Spanish Gold. George A. Birmingham
excited and eager to get dinner over. Contrary to his usual custom, he ate very little. He kept the old diary beside his plate, and every now and then stroked it affectionately.
At last the meal came to an end. The servant, after leaving coffee on the table, finally withdrew. Major Kent lit a pipe and lay back in a comfortable chair, Meldon stood with his back against the chimneypiece.
"I'm coming with you on your cruise to Inishgowlan," he said.
"What about your poor old governor and the little girl in Rathmines?"
"Never you mind about them. When I've explained things to you a bit you'll see that it'll be a jolly sight better both for my governor and for my little girl if I go with you."
"You mean to shoot seals and to make muffs out of their skins for the little girl?"
"No, I don't. I know well enough that the seals off this coast don't have the proper sort of skins for muffs. I mean to go to Inishgowlan and bring back a whole pot of money, thousands and thousands of pounds. I'll rig my little girl out in proper furs when I get back. She shall have silk dresses and real lace and a motor-car, and I'll drive her up and down Grafton Street and buy her any mortal thing she chooses. I'll take my poor old governor out of that beastly dispensary, where he's slaving away doctoring people who neither pay nor say 'Thank you.' I'll set him up in a jolly little house down near Kingstown with a couple of daily papers, a bottle of good whisky, and as much tobacco as he cares to smoke. I'll give the rector a couple of hundred or so for the church, and make his mind easy about the loss of Sir Giles's subscription. I'll——"
"Perhaps you'll tell me," said the Major, "where this enormous fortune is to come from."
"Out of Inishgowlan."
"Oh! out of Inishgowlan. I see. But how?"
"Look here, Major. Your grandfather went to that island in 1798 with Sir Giles and Lady Buckley. He anchored his sloop in the bay, and, naturally, as they were there nearly six weeks, they occasionally went on shore."
"I shouldn't wonder if they did."
"Very well. The people of Inishgowlan in those days talked nothing but Irish, and so naturally your grandfather and Sir Giles couldn't understand them. But Lady Buckley could."
"I know what you're at now," said the Major. "I've read that diary or log or whatever the old man called it. You've got a hold of that cock-and-bull story about the Spanish Armada shipwreck and the lost treasure."
"Do you mean to deny," said Meldon, "that a Spanish ship was wrecked on Inishgowlan?"
"No, I don't. I dare say there was one wrecked there. That Armada seems to have piled up ships all round this coast. My grandfather brought back an old iron chest from Inishgowlan which is in the house this minute. I always heard it was an Armada chest."
"So far, so good. You give in to the shipwreck. Now it appears that Lady Buckley didn't say a word to her husband or your grandfather at the time about what she heard from the island people. But when she came home she told them a long story. All the people believed then that there was a pile of gold hidden somewhere on the island. They said that the Spanish captain left the island with the remains of his crew in two of their curraghs, or rather their great-grandfather's curraghs, and didn't, in fact, couldn't, take anything with him except some papers and arms. That's the story Lady Buckley heard."
"I don't think much of it," said the Major. "I don't see where the treasure comes in."
"Well, you must be uncommonly thick-headed if you don't. If the Spanish captain didn't carry off the treasure, he must have left it on the island. You follow that reasoning, I suppose?"
"I do, of course, but——"
"Well, if the treasure had been found any time between the shipwreck and 1798 the people would have known about it, wouldn't they? And they wouldn't have told Lady Buckley it was still on the island. Therefore the treasure was still there in 1798. See?"
"But——"
"Wait a moment. If the treasure was discovered since 1798 we'd have heard of it. Those Inishgowlan men come in here to Ballymoy to do their marketing. Now suppose they'd taken to offering the shopkeepers hundreds and thousands of Spanish gold coins any time during the last century, do you suppose we shouldn't have heard of it? Why, man, the whole country would be full of stories of their find. But nobody in this neighbourhood has ever so much as seen a Spanish coin, therefore the Inishgowlan people can't have found the treasure. Therefore it's on the island still."
Meldon paused triumphantly. His chain of reasoning was complete.
"That's all right," said the Major, "supposing there ever was any treasure to find."
"My dear Major, do try to be sensible. Further on in the log-book, which you say you've read, I find that old Sir Giles and your grandfather, having heard Lady Buckley's story, made another expedition to the island to look for the treasure."
"They did, and brought back the old iron chest that's in my bedroom this minute."
"Now I ask you," said Meldon, "were your grandfather and old Sir Giles the kind of men to go off on a wild-goose chase after treasure which didn't exist? They weren't that kind of men at all, either of them. They were shrewd, hard-headed men who thought things out carefully before they acted. If they had a fault, it was that they were a bit too keen about money."
"How do you know all that?"
"It stands to common sense," said Meldon. "People who keep their property safe, as the Buckleys did, all through the eighteenth century in Ireland, must have been pretty sharp business men. Besides, I always heard that the first Buckley came over from Scotland. And the Scots, as we all know, don't waste their time fooling after treasure which doesn't exist. You may take my word for it, Major, that those two old gentlemen knew what they were about."
"They didn't find it."
"No, they didn't. That's where we come in. If they'd found it, it wouldn't be there for us, would it?"
"I don't see that you've proved yet that there was any treasure to find. The ship, supposing there was a ship wrecked there, mightn't have had treasure in her."
"That's where your want of a proper education tells against you, Major. If you'd read history you'd know that all those Spanish ships were full of treasure. Take Kingsley's 'Westward Ho!' for instance. You may have read that perhaps."
"That's only a novel."
"Well, I can't help quoting novels to you when you've read nothing else, and very few of them. If you'd read other books I'd refer you to them. But 'Westward Ho!' will show you that the Spaniards never went to sea without a good supply of gold in the holds of their ships, besides silver cups and any amount of ecclesiastical robes, copes, and mitres and things, simply studded with gems. That's the kind of men the Spaniards were."
"I suppose you think you're going to find all this wonderful treasure yourself."
"Of course I am. It only wants a little intelligence."
"You said just now that old Sir Giles and my grandfather were intelligent men, and they didn't find it."
"They hadn't the advantages we have now," said Meldon. "I don't deny their intelligence, but they didn't know, they couldn't know, how to go about the business. The discovery of buried treasure hadn't become an exact science in their time. Edgar Allan Poe hadn't written his stories. The art of the detective hadn't been developed. They hadn't so much as heard of Sherlock Holmes. They had about as much chance of finding that treasure as Galileo with his old-fashioned telescope had of discovering a disease germ. Now we are in quite a different position. We start with all the methods of highly-trained intellects ready to our hand, so to speak. There's only one thing I'm sorry for, and that is that there isn't a cryptogram. I'm particularly good at cryptograms."
"How do you mean to start?"
"It would have been easier," said Meldon, "if there had been a cryptogram. However, there isn't. Or, if there is,