The bags had been untouched!
There was no further loss, and the clinking weight assured him that his nocturnal visitor had made no more of his gross substitutions.
“Listen, Robert,” said Raikes with laborious amiability, as his astonished nephew seated himself near the bedside, “it has been my purpose to conceal this hiding place from any living soul, but I find that I have not succeeded.
“Some one has made three visits to that recess and helped himself to as many bags of coin.”
Robert, remembering his uncle’s well-known secrecy and the unusual precautions taken by him to secure his room from intrusion, looked his incredulity, which stimulated Raikes into exclaiming:
“Ah, but you do not know how incredible it is. Wait until you hear all. You will wonder what human agency could penetrate these locks, open the doors of this hiding place, extract the plunder, restore the locks to their original condition, and re-issue into the passageway without disturbing the latches or the crossbar. My losses are supernatural. Now follow me carefully and confess that you have not heard anything so ghastly, so unreal as what I am about to relate.”
As Raikes proceeded in his narrative, his nephew was at first inclined to receive these weird confidences as features of the unhappy man’s condition, but as the latter progressed, with a constantly increasing degree of his customary emotionless lucidity, his sincerity became apparent.
“And now,” concluded Raikes, “what have you to say to all this? Is it not worthy of a Poe or a Maupassant? I tell you, I must have some explanation of this mystery or I shall go mad.”
During this singular recital the young man’s mind, stimulated by the eerie perplexities and the unhappy dénouement, had been busy.
It was not difficult to convince himself of the futility of any of his own speculations; the nearness of the calamity affected him, in a degree, as it did the withered invalid.