In that belief I remained perfectly content. She was mine, mine alone, and I desired no more. For me her affection was all-sufficient. I had searched for a hidden treasure, and found the greatest on earth—perfect love.
CHAPTER XXXII
WHAT WE DISCOVERED AT THE RECORD OFFICE
A month dragged slowly by. I saw Dorothy daily, and we were happy in each other’s love. She had resumed her post of typewriter at an insurance office in Moorgate Street, and on her return home would generally spend each evening with me. Robert Usher continued to live with me in Keppel Street and proved a most entertaining companion, and Philip Reilly, bitterly disappointed, had also returned to the bank, while Job Seal had sailed from Cardiff with his usual cargo of steam coal for Malta.
Worn out with all the confusion, we had all of us given up hope of ever discovering the treasure, and my chief regret was that we had played such havoc with the interior of Caldecott Manor. What the landlord’s claim for dilapidations would be I dreaded to think.
Usher was, of course, a typical adventurer. His whole life had been spent upon the sea, and yet, curiously enough, his speech was never interlarded with nautical phrases like Seal’s. Some men, however long they are at sea, never become “salts,” and Robert Usher was one of them. Over our pipes he often related to me his exciting adventures as slave in the interior of Morocco, and times without number gave me vivid descriptions of the old Seahorse as he found it held beneath the clear water by the ledge of rock. At first it had puzzled me greatly why the water had not entered the cabins when the flood closed over the vessel, but both Seal and I recollected how, after hacking away the growth of weeds and shells from the deck, the men had found the hatches covered tightly with a kind of waterproof tarpauling, which had evidently been placed there by those on board to prevent the heavy sea that washed the decks from entering the cabins. The commander and his officers had closed themselves down tightly, trusting to the one officer and his men on deck to manage the ship, but, alas! they had all perished.
At first it had seemed utterly incredible that the ship had retained its buoyancy all those years, and that the water had never entered; yet it was evident that the decomposition of the bodies of those unfortunate victims had generated gases that had increased its buoyancy, and that, being held within the river bar, there were no waves to beat and break the thick, green glass of the tightly-secured windows. Had the vessel sunk in deep water, the pressure of the latter would, of course, have broken the glass at once, but resting on that soft, sandy bed, only just submerged, it had been preserved quite intact through all those years, a tribute to the stability of the stout oak and teak of which our forefathers constructed ships in Queen Elizabeth’s day.
I introduced Robert Usher to the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, and he was invited to deliver a lecture before the Fellows describing the interior of Morocco, about which so very little is known even in these days. His wanderings in the Anti-Atlas and the Jeb Grus to Figig, his captivity in Aksabi and with the warlike Riffs, and the information he gave regarding the power of the latter and the weakness of the Sultan’s army were extremely interesting, and were afterwards printed in the journal of the society as a permanent record. His map of the sources of the Muluya River, on Jeb Aiahin, in the Great Atlas, was of considerable value, and was afterwards marked on the map of Morocco. It will, indeed, be found upon the revised maps of that country now published.
In the privacy of my sitting-room he related many stories regarding the man known as Black Bennett. As far as I could discover, the latter had led a curious double life for years. He possessed a small but comfortable house out at Epping, where he posed as a retired sea captain, but now and then he would disappear, sometimes for a whole year, occupying his time in depredations on the sea. The common belief in England is that piracy is dead, but it was certainly not so a dozen years ago, when Chinese waters were not watched by Japanese and European war vessels as they now are. To commit acts of piracy in the Yellow Seas would nowadays be a difficult matter.
About Harding, the man who had so cleverly copied the documents I had taken from the Seahorse, Usher told me a good deal. Formerly a professor at Cambridge, he had committed some fraud, and fearing arrest had, it seemed, escaped to sea. An adventurer of the same type as Bennett, the pair became inseparable, and Harding had assisted the former in many of his most daring schemes.
So the weeks went on, autumn drew to a close, and I began to glance at the Lancet anxiously each week to ascertain where a locum tenens was wanted, for, even though compelled to go to the country and leave my love alone and at the mercy of that quartette of unscrupulous scoundrels, I saw myself compelled to earn my living.