Читать книгу The Secret of the Barbican and Other Stories - J. S. Fletcher - Страница 15

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Linkwater made ready, and consumed his tea-supper, and while he ate and drank his mind was busy. In spite of the fact that he was almost as much a part of the ecclesiastical establishment of Wyechester as the Dean himself, Linkwater was impassive on questions of strict commercial morality as any one of the gargoyles on the cathedral tower. It was his principle that every man should do the best he can for himself. The more a man does for himself, said he, the less other folks will have to do for him. Therefore, whenever, and if ever, an extraordinary piece of good luck comes in a man’s way, he is a fool, and worse, if he does not take full advantage of it. Besides, who had a better right to these precious stones than himself? The venerable folk to whom they had belonged were dead and gone over 400 years ago—their bones were somewhere under the pavements of the cloisters. Dead and gone! Yes, centuries ago, but Linkwater felt warmly and kindly towards them just then—they had put by a nice little store for him. And—he would use it to the best advantage.

His tea-supper over, Linkwater washed up his crockery, mended his fire, and went out. He repaired to the adjacent Mechanics’ Institute, and asked the librarian for the best encyclopædia on the shelves. He selected three volumes from this—those beginning with D. R. and S. and, carrying them over to a quiet corner he began to read all about diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Now Linkwater was a highly intelligent man, and this was very good reading. He became deeply interested. He was himself a mine of information by the time he had finished his task. He learnt that diamonds have been known for a very, very long period; that they are mentioned by the earliest historians; that they are pure carbon in a crystallized form—that did not interest him greatly; that India was believed for a long time to be the only diamond-producing country; that all the diamonds known to be ancient came from India; that nowadays diamonds came from South America and South Africa. He learnt, too, with some surprise and great satisfaction, that the diamond is not the most precious of precious stones, and that the ruby is. This made him turn to the articles on rubies with added zest. He got somewhat puzzled over the chemical and scientific terms, but he found it established that rubies are of all stones the most precious, and that the best come from Burma and Siam. And when he had further learnt that the sapphire is also a stone of great value, and that the most valuable variety is the cornflower-blue one, Linkwater restored the encyclopædia to its place and went home highly satisfied.

“Nine rubies, seven sapphires, eighteen diamonds!” mused Linkwater, as he sat over his fire a little later, comforting himself with a pipe of tobacco and a glass of rum and water. “I ought to get a very nice thing out of the lot. And now—how to dispose of ’em to the best advantage.”

That, however, was only one out of many questions which Linkwater addressed to himself that evening. For there were many things to think about. He meant to dispose of his find for his own benefit. Very good; but having done so—satisfactorily—he would be a man of much increased wealth. He would have to give some account—to somebody—of how his increase of wealth had come about. Of course, he could, if he liked, leave Wyechester altogether, and go clean away where he was not known.

But Linkwater had no desire to leave Wyechester. He was very comfortable. He had a good salary—and in spring and summer, when the tourists and Americans came around, his tips ran to a handsome total. Besides, in a very few years he would be entitled to a pension. No: Linkwater desired to stay where he was—until his pension fell due anyway. And he also desired to have a good and plausible reason for suddenly becoming a better-off man. For you cannot become better off, said Linkwater, without letting people know it, unless you are a miserly hermit, and hide all your money where it does no good to you. And Linkwater was not the sort to hide his money; his notion was that money makes money, and he had already decided that, as soon as he had converted those precious stones into cash, he would buy some property—house property—in Wyechester which would bring him a nice amount in rents. Now, you cannot buy property without its becoming known—you have to employ lawyers and so on, and in a small cathedral town everybody knows everybody else’s business. Therefore it was necessary that Linkwater should presently invent some good plausible story in explanation of his sudden influx of riches.

But Linkwater was a man of resource and ingenuity. By the time he rose next morning he had hit on a plan which seemed to him a remarkably good one. Secure in his knowledge that he himself was not a Wyechester man, and had never set foot in the place until his first coming to it twenty years before, he invented a brother. He even gave this imaginary brother a name—Nelson. Nelson Linkwater sounded very well, and quite nautical. And it was necessary, for the purpose of Linkwater’s story, that the brother should be a man who had gone down to the sea in ships.

Next day, Linkwater took his weekly half-holiday, and got in the train for Salport, twenty miles away on the coast. It was not often that he visited that famous town of ships and sailors, but he knew it well enough to make a bee-line for what he wanted. In the queer little streets off the Hard, and in the nooks and corners of the Hard itself, there were shops of a sort which are never found in any but seaport towns—shops in which all sorts of odds and ends, from bits of old metal to pieces of rare ivory, accumulate. It would be difficult to give a fitting name to these shops; when you have said that their proprietors are general dealers you have said little, for the word “general” is too narrow a term. Linkwater spent half an hour in examining the windows of these establishments staring at the curious things which generations of seafaring men had picked up in all quarters of the globe and sold on coming home—usually for about a hundredth part of their value. And, finally, stepping into one kept by Issachar, a Semitic gentleman, he asked if there was such a thing in store as a second hand ditty box.

Now, the ditty box, as most folks are aware who know anything about nautical matters, is a small chest, often no longer than a cigar box, in which sailors are wont to keep their private belongings. Into this ditty box Jack puts all manner of queer things which he picks up in his travels. And Mr. Issachar had several in various states of repair. Linkwater picked out one that smelled strongly of the East, a square box made of some fragrant wood and fitted with a lock and key. It was by no means a new box, though it was in excellent repair; it looked as if it had been made by some Oriental craftsman at least a hundred years previously. This was precisely what Linkwater wanted, and he did not haggle about the price.

But his subsequent proceedings puzzled the vendor, who was well aware, from his semi-ecclesiastical rig, that Linkwater was not a seafaring man. For Linkwater began to buy things indiscriminately. He bought two or three old medals from a tray in the window, some Eastern coins, a string or two of beads, some pieces of embroidery, some carvings in bone, and at least one in ivory, a worked tobacco pouch and some queer pipes, a bit of canvas or two, two or three Indian images the size of his thumb, an ancient purse of black leather, ornamented with a skull and crossbones in silver—these were but items amongst other matters. As he purchased each he stored it in the ditty box; when the ditty box was full he paid the reckoning, had the box wrapped in canvas and brown paper, and went away. He had spent between four and five pounds, and he considered that he had laid out his money to good purpose.

Linkwater was very busy when he got home that night. Having locked up his cottage and drawn his blinds, he got out the precious stones from the chest beneath his bed, and stored them away in the queer old purse, wrapped the purse in one of the pieces of canvas, and deposited the parcel in the ditty box beneath all the other odds and ends. This done, and the box safely locked, he proceeded to wrap the oldest of his scraps of canvas round it, and afterwards to seal everything with wax. He used two or three sticks of wax in this sealing process. But if any second person had been present he would have been greatly surprised at Linkwater’s next proceeding.

For as soon as all the seals were firmly set and quite hard Linkwater deliberately broke them. He broke them just as any recipient of the parcel would have broken them—by tearing the canvas wrapping off the box. And as soon as this was done, he wrapped the canvas loosely round the box again, put the lot under his arm, turned down his lamp and set off to call on the sub-dean.