THE doctor felt that no time ought to be lost, if those three men, who had so shamefully treated poor Dick, were to be brought to justice. He did not even stop to tell Mr. Sinclair what he had heard, but went down to the village at once, that he might wire to the police station at Llantrug.
Needless to say, the matter was taken up immediately; most diligent and persistent enquiries were made, clever detectives were called in, and endeavored to get upon the track of Clegg and his assistants; but, unfortunately, so much time had been lost that the thieves had been able to escape with their plunder from the country, and no trace of their movements could be discovered.
The doctor was most anxious that Dick should not be allowed to dwell upon what had happened. He saw that he had received a great shock to his system, and that, if he were to recover his usual health and spirits, they must make every endeavor to prevent his thoughts constantly recurring to the painful events of those three terrible days.
But, without saying a single word to Dick of their intentions, Mr. Sinclair, Rupert, Val, and Forester determined to visit the loft and discover the entrance to the secret staircase. They went up together on the very day on which Dick told the doctor where he had been and what had happened to him.
They had no difficulty in finding the corner where the turret stood; but it was quite another matter to discover the way in which to open the trap door, through which they must pass in order to be able to get upon the winding steps. There was apparently no sign of it in that corner of the floor. They noticed that there were two short pieces of plank in the flooring, which appeared to have been joined to It longer planks running across the loft; but these seemed to be firmly fixed underneath the skirting board at the bottom of the wall of the room.
In this skirting board, however, they discovered a sliding panel, and when this had been pushed back, the two short boards could easily be removed from the floor, and the entrance to the staircase stood revealed. As they went down the narrow stone steps they realized what poor Dick must have felt, as he walked on and heard the footsteps following him.
At the bottom they came upon the underground chamber in which the treasure had been found. They could see the various holes and excavations which had been made by Clegg and his companions in the course of their search, and they agreed that Dick was quite right in imagining that the jewels had been discovered in different parts of this underground cell, and that they had taken several weeks in digging them up and carrying them away.
‘But,’ said Forester, as he was sitting that evening in his favorite place on the settle in the old kitchen, ‘we have not yet got to the bottom of the mystery. How on earth did those rascals know that this treasure was hidden in the Castle? And even if they did know that, how did they ever manage to discover in which part of the ruins it was to be found?’
They all agreed with the doctor that no solution of this difficulty had as yet come to light.
‘I think you must have told Clegg about that French ship, father,’ said Rupert, ‘when he was here in the spring, and when you took him round the Castle.’
‘Well, now I come to think of it,’ said the old man, ‘I believe I did. You see, he came with such a fair tongue, saying he was an antiquarian, and took so much interest in old places and old things, and he asked me so many questions about the Castle. Yes, Rupert, I believe I did tell him.’
‘Will you tell me?’ asked Don, who was sitting on the settle beside Forester. ‘I haven’t heard about this French ship.’
‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘it was in the days of old Sir John Mandeville, when he lived here in Hildick Castle. There was an awful storm one night, and this ship was wrecked just outside the bay.’
‘Where was it going?’
‘It was on its way to Scotland. James IV. was king then, the man that was killed on Flodden Field; you’ll remember about him, sir.’
‘Well,’ said Forester, ‘what was the ship going to Scotland for?’
‘It was this way, as far as I can make out, Our King Henry VII. had got his daughter married to King James of Scotland, and it seemed as if the two countries were going to be the best of friends. But Henry was a good fighter, and he picked up a quarrel with France, and he talked of going across the Channel to see if he couldn’t conquer France, as some of our other kings had done. The King of France, of course, was very mad with him and made up his mind to stop him, and he thought if he could only persuade the Scotch to join with him, and to come across the Border and attack the North of England, then Henry would have to keep at home and fight Scotland instead of France.’
‘Not a bad idea!’ said Don.
‘No; but the difficulty was that James’ wife was sister to King Henry. So the King of France puzzled how it would be possible to get him over to his side and make him help him. Well, he found out that the Scotch king was very poor. He had lived a merry life, and spent a fortune over his wedding; his father had left him a good hoard, but he had spent every farthing of it, and now he was very hard up, and when a man’s hard up, why, he’ll do almost anything! That King of France knew his man, and he felt sure that if he could only fill up King James’ treasury, why, then he could make him do just what he wanted! The big men in Scotland too, the lords and all the great folk, were as poor as church mice, so he packed up a lot of presents for them all, jewels and gold and silver, and all the rest of it. He didn’t like to send his ship, with these things on board, down the Channel, for he thought Henry might get wind of it, and seize it, so he sent it up our way, along the Irish sea to Glasgow.’
‘But it never got there after all?’
‘No; it was wrecked on the way, and most of the treasure went down in the storm. What was washed ashore old Sir John seized and brought up to the Castle here, and nobody knew what became of it after, or what he did with it.’
‘I suppose he had that underground chamber made for it,’ said Forester.
‘I suppose so, sir. They were wild days then, and no man’s property was safe, and Sir Harry D’Arcy had an eye on the treasure, and tried hard to get it. So old Sir John hid it, and soon after that he died, and in his son’s time the family moved away from Hildick Castle, and went to another estate grander than this, that King Henry VIII. gave them, and we Norrises came to live here, in this part of the old house.’
‘It’s a wonder they didn’t take the treasure with them,’ said Don.
‘It is a wonder, sir; but perhaps they did not know where it was. Old Sir John was a close and secret man, and the son was only young when he died. Anyhow the secret seems to have died out, and I’m quite sure my father and my grandfather never had the least idea that the treasure was still in the Castle, and I’m quite sure I hadn’t.’
‘Nor I,’ said Rupert; ‘it would have been found long ago, if I had got wind of it,’
‘Then how in the world did Clegg get to know it was here?’ said Forester; ‘and how, knowing this, did he manage to discover the curious place in which it was hidden?’
Those were questions which none of them could answer. Many years went by before that part of the mystery was solved. Old Mr. Norris had passed away, and Rupert’s children were growing up to manhood and womanhood, before any explanation was found of what had so much puzzled them. The solution came in the form of a letter addressed as follows:
MT. RUPERT NORRIS,
Hildick Castle,
Nr. Llantrug
Wales.
It was written on foreign paper, and the postmark upon it was that of Kimberley, South Africa. The letter was from a lawyer in Kimberley, who wrote to inform Rupert that, a few weeks before, he had made the will of a man who went by the name of Joseph Carrington. This man had since died, and now it was the lawyer’s duty to inform Rupert Norris, of Hildick Castle, that the said Joseph Carrington had bequeathed to him the whole of his personal estate, amounting to several thousand pounds.
Rupert was utterly astonished, for he had never even heard of a man of the name of Joseph Carrington; but when the lawyer’s letter went on to inform him that he had known the testator by the name of Clegg, and that the will had been made in his favor as a reparation for the inconvenience caused by him on the night of 31st August, fourteen years before, Rupert began to understand the reason of his unexpected legacy.
The lawyer enclosed a sealed envelope, which Clegg had requested him to forward to Rupert Norris after his death, and which, he had told the lawyer, would give Mr. Norris information which he might be interested to receive. Of what nature this information was, the testator had not disclosed to the lawyer, and he forwarded the envelope just as he had received it from Carrington.
When he had finished this letter, and had found out how much money had been left to him, and what steps he must take to become possessed of it, Rupert took up the enclosure and opened the sealed letter. Inside he found two papers. One of these was a statement written by Clegg, to the effect that his curiosity had been excited by Mr. Norris’ account of the shipwreck and of the treasure brought by Sir John to the Castle.
Then, soon after, he had bought, in one of the cottages on the Garroch, an old oak bureau. The woman who sold it to him said that she believed it was hundreds of years old, and that it had once been in Hildick Castle. She told him that her great-grandfather had bought it at a sale. He said that he took this bureau away with him, and paid the woman a five-pound note for it. When he reached home he examined it carefully; he was fond of old pieces of furniture, and he had a craze for hunting in them for secret drawers or other hiding-places.
At first it seemed as if this bureau would not prove to contain any private receptacle; but one day, to his great delight, he discovered one quite by chance It had evidently been unopened for years; no one had touched the spring since the days of old Sir John Manderville. He enclosed the paper which he found in the secret drawer, that Rupert might see how he had been guided in his search for the treasure. The paper referred to was yellow with age, and was torn in several places.
Rupert spread it out before him, and after puzzling for a long time over the old English in which it was written, he was able to read the following words:
To MY DEARE SONNE FOR GUIDANCE.
Would’st thou ye treasure find?
Do thou descend;
Lower, and lower still,
Then downward bend!
Search thou by day and night,
Till thou hast brought to light
Twelve heaps of jewels bright;
That is the end!
After reading this paper, it was easy for Rupert to see why Clegg, when he had carefully explored every nook and cranny of the Castle, came to the conclusion that none of the steps he had already seen were the ones which the writer of the paper urged his son to descend. He seems accordingly to have hunted about until he found some place where a secret staircase might have been made; and the turret had evidently appeared to him to be just the place for which he was looking. How he had discovered the way to lift the trapdoor they never knew; probably his previous experience in opening secret drawers had greatly assisted him in his search. Anyhow, he had somehow or other found out the sliding panel, and had managed to lift the door and to get upon the spiral staircase, and then, with the directions in his hand, all was easy.
He knew exactly in how many different portions he should unearth the treasure. As each of these came to light, he and De Jersey had removed what they found to Dan’s cottage. They had evidently been bringing one of these bundles to the cove on the night when Forester stayed with the dying man.
Dan never knew when they would come, for he could not tell how soon the next portion of the treasure would be discovered. He had been very reluctant to go for the doctor whilst Forester remained with his father, lest Clegg and De Jersey should arrive in his absence, bringing more treasure to the cottage; but he had been compelled at last to depart, and had gone trusting that no discovery would be made that night. Clegg, happily for himself, had left the bundle with De Jersey under the hedge outside, so that the doctor saw nothing of it when he opened the door.
So ended the story of the Hildick Castle treasure; but the old paper, with the writing upon it in ink which was fast fading away, was carefully preserved by Rupert as an interesting curiosity, and will be handed down as a family heirloom to generations yet unborn.