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Jewel Mysteries, from a Dealer's Note Book

by Max Pemberton · English · Gutenberg #39891 · 368,436 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Jewel Mysteries, from a Dealer's Note Book

Author: Max Pemberton


        
Release date: June 1, 2012 [eBook #39891]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JEWEL MYSTERIES, FROM A DEALER'S NOTE BOOK ***




Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Kerry Tani and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)









JEWEL MYSTERIES


[Illustration: "He had turned the pistol to his head and blown his
brains out."

    --_Page 27_]




    Jewel Mysteries

    From a Dealer's Note Book

    BY
    MAX PEMBERTON

    _Author of "The Garden of Swords,"
    "Kronstadt," "The Iron
    Pirate," etc., etc._




    R. F. FENNO & COMPANY
    _9 & 11 East Sixteenth Street, New York City: 1904_




CONTENTS.


                                            PAGE

    THE OPAL OF CARMALOVITCH                   9

    THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS            33

    THE COMEDY OF THE JEWELED LINKS           57

    TREASURE OF WHITE CREEK                   79

    THE ACCURSED GEMS                        109

    THE WATCH AND THE SCIMITAR               133

    THE SEVEN EMERALDS                       157

    THE PURSUIT OF THE TOPAZ                 187

    THE RIPENING RUBIES                      217

    MY LADY OF THE SAPPHIRES                 245




THE OPAL OF CARMALOVITCH.




THE OPAL OF CARMALOVITCH.


Dark was falling from a dull and humid sky, and the lamps were beginning
to struggle for brightness in Piccadilly, when the opal of Carmalovitch
was first put into my hand. The day had been a sorry one for business:
no light, no sun, no stay of the downpour of penetrating mist which had
been swept through the city by the driving south wind from the late dawn
to the mock of sunset. I had sat in my private office for six long
hours, and had not seen a customer. The umbrella-bearing throng which
trod the street before my window hurried quickly through the mud and the
slush, as people who had no leisure even to gaze upon precious stones
they could not buy. I was going home, in fact, as the one sensible
proceeding on such an afternoon, and had my hand upon the great safe to
shut it, when the mirror above my desk showed me the reflection of a
curious-looking man who had entered the outer shop, and stood already at
the counter.

At the first glance I judged that this man was no ordinary customer. His
dress was altogether singular. He had a black coat covering him from his
neck to his heels--a coat half-smothered in astrachan, and one which
could have been made by no English tailor. But his hands were ungloved,
and he wore a low hat, which might have been the hat of an office boy. I
could see from the little window of my private room, which gives my eye
command of the shop, that he had come on foot, and for lack of any
umbrella was pitiably wet. Yet there was fine bearing about him, and he
was clearly a man given to command, for my assistant mounted to my room
with his name at the first bidding.

"Does he say what he wants?" I asked, reading the large card upon which
were the words--

    "STENILOFF CARMALOVITCH";

but the man replied,--

"Only that he must see you immediately. I don't like the look of him at
all."

"Is Abel in the shop?"

"He's at the door."

"Very well; let him come to the foot of my stairs, and if I ring as
usual, both of you come up."

In this profession of jewel-selling--for every calling is a profession
nowadays--we are so constantly cheek by jowl with swindlers that the
coming of one more or less is of little moment in a day's work. At my
own place of business the material and personal precautions are so
organized that the cleverest scoundrel living would be troubled to get
free of the shop with sixpenny-worth of booty on him. I have two armed
men ready at the ring of my bell--Abel is one of them--and a private
wire to the nearest police-station. From an alcove well hidden on the
right hand of the lower room, a man watches by day the large cases where
the smaller gems are shown, and by night a couple of special guards have
charge of the safe and the premises. I touch a bell twice in my room,
and my own detective follows any visitor who gives birth in my mind to
the slightest doubt. I ring three times, and any obvious impostor is
held prisoner until the police come. These things are done by most
jewelers in the West End; there is nothing in them either unusual or
fearful. There are so many professed swindlers--so many would-be
snappers up of unconsidered and considerable trifles--that precautions
such as I have named are the least that common sense and common prudence
will allow one to take. And they have saved me from loss, as they have
saved others again and again.

I had scarce given my instructions to Michel, my assistant--a rare
reader of intention, and a fine judge of faces--when the shabby-genteel
man entered. Michel placed a chair for him on the opposite side of my
desk, and then left the room. There was no more greeting between the
newcomer and myself than a mutual nodding of heads; and he on his part
fell at once upon his business. He took a large paper parcel from the
inside pocket of his coat and began to unpack it; but there was so much
paper, both brown and tissue, that I had some moments of leisure in
which to examine him more closely before we got to talk. I set him down
in my mind as a man hovering on the boundary line of the middle age, a
man with infinite distinction marked in a somewhat worn face, and with
some of the oldest clothes under the shielding long coat that I have
ever looked upon. These I saw when he unbuttoned the enveloping cape to
get at his parcel in the inner pocket; and while he undid it, I could
observe that his fingers were thin as the talons of a bird, and that he
trembled all over with the mere effort of unloosing the string.

The operation lasted some minutes. He spoke no word during that time,
but when he had reduced the coil of brown paper to a tiny square of
wash-leather, I asked him,--

"Have you something to show me?"

He looked up at me with a pair of intensely, ridiculously blue eyes, and
shrugged his shoulders.

"Should I undo all these papers if I had not?" he responded; and I saw
at once that he was a man who, from a verbal point of view, stood
objectionably upon the defensive.

"What sort of a stone is it?" I went on in a somewhat uninterested tone
of voice; "not a ruby, I hope. I have just bought a parcel of rubies."

By way of answer he opened the little wash-leather bag, and taking up my
jewel-tongs, which lay at his hand, he held up an opal of such
prodigious size and quality that I restrained myself with difficulty
from crying out at the sight of it. It was a Cerwenitza stone, I saw at
a glance, almost a perfect circle in shape, and at least four inches in
diameter. There was a touch of the oxide in its color which gave it the
faintest suspicion of black in the shade of its lights; but for wealth
of hue and dazzling richness in its general quality, it surpassed any
stone I have ever known, even that in the imperial cabinet at Vienna.
So brilliant was it, so fascinating in the ever-changing play of its
amazing variegations, so perfect in every characteristic of the finest
Hungarian gem, that for some moments I let the man hold it out to me,
and said no word. There was running through my mind the question which
must have arisen under such circumstances: Where had he got it from? He
had stolen it, I concluded at the first thought; and again, at the
second, How else could a man who wore rags under an astrachan coat have
come to the possession of a gem upon which the most commercial instinct
would have hesitated to set a price?

I had fully determined that I was face to face with a swindler, when his
exclamation reminded me that he expected me to speak.

"Well," he said, "are you frightened to look at it?"

He had been holding out the tongs, in which he gripped the stone
lightly, for some seconds, and I had not yet ventured to touch them,
sitting, I do not doubt, with surprise written all over my face. But
when he spoke, I took the opal from him, and turned my strong glass upon
it.

"You seem to have brought me a fine thing," I said as carelessly as I
could. "Is it a stone with a history?"

"It has no history--at least, none that I should care to write."

"And yet," I continued, "there cannot be three larger opals in Europe;
do you know the stone at Vienna?"

"Perfectly; but it has not the black of this, and is coarser. This is an
older stone, so far as the birth of its discovery goes, by a hundred
years."

I thought that he was glib with his tale for a man who had such a poor
one; and certainly he looked me in the face with amazing readiness. He
had not the eyes of a rogue, and his manner was not that of one
criminally restless.

"If you will allow me," I said, when I had looked at the stone for a few
moments, "I will examine this under the brighter light there; perhaps
you would like to amuse yourself with this parcel of rubies."

This was a favorite little trick of mine. I had two or three parcels of
stones to show to any man who came to me laboring under a sorry and
palpably poor story; and one of these I then took from my desk and
spread upon the table under the eyes of the Russian. The stones were all
imitation, and worth no more than sixpence apiece. If he were a judge,
he would discover the cheat at the first sight of them; if he were a
swindler, he would endeavor to steal them. In either case the test was
useful. And I took care to turn my back upon him while I examined the
opal, to give him every opportunity of filling his pockets should he
choose.

When I had the jewel under the powerful light of an unshaded
incandescent lamp I could see that it merited all the appreciation I had
bestowed upon it at first sight. It was flawless, wanting the demerit of
a single mark which could be pointed to in depreciation of its price.
For play of color and radiating generosity of hues, I have already said
that no man has seen its equal. I put it in the scales, called Michel
to establish my own opinions, tried it by every test that can be applied
to a gem so fragile and so readily harmed, and came to the only
conclusion possible--that it was a stone which would make a sensation in
any market, and call bids from all the courts in Europe. It remained for
me to learn the history of it, and with that I went back to my desk and
resumed the conversation, first glancing at the sham parcel of rubies,
to find that the man had not even looked at them.

"It is a remarkable opal," I said; "the finest ever put before me. You
have come here to sell it, I presume?"

"Exactly. I want five thousand pounds for it."

"And if I make you a bid you are prepared to furnish me with the history
both of it and of yourself?"

He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. "If you think that I have
stolen it we had better close the discussion at once. I am not prepared
to tell my history to every tradesman I deal with."

"In that case," said I, "you have wasted your time. I buy no jewels that
I do not know all about."

His superciliousness was almost impertinent. It would have been quite so
if it had not been dominated by an absurd and almost grotesque pride,
which accounted for his temper. I was sure then that he was either an
honest man or the best actor I had ever seen.

"Think the matter over," I added in a less indifferent tone; "I am
certain that you will then acquit me of unreasonableness. Call here
again in a day or two, and we will have a chat about it."

This softer speech availed me as little as the other. He made no sort of
answer to it, but packing his opal carefully again, he rose abruptly and
left the shop. As he went I touched my bell twice, and Abel followed him
quietly down Piccadilly, while I sent a line to Scotland Yard informing
the Commissioners of the presence of such a man as the Russian in
London, and of the Gargantuan jewel which he carried. Then I went home
through the fog and the humid night; but my way was lighted by a memory
of the magnificent gem I had seen, and the hunger for the opal was
already upon me.

The inquiry at Scotland Yard proved quite futile. The police telegraphed
to Paris, to Berlin, to St. Petersburg, to New York, but got no tidings
either of a robbery or of the man whom mere circumstances pointed at as
a pretender. This seemed to me the more amazing since I could not
conceive that a stone such as this was should not have made a sensation
in some place. Jewels above all material things do not hide their light
under bushels. Let there be a great find at Kimberley or in the Burmese
mines; let a fine emerald or a perfect turquoise be brought to Europe,
and every dealer in the country knows its weight, its color, and its
value before three days have passed. If this man, who hugged this small
fortune to him, and without it was a beggar, had been a worker at
Cerwenitza, he would have told me the fact plainly. But he spoke of the
opal being older even than the famous and commonly cited specimen at
Vienna. How came it that he alone had the history of such an ancient
gem? There was only one answer to such a question--the history of his
possession of it, at any rate, would not bear inquiry.

Such perplexity was not removed by Abel's account of his journey after
Carmalovitch. He had followed the man from Piccadilly to Oxford Circus;
thence, after a long wait in Regent's Park, where the Russian sat for at
least an hour on a seat near the Botanical Gardens entrance, to a small
house in Boscobel Place. This was evidently a lodging-house, offering
that fare of shabbiness and dirt which must perforce be attractive to
the needy. There was a light burning at the window of the pretentiously
poor drawing-room when the man arrived, and a girl, apparently not more
than twenty-five years of age, came down into the hall to greet him, the
pair afterwards showing at the window for a moment before the blinds
were drawn. An inquiry by my man for apartments in the house elicited
only a shrill cackle and a negative from a shuffling hag who answered
the knock. A tour of the little shops in the neighborhood provided the
further clue "that they paid for nothing." This suburban estimation of
personal worth was a confirmation of my conclusion drawn from the rags
beneath the astrachan coat. The Russian was a poor man; except for the
possession of the jewel he was near to being a beggar. And yet he had
not sought to borrow money of me, and he had put the price of L5,000
upon his property.

All these things did not leave my mind for the next week. I was in
daily communication with Scotland Yard, but absolutely to no purpose.
Their sharpest men handled the case, and confessed that they could make
nothing of it. We had the house in Boscobel Place watched, but, so far
as we could learn, Carmalovitch, as he called himself, never left it.
Meanwhile, I began to think that I had betrayed exceedingly poor
judgment in raising the question at all. As the days went by I suffered
that stone hunger which a student of opals alone can know. I began to
believe that I had lost by my folly one of the greatest possessions that
could come to a man in my business. I knew that it would be an act of
childishness to go to the house and re-open the negotiations, for I
could not bid for that which the first telegram from the Continent might
prove to be feloniously gotten, and the embarkation of such a sum as was
asked was a matter not for the spur of the moment, but for the closest
deliberation, to say nothing of financial preparation. Yet I would have
given fifty pounds if the owner of it had walked into my office again;
and I never heard a footstep in the outer shop during the week following
his visit but I looked up in the hope of seeing him.

A fortnight passed, and I thought that I had got to the beginning and
the end of the opal mystery, when one morning, the moment after I had
entered my office, Michel told me that a lady wished to see me. I had
scarce time to tell him that I could see no one for an hour when the
visitor pushed past him into the den, and sat herself down in the chair
before my writing-desk. As in all business, we appreciate, and listen
to, impertinence in the jewel trade; and when I observed the magnificent
impudence of the young lady, I asked Michel to leave us, and waited for
her to speak. She was a delicate-looking woman--an Italian, I thought,
from the dark hue of her skin and the lustrous beauty of her eyes--but
she was exceedingly shabbily dressed, and her hands were ungloved. She
was not a woman you would have marked in the stalls of a theater as the
fit subject for an advertising photographer; but there was great
sweetness in her face, and those signs of bodily weakness and want of
strength which so often enhance a woman's beauty. When she spoke,
although she had little English, her voice was well modulated and
remarkably pleasing.

"You are Monsieur Bernard Sutton?" she asked, putting one hand upon my
table, and the other between the buttons of her bodice.

I bowed in answer to her.

"You have met my husband--I am Madame Carmalovitch--he was here, it is
fifteen days, to sell you an opal. I have brought it again to you now,
for I am sure you wish to buy it."

"You will pardon me," I said, "but I am waiting for the history of the
jewel which your husband promised me. I rather expected that he would
have sent it."

"I know! oh, I know so well; and I have asked him many times," she
answered; "but you can believe me, he will tell of his past to no one,
not even to me. But he is honest and true; there is not such a man in
all your city--and he has suffered. You may buy this beautiful thing
now, and you will never regret it. I tell you so from all my heart."

"But surely, Madame," said I, "you must see that I cannot pay such a
price as your husband is asking for his property if he will not even
tell me who he is, or where he comes from."

"Yes, that is it--not even to me has he spoken of these things. I was
married to him six years now at Naples, and he has always had the opal
which he offers to you. We were rich then, but we have known suffering,
and this alone is left to us. You will buy it of my husband, for you in
all this London are the man to buy it. It will give you fame and money;
it must give you both, for we ask but four thousand pounds for it."

I started at this. Here was a drop of a thousand pounds upon the price
asked but fifteen days ago. What did it mean? I took up the gem, which
the woman had placed upon the table, and saw in a moment. The stone was
dimming. It had lost color since I had seen it; it had lost, too, I
judged, at least one-third of its value. I had heard the old woman's
tales of the capricious changefulness of this remarkable gem, but it was
the first time that I had ever witnessed for myself such an
unmistakeable depreciation. The woman read the surprise in my eyes, and
answered my thoughts, herself thoughtful, and her dark eyes touched with
tears.

"You see what I see," she said. "The jewel that you have in your hand is
the index to my husband's life. He has told me so often. When he is
well, it is well; when hope has come to him, the lights which shine
there are as the light of his hope. When he is ill, the opal fades; when
he dies, it will die too. That is what I believe and he believes; it is
what his father told him when he gave him the treasure, nearly all that
was left of a great fortune."

This tale astounded me; it betrayed absurd superstition, but it was the
first ray of coherent explanation which had been thrown upon the case. I
took up the thread with avidity and pursued it.

"Your husband's father was a rich man?" I asked. "Is he dead?"

She looked up with a start, then dropped her eyes quickly, and mumbled
something. Her hesitation was so marked that I put her whole story from
me as a clever fabrication, and returned again to the theory of robbery.

"Madame," I said, "unless your husband can add to that which you tell
me, I shall be unable to purchase your jewel."

"Oh, for the love of God don't say that!" she cried; "we are so poor, we
have hardly eaten for days! Come and see Monsieur Carmalovitch and he
shall tell you all; I implore you, and you will never regret this
kindness! My husband is a good friend; he will reward your friendship.
You will not refuse me this?"

It is hard to deny a pretty woman; it is harder still when she pleads
with tears in her voice. I told her that I would go and see her husband
on the following evening at nine o'clock, and counseled her to persuade
him in the between time to be frank with me, since frankness alone could
avail him. She accepted my advice with gratitude, and left as she had
come, her pretty face made handsomer by its look of gloom and
pensiveness. Then I fell to thinking upon the wisdom, or want of wisdom,
in the promise I had given. Stories of men drugged, or robbed, or
murdered by jewel thieves crowded upon my mind, but always with the
recollection that I should carry nothing to Boscobel Place. A man who
had no more upon him than a well-worn suit of clothes and a Swiss lever
watch in a silver case, such as I carry invariably, would scarce be
quarry for the most venturesome shop-hawk that the history of knavery
has made known to us. I could risk nothing by going to the house, I was
sure; but I might get the opal, and for that I longed still with a fever
for possession which could only be accounted for by the beauty of the
gem.

Being come to this determination, I left my own house in a hansom-cab on
the following evening at half-past eight o'clock, taking Abel with me,
more after my usual custom than from any prophetic alarm. I had money
upon me sufficient only for the payment of the cab; and I took the
extreme precaution of putting aside the diamond ring that I had been
wearing during the day. As I live in Bayswater, it was but a short drive
across Paddington Green and down the Marylebone Road to Boscobel Place;
and when we reached the house we found it lighted up on the drawing-room
floor as Abel had seen it at his first going there. But the hall was
quite in darkness, and I had to ring twice before the shrill-voiced dame
I had heard of answered to my knock. She carried a frowsy candle in her
hand; and was so uncanny-looking that I motioned to Abel to keep a watch
from the outside upon the house before I went upstairs to that which was
a typical lodging-house room. There was a "tapestry" sofa against one
wall; half a dozen chairs in evident decline stood in hilarious
attitudes; some seaweed, protected for no obvious reason by shades of
glass, decorated the mantelpiece, and a sampler displayed the obviously
aggravating advice to a tenant of such a place, "Waste not, want not."
But the rickety writing-table was strewn with papers, and there was half
a cigar lying upon the edge of it, and a cup of coffee there had grown
cold in the dish.

The aspect of the place amazed me. I began to regret that I had set out
upon any such enterprise, but had no time to draw back before the
Russian entered. He wore an out-at-elbow velvet coat, and the rest of
his dress was shabby enough to suit his surroundings. I noticed,
however, that he offered me a seat with a gesture that was superb, and
that his manner was less agitated than it had been at our first meeting.

"I am glad to see you," he said. "You have come to buy my opal?"

"Under certain conditions, yes."

"That is very good of you; but I am offering you a great bargain. My
price for the stone now is L3,000, one thousand less than my wife
offered it at yesterday."

"It has lost more of its color, then?"

"Decidedly; or I should not have lowered my claim--but see for
yourself."

He took the stone from the wash-leather bag, and laid it upon the
writing-table. I started with amazement and sorrow at the sight of it.
The glorious lights I had admired not twenty days ago were half gone; a
dull, salty-red tinge was creeping over the superb green and the
scintillating black which had made me covet the jewel with such longing.
Yet it remained, even in its comparative poverty, the most remarkable
gem I have ever put hand upon.

"The stone is certainly going off," I said in answer to him. "What
guarantee have I that it will not be worthless in a month's time?"

"You have my word. It is a tradition of our family that he who owns that
heirloom when it begins to fade must sell it or die--and sell it at its
worth. If I continue to possess it, the tradition must prove itself, for
I shall die of sheer starvation."

"And if another has it?"

"It will regain its lights, I have no doubt of it, for it has gone like
this before when a death has happened amongst us. If you are content to
take my word, I will return to you in six months' time and make good any
loss you have suffered by it. But I should want some money now,
to-night, before an hour--could you let me have it?"

"If I bought your stone, you could have the money for it; my man, who is
outside, would fetch my check-book."

At the word "man," he went to the window, and saw Abel standing beneath
the gas-lamp. He looked fixedly at the fellow for a moment, and then
drew down the blinds in a deliberate way which I did not like at all.

"That servant of yours has been set to watch this house for ten days,"
he said. "Was that by your order?"

I was so completely taken aback by his discovery that I sat for a moment
dumfounded, and gave him no answer. He, however, seemed trembling with
passion.

"Was it by your orders?" he asked again, standing over me and almost
hissing out his words.

"It was," I answered after a pause; "but, you see, circumstances were
suspicious."

"Suspicious! Then you _did_ believe me to be a rogue. I have shot men
for less."

I attempted to explain, but he would not hear me. He had lost command of
himself, stalking up and down the room with great strides until the
temper tautened his veins, and his lean hands seemed nothing but wire
and bones. At last, he took a revolver from the drawer in his table, and
deliberately put cartridges into it. I stood up at the sight of it and
made a step towards the window; but he pointed the pistol straight at
me, crying,--

"Sit down, if you wish to live another minute--and say, do you still
believe me to be a swindler?"

The situation was so dangerous, for the man was obviously but half sane,
that I do not know what I said in answer to him; yet he pursued my
words fiercely, scarce hearing my reply before he continued,--

"You have had my house watched, and, as I know now, you have branded my
name before the police as that of a criminal; you shall make atonement
here on the spot by buying that opal, or you do not leave the room
alive!"

It was a desperate trial, and I sat for some minutes as a man on the
borderland of death. Had I been sensible then and fenced with him in his
words I should now possess the opal; but I let out the whole of my
thoughts--and the jewel went with them.

"I cannot buy your stone," I said, "until I have your history and your
father's----" But I said no more, for at the mention of his father he
cried out like a wounded beast, and fired the revolver straight at my
head. The shot skinned my forehead and the powder behind it blackened my
face; but I had no other injury, and I sprang upon him.

For some moments the struggle was appalling. I had him gripped about the
waist with my left arm, my right clutching the hand wherein he held the
pistol. He, in turn, put his left hand upon my throat and threw his
right leg round mine with a sinewy strength that amazed me. Thus we
were, rocking like two trees blown in a gale, now swaying towards the
window, now to the door, now crashing against the table, or hurling the
papers and the ink and the ornaments in a confused heap, as, fighting
the ground foot by foot, we battled for the mastery. But I could not cry
out, for his grip about my neck was the grip of a maniac; and as it
tightened and tightened, the light grew dim before my eyes and I felt
that I was choking. This he knew, and with overpowering fury pressed his
fingers upon my throat until he cut me with his nails as with knives.
Then, at last, I reeled from the agony of it; and we fell with
tremendous force under the window, he uppermost.

Of that lifelong minute that followed, I remember but little. I know
only that he knelt upon my chest, still gripping my throat with his left
hand, and began to reach out for his revolver, which had dropped beneath
the table in our struggle. I had just seen him reach it with his
finger-tips, and so draw it inch by inch towards him, when a fearful
scream rang out in the room, and his hand was stayed. The scream was
from the woman who had come to Piccadilly the day before, and it was
followed by a terrible paroxysm of weeping, and then by a heavy fall, as
the terrified girl fainted. He let me go at this, and stood straight up;
but at the first step towards his wife he put his foot upon the great
opal, which we had thrown to the ground in our encounter, and he crushed
it into a thousand fragments.

When he saw what he had done, one cry, and one alone, escaped from him;
but before I could raise a hand to stay him, he had turned the pistol to
his head, and had blown his brains out.

       *       *       *       *       *

The story of the opal of Carmalovitch is almost told. A long inquiry
after the man's death added these facts to the few I had already
gleaned. He was the son of a banker in Buda-Pesth, a noble Russian, who
had emigrated to Hungary and taken his wealth with him to embark it in
his business. He himself had been educated partly in England, partly in
France; but at the moment when he should have entered the great firm in
Buda-Pesth, there came the Argentine crash, and his father was one of
those who succumbed. But he did more than succumb, he helped himself to
the money of his partners, and being discovered, was sentenced as a
common felon, and is at this moment in a Hungarian prison.

Steniloff, the son, was left to clear up the estate, and got from it,
when all was settled, a few thousand pounds, by the generosity of the
father's partners. Beyond these he had the opal, which the family had
possessed for three hundred years, buying it originally in Vienna. This
possession, however, had been, for the sake of some absurd tradition,
always kept a profound secret, and when the great crash came, the man
whose death I had witnessed took it as his fortune. For some years he
had lived freely at Rome, at Nice, at Naples, where he married; but his
money being almost spent, he brought his wife to England, and there
attempted to sell the jewel. As he would tell nothing of his history,
lest his father's name should suffer, he found no buyer, and dragged on
from month to month, going deeper in the byways of poverty until he came
to me. The rest I have told you.

Of the opal which I saw so wofully crushed in the lodging-house in
Boscobel Place, but one large fragment remained. I have had that set in
a ring, and have sold it to-day for fifty pounds. The money will go to
Madame Carmalovitch, who has returned to her parents in Naples. She has
suffered much.




THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS.




THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS.


I can remember perfectly well the day upon which I received the order
from my eccentric old friend, Francis Brewer, to make him a necklace of
green diamonds. It was the 2d of May in the year 1890, exactly three
days after his marriage with the fascinating little singer, Eugenie
Clarville, who had set Paris aflame with the piquancy of her acting and
her delightful command of a fifth-rate voice some six months after
Brewer had left London to take up the management of a great banking
enterprise in the French capital. He was then well into the forties; but
he had skipped through life with scarce a jostle against the venial
sins, and was as ignorant as a babe where that mortal septette of vices
which the clergy anathematize on the first Wednesday in Lent was
concerned. I have never known a more childish man, or one who held your
affection so readily with simplicity. He was large-hearted, trusting,
boyish, by no means unintellectual, and in no sense a fool. Indeed, his
commercial knowledge was highly valuable; and his energy in working up a
business was a reproach to those who, like myself, love to sit in
arm-chairs and watch the ebb of life from a plate-glass window.

When he was married he wrote to me, and I laid his letter upon my table
with a whistle. Not that he was in any way suited for the celibate
state, for his instinct was wholly cast in the marrying mould. Had I
been called upon to paint him, I should have sat him in an arm-chair by
the side of a roaring fire, with a glass of punch to toast a buxom
goodwife, and a pipe as long as the stick of my umbrella to make rings
of smoke for a new generation at his knee. Such a man should, said
common sense, have been yoked to an English dame, to one used to the
odor of the lemon, and motherly by instinct and by training. I could not
imagine him married to a lady from the vaudeville; the contrast between
his iron-headed directness and the gauze and tinsel of opera bouffe
seemed grotesque almost to incredulity. Yet there was the letter, and
there were his absurd ravings about a woman he had known distantly for
six months, and intimately for three days.

"I have married," he said in this memorable communication, "the dearest
little soul that God ever brought into the world--fresh as the breeze,
bright as the sky, eyes like the night, and temper like an angel. You
must come and see her, old boy, the moment we set foot in our house at
Villemomble. I shan't let you lose an hour; you must learn for yourself
what a magnificent Benedick I make. Why, the days go like flashes of the
sun--and there never was a happier man in or out of this jolly city.
Oh, you slow-goers in London, you poor lame cab-horses, what do you know
of life or of woman, or even of the sky above you? Come to Paris, old
man; come, I say, and we'll put you through your paces, and you shall
meet her, the very best little wife that ever fell to an old dray-horse
in this fair of high-steppers."

There was a good deal more of this sort of thing; but the kernel of the
letter was in a postscriptum, as was the essence of most of his
communications. He told me there that he desired to make some
substantial present to the girl he had just married; and he enclosed a
rough sketch of a necklace which he thought would be a pretty thing if
rare stones were used to decorate it. I fell in with his whim at once;
and as it chanced that I had just received from the Jaegersfontein mine a
parcel of twenty very fine greenish diamonds, I determined to use them
in the business. I may say that these stones were of a delicious pale
green tint, almost the color of the great jewel in the vaults at
Dresden, and that their fire was amazing. I have known a gem of the hue
to be worth nearly a hundred pounds a carat; and as the lot I had
averaged two carats apiece, their worth was very considerable. I had not
learnt what were Brewer's instructions in the matter of expense; but I
wrote to him by the next post congratulating him on his marriage and
informing him that I would set the green diamonds in a necklace, and
sell them for two thousand pounds. He accepted the offer by a cablegram,
and on the following day sent a long letter of instruction, the pith of
which was the order to engrave on the inner side of the pendant the
words, _major lex amor est nobis_. I laughed at his Latin, and the
amatory exuberance which it betrayed; but fell upon the work, and
finished it in the course of three weeks, during which time I had many
and irritating requests from him for constant and detailed accounts of
its progress.

When the trinket reached him, his satisfaction was quite childish. He
wrote of his delight, and of "Eugy's," and spoilt three sheets of good
note-paper telling me of her appearance at the English ball early in
June; and of the sensation such an extraordinary bauble caused. Then I
heard from him no more until August, when I read in an evening paper
that he had been returning from Veulettes after a short holiday, and had
been in a great train smash near Rouen. A later telegram gave a list of
the dead, in which was the name of his wife; and three days after I
received from him the most pitiful letter that it has ever been my
misfortune to read. The whole wounded soul of the man seemed laid bare
upon the paper; the simplicity of his words was so touching and so
expressive of his agony, that I could scarce trust myself to go through
the long pages over which he let his sorrow flow. Yet one paragraph
remained long in my mind, for it was one that recalled the necklace of
green diamonds, and it was so astonishing that I did not doubt that
Brewer was, for the time at any rate, on the high-road to madness. "I
have put them round her dear neck," he said, "and they shall cling
always to her in her long sleep."

At the end of the month he wrote again, mentioning that, despite my
sharp remonstrance, he had seen the jewels buried with her, and that his
heart was broken. He said that he thought of coming to stay with me, and
of retiring from business; but went on in the next paragraph to confess
his inability to leave the city in which she was buried, and the places
which kept her memory so sharply before him. I wrote an answer, advising
him to plunge into work as an antidote to grief, and had posted it but
an hour when the mystery of the green diamond necklace began.

The circumstances were these. My clerk had left with the letters, and I
was sitting at my table examining a few unusually large cat's-eyes which
had been offered to me that morning. I heard the shop door open, and saw
from the small window near my desk a man in a fur coat, who seemed in
something of a hurry when he went to the counter. Three minutes
afterwards, Michel came up to me breathlessly and stammering. He carried
in his hand the identical necklace which I had made for my friend
Brewer, and which he had buried with his wife, as his letter said, not a
month before. My amazement at the sight of it was so great that for many
minutes I sat clasping and unclasping the snap of the trinket, and
reading again that strange inscription, _major lex amor est nobis_,
which had caused me so much amusement when I had first ordered it to be
cut. Then I asked Michel,--

"Who brought this?"

"A man in the shop below--the agent of Green and Sons, who have been
offered it by a customer at Dieppe."

"Have they put a price upon it?"

"They ask one thousand five hundred pounds for it."

"Oh, five hundred less than we sold it for; that is curious. Ask the man
if he will leave it on approval for a week."

"I have put the question already. His people are quite willing."

"Then write out a receipt."

He went away to do so, still fumbling and amazed. The thing was so
astounding to one who knew the whole of the circumstances, as I did,
that I told him nothing more, but examined the necklace minutely at
least half a dozen times. Was it possible that there could be two sets
of matching green diamonds, two infatuated lovers who had chosen the
same pattern of ornament, the same strange inscription, and the same
tint of stones? Such a thing was out of the question. Either Brewer had
made a mistake when he said that the necklace had been buried with his
wife--a theory which presupposed his return to his normal common
sense--or some scoundrel had stolen it from her coffin. I determined to
wire to him at once, and had written out a message when the second
mystery in the history of the trinket began to unfold itself. It came to
me in the form of a cablegram from Brewer himself, who asked me to go to
him at Paris without delay, as something which troubled him beyond
description had happened since he wrote to me.

I need not say that at the time when I received this telegram I had no
idea that a second mystery had engendered it. I believed that Brewer had
discovered the loss of the necklace, and had sent for me to trace the
thieves. This task I entered upon very willingly; and when I had
instructed Michel to ask Green & Co.--with whom we did a large
business--to give me as a special and private favor the real name of the
seller of the necklace, I took the eight o'clock train from Victoria;
and was in Paris at dawn on the following morning. Early as it was,
Brewer waited for me at the Gare du Nord, and greeted me with a welcome
which was almost hysterical in its effusiveness. This I could not
return, for the shock of the sight of him was enough to make any man
voiceless. He had aged in look twenty years in as many months. His
clothes hung in folds upon a figure that had once been the figure of a
robust and finely built man; his face was wan and colorless; there were
hollows above his temples, and furrows as of great age in the cheeks,
which erstwhile shone with all the healthy coloring that physical vigor
can give. His aspect, indeed, was pitiable; but I made a great effort to
convince him that I had not noticed it, and said cheerily,--

"Well, and how is my old friend?"

"I am a widower," he answered; and there was more pathos in the simple
remark than in any lament I ever heard from him. It was quite evident
that his one grief still reigned in his thoughts; and I made no other
attempt to conquer it.

"You have important news, or you would not have summoned me from
London," I said, as we left the station in a fiacre. "Won't you give me
an idea of it now?"

"When we reach my place I will tell you everything and show you
everything. It's very kind of you to come, very kind indeed; but I'd
sooner speak of such things at my own house."

"You are still at Villemomble?"

"Yes; but I have an apartment by the Rue de Morny, and am staying there
now; the old home is not the same. She is dead, you know."

I thought this remark very strange, and his manner of giving it no less
curious. He nodded his head gravely, and continued to nod it, repeating
the words and holding my hand like some great schoolboy who feared to be
alone. He was scarcely better when we arrived at his lodging, and he
took me to a luxurious apartment which was well worthy of his consummate
taste; but the moment he had shut the outer door his manner changed,
becoming quick, interested, and distinctly nervous.

"Bernard," he said, "I brought you to Paris because the strangest thing
possible has happened. You remember the necklace of green diamonds I
gave my poor wife, and buried with her?"

"Am I likely to forget that folly?" I asked.

"Well," he continued, "it was stolen from her grave in the little
cemetery near Raincy----"

"I know that," said I.

"You know it!" he cried, looking up aghast. "How could you know it?"

"Because it was offered to me yesterday."

"Good God!" he exclaimed, "offered to you yesterday! But it could not
have been, for my servant bought it in a shabby jeweler's near the Rue
St. Lazarre! Look for yourself, and say what do you call that?"

He had unlocked a small safe as he spoke, and he threw a jewel case upon
the table. I opened it quickly, and it was then my turn to call out as
he had done a moment before. The case contained a second necklace of
green diamonds exactly resembling the one I had made, and had then in my
pocket; and it bore even the memorable inscription--_major lex amor est
nobis_.

When I made this discovery there seemed something so uncanny and
terrible about it that the beads of perspiration stood on my forehead,
and my hand shook until I nearly dropped the case.

"Frank," I said, "there's deeper work here than you think; this is the
necklace which you believe you buried with your wife; well, what is this
one, then, that I have in my pocket?"

I opened the second case and laid the jewels side by side. You could not
have told one bauble from the other unless you had possessed such an eye
as mine, which will fidget over a sham diamond when it is yet a yard
away. He had no doubt that they were identical; and when he saw them
together, he began to cry like a frightened woman.

"What does it mean?" he asked. "Have they robbed my wife's grave? My
God!--two necklaces alike down to the very engraving. Who has done it?
Who could do such a thing with a woman who never harmed a living soul?
Bernard, if I spend every shilling I possess, I will get to the bottom
of this thing! Oh, my wife, my wife----"

His distress would have moved an adamantine heart, and was not a thing
to cavil at. The mystery, which had completely unnerved him, had
fascinated me so strangely that I determined not to leave Paris until
the last line of its solution was written. The robbery of the grave I
could quite understand, but that there should be two necklaces, one of
them with real stones and the other with imitation, was a fact before
which my imagination reeled. As for him, he continued to sit in his
arm-chair, and to fret like a child; and there I left him while I went
to consult the first detective I could run against.

The difficulties in getting at the police of Paris are proverbial. The
officials there hold it such an impertinence for a mere civilian to
inform them of anything at all, that the unfortunate pursuer of the
criminal comes at last to believe himself guilty of some crime. I put up
with some hours, badgering at the nearest bureau, and then having no
French but that which is fit for publication, I returned to the Rue de
Morny, getting on the way some glimmer of a plan into my head. I found
Brewer in the same wandering state as I had left him; and although he
listened when I spoke, I felt sure that his mind was in that infantile
condition which can neither beget a plan nor realize one. For himself,
he had a single idea; and upon that he harped _usque ad nauseam_.

"I must send for Jules," he kept muttering; "Jules knew her well; he
was one of her oldest friends; he would help me in a case like this, I
feel sure. He always told her that green diamonds were unlucky; I was
insane to touch the things, positively insane. Jules will come at once,
and I will tell him everything, and he will explain things we do not
understand. Perhaps you will send a letter to him now; Robert is in the
kitchen and he will take it."

"I will send a note with pleasure if you think this man can help us; but
who is he, and why have I not heard of him before?"

"You must have heard of him," he answered testily; "he was always with
us when she lived--always."

"Do you see him often now?"

"Yes, often; he was here a week ago; that is his photograph on the
cabinet there."

The picture was that of a finely built but very typical Frenchman, a man
with a pointed, well-brushed beard, and a neatly curled mustache. The
head was not striking, being cramped above the eyes and bulging behind
the ears; but the smile was very pleasant, and the general effect one of
geniality. I examined the photograph, and then asked casually:

"What is this M. Jules? you don't tell me the rest of his name."

"Jules Galimard. I must have mentioned him to you. He is the editor, or
something, of _Paris et Londres_. We will write for him now, and he will
come over at once."

I sent the letter to please him, asking the man to come across on
important business, and then told him of my plan.

"The first thing to do," said I, "is to go to Raincy, and to ascertain
if the grave of your wife has been tampered with--and when. If you will
stay here and nurse yourself, I will do that at once?"

He seemed to think over the proposition for some minutes; and when he
answered me he was calmer.

"I will come with you," he said; "if--if any one is to look upon her
face again, it shall be me."

I could see that a terrible love gave him strength even for such an
ordeal as this. He began to be meaningly and even alarmingly calm; and
when we set out for Raincy he betrayed no emotion whatever. I will not
describe anything but the result of that never-to-be-forgotten mission,
although the scene haunts my memory to this day. Suffice it to say that
we found indisputable evidence of a raid upon the vault; and discovered
that the necklace had been torn from the body of the woman. When nothing
more was to be learnt, I took my friend back to Paris. There I found a
letter from the office of _Paris et Londres_ saying that Galimard was at
Dieppe but would be with us in the evening.

The mystery had now taken such hold of me that I could not rest. Brewer,
whose calm was rather dangerous than reassuring, seemed strangely
lethargic when he reached his rooms, and began to doze in his arm-chair.
This was the best thing he could have done; but I had no intention of
dozing myself; and when I had wormed from him the address of the shop
where the sham necklace had been purchased--it proved to be in the Rue
Stockholm--I took a fiacre at once and left him to his dreaming. The
place was a poor one, though the taste of a Frenchman was apparent in
the display and arrangement of the few jewels, bronzes, and pictures
which were the stock-in-trade of the dealer. He himself was a lifeless
creature, who listened to me with great patience, and appeared to be
completely astounded when I told him that I desired to have an interview
with the vendor of the necklace and the green diamonds.

"You could not have come at a more fortunate moment," said he, "the
stones were pretty, I confess and I fear to have sold them for much less
than they were worth; but my client will be here in half an hour for his
money, and if you come at that time you can meet him."

This was positive and altogether unlooked-for luck. I spent the thirty
minutes' interval in a neighboring _cafe_, and was back at his shop as
the clocks were striking seven. His customer was already there; a man
short and thick in figure, with a characteristic French low hat stuck on
the side of his head; and an old black cutaway coat which was
conspicuously English. He wore gaiters, too--a strange sight in Paris;
and carried under his arm a rattan cane which was quite ridiculously
short. When he turned his head I saw that his hair was cropped quite
close, and that he had a great scar down one side of his face, which
gave him a hideous appearance. Yet he could not have been twenty-five
years of age; and he was one of the gayest customers I have ever met.

"Oh," he said, looking me up and down critically, and with a perky cock
of his head, "you're the cove that wants to speak to me about the
sparklers, are you? and a damned well-dressed cove, too. I thought you
were one of these French hogs."

"I wanted to have a chat about such wonderful imitations," I said, "and
am English like yourself."

At this he raked up the gold which the old dealer had placed upon the
counter for him and went to the door rapidly, where he stood with his
hands upon his hips, and a wondrous knowing smile in his bit of an eye.

"You're a pretty nark, ain't you?" he said, "a fine slap-up Piccadilly
thick-un, s' help me blazes; and you ain't got no bracelets in your
pockets, and there ain't no more of you round the corner. Oh, hell! but
this is funny!"

"I am quite alone," I said quickly, seeing that the game was nearly
lost, "and if you tell me what I want to know, I will give you as much
money as you have in your hand there, and you have my word that you
shall go quite free."

"Your word!" he replied, looking more knowing than ever; "that's a
ripping fine Bank of Engraving to go on bail on, ain't it? Who are you,
and how's your family?"

"Let's stroll down the street, any way you like," said I, "and talk of
it. Choose your own course, and then you will be sure that I am alone."

He looked at me for a minute, walking slowly. Then suddenly he stopped
abruptly, and put his hand upon a pocket at his waist.

"Guv'ner," he said, "lay your fingers on that; do you feel it? it's a
Colt, ain't it? Well, if you want to get me in on the bow, I tell you
I'll go the whole hog, so you know."

"I assure you again that I have no intention of troubling you with
anything but a few questions; and I give you my word that anything you
tell me shall not be used against you afterwards. It's the other man we
want to catch--the man who took the green diamonds which were not
shams."

This thought was quite an inspiration. He considered it for a moment,
standing still under the lamp; but at last he stamped his foot and
whistled, saying:--

"You want him, do you? well, so do I; and if I could punch his head I'd
walk a mile to do it. You come to my room, guv'ner, and I'll take my
chance of the rest."

The way lay past the Chapel of the Trinity, and so through many narrow
streets to one which seemed the center of a particularly dark and
uninviting neighborhood. The man, who told me in quite an affable mood
that his name was Bob Williams, and that he hoped to run against me at
Auteuil, had a miserable apartment on the "third" of a house in this
dingy street; and there he took me, offering me half-a-tumbler of neat
whisky, which, he went on to explain, would "knock flies" out of me. For
himself, he sat upon a low bed and smoked a clay pipe, while I had an
arm-chair, lacking springs; and one of my cigars for obvious reasons.
When we were thus accommodated he opened the ball, being no longer
nervous or hesitating.

"Well, old chap,"--I was that already to him--"what can I tell you, and
what do you know?"

"I know this much," said I; "last month the grave of Madame Brewer at
Raincy was rifled. The man who did it stole a necklace of green
diamonds, real or sham, but the latter, I am thinking."

"As true as gospel--I was the man who took them, and they were sham, and
be damned to them!"

"Well, you're a pretty ruffian," I said. "But what I want to know is,
how did you come to find out that the stones were there, and who was the
man who got the real necklace I made for Madame Brewer only a few months
ago?"

"Oh, that's what you want to know, is it? Well, it's worth something,
that is; I don't know that he ain't a pard of mine; and about no other
necklace I ain't heard nothing. You know a blarmed sight too much, it
seems to me, guv'ner."

"That may be," said I, "but you can add to what I know, and it might be
worth fifty pounds to you."

"On the cushion?"

"I don't understand."

"Well, on that table then?"

"Scarcely. Twenty-five now, and twenty-five when I find that you have
told me the truth."

"Let's see the shiners."

I counted out the money on to the bed--five English bank notes, which he
eyed suspiciously.

"May, his mark," he said, thumbing the paper. "Well, as I'm shifting for
Newmarket to-morrow that's not much odds, if you're not shoving the
queer on me."

"Do you think they're bad?"

"I'll tell you in a moment; i broken, e broken, watermark right;
guv'ner, I'll put up with 'em. Now, what do you want to know?"

"I want to know how you came to learn that the stones were in Madame
Brewer's grave?"

"A straight question. Well, I was told by a pal."

"Is he here in Paris?"

"He ought to be; he told me his name was Mougat, but I found out that it
ain't. He is a chap that writes for the papers and runs that rag with
the rum pictures in it; what do you call it, Paris and something or
other?"

"_Paris et Londres_," I ventured at hazard.

"Ay, that's the thing; I don't read much of the lingo myself, but I gave
him tips at Longchamps last month, and we came back in a dog-cart
together. It was then that he put me on to the stones and planted me
with a false name."

"What did he say?"

"Said that some mad cove at Raincy had buried a necklace worth two
thousand pounds with his wife, and that the dullest chap out could get
into the vault and lift it. I'd had a bad day, and was almost stony. He
kept harping on the thing so, suggesting that a man could get to America
with five thousand in his pocket, and no one be a penny the wiser or a
penny the worse, that I went off that night and did it, and got a fine
heap for my pains. That's what I call a mouldy pal--a pal I wouldn't
make a doormat of."

"And you sold the booty to the old Frenchman in the Rue de Stockholm?"

"Exactly! he gave me a tenner for it, and I'm crossing to England
to-night. No place like the old shop, guv'ner, when the French hogs are
sniffing about you. I guess there's a few of them will want me in Parry
in a day or two; and that reminds me, you can do the noble if you like,
and send the other chips to the Elephant Hotel at Cambridge last post
to-morrow."

I told him that I would, and left. You may ask why I had any truck with
such a complete blackguard, but the answer is obvious: I had guessed
from the first that there was something in the mystery of the green
diamonds which would not bear exposure from Brewer's point of view, and
his tale confirmed the opinion. I had learnt from it two obvious facts:
one that Jules Galimard was anything but the friend of my friend; the
other, that this man knew perfectly well that a sham diamond necklace
was buried with Madame Brewer. It came to me then, as in a flash, that
he, and he alone, must have stolen, or at least have come into
possession of, the real necklace which I had made.

How to undeceive the good soul who had entrusted me with his case was
the remaining difficulty. He had loved this woman so; and yet instinct
suggested to me that she had been unworthy of his deep affection. That
she had been untrue to him I did not know. Galimard might have stolen
the jewels from her, and have replaced them with a false set; on the
other hand, she might have been a party to the fraud. What, then, should
I say, or how much should I dare with the great responsibility before me
of crushing a man whose heart was already broken?

With such thoughts I re-entered the apartment in the Rue de Morny. As I
did so, the servant put a telegram into my hand, and told me that M.
Jules Galimard was with his master. Fate, however, seemed to have given
the man another chance, for the cipher said,--

"Green and Co. in error, they should have sent the stones only; necklace
not for sale; client's name unknown, acting for Paris agents."

I walked into the room with this message in my pocket; and when Brewer
saw me he jumped up with delight, and introduced me to a well-dressed
Frenchman who had the red rosette in the buttonhole of his faultless
frock-coat, and who showed a row of admirable teeth when he smiled to
greet me.

"Here is Jules," said Brewer, "my friend I have spoken of, M. Jules
Galimard; he has come to help us, as I said he would; there is no one
whose advice I would sooner take in this horrible matter."

I bowed stiffly to the man, and seated myself on the opposite side of
the table to him. As they seemed to wait for me to speak, I took up the
question at once.

"Well," I said, speaking to Brewer; but turning round to look at his
friend, as I uttered the words, "I have found out who sold the sham
necklace to the man in the Rue de Stockholm; the rogue is a racing tout
named Bob Williams!"

Galimard turned right round in his chair at this, and put his elbows on
the table. Brewer said, "God bless me, what a scamp!"

"And," I continued, "the extraordinary part of the affair is that this
scoundrel was put to the business by a man he met at Longchamps last
month. It is obvious that this man stole the real necklace, and now
desired all traces of his handiwork to be removed from Madame Brewer's
coffin. I have his name," with which direct remark I looked hard at the
fellow, and he rose straight up from his chair and clutched at the back
of it with his hand. For a moment he seemed speechless; but when he
found his tongue, he threw away, with dreadful maladroitness, the
opening I had given him.

"Madame gave me the jewels," he blurted out, "that I will swear before
any court."

The situation was truly terrible, the man standing gripping his chair,
Brewer staring at both of us as at lunatics.

"What do you say? What's that?" he cried; and the assertion was
repeated.

"I am no thief!" cried the man, drawing himself up in a way that was
grotesquely proud, "she gave me the jewels, your wife, a week after you
gave them to her. I had a false set made so that you should not miss
them; here is her letter in which she acknowledges the receipt of
them."

The old man--for he was an old man then in speech, in look, and in the
fearful convulsions of his face--sprung from his chair, and struck the
rascal who told him the tale full in the mouth with his clenched fist.
The fellow rolled backwards, striking his head against the iron of the
fender; and lay insensible for many minutes. During that time I called a
cab, and when he was capable of being moved, sent him away in it. I saw
clearly that for Brewer's sake the matter must be hushed at once,
blocked out as a page in a life which had been false in its every line.
Nor did I pay any attention to Galimard's raving threat that his friends
should call upon me in half an hour; but went upstairs again to find the
best soul that ever lived sitting over the fire which had been lighted
for him, and chattering with the cackle of the insane. He had the
letter, which Galimard had thrown down, in his hands, and he read it
aloud with hysterical laughter and awful emphasis.

I tried to speak to him, to reason with him, to persuade him. He heard
nothing I said, but continued to chuckle and to chatter in a way that
made my blood run cold. Then suddenly he became very calm, sitting bolt
upright in his chair, with the letter clutched tightly in his right
hand; and I saw that tears were rolling down his cheeks.

An hour later the friends of M. Jules Galimard called. They entered the
room noisily, but I hushed them, for the man was dead!




THE COMEDY OF THE JEWELED LINKS.




THE COMEDY OF THE JEWELED LINKS.


I do not know if there be any drug in the Pharmacopoeia, or any clearly
defined medical treatment, which may ever hope to grapple effectively
with the strange disease of jewel-hunger, but if there be not, I have
much pleasure in recommending this most singular ill to the notice of a
rising generation of physicians. That it is a branch of that mystery of
mysteries, _la nevrose_, I have no manner of doubt, for I have seen it
in all its forms--a malignant growth which makes night of the lives it
plays upon; and flourishes to exceeding profit down in the very heart of
tragedies. For the matter of that, the flunkies, who study in the
kitchen--as the great master has told us--the characters of their
governing acquaintances in the boudoir above over a quart pot and the
_Police News_, get no little insight into the development of the social
disaster which treads often upon the heels of jewel-hunger, as they read
those extravagantly ornate reports of robbery and of mystery in which a
highly moral people revels. These are but gleaners in the field--to them
the inner life must remain hidden. No physician hoping to cope with the
affection should turn either to gossips or to slanderers for his
diagnosis. Let him get down into the caves of the trade, give his ear to
the truer narrative which the jewel dealer alone can write for him, and
he may hope for material and for success. And if he be wise, he will
study both the comedy and the tragedy which such an investigation will
bring before him, and will by this means alone set himself up as a
specialist.

It is to such a one that I would recommend perusal of the following case
which I record here as one of the comedies of my note-book--a story of
meanness, cupidity, and stupid cunning; I doubt if there be any
philosophy of medicine which could make pretense of solving it. There
were but two principal actors mentioned in the argument, and, indeed, it
might fairly be called a one-part play. The chief person concerned, Lord
Harningham, I had known for many years. He was a man of whom a
biographer wrote "that his long and unblemished career was a credit to
his country," and to whom a book on the Decalogue was inscribed as to
one _sans peur et sans reproche_. Yet they told you in the smoking-rooms
that he had starved his first wife, and left his only son as the partner
of a horse-coper in Melbourne, on the princely allowance of one hundred
and fifty pounds per annum. His wealth, said common report, was anything
from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand pounds per annum; and in his
second childhood, for he was a septuagenarian when this comedy was
played, he was suckled on the nourishing food of expiring leases and
forfeited improvements until he seemed to exude sovereigns from every
pore in his enormous body.

A meaner man never lived. All similes in converse were based upon his
exploits. "As mean as old Harningham" was a phrase you heard every day
at the "Bachelors." In the countless old stories they put upon him,
telling how, at a tenants' lunch in Bedfordshire, he had cried, "Here's
another quart of cider, and hang the expense!" how he had been seen in
Farringdon Market buying his own fish; how he haggled with cabmen
innumerable; how he had been stricken with a malignant fever on the day
he gave away a sovereign for a shilling--there was but the echo of the
general sentiment. The society prints were hilarious at the mere mention
of his name. I recollect well his anger when a wag said in one of them,
"It is rumored that Lord Harningham is shortly about to give something
away." He was in my office next day--a week rarely passed but what I saw
him--and he laid the journal upon my table, beating it flat with a
stick, and pointing at it with his ample finger as though his very touch
would wither the writer.

"Please to read that," he said with forced calm but considerable
emphasis, "and tell me if the scoundrel doesn't deserve to be hanged. He
dares to mention my name, d'ye see! To mention _me_, and speak about my
concerns. Ha! but I wish I had him under this stick!"

"Of course you don't know who wrote it," said I.

"How should I know?" he gabbled testily. "Do I go round to the taverns
swilling gin-and-water with such gutter birds? Do I hobnob with all the
half-starved limners in Fleet Street? Pshaw, you talk like a fool!"

I suffered his temper, for he was worth a couple of thousand a year to
me. Presently he became calmer, and the humor of the thing dawned upon
his dull mind.

"Ha!" he said, snuffing ferociously from the great diamond-studded box
he always carried, "I shouldn't wonder if that's Master Bertie
Watts--you know my nephew, eh? he owes you something, eh?--well, that's
like him, and his scoundrelly impudence--the vagabond!"

"Did not I read somewhere that he was going to be married?" I remarked
at hazard; but the notion tickled him immensely, and he rolled about in
his chair, shaking the snuff from his box over his fur coat, and even
upon my papers.

"Yes, you read it," he gasped at last, "a fine tale too. Why, what's he
got?--four hundred a year in Whitehall, and what he can draw out of
me--not much, Mr. Sutton--not much."

I had no doubt of that, but I kept my face while he went on to mutter
and to chortle; and I showed him a bracelet of rubies, which he desired
instantly to purchase. I had put a price of four hundred and twenty
pounds upon it, meaning to accept three hundred, so that we haggled for
two hours by the clock and had then done business. He took the rubies
away with him, while I caused the further sum to be set against him in
the ledger, where already there were so many unpaid items under the
name. He owed me eight thousand pounds at the least, but I could not
press the account, or should have lost him; and while I was often sore
troubled for lack of the money, I knew that I should get it at his
death, and so aided his jewel-hunger. This was prodigious. All the gems
that I sold--watches, necklaces, tiaras, brooches, and breastpins, were
conveyed at once to the great safe in his bedroom and there immured. No
one ever saw them but himself. His wives, both of whom were dead, had
scarce enjoyed the possession of a barmaid's jewelry. The passion of the
collector, of the hungerer after stones, alone consumed him. Of all his
meanness, this was the most contemptible--this hiding of fair treasure
from the light it lived upon--this gross hoarding of beautiful things
for one man's selfish enjoyment.

When he left Bond Street that day, crying at my door, "So I'm going to
give something away, am I?--but I ain't, Sutton, I ain't"--and walking
off as though he had found satisfaction in the negative thus conveyed to
me, I picked up the paper, and read again that young Bertie Watts was at
last engaged to the Hon. Eva Benley, and that the wedding was to be
celebrated in a month's time. Every one in town said that old Harningham
would do something for Watts when the time for the marriage actually
came; and it was gossip in the clubs that her people had given their
consent--for they were historically poor--only upon the sincere
assurance from their daughter's _fiance_ that his uncle really was very
fond of him, and would present him with a handsome check on the wedding
day. But here was the announcement of the wedding, and the old
curmudgeon had just said--being readier in speech with me, perhaps, than
with any one of his few acquaintances--that he did not mean to give the
young people a halfpenny. It did occur to me that possibly he might have
bought the ruby bracelet for the exceedingly pretty girl to whom his
nephew was engaged; but in this I was mistaken, as you shall presently
see; and the interest of the whole problem deepened when I learnt later
on in the smoking-room of my club that the marriage was likely to be
postponed, and something of a scandal to ensue. Bertie Watts, they said,
was going about like a ravenous beast, seeking what financier he could
devour. His opinion of his uncle was expressed in phrases of which the
chief ornament was appalling curses and maledictions. He declared he
would have the whip-hand of him yet, would make him pay handsomely for
all the trouble he had put people to--in short, behaved like a man who
was absurdly in love, regardless of that financial prudence which is so
dear to the sight of parents and of guardians. Even he, however, could
not foresee the strange thing about to happen to him, or the very
curious opportunity which was shortly to be his.

A week passed. There was no definite announcement of any postponement of
the arrangements noted by _The Hyde Park Gazette_, nor did such part of
society as is represented by the tonguesters, hear that Bertie had
persuaded his uncle. The thing was a kind of deadlock in its financial
aspect, until at last the world of Belgravia knew that the young lady's
father, Lord Varnley, had consented to let the wedding be, and to trust
to Harningham's better sense when the time of the accomplishment came. I
saw Watts one day driving with his _fiancee_ near the Achilles Statue,
and thought that he looked glum enough; but he came to me on the
following morning for a diamond aigrette, and although he couldn't pay
for it I let him have it.

"It'll be all right in a month, Sutton," said he; "you know the old
chap's hard enough, but he can't let me marry on nothing a year, can he
now?"

I said that the thing was possible; and for his own sake ventured to
hint that it was even probable, an opinion which he took in no good
part, sucking his stick silently for a while, and then laughing with a
poor little chuckle that seemed to come from the very top of his head.

"Well," he exclaimed at last, "it's devilish rough on a fellow to have a
relation of that sort, isn't it?--a positive disgrace to the family. I
wonder what the old blackguard is going to give me for a wedding
present. Did he ask you to show him any American tickers, by the way? I
shouldn't wonder if he presented me with a brass clock, and Eva with a
guinea set in jet--he's mean enough."

"He bought a ruby bracelet here some days ago," I remarked, as in
parenthesis.

"Did he now?" he exclaimed in a tone of pleasure. "I wonder if it's for
the girlie! but, of course, it couldn't be. He'd die to give away
anything that once went into his old safe. Look here, Sutton, couldn't
you charge him an extra hundred, and go halves? I feel like something
desperate."

I told him that that was impossible, and he went away with the aigrette
in his pocket, and a very thoughtful expression upon his face. Before he
did so, however, he had uttered the pious wish that his uncle might die
of some tormenting visitation; and that he might be alive to dance on
the day of the funeral. I must say that I sympathized with him, for he
was a good-looking and kindly-hearted young fellow, who for many years
had been led to believe that his relations would do something for him;
and who was about to be grievously disappointed. Nor could I forget that
he was engaged to one of the prettiest girls in town--and for her sake
enjoyed a kind of reflected sympathy which was sincere enough on the
part of every man who knew him.

The date of the wedding was now fixed, being the 21st of January, to be
well ahead of Lent. I saw Watts very frequently during the following ten
days, he coming with expectant persistency to ask me if his uncle had
yet bought him anything; and remaining disappointed almost to the very
eve of his marriage. In fact, the wedding was to take place on the
Wednesday, and it was only on the previous Monday that Lord Harningham
ascended my stairs puffing and blowing, and in a shocking temper, to
make his purchase of a present.

"Sutton," he said, "this is the greatest tomfoolery on earth--that young
rascal is going to get married after all, and I suppose I'll have to
give him something."

"You can scarce do less," I said with a smile.

"Of course I can do less," he replied garrulously. "I can give him
nothing at all, d'ye see; not a brass halfpenny. Look at the ass,
maudling about the first pretty face he sees over a dinner table when he
might marry money twenty times for the asking of it. Did I make such a
fool of myself when I was his age?"

I assured him that he did nothing of the sort.

"Then what's he want to do it for? Thinks he's going to get something
out of me, perhaps--out of _me_, but he ain't--not sixpence; not if they
hadn't enough to get to the station with. Ha, ha! I'm not such a
spendthrift as I look."

He talked in this strain for some while, and then fell to haggling over
a gift. He told me that the custom of giving wedding presents was the
insane fashion of an insane age; that he consented to follow it only in
view of the fuss that society would make if his card did not lie on Lord
Varnley's table when the other presents were shown. In this bargaining
he displayed a meanness which was triumphant even for him. I must have
shown him quite a hundred rings, pins, and watches, of all values, from
fifty pounds to five hundred, before he could in any way make up his
mind, and he did not cease to rebuke me for that which he called my
preposterously extravagant insinuation. "Fifty sovereigns! a hundred
sovereigns!" he kept exclaiming; "Why, man alive, do you think I'm made
of money? Show me something cheap, something that five pounds will buy,
d'ye see? any bit of stuff's good enough for a jackanapes like that."

"But not for your card on Lord Varnley's table."

"Why, what do you mean?"

"People who are uncharitable, you know, might say that it was a
curiously insufficient present."

"D'ye think they'd say that?"

"I am sure they would."

"Pshaw!--so am I; that comes of being thought a rich man when you're as
poor as a parson. I'm quite a poor man, you know, Sutton."

I listened to him patiently, and in the end persuaded him to buy Watts
an exquisite set of jeweled links. These had a fine diamond in each of
them, but their greatest ornament was the superb enameling, worthy of
Jean Toutin or Petitot, with which all the gold was covered. I asked one
hundred and fifty pounds for these remarkable ornaments; and the old
man, struck, like the artist he was, with the perfection of the
workmanship, fixed his greedy eyes upon them, and was persuaded. He
protested that they were too good, far too good, for such a worthless
ingrate as his nephew, and that he ought to keep them in his own
collection; but at last he ordered me to send them, with his card, to
Lord Varnley's town house, and went away chafing at his own generosity,
and, as he avowed, at his stupidity.

I saw no more of him for a week. The wedding had been celebrated, and
Master Bertie Watts had conveyed away quietly to Folkestone as pretty an
English girl as ever flourished in the glare of the West. Lord and Lady
Varnley shut up their house during the week after the marriage, having
sent the very numerous wedding presents to their bankers; and society
would have forgotten the whole business if it had not paused to discuss
the important question--How were the young couple to exist in the future
on the paltry income of four or five hundred pounds a year? One half of
the world may not know how the other half lives, but that is not for
lack of effort on its part to find out. It was a matter of club-room
news that old Lord Harningham had not relented--and, beyond what his
nephew called "those twopenny-half-penny sleeve links," had not given
him a penny. How then, said this same charitable world, will these silly
children keep up their position in town when they return from the
second-rate hotel they are now staying in at Folkestone?

Curiously enough, I was able myself to answer that question in three
days' time--though at the moment I was as ignorant as any of them. The
matter came about in this way. On the very morning that Lord Varnley
went to Paris, it was known through the daily papers that there had been
a robbery at his house in Cork Street, of a green velvet case,
containing a crescent of pearls, turquoises, and diamonds. This was a
present from one of the Embassies to his daughter, and must, said the
reports, have been abstracted from the house during the press and the
confusion of the reception. Later in the afternoon I received an advice
from Scotland Yard cautioning me against the purchase of such a gem, and
inviting immediate communication if it were offered to me. The theft of
wedding presents is so common that I gave little heed to the matter; and
was already immersed in other business when Lord Harningham was
announced. He seemed rather fidgety in his manner, I thought, and hummed
and hawed considerably before he would explain his mission.

"It's about those links I gave my nephew," he said at last. "They're far
too good for him, Sutton--and they're too pretty. I never saw better
work in my life, and must have been a fool when I let them go out of my
possession--d'ye see?"

"Well, but you can't get them back now?" I remarked with a smile.

He took snuff vigorously at my reply, and then said,--

"Man, you're wrong, I've got them in my pocket."

I must have expressed my astonishment in my look, for he went on
quickly,--

"Yes, here in the green case as you sold them. Do I surprise you, eh?
Well, I'm going to give Master Bertie a bit of a check and to keep these
things; but one of the stones is off color--I noticed it at the
wedding--and I must have a new one in, d'ye see?"

"I thought that you had already handed them over," I interrupted, quite
disregarding his last request.

"So I did, so I did; but a man can take his own back again, can't he?
Well, when I saw them at the house, I concluded it was ridiculous to
give a boy like that such treasures, and so----"

"You spoke to him?"

"Hem--that is, of course, man. Pshaw! You're too inquisitive for a
jeweler: you ought to have been a lady's maid."

"Have you brought them with you now?"

"What should I be here for if I hadn't?"

He laid upon my table a green velvet case, of the exact size, color, and
shape of that which had contained the links; but when I opened it I gave
a start, and put it down quickly. The case held a crescent of pearls,
turquoises, and diamonds, which answered exactly to the description of
the one stolen from Lord Varnley's house on the day of his daughter's
wedding.

"There's some mistake here," said I, "you've evidently left the links at
home," with which remark I put the jewels under his very nose for him to
see. He looked at them for a moment, the whole of his flabby face
wrinkling and reddening; then he seemed almost to choke, and the veins
in his forehead swelled until they were as blue threads upon an ashen
and colorless countenance.

"Good God!" he ejaculated, "I've taken the wrong case."

"Your nephew gave it you, no doubt, but he must have forgotten it, for
he's advertised the loss of this crescent at Scotland Yard, and there
are detectives now trying to find it. I am cautioned not to purchase
it," I said with a laugh.

The effect of these words upon him was so curious that for some moments
I thought he had spasm of the heart. Starting up in the chair, with wild
eyes, and hands clutching at the arms to rest upon them, he made several
attempts to speak, but not a word came from his lips. I endeavored to
help him with his difficulty, but it was to little purpose.

"It seems to me, Lord Harningham," I suggested, "that you have only to
write a line of explanation to your nephew--and there's an end of the
matter."

"You think so?" he cried eagerly.

"Why not," said I, "since he returned the jewels to you?"

"But he didn't," he interrupted, cringing in the chair at this
confession of a lie; "he didn't; and he'd prosecute me; he hates me, and
this is his opportunity, d'ye see?"

"Do you mean to say," I exclaimed, beginning to understand the
situation, "that you took the case without his permission?"

"Yes, yes," he mumbled, "they were so beautiful, such work! You know
what work they were. I saw them at the wedding, and was sure that I
should not have parted with them. I meant to send him a check against
them--and when no one was looking I put what I thought was the case into
my pocket, but it was the wrong one. God help me, Sutton what shall I
do?"

Now it seemed to me that this was one of the most delightful comedies I
had ever assisted at. Technically, Lord Harningham was a thief, and
undoubtedly Bertie Watts could have prosecuted him had he chosen, though
the probability of his getting a conviction was small. But it was very
evident to me that here was the boy's opportunity, and that in the
interest of his pretty wife I should make the best of it. With this
intent, I played my first card with necessary boldness.

"Undoubtedly the case is very serious for you," said I, apparently with
sympathy, "and it is made the more serious from the strange relations
existing between your nephew and yourself. You know the law, I doubt
not, as well as I do; and that once a prosecution has been initiated at
Scotland Yard it is impossible to withdraw without a trial. Mr. Watts
might get into serious trouble for compounding a felony; and I might
suffer with him as one in the conspiracy. But I tell you what I will do;
I'll write to him to-night and sound him. Meanwhile, let me advise you
to keep out of the way, for I can't disguise the fact that you might be
arrested."

He gave a great scream at this, and the perspiration rolled from him,
falling in great drops upon the carpet. "Oh, Lord!" he kept muttering,
"oh, that I should have been such a consummate fool!--oh, Heaven help
me! To think of it--and what it will cost, I could cry, Sutton--cry like
a child."

I calmed him with difficulty, and led him down the back stairs to a cab
with a positive assurance that I would not communicate with Scotland
Yard. Then I wrote to Folkestone a letter, the precise contents of which
are immaterial, but the response to which was in the form of a telegram
worded as follows:--

"Am inexpressibly shocked and pained, but the law must take its course."

I put this into my pocket without any delay and went over to
Harningham's house in Park Lane. He had been up all night, they told me,
and the doctor had just left him; but I found him suffering only from an
enervating fear, and white as the cloth on the breakfast table before
him.

"Well," he said, "what is it, what does he say? Will he prosecute me?"

I handed him the telegram for answer, and I thought he would have
swooned. He did not know that I had in my pocket another letter from his
nephew, in which Master Bertie informed me that I was the "best chap in
the world," and I saw no reason to mention this. Indeed, I listened with
infinite gravity when the old man told me that he was irretrievably
ruined, and that his name would stand in all the clubs as that of a
common thief. Jewel-hunger plainly accounted for everything he had done;
but it was not to my end to console him, and I said in a severe and
sufficiently melancholy voice,--

"Lord Harningham, there is only one thing to do, and for your sake I
will make myself a criminal participator in the conspiracy. You must go
to Folkestone with me this afternoon, and take your check book with
you."

The groan he gave at this would have moved a man of iron. I saw tears
standing in his eyes, and his hand shook when I left him so that he
could scarce put it into mine. Yet he came to the station to meet me in
the afternoon, and by six o'clock we were in Folkestone at a shabby
second-rate hotel, called "The Cock and Lobster," inquiring for the
bride and bridegroom. Mr. and Mrs. Watts, they said, were out on the
parade; but we went to look for them, and surprised them coming from the
Lees, as handsome a couple as you could look upon. She, a pretty,
brown-haired English girl, her tresses tossed over her large eyes by the
sharp wind that swept in from the sea, was close under the arm of her
husband, who, at that stage, fearing to lose her touch, seemed engaged
in the impossible attempt to cover her entirely with one of his arms.
And in this pursuit privacy came to his aid, for the breeze was fresh
from the Channel at the beginning of night, banishing all loiterers but
those loitering in love; and the lamps flickered and went low in the
gusts as though fearing to illumine the roses upon the cheeks of a
bride.

When Master Bertie saw us he became as sedate as a Methodist minister,
and, commanding a solemn tone acted the part to perfection.

"Uncle," he said, "I would never have believed it of you. But this is
too serious a matter to mention here; let us go to the hotel."

We returned in silence, but directly we were in the hall the young man
called for his bill, and speaking almost in a boisterous tone, cried:--

"We're going to change our quarters, uncle, and will begin by moving to
the best hotel in the place. That poor girl is moped to death here, and
now you're going to pay for our honeymoon--cost doesn't matter, does it,
old man?"

The old man concerned started at this, his mouth wide open with the
surprise of it.

"What's that?" he muttered. "What're you going to do?" But I whispered
to him to be silent, and in an hour we were sitting down to a superb
dinner--which he did not touch, by the bye--in the great saloon of the
biggest hotel in the place. During the meal the bride, who scarce seemed
able to do anything else than look at her husband, made few remarks,
but Watts and I talked freely, quite ignoring the old man; and it was
not until we were in the private room that the negotiations began.

There is no need to describe them. They lasted until midnight, at which
hour the nephew of Lord Harningham had five hundred pounds in his
pocket, and an allowance of five hundred a year. From the moment of
assenting to these conditions until we entered the train next morning
the old man never opened his lips, but he kissed the bride at the door
of the hotel, and color came again to his cheeks at the warmth of her
lips. When at last we were alone in the carriage he gave a great sigh of
relief and said,----

"Sutton, thank God that's over!"

"Nearly over, my lord," I replied with emphasis.

"What do you mean?" he cried. "Do you think that any one will get to
hear of it? Why, man, what have I half-ruined myself for?"

"To keep your nephew quiet," I suggested pleasantly.

"And who else knows anything when he's settled with?" he asked angrily.

"Why," said I quite calmly, "you and I, perhaps."

He looked at me as though his glance was all-consuming and would wither
me, but I met him with a placid smile and continued,--

"It seems to me that I want what Mr. Stevenson calls 'a good memory for
forgetting.' Do you know, Lord Harningham, that if you paid my
bill--gave me, say, eight thousand pounds on account, I believe my mind
would be quite oblivious to the events of last night."

The shot struck home--in the very center of my target. He thought over
it for some while, and spoke but once between Sevenoaks and Charing
Cross. His remark was more forcible than convincing, for he exclaimed
suddenly, and _a propos_ of nothing in particular, "Sutton to blazes
with all jewels!" Then he subsided, and came with me quietly to my
rooms, where he wrote a check for eight thousand pounds and signed it
with considerable firmness. The ink was hardly dry, however, before he
dropped heavily upon the carpet, and lay prone in a fit.

The shock of parting with so much money had been too much for him. He is
now in Madeira seeking a climate.




TREASURE OF WHITE CREEK.




TREASURE OF WHITE CREEK.


She was the daughter of Colonel Kershaw Klein, and he was worth a
million, as the society papers said. I had danced with her for the first
time in the ball-room of the magnificent house her father had rented in
Grosvenor Crescent, on the occasion of her coming of age; and I agreed
with the men that she was beyond criticism, an exquisite vision of dark
and matured girlhood, so incomparably fascinating that you forget in her
company some of her bluntness in speech, and set down the voluptuousness
of her glance and mien to the southern luxuriance amidst which she had
been reared, and to those "other" notions which prevail in Chili, the
land of fleeting republics.

Some part of this perhaps unnecessary adulation may have been due to the
fact that I had helped in the production of her perfect picture on the
night of which I am speaking. The commercial element will intrude at
such times; and I could not help but see that she wore at least eight
hundred pounds' worth of my jewels. Had the value of them been double,
it would have been the same to me, for of her father's stability I had
then no doubt. He had been received and made much of in the highest
places, accorded the chief seats at the feasts; entrusted--as the old
ladies told you--with the most important missions by Government; and a
share in the Western Hill diamond mine at South Africa was not the least
substantial factor in the sum of his income. Any and every gem to which
he took a fancy I had let him have readily, being assured by an
important personage at the Embassy that his credit was unquestionable;
and it was a pretty pleasure to me when I first met his daughter to
observe how well my diamonds sat upon her, and how shapely were her arms
clasped in the ruby bracelets which had been amongst the treasures of
Bond Street but three months before. She was, indeed, a sunny child of
the South, radiating a warming light about her, tempting you to wait
long for a single press of her hand, luring you to follow the sparkle of
her eyes even when she looked at you over the shoulder of a dancer who
for the moment had the privilege of holding her in the entrancement of
the _deux temps_. There was keen contention for her programme, but
somehow I found her disposed to favor me, and danced no less than four
with her, to the infinite annoyance of the many youths who eyed me
angrily from their watching-ground by the door. They said that they had
never seen her brighter; and I was ready to believe them, for she kept
her tongue going merrily through the waltzes, and leant upon my arm in a
languorous way that was completely entrancing.

At the end of the dance--the next being some newfangled "Barn Dance"
wherein men scarce put their hands upon their partners--she said that
she would sit in the conservatory and eat ices; and for the first time
during the long evening I found myself able to talk easily with her.

"Well," she said, when we had composed ourselves behind a huge fern, and
had made a successful attack upon the _meringues glaces_, "well, this is
about splendid; don't you think so?"

I said that nothing could be more delightful.

"And to think that I've never danced with you before; why, you're just
perfect," she went on. "I haven't enjoyed myself right along like this
since I was in Valparaiso."

"Are the Chilians such wonderful dancers then?" I asked, as she looked
up at me bewitchingly.

"They just make a profession of it between the shooting times," said
she; and then changing the subject quickly, she asked, "What do you
think of the crystals now I've got them on?"

It is not particularly consoling to hear your rubies spoken of as
crystals, but her description was accompanied by such a pretty laugh,
and she opened her great black eyes so widely, that I smiled when I
answered,--

"Why, they're to be envied in such a setting."

"You're the fourth man that has said the same to-night," she exclaimed,
putting her glass down and tugging at her glove. "I think that
Britishers learn their compliments out of copy-books; they're all
presents for good girls. Let's see if you're cleverer at getting a glove
on than at making pretty speeches."

The arm that she held out was gloriously white; and as every man knows,
the operation of pulling on the glove of a pretty girl is apt to be
prolonged. There are fingers to fit, and a little thumb to stroke
daintily; while the grip upon the more substantial part of the forearm
will bear repetition so long as time serves. I must have occupied myself
at least five minutes with her buttons, she finding it necessary to
press close to me when I did so; and the task was none the less pleasant
when her rich brown hair touched my face, and her dress rustled with her
long-drawn breathing. How long the process would have lasted, or what I
should have said foolishly in the end, I do not know; but of a sudden
she drew her arm away and exclaimed,--

"Oh, I'd quite forgotten; I wanted to ask you about the bull's-eye."

[Illustration: "I wanted to ask you about the bull's-eye."

    --_Page 82_]

This was her description, I may mention without anger, of the famous
White Creek Diamond, which, as all London knows, I have had in my
possession for the last two years. Her father, who was reputed to have
some commission to buy it for a Persian, was then negotiating with me
for its purchase for the sum of one hundred and thirty thousand pounds.
He waited only, he said, for the coming of his partner from Valparaiso,
to complete the transaction; and it was owing to the intimacy which the
_pour parlers_ brought about that I found myself then in his house. How
much his daughter knew of the business, however, I could not tell, and I
answered her question by another.

"What do you know about the bull's-eye?"

"That you're trying to sell it to my father," she replied, "and that he
won't promise to give it to me."

"Have you asked him, then?"

"Have I asked him--why, look at him; isn't he ten years older since he
met you in Bond-street?"

"He certainly seems to have something on his mind," said I.

"That's me; he's got me on his mind," she remarked flippantly; "but I
wish he'd buy the bull's-eye, and give it to me for a wedding present."

"Oh, you're engaged," I ventured dolefully; "you never told me that----"

"Didn't I?" she answered, "well, of course I am, and here's my partner."

She went away on another man's arm; but she left to me a vision of dark
eyes and ivory white flesh; and her breath still seemed to blow balmily
upon my forehead. Her partner was a young man just down from Oxford,
they told me; seemingly a simple youth, to whom the whole sentence in
conversation was as much a mystery as the binomial theorem; but he
danced rather well, and I doubt not that she suffered him for that. I
watched her through the waltz, and then, after a few words with her
father, who promised to call upon me the next day concerning White Creek
treasure, I said "Good night" to her. She give me a glance which was
more entrancing than any word; and although she had the habit of looking
at a man as though she were dying for love of him, I carried it away
with me foolishly into the street, when the dawn had broken with summer
haze, and an exalting sweetness was in the air.

The invigorating breath of morning somewhat sobered my thoughts; but
none the less left the impression of her beauty fermenting in my mind. I
turned into Hyde Park, where the trees were alive with song-birds, and
the glowing flowers sparkled with the silver freshness of the dew, and
set out to walk to Bayswater. In these moments, I forgot the prosaic
necessities of forms and customs; and bethought how pleasant it would be
if some enchantment could place her at my side, a Phyllis of Mayfair,
freed from the tie of conventionality, to look at me for all time with
those eyes she had used so well but an hour ago. I forgot her manners of
speech, her unpleasing idioms, even the discordant note that her usually
melodious voice was sometimes guilty of; forgot all but her ripe beauty,
the softness of her touch, the alluring fascination of her way, the
insurpassable play of her mouth, the exquisite perfection of her figure.

Women's eyes make dreamers of us all; and though I have pride in the
thought that I am not a susceptible man, I will confess without
hesitation that I was as near to being in love on that summer morning in
July as was ever a professor of the single state who has come within
hail of his thirty-fifth year with the anti-feminine vow unweakened.

At Lancaster Gate I paused a moment, leaning upon the iron rail of the
drive to look back at the London veldt fresh to luxuriance in the dew
showers which gave many colors in the play of sunlight. There was
stillness under the trees, and the hum of the still sleeping city was
hushed, though day was seeking to enter the blind-hid windows, and
workmen slouched heavily to their labor. The scene was fresh enough,
beautiful as many of the city's scenes are beautiful; but I had scarce
time to enjoy when I saw the Oxford youth who had last danced with
Margaret Klein coming striding over the grass; a masterful pipe in his
mouth; and a very rough ulster wrapped round his almost vanishing
shoulders. He gave me a cheery nod for greeting, and to my surprise he
seated himself upon the seat beside me; and having offered me a cigar,
which I took, he found his tongue so readily that I, who had heard his
"haw-hawing" in the ball-room, concluded at once that it was assumed and
not natural to him. And in this I was right, as the first exchange of
speech with him proved.

"I've had a sharp run to catch you," said he, "for this infernal dancing
takes it out of you when you're not used to it. I wanted a word with you
particularly before this thing goes any further. Do you know anything of
these people?"

"Why," said I, "I might ask you that question, since you made yourself
so much at home there; don't you know them?"

"No, I'm hanged if I do," said he; "but, if I'm not mistaken, I shall be
on very good terms with them before the season's out. You haven't sold
them any jewels, have you?"

This was such an extraordinary question that I turned upon him with an
angry reply upon my lips; but the word changed to one of amazement when
I saw his face closely in the full sunlight. It was no longer the face
of an Oxford boy, but of a man of my own age at the least.

"Whew!" I remarked, as I looked full at him, "you've made rather a quick
change, haven't you?"

"It's the running," he replied, mopping himself with a handkerchief, and
leaving his countenance like a half-washed chess-board, "we're in for
another six hours' stew, and my phiz is plastic--I'd better be moving
on, lest I meet any of my partners; I might break some hearts, you know;
but what I wanted to say was, Don't go making a fool of yourself, Mr.
Sutton, over that little witch with the black eyes, and don't, if you
love your life, put yourself for a moment in the power of her
long-tongued father."

This utterly surprising rejoinder was given without a suspicion of
concern or bombast. Many people would have resented it as an
impertinence, and a dishonorable slander upon one whose hospitality we
had just enjoyed; but I had not been a dealer in jewels for ten years
without learning to recognize instantly the "professional" tongue; and I
knew that I was talking to a man from Scotland Yard. Yet I must confess
that I laughed inwardly at the absurdity of his fears. Few men had come
to London with stronger recommendation than Kershaw Klein, and even the
banks had trusted him implicitly.

"Are you sure that you are making no mistake?" I asked, as he buttoned
up his coat and looked about for a hansom. "You gentlemen have been
woefully out lately; I can't forget that one of you cautioned me against
Count Hevilick three months ago, and if I'd listened to him I should be
worth five thousand less than I am at this moment. If this man is what
you think, he's managed to blind a good many big people--and his own
Embassy into the bargain."

He thought for some minutes before he answered me, standing with his
hands in his pockets and his cigar pointing upwards from the extreme
corner of his mouth. His reply was given with a pitying smile, and was
patronizing--as are the replies of men convinced but unable to convince.

"Well," he said, exhaling tremendous clouds of smoke, "what I know I
know; and what I don't know my wits will find out for me. I gave you the
tip because you've done me--though you don't know it--a good many
services; but whether you take it or leave it, that's your look out.
Only, and this is my last word, don't come complaining to me if the
witch walks off with your goods--and don't write to the _Times_ if her
father cracks your skull."

He had turned on his heel before I could utter another word; and he left
me to walk slowly and thoughtfully to Bayswater, divided in my musings
between the vision of the Chilian girl's beauty and the jewels of mine
which she wore; but for which her father had not paid. I can only set it
down to absurd infatuation; but I admit unhesitatingly that I did not
very much care then whether the financial part of the business left me
lacking the money or possessed of it. A rash disregard for expense is
the surest sign that a woman has interested you; a longing to pay her
milliner's bills is a necessary instinct to the disposition for
marriage. I was at that time, and in the exhilaration of wish that came
of the power of morning, quite ready to let so perfect a creature remain
indebted to me for anything; and this was natural since the spice of a
little suspicion is often the most attractive flavor in a woman's
character. But the question of the treasure of White Creek was another
matter altogether. The great diamond was not my own, although it lay at
that time in my safe in Bond Street. It was the property of a syndicate,
in which I held a third of the shares; but the others looked to me for
the safe disposal of the stone, and for the profit of ten thousand
pounds which we hoped to get by its sale. My responsibility, then, was
no usual one; and the barest suggestion that I was trafficking with a
swindler was enough to set me itching with anxiety.

I went home in this mood, but not to sleep. A feverish dreaming--chiefly
of a seductive girl with black-brown wavy hair and black eyes that
searched and fascinated with an inexplicable spell--served me for rest;
and at eleven o'clock I was at my office, and the Chilian was with me.
He was a man of fine presence, a long black beard falling upon his ample
chest, and a certain refinement of carriage and bearing giving him a
dignity which is not usual in an American. The object of his visit was
twofold, to pay the bill he owed me, and to tell me that his partner,
Hermann Rudisic, would reach London from Valparaiso in a week's time;
when he would bring him to me to complete the purchase of the great
stone. He said further that as the season was over he had taken a place
near Basingstoke, the Woodfields it was named; and that he hoped his
daughter, who did not do well in an English climate, would benefit by
the wealth of pine-trees about the house. He finished by giving me a
reference to his London bankers, and also another to one of the best
known of the financiers in Lombard Street. In due course I communicated
with both firms, and received answers which set every doubt about the
financial position of Kershaw Klein at rest. The bankers declared that I
might trust him unhesitatingly for such a sum as I named. The other
replied that the Colonel's brother was of great standing and position in
Chili, and that he himself carried letters which proved his undoubted
probity. More complete vindication could not be had; and I went home to
laugh consumedly at the gentleman who had found such a mare's nest, and
to wonder if my friends would laugh very much if they heard--how little
I thought at that time of the old pleasantries with which I had once
greeted the tidings of a marriage.

I did not hear more of Klein for some fifteen days, at the end of which
time he wrote saying that Hermann Rudisic was with him at Basingstoke;
and that they hoped to call upon me on the following Friday. The march
of events was from that time quick. On the Thursday I read in a daily
paper of an accident in Berkshire to a Chilian visitor, who had been
thrown from his carriage and seriously hurt. The account said that his
life was despaired of, and that he was then lying at the house of his
host, the well-known Colonel Kershaw Klein, who had taken Lord Aberly's
place, the Woodfields. On the Friday morning I received a long letter
from the Colonel deploring the accident and the delay, more especially
because his commission to purchase the stone extended only to the 10th
of August, and it was then the third. He hoped, however, that matters
would look brighter at the end of that time; and would bring his partner
to London the moment he could travel.

Now, at the first thought, this intelligence set all the inherent
suspicion, which is a part of me, at work once more. Suggestions of
doubt rose again and again, instantly to be suppressed. Had I not
satisfied myself completely as to the Colonel's standing, his means, his
reputation, and his personal character? Was he not staying in Lord
Aberly's house? Had not he passed most brilliantly through a London
season? Were there not twenty members of the Bachelors' Club seeking to
pay for the sake of his daughter the fine imposed upon amorous
backsliders? If one were to suspect every man with such credentials as
these, the sooner one shut one's door, and locked one's safe for good,
the better for all hope of doing business. Of all this I was certain;
and had already come to the determination to put from my mind suspicion
both of the Count and his daughter, when there came to me by the
afternoon delivery another letter concerning the matter; but this was
anonymous, and in a hand I did not know. It was a curious scrawl written
upon a slip of account paper, and its contents were but these words:--

"You will be asked to Kershaw Klein's house in three days. I told you
the other morning not to trust yourself with the man; I say now, accept
the invitation."

This was plainly from my friend of Hyde Park; and I confess that his
pompous mysteriousness and pretence of knowledge amused me. Even he no
longer complained of Colonel Klein's reputation, nor advised me now to
avoid him. His letter finally quieted my scruples, and from that moment
I resolved to dally with them no longer; and to let no silly fears delay
the negotiations for the sale of the treasure of White Creek.

In this resolution I waited rather anxiously for the coming of Klein and
his partner, but three days went, and I saw nothing of them; it being on
the Monday morning at eleven o'clock that the former drove up to Bond
Street in a single brougham, and came with his daughter into my private
office. He seemed in a great state of distress, saying that Rudisic,
although better, was still unable to set foot to the ground: and begging
me as the time was so short to take the great jewel to Berkshire--his
house was just across the line dividing the county from Hampshire--and
there to settle the matter that very day. I heard him mechanically; my
eyes glued on the exquisite picture which his daughter made; her gown of
white delaine showing the mature contour of her figure admirably; and
her deep brown hair rolling from the shelter of a great straw hat in
silken waves upon her shoulders. If she had fascinated me at the dance,
the fascination was intensified there. I would cheerfully have risked
the best parcel of rubies in the place to have had the pleasure of
keeping her in the office even for an hour; and I did not hesitate one
moment in accepting Klein's offer.

"Come down to-day," said he, "and bring your man with you in case we
don't do business, and you have to return alone. I don't like mailing
with big stuff on me; you never know who gets wind of it. I suppose you
have somebody you could take."

Even with the girl's eyes upon me and her laughing threat to "make me
tramp at tennis awhile," I had a measure of satisfaction in this
request, and thought instantly of Abel.

"Yes," said I, with a light laugh, "I will bring my own detective. He's
down below now."

"That's right," said Klein, "and we'll catch the two-forty from
Waterloo. I've ordered the carriage to meet that, and there's just time
for a snack between whiles. Never forget your food, sir--I don't for all
the business in Europe. I once lost a commission for a railway in
Venezuela through a sandwich--but there, that's another story, and I'll
tell it you over a chop at the Criterion. I guess I've got an appetite
on, and so's Margaret, eh, little girl?"

He slapped his chest to signify that a void was there; and we all went
off down Piccadilly, returning afterwards for the gem which I had placed
in a flat-velvet case. I put it into my jewel pocket, cunningly
contrived in my vest, and with no more delay we got to Waterloo and to
our saloon, Abel traveling second class, by the bye, and in another
compartment. There was a well-turned-out wagonette to meet us when we
reached Basingstoke; and after a drive of something under an hour
through some of that glorious pine scenery of southern Berkshire, we
entered a short drive edged by thick laurels, and were shortly at the
gate of the Woodfields. Of the exterior of the house I saw nothing, for,
as I descended from the wagonette, I chanced to catch the eye of the
footman, who had a finger to his lips; and an exclamation almost broke
from my lips. Notwithstanding his disguise I recognized the man in a
moment. He was the "Oxford youth" who had given me a cigar in the park
on the morning after the dance in Grosvenor Crescent.

The discovery was not a pleasant one. It made discord of all the music
of Margaret Klein's voice--she was quickly babbling to me in the old
Georgian Hall--and forbade my taking considerable notice of the massive
oak of the double staircase, or of the exceedingly bright-nosed
"ancestors" who smiled upon us from twenty gilt frames. Abel had come up
to my room with me, I pretending that he invariably acted as my valet;
and once inside a very large but very ugly square bedchamber, whose
windows overlooked the prim lawn and terrace of flowers, I shut the door
and had a word with him.

"Abel," said I, "that footman who drove us from the station must be one
of the Scotland Yard lot; what's he doing in this house?"

Abel whistled, and by instinct, I suppose, put his hand upon his pistol
pocket.

"Have you got your revolver with you, sir?" he asked.

"Of course I have; and I'll take this opportunity to charge all the
chambers, but I don't believe for a moment there will be occasion to use
it. The man's on a false scent entirely. It's necessary at the same time
to act like wise men, and not like fools; and I must count on you to be
near me while we're in the place. If there's any knavery afoot, we
shan't hear of it until the place is asleep; but come here when I am
going to bed, and then we shall know what to do."

I sent him off with this to the servants' quarters, and dressed, though
an indescribable sense of nervousness had taken hold of me; and I found
myself peering into every cupboard and cranny like an old woman looking
for a burglar. The situation was either as dangerous as it could be, or
I was the victim of farcical fears. Yet the very shadows across the
immense floor, and the aureola upon the carpet about the dressing table
seemed to give gloom to the chamber. So thick were the walls of the old
house that no sound reached me from the rooms below; and when the gong
struck the hour for dinner its note reverberated as a wave of deadened
sound through some curtained chapel or chill vault. What did it mean, I
kept asking myself; the illness, was it sham? the man from London, was
he on a fool's errand? my visit, was it foolhardy? Had I walked into a
trap at the bidding of a pretty woman? Were all the guarantees I had
received in the Colonel's favor fraudulent or mistaken? I could not
think so. Again and again I told myself that the fellow from Scotland
Yard was an absurd crank upon a false scent, and that ninety jewelers of
a hundred would have done as I had done, and have brought the stone to
Berkshire. And with this thought I took a better courage and hastily
finished my dressing. I need scarce say that I had the jewel in my
pocket when I went to the drawing-room, and that I had already
determined that it should not leave me for a moment. I got rid, however,
of more of my fears when I entered the artistic and homely room where
Margaret Klein was waiting; and in the brighter scene of light and
laughter the absurdity of suspicion again occurred to me.

The meal was an excellent one, admirably served; the wine was perfect. I
sat at my host's right facing his daughter, who seemed to exert herself
unusually to fascinate, making delicate play with her speaking eyes; and
promising me all the possibilities of Berkshire rest, if I cared to stay
with them over the week. To this her father, the Colonel, who had the
ribbon of an Order in his buttonhole, and looked exceedingly handsome,
added:

"And I hope you will, for you're not seeming as well as you were last
week. You people in England live in too narrow a circle. A voyage across
the pond makes an epoch in your lives; you are scarce prepared to admit
yet that there is any other city but London. If you would enlarge the
scope of your actions, you would grumble less--and perhaps, if I may
say so, allow that other nations share some of your best boasted
qualities. Now I am truly cosmopolitan; I regard no city as my home; I
would as soon set out on a voyage of three thousand miles as of five. I
come to England, and I do it in ten days from Land's End to John o'
Groat's; and when I think I'll rest awhile I ask, Where is your pretty
county? and I settle for three weeks to explore it."

"I hope Mr. Sutton will do the same," said Margaret, following up his
invitation. "I want to learn all about the dames who won't know you
unless you had a grandfather; and I should like to see a curate who is
passing rich on forty pounds a year. I guess we mean to go right in now
we're amongst your best folk."

"I'll stay a day or two with pleasure if you will pilot me," said I, as
she rose to go to the drawing-room; but I little knew that my visit was
to terminate abruptly in three hours or less, or what was to happen in
the between-time.

A lean, lank-looking butler served the Colonel and myself with coffee
when she had gone; and after that my host took me to the drawing-room,
where I found her engaged in the pursuit of trying over a "coster" song.
The Colonel suggested business at once, saying:

"I'll leave you with Margaret while I go up to Hermann and learn if he's
well enough to receive us; I dare say you can amuse yourselves. I shan't
be gone five minutes."

He was really away for twenty minutes; but I did not count the time. The
whole situation seemed so curious--on the one hand a London detective
playing footman in the house, on the other a delightful host, and a girl
whose every word fascinated and whose every motion drew you
instinctively to her--that I gave up any attempt to solve it; and beyond
the knowledge that I had reason to be watchful, I put no restraint upon
myself; but sat at her side while she played the lightest of music; or
occasionally leant back to speak to me, so that her hair brushed my face
and her eyes almost looked into mine.

"It was good of you to come," she almost whispered in one of these
pauses, glancing up timorously, and speaking altogether in the
sympathetic tone.

"Do you miss the excitement of London?" I asked, letting my hand rest
for a moment on hers.

"I guess not," she replied; "but I miss some one who can talk to me as
you talk; you're going to stop awhile, aren't you?"

"I'll stop as long as you ask me to."

When he was gone she went on playing for some minutes, turning away at
last impatiently from the piano, and facing round with a serious, almost
alarmed look. What she meant to say or do I cannot tell, for at that
moment the Colonel came back and told us that his partner was in the
dressing-room upstairs, and would be glad to see me at once.

"Margaret may come too?" he asked me. "She would like to see the great
stone."

"Of course," I replied; "it will be a pleasure to show it to her."

I cannot tell you why it was, but as we rose together to leave the room
I seemed in a moment to realize that the affair had come to a crisis. In
that instant, notwithstanding guarantees, references, Margaret Klein's
fascinations, and the hundred arguments I had so often used to convince
myself of the folly of suspicion, there came to me as distinct and clear
a warning as though some human voice had given speech to it. The very
silence of the others--for they said no word, and a curious hesitation
seemed to come upon them--impressed the conviction of the monition. Once
in the hall, my uneasiness became stronger, for there at a table was the
footman I had recognized, and as he glanced at me when I passed him his
face was knit up as the face of a man thinking; and he let a glass fall
at the very moment we reached the stairs. What he wished to convey I do
not know; but although I felt there was danger in leaving the ground
floor, another force dragged me on behind the Colonel, and kept me
advancing unhesitatingly until I had reached the end of the long
picture-gallery with him, and he had knocked upon a door in the eastern
wing of the rambling mansion. What this force was I do not pretend to
explain. It may have been merely the influence of the woman; it may have
been my inherent obstinacy and belief in myself; or simple lack of
conviction which forbade any public expression of the fears I had
fomented. I know only that we waited for some seconds in the passage
until a hospital nurse opened the door, and that I found myself at last
in a very pretty boudoir, where a pale and sickly-looking man was lying
upon a couch, but propped up to greet us. The formalities of
introduction were accomplished by the Colonel with great suavity and
grace; and the nurse having set chairs at the side of the sick man's
couch, and placed a table there, she withdrew, and we were ready for the
business.

That you should understand what happened in the next few minutes it is
necessary for me to say a word upon the construction of the boudoir. It
was a room hung in pink silk and white, and it had two doors in it,
giving off to other rooms, whose size I could not see since they were in
darkness. For light, we had a lamp with a white shade upon the invalid's
table, and two others upon the mantelshelf; while we were seated in a
fashion that allayed any fears I might have had of personal and sudden
attack. The Colonel lounged in an American rocking-chair, he being
nearest to the head of the couch; his daughter leant back against a
buhl-work cabinet, she being a little way from the sick man's feet; I
had a library-chair, and was alone in an attitude which would allow me
to spring to my defence--if that were necessary--without delay. I
looked, too, at Hermann Rudisic, the Colonel's partner, and I confess
that contempt for his physical powers was my first thought. I was
convinced that if it were a question of fight, I could hold the two men
until Abel, who was in the servants' hall, came to my assistance; and
while the others were present I had no fear of any of those wild
machinations which are chiefly the property of imaginative
fiction-makers. This knowledge gave to me my nerve again, and without
more ado I took the case from my pocket and showed the stone.

The vision of the glorious gem, rippling on its surface with a myriad
lights, white, and golden, and many-colored, in the play of radiating
fire, was one that compelled the silence of amazed admiration for many
minutes. Margaret Klein first spoke, her face bent to the diamond so
that its waves of color seemed to float up to her ravished eyes; and
with a little cry wrung from her satisfaction she said,--

"Oh, Mr. Sutton, it's too beautiful to look at!"

"I am glad that it does not disappoint," said I.

"It could disappoint no one," the invalid said, stretching out a hand
which trembled to draw the treasure closer to his eyes.

"It's the whitest stone I've seen for three years," the Colonel remarked
coolly, and then, as with a new thought, he added,--

"I believe it's whiter than the Brazilian stone in my old ring. I should
like to compare them, if you'll let me? The other stuff is in my
dressing-room there; Margaret, will you get it?"

He gave her his keys, and taking a lamp from the shelf, she passed into
the chamber which was behind me. In the same moment Rudisic asked his
host to prop him up higher upon the couch, and the Colonel had just
begun to place the pillows when I heard Margaret's voice crying,--

"Father, I can't open the drawer--it's stuck; do come and help."

It was an act of consummate folly--that I concede you; but I was so
completely unaware of any signs of trickery here, and had so forgotten
my fears, that I found it the most natural thing in the world to step
into the room, and to enjoy helping the girl in her difficulty. I
discovered her before an open door--the door of a wardrobe I thought it
was for a moment, but I saw at the second look that it gave access to a
tiny chamber, whereof the walls were all drawers. Margaret Klein herself
stood within this curiously fashioned safe, built as part of the house,
and was still struggling with the refractory drawer; so that I had no
hesitation--nor, indeed, thought suspiciously--in going to her side. She
laughed slyly as we stood in the semi-dark together, and my hand falling
by chance on hers, she pressed it, and put her face very close to
mine--so close, that to have resisted kissing her would have been a
crime for which a man would have repented until his last day. I cannot
tell accurately how long I held her in a passionate embrace, feeling her
lips glued upon my own; but suddenly and quickly she pushed me from her
with a surprising strength of arm, and before I could regain my balance
she had sprung into the room, and the door of the small chamber in which
I was left swung to with a clang, striking me backwards as it pressed
upon me, and coming nigh to stunning me. So thick was this door, so
impenetrable, that its closing was succeeded by the stillness of vault
or catacomb. I had scarce realized the whole trick, or the terrible
predicament sheer folly had placed me in, when I was plunged into the
abyss of utter darkness, shut as it were into the coffin that had been
prepared for me. A frightful panic, a hideous terror, an indescribable
anger, came upon me from the very first moment of that fearful trial.
For some minutes--the first minutes of imprisonment in a room where I
could stand my height with difficulty, but whose iron sides my elbows
touched as I turned--I think my reason must have been paralyzed. Rage,
shame of my folly, yet, above all, unsurpassable fear, drove me to beat
with my fists upon the door, which gave me back the touch of solid
steel; to cry out aloud as a man in the throes of painful death; to
grind my teeth until pain shot into my brain; to forget, in fact, that I
was from that time helpless, and that others alone could give to me
life.

When the first great terror had passed, and a mental struggle had left
me with some sense, I leant against the steel door, and thought again of
my fate. I had little science, yet I knew that the hours of any man,
shut in an air-tight chamber such as that room of steel was, could be
few. I had heard that asphyxiation was a peaceful death, and think I
could have had courage to face it if a little light had been given to
me. But I was in utter weighty darkness; I could not even see that dull
red light as of one's own soul shining, which may come in the gentler
dark of night. There was only upon me that sense of impenetrable
blackness, the grim feeling that I had come to my coffin, had slept in
it, and arisen to this unspeakable terror. My whole being then seemed to
cry aloud for sight, one moment in which living light should again shine
upon me. A great craving for air; a sense of terrible effort in the
lungs, a rushing of blood to the head--these things succeeded, and as I
suffered them flashes of thought came and passed, hope extended a hand
to me, processes of reasoning told me that I should be saved, only to
convince me the more that I should die.

If I could have reasoned sanely I should have seen that my hope was all
bound up in Abel and the detective in the house. Klein, and the invalid,
and the girl--they had been gone long since, unless others had put hands
upon them. My own servant, I knew, would seek for me first; but even if
he came to the safe, how would he open it, how cut through these inches
of steel before death had ended it all? It was even possible that the
door of the strong room was a concealed door--and so afterwards I proved
it to be. In that case, how would they know even of my necessity? These
torturing reflections threw at last a glimmer of necessary activity upon
my despair. I raised my voice, though I had then the strangest sensation
in my veins, and my heart was pumping audibly; and for many minutes I
shouted with all my strength. Once I thought that I heard, even through
the door, some sound from the other room; yet when I cried louder, and
beat again upon the steel, there was no signal. I remained unheeded; my
voice gradually failed me; I could cry no longer, but began to sink
almost into a coma.

How long this coma lasted I cannot tell. I was roused from it, after a
hideous dream of waiting, by sounds of knocking upon some wall near me;
and with a new strength I shouted again, and beat again upon the door
of steel. Yet, I knew that I was not heard, for the sound of the blows
grew fainter and were passing away and life, which had come near again,
seemed to pass with them. Then was my supreme moment of misery, yet one
giving an inspiration which brought me here to write this record.
Recoiling from the door as the knocks without grew fainter, I struck my
back against the iron wall, and my pistol, which I had forgotten,
pressed into my flesh. Regardless of all thought of consequences, of the
path of the bullet, or the effect upon me of the stifling smoke, I fired
three rounds from the revolver into the room--and instantly was
breathing the densest smoke. Then a sudden faintness took me; and I
recollect only that I fell forward into a world of light, and there
slept.

[Illustration: "I fired three rounds from the revolver into the door."

    --_Page 104_]

       *       *       *       *       *

"The joke, was, seeing you living, Mr. Sutton, that Abel swallowed the
wine that butler gave him, and was made as insensibly drunk as a man who
takes stage chloroform. I knew all along that the butler was the one to
watch; and while I never thought they'd do you mischief in the
room--believing they meant to work after midnight--my men in the grounds
clapped the bracelets on the lank chap up by the woods there, and he had
the diamond on him."

"And the Colonel and his daughter and the invalid?" I asked, raising
myself in the bed of an upper chamber of the Woodfields, on the foot of
which sat my old friend, the detective of Hyde Park.

"Got clear away by a back staircase we'd never heard of, through a
cellar and a passage to the lower grounds! They knocked old Jimmy, the
local policeman, on the head by the spinney, and all they left him was a
bump as big as an orange. That girl must have had a liking for you. One
of my men nearly took her as she jumped into a dog-cart; but she threw
the keys in his face, and he brought them here. I knew nothing about
this room, and shouldn't have done except for the ring of your revolver;
but the last Lord Aberly built it to take his famous collection of
rubies and emeralds, and that lag Klein evidently heard of it, and
leased the place furnished on that account."

"How do you know that he was a swindler?"

"I heard of him in New York when I was there last winter. He was wanted
for the great mail robbery near St. Louis. A clever scoundrel, too;
deceived a heap of folk by forged letters of introduction, and the banks
by leaving big deposits with them. He must be worth a pretty pile; but I
don't doubt he came over here from America on purpose to steal your
diamonds. He was out at the Cape nine months ago, and got to hear all
about the White Creek stone. Then he must have known that Herbert Klein,
his supposed brother, and a real rich man of Valparaiso, was away
yachting in the Pacific; and so he claimed him, and traded on his
undoubted couple of million. A clever forger, and the other two with him
nearly as smart. It was lucky for you that one of the grooms here had
heard of a mysterious place in that dressing-room, and led me, when I
missed you, to tap the walls. You were nearly done for, and though you
don't know, you've been in bed pretty well a week."

"And the man's daughter?" I asked, a little anxiously.

"His daughter," he replied; "pshaw, she's his wife!--and we'll take the
pair of them yet."

But he never did, although the lank butler is now our guest at
Dartmoor.




THE ACCURSED GEMS.




THE ACCURSED GEMS.


The accursed gems lie sedately in the lowest drawer of my strong room,
shining from a couple of dozen of prim leather cases, with a light which
is full of strange memories. I call them accursed because I cannot sell
them; yet there are those with other histories, stones about which the
fancy of romance has sported, and the strong hand of tragedy has touched
with an indelible brand. It may be that the impulse of sentiment,
working deep down in the heart of the ostensibly commercial character,
forbids me to cry some of these wares in the market-place with any
vigor; it may be that the play of chance moves the mind of the
jewel-buyer to a prejudice against them. In any case, they lie in my
safe unhonored and unsung--and, lacking that which Sewell called the
"precious balsam" of reputation, are merely so much carbon or mineral
matter giving light to iron walls which give no light again.

For the stones which have no history I am not an apologist. Some day,
those excellent people who now decry them in every salon where jewels
are discussed, will give up the hope of attempting to buy them cheaply;
and I shall make my profit. Everything comes to him who _can_ wait, and
I am not in a hurry. As to the others, which have been the pivots of
romance or serious story, they may well lie as they are while they serve
my memory in the jotting down of some of these mysteries.

And that they do serve it I have no measure of doubt. Here, for
instance, is a little bag of pearls and diamonds. It contains a black
pearl from Koepang, so rich in silvery lustre, and so perfect in shape,
that it should be worth eight hundred pounds in any market in Europe; a
couple of pink pearls from the Bahamas, of fine orient yet pear-shaped,
and therefore less valuable as fashion dictates; five old Brazilian
diamonds averaging two carats each; a number of smaller diamonds for
finish; and two great white pearls, which I find at the very bottom of
the bag. Those stones were bought by the late Lord Maclaren a month
before the date announced for his marriage with the Hon. Christine King.
He had intended them as his gift to her, a handsome and sufficient gift,
it must be admitted, yet so did fickle fortune work that his very
generosity was the indirect cause of a commotion in the week of the
wedding, and of as pretty a social scandal as society has known for a
decade.

The matter was hushed up of course. For six weeks, as a wag said, it was
a nine days' wonder. Aged ladies discussed it from every point of view,
but could make nothing of it. The Society papers lacked enough
information to lie about it. The principal actors held their tongues,
and in due time the West forgot, for a new scandal arose, and the courts
supplied the craving for the doubtful, which is a part of polite
education nowadays. Yet I do not think that I make a boastful claim, in
asserting that I alone, beyond those immediately concerned, became
possessed of full knowledge of the occurrence. It was to me first of all
that Lord Maclaren related the history of it, and, despite my advice to
the contrary, laid it upon me that I should tell none in his lifetime.
He is dead now, and the publication of the story will throw a light upon
much that is well worth investigating. It may also help me to sell the
pearls, which is infinitely more important, as any unprejudiced person
will admit.

Here then is the story. I had a visit from the chief actor in it towards
the end of June in the year 1890. He came to tell me that he was to be
married quietly in the middle of the following month to the Hon.
Christine King, the very beautiful sister of Lord Cantiliffe. She was
then staying at the old family place at St. Peter's, in Kent; and she
wished to avoid a public wedding in view of the recent death of her
sister, whose beauty was no less remarkable than her own. Maclaren's
visit was but the prelude to the purchase of a present, and the business
was made the easier since he had the simplest notions as to his
requirements. He had recently come from America--without a wife
_mirabile dictu_--and there had seen a curious anchor bracelet. The
wristband of this bauble was formed of a plain gold cable, the anchor
itself of pearls and diamonds; the shackle consisted of a small circle
of brilliants; the shaft had a pink pearl at either end; the shank had a
black pearl at the foot of it, and the flukes were of white pearls with
small diamonds round them. I found it to be rather a vulgar ornament;
but his heart was set on having it, and it chanced that I had the very
pearls necessary. I told him that I would make him a model, and send it
down to his hotel at Ramsgate within a week; and that, if he then
thought the jewel to be over showy, we could refashion it. He left much
pleased, returning by the Granville express to Kent; and within the week
he had the model; and I received his instructions to proceed with the
work.

It is necessary, I think, to say a word here about this curious
character. At the time I knew him, Maclaren was a man in his fortieth
year, though he looked older. He was once vulgarly described in a club
smoking-room as being "all hair and teeth," like a buzzard; and his best
friend could not have ranked him with the handsome. Yet the women liked
him--perhaps because it was a tradition that he made love to every
pretty girl in town; and it was surprising beyond belief that he reached
his fortieth year, and remained single. When he went to America in 1888
the whole of the prophets gave him six months of celibacy; but he
cheated them, and returned without a wife. True, a copy of an American
society paper was passed round the club, where the men learnt with
surprise that New York had believed this elderly Don Juan to be engaged
to Evelyn Lenox, "the lady of the unlimited dollars," as young
Barisbroke of the Bachelors' called her; and had been very indignant
when he took passage by the _Teutonic_, and left her people to face the
titters of a triumphant rivalry. But for all that he was not married,
and could afford to laugh at the malignant scribes who made couplets of
his supposed amatory adventures in Boston; and dedicated sonnets of
apology, "_pro amore mea_," to E---- L---- and the marrying mothers of
New York generally. Such a man cared little for the threats of this
young lady's brother, or for the common rumor that she was the most
dashing girl in New York city, and would make things unpleasant for him.
He had twenty thousand a year, and for _fiancee_ one of the prettiest
roses in the whole garden of Kent. What harm then could a broker's
daughter, three thousand miles away, do to him? or how mar his
happiness?

But I am anticipating, and must hark back to the anchor with the flukes
of pearl. I sent the model down on Wednesday; on the Friday morning I
received the order to proceed with the work. Early on the following
Monday, as I read my paper in a cab on the way to Bond Street, I saw a
tremendous headline which announced the "sudden and mysterious
disappearance of Lord Maclaren." The report said that he had left his
hotel on the Saturday afternoon to walk, as the supposition went, to St.
Peters. But he had never reached Lord Cantiliffe's house; and although
search had been made by the police and by special coastguard parties, no
trace of him had been found. I need scarcely say that the murder theory
was set up at once. Clever men from town came down to wag their heads
with stupid men from Canterbury, and to discuss the "only possible
theory," of which there were a dozen or more. The police arrested all
the drunken men within a radius of ten miles, and looked for bloodstains
on their coats. The Hon. Christine King was spoken of as "distracted,"
which was possible; and the family of the missing nobleman as "plunged
into the most profound grief." Nor, as an eloquent special reporter in
his best mood explained, was this supposed tragedy made less painful by
the knowledge that the unhappy victim of accident or of murder was to
have been married within the month.

For a whole week the press had no other topic; the police telegraphed to
all the capitals; a reward of a thousand pounds was offered for
knowledge of Lord Maclaren, "last seen upon the East Cliff at Ramsgate
at three o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, the fifth of July." A
hundred tongues gave you the exact details of an imagined assassination;
ten times that number--and these tongues chiefly feminine--told you that
he had shirked the marriage upon its very threshold. But the mystery
remained unexplained--and as the day for the wedding drew near, the
excitement amongst a section of society rose to fever heat. Had the body
been found? Had the detectives a clue? Were the strange hints--implying
that the missing man had quarrelled with his _fiancee's_ brother, and
thrown a glass of wine in his face; that he had a wife in Algiers; that
he was married a year ago at Cyprus; that he was bankrupt--merely the
fable of malicious tongues, or had they that germ of truth from which so
vast a disease of scandal can grow? I made no pretence to answer the
questions--but they interested me, and I watched for the development of
the story with the keenness of a hardened novel reader.

The day fixed for the wedding now drew near; and when the bridegroom did
not appear, the vulgar, who do not believe scandals though they like to
hear them, declared that the murder theory was true beyond question. The
rest said that he was either bankrupt or bigamist--and having consoled
themselves with the reflection, they let the matter go. It is likely
that I should have done the same had I not enjoyed a solution of the
mystery, which came to me unsought and accidentally. On a day near to
that fixed for the wedding I was at Victoria Station about eight o'clock
in the evening when I ran full upon the missing nobleman; and for some
while stood speechless with astonishment at the sight of him. His beard
was longer than ever, recalling the traditions of Killingworthe or of
Johann Mayo; his Dundreary whiskers were shaggy and unkempt; he was very
pale in the face, and wore a little yachting cap and a blue serge suit
which begarbed him ridiculously. He had no luggage with him, not even a
valise; and his first remark was given in the voice of a man afraid, and
in a measure broken.

"Ah, Sutton, that's you, is it?" he cried. "I'm glad to see you, by
Jove; have you such a thing as half-a-crown in your pocket?"

I offered him half-a-sovereign, still saying nothing; but he continued
rapidly,--

"You've heard all about it, of course--what are they saying here now? Do
they think I'm a dead man, eh?--but I won't face them yet. Upon my
life, I dare not see a soul. Come with me to an hotel; there's a good
fellow--but let's have a cognac first; I'm shivering like a child with a
fever."

I gave him some brandy at a bar, and after that we took a four-wheeled
cab--he insisting on the privacy--and drove to a private hotel in
Cecil-street, Strand. They did not know him there, and I engaged a room
for him and ordered dinner, taking these things upon myself, since he
was as helpless as a babe. After the meal he seemed somewhat better, and
I telegraphed to Ramsgate for his man, though it was impossible that the
fellow could be with him until the following morning. In the meantime I
found myself doing valet's work for him--but I had his story; and
although it was not until some months later that another supplied some
of the missing links in it, he telling me the barest outline, I will set
it down here plainly as a narrative, and without any of those "says I's"
and "says he's," which were the particular abomination of Defoe, as they
have been of many since his day.

The complete explanation of this mystery was one, I think, to astonish
most people. It was so utterly unlooked for, that I was led at the first
hearing to believe the narrator insane. He told me that at three o'clock
on the afternoon of July 5th, he had left his hotel on the East Cliff at
Ramsgate--the day being glorious, and a full sun playing upon the
Channel and many ships--and had determined to walk over to St. Peters,
where his _fiancee_ expected him to a tennis party. With this intention,
he struck along the cliff towards Broadstairs, but had gone only a few
paces, when a seaman stopped him, and touching his hat respectfully,
said that he had a message for him.

"Well, my man, what is it?" Maclaren asked--I had the dialogue from the
seaman himself--being in a hurry as those who walk the ways of love
usually are.

"My respects to your honor," replied the fellow, "but the ketch
_Bowery_, moored off the pier-head, 'ud be glad to see your honor if
convenient, and if not, maybe to-morrow?"

"What the devil does the man mean?" cried his lordship, but the seaman
plucking up courage continued,--

"An old friend of your honor's for sure he is, my guv'ner, Abraham
Burrow, what you had the acquaintance of in New York city."

"Well, and why can't he come ashore? I remember the man perfectly--I
have every cause to"--a true remark, since Abraham Burrow then owed the
speaker some two thousand pounds; and had shown no unprincipled desire
to pay it.

"The fact is, my lordship," replied the seaman, whose vocabulary was
American and strange, "the fact is he's tidy sick, on his beam ends, I
guess with brounchitis; and he won't be detaining you not as long as a
bosun's whistle if you go aboard, and be easin' of him."

Now, although this comparatively juvenile lover was in a mighty hurry to
get to St. Peter's, there was yet a powerful financial motive to send
him to the ship. He had done business with this Abraham Burrow in
America; the man had--we won't say swindled--but been smart enough there
to relieve him of a couple of thousand pounds. To hope for the recovery
of such a sum seemed as childish as a sigh for the moon. Maclaren had
not seen Burrow for twelve months, and did not know a moment before this
meeting whether he was alive or dead. Yet here he was in a yacht off
Ramsgate harbor, desiring to see his creditor, and to see him
immediately. The latter reflected that such a visit would not occupy
half an hour of his time, that it might lead to the recovery of some
part of his money, that he could make his excuses to the pretty girl
awaiting him--in short, he went with the seaman; and in a quarter of an
hour he stepped on board an exceeding well-kept yacht, which lay beyond
the buoy over against the East Pier; and all his trouble began.

The craft, as I have said, was ketch rigged, and must have been of
seventy tons or more. There was a good square saloon aft, and a couple
of tiny cabins, the one amidships, the other at the poop. When Lord
Maclaren went aboard, three seamen and a boy were the occupants of the
deck; but a King Charles spaniel barked at the top of the companion; and
a steward came presently and asked the visitor to go below. He descended
to the saloon at this; but the sick man, they told him, lay in the fore
cabin; and thither he followed his very obsequious guide.

I had the account of this episode and of much that follows from two
sources, one a man I met in New York last summer, the other, the victim
of the singularly American conspiracy. Lord Maclaren's account was
simple--"As there's a heaven above me, Sutton," said he, "I'd no sooner
put my foot in the hole when the door was slammed behind me, and bolted
like a prison gate." The American said, "I guess the old boy had hardly
walked right in, before they'd hitched up the latch, and he was shouting
glory. Then the skipper let the foresail go--for the ketch was only
lyin'-to, and in ten minutes he was standing out down the Channel. But
you never heard such a noise as there was below in all your days. Talk
about a sheet and pillow-case party in an insane asylum, that's no word
for it."

The fact that the "illustrious nobleman," as the penny society papers
called him, was trapped admitted of no question. He realized it himself
in a few moments, and sat down to wonder, "who and why the devil, etc.,"
in five languages. I need scarcely say that the thing was an utter and
inexplicable mystery to him. He thought at first that robbery was the
motive, for he had the model of the bracelet upon him; and as he sat
alone in the cabin, he really feared personal violence. He told me that
he waited to see the door open, and a villain enter, armed with Colt or
knuckleduster, after the traditional Adelphian mood; but a couple of
hours passed and no one came, and after that the only interruption to
his meditation was the steward's knock upon the cabin door, and his
polite desire to know "Will my lord take tea?" "My lord" told him to
carry his tea to a latitude where high temperatures prevail; and after
that, continued to kick lustily at the door, and to make original
observations upon the owner of the yacht, and upon her crew, until the
light failed. Yet no one heeded him; and when it was dark the roll of
the yacht to the seas made him sure that they stood well out, and were
beating with a stiff breeze.

Unto this point, temper had dominated him; but now a quiet yet very deep
alarm took its place. He began to ask himself more seriously if his
position were not one of great danger, if he had not to face some
mysterious but very daring enemy--even if he were like to come out of
the adventure with his life. Yet his mind could not bring to his
recollection any deed that had merited vindictive anger on the part of
another; nor was he a blamable man as the world goes. He paid his
debts--every three years; he was amongst the governors of five
fashionable charities, and the only scandalous case which concerned him
was arranged between the lawyers on the eve of its coming into court.
The matrons told you that he was "a dear delightful rogue"; the men said
that he was "a cunning old dog"; and between them agreed that he had
read the commandments at least. Possibly, however, those hours of
solitude in the cabin compelled him to think rather of his vices than of
his virtues--and it may be that the fear was so much the more real as
his shortcomings were secret. Be that as it may, he assured me that he
had never suffered so much as he did during that strange imprisonment,
and that he cried almost with delight when the door of the cabin opened,
and he saw the table of the saloon set for dinner, and light falling
upon it from a handsome lamp below the skylight. During one delicious
moment he thought himself the victim of a well-meaning practical
joker--the next his limbs were limp as cloth, and he sank upon a
cushioned seat with a groan which must have been heard by the men above.

This scene has been so faithfully described to me that I can see it as
clearly as though I myself stood amongst the players. On the one hand, a
pretty little American girl, with hands clasped and malicious laughter
about her rosy mouth; on the other, a shrinking, craven, abject shadow
of a man, cowering upon the cushions of a sofa, in blank astonishment,
and hiding his view of her with bony fingers. At a glance you would have
said that the girl was not twenty--but she was twenty-three, the picture
of youth, with the color of the sea-health upon her cheeks, the spray of
the sea-foam glistening in her rich brown hair. She had upon her head a
little hat of straw poised daintily; her dress was of white serge with a
scarf of yacht-club colors at the throat; but her feet were the tiniest
in the world, and the brown shoes which hid them not unfit for an
artist's model. And as she stood laughing at the man who had become her
guest upon the yacht, her attitude would have made the fortune of half
the painters in Hampstead. The two faced each other thus silently for a
few minutes, but she was the first to speak, her voice overflowing with
rippling laughter.

"Well," she said, "I call this real good of you, my lord, to come on my
yacht--when you were just off to the other girl--and your wedding's
fixed for the eighteenth of July. My word, you're the kindest-hearted
man in Europe."

He looked up at her, some shame marked in his eyes, and he said,--

"Evelyn, I--I--never thought it was you!"

"Then how pleased you must be. Oh, I'm right glad, I tell you; I'm just
as pleased as you are. To think that we've never met since you left
N'York in such a flurry that you hadn't time even to send me a line--but
of course you men are so busy and so smart that girls don't count, and I
knew you were just dying to see me, and I sent the boat off saying it
was old Burrow--how you love Burrow!--and here you are, my word!"

She spoke laboring under a heavy excitement, so that her sentences
flowed over one another. But he could scarce find a coherent word, and
began to tremble as she went on,--

"You'll stay awhile, of course, and--why, you're as pale as spectres, I
guess. Now if you look like that I shall begin to think that we're not
the old friends we were in N'York a year ago, and walk right upstairs to
Arthur. You remember my brother Arthur, of course you do. He was your
particular friend, wasn't he?--but how you boys quarrel. They really
told me two months ago in the city that Arthur was going in the shooting
business with you. Fancy that now, and at your age."

This sentence revealed what was lacking in the character of the girl; it
showed that malicious, if rather low and vulgar, cunning which prompted
the whole of this adventure; and it betrayed a revenge which was worthy
of a Frenchwoman. Maclaren had but to hear the harsh ring of the voice
to know that the girl who had threatened him months ago in New York had
met her opportunity, and that she would use it to the last possibility.
Every word that she uttered with such meaning vehemence cut him like a
knife; his hair glistened with the drops of perspiration upon it; his
right hand was passed over his forehead as though some heat was
tormenting his brain. And as her voice rose shrilly, only to be
modulated to the pretence of suavity again, he blurted out,--

"Evelyn, what are you going to do?"

"I--my dear Lord Maclaren--I am entirely in your hands; you are my
guest, I reckon, and even in America we have some idea of what that
means. Now, would you like to play cards after dinner, or shall we have
a little music?"

The steward entered the cabin at this moment, and the conversation being
interrupted, Maclaren chanced to see that the companion was free. A wild
idea of appealing to the captain of the yacht came to him, and he made a
sudden move to mount the ladder. He had but taken a couple of steps,
however, when a lusty young fellow, perhaps of twenty-five years of age,
barred the passage, and pushed him with some roughness into the cabin
again. The man closed the long, panelled door behind him; and then
addressed the unwilling guest.

"Ah, Maclaren, so that's you--devilish good of you to come aboard, I
must say."

The newcomer was Evelyn Lenox's brother, the owner of the ketch
_Bowery_. He acted his part in the comedy with more skill than his
sister, having less personal interest in it; indeed, amusement seemed
rather to hold him than earnestness. It was perfectly clear to Maclaren,
however, that he would stand no nonsense; and seeing that a further
exhibition of feeling would not help him one jot, the unhappy prisoner
succumbed. When the dinner was put upon the table, he found himself
sitting down to it mechanically, and as one in a dream. It was an
excellent meal to come from a galley; and it was made more appetizing by
the wit and sparkle of the girl who presided, and who acted her _role_
to such perfection. She seemed to have forgotten her anger, and cloaked
her malice with consummate art. She was a well-schooled flirt--and her
victim consoled himself with the thought, "They will put me ashore in
the morning, and I can make a tale." By ten o'clock he found himself
laughing over a glass of whisky and soda. By eleven he was dreaming that
he stood at the altar in the church of St. Peter's and that two brides
walked up the aisle together.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next picture that I have to show you of Maclaren is one which I am
able to sketch from a full report of certain events happening on the
evening of his wedding day. The yacht lay becalmed some way out in the
bay of the Somme; the sea had the luster of a mirror, golden with a
flawless sheen of brilliant light which carried the dark shadows of
smack-hulls and flapping lug-sails. There was hardly a capful of wind,
scarce an intermittent breath of breeze from the land; and the crew of
the _Bowery_ lay about the deck smoking with righteous vigor, as they
netted or stitched, or indulged in those seemingly useless occupations
which are the delight of sailors. Often however, they stayed their work
to listen to the rise and fall of sounds in the saloon aft; and once,
when Maclaren's voice was heard almost in a scream, one of them,
squirting his tobacco juice over the bulwarks, made the sapient remark,
"Well, the old cove's dander is riz now, anyway."

The scene below was played vigorously. Evelyn Lenox sat upon the sofa,
her arms resting upon the cabin table, her bright face positively alight
with triumph. Maclaren stood before her with clenched hands and gnashing
teeth. Arthur, the brother, was smoking a pipe and pretending to read a
newspaper, leaving the conversation to his guest, who had no lack of
words.

"Good God, Evelyn," he said, "you cannot mean to keep me here any
longer--to-morrow's my wedding day!"

She answered him very slowly.

"How interesting! I remember the time, not so long ago, when my wedding
day was fixed--and postponed."

He did not heed the rebuke, but continued cravenly,--

"You do not seem to understand that your brother and yourself have
perpetrated upon me an outrage which will make you detested in every
country in Europe. Great Heaven! the whole town will laugh at me. I
shan't have a friend in the place; I shall be cut at every club, as I'm
a living man."

The girl listened to him, her eyes sparkling with the excitement of it.
"Did you never stop to think," said she, "when you left America, like
the coward you were, that people would laugh at me, too, and I should
never be able to look my friends in the face again? Why, even in the
newspapers they held me up to ridicule when my heart was breaking. You
speak of suffering; well, I have suffered."

Her mood changed, as the mood of women does--suddenly. The feminine
instinct warred against the actress, and prevailed. She began to weep
hysterically, burying her head in her arms; and a painful silence fell
on the man. He seemed to wait for her to speak; but when she did so,
anger had succeeded, and she rose from her place and stamped her foot,
while rage seemed to vibrate in her nerves.

"Why do I waste my time on you?" she cried; "you who are not worth an
honest thought. Pshaw! 'Lord Maclaren, illustrious nobleman and great
sportsman'"--she was quoting from an American paper--"go and tell them
that for ten days you have humbled yourself to me, and have begged my
pity on your knees. Go and tell them that my crew have held their sides
when the parts have been changed, and you have been the woman. Oh, they
shall know, don't mistake that; your wife shall read it on her wedding
tour. I will send it to her myself, I, who have brought the laugh to my
side now, scion of a noble house. Go, and take the recollection of your
picnic here as the best present I can give to you."

I was told that Maclaren looked at her for some moments in profound
astonishment when she pointed to the cabin door. Then, without a word,
he went on deck, to find the yacht's boat manned and waiting for him. He
said himself that many emotions filled him as he stepped off the
yacht--anger at the outrage, desire for revenge, but chiefly the
emotions of the thought, was there time to reach St. Peter's for the
wedding ceremony? He did not doubt that lies would save him from the
American woman, if things so happened that he could reach England by the
morning of the next day. But could he? Where was he? Where was he to be
put ashore? He asked the men at the oars these questions in a breath,
standing up for one moment as the boat pushed off to shake his fist at
the yacht, and cry, "D--n you all!" But the answer that he got did not
reassure him. He was to be put ashore, the seaman said, at Crotoy, the
little town on a tongue of land in the bay of the Somme. There was a
steamer thence once a day to Saint Valery, from which point he could
reach Boulogne by rail. He realized in a moment that all his hope
depended on catching the steamer. If she had not sailed, he would arrive
at Boulogne before sunset, and, if need were, could get across by the
night mail and a special train from Folkestone. But if she had sailed!
This possibility he dared not contemplate.

The men were now rowing rapidly towards the shore, whose sandy dunes and
flat outlines were becoming marked above the sea-line. The yacht lay far
out, drifting on a glassy mirror of water; the sun was sinking with
great play of yellow and red fire in the arc of the west. Maclaren had
then, however, no thought for Nature's pictures, or for seascapes. One
burning anxiety alone troubled him--had the steamer sailed? He offered
the men ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred pounds if they would catch her.
The remark of one of them that she left on the top of the tide begot in
him a mad eagerness to learn the hour of high-water; but none of those
with him could remember it. He found himself swaying his body in rhythm
with the oars as coxswains do; or standing up to look at the white
houses shorewards. Another half-hour's rowing brought him a sight of the
pier; he shouted out with a laugh that might have come from a jackal
when he saw that the steamer was moored against it, and that smoke was
pouring heavily from her funnels.

"Men," he said, "if you catch that boat, I'll give you two hundred and
fifty pounds!" and later on their lethargy moved him to such disjointed
exclamations as "For the love of heaven, get on to it!" "Now, then, a
little stronger--fine fellows, all of you--a marriage depends upon
this." "I'll give you a gold watch apiece, as I'm alive." "By----, she's
moving--no, she isn't, there's time yet, if you'll put your backs on to
it--time, time--oh, Lord, what a crawl, what a cursed crawl!"

If one had peered into the faces of the yachtsmen critically, one might
have detected the ripples of smirks about their lips; but Maclaren could
not take his eyes away from the steamer, and the import of the
suppressed amusement was lost upon him. The little town of Crotoy, with
the garish _etablissement des bains_, the picturesque church, and the
time-wrecked ramparts escarped by the ceaseless play of currents, was
then not half a mile away; but a bell was ringing on the pier, and there
was all the hurry and the press known in "one packet" or "one train"
towns. Those who had much to do did it slowly, that they might enjoy
leisure to blow whistles or to shout; those who had little atoned by
great displays of ineffective activity. Some ran wildly to and fro near
the steamer; others bawled incomprehensible ejaculations, and incited,
both those who were to leave by the ship, and those who were not, to
hurry, or they would be late. Presently the little passenger steamer
whistled with a hoarse and lowing shriek, and cast foam behind her
wheels. Maclaren observed the motion, and cried out as a man in pain,
waving his arms wildly. Those on shore mistook as much as they could see
of his surprising signals for a parting salute to the vessel; and she
left ten minutes after her time--without him.

He was hot from the battle of excitement, rivulets of perspiration
trickling upon his face; but he had breath to curse the crew of the
yacht's boat for five minutes when he stepped ashore; and the request of
the coxswain to drink his health stirred up uncounted gifts for
oath-making within him. In a quarter of an hour he was raving about the
town of Crotoy, threatening to do himself injury if a boat were not
forthcoming to carry him to St. Valery, whence he could get train to
Boulogne. But the day was nigh gone, and the local seamen were at their
homes. Few cared for his commission, and the man who took it ultimately
set him down just twenty minutes after the last train had left.

       *       *       *       *       *

The accounts given in the society papers for the abandonment of the
wedding between Lord Maclaren and the Hon. Christine King were many. The
true one is found in the simple statement that his lordship did not
reach England until the evening of the day which had been fixed for the
ceremony. So the presents were returned--and I kept the pearls which
were to have made the famous anchor bracelet. And when I think the
matter over, I cannot wonder at Maclaren's hatred of them, or of his
wish that I should burn them.

"Sutton," he said, "I was more than a fool. I ought to have remembered
that Evelyn Lenox was with me when I saw the piece of stuff similar to
that I wanted you to make. Why, I got the very notion of it from her,
and it was only when one of your idiots let a society journalist know
what you were doing for me that she heard of the marriage, and of my
being at Ramsgate."

But the rest of his remarks were purely personal.




THE WATCH AND THE SCIMITAR.




THE WATCH AND THE SCIMITAR.


The city of Algiers, the beautiful El Djzair, as the guide-book maker
calls it, has long ceased to charm the true son of the East, _blase_
with the nomadic fulness of the ultimate Levant, or charged with those
imaginary Oriental splendors which are nowhere writ so large as in the
catalogues and advertisements of the later day upholsterer. This is not
the fault of the new Icosium, as any student of the Moorish town knows
well; nor is it to be laid to the account of the French usurpation, and
that strange juncture of Frank and Fatma, which has brought the
boulevard to the city of the Corsairs and banished Mohammed to the
shadow of the Kasbah. Rather, it is the outcome of coupons and of
co-operative enthusiasm, which sends the roamer to many lands, of which
he learns the names, and amongst many people with whose customs he
claims familiarity.

To know Algiers, something more than a three days' _pension_ in the
Hotel de la Regence is necessary; though that is the temporal limit for
many who return to Kensington or Mayfair to protest that "it is so
French, you know." I can recollect well the monitions and advice which I
received two years gone when I ventured a voyage to Burmah--in the
matter of the ruby interest--and determined to see Cairo, Tunis, and the
City of Mosques on my return westward. Many told me that I would do
better to reach Jaffa and Jerusalem, others advised the seven churches
of Asia; many spoke well of Rhodes; all agreed, whether they had been
there or whether they had not, that Algiers was eaten up with
Chauvinism, and scarce worthy a passing call. Barisbroke at the club,
who is always vigorous in persuading other people not to do things,
summed it up in one of his characteristically inane jokes. "It's had its
Dey," said he, and buried himself in his paper as though the project
ended then and there upon his own _ipse dixit_. This marked and decided
consensus of opinion could have had but one result--it sent me to the
town of Hercules at the first opportunity.

If the truth is to be told, the visit was in some part one of pleasure,
but in the more part a question of sequins. I had done well in the
remoter East, and had sent some fine parcels of rubies, sapphires, and
pearls to Bond Street; but a side-wind of curiosity casting me up upon
the shores of Tunis, I had bought there, in the house of a very
remarkable Jew, a bauble whose rival in strange workmanship and splendor
of effect I have not yet met with. It was, to describe it simply, the
model of a Moorish scimitar perhaps four inches long, the sheath
exquisitely formed of superb brilliants, the blade itself of platinum,
and in the haft not only a strange medley of stones, but a little watch
with a thin sheet of very fine pearl for a face, and a superb diamond as
the cup of the hands. Although the jewels in this were worth perhaps
five hundred pounds, the workmanship was so fine, and the whole bauble
had such an original look, that I paid eight hundred pounds for it
cheerfully, and thought myself lucky to get it at that. What is more to
the point, however, is the fact that the hazard which gave me the
possession of the scimitar sent me also to Algiers to hunt there for
like curiosities--and in the end brought me a large knowledge of the
Moorish town, and nearly cost me my life.

I had intended to stay in the town for three days, but on the very
evening of my coming to the Hotel d'Orleans in the Boulevard de la
Republique, I met a French lieutenant of artillery, a man by name Eugene
Chassaigne; an exceedingly pleasant fellow, and one who had some Arabic,
but small appreciation of anything beyond the "to-day" of life. He
laughed at my notion of buying anything in the upper city, and urged me
not to waste time plodding in dirty bazaars and amongst still dirtier
dealers. For himself his one idea was to be _dans le mouvement_; but he
brought me to know, on the second day of my visit, a singularly docile
Moor, Sidi ben Ahmed by name; and told me that if I still persisted in
my intention, the fellow would serve well for courier, valet, or in any
office I chose to place him. And in this he spoke no more than the
truth, as I was very soon to prove.

I have always thought when recalling this sheep-like Moor to my
recollection, that the Prophet had done him a very poor turn in locating
him so far away from the blessings of company-promotion and rickety
building societies. His face would have been his fortune at any public
meeting; and as for thoroughness, his love of detail was amazing. Before
I had been in his hands for twenty-four hours he knew me; being able to
tell you precisely how much linen I carried, the number of gold pieces
in my purse, my taste in fish and fruits, my object in coming to his
country. And this was vexatious; for all the vendors of Benares ware
fashioned in Birmingham, all the sellers of gaudy burnouses, the
hucksters of the tawdriest carpets and the most flimsy scimitars, held
concert on the steps of the hotel every time I showed my face within
twenty paces of the door. Sidi alone was immobile, stolid "_Nom d'un
chien_--they are _blagueurs_ all," said he; and I agreed with him.

If these things troubled my man, the jewel I had purchased in Tunis
troubled him still more. How he learned that I had it heaven alone could
tell; but he did not fail to come to me at _dejeuner_ each morning and
to repeat with unfailing regularity the monition, "If Allah wills, the
jewel is stolen." I used to tolerate this at first; but in the end he
exasperated me; and upon the seventh morning I showed him the model and
said emphatically, "Sidi, you will please to observe that Allah does not
will the loss of the jewel--let us change the subject." He gave me no
answer, but on the next morning I had from him the customary
greeting--and the laugh was all upon his side, for the scimitar was
gone.

I say that the laugh was with Sidi, but in very truth I do not believe
that this worthy fellow ever laughed in his life. He possessed a stolid
immobility of countenance that would have remained in repose even at the
sound of the last trumpet. The intelligence which I conveyed to him, I
doubt not with pathetic anger, and much bad language, moved him no more
than the soft south wind moved the statue of the first Governor-General
out by the mosque there. He examined my ravished bag with a provoking
silence; muttered a few pessimistic sentences in Arabic; and then fell
back upon the Koran and the platitudes of his prophet. If he had been an
Englishman, I should have suspected him without hesitation; but he bore
such a character, he had been so long a servant of the hotel, he was by
his very stolidity so much above doubt, that this course was impossible;
and being unable to accuse him, I bade him take me to the nearest bureau
of police, that I might satisfy my conscience with the necessary farce.
This he did without a protest, but I saw that he looked upon me with a
pitying gaze, as one looks upon a child that is talking nonsense.

Although I flatter myself that I concealed my annoyance under a placid
exterior, this loss affected me more than I cared to tell. For one
thing, the jewel was very valuable (I was certain that I could have
obtained a thousand pounds for it in Bond Street); I was convinced,
moreover, that I should hardly discover its fellow if I searched Europe
through. During my stay at the Hotel d'Orleans I had kept it locked in a
well-contrived leather pouch in my traveling trunk; and as this pouch
had been opened with my own keys it was evident that the thief had
access to my bedroom during the night--a conclusion which led me to
think again of this stolid Moor, and to declare that the case against
him was singularly convincing. So strong, in fact, were my suspicions
that I made it my first care to go to the _maitre_ of the hotel and to
demand satisfaction from him with all the justifiable indignation which
fitted the case. When he heard my tale, his face would have given
Rembrandt a study.

"How?" said he. "Monsieur is robbed, and _chez-moi_?"

I repeated that I was, and told him that if he did not recover the
bauble in twenty-four hours, consequences would follow which would be
disastrous to his establishment. Then I asked him frankly about the Moor
Sidi; but he protested with tears in his eyes that he would as soon
accuse his own mother. He did not deny that some one in his house might
know something about it; and presently he had marshaled the whole of his
servants in the central court, addressing them with the fierce
accusation of a _juge d'instruction_. It is superfluous to add that we
made no headway, and that all his "desolation" left me as far from the
jewels I had lost as I was at the beginning of it.

From the hotel to the bureau of the police was an easy transition, but a
very hopeless one. A number of extremely polite, and elaborately
braided, officials heard me with interest and pity; and having covered
some folios of paper with notes declared that nothing could be done. For
themselves, their theory was that the Moor Sidi had been talking about
my treasure, and that some other domestic in the Hotel de la Regence had
opened my door while I slept and got possession of the ornament with
little risk. But that any one should recover the property was in their
idea a preposterous assumption.

"It is on its way to Paris," said one of them as he closed his note-book
with a snap, "and there's an end of it. We shall, without doubt, watch
the servants of the hotel closely for some time, but that should not
encourage you. It is possible that the man Mohammed, the porter of the
place, may know something of the affair. We shall have his house
searched to-day, but, my friend, _ne vous montez pas la tete_, we are
not in Paris, and the upper town is worse than a beehive. I am afraid
that your hope of seeing the thing again is small."

I was afraid so, too; but being accustomed to strange losses and to
strange recoveries, I determined to venture something in the hazard, and
to remain in Algiers for a few weeks, at any rate. The most difficult
part of my work lay in my ignorance of the city, and in that matter Sidi
alone could help me. Every day we went with measured and expectant tread
through that labyrinth of fantastic and half-dark streets, where
repulsive hags grin at the wickets below, and dark eyes coquette at the
gratings above; every day we delved in booths and bazaars, we haggled
with the jewel sellers, we bartered with the gold workers, but to no
purpose. I had come to think at last that the loss was not worth further
trouble; and had made up my mind to return to London, when I
recollected with some self-reproach that I had as yet neglected one of
the very simplest means to grapple with the occasion--that I had, in
fact, offered no reward for the recovery of the jeweled scimitar, and to
this omission owed, I did not doubt, the utter absence of clue or
conviction.

When I was yet angry with myself at this absurd oversight I had a second
thought which was even more useful, and one to which I owed much before
I had done with the matter. I remembered that the French police had set
down my loss to the loud talk of Sidi amongst the others at the hotel.
Why, then, I asked, should not this man also scatter the tidings that I
would give so many hundreds of francs for the recovery of the scimitar?
No sooner had I got the idea than I acted upon it.

"Sidi," said I, when he came to me on the next morning, "I have heard
much of your cleverness, but you have not yet found my property; now I
will give a thousand francs to the man who brings it here within a
week."

To my utter surprise he bowed his head with his old gravity, and
answered, "If Allah wills, the jewel is found."

This was amazing, no doubt, and in its way a triumph of impudence. If he
could find it with that ease, then he must have known by whom it was
stolen. I turned upon him at once with the accusation, but he stood with
the gravity of granite and responded to all my threats with the simple
greeting, as of a father to a son,--

"And upon you be peace."

To have argued with such a rogue would have been as useful as a
demonstration in theology before a mollah; to have accused him boldly of
the theft would have been absurd, even had I not possessed such a wealth
of testimony in his favor. I sent him about his business, therefore, and
went in search of my friend Chassaigne, who had been away since I lost
the trinket, but was then at the arsenal again. The lieutenant took the
news with edifying calmness, but assured me that I had at last taken the
only course which was at all likely to result in success.

"Our friend the Moor," said he, "is the most honorable of his kind in
Algiers, where all are rogues. I do not believe for a moment that he
stole the jewels, although his father, his uncle, or his own brother may
have done so. Your reward may tempt him to return them if the police set
up a hue and cry; but if he suggests that you go up in the old town to
receive them, tell him you will do nothing of the sort. There are far
too many dark eyes and sharp knives there for an Englishman's taste, and
a Moor still has claims in Paradise for every Frank he sticks. If you
took the other course, and sought your money from this hotel-keeper, he
would bring a hundred to swear that you did not lose the stones in the
hotel, and you would be where you are. It's annoying to adopt a _laissez
aller_ policy, but I fear you can do nothing else."

I thought that he was right, but my habitual obstinacy was all upon me,
and I found myself as much determined to recover the jewels I had lost
as if they had been worth ten thousand pounds. I was quite sure that
the police would do nothing, and save that they informed me in a
cumbrous document that they had searched the house of Mohammed the
porter, and of five others, my surmise proved a true one. It was left to
Sidi, and for Sidi I waited on the morning of the ninth day with an
expectancy which was unwarrantably large. He came to me at his usual
hour, eight o'clock, and when he had salaamed, he said,--

"If Allah is willing, the jewel is found--but the money is not enough."

"Not enough!" said I, choking almost with anger, "the money is not
enough! Why, you brazen-faced blackguard, what do you mean?"

He replied with an appeal to the beard of the Prophet, and an evident
word of contempt for my commercial understanding. The irony of the whole
situation was so great, and his immobility so stupendous, that I quickly
forbore my anger and said,--

"Very well, Sidi, we will make it fifteen hundred francs." And with that
he went off again, and I saw him no more until the next day, when he
repeated the _incha Allaeh_ and the intimation that the price was too
low. On this occasion my anger overcame me. I seized him by the throat,
and shaking him roughly, said,--

"You consummate rascal, I believe you have the jewels all the time; if
you don't bring them in an hour, I will take you to the police myself."

My anger availed me no more than my forbearance. It did but awaken that
inherent dignity before which I cowed; and when I had done with him, he
left me and came no more for three days. On the third morning when he
returned he looked at me with reproach marked in his deep black eyes;
and raising his hands to heaven he protested once more in the old words,
and to the old conclusion. I was then so wearied of the very sound of
his voice that I took him by the shoulders and held him down upon an
ottoman until he would consent to bargain with me, shekel by shekel for
the return of my gems; and in the end he consented to make me the
longest speech that I had yet had from his lips.

"By the beard of my father," said he, "I protest to milord that neither
I nor my people have the precious thing he wots of; but the dog of a
thief, upon whose head be desolation, is known to me. For money he took
the jewel, for money he shall lay it again at milord's feet; yet not
here, but in the house of his people, where none shall see and none
shall know."

A long argument, and some fine bargaining, enabled me to get to the
bottom of the whole story; but only under a solemn oath that the keeping
of the secret should be shared by no one. With much fine recital and
many appeals to the holy marabouts to bear witness, Sidi demonstrated
that the thief was no other than Mohammed the porter, who had the stone
hidden with extraordinary cunning, and from whom it was to be got only
at my own personal risk.

"Under the shadow of the Kasbah it lies," said he; "under the shadow of
the Kasbah must you seek it with those I shall send to you, and no
others. Obey them in all things; be silent when they are silent, speak
when they speak, fly and lose not haste when they bid you fly."

This was all very vague, but a deeper acquaintance with his purpose made
it the more clear. In answer to my question why he could not bring the
jewel to the hotel, he said that it would never be surrendered except to
a certain force; and with that force he would supply me. He himself
seemed to be under an oath to bear no hand to the emprise; and he was
emphatic in laying down the condition that I must go absolutely alone;
or, said he, "the hand of Fatma shall not be passed nor that which you
seek come to you."

Now, the proper spirit in which to have received this suggestion would
have been that of an uncompromising negative. Chassaigne had cautioned
me particularly against going into the old town, and here was I
hearkening to a proposition to visit it not only by night, but in the
company of those who possibly were honest, but more possibly were
cut-throats. I knew well enough what he would say to the venture; and
truly I was much disposed to refuse it at the beginning, and to go to
London as I had at first intended. This I told Sidi, and he gave me for
answer a shrug of the shoulders, which implied that if I did, my
property, for which I hoped to get a thousand pounds, would certainly
remain behind me. Nor did threats and entreaties move him one iota from
his position, neither on that day nor on the next two; so that I saw in
the end that I had better decide quickly, or take ship and fly a city of
indolent Frenchmen and rascally Moors.

It would prove tedious to recount to you the various processes of
reasoning by which, finally, I found myself of a mind to court this
hazard and agreed to Sidi's terms. He on his part had vouched for my
safety; and after all, the man who ever wraps his life in cotton-wool,
as it were, must see little beyond the stuffy box on his own habitation.
Here was a chance to see the Moors _chez-eux_, possibly to risk a broken
head with them; in any case, a chance which an adventurous man might be
thankful for, and which I took.

Having once agreed to Sidi's terms, he set upon the realization of the
project with unusual ardor. The very next evening was chosen for the
undertaking, the hour being close upon ten, and the Moor himself
accompanying me some part of the way. He had advised me to equip myself
_en Arabe_ for the business; and this I did with some little discomfort,
especially in the manipulation of the long burnouse, and in the carriage
of appalling headgear which he would not allow me to dispense with. I
had put these things on at the hotel; but as it is not unusual for a
Frank to ape the Moor when wishing to explore the upper town at night, I
escaped unpleasant curiosity, and arrived at the steep ascent of the Rue
de la Lyre, feeling that I was like, at any rate, to get more excitement
out of the old city than nine-tenths of the Englishmen who visit her.

Almost at the top of the street the Moor's friends met me. I could see
little of their faces, for they covered them as much as possible with
their somber-hued cloaks, but they salaamed profoundly on greeting me;
and Sidi took his leave when he had exchanged a few words in Arabic with
them. From that time onward they did not speak, but went straight
forward into the old quarter, and soon we had entered a narrow way where
flights of stairs, frequently recurring, led one up towards the Kasbah.
Here the gables seemed to be exchanging whispered confidences as they
craned forwards across the stone-paved ascent; you could see the zenith
of the silver sky shot with starlight through the jutting angles of
rickety roofs and bulging eaves; the hand of Fatma protected the hidden
doors of the pole-shored but singularly picturesque houses; the sound of
tom-toms and _derboukas_ came from the courts of the Kahouaji. The peace
of the scene, deriving something from the distant and seductive
harmonies, got color from the slanting flood of moonlight which streamed
upon the pavement, from the swell of song floating upward from the
hidden courts. Here and there one imagined that black eyes looked down
upon one from the gratings of the shadowed windows above; a Biskri,
strong of limb and bronzed, lurked now and then in the dark angles of
the quaint labyrinth; a few Moors passing down to the lower city
inclined their heads gravely as we passed them. But for the most part
the children of the Prophet had gone to their recreations or their
sleep; the narrow path of stairs was untenanted, the silence and
softness of an African night held sway with all its potent beauty.

We must have mounted for ten minutes or more before my guides stopped at
a large house in a particularly uninviting looking _cul-de-sac_; and
having spoken a few words with an old crone at the wicket, we gained
admittance to a large court, and found it packed with a very curious
company. It was a picturesque place, gloriously tiled, and surrounded by
a gallery supported on slender columns of exquisite shape, terminating
in Moorish arches and fretwork balustrades. There the women, numbering
some score, sat; but I, knowing the danger of betraying the faintest
interest in a Moor's household, averted my eyes at once, and examined
more minutely the strange scene below. Here was a dense throng
surrounding a dervish who danced until he foamed; a throng of bronzed
and bearded Arabs sipping coffee and smoking hubble-bubble pipes with
profound gravity; a throng which seemed incapable of expressing any sort
of emotion, either of pleasure or of pain. At the further end of the
court, where many luxuriant palms and jars of gorgeous flowers gave
ornament to a raised dais, musicians squatted upon their haunches,
playing upon divers strange instruments, guitars, flutes, and the
gourd-like _derbouka_, and sent up a hideous and unbroken wave of
discordant harmony which made the teeth chatter and seemed to agitate
one's very marrow. It was a strange scene, full of life and color, and
above all of activity; and to what it owed its origin I have not learnt
to this day. I know only that our coming with such a lack of ceremony
did not disconcert either the host or his guests. They paused a moment
to give us an "Es-salaam alikoum," to which we returned the expected
"Oua alikoum es-salaam;" and with that we sat amongst the company, but
in a very conspicuous place, and took coffee with the gravity of the
others.

I must confess that the surprise of finding myself in such a place was
very great. I had gone with the Moors to recover a thousand pounds'
worth of property, but how the visit brought me nearer to that, or to
any purpose whatever, I could not see. I knew that I was the only
European in the company, and all tradition as well as common-sense told
me of my danger. Yet I had gone of my own will, and the Moor Sidi had
encouraged me to the risk, which after all, I thought, was worth
bartering for the sight of so strange an entertainment. Indeed, it is
not in accord with my fatalistic creed to conjure up terrors of the mind
in moments of comparative tranquillity; and when I realized that the
question of wisdom, or want of wisdom, was no longer under discussion, I
fell in with the spirit of this singular festivity--and waited for
enlightenment.

The feast of performance was now going briskly. A conjurer trod upon the
heels of the dervish, and performed a few palpable feats which deceived
no one but himself; and after that we had the expected dancing girls,
and the Ouled-Nails. Nor were the latter the central piece, as it were,
of our host's program; for presently the Moors about me ceased their
babbling; there was a restless chatter in the gallery above, the old
host whispered something to his attendant, and new musicians, who had
relieved the others, struck up a hideous banging of tom-toms,
flageolets, and guitars. At that very moment, when I had come to the
conclusion that Sidi ben Ahmed had made a fool of me, and that my
errand was to end idly, one of my guides spoke for the first time,
putting his mouth close to my ear, and using very passable English.
"Now," said he, "be ready;" but whether he meant me to prepare for some
saltatory display, or for action, he did not condescend to say; and
before I could ask him a great applause greeted the advent of a dancing
girl, who bounded into the arena with a conventional run, and at once
began her amazing gyrations.

She was a beautiful girl, not more than eighteen years of age, I should
think, and probably a Circassian. She had clear-cut features, a
complexion bright with the freshness of youth, a figure of fine balance
and maturity; but the most striking thing about her was her hair. More
abundant or glossier tresses I have never seen. In color, a deep
golden-red, this magnificent silky gift was bunched upon her head in a
great coil at the back, and fell thence almost to her feet. It covered
her when she chose as the burnouses covered the Moors who watched her;
and she used it in her dancing with a _chic_ and skill unimaginable. In
one moment coiling it about her body so that she seemed wrapped in a
sheen of gold; in the next cast like an outspread fan behind her, she
presented a picture ravishing beyond description, and one which drew
shouts of "Zorah, Zorah!" even from the women in the galleries above. I
sat under the spell, enraptured like the rest; and as the girl floated
with a dreamy lightness, or pirouetted with amazing agility, or swept
past me with a motion that was the very essence of grace, I was ready
to declare that the dance was unrivaled by anything I had seen in any of
the capitals.

Now, the girl must have been dancing for a couple of minutes, and the
audience was thoroughly held by her prodigious cleverness, when I,
engrossed as the others, was suddenly interrupted in my contemplation of
her by the action of the Moors, my guides. To my utter surprise they all of
a sudden stood up on either side of me, and one of them crying to me in
English as before to be ready, the other seemed to wait for the girl
Zorah, who, with streaming hair and body thrown well back, was dancing
down towards us.

A few of the company near to us turned their heads, and cried out at the
interruption; but the girl came on with quick steps, and when she was
just upon us, the Moor who waited seized her by her hair, and putting
his hands in the great coil upon her head, he unrolled it with a strong
grasp, and the missing scimitar, to my unutterable surprise, rolled out
upon the pavement.

I am willing to confess that for one moment the whole action dazed me so
completely that I stood like a fool gaping at the jewel, and at the
girl, who had begun to cling to the Moor and to scream. The thing was so
unlooked for, so strange, so incredible, that I could do nothing but ask
myself if it were really my bauble that lay upon the floor, or was I the
victim of an incomprehensible trick? Yet there was the jewel, and there
at my elbow were the two Moors, now all ready for the action aftermath.
Scarce, in fact, had one of them picked up my property and crammed it
into my hand before the uproar began, the whole roomful of erstwhile
sedate-looking men springing to their feet and turning upon us. For an
instant, the Moor who had snatched the jewel for me kept them back with
an harangue in Arabic of which I did not understand one word; but his
best and only card failed him at the first playing, and it remained to
face the danger and to fight it.

Of the extraordinary scene that followed I remember but little. It
seemed to me that I was surrounded in an instant by hungry, gleaming
hawk-like eyes which glowed with mischief; that women screamed, that
lamps were overturned; that I saw knives flashing on every side of me.
Had Sidi's men then failed him or displayed any craven cunning, I take
it that my body might have been hurled from the Kasbah within a minute
of the recovery of the jewel; but they showed quite an uncommon fidelity
and courage. Standing on either side of me so that my body was almost
wedged between theirs, they suddenly flashed long knives in the air, and
cut and parried with wondrous dexterity. For myself, I had only my
fists, and these I used with a generous freedom, thinking even in the
danger that a Moor's face is a substantial one to hit; and that a little
boxing goes a long way with him. Yet I could not help but realize that
the minute was a supreme one, and as the crowd of demoniacal and
shouting figures pressed nearer and nearer, threatening to bear us down
in the _melee_, I heard my heart thumping, and began to grow giddy.

As the press became more furious, the two men who had done so well were
gradually carried away from me. I found myself at last in the lower
corner of the room, surrounded by four burly fellows (the main body of
the company swarming round the Moors, my guides); and of these but one
had a knife in his hand. With this, taking the aggressive, he made a
prodigious cut at me, which slit my left arm from the shoulder almost to
the elbow; but I had no pain from the wound in the excitement of the
moment; and I sent him howling like a dervish with a heavy blow low down
upon the chest. Of the others, one I hit on the chin, whereupon he cried
like a woman; but the remaining two sprang upon me with altogether an
unlooked-for activity; and bore me down with a heavy crash upon the
pavement. I thought then that the end had come; for not only was I half
stunned with the blow, but the man who knelt upon my chest gripped my
throat with grim ferocity and threatened to squeeze the life out of me
as I lay. In that supreme moment I recollect that the lights of the room
danced before my eyes in surprising shapes; that I saw a vision of
dark-eyed but screaming women in the gallery above; that the jewel in my
vest cut my skin under the pressure of the Moor's knee; and that I fell
to wondering if I would live one minute or five. Then, as a new and
violent shouting reached me, even above the singing in my ears, the Moor
suddenly let go his hold, the light of the scene gave way to utter
impenetrable darkness, and I fainted.

[Illustration: Buying the scimitar.

    --_Page 152_]

       *       *       *       *       *

Next day I took _dejeuner_ at the Cafe Apollon with my arm in a sling,
and Chassaigne's talk to whet my appetite. He had occupied himself
during the morning in cross-examining Sidi, from whom he had wormed the
whole secret of the robbery.

"It is as clear as the sun," said he, "the porter Mohammed was advised
to steal the jewel by the man I unfortunately recommended to you.
Mohammed, knowing that the police would search his house and watch him,
hid the jewel in his wife's hair."

"His wife!" said I. "Was this dancing girl married to a scamp like
that?"

"Certainly; these Circassians don't make great matches, if they make a
good many of them. Their husbands are generally loafers about the cafes;
and this girl was no more fortunate in that way than most of her
sisters. You see, the fun of the business is that Sidi got two thousand
francs from this man for telling him how to steal your jewels, and
another two thousand from you for stealing them back again. That's why
he did not go with you himself last night. Luckily, I went into your
hotel at ten o'clock, and learning from the man where you had gone, I
followed you with a dozen of my fellows."

"You came at a happy time, my dear fellow," said I, "in another five
minutes I should have needed only an executor."

"That's true; you were nearly dead when I had the pleasure of kicking
the man who sat on your head. But it was your own fault, you must
admit."

"Any way," said I, "I got the stones, and that's something."

He agreed to this, and when I had thanked him for the great service he
had done me, we parted. That night I left Algiers, carrying with me the
pacific benediction of the admirable Moor, Sidi, who, despite the fact
that I had kicked him down the steps of the hotel in the morning, came
with me to the steamer, and patronized me to the end of it. I can hear
to this day his last and final salutation:--

"Blessed be Allah, the jewel is found!"




THE SEVEN EMERALDS.




THE SEVEN EMERALDS.


The man stood upon the weir-bridge watching me, a conspicuous man with
strange clothes for river-work upon him, and a haunting activity which
drove him from the lock to the inn, and again from the inn to the lock
with a crazy restlessness which was maddening. I had been for some hours
whipping the mill-stream, which lies over against the lockhouse at
Pangbourne; but meeting with no success amongst the chub, which on this
particular July evening were aggravatingly indifferent even to the
succulent frog, I had punted to the bushes in the open river; and there
lit my pipe and fell to speculation upon him who favored me with so
close an attention. I have said that he was a conspicuous man, and to
this I owed it that I had seen him. He wore the straw hat of Jesus
College, Cambridge, and a velvet coat which shone brown and greasy in
the falling sunlight; but his legs were encased in salmon-pink riding
breeches, and he had brown boots reaching to his knees. Beyond this, he
was singularly handsome, so far as I could judge with the river's
breadth between us; and his hair was fair with a ridiculous golden
strain quite unlooked for in one who has grown to manhood. Why he
watched me so closely I could not even conjecture, but the fact was not
to be disputed. I had lain by the mill since the forenoon, and since the
forenoon he had hugged to the weir-bridge or to the lockhouse, giving no
attention to the score of small boats and launches which passed up or
down to Goring or Mapledurham; or even to the many pretty women who
basked upon the cushions of punts or pair-oars. I alone was the object
of his gaze, and for me he seemed to wait through the afternoon and
until the twilight.

Now, had the man hailed me, I should have gone shorewards at once, for
my curiosity had been petted by his attentions until it waxed warm and
harassing, but this he did not do; keeping his eyes upon me even when I
had rested from casting and sat idling in the punt. It would have been
easy, I concede, to have g

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