Cecil Mitford tore his hair as he counted it in impotent
self punishment; two hundred and twenty pounds, and he had expected at
least as many thousands! He saw it all in a moment. His wild fancy had
mistaken the poor outcast hunted-down pirate for a sort of ideal
criminal millionaire; he had erected the ignorant, persecuted John Cann
of real life, who fled from the king's justice to a nest of chartered
outlaws in Jamaica, into a great successful naval commander, like the
Drake or Hawkins of actual history. The whole truth about the wretched
solitary old robber burst in upon him now with startling vividness; he
saw him hugging his paltry two hundred pounds to his miserly old bosom,
crossing the sea with it stealthily from Jamaica, burying it secretly in
a hole in the ground at Bovey, quarrelling about it with his peasant
relations in England, as the poor will often quarrel about mere trifles
of money, and dying at last with the secret of that wretched sum hidden
in the snuff-box that he clutched with fierce energy even in his
lifeless skeleton fingers. It was all clear, horribly, irretrievably,
unmistakably clear to him now; and the John Cann that he had once
followed through so many chances and changes had faded away at once into
absolute nothingness, now and for ever! If Cecil Mitford had known a little less about John Cann's life and
exploits he might still perhaps have buoyed himself up with the vain
hope that all the treasure was not yet unearthed--that there were more
boxes still buried in the ground, more doubloons still hidden further
down in the unexplored bosom of the little three-cornered field. But the
words of John Cann's own dying directions were too explicit and clear to
admit of any such gloss or false interpretation. "In a strong oaken
chest, bound round with iron, and buried at four feet of depth in the
south-western angle of the Home Croft, at Bovey," said the document,
plainly; there was no possibility of making two out of it in any way. Indeed, in that single minute, Cecil Mitford's mind had undergone a
total revolution, and he saw the John Cann myth for the first time in
his life now in its true colours. The bubble had burst, the halo had
vanished, the phantom had faded away, and the miserable squalid miserly
reality stood before him with all its vulgar nakedness in their place. The whole panorama of John Cann's life, as he knew it intimately in all
its details, passed before his mind's eye like a vivid picture, no
longer in the brilliant hues of boyish romance, but in the dingy sordid
tones of sober fact. He had given up all that was worth having in this
world for the sake of a poor gipsy pirate's penny-saving hoard. A weaker man would have swallowed the disappointment or kept the
delusion still to his dying day. Cecil Mitford was made of stronger
mould. The ideal John Cann's treasure had taken possession of him, body
and soul; and now that John Cann's treasure had faded into utter
nonentity--a paltry two hundred pounds--the whole solid earth had failed
beneath his feet, and nothing was left before him but a mighty blank. A
mighty blank. Blank, blank, blank. Cecil Mitford sat there on the edge
of the pit, with his legs dangling over into the hollow where John
Cann's treasure had never been, gazing blankly out into a blank sky,
with staring blank eyeballs that looked straight ahead into infinite
space and saw utterly nothing. How long he sat there no one knows; but late at night, when the people
at the Red Lion began to miss their guest, and turned out in a body to
hunt for him in the corner field, they found him sitting still on the
edge of the pit he had dug for the grave of his own hopes, and gazing
still with listless eyes into blank vacancy. A box of loose coin lay
idly scattered on the ground beside him. The poor gentleman had been
struck crazy, they whispered to one another; and so indeed he had: not
raving mad with acute insanity, but blankly, hopelessly, and helplessly
imbecile. With the loss of John Cann's treasure the whole universe had
faded out for him into abject nihilism. They carried him home to the inn
between them on their arms, and put him to bed carefully in the old
bedroom, as one might put a new-born baby. The Lord of the Manor, when he came to hear the whole pitiful story,
would have nothing to do with the wretched doubloons; the curse of blood
was upon them, he said, and worse than that; so the Treasury, which has
no sentiments and no conscience, came in at the end for what little
there was of John Cann's unholy treasure. VIII. In the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum for Devon there was one quiet
impassive patient, who was always pointed out to horror-loving visitors,
because he had once been a gentleman, and had a strange romance hanging
to him still, even in that dreary refuge of the destitute insane. The
lady whom he had loved and robbed--all for her own good--had followed
him down from London to Devonshire; and she and her aunt kept a small
school, after some struggling fashion, in the town close by, where many
kind-hearted squires of the neighbourhood sent their little girls, while
they were still very little, for the sake of charity, and for pity of
the sad, sad story. One day a week there was a whole holiday--Wednesday
it was--for that was visiting day at the County Asylum; and then Ethel
Sutherland, dressed in deep mourning, walked round with her aunt to the
gloomy gateway at ten o'clock, and sat as long as she was allowed with
the faded image of Cecil Mitford, holding his listless hand clasped hard
in her pale white fingers, and looking with sad eager anxious eyes for
any gleam of passing recognition in his. Alas, the gleam never came
(perhaps it was better so), Cecil Mitford looked always straight before
him at the blank whitewashed walls, and saw nothing, heard nothing,
thought of nothing, from week's end to week's end. Ethel had forgiven him all; what will not a loving woman forgive? Nay,
more, had found excuses and palliations for him, which quite glossed
over his crime and his folly. He must have been losing his reason long
before he ever went to Jamaica, she said; for in his right mind he would
never have tried to deceive her or himself in the way he had done. Did
he not fancy he was sent out by the Colonial Office, when he had really
gone without leave or mission? And did he not persuade her to give up
her money to him for investment, and after all never invest it? What
greater proofs of insanity could you have than those? And then that
dreadful fever at Spanish Town, and the shock of losing his kind
entertainer, worn out with nursing him, had quite completed the downfall
of his reason. So Ethel Sutherland, in her pure beautiful woman's soul,
went on believing, as steadfastly as ever, in the faith and the goodness
of that Cecil Mitford that had never been.