This, too, belonged to a complete assortment of human bones clad in Chinese dress. By its side lay a rusty pistol. Lawrence picked it up.
"By Gad!" he said, "it's the same pistol I gave to Leeching. How do you read this story, Ladds?"
Ladds sat down and replied slowly. He said that he never did like reading ghost stories, and since the apparition of the murdered Achow, the night before, he should like them still less. Ghost stories, he said, are all very well until you come to see and hear a ghost. Now that he had a ghost story of his own—an original one in pigeon English—he did not intend ever to read another. Therefore Colquhoun must excuse him if he gave up the story of Leeching's skeleton entirely to his own reading. He then went on to say that he never had liked skeletons, and that he believed Empire City was nothing but a mouldy old churchyard without the church, while, as a cemetery, it wasn't a patch upon Highgate. And the mention of Highgate, he said, reminded him of Phillis; and he proposed they should both get to Virginia, and call upon Jack and his wife.
All this took time to explain; and meanwhile Lawrence was poking the butt end of his gun about in the grass to see if there was anything more. There was something more. It was a bag of coarse yellow canvas, tied by a string round what had been the waist of a man. Lawrence cut the string, and opened the bag.
"We're in luck, Tommy. Look at this."
It was the gold so laboriously scraped together by the two Chinamen, which had caused, in a manner, the death of both.
"Lift it, Tommy." Colquhoun grew excited at his find. "Lift it—there must be a hundred and fifty ounces, I should think. It will be worth four or five hundred pounds. Here's a find!"
To this pair, who had only a year ago chucked away their thousands, the luck of picking up a bag of gold appeared something wonderful.
"Tommy," said Colquhoun, "I tell you what we will do. We will add this little windfall to what Beck would call your little pile and my little pile. And we'll go and buy a little farm in Virginia, too; and we will live there close to Jack and Phillis. Agatha will like it too. And there's capital shooting."
Gabriel Cassilis and his wife reside at Brighton. The whole of the great fortune being lost, they have nothing but Victoria's settlement. That gives them a small income. "Enough to subsist upon," Victoria tells her friends. The old man—he looks very old and fragile now—is wheeled about in a chair on sunny days. When he is not being wheeled about he plays with his child, to whom he talks; that is, pours out a stream of meaningless words, because he will never again talk coherently. Victoria is exactly the same as ever—cold, calm, and proud. Nor is there anything whatever in her manner to her husband, if she accidentally meets him, to show that she has the slightest sorrow, shame, or repentance for the catastrophe she brought about. Joseph Jagenal is working the great Dyson will case for them, and is confident that he will get the testator's intentions, which can now be only imperfectly understood, set aside, when Gabriel Cassilis will once more become comparatively wealthy.