The Specimen Case/The Great Hockington Find
XI
The Great Hockington Find
Mr. Lester, of the firm of Lester and Scott, antiquarians, picture and bric-à-brac dealers, commission agents, and general high-class pawnbrokers, stood before the fire in his private room with the pleasantest expression imaginable upon his slightly Hebrew features, and all, apparently, because an insignificant little disc of tin—as it would certainly have appeared to the uninterested—of about the size of a sixpence had come to him by post that morning, packed clumsily in an ordinary wooden matchbox, which bore the postmark of an obscure Midland village.
Mr. Lester took the antique and bijoutry department of the business, leaving his partner Scott the pictures, stones and occasionally wine, while both interested themselves equally in the discreet money-lending transactions that brought them into profitable connection with certain circles of the aristocracy. Neither, by the way, had any hereditary claim to the name he bore, both "Lester" and "Scott" having been adopted as good, solid, middle-class English cognomens, likely to inspire confidence and respect.
"Look here, Scotty, my boy," cried Lester boisterously, as his partner entered in response to his message, "what do you think of that for a little beauty? Didn't I tell you that those quiet, gentlemanly ads. in the country papers would bring in something?"
Mr. Scott took the proffered coin without any show of enthusiasm. A cold-eyed man, with a projecting lower jaw, that at once suggested comparison with that of a pike, he carried a mercilessly depreciating manner even into his most private life.
"Anglo-Saxon?" he replied shortly. "What's the thing worth?"
"Beornwulf, King of Mercia; lovely fine condition, too. Fetch a tenner any time at Sotheby's, even on a wet day."
"Oh, that all?" said Scott dispassionately. "What do they want for it?" Not that he despised such crumbs of commerce as "tenners" any more than his prototype the pike neglects the smaller minnows, but his personal tastes ran in the direction of high finance and large transactions.
"No, my boy, that isn't all; not by a long, long chalk," replied Mr. Lester, with imperturbable good-humour. "That's only the sample that came along in a chip matchbox, as though it might be a penn'orth of tin-tacks. Listen to this:
"'One Tree Cottage,
High Cross,
Hockington.
"'James Cray.'"
Mr. Scott's mouth opened and closed unconsciously, until he resembled a monstrous pike more than ever. "By the hundred!" he murmured, in an awe-struck voice.
"It's a find, of course—treasure trove," continued Lester keenly. "Ever heard of the Beaworth find, my son? Ten thousand William the Conq. pennies kicked up in a cart-wheel rut. Or the Hexham case? Eight thousand Saxon stycas fished out of an old tin bucket. This will be known to history as the great Hockington find, and Lester and Scott will corner the lot. Hundreds! Why shouldn't we scoop thousands, tens of thousands?"
"I'll tell you why," replied his partner, reverting from momentary surprise to his habitual business pessimism. "Because this fellow Clay will promptly get drunk on the strength of his luck and open his mouth in the village ale-house. By now it will be all over the place, and the owner of the land, and the tenant, and the lord of the manor, and the Crown agent will all be there at this moment, screwing the last denier out of him."
"No, no, no," exclaimed Lester, with a deprecating gesture. "It won't be like that at all, my dear fellow. You're a good business man in your own line, I don't deny it; but you've got no romance, Scott; no imagination. This honest yokel Clay is certain to be a shrewd, sober, thrifty son of toil of the kind that has made this England of ours what it is. A little boorish and slow-witted, perhaps, but none the worse for that. Busied with the prosaic duty of mangling wurzels, or whatever his occupation may be, his implement one day happens to go a few inches deeper than usual, and then, as the poet says, 'The ploughshare turns them out.' Your town artisan would grovel on his hands and knees at once, and run about half demented, and give the show away; but our stolid, cautious friend Clay does nothing of the kind. I see and know the man from head to foot. He"
"What are you going to offer him?" interrupted Scott impatiently. "Silver is 2s. 2d. this morning. Try him with 2s. 6d. the ounce."
"Stop a bit, though," replied Lester, coming down at once to the realms of pure business. "It's no use being wasteful. If we tell him that this is very bad silver he may jump at much less."
"Well, it's your affair," remarked the other, "and one thing is certain: if there are hundreds or thousands of this particular coin coming into the market, the price goes all to pieces."
Mr. Lester winked cunningly. "Leave that to me, my boy," he replied. "If we collar the lot the trade needn't never know nothing. We can spread it over as many years as we like. Quite a few can go to New York and Philadelphia with solid pedigrees, and one or two to Edinburgh. Then the private cabinets will take ever so many direct, and when they're filled up we can begin to work a sprinkling discreetly into the London sales. Besides, you don't imagine that they're all alike, do you? This poor jay Clay don't know a Saxon sceatta from a trouser-button, of course, but there are certain to be dozens of types, and most likely from several reigns."
"Get them first," hinted the material Scott.
"I'm coming to that, Scott. Indeed it was on the tip of my tongue," protested Lester. "Heavens! What machines of business this London of ours turns us into. No romance. What do we live for, after all? My ambition is to make a million, and to be able to call a duchess 'Dear lady' without being kicked out. Yours is to make two millions, and to have a medal struck in your honour as the endower of a national Yiddish theatre. It's all vanity, Joey. This morning a lark was singing outside my bedroom window"
"In Maida Vale!" said Scott contemptuously.
"Well, it was a tom-tit, or a sparrow, or something. Anyway, it gave me a taste for fields. I shall go down to this pretty little Hockington place right away, and finish the business at once. It’s too enticing to risk anything over."
"Just what I should have suggested all along," replied the partner. "Then if the things are scattered you may be able to pick up a few. What shall we write the fellow?"
Mr. Lester thought for a moment, considering the matter from its unromantic side.
"I'll drop him a line by the next post that there's practically no market for these things, but if he'll send a few more along as samples we'll see what can be done. That'll keep him going. Then I'll be on the spot—not connected with L. and S., mind you, but just a leisurely passing tourist with a fishing-rod or a golf-club, see?—and you may call me a descendant of Manasseh the Unlucky if I don't bring it off."
Late the following afternoon, as a remarkably pretty and rustically picturesque maiden was leaning over the gate of One Tree Cottage, a portly middle-aged gentleman, whose white hat and fancy waistcoat proclaimed his determination to wear a holiday air (despite the fact that he looked as little in keeping with a country lane as a columbine would be at a Quakers' meeting), stopped before her and inquired the distance to Hockington.
"About a mile, sir," replied the damsel with an artless curtsy—a thing Mr. Lester had hitherto believed to be extinct—"or rather more. Straight on."
"Dear, dear me," groaned Mr. Lester. He had, indeed, already walked three times that distance through misdirection. "These country miles are very long, my dear. Do you think that you could make me a cup of tea—for payment, of course?"
"Oh, yes, sir," she replied brightly. "We were thinking of putting out a sign, only so few people pass here that it didn't hardly seem worth while."
She opened the gate with another curtsy, and led the astute gentleman through a patch of overgrown garden into a tiny cottage. Nothing could have suited Mr. Lester's purpose better. In ten minutes he had learned that her name was Rosie Clay, and that she and her brother Jim lived there alone; that they had only recently come from another part of the country where work was scarce, and that Jim had for the time got temporary employment on a farm a couple of miles away. So pleasantly was the susceptible gentleman progressing that he was quite annoyed when his business side insisted upon something being done towards the real object of his visit.
On leaving town he had put into his pocket a few silver pennies of the early Edwards, common enough coins but sufficiently like the Saxon pieces to suggest comparison. With a word about payment he now took out a handful of money, and, spreading it on the table before him, carelessly sorted out the silver pennies from among the current coins.
"Oh," exclaimed the girl, with sudden interest, "you've got some of that funny old money too."
"Yes," he admitted, without any sign of the excitement he began to feel. "I'm fond of old things of that sort. Why, have you got any?"
"Jim has," she replied. "He found a whole crockful, digging in the little meadow at the back. Hundreds and hundreds of them. But oh!" she exclaimed with a belated recollection, "I wasn't to say a word to anyone. He would be dreadfully angry."
"Not in the circumstances, I'll be bound, my dear," he reassured her. "Your brother very prudently did not want anyone about here to know, but I'm different. I suppose he don't mind selling them?"
"He did say something about it," she confessed.
"Very well, then. Why shouldn't I buy them? Here I am on the spot, sent by Providence, so to speak. But one thing at a time; what shall we say for the tea?"
"Fourpence?" she murmured, with bashful hesitation (he had consumed quite a substantial repast), and then catching his expression of momentary surprise, added in confusion, "Threepence?"
"No, no, my dear," protested Mr. Lester generously. "Fourpence; not a penny less. It's quite worth it. Now, will you let me see these rum old things your brother found?"
"Indeed I would," she replied, "but I can't, because he's hidden them away somewhere."
"Oh," said Mr. Lester, a little blankly. "He seems to be a suspicious sort of cove, this brother of yours. What time will he be back?"
"Generally about half-past six," she replied. "But I have a few here that Jim gave me. I'm going to have a bangle made of them when he says I may."
"A bangle!" exclaimed Mr. Lester, starting violently "Oh, suffer No, no, my dear. You shall have a better bangle than this old truck for that pretty little arm, or I'll be hanged." He took the half-dozen coins which she had poured from a little china ornament, and examined them closely through his magnifying glass. As he had anticipated, they belonged to three different Mercian kings, and exhibited six different types. All were passably rare, and in the most exquisite condition. To the man who united the enthusiasm of the numismatist with the rapacity of the dealer, the thought of "hundreds and hundreds" was a dazzling intoxication.
"I buy such things if they come my way," he remarked expansively, when he had satisfied himself. "It's a sort of harmless craze of mine, and it don't cost me anything to speak of. I gave an old fellow half-a-crown for a handful of these the other day, and he was well pleased. What do you think your brother wants for the lot?"
She was sure she did not know, she said.
"Oh, come now," said Mr. Lester, with just a suggestion of masterful authority. "You've some idea. Out with it."
With downcast eyes, for the subject of money seemed actually to distress her, she admitted hearing Jim remark that from their size they must be sixpences, and that, therefore, they could not be worth less than sixpence each.
"Sixpence each!" exclaimed Mr. Lester appalled. "Sixpence each! Sixpence of itself may not seem very much, my dear, but when you come to consider hundreds of sixpences, why it's a fortune."
"Yes, indeed," agreed the girl, simply, "and as he said they couldn't be worth less than sixpence, he may want a shilling."
Mr. Lester could not restrain a professional gesture of despair. His faith in James Clay's arcadian simplicity had received a shock. All hope of acquiring the treasure at the price of "bad silver" would have to be abandoned. The only grain of satisfaction he could extract from the situation was that in any case the coins, from what he had seen, would be worth an average value of at least five pounds each.
"Here he is," exclaimed Rosie, as a footstep sounded on the path.
The door was thrown open, and a tall, well-made young labourer entered. He clattered his tools down in one corner, tossed his cap on to a chair, nodded unconcernedly to Mr. Lester, and forthwith demanded to know whether his tea was ready.
"I must plead guilty to wasting your charming sister's time," interposed Mr. Lester gallantly. "Quite by accident it has come out that we are all interested in the subject of this old money that there's such a lot of about."
Clay bent a look towards his sister that made her tremble.
"Oh, come now," expostulated the visitor affably. "No harm done. You have 'em to sell and I'm willing to buy—at a reasonable figure, of course."
"There you're wrong, mister," said Clay stolidly. "I have none to sell."
Mr. Lester stared at him blankly, and Rosie forgot her nervousness in surprise.
"Why, Jim," she exclaimed, "and I told the gentleman that you wanted perhaps a shilling each!"
"That's like you, babbling," he retorted wrathfully. "Well, I don't."
"But—but" protested the dealer.
"Look here," said Clay brusquely. "They're on offer to some gen'lemen up at London. Gimme them few that you have, Rose. You aren't to be trusted with anything; and then go to the shop and get me a penny stamp."
"This is all very well, my young friend," said Mr. Lester, as Rosie departed, and her brother proceeded to pack up the coins in his rough-and-ready fashion, and to copy laboriously upon the cover an address from a letter, which the observant gentleman recognised as his own, "very nice and high-flown, but it ain't business."
Clay answered him with a look of native shrewdness. "I don't tell Rosie everything," he explained. "But as you seem to know so much about it, I don't mind you seeing what I come across in the Herald. What d'ye make of this?"
It was a small newspaper cutting that he passed across, and on it Mr. Lester read as follows:
"At Messrs. Puttick and Simpson's sale-rooms last week, an Elizabeth sixpence, described as 'brilliant,' realised fifteen shillings."
"Now," continued the young man, "why shouldn't these be Elizabeth sixpences, too? I can read an 'E' and an 'L' and something that might be a 'Z' here and there. I don't altogether make out that 'brilliant' because they are mostly blackish, but I've rubbed one here with a bit of sandpaper, and it comes as bright as a mirror; it do indeed."
Tears, real tears, stood in Mr. Lester's eyes as he regarded the shocking wreck of a priceless Beornwulf from which Clay had succeeded in removing almost every trace of the impression. Argument was useless, he recognised, and, even worse, delay was dangerous. The only thing was to buy, to get the coins away at any reasonable cost—say as much under a quarter of their value as possible.
"How many are there?" he inquired mildly.
"Over two thousand. I counted that many, and there were hundreds more."
"At least you can let me see them?"
"Aye. I don't mind now that it's dark. They're put away in the garden to be safe, and I don't want any chaps to see me getting them up."
"That's right," nodded Mr. Lester. "You can't be too careful, my dear young friend. Two thousand! Two thousand shillings, I may remind you, represent a hundred pounds.
"At two shillings," he continued, musingly, as he received no encouragement, "there would, of course, be two hundred pounds. Now I will give you, not because they are worth it, but because I think money ought to be more evenly divided, I will give you two hundred and fifty pounds."
"You'd better see them," replied Clay, rising.
He was back in less than five minutes, carrying a small tin biscuit-box, to which the crumbs of damp earth still clung. When the lid was removed the one feeble candle shone on layer upon layer of coins, all deepened by the action of time into a dull, obscuring black. What rarities, what hitherto unknown types and unique examples might not be revealed when, by a safe and proper process, all this disfigurement was removed?
Mr. Lester ran his hand through the tinkling mass. It was too bitter. He felt that he really could not leave them.
"I'll take them as they stand," he said. "I'll have all the risk and uncertainty, and I'll give you—yes, I'll give you five hundred pounds! A fortune!"
The sound of someone coming along the road caused Clay hastily to replace the lid, and as the gate creaked he disappeared through the back door to re-bury his treasure. It proved to be Rosie returning.
"Well? Eh?" urged Mr. Lester, as Clay re-entered.
He shook his head, and proceeded to affix the stamp to the packet.
"I'm going to post this now," he said shortly. "You lock up, Rose, till I'm back again."
"I'll go with you," volunteered Mr. Lester, who had a pardonable desire to see the packet safely posted. "I like an evening walk in any direction."
They walked together as far as the wall letter-box at the cross-roads, a quarter of a mile away, Mr. Lester smoking an aromatic cigar and explaining the beauty of the evening, his companion taciturn and unresponsive.
"Five hundred pounds," remarked the dealer, as they stood at the cross-roads, and it became perfectly obvious that he would have to reintroduce the subject himself or leave it as it was. "It's a gigantic sum. Consider what you could do with it, my dear young fellow. You could take a farm, get married, put up for the village council here and doubtless become a churchwarden. The fact is, I overbid myself, and I'm beginning to repent."
"Well, good-night, then," said Clay.
"Stop a bit," urged Mr. Lester. "I did it and I don't go back on my word."
"It isn't fifteen shillings each, and that seems to be the value of these old Queen Elizabeth sixpences," remarked Clay stolidly.
"Don't mind my saying so, my good chap, but you don't know the first thing you're talking about," replied Mr. Lester with some warmth, and it was not the least part of his annoyance that while Clay certainly did not know what he was talking about, it was quite impossible to correct him without the risk of putting him on the track of something even more dangerous. "One article may be worth a price, but if you go and turn two thousand of them on the market, they become unsaleable."
"There's something in that," admitted Clay. "I've seen it with sheep."
"Very well then, be reasonable. Is it a deal?"
"I'll think about it."
That was the utmost that could be got from the unsatisfactory young man, and they parted on the understanding that the dealer should come again on the following day for a definite answer.
Mr. Lester spent a tedious evening at the Railway Inn, and, as it rained, an even duller day. Shortly after six he reached One Tree Cottage again, determined to clinch the bargain by the concession of another hundred.
"Rosie's out, but you can go in and sit down," said Clay, who was already back and working in his garden. "I must finish these few rows of cabbage while it's light."
Mr. Lester went in, but he did not sit down. The window of the room commanded a view of Clay, and the visitor utilised his time by peering into the ornaments and corners to see whether a few Beornwulfs or a stray Ludeca had not been left about. The survey brought him to the mantelpiece, where two envelopes instantly caught his eye. One was that which contained his own letter, but at the sight of the name embossed on the flap of the other, Mr. Lester's heart for one crowded moment stood still. It was that of another London firm, Lester and Scott's particular trade rivals, and young Clay's procrastinating indifference began to assume another face.
Mr. Lester's hesitation only lay in the direction of assuring himself that he was in no danger of being seen. Then he took out the letter and read as follows:
Yours truly,
"J. S. Mercer and Company."
He replaced the letter, ascertained from the postmark that it had only been delivered that day, and sat down to think. He was thus engaged when Rosie entered a few minutes later.
"Oh, sir," she exclaimed, as soon as she saw him. "What do you think? Jim says now that he's thinking of going to London. Do, do stop him!"
"My dear young lady, your brother seems to be a person of well-developed determination, tempered by a rather questionable commercial morality," he replied testily. "How on earth am I to stop him?"
"It's all through that wretched old money I know," she continued wildly. "A letter came this morning and now he says that he will go, and I know that he will be led astray and ruined in that wicked place, because he is really so simple. Oh, sir, buy them and then he needn't go."
"Well, I've done my little best, I must say," exclaimed Mr. Lester.
"Yes, indeed," she replied quickly. "He must have gone to the Green Man after leaving you, for he was quite talkative when he came back. He told me that you had offered him six hundred pounds."
"Five hundred," corrected the gentleman.
"Was it, sir? He must have got the idea of six hundred somehow: it seemed quite fixed in his mind. He said that he meant to have a thousand pounds yet, and he didn't care whether you gave it or someone else."
"A thousand pounds!" cried Mr. Lester, really much relieved to know the worst at last. "Oh, ridiculous, preposterous, unheard-of! No one would give it, eh?"
"No, indeed," agreed the maiden. "I don't think that all the old money in the world would be worth that. It's just a big number that he has got into his head."
"It's grotesque," fumed the dealer. "I don't mind telling you, my dear, as it's no good now, that seven-hundred-and-fifty was the limit I was prepared to go to. And that would have been a wildly generous offer."
"I'm sure it would be, sir. I wish we could persuade him to take it."
"But I haven't made it," he reminded her.
"No, and it would be no good," she said dolefully.
"We shall have to give it up then, eh?"
Rosie pondered a minute, deeply.
"I think, sir," she suggested prettily, "that if I could go to him and say that you had let out to me that you would give eight hundred pounds, and remind him that last night he had said a thousand, he would say, as they do hereabouts, 'Well, I don't mind splitting the difference.'"
Mr. Lester looked at the ingenuous maiden with an admiration he usually reserved for excessively rare coins in mint condition.
"Go and see, my dear," he said at length, "and you may earn a really beautiful bangle. Only, for heaven's sake don't forget and begin at the nine hundred with him."
••••••••••
About noon, two days later, Mr. Lester entered his partner's room, and flinging a suit-case into one armchair and himself into another, groaned several times as though he was in acute physical pain.
"What the deuce is the matter?" demanded Mr. Scott sharply. "Where have you been?"
"At Mercer's, learning the worst," moaned Mr. Lester. "Scott, if you utter one word of reproach I shall go down and commit suicide on that five-hundred-guinea Persian carpet."
"Well, well," replied Mr. Scott, "I see. You've lost three days and not got any of the things. Can't be helped."
So far from being soothed Mr. Lester roared like an agonised elephant.
"Not got any!" he almost shrieked. "I've wasted three days and I've got all the damned things. Would to the prophets that each one was a millstone round the perjured neck of that accursed young man!"
"You mean?" demanded Scott, with increasing deliberation.
"They're forgeries. All except the Beornwulf and the half-dozen I examined there in the daylight. Look for yourself."
Mr. Scott opened the case, then the biscuit tin, and took out a handful of coins.
"Forgeries!" he repeated with cold contempt. "Why, these would scarcely deceive even me. And you have paid for them the nine hundred pounds that you wired to be sent down to you in gold!"
"He insisted on gold," babbled Mr. Lester, reverting to an almost maudlin retrospective monotone. "When I offered him bills at three months he said in his bucolic way that bills were what he had to pay and he didn't want any of them. He said he had never seen a cheque or possessed a bank-note in his life, and he didn't understand them. All he understood was gold."
"You are neither a child nor a dotard in the ordinary way, Lester," said his partner. "What is at the bottom of this; were you drunk or was there a woman?"
"Two cups of tea for fourpence, and a simple village maiden," replied Lester hysterically. "Scott," he exclaimed, rousing himself, "the solid, blasting incomprehensible truth is that I was dazzled. I never examined the bulk; I never had the opportunity. I had seen the others and they were unimpeachable. I couldn't in any case examine two thousand five hundred coins in detail. I saw them for a moment by candle-light the first time. I saw them again under the same conditions when the bargain was struck, and I sealed them up. When I went yesterday with young Walls to pay for them, we both carried loaded revolvers. We had much better have carried wax candles. An hour late, Clay reeled in blindly and offensively drunk. What with that, and with having only just time to catch the last up train, I simply cut the seals, opened the box—practically in the dark—and saw that they were intact."
"I still fail to understand your exact system of estimating the value of an important purchase," remarked Mr. Scott inflexibly.
"Go on; I don't blame you," said the unhappy man bitterly. "I shan't understand it myself in a month's time. But I do just now. It was the arcadian simplicity of the scene, the peaceful cottage interior, the fading light, the confiding rustic damsel, the toil-stained young labourer's return. If there had been a jarring note, a breath of suspicion—crash! But there wasn't."
"Who are they?"
Mr. Lester shook his head in miserable ignorance.
"I've been round to see Mercer's," he said. "The genuine coins were bought there a few weeks ago by a fashionably-dressed lady and gentleman. Mr. Mercer distinctly remembers the lady unconcernedly wrapping up the purchase in a sheet of his office notepaper, and putting it in one of his envelopes, as they sat in his private room. It's been a plant throughout, of course—the whole thing mapped out and worked beautifully to scale. I expect that she's an actress in real life, and he's probably someone whom you've let in over something at one time or another. Scott! in many things we are still as children groaning in this land of Egypt!"
"At all events," said Scott, rising, "if we have luck and the police are not more than normally obtuse, we may have the satisfaction of seeing someone go into the house of bondage over this."
"Sit down, Scotty, my boy; sit down," said Lester dispassionately. “It's heart-breaking, but it's got to be. It was clear treasure trove. We can't afford to make a fuss about it."
Scott took up a pen with admirable restraint.
"Then we'll regard it as a bad debt," was all he said. "What crumbs are there?"
"The Beornwulf, say twelve guineas; a hundred ounces of silver, eleven more; the six coins he sent you, thirty-five"
"Stop a minute. What are those?"
Mr. Lester gripped the arms of his chair in a new frenzy.
"Sent on Wednesday night. D'ye mean to say you haven't had them?"
"Had nothing of the sort," said his partner.
"Under my very nose," groaned Mr. Lester, with a flash of intuition. "I see it all. Took out my letter and then coolly addressed the genuine bait to himself, to put it out of my way, right before my silly eyes! Scott, Scott, it's the finest finishing touch. I forgive them everything!"
Hampton Hill, 1907.