Complete Works

— and this suicide.  For if it was not suicide, Mr. Cloete, then I know of a victim of the most cruel, cold-blooded attempt at murder; somebody who has suffered a thousand deaths.  And that makes the thousand pounds of which we spoke once a quite insignificant sum.  Look how very convenient this suicide is. . .
    “He looks up at Cloete then, who smiles at him and comes quite close to the table.
    “You killed Harry Dunbar, he whispers. . . The fellow glares at him and shows his teeth: Of course I did!  I had been in that cabin for an hour and a half like a rat in a trap. . . Shut up and left to drown in that wreck.  Let flesh and blood judge.  Of course I shot him!  I thought it was you, you murdering scoundrel, come back to settle me.  He opens the door flying and tumbles right down upon me; I had a revolver in my hand, and I shot him.  I was crazy.  Men have gone crazy for less.
    “Cloete looks at him without flinching.  Aha!  That’s your story, is it? . . . And he shakes the table a little in his passion as he speaks. . . Now listen to mine.  What’s this conspiracy?  Who’s going to prove it?  You were there to rob.  You were rifling his cabin; he came upon you unawares with your hands in the drawer; and you shot him with his own revolver.  You killed to steal — to steal!  His brother and the clerks in the office know that he took sixty pounds with him to sea.  Sixty pounds in gold in a canvas bag.  He told me where they were.  The coxswain of the life-boat can swear to it that the drawers were all empty.  And you are such a fool that before you’re half an hour ashore you change a sovereign to pay for a drink.  Listen to me.  If you don’t turn up day after to-morrow at George Dunbar’s solicitors, to make the proper deposition as to the loss of the ship, I shall set the police on your track.  Day after to-morrow. . .
    “And then what do you think?  That Stafford begins to tear his hair.  Just so.  Tugs at it with both hands without saying anything.  Cloete gives a push to the table which nearly sends the fellow off his chair, tumbling inside the fender; so that he has got to catch hold of it to save himself. . .
    “You know the sort of man I am, Cloete says, fiercely.  I’ve got to a point that I don’t care what happens to me.  I would shoot you now for tuppence.
    “At this the cur dodges under the table.  Then Cloete goes out, and as he turns in the street — you know, little fishermen’s cottages, all dark; raining in torrents, too — the other opens the window of the parlour and speaks in a sort of crying voice —
    “You low Yankee fiend — I’ll pay you off some day.
    “Cloete passes by with a damn bitter laugh, because he thinks that the fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it.”
     
    My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his black, sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.
    “I don’t quite understand this,” I said.  “In what way?”
    He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that Captain Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it.  Enough to keep her comfortable.  George Dunbar’s half, as Cloete feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.
    “I am curious,” I said, “to learn what the motive force of this tragic affair was — I mean the patent medicine.  Do you know?”
    He named it, and I whistled respectfully.  Nothing less than Parker’s Lively Lumbago Pills.  Enormous property!  You know it; all the world knows it.  Every second man, at least, on this globe of ours has tried it.
    “Why!” I cried, “they missed an immense fortune.”
    “Yes,” he mumbled, “by the price of a revolver-shot.”
    He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States, passenger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock.  The night before he sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for a drink.  “Funny chap, Cloete.  We sat all night drinking grogs, till it was time for him to go on board.”
    It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this story, with that utterly unconscious frankness of a patent-medicine man stranger to all moral standards.  Cloete concluded by remarking that he, had “had enough of the old country.”