»Dyson leant back in his arm-chair, relit his pipe, and puffed
thoughtfully. Phillipps began to walk up and down the room, musing
over the story of violent death fleeting in chase along the pavement,
the knife shining in the lamplight, the fury of the pursuer, and the
terror of the pursued.
'Well,' he said at last, 'and what was it, after all, that you rescued
from the gutter?'
Dyson jumped up, evidently quite startled. 'I really haven't a notion.
I didn't think of looking. But we shall see.'
He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a small and shining
object, and laid it on the table. It glowed there beneath the lamp
with the radiant glory of rare old gold; and the image and the letters
stood out in high relief, clear and sharp, as if it had but left the
mint a month before. The two men bent over it, and Phillipps took it
up and examined it closely.
'Imp. Tiberius Cæsar Augustus,' he read the legend, and then looking
at the reverse of the coin, he stared in amazement, and at last turned
to Dyson with a look of exultation.
'Do you know what you have found?' he said.
'Apparently a gold coin of some antiquity,' said Dyson coolly.
'Quite so, a gold Tiberius. No, that is wrong. You have found _the_
gold Tiberius. Look at the reverse.'
Dyson looked and saw the coin was stamped with the figure of a faun
standing amidst reeds and flowing water. The features, minute as they
were, stood out in delicate outline; it was a face lovely and yet
terrible, and yet Dyson thought of the well-known passage of the lad's
playmate, gradually growing with his growth and increasing with his
stature, till the air was filled with the rank fume of the goat.
'Yes,' he said; 'it is a curious coin. Do you know it?'
'I know about it. It is one of the comparatively few historical
objects in existence; it is all storied like those jewels we have read
of. A whole cycle of legend has gathered round the thing; the tale
goes that it formed part of an issue struck by Tiberius to commemorate
an infamous excess. You see the legend on the reverse: "Victoria". It
is said that by an extraordinary accident the whole issue was thrown
into the melting-pot, and that only this one coin escaped. It glints
through history and legend, appearing and disappearing, with intervals
of a hundred years in time, and continents in place. It was
"discovered" by an Italian humanist, and lost and rediscovered. It has
not been heard of since 1727, when Sir Joshua Byrde, a Turkey
merchant, brought it home from Aleppo, and vanished with it a month
after he had shown it to the virtuosi, no man knew or knows where. And
here it is!'
'Put it into your pocket, Dyson,' he said, after a pause. 'I would not
let anyone have a glimpse of the thing if I were you. I would not talk
about it. Did either of the men you saw see you?'
'Well, I think not. I don't think the first man, the man who was
vomited out of the dark passage, saw anything at all; and I am sure
that he could not have seen me.'
'And you didn't really see them. You couldn't recognize either the one
or the other if you met him in the street to-morrow?'
'No, I don't think I could. The street, as I said, was dimly lighted,
and they ran like madmen.'
The two men sat silent for some time, each weaving his own fancies of
the story; but lust of the marvellous was slowly overpowering Dyson's
more sober thoughts.«
Source