The Pit-Prop Syndicate · Part I · Chapter 10 (2/2)

“Captain Beamish was speaking. He was just finishing a sentence and I only caught the last few words. ‘So that’s a profit of six thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds,’ he said; ‘fifty pounds loss on the props, and six thousand seven hundred netted over the other. Not bad for one trip!’ ”

“Lord!” Merriman exclaimed in amazement. “No wonder you stopped!”

“I couldn’t understand what was meant, and while I sat undecided what to do I heard my father say, ‘No trouble planting the stuff?’ Captain Beamish answered, ‘Archer said not, but then Archer is⁠—Archer. He’s planting it in small lots⁠—ten here, twenty there, fifty in t’other place; I don’t think he put out more than fifty at any one time. And he says he’s only learning his way round, and that he’ll be able to form better connections to get rid of it.’ Then Mr. Bulla spoke, and this was what upset me so much and made me think, ‘Mr. Archer is a wonderful man,’ he said with that horrible fat chuckle of his, ‘he would plant stuff on Old Nick himself with the whole of the C.I.D. looking on.’ I was bewildered and rather horrified, and I did not wait to hear any more. I crept away noiselessly, and I didn’t want to be found as it were listening. Even then I did not understand that anything was wrong, but it happened that the very next day I was walking through the forest near the lane, and I noticed Henri changing the numbers on the lorry. He didn’t see me, and he had such a stealthy surreptitious air, that I couldn’t but see it was not a joke. Putting two and two together I felt something serious was going on, and that night I asked my father what it was.”

“Well done!” Merriman exclaimed admiringly.

“But it was no use. He made little of it at first, but when I pressed him he said that against his will he had been forced into an enterprise which he hated and which he was trying to get out of. He said I must be patient and we should get away from it as quickly as possible. But since then,” she added despondently, “though I have returned to the subject time after time he has always put me off, saying that we must wait a little longer.”

“And then you thought of the false notes?”

“Yes, but I had no reason to do so except that I couldn’t think of anything else that would fit the words I had overheard. Planting stuff by tens or twenties or fifties seemed to⁠—”

There was a sudden noise in the hall and Madeleine broke off to listen.

“Father,” she whispered breathlessly. “Don’t say anything.”

Merriman had just time to nod when the door opened and Mr. Coburn appeared on the threshold. For a moment he stood looking at his daughter’s visitor, while the emotions of doubt, surprise and annoyance seemed to pass successively through his mind. Then he advanced with outstretched hand and a somewhat satirical smile on his lips.

“Ah, it is the good Merriman,” he exclaimed. “Welcome once more to our humble abode. And where is brother Hilliard? You don’t mean to say you have come without him?”

His tone jarred on Merriman, but he answered courteously: “I left him in London. I had business bringing me to this neighbourhood, and when I reached Bordeaux I took the opportunity to run out to see you and Miss Coburn.”

The manager replied suitably, and the conversation became general. As soon as he could with civility, Merriman rose to go. Mr. Coburn cried out in protest, but the other insisted.

Mr. Coburn had become more cordial, and the two men strolled together across the clearing. Merriman had had no opportunity of further private conversation with Madeleine, but he pressed her hand and smiled at her encouragingly on saying goodbye.

As the taxi bore him swiftly back towards Bordeaux, his mind was occupied with the girl to the exclusion of all else. It was not so much that he thought definitely about her, as that she seemed to fill all his consciousness. He felt numb, and his whole being ached for her as with a dull physical pain. But it was a pain that was mingled with exultation, for if she had refused him, she had at least admitted that she loved him. Incredible thought! He smiled ecstatically, then, the sense of loss returning, once more gazed gloomily ahead into vacancy. As the evening wore on his thoughts turned towards what she had said about the syndicate. Her forged note theory had come to him as a complete surprise, and he wondered whether she really had hit on the true solution of the mystery. The conversation she had overheard undoubtedly pointed in that direction. “Planting stuff” was, he believed, the technical phrase for passing forged notes, and the reference to “tens,” “twenties,” and “fifties,” tended in the same direction. Also “forming connections to get rid of it” seemed to suggest the finding of agents who would take a number of notes at a time, to be passed on by ones and twos, no doubt for a consideration.

But there was the obvious difficulty that the theory did not account for the operations as a whole. The elaborate mechanism of the pit-prop industry was not needed to provide a means of carrying forged notes from France to England. They could be secreted about the person of a traveller crossing by any of the ordinary routes. Hundreds of notes could be sewn into the lining of an overcoat, thousands carried in the double bottom of a suitcase. Of course, so frequent a traveller would require a plausible reason for his journeys, but that would present no difficulty to men like those composing the syndicate. In any case, by crossing in rotation by the dozen or so well-patronised routes between England and the Continent, the continuity of the travelling could be largely hidden. Moreover, thought Merriman, why print the notes in France at all? Why not produce them in England and so save the need for importation?

On the whole there seemed but slight support for the theory and several strong arguments against it, and he felt that Madeleine must be mistaken, just as he and Hilliard had been mistaken.

Oh! how sick of the whole business he was! He no longer cared what the syndicate was doing. He never wanted to hear of it again. He wanted Madeleine, and he wanted nothing else. His thoughts swung back to her as he had seen her that afternoon; her trim figure, her daintiness, her brown eyes clouded with trouble, her little shell-like ears escaping from the tendrils of her hair, her tears.⁠ ⁠… He broke out once more into a cold sweat as he thought of those tears.

Presently he began wondering what his own next step should be, and he soon decided he must see her again, and with as little delay as possible.

The next afternoon, therefore, he once more presented himself at the house in the clearing. This time the door was opened by an elderly servant, who handed him a note and informed him that Mr. and Miss Coburn had left home for some days.

Bitterly disappointed he turned away, and in the solitude of the lane he opened the note. It read:

“Dear Mr. Merriman⁠—I feel it is quite impossible that we should part without a word more than could be said at our interrupted interview this afternoon, so with deep sorrow I am writing to you to say to you, dear Mr. Merriman, ‘Goodbye.’ I have enjoyed our short friendship, and all my life I shall be proud that you spoke as you did, but, my dear, it is just because I think so much of you that I could not bring your life under the terrible cloud that hangs over mine. Though it hurts me to say it, I have no option but to ask you to accept the answer I gave you as final, and to forget that we met.

“I am leaving home for some time, and I beg of you not to give both of us more pain by trying to follow me. Oh, my dear, I cannot say how grieved I am.

Merriman was overwhelmed utterly by the blow. Mechanically he regained the taxi, where he lay limply back, gripping the note and unconscious of his position, while his bloodless lips repeated over and over again the phrase, “I’ll find her. I’ll find her. If it takes me all my life I’ll find her and I’ll marry her.”

Like a man in a state of coma he returned to his hotel in Bordeaux, and there, for the first time in his life, he drank himself into forgetfulness.