"OFT FROM APPARENT ILLS."
Doubtless a person with Mr. C. Augustus Ebénier's pretensions to
gentility should have sent down his card to the individuals engaged in
conference below before he went down himself; but the circumstances did
not permit the exercise of this degree of courtesy. In fact the steward
had no intention forcibly to intrude himself upon the persons below;
only to obtain a glance at them. He was a man of intelligence, and the
arrest of his captain, in whose character he had a becoming interest,
was enough to assure him that something was wrong. He had listened
patiently to the details of the examination, and while he was willing
to admit that the old man had been robbed of his gold, it never entered
his head that Levi was guilty of the crime.
The muffled speech of the two men in the Hotel de Poisson, and the
unseemly hour they had chosen for their conference, suggested to the
steward that they had something to do with this robbery. He had vainly
endeavored to identify their voices, and as a last resort, failing to
obtain any information by other means, he decided to obtain one glance
at them at all hazards. Perhaps it was well for him that the timbers
broke beneath his weight, for the men, not relishing the intrusion,
might have subjected him to much bodily harm.
As it was, they bolted as though an evil spirit had suddenly dropped
down between them from the upper regions. They were terribly
frightened, as indicated by their rapid flight. The steward had not
even obtained his coveted view of their faces and forms, and was no
wiser in the end than he was in the beginning. The treacherous timbers
had defeated his purpose, while, perhaps, they had saved him from a
greater calamity than his fall.
For the second time that day, the steward lay senseless on the ground.
Though Mr. C. Augustus Ebénier was not wanting in intelligence, his
skull seemed to have a capability for enduring hard knocks which was
really surprising. Doubtless his head was his strong place; if it had
not been, his brains must have been dashed out. According to the
tradition, it was safer for him to strike on his head than on his
shins. Certainly he was not badly injured, and if reduced to extremity
he might have let out his head for use as a blacksmith's anvil.
Before the two men who had been conferring together in the Hotel de
Poisson could muster courage to return, the steward had in a great
measure recovered from the effects of the fall. Perhaps the
superabundance of stars which dawned upon his vision had not all ceased
to shine; and perhaps his ideas, which had all been thrown into a
confused mass, were not altogether detached and restored to their
original channels; but Augustus was practically himself again. His
first thought was one of regret that he had failed to obtain a sight of
the two men; that he had not even learned whether they were black or
white, old or young, seamen or landsmen.
He rubbed his head to relieve the pressure on his brain, and to vivify
his ideas. The incident which had occurred seemed to render the Hotel
de Poisson an unfit place for him to remain during the balance of the
night; but he was not willing to leave till he had examined the
locality, and obtained whatever evidence it might afford him in regard
to the mysterious couple who had met there. Kicking about the ground,
he disturbed the fractured glass of the lantern. The globe had been
broken, but the lamp was still whole.
Though Mr. C. Augustus Ebénier had a great many bright parts, he was
inclined to be a "swell." He smoked a pipe on the forecastle of the
yacht, but when he walked through the principal streets of Rockport, in
his plaid pants and bobtail sack, he smoked an Havana cigar, with a
meerschaum mouthpiece, in deference to his huge mustache--it was more
genteel to smoke a cigar than a pipe. The steward carried a cigar case,
which always contained two or three of the choicest brand, and he
claimed to have brought them from Havana himself. In this case he also
carried matches, which now promised to serve him a better turn than for
the lighting of his cigar.
In a moment he had the lamp from the lantern burning, and was looking
curiously and eagerly about the premises. The steward had an idea;
perhaps not a very brilliant one, but as brilliant as could be expected
of a man whose intellect had been so rudely jarred twice within a brief
period. The conduct of the two transient guests at the Hotel de Poisson
had been suspicious, to say the least. That afternoon the robbery had
been fully discussed, and he was confident that the visitors were in
some manner connected with that affair. His idea was, that the
fish-house had been used as a place of concealment for the plunder. He
made a hasty examination of the ground and the rocks which formed the
first floor of the Hotel de Poisson, but discovered nothing to confirm
his impression.
The steward crossed the place to examine under the rickety stairs. On
his way he hit his head against a splintered board, which was hanging
from the floor above, partly detached by his movement through the
structure. It scratched the top of his head, already tender from rough
usage, and thereby vexed and angered him, as slight accidents often
ruffle even great minds. With a gesture of impatience, and a petulant
word not in good taste for a drawing-room, he seized the projecting
board, and gave it a savage wrench.
Mr. Ebénier was not a poet himself, but he was fond of the poets, and
had perused Milton, Shakspeare, Beattie, Cowper, and Keats with real
pleasure, to say nothing of having read Corneille and Racine in the
original. The steward, therefore, was prepared to appreciate the poet's
sentiment, "Oft from apparent ills our blessings rise." His impatient
gesture and his petulant exclamation when the board scratched his head,
indicated that he regarded the accident as "an apparent ill;" but, as
he wrenched the board, a shot-bag, plethoric with gold coin, tumbled,
with a clinking clang, upon the ground at his feet, narrowly avoiding
his head, and thus saying him from being knocked senseless a third
time.
The steward opened his eyes, and regarded the bag as the blessing. He
shook the board again, and another bag came this time. Then he pulled
it away, and the sail which had formed his bed in the loft rolled down.
Overhauling this, he found a third bag; and this was the last he could
find. Picking up the lamp till it blazed like a torch, he renewed the
search; but no more of these heavy blessings were available.
Mr. Ebénier was satisfied, and he set his lamp down on the ground,
intending to open one of the bags, and ascertain the nature of its
contents. Under ordinary circumstances the steward would have been too
careful to set his lamp down so near a pile of dry seaweed as he did on
the present occasion. But his mind was, probably, so confused by the
hard knocks his head had received, and by the excitement of finding the
gold, that he took little note of his surroundings. His thought was
concentrated upon the bags of gold. He did not even think of the two
men whose conference he had disturbed, and did not seem to fear that
they would return and deprive him of his booty.
He was about to untie the string of one of the heavy bags, when a
bright glare overspread the space before him. The pile of dry seaweed,
which had been used to cover a sail-boat in the winter, was all in a
light blaze. The steward tried to quench the flames with his feet, but
his efforts were unavailing. The dry stuff burned like shavings, and
the more he kicked, the more the fire leaped up and spit at him. He
fought the flames as long as his courage held out, and then he
"allowed" that the Hotel de Poisson was a doomed structure.
Taking the money-bags, he retreated down the peninsula towards the
landing-place at the Point, lighted on his way by the burning building.
Crossing the plank, he reached the shore. There was a dory there, and
putting the three bags into it, the steward launched it, and pulled off
to the yacht. The treasure was conveyed to the cabin, and deposited
temporarily in a locker under a berth. The dory was towed back to the
shore, and placed where the steward had found it, that no early
fisherman might be deprived of his morning trip. Augustus was in a
flurry of excitement all this time, and had not even considered what he
should do with the bags. His present object was to secure the plunder
so that it could not be recovered by the robbers; and, having done
this, he was entirely satisfied with himself, and everybody else,
except Dock Vincent, to whom he owed a balance on account, for that
night's business.
There was an alarm of fire on shore. The bright glare of the flames
from the Hotel de Poisson penetrated the windows of a house near Dock
Vincent's, and lighted up the bed-chamber of a sleeping stone-cutter.
He gave the alarm; the bells rang, the engines rattled, and the whole
town was aroused from its peaceful slumbers. Hundreds of men, who had
worked hard all day, lost two hours of sleep for an old shanty which
was not worth five dollars.
The Hotel de Poisson was burned to the ground before many people had
gathered. Some good men thanked God that it had not been a poor man's
house; young men enjoyed the excitement of "running with the machine,"
and those with an eye for the picturesque were thankful that the
unsightly shanty had been removed from a place where it disfigured the
landscape. No one appeared to be sorry; but every one wondered how the
fire had caught. Various conjectures were suggested; but, after all, no
one knew anything about it. Some thought a straggler had used it as a
lodging, and set it on fire in lighting his pipe. Others thought some
bad boys had set the fire for fun.
If the two men who had met there to confer about their ill-gotten gold
were in the crowd, doubtless they were sadder and wiser men. Probably
they thought that the breaking of the lantern had communicated the
flame to the shanty. The people present knew nothing of the event in
the Hotel de Poisson wherein Mr. C. Augustus Ebénier had been the
principal actor. The finding of the half-melted remains of a lantern
had no significance or suggestiveness to them. The building burned up
clean, and there was nothing left of it but a few smoking timbers, and
a thin sprinkling of ashes on the ground and the rocks.
If the robbers, whoever they were, went to the fire, it is more than
likely that they searched eagerly among the ruins for the gold. If they
did, they saw nothing which looked like the fused coins of the
treasure. The old sail, in which the gold appeared to have been
concealed, or which had been thrown over its place of concealment, was
burned to tinder, and there was not a vestige of the bags or the money.