Clutterbuck's Treasure

"Dinner's at eight; you'd better change those digging clothes and make yourself look like a decent Christian, if you can."

Jack was perfectly right. Dinner made a wonderful difference in the view I took of things in general; it always does. After dinner, armed with his pipe, sitting over an early fire in our private sitting-room, Jack dismounted from his high horse and admitted me into his confidence.

"I daresay you won't think anything of it," he said; "but it was the portrait of old Clutterbuck that set me dreaming."

"What!" I said, jumping to my feet and seizing a dessert knife, "you don't mean to say, after all my digging, that the money's hidden in it?"

"Why, man, no! I never thought of that," said Jack. "However, open the back carefully and see, if you like."

I did so; I ripped the back off and looked in the space between it and the canvas upon which the odious caricature was painted. An earwig ran out, but there was no treasure. I threw the thing back upon the table, and the knife with it.

"Don't fret," said Jack; "that's not what I meant at all. What I did mean is this: do you suppose that any sane man—and you cannot say that old Clutterbuck was anything else—would any man who was not insane take the trouble to carry a picture to the Gulf of Finland and bury it there for his heirs to find—an odious misrepresentation of his features too—unless there were some object to gain by so doing? In a word, what I can't understand is how both you and I should hitherto have accepted the ridiculous fact without suspicion."

"But we did suspect," I cried. "We said at the time that the thing was about as idiotic as it could be; but when one's right to benefit by a will depends on the sanity of the testator, one doesn't like to air one's opinion that he was mad, even though one may think so."

"Depend upon it, the old boy was no madder than you or I," said Jack gravely. "I am beginning to think that he was very sane indeed, and that he has managed the whole of this business with consummate skill—always bearing in mind his expressed desire to make his heirs sweat for their money. Now listen here. I have been thinking while you did your hard labour in the garden, and I am now perfectly convinced that the old fox did not bury his precious piece of rubbish because he valued it or thought his heir would. Quite the contrary. He knew that it was extremely likely that his heir—probably James Strong, as he supposed at the time—would chuck the portrait in the fire with a curse at the memory of the original. And why, think you, did he take the trouble to have this picture painted and to bury it and solemnly bequeath it to his heir if he suspected that the finder would burn it?"

"It beats me," said I. "Go on."

"Because he knew that the portrait was indispensable, or nearly so, to the finding of the treasure," said Jack mysteriously. "See here. He hates Strong and the rest, and knows they hate him. Therefore he makes his portrait indispensable in the hope that they will destroy it, and with it their chance of finding his money."

"Very well," said I, "let us admit all that; but how can the portrait be indispensable to, or have any connection with, the finding of the hidden treasure?"

"That's what we have to learn," said Jack; "but I have evolved a theory on that point also."

I laughed.

"Upon my life, Jack, it's too funny," I said. "You are as ingenious as Machiavelli himself; but how are you going to connect that awful daub with the buried treasure? You can't do it; I defy you!"

"Well, I'll tell you, anyhow; it may be as ridiculous as you suppose, and it may not," said Jack. "You see the eyes of the awful personage in the picture: look here, I hold the portrait thus. Now get in front of the thing and try if you can find a place where the eyes focus you; you'll have to lie down on the carpet."

Still amused, but interested nevertheless, I lay down along the carpet, as desired, and presently found a spot where the eyes certainly seemed to gaze at me.

"Well," I said, "what then? They are to gaze at the spot where the money lies hidden? Is that it?"

"That's just exactly it," said Jack, flushing a little.

CHAPTER XLI

THE EXCITEMENT BECOMES INTENSE

"But, man alive," said I, "where's the picture going to hang, or be held, in order to point out the spot?"

"That's what we've to find out," said Jack. "If my theory is right, the old boy will have prepared a place for it to hang. Are there trees, or nails in the wall?"

"There are trees, certainly," said I; "I don't know about the nails. And am I to dig a seven-foot hole wherever the confounded picture will hang?"

"Yes, you are," said Jack imperturbably, "and you know it. And now you had better go to bed; partly because you'll require some rest for these seven-foot holes, but chiefly because you are in such an evil humour to-night that I'm blessed if I will endure your society any longer!"

And so to bed I went.

That night I dreamed a great many wonderful dreams, and in each and all of them I was digging and for ever digging, and the treasure was still unfound or, when found, snatched from me! In one of my dreams, I remember, I fancied that I had hit upon the right tack, when of a sudden three huge Mahatmas bore silently down upon me from the world of spirits and demanded of me what I sought.

They looked out upon me with piercing black eyes let into cavernous sockets framed in dead-white faces, and they flapped their sable mantles over me and frightened me.

"Oh, sirs," I said, "I am seeking for buried treasure; I am within an ace of finding it and yet have not found it. Help me, I beseech you, to light upon it, and you shall do with me as you will!"

"Treasure is vanity, vanity, vanity!" cried one of the Mahatmas.

"Gold is dross, dross, dross!" wailed a second.

"Nevertheless, I will show you where to find it!" sang the third, in a mournful monotone. "Come!"

I dreamed that I followed the Mahatma back, earthwards, and we alighted in Clutterbuck's garden. He did but turn over one spadeful of earth, and there lay revealed a sack of glittering gold pieces. Instantly the two other Mahatmas flew shrieking to the treasure and fought for it, tearing the black mantles from one another's shoulders. But the third slew them both from behind, and, seizing the sack of gold, fled over land and sea, I, shrieking, after him.

But just as I was overtaking him he turned, and I saw his face—it was James Strong. At the same moment he cried aloud, and said: "For treasure I have sinned and murdered, and lo! I have bartered my soul in vain—for see what this gold of yours is!"

With the words he poured the gold out of the sack's mouth, and behold! it was ashes, and they fell hissing into the sea.

In another of my dreams I was busily digging, while the dog Ginger watched my efforts. Suddenly I turned up a sod in which lay a piece of bread, and in the bread was folded a cheque for one hundred thousand pounds; but even as I read the figures, and was about to cry aloud for joy, the dog snatched both bread and paper from my hand, and swallowed them.

All this dreaming went to prove that I was far more interested and influenced by Jack's rather brilliant idea than I had chosen to show; his suggestion was on my mind and had "murdered sleep," quiet, solid sleep, such as I usually indulged in. Consequently, I was up very early on the following morning in order to set about putting the new idea to a trial. I hurried through breakfast, and was out of the hotel and busy at work in the garden before Jack was dressed.

First I tried the trees.

There was a willow, a fine tree with two big branches, almost as large as the parent stem, about ten feet from the ground. There was no excrescence from this tree small enough to hang the picture upon, and I passed on to the next, a poplar. Here, at about five feet from the earth, there was a twig from which the picture might be got to hang in a lopsided kind of way; but the twig was evidently a young shoot, and had probably sprung into existence since the picture had been taken to Hogland and buried, so that I spared myself a seven-foot dig beneath that poplar.

Then there was a lime, a small one, near the end of the garden; and into the trunk of this tree, on the wall side, I discovered that a nail had been knocked. I grew hot and cold at the sight, for I thought I had "struck oil" at last.

But, alas! when I had hung the picture by its little ring to this nail, and tried to get my face where the eyes would be fixed upon it, I found that the portrait glared at a spot about half-way down the brick wall, and not at any place on the ground whereinto a man might sink a spade.

There were no more trees, and I now turned my attention to the wall itself, and looked for nails up and down, and from end to end. I found one, to my delight, and having hung up the portrait, was engaged in the occupation of lying on my stomach and wooing the stony glare of old Clutterbuck's lack-lustre eyes, when Jack mounted the wall just above it, and nearly fell off again for laughing at the ridiculous spectacle which he said I presented. However, I focussed the eyes, and planted a stick in the exact spot.

"It's the only nail in the garden, Jack," I cried excitedly. "I do believe we've hit off the place at last!"

"Good!" said Jack grimly; "now dig for all you're worth!"

I did dig. I dug that seven-foot hole as though at the bottom of it some terrible earthworm had seized by the throat all that I held most dear in the world. Never were seven feet of earth displaced in quicker time by human energy.

But there was nothing there.

"Dig another three-foot-six!" said Jack from the wall. "The rhyme may mean 'Three foot six, and double that besides'—that is, ten feet six in all."

Breathless, despondent, stiff, half dead with fatigue, I dug on till the water was up to the top of my boots; it was of no use.

"I won't dig another inch!" I groaned; "not to-day, at all events."

"Come out then, and consult," said Jack. Even he seemed dejected with the last failure.

I came out, dead beat.

"Are there no more nails in the wall, anywhere?" he asked.

"Not one," said I. "I couldn't dig again to-day if there were!"

"Have you tried the trees?"

"Yes; there's nothing to hang the confounded thing from on any of them."

"I see the cut-up trunk of a felled tree against the shed, over there. When was that one cut down?"

I didn't know.

"Ask old Baines," said Jack.

Baines was within doors, though Ginger was with me; the dog had been a terrible nuisance all day, licking my face when I had to lie on my waistcoat in order to focus those eyes, and while I was digging the huge hole standing at the brink and whining and howling as though he expected me to unearth a huge cat for his delectation. As a matter of fact, he would have run away if a mouse had jumped out. Ginger was not a brave dog; he was too benevolent to be really brave.

I went and fetched Baines, and asked him who had cut down the tree, and when and why?

Baines said that he had felled it a year ago at his master's orders.

"What for?" I asked. But Baines did not know that. Only, he said, he had strict orders not to burn the wood, or even touch it, for some reason or other.

This seemed rather curious, and I reported to Jack on the wall.

"Great scissors!" said that most ingenious individual; "go and see if there's a nail in the trunk!"

To my astonishment and delight, there was a nail; I shouted this news to Jack.

"Oh, hang it all, I'm coming over!" cried Jack; "this is too exciting for sitting on walls," he added, as he joined me and looked at and felt the nail for himself. "Where was this tree?" I took Jack and showed him the big hole in the centre of the garden out of which I had dug the root.

"Come on," said he; "we must have that root in again! Shove!"

Together we shoved the stump back into its own place, taking care to fit it into the hole exactly as it had rested there in life, and to keep its sawn surface level with the earth in order that the sundered portions of the trunk might be made to stand one upon another and all upon the parent stump, straight and without tipping forward or backward.

CHAPTER XLII

ALL OVER BUT–

Then we brought the round thick logs which had formed the trunk, and which had been sawn into lengths of about four feet, and piled them one on top of another in their own order, which was obvious and unmistakable on account of the lessening girth of the trunk as it went higher. We piled three of these, fitting them one upon the other as they had stood in life, and the nail was in the fourth, with which we crowned the edifice, Jack standing upon a step-ladder and I handing up the logs.

"There!" he said, when he had built up the edifice to the height of some fifteen feet; "there's our tree as it stood in life, wobbly, no doubt, and insecure; but it will bear the picture though it wouldn't stand much of north-easter. Hand up the work of art."

We hung up the portrait, and again I lay on the ground here and there and ogled the hideous thing until I had wooed its eyes to meet my own.

Then we dug together. Jack had thrown all ridiculous fastidiousness to the winds of heaven, and helped me like a man and a sensible being.

Together we dug, and the hole rapidly grew, and with it grew also our own excitement and Ginger's, who looked on whining, as before, for the game that we were to start from our burrow for him to run away from. We had had no lunch, and the afternoon was fleeting fast; but we dug on.

Now the grave was two feet deep, and now four, now five. I had never felt so excited as this, even at that supreme moment when my fingers touched the tin box in the African veldt.

Now the hole was six feet in depth, and Jack's head, when he stood up, was just below the earth-level. Ginger, in his excitement, pulled Jack's cap off and laid it on the ground beside him, probably determined that if we were to disappear altogether, he would preserve at least a memento of us to swear by.

Six feet and a half, and now my spade (it wasmine; I am glad it was mine), my spade struck against something hard and metallic.

"Hullo!" cried Jack, who heard the sound.

"Only a stone, I'm afraid!" said I, trembling so that I could hardly raise my spade. Jack stopped work to watch.

"Your first blood!" he said. "Dig again and see; if there are honours, they shall be yours!"

There were honours. Half impotent with excitement, I dug again.

It was no stone. Trembling, I cleared the clayey soil from the object, whatever it might be, and revealed a vessel of hardware.

"Pull it out, pull it out, man!" said Jack; "don't stand quaking there!"

I made an effort, and removed the thing and handed it to Jack; I felt cold and faint with the excitement. I could only just see out of my eyes sufficiently to recognise that the object I had found was a large earthen jar, corked and sealed round.

Jack scrambled out of the hole and gave me a hand; I climbed out in a dream.

"Open it," he said.

"No—you," I gasped. I sat down and watched, only half alive.

Jack put the vessel on the ground and broke it neatly in two pieces. Inside was a small tin box, hardly larger than the envelope which Jack drew forth from it after prising it open.

"Another sickening disappointment?" I gasped.

"I don't know," said Jack; "read it, and see."

"I can't," I said; "open it and read it to me; if it's another sell, I shall curse Clutterbuck and die."

Jack—looking pale and thin—broke the seal of the envelope. I saw the colour rush back to his face.

"What is it, in Heaven's name?" I said; "don't madden me!"

"All right this time, old boy," cried Jack, handing me the paper with flashing eyes—"a cheque to bearer."

It was so. A cheque for ninety-seven thousand odd pounds!

I do not know what I did. Jack, who sometimes tells the truth, says that I deliberately stood on my head on the very top of the pile of earth we had dug out of the hole, and that Ginger licked my face just as I had reached the third bar of the National Anthem (performed then positively for the first time in that position!) and brought me down with a run. Personally I do not recollect the episode.

The cheque was duly paid, the bank manager gravely smiling as I handed it to him in his private room. He was, I found, partially in the secret. He asked for, and I gave him, a short account of my adventures, when he was kind enough to express the opinion that I deserved the money.

CHAPTER XLIII

–THE SHOUTING

That evening Jack and I gave a party. That is, we sent down to old Baines a box of cigars, a bottle of champagne, and a hamper of delicacies which—I have since reflected—must have made him very unwell, if he ate them. We did not forget Ginger; Ginger enjoyed, that night, a meal which he must, I am sure, have believed to have been cooked in the Happy Hunting Grounds, and to have been sent specially from that abode of canine bliss for the comfort of his declining years. To this day I sometimes see him, when asleep, licking his lips and going through the action of masticating imaginary food. Well, I believe he is, at such moments, enjoying once again—in the sweet glades of remembrance—the ecstasies of that gala banquet.

As for ourselves, Jack invited me and I him to a Gaudeamus, and together we celebrated the occasion in a manner befitting so glorious a finish to our wanderings and toil (not that Jack ever did much of the digging!) and sufferings and disappointments, and so on. Together we fought o'er again every encounter, whether with Strong, with elephants, with lions, or with the devils of despair and disappointment, and it was on this festive occasion that Jack made me promise to write down for your benefit, my dear reader, the record of our experiences and adventures. I may say that we drank your health, dear owner of this volume, whoever you may be, and voted you an excellent fellow for buying, or having presented to you, the book; and wished you were twins and each had a copy,—all for your own benefit, you know, because the tale is a jolly good—but perhaps I had better leave all this for others to say; only I should just like you to know that we thought of you, as of a wise person to have possessed yourself of the book, that's all. Well, among other things that night, absurd things that—in our joy and triumph—we said and did, we drank Strong's health and wished that he might escape the hangman's rope; we also breathed a fervent wish that we might never see the rascal again, and then, in more serious mood, discussed the question as to whether it was at all likely that we ever should.

We both decided that it was extremely unlikely. He certainly had audacity enough and—to do him justice—pluck enough for five men; but when a man knows that he is a murderer, and a double or treble murderer, and that if his crimes could be brought home to him he must "swing" for them, he is not likely to haunt those parts of the world where he would be most in danger. The world is big enough. He would keep away from us, at anyrate!

"I wonder what he is doing now?" said Jack with a laugh; "and where he is, and what he would say or do if he knew of to-day's little success, eh?"

"Well, I'm glad on the whole that he doesn't," I said; and in this conclusion Jack concurred; for, without being exactly afraid of the fellow, we had had enough of him, and that's the truth.

Now, the longer I live in this world the more I realise that we human beings are but a poor, blind, helpless lot of creatures; we are best pleased with ourselves when we have, in reality, little cause for satisfaction; we imagine ourselves safely out of what is familiarly termed "the wood," when, as a matter of fact, a very jungle of trouble lies immediately before us, could we but see it! Here is a case in point. We were very, very happy that night, and apparently with every legitimate reason; moreover, when I laid my head upon the pillow at about twelve o'clock, I imagined that I should awake at eight or so, ready to step into a new bright world which the sunshine of yesterday's success should have transformed for me into a very paradise of bliss. I had every reason to suppose that this would be so. I never for one moment imagined, for instance, that this might be the last time that I should lay my head to rest in this world, and that the sleep I now courted should be an endless one in so far as concerned the usual awaking to a terrestrial morrow!

And yet this came very near to being the actual and exact state of the case.

It was, I think, about two or three o'clock in the morning, when some pleasant dream I was enjoying began to be marred—I remember the feeling quite well—by a kind of choky sensation, a difficulty in breathing. I can even recall the fact that some friend—a dream-friend, I mean—made the heartless remark that prosperity was making me so fat that the function of getting breath had become a labour to me.

But the sensation became rapidly unpleasant and intolerable, and I awoke suddenly, sweating and in terror. What had happened to me?

Then I heard Strong's voice, very subdued and soft, but certainly Strong's voice. Could this be still a part of the dream?

No, it was reality; Strong's voice was a reality; so was a handkerchief which he had tied over my mouth, gag-wise; so was a candle which he had lighted in the room, and the light of which revealed the detested face and ferocious expression of the scoundrel as he bent over me, and hissed his oaths and threats into my ear.

"Ah, you're awake, are you?" he murmured (I omit the oaths with which he befouled his language)—"I have you at last, you see, you infernal"—(I really cannot repeat the names he called me, they were too vile even to mention), "say your prayers, for you're off this time, to glory!"

I could not speak for the gag upon my mouth. I tried to raise my hands, but I found the rascal had tied them together at the wrists. I could hardly breathe, for the bandage was so tightly drawn that I was half suffocated already.

Strong saw that this was so. He put his hand behind my head and slightly loosened the handkerchief.

"Now, you whelp of Satan," he said, "get out of bed and show me where you've hidden the treasure, curse you! I've wasted time enough over it already. Don't pretend this hundred pounds odd, in your letter-case, is the lot. Lies won't do, you're off to Kingdom Come in two minutes; you'd better not go with a lie on your lips! Come,—I saw you find it,—you'd better be quick!"

I glared at the scoundrel, but did not move. I was thinking hard! Oh that I could get my hands free and be at him! or my mouth, that I might shout for Jack—who was in the adjoining bedroom. My heart was almost bursting with rage and hatred for this man; yet I was absolutely helpless; I could do nothing.

"What, you won't budge, won't you?" said the scoundrel. His face, at this crisis, looked exactly what I should imagine the devil to be like: the very incarnation of hatred and malice and all evil—but I daresay my own was not, at the moment, a type of innocent beauty and passionless charm, any more than his!

Strong placed his hand behind my neck a second time, and tightened the gag. I was suffocating—I kicked and struggled—my heart was bursting, my brain reeled and swam, my veins swelled—I sweated from head to foot in my agony and terror, and then—at the critical moment—by God's mercy an idea occurred to me.

I sprang out of bed and rushed to the wash-hand stand, and, whether by kicking, or falling over upon them, or pushing with bound hands or with elbow, I contrived, somehow, before Strong realised my intention, to send the jug and basin crashing upon the floor with a noise, I suppose, that would have awakened an army of men a mile away. At the same moment I lost consciousness, and therefore for the events of the next few minutes I am indebted to second-hand information.

This is, I understand, what happened.

Jack is a lightish sleeper. He was dreaming, he says, of a cricket match in which he once took part at "Lords," playing for his school against the M.C.C. in the great annual function held, as a rule, on the first two days of the holidays. Jack was batting, it appears, to Strong's bowling. Dream-bowling is sometimes very difficult to play by dream-batsmen. It depends very much upon whether the batsman has dined judiciously or the reverse. Jack had assisted at a banquet, as has been shown; and Strong's bowling was giving him a lot of trouble. Strong had sent down four balls, of which the slowest, Jack declared, could have given points to a flash of buttered lightning. One of them killed the wicket-keeper; and another, being a wide, lamed short-slip for life; no one knew what became of the other two balls, they were never caught sight of at all. Then Strong sent down the fifth, and Jack—though he saw nothing of it—slogged at it for all he was worth. The wicket-keeper, it seems, just before he died, had assured Jack that Clutterbuck's treasure would be lost to us for ever, and that Strong was to be declared the legitimate proprietor of the same, by special rule just passed by the committee of the M.C.C., unless he contrived to make four runs in this over. So that it was absolutely necessary, Jack explained, to hit this fifth ball to the boundary.