side.
"Look!" he cried. "See! There is a little piece of a different woodlet in here--round like a large wooden stud! I wonder what it is?" Hepressed it with his fingers, but to no avail. Therefore he took out hispocket-knife and with the end pressed down hard, throwing all his weightupon his hand. "It gives!" he cried excitedly. "There's some springbehind it! You are stronger," he exclaimed, turning to the younger man."Try. Push down, so!"
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.
THE TICKING OF THE CLOCK.
The man with the grey hat took the pocket-knife, knelt over the spot,placed the knife in position, and pressed with all his might, whenslowly a panel of the oak wainscoting about two feet square fell forwarduntil it lay flat at right angles, disclosing a small locked doorbehind.
"This is it, no doubt!" cried the doctor, tugging at the door. Ityielded, disclosing a secret cupboard.
A clock set upon a cabinet on the side of the room near where I washidden was ticking. I had not noticed that sound before, and I thoughtit strange.
Miller held the candle while the others peered within. They all hadtheir backs turned to me, and in my eagerness I bent forward in order toobtain a better view of what was concealed there.
"See!" cried Gavazzi. "I was not mistaken! I knew he had some secrethiding-place here. In this room he spent days, sometimes with me, butmore often locked in here alone. Fortunately for us, the police knownothing of this."
"Yes," exclaimed Miller. "Let us see what his treasures are. I wonderwhat he would say if he saw us handling his secrets," he added, with ashort dry laugh. "The papers to-day say that he's been seen in Bahia."
Evidently Lucie had for some reason kept her knowledge of the fugitive'sdeath from her father.
"He was always methodical," remarked the Italian. "And he seems to havecarried out his methods here. Look at all these pigeon-holes! Made byhimself, it seems, from their roughness. He dared not call in acarpenter. But he was of a very mechanical turn of mind, and probablyconstructed the whole thing himself."
"It certainly would escape observation," remarked the young man,examining the thick old panel of polished oak that had fallen back.
The doctor had drawn from one of the pigeon-holes a bundle ofofficial-looking papers folded and secured with tape. He glanced atthem with critical eye and cast them aside as being without interest.Another, and another, he drew out, but none of them attracted hisattention for more than a few moments.
"They are merely secret information collected against variouspoliticians and personages--information that he thought might one day beuseful," said Gavazzi.
"And profitable, eh?" added Miller, with a laugh.
"Quite so. We may find it equally profitable to us one day," remarkedhis companion. "They will prove interesting reading when we have timeto go through them."
They were evidently in search of something else. Surely they had notdeliberately sacrificed a man's life to obtain those few dusty papers?What, I wondered, was contained in that precious packet which the ownerof that villa had given me before his death?
Two large matrices of official seals Miller drew out and examined.
"Ah! yes!" exclaimed Gavazzi, "I suspected he had those. They arecopies of the seal of the Ministry, and with them he fabricated quite anumber of official documents. By means of those he sent an order to theconvict prison at Volteria to release Rastelli, the forger, who was afriend of his. The Governor at once set him at liberty, and does notknow to this day that the order was a forgery. Indeed, I believe that,for a consideration, he used to give out these orders."
"And he made them himself!" Miller laughed. "A pretty profitablebusiness!" And he turned over the brass seals in his hand, while thelittle clock ticked on.
"Of course. If he had only been satisfied and not attempted too much,he would have remained years in office without any suspicion fallingupon him. I, however, knew something of what was in progress, and yethe defied me and absolutely refused to let me share. Well--you know therest," he laughed. "I didn't see why he should take all the profits andI do the work."
"But you managed to be pretty well paid," his friend remarked.
"I merely looked after myself. Yet, if Giovanni had not been a fool andtaken me into the affair when he knew that I'd discovered everything, wemight have run the Ministry as a joint concern until--well, until thenext Cabinet crisis or King Umberto dismissed us. It's a pity--athousand pities--he was such a fool. But you see he got unnerved, hewas afraid of his enemies, and so he acknowledged his peculations bybolting."
"A fatal mistake," Miller declared. "I wonder he didn't get across toGreece. The police couldn't have touched him there. He knew the law ofextradition quite as well as you or I. To go to South America is simplyrunning into the arms of the police."
"I question whether he is in America," the doctor said, examiningdeliberately the contents of another of the pigeon-holes. "The reportmay have been circulated by the police themselves--as reports so oftenare--to put the fugitive off his guard. No, I should think that he ismore likely in Paris, or Vienna, or Berlin. He could reach eithercapital by the through train from Rome. He probably put on a suit ofworkman's clothes and travelled third-class with a stick and a bundle.That's the safest way to get out of the country--don't you think so?We've both done it more than once," he laughed.
There was something distinctly humorous to me in the owner of the Manorat Studland travelling as an Italian labourer among the unwashedthird-class passengers and passing the guards at the frontier with hisworldly belongings tied up in a dirty handkerchief.
And yet that is a course very often adopted by the international thiefas the safest way in which to pass from one country to another.
"_Gran Dio_!" ejaculated Gavazzi a moment later, as he held a smallpacket open in his hand. "Money! Look!"
Both men bent eagerly, and I saw that the doctor held in his hand athick packet of yellow bank-notes secured by an elastic band--thousand-franc notes they were, and there could not be less than fiftyof them.
"What good fortune!" cried Miller. "It was worth doing after all."
"I told you it was. This was his secret bank. Probably there's moreinside."
In an instant the three men tore out the contents of the pigeon-holesand scattered them upon the floor in their eagerness to secure what thedead man had hidden there.
"Here's another lot!" exclaimed the young man, holding up a secondpacket, while a few minutes later Miller himself discovered two fatpackets, each note for one thousand francs. A fourth packet wasdiscovered containing English twenty-pound notes and some German papermoney.
Those were exciting moments. The men scrambled and snatched the packetsfrom each other, tearing them open in their fierce eagerness toascertain whether they contained notes. In the eyes of all three wasthat terrible lust for gold that impels men to great crimes, that fiercepassion that renders men unconscious of their actions.
Time after time smaller packets were discovered, which they thrust intotheir pockets uncounted.
There was wealth there--wealth that would place all three of them beyondthe necessity of those subterfuges by which they had previously lived--an ill-gotten hoard of bank-notes which I calculated to be of the valueof many thousands of English pounds sterling.
And I was witness of their unexpected good fortune, for which the poorunfortunate man in charge had been foully done to death.
Miller suddenly discovered a large packet of thousand-franc notes in theback of the cupboard and pocketed them--a packet double the size of thefirst--whereupon a fierce quarrel instantly ensued.
Both the doctor and the young man declared that the money should beproperly divided, while Miller flatly refused.
Hot words arose--quick accusations and recriminations, the men raisingtheir voices all unconsciously, when of a sudden something entirelyunexpected occurred.
The men were silent in an instant--silent in awe.
The clock, hitherto unnoticed by them, ha
d stopped ticking.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE.
CERTAIN PERSONS ARE INQUISITIVE.
The half-open door through which I had been watching the men'smysterious movements, and the discovery of the fugitive's hidden wealth,suddenly closed of its own accord, with the heavy clang of iron.
Besides startling me, it left me in semi-darkness in the great salon.
I heard them rush frantically towards it, trying to open it, but theirefforts were unavailing. Loud imprecations escaped them, for theybelieved that some person had imprisoned them. If they succeeded inescaping they would certainly discover me, therefore my position was oneof extreme peril.
But I recollected the strange ticking of that clock which had commencedwhen the secret