It had been a long job after all to arrange fully the needful
preliminaries for the actual search after John Cann's buried doubloons.
First of all, there was Ethel's interest to pay, and a horrid story for
Cecil to concoct--all false, of course, worse luck to it--about how he
had managed to invest her poor three hundred to the best advantage. Then
there was another story to make good about three months' extra leave
from the Colonial Office. Next came the question of buying the land
where John Cann's treasure lay hidden, and this was really a matter of
very exceptional and peculiar difficulty. The owner--pig-headed
fellow!--didn't want to sell, no matter how much he was offered, because
the corner contained a clump of trees that made a specially pretty
element in the view from his dining-room windows. His dining-room
windows, forsooth! What on earth could it matter, when John Cann's
treasure was at stake, whether anything at all was visible or otherwise
from his miserable dining-room windows? Cecil was positively appalled at
the obstinacy and narrow-mindedness of the poor squireen, who could
think of nothing at all in the whole world but his own ridiculous
antiquated windows. However, in the end, by making his bid high enough,
he was able to induce this obstructive old curmudgeon to part with his
triangular little corner of land in the bend of the river. Even so,
there was the question of payment: absurd as it seemed, with all John
Cann's money almost in his hands, Cecil was obliged to worry and bother
and lie and intrigue for weeks together in order to get that paltry
little sum in hard cash for the matter of payment. Still, he raised it
in the end: raised it by inducing Ethel to sell out the remainder of her
poor small fortune, and cajoling Aunt Emily into putting her name to a
bill of sale for her few worthless bits of old-fashioned furniture. At
last, after many delays and vexatious troubles, Cecil found himself the
actual possessor of the corner of land wherein lay buried John Cann's
treasure.
The very first day that Cecil Mitford could call that coveted piece of
ground his own, he could not restrain his eagerness (though he knew it
was imprudent in a land where the unjust law of treasure-trove
prevails), but he must then and there begin covertly digging under the
shadow of the three big willow trees, in the bend of the river. He had
eyed and measured the bearings so carefully already that he knew the
very spot to a nail's breadth where John Cann's treasure was actually
hidden. He set to work digging with a little pick as confidently as if
he had already seen the doubloons lying there in the strong box that he
knew enclosed them. Four feet deep he dug, as John Cann's instructions
told him; and then, true to the inch, his pick struck against a solid
oaken box, well secured with clamps of iron. Cecil cleared all the dirt
away from the top, carefully, not hurriedly, and tried with all his
might to lift the box out, but all in vain. It was far too heavy, of
course, for one man's arms to raise: all that weight of gold and silver
must be ever so much more than a single pair of hands could possibly
manage. He must try to open the lid alone, so as to take the gold out, a
bit at a time, and carry it away with him now and again, as he was able,
covering the place up carefully in between, for fear of the Treasury and
the Lord of the Manor. How abominably unjust it seemed to him at that
moment--the legal claim of those two indolent hostile powers! to think
that after he, Cecil Mitford, had borne the brunt of the labour in
adventurously hunting up the whole trail of John Cann's secret, two idle
irresponsible participators should come in at the end, if they could, to
profit entirely by _his_ ingenuity and _his_ exertions!
At last, by a great effort, he forced the rusty lock open, and looked
eagerly into the strong oak chest. How his heart beat with slow, deep
throbs at that supreme moment, not with suspense, for he _knew_ he
should find the money, but with the final realization of a great hope
long deferred! Yes, there it lay, in very truth, all before him--great
shining coins of old Spanish gold--gold, gold, gold, arranged in long
rows, one coin after another, over the whole surface of the broad oak
box. He had found it, he had found it, he had really found it! After so
much toilsome hunting, after so much vain endeavour, after so many
heart-breaking disappointments, John Cann's treasure in very truth lay
open there actually before him!
For a few minutes, eager and frightened as he was, Cecil Mitford did not
dare even to touch the precious pieces. In the greatness of his joy, in
the fierce rush of his overpowering emotions, he had no time to think of
mere base everyday gold and silver. It was the future and the ideal that
he beheld, not the piled-up heaps of filthy lucre. Ethel was his, wealth
was his, honour was his! He would be a rich man and a great man now and
henceforth for ever! Oh, how he hugged himself in his heart on the wise
successful fraud by which he had induced Ethel to advance him the few
wretched hundreds he needed for his ever-memorable Jamaican journey! How
he praised to himself his own courage, and ingenuity, and determination,
and inexhaustible patience! How he laughed down that foolish conscience
of his that would fain have dissuaded him from his master-stroke of
genius. He deserved it all, he deserved it all! Other men would have
flinched before the risk and expense of the voyage to Jamaica, would
have given up the scent for a fool's errand in the cemetery at Port
Royal, would have shrunk from ransacking John Cann's grave at dead of
night in the Cathedral precincts at Spanish Town, would have feared to
buy the high-priced corner of land at Bovey Tracy on a pure imaginative
speculation. But he, Cecil Mitford, had had the boldness and the
cleverness to do it every bit, and now, wisdom was justified of all her
children. He sat for five minutes in profound meditation on the edge of
the little pit he had dug, gloating dreamily over the broad gold pieces,
and inwardly admiring his own bravery and foresight and indomitable
resolution. What a magnificent man he really was--a worthy successor of
those great freebooting, buccaneering, filibustering Devonians of the
grand Elizabethan era! To think that the worky-day modern world should
ever have tried to doom him, Cecil Mitford, with his splendid enterprise
and glorious potentialities, to a hundred and eighty a year and a
routine clerkship at the Colonial Office!
After a while, however, mere numerical cupidity began to get the better
of this heroic mood, and Cecil Mitford turned somewhat languidly to the
vulgar task of counting the rows of doubloons. He counted up the
foremost row carefully, and then for the first time perceived, to his
intense surprise, that the row behind was not gold, but mere silver
Mexican pistoles. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, but the fact was
unmistakable; there was only one row of yellow gold in the top layer,
and all the rest was merely bright and glittering silver. Strange that
John Cann should have put coins of such small value near the top of his
box: the rest of the gold must certainly be in successive layers down
further. He lifted up the big gold doubloons in the first row, and then,
to his blank horror and amazement, came to--not more gold, not more
silver, but--but--but--ay, incredible as it seemed, appalling,
horrifying--a wooden bottom!
Had John Cann, in his care and anxiety, put a layer of solid oak between
each layer of gold and silver? Hardly that, the oak was too thick. In a
moment Cecil Mitford had taken out all the coins of the first tier, and
laid bare the oaken bottom. A few blows of the pick loosened the earth
around, and then, oh horror, oh ghastly disappointment, oh unspeakable
heart-sickening revelation, the whole box came out entire. It was only
two inches deep altogether, including the cover--it was, in fact, a mere
shallow tray or saucer, something like the sort of thin wooden boxes in
which sets of dessert-knives or fish-knives are usually sold for wedding
presents!
For the space of three seconds Cecil Mitford could not believe his eyes,
and then, with a sudden flash of awful vividness, the whole terrible
truth flashed at once across his staggering brain. He had found John
Cann's treasure indeed--the John Cann's treasure of base actual reality;
but the John Cann's treasure of his fervid imagination, the John Cann's
treasure he had dreamt of from his boyhood upward, the John Cann's
treasure he had risked all to find and to win, did not exist, could not
exist, and never had existed at all anywhere! It was all a horrible,
incredible, unthinkable delusion! The hideous fictions he had told would
every one be now discovered; Ethel would be ruined; Aunt Emily would be
ruined; and they would both know him, not only for a fool, a dreamer,
and a visionary, but also for a gambler, a thief, and a liar.
In his black despair he jumped down into the shallow hole once more, and
began a second time to count slowly over the accursed dollars. The whole
miserable sum--the untold wealth of John Cann's treasure--would amount
altogether to about two hundred and twenty pounds of modern sterling
English money. Cecil Mitford tore his hair as he counted it in impotent
self punishment; two hundred and twenty pounds, and he had expected at
least as many thousands! He saw it all in a moment. His wild fancy had
mistaken the poor outcast hunted-down pirate for a sort of ideal
criminal millionaire; he had erected the ignorant, persecuted John Cann
of real life, who fled from the king's justice to a nest of chartered
outlaws in Jamaica, into a great successful naval commander, like the
Drake or Hawkins of actual history. The whole truth about the wretched
solitary old robber burst in upon him now with startling vividness; he
saw him hugging his paltry two hundred pounds to his miserly old bosom,
crossing the sea with it stealthily from Jamaica, burying it secretly in
a hole in the ground at Bovey, quarrelling about it with his peasant
relations in England, as the poor will often quarrel about mere trifles
of money, and dying at last with the secret of that wretched sum hidden
in the snuff-box that he clutched with fierce energy even in his
lifeless skeleton fingers. It was all clear, horribly, irretrievably,
unmistakably clear to him now; and the John Cann that he had once
followed through so many chances and changes had faded away at once into
absolute nothingness, now and for ever!
If Cecil Mitford had known a little less about John Cann's life and
exploits he might still perhaps have buoyed himself up with the vain
hope that all the treasure was not yet unearthed--that there were more
boxes still buried in the ground, more doubloons still hidden further
down in the unexplored bosom of the little three-cornered field. But the
words of John Cann's own dying directions were too explicit and clear to
admit of any such gloss or false interpretation. "In a strong oaken
chest, bound round with iron, and buried at four feet of depth in the
south-western angle of the Home Croft, at Bovey," said the document,
plainly; there was no possibility of making two out of it in any way.
Indeed, in that single minute, Cecil Mitford's mind had undergone a
total revolution, and he saw the John Cann myth for the first time in
his life now in its true colours. The bubble had burst, the halo had
vanished, the phantom had faded away, and the miserable squalid miserly
reality stood before him with all its vulgar nakedness in their place.
The whole panorama of John Cann's life, as he knew it intimately in all
its details, passed before his mind's eye like a vivid picture, no
longer in the brilliant hues of boyish romance, but in the dingy sordid
tones of sober fact. He had given up all that was worth having in this
world for the sake of a poor gipsy pirate's penny-saving hoard.
A weaker man would have swallowed the disappointment or kept the
delusion still to his dying day. Cecil Mitford was made of stronger
mould. The ideal John Cann's treasure had taken possession of him, body
and soul; and now that John Cann's treasure had faded into utter
nonentity--a paltry two hundred pounds--the whole solid earth had failed
beneath his feet, and nothing was left before him but a mighty blank. A
mighty blank. Blank, blank, blank. Cecil Mitford sat there on the edge
of the pit, with his legs dangling over into the hollow where John
Cann's treasure had never been, gazing blankly out into a blank sky,
with staring blank eyeballs that looked straight ahead into infinite
space and saw utterly nothing.
How long he sat there no one knows; but late at night, when the people
at the Red Lion began to miss their guest, and turned out in a body to
hunt for him in the corner field, they found him sitting still on the
edge of the pit he had dug for the grave of his own hopes, and gazing
still with listless eyes into blank vacancy. A box of loose coin lay
idly scattered on the ground beside him. The poor gentleman had been
struck crazy, they whispered to one another; and so indeed he had: not
raving mad with acute insanity, but blankly, hopelessly, and helplessly
imbecile. With the loss of John Cann's treasure the whole universe had
faded out for him into abject nihilism. They carried him home to the inn
between them on their arms, and put him to bed carefully in the old
bedroom, as one might put a new-born baby.
The Lord of the Manor, when he came to hear the whole pitiful story,
would have nothing to do with the wretched doubloons; the curse of blood
was upon them, he said, and worse than that; so the Treasury, which has
no sentiments and no conscience, came in at the end for what little
there was of John Cann's unholy treasure.