Till the Clock Stops | Page 3

Christopher will be too proud to ask questions. Well, I must really go."
When the door had closed, Bullard took up the document, folded it, and placed it in a long envelope.
"Lancaster!"
Lancaster did not seem to hear. He had dropped back into the easy-chair, his hands to the fire.
Bullard went over and tapped him on the shoulder, and he started.
"What's the matter, Lancaster?"
"Oh, nothing--nothing!" Lancaster sat up. "I feel a bit fagged to-day. I--I'm rather glad that bit of business is over. I didn't like it, though it was only a matter of--"
"Perhaps nothing; perhaps half a million--"
"'Sh, Bullard! We must not think of such a thing. Christopher may live for many years, and--"
"He won't do that! The attacks are becoming more frequent."
"--And with all my heart I hope the boy will return safely."
"And so say we all of us!" returned Bullard. "Only I like to be prepared for emergencies. After all, we can't be positive that Christopher will do the friendly to us when the time comes, and Alan being the only relative is certain to benefit, more or less. Our own prospects are not so bright as they were. Of course, you've run through a pile--at least, Mrs. Lancaster has done it for you--"
"If you please, Bullard--"
"Come in!"
A clerk entered, handed a telegram to Lancaster, and withdrew.
Bullard lounged over to one of the windows, and lit a cigarette. Presently a queer sound caused him to turn sharply. Lancaster was lying back, his face chalky.
"Fainted, good Lord!" muttered Bullard, and took a step towards a cabinet in the corner. He checked himself, came back and picked up the message. He read:
"Just arrived with valuable goods to sell. Shall I give first offer to Christopher or to you and Bullard? Reply c/o P.O., Tilbury. Edwin Marvel."
"Damnation!" said Bullard.
CHAPTER I
Despite its handsome and costly old furnishings, the room gave one a sense of space and comfort; its agreeable warmth was too equable to have been derived solely from the cheerful blaze in the veritable Adam's fireplace, which seemed to have provided the keynote to the general scheme of decoration. The great bay-window overlooked a long, gently sloping lawn, bounded on either side by shrubbery, trees, and hedges, terminated by shrubbery and hedges alone, the trees originally there having been long since removed to admit of a clear view of the loch, the Argyllshire hills, and the stretch of Firth of Clyde right down to Bute and the Lesser Cumbrae. Even in summer the garden, while scrupulously tidy, would have offered but little colour display; its few flower beds were as stiff in form and conventional in arrangement as a jobbing gardener on contract to an uninterested proprietor could make them. And on this autumn afternoon, when the sun seemed to rejoice coldly over the havoc of yesterday's gale and the passing of things spared to die a natural death, the eye was fain to look beyond to the beauty of the eternal waters and the glory of the everlasting hills.
Turning from the window, one noticed that the brown walls harboured but four pictures, a couple of Bone etchings and a couple by Laguil��rmie after Orchardson. There were three doors, that in the left wall being the entrance; the other two, in the right and back walls, near the angle, suggested presses, being without handles. In the middle of the back wall, a yard's distance from the floor, was a niche, four feet in height by one in breadth by the latter in depth, a plain oblong, at present unoccupied. Close inspection would have revealed signs of its recent construction.
Near the centre of the room a writing-table stood at such an angle that the man seated at it, in the invalid's wheeled chair, could look from the window to the fire with the least possible movement of the head. You would have called him an old man, though his age was barely sixty. Hair and short beard were white. He was thin to fragility, yet his hand, fingering some documents, was steady, and his eyes, while sunken, were astonishingly bright. His mobile pale lips hinted at a nature kindly, if not positively tender, yet they could smile grimly, bitterly, in secret. Such was Christopher Craig, a person of no importance publicly or socially, yet the man who, to the knowledge of those two individuals now sitting at his hearth, had left the Cape, five years ago, with a moderate fortune in cash and shares, and half a million pounds in diamonds. And he had just told those two, his favoured friends and trusted associates of the old South African days, that he was about to die.
Robert Lancaster and Francis Bullard, summoned by telegraph from London the previous afternoon, had not been unprepared for such an announcement. As a matter of fact, they had