And he jabbed him conscientiously for the last time.
The direct result of this raid was that Cap’n Dan resolved to build himself a house that would make him and all his treasures secure in future from an attack of this sort. To this end he had masons by coach from a great distance—as distances were counted great in those days—and, acting as his own architect, he planned out a strange great house in the form of a ship in masonry, with a double tier of iron-barred windows in place of ports, and three narrow towers like modern lighthouses, to take the place of masts, with stairs inside so that they could be used for look-out posts.
There was one great door in the stern, which was hung on pintles, from the sternpost, like a huge and somewhat abnormally shaped rudder. Somewhere below this ship-house there was built a strong-room, though this was not known till later; for as soon as the masons had done their work they were sent back to their own towns, and in this way the secrets of the house were hidden from the men of Geddley.
It may be as well to say here that this peculiar house, minus its three towers, which had long since been removed, was to be seen almost intact as late as 1871. It had become built in, “bow-and-stern”, into a terrace of houses, which still form what is known as Big Fortune Terrace, and was then an inn, run by one Thomas Walker, under the name of the Stone Ship Inn. “Very much in!” used to be the local and extraordinarily witty joke, according to the “New Records” of Geddley, which we owe to Richard Stetson, a citizen, I imagine, of that same quaint seaport.
To revert to Cap’n Dan. As I have said, he concluded his house and “shipped back” his masons to their varied and distant homes, by this means hiding from the men of Geddley all possible details concerning the construction of his stronghold.
Presently he removed with his two great chests of treasure to his new house, and thereafter very little of his doings appear to have been worthy of remark; for, saving an odd walk down to Nancy Garbitt’s little cot, or a still rarer visit to the Tunbelly—now under the care of a new landlord—Cap’n Dan, sir, as he was latterly always addressed, appeared but little beyond his own great rudder-door.
After his removal he still continued to pay Nancy her guinea per week, and often assured her, that when he died she should own the whole of his treasure.
And presently, as I have intimated; he died. And certain grave lawyers, if that be the right term, came all the way from Bristol to read his will, which was quaint but simple. The whole of his wealth he left to Nancy Garbitt and her seven daughters, the one condition being that they must first find it, one day in each year being allowed only for the search. And if they had no success within and including seven years from his death, then the whole of the treasure—when found—must be handed over entire to a certain person named in a codicil to the will, which was not to be read save in the event of the gold not being found within the said seven years.
As may be imagined, the sensation which this will provoked was profound, not only within the parish of Geddley but throughout the whole county, and beyond.
Eventually, certain of the masons who had assisted in the building of the stone ship-house heard of the will, and sent word that there was a specially built strong-room under the foundations of the house, very cunningly hidden, and under it again there was a sealed vault. For a remuneration one of their number would come by coach and assist at the locating of the place.
This, of course, increased the excitement and general interest; but it was not until the 27th day of September of that year that the search might be made, between the hours of sunrise and sunset, the stone ship-house being occupied meanwhile by the lawyers; caretakers and seals liberally spread about.
On September 26th the mason arrived, accompanied by two of his fellows; the three of them being hired by Nancy Garbitt to act as expert searchers on her behalf. For; very wisely, she had steadfastly refused the enormous amount of “free” aid that had been tendered by the men of Geddley, collectively and singly, from day to day.
The 27th dawned—the anniversary, had Nancy but remembered, of that day, so many years gone, when she and young Dan had broken their silver penny. Surely the date was significant! Nancy Garbitt and her seven daughters and the men of Geddley stood near the door of the stone ship-house, with the three masons. As the sun rose into sight the lawyer knocked on the door, and the caretakers opened it and stood back for Nancy, her daughters, and the three masons to enter. But the men of Geddley had to remain outside, and there waiting, many of them remained the whole of the livelong day, if we are to believe the worthy John Stockman.
Within the house the masons went confidently to work, but at the end of a short time had to acknowledge themselves bewildered. There had been surely other masons to work since they had been sent away, or else the grim old sea-dog himself had turned mason in those last months of his life, for no signs of the hidden entrance to the strong-room could they discover.
At this, after some little discussion, it was resolved to break down through the stone-built floor direct into the strong-room, which the masons asserted to be immediately below a certain point, which they had ascertained by measurements. Yet the evening of that day found them labouring, still lacking the whereabouts of the strong-room. And presently sunset had put an end to the search for a year. And Nancy Garbitt and her seven daughters had to return treasureless to their small cot in the alley.
The second and the third and the fourth years Nancy and her daughters returned, likewise lacking of treasure; but in the fifth year it was evident to Nancy and her maidens that they had come upon signs of the long-lost strong-room. Yet the sunset of the “day of grace” cut short their delving before they could prove their belief.
Followed a year of tense excitement and conjecture; in which Nancy could have married off her daughters to the pick of the men of Geddley; for to every sanguine male it was apparent that the treasure was almost in sight.
Some suggestion there was of carrying the stone ship-house by assault, and prosecuting the search to its inevitable end without further ridiculous delay; but this Nancy would not listen to. Moreover, the strength of the building, and the constant presence of the armed legal guardians thereof, forbade any hope of success along these lines.
In the sixth year Nancy Garbitt died, just before sunset on the day of the search. Her death was possibly due, in part at least, to the long-continued strain of the excitement and the nearing of the hour when the search must be delayed for another whole year. Her death ended the search for that time, though a portion of the actual built-in door of the strong-room itself had been uncovered.
Yet already, as I have said, it had been close to the time when the search must cease.
When the 27th day of September in the seventh year arrived, the men of Geddley made a holiday, and accompanied the seven Misses Garbitt with a band to the great door of the stone ship-house. By midday the door of the long-shut strong-room was uncovered and a key the lawyer produced was found to fit. The door was unlocked, and the seven maidens rushed in—to emptiness.
Yet, after the first moment of despair, someone remembered the sealed vault which lay under the strong-room. A search was made, and the covering stone found; but it proved an intractable stone, and sunset was nigh before finally it was removed. A candle was lowered into the vault, and a small chest discovered, otherwise the vault was as empty as the strong-room.
The box was brought out into daylight and broken open. Inside was found nothing but the half of a broken silver penny.
At that moment, watch in hand; the lawyer declared that the hour of sunset had arrived, and motioned for silence where was already the silence of despair. He drew from his pocket the package that held the codicil, broke the seal, and proceeded to read to the seven maidens its contents.
They were brief and startling and extraordinary in their revelation of the perversity of the old sea-dog’s warped and odd nature. The codicil revealed that the gold for which they had so long searched was still left to Nancy, but that it lay un
der the stone flags of their own living-room, where the captain had buried it at nights all the long years gone when he had lived at Nancy’s, storing the removed earth in the chests in place of the buried gold.
“Seven children have you had, Nancy Drigg, to that top-o’-my-thumb, Jimmy Garbitt,” the codicil concluded, “and seven years shall you wait—you who could not wait.”
That is all. The money went to the children of Nancy Garbitt, for, by the whimsy of Fate, the woman for whose reproval all this had been planned was never to learn, and the bitter taunt of the broken silver penny was never to reach its mark; for the woman, as you know, was dead. And so ended the seven years’ search. And, likewise, this history of the strange but persistent love-affair of Captain Dan, sea-dog and pirate.
Merciful Plunder
Captain Mellor, trading along the Adriatic coast, had put in at one of those small seaports which found themselves involved in the wars so common in the Balkans. He had stayed the night ashore with a business acquaintance whose veranda, under its cane mat sun roof, commanded a magnificent view over the red slates of the village beyond which he could see his own ship as she lay at anchor, among a dozen others, in the bay.
From the mountains to his left there came every now and again the monstrous far-off grunt of a big gun. For days a prolonged fight had been waging. At times the far-off grunting would merge into a ponderous grumbling of sound, then, the continuous mutter dying away, there came the vast hrrump, hrrump of the rifles in the unseen fort that lay round on the eastern shoulders of the hills which sloped away into the sea in the curve of the coast.
Each time the fort fired Captain Mellor felt the iron-framed chair under him tingle, and the windows behind him jarred and thrummed to the huge, ugly sound. Even the silver and green leaves of the olive trees all about the châlet seemed to quiver oddly with the great throb of the vibrated air.
Suddenly he sat up in his chair, his cup of coffee halfway to his lips. Through the still air of the eastern morning came the cries of a lad in agony.
He sickened as he heard with incredible clearness the awful sound. He had refused to go down into the village to see the butchery which the war authorities had dignified with the name of execution, though his friend, a Frenchman, had joined the onlookers at the scene. But he knew by the cries that the punishment was being carried out for twenty of the band of forty youths of the enemy who had been caught the day before fighting out of uniform—a youthful band of “death or glory” irregulars.
And so, hour later; sitting on the quiet balcony amid the silent olives, the drowse and rest of the hushed morning about him, Captain Mellor listened to his host’s account of the punishment.
The Frenchman shook with emotion as he described it. He declaimed against it all, though the youths had been taken fighting, out of uniform, upon their own initiative, and firing from ambush against the natives of the place where he lived and did business.
“And to-morrow,” he ended, “the osser twenty will be executed, they say.”
“No, they won’t!” cried Captain Mellor. He jumped up from his chair, mopped his forehead with his red cotton handkerchief, and sat down again.
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. He continued his tale of horror and emotion till at last the captain interrupted him.
“If you don’t like that sort of thing you should have kept away,” he told him. “I don’t like it, so I didn’t go. After all, I expect the boys got what was coming to them.”
“But, monsieur—Sapristi! It is terrible so to speak.”
His friend’s callousness shocked him, and he burst out afresh in horror; but Captain Mellor refused to show overmuch sympathy. Yet without seeming to be interested he managed to get a certain amount of very definite information from the excited Frenchman.
He discovered, for instance, where the second batch of prisoners was locked up. Also how they were guarded. And one or two other details which joined on, as one might say.
“Well,” he said at last, “let’s finish our business. I am sailing some time to-night.”
Later that day the two men went down into the little town and took a walk round the palm-lined public square, where stood the low scaffold in readiness of the next morning.
With the terrible insouciance of the East—for even the Near East is touched with this quality of insensitiveness to the merciful fitness of things—the scaffold was neither more nor less than one of the town’s fête platforms, used at half a dozen big festivals in the year.
When Captain Mellor saw it, the front was draped with the black funeral trappings which the townspeople hang round their doors before a funeral. And crowded on the platform were scores of the natives of all ages, standing with strangely morbid pleasure upon the very spot where those boys had met their deaths a few hours previously.
“Come on,” said the captain to his friend, “this sickens me.”
He dragged the Frenchman down to the water front, where stood the municipal hall. Farther along the quay side was a tall building, outside of which stood a guard, leaning on his rifle.
“Up there, captain,” said the Frenchman, “up there where you see the barred window. Zat is the room at the utmost top!”
“Sorry for ’em,” replied the captain callously. “But I guess they’ll be all right this time to-morrow!”
“Ah!” exclaimed his friend. “You are of all the most hard man I ever speak to.”
Yet when Captain Mellor stepped into his boat and was pulled off to his ship that night, he had achieved a knowledge of local geography that would have amazed his friend. He had spurred the little Frenchman by his callous remarks to enlarge upon every detail concerning the twenty prisoners who were to die in the morning. The Frenchman had been incurably voluble and profuse with explanations, intent only to waken some pity in this Englishman.
And all the time Captain Mellor had shrugged his great shoulders and answered inhumanly. But always he had used his eyes, even while he used his ears to take in all the information that his friend insisted on deluging him with.
It was the Frenchman who had suggested they should go to inspect the prisoners. He knew the officer in charge, and he was sure of getting permission. The captain showed no enthusiasm, but submitted to be dragged to the prison. Here after a brief talk, his friend, accompanied by his officer acquaintance and one of the guards, invited him to come and see “the birds”.
Never would the captain forget what he saw! The room was just under the roof, and the windows shut fast. There was dirty straw all over the floor, and the prisoners, most of them, were lying silently about.
Not one of them looked up or showed any sign of interest. They were all of them under eighteen, and at least half of them were boys of fourteen and fifteen. Some were wounded and roughly bandaged, and all of them showed marks of ill treatment.
“They’ll be gone this time to-morrow,” said the sergeant in patois, laughing and stubbing out the lighted end of his cigarette stump against the bare leg of one of the prostrate youths.“Pouf, they are pigs! Come on out,” he added as he led the way downstairs again.
Thus it was that Captain Mellor, as be stepped into his boat that evening, had by the use of ears and eyes and some aid of good fortune, the following knowledge stowed in his big head:
He knew that the twenty boys were locked in the topmost room of that four-storied house which was owned by the mayor of the town. The house was built quite by itself on the edge of the road, with, at the back of it, the sheer, blasted rock face of the cliff that, further to the north, ran out into a long dwindling point of black rock. This cliff stood up within fifteen feet of the rear of the house and rose at least a hundred feet above it.
With regard to the house, the windows of the top room were all barred, and the roof was, like all other houses in the place, of red tiles wired down to the rafters underneath.
The top floor was just one big room, entered by a door at the head of the long flight of stairs. The door was covered with sheet iron
on the inside, and the same kind of sheet iron had been nailed over the rafters so as to hide the backs of the naked tiles and prevent them from being removed by any prisoner.
The floor immediately below the prison room was also without partition, and was in use as a temporary guard room; three soldiers being stationed there while the fourth stood on guard at the main entrance to the house. The lower floors were used as temporary offices and headquarters by the military authorities.
The guard at the main entrance was relieved every two hours, and the prisoners were fed morning and evening, and inspected day and night every time the guard was relieved.
From this mass of information which Captain Mellor had accumulated some idea may be had of the good use he had made of his friend’s eternal volubility, and of his brief visit to the prison.
When he got aboard he sent word to the chief engineer that he wanted him.
“Is it away we are, George?” asked the chief as he entered the captain’s cabin. “It’s not sorry I am to be goin’—the murderin’ brutes! Did ye see the doin’s this mornin’?”
Captain Mellor shook his head.
“Were you there, Mac?” he asked.
“Aye, I was that!” replied the chief engineer. “It was disgusting. Plain beheadin’ I’ve seen, an’ plain hangin’; but yon was just brute’s work. I tell ye I had me work cut out to keep me hands in me pockets—I had that!”
The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places Page 54