by Grant Allen
But Margaret Owen put her hand on his shoulder and said softly, ‘John, let us hear him out.’ And John, recalled by that gentle touch, listened once more. Then Paul pleaded his case powerfully again. He quoted Scripture to them; he argued with them, after their own fashion, and down to their own comprehension, text by text; he pitted his own critical and exegetical faculty against the Apostle’s. Last of all, he turned to his mother, who, tearful still and heartbroken with disappointment, yet looked admiringly upon her learned, eloquent boy, and said to her tenderly, ‘Remember, mother, you yourself were once in love. You yourself once stood, night after night, leaning on the gate, waiting with your heart beating for a footstep that you knew so well. You yourself once counted the days and the hours and the minutes till the next meeting came.’ And Margaret Owen, touched to the heart by that simple appeal, kissed him fervently a dozen times over, the hot tears dropping on his cheek meanwhile; and then, contrary to all the rules of their austere Church, she flung her arms round her husband too, and kissed him passionately the first time for twenty years, with all the fervour of a floodgate loosed. Paul Owen’s apostolate had surely borne its first fruit.
The father stood for a moment in doubt and terror, like one stunned or dazed, and then, in a moment of sudden remembrance, stepped forward and returned the kiss. The spell was broken, and the Apostle’s power was no more. What else passed in the cottage that night, when John Owen fell upon his knees and wrestled in spirit, was too wholly internal to the man’s own soul for telling here. Next day John and Margaret Owen felt the dream of their lives was gone; but the mother in her heart rejoiced to think her boy might know the depths of love, and might bring home a real lady for his wife.
On Sunday it was rumoured that the Apostle’s ailment was very serious; but young Brother Paul Owen would address the Church. He did so, though not exactly in the way the Church expected. He told them simply and plainly how he had changed his views about certain matters; how he thanked them from his heart for the loan of their money (he was careful to emphasise the word loan), which had helped him to carry on his education at Oxford; and how he would repay them the principal and interest, though he could never repay them the kindness, at the earliest possible opportunity. He was so grave, so earnest, so transparently true, that, in spite of the downfall of their dearest hopes, he carried the whole meeting with him, all save one man. That man was Job Grimshaw. Job rose from his place with a look of undisguised triumph as soon as Paul had finished, and, mounting the platform quietly, said his say.
‘I knew, Episcops, Presbyters, and Brethren,’ he began, ‘how this ’ere young man would finish. I saw it the day he was appinted. He’s flushing up now the same as he flushed up then when I spoke to him; and it ain’t sperritual, it’s worldly pride and headstrongness, that’s what it is. He’s had our money, and he’s had his eddication, and now he’s going to round on us, just as I said he would. It’s all very well talking about paying us back: how’s a young man like him to get five hunderd pounds, I should like to know. And if he did even, what sort o’ repayment would that be to many of the brethren, who’ve saved and scraped for five year to let him live like a gentleman among the great and the mighty o’ Midian? He’s got his eddication out of us, and he can keep that whatever happens, and make a living out of it, too; and now he’s going back on us, same as I said he would, and, having got all he can out of the Church, he’s going to chuck it away like a sucked orange. I detest such backsliding and such ungratefulness.’
Paul’s cup of humiliation was full, but he bit his lip till the blood almost came, and made no answer.
‘He boasted in his own strength,’ Job went on mercilessly, ‘that he wasn’t going to be a backslider, and he wasn’t going to sign no bond, and he wasn’t going to confer with us, but we must trust his honour and honesty, and such like. I’ve got his very words written down in my notebook ’ere; for I made a note of ’em, foreseeing this. If we’d ‘a’ bound him down, as I proposed, he wouldn’t ‘a’ dared to go backsliding and rounding on us, and making up to the daughters of Midian, as I don’t doubt but what he’s been doing.’ Paul’s tell-tale face showed him at once that he had struck by accident on the right chord. ‘But if he ever goes bringing a daughter of Midian here to Peckham,’ Job continued, ‘we’ll show her these very notes, and ask her what she thinks of such dishonourable conduct. The Apostle’s dying, that’s clear; and before he dies I warrant he shall know this treachery.’
Paul could not stand that last threat. Though he had lost faith in the Apostle as an Apostle, he could never forget the allegiance he had once borne him as a father, or the spell which his powerful individuality had once thrown around him as a teacher. To have embittered that man’s dying bed with the shadow of a terrible disappointment would be to Paul a lifelong subject of deep remorse. ‘I did not intend to open my mouth in answer to you, Mr. Grimshaw,’ he said (for the first time breaking through the customary address of Brother), ‘but I pray you, I entreat you, I beseech you, not to harass the Apostle in his last moments with such a subject.’
‘Oh yes, I suppose so,’ Job Grimshaw answered maliciously, all the ingrained coarseness of the man breaking out in the wrinkles of his face. ‘No wonder you don’t want him enlightened about your goings on with the daughters of Midian, when you must know as well as I do that his life ain’t worth a day’s purchase, and that he’s a man of independent means, and has left you every penny he’s got in his will, because he believes you’re a fit successor to the Apostolate. I know it, for I signed as a witness, and I read it through, being a short one, while the other witness was signing. And you must know it as well as I do. I suppose you don’t think he’ll make another will now; but there’s time enough to burn that one anyhow.’
Paul Owen stood aghast at the vulgar baseness of which this lewd fellow supposed him capable. He had never thought of it before; and yet it flashed across his mind in a moment how obvious it was now. Of course the Apostle would leave him his money. He was being educated for the Apostolate, and the Apostolate could not be carried on without the sinews of war. But that Job Grimshaw should think him guilty of angling for the Apostle’s money, and then throwing the Church overboard — the bare notion of it was so horrible to him that he could not even hold up his head to answer the taunt. He sat down and buried his crimson face in his hands; and Job Grimshaw, taking up his hat sturdily, with the air of a man who has to perform an unpleasant duty, left the meeting-room abruptly without another word.
There was a gloomy Sunday dinner that morning in the mason’s cottage, and nobody seemed much inclined to speak in any way. But as they were in the midst of their solemn meal, a neighbour who was also a Gideonite came in hurriedly. ‘It’s all over,’ he said, breathless— ‘all over with us and with the Church. The Apostle is dead. He died this morning.’
Margaret Owen found voice to ask, ‘Before Job Grimshaw saw him?’
The neighbour nodded, ‘Yes.’
‘Thank Heaven for that!’ cried Paul. ‘Then he did not die misunderstanding me!’
‘And you’ll get his money,’ added the neighbour, ‘for I was the other witness.’
Paul drew a long breath. ‘I wish Meenie was here’ he said. ‘I must see her about this.’
IV
A few days later the Apostle was buried, and his will was read over before the assembled Church. By earnest persuasion of his father, Paul consented to be present, though he feared another humiliation from Job Grimshaw. But two days before he had taken the law into his own hands, by writing to Meenie, at her aunt’s in Eaton Place; and that very indiscreet young lady, in response, had actually consented to meet him in Kensington Gardens alone the next afternoon. There he sat with her on one of the benches by the Serpentine, and talked the whole matter over with her to his heart’s content.
‘If the money is really left to me,’ he said, ‘I must in honour refuse it. It was left to me to carry on the Apostolate, and I can’t take it on any other ground. But what ought I
to do with it? I can’t give it over to the Church, for in three days there will be no Church left to give it to. What shall I do with it?’
‘Why,’ said Meenie, thoughtfully, ‘if I were you, I should do this. First, pay back everybody who contributed towards your support in full, principal and interest; then borrow from the remainder as much as you require to complete your Oxford course; and finally, pay back all that and the other money to the fund when you are able, and hand it over for the purpose of doing some good work in Peckham itself, where your Church was originally founded. If the ideal can’t be fulfilled, let the money do something good for the actual.’
‘You are quite right, Meenie,’ said Paul, ‘except in one particular. I will not borrow from the fund for my own support. I will not touch a penny of it, temporarily or permanently, for myself in any way. If it comes to me, I shall make it over to trustees at once for some good object, as you suggest, and shall borrow from them five hundred pounds to repay my own poor people, giving the trustees my bond to repay the fund hereafter. I shall fight my own battle henceforth unaided.’
‘You will do as you ought to do, Paul, and I am proud of it.’
So next morning, when the meeting took place, Paul felt somewhat happier in his own mind as to the course he should pursue with reference to Job Grimshaw.
The Senior Episcop opened and read the last will and testament of Arthur Murgess, attorney-at-law. It provided, in a few words, that all his estate, real and personal, should pass unreservedly to his friend, Paul Owen, of Christ Church, Oxford. It was whispered about that, besides the house and grounds, the personalty might be sworn at eight thousand pounds, a vast sum to those simple people.
When the reading was finished, Paul rose and addressed the assembly. He told them briefly the plan he had formed, and insisted on his determination that not a penny of the money should be put to his own uses. He would face the world for himself, and thanks to their kindness he could face it easily enough. He would still earn and pay back all that he owed them. He would use the fund, first for the good of those who had been members of the Church, and afterwards for the good of the people of Peckham generally. And he thanked them from the bottom of his heart for the kindness they had shown him.
Even Job Grimshaw could only mutter to himself that this was not sperritual grace, but mere worldly pride and stubbornness, lest the lad should betray his evil designs, which had thus availed him nothing. ‘He has lost his own soul and wrecked the Church for the sake of the money,’ Job said, ‘and now he dassn’t touch a farden of it.’
Next John Owen rose and said slowly, ‘Friends, it seems to me we may as well all confess that this Church has gone to pieces. I can’t stop in it myself any longer, for I see it’s clear agin nature, and what’s agin nature can’t be true.’ And though the assembly said nothing, it was plain that there were many waverers in the little body whom the affairs of the last week had shaken sadly in their simple faith. Indeed, as a matter of fact, before the end of the month the Gideonite Church had melted away, member by member, till nobody at all was left of the whole assembly but Job Grimshaw.
‘My dear,’ said the Rector to his wife a few weeks later, laying down his Illustrated, ‘this is really a very curious thing. That young fellow Owen, of Christ Church, that Meenie fancied herself engaged to, has just come into a little landed property and eight or nine thousand pounds on his own account. He must be better connected than Tom imagines. Perhaps we might make inquiries about him after all.’
The Rector did make inquiries in the course of the week, and with such results that he returned to the rectory in blank amazement. ‘That fellow’s mad, Amelia,’ he said, ‘stark mad, if ever anybody was. The leader of his Little Bethel, or Ebenezer, or whatever it may be, has left him all his property absolutely, without conditions; and the idiot of a boy declares he won’t touch a penny of it, because he’s ceased to believe in their particular shibboleth, and he thinks the leader wanted him to succeed him. Very right and proper of him, of course, to leave the sect if he can’t reconcile it with his conscience, but perfectly Quixotic of him to give up the money and beggar himself outright. Even if his connection was otherwise desirable (which it is far from being), it would be absurd to think of letting Meenie marry such a ridiculous hare-brained fellow.’
Paul and Meenie, however, went their own way, as young people often will, in spite of the Rector. Paul returned next term to Oxford, penniless, but full of resolution, and by dint of taking pupils managed to eke out his scholarship for the next year. At the end of that time he took his first in Greats, and shortly after gained a fellowship. From the very first day he began saving money to pay off that dead weight of five hundred pounds. The kindly ex-Gideonites had mostly protested against his repaying them at all, but in vain: Paul would not make his entry into life, he said, under false pretences. It was a hard pull, but he did it. He took pupils, he lectured, he wrote well and vigorously for the press, he worked late and early with volcanic energy; and by the end of three years he had not only saved the whole of the sum advanced by the Gideonites, but had also begun to put away a little nest-egg against his marriage with Meenie. And when the editor of a great morning paper in London offered him a permanent place upon the staff, at a large salary, he actually went down to Worcestershire, saw the formidable Rector himself in his own parish, and demanded Meenie outright in marriage. And the Rector observed to his wife that this young Owen seemed a well-behaved and amiable young man; that after all one needn’t know anything about his relations if one didn’t like; and that as Meenie had quite made up her mind, and was as headstrong as a mule, there was no use trying to oppose her any longer.
Down in Peckham, where Paul Owen lives, and is loved by half the poor of the district, no one has forgotten who was the real founder of the Murgess Institute, which does so much good in encouraging thrift, and is so admirably managed by the founder and his wife. He would take a house nowhere but at Peckham, he said. To the Peckham people he owed his education, and for the Peckham people he would watch the working of his little Institute. There is no better work being done anywhere in that great squalid desert, the east and south-east of London; there is no influence more magnetic than the founder’s. John and Margaret Owen have recovered their hopes for their boy, only they run now in another and more feasible direction; and those who witness the good that is being done by the Institute among the poor of Peckham, or who have read that remarkable and brilliant economical work lately published on ‘The Future of Co-operation in the East End, by P. O.,’ venture to believe that Meenie was right after all, and that even the great social world itself has not yet heard the last of young Paul Owen’s lay apostolate.
JOHN CANN’S TREASURE
Cecil Mitford sat at a desk in the Record Office with a stained and tattered sheet of dark dirty-brown antique paper spread before him in triumph, and with an eager air of anxious inquiry speaking forth from every line in his white face and every convulsive twitch at the irrepressible corners of his firm pallid mouth. Yes, there was no doubt at all about it; the piece of torn and greasy paper which he had at last discovered was nothing more or less than John Cann’s missing letter. For two years Cecil Mitford had given up all his spare time, day and night, to the search for that lost fragment of crabbed seventeenth-century handwriting; and now at length, after so many disappointments and so much fruitless anxious hunting, the clue to the secret of John Cann’s treasure was lying there positively before him. The young man’s hand trembled violently as he held the paper fast, unopened in his feverish grasp, and read upon its back the autograph endorsement of Charles the Second’s Secretary of State— ‘Letter in cypher from Io. Cann, the noted Buccaneer, to his brother Willm., intercepted at Port Royal by his Matie’s command, and despatched by General Ed. D’Oyley, his Matie’s Captain-Gen^l and Governor-in-Chief of the Island of Jamaica, to me, H. Nicholas.’ That was it, beyond the shadow of a doubt; and though Cecil Mitford had still to apply to the cypher John Cann’s own written key, an
d to find out the precise import of the directions it contained, he felt at that moment that the secret was now at last virtually discovered, and that John Cann’s untold thousands of buried wealth were potentially his very own already.
He was only a clerk in the Colonial Office, was Cecil Mitford, on a beggarly income of a hundred and eighty a year — how small it seemed now, when John Cann’s money was actually floating before his mind’s-eye; but he had brains and industry and enterprise after a fitful adventurous fashion of his own; and he had made up his mind years before that he would find out the secret of John Cann’s buried treasure, if he had to spend half a lifetime on the almost hopeless quest. As a boy, Cecil Mitford had been brought up at his father’s rectory on the slopes of Dartmoor, and there he had played from his babyhood upward among the rugged granite boulders of John Cann’s rocks, and had heard from the farm labourers and the other children around the romantic but perfectly historical legend of John Cann’s treasure. Unknown and incredible sums in Mexican doubloons and Spanish dollars lay guarded by a strong oaken chest in a cavern on the hilltop, long since filled up with flints and mould from the neighbouring summits. To that secure hiding-place the great buccaneer had committed the hoard gathered in his numberless piratical expeditions, burying all together under the shadow of a petty porphyritic tor that overhangs the green valley of Bovey Tracy. Beside the bare rocks that mark the site, a perfectly distinct pathway is worn by footsteps into the granite platform underfoot; and that path, little Cecil Mitford had heard with childish awe and wonder, was cut out by the pacing up and down of old John Cann himself, mounting guard in the darkness and solitude over the countless treasure that he had hidden away in the recesses of the pixies’ hole beneath.
