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Read books online » Fiction » Colonel Thorndyke's Secret by G. A. Henty (acx book reading TXT) 📖

Book online «Colonel Thorndyke's Secret by G. A. Henty (acx book reading TXT) 📖». Author G. A. Henty



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the possibilities of this could not have escaped him. As I told you, Mr. Prendergast made inquiries of all the principal bankers and Indian agents here, and altogether without success. After he had done that, I got a list of all the leading firms in Calcutta and Madras, and wrote to them, and all the replies were in the negative. It is true that does not prove anything absolutely. Eighteen years is a long time, and the chances are that during those years almost every head of a firm would have retired and come home. Such a matter would only be likely to be known to the heads; and if, as we thought likely, the box or chest was merely forwarded by a firm there to England, the transaction would not have attracted any special attention. If, upon the other hand, it remained out there it might have been put down in a cellar or store, and have been lying there ever since, altogether forgotten.”

“I don't see myself why you should bother any more about it; perhaps, as you say, it will turn up of itself when I come of age. At any rate, I should say it is certainly as well to wait till then and see if it does, especially as you acknowledge that you have no clew whatever to work on. It is only three more years, for I am eighteen next week, and it certainly seems to me that it will be very foolish to spend the next three years in searching about for a thing that may come to you without any searching at all.”

“Well, I will think it over.”

“You see, you really don't want the money, Mark,” she went on.

“No, I don't want it particularly, Millicent; but when one knows that there is something like 50,000 pounds waiting for one somewhere, one would like to get it. Your father worked for twenty years of his life accumulating it for us, and it seems to me a sort of sacred duty to see that his labor has not all been thrown away.”

Millicent was silent.

“It is very tiresome,” she said presently. “Of course my father intended, as you say, that his savings should come to us, but I am sure he never meant that they should be a bother and a trouble to us.”

“I don't see why they should ever be that, Millicent. As it is we have both sufficient for anything any man or woman could reasonably want, and neither of us need fret over it if the treasure is never found. Still, he wished us to have it, and it is properly ours, and I don't want it to go to enrich someone who has not a shadow of a right to it.”

On the following morning Mark went to attend the inquest on Bastow. He did not go into the court, however, but remained close at hand in the event of the coroner insisting upon his being called. However, the two men only spoke casually in their evidence of their comrade Roberts, who had been also engaged in the capture. One of the jurymen suggested that he should also be called, but the coroner said:

“I really cannot see any occasion for it; we are here to consider how the deceased came by his death, and I think it must be perfectly clear that he came by it by his own act. You have heard how he was captured, that the spoils of the coach that he had just rifled were found upon him, and that the booty he had been acquiring from his deeds for months past also was seized; therefore, as the man was desperate, and knew well enough that his life was forfeited, there was ample motive for his putting an end to his wretched existence. I really do not think, gentlemen, that it is worth while to waste your time and mine by going into further evidence.”

Finally, a verdict of felo de se was returned, with a strong expression of the jury's admiration of the conduct of constables Malcolm, Chester, and Roberts, who had so cleverly effected the capture of the man who had so long set the law at defiance.





CHAPTER XVII.

Four days later Mark, on his return from dinner, found Philip Cotter sitting in his room waiting for him. They had met on the previous evening, and Cotter had expressed his intention of calling upon him the next day.

“I am here on a matter of business, Thorndyke,” the latter said as they shook hands.

“Of business!” Mark repeated.

“Yes. You might guess for a year, and I don't suppose that you would hit it. It is rather a curious thing. Nearly twenty years ago—”

“I can guess it before you go any further,” Mark exclaimed, leaping up from the seat that he had just taken. “Your people received a box from India.”

“That is so Mark; although how you guessed it I don't know.”

“We have been searching for it for years,” Mark replied. “Our lawyer, Prendergast, wrote to you about that box; at least, he wrote to you asking if you had any property belonging to Colonel Thorndyke, and your people wrote to say they hadn't.”

“Yes, I remember I wrote to him myself. Of course that was before you did me that great service, and I did not know your name, and we had not the name on our books. What is in the box?”

“Jewels worth something like fifty thousand pounds.”

“By Jove, I congratulate you, old fellow; that is to say, if you have the handling of it. Well, this is what happened. The box was sent to us by a firm in Calcutta, together with bills for 50,000 pounds. The instructions were that the money was to be invested in stock, and that we were to manage it and to take 100 pounds a year for so doing. The rest of the interest of the money was to be invested. The box was a very massive one, and was marked with the letters XYZ. It was very carefully sealed. Our instructions were that the owner of the box and the money might present himself at any time.”

“And that the proof of his ownership was to be that he was to use the word 'Masulipatam,'” Mark broke in, “and produce a gold coin that would, probably—though of this I am not certain—correspond with the seals.”

He got up and went to the cabinet which he had brought up with him from Crowswood, unlocked it, and produced the piece of paper and the coin.

“Yes, that looks like the seal, Thorndyke. At any rate, it is the same sort of thing. Why on earth didn't you come with it before, and take the things away?”

“Simply because I did not know where to go to. My uncle was dying when he came home, and told my father about the treasure, but he died suddenly, and my father did not know whether it was sent to England or committed to someone's charge in India, or buried there. We did the only thing we could, namely, inquired at all the banks and agents here and at all the principal firms in Madras and Calcutta to ask if they had in their possession any property belonging to

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