Beaumaroy Home from the Wars Part 16

"The Sergeant has picked out a big clump of trees, a hundred yards from the cottage on the Sprotsfield side, and about thirty yards from the road. Pretty clear going to it, bar the bracken--she'll do it easily.

There she'll lie, snug as you like. As we go by Sprotsfield, the car won't have to pa.s.s the cottage at all--that's an advantage--and yet it's not over far to carry the stuff."

"Sounds all right," said Neddy placidly, and with a yawn. "Have a drop?"

"No, I won't--and I wish you wouldn't, Neddy. It makes you bad-tempered, and a man doesn't want to be bad-tempered on these jobs."

"Take the wheel a second while I have a drop," said Neddy, just for all the world as if his friend had not spoken. He unscrewed the top of a large flask and took a very considerable "drop." It was only after he had done this with great deliberation that he observed good-naturedly, "And you go to h.e.l.l, Mike! It's dark, ain't it? That's a bit of all right."

He did not speak again till they were near Sprotsfield. "This Beaumaroy--queer name, ain't it?--he's a big chap, ain't he, Mike?"

"Pretty fair; but, Lord love you, a baby beside yourself."

"Well, now, you told me something the Sergeant said about a man as was"

(Neddy, unlike his friend, occasionally tripped in his English) "really big."

"Oh, that's Naylor--Captain Naylor. But he's not at the cottage; we're not likely to meet him, praise be!"

"Rather wish we were! I want a little bit of exercise," said Neddy.

"Well, I don't know but what Beaumaroy might give you that. The Sergeant's got tales about him at the war."

"Oh, blast these soldiers--they ain't no good." In what he himself regarded as his spare hours, that is to say, the daytime hours wherein the ordinary man labours, Neddy was a highly skilled craftsman, whose only failing was a tendency to be late in the morning and to fall ill about the festive seasons of the year. He made lenses, and, in spite of the failing, his work had been deemed to be of National Importance, as indeed it was. But that did not excuse his prejudice against soldiers.

They pa.s.sed through the outskirts of Sprotsfield; Mike--to use his more familiar name--had made a thorough exploration of the place, and his directions enabled his chauffeur to avoid the central and populous parts of the town. Then they came out on to the open heath, pa.s.sed Old Place, and presently--about half a mile from Tower Cottage--found Sergeant Hooper waiting for them by the roadside. It was then hard on midnight--a dark cloudy night, very apt for their purpose. With a nod, but without a word, the Sergeant got into the car, and in cautious whispers directed its course to the shelter of the clump of trees; they reached it after a few hundred yards of smooth road and some thirty of b.u.mping over the heath. It afforded a perfect screen from the road, and on the other side there was only untrodden heath, no path or track being visible near it.

Neddy got out of the car, but he did not forget his faithful flask. He offered it to the Sergeant in token of approval. "Good place, Sergeant,"

he said; "does credit to you, as a beginner. Here, mate, hold on, though. It's evident you ain't accustomed to liqueur gla.s.ses!"

"When I sits up so late, I gets a kind of a sinking," the Sergeant explained apologetically.

Mike flashed a torch on him for a minute; there was a very uncomfortable look in his little squinty eyes. "Sergeant," he said suavely but gravely, "my friend here relies on you. He's not a safe man to disappoint." He shifted the light suddenly on to Neddy, whose proportions seemed to loom out prodigious from the surrounding darkness.

"Are you, Neddy?"

"No, I'm a sensitive chap, I am," said Neddy, smiling. "Don't you go and hurt my pride in you by any sign of weakness, Sergeant."

The Sergeant shivered a little. "I'm game--I'll stick it," he protested valorously.

"You'd better!" Neddy advised.

"All quiet at the cottage as you came by?" asked Mike.

"Quiet as the grave, for what I see," the Sergeant answered.

"All right. Mike, where are them sandwiches? I feel like a bite. One for the Sergeant too! But no more flask--no, you don't, Sergeant! When'll we start, Mike?"

"In about half an hour."

"Just nice time for a snack--oysters and stout for you, my darling?"

said jovial Neddy. Then--with a change of voice--"Just as well that didn't pa.s.s us!"

For the sound of a car came from the road they had just left. It was going in the direction of the cottage and of Inkston. Captain Alec was taking his betrothed home after a joyful evening of congratulation and welcome.

CHAPTER XII

THE SECRET OF THE TOWER

The scene presented by the interior of the Tower, when Beaumaroy softly opened the door and signed to Doctor Mary to step forward and look, was indeed a strange one, a ridiculous yet pathetic mockery of grandeur.

The building was a circular one, rising to a height of some thirty-five feet and having a diameter of about ten. Up to about twelve feet from the floor its walls were draped with red and purple stuffs of coa.r.s.e material; above them the bare bricks and the rafters of the roof showed naked. In the middle of the floor--with their backs to the door at which Mary and her companion stood--were set two small arm-chairs of plain and cheap make. Facing them, on a rough dais about three feet high and with two steps leading up to it, stood a large and deep carved oaken arm-chair. It too was upholstered in purple, and above and around it were a canopy and curtains of the same colour. This strange erection was set with its back to the one window--that which Mr. Saffron had caused to be boarded up, soon after he entered into occupation. The place was lighted by candles--two tall standards of an ecclesiastical pattern, one on either side of the great chair or throne, and each holding six large candles, all of which were now alight and about half consumed. On the throne, his spare wasted figure set far back in the recesses of its deep cushioned seat and his feet resting on a high ha.s.sock, sat old Mr.

Saffron; in his right hand he grasped a sceptre, obviously a theatrical "property," but a handsome one, of black wood with gilt ornamentation; his left arm he held close against his side. His eyes were turned up towards the roof; his lips were moving as though he were talking, but no sound came.

Such was Doctor Mary's first impression of the scene; but the next moment she took in another feature of it, not less remarkable. To the left of the throne, to her right as she stood in the doorway facing it, there was a fireplace; an empty grate, though the night was cold.

Immediately in front of it was--unmistakably--the excavation in the floor which Mr. Penrose had described at the Christmas dinner-party at Old Place--six feet in length by three in breadth, and about four feet deep. Against the wall, close by, stood a sheet of cast iron, which evidently served to cover and conceal the aperture; by it was thrown down, in careless disorder, a strip of the same dull red baize as covered the rest of the floor of the Tower. By the side of the sheet and the piece of carpet there was an old brown leather bag.

Tradition--and Mr. Penrose--had told the truth. Here without doubt was Captain Duggle's grave, the grave he had caused to be dug for himself, but which--be the reason what it might--his body had never occupied. Yet the tomb was not entirely empty. The floor of it was strewn with gold--to what depth Mary could not tell, but it was covered with golden sovereigns; there must be thousands of them. They gleamed under the light of the candles.

Mary turned startled, inquiring, apprehensive eyes on Beaumaroy. He pressed her arm gently, and whispered:

"I'll tell you presently. Come in. He'll notice us, I expect, in a minute. Mind you curtsey when he sees you!" He led her in, pulling the door to after him, and placed her and himself in front of the two small arm-chairs opposite Mr. Saffron's throne.

Beaumaroy removed his hand from her arm but she caught his wrist in one of hers and stood there, holding on to him, breathing quickly, her eyes now set on the figure on the throne.

The old man's lips had ceased to move; his eyes had closed; he lay back in the deep seat, inert, looking half dead, very pale and waxen in the face. For what seemed a long time he sat thus, motionless and almost without signs of life, while the two stood side by side before him. Mary glanced once at Beaumaroy; his lips were apart in that half-humorous, half-compa.s.sionate smile; there was no hint of impatience in his bearing.

At last Mr. Saffron opened his eyes and saw them; there was intelligence in his look, though his body did not move. Mary was conscious of a low bow from Beaumaroy; she remembered the caution he had given her, and herself made a deep curtsey; the old man made a slight inclination of his handsome white head. Then, after another long pause, a movement pa.s.sed over his body--excepting his left arm. She saw that he was trying to rise from his seat, but that he had barely the strength to achieve his purpose. But he persisted in his effort, and in the end rose slowly and tremulously to his feet.

Then, utterly without warning, in a sudden and shocking burst of that high, voluble, metallic speech which Captain Alec had heard through the ceiling of the parlour, he began to address them--if indeed it were they whom he addressed, and not some phantom audience of princes, marshal's admirals, or trembling sheep-like recruits. It was difficult to hear the words, hopeless to make out the sense. It was a farrago of nonsense, part of his own inventing, part (as it seemed) wild and confused reminiscences of the published speeches of the man he aped, all strung together on some invisible thread of insane reasoning, delivered with a mad vehemence and intensity that shook and seemed to rend his feeble frame.

"We must stop him, we must stop him," Mary suddenly whispered. "He'll kill himself if he goes on like this!"

"I've never been able to stop him," Beaumaroy whispered back. "Hush! If he hears us speaking, he'll be furious and carry on worse."

The old man's blue eyes fixed themselves on Beaumaroy--of Mary he took no heed. He pointed at Beaumaroy with his sceptre, and from him to the gleaming gold in Captain Duggle's grave. A streak of coherency, a strand of mad logic, now ran through his hurtling words; the money was there, Beaumaroy was to take it--to-day, to-day!--to take it to Morocco, to raise the tribes, to set Africa aflame. He was to scatter it--broadcast, broadcast! There was no end to it--don't spare it! "There's millions, millions of it!" he shouted, and achieved a weird wild majesty in a final cry, "G.o.d with us!"

Then he fell--tumbled back in utter collapse into the recesses of the great chair. His sceptre fell from his nerveless hand and rolled down the steps of the dais; the impetus it gathered carried it, rolling still, across the floor to the edge of the open pit; for an instant it lay poised on the edge, and then fell with a jangle of sound on the carpet of golden coins that lined Captain Duggle's grave.

"Quick! Get my bag--I left it in the pa.s.sage," whispered Mary, as she started forward, up the dais, to the old man's side. "And brandy, if you've got it," she called after Beaumaroy, as he turned to the door to do her bidding.

Beaumaroy was gone no more than a minute. When he came back, with the bag hitched under his arm, a decanter of brandy in one hand and a gla.s.s in the other, Mary was leaning over the throne, with her arm round the old man. His eyes were open, but he was inert and motionless. Beaumaroy poured out some brandy, and gave it into Mary's free hand. But when Mr.

Saffron saw Beaumaroy by his side, he gave a sudden twist of his body, wrenched himself away from Mary's arm, and flung himself on his trusted friend. "Hector, I'm in danger! They're after me! They'll shut me up!"

Beaumaroy put his strong arms about the frail old body. "Oh no, sir, oh no!" he said in low, comforting, half-bantering tones. "That's the old foolishness, sir, if I may say so. You're perfectly safe with me. You ought to trust me by now, sir, really you ought."

"You'll swear--you'll swear it's all right, Hector?"