Arthur Quiller-Couch

“ I am Martin—the same man that outwitted Melhuish and his crew—the same that played Harry with this Glass, and the man Coffin, and a drunken old ruffian they brought with them from Whydah! The fools! to think to frighten me, that had started by laying out a whole ship's crew! And now you come along; and I hold you all in the hollow of my palm. But I open my hand—so—and let you go."
"Why?"
"Why? I have told you. I am tired."
"That is not all the truth," answered Miss Belcher, eyeing him steadily.
"No; it is not all the truth. No one tells all the truth in this world. ”

“ From an outcast child in Havana I had made myself the sole king of this treasure of Mortallone. I went back and made slaves of men and women who had tossed that child their coppers in contemptuous pity. I brought them here, to Mortallone, to play with them; and as soon as they tired me, they—went. It was power I wanted; power I achieved; and in power, as I thought, lay the secret. The tools in this world say that a poisoner is always a coward: it is one of the phrases with which fools cheat themselves. ”

“ Captain Branscome had unslipped his gun, and stood eyeing the Doctor with a puzzled frown. Plinny stared up at the cliffs. She was white to the lips, but the lips were firmly set; whereas Mr. Goodfellow's jaw hung as though loosed from its tacklings.
So we waited for twenty seconds, maybe; but no third scream came down from the heights.
"That makes one accounted for," said Dr. Beauregard. "I have known, first and last, eleven parties who hunted treasure on this island. They all quarrelled. They quarrelled, moreover, every one of them, before getting their stuff—such as it was—to the boats. ”

“ So stood Miss Belcher, with a cricket-bat under her arm; an Englishwoman, owner of one of England's "stately homes"; a lady amenable to few laws save of her own making, and to no man save—remotely—the King, whose health she drank sometimes in port and sometimes in gin-and-water.
"Good morning, Jack! Sorry to cut you over with that off-drive; but you shouldn't have come in without knocking. Eh? Is that Harry Brooks?" Her face grew grave for a moment before she turned upon Mr. Rogers that smile which, if usually latent and at the best not entirely feminine, was her least dubitable charm. ”

“ Captain Branscome answered, but inattentively. "Mortallone—Mortallone," he went on, muttering the word over as if to himself. "It is curious, all the same."
"What is curious?" demanded Miss Belcher.
"Why, ma'am, I have never myself visited the Gulf of Honduras, but among seamen there are always a hundred stories floating about. In a manner of speaking, there is no such shop for gossip as the sea. In every port you meet 'em, in taverns where sailors drink and brag— the liquor being in them—and one man talks and the rest listen, not troubling themselves to believe. ”

“ If this incredible thing were true—if Captain Branscome were the criminal—the puzzle ceased to be a puzzle; the guinea and the broken cashbox were only too fatally accounted for.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the guinea, in spite even of the eyeglass there in my hand, I could not bring myself to believe. What? Captain Branscome, the simple-minded, the heroic? Captain Branscome, of the threadbare coat and the sword of honour? Poor he was, no doubt—bitterly poor—poor almost to starvation at times. To what might not a man be driven by poverty in this degree? ”

“ Captain Branscome stared at her in weak bewilderment; and, indeed, the snort which accompanied Miss Belcher's question seemed to accuse him of impregnating the morning air with a scent of onions.
"You can answer a plain question, I hope?" said she. "When did you eat last, and what was it?"
"To be precise, ma'am—though I don't understand you—it was an apple, and about—let me see—seven hours ago."
Miss Belcher turned to me and nodded.
"In other words, the man's starving. I don't blame you, Harry Brooks. One can't look for old heads on young shoulders. ”

“ The Doctor was filling Plinny's glass. Having filled it, he pushed the decanters towards Mr. Rogers, and turned to say a word to Miss Belcher, on his right. No; there was time. It had not happened—yet.
I wanted to start up and scream aloud. But some power, stronger than my will, held me down against the sofa-cushion. I had lost all grip of myself—of my voice and limbs alike. I could neither stir nor speak, but lay watching with half-closed eyes, while the room swam and in my ears I heard a thin voice buzzing: "Tell your friends-the ice—he never touches the ice. But it will not save them. ”

“ He mounted the coach again, and, climbing forward whispered in the back of the coachman's ear. The passengers bent their heads to listen. They nodded; the coachman nodded too, and stretched down a hand.
"Can you climb, sonny, or shall we fetch the steps for you? There, I reckoned you was more of a man than to need 'em!"
Mrs. Stimcoe detained me for a moment to fold me in a masculine hug. But her bosom might have been encased in an iron corselet for all the tenderness it conveyed. "God bless you, Harry Brooks, and try to be a man!" ”

“ Below, where the tunnel ran down into darkness, a voice hailed—
"'Metta! Is that 'Metta?"
It was the voice of Dr. Beauregard. The poor creature gazed at me helplessly and ran for the stairway. But her feet sank in the loose heap of jewels; she stumbled; and, as she picked herself up, I saw that she was too late; for already a light shone up from the tunnel below, and before she could gain the exit the Doctor stood there, lifting a torch, in the light of which I saw Mr. Rogers close behind his shoulder. ”

“ Goodfellow between them had finished the whaleboat.
The truth was—though I did not at once perceive it—that upon its completion the old man had begun to drink hard. Drink invariably made him morose, suspicious. His real goodwill to me had not changed, as I was to learn. He had paid a visit to Captain Branscome, and give him special instructions to teach me the art of navigation, the intricacies of which eluded his own fuddled brain. But for the present he could only talk of trivialities, and especially of the barber's parrot, for which he had conceived a ferocious hate. ”

“ We stood at the lower end of a smooth, green glade, through which a broad stream—a river, almost—came swirling, its murmur drowned in the thunder of the waterfall behind us, which the bushes now concealed. The glade was, in fact, a valley-bottom, thinned of undergrowth and set with tall trees; and the stream such a stream as tumbles through many an English deer-park. The whole scene might have been transplanted from England but for a wall of naked cliff, sharply serrated, which enclosed the valley on the left. ”

“ Our course gave them a fairly wide berth; and at first I took them for a continuous line of sandbanks running in a rough semicircle around the low spit which the chart called Gable Point; but as we drew level they broke up into islets, with blue channels between, and at sight of us thousands of sea-birds rose in cloud upon cloud, with a clamour that might have been heard for miles. One of these banks— the northernmost—showed traces of herbage, grey in colour and dull by contrast with the verdure of the Island. ”

“ Certainly it was a fairy-like spot, with white sand underfoot, green creepers overhanging, and through the creepers a rill of water splashing down the cliff; yet we had passed at least a dozen other beaches, which to me had looked no less inviting.
"We will leave the ladies to unpack the hampers," said Dr. Beauregard. "I speak as a bachelor, but in my experience there is a half-hour before lunch in which that man is best appreciated who makes himself scarce. Captain Branscome, if you will not mind a short scramble over the rocks here, to the left, I can promise you something worth seeing." ”

“ The fourth day we had scarcely started to dig before Klootz struck on a second chest that sounded like another full one—
Here Miss Belcher turned a page, glanced overleaf, and came to a full stop.
"For pity's sake, Lydia—" protested Mr. Rogers, who sat leaning forward, his elbows on the table.
"There's no more," Miss Belcher announced.
"No more?"
"Not a word." She fumbled quickly through the remaining blank leaves. "Not a word more," she repeated.
"Death cut short his hand," said Captain Branscome, his voice breaking in upon a long silence. ”

“ We will take Master Harry here, who seems a good, ordinary healthy boy. We will suppose him in possession of the treasure you are here to seek. What in the end can he purchase with it better than the fun he is getting out of this expedition? He can indulge all his senses, but for a while only; in the end indulgence brings satiety, dulls the appetite, takes the savour from the feast, and so destroys itself. He can purchase power, you say? ”

“ I grant admiringly the courage that brought you across thousands of miles to Mortallone, as I grant, and again admiringly, the steadiness of your behaviour this afternoon. But one thing you did not know—that in the nature of things you were bound to meet with such men and see such things done. I have not lived beside treasure all these years without learning that it attracts such men as carrion attracts the vultures. Hide it where you will, from the end of the earth some bird of prey will spy it out, or at least some scent of it will lie and draw such prowlers as this fellow. ”

“ Upon commerce in the concrete—that is to say, upon the butchers, bakers, and other honest tradesmen of Falmouth—Mrs. Stimcoe waged a predatory war, and waged it without quarter. She had a genius for opening accounts, and something more than genius for keeping her creditors at bay. She never wheedled nor begged them for time; she never compromised nor parleyed, nor condescended to yield an inch to their claims for decent human treatment. She relied simply upon browbeating and the efficacy of the straight-spoken lie. A more dauntless, unblushing, majestic liar never stood up in petticoats. ”

“ At the edge of this puddle the turf twinkled with clean dew—close, well-trimmed turf sloping gently to the stream which formed the real boundary of the garden; but Miss Belcher, the neighbouring land-owner, a person of great wealth and the most eccentric good-nature, had allowed my father to build a wall on the far side, for privacy, and had granted him an entrance through it to her park—a narrow wooden door to which a miniature bridge gave access across the stream. ”

“ That is my suffering, Harry Brooks. I cannot bend over a flower but it withers, and the butterflies die if they come near my breath . . . and that, too, is his doing. He would be kind to me, he said, and would een-oculate me; yes, that is his word—een-oculate me, so that no poison could ever harm me. He knows the secrets of all the plants, and why people die of disease. Months at a time he used to leave me alone with Rosa, and go to Havana, to the hospitals; and there he would study till his body was wasted away with work ”

“ Captain Branscome answered, still in a slow, measured voice. "But, indeed, too, I might have been prepared for it when you started by taking a line that beats all my experience of landsmen; or perhaps in this case I ought to say landsladies."
"Why, what have I done that is wonderful?"
"You took the line, ma'am, that, from here to Honduras, what is it but a passage? A few months at the most—oh, to be sure, to a seaman that's no more than nature; but to hear it from any one land-bred, and a lady too! As a Christian man, I have believed in miracles, but to-day I seem to be moving among them. ”

“ The Townshend Packet is a gallant brig Of one hundred and eighty tons; 'Tis the Postmaster-General's favourite rig, And she carries six useful guns. As she sails, as she sails With his Majesty's mails, Hurrah for her long six-pounders! They relieve our fear Of a privateer, But what shall we do if she founders? I prefer not to think of any such contingency: She has excellent sailing qualities, And her captain appears to rule with stringency And to be averse from minor frivolities. ”

“ Falmouth, with its narrow streets and crowd of sailors, postmen, 'longshoremen, porters with wheelbarrows, and passengers hurrying to and from the packets, its smells of pitch and oakum and canvas, its shops full of seamen's outfits and instruments and marine curiosities, its upper windows where parrots screamed in cages, its alleys and quay-doors giving peeps of the splendid harbour, thronged—to quote Miss Plinlimmon again—"with varieties of gallant craft, between which the trained nautical eye may perchance distinguish, but mine doesn't." ”

“ IN WHICH PLINNY SURPRISES EVERYONE.
Everybody stared; and this had the effect of making the dear good creature blush to the eyes.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am?" said Mr. Jack Rogers.
"It—it was not for me to say so, perhaps." Her voice quavered a little, and now a pair of bright tears trembled on her lashes; but she kept up her chin bravely and seemed to take courage as she went on. "I am aware, sir, that in all matters of hazard and enterprise it is for the gentlemen to take the lead. If I appear forward—if I speak too impulsively—my affection for Harry must be my excuse." ”