Rees meanwhile was spending his Christmas at his lodgings in St.
Martin’s-lane, with the faithful Sep Jocelyn for company. Sep was
still as much outwardly devoted as ever to his more brilliant friend;
but the fast life they were leading, acting upon a constitution
already weakened by former excesses, was telling upon him even more
plainly than upon the younger man. Sep was losing his nerve. As he sat
with Rees by the fire on the evening of Christmas Day, heavy with late
sleep and with a drinking bout of the previous night, every slight
noise made by a movement of his companion, or by the traffic in the
street outside, caused him to start, and sometimes to shiver. He had
grown much older looking during the past year; his face was swollen
and puckered about the eyes, while the threads of grey in his fair
hair had multiplied into wide white streaks. His starts and tremors
began to irritate Rees, who put out his hand to stop Sep as the latter
was about to help himself from a decanter which stood on the table.
“That will do, Sep. Goodhare will be here in a minute to settle our
next plans, and you’ll want all your wits about you.”
“But I’m so cold,” pleaded the other, in a husky voice.
“Well, brandy won’t warm you. Sit nearer to the fire.”
“I can’t get any nearer, unless I sit in the fender,” complained Sep,
rather sullenly.
For Rees had used rather a bullying tone.
“I’m going into a decline, I think,” Sep began again. “This life’s too
much for me, what with the danger, and the work, and the risks, and
then the pace we go when we’re in funds.”
“Do you want to go back to Carstow and your old auntie, then?” asked
Rees, with what was meant for a sneer, but which proved to be a rather
feeble one.
“No-o; at least if I did, I suppose you wouldn’t let me go; and if you
would, Goodhare wouldn’t,” said Sep, hopelessly.
The idea of starting an independent course of action was now further
than ever beyond his capacity.
“I shouldn’t prevent you,” said Rees, gloomily. “This occupation of
gentlemanly footpad is not more to my taste than to yours. I believe
Goodhare likes violence; it’s one vent to the savagery he has been
saving up all these years. But, for my part, if I had my chances over
again, I should choose life in the country with----”
He stopped.
“With Deborah Audaer?” suggested Sep.
Rees got up and stretched himself.
“What’s the use of talking, when there’s one of Marion’s ecstatic
effusions to be answered, and Goodhare may be in any minute.”
“I’m sick of Goodhare, Rees; aren’t you? He’s a selfish, greedy old
rascal, and he always contrives to get the lion’s share of the plunder
and the fox’s share of the risk. He hardly lets one call one’s soul
one’s own.”
“Have we any souls?” said Rees. “I don’t feel as if I had any such
relic of respectability about me. Whatever I may have had left of that
sort Deborah took away with her the day she came here with my mother.
When I’m tired of this life I shall go to Carstow and claim it back
from her.”
“Do you think, Rees,” suggested Sep, after a pause, “that a man who’s
led the sort of life we have is--is--well--quite good enough for a
woman like Miss Audaer?”
“My dear boy, why trouble ourselves with questions of that sort? As
long as they’ll have us and worship us, no matter what sort of lives
we’ve led, why should we worry ourselves by trying to lead any
better?”
“And you think Miss Audaer worships you still?”
Rees got up, swaggered confidently across the room to his desk,
unlocked it, and took from an inner drawer a woman’s little morocco
purse, which he flung across the table carelessly to his companion.
“Look inside,” said he.
Sep opened it almost reverently, and found that it contained ten
sovereigns.
“Her savings for half a year at least,” explained Rees. “The day she
came here she left it on the desk, sliding it under a piece of
blotting paper, because she knew I was badly off. You see I have not
touched it,” he added, magnanimously.
“So I should think,” said Sep, laconically. “Are you sure, though,
Rees, whether she left it at the beginning or the end of her visit--on
her coming in or on her going away?”
“What do you mean?” asked Rees sharply.
“Why, that perhaps she left it for the old Rees, whom she had known,
and would not have left it for the new Rees whom she had to learn to
know.”
Limp and undecided in action, Sep was shrewd of thought and could be
plain of speech. Rees received his suggestion very haughtily, and the
two men were on the verge of a quarrel when the sound of the turn of a
latch-key in the front door caused them instantly to drop their
voices. For mistrust of their elder was the bond on which the
friendship between the two younger men now chiefly rested.
Amos Goodhare entered in brisk and jaunty fashion. He alone of the
three seemed to have found their alternately riotous and risky life
perfectly agreeable to his tastes and constitution. After having grown
old in the pursuit of learning, he was now growing young again at the
fountain of pleasure. If he had lost something in dignity, he had
gained in distinction, and the man on whom all had looked as an
intellectual marvel seemed now remarkable rather for his well-cut
clothes and the easy condescension of his manner.
“Well, boys,” was his greeting, “you don’t seem to understand how to
make Christmas merry. I’ve come to show you how it can be made
useful.”
“By taking a lesson at Drury Lane, perhaps, and buttering the pavement
outside rich old gentlemen’s doors,” suggested Rees ironically.
Amos gave the young man a glance of no particular warmth and said:
“No, not exactly that. We have a game in hand that nobody, I think,
need despise for its facility. What do you say, boys, to carrying off
the Crown jewels, or at least part of them?”
“I should say it was a very bad joke, and might, if indulged in, lead
to a very good term of penal servitude,” answered Rees, picking out a
cigar very carefully from the case Goodhare offered.
“But I suppose that, like many other bad jokes, you won’t be unwilling
to lend a hand to carry it out.”
Rees considered a few moments, and then laughed.
“No,” said he. “It would be a new sensation, at all events.”
But Sep began to shiver, and to look with glances of alarm from the
one to the other.
“Leave me out this time, Goodhare,” he said at last, hoarsely.
“Can’t, my dear boy. Your shrewdness and methodical way of carrying
out instructions is just as necessary to our combination as Rees’s
dash and my inventiveness. You sketch, don’t you?”
“Ye-es, a little,” admitted Sep reluctantly.
“And you have been in America, and could get up, I suppose, very
fairly as artist and correspondent to a New York paper?”
“If I must, I suppose I could.”
“And you, Rees,” continued Amos, “who can do anything which needs
smartness and dexterity of fingers, can use a file, or could learn to
do it?”
“I could learn to do it, of course.”
“Very well, then. The Christmas holidays are now on, and people flock
to the Tower in swarms. By-the-by, I suppose that you know that St.
Austell’s brother, the Honorable Charles Cenarth, is keeper of the
regalia?”
Rees started.
“Why on earth can’t you leave that family alone, Goodhare?”
Amos laughed harshly, and a look of diabolical malice flashed out of
his eyes.
“Oh, in this case my reason will explain itself as it goes on,” said
he. “In the meantime you will both, in the course of the holidays,
visit the Tower more than once to familiarise yourselves with it. Go
on Mondays and Saturdays, the free days, when there is a crush. Use
disguise, but of the simplest and neatest sort. Rees, you will
practise the filing away of iron bars without noise. And there is
something else for you to do. Lord Wenlock, the general, is a great
chum of St. Austell’s, isn’t he?”
“I believe so.”
“Have you ever seen any of his handwriting?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Then you must get Lady Marion to procure you a couple of his letters.
Say they’re for autographs. Study the handwriting, and then forge a
letter requesting the keeper to give the bearer (whom you will call an
American journalist of note), permission to sketch the regalia. I
think you will find these instructions enough for the present.”
“Yes, quite enough to land us at Portland,” said Rees, cheerfully.
Reckless as impunity in crime had made him, he was not dull enough to
ignore the stupendous risk of such a colossal piece of knavery. But
the excitement of carrying out Goodhare’s daring plans had now become
necessary to his jaded senses, on which the risks of smaller and
meaner thefts were beginning to pall. Trusting, therefore, to the
fertile invention of the elder man for the details of the plot, he at
once set to work on the preliminaries Amos had suggested, and
persuaded the reluctant Sep to do the same.
Weeks passed on, during which Amos put the younger men through their
paces with regard to their recently acquired knowledge of the
geography of the Tower, tested Rees’s progress in the art of using a
file expeditiously and without noise, and caused him to forge letters
from Lord Wenlock, until he produced one which the general himself
might have mistaken for the production of his own pen.
Then, when all was ready, came a spell of bright weather; and Amos,
who had implicit faith in the disorganising powers of fog, waited
until the kindly brown cloak was again drawn over the sky.
One morning in the middle of February he announced that all was ready,
and that the attempt would be made that day. Sep, whom Amos had kept
under his own eye for a week or more, made his way through a thick
sepia-colored mist to the Tower, presented the forged letter, and
after only a short delay was admitted to the Wakefield, or Record,
Tower, where the Crown jewels were kept, and accommodated with a seat.
The day was so dark, and the consequent difficulties of locomotion
were so great, that only very few visitors came to the tower at all.
These few were chiefly of the country cousin sort, and those who came
into the Record Tower did not scruple to crowd round Sep, and to pass
their opinion, in loud whispers, on the merits of the series of neat
little pen-and-ink drawings which he was making from different points
of view, so that from time to time the warder, who stood at the door,
had to come forward and beg them not to interrupt the gentleman.
Presently, in the midst of a small batch of strangely-dressed people
fresh from the colonies, there sauntered in, guide-book in hand, a
young fellow of rather rustic appearance, dressed in the sort of
clothes a respectable carpenter might wear for his Sunday suit. He was
greatly interested in the work of the artist, who was making his way,
by easy stages, all round the great cage, in the centre of the small
stone room, in which the Crown and other jewels are kept. Wherever the
American artist stopped, the young carpenter stopped too, carried away
by his interest in the sketches. The warder, who never remained for
many minutes out of the room, grew interested also, and watched the
progress of the little pictures with much admiration. The day was so
dark, and the fog so thick even inside the stone chamber, that the gas
jets between the deeply-embrasured windows were all alight, giving to
the precious gems a fiery lustre as they glittered through the murky
atmosphere.
Sep had almost reached that side of the room which was furthest from
the door when a tall, well-dressed man appeared at the entrance, and
peeping in, said in cheery tones:
“Hallo! you’ve got an illumination up here, I see! What a mistake it
is, this showing the State jewels at sixpence a head, like the Chamber
of Horrors at a waxworks! What do you think, warder?”
“Well, I don’t know, my lord; they’re the people’s treasures after
all, and it pleases them to see ’em.”
At the words “my lord,” the American correspondent and the young
carpenter looked around. The latter started. Seen by a cursory
observer, not careful to mark trifling differences of stature and
feature, the easy-mannered gentleman at the door, who wore an overcoat
of “horsey” cut, and carried a small dressing-bag, would have passed
for Lord St. Austell.
“I find my brother is not in,” went on Amos, still in the earl’s
well-known genial manner, “so I’ve come up for a chat with you. They
wanted to stop my bag at the gate--for a dynamitard’s, I suppose. But
the sight of my hair brushes and pomatum pots reassured them, I
believe. You can keep it under your own eye, at any rate.”
And the pseudo earl threw his bag down inside the doorway of the stone
chamber, and proceeded to ask the alarmed warder if he had heard that
it was proposed to do away with the body of men of which he formed so
distinguished and ornamental a member, and to replace them with a
staff chosen from the ranks of the metropolitan police.
The alarmed warder listened in consternation to this suggestion,
which, coming from the lips of a gentleman who had so much access to
persons in authority as the Earl of St. Austell, bore a frightful
impress of probability. They discussed the rumor with much warmth, the
sham nobleman growing even more excited and loud than the warder. A
few visitors passed into the chamber and out again, while still the
noble visitor and the alarmed guardian conversed at the door. With the
last batch came the young carpenter and the American, the latter full
of thanks to the warder for his courteous assistance. Still they
discussed, the poor veteran much comforted, in the midst of his alarm,
by the promise of his noble companion to “use his influence” for him
and the body to which he belonged.
At last, however, with a start, the gentleman affected to remember
that his brother, the Honorable Charles Cenarth, would have returned
and be waiting for him. Snatching up his bag, he thrust a
half-sovereign into the warder’s hand, and made his way in a
sauntering, jaunty manner, down the stone staircase.
That handsome “tip” was, however, dearly bought. A quarter of an hour
later the poor warder, having recovered his equanimity a little, made
his accustomed perfunctory tour of the chamber in which the Crown
jewels lay. At the innermost point of the stone apartment he stopped,
sick with horror. Some of the jewels were gone.
With clammy, trembling hands, the unhappy man touched the cage, behind
the bars of which the treasures had seemed so safe. They gave way at
the touch. The bars had been filed through, the glass neatly and
noiselessly cut, and the jewels taken without the least warning sound.
In a moment the whole building rang with the alarm. The soldiers
turned out, the gates were closed, the few visitors still groping
their way about in the fog were closely searched--all to no purpose.
By that time there was a bundle of clothes--“horsey” overcoat,
carpenter’s suit, American tourist’s rig out--sinking,
heavily-weighted, to the bottom of the Thames; while Amos Goodhare,
Sep, and Rees were finding their way to the lodging in St.
Martin’s-lane by different routes.
An hour later there lay on the table in the dingy back sitting-room
two Royal crowns--the so-called Queen’s diadem, a massive circlet set
with pearls and diamonds of enormous size, and St. Edward’s golden
crown, a larger and still more magnificent treasure, ablaze with
precious stones. Besides these lay an old golden spoon and a collar
studded with gems.
The three plotters, having carried through their adventures so
successfully, stood staring at their treasure in bewilderment.
For even Amos, the oldest and craftiest, began to understand, in the
face of this splendid prize, that they were very much in the position
of gentlemen who, having obscurity as their only hope of safety, find
themselves suddenly the possessors of a fine white elephant.