The Moon Rock by Arthur J. Rees (e novels to read TXT) 📗

for his inspection, which was not, indeed, the case. If that arm could save Sisily, it was at her service. But what was the good of that? What was the good of his own efforts to help her? Charles had a suffocating feeling of the futility of human effort when opposed by the malignity of Fate. He asked himself with aching heart what was to be the outcome of it all? He had failed. What then? It was not until that moment that he realized how strongly he had been buoyed up by the false optimism of hope. His consciousness, as though directed by the power of a devil, was forced to look for the first time upon the hideous inevitability of the appointed end.

“No, no! Not that—not that,” he shudderingly whispered to himself.

Neither moved. The minutes passed leaden-footed. It was silent and still in that wild spot, as if theirs were the only two human hearts beating in a dead world. It seemed as though neither could bring it upon himself to terminate the interview. Charles was the first to break the silence. He spoke like a man coming out of a dream.

“Did that clock upstairs keep good time?” he asked in a low voice.

Thalassa turned on him as if not understanding the purport of the question.

“It was going shipshape and Bristol fashion in the afternoon. What’s that got to do with it? What does it signify if it was five minutes fast or slow?”

The logic of the answer was apparent to Charles, who knew he was only attempting to pluck something by chance out of the dark maze. But another and shrewder idea started up in his mind.

“What was your reason for hurrying back across the moors that night?”

“Miss Sisily told me to go.”

“But you had another reason—a reason of your own,” said Charles, turning quickly to regard him. “You said so yourself.”

“If I had I’ve forgotten what it was,” said Thalassa with a black look.

“You cannot have forgotten!” cried Charles. “What was it?” Hope sprang up in his heart again like a warm flame as he detected something confused and irresolute in the other’s attitude. “Thalassa, you are keeping something back. You know, or you guess, who the murderer is!”

“I’m keeping nothing back.”

“You are. I can see it in your face. What is it that you will not tell? What do you fear?”

“The gallows—for one thing.”

“You’d sooner see Sisily lose her life on them?”

This bitter taunt, wrung from the depth of the young man’s anguished heart, had an instantaneous and unexpected effect on his companion.

“No, no!” he hoarsely cried, “I couldn’t a’ bear that. But it’s nothing to tell, nothing to help. It was earlier that night, before she came. I was looking out of the kitchen window, when I thought I saw a rock move. Then I looked again, and it seemed like a man—though I couldn’t see his face.”

“Is that all?” Bitter disappointment rang in Charles’s voice. “That might have been me. I was out on the rocks that night, close to Flint House.”

“‘Tweren’t you.” Thalassa’s reply was so low as to be almost inaudible. “I don’t know who it was, but I’ll take my Bible oath it weren’t you.”

“Who was it then?” Charles asked breathlessly.

“A dead man, or his spirit. I know that now, though I laughed when he said it. I know better now.”

He stopped suddenly, like one who has said too much, and looked moodily out to sea.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind what I mean. It’s nothing to do with you. A man’s a fool when he gets talking. The tongue trips you up.”

“Thalassa,” said Charles solemnly, “if you know anything which might throw the remotest light on this mystery it is your duty to reveal it.”

“It’s easy to talk. But I swore—I swore I would never tell.”

“This is the moment to forget your oath.”

“It’s fine to talk—for you. But he’d come back to haunt me, if he knew.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the distant churchyard where Robert Turold lay.

Charles looked at his grim and secret face in despair. “I hope you realize what you are doing by keeping silence,” he said.

“I’m keeping a still tongue in my head, for one thing.”

“For one thing—yes. For another, you’re injuring Sisily—you’re doing more than injure her. You’re letting her remain under suspicion of her father’s death, in hiding in London, hunted by the police. Yet she believed in you. It was she who sent me to you, it was she who said: ‘Tell Thalassa from me to tell the truth, if he knows it.’ Is she mistaken in you, Thalassa? Do you think more of your own skin than her safety?”

Chapter XXVIII

It was a strange story which Charles Turold heard by that grey Cornish sea—a story touched with the glitter of adventurous fortune in the sombre setting of a trachytic island, where wine-dark breakers beat monotonously on a black beach of volcanic sand strewn with driftwood, kelp, dead shells, and the squirming forms of blindworms tossed up from the bowels of a dead sea. It was there in the spell of solitude thirty years before that Robert Turold’s soul had yielded to temptation at the beck of his monstrous ambition.

That, however, was the end—or what Robert Turold imagined to be the end—of the story. The listener was first invited to contemplate a scene in human progress when men gathered from the four corners of the earth and underwent incredible hardships of hunger, thirst, disease, lived like beasts and died like vermin for the sake of precious stones in the earth. Thalassa brought up before the young man’s eyes a vivid picture of an African diamond rush of that period—a corrugated iron settlement of one straggling street, knee-deep in sand, swarming with vermin and scorpions, almost waterless, crowded with a mongrel, ever-increasing lot of needy adventurers brought from all parts of the world by reports of diamonds which could be picked out with a penknife from the dunes and sandy shingle which formed the background of the villainous “town.” In the great waves and ridges of sand which stretched everywhere as far as the eye could reach, runaway scoundrels of every shade of colour wormed on their bellies with the terrible pertinacity of ants, sweating and groping in that choking dust for the glittering crystals so rarely found.

Thalassa had been infected by the diamond fever like so many more. Like other young men he wanted plenty of money for women and grog—what else, he asked, could a man get for money that was worth having? In those days he was a sailor before the mast, lacking the capital for such delights. So he deserted his timber tramp when she touched at Port Elizabeth, and set out for the diamond fields with another runaway—the ship’s cook, who had an ambition to have his meals cooked for him for the rest of his life, instead of cooking meals for other people.

The fields were far to the north. Thalassa reached them after a terrible journey through the stony veldt and sandy desert, broken by barren hills. His companion died of the hardships, and was buried in the desert which stretched to the wandering course of the Orange River. Thalassa secured his license and went “prospecting.”

“Dost a’ know anything about diamonds—digging for them?” he broke off to ask.

Charles Turold shook his head.

Thalassa lapsed into silence for some moments, his eyes fixed on the sea hissing among the black wet rocks at his feet, then said—

“A man’s a fool most of his days, but sometimes he can be such a fool that the memory ‘ll come up to mock him when he lays dying. Here was I, deserting my ship and throwing away a year’s wages and a’most my life to get to these damned fields, thinking to pick up diamonds cut and glittering like I’d seen them in London shops, when as soon as I’d clapped eyes on the first diamond I saw dug up I knew that I’d left behind me at the other end of the world as many rough diamonds as there was in the whole of that dustbin of a place—diamonds that didn’t have to be dug for, either, only I didn’t know them when I saw them.”

His narrowed eye gleamed craftily, a mere pin’s point of expression in the direction of Charles, as though expecting a question. But Charles kept silence, so he went on with his story. He let it be understood that his luck on the fields was of the worst possible description—never a solitary stone came his way. But he had no heart for digging. He was always thinking of the diamonds in that remote spot which he had ignorantly let slip from his grasp, like the dog in the fable dropping the substance for the shadow. He would have gone back to look for them, but he’d spent most of his little capital in that wild-goose chase, and the miserable remnant oozed away like water in a place where the barest necessaries of life cost fabulous prices. Soon he became stranded, practically penniless.

It was this precarious moment of his fortunes which his star (his evil star, he insisted on that) selected to bring him into juxtaposition with the man whose life was to be inexorably mingled with his own from that time henceforward. The actual meeting place was a tin-roofed grog shanty kept by a giant Kaffir woman and a sore-eyed degenerate white man, whose subjection to his black paramour had earned for him among the blacks on the field the terrible sobriquet of “White Harry.” Here, one night, Thalassa sat drinking bad beer and planning impossible schemes for returning to his diamonds at the other end of the world. The place was empty of other customers. The Kaffir woman slumbered behind the flimsy planking of the bar, and “White Harry” sat on the counter scraping tunes out of a little fiddle. Thalassa remembered the tune he was playing—“Annie Laurie.” Upon this scene there entered two young men, Englishmen. Thalassa discerned that at once by the cut of their jib. Besides, they ordered Bass beer. Who else but Englishmen would order Bass beer at five shillings a bottle in a God-forsaken place like that?

“He was one of them.” Thalassa moved his hand vaguely in the direction of St. Fair churchyard. “Smart and lively he was then—not like what he was afore he died. I took a fancy to him as soon as I set my eyes on him. He was a man in those days, and I knowed a man when I saw ‘un. I didn’t care so much for the looks of the other ‘un—Remington was his name, as I heered afterwards. Well enough for some tastes, but too much of the God Almighty Englishman about him to suit me. A handsome chap he was, this Remington, I’m bound to say—young and slim, wi’ a pink face like a girl’s, not a hair on it, and lookin’ as though he might a’ turned out of a bandbox. Him—Turold—had a moustache, and his face was a dark ‘un, but I liked him for all his black looks—though not so black in those days, either. More eager like.”

Charles Turold found himself trying to picture Robert Turold in the part of a smart lively young fellow, and failing utterly. But Time took the smartness out of a man in less than thirty years. It had also taken the liveliness out of Robert Turold for good and all.

Thalassa went on with his story. The young men were served with their beer at five shillings a bottle, and sat down in a corner to drink it. They talked as they sipped, and Thalassa listened. His original idea that they were young men of wealth (because of the Bass) was soon dispersed by the trend of their conversation. They had gone out from England to make their fortunes on the fields, but had come a cropper like himself, and were discussing what they’d do next. The fair-haired one, Remington, was all for getting back to England while they had any money left, but Turold was dead against it. There were plenty of diamonds to be found, and he was going to have some of them. He’d been talking to a man who was just back from the interior with a story of a river beach full of diamonds, and he was fitting up an expedition to go back and get them. Turold wanted to join in, but Remington said he’d heard too many stories of diamonds to be picked up for the asking. Had he forgotten about the cursed Jew who got a hundred pounds out of them? Turold said this was different—the man had brought back a little bottleful of diamonds. Remington replied