The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English
other books lay on the stand by his side. The green curtains lent a
cadaverous shade to his cheek; and, as he sat propped on pillows, his
great stature was painfully hunched, and his head protruded till it
overhung his knees. I believe if he had not died otherwise, he must have
fallen a victim to consumption in the course of but a very few weeks.
He held out to me a hand, long, thin, and disagreeably hairy.
"Come in, come in, Mr. Cassilis," said he. "Another
protector--ahem!--another protector. Always welcome as a friend of my
daughter's, Mr. Cassilis. How they have rallied about me, my daughter's
friends! May God in heaven bless and reward them for it!"
I gave him my hand, of course, because I could not help it; but the
sympathy I had been prepared to feel for Clara's father was immediately
soured by his appearance, and the wheedling, unreal tones in which he
spoke.
"Cassilis is a good man," said Northmour; "worth ten."
"So I hear," cried Mr. Huddlestone eagerly; "so my girl tells me. Ah, Mr.
Cassilis, my sin has found me out, you see! I am very low, very low; but I
hope equally penitent. We must all come to the throne of grace at last,
Mr. Cassilis. For my part, I come late indeed; but with unfeigned
humility, I trust."
"Fiddle-de-dee!" said Northmour roughly.
"No, no, dear Northmour!" cried the banker. "You must not say that; you
must not try to shake me. You forget, my dear, good boy, you forget I may
be called this very night before my Maker."
His excitement was pitiful to behold; and I felt myself grow indignant
with Northmour, whose infidel opinions I well knew, and heartily despised,
as he continued to taunt the poor sinner out of his humor of repentance.
"Pooh, my dear Huddlestone!" said he. "You do yourself injustice. You are
a man of the world inside and out, and were up to all kinds of mischief
before I was born. Your conscience is tanned like South American
leather--only you forgot to tan your liver, and that, if you will believe
me, is the seat of the annoyance."
"Rogue, rogue! bad boy!" said Mr. Huddlestone, shaking his finger. "I am
no precisian, if you come to that; I always hated a precisian; but I never
lost hold of something better through it all. I have been a bad boy, Mr.
Cassilis; I do not seek to deny that; but it was after my wife's death,
and you know, with a widower, it's a different thing: sinful--I won't say
no; but there is a gradation, we shall hope. And talking of that--Hark!"
he broke out suddenly, his hand raised, his fingers spread, his face
racked with interest and terror. "Only the rain, bless God!" he added,
after a pause, and with indescribable relief.
For some seconds he lay back among the pillows like a man near to
fainting; then he gathered himself together, and, in somewhat tremulous
tones, began once more to thank me for the share I was prepared to take in
his defense.
"One question, sir," said I, when he had paused. "Is it true that you have
money with you?"
He seemed annoyed by the question, but admitted with reluctance that he
had a little.
"Well," I continued, "it is their money they are after, is it not? Why not
give it up to them?"
"Ah!" replied he, shaking his head, "I have tried that already, Mr.
Cassilis; and alas! that it should be so, but it is blood they want."
"Huddlestone, that's a little less than fair," said Northmour. "You should
mention that what you offered them was upward of two hundred thousand
short. The deficit is worth a reference; it is for what they call a cool
sum, Frank. Then, you see, the fellows reason in their clear Italian way;
and it seems to them, as indeed it seems to me, that they may just as well
have both while they're about it--money and blood together, by George, and
no more trouble for the extra pleasure."
"Is it in the pavilion?" I asked.
"It is; and I wish it were in the bottom of the sea instead," said
Northmour; and then suddenly--"What are you making faces at me for?" he
cried to Mr. Huddlestone, on whom I had unconsciously turned my back. "Do
you think Cassilis would sell you?"
Mr. Huddlestone protested that nothing had been further from his mind.
"It is a good thing," retorted Northmour in his ugliest manner. "You might
end by wearying us. What were you going to say?" he added, turning to me.
"I was going to propose an occupation for the afternoon," said I. "Let us
carry that money out, piece by piece, and lay it down before the pavilion
door. If the _carbonari_ come, why, it's theirs at any rate."
"No, no," cried Mr. Huddlestone; "it does not, it cannot, belong to them!
It should be distributed _pro rata_ among all my creditors."
"Come now, Huddlestone," said Northmour, "none of that."
"Well, but my daughter," moaned the wretched man.
"Your daughter will do well enough. Here are two suitors, Cassilis and I,
neither of us beggars, between whom she has to choose. And as for
yourself, to make an end of arguments, you have no right to a farthing,
and, unless I'm much mistaken, you are going to die."
It was certainly very cruelly said; but Mr. Huddlestone was a man who
attracted little sympathy; and, although I saw him wince and shudder, I
mentally indorsed the rebuke; nay, I added a contribution of my own.
"Northmour and I," I said, "are willing enough to help you to save your
life, but not to escape with stolen property."
He struggled for awhile with himself, as though he were on the point of
giving way to anger, but prudence had the best of the controversy.
"My dear boys," he said, "do with me or my money what you will. I leave
all in your hands. Let me compose myself."
And so we left him, gladly enough I am sure.
The last that I saw, he had once more taken up his great Bible, and with
tremulous hands was adjusting his spectacles to read.
VII
The recollection of that afternoon will always be graven on my mind.
Northmour and I were persuaded that an attack was imminent; and if it had
been in our power to alter in any way the order of events, that power
would have been used to precipitate rather than delay the critical moment.
The worst was to be anticipated; yet we could conceive no extremity so
miserable as the suspense we were now suffering. I have never been an
eager, though always a great, reader; but I never knew books so insipid
as those which I took up and cast aside that afternoon in the pavilion.
Even talk became impossible, as the hours went on. One or other was always
listening for some sound, or peering from an upstairs window over the
links. And yet not a sign indicated the presence of our foes.
We debated over and over again my proposal with regard to the money; and
had we been in complete possession of our faculties, I am sure we should
have condemned it as unwise; but we were flustered with alarm, grasped at
a straw, and determined, although it was as much as advertising Mr.
Huddlestone's presence in the pavilion, to carry my proposal into effect.
The sum was part in specie, part in bank paper, and part in circular notes
payable to the name of James Gregory. We took it out, counted it, inclosed
it once more in a dispatch box belonging to Northmour, and prepared a
letter in Italian which he tied to the handle. It was signed by both of us
under oath, and declared that this was all the money which had escaped the
failure of the house of Huddlestone. This was, perhaps, the maddest action
ever perpetrated by two persons professing to be sane. Had the dispatch
box fallen into other hands than those for which it was intended, we stood
criminally convicted on our own written testimony; but, as I have said, we
were neither of us in a condition to judge soberly, and had a thirst for
action that drove us to do something, right or wrong, rather than endure
the agony of waiting. Moreover, as we were both convinced that the hollows
of the links were alive with hidden spies upon our movements, we hoped
that our appearance with the box might lead to a parley, and, perhaps, a
compromise.
It was nearly three when we issued from the pavilion. The rain had taken
off; the sun shone quite cheerfully. I had never seen the gulls fly so
close about the house or approach so fearlessly to human beings. On the
very doorstep one flapped heavily past our heads, and uttered its wild cry
in my very ear.
"There is an omen for you," said Northmour, who like all freethinkers was
much under the influence of superstition. "They think we are already
dead."
I made some light rejoinder, but it was with half my heart; for the
circumstance had impressed me.
A yard or two before the gate, on a patch of smooth turf, we set down the
dispatch box; and Northmour waved a white handkerchief over his head.
Nothing replied. We raised our voices, and cried aloud in Italian that we
were there as ambassadors to arrange the quarrel, but the stillness
remained unbroken save by the seagulls and the surf. I had a weight at my
heart when we desisted; and I saw that even Northmour was unusually pale.
He looked over his shoulder nervously, as though he feared that some one
had crept between him and the pavilion door.
"By God," he said in a whisper, "this is too much for me!"
I replied in the same key: "Suppose there should be none, after all!"
"Look there," he returned, nodding with his head, as though he had been
afraid to point.
I glanced in the direction indicated; and there, from the northern quarter
of the Sea-Wood, beheld a thin column of smoke rising steadily against the
now cloudless sky.
"Northmour," I said (we still continued to talk in whispers), "it is not
possible to endure this suspense. I prefer death fifty times over. Stay
you here to watch the pavilion; I will go forward and make sure, if I have
to walk right into their camp."
He looked once again all round him with puckered eyes, and then nodded
assentingly to my proposal.
My heart beat like a sledge hammer as I set out walking rapidly in the
direction of the smoke; and, though up to that moment I had felt chill and
shivering, I was suddenly conscious of a glow of heat all over my body.
The ground in this direction was very uneven; a hundred men might have
lain hidden in as many square yards about my path. But I who had not
practiced the business in vain, chose such routes as cut at the very root
of concealment, and, by keeping along the most convenient ridges,
commanded several hollows at a time. It was not long before I was rewarded
for my caution. Coming suddenly on to a mound somewhat more elevated than
the surrounding hummocks, I saw, not thirty yards away, a man bent almost
double, and running as fast as his attitude permitted, along the bottom of
a gully. I had dislodged one of the spies from his ambush. As soon as I
sighted him, I called loudly both in English and Italian; and he, seeing
concealment was no longer possible, straightened himself out, leaped from
the gully, and made off as straight as an arrow for the borders of the
wood. It was none of my business to pursue; I had learned what I
wanted--that we were beleaguered and watched in the pavilion; and I
returned at once, and walked as nearly as possible in my old footsteps, to
where Northmour awaited me beside the dispatch box. He was even paler than
when I had left him, and his voice shook a little.
"Could you see what he was like?" he asked.
"He kept his back turned," I replied.
"Let us get into the house, Frank. I don't think I'm a coward, but I can
stand no more of this," he whispered.
All was still and sunshiny about the pavilion, as we turned to reenter it;
even the gulls had flown in a wider circuit, and were seen flickering
along the beach and sand hills; and this loneliness terrified me more than
a regiment under arms. It was not until the door was barricaded that I