Part 18

“Now, sir, you may suppose the snarling gentleman didn’t make the best of what he see; and he broke out just as they was a-hauling the invalid in, wanting to know very sarcastic if they hadn’t mistook the ‘Globe’ for a hearse. But the fat man he accepted him as good-humoured as could be.

“‘It’s nothing affectionate, sir,’ says he. ‘Only paralysis, which ain’t catching. The gentleman won’t trouble you.’

“‘Not for my place,’ says the fierce gentleman, bristling up like a dog. ‘Damme, sir, not for my place. O, I can see very well what his nose is a-pinting to, and damme if it isn’t as monstrous a piece of coolness as ever I expeerunced. _These_ seats, sir, are the nat’ral perkisite of a considerate punctiality, and if your friend objects to travelling with his back to the ’orses——’

“‘Now, now,’ says the fat man—‘nothing of the sort. You don’t mind sitting with your back to the ’orses, do you, nunky?”

“‘Eh,’ says the old man, ’usky-like, and starting a bit forward—‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no—’ and he sunk into the front cushions, while Cato and the fat ’un dispodged him to his comfort.

“‘Time, gentlemen!’ says I.

“‘Wait a bit’ says snarler. ‘It can’t never be—why, surely, it can’t never be that the sixth inside is took for a blackamoor?’

“‘Alfred,’ says the lady, half veeping: ‘pray let things be. It’s only as far as Cuckfield we’re goin’, arter all.’

“‘A poor argument, my dear,’ says he, ‘in favour of suffering forty miles of a sulphurious devil.’

“‘Pray control yourself, sir,’ says the fat man, still very ekable. ‘We’ve booked three places, for two, just to be comfortable. Our servant rides outside.’

“Well, that settled it; and in another minute we was off. I laughed a bit to myself as I swung up; but I hadn’t a thought of suspicion. What do _you_ say, sir? Would you have? Why, no, of course not—no more than if you was a Lyons Mail. There was the five o’ them packed in there, and one on the roof behind the coachman—three divisions of a party as couldn’t have seemed more unconnected with one another, or more cat and dog at that. Yet, would you believe it, every one of them six had his place in the robbery that follered as carefully set for him as a figure in a sum.

“As for me, sir, I done my duty; and what more could be expected of me? At every stage I tuk a general look round, to see as things were snug and nat’ral; and at Croydon, fust out, I observed as how the invalid were a’ready nodding in a corner, and the other two gents settled to their ‘Mornin’ Postses.’

“Beyond Croydon the cold begun to take the outsides bitter; and the nigger got into a vay of drummin’ with his feet so aggerawacious, that at last George he lost his temper with him and told him to shut up. Well, he shut up that, and started scrapin’ instead; and he went on scrapin’ till the fierce gentleman exploded out of the vinder below fit to bust the springs.

“‘Who’s that?’ roars he—‘the blackamoor? Damme!’ he roars, ‘if you aren’t wus nor a badger in more ways than one,’ he roars.

“‘All right, boss,’ says the nigger, grinning and lookin’ down. ‘Feet warm at last, boss,’ and he stopped his shufflin’ and begun to sing.

“Now, sir, a sudden thought—I won’t go so far as to call it a suspicion—sent me, next stop, to examine unostentatious-like the neighbourhood of them great boots. But all were sound there, and the man sittin’ well tucked into his wraps. It wasn’t like, of course, that he could a’ kicked the panels of the box in without George knowin’ somethin’ about it. And he didn’t want to neither; _for he’d finished his part of the business a’ready_. So he just sat and smiled at me as amiable as Billy Vaters.

“Well, we went on without a hitch; and at Cuckfield the three back insides turned out into the snow, and went for a bespoke po’-chaise that was waitin’ for ’em there. But, afore he got in, the fierce gentleman swung round and come blazin’ back to the vinder.

“‘My compliments, sir,’ says he, ‘at parting; and, if it _should_ come to the vorst,’ he says, ‘I’d advise you to lay your friend pretty far under to his last sleep,’ he says, ‘or his snores’ll wake the dead.’

“‘Hush,’ says the fat ’un. ‘It’s the drowndin’ spirit in him comin’ up to blow like a vale.’

“‘Is it?’ says the fierce gentleman. ‘Then it’s my opinion that the outsides ought to be warned afore he gives his last heave——’ and he went off snortin’ like a tornader.

“The fat man shook his head when he were gone. His mildness, having sich a figger, was amazing. He sat with his arm and shoulder for a bolster to old paralysis, who was certainly going on in style.

“‘Now, sir,’ says I, ‘the whole blessed inside is yourn till the end of the journey.’

“‘Thank you, guard,’ says he; ‘but I won’t disturb my friend, and we’ll stay as we are, thank you.’

“I got up then, and on we went—last stage, sir, through Clayton, over the downs, whipping through Pyecombe and Patcham, swish through Preston turnpike, and so into East Street, where we’d scarce entered, when there come sich a hullabaloo from underneath as if the devil, riding on the springs, had got his tail jammed in the brake. Up I jumps, and up jumps the blackamoor, screeching and clawing at George, so as he a’most dropped the ribbins.

“‘Eh, boss!’ he yelled. ‘De old man—down dere!—damn bad!’

“George he pulled up; and I thought he’d a bust, till I climbed over and loosened his neckercher, and let it all out. Then down we got—nigger and I, and one or two of the passengers—and looked in. ‘What the thunder’s up?’ says I. The fat man were goin’ on awful, sobbin’, and hiccupin’, and holding on to old paralysis, as were sunk back in the corner.

“‘I’m afraid he’s dyin’,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid he’s dyin’! O, why did I ever give way to him, and let him come!’

“Well, we all stood pretty foolish, not knowing what to say or do, when his great tricklin’ face come round like a leg o’ mutton on a spit, and, seein’ the nigger, bust into hystrikes.

“‘O, Cato!’ he roars; ‘O Cato, O Cato! Sich a loss if he goes!’ he roars. ‘Run on by a short cut, Cato,’ he says, ‘and see if you can find a doctor agen our drawin’ up at the “New Inn.”’

“That seemed to us all a good idea, though, to be sure, there was no cut shorter than the straight road we was in. But anyhow, before we could re’lise it, the nigger was off like a arrer; and one of the gentlemen offered to keep the fat man company. But that he wouldn’t listen to.

“‘If he _should_ come round,’ he said, ‘the shock of a stranger might send him off agen. No, no,’ he said: ‘leave me alone with my dying friend, and drive on as quick as ever you can.’

“It were only a matter of minutes; but afore we’d been drawed up half of one afore the inn, a crowd was gathered round the coach door.

“‘Is he back?’ says the fat man—‘Is Cato come back with a doctor? No, I won’t have him touched or moved till a doctor’s seen him.’

“Then all at once he was up and out, rampageous.

“‘Where is he?’ he shrieks. ‘I can’t vait no longer—I’m goin’ mad—I’ll find one myself’—and, afore you could say Jack Robinson, he was off. I never see sich a figger run so. He fair melted away. But the crowd was too interested in the corpse to follow him.

“Well, sir, he didn’t come back with a doctor, and no more did Cato. And the corpse may have sat there ten minutes, and none daring to go into it, when a sawbones, a-comin’ down the street on his own account, was appealed to by the landlord for a verdict, seein’ as how by this time the whole traffic was blocked. He got in, and so did I; and he bent over the body spread back with its wraps agen the corner.

“‘My God!’ I whispers—‘there’s no breath comin’ from him. Is he dead, sir?’

“The sawbones he rose up very dry and cool.

“‘No,’ he says, ‘there ain’t no breath comin’ from him, nor there never will. It ain’t in natur’ to expect it from a waxworks.’

“Sir, I tell you I looked at him and just felt my heart as it might be a snail that someun had dropped a pinch of salt on.

“‘Waxworks!’ I says, gaspin’. ‘Why, the man spoke and groaned!’

“‘Or was it the gentleman you was tellin’ me of as did it for him?’ says the sawbones, still as dry as cracknels.

“Then I took one jump and pounced on the thing, and caught it up;—and I no sooner ’ad it in my ’ands, than I knew it were a dummy—nothing more nor less. But what I felt at that was nothin’ to the shock my pullin’ it away give me—for there, behind where it had set, was a ’ole, big enough for a boy to pass, cut right through the cushions and panels into the fore boot; and the instant I see it, ‘O,’ I says, ‘the mail’s been robbed!’”

The old man, who had worked himself up to a state of practised excitement, paused a dramatic moment at this point, until I put the question he expected.

“And it had been?”

“And it had been,” he said, pursing his lips, and nodding darkly. “In the vinter of ’13, sir—the cleverest thing ever planned. It made a rare stir; but the ’ole truth was never known till years arterwards, when one o’ the gang (it was the boy as had been, now growed up) were took on another charge, and confessed to this one. The fat man were a ventriloquist, you see. That, and to secure the ’ole six insides to themselves while seemin’ strangers was the cream of the job. They cut into the boot soon arter we was clear of London, and passed the boy through with a saw and centre-bit t’other side o’ Croydon. He set to—the young limb, with his pretty innocent ducks!—tuk a piece clean out of the roof just under the driver’s seat, and brought down the cash-box; while Mr. Blackamoor Cato kep’ up his dance overhead to drown the noise of the saw. The box was opened and emptied, and put back in the boot where it was found; and the swag, for fear of accidents, was all tuk away at Cuckfield.”

He came to an end. I was aware of William gamekeeper, the younger, standing silent at the door, with a couple of speckled auburn trophies in his hand. The fire leapt and fluttered. I rose with a sigh—then with a smile.

“Thank you, William,” I said gratefully, as I took the woodcock. “How plump they are; and how I love these links with the past.”

THE JADE BUTTON

The little story I am about to tell will meet, I have no doubt, with a good deal of incredulity, not to say derision. Very well; there is the subject of it himself to testify. If you can put an end to him by any lethal process known to man, I will acknowledge myself misinformed, and attend your last moments on the scaffold.

Miss Belmont disapproved of Mrs. John Belmont; and Mrs. John Belmont hated Miss Belmont. And the visible token of this antagonism was a button.

It was of jade stone, and it was a talisman. For three generations it had been the mascot of the Belmont family, an heirloom, and symbolizing in its shining disk a little local sun, as it were, of prosperity. The last three head Belmonts had all been men of an ample presence. The first of them, the original owner of the stone, having assigned it a place in perpetuity at the bottom hole of his waistcoat (as representing the centre of his system), his heirs were careful to substantiate a tradition which meant so much to them in a double sense.

Indeed, the button was as good as a blister. It seemed to draw its wearer to a head in the prosperous part of him. It was set in gold, artfully furnished at its back with a loop and hank, and made transferable from waistcoat to waistcoat, that its possessor for the time being might enjoy at all seasons its beneficent influence. In broad or long cloth, in twill or flannel, by day and by night, the button attended him, regulating indiscriminately his business and his digestion. In such circumstances, it is plain that Death must have been hard put to it to find a vulnerable place; and such was the fact. It has often been said that a man’s soul is in his stomach; how, then, could it get behind the button? Only by one of those unworthy subterfuges, which, nevertheless, it does not disdain. The first Belmont lived to ninety, and with such increasing portliness that, at the last, a half-moon had to be cut, and perpetually enlarged, out of the dining-room table to accommodate his presence. Practically, he was eating his way through the board, with the prospect of emerging at the other end, when, in rising from a particularly substantial repast one night, he caught the button in the crack between the first slab (almost devoured) and the second, wrenched it away, and was immediately seized with apoplexy. He died; and the Destroyer, after pursuing his heir to threescore years and ten, looking for the heel of Achilles, as unworthily “got home” into him. He was lumbering down Fleet Street one dog-day when, oppressed beyond endurance by the heat, he wrenched open—in defiance of all canons of taste and prudence—his waistcoat. The button—_the_ button—was burst from its bonds in the act, though, fortunately—for the next-of-kin—to be caught by its hank in the owner’s watch-chain. But to the owner himself the impulse was fatal. A prowling cutpurse, quick to the chance, “let out” full on the old gentleman’s bow-window, quenching its lights, so to speak, for ever; and then, having snatched the chain, incontinently doubled into the arms of a constable. The property was recovered—but for the heir; the second Belmont’s bellows having been broken beyond mending.

The third met with as inglorious an end, and at a comparatively early age; for the button—as a saving clause to whatever god had thrown it down, for the fun of the thing, among men—was possessed with a very devil of touchiness, and always instant to resent the least fancied slight to its self-importance. Else had Tithonus been its wearer to this day, as——but I won’t anticipate. The third Belmont, then, in a fit of colossal forgetfulness, sent the button, _in_ a white waistcoat, to the wash. The calamity was detected forthwith, _but not in time to avert itself_. After death, the doctor. Before the outraged article could be restored to its owner and victim, he had died of a rapid dropsy, and the button became the property of Mrs. John Belmont, his relict and residuary legatee, who——

But, for the history of the button itself? Why, in brief, as it affected the Belmont family, it was this. Mr. Adolphus Belmont had been Consul at one of the five treaty ports of China about the troublous years of 1840-42. During the short time that he held office, a certain local mandarin, Elephoo Ting by name, was reported to Peking for high treason, and honoured with an imperial ukase, or invitation to forestall the headsman. There was no doubt, indeed, that Elephoo Ting had been very strenuous, in public, in combating the intrusion of the foreign devil, while inviting him, in private, to come on and hold tight. There is no doubt, too, that in the result Elephoo and Adolphus had made a profitable partnership of it in the matter of opium, and that the mandarin had formed a very high, and even sentimental, opinion of the business capacities of his young friend. Young, that is to say, relatively, for Adolphus was already sixty-three when appointed to his post. But, then, of the immemorial Ting’s age no record actually existed. The oldest inhabitant of Ningpo knew him as one knows the historic beech of one’s district. He had always been there—bland, prosperous, enormous, a smooth bole of a man radiating benevolence. And now at last he was to die. It seemed impossible.

It _was_ impossible, save on a condition. That he confided to his odd partner and confidant, the English Consul, during a last interview. He held a carving-knife in his hand.

“Shall I accept this signal favour of the imperial sun?” he said.

“Have you any choice?” asked the Consul gloomily. “The decree is out; the soldiers surround your dwelling.”

Elephoo Ting laughed softly.

“Vain, vain all, unless I discard my talisman.” He produced the jade button from his cap. “This,” he said, “I had from my father, when the old man sickened at last of life, desiring to be an ancestor. It renders who wears it, while he wears it, immortal; only it is jealous, jealous, and stands upon its dignity. Shall I, too, part with it, and at a stroke let in the light of ages?”

He saw the incredulity in his visitor’s face, and handed him the carving-knife.

“Strike,” he said. “I bid thee.”

“You take the consequences?”

“All.”

With infinite cynicism, Mr. Belmont essayed to tickle, just to tickle, the creature’s infatuation with the steel point. It bent, where it touched, like paper. He thrust hard and ever harder, until at last he was thrashing and slicing with the implement in a sort of frenzy of horror. The mandarin stood apathetic, while the innocuous blade swept and rustled about his huge bulk like a harmless feather. Then said he, as the other desisted at length, unnerved and trembling: “Art thou convinced?”

“I am convinced,” said the Consul.

Elephoo Ting handed him the button in exchange for the knife.

“Take and wear it,” he said, “for my sake, whom you have pleased by outwitting, on the score of benefiting, two Governments. You have the makings of a great mandarin in you; the button will do the rest. Would you ever escape the too-soon satiety of this stodgy life, pass it on, with these instructions which I shall give you, to your next-of-kin. Be ever deferential to the button and considerate of its vanity, for it is the fetish of a sensitive but undiscriminating spirit. So long as you cherish it, you will prosper. But the least apparent slight to itself, it will revenge, and promptly. As for me, I have an indigestion of the world that I would cure.”

And with the words he too became an ancestor.

Then riches and bodily amplitude came to Adolphus Belmont, until the earth groaned under his importance. He was a spanker, and after him Richard Belmont was a spanker, and after him John Belmont was a very spanker of spanks, even at thirty-two, when he committed the last enormous indiscretion which brought him death and his fortunes almost ruin. For the outrage to the button had been so immeasurable that, not content with his obliteration, it must manœuvre likewise to scatter the accumulations of fortune, which it had brought him, by involving in a common ruin most of the concerns in which that fortune was invested, so that his widow found herself left, all in a moment, a comparatively poor woman.

And here Mrs. John Belmont comes in.

She was a little woman, of piquancy and resource, and a very accomplished angler of men. She could count on her pink finger-tips the ten most killing baits for vanity. And, having once recovered the button, she set herself to conciliating it with a thousand pretty kisses and attentions. It lived between the bosom of her frock and the ruff of her dainty nightgown. Yet for a long time it sulked, refusing to be coaxed into better than a tacit staying of its devastating hand. And so matters stood when the Assembly ball was held.

Miss Emma Belmont and Mrs. John Belmont lived in the same town, connexions, but apart. Their visits were visits of ceremony—and dislike. Miss Emma was Mr. John’s sister, and had always highly disapproved of his marriage with the “adventuress.” Her very name, she thought, bordered on an impropriety! How could any “Inez” dissociate herself from the tradition of cigarette-stained lips and white eyeballs travelling behind a fan like little moons of coquetry? This one, in fact, took no trouble to. Her reputation involved them in a common scandal; and it was solely on this account, I think, that she so resented her sister-in-law’s appropriation of the button. She herself was devoted to good works, and utterly content in her mission. She did not want the button; but, inasmuch as it was a Belmont heirloom, and Mrs. John childless, she chose to symbolize in it the bone of contention, and to use it as a convenient bar to amenities which would, otherwise, have seemed to argue in her a sympathy with a mode of life with which she could not too emphatically wish to disconnect herself.

They met at the Assembly ball. Miss Belmont, though herself involved in the financial ebb, had considered it her duty to respect so respectable an occasion, and even to adorn it with a silk of such inflexibility that (I tremble as I write it) one could imagine her slipping out of it through a trap, like the vanishing lady, and leaving all standing. Presently Mrs. John Belmont, with a wicked look, floated up to her.

“_You_ here, Inez!” exclaimed Miss Emma, affecting an amazement which, unhappily, she could not feel.

The other flirted and simpered. When she smiled, one could detect little threads drawn in the fine powder near the corners of her mouth. There was no ensign of widowhood about her. She ruffled with little gaudy downs and feathers, like a new-fledged bird of paradise.

“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And I’ve brought Captain Naylor, who’s been dining with me. Shall I introduce him to you?”

Miss Belmont’s sense of decorum left her speechless.

Inez, on the contrary, rippled out the most china-tinkling laugh.

“You dear old thing,” she tittered. “Don’t look so shocked. I knew you’d be here to chaperon me, and——” She came a step closer. “Yes, the button’s there, Emma. You may stare; but make up your mind, I’m not going to part with it.”

Miss Belmont found herself, and responded quietly—

“I hope not indeed, Inez. I don’t ask or expect you. You might multiply it to-night by a dozen, and only offend me less.”

Mrs. John laughed again, rather shrilly.

“O, fie!” she said. “Why, even you haven’t a high-necked dress, you know.”

And then a very black and red man, in a jam-pot collar and with a voice like a rook, came and claimed her.

“Haw, Mrs. Belmont! Aw—er, dance, I think.”

Miss Belmont, to save appearances, rigidly sat out the evening. When at last she could endure no more, she had her fly called and prepared to go home. She was about to get into it, when she observed a familiar figure standing among the few midnight loafers who had gathered without the shadow of the porch.

“Hurley!” she exclaimed.

The man, after a moment, slouched reluctantly forward, touching his hat. He had once been her most favoured protégé—a rogue and irreclaimable, whom she had persuaded, temporarily, from the devil’s service to her own. He had returned to his master, but with a reservation of respect for the practical Christian. Miss Belmont was orthodox, but she had a way with sinners. She pitied and fed and _trusted_ them. She was a member of the Prisoners’ First Aid Society, with a reverence for the law and a weakness for the lawless. Her aim was to reconcile the two, to interpret, in a yearning charity, between the policeman and the criminal, who at least, in the result, made a common cause of honouring _her_. Inez asserted that, living, as she did, very nervously alone on the outskirts of the town, she had adopted this double method of propitiation for the sake of her own security. But, then, Inez had a forked tongue, which you would never have guessed from seeing the little scarlet tip of it caressing her lips.