Luck at the Diamond Fields - Dalrymple J. Belgrave

The next morning the servant found Enderby in the chair, and could not wake him up. A doctor was sent for, and when he came his verdict was that he was dead. The bottle of laudanum on the table near him suggested that he had taken an overdose, and a post-mortem examination bore out this theory.

Jack Enderby, though he looked tough enough, had a weak heart, so it seemed, and the dose, which would only have stupefied most men, had caused his death. The diamond had proved as fatal to him as it did to Sixpence, and his run of luck had suddenly come to an end.

One circumstance which was thought rather strange, was the absence at the inquest of the man who had been in his rooms the night before, and who must have been the last man to see him alive. This, perhaps, was the reason why the jury found an open verdict, though all the other circumstances pointed towards his having taken too much laudanum by accident.

The police, however, when they made inquiries, and found out from a waiter at the restaurant that Le Mert was the man who had dined with the deceased, thought that his absence was explained. That gentleman was wanted at other places as well as the inquest. He was not to be found at his office or anywhere else, and the accounts of some companies he had been connected with, and what came out about the state of his finances, fully explained his absence. Shareholders in his companies and men in Hatton Garden were vowing vengeance against him, without much hope of ever seeing or hearing of him again. People were asking themselves, as is so often the case after a smash, why they had put any trust in a man of whom they knew so very little which was at all to his credit?

At last the police, who were put on his track as a defaulting bankrupt, got a clue which enabled them to say that he had taken a passage in a steamer bound for a South American port, where there was no extradition treaty.

His creditors, however, did not give up all hopes of bringing him to an account until they got some news which told them that he had gone further from their clutches than they supposed. The ship in which he had sailed had gone down, and though all the other passengers were saved, he was missing. The ship had been run down by another vessel, and after the collision had begun to sink rapidly. Le Mert, with several of the passengers, had been in the smoking cabin, and when he had seen that the boats were being lowered he had turned to go down below to fetch something from his cabin. One of the officers had warned him not to leave the deck, and told him that if he went below he would not get up again, but he would not listen, but had rushed down to his cabin. He was never seen again, for the boat had only time to put off and get clear of the ship, before she settled and sank. His creditors wondered what it was he went below to get, and some believed that he had a store of embezzled money. Others, however, who heard the particulars of Enderby’s death, and rumours of the diamond that had been found by the Kaffir he had shot, put two and two together and formed a theory, which agreed with the history of the fatal diamond that Le Mert clutched as he went down in the sinking ship. It had claimed its last victim, and it lies at the bottom of the sea, and is as harmless as it was before it was unearthed.

The End.