had followed me to the gap in the wall, and she saw the things below as soon as I did, and turned on me with a world of surmise in her eyes.
“Ben!” she exclaimed. “What on earth does that mean? That’s the old bag that your uncle carried up from the boat, and that he was so careful about! Thrown away!”
“I know what it means!” said I. “The old scamp has had an accident at this spot. Fallen over the wall in climbing over—that’s it. Look there!—the stones are newly disturbed. He’s evidently come this way from the tower, and meant to cross the moat into the wood on the other side. And he must have slipped, or his weight was too much for the wall—you see how crumbly it is?—and over he went, and I guess he fell on his precious bag. Well! he must weigh seventeen or eighteen stone! But, Pepita, do you see that broken china? I reckon that’s Miss Ellingham’s vase, that all the row’s been about. Smashed!”
“Do you think it is, Ben?” she said wonderingly. “To be sure, I can see queer figures and patterns on it. But why has he left it, and the bag, too?”
“Come over,” I said, beginning to climb the gap. “Steady, now! we don’t want the whole lot down. We must know more about this—it’s important.”
I helped her to climb the wall and down into the moat, and we began to pick up the pieces of broken chinaware from the weeds and grass in which they lay. And from this moment onwards I began to get more and more bewildered and puzzled: the mystery of Cousins’ murder, and the stealing of the Kang-he vase, and Uncle Joseph’s possession of it, and our own kidnapping, and the Getch affair, and the presence on the island of Mandhu Khan, seemed to take on more amazing and baffling features than ever. This, without a doubt, was the vase of which I had heard so much, which I understood to be worth a—to me—immense amount of money, and here it lay, thrown aside like a bit of cheap earthenware! And it was not so badly damaged, after all; true, it was broken into some five or six pieces, but they were clean breaks, and the edges fitted; I had often seen Keziah mend old china which was much more in need of repair than that. However, there it was, cast aside, and there were shavings, of the same sort that I had seen in our spare bedchamber, and there was the bag. And, looking towards the wood, I saw where Uncle Joseph, who was large-footed, had trodden down the thick, long grass as he made his way from the scene of his fall into shelter and safety.
While I was examining the vase and its one-time wrappings, Pepita was looking round about, and she suddenly let out an exclamation that drew me to her side.
“Ben!” she said sharply. “What’s this? And—that?”
She had picked up a queer-looking object from amongst the rank weeds, and now she pointed her other hand to something close by. I saw at once what those things were—they were the broken halves of one of those images which Miss Ellingham had missed after losing the Kang-he vase—the little Indian gods. I remembered what Carsie, the butler, had told me about them when he stopped to talk to me the Sunday night Cherry and I returned from London—“Foul and loathsome objects, I call those figures, one of ’em particularly … why, it had ever so many heads and arms—a monstrosity!—and t’other had some animal’s head instead of a human being’s!” So Carsie had said—and here, indeed, was the many-headed, many-armed thing, in two pieces. And suddenly, glancing around me, I saw the other—a thing with a beast’s head—lying close by … and it also was broken in two.
One by one I carefully examined these images. They were fashioned of some sort of stuff the like of which I had never seen: I could not make out if it was stone, or marble, or an artificial product. It seemed softish to the touch; anyway, you could scrape it with your finger-nail, indenting it easily. One figure—that which Pepita had found—was broken in jagged fashion, as if from a fall; the other appeared to me to have been deliberately broken, or cut—I fancied I could detect the marks of a knife-blade. But in each there was a similar and curious feature. Each contained a hollow space, rounded and smoothed, big enough in both cases to hold something as big, say, as a blackbird’s egg. But if there had been anything in these hollows a careful search in the grass and weeds round about failed to reveal it to us.
This puzzled me even more than the throwing away of the Kang-he vase. But I refrained from saying anything of my amazement and my speculations to Pepita. Instead, I carefully put together the pieces of the vase and the broken halves of the idols, wrapped them all up in the shavings, bundled the lot into the old bag, and hid that behind a clump of thick ivy at the foot of the wall.