The Midnight Folk Read online

  “However, I find a lot of these squeamish, mealy-mouthed people of the pleasant present day, who live on pap and poppycock, are always ready to condemn anybody who lives in a way that is not their own way. Nothing shows a narrow mind like that. I’m glad to say I’m without prejudice. If a man says to me. ‘I’m a pirate, madam,’ I say to him, ‘I admire your pluck, sir. Do you want a mate, sir?’ That is my opinion of pirates. But then I take after my father. Burn my wig and bonnet if this bottle isn’t empty!

  “These people, whoever they were, lived on the shores of one of the lagoons near there: I daresay they do still. Some were French, some Spanish, some Americans, a few of all sorts. They’d rather lost their way. My Pa directed them how to steer.

  “That very evening, as they sailed, they sighted the masts of a wreck sticking out of the water, with the sails still set. My father knew the sails at once, from having made them and mended them. The wreck was the Plunderer lying in six or seven fathoms of water. She had been caught in a squall, when the men were drunk. You see what came of getting rid of my father, the one man who could have saved them.

  “There wasn’t a sign of the crew, my Pa said, but the sharks there had a well-fed sort of a look. Near by were the two boats floating bottom up. That was the end of them. Those that hadn’t been drowned the sharks had eaten.

  “‘That’s my old ship,’ my Pa said, ‘that I fell overboard from the other night.’

  “‘She’s fallen overboard herself now,’ they said. ‘What was in her? Anything worth diving for?’

  “‘No, only sugar; it will all be spoilt.’

  “So they left her there and sailed on; but my Pa took a very careful reckoning of where she was.

  “If you will oblige me with a light to my cigarette, instead of gawping at me in that South country fashion, it will be a comfort and a change. Tobacco isn’t ladylike, they say. Don’t talk about these pinafore things to me: ladies, quotha!

  “About my father . . . He landed with the chasse-marée people, in a very pleasant French city; I name no names. Nice ironwork on the balconies, he said there was, altogether a change from the sandbank and the worms. But he was destitute. He could not set off at once by himself to fetch the treasure from the Plunderer, and for a long time he could not find anyone to be his partner. That is where respectable people fail: they won’t gamble.

  “My Pa had a hard year of it, and all the time that treasure was sinking deeper into the coral. Believe me, he was there a year before he met a sportsman.”

  “Was the sportsman’s name Abner Brown?” Kay asked.

  “Yes, child, it was. Who was Abner Brown? He was a local gentleman who received things: that is, bought things from pedlars and people. My father dealt with him and at last persuaded him to come to look for the Plunderer. My Pa had no money, Abner had. Abner fitted out a yawl; then he and my Pa set out in her to whereabouts the Plunderer had been, and spent a month there dragging the bottom with grapnels, hoping to find the wreck. They sailed to and fro, to and fro; they found coral and seaweeds and squids with parrot-beaks, but no Plunderer. Of course a year had passed; there had been storms, and sandbanks form quickly there; then she might have been struck by lightning and broken apart. Still, it was sad not to find any trace of her.

  “After a month Abner said he would search no more; it was no good looking any longer. My Pa was all for searching for another month, but of course it was Abner’s yawl, and then the stormy season was at hand; so there was nothing for it but to turn. My Pa spoke his mind though; he called Abner a lily-livered papgoose. He said Abner bore no malice for this, but on their coming ashore, gave him a sum of money, and sent him along the coast to a seaport where he could go into the hotel trade.

  “You might think that this was handsome in Abner Brown, my mouselike Miss and Sir. Judge by results, I say.

  “What was he like, this Abner Brown? He was like a white, sweet, sanctified horse-dealer, or a hymn-singing cut-throat, or any cherry-lipped poisoner who will drop a tear at your pain and put ratsbane in your beer at the same breath. Talk? He would talk the hind legs off a mule. Weep? He would weep at a word. He wept when my Pa called him a papgoose. He was always weeping: a crocodile was a drought to him.

  “But how you two can expect me to speak of a man like that without rinsing my mouth to clear the taste away, is more than I can comprehend.

  “What did my Pa do? He went into the refreshment trade, selling liquor to seamen. Then he did a little crimping, which is either needlework or keeping a sailors’ home. With the profits of this he went into the industry business, getting negro servants from savage parts to places where they could go to school and wear proper trousers, instead of the fans and things, sometimes only pieces of sealing-wax, my Pa said, which they were accustomed to where they lived in their heathendom. He did very well in the industry business and brought many heathen savages into the advantages of civilisation. Sometimes they died, of course, but that was due to the fevers, that wasn’t my Pa’s doing. My Pa always gave them what he gave to a seaman, fifteen inches broad to lie upon, and always the very best plank and chain. He spared no expense in those ways, never: penny wise, pound foolish, was one of his mottoes.

  “However, there were so many anxieties in the industry business, my Pa gave it up, and went to Honduras, where he became a merchant under the name of Trigger. Until then he had usually called himself Suarez: Benito Suarez, which means Blessed Suarez. Now that he was Trigger he prospered so that he gave up thinking of the Plunderer: put her out of his mind as lost, in fact.

  “When he was very rich he came to these parts, where nobody knew him except as the rich Honduras merchant. He was knighted, too, Sir Piney. Very jovial we were. When people saw a yellow turn-out tooling down to Epsom behind two bits of blood, they sometimes asked: ‘By Jove, who is that extraordinarily handsome woman in the scarlet and fur, with the geraniums in her hat?’ The answer always was: ‘That’s Miss Trigger, the beautiful Miss Trigger, that the Begum offered a cool million for; that is she and her Pa.’ Then the Duke or the Earl (and once it was a foreign Prince) would say: ‘By Jove, Badger, that’s a woman to die for! How could I meet her Pa, do you think?’

  “Oh, the songs we used to sing coming back from the races; all those good old songs with choruses:

  “As we came from the races,

  At our tandem’s best paces,

  We rivalled the graces, we outshone the Queen;

  With our satins and laces

  And the smiles on our faces

  We wiped out the traces where sorrow had been.

  “Singing tooral li ooral li oddity,

  Polly tooral li ooral li Een;

  Since sorrow is death to a boddity,

  We wiped out where sorrow had been.

  “Oh tooral, it goes on: there’s another verse of chorus.

  “My Pa was rich, but what is that to a man who has energy? He found life quiet here. Who wouldn’t, after all the stir of the west? He organised a business to bring moonlight into cheerless homes. You pretend that you don’t know what that is, young woman and sir. Moonlight is what comes by moonlight, French brandy and tea and this Burgundy, that none but the English are strong enough to drink. That’s what I mean by moonlight; and many an ounce of tobacco that never paid threepence to the Queen. They told my Pa that the moonlight trade was dead, but they little knew my Pa. Nothing is dead when there’s somebody alive to do it. Seven barges with false bottoms he had, and he saw them go, all full of moonlight, right through a lock that the Queen herself was opening. There was a triumph for my Pa.

  “But it was the beginning of the end in one way. If he’d not taken to the moonlight business, he might never have known that Captain Harker was still alive. The best place for his moonlight was on a river not five miles from where that Captain Harker lived, or moaned rather, for that Captain H. was a morbid man, mealy-faced, always mourning about the treasure. My Pa was doing his moonlight business right close to that man’s home, and saw him again.
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  “When I consider the change that seeing that man made in Pa, I feel that I must open another bottle.

  “Some of the change was due to liver, no doubt, but the rest was remorse. ‘It was I,’ he said, ‘made poor Captain Harker as he is. Oh woe, woe!’

  “I did what I could to change his heart, but who can change the heart when the liver’s all wrong? No one.

  “‘Piney,’ he used to say, ‘Piney, I have been a great sinner.’

  “‘Nonsense, my Pa,’ I used to say. ‘And, if you have, you ought to be proud of it.’

  “‘No,’ he said, ‘I am not proud of it. It weighs in here,’ and then he would beat where his liver was.

  “At last he said: ‘One thing I can do. I can get that treasure back to Captain Harker before I die, if two marks of the five are still above water.’

  “‘Why, rubbish,’ I said. ‘What stuff and rubbish! I never heard the like.’ For I didn’t want my Pa at his age, and with his liver, to go wandering about in all sorts of mud and climates, dredging in the sea and diving. Still he would go, and without me. There was nothing for it but to let my Pa have his own way, and he was away two years.

  “And do you know what he found at the end of twenty months? Oh, the deceitfulness of false companions! Never shall I forget my sweet Pa’s letter about it.

  “My Pa found that one whom I sullied my lips over by calling him a gentleman had robbed him and deceived him.

  “He found that Abner Brown had taken the treasure years before. This was how he discovered it: listen.

  “After he had searched for twenty months and more, my Pa had to change his divers: he was advised to hire some Indian divers from the pearl-fisheries, because they stood the heat better. They were very nice men, these Indians; they always called him Massa. When he brought them to dive where the Plunderer had been, they said: ‘Oh, Massa, him no good. Mr. Blown he get the tleasure here long, long time ago; he take him all away, boxy and bundley and big piecee tandletick.’

  “That was what Abner Brown had done in return for my Pa’s trusting him with the secret.

  “When he took my father to look for the Plunderer’s wreck that first time, long, long ago, he sighted the wreck, as it chanced, when Pa was asleep. Did he tell my Pa? No. Like a false knave he made a note of where she was, and told my Pa it was no good looking any longer. So back he sailed, waited till my Pa had moved elsewhere, then came back with his divers and took everything.

  “But the divers were able to tell my Pa what had happened next, though.”

  “Abner lost it,” Kay said.

  “Yes, my little love-bird, he lost it. He was taking it back to that French city that I mentioned. He had it all, and he was only five miles from home. All seemed to favour his false heart. But lo, when he got near, the Army and the Navy were there, rooting out all the Settlement and hanging a lot of them. Abner had to leave his boat full of treasure and fly for his life; and even so, though he was not hung, he had seven years in a chain-gang.

  “But it is my Pa that I want to talk of, not Abners and treasures. When my Pa came home at the end of those two years, he did not talk about them, but about his liver. ‘Piney,’ he said, ‘my liver’s like a shifting backstay. It takes me across the brisket instead of supporting my vital organs.’

  “He was a broken man on his return, my Pa. First he would say that about his liver. Then, once, he flashed out, just like his old self: ‘By goom, Piney, yon Abner was theer, digging and digging for t’brass and finding nowt.’ But that was only a rally. He told me nothing more than that about his last four months of search: only that yon Abner was there. What could one make of that?

  “Then once, in a dreadful voice, he said: ‘Captain Harker is dead, Piney. After all, Captain Harker is dead. But I have been beside his tomb, Piney, and told him I did my best.’ Ah, after all my longing for him, to have him like that!”

  Here the poor old lady shed a few tears, tried to fill her glass from the bottle, and finding it empty, sucked its neck instead. After a few puffs at her cigarette she went on:

  “And he was only at home for two days. He went off again. No harm in that: he was always going off in the old days to see about his moonlight. But this time he went off muttering about the tomb. And this time he never came back to his poor little Tiney Piney, never, never, never, never, never: Shakespeare.

  “Do you ask me ‘Was it liver?’ No. I say it wasn’t liver. He went off in the fly, muttering about the tomb, and what became of him nobody knows.”

  Here she sat up in bed and gripped the bottle by the neck as though it were a club.

  “Ah! what happened? What happened?” she said. “What happened in those last four months in the West? What happened when he went from here to Condicote? And what happened on that midnight after he left the Ring of Bells Inn? I ask what, and I ask why, and nobody answers.

  “But if you ask me, I say that Abner Brown was at the bottom of it. However hard he was digging when Pa saw him, he certainly followed Pa here. Why?

  “To try to get money from him, probably, by blackmail. He came to this house and my Pa kicked him out. Next day, my sweet Pa went away, forever and forever farewell, Cassius. He was traced to Condicote, and there he was seen talking to Abner Brown, for Abner followed him. ‘The gents were having words,’ the potboy said. ‘Sir Trigger kicked him out and told him to do his worst.’ It was the wettest season ever known, and the great floods were out. No one has ever learned what happened next. He went out very late, after dinner, to which he drank only barley water, and he never came back, though the maid had put out his nightgown and laid the warming-pan in his bed. He was never seen by mortal eye from that day to this.

  “Abner Brown was seen. They found my fine papgoose partly eaten by fish, but identified by his linen, at Seven Hatches Weir, having been drowned, the medical men said. Some said that my Pa had killed Abner, but with a liver like a shifting backstay my poor Pa was deprived of manly pleasures. To be killed by a man like my Pa, let him lay not that flattering unction to what he called his soul: Shakespeare. That he had a tooth knocked out by my Pa’s hand is glory enough for him.

  “Some said that Abner had killed my Pa. I say, bosh, both Miss and Sir. It was thought that my Pa fell into the floods while in a spasm from his backstay.

  “This world is but a woeful vale of dissolution and despair, but though of the feebler sex I’ve backed seven Derby winners in the last twenty-three years.

  “What took him to Condicote? Did I mention the word moonlight ever?”

  “You did,” Kay said.

  “Then don’t repeat it,” she said. “Moonlight is a thing of the night, all these things beginning with M are: there’s Moonlight, and Murder, and Mystery, and Missing the Midnight Train, and Mourning a Much-loved Pa; all dark, sorrowful things.

  “However, a long life and a merry one is Piney Trigger’s motto, and a very good one too.

  “Miss Piney Tricker is a girl whose wisdom is most weighty,

  She never went to bed till three till she was over eighty.

  When claret red is in her head, she carols from her throttle,

  Hurray, hurray, my jolly lads, let’s have another bottle!

  Tooral-loo.

  “At ninety-five her chief delight was going out to dances,

  At ninety-nine she dazzled men by fire from her glances;

  And now that she’s a hundred odd, she fills her glass with liquor

  And says hurray, my jolly lads, hurray for Piney Tricker!

  Tooral-loo.

  “I call myself Tricker in poetry, because Trigger has so few rhymes. There’s bigger and digger and figger and jigger and nigger and pigger and rigger and wigger and the man who goes zag-zig is a zagger-zigger. If he isn’t, I don’t know what he is, and I’m sure you don’t. Where is that electric light switch?”

  For some minutes Kay had been longing to speak, but the old lady had talked with such energy that he had had no chance. As she paused to grope for the light switch, he
broke in:

  “Miss Trigger-Pricker,” he said, “your father found the treasure and I believe he brought it to somewhere near Condicote. And some think it may be there still. And Pimply Whatto’s father said he saw Abner Brown, with a pistol in his hand, following your father towards the floods on the night they both disappeared.”

  “I shall most certainly give Sophronia a piece of my mind,” the old lady answered. “Not only is the stitching giving way in the seams, but the stuff itself shows signs of wear, which is an affecting instance of the total inutility of geography.”

  She said this very rapidly and at the same time seemed to recede. He could not see her so clearly, nor could he see the lobster eyes of Sir Piney staring out of the portrait. The fire in the grate had burned dim, all the room was dim, and far away, though he could hear Miss Piney’s voice going on still like a mill-wheel. He felt the young woman with the fierce and smiling face pluck him towards the window, where the horse was, but he was so very, very sleepy that he really could not keep his eyes open. He managed to say, “Do let’s stop at the weathercocks,” but they were already rushing and rushing through miles of wind.

  “Weathercocks, Master Kay,” Ellen said, as she shook him awake from his bed. “Do wake up, there’s a good boy. Such a boy to wake I never did see. Now don’t be late for breakfast, but get up at once, like a little moral. Why, you sleep like one of them things that curl up all winter! Now don’t go to sleep again, or I don’t know what she’ll say.”

  As it was Sunday, he had no lessons that morning, except the Collect for the day, which had to be learned by heart. After this he was taken to church to a pew in the forward part of the nave, from which he could see the chancel through the hollow of the tower. He was much too young to understand or follow the service. He liked some of the hymns, and adored Miss Holyport, who played the organ.