Found money

Chapter I

'HE squall struck the boat and heeled her over,

A gunwale down to the rushing green water. There was force and weight behind them and spray hissed viciously. A great bank of cloud was piling up, black and threatening, to the westward. The evening dark¬ ened rapidly in spite of the splendor of a stormy sun¬ set. I am a summer sailor, no lover of winter seas and winter cold. I knew by a dozen signs that my boating was over for that year.

I beached the boat on the strand, under the shelter of the headland which protects St. Jacut Bay. Pierre, madame’s fat husband, was there to meet me, and he helped me to haul the boat far up beyond all possibility of danger from the highest tide. We stored the sails and oars in a bathing-box, disused for several weeks, which stood in a sheltered nook. Fat Pierre agreed with me that the summer was over and my sailing done. He peered up at the sky out of his little eyes and told me that it was going to be a nasty night, the first of the many which make winter in St. Jacut a dreary time.

I walked back to the village by the path along the dunes, and the rising wind blew little showers of prickly sand against my face. There was rain coming, and plenty of it. I was depressed and ill-pleased with myself. The summer was over, and I had idled away the splendid three months when I should have been working. Day after day had slipped by. There was sailing. There was swimming. There were adventur¬ ous explorations of the wonderful Breton coast. Not one line had I written. Not one chapter of the novel I had planned was even sketched out. And the first large drops of rain struck me—the summer was over.

I reached the door of the little Hotel de la Mer, uncomfortably aware that no warm welcome awaited me. Madame, proprietress and manager, was anxious to be rid of me, and had been making her feeling quite evident for more than a week. She is a Frenchwoman of orderly mind. She runs her hotel for summer visi¬ tors, cooks for them, chatters to them, smiles at them, and is altogether agreeable. In winter, according to madame’s view of life, visitors ought to go to their ii homes. Then she can shut up the greater part of her house and devote herself to the business of a farmer's wife till summer comes again. While I stayed on, madame could not settle down for the winter. I occu¬ pied a corner in the salle a manger , a solitary guest for whom it was still necessary to cook, to whom Fanni and Felicite, two sturdy Breton girls, must render ser¬ vice when they should be out in the fields gathering in the apples or helping the men with cider making. There was neither sense nor profit in such an arrange¬ ment. Madame meant me to go, and I knew well enough that I must. Not for me any more than for her was there sense or profit in my lingering on.

Madame met me in the narrow passage outside the door of the dining-room and handed me a letter. The envelope bore neither stamp nor postmark. It was addressed “To the English Gentleman in St. Jacut.” Six weeks earlier there might have been a dozen claim¬ ants for it. That evening, no doubt, madame was right in handing it to me. I was the only Englishman, gentle or simple, in the whole village.

The letter had been left, so madame told me, early in the afternoon, by a jeune fille Anglaise. I knew no young English girl in the whole of Brittany. So far as I knew there was not one within ten miles of St.

Jacut. The last of the species, a lean creature who spent most of the summer in her bathing-dress, had left three weeks before with her mother.

But madame was positive that the bearer of the letter was Anglaise. She could not be mistaken on such a point. Une Anglaise, petite, mince, brune, apparently gaie, and une peu causeuse; but since she spoke little French, madame could only guess at her gaiety and garrulity. But no. Madame did not know her name. She had not asked it. English names are very difficult. Even if she had heard it she would certainly have forgotten it. She wore—madame was clear and accurate on these points—a blue dress and a blue hat, both unmistakably English, stockings of the thickest, and shoes—madame threw up her hands over the shoes, and I gathered that English was too mild a word for them.

There was a great deal more of the description, but it did not help me at all. I turned the letter over in my hand, doubtful whether I should open it. I did not want to pry into the correspondence, perhaps the love-letters, of any jeune fille even if she were English and wore low-heeled shoes with thick soles. Madame kept assuring me that the letter was certainly meant for me. Was I not the only Englishman left in St.

i3

Jacut? For whom else could it be intended? I think she hoped it might hasten my departure from her hotel, and that she would be free at last to settle down for the winter. By way of overcoming my unwilling¬ ness to open the letter she assured me that mademoi¬ selle was very gentille, altogether charmante, and had the manner very chic.

At last I did open the letter. It was signed Quartus Wilbred and dated from the Chateau d’Aix. The writer was ill. He had some business to transact, im¬ portant business. He was totally unable to make him¬ self understood in French, or to understand what French people said to him. Fie had heard through his daughter, who did speak a little French, that there was an Englishman in St. Jacut. Would I go to his assist¬ ance ? Then followed apologies. If he had been able to come to me he would have done so. His business was of a very pressing kind, and so forth.

I put the letter into my pocket, and asked madame to tell me where the Chateau d’Aix was. She told me that it was some five miles inland from St. Jacut. She also told me a great deal more, for she herself is more than a little causeuse. The chateau is a great house. It was once magnifique. But of late years it had been uninhabited and very ill taken care of. It became dilapidated and triste, triste as death. Madame was eloquent about its loneliness and sadness. She was amazed to hear that it was inhabited, and even more amazed that the tenant should be an Englishman. Englishmen, so madame believes, and believes on good evidence, will only live in houses with bathrooms and will not live anywhere more than a mile from a golf links. In the Chateau d’Aix there is certainly no bath¬ room, and the nearest golf links must be fourteen or fifteen miles away.

But would monsieur have his dinner at once?

Monsieur would and did, a thoroughly excellent dinner. Madame knows how to cook and does not starve her guests, even when she wants to get rid of them. The storm gathered force while I was eating my omelette and the rain lashed furiously against the long windows of the room. I hoped that Mr. Wilbred’s business was not of an urgent kind. I was quite prepared to go to him next day, to witness his sig¬ nature, to explain to him the terms of a French lease or to do whatever it was he wanted done. I had no intention of facing a long walk that night through the driving rain.

I was too quick in making up my mind about that. Mr. Wilbred’s business was of the most urgent possible kind. I found that out while I was drinking my coffee and smoking my first cigarette.

Madame, in a high state of excitement, led an old peasant woman into the dining-room. Fanni and Felicite, both greatly agitated, followed. Madame’s husband, fat Pierre, whom we seldom saw indoors, came too. The old woman was soaked to the skin. The water trickled out of her skirts on to the floor. Her Breton coif was a mere wisp of wet muslin on her head. The whole party, except fat Pierre, who seldom speaks, began to talk at once, very fast and volubly. I gathered that the old woman was servant to monsieur and mademoiselle at the Chateau d’Aix. She had walked all the way to St. Jacut through the storm to tell me that Monsieur—she, madame, Fanni and Felicite made four separate attempts to say Wilbred, and all failed to get anywhere near it—Monsieur was dying, without doubt, that very night, and most earnestly desired to see another Englishman to whom he could speak.

I could not refuse to go. Wilbred evidently needed my help badly. If a feeble old woman could face the storm on an errand of mercy for a foreigner it would ill befit me, a strong young man, to fail my fellow countryman who was dying in a strange land.

Madame, who was deeply thrilled, turned to her husband and ordered him to put his horse into the trap and drive me to the Chateau d’Aix. Pierre did not like the job, but he did not refuse to do it. He sent Fanni and Felicite to harness the horse while he wrapped himself in every garment he could find.

It was a dismal journey through a villainously dark night over vile roads. The rain beat through our clothes and coursed down our necks and sleeves. In spite of an oilskin coat, I was soaked before I got to the chateau. The old woman took fat Pierre off to some outhouse and helped him to stable the horse. I was left to make my own way through the kitchen to the sitting-room. There I found Wilbred’s daughter, the girl who had brought the letter to me. I made no attempt then to decide for myself how far madame's description of her was accurate. She may have been mince and gentille and all the rest of it. She was cer¬ tainly young. I should have guessed her age as seven¬ teen or eighteen years. She seemed singularly little affected by her father's state. She was neither tearful nor frightened, and she led me to his room very much as she might have shown me to a drawing-room where afternoon tea was waiting for me.

I did not at all like the look of Wilbred. He was

1 7 haggard, and had evidently not attempted to shave for about a week. That I expected, for the man was dy¬ ing, or at all events very ill. What I did not like were the plain signs that he had been drinking heavily for some time. There was a pile of empty brandy bottles in the corner of the room, and the man’s face and hands suggested a bad debauch. It might very well have been the brandy that was killing him. But he was not drunk when I saw him and he seemed to be in full possession of his senses. He was at all events quite sensible enough to know that he was dying. Besides the unmistakable signs of heavy drinking about him, he looked to me a shifty and untrustworthy man. He gave me the impression of being one of those unfort¬ unate people who never succeed in running straight in life.

I sat down beside him. His daughter stood quietly at the end of the bed. Very soon he began to speak.

“I’m dying,” he said. “The doctor made that clear to me this afternoon, quite clear, though he couldn’t talk English and I don’t understand French. Any¬ how, I should have known it without his telling me. I’m dying, so I’ve got to trust you—got to, because there’s nobody else who can understand a word I say. It’s damned hard.”

i8

He repeated “damned hard” several times, and then drifted off into a meaningless repetition of the word damned. “Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn,” spoken very rapidly in a patter. It was an extremely feeble piece of swearing, petulant and unimaginative. I was sick of the sound of the word “damn” before he stopped.

“There’s money,” he said at last. “Money for her, for my daughter. I meant to have it myself and en¬ joy it. I meant to have a good time. I deserved a good time. If ever a man deserved a good time I did. And now I can’t have it. Oh, damn, damn, damn—”

This time I stopped him.

“If you want your daughter to have your money,” I said, “you’d better make your will. I’ll do it for you to-night as well as I can, and to-morrow I’ll go over to Dinard and get a lawyer or a consul or somebody to fix it up properly.”

“No, no,” he said. “I don’t want lawyers. Damn all lawyers—or consuls—and I don’t want to make a will. No will is needed. A will wouldn’t be the slight¬ est use. You might lose the money if there was a will. It’s not invested or in a bank. It’s—”

He stretched out his hand and pulled me over to him till my face was quite close to his.

"It's buried,” he whispered. “Twenty thousand golden sovereigns, buried safe.”

I thought I had been mistaken in my first impres¬ sion, and that the man was delirious and raving wildly. No man nowadays could get a hundred golden sover¬ eigns however badly he wanted them. As for twenty thousand—besides, no one would bury such a sum of money.

I tried to talk sense to him. I told him that even if he did not make a will his daughter would get his money: the whole of it if she was his only child, her proper share if she had brothers and sisters. I assured him that he might make his mind quite easy.

I merely succeeded in irritating him. He went on asserting that his money was buried, that nobody knew where it was, that nobody even knew of its existence. He said that unless I would undertake the job of dig¬ ging it up, neither his daughter nor any one else would ever get a penny of it. All the wills in the world, wit¬ nessed, executed, proved, would never secure his money. The only way to get it was to follow his in¬ structions and dig it up. That is what he wanted me to do. Would I do it? Then he became insulting.

“I don’t suppose you’re honest,” he said. “No man is honest enough to be trusted with the handling of twenty thousand pounds. You’ll take your rake-off while you handle it. I dare say you’ll take half. I don’t see what’s to stop you taking more than half. But you’ll surely give her some of it. Anyhow, I’ve got to trust you. If I don’t trust you Genevieve will not get a penny.”

So Genevieve was the girl’s name. It was the first time I had heard it.

“I won’t tell you exactly where it is,” he said. “I’ll tell Genevieve and no one else. Then she’ll have a hold over you.” He spoke to his daughter. “But don’t trust him, Genevieve. Don’t trust any one.”

I was annoyed with the man, particularly annoyed because he was trying to induce his daughter to regard me as a thief.

“You needn’t worry about what precautions you’re going to take,” I said. “I’m not going to have any¬ thing to do with the money or to mix myself up in your affairs at all.”

The wretched man broke down and cried when I said that. After crying for a while he began to swear again, if his monotonous repetition of “Oh, damn, damn” could be called swearing. His daughter did not make the smallest attempt to quiet him or to com¬ fort him. After watching him for a while she shrugged her shoulders slightly and left the room. I gathered that she was used to scenes of the kind, perhaps to worse scenes. The man was at all events sober when I saw him. He might be a great deal more offensive when he was drunk. And I felt sure that he had been drunk very often lately.

After the girl left the room he stopped swearing and made a half-hearted apology to me.

“I’m not accusing you of being dishonest,” he said. “I dare say you’re no worse than everybody else. But if you’d been where I’ve been the last ten years you’d have precious little faith in anybody’s honesty.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “it doesn’t in the least matter what you think or believe about me. I’m not going to have anything to do with this buried money of yours. I’m going home at once.”

“You won’t do that,” he said. “You can’t be so devilish as to walk off and leave me helpless in a place where nobody understands a word I say. You must help me. Genevieve will never be able to get that money for herself. She’s only a child. She can't do it. Look here. I’ll agree to your taking ten per cent. —I’ll agree to your taking twenty per cent, if you like. But don’t go away and leave me.”

That offer seemed to me nearly as insulting as his suspicion of my honesty. Besides, I did not believe in his buried money. I thought he was suffering from some delusion, the sort of hallucination which comes on men who have poisoned themselves with alcohol. Nor did I think he was dying at once. He looked hag¬ gard and desperately ill. But his voice was strong, and he seemed able to move in his bed quite well. I thought it likely that he would live for a week.

I rose and held out my hand to him. He took it, held it in his, fondled it, wept over it, even kissed it.

“For God’s sake don’t desert me,” he said. “I want to settle about that money. I can die happy if only you’ll promise to do as I ask you. A girl is help¬ less in a matter like this. Unless she has a man to help her she’ll never get the money.”

For the first time I felt a little sorry for the man. There was an earnestness in the appeal he made and a look of despair in his shifty eyes which moved me.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,” I said. “I’ll drive over to Dinard to-morrow and get somebody to come here and help you. You don’t like lawyers. Any¬ way, I dare say there’s no English lawyer there. But I’ll get you a clergyman. I know there’s a clergyman in Dinard. Or if you like I’ll get you a colonel or a general. That place is full of retired military men.”

Wilbred managed to raise himself a little on one elbow. He glared at me.

“Don’t dare to publish what I’ve told you,” he said. “I’ve spoken to you in confidence, and I won’t have you repeating what I’ve said. If people get to know about that twenty thousand pounds—if anybody gets to know— Oh, damn, damn, damn. . .

He was at that monotonous chant of his again, and I could stand no more of it. I left the room.

I found Genevieve Wilbred in the sitting-room, sewing by the light of an inefficient lamp.

“I am sorry,” she said, “that he spoke to you the way he did. I don’t wonder you won’t stay. You’re perfectly right to go away. If I’d known he’d be like that I wouldn’t have asked you to come here at all.”

Then she went and found fat Pierre for me. She came out with us to the shed where the horse was stabled and helped us to harness him again.

I felt that she was rather a heartless young woman. Wilbred was a drunken scoundrel of the most objec¬ tionable kind, but he was her father. I thought she should at least have pretended to be a little sorry for him.

Chapter II

1 WAS wrong, so it turned out, in my guess about Wilbred’s condition. He died that night. The news was brought to me next morning by the old Breton servant from the chateau. She begged me to go there at once to the assistance of mademoiselle, who was desolee. From what I had seen of Genevieve Wilbred the night before, I did not think she was likely to be desolated to any very serious extent. But she was a young girl and was placed in a difficult position. I could not well refuse to go to her. I walked over to the chateau. But I was quite deter¬ mined not to mix myself up in her business affairs or to have anything whatever to do with her twenty thousand pounds, supposing that there was such a sum, which I very much doubted. I thought that I might send telegrams to her relatives announcing Wilbred's death. I would, if necessary, make the arrangements for his funeral. Beyond that I did not mean to go.

I found the girl excited and a little frightened. Her father's death had been a shock to her. I do not think she expected it any more than I did, and death 24 is always a terrifying thing to the young. But she was evidently not in the least sorry. She made no pre¬ tense whatever at mourning, and after I had talked to her for a few minutes she explained her feeling to me quite frankly.

“There’s no use my pretending to be sorry about father,” she said. “For one thing I have only known him for about six weeks, and besides he never was—”

She was frank enough, but she hesitated about describing what her father had been. I gave her the phrase I thought she wanted.

“Particularly nice to you?”

“He was beastly,” she said.

I could believe it. That pile of empty brandy bot¬ tles in Wilbred’s room helped me to guess just how beastly the man must have seemed to a young girl.

“And anyhow,” she went on, “I never knew him until just lately. My mother died when I was a baby, and I’ve always lived with Aunt Josephine. At first father used to come to see me sometimes, but for the last ten years he never came near us, not once, until six weeks ago. Then he came and took me away, and I came over here with him.”

My way seemed plain before me. Aunt Josephine was the person to take charge of the girl.

“The first thing to do,” I said, “is to telegraph to your aunt. Will you tell me what her name is? I mean her other name besides Josephine, and where she lives ?”

I was startled by the answer I got to that request.

“I won’t have Aunt Josephine here,” said Gene¬ vieve. “I won’t have anything whatever to do with her. She’s perfectly horrid and always was. Father was bad enough, but Aunt Josephine—”

Genevieve’s relatives were evidently a disagree¬ able lot. I supposed that Aunt Josephine must be given to alcohol like her brother, and a woman with that vice is always worse than a man. It turned out afterward that Aunt Josephine was a strictly sober and highly moral lady, objectionable for quite other reasons, but I did not know that at the time. If I had I think I should have tried to insist on getting her name and address from Genevieve. I did make a half¬ hearted attempt to get them. But Genevieve clenched her hands, stamped her foot, and pouted like a naughty child.

She was indeed little more than a child, but she was a little more; just so much more as to make it very awkward for me to take entire charge of her. I am still quite a young man.

“Very well,” I said, “if you don’t like your Aunt Josephine, tell me the name of some one else to tele¬ graph to. Have you any sisters or brothers?”

“No,” she said.

“Then give me the name of your favorite uncle or aunt,” I said.

“I haven’t got any uncles that I ever heard of,” said Genevieve, “or any aunts except Aunt Josephine.”

“Then, my dear Genevieve—”

I rather liked the way I said that. My use of her Christian name with “dear” in front of it was fatherly, or if not fatherly—I remembered poor Wilbred—was in the manner of an elderly male relative, a great-uncle perhaps, or a grandfather. I admired the phrase and my way of saying it so much that I repeated it.

“In that case, my dear Genevieve,” I said, “I must telegraph to your Aunt Josephine whether you like her or not.”

No one ever spoke with a finer mingling of firm¬ ness and kindness. I achieved such a tone of benevo¬ lent dignity that I felt myself many years older than I really was. But never were firmness and kindness so wasted. Never did dignity collapse more abruptly and completely. Genevieve looked at me sidewise. There was a mischiveous twinkle in her eyes. She was something more, most alarming more, than a naughty child. She was not trying to flirt with me. I acquit her of any intention of using her eyes in that way. She was trying—I do not know what she was trying to do. What she succeeded in doing was mak¬ ing me feel like a schoolboy and that she and I were out for a lark together.

“I don’t quite see how you mean to telegraph for Aunt Josephine,” she said, “when you don’t know her name or address.”

I made one more effort to assert myself.

“But you’re going to be a good girl and give them to me,” I said.

I suppose I had no right to take that tone with her. I am barely twenty-seven years old, not nearly old enough for the heavy father part. And Genevieve was so far grown-up that her hair no longer hung down her back, and her skirts, if not long, were no shorter than those of most other young women.

Genevieve was not the least impressed.

“I won’t,” she said.

Then she pursed up her lips and nodded her head at me in a way which I ought perhaps to call impu¬ dent, which was certainly most attractive. I do not know what a young man of high principle, afflicted with shyness, ought to do when a lonely and unpro¬ tected girl sits nodding her head and smiling at him. Perhaps I ought to have got up and gone away. Per¬ haps I ought to have tried being very severe with her, if possible reducing her to tears. Perhaps I ought to have sent for the old Breton servant to chaperon, not Genevieve but me. What I actually did was to sit and look at her helplessly with my mouth open.

Genevieve stopped looking like a mocking imp and made an appeal to me.

“You're going to help me, aren't you?" she said.

“I want to help you in every way I can; but if you won't give me your Aunt Josephine's address I can't do anything. What is there for me to do ?"

“You can help me to get that money," she said.

But then, in broad daylight, I felt less inclined than ever to believe in Wilbred’s treasure of buried sov¬ ereigns. The existence of such a sum, hidden in a hole in the ground, was obviously absurd. I explained carefully to Genevieve the uses that can be made of money. I told her about high rates of interest earned by those who have capital to invest; about deposits in banks; about savings certificates. I explained to her that nobody, unless he were actually insane, would bury twenty thousand pounds, when it might be earning a thousand a year for him without the smallest exertion on his part.

I do not know how much of what I said she under¬ stood. She certainly seemed quite unimpressed and allowed me to talk on without making any reply or giving a sign of assent.

“Besides,” I said at last, “your father spoke of twenty thousand sovereigns, actual gold coins. Now since 1914 nobody could possibly have got twenty thousand sovereigns. There aren’t that many in Eng¬ land. All the sovereigns there are are in New York now, locked up in bank safes, or else in Russia being melted down by the Bolsheviks. I forget where they are though I’ve often been told. But they’re certainly not to be had. Nobody nowadays could lay hands on twenty sovereigns, let alone twenty thousand.”

This time she did answer me, in a most disconcert¬ ing manner. She walked over to a highly gilt cabinet with a marble top which stood against one of the walls of the room. She took from it a large cash box, car¬ ried it over to where I was sitting and dumped it down on the table in front of me. Inside of it was a heap of gold coins, good, solid, old-fashioned English sov¬ ereigns. At Genevieve’s request I counted them. There were two hundred thirty-seven.

3 i

I confess that I was amazed. I had not seen so many sovereigns since before the war. Genevieve pressed her advantage.

“Now,” she said, “perhaps you’ll believe that the money is really buried where father says it is.”