Chapter 19

“Has my uncle returned from Oban?”

But I had no profit of the venture.

“The master,” he said, “is where he went this morning.”

The strange elements in this affair seemed on the point of converging upon some common center. The thing was in the air. Old Andrew voiced it when he went out with his candle.

“Ah, sir,” he said, “it was the fool work of an old man to bring you into this affair. The master will have his way and he must meet what waits for him at the end of it.”

I saw how he hoped that my visit might interrupt some plan that my uncle was about to put into effect, but realized that it was useless.

Clearly my uncle had not left the place; he had been at work all day in the boathouse. The journey was to account to me for his disappearance. I had passed the lie along to the queer sentinel that sat watching in the heather and I wondered whether I had sent a friend or an enemy into Oban on an empty mission, and whether I had fouled or forwarded my uncle's enterprise.

I put out the candle and sat down by the window to keep watch, for the boathouse, the loch and the open sea were under the sweep of it. But, alas, Nature overreaches our resolves when we are young. It was far into the night when I awoke.

A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window that aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the world was filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below the window was blurred a little like an impalpable picture.

A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat at the edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the boathouse with burdens which they were loading into the boat. Almost immediately the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and silently traversed the crook of the loch on its way to the ship. But certain of the human figures remained. They continued between the boathouse and the beach.

And I realized that I had opened my eyes on the loading of a ship. The boat was taking off a cargo.

Something stored in the boathouse was being transferred to the hold of the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal. There was no sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and the figures were like phantoms in a sort of lighted mist. Directly as I looked two figures came out of the boathouse and along the path to the drawing-room door under my window. I took off my shoes and crept carefully out of the room and down the stairway. The door from the hall into the long, low room was ajar. I stood behind it, and looked in through the crack.

My uncle was burning letters and papers in the fireplace with a candle, and in the chair beyond him sat the strangest human creature that I had ever seen in the world.

He was a big Oriental with a sodden, brutal face fixed as by some sorcery into an expression of eternal calm. He wore the uniform of an English skipper. It was dirty and sea-stained as though picked up at some sailor's auction. He was speaking to my uncle and his careful precise sentences in the English tongue, coming from the creature, seemed thereby to take on added menace.

“Is it wise, Sahib,” he said, “to leave any man behind us in this house?”

“We can do nothing else,” replied my uncle.

The Oriental continued with the same carefully selected words:

“Easily we can do something else, Sahib,” he said, “with a bar of pig securely lashed to the ankles, the sea would receive them.”

“No, no,” replied my uncle, busy with his letters and the candle. The big Oriental did not move.

“Reflect, Sahib,” he went on. “We are entering an immense peril. The thing that will be hunting us has innumerable agencies everywhere in its service. If it shall discover that we have falsified its symbols, it will search the earth for us. And what are we, Sahib, against this thing? It does not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”

“The lad knows nothing,” replied my uncle, “and old Andrew will keep silent.”

“Without trouble, Sahib,” the creature continued, “I can put the young one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech. Is it permitted?”

My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his work.

“No,” he said, “let there be an end of it.”

He turned about, and under the glimmer of the candle I could see that the man had changed; his big pale face was grim with some determined purpose, and there was about him the courage and the authority of one who, after long wavering, at last hazards a desperate venture. He broke the glass box and put the Buddha into his pocket.

“It is good silver,” he said, “and it has served its purpose.”

The Oriental got softly onto his feet like a great toy of cotton wood. His face remained in its expression of equanimity, and he added no further word of gesture to his argument.

My uncle held the door open for him to pass out, and after that he extinguished the candle and followed, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

The thing was like a scene acted in a playhouse. But it accomplished what the playhouse fails in. It put the fear of death into one who watched it. To me in the dark hall, looking through the crack of the door, the placid Oriental in his English uniform, and with his precise words like an Oxford don, was surely the most devilish agency that ever urged the murder of innocent men on an accomplice.

The wind was continuing to rise and the mist now covered the loch and the open sea. It was of no use to stand before the window, for the world was blotted out. I was cold and I lay down on the bed and wrapped the covers around me. It seemed only a moment later when old Andrew's hand was on me, and his thin voice crying in the room.

“Will you sleep, sir, and God's creatures going to their death!”

He ran, whimpering in his thin old voice, down the stair, and I followed him out of the house into the garden.

It was midmorning. A man was standing before the door, his hands behind him, looking out at the sea. In his long trousers and bowler hat I did not at once recognize him for the Highlander of my yesterday's adventure.

The coast was in the tail of a storm. The wind boomed, as though puffed by a bellows, driving in gusts of mist.

The ship I had seen in the night was hanging in the sea just beyond the crook of the loch. It fluttered like a snared bird. One could see the crew trying every device of sail and tacking, but with all their desperate ingenuities the ship merely hung there shivering like a stricken creature.

It was a fearful thing to look at. Now the mist covered everything and then for a moment the wind swept it out, and all the time, the silent, deadly struggle went on between the trapped ship and the sea running in among the needles of the loch. I don't think any of us spoke except the Highlander once in comment to himself.

“It's Ram Chad's tramp.... So that's the craft the man was depending on!”

Then the mist shut down. When it lifted, the doom of the ship was written. It was moving slowly into the deadly maw of the loch.

Again the mist shut down and, when again the wind swept it out, the ship had vanished.

There was the open sea and the long swells and the murderous current boiling around the sharp points of the needles; but there was no ship nor any human soul of the crew. Old Andrew screamed like a woman at the sight.

“The ship!” he cried. “Where is the ship and the master?”

The thing was so swift and awful that I spoke myself.

“My God!” I said. “How quickly the thing they feared destroyed them!”

The big Highlander came over where I stood. The burr of his speech and its sacred imagery were gone with his change of dress.

“No,” he said, “they escaped the thing they feared.... What do you think it was?”

“I don't know,” I answered. “The creature in the English uniform said that it did not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”

“Ram Chad was right,” replied the Highlander. “The British government neither dies, ages, nor tires out. Do you realize what your uncle was doing here?”

“Molding images of Buddha,” I said.

“Molding Indian rupees,” he retorted.

“The Buddha business was a blind.... I'm Sir Henry Marquis, Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. ... We got track of him in India.”

Then he added:

“There's a hundred thousand sterling in false coin at the bottom of the loch yonder!”