Three years passed away quietly in the Kentish village, and every day
Olga's unreasoning terror of Niaz grew gradually fainter and fainter. If
she had known that Niaz had escaped from the mines, after eight months'
imprisonment, and made his way by means of his Tartar friends across the
passes to Tibet and Calcutta, she would not have allowed the sense of
security to grow so strong upon her.
Meanwhile Frank, often in London, had picked up the acquaintance of a
certain M. de Vouillemont, a French gentleman much about at the clubs,
of whose delightful manners and wide acquaintance with the world and men
he was never tired of talking to Olga. "A most charming man, indeed, De
Vouillemont, and very anxious to come down here and see Hazelhurst.
Besides, Olga, he has been even in Russia, and he knows how to talk
admirably about everybody and everything. I've asked him down for Friday
evening. Now, do, like a good girl, break your rule for once, and come
and dine with us, although there's to be a stranger. It's only one, you
know, and the girls would be so delighted if you'd help entertain him,
for he speaks hardly any English, and their French, poor things, is
horribly insular and boarding-schooly."
At last, with much reluctance, Olga consented, and on the Friday she
went up to the big house at eight punctually.
Mrs. Davids and the girls were not yet in the drawing-room when she
arrived; but M. de Vouillemont had dressed early, and was standing with
his back to the room, looking intently at some pictures on the wall, as
Olga entered.
As she came in, and the servant shut the door behind her, the stranger
turned slowly. In a moment she recognized him. His complexion was
disguised, so as to make him look darker than before; his black
moustache was shaved off; his hair was differently cut and dressed; but
still, as he looked her in the face, she knew him at once. It was
Alexander Niaz!
Petrified with fear, she could neither fly nor scream. She stood still
in the middle of the drawing-room, and stared at him fixedly in an agony
of terror.
Niaz had evidently tracked her down, and come prepared for his horrid
revenge. Without a moment's delay, his face underwent a hideous change,
and from the cultivated European gentleman in evening clothes that he
looked when she entered, he was transformed as if by magic into a
grinning, gibbering Tartar savage, with his tongue lolling out once
more, as of old in Siberia, in hateful derision of her speechless
terror.
Seizing her roughly by the arm, he dragged her after him, not so much
unresisting as rigid with horror, to the open fireplace. A marble fender
ran around the tiled hearth. Laying her down upon the rug as if she were
dead, he placed her small right hand with savage glee upon that
ready-made block, and then proceeded deliberately to take out a small
steel hatchet from inside his evening coat. Olga was too terrified even
to withdraw her hand. He raised the axe on high--it flashed a second in
the air--a smart throb of pain--a dreadful crunching of bone and
sinew--and Olga's hand fell white and lifeless upon the tiled
hearthplace. Without stopping to look at her for a second, he took it
up brutally in his own, and flung it with a horrible oath into the
blazing fire.
At that moment, the door opened, and Frank entered.
Olga, lying faint and bleeding on the hearth rug, was just able to look
up at him imploringly and utter in a sharp cry of alarm the one word
"Niaz."
Frank sprang upon him like an angry lion.
"I told her her hand should pay the penalty," the Tartar cried, with a
horrible joy bursting wildly from his livid features; "and now it burns
in the fire over yonder, as she herself shall burn next minute for ever
and ever in fire and brimstone."
As he spoke he drew a pistol from his pocket, and pointed it at her with
his finger on the trigger.
Next moment, before he could fire, Frank had seized his hand, flung the
pistol to the farther end of the drawing-room, and forced the Tartar
down upon the floor in a terrible life-and-death struggle.
Niaz's face, already livid, grew purpler and purpler as they wrestled
with one another on the carpet in that deadly effort. His wrath and
vindictiveness gave a mad energy to his limbs and muscles. Should he be
baulked of his fair revenge at last? Should the woman who had betrayed
him escape scot-free with just the loss of a hand, and he himself merely
exchange a Siberian for an English prison? No, no, never! by St.
Nicholas, never! Ha, madame! I will murder you both! The pistol! the
pistol! A thousand devils! let me go! I will kill you yet! I will kill
you! I will kill you! Then he gasped, and grew blacker and
purpler--blacker and purpler--blacker--blacker--blacker--ever blacker.
Presently he gasped again. Frank's hand was now upon his mumbling
throat. They rolled over and over in their frantic struggles. Then a
long, slow inspiration. After that, his muscles relaxed. Frank loosed
him a little, but knelt upon his breast heavily still, lest he should
rise again in another paroxysm. But no: he lay quite motionless--quite
motionless, and never stirred a single finger.
Frank felt his heart--no movement; his pulse--quite quiet; his lips--not
a breath perceptible! Then he rose, faint and staggoring, and rang for
the servants.
When the doctor came hurriedly from the village to bandage up the
Russian lady's arm, he immediately pronounced that M. de Vouillemont was
dead--stone dead--not a doubt about it. Probably apoplexy under stress
of violent emotion.
The inquest was a good deal hushed up, owing to the exceedingly painful
circumstances of the case; and to this day very few people about Torquay
(where she now lives) know how Mrs. Frank Davids, the quiet lady who
dresses herself always in black, and has such a beautiful softened
half-frightened expression, came to lose her right hand. But everybody
knows that Mr. Davids is tenderness itself to her, and that she loves
him in return with the most absolute and childlike devotion.
It was worth cutting off her right hand, after all, to be rid of that
awful spectre of Niaz, and to have gained the peaceful love of Frank
Davids.
_JOHN CANN'S TREASURE._
Cecil Mitford sat at a desk in the Record Office with a stained and
tattered sheet of dark dirty-brown antique paper spread before him in
triumph, and with an eager air of anxious inquiry speaking forth from
every line in his white face and every convulsive twitch at the
irrepressible corners of his firm pallid mouth. Yes, there was no doubt
at all about it; the piece of torn and greasy paper which he had at last
discovered was nothing more or less than John Cann's missing letter. For
two years Cecil Mitford had given up all his spare time, day and night,
to the search for that lost fragment of crabbed seventeenth-century
handwriting; and now at length, after so many disappointments and so
much fruitless anxious hunting, the clue to the secret of John Cann's
treasure was lying there positively before him. The young man's hand
trembled violently as he held the paper fast unopened in his feverish
grasp, and read upon its back the autograph endorsement of Charles the
Second's Secretary of State--"Letter in cypher from Io. Cann, the noted
Buccaneer, to his brother Will'm, intercepted at Port Royal by his
Ma'ties command, and despatched by General Ed. D'Oyley, his Ma'ties
Captain-Gen'l and Governor-in-Chief of the Island of Jamaica, to me,
H. NICHOLAS." That was it, beyond the shadow of a doubt; and though
Cecil Mitford had still to apply to the cypher John Cann's own written
key, and to find out the precise import of the directions it contained,
he felt at that moment that the secret was now at last virtually
discovered, and that John Cann's untold thousands of buried wealth were
potentially his very own already.
He was only a clerk in the Colonial Office, was Cecil Mitford, on a
beggarly income of a hundred and eighty a year--how small it seemed now,
when John Cann's money was actually floating before his mind's eye; but
he had brains and industry and enterprise after a fitful adventurous
fashion of his own; and he had made up his mind years before that he
would find out the secret of John Cann's buried treasure, if he had to
spend half a lifetime on the almost hopeless quest. As a boy, Cecil
Mitford had been brought up at his father's rectory on the slopes of
Dartmoor, and there he had played from his babyhood upward among the
rugged granite boulders of John Cann's rocks, and had heard from the
farm labourers and the other children around the romantic but perfectly
historical legend of John Cann's treasure. Unknown and incredible sums
in Mexican doubloons and Spanish dollars lay guarded by a strong oaken
chest in a cavern on the hilltop, long since filled up with flints and
mould from the neighbouring summits. To that secure hiding-place the
great buccaneer had committed the hoard gathered in his numberless
piratical expeditions, burying all together under the shadow of a petty
porphyritic tor that overhangs the green valley of Bovey Tracy. Beside
the bare rocks that mark the site, a perfectly distinct pathway is worn
by footsteps into the granite platform underfoot; and that path, little
Cecil Mitford had heard with childish awe and wonder, was cut out by the
pacing up and down of old John Cann himself, mounting guard in the
darkness and solitude over the countless treasure that he had hidden
away in the recesses of the pixies' hole beneath.
As young Mitford grew up to man's estate, this story of John Cann's
treasure haunted his quick imagination for many years with wonderful
vividness. When he first came up to London, after his father's death,
and took his paltry clerkship in the Colonial Office--how he hated the
place, with its monotonous drudgery, while John Cann's wealth was only
waiting for him to take it and floating visibly before his prophetic
eyes!--the story began for a while to fade out under the disillusioning
realities of respectable poverty and a petty Government post. But before
he had been many months in the West India department (he had a small
room on the third floor, overlooking Downing Street) a casual discovery
made in overhauling the archives of the office suddenly revived the
boyish dream with all the added realism and cool intensity of maturer
years. He came across a letter from John Cann himself to the Protector
Oliver, detailing the particulars of a fierce irregular engagement with
a Spanish privateer, in which the Spaniard had been captured with much
booty, and his vessel duly sold to the highest bidder in Port Royal
harbour. This curious coincidence gave a great shock of surprise to
young Mitford. John Cann, then, was no mythical prehistoric hero, no
fairy-king or pixy or barrow-haunter of the popular fancy, but an actual
genuine historical figure, who corresponded about his daring exploits
with no less a personage than Oliver himself! From that moment forth,
Cecil Mitford gave himself up almost entirely to tracing out the
forgotten history of the old buccaneer. He allowed no peace to the
learned person who took care of the State Papers of the Commonwealth at
the Record Office, and he established private relations, by letter, with
two or three clerks in the Colonial Secretary's Office at Kingston,
Jamaica, whom he induced to help him in reconstructing the lost story of
John Cann's life.
Bit by bit Cecil Mitford had slowly pieced together a wonderful mass of
information, buried under piles of ragged manuscript and weary reams of
dusty documents, about the days and doings of that ancient terror of the
Spanish Main. John Cann was a Devonshire lad, of the rollicking, roving
seventeenth century, born and bred at Bovey Tracy, on the flanks of
Dartmoor, the last survivor of those sea-dogs of Devon who had sallied
forth to conquer and explore a new Continent under the guidance of
Drake, and Raleigh, and Frobisher, and Hawkins. As a boy, he had sailed
with his father in a ship that bore the Queen's letters of marque and
reprisal against the Spanish galleons; in his middle life, he had lived
a strange roaming existence--half pirate and half privateer, intent upon
securing the Protestant religion and punishing the King's enemies by
robbing wealthy Spanish skippers and cutting off the recusant noses of
vile Papistical Cuban slave traders; in his latter days, the fierce,
half-savage old mariner had relapsed into sheer robbery, and had been
hunted down as a public enemy by the Lord Protector's servants, or later
still by the Captains-General and Governors-in-Chief of his Most Sacred
Majesty's Dominions in the West Indies. For what was legitimate warfare
in the spacious days of great Elizabeth, had come to be regarded in the
degenerate reign of Charles II. as rank piracy.
One other thing Cecil Mitford had discovered, with absolute certainty;
and that was that in the summer of 1660, "the year of his Ma'tie's
most happy restoration," as John Cann himself phrased it, the persecuted
and much misunderstood old buccaneer had paid a secret visit to England,
and had brought with him the whole hoard which he had accumulated during
sixty years of lawful or unlawful piracy in the West Indies and the
Spanish Main. Concerning this hoard, which he had concealed somewhere in
Devonshire, he kept up a brisk vernacular correspondence in cypher with
his brother William, at Tavistock; and the key to that cypher, marked
outside "A clew to my Bro. John's secret writing," Cecil Mitford had
been fortunate enough to unearth among the undigested masses of the
Record Office. But one letter, the last and most important of the whole
series, containing as he believed the actual statement of the
hiding-place, had long evaded all his research: and that was the letter
which, now at last, after months and months of patient inquiry, lay
unfolded before his dazzled eyes on the little desk in his accustomed
corner. It had somehow been folded up by mistake in the papers relating
to the charge against Cyriack Skinner, of complicity in the Rye House
Plot. How it got there nobody knows, and probably nobody but Cecil
Mitford himself could ever have succeeded in solving the mystery.
As he gazed, trembling, at the precious piece of dusty much-creased
paper, scribbled over in the unlettered schoolboy hand of the wild old
sea-dog, Cecil Mitford could hardly restrain himself for a moment from
uttering a cry. Untold wealth swam before his eyes: he could marry Ethel
now, and let her drive in her own carriage! Ah, what he would give if he
might only shout in his triumph. He couldn't even read the words, he was
so excited. But after a minute or two, he recovered his composure
sufficiently to begin deciphering the crabbed writing, which constant
practice and familiarity with the system enabled him to do immediately,
without even referring to the key. And this was what, with a few
minutes' inspection, Cecil Mitford slowly spelled out of the dirty
manuscript:--
"From Jamaica. This 23rd day of Jan'y,
"in the Yeare of our Lord 1663.
"My deare Bro.,--I did not think to have written you againe, after
the scurvie Trick you have played me in disclosing my Affairs to
that meddlesome Knight that calls himself the King's Secretary: but
in truth your last Letter hath so moved me by your Vileness that I
must needs reply thereto with all Expedicion. These are to assure
you, then, that let you pray how you may, or gloze over your base
treatment with fine cozening Words and fair Promises, you shall
have neither lot nor scot in my Threasure, which is indeed as you
surmise hidden away in England, but the Secret whereof I shall
impart neither to you nor to no man. I have give commands,
therefore that the Paper whereunto I have committed the place of
its hiding shall be buried with my own Body (when God please) in
the grave-yarde at Port Royal in this Island: so that you shall
never be bettered one Penny by your most Damnable Treachery and
Double-facedness. For I know you, my deare Bro., in very truth for
a prating Coxcomb, a scurvie cowardlie Knave, and a lying Thief of
other Men's Reputations. Therefore, no more herewith from your very
humble Ser'vt., and Loving Bro.,
"IOHN CANN, Capt'n"
Cecil Mitford laid the paper down as he finished reading it with a face
even whiter and paler than before, and with the muscles of his mouth
trembling violently with suppressed emotion. At the exact second when he
felt sure he had discovered the momentous secret, it had slipped
mysteriously through his very fingers, and seemed now to float away into
the remote distance, almost as far from his eager grasp as ever. Even
there, in the musty Record Office, before all the clerks and scholars
who were sitting about working carelessly at their desks at mere
dilettante historical problems--the stupid prigs, how he hated them!--he
could hardly restrain the expression of his pent-up feelings at that
bitter disappointment in the very hour of his fancied triumph. Jamaica!
How absolutely distant and unapproachable it sounded! How hopeless the
attempt to follow up the clue! How utterly his day-dream had been dashed
to the ground in those three minutes of silent deciphering! He felt as
if the solid earth was reeling beneath him, and he would have given the
whole world if he could have put his face between his two hands on the
desk and cried like a woman before the whole Record Office.
For half an hour by the clock he sat there dazed and motionless, gazing
in a blank disappointed fashion at the sheet of coffee-coloured paper in
front of him. It was late, and workers were dropping away one after
another from the scantily peopled desks. But Cecil Mitford took no
notice of them: he merely sat with his arms folded, and gazed
abstractedly at that disappointing, disheartening, irretrievable piece
of crabbed writing. At last an assistant came up and gently touched his
arm. "We're going to close now, sir," he said in his unfeeling official
tone--just as if it were a mere bit of historical inquiry he was
after--"and I shall be obliged if you'll put back the manuscripts you've
been consulting into F. 27." Cecil Mitford rose mechanically and sorted
out the Cyriack Skinner papers into their proper places. Then he laid
them quietly on the shelf, and walked out into the streets of London,
for the moment a broken-hearted man.
But as he walked home alone that clear warm summer evening, and felt the
cool breeze blowing against his forehead, he began to reflect to himself
that, after all, all was not lost; that in fact things really stood
better with him now than they had stood that very morning, before he
lighted upon John Cann's last letter. He had not discovered the actual
hiding-place of the hoard, to be sure, but he now knew on John Cann's
own indisputable authority, first, that there really was a hidden
treasure; second, that the hiding-place was really in England; and
third, that full particulars as to the spot where it was buried might be
found in John Cann's own coffin at Port Royal, Jamaica. It was a risky
and difficult thing to open a coffin, no doubt; but it was not
impossible. No, not impossible. On the whole, putting one thing with
another, in spite of his terrible galling disappointment, he was really
nearer to the recovery of the treasure now than he had ever been in his
life before. Till to-day, the final clue was missing; to-day, it had
been found. It was a difficult and dangerous clue to follow, but still
it had been found.
And yet, setting aside the question of desecrating a grave, how all but
impossible it was for him to get to Jamaica! His small funds had long
ago been exhausted in prosecuting the research, and he had nothing on
earth to live upon now but his wretched salary. Even if he could get
three or six months' leave from the Colonial Office, which was highly
improbable, how could he ever raise the necessary money for his passage
out and home, as well as for the delicate and doubtful operation of
searching for documents in John Cann's coffin? It was tantalising, it
was horrible, it was unendurable; but here, with the secret actually
luring him on to discover it, he was to be foiled and baffled at the
last moment by a mere paltry, petty, foolish consideration of two
hundred pounds! Two hundred pounds! How utterly ludicrous! Why, John
Cann's treasure would make him a man of fabulous wealth for a whole
lifetime, and he was to be prevented from realizing it by a wretched
matter of two hundred pounds! He would do anything to get it--for a
loan, a mere loan; to be repaid with cent. per cent. interest; but where
in the world, where in the world, was he ever to get it from?
And then, quick as lightning, the true solution of the whole difficulty
flashed at once across his excited brain. He could borrow all the money
if he chose from Ethel! Poor little Ethel; she hadn't much of her own;
but she had just enough to live very quietly upon with her Aunt Emily;
and, thank Heaven, it wasn't tied up with any of those bothering,
meddling three-per-cent.-loving trustees! She had her little all at her
own disposal, and he could surely get two or three hundred pounds from
her to secure for them both the boundless buried wealth of John Cann's
treasure.
Should he make her a confidante outright, and tell her what it was that
he wanted the money for? No, that would be impossible, for though she
had heard all about John Cann over and over again, she had not faith
enough in the treasure--women are so unpractical--to hazard her little
scrap of money on it; of that he felt certain. She would go and ask old
Mr. Cartwright's opinion; and old Mr. Cartwright was one of those
penny-wise, purblind, unimaginative old gentlemen who will never believe
in anything until they've seen it. Yet here was John Cann's money going
a-begging, so to speak, and only waiting for him and Ethel to come and
enjoy it. Cecil had no patience with those stupid, stick-in-the-mud,
timid people who can see no further than their own noses. For Ethel's
own sake he would borrow two or three hundred pounds from her, one way
or another, and she would easily forgive him the harmless little
deception when he paid her back a hundredfold out of John Cann's
boundless treasure.