Not that I had any troublesome friendship for Ladd, who was no sort of a man to think about; yet I could not forget that he was a buyer, and it seemed both wise and likely to be profitable to warn him. Possibly I had reared a fine superstructure of suspicion upon a mere flimsy basis of prejudice; but in any case I could do no harm, I thought, and might even sell the old scoundrel a parcel of jewels in the attempt. His house, as I then knew, lay over by the hills of Caversham; and I remembered that I could take it by a circuitous route which would bring me to Pangbourne, after I had pa.s.sed through Mapledurham and Whitchurch. In the end, I resolved at least to see the old man; and when I had dined at a ridiculously early hour with Barisbroke, I crossed the river by the white bridge, and in thirty minutes I was at the gate of Yore Hall.

I am no archaeologist, and have an exceedingly poor eye for a building; but my first impression of this hall was a pleasing one. It is true that the wooden gate of the drive was broken down, and the garden-land beyond it nothing but a tangle of swaying gra.s.s, thistle, and undergrowth, preparing one for poor things to come; but the house itself was a ma.s.sive and even a grand attempt at a towered and battlemented structure, built in stout stone with Norman windows, and the pretense of a keep, which gave strength to its air of antiquity. When I came near to it, I saw that many of the gargoyles had fallen from the roof of the left wing, which seemed to be unfinished, and the parapet was broken away and decaying above the porch; while--and this was even more singular--there did not seem a single curtain to the house. It was now upon the hour of seven, and a glimmer of sunlight shining redly upon the latticed cas.e.m.e.nts lit up the facade with a greater brilliance than one looks to see out of Italy. There were rooks circling and cawing in the great elms by the moat which ran round three sides of the house; I could hear the baying of a hound in the courtyard by the stables--but of man or woman I saw nothing, though I rang the great bell thrice, and birds fled from the eaves at the clatter, and the rabbits that had sported by the thicket disappeared in the warren.

Some minutes after the third ring, and when I was preparing to drive off and leave Jabez Ladd to his own affairs, the stable door opened, and a girl came out, dressed, it seemed to me, curiously in a smart white frock; but with untidy hair, though much of it; and an exceedingly pretty face, which had been the prettier for a little scouring. The creature had great dark eyes like a _grisette_ of Bordeaux; and when she saw me, stood swaying upon her feet, and laughing as she bit at her ap.r.o.n-strings, as though my advent was an exceedingly humorous thing.

Then she said,--

"Is it Mr. Ladd you're wanting?"

I told her that it was.

"You'll not be a county man?" she asked.

"I'm from London," said I, "and my name is Bernard Sutton. Tell Mr.

Ladd that I'll not keep him five minutes."

"There's no need," said she, simpering again; "he's been a-bed since the milk."

"In bed!" cried I amazed.

"Yes," said she, "it's over late for company; but if ye'll write something I'll run up with it; the housekeeper's away sick."

She seemed to think that all this was a good joke, and wondered, I doubt not, that I did not simper at her again. I was on the very point of whipping up the nag, and leaving such a curious household, when one of the landing windows went up with a creak, and Ladd himself, with a m.u.f.fler round his throat, was visible.

"What d'ye want in my grounds?" he roared. "Here, you hussy, what are ye chattering there for?--thought I was asleep did ye--ha!"

"Good evening, Mr. Ladd," said I, quietly; "I'm sorry, but I appear to have disturbed you. I've a word for your ear if you'll come down."

"Hullo," cried he, in his cracked and piercing voice; "why it's you, is it? egad, I thought you were the butcher! What's your business?--I'm biding in bed, as you can see."

"I can't shout," said I, "and my business is private."

"Won't it wait?" he snarled. "You haven't come to sell me anything?"

"I don't sell stuff in the street," said I; "come down and I'll talk to you. But if you don't want to hear--well, go to bed."

His curiosity got the better of him at this point, and he snapped out the words, "I'm coming down," and then disappeared from the window. But he had no intention of opening the front door, as I found presently when of a sudden he appeared at a cas.e.m.e.nt upon the ground floor, and resumed the conversation.

"You're not asking after my health," said he, "but I'll let you know that I'm eat up with cold; can ye have done with it straight off?"

"Yes," said I, leaning over from the dog-cart to spare my voice. "Do you know a tall man with yellow hair who's got two emeralds to sell?"

At these words his face whitened in the sunlight, and he opened his great mouth as though to speak, but no sound came. Then quickly he drew a small box from his pocket, such as I had seen in the hands of the velvet-coated man, and took a tabloid from it.

"I'll be about letting you in," said he, as he went to shut down the cas.e.m.e.nt.

But I said, "I think not, there's a drive of five miles to Whitchurch before me, and this horse trips."

"For the love of G.o.d," cried he, suddenly putting off all self-restraint, "don't go till I've heard you--man, my life may depend upon it!"

"How's that?" said I.

"I'm going to tell you," said he; "and if ye'll stay, we'll crack a bottle of port together."

He had whetted my curiosity now, and presently I heard him nagging at the pretty girl who had first greeted me. After that he threw the stable door wide open, and dressed only, as I could see, in a loose dressing-gown and a pair of carpet slippers, he led the horse to a stall that had the half of a roof; crying to the maid to get her down to the house of a man he named, there to beg a feed of corn and the loan of a boy. But while he was doing it, he shivered incessantly, and seemed eaten up with fear.

"You appear to think that I'm putting up with you," said I, when I heard his orders; "there's no need to look after the nag--I shan't be here ten minutes."

"Not ten minutes!" he exclaimed, still with quavering voice. "Oh, but you will--when you've heard my talk. Would you see me murdered?"

I did not answer, being in the main amused at his attempts to get the horse out of the trap, and particularly to unbuckle the very stiff belly-band. The girl had gone tripping off with herself to the village as I thought; but though at that time I had no intention of staying beyond an hour with him, I unshafted the animal myself, and tethered the beast to the rickety manger, throwing my own rug across his loins; then I followed Ladd through a black and smoke-washed kitchen to a dingy apartment near the hall, and, the place being shuttered, he kindled a common paraffin lamp, which might have cost a shilling but would have been dear at two.

"I'll be getting the port," said he, casting a wistful look at me in the hope, perhaps, that I should decline his invitation to a gla.s.s, "you'll not mind refreshment after your drive?"

"Thanks; you may be sure I won't," said I; and while he was gone fumbling down the pa.s.sage, I saw that his dining-room had once been a fine apartment, oak-panelled and s.p.a.cious; and that ancestors, whose rubicund jowls spoke of "two-bottle" men, now seemed to survey the economy below with agony unspeakable. For the rest, there was little in the room but depressing Victorian chairs in mahogany, and a piano with a high back, such as our grandmothers played upon.

When Ladd came back, he had a bottle in his hand. I smiled openly when I saw that it was a pint; but he decanted it with a fine show of generosity, and pushing a gla.s.s to me, took up the matter which interested him at once.

"Where did ye see my nephew?" he asked, while I sipped the wine with satisfaction; "it'll have been in London, perhaps?"

"I saw him--if he was your nephew--at Pangbourne last night," said I; "he had a pretty woman with him, and wanted to sell me two emeralds."

"That must have been the wife he married in San Francisco," cried he, "but she has no sinecure; you didn't hear that I paid his pa.s.sage abroad last spring after he'd robbed me of a thousand----Well and it was emeralds he wanted to sell you?"

"Two of the finest I have ever seen," said I, "and matching perfectly."

The import of the emeralds had evidently been lost upon him until this time; but now of a sudden he realized that he might be concerned in the business, and his agitation was renewed. "I wonder what emeralds they were?" he asked as if of himself; then turning to me, he exclaimed, "Will you come upstairs with me a minute?"

He did not wait for me to answer, but led the way up bare stone steps to a landing off which there led two long pa.s.sages; and in a big and not uncomfortable bedroom he showed me three safes, one a little one, which he opened, and took therefrom a case containing seven emeralds of a size and quality apparently similar to the two I had seen at Pangbourne. But when he gave them to me to examine I saw at once that five of them were genuine and two were false.

"Well," said he, after I had looked at them long and closely, "how do you like them?"

"I like them well enough," said I; "at least, I like five of them, but the other two are gla.s.s!"

At this he cried, "Oh, my G.o.d!" and clutched the stones from me with the trembling fingers of a madman. When he had seen them for himself--being judge enough to follow me in my conclusions--he began to roar out oaths and complaints most pitifully, cursing his nephew as I have never heard a man cursed before or since. In my endeavor to calm him, I asked how it could possibly be that this fellow he feared had got access to his safe; but he poured out only an incoherent tale, begging me to send for the police, then not to leave him, then falling to prophecy, and declaring that he would be murdered before the month was out. It was altogether the most moving sight I have ever seen--pointing strongly to the conclusion that the man was mad; and, in fact, where his jewels were concerned, sanity was not his strong point.

By and by he got sufficient reason to tell me that he had the administration of some of his nephew's property, and that in his work he had first fallen foul of a man, headstrong, vindictive, by no means honest, and, in some moods, dangerous. Yet, even knowing his relative's character and the threats he had urged against him, he could not tell how the safe was broken, or by what means the emeralds had gone. He was not even aware that his nephew was in England; and I had been the first to bring intelligence of his coming. I asked him, naturally, if these two stones represented the whole of his loss, and at that he fell off again to his raving, but took two keys of the larger safes from a secret drawer in the smaller as I could see; and began to pour upon the faded bed-cover a wealth of treasure which might have bought a city. Here were rubies of infinite perfection, diamonds set in a hundred shapes, ropes of pearls, boxes of opals, bracelets of every known pattern, rings scarce to be numbered, aigrettes, necklaces--in short, such a stupendous show that the dark and dingy bedroom was lighted with wondrous light, a myriad rays flashing up from the bed, until the whole place seemed touched with a wand, and changed to a chamber of a thousand colors.

Before the bed of jewels the old man stood chattering and moaning; now bathing, as it were, in the gems, now letting them ripple over his hands, or addressing tender endearments to them; or clutching them with nervous avidity as though he feared even my companionship.

In the midst of this strange scene, and while we were both held spellbound by the wondrous vision of wealth, a sudden exclamation drew the miser from his employment. It came from the girl who had been sent to the village, she now standing in the doorway of the bedroom, and crying, "Oh, good Lord!" as she saw the glitter of the gems. But Ladd turned upon her at the words, and grasped her by the wrists, crying out as he had cried when first he knew that he was robbed.

"You hussy," he hissed, bending her by the arms backward almost to the floor; "what do you watch me for? What do you mean by coming here? Where are the emeralds you have stolen? Tell me, wench; do you hear? Tell me, or I shall hurt you!"

He held her in so firm a grasp that I feared she would suffocate, and went to pull him off; at which action he turned to cry out against me; but the anger had played upon him so that he fainted suddenly all across the bed, and amongst the jewels. The girl, whom he had forced upon the floor, now rose impudently, and said,--

"Did ye ever see the like of him?--but I'll make him pay for it! Oh, you needn't look, he's that way often. He'll come to in a minute; but he won't find me in the house to-morrow--wages or no wages."

"Do what you like," I cried to her angrily, "but don't chatter. Have you got any brandy in the house?"

"Brandy! and for him!" said she, arranging her dress which he had torn.