'If you don't know,' the clerk replied, 'nobody knows. You've got the key of the safe.'
'Good Heavens!' If Mr. Dering had been twenty years younger, he would have jumped. Men of seventy-five are not allowed to jump. The dignity of age does not allow of jumping. 'This is most wonderful! Checkley, this is most mysterious!'
'What is it?'
'These notes—the Devil is in the safe to-day, I do believe. First the certificates are lost; that is, they can't be found—and next these notes turn up.'
'What notes are they, then?'
'They are nothing else than the bank-notes paid across the counter for that forged cheque of eight years ago. Oh! there is no doubt of it—none whatever. I remember the numbers—the consecutive numbers—seventy-two of them—seven hundred and twenty pounds. How did they get here? Who put them in? Checkley, I say, how did these notes get here?'
He held the notes in his hand and asked these questions in pure bewilderment, and not in the expectation of receiving any reply.
'The notes paid to that young gentleman when he forged the cheque,' said Checkley, 'must have been put back in the safe by him. There's no other way to account for it. He was afraid to present them. He heard you say they were stopped, and he put them back. I think I see him doing it. While he was flaring out, he done it—I'm sure I see him doing it.'
Mr. Dering received this suggestion without remark. He laid down the notes and stared at his clerk. The two old men stared blankly at each other. Perhaps Checkley's countenance, of the two, expressed the greater astonishment.
'How did those notes get into the safe?' the lawyer repeated. 'This is even a more wonderful thing than the mislaying of the certificates. You took them out. Show me exactly where they were lying.'