by Grant Allen
“At any rate,” Paul cried, looking toward the detective for support, “our first business now must be to go out and save him.”
Mr. Solomons stood still in the boat and waved wildly forward with his outstretched hand.
“To the wreck! To the wreck!” he shouted aloud, above the noise of the breakers. “I see him! I see him!”
And, in truth, Paul, turning round toward the hull that still crashed and ground upon the great granite millstones, saw a frantic figure, clasping the shattered taffrail with one clenched hand, and waving wildly toward the boats for assistance with the other. The white swirls of fog were growing thinner now, and through the gap they made he could plainly perceive that the figure was beckoning them with a japanned tin dispatch-box of the sort in which bankers keep their clients’ documents.
“He would go down to fetch them!” Mme. Ceriolo cried apologetically from the neighboring boat. “We were all on deck and might have been saved together, but he would go down to his cabin to fetch them.”
Mr. Solomons gazed back at her with contemptuous pity.
CHAPTER XLII.
THE THIEF IS ARRESTED.
THEY were rowing ahead now with all their thews and muscles, and the breakers, those treacherous, terrible, faithless breakers, were carrying them forward with huge lunges toward the broken hull as fast as they could carry them. The great danger lay in the chance of being dashed against the broadside, and crushed to pieces between the waves and the wreck. The one hope of safety lay in being able to bring the boat within leaping distance or ropecatch for the man on the hull, without going quite so near as to be actually hurled against her side in the effort.
Lionel Solomons stood on the broken deck, frantic with fear, but still clutching the taffrail. — A craven terror had whitened his pasty face to deadly whiteness. He clung with one hand to his doubtful support, as the waves washed over and over the shattered hull, and ground its spars to pieces on the stacks of rock behind him. Each moment he disappeared from sight beneath a cataract of spray, then reappeared once more as the wave sank back ineffectual. The whole hull swayed and pounded upon the clattering rocks. But Lionel Solomons still clung on, with the wild tenacious grip of his race, to that last chance of safety. He held the dispatch-box as firmly in one hand as he held to the taffrail with the other. He was clutching to the last at his life and his money.
Mr. Solomons, who had been the first to see him, was also the one to keep him clearest in view, and he urged the fishermen forward through those boisterous waves with his outstretched forefinger turned ever toward the wretched fugitive.
“My nephew!” he cried out to them. “There he is! That’s he! My nephew! My nephew! A hundred pounds a-piece to you, men, if you save my nephew!”
Paul could make him out through the mist quite distinctly now, and he half unconsciously observed, even in that moment of peril and intense excitement, that the reason why he had failed to recognize Lionel earlier was because the miserable man had shaved his upper lip, and otherwise superficially disguised his hair and features.
“Yes, it’s Leo, it’s Leo!” Mr. Solomons cried convulsively, clasping his hands. “He tracked the fellow down, and followed him out to sea — at his own peril! Fourteen years! Why the man ought to be hanged, drawn, and quartered!”
“We’ll never make this arrest,” the detective murmured, half aside to Paul. “Hold her off there, you fishermen; we shall all be dashed to pieces. We shall drown ourselves if we go near enough to save him.”
“Now then, nearer, nearer!” Mr. Solomons cried, mad with suspense and agony, and blue in the face with the horror of the crisis. “Let her go with the wave! Let him jump, let him jump there! Hold her off with your oars men; don’t be afraid! A hundred pounds a-piece, I tell you, if you save my nephew!”
As he spoke, the boatmen, taking advantage of the undertow as it rolled off the hull and the reef, put the boat as close in as safety would permit to the riddled” broadside, and held up a coil of rope in act to fling it to the terrified fugitive. Lionel still gripped the ill-omened dispatch-box. “Fling it away, man; fling it away!” the sailors called out impatiently. “Catch at the rope for dear life as I throw the coil at ‘ee!”
Lionel Solomons gazed one instant at the box — the precious box for whose contents he had risked, and was losing everything. It went against the grain with him, white and palsied coward that he was that moment, to relinquish his hold of it even for one passing interval. But life was at stake, dear life itself, to which he clung in his craven dread, even more, if possible, than to his illgotten money. Lunging forward as the wave brought the great hull back again nearest to the boat, he flung the case with desperate aim into the stern, where it fell clattering at Mr. Solomons’ feet. But the golden opportunity was now past and gone. Before the fishermen could fling the coil, the hull had rocked back again with the advancing wave, and it was only by backing water with all their might on a refluent side-current that the other men could hold off their boat from being hurled, a helpless walnut-shell, against the great retreating broadside. The wreck bore on upon the rocks, and Lionel Solomons went with it, now clinging desperately with both hands to that shattered taffrail.
“Try once more,” Mr. Solomons shouted, almost beside himself with excitement and anguish, and livid blue from chin to forehead. “A hundred pounds — two hundred pounds each man, if you save him! Leo, Leo, hold on to it still — wait for the next wave! We can come alongside again for you.”
The billow rolled back and the hull heeled over, careening in their direction. Once more the boatmen rowed hard against the recoiling undertow. For a moment, with incredible struggles, they held her within distance for throwing the coil.
“Catch it! catch it and jump!” Paul cried at the top of his voice.
Lionel Solomons, coming forward a third time with the careening hull, held out one despairing hand with a wild, clutching motion for the rope they flung him.
At that instant, while they looked for him to catch it and leap, a sudden and terrible change came over the miserable being’s distorted features. For the very first time he seemed to focus his sight deliberately on the people in the boat. His gaze fell full upon his uncle’s face. Their eyes met. Then Lionel’s moved hastily to Paul’s and the detective’s. There was a brief interval of doubt. He seemed to hesitate. Next instant the coil fell, unwinding itself, into the water by his side, not six inches short, and Lionel Solomons’ last chance was gone forever.
Instead of leaning forward and catching it, he had flung up his arms wildly in the air as the coil approached him, and, shrieking out in a voice that could be heard above the breakers and the grinding jar of the hull upon the rocks, “O God! — my uncle!” had let go his hold altogether upon the unsteady taffrail.
His sin had found him out. He dared not face the man he had so cruelly robbed of a life’s savings.
Then, all of a sudden, as they held back the boat with the full force of six stalwart arms, they saw a great billow burst over the whole wreck tumultuously. As the foam cleared away and the water came pouring in wild cataracts over her side, they looked once more for their man upon the clean-swept deck. But they looked in vain. The taffrail was gone, and the skylights above the cabin.
And Lionel Solomons was no longer visible.
The great wave had swept him off, and was tossing and pounding him now upon the jagged peaks of granite.
Mr. Solomons fell back in his place at the stern. His color was no longer blue, but deadly white, like Lionel’s. Some awful revulsion had taken place within him. He bowed down his face between his hands like a brokenhearted man, and rocked himself to and fro above his knees convulsively.
“And I drove him to his death!” he cried, rocking himself still in unspeakable remorse and horror and anguish. “I drove him to his death when I meant to save him!”
Seething inwardly in soul, Paul knew the old man had found out everything now. In that last awful moment, when the drowning nephew shrank, at the final
gasp, from the uncle he had so cruelly and ungratefully robbed, it came in with a burst upon Mr. Solomons’ mind that it was Leo himself who had stolen the securities. It was Leo he had hounded and hunted down in the wreck. It was Leo he had confronted, like an evil conscience, in that last drowning agony. It was Leo for whom he had demanded with threats and curses fourteen years’ imprisonment! The horror of it struck Mr. Solomons mute and dazed. He rocked himself up and down in a speechless conflict of emotion. He could neither cry nor groan nor call out now; he could only gaze, blankly and awfully, at the white mist in front of him.
Leo had robbed him — Leo, for whom he had toiled and slaved so long! And he had tracked him down, unconsciously, unwittingly, till he made himself, against his will, Leo’s executioner!
“We can do no more good here,” the detective murmured in low tones to Paul. “I felt sure it was him, but I didn’t like to say so. We may go ashore now. This ’ere arrest aint going to be effected.”
“Row back!” Paul said. “There’s nobody else on the wreck. If we row ashore at once, we can find out who’s saved and how many are missing.”
They rowed ashore by the same long detour to avoid the reef, and saw the little cove looming distinctly through the cold morning mist to the left before them. On the strip of shingle a crowd was drawn up, gathered together in knots around some dark unseen objects. They landed and approached, Mr. Solomons still white and almost rigid in the face, but walking blindly forward, as in a dream, or like some dazed and terrified dumb creature at bay in the market place. Four or five corpses lay huddled upon the beach; some others the bystanders were trying rudely to revive, or were carrying between them, like logs, to the shelter of their cottages.
A group of dripping creatures sat apart, wringing their hands, or looking on with the stolid indifference of acute hopelessness. Among them was one in a pilot-coat whom some of the bystanders were regarding with supreme pity. “Poor thing!” one woman said to Paul as they approached. “She was married a-Saturday — and her husband’s missing!”
Paul looked at her with an indefinable sense of profound distaste and loathing. The detective, who followed with the dispatch-box still held tight in his hand, cast his eye upon her hard. “I’ve got no warrant for arresting her,” he observed grimly, “but she’d ought to be one of them.”
Mr. Solomons sat down upon the beach, quite motionless. He gazed away vaguely in the direction of the wreck. Presently a dark body appeared upon the crest of a long wave swell to seaward. One of the sailors, plunging boldly through the breakers upon a recoiling wave, with a rope round his waist, struck out with brave arms in the direction of the body. Mr. Solomons watched with strangely passive interest. The sailor made straight for it, and grasped it by the hair — short, curly hair, black and clotted with the waves — and brought it back in tow as his companions pulled him by the rope over the crest of a big breaker. Mr. Solomons sat still and viewed it from afar. The face was battered out of all recognition and covered with blood, but the hands and dress were beyond mistake. Three or four of the passengers gathered round it with awestruck glances.
“Hush, hush,” they murmured. “Keep it from her for a while. It’s poor Mr. Burton. His uncle’s here, they say — on the beach somewhere about. And there’s Mrs. Burton, sitting crying by the coastguard on the shingle over yonder.”
As the words fell on his ears and crushed the last grain of hope — that fatal alias telling him all the terrible story in full at once — Mr. Solomons rose and staggered blindly forward. Paul held his hand, for he thought he would fall; but Mr. Solomons walked erect and straight, though with reeling footsteps like one crushed and paralyzed. He knelt beside the body, and bent over it tenderly. The tears were in his eyes, but they didn’t drop.
“O Leo, my boy!” he cried, “O Leo, Leo, Leo! why didn’t you ask me for it? Why didn’t you ask me? You had but to ask, and you knew it was yours? O Leo, Leo, Leo! why need you do it like this? You’ve killed yourself, my boy, and you’ve broken my heart for me!”
At the words, Mme. Ceriolo rushed forward with a magnificent burst of theatrical anguish. She flung herself upon the body passionately, like a skilled actress that she was, and took the dead hand in hers and kissed it twice over. But Mr. Solomons pushed her aside with unconscious dignity.
“Not now,” he said calmly; “not now, if you please. He’s mine, not yours. I would never have left him. I will care for him still. Go back to your seat, woman!”
And he bent once more, broken-hearted, over the prostrate body.
Mme. Ceriolo slunk back aghast, into the circle of spectators. She buried her face in her hands, and cried aloud in her misery. But the old man knelt there, long and motionless, just gazing blankly at that battered corpse, and murmured to himself in half-inarticulate tones, “Leo, Leo, Leo! To think I should have killed you! You had but to ask, and you knew it was yours, my boy. Why didn’t you ask? Oh, why didn’t you ask me?”
CHAPTER XLIII.
RELICT OF THE LATE LIONEL SOLOMONS.
THEY waited on at Lizard Town till after the funeral. Mr. Solomons, in a certain dazed and dogged fashion, went through with it all, making his arrangements for a costly Cornish serpentine monument with a short inscription in memory of Leo, to the outward eye almost as if nothing very much out of the way had happened; but Paul, looking below the surface, could easily see that in his heart of hearts the poor broken old money-lender was utterly crushed and shattered by this terrible disillusionment. It wasn’t merely the loss of his nephew that weighed down his gray hairs — though that in itself would have gone far to break him — it was the shame and disgrace of his crime and his ingratitude, the awful awakening that overtook him so suddenly in the boat that morning. He could hardly even wish his nephew alive again, knowing him now for exactly what he was; yet the way he leaned over the coffin where that bruised and battered face lay white and still in its still, white grave-clothes muttering, “Leo, Leo,” to himself as he gazed on it, was painfully pathetic for anyone to look upon. Paul knew that the old man’s life was clean cut away from under him. The end for which he had labored so hard and so sternly for so many years was removed at one swoop from his path in life; and the very remembrance of it now was a pang and a humiliation to him.
Paul observed, however, that in the midst of this unspeakable domestic tragedy, Mr. Solomons seemed to recline upon his shoulder for aid, and to trust and confide in him with singular unreserve, even more fully than heretofore. On the very evening of Leo’s funeral, indeed, as he sat alone in his own room at the Lizard Hotel, Mr. Solomons came to him with that white and impassive face he had preserved ever since the morning of the wreck, and beckoning to him with his hand, said, in an ominous tone of too collected calmness, “Come into my room, Sir Paul; that woman is coming to speak with me to-night, and I want you to be by to hear whatever she may have to tell me.”
Paul rose in silence, much exercised in soul. He had fears of his own as to how Mme. Ceriolo’s story might further lacerate the poor old man’s torn heart; but he went reluctantly. Mme. Ceriolo had stopped on at the Lizard, meanwhile, partly because she felt herself compelled in common decency to wait where she was till Leo was buried, but partly also because she wanted to know how much, if anything, Leo’s widow might still hope to extract out of old Cento Cento’s well-filled pockets. She had stood ostentatiously that day beside Lionel Solomons’ open grave with much display of that kind of grief betokened by copious use of a neat pocket-handkerchief with a coronet in the corner; and she was very well satisfied when, in the evening, Mr. Solomons sent a curiously worded card to her in her own room:
“If you will step into my parlor for half an hour’s talk, about eight o’clock, I wish to speak with you.”
The little adventuress came in to the minute, with very red eyes, and with such an attempt at impromptu mourning as her hasty researches among the Helston shops had already allowed her to improvise for the occasion. Her get up, under the circumstances, was strictly irreproac
hable.
She looked the very picture of inconsolable grief, not wholly unmixed with a sad state of pecuniary destitution. It disconcerted her a little when she saw Paul, too, was to be included in the family party — he knew too much to be quite agreeable to her — but she quickly recovered her equanimity on that score and appealed to “Sir Paul” with simple womanly eloquence as an old Mentone friend, as the very person who had been the means of first introducing her to her own dear Lionel. Mr. Solomons listened with grimly impervious face.
“What I want to hear,” he said at last, fairly confronting the little woman with his sternly critical eye, “is, What do you know about this dreadful business?”
“What business?” Mme. Ceriolo asked, with a little tearful astonishment.
Mr. Solomons eyed her again even more sternly than before.
“You know very well what business,” he retorted with some scorn. “Don’t make an old man go over his shame again, woman. By this time all Cornwall has heard it from the detective, no doubt. If you pretend not to know you’ll only exasperate me. Let’s be plain with one another. Your best chance in this matter is to be perfectly straightforward.”
His tone took Mme. Ceriolo completely by surprise. She had never before in her life been placed in a position where her little feminine wiles and pretenses proved utterly useless. She gasped for breath for a second, and stared blankly at the stern old man, out of whom this terrible episode seemed to have driven forever all the genuine kernel of geniality and kindness. Paul was truly sorry for her mute embarrassment.
“I — I — don’t know what you mean,” she answered at last, leaning back in her chair and bursting into real, irrepressible, womanly tears. “I thought you wanted to speak to me as Lionel’s widow.”