"Well, Cloete splashes along in the wind and rain. n.o.body in the streets-all the excitement over. The publican runs out to meet him in the pa.s.sage and says to him: Not this way. He isn"t in his room. We couldn"t get him to go to bed nohow. He"s in the little parlour there.
We"ve lighted him a fire. . . You have been giving him drinks too, says Cloete; I never said I would be responsible for drinks. How many? . . .
Two, says the other. It"s all right. I don"t mind doing that much for a shipwrecked sailor. . . Cloete smiles his funny smile: Eh? Come. He paid for them. . . The publican just blinks. . . Gave you gold, didn"t he? Speak up! . . . What of that! cries the man. What are you after, anyway? He had the right change for his sovereign.
"Just so, says Cloete. He walks into the parlour, and there he sees our Stafford; hair all up on end, landlord"s shirt and pants on, bare feet in slippers, sitting by the fire. When he sees Cloete he casts his eyes down.
"You didn"t mean us ever to meet again, Mr. Cloete, Stafford says, demurely. . . That fellow, when he had the drink he wanted-he wasn"t a drunkard-would put on this sort of sly, modest air. . . But since the captain committed suicide, he says, I have been sitting here thinking it out. All sorts of things happen. Conspiracy to lose the ship-attempted murder-and this suicide. For if it was not suicide, Mr. Cloete, then I know of a victim of the most cruel, cold-blooded attempt at murder; somebody who has suffered a thousand deaths. And that makes the thousand pounds of which we spoke once a quite insignificant sum. Look how very convenient this suicide is. . .
"He looks up at Cloete then, who smiles at him and comes quite close to the table.
"You killed Harry Dunbar, he whispers. . . The fellow glares at him and shows his teeth: Of course I did! I had been in that cabin for an hour and a half like a rat in a trap. . . Shut up and left to drown in that wreck. Let flesh and blood judge. Of course I shot him! I thought it was you, you murdering scoundrel, come back to settle me. He opens the door flying and tumbles right down upon me; I had a revolver in my hand, and I shot him. I was crazy. Men have gone crazy for less.
"Cloete looks at him without flinching. Aha! That"s your story, is it?
. . . And he shakes the table a little in his pa.s.sion as he speaks. . .
Now listen to mine. What"s this conspiracy? Who"s going to prove it?
You were there to rob. You were rifling his cabin; he came upon you unawares with your hands in the drawer; and you shot him with his own revolver. You killed to steal-to steal! His brother and the clerks in the office know that he took sixty pounds with him to sea. Sixty pounds in gold in a canvas bag. He told me where they were. The c.o.xswain of the life-boat can swear to it that the drawers were all empty. And you are such a fool that before you"re half an hour ash.o.r.e you change a sovereign to pay for a drink. Listen to me. If you don"t turn up day after to-morrow at George Dunbar"s solicitors, to make the proper deposition as to the loss of the ship, I shall set the police on your track. Day after to-morrow. . .
"And then what do you think? That Stafford begins to tear his hair.
Just so. Tugs at it with both hands without saying anything. Cloete gives a push to the table which nearly sends the fellow off his chair, tumbling inside the fender; so that he has got to catch hold of it to save himself. . .
"You know the sort of man I am, Cloete says, fiercely. I"ve got to a point that I don"t care what happens to me. I would shoot you now for tuppence.
"At this the cur dodges under the table. Then Cloete goes out, and as he turns in the street-you know, little fishermen"s cottages, all dark; raining in torrents, too-the other opens the window of the parlour and speaks in a sort of crying voice-
"You low Yankee fiend-I"ll pay you off some day.
"Cloete pa.s.ses by with a d.a.m.n bitter laugh, because he thinks that the fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it."
My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his black, sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.
"I don"t quite understand this," I said. "In what way?"
He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that Captain Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it. Enough to keep her comfortable. George Dunbar"s half, as Cloete feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.
"I am curious," I said, "to learn what the motive force of this tragic affair was-I mean the patent medicine. Do you know?"
He named it, and I whistled respectfully. Nothing less than Parker"s Lively Lumbago Pills. Enormous property! You know it; all the world knows it. Every second man, at least, on this globe of ours has tried it.
"Why!" I cried, "they missed an immense fortune."
"Yes," he mumbled, "by the price of a revolver-shot."
He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States, pa.s.senger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock. The night before he sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for a drink. "Funny chap, Cloete. We sat all night drinking grogs, till it was time for him to go on board."
It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this story, with that utterly unconscious frankness of a patent-medicine man stranger to all moral standards. Cloete concluded by remarking that he, had "had enough of the old country." George Dunbar had turned on him, too, in the end. Cloete was clearly somewhat disillusioned.
As to Stafford, he died, professed loafer, in some East End hospital or other, and on his last day clamoured "for a parson," because his conscience worried him for killing an innocent man. "Wanted somebody to tell him it was all right," growled my old ruffian, contemptuously. "He told the parson that I knew this Cloete who had tried to murder him, and so the parson (he worked among the dock labourers) once spoke to me about it. That skunk of a fellow finding himself trapped yelled for mercy. . .
Promised to be good and so on. . . Then he went crazy . . . screamed and threw himself about, beat his head against the bulkheads . . . you can guess all that-eh? . . . till he was exhausted. Gave up. Threw himself down, shut his eyes, and wanted to pray. So he says. Tried to think of some prayer for a quick death-he was that terrified. Thought that if he had a knife or something he would cut his throat, and be done with it.
Then he thinks: No! Would try to cut away the wood about the lock. . .
He had no knife in his pocket. . . he was weeping and calling on G.o.d to send him a tool of some kind when suddenly he thinks: Axe! In most ships there is a spare emergency axe kept in the master"s room in some locker or other. . . Up he jumps. . . Pitch dark. Pulls at the drawers to find matches and, groping for them, the first thing he comes upon-Captain Harry"s revolver. Loaded too. He goes perfectly quiet all over. Can shoot the lock to pieces. See? Saved! G.o.d"s providence! There are boxes of matches too. Thinks he: I may just as well see what I am about.
"Strikes a light and sees the little canvas bag tucked away at the back of the drawer. Knew at once what that was. Rams it into his pocket quick. Aha! says he to himself: this requires more light. So he pitches a lot of paper on the floor, set fire to it, and starts in a hurry rummaging for more valuables. Did you ever? He told that East-End parson that the devil tempted him. First G.o.d"s mercy-then devil"s work.
Turn and turn about. . .
"Any squirming skunk can talk like that. He was so busy with the drawers that the first thing he heard was a shout, Great Heavens. He looks up and there was the door open (Cloete had left the key in the lock) and Captain Harry holding on, well above him, very fierce in the light of the burning papers. His eyes were starting out of his head. Thieving, he thunders at him. A sailor! An officer! No! A wretch like you deserves no better than to be left here to drown.
"This Stafford-on his death-bed-told the parson that when he heard these words he went crazy again. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand with the revolver in it out of the drawer, and fired without aiming. Captain Harry fell right in with a crash like a stone on top of the burning papers, putting the blaze out. All dark. Not a sound. He listened for a bit then dropped the revolver and scrambled out on deck like mad."
The old fellow struck the table with his ponderous fist.
"What makes me sick is to hear these silly boat-men telling people the captain committed suicide. Pah! Captain Harry was a man that could face his Maker any time up there, and here below, too. He wasn"t the sort to slink out of life. Not he! He was a good man down to the ground. He gave me my first job as stevedore only three days after I got married."
As the vindication of Captain Harry from the charge of suicide seemed to be his only object, I did not thank him very effusively for his material.
And then it was not worth many thanks in any case.
For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in our respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo. This story to be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South Seas.
But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the consumption of magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak-just as it was told to me-but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port of London.
_Oct._ 1910.
THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES A FIND
This tale, episode, experience-call it how you will-was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age-unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but-so to speak-naked, stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering shadows.
I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder of his posterity. It could not have been for his glory, because the experience was simply that of an abominable fright-terror he calls it. You would have guessed that the relation alluded to in the very first lines was in writing.
This writing const.i.tutes the Find declared in the sub-t.i.tle. The t.i.tle itself is my own contrivance, (can"t call it invention), and has the merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here. As to the witches that"s merely a conventional expression, and we must take our man"s word for it that it fits the case.
The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last stage of decay. As to the books themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of money I disbursed. It might have been some premonition of that fact which made me say: "But I must have the box too." The decayed bookseller a.s.sented by the careless, tragic gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.
A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my curiosity but faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting was not attractive at first sight. But in one place the statement that in A.D. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye. Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being weak and the power of imagination strong.
In another place the phrase: "At night we stood in again," arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. "Let"s see what it is all about," I thought, without excitement.
Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other line in their close-set and regular order. It was like the drone of a monotonous voice. A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively appearance. "In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two years old," he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don"t imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a hundred young men of twenty in the twinkling of an eye.
If this isn"t progress! . . . Why immense! We have moved on, and so you must expect to meet here a certain naiveness of contrivance and simplicity of aim appertaining to the remote epoch. And of course no motoring tourist can hope to find such an inn anywhere, now. This one, the one of the t.i.tle, was situated in Spain. That much I discovered only from internal evidence, because a good many pages of that relation were missing-perhaps not a great misfortune after all. The writer seemed to have entered into a most elaborate detail of the why and wherefore of his presence on that coast-presumably the north coast of Spain. His experience has nothing to do with the sea, though. As far as I can make it out, he was an officer on board a sloop-of-war. There"s nothing strange in that. At all stages of the long Peninsular campaign many of our men-of-war of the smaller kind were cruising off the north coast of Spain-as risky and disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.
It looks as though that ship of his had had some special service to perform. A careful explanation of all the circ.u.mstances was to be expected from our man, only, as I"ve said, some of his pages (good tough paper too) were missing: gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity. But it is to be seen clearly that communication with the sh.o.r.e and even the sending of messengers inland was part of her service, either to obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or advice to patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret juntas of the province. Something of the sort. All this can be only inferred from the preserved sc.r.a.ps of his conscientious writing.
Next we come upon the panegyric of a very fine sailor, a member of the ship"s company, having the rating of the captain"s c.o.xswain. He was known on board as Cuba Tom; not because he was Cuban however; he was indeed the best type of a genuine British tar of that time, and a man-of-war"s man for years. He came by the name on account of some wonderful adventures he had in that island in his young days, adventures which were the favourite subject of the yarns he was in the habit of spinning to his shipmates of an evening on the forecastle head. He was intelligent, very strong, and of proved courage. Incidentally we are told, so exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for thickness and length of any man in the Navy. This appendage, much cared for and sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad back to the great admiration of all beholders and to the great envy of some.