THE TICKING OF THE CLOCK.

The man with the grey hat took the pocket-knife, knelt over the spot, placed the knife in position, and pressed with all his might, when slowly a panel of the oak wainscoting about two feet square fell forward until it lay flat at right angles, disclosing a small locked door behind.

"This is it, no doubt!" cried the doctor, tugging at the door. It yielded, disclosing a secret cupboard.

A clock set upon a cabinet on the side of the room near where I was hidden was ticking. I had not noticed that sound before, and I thought it strange.

Miller held the candle while the others peered within. They all had their backs turned to me, and in my eagerness I bent forward in order to obtain a better view of what was concealed there.

"See!" cried Gavazzi. "I was not mistaken! I knew he had some secret hiding-place here. In this room he spent days, sometimes with me, but more often locked in here alone. Fortunately for us, the police know nothing of this."

"Yes," exclaimed Miller. "Let us see what his treasures are. I wonder what he would say if he saw us handling his secrets," he added, with a short dry laugh. "The papers to-day say that he's been seen in Bahia."

Evidently Lucie had for some reason kept her knowledge of the fugitive's death from her father.

"He was always methodical," remarked the Italian. "And he seems to have carried out his methods here. Look at all these pigeon-holes! Made by himself, it seems, from their roughness. He dared not call in a carpenter. But he was of a very mechanical turn of mind, and probably constructed the whole thing himself."

"It certainly would escape observation," remarked the young man, examining the thick old panel of polished oak that had fallen back.

The doctor had drawn from one of the pigeon-holes a bundle of official-looking papers folded and secured with tape. He glanced at them with critical eye and cast them aside as being without interest.

Another, and another, he drew out, but none of them attracted his attention for more than a few moments.

"They are merely secret information collected against various politicians and personages--information that he thought might one day be useful," said Gavazzi.

"And profitable, eh?" added Miller, with a laugh.

"Quite so. We may find it equally profitable to us one day," remarked his companion. "They will prove interesting reading when we have time to go through them."

They were evidently in search of something else. Surely they had not deliberately sacrificed a man's life to obtain those few dusty papers?

What, I wondered, was contained in that precious packet which the owner of that villa had given me before his death?

Two large matrices of official seals Miller drew out and examined.

"Ah! yes!" exclaimed Gavazzi, "I suspected he had those. They are copies of the seal of the Ministry, and with them he fabricated quite a number of official doc.u.ments. By means of those he sent an order to the convict prison at Volteria to release Rastelli, the forger, who was a friend of his. The Governor at once set him at liberty, and does not know to this day that the order was a forgery. Indeed, I believe that, for a consideration, he used to give out these orders."

"And he made them himself!" Miller laughed. "A pretty profitable business!" And he turned over the bra.s.s seals in his hand, while the little clock ticked on.

"Of course. If he had only been satisfied and not attempted too much, he would have remained years in office without any suspicion falling upon him. I, however, knew something of what was in progress, and yet he defied me and absolutely refused to let me share. Well--you know the rest," he laughed. "I didn't see why he should take all the profits and I do the work."

"But you managed to be pretty well paid," his friend remarked.

"I merely looked after myself. Yet, if Giovanni had not been a fool and taken me into the affair when he knew that I'd discovered everything, we might have run the Ministry as a joint concern until--well, until the next Cabinet crisis or King Umberto dismissed us. It's a pity--a thousand pities--he was such a fool. But you see he got unnerved, he was afraid of his enemies, and so he acknowledged his peculations by bolting."

"A fatal mistake," Miller declared. "I wonder he didn't get across to Greece. The police couldn't have touched him there. He knew the law of extradition quite as well as you or I. To go to South America is simply running into the arms of the police."

"I question whether he is in America," the doctor said, examining deliberately the contents of another of the pigeon-holes. "The report may have been circulated by the police themselves--as reports so often are--to put the fugitive off his guard. No, I should think that he is more likely in Paris, or Vienna, or Berlin. He could reach either capital by the through train from Rome. He probably put on a suit of workman's clothes and travelled third-cla.s.s with a stick and a bundle.

That's the safest way to get out of the country--don't you think so?

We've both done it more than once," he laughed.

There was something distinctly humorous to me in the owner of the Manor at Studland travelling as an Italian labourer among the unwashed third-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers and pa.s.sing the guards at the frontier with his worldly belongings tied up in a dirty handkerchief.

And yet that is a course very often adopted by the international thief as the safest way in which to pa.s.s from one country to another.

"_Gran Dio_!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Gavazzi a moment later, as he held a small packet open in his hand. "Money! Look!"

Both men bent eagerly, and I saw that the doctor held in his hand a thick packet of yellow bank-notes secured by an elastic band-- thousand-franc notes they were, and there could not be less than fifty of them.

"What good fortune!" cried Miller. "It was worth doing after all."

"I told you it was. This was his secret bank. Probably there's more inside."

In an instant the three men tore out the contents of the pigeon-holes and scattered them upon the floor in their eagerness to secure what the dead man had hidden there.

"Here's another lot!" exclaimed the young man, holding up a second packet, while a few minutes later Miller himself discovered two fat packets, each note for one thousand francs. A fourth packet was discovered containing English twenty-pound notes and some German paper money.

Those were exciting moments. The men scrambled and s.n.a.t.c.hed the packets from each other, tearing them open in their fierce eagerness to ascertain whether they contained notes. In the eyes of all three was that terrible l.u.s.t for gold that impels men to great crimes, that fierce pa.s.sion that renders men unconscious of their actions.

Time after time smaller packets were discovered, which they thrust into their pockets uncounted.

There was wealth there--wealth that would place all three of them beyond the necessity of those subterfuges by which they had previously lived-- an ill-gotten h.o.a.rd of bank-notes which I calculated to be of the value of many thousands of English pounds sterling.

And I was witness of their unexpected good fortune, for which the poor unfortunate man in charge had been foully done to death.

Miller suddenly discovered a large packet of thousand-franc notes in the back of the cupboard and pocketed them--a packet double the size of the first--whereupon a fierce quarrel instantly ensued.

Both the doctor and the young man declared that the money should be properly divided, while Miller flatly refused.

Hot words arose--quick accusations and recriminations, the men raising their voices all unconsciously, when of a sudden something entirely unexpected occurred.

The men were silent in an instant--silent in awe.

The clock, hitherto unnoticed by them, had stopped ticking.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE.

CERTAIN PERSONS ARE INQUISITIVE.

The half-open door through which I had been watching the men's mysterious movements, and the discovery of the fugitive's hidden wealth, suddenly closed of its own accord, with the heavy clang of iron.

Besides startling me, it left me in semi-darkness in the great salon.

I heard them rush frantically towards it, trying to open it, but their efforts were unavailing. Loud imprecations escaped them, for they believed that some person had imprisoned them. If they succeeded in escaping they would certainly discover me, therefore my position was one of extreme peril.

But I recollected the strange ticking of that clock which had commenced when the secret cupboard had been opened. The ticking had now ceased, therefore the door had closed automatically upon the intruders. By some clever contrivance Nardini had connected his secret hiding-place with the door that had been strengthened and lined with steel, enamelled white to match the wood-work of the salon. By a clockwork arrangement the door would evidently close upon the inquisitive person who opened the cupboard at a certain time afterwards.

When the little clock standing upon the pearl-inlaid cabinet had suddenly broken the silence by ticking it had attracted my attention, but I quickly forgot it in watching the trio so narrowly. The study window was evidently strongly barred, as were all the windows of the ground floor of the villa, the bars being built into the wall outside the house in such a manner that they could only be filed through, an operation which would take considerable time even with proper tools.

They hammered upon the door and threw their weight upon it, but it did not budge. Evidently by the same mechanical contrivance several strong steel bolts had been shot into their sockets.