“We can see now,” said he, “how the skeleton lies, and all we have to do is to extend the excavation in that direction. But there is only room for one to work down here. I think you and Mr. Blowgrave had better dig down from the surface.”
On this, I climbed out of the pit, followed reluctantly by Blowgrave, who still held the little brown bone in his hand and was in a state of wild excitement and exultation that somewhat scandalised his daughter.
“It seems rather ghoulish,” she remarked, “to be gloating over poor Uncle Reuben’s body in this way.”
“I know,” said Blowgrave, “it isn’t reverent. But I didn’t kill Uncle Reuben, you know, whereas—well it was a long time ago.” With this rather inconsequent conclusion he took a draught of lemonade, seized his pick and fell to work with a will. I, too, indulged in a draught and passed a full tumbler down to Thorndyke. But before resuming my labours I picked up the telescope and once more inspected the farm-house. The window was still open, but the watcher had apparently become bored with the not very thrilling spectacle. At any rate he had disappeared.
From this time onward every few minutes brought some discovery. First, a pair of deeply rusted steel shoe buckles; then one or two buttons, and presently a fine gold watch with a fob-chain and a bunch of seals, looking uncannily new and fresh and seeming more fraught with tragedy than even the bones themselves In his cautious digging, Thorndyke was careful not to disturb the skeleton; and looking down into the narrow trench that was growing from the corner of the pit, I could see both legs, with only the right foot missing, projecting from the miniature cliff. Meanwhile our of the trench was deepening rapidly, so that Thorndyke presently warned us to stop digging and bade us come down and shovel away the earth as he disengaged it.
At length the whole skeleton, excepting the head, was uncovered, though it lay undisturbed as it might have lain in its coffin. And now, as Thorndyke picked away the earth around the head, we could see that the skull was propped forward as if it rested on a high pillow. A little more careful probing with the pick-point served to explain this appearance. For as the earth fell away and disclosed the grinning skull, there came into view the edge and ironbound corners of a small chest.
It was an impressive spectacle; weird, solemn and rather dreadful. There for over a century the ill-fated gambler had lain, his mouldering head pillowed on the booty of unrecorded villainy, booty that had been won by fraud, retrieved by violence, and hidden at last by the final winner with the witness of his crime.
“Here is a fine text for a moralist who would preach on the vanity of riches,” said Thorndyke.
We all stood silent for a while, gazing, not without awe, at the stark figure that lay guarding the ill-gotten treasure. Miss Blowgrave—who had been helped down when we descended—crept closer to her father and murmured that it was “rather awful,” while Blowgrave himself displayed a queer mixture of exultation and shuddering distaste.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice from above, and we all looked up with a start. A youngish man was standing on the brink of the pit, looking down on us with very evident disapproval.
“It seems that I have come just in the nick of time,” observed the newcomer. “I shall have to take pos session of that chest, you know, and of the remains, too, I suppose. That is my ancestor, Reuben Blowgrave.”
“Well, Harold,” said Blowgrave, “you can have Uncle Reuben if you want him. But the chest belongs to Nellie.”
Here Mr. Harold Bowker—I recognised him now as the watcher from the window—dropped down into the pit and advanced with something of a swagger.
“I am Reuben’s heir,” said he, “through my Uncle Arthur, and I take possession of this property and the remains.”
“Pardon me, Harold,” said Blowgrave, “but Nellie is Arthur’s residuary legatee, and this is the residue of the estate.”
“Rubbish!” exclaimed Bowker. “By the way, how did you find out where he was buried?”
Oh, that was quite simple,” replied Thorndyke with unexpected geniality. “I’ll show you the plan.” He climbed up to the surface and returned in a few moments with the three tracings and his letter-case. “This is how we located the spot.” He handed the plan numbered 3 to Bowker, who took it from him and stood looking at it with a puzzled frown.
“But this isn’t the place,” he said at length.
“Isn’t it?” queried Thorndyke. “No, of course; I’ve given you the wrong one. This is the plan.” He handed Bowker the plan marked No. 1, and took the other from him, laying it down on a heap of earth. Then, as Bowker pored gloomily over No. 1, he took a knife and a pencil from his pocket, and with his back to our visitor; scraped the lead of the pencil, letting the black powder fall on the plan that he had just laid down. I watched him with some curiosity; and when I observed that the black scrapings fell on two spots near the edges of the paper, a sudden suspicion flashed into my mind, which j was confirmed when I saw him tap the paper lightly with his pencil, gently blow away the powder, and quickly producing my photograph of the typewritten letter from his case, hold it for a moment beside the plan.
“This is all very well,” said Bowker, looking up i from the plan, “but how did you find out about these bearings?”
Thorndyke swiftly replaced the letter in his case, and turning round, replied, “I am afraid I can’t give you any further information.”
“Can’t you, indeed!” Bowker exclaimed insolently. “Perhaps I shall compel you to. But, at any rate, I forbid any of you to lay hands on my property.”
Thorndyke looked at him steadily and said in an ominously quiet tone: “Now, listen to me, Mr. Bowker. Let us have an end of this nonsense. You have played a risky game and you have lost. How much you have lost I can’t say until I know whether Mr. Blowgrave intends to prosecute.”
“To prosecute!” shouted Bowker. “What the deuce do you mean by prosecute?”
“I mean,” said Thorndyke, “that on the 7th of June, after nine o’clock at night, you entered the dwelling-house of Mr. Blowgrave and stole and carried away certain of his goods and chattels. A part of them you have restored, but you are still in possession of some of the stolen property, to wit, a scarab and a deed-box.”
As Thorndyke made this statement in his calm, level tones, Bowker’s face blanched to a tallowy white, and he stood staring at my colleague, the very picture of astonishment and dismay. But he fired a last shot.
“This is sheer midsummer madness,” he exclaimed huskily; “and you know it.”
Thorndyke turned to our host. “It is for you to settle, Mr. Blowgrave,” said he. “I hold conclusive evidence that Mr. Bowker stole your deed-box. If you decide to prosecute I shall produce that evidence in court and he will certainly be convicted.”
Blowgrave and his daughter looked at the accused man with an embarrassment almost equal to his own.
I am astounded,” the former said at length; “but I don’t want to be vindictive. Look here, Harold, hand over the scarab and we’ll say no more about it.”
“You can’t do that,” said Thorndyke. “The law doesn’t allow you to compound a robbery. He can return the property if he pleases and you can do as you think best about prosecuting. But you can’t make conditions.”
There was silence for some seconds; then, without another word, the crestfallen adventurer turned, and scrambling up out of the pit, took a hasty departure.
It was nearly a couple of hours later that, after a leisurely wash and a hasty, nondescript meal, we carried the little chest from the dining-room to the study. Here, when he had closed the French window and drawn the curtains, Mr. Blowgrave produced a set of tools and we fell to work on the iron fastenings of the chest. It was no light task, though a century’s rust had thinned the stout bands, but at length the lid yielded to the thrust of a long case-opener and rose with a protesting creak. The chest was lined with a double thickness of canvas, apparently part of a sail, and contained a number of small leathern bags, which, as we lifted them
out, one by one, felt as if they were filled with pebbles. But when we untied the thongs of one and emptied its contents into a wooden bowl, Blowgrave heaved a sigh of ecstasy and Miss Nellie uttered a little scream of delight. They were all cut stones, and most of them of exceptional size; rubies, emeralds, sapphires and a few diamonds. As to their value, we could forn but the vaguest guess; but Thorndyke, who was a fair, judge of gem-stones, gave it as his opinion that they were fine specimens of their kind, though roughly cut, and that they had probably formed the enrichment of some shrine.
“The question is,” said Blowgrave, gazing gloatingly on the bowl of sparkling gems, “what are we to do with them?”
“I suggest,” said Thorndyke, “that Dr. Jervis stay here tonight to help you to guard them and that in the morning you take them up to London and deposit them, at your bank.”
Blowgrave fell in eagerly with this suggestion, which I seconded. “But,” said he, “that chest is a queer-looking package to be carrying abroad. Now, if we only had that confounded deed-box—”
“There’s a deed-box on the cabinet behind you,” said Thorndyke.
Blowgrave turned round sharply. “God bless us!” he exclaimed. “It has come back the way it went. Harold must have slipped in at the window while we were at tea. Well, I’m glad he has made restitution. When I look at that bowl and think what he must have narrowly missed, I don’t feel inclined to be hard on him. I suppose the scarab is inside—not that it matters much now.”
The scarab was inside in an envelope; and as Thorndyke turned it over in his hand and examined the hieroglyphics on it through his lens, Miss Blowgrave asked: “Is it of any value, Dr. Thorndyke? It can’t have any connection with the secret of the hiding-place, because you found the jewels without it.”
“By the way, doctor, I don’t know whether it is permissible for me to ask, but how on earth did you find out where the jewels were hidden? To me it looks like black magic.”
Thorndyke laughed in a quiet, inward fashion. “There is nothing magical about it,” said he. “It was a perfectly simple, straightforward problem. But Miss Nellie is wrong. We had the scarab; that is to say we had the wax impression of it, which is the same thing. And the scarab was the key to the riddle. You see,” he continued, “Silas’s letter and the scarab formed together a sort of intelligence test.”
“Did they?” said Blowgrave. “Then he drew a blank every time.”
Thorndyke chuckled. “His descendants were certainly a little lacking in enterprise,” he admitted. “Silas’s instructions were perfectly plain and explicit. Whoever would find the treasure must first acquire some knowledge of Egyptian lore and must study the scarab attentively. It was the broadest of hints, but no one—excepting Harold Bowker, who must have heard about the scarab from his Uncle Arthur—seems to have paid any attention to it.
“Now it happens that I have just enough elementary knowledge of the hieroglyphic characters to enable me to spell them out when they are used alphabetically; and as soon as I saw the seal, I could see that these hieroglyphics formed English words. My attention was first attracted by the second group of signs, which spelled the word ‘Reuben,’ and then I saw that the first group spelled ‘Uncle.’ Of course, the instant I heard Miss Nellie speak of the connection between the scarab and Uncle Reuben, the murder was out. I saw at a glance that the scarab contained all the required information. Last night I made a careful tracing of the hieroglyphics and then rendered them into our own alphabet. This is the result.”
He took from his letter-case and spread out on the table a duplicate of the tracing which I had seen him make, and of which he had given me a copy. But since I had last seen it, it had received an addition; under each group of signs the equivalents in modern Roman lettering had been written, and these made the following words:
“UNKL RUBN IS IN TH MILL FIELD SKS FT DOWN CHURCH SPIR NORTH TEN THIRTY EAST DINGL SOUTH GABL NORTH ATY FORTY FIF WEST GOD SAF KING JORJ.”
Our two friends gazed at Thorndyke’s transliteration in blank astonishment. At length Blowgrave remarked: “But this translation must have demanded a very profound knowledge of the Egyptian writing.”
“Not at all,” replied Thorndyke. “Any intelligent person could master the Egyptian alphabet in an hour. The language, of course, is quite another matter. The spelling of this is a little crude, but it is quite intelligible and does Silas great credit, considering how little was known in his time.”
“How do you suppose M. Fouquet came to overlook this?” Blowgrave asked.
“Naturally enough,” was the reply. “He was looking for an Egyptian inscription. But this is not an Egyptian inscription. Does he speak English?”
“Very little. Practically not at all.”
“Then, as the words are English words and imperfectly spelt, the hieroglyphics must have appeared to him mere nonsense. And he was right as to the scarab being an imitation.”
“There is another point,” said Blowgrave. “How was it that Harold made that extraordinary mistake about the place? The directions are clear enough. All you had to do was to go out there with a compass and take the bearings just as they were given.”
“But,” said Thorndyke,” that is exactly what he did, and hence the mistake. He was apparently unaware of the phenomenon known as the Secular Variation of the Compass. As you know, the compass does not—usually—point to true north, hut to the Magnetic North; and the Magnetic North is continually changing its position. When Reuben was buried—about 1810—it was twenty-four degrees, twenty-six minutes west of true north; at the present time it is fourteen degrees, forty-eight minutes west of true north. So Harold’s bearings would be no less than ten degrees out, which of course, gave him a totally wrong position. But Silas was a ship-master, a navigator, and of course knew all about the vagaries of the compass; and, as his directions were intended for use at some date unknown to him, I assumed that the bearings that he gave were true bearings—that when he said ‘north’ he meant true north, which is always the same; and this turned out to be the case. But I also prepared a plan with magnetic bearings corrected up to date. Here are the three plans: No. 1—the one we used—showing true bearings; No. 2, showing corrected magnetic bearings which might have given us the correct spot; and No. 3, with uncorrected magnetic bearings, giving us the spot where Harold dug, and which could not possibly have been the right spot.”
On the following morning I escorted the deed-box, filled with the booty and tied up and sealed with the scarab, to Mr. Blowgrave’s bank. And that ended our connection with the case; excepting that, a month or two later, we attended by request the unveiling in Shawstead churchyard of a fine monument to Reuben Blowgrave. This took the slightly inappropriate form of an obelisk, on which were cut the name and approximate dates, with the added inscription: “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return after many days,” concerning which Thorndyke remarked dryly that he supposed the exhortation applied equally even if the bread happened to belong to someone else.
THE NEW JERSEY SPHINX (1923)
“A rather curious neighbourhood this, Jervis,” my friend Thorndyke remarked as we turned into Upper Bedford Place; “a sort of aviary for cosmopolitan birds of passage, especially those of the Oriental variety. The Asiatic and African faces that one sees at the windows of these Bloomsbury boarding houses almost suggest an overflow from the ethnographical galleries of the adjacent British Museum.”
“Yes,” I agreed,” there must be quite a considerable population of Africans, Japanese and Hindus in Bloomsbury; particularly Hindus.”
As I spoke, and as if in illustration of my statement, a dark-skinned man rushed out of one of the houses farther down the street and began to advance towards us in a rapid, bewildered fashion, stopping to look at each street door as he came to it. His hatless condition—though he was exceedingly well dressed—and his agitated manner immediately attracted my attention, and Thorndyke’s too, for the latter remarked, “Our friend seems to be in trouble. An accident, p
erhaps, or a case of sudden illness.”
Here the stranger, observing our approach, ran for ward to meet us and asked in an agitated tone, “Can you tell me, please, where I can find a doctor?”
“I am a medical man,” replied Thorndyke, “and so is my friend.”
Our acquaintance grasped Thorndyke’s sleeve and exclaimed eagerly, “Come with me, then, quickly, if you please. A most dreadful thing has happened.”
He hurried us along at something between a trot and a quick walk, and as we proceeded he continued excitedly, “I am quite confused and terrified; it is all so strange and sudden and terrible.”
“Try,” said Thorndyke, “to calm yourself a little and tell us what has happened.”
“I will,” was the agitated reply. “It is my cousin, Dinanath Byramji—his surname is the same as mine. Just now I went to his room and was horrified to find him lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and blowing—like this,” and he puffed out his cheeks with a soft blowing noise. “I spoke to him and shook his hand, but he was like a dead man. This is the house.”
He darted up the steps to an open door at which a rather scared page-boy was on guard, and running along the hall, rapidly ascended the stairs. Following him closely, we reached a rather dark first-floor landing where, at a half-open door, a servant-maid stood listening with an expression of awe to a rhythmical snoring sound that issued from the room.
The unconscious man lay as Mr. Byramji had said staring fixedly at the ceiling with wide-open, glazy eyes, puffing out his cheeks slightly at each breath. But the breathing was shallow and slow, and it grew perceptibly slower, with lengthening pauses. And even as I was timing it with my watch while Thorndyke examined the pupils with the aid of a wax match, it stopped. I laid my finger on the wrist and caught one or two slow, flickering beats. Then the pulse stopped too.
The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 4