The Victorian Villains Megapack (36 page)

The suspense was becoming intolerable. A crawl of fifty yards or so over damp grass was not to be lightly undertaken; but he was just on the point of coming out from the shadow of the bush, when a faint rhythmic sound arose, to be followed by a thud. He held his breath, but could hear nothing more. He counted up to a hundred—still silence. He rose to his knees, when the sound began again, and now it was louder. It ceased; again there was the thud, and then another interval of silence. Once more; it seemed quite close, grew louder, louder still, and resolved itself into the laboured breathing of a man who now came into view. He was bending under a burden which he suddenly dropped, as if exhausted, and then, after resting awhile, slowly raised it to his shoulders and panted onwards, until, staggering beneath his load, he lurched against the hurdle, his foot slipped, and he rolled with a crash down the muddy bank. In that moment Pringle recognised the more than usually unctuous figure of Mr. Hardgiblet, who embraced a small oblong chest. Spluttering and fuming, the rector scrambled to his feet, and after an unsuccessful hoist or two, dragged the chest into the boat. Then, taking a pause for breath, he climbed the bank again and tramped across the field.

Mr. Hardgiblet was scarcely beyond earshot when Pringle, seizing his bag, jumped down to the water-side. He untied the painter, and shoving off with his foot, scrambled into the boat as it slid out on the river. With a paddle of his hand alongside, he turned the head up stream, and then dropped his bag with all its contents overboard and crouched along the bottom. A sharp cry rang out behind, and, gently he peeped over the gunwale. There by the hurdle stood Mr. Hardgiblet, staring thunder-struck at the vacancy. The next moment he caught sight of the strayed boat, and started to run after it; and as he ran, with many a trip and stumble of wearied limbs, he gasped expressions which were not those of resignation to his mishap. Meantime, Pringle, his face within a few inches of the little chest, sought for some means of escape. He had calculated on the current bearing him out of sight long before the rector could return, but such activity as this discounted all his plans. All at once he lost the sounds of pursuit, and, raising his head, he saw that Mr. Hardgiblet had been forced to make a detour round a little plantation which grew to the water’s edge. The next second Pringle had seized the sculls, and with a couple of long rapid strokes grounded the boat beneath a bush on the opposite bank. There he tumbled the chest on to the mud, and jumping after it shoved the boat off again. As it floated free and resumed its course up stream, Pringle shouldered the chest, climbed up the bank, and keeping in the shade of a hedge, plodded heavily across the field.

Day was dawning as Pringle extinguished the lamp in his studio, and setting the shutters ajar allowed the light to fall upon the splinters, bristling like a cactus-hedge, of what had been an oaken chest. The wood had proved hard as the iron which clamped and bound it, but scarcely darker or more begrimed than the heap of metal discs it had just disgorged. A few of these, fresh from a bath of weak acid, glowed golden as the sunlight, displaying indifferently a bust with “Bonaparte Premier Consul” surrounding it, or on the reverse “République Française, anno XI. 20 francs.” Such were the silkworms of Florence.

Romney Pringle in THE BOX OF SPECIE

“Now then, sir, if you’re coming!”

Mr. Pringle, carrying a brown gladstone, was the last to cross the gangway before it was hauled back on to the landing-stage. The steam ceased to roar from the escape pipes, impatiently tingled the bells in the engine-room; then, pulsating to the rhythmic thud of her screws, the liner swung from the quay and silently picked her way down the crowded Pool. As reach succeeded reach the broadening stream opened a clearer course, and the
Mary Bland
moved to the full sweep of the ebbing tide; a whitened path began to lengthen in her wake, for nearing Tilbury the Thames becomes a clean and wholesome stream, and its foam is not as that of porter.

The day had been wet and gusty, and although, when he stepped aboard, the declining sun shone brightly, there was a touch of autumn rawness in the air which induced Pringle to seek a sheltered corner. Such he found by the break of the poop, and here he sat and watched the stowing of the cargo, the last arrival of which encumbered the after-deck.

By the time Tilbury was in sight all had been sent down the after-hatch but three small cases which the mate and purser, who stood superintending operations, appeared to view with a jealous eye. They were clamped with iron, of small size (about fourteen inches long by seven wide and four deep), and Pringle, even from where he sat, could read the direction in bold, black letters on the nearest:

THE MANAGER

Ivory and Produce Company

Cameroons

These were obviously for trans-shipment, since the
Mary Bland’s
route was but London to Rotterdam. It was to Rotterdam that Pringle was bound. The journey was not undertaken for pleasure; he was
en route
for Amsterdam on business of peculiar interest, and not unconnected with precious stones, Amsterdam, as everybody knows, being the headquarters of the diamond-cutting industry. But this by the way.

The men were about attaching the chain-tackle to the nearest of the three boxes when the captain came half-way down from the bridge.

“Haven’t you got that specie stowed, Mr. Trimble? It’ll be dark presently.” He addressed the mate with just a little anxiety in the tone.

“All right, sir,” interposed the purser. “We just wanted to get the deck clear before I opened the strong-room”

“Go ahead, then,” and the captain returned to the bridge.

The purser disappeared below, and presently came his voice from the after-hatch: “Lower away, there!”

With much clanking and rattling of the chain, a case swung for a moment over the gulf, and then disappeared. A second followed, and a third was about to join them, when a voice from somewhere forward called:

“Steamer on the starboard bow!”

As the sun went down a grey mist, rising from the Cliffe marshes, had first blotted out the banks and then steamed across the fairway, which but a few minutes before had shown a clear course through the reach. It was quite local, and a big ocean tramp, coming slowly up stream, was just emerging from the obscurity as the
Mary Bland
encountered it.

“Hard a-starboard!” roared the captain, as he gave a sharp tug at the whistle lanyard. The man at the wheel spun it till the brass work on the spokes seemed an endless golden ring.
“Bang, clank! Bang, clank!”
went the steam steering-gear with a jarring tremor on deck, answered by the furious din of the engine-room telegraph as the captain jammed the indicator at “full speed astern”. And on came the tramp, showing bulkier through the mist.

“All hands forward with fenders!” and the men by the after-hatch scurried forward, the mate at their head. Slowly the vessels approached amid a whirr of bells and frantically shouted orders, their whistles hooting the regulation blasts. Suddenly, as but a few yards intervened, they obeyed their helms and slowly paid off, almost scraping one another’s sides as they slid by, while at half-speed the
Mary Bland
plunged into the fog, her siren continuing the concert begun by the now silent tramp.

All at once there was a loud shout from the water, and a chocolate-coloured topsail, with a little dogvane above it, rose on the port-bow. Once more the captain’s hand wrenched the telegraph to “full speed astern”, but it was too late. There was a concussion, plainly felt all over the steamer, a grinding and a splintering noise, and the topsail with its little weathercock dogvane had disappeared. The after-coming crowd rushed back again to find the
Mary Bland
drifting with the tide through an archipelago of hay-trusses.

“Where in thunder are yer comin’ to?” sounded in plaintive protest from the nearest truss. “Ain’t there room enough roun’ Coal-’ouse point for the likes of you?”

“What have we run down, Mr. Trimble?” demanded the captain, his hands quivering on the bridge rail in a spasm of suppressed excitement.

“I think it’s a hay-barge, sir. It looks like a man floating on a truss over there on the port-beam,” said the mate, pointing in the direction of the voice.

“Get a boat out then, lively, and pick him up! And send that look-out man to me—I want to speak to him.”

The men were already handling the falls, and, as the hapless look-out man slouched aft, the first officer, jumping into the boat with four sailors, was lowered to the water, and rowed towards the survivor of the barge.

All this time Pringle had remained near the after-hatch. When the collision seemed imminent he was about to follow the general movement to the centre of interest, when a light suddenly flashed on the port side, and, even as he gazed in wonder, ceased as abruptly as it rose. He stopped and looked about him; the gathering gloom of the evening seemed deeper after the momentary light, everyone was forward, the deck quite deserted, and the box of specie for the time ignored. Not altogether, though. A sailor was coming aft, detailed, no doubt, to watch the treasure where it lay.

Noting how stealthily he approached, Pringle drew back into his corner and watched him. The man walked on tiptoe, with every now and then a backward glance; and, for all the dimness of the fog and the oncoming night, he stalked along, taking advantage of every slightest shadow. Clearly he imagined that everyone was forward; he never gave a glance in Pringle’s direction, but moved ‘the beard on the shoulder’. On he stole till he reached the deserted box, and there he stopped and crouched down. Faint echoes were heard from forward, but not a soul came anywhere near the after-hatch. The captain was, of course, on the bridge; but, having relieved his feelings at the expense of the look-out man, was now absorbed in trying to follow the progress of the mate among the hay trusses.

Presently the light shot up again, and now a little closer. As it flickered and oscillated, Pringle saw that it came from a slender cylindrical lamp, supported by a sort of conical iron cage topping a large, black-coloured buoy, which floated some twenty feet off from the
Mary Bland
. The sight appeared to nerve the sailor to action; it seemed, indeed, as if he had waited for the buoy to reveal itself.

Dragging the box aside as gently as its weight allowed, he seized the chain placed ready for the tackle-hook, and tried to raise it. Again and again he made the attempt, but the weight seemed beyond his single strength. In the midst the light flared out once more; it was just opposite the ship, and as the buoy slowly dipped and turned, with a curtsey to this side and to that, the word “OVENS”, in large white capitals, showed upon it before the light went out and all was dark again.

With a wrench and a groan, the man tilted the box on end; then, bracing himself, he raised it first to a bollard, and with a final and desperate heave to the gunwale. And then a curious thing happened. When presently the light shone the chest had disappeared, but, as if tracing its descent, the man hung over the side, his feet slipping and squirming to get a purchase, and as the light passed the sound of his struggling continued in the darkness.

At the next flash he was gone—all but a hand, which still gripped the gunwale, while his feet could be heard drumming furiously against the vessel’s side; and now, as his fingers slipped from their agonising hold, he gave a shriek for help, and then another and another.

Pringle darted across the deck, but the unfortunate wretch was beyond help; his hand wedged fast in the chain, he had been dragged overboard by the momentum of nearly a hundredweight of specie. And as he plunged headlong into the river the beacon shimmered upon a fountain of spray, a few jets even breaking in cascade against the sides of the buoy.

The cries of the drowning man had passed unnoticed. The boat had reached the barge just as the truss began to break up in the swirl; the passengers were cheering lustily, and Pringle walked quietly forward and mingled unperceived with the crowd. While rescued and rescuers climbed on board, the captain telegraphed “full speed ahead”, and the
Mary Bland
resumed her voyage, so prolific of incident.

A group of passengers were discussing the proper course to have pursued had the collision with the tramp steamer actually occurred. A burly man with a catarrhal Teutonic accent maintained that the only sensible thing to do would have been to scramble on board the colliding ship. “At the worst,” said he, “she would only have had two or three of her fore compartments stove in, whilst we stood to have a hole punched in our side big enough for an omnibus to drive through. We should have sunk inside of ten minutes, whilst they would have floated—well, long enough to have got us comfortably ashore.”

In this discussion Pringle innocently joined, with an eye on the captain, who paced the bridge in ignorance of the new anxiety in store for him. Meanwhile, the purser had remained at his post in the strong-room. He awaited the further storage of the specie; but, although he could hear the men returning to the hatchway, not a shadow of the box appeared. At length he cried impatiently:

“Lower away, there—oh, lower away!”

“There ain’t no more up ’ere, sir,” said one of the men, as he put his head over the coaming.

“No
more
?” repeated the purser in hollow tones from the depths. “Send down that third box of specie—the money, I mean. Ah, you jackass! Don’t stand grinning there! Where’s the box you were going to send down when that cursed hooker nearly ran into us? Where’s Mr. Trimble?”

‘”E’s with the captain, sir. Ain’t the box down there? Didn’t we send it down atop of the other two ’fore we went forward?”

Bang!
went the strong-room door as the purser, without further discussion, rushed up on deck.

“Where’s that third box of specie, Mr. Trimble?” The captain and the mate stared down at him from the bridge without answering.

“These idiots think they sent it down; but I’ve only received two, and it’s nowhere about the deck.”

The captain gasped and turned pale. “When did you last see it?” he asked the mate.

“Just before we got into the fog.”

The captain suppressed an oath.

“Go down with the purser, Mr. Trimble, and see if it’s fallen down the hatch.”

Twenty minutes saw the mate return, hot and perspiring.

“Can’t see a bit of it, sir,” he reported; “and, what’s more, Cogle seems to have disappeared as well!”

“Cogle?”

“Yes, sir. He was working the crane, but no one has seen him since. He can’t have jumped overboard with the specie.”

“Rot! Why, that box held five thousand sovereigns according to the manifest, and couldn’t weigh an ounce less than three-quarters of a hundredweight altogether! You can’t put a thing like that in your pocket, can you?”

The mate glanced doubtfully at the passengers on the saloon-deck, but none showed such a bulging of the person as might be expected from a concealed box of specie.

“How would it be to put back to Gravesend and inform the police?” he suggested. “Cogle must have tumbled overboard in the ruction.”

“It’s no good putting back,” the captain decided gloomily. “That specie was delivered right enough, and I’m responsible for it. It can’t have fallen overboard, so it’s on the ship somewhere—that I’ll swear. Can’t you suggest anything?” he added testily, as the mate continued to cast a suspicious eye on all around.

“Why not search the passengers’ luggage?”

“Search your grandmother!” returned the captain contemptuously. “How can I do that’? Hold on, though—I’ll send you ashore as soon as we get to Rotterdam, and we’ll ask the police to stand by while the Customs fellows search the luggage. Not a mother’s son leaves this ship except the passengers; and as to the cargo, our agent’ll see after that.” And he went below to ‘log down’ the events of the day whilst they were fresh in his memory.

The one person who could have thrown any light on the mystery remained silent. Pringle had resolved to be the dead man’s legatee. It would be a large order, no doubt, to fish the chest up again, but the light marked a shoal thereabouts, and the depth was unlikely to be great; and, thinking the affair over, Pringle had little doubt that it was the sight of the buoy, a fixed watermark, which had determined the man to jettison the specie where he did.

* * * *

As soon as he got back to London again, Pringle devoted some time to a careful study of Pearson’s
Nautical Almanac
. From this useful publication he learnt that at the time the
Mary Bland
was on her exciting course down the river it was the first of the ebb-tide—that is to say, about three-quarters of an hour after high-water. Now, inasmuch as a buoy is moored by a considerable length of chain, it is able to drift about within a circle of many feet; hence Pringle, to ensure success in his search, must choose a state of the tide identical with that prevailing when the box disappeared. At the same time, he proposed, for obvious reasons, to work at night, and preferably a moonless one.

At length he found that all these conditions were present about seven in the evening of the tenth day after his return.

Pringle, among his varied accomplishments, could handle a boat with most yachtsmen; and, leaving his chambers in Furnival’s Inn for a season, he took up his residence at Erith. Here, attired in yachting costume, he spent depressing hours among the forlorn and aged craft at disposal, until, lighting on a boat suited to his purpose, he promptly hired it.