"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile.
"Thank God!" said I.
He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the face, on a white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written inscription:
"The Diamond Gate. A Novel—by Thomas Castleton."
"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second or two we both stood stock-still.
The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script hastily flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's—Tom Castleton, the one genius of our boyish brotherhood, who had died on his voyage to Australia. There was no mistake. The great square virile hand was only too familiar—as different from Adrian's precise, academical writing as Tom Castleton from Adrian.
Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been committed.
There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The Diamond Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom Castleton. Adrian had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man. Not only from a dead man, but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him.
We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up his hands and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There are times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. The apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we examined it. A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into an awful certainty.
The great epoch-making novel did not exist.