CHAPTER XVII.
Amos Goodhare was the first to recover from the sort of stupefaction into which the sight of their royal plunder had thrown the three confederates.
“Well, boys,” he said, “I think we may rest on our laurels a little while after this feat. It would take an expert in jewels, which I don’t profess to be, to tell you what value we have there. But here is a diamond in this,” and he took up the diadem, “which cannot, I should think, be worth less than five thousand pounds. While this crown,” and he laid his hand upon the other and still more magnificent prize, “ought to bring us in enough to live in modest comfort for the remainder of our lives.”
“Well, there can’t be much of them left to run at the rate we’re going on,” moaned Sep, who was altogether unhinged by the life of enforced abstinence he had led for the last few days under Goodhare’s supervision, by the risks of the morning, and by the still greater risks in the disposal of the jewels which he knew would fall to his share.
“Sep, you’re out of sorts. Drink a health to the Honorable Charles Cenarth, keeper of the regalia, and may he come half as easily out of this scrape as we have done!”
He went to the little rickety sideboard, and, taking out a decanter and glasses, filled three bumpers, and pushed one over to Sep, who emptied part of the spirit into another tumbler, and drank the rest, diluted with two-thirds of water.
“Now, to the health of the Honorable——” began Goodhare again.
But Sep interrupted him. Glancing restlessly round the room, he laid his hand on the elder man’s arm, and whispered hoarsely:
“Don’t. Its unlucky.”
“And instead of spending our time drinking healths we’d better be deciding what to do with these dangerous little toys, now we’ve got them,” suggested Rees drily. “As long as they remain in their present form the sight of them by an outsider might expose our motives to misconstruction.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the door burst open, and the landlady, a rheumatic old woman in a rusty black cap, entered with only that perfunctory knock which is more like a fall against the door in the act of opening it, than a respectful request for permission to enter. Mrs. Williamson was quite taken aback at the sight of the treasures on the table. Luckily for them, the confederates also were so utterly overwhelmed by this unexpected surprise, that no one of them made so much as an instinctive movement as if to hide the jewels.
After a few moments’ dead pause, during which the old woman remained blinking at the gems, and the three men felt as if the handcuffs were already on their wrists, Mrs. Williamson, with a short laugh, put all their fears to flight with half a dozen words.
“Well, I never,” she said. “What finery to be sure!”
It had not for a moment occurred to this matter-of-fact Londoner that the crowns were “real.” Her words suddenly opened the eyes of the three men to a different view of the gold and precious stones before them. Knowing them to be genuine, they had seen them illuminated by the glow with which the consciousness of their value endowed them. Looking at them all at once from the landlady’s point of view, they saw that in the weak and murky daylight which came through the dirty window the jewels looked wonderfully little better than theatrical properties. The resourceful Amos hailed this idea with delight. Seizing one of the crowns, he held it over his own head, and asked gaily:
“Well, Mrs. Williamson, what do you think of my crown? You didn’t know that I went in for acting, did you? I’m going to play Richard the Third to-night.”
“And a very handsome-looking king too, I’m sure, sir. But you should have gone to ’Ales, in Wellington-street, for your crown, begging your pardon for suggesting it. He’d never have sent you such a one as that, with a dirty old piece of velvet in the middle not fit to touch. I’ve had a actor—not an amateur like you, sir, but one who did it for his living—on my third floor, and he had a much better one than that from ’Ales, much brighter and bigger jewels.”
“Well, I must remember that for the next time. I think now this will have to serve my purpose.”
“Mrs. Williamson thought they were real at first, I believe,” laughed Rees, throwing himself on the sofa.
“Indeed, sir, I did not,” said the old woman indignantly. “I’ve not always been redooced to letting lodgings, and there was a time when I had jewellery of my own, though you mayn’t choose to believe it. And I don’t suppose now there’s many better judges about of what’s good than what I am, sir. However, I hadn’t come to tell you that, but to know whether I should lay the cloth for dinner?”
“Certainly, and Mr. Goodhare will dine with us to-day,” said Rees.
Sep and Rees had each a little room on the second floor, but Goodhare’s lodgings were at Westminster. There was too much business to be settled, however, for them to separate for the present. So they ate a hurried meal, had the table cleared, and then very gently, very noiselessly, opened the window and looked out.
The fog was thicker than ever, settling down upon the city for such a night as the three confederates loved. Only a little bit of sky was visible at all from this ground floor room, for the backs of the houses behind came very close, leaving between the two walls of blackened brick nothing but a passage paved with worn and irregular flags. When a good look to right and left had assured the three men that no one was about and that the fog was thick enough to hide them from a chance observer at any of the adjacent windows, one by one they dropped through their own window into the passage, turned to the right, and over the wall at the end into a second and much narrower passage, which ran at right angles to the first, along the backs of the deserted houses which had struck Deborah Audaer with such a sense of poverty and desolation.
The back doors of all these houses were boarded up as carefully as the windows and doors in front. But Rees, who was the first of the three to venture on this errand, stopped at the door of the fourth house, with one strong pull wrenched off the two lowest boards, and crawled through the opening thus made. For the door itself had been taken bodily away. A minute later, Sep, and then Goodhare, had passed through also.
As soon as they were all inside they drew up the displaced boards, which were joined together, fastened them in their place with bolts, and proceeded together along the passage which ran from the back to the front of the house. Without striking a light they felt for and found, about half way along the passage, an opening in the floor which led, by a narrow ladder-staircase, into the cellars.
The first they entered was at the front, underneath that part of the house which had once been a shop. It was very dimly lighted through a rusty grating just below the shop window, and was full of scraps of paper, heaps of dust, and rubbish of the most worthless kind, such as not even the poorest rag-picker would find it worth while to carry away. Behind this miserable and mouldy-smelling cellar was a second, more miserable and mouldy still. It had been sunk some three feet deeper into the earth than the front one, from which it was divided by a brick wall, in which a wooden door had been inserted, artfully painted so as to be undistinguishable, except by an experienced eye, from the brickwork on either side. Into this lower cellar all three men dropped and shut the door behind them.
Then Goodhare struck a light. The cellar was small, and ventilated only by a hole about a foot square in the floor of the back shop above. Immediately under this hole was a small, roughly-made square grate, and above the grate there swung a huge melting-pot. The rest of the furniture consisted of a couple of benches, a dirty table on which was a piece of brown paper containing tools, a large collection of wine and spirit bottles, both empty and full, and a wide, comfortable-looking, old-fashioned couch.
Rees and Sep set to work without delay, extracting the precious stones from their heavy setting with accustomed fingers. In the meantime Amos built up a fire in the rusty grate, and as fast as a piece of gold was deprived of its jewels, he threw it into the melting-pot. While he did so he issued his next instructions to the two younger men.
“We shall have a day or two to work in, boys, because I expect they’ll try to recover the things first without raising a hue and cry. Cenarth will know it’s life and death to him to get them back quietly. You, Sep, will have to cross to Amsterdam to-night. I’ll take care to make up such a parcel as no one shall suspect. You will represent yourself as a merchant of—Tunis, say—who has been trading in South Africa. When you have disposed of as much there as you safely can, go on to Paris, and try—not the big firms—they’ll be on the alert by that time—but rich private Americans. Try the swell hotels. Stay at the Grand or the Louvre, and look out for Bertram, the railway millionaire; he’s due in Paris in a day or two. With him you may suggest the real source they came from; you needn’t give him all particulars. But if you manage well, he’ll nibble. And there will be no haggling. Do you understand? Keep your head clear—but you always do when there’s work in hand. I must do you that justice.”
“Justice!” echoed Sep sulkily. “I shall get a little too much of that before this affair is over, I fancy. There’s nothing in what we’ve done up to now. It might have been done over and over again if the rascals who thought of the Crown jewels before us hadn’t remembered the certainty of discovery afterwards. I’m tired of playing cat’s-paw. Go to Amsterdam yourself. You’re much more like a Tunisian merchant than I am. And you’ve more nerve. I don’t know what’s become of mine, but it’s gone.”
And Sep shivered as he cast round him another of the restless glances which Amos had noticed in him all day. Goodhare looked at him searchingly, and then laid an encouraging hand on his shoulder.
“I’d go with pleasure, my boy, if I could do what is to be done as well as you. But my Greek and Hebrew would not serve me as your knowledge of modern languages serves you; besides, you have been a traveller, and I a stay-at-home, and there is a difference between those two classes which I could not hide.”
“Come, Sep, don’t make difficulties,” said Rees impatiently. “We have all our different departments and separate work. Goodhare organises, I have the chief hand in carrying out——”
“And I do the dirty work,” added Sep querulously. “I shall have to go, of course; I know that. But it will be the last time; I feel it. So look out for yourselves.”
“What do you mean? You’re not going to round on us, I suppose?” said Rees, savagely.
“No, I haven’t the spirit to do that, as you know. But I—I’ve been seen—I’m sure of it. On my way back from that cursed Tower I seemed to see faces peering out of the fog—Charles Cenarth’s and Lord St. Austell’s. Of course I’ll go if you insist, but I tell you it will be a d——d unlucky journey.”
His companions laughed at his fears, did their best to raise his drooping spirits, and at last, chiefly by the aid of consoling potations, restored him to something like his old cheerful submissiveness. Then, taking swift advantage of the change in him, they equipped him for his journey with a disguise which Amos had had ready, with clothing, with money, and with a travelling bag with a false bottom, in which, between layers of tissue paper, the stolen jewels were packed. All these preparations being completed, Amos mixed a loving cup, which they all drank solemnly to their usual toast on the eve of one of their nefarious enterprises:
“Success to the Princes of the Fog.”
But somehow the old spirit flagged. As the light from the glowing charcoal fire flickered up on their faces, each seemed to see distorting shadows of fear and failure on the features of his companions. They finished the ceremony with unusual haste and in unusual silence, and climbing up out of the damp yet stifling underground retreat, slipped out into the raw air, and getting over the palings unseen in the mist, emerged into Charing Cross-road. Rees and Goodhare accompanied Sep as far as St. Martin’s Church, and left him with just time to catch the continental mail train from Charing Cross. Then they returned to Rees Pennant’s lodgings.
“For,” whispered Amos, as soon as their companion had left them, “I have something for you also to do.”
As soon as they were again within closed doors, the older man unburdened himself of his instructions.
“I didn’t wish to frighten Jocelyn,” he began ominously, “for the lad’s turning soft and doesn’t need warning to be careful at any time. But there’s no denying that this is a dangerous business, the most ticklish thing we’ve had on our hands yet.”
“Yes, of course,” assented Rees gloomily.
“So I think we had better get as near the safe side as possible.”
He paused.
“Well?” said Rees.
“Now, the best shelter we can get behind is—influence.”
“Whose?”
“Lord St. Austell’s.”
Rees started.
“The man we both hate?”
“Why should that prevent our making use of him? Now he can’t, in common decency, let me suffer if he can help it. It lies with you to make it equally impossible for him to let you suffer.”
“Go on; out with it.”
“Become his son-in-law without delay. Marion will jump at you.”
Rees moved uneasily.
“I know that. If she were a little less ready, I might be a little more so.”
“This is not a time to stick at trifles. You had an appointment with her to-night at a friend’s house?”
“Yes, but I can’t go—fog’s too thick for me to venture out.”
“She’ll venture, I suppose?”
The young man shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“Of course. She’d walk through the Thames to meet me at any time.”
“Then your unparalleled devotion must stand even this test. You must meet her to-night and arrange to marry her with as little delay as possible.”
Rees made a grimace.
“Can’t it be put off until we see how things really turn out?”
“No,” answered Amos, decisively, “we can really only reckon on safety for a few hours. You see we were all seen. Our best chance, yours and mine, is to remain where we are, keep perfectly quiet, and trust to Sep’s keeping his head; in the meantime we must take all the precautions we can, and yours is—Lady Marion.”
Rees got up from his chair with a very sour face.
“All right,” he said briefly. “If it’s got to be done, here goes.”
He ran upstairs to his room without another word, and returned in twenty minutes in evening dress and overcoat, wearing the tired and blasé air which was now no affectation with him. His pale face, curly hair, and great black eyes with dark rings under them, made him look what ladies call “interesting,” a fact of which he did not appear to be ignorant.
“Will it do?” he asked, carelessly, as he took up his gloves.
“First-rate,” answered Amos, with a nod.
And with much apparent reluctance, part of which was real and part affected, Rees Pennant jumped into a hansom and gave the driver an address in a street near Russell-square.