable, and I awoke suddenly, sweating and in terror. What had happened to me?

Then I heard Strong's voice, very subdued and soft, but certainly Strong's voice. Could this be still a part of the dream?

No, it was reality; Strong's voice was a reality; so was a handkerchief which he had tied over my mouth, gag-wise; so was a candle which he had lighted in the room, and the light of which revealed the detested face and ferocious expression of the scoundrel as he bent over me, and hissed his oaths and threats into my ear.

"Ah, you're awake, are you?" he murmured (I omit the oaths with which he befouled his language)—"I have you at last, you see, you infernal"—(I really cannot repeat the names he called me, they were too vile even to mention), "say your prayers, for you're off this time, to glory!"

I could not speak for the gag upon my mouth. I tried to raise my hands, but I found the rascal had tied them together at the wrists. I could hardly breathe, for the bandage was so tightly drawn that I was half suffocated already.

Strong saw that this was so. He put his hand behind my head and slightly loosened the handkerchief.

"Now, you whelp of Satan," he said, "get out of bed and show me where you've hidden the treasure, curse you! I've wasted time enough over it already. Don't pretend this hundred pounds odd, in your letter-case, is the lot. Lies won't do, you're off to Kingdom Come in two minutes; you'd better not go with a lie on your lips! Come,—I saw you find it,—you'd better be quick!"

I glared at the scoundrel, but did not move. I was thinking hard! Oh that I could get my hands free and be at him! or my mouth, that I might shout for Jack—who was in the adjoining bedroom. My heart was almost bursting with rage and hatred for this man; yet I was absolutely helpless; I could do nothing.

"What, you won't budge, won't you?" said the scoundrel. His face, at this crisis, looked exactly what I should imagine the devil to be like: the very incarnation of hatred and malice and all evil—but I daresay my own was not, at the moment, a type of innocent beauty and passionless charm, any more than his!

Strong placed his hand behind my neck a second time, and tightened the gag. I was suffocating—I kicked and struggled—my heart was bursting, my brain reeled and swam, my veins swelled—I sweated from head to foot in my agony and terror, and then—at the critical moment—by God's mercy an idea occurred to me.

I sprang out of bed and rushed to the wash-hand stand, and, whether by kicking, or falling over upon them, or pushing with bound hands or with elbow, I contrived, somehow, before Strong realised my intention, to send the jug and basin crashing upon the floor with a noise, I suppose, that would have awakened an army of men a mile away. At the same moment I lost consciousness, and therefore for the events of the next few minutes I am indebted to second-hand information.

This is, I understand, what happened.

Jack is a lightish sleeper. He was dreaming, he says, of a cricket match in which he once took part at "Lords," playing for his school against the M.C.C. in the great annual function held, as a rule, on the first two days of the holidays. Jack was batting, it appears, to Strong's bowling. Dream-bowling is sometimes very difficult to play by dream-batsmen. It depends very much upon whether the batsman has dined judiciously or the reverse. Jack had assisted at a banquet, as has been shown; and Strong's bowling was giving him a lot of trouble. Strong had sent down four balls, of which the slowest, Jack declared, could have given points to a flash of buttered lightning. One of them killed the wicket-keeper; and another, being a wide, lamed short-slip for life; no one knew what became of the other two balls, they were never caught sight of at all. Then Strong sent down the fifth, and Jack—though he saw nothing of it—slogged at it for all he was worth. The wicket-keeper, it seems, just before he died, had assured Jack that Clutterbuck's treasure would be lost to us for ever, and that Strong was to be declared the legitimate proprietor of the same, by special rule just passed by the committee of the M.C.C., unless he contrived to make four runs in this over. So that it was absolutely necessary, Jack explained, to hit this fifth ball to the boundary.

By some fluke Jack caught the ball full; he did not see it; he admits having shut his eyes; Strong's face was more than he could stand up to. He lashed out at it blindly, and sent it flying, at the rate of a million miles an hour, over Strong's head, straight for the pavilion seats.

That marvellous fellow, Strong—the dream-Strong—rushed after it, and careered so fast (at the rate, in fact, of a million and one miles per hour) that he was just able to leap into the air at the very pavilion rail and touch the ball.

He could not hold it, however, and, losing his balance—owing to the great pace at which he had travelled—he flew head over heels clean through the glass windows of the pavilion, and alighted upon the luncheon-table, which fell with a frightful crash.

This crash was my little contribution to Jack's dream; it was the overthrow of my jug and basin, and the tumult of it roused Jack in an instant. He sprang from his bed, wide awake, and seeing that a light burned in my room, and hearing—as he thought—some sound there, pushed the door open and entered, full of wonder and some alarm.

He was just in time to see a figure disappearing out of the door, and without stopping to help me—indeed, he declares that he didn't notice me lying there in the corner!—sprang away after the man at the door, believing that it was I, and that I had gone suddenly and mysteriously mad.

Things went propitiously. Several people rushed into my room, wakened and startled by the crash of china and the sound of feet scudding down the passage; and one of them speedily removed the bandage from my mouth and the cord from my wrists. I think this saved my life. Indeed, I was already half dead, and even when released I did not for some minutes recover consciousness.

Meanwhile, Jack had scudded after Strong without knowing whom he pursued.

Strong made for the outer hall, intending to escape from the hotel; but delay at the front door, which he found locked, enabled Jack to run him to earth.

Strong fished out a revolver and pointed it at Jack's head, but Jack luckily dashed it aside, and it fell upon the marble floor of the entrance hall, exploding as it did so, with a startlingly loud report, which effectually roused those few people sleeping in the hotel whose slumbers had survived the upsetting of my jug and basin.

Then Jack, recognising Strong at last, fell upon the scoundrel and administered the grandest possible thrashing and kicking that you can imagine. That thrashing of Strong, Jack always says, did him a heap of good, and made a new and self-respecting man of him again; for he had lost of late some of his self-respect by reason of Strong's indisputable cleverness in Copenhagen and Bremen, where he had scored heavily against us.

When, however, he had "scarcely begun," as he says, the process of kicking and punching the wretched man, the performance was interrupted by an inrush of frightened people, who had heard a pistol-shot and were rushing downstairs to see what was the matter.

So that there was no difficulty about securing Strong; and that arch scoundrel was presently led upstairs to my room, bound tightly at the wrists, in order that I might testify to his identity as set forth by Jack.

Well, there was little doubt about that, and as little trouble in getting the midnight burglar transferred from the hotel to the police cell. He had been caught red-handed. My money and my letter-case, with my own cards in one of the pockets, were found in his possession, two hundred pounds in notes, the bulk of Clutterbuck's cheque had of course been deposited by me in the bank. It was as clear a case of burglary as ever delighted policeman's ears, and the constable, summoned to remove Strong, looked as pleased as one who has come, unexpectedly, into a good thing.

We found that Strong had—under an assumed name, of course—actually slept for three nights within a room or two of us! He had taken care to remain invisible at all such times as we spent within the hotel, however; but had kept a watch upon our actions, and had even—as he declared—watched me find the treasure,—peeping over the wall at a spot where his face was well hidden by the branch of a spreading tree. He probably concluded that I should have the entire proceeds of the cheque with me in the hotel. It was just as well that I took the precaution to bank the money, however; for had he found it, he would have got clear away without awaking me. As it was, he deliberately awoke me in order to compel me, by the torture of suffocation, to point out where I had hidden my property.

There is not much more to tell. The magistrate committed our rascal for trial at the Croydon sessions, and in due time he was sentenced by the court to a term of hard labour. Jack and I consulted earnestly as to whether we ought to reveal the miscreant's criminal acts in Bechuana and in Narva; but we decided that it would be useless to attempt to prove the major offence of murder; we were without evidence of any kind; and, after all, so long as the fellow was safe within stone walls and under many locks and keys at Millbank or Portland or at Dartmoor, or wherever it might be, it would be out of his power to commit further mischief.

Did he intend to murder me in the hotel, I wonder? Jack says he thinks not; but then Jack did not feel the torture of that gag, and the horror of imminent suffocation as I did; and I am certain that, whether Strong intended it or not, I should have died then and there, if my good friend had not rushed in and released me in the nick of time.

I suppose there are not many, even among the convicts in Dartmoor, so utterly evil and cruel in disposition as this man James Strong, and I am glad that I may here take leave of him—in these pages at least—for good and all. I daresay the reader is as glad to be rid of him as I am. I humbly hope and pray that I may never meet him again in this world.

And now at length I was able to enter into peaceful possession of my hard-earned inheritance of Clutterbuck's treasure. I had worked and suffered much for it, and I think on the whole that I deserved it. Of course, money earned by regular daily toil is, in a way, more worthily obtained; but since destiny placed in my way the opportunity to make my fortune, as it were, by a single sustained effort, the only condition being that I should possess the necessary pluck and perseverance to continue that effort right up to the goal, Success, why, I am not troubled with any compunctions as to the comparative shortness of the road which, in my case, led to wealth and prosperity. Nevertheless, feeling that I should better enjoy my prosperity if I were assured of the well-being of those (always excepting James Strong) whom my own success had, in a manner, disappointed of expected benefit, I sought out, through Steggins, the relatives of the murdered Clutterbuck, who—I found—had been a widower. He had left two children in poor circumstances, and the future of these youngsters I shall make it my business to secure. They are living in comfort with a sister of their dead father, and will never know, I hope, but that their parent perished through an accidental fall into an African nullah.

Ellis, the cousin, a meek person, who refused from the first to take part in the treasure hunt, though one of the five potential heirs of the old man, was, I found, fairly well-to-do, and declined with thanks my offer to make him a small allowance.

As for myself—well, you have probably had enough of me by this time. But I will just mention this much: that the little affair down in Gloucestershire to which I have once or twice made slight allusion ended in accordance with my dearest hopes; and that Jack and I are now even more than school and college chums, being united by a tie whose name is Gladys, and who is certainly one of the sweetest— But no! I will not go into that. She suits me excellently, and that, after all, is the main thing!

We live in Gloucestershire, near Henderson Court, in a house that was once a farmhouse but which has been glorified for our benefit by Jack, who is its owner.

Jack and I have not many elephants and lions, or even ibex and elands, about the premises; in fact, I do not remember to have shot a single one. But we have plenty of rabbits and not a few partridges, and occasionally a pheasant or two. As for our ".500 Expresses," they are hanging ready on the wall in case any of the above-mentioned types of the larger animals should come down into Gloucestershire; so that we are all right.

Ginger came to the wedding. He would come into church with the rest of us, and he sat between two school children and behaved shockingly; for he nosed all the hymn-books off the pew in about half a minute, and howled aloud when I told Gladys that with all my worldly goods I her endowed.

Jack said afterwards that there spoke the spirit of old Clutterbuck, who was doubtless present in the form of Ginger, and who hated to hear me make over his property in this way without forcing Gladys to do a single day's work for it.