The Kang-He Vase/Chapter 23

bloodhounds, their owner, and the men following them had swept on before us, on another line of route, to a point overlooking the headlands and the beach. But there they had turned, and now they were coming back in our direction. There were many great boulders of grey limestone or granite outcropping from the heather at that point, and at one of these, big and broad enough to conceal a man, they came to a momentary halt, some fifteen yards away from us. Cherry and I exchanged glances: the same thought had occurred to both, simultaneously.

“It was from behind that rock that Krevin shot this poor fellow!” said Cherry. “He must have seen Mandhu Khan tracking him, turned in his own tracks, came back there, and intercepted him. Anyhow, here he is—all up with him, whatever he was after!”

He motioned Major Cottam and the others to come to us; presently we were all grouped round the dead man, staring thoughtfully at him. Then Cherry and the two policemen began to examine him: he had been shot clean through the heart, they said, and must have died instantaneously. And at that my memory went back to the events of the previous afternoon, and I decided that the shot which I had heard from this part of the island, and had then taken for a signal to the steamer, had been nothing of the sort—that, without doubt, was the shot which killed Mandhu Khan: however wily he might be, Krevin had been too cunning for him, and from being the hunted had become the hunter.

There was nothing on the Hindu’s dead body that gave us any clue—to anything. He had a little money, in silver and copper; there was also, in a queer little box, a supply of some stuff which Major Cottam, learned in such matters, declared to be opium. But he had no weapons—no revolver, no knife. And once more the question came up—who killed Getch? It was no use speculating and debating on that, however; the immediate necessity was to go on with the search for Krevin, and leaving the fishermen to see about removing Mandhu Khan’s body to the north beach, the rest of us went after the bloodhounds, which, while we examined the Hindu and his surroundings, had been kept back behind the big rock from the cover of which Krevin had no doubt fired on his victim.

The bloodhounds went on their slow, steady, assured way—it gave me a feeling of uncanniness to watch them work. They went from the rock back again to the headlands, but in a slightly different direction: this made Cherry remark to me, in an aside that it showed that Krevin, having shot Mandhu Khan, made no attempt to go near his dead body, but immediately sheered off, probably bent on saving himself by securing the Hindu’s boat. And certainly, judging by the doings of the bloodhounds, he made for the sea, following a track along the cliffs for some distance, but keeping steadily to the valleys and gullies which lay between its edge and the middle, more elevated, part of the island. Once the bloodhounds seemed somewhat at fault, and hesitated, but here their extraordinary sagacity was quickly manifested; they came back slowly and carefully along their original track, and picked up the scent again, and went on in another direction. And eventually, without further break, they took us to the far western point of Melsie Island, and down a rugged path in the side of the cliffs to a stretch of fine white sand that lay beneath, and thence to a tiny cove, set deep in the rocks, and then on its smooth flooring we saw the marks of the place whereat a boat had rested and from which it had been dragged down to the surf. And at the edge of the water that stage of the man-hunt came to an abrupt end. The bloodhounds whimpered and cried restlessly a little—but Uncle Joseph Krevin had set forth on a voyage in which they could not follow. None of us had any doubt as to what had happened. He had circumvented the Hindu, shot him dead, made for his boat, and got away in it. Knowing his wiliness, his cunning, his ready adaptability to circumstances as I did, I might have been excused for suggesting that in spite of the evidence he was still somewhere on the island. But I could not doubt the sagacity of the bloodhounds—he was gone! The only question that arose in my mind was—when did he go? We had been all about these waters in the soft-hearted man’s vessel all the previous later afternoon and during the whole of the light hours of the evening that followed, and, for reasons of their own, the men on the steamer had kept an unusually sharp look-out. But we had never sighted anything in the shape of craft—big or little—from the time Pepita and I went on board to that in which we were set ashore near Summerstead. I could only conclude that for reasons of his own Uncle Joseph Krevin had laid low in that cove until after dark and had then dragged the boat down to the sea, pushed off, and gone away under cover of the night.

But my companions, especially the seafarers, were discussing another question. With them it was not when but where! Where had he gone?—or, rather, where had he intended or hoped to go? We knew that he had got away in the boat which Mandhu Khan had stolen from the beach at Middlebourne; knew, at any rate, as far as anybody could know anything. Now that boat was a very small one, a mere skiff, of the sort used on our coasts for going out from shore to the larger fishing boats lying at anchor in the roadways; a bit of a thing propelled by oars, and without mast or sail. He would have to pull himself—and he was a big, heavy man, not, one would think, used to violent exercise, and, therefore, incapable of rowing any great distance, even in a smooth sea. (I could have added to these conclusions another—that as he suffered from some sort of heart affection, he was not very likely to make much progress—but I said nothing, preferring, for various reasons, to hold my tongue.) Accordingly, argued somebody, it was not likely that he would try to cross to France, that was unthinkable; the French coast, at its nearest point, was seventy to eighty miles distant. Some thought he would make for Kingshaven, landing in the darkness on some lonely part of the beach outside the town, and trusting to luck to get away from the big, busy port by rail. But others, going on the lines that he escaped from Melsie Island by night, argued that he would make for the nearest point on the mainland and that he would be helped by the incoming tide to get there: once there, they said, he could strike inland, covered by the darkness, reach some adjacent line of railway and get away by an early morning train to London.

The nearest point of land to that outlying corner of Melsie Island was Fliman’s End. There was excellent landing there; the country beyond was of a nature that would afford good cover for a fugitive, and without touching any village or hamlet, it was possible for anybody well acquainted with the neighbourhood to get away unobserved from the shore at that point to a line of railway several miles inland. For Fliman’s End, therefore, we determined to make, and hurried back to our own boat on the north beach. We left Mandhu Khan’s dead body in a niche of the rocks, side by side with Getch—the police authorities, said Veller and his sergeant, would have to come over specially to see them! But Cherry and I went back to the moat and fetched the bag and its contents of smashed vase and broken images—and set sail again still wondering about the mystery of the idols in pursuit of which the unfortunate Hindu had evidently sacrificed his life.

It was a bright and beautiful summer morning, that, and there was a smart breeze blowing off the sea that carried us rapidly towards Fliman’s End, four miles away. We were about half-way over, and just then crossing a stretch of water known to the local fishermen as Middlebourne Moorings when one of our company, keeping a look out forward, sighted something floating on the sea, which something, when we got closer to it, proved to be an oar. Now we had, on board, the owner of the boat taken away from the beach at Middlebourne on the night of Mandhu Khan’s disappearance, and he immediately recognised this oar as his property: his name, in fact, was branded on it. And we had not sailed much further when we were aware of a black speck about a mile away, between us and Fliman’s End. That turned out to be the missing boat, dancing lightly and aimlessly on the waves. But it was an empty boat … and whatever the rest of my companions thought, I knew then that retribution had fallen on Uncle Joseph Krevin. And before ever we reached it and the men hauled it alongside, I had settled and adopted my own theory as to what had happened. The exertion of pulling even a small craft through a smooth sea had been too much for a man who suffered from a weak heart, and he had collapsed and fallen overboard, possibly in an endeavour to save the oar which had slipped from his hand as faintness overcame him. Anyway, there was no Uncle Joseph Krevin there. But there was his coat … familiar enough to me. It lay, neatly folded and bundled, in the stern: evidently he had taken it off and laid it aside before taking up the oars. It was handed over the side to Cherry, and Cherry immediately began to search the pockets. He took out of them a miscellaneous collection of things, and paid no particular attention to any, until he came to a pocket-book, an old, much worn thing of strong leather, tied about with a length of whip-cord. There was something bulky in that, and we all held our breath while he got it out—a piece of wash-leather, out of the folds of which there presently rolled into his palm, their facets flashing in wondrous brilliance as the rays of the morning sun caught them, a couple of marvellous diamonds—of a fire and quality, said Major Cottam, five minutes later, such as he had never seen in all his experience in lands where diamonds are common as walnuts. And though we said nothing, I think Cherry and I knew exactly, and at the same moment, where those diamonds sprang from. They had been concealed in Miss Ellingham’s images!—and when Krevin fell and broke one image the first diamond was revealed to him. Then he purposely cut and broke the other image, and found the second diamond, and knew, that if he had lost one prize in smashing the Kang-he vase, his accident had yielded him a veritable Golconda.

We carried the diamonds to Miss Ellingham, and thereupon arose all manner of speculations. But they did not concern me, and Keziah turned up her nose at them. We were only interested just then in Uncle Joseph Krevin. Nothing more was heard of him. His body was never recovered. Eventually, for legal purposes, his death was presumed. But dead though he was, and lying deep in Middlebourne Moorings, he caused us some trouble. For the old sinner left money behind him, and as we were next-of-kin we had to administer his estate, and the money came to us. Keziah would have none of it. We gave it, every penny, to the local charitable institutions—all but some twenty or thirty pounds. That Keziah ear-marked for a certain purpose. After all, she said, Uncle Joseph had not been really proved guilty of the crimes alleged against him, and he might be more or less or quite innocent of them; in her opinion that brown-faced Mandy Kann man, as she called him, was just as likely to have cut Getch’s throat as Krevin was, and if Krevin did shoot Mandy Kann it might have been in self-defence—who could say? And anyway, Uncle Joseph, when all was said and done, was a Krevin, and related by marriage to the Heckitts, and if he couldn’t be buried with his forefathers he could at any rate have a proper memorial monument amongst theirs in Middlebourne churchyard, where two or three score of Krevinses and Heckitts were already commemorated. So the monument rose, and Keziah, after a great deal of searching of Holy Scripture, made the mason carve on it a text, or, rather, the reference to a text—Isaiah lvii. 20. She said that it would do a lot of people a heap of good to turn to that text in their family Bibles, and to meditate on it.

Pepita and I were married in Middlebourne Church some five years later, when I had served my articles, passed my examinations, and become a duly admitted limb of the Law. All the folk of the neighbourhood came to see us married, and the churchyard was packed with well-wishers who stared so much at us—we were said to be a very good-looking couple, for Pepita was more charming than ever, and I had improved as I grew older—that we became shy, and scarcely knew which way to look. But you may be sure we did not turn our eyes on Uncle Joseph’s marble cenotaph: Pepita and I had known quite enough of Uncle Joseph Krevin in real life.

LONDON AND GLASGOW: COLLINS’ CLEAR-TYPE PRESS.