Collected works of j s f.., p.534
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 534
I went back, presently, to the tea-table and dropped into my deck-chair again. Baxter was still away from us; as far as I could see, there was no one about. I gave her a look which was intended to suggest caution, but I spoke in a purposely affected tone of carelessness.
“I shouldn’t wonder if you are right in your suggestion,” I said. “In that case, I think we should have a friend on board in case we need one.”
“But you don’t anticipate any need?” she asked quickly.
“I don’t,” said I. “So don’t think I do.”
“What do you suppose is going to happen to us?” She asked, glancing over her shoulder at the open door of the galley into which Baxter had vanished.
“I think they’ll detain us until they’re ready to depart, and then they’ll release us,” I answered. “Our host, or jailor, or whatever you like to call him, is a queer chap — he’ll probably make us give him our word of honour that we’ll keep close tongues.”
“He could have done that without bringing us here,” she remarked.
“Ah, but he wanted to make sure!” said I. “He’s taking no risks. However, I’m sure he means no harm to us. Under other conditions, I shouldn’t have objected to meeting him. He’s — a character.”
“Interesting, certainly,” she agreed. “Do you think he really is a — pirate?”
“I don’t think he’ll have any objection to making that quite clear to us if he is,” I replied, cynically. “I should say he’d be rather proud of it. But — I think we shall hear a good deal of him before we get our freedom.”
I was right there. Baxter seemed almost wistfully anxiously to talk with us — he behaved like a man who for a long time had small opportunity of conversation with the people he would like to converse with, and he kept us both talking as the afternoon faded into evening and the evening fell towards night. He was a good talker, too, and knew much of books and politics and of men, and could make shrewd remarks, tinged, it seemed to me, with a little cynicism that was more good-humoured than bitter. The time passed rapidly in this fashion; supper-time arrived; the meal, as good and substantial as any dinner, was served in the little saloon-like cabin by the soft-footed Chinaman who, other than Baxter, was the only living soul we had seen since the Frenchman went away in the boat; all through it Baxter kept up his ready flow of talk while punctiliously observing his duties as host. Until then, the topics had been of a general nature, such as one might have heard dealt with at any gentleman’s table, but when supper was over and the Chinaman had left us alone, he turned on us with a queer, inquisitive smile.
“You think me a strange fellow,” he said. “Don’t deny it! — I am, and I don’t mind who thinks it. Or — who knows it.”
I made no reply beyond an acquiescent nod, but Miss Raven — who, all through this adventure, showed a coolness and resourcefulness which I can never sufficiently praise — looked steadily at him.
“I think you must have seen and known some strange things,” she said quietly.
“Aye — and done some!” he answered, with a laugh that had more of harshness in it than was usual with him. Then he glanced at me. “Mr. Middlebrook, there, from what he told me this afternoon, knows a bit about me and my affairs,” he said. “But not much. Sufficient to whet your curiosity, eh, Middlebrook?”
“I confess I should like to know more,” I replied. “I agree with Miss Raven — you must have seen a good deal of the queer side of life.”
There was some fine old claret on the table between us; he pushed the bottle over to me, motioning me to refill my glass. For a moment he sat, a cigar in the corner of his lips, his hands in the armholes of his waistcoat, silently reflecting.
“What’s really puzzling you this time,” he said suddenly, “is that Quick affair — I know because I’ve not only read the newspapers, but I’ve picked up a good deal of local gossip — never mind how. I’ve heard a lot of your goings-on at Ravensdene Court, and the suspicions, and so on. And I knew the Quicks — no man better, at one time, and I’ll tell you what I know. Not a nice story from any moral point of view, but though it’s a story of rough men, there’s nothing in it at all that need offend your ears, Miss Raven — nothing. It’s just a story — an instance — of some of the things that happen to Ishmaels, outcasts, like me.”
We made no answer, and he refilled his own glass, took a mouthful of its contents, and glancing from one to the other of us, went on.
“You’re both aware of my youthful career at Blyth?” he said. “You, Middlebrook, are, anyway, from what you told me this afternoon, and I gather that you put Miss Raven in possession of the facts. Well, I’ll start out from there — when I made the acquaintance of that temporary bank-manager chap. Mind you, I’d about come to the end of my tether at that time as regards money — I’d been pretty well fleeced by one or another, largely through carelessness, largely through sheer ignorance. I didn’t lose all my money on the turf, Middlebrook, I can assure you — I was robbed by more than one worthy man of my native town — legally, of course, bless ’em! And it was that, I think, turned me into the Ishmael I’ve been ever since — as men had robbed me, I thought it a fair thing to get a bit of my own back. Now that bank-manager chap was one of those fellows who are born with predatory instincts — my impression of him, from what I recollect, is that he was a born thief. Anyway, he and I, getting pretty thick with each other, found out that we were just then actuated by similar ambitions — I from sheer necessity, he, as I tell you, from temperament. And to cut matters short, we determined to help ourselves out of certain things of value stored in that bank, and to clear out to far-off regions with what we got. We discovered that two chests deposited in the bank’s vaults by old Lord Forestburne contained a quantity of simply invaluable monastic spoil, stolen by the good man’s ancestors four centuries before: we determined to have that and to take it over to the United States, where we knew we could realize immense sums on it, from collectors, with no questions asked. There were other matters, too, which were handy — we carefully removed the lot, brought them along the coast to this very cove, and interred them in those ruins where we three foregathered this afternoon.”
“And whence, I take it, you have just removed them to the deck above our heads?” I suggested.
“Right, Middlebrook, quite right — there they are!” he admitted with a laugh. “A grand collection, too — chalices, patens, reliquaries, all manner of splendid mediaeval craftsmanship — and certain other more modern things with them — all destined for the other side of the Atlantic — the market’s sure and safe and ready—”
“You think you’ll get them there?” I asked.
“I shall be more surprised than I ever was in my life if I don’t,” he answered readily, and with that note of dryness which one associates with certainty. “I’m a pretty cute hand at making and perfecting and carrying out a plan. Yes, sir, they’ll be there, in good time — and they’d have been there long since if it hadn’t been for an accident which I couldn’t foresee — that bank-manager chap had the ill-luck to break his neck. Now that put me in a fix. I knew that the abstraction of these things would soon be discovered, and though I’d exercised great care in covering up all trace of my own share in the affair, there was always a bare possibility of something coming out. So, knowing the stuff was safely planted and very unlikely to be disturbed, I cleared out, and determined to wait a fitting opportunity of regaining possession of it. My notion at that time, I remember, was to get hold of some American millionaire collector who would give me facilities for taking up the stuff, to be handed over to him. But I didn’t find one, and for the time being I had to keep quiet. Inquiries, of course, were set afoot about the missing property, but fortunately I was not suspected. And if I had been, I shouldn’t have been found, for I know how to disappear as cleverly as any man who ever found that convenient.”
He threw away the stump of his cigar, deliberately lighted another, and leaned across the table towards me in a more confidential manner.
“Now we’re coming to the more immediately interesting part of the story,” he said. “All that I’ve told you is, as it were, ancient history. We’ll get to more modern times, affairs of yesterday, so to speak. After I cleared out of Blyth — with a certain amount of money in my pocket — I knocked about the world a good deal, doing one thing and another. I’ve been in every continent and in more sea-ports than I can remember. I’ve taken a share in all sorts of queer transactions from smuggling to slave-trading. I’ve been rolling in money in January and shivering in rags in June. All that was far away, in strange quarters of the world, for I never struck this country again until comparatively recently. I could tell you enough to fill a dozen fat volumes, but we’ll cut all that out and get on to a certain time, now some years ago, whereat, in Hong-Kong, I and the man you saw with me this afternoon, who, if everybody had their own, is a genuine French nobleman, came across those two particularly precious villains, the brothers Noah and Salter Quick.”
“Was that the first time of your meeting with them?” I asked. Now that he was evidently bent on telling me his story, I, on my part, was bent on getting out of him all that I could. “You’d never met them before — anywhere?”
“Never seen nor heard of them before,” he answered. “We met in a certain house-of-call in Hong-Kong, much frequented by Englishmen and Americans; we became friendly with them; we soon found out that they, like ourselves, were adventurers, would-be pirates, buccaneers, ready for any game; we found out, too, that they had money, and could finance any desperate affair that was likely to pay handsomely. My friend and I, at that time, were also in funds — we had just had a very paying adventure in the Malay Archipelago, a bit of illicit trading, and we had got to Hong-Kong on the look-out for another opportunity. Once we had got thoroughly in with the Quicks, that was not long in coming. The Quicks were as sharp as their name — they knew the sort of men they wanted. And before long they took us into their confidence and told us what they were after and what they wanted us to do, in collaboration with them. They wanted to get hold of a ship, and to use it for certain nefarious trading purposes in the China seas — they had a plan by which the lot of us could have made a lot of money. Needless to say, we were ready enough to go in with them. Already they had a scheme of getting a ship such as they particularly needed. There was at that time lying at Hong-Kong a sort of tramp steamer, the Elizabeth Robinson, the skipper of which wanted a crew for a trip to Chemulpo, up the Yellow Sea. Salter Quick got himself into the confidence and graces of this skipper, and offered to man his ship for him, and he packed her as far as he could — with his own brother, Noah, myself, my French friend, and a certain Chinese cook of whom he knew and who could be trusted — trusted, that is, to fall in whatever we wanted.”
“Am I right in supposing the name of the Chinese cook to have been Lo Chuh Fen?” I asked.
“Quite right — Lo Chuh Fen was the man,” answered Baxter. “A very handy man for anything, as you’ll admit, for you’ve already seen him — he’s the man who attended on Miss Raven and who served our supper. I came across him again, in Limehouse, recently, and took him into my service once more. Very well — now you understand that there were five of us all in for the Quick’s plan, and the notion was that when we’d once got safely out of Hong-Kong, Salter, who had a particularly greasy and insinuating tongue, should get round certain others of the crew by means of promises helped out by actual cash bribes. That done, we were going to put the skipper, his mates, and such of the men as wouldn’t fall in with us, in a boat with provisions and let them find their way wherever they liked, while we went off with the steamer. That was the surface plan — my own belief is that if it had come to it, the two Quicks would have been quite ready to make skipper and men walk the plank, or to have settled them in any other way — both Noah and Salter, for all their respectable appearance, were born out of their due time — they were admirably qualified to have been lieutenants to Paul Jones or any other eighteenth-century pirate! But in this particular instance, their schemes went all wrong. Whether it was that the skipper of the Elizabeth Robinson, who was an American and cuter than we fancied, got wind of something, or whether somebody spilt to him, I don’t know, but the fact is that one fine morning when we were in the Yellow Sea he and the rest of them set on the Quicks, my friend, myself, and the Chinaman, bundled us into a boat and landed us on a miserable island, to fend for ourselves. There we were, the five of us — a precious bad lot, to be sure — marooned!”
CHAPTER XX
THE POSSIBLE REASON
AT THAT LAST word, spoken with an emphasis which showed that it awoke no very pleasant memories in the speaker, Miss Raven looked questioningly from one to the other of us.
“Marooned?” she said. “What is that, exactly?”
Baxter gave her an indulgent and me a knowing look.
“I daresay Mr. Middlebrook can give you the exact etymological meaning of the word better than I can, Miss Raven,” he answered. “But I can tell you what the thing means in actual practice! It means to put a man, or men, ashore, preferably on a desert island, leaving him, or them, to fend for himself, or themselves, as best he, or they, can! It may mean slow starvation — at best it means living on what you can pick up by your own ingenuity, on shell-fish and that sort of thing, even on edible sea-weed. Marooned? Yes! that was the only experience I ever had of that — it’s all very well talking of it now, as we sit here on a comfortable little vessel, with a bottle of good wine before us, but at the time — ah!”
“You’d a stiff time of it?” I suggested.
“Worse than you’d believe,” he answered. “That old Yankee skipper was a vindictive chap, with method in him. He’d purposely gone off the beaten track to land us on that island, and he played his game so cleverly that not even the Quicks — who were as subtle as snakes! — knew anything of his intentions until we were all marched over the side at the point of ugly-looking revolvers. If it hadn’t been for that little Chinese whom you’ve just seen we would have starved, for the island was little more than a reef of rock, rising to a sort of peak in its centre — worn-out volcano, I imagine — and with nothing eatable on it in the way of flesh or fruit. But Chuh was a God-send! He was clever at fishing, and he showed us an edible sea-weed out of which he made good eating, and he discovered a spring of water — altogether he kept us alive. All of which,” he suddenly added, with a darkening look, “made the conduct of these two Quicks not merely inexcusable, but devilish!”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“I’m coming to it,” he said. “All in due order. We were on that island several weeks, and from the time we were flung unceremoniously upon its miserable shores to the day we left it we never saw a sail nor a wisp of smoke from a steamer. And it may be that this, and our privations, made us still more birds of a feather than we were. Anyway, you, Middlebrook, know how men, thrown together in that way, will talk — nay, must talk unless they’d go mad! — talk about themselves and their doings and so on. We all talked — we used to tell tales of our doubtful pasts as we huddled together under the rocks at nights, and some nice, lurid stores there were, I can assure you. The Quicks had seen about as much of the doubtful and seamy side of seafaring life as men could, and all of us could contribute something. Also, the Quicks had money, safely stowed away in banks here and there — they used to curse their fate, left there apparently to die, when they thought of it. And it was that, I think, that led me to tell, one night, about my adventure with the naughty bank-manager at Blyth, and of the chests of old monastic treasure which I’d planted up here on this Northumbrian coast.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed. “So you told Noah and Salter Quick that?”
“I told Noah and Salter Quick that,” he replied slowly. “Yes — and I can now explain to you what Salter was after when he appeared in these parts. I read the newspaper accounts, of the inquest and so on, and I saw through everything, and could have thrown a lot of light on things, only I wasn’t going to. But it was this way — I told the Quicks all about the Blyth affair — the truth was, I didn’t believe we should ever get away from that cursed island — but I told them in a fashion which, evidently, afterwards led to considerable puzzlement on their part. I told them that I buried the chests of old silver, wherein were the other valuables taken from the vaults of the bank, in a churchyard on this coast, close to the graves of my ancestors — I described the spot and the lie of the ruins pretty accurately. Now where the Quicks — Salter, at any rate — got puzzled and mixed was over my use of the word ancestors. What I meant — but never said — was that I had planted the stuff near the graves of my maternal ancestors, the old De Knaythevilles, who were once great folk in these parts, and of whose name my own Christan name, Netherfield, is, of course, a corruption. But Salter Quick, to be sure, thought the graves would bear the name Netherfield, and when he came along this coast, it was that name he was hunting for. Do you see?”
