He was never very fond of his right hand's knowing what his left hand did; for while the right hand promoted companies, the left hand, by means of a manager and a registered alias, carried on a very useful little money-lender's business. He was never averse to putting the screw on, if there was anything to be got by it; and sometimes he got rather funny things. Recently he had had a broken debtor on his hands, and had taken what he could get; among other things, an old bureau full of papers. Jeconiah, being a methodical soul, had turned a clerk on to sort the papers; and the clerk had presently brought him the long lost map of the Scargill cave, and a sheet of paper containing somebody's rough explanation of what it was supposed to be. Jeconiah, who had heard the story, scented possibilities, and, it being a slack time in the City, promptly invited himself to his brother-in-law's house to recover from an attack of influenza. That is how Jeconiah comes into this story. It could not be helped, for he had the map. The finner had said he was too fat to count; but that is where the finner was wrong.
Jeconiah forthwith gave his mind, such as it was, to the subject of caves. Diffidence was not his failing, and he cross-examined every person he could find, concealing, of course, his real object. He collected a splendid amount of rubbish; but he was acute enough where his pocket was concerned, and out of the rubbish he presently dragged forth the fact of the haunted cave which no one would enter. Whereon Jeconiah went over to Scargill to fish, and had a look at the lie of the island; settled with himself that it seemed a good enough place for a wreck, and told the keeper to row him into the west cave. But the keeper, who had no particular liking for Jeconiah, refused point-blank, and told him he would not find a man in the island who would do it; and Jeconiah, who had suddenly lost interest in the fishing, went home in a bad temper. This happened the day after the two children were in the cave; and the day after that the Urchin's father received an excited cablegram from Brazil on the subject of his beloved beetles. He rushed down at once to see the Student.
"I am going to Brazil, I don't know for how long," he said. "And my boy can't go back to school for a month or more, as they have scarlet fever in the village there. And I don't like to leave him with the housekeeper, and I start in two hours. Will you take him?"
"Delighted," said the Student. "Fiona will look after him."
So the Urchin came, and with him came to Fiona a sense of responsibility for him. She couldn't help it.
But Jeconiah showed no intention of moving. On the contrary, the after-effects of influenza were still troubling him sorely, it seemed. At last the Urchin's father had to tell him to stay a week or two longer, if he wanted to; the servants would be there anyhow. And Jeconiah thanked him and settled down to stay, as he had meant to do all along. But as soon as his brother-in-law was gone he took the car and went off for the day. The chauffeur said that he went to a lot of places and talked to a lot of people; and a couple of days later two strange men in a boat entered the bay and proceeded to camp out on a part of the shore which was not the Student's property. Jeconiah had, in fact, hired the boat, and found a couple of ne'er-do-wells from the mainland who knew nothing of him and were ready to row him anywhere in pursuit of his business, which was understood to be photographing wild birds for an illustrated paper.
Jeconiah had, however, made one great mistake. He was aware that you must not neglect little things, and he had neglected quite a big little thing—the Urchin. He had never spoken to him about caves, or taken the least notice of the boy's movements. And the Urchin on his side had been hard at work. He had confessed to Fiona on the subject of the footsteps, and she to him; and they had agreed, under the broad healthy light of day, that probably they had been mistaken and afraid of the dark, and that with lanterns it would be all right. They agreed, however, that it was necessary to have a really good light, and the difficulty was to find one. It was the Urchin who came forward as the saviour of society by proposing to win over Jones, the chauffeur, and get the loan of one of the big acetylene head-lamps from the car. Jones, a newcomer, had not yet heard about the cave, and, being English, he had not yet found his feet among his fellows and was glad of any sort of diversion. The Urchin wound up a triumphant half hour of diplomacy by making Jones promise to lend him one of the headlights and show him how to work it. Then the Urchin fell, as many greater men have fallen; he was lifted up with pride, and told Jones that Fiona and he were going treasure-hunting. Jones grinned; but that evening he talked; and in due course Jeconiah heard.
Fiona was digging in her garden, or rather in the Urchin's, for she had assigned him one bit of it, which she had to cultivate for him; otherwise it would have run waste, for all the work the Urchin put into it. Her garden was one corner of the old walled garden of the Student's house, which was not very well kept now. Once it had been gay with flowers and rich with fruit; but now few flowers grew there save such as could look after themselves, and the fruit had come down to two gnarled old apple trees, in which Fiona had made her earliest experiments in climbing. Most of the ground, so far as it was in use, was now given over to cabbages and potatoes; but in June the borders were sweet with double white narcissus, and now in September there was a revel of unpruned roses, their blooms growing smaller year by year, and a mass of the dark-red blossoms of the little west coast fuchsia, which knows how to live through the winter. One deserted corner was gay with Turk's turban, which still had strength to push up through the ever-thickening tangle of weeds; and groups of winter crocus were coming up in the borders, and among them a few Shirley poppies which Fiona had sown herself. Fiona had had thoughts of taking the garden in hand, but the space enclosed by the old walls was far too large for her to manage unaided; and as there was no money to pay a proper gardener, she had had to content herself with clearing one corner. Here she had achieved a riot of color. She had made a little rockery of oak-leaf and beech ferns brought down from the hill, sentinelled by tall pink foxgloves; the worn-out plum trees against the wall behind were threaded and festooned with thick trailers of yellow and scarlet nasturtium; and in front of the rockery, her especial pride, was a great bed of velvet pansies, rich with every hue of the rainbow. They were flanked by simple annuals, filmy pink poppies, orange escholtzias and sweet-scented mignonette; and in a bed by themselves were the gold and crimson snapdragons which the Urchin had begged for her from the gardener at the big house.
She must needs dig up a centipede, one of the small yellow ones. They were her special dislike. The centipede did not like being dug up either, and writhed himself into seven different sets of tangles at once, as is the way of the smaller centipedes.