his cabin, and for some while we paced the planks together. There was
a pleasant hush upon the ship; the silence was as refreshing as a fold
of coolness lifting off the sea. A spun-yarn winch was clinking on the
forecastle; from alongside rose the music of fretted waters.
I was talking to the captain on some detail of the ship’s furniture, when
Major Hood came running up the companion steps, his face as white as his
waistcoat, his head uncovered, every muscle of his countenance rigid, as
with horror.
“Good God, captain!” cried he, standing in the companion, “what do you
think has happened?” Before we could fetch a breath he cried, “Some one’s
stolen the diamond!”
I glanced at the helmsman, who stood at the radiant circle of wheel
staring with open mouth and eyebrows arched into his hair. The captain,
stepping close to Major Hood, said in a low, steady voice—
“What’s this you tell me, sir?”
“The diamond’s gone!” exclaimed the Major, fixing his shining eyes upon
me, whilst I observed that his fingers convulsively stroked his thumbs as
though he were rolling up pellets of bread or paper.
“Do you tell me the diamond’s been taken from the place you hid it in?”
said Captain North, still speaking softly, but with deliberation.
“The diamond never was hidden,” replied the Major, who continued to stare
at me. “It was in a portmanteau. _That’s_ no hiding-place!”
Captain North fell back a step. “Never was hidden!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t
you bring two native workmen aboard for no other purpose than to hide it?”
“It never was hidden,” said the Major, now turning his eyes upon the
captain. “I chose it should be believed it was undiscoverably concealed
in some part of my cabin, that I might safely and conveniently keep it in
my baggage, where no thief would dream of looking for it. Who has it?”
he cried with a sudden fierceness, making a step full of passion out of
the companion-way; and he looked with knitted brows towards the ship’s
forecastle.
Captain North watched him idly for a moment or two; and then, with an
abrupt swing of his whole figure, eloquent of defiant resolution, he
stared the Major in the face, and said in a quiet, level voice—
“I shan’t be able to help you. If it’s gone, it’s gone. A diamond’s not
a bale of wool. Whoever’s been clever enough to find it will know how to
keep it.”
“I must have it!” broke out the Major. “It’s a gift for Her Majesty the
Queen. It’s in this ship. I look to you, sir, as master of this vessel,
to recover the property which some one of the people under your charge
has robbed me of!”
“I’ll accompany you to your cabin,” said the captain; and they went down
the steps.
I stood motionless, gaping like an idiot into the yawn of hatch down
which they had disappeared. I had been so used to think of the diamond
as cunningly hidden in the Major’s berth, that his disclosure was
absolutely a shock with its weight of astonishment. Small wonder that
neither Captain North nor I had observed any marks of a workman’s tools
in the Major’s berth. Not but that it was a very ingenious stratagem,
far cleverer to my way of thinking than any subtle, secret burial of the
thing. To think of the Major and his two Indians sitting idly for hours
in that cabin, with the captain and myself all the while supposing they
were fashioning some wonderful contrivance or place for concealing the
treasure in! And still, for all the Major’s cunning, the stone was gone!
Who had stolen it? The only fellow likely to prove the thief was the
steward, not because he was more or less of a rogue than any other man in
the ship, but because he was the one person who, by virtue of his office,
was privileged to go in and out of the sleeping-places as his duties
required.
I was pacing the deck, musing into a sheer muddle this singular business
of the Maharajah of Ratnagiri’s gift to the Queen of England, with all
sorts of dim, unformed suspicions floating loose in my brains round the
central fancy of the fifteen thousand pound stone there, when the captain
returned. He was alone. He stepped up to me hastily, and said—
“He swears the diamond has been stolen. He showed me the empty case.”
“Was there ever a stone in it at all?” said I.
“I don’t think that,” he answered quickly; “there’s no motive under
Heaven to be imagined if the whole thing’s a fabrication.”
“What then, sir?”
“The case is empty, but I’ve not made up my mind yet that the stone’s
missing.”
“The man’s an officer and a gentleman.”
“I know, I know!” he interrupted, “but still, in my opinion, the stone’s
not missing. The long and short of it is,” he said, after a very short
pause, with a careful glance at the skylight and companion hatch, “his
behaviour isn’t convincing enough. Something’s wanting in his passion and
his vexation.”
“Sincerity!”
“Ah! I don’t intend that this business shall trouble me. He angrily
required me to search the ship for stowaways. Bosh! The second mate and
steward have repeatedly overhauled the lazarette: there’s nobody there.”
“And if not there, then nowhere else,” said I. “Perhaps he’s got the
fore-peak in his head.”
“I’ll not have a hatch lifted!” he exclaimed warmly; “nor will I allow
the crew to be troubled. There’s been no theft. Put it that the stone is
stolen. Who’s going to find it in a forecastle full of men—a thing as
big as half a bean, perhaps? If it’s gone, it’s gone, indeed, whoever
may have it. But there’s no go in this matter at all,” he added, with a
short, nervous laugh.
We were talking in this fashion when the Major joined us; his features
were now composed. He gazed sternly at the captain and said loftily—
“What steps are you prepared to take in this matter?”
“None, sir.”
His face darkened. He looked with a bright gleam in his eyes at the
captain, then at me: his gaze was piercing with the light in it. Without
a word he stepped to the side and, folding his arms, stood motionless.
I glanced at the captain; there was something in the bearing of the Major
that gave shape, vague indeed, to a suspicion that had cloudily hovered
about my thoughts of the man for some time past. The captain met my
glance, but he did not interpret it.
When I was relieved at four o’clock by the second mate, I entered my
berth, and presently, hearing the captain go to his cabin, went to him
and made a proposal. He reflected, and then answered—
“Yes; get it done.”
After some talk, I went forward and told the carpenter to step aft and
bore a hole in the bulkhead that separated the Major’s berth from mine.
He took the necessary tools from his chest and followed me. The captain
was now again on deck, talking with the Major; in fact, detaining him in
conversation, as had been preconcerted. I went into the Major’s berth,
and quickly settled upon a spot for an eye-hole. The carpenter then went
to work in my cabin, and in a few minutes bored an orifice large enough
to enable me to command a large portion of the adjacent interior. I swept
the sawdust from the deck in the Major’s berth, so that no hint should
draw his attention to the hole, which was pierced in a corner shadowed
by a shelf. I then told the carpenter to manufacture a plug and paint
its extremity of the colour of the bulkhead. He brought me this plug
in a quarter of an hour. It fitted nicely, and was to be withdrawn and
inserted as noiselessly as though greased.
I don’t want you to suppose this Peeping-Tom scheme was at all to my
taste, albeit my own proposal; but the truth is, the Major’s telling us
that some one had stolen his diamond made all who lived aft hotly eager
to find out whether he spoke the truth or not; for, if he had been really
robbed of the stone, then suspicion properly rested upon the officers
and the steward, which was an _infernal_ consideration: dishonouring and
inflaming enough to drive one to seek a remedy in even a baser device
than that of secretly keeping watch on a man in his bedroom. Then, again,
the captain told me that the Major, whilst they talked when the carpenter
was at work making the hole, had said he would give notice of his loss to
the police at Capetown (at which place we were to touch), and declared
he’d take care no man went ashore—from Captain North himself down to the
youngest apprentice—till every individual, every sea-chest, every locker,
drawer, shelf and box, bunk, bracket and crevice, had been searched by
qualified rummagers.
On this the day of the theft, nothing more was said about the diamond:
that is, after the captain had emphatically informed Major Hood that he
meant to take no steps whatever in the matter. I had expected to find the
Major sullen and silent at dinner; he was not, indeed, so talkative as
usual, but no man watching and hearing him would have supposed so heavy
a loss as that of a stone worth fifteen thousand pounds, the gift of an
Eastern potentate to the Queen of England, was weighing upon his spirits.
It is with reluctance I tell you that, after dinner that day, when he
went to his cabin, I softly withdrew the plug and watched him. I blushed
whilst thus acting, yet I was determined, for my own sake and for the
sake of my shipmates, to persevere. I spied nothing noticeable saving
this: he sat in a folding chair and smoked, but every now and again he
withdrew his cigar from his mouth and talked to it with a singular smile.
It was a smile of cunning, that worked like some baleful, magical spirit
in the fine high breeding of his features; changing his looks just as a
painter of incomparable skill might colour a noble, familiar face into a
diabolical expression, amazing those who knew it only in its honest and
manly beauty. I had never seen that wild, grinning countenance on him
before, and it was rendered the more remarkable by the movement of his
lips whilst he talked to himself, but inaudibly.
A week slipped by. Time after time I had the man under observation; often
when I had charge of the deck I’d leave the captain to keep a look-out,
and steal below and watch Major Hood in his cabin.
It was a Sunday, I remember. I was lying in my bunk half dozing—we were
then, I think, about a three-weeks’ sail from Table Bay—when I heard
the Major go to his cabin. I was already sick of my aimless prying; and
whilst I now lay I thought to myself, “I’ll sleep; what is the good of
this trouble? I know exactly what I shall see. He is either in his chair,
or his bunk, or overhauling his clothes, or standing, cigar in mouth,
at the open porthole.” And then I said to myself, “If I don’t look now
I shall miss the only opportunity of detection that may occur.” One is
often urged by a sort of instinct in these matters.
I got up, almost as through an impulse of habit, noiselessly withdrew
the plug, and looked. The Major was at that instant standing with a
pistol-case in his hand: he opened it as my sight went to him, took out
one of a brace of very elegant pistols, put down the case, and on his
apparently touching a spring in the butt of the pistol, the silver plate
that ornamented the extremity sprang open as the lid of a snuff-box
would, and something small and bright dropped into his hand. This he
examined with the peculiar cunning smile I have before described; but,
owing to the position of his hand, I could not see what he held, though I
had not the least doubt that it was the diamond.
I watched him breathlessly. After a few minutes he dropped the stone into
the hollow butt-end, shut the silver plate, shook the weapon against his
ear as though it pleased him to rattle the stone, then put it in its
case, and the case into a portmanteau.
I at once went on deck, where I found the captain, and reported to him
what I had seen. He viewed me in silence, with a stare of astonishment
and incredulity. What I had seen, he said, was not the diamond. I told
him the thing that had dropped into the Major’s hand was bright, and, as
I thought, sparkled, but it was so held I could not see it.
I was talking to him on this extraordinary affair when the Major came on
deck. The captain said to me, “Hold him in chat. I’ll judge for myself,”
and asked me to describe how he might quickly find the pistol-case. This
I did, and he went below.
I joined the Major, and talked on the first subjects that entered my
head. He was restless in his manner, inattentive, slightly flushed in the
face; wore a lofty manner, and being half a head taller than I, glanced
down at me from time to time in a condescending way. This behaviour in
him was what Captain North and I had agreed to call his “injured air.”
He’d occasionally put it on to remind us that he was affronted by the
captain’s insensibility to his loss, and that the assistance of the
police would be demanded on our arrival at Capetown.
Presently looking down the skylight, I perceived the captain. Mackenzie
had charge of the watch. I descended the steps, and Captain North’s first
words to me were—
“It’s no diamond!”
“What, then, is it?”
“A common piece of glass not worth a quarter of a farthing.”
“What’s it all about, then?” said I. “Upon my soul, there’s nothing in
Euclid to beat it. Glass?”
“A little lump of common glass; a fragment of bull’s-eye, perhaps.”
“What’s he hiding it for?”
“Because,” said Captain North, in a soft voice looking up and around,
“he’s mad!”
“Just so!” said I. “That I’ll swear to _now_, and I’ve been suspecting it
this fortnight past.”
“He’s under the spell of some sort of mania,” continued the captain; “he
believes he’s commissioned to present a diamond to the Queen; possibly
picked up a bit of stuff in the street that started the delusion, then
bought a case for it, and worked out the rest as we know.”
“But why does he want to pretend that the stone was stolen from him?”
“He’s been mastered by his own love for the diamond,” he answered.
“That’s how I reason it. Madness has made his affection for his imaginary
gem a passion in him.”
“And so he robbed himself of it, you think, that he might keep it?”
“That’s about it,” said he.
After this I kept no further look-out upon the Major, nor would I ever
take an opportunity to enter his cabin to view for myself the piece of
glass as the captain described it, though curiosity was often hot in me.
We arrived at Table Bay in twenty-two days from the date of my seeing
the Major with the pistol in his hand. His manner had for a week before
been marked by an irritability that was often beyond his control. He had
talked snappishly and petulantly at table, contradicted aggressively, and
on two occasions he gave Captain North the lie; but we had carefully
avoided noticing his manner, and acted as though he were still the
high-bred, polished gentleman who had sailed with us from Calcutta.
The first to come aboard were the Customs people. They were almost
immediately followed by the harbour-master. Scarcely had the first of the
Custom House officers stepped over the side when Major Hood, with a very
red face, and a lofty, dignified carriage, marched up to him, and said in
a loud voice—
“I have been robbed during the passage from Calcutta of a diamond worth
fifteen thousand pounds, which I was bearing as a gift from the Maharajah
of Ratnagiri to Her Majesty the Queen of England.”
The Customs man stared with a lobster-like expression of face: no image
could better hit the protruding eyes and brick-red countenance of the man.
“I request,” continued the Major, raising his voice into a shout, “to be
placed at once in communication with the police of this port. No person
must be allowed to leave the vessel until he has been thoroughly searched
by such expert hands as you and your _confrères_ no doubt are, sir. I am
Major Byron Hood. I have been twice wounded. My services are well known,
and, I believe, duly appreciated in the right quarters. Her Majesty the
Queen is not to suffer any disappointment at the hands of one who has the
honour of wearing her uniform, nor am I to be compelled, by the act of a
thief, to betray the confidence the Maharajah has reposed in me.”
He continued to harangue in this manner for some minutes, during which I
observed a change in the expression of the Custom House officers’ faces.
Meanwhile Captain North stood apart in earnest conversation with the
harbour-master. They now approached; the harbour-master, looking steadily
at the Major, exclaimed—
“Good news, sir! Your diamond is found!”
“Ha!” shouted the Major. “Who has it?”
“You’ll find it in your pistol-case,” said the harbour-master.
The Major gazed round at us with his wild, bright eyes, his face a-work
with the conflict of twenty mad passions and sensations. Then bursting
into a loud, insane laugh, he caught the harbour-master by the arm, and
in a low voice and a sickening, transforming leer of cunning, said,
“Come, let’s go and look at it.”
We went below. We were six, including two Custom House officers. We
followed the poor madman, who grasped the harbour-master’s arm, and on
arriving at his cabin we stood at the door of it. He seemed heedless of
our presence, but on his taking the pistol-case from the portmanteau, the
two Customs men sprang forward.
“That must be searched by us,” one cried, and in a minute they had it.
With the swiftness of experienced hands they found and pressed the spring
of the pistol, the silver plate flew open, and out dropped a fragment of
thick, common glass, just as Captain North had described the thing. It
fell upon the deck. The Major sprang, picked it up and pocketed it.
“Her Majesty will not be disappointed, after all,” said he, with a
courtly bow to us, “and the commission the Maharajah’s honoured me with
shall be fulfilled.”
* * * * *
The poor gentleman was taken ashore that afternoon, and his luggage
followed him. He was certified mad by the medical man at Capetown, and
was to be retained there, as I understood, till the arrival of a steamer
for England. It was an odd, bewildering incident from top to bottom.
No doubt this particular delusion was occasioned by the poor fellow,
whose mind was then fast decaying, reading about the transmission of the
Koh-i-noor, and musing about it with a madman’s proneness to dwell upon
little things.
_A NIGHTMARE OF THE DOLDRUMS._
The _Justitia_ was a smart little barque of 395 tons. I had viewed
her with something of admiration as she lay in mid-stream in the
Hooghly—somewhere off the Coolie Bazaar, I think it was. There was steam
then coming to Calcutta, though not as steam now is; very little of it
was in any sense palatial, and some of the very best of it was to be as
promptly distanced under given conditions of weather by certain of the
clippers, clouded with studding-sails and flying-kites to the starry
buttons of their skysail mastheads, as the six-knot ocean tramp of to-day
is to be outrun by the four-masted leviathan thrashing through it to
windward with her yards fore and aft.
I—representing in those days a large Birmingham firm of dealers in the
fal-lal industries—had wished to make my way from Calcutta to Capetown.
I saw the _Justitia_ and took a fancy to her; I admired the long, low,
piratic run of her hull as she lay with straining hawsepipes on the
rushing stream of the Hooghly; upon which, as you watched, there might go
by in the space of an hour some half-score at least of dead natives made
ghastly canoes of by huge birds, erect upon the corpses, burying their
beaks as they sailed along.
I found out that the _Justitia_ was one of the smartest of the Thames
and East India traders of that time, memorable on one occasion for
having reeled off a clean seventeen knots by the log under a main
topgallant-sail, set over a single-reefed topsail. It was murmured,
indeed, that the mate who hove that log was drunk when he counted the
knots; yet the dead reckoning tallied with the next day’s observations. I
called upon the agents, was told that the _Justitia_ was not a passenger
ship, but that I could hire a cabin for the run to Capetown if I chose; a
sum in rupees, trifling compared with the cost of transit by steam, was
named. I went on board, found the captain walking up and down under the
awning, and agreeably killed an hour in a chat with as amiable a seaman
as ever it was my good fortune to meet.
We sailed in the middle of July. Nothing worth talking about happened
during our run down the Bay of Bengal. The crew aforemast were all of
them Englishmen; there were twelve, counting the cook and steward. The
captain was a man named Cayzer; the only mate of the vessel was one
William Perkins. The boatswain, a rough, short, hairy, immensely strong
man, acted as second mate and kept a look-out when Perkins was below. But
he was entirely ignorant of navigation, and owned to me that he read
with difficulty words of one syllable, and could not write.
I was the only passenger. My name, I may as well say here, is Thomas
Barron. Our run to the south Ceylon parallels was slow and disappointing.
The monsoon was light and treacherous, sometimes dying out in a sort of
laughing, mocking gust till the whole ocean was a sheet-calm surface, as
though the dependable trade wind was never again to blow.
“Oh yes,” said Captain Cayzer to me, “we’re used to the unexpected
hereabouts. Monsoon or no monsoon, I’ll tell you what: you’re always safe
in standing by for an Irishman’s hurricane down here.”
“And what sort of breeze is that?” I asked.
“An up-and-down calm,” said he; “as hard to know where it begins as to
guess where it’ll end.”
However, thanks to the frequent trade puffs and other winds, which tasted
not like the monsoon, we crawled through those latitudes which Ceylon
spans, and fetched within a few degrees of the equator. In this part of
the waters we were to be thankful for even the most trifling donation of
catspaw, or for the equally small and short-lived mercy of the gust of
the electric cloud. I forget how many days we were out from Calcutta: the
matter is of no moment. I left my cabin one morning some hour after the
sun had risen, by which time the decks had been washed down, and were
already dry, with a salt sparkle as of bright white sand on the face of
the planks, so roasting was it. I went into the head to get a bath under
the pump there. I feel in memory, as I write, the exquisite sensation of
that luxury of brilliant brine, cold as snow, melting through me from
head to foot to the nimble plying of the pump-brake by a seaman.
It was a true tropic morning. The sea, of a pale lilac, flowed in a
long-drawn, gentle heave of swell into the south-west; the glare of the
early morning brooded in a sort of steamy whiteness in the atmosphere;
the sea went working to its distant reaches, and floated into a dim
blending of liquid air and water, so that you couldn’t tell where the
sky ended; a weak, hot wind blew over the taffrail, but it was without
weight. The courses swung to the swell without response to the breathings
of the air; and on high the light cotton-white royals were scarcely
curved by the delicate passage of the draught.
Yet the barque had steerage way. When I looked through the grating at her
metalled forefoot I saw the ripples plentiful as harp strings threading
aft, and whilst I dried myself I watched the slow approach of a piece of
timber hoary with barnacles, and venerable with long hairs of seaweed,
amid and around which a thousand little fish were sporting, many-coloured
as though a rainbow had been shivered.
I returned to my cabin, dressed, and stepped on to the quarter-deck,
where I found some men spreading the awning, and the captain in a white
straw hat viewing an object out upon the water through a telescope, and
talking to the boatswain, who stood alongside.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Something that resembles a raft,” answered the captain.
The thing he looked at was about a mile distant, some three points on
the starboard bow. On pointing the telescope, I distinctly made out the
fabric of a raft, fitted with a short mast, to which midway a bundle—it
resembled a parcel—was attached. A portion of the raft was covered by
a white sheet or cloth, whence dangled a short length of something
chocolate-coloured, indistinguishable even with the glass, lifting and
sinking as the raft rose and fell upon the flowing heave of the sea.
“This ocean,” said the captain, taking the glass from me, “is a big
volume of tragic stories, and the artist who illustrates the book does it
in that fashion,” and he nodded in the direction of the raft.
“What do you make of it, boatswain?” I asked.
“It looks to me,” he answered in his strong, harsh, deep voice, “like a
religious job—one of them rafts the Burmah covies float away their dead
on. I never see one afore, sir, but I’ve heard tell of such things.”