Merry-Garden and Other Stories Part 20

With a scream, the poor creature flung himself on his knees.

"Don't shoot! Oh, don't shoot!" His voice came across the pool to them in a squeal like a rabbit's.

"Eh? Hullo!" said the doctor, but without lowering his gun. "Mr.

Deiphobus Geen, I believe?"

"Don't shoot! Oh, don't shoot me!"

"Be so good as to step across here," the doctor commanded.

"You won't hurt me? Dan'l, make him promise he won't hurt me!"

"Come!" the doctor commanded again, and Phoby Geen came to them through the pool with his knees knocking together. "Put out your hands, please.

Thank you. Dan'l, search, and you'll find a piece of cord in my pocket.

Take it, and tie up his wrists."

"I never meant you no harm," whined Phoby; but he submitted.

"And now,"--the doctor turned to Dan'l--"leave him to me, step outside and bring word as soon as you hear or glimpse a boat in the offing.

At what time, Mr. Geen, are the carriers coming for the tubs out yonder?

Answer me: and if I find after that you've answered me false, I'll blow your brains out."

"Two in the morning," answered Phoby.

"And Tummels will be here in an hour," sighed the doctor, relieved in his mind on the one point he had been forced to leave to chance.

"Step along, Dan'l; and don't you strain yourself in your weak state by handling the tubs: Tummels can manage them single-handed. You see, Mr.

Geen, plovers don't shed their feathers hereabouts in the summer months; and a feather floating on a tideway doesn't, as a rule, keep moored to one place. I took a swim this morning and cleared up those two points for myself. Step along, Dan'l, my friend; I seemed to hear Tummels outside, lowering sail."

Twelve hours later, Dan'l, with a pocketful of money, was shipped on the high seas aboard a barque bound out of Bristol for Georgia; and there, six months later, Amelia Sanders followed him out and married him. Not for years did they return to Porthleven and live on Aunt Bussow's money, no man molesting them. The Cove had given up business, and Government let bygones be bygones, behaving very handsome for once.

WHERE THE TREASURE IS.

I.

In Ardevora, a fishing-town on the Cornish coast not far from the Land's End, lived a merchant whom everybody called 'Elder' Penno, or 'The Elder'--not because he had any right, or laid any claim, to that t.i.tle. His father and grandfather had worn it as office-bearers in a local religious sect known as the Advent Saints; and it had survived the extinction of that sect and pa.s.sed on to William John Penno, an orthodox Wesleyan, as a family sobriquet.

He was sixty-three years old, a widower, and childless.

His fellow-townsmen supposed him to be rich because he had so many irons in the fire and employed, in one way and another, a great deal of labour.

He held a number of shares in coasting vessels, and pa.s.sed as owner of half a dozen--all of them too heavily in debt to pay dividends.

He managed (ostensibly as proprietor, but actually in dependence on the local bank) a shipbuilding-yard to which the fishermen came for their boats. He had an interest in the profit of most of these boats when they were launched, as also in a salt-store, a coal-store, a company for the curing of pilchards, and an agency for buying and packing of fish for the London market. He kept a retail shop and sold almost everything the town needed, from guernseys and hardware to tea, bacon, and tallow candles.

He advanced money, at varying rates of interest, on anything from a ship to a frying-pan; and by this means had made himself accurately acquainted with his neighbours' varying degrees of poverty. But he was not rich, although generally reputed so: for Ardevora's population was not one out of which any man could make his fortune, and of poor folk who borrow or obtain goods on credit quite a large number do not seriously mean to pay-- a fact often overlooked, and always by the borrowers themselves.

Still, and despite an occasional difficulty in keeping so many b.a.l.l.s in the air at one time, Elder Penno was--as a widower, a childless man, and in comparison with his neighbours--well-to-do. Also he filled many small public offices--district councillor, harbour commissioner, member of the School Board, and the like. They had come to him--he could not quite tell how. He took pride in them and discharged them conscientiously.

He knew that envious tongues accused him of using them to feather his nest, but he also knew that they accused him falsely. He was thick-skinned, and they might go to the devil. In person he was stout of habit, brusque of bearing, with a healthy, sanguine complexion, a double chin, shrewd grey eyes, and cropped hair which stood up straight as the bristles on a brush. He lived abstemiously, rose at six, went to bed at nine, and might be found, during most of the intervening hours, hard at work at his desk in the little office behind his shop. The office had a round window, and the window overlooked the quay, the small harbour (dry at low water), and the curve of a sandy bay beyond.

One morning Elder Penno looked up from his desk and saw, beyond the masts of the fishing-boats lying aslant as the tide had left them, a small figure--a speck, almost--on the sandy beach, about three furlongs away.

He was engaged at the moment in adding up a column of figures.

Having entered the total, he looked up again, laid down his pen, frowned with annoyance, and picked up an old pair of field-gla.s.ses that stood ready to hand on the sill of his desk beside the ink-well. He glanced at the clock on his chimney-piece before throwing up the window-sash.

The hour was eleven--five minutes after eleven, to be exact; the month April; the day sunny, with a humming northerly wind; the tide drawing far out towards low-ebb, and the air so clear that the small figure standing on the edge of the waves could not be mistaken.

As he threw up the sash Elder Penno caught sight of Tom Hanc.o.c.k, the school attendance officer, lounging against a post on the quay below.

"You're the very man I want," said the Elder. "Isn't that Tregenza's grandchild over yonder?"

"Looks like her," said the A.O., withdrawing a short clay pipe from his mouth, and spitting.

"Then why isn't she at school at this hour?"

"'Tis a hopeless case, if you ask me." The A.O. announced this with a fine air of resignation. His pay was 2s. 6d. a week, and he never erred on the side of zeal.

"Better fit you was lookin' up such cases than idlin' here and wastin'

baccy. That's if you ask _me_," retorted the Elder.

"I've a-talked to the maid, an' I've a-talked to her gran'father, till I'm tired," said Hanc.o.c.k, and spat again. "She'll be fourteen next May, an'

then we can wash our hands of her."

"A nice look-out it'd be if the eddication of England was left in your hands," said the Elder truthfully, if obviously.

"You can't do nothin' with her." The A.O. was used to censure and wasted no resentment on it. "Nothin'. I give 'ee leave to try."

The Elder stood for a moment watching the small figure across the sands.

Then, with a snort of outraged propriety, he closed the window, reached down his hat from its peg, marched out of his office--through the shop-- and forth upon the sunny quay. A flight of stone stairs led down to the bed of the harbour, now deserted by the tide; and across this, picking his way among the boats and their moorings, he made for the beach where the sea broke and glittered on the firm sand in long curves of white.

A tonic northerly breeze was blowing, just strongly enough to lift the breakers in blue-green hollows against the sunshine and waft a delicate film of spray about the figure of the child moving forlornly on the edge of the foam. She was not playing or running races with the waves, but walking soberly and anon halting to scan the beach ahead. Her legs were bare to the knee, and she had hitched up her short skirt high about her like a c.o.c.kle-gatherer's. In the roar and murmur of the surf she did not hear the Elder approaching, but faced around with a start as he called to her.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

For answer she held up a billet of wood, bleached and frayed with long tossing on the seas, worthless except for firewood, and almost worthless for that. The Elder frowned. "Look here," he said, "you ought to be in school at this moment instead of minchin[1] idle after a few bits o'

stick, no good to anyone. A girl of your age, too! What's your name?"

"Please, sir, Liz," the child stammered, looking down.

"You're Sam Tregenza's grandchild, hey?"

"Please, sir."

"Then do you go home an' tell your grandfather, with my compliments, he ought to know better than to allow it. It's robbin' the ratepayers, that's what it is."

"Yes, sir," she murmured, glancing down dubiously at the piece of wood in her hand.

"You don't understand me," said the Elder. "The ratepayers spend money on a school here that the children of Ardevora mayn't grow up into little dunces. Now, if the children go to school as they ought, the Government up in London gives the ratepayers--me, for instance--some of their money back: so much money for each child. If a child minches, the money isn'

paid. 'Tisn' the wood you pick up--that's neither here nor there--but the money you're takin' out of folks' pockets. Didn' you know that?"