Max Carrados

Three weeks later a registered letter bearing the Liverpool postmark was delivered at The Turrets. After he had read it Carrados put it away in a special drawer of his desk, and once or twice in after years, when his work seemed rather barren, he took it out and read it. This is what it contained:

“Dear Mr Carrados, – Some time after you had left me that Sunday afternoon, a man came in the dark to the door and asked for me. I did not see his face for he kept in the shade, but his figure was not very unlike that of your servant Parkinson. A packet was put into my hands and he was gone without a word. From this I imagine that perhaps you did not leave quite as soon as you had intended.

“Thank you very much indeed for the letters. I was glad to have the miserable things, to drop them into the fire, and to see them pass utterly out of my own and everybody else’s life. I wonder who else in the world would have done so much for a forlorn creature who just flashed across a few days of his busy life? and then I wonder who else could.

“But there is something else for which I thank you now far, far more, and that is for saving me from the blindness of my own passionate folly. When I look back on the abyss of meanness, treachery and guilt into which I would have wilfully cast myself, and been condemned to live in all my life, I can scarcely trust myself to write.

“I will not say that I do not suffer now. I think I shall for many years to come, but all the bitterness and I think all the hardness have been drawn out.

“You will see that I am writing from Liverpool. I have taken a second-class passage to Canada and we sail to-night. Willie, who returned to Barony last week, has lent me all the money I shall need until I find work. Do not be apprehensive. It is not with the vague uncertainty of an indifferent typist or a downtrodden governess that I go, but as an efficient domestic servant – a capable cook, housemaid or ‘general,’ as need be. It sounds rather incredible at first, does it not, but such things happen, and I shall get on very well.

“Good-bye, Mr Carrados; I shall remember you very often and very gratefully.

“Madeline Whitmarsh.

“P.S.– Yes, there is friendship at first sight.”

THE COMEDY AT FOUNTAIN COTTAGE

Carrados had rung up Mr Carlyle soon after the inquiry agent had reached his office in Bampton Street on a certain morning in April. Mr Carlyle’s face at once assumed its most amiable expression as he recognized his friend’s voice.

“Yes, Max,” he replied, in answer to the call, “I am here and at the top of form, thanks. Glad to know that you are back from Trescoe. Is there – anything?”

“I have a couple of men coming in this evening whom you might like to meet,” explained Carrados. “Manoel the Zambesia explorer is one and the other an East-End slum doctor who has seen a few things. Do you care to come round to dinner?”

“Delighted,” warbled Mr Carlyle, without a moment’s consideration. “Charmed. Your usual hour, Max?” Then the smiling complacence of his face suddenly changed and the wire conveyed an exclamation of annoyance. “I am really very sorry, Max, but I have just remembered that I have an engagement. I fear that I must deny myself after all.”

“Is it important?”

“No,” admitted Mr Carlyle. “Strictly speaking, it is not in the least important; this is why I feel compelled to keep it. It is only to dine with my niece. They have just got into an absurd doll’s house of a villa at Groat’s Heath and I had promised to go there this evening.”

“Are they particular to a day?”

There was a moment’s hesitation before Mr Carlyle replied.

“I am afraid so, now it is fixed,” he said. “To you, Max, it will be ridiculous or incomprehensible that a third to dinner – and he only a middle-aged uncle – should make a straw of difference. But I know that in their bijou way it will be a little domestic event to Elsie – an added anxiety in giving the butcher an order, an extra course for dinner, perhaps; a careful drilling of the one diminutive maid-servant, and she is such a charming little woman – eh? Who, Max? No! No! I did not say the maid-servant; if I did it is the fault of this telephone. Elsie is such a delightful little creature that, upon my soul, it would be too bad to fail her now.”

“Of course it would, you old humbug,” agreed Carrados, with sympathetic laughter in his voice. “Well, come to-morrow instead. I shall be alone.”

“Oh, besides, there is a special reason for going, which for the moment I forgot,” explained Mr Carlyle, after accepting the invitation. “Elsie wishes for my advice with regard to her next-door neighbour. He is an elderly man of retiring disposition and he makes a practice of throwing kidneys over into her garden.”

“Kittens! Throwing kittens?”

“No, no, Max. Kidneys. Stewed k-i-d-n-e-y-s. It is a little difficult to explain plausibly over a badly vibrating telephone, I admit, but that is what Elsie’s letter assured me, and she adds that she is in despair.”

“At all events it makes the lady quite independent of the butcher, Louis!”

“I have no further particulars, Max. It may be a solitary diurnal offering, or the sky may at times appear to rain kidneys. If it is a mania the symptoms may even have become more pronounced and the man is possibly showering beef-steaks across by this time. I will make full inquiry and let you know.”

“Do,” assented Carrados, in the same light-hearted spirit. “Mrs Nickleby’s neighbourly admirer expressed his feelings by throwing cucumbers, you remember, but this man puts him completely in the shade.”

It had not got beyond the proportions of a jest to either of them when they rang off – one of those whimsical occurrences in real life that sound so fantastic in outline. Carrados did not give the matter another thought until the next evening when his friend’s arrival revived the subject.

“And the gentleman next door?” he inquired among his greetings. “Did the customary offering arrive while you were there?”

“No,” admitted Mr Carlyle, beaming pleasantly upon all the familiar appointments of the room, “it did not, Max. In fact, so diffident has the mysterious philanthropist become, that no one at Fountain Cottage has been able to catch sight of him lately, although I am told that Scamp – Elsie’s terrier – betrays a very self-conscious guilt and suspiciously muddy paws every morning.”

“Fountain Cottage?”

“That is the name of the toy villa.”

“Yes, but Fountain something, Groat’s Heath – Fountain Court: wasn’t that where Metrobe – ?”

“Yes, yes, to be sure, Max. Metrobe the traveller, the writer and scientist – ”

“Scientist!”

“Well, he took up spiritualism or something, didn’t he? At any rate, he lived at Fountain Court, an old red-brick house in a large neglected garden there, until his death a couple of years ago. Then, as Groat’s Heath had suddenly become a popular suburb with a tube railway, a land company acquired the estate, the house was razed to the ground and in a twinkling a colony of Noah’s ark villas took its place. There is Metrobe Road here, and Court Crescent there, and Mansion Drive and what not, and Elsie’s little place perpetuates another landmark.”

“I have Metrobe’s last book there,” said Carrados, nodding towards a point on his shelves. “In fact he sent me a copy. ‘The Flame beyond the Dome’ it is called – the queerest farrago of balderdash and metaphysics imaginable. But what about the neighbour, Louis? Did you settle what we might almost term ‘his hash’?”

“Oh, he is mad, of course. I advised her to make as little fuss about it as possible, seeing that the man lives next door and might become objectionable, but I framed a note for her to send which will probably have a good effect.”

“Is he mad, Louis?”

“Well, I don’t say that he is strictly a lunatic, but there is obviously a screw loose somewhere. He may carry indiscriminate benevolence towards Yorkshire terriers to irrational lengths. Or he may be a food specialist with a grievance. In effect he is mad on at least that one point. How else are we to account for the circumstances?”

“I was wondering,” replied Carrados thoughtfully.

“You suggest that he really may have a sane object?”

“I suggest it – for the sake of argument. If he has a sane object, what is it?”

“That I leave to you, Max,” retorted Mr Carlyle conclusively. “If he has a sane object, pray what is it?”

“For the sake of the argument I will tell you that in half-a-dozen words, Louis,” replied Carrados, with good-humoured tolerance. “If he is not mad in the sense which you have defined, the answer stares us in the face. His object is precisely that which he is achieving.”

Mr Carlyle looked inquiringly into the placid, unemotional face of his blind friend, as if to read there whether, incredible as it might seem, Max should be taking the thing seriously after all.

“And what is that?” he asked cautiously.

“In the first place he has produced the impression that he is eccentric or irresponsible. That is sometimes useful in itself. Then what else has he done?”

“What else, Max?” replied Mr Carlyle, with some indignation. “Well, whatever he wishes to achieve by it I can tell you one thing else that he has done. He has so demoralized Scamp with his confounded kidneys that Elsie’s neatly arranged flower-beds – and she took Fountain Cottage principally on account of an unusually large garden – are hopelessly devastated. If she keeps the dog up, the garden is invaded night and day by an army of peregrinating feline marauders that scent the booty from afar. He has gained the everlasting annoyance of an otherwise charming neighbour, Max. Can you tell me what he has achieved by that?”

“The everlasting esteem of Scamp probably. Is he a good watch-dog, Louis?”

“Good heavens, Max!” exclaimed Mr Carlyle, coming to his feet as though he had the intention of setting out for Groat’s Heath then and there, “is it possible that he is planning a burglary?”

“Do they keep much of value about the house?”

“No,” admitted Mr Carlyle, sitting down again with considerable relief. “No, they don’t. Bellmark is not particularly well endowed with worldly goods – in fact, between ourselves, Max, Elsie could have done very much better from a strictly social point of view, but he is a thoroughly good fellow and idolizes her. They have no silver worth speaking of, and for the rest – well, just the ordinary petty cash of a frugal young couple.”

“Then he probably is not planning a burglary. I confess that the idea did not appeal to me. If it is only that, why should he go to the trouble of preparing this particular succulent dish to throw over his neighbour’s ground when cold liver would do quite as well?”

“If it is not only that, why should he go to the trouble, Max?”

“Because by that bait he produces the greatest disturbance of your niece’s garden.”

“And, if sane, why should he wish to do that?”

“Because in those conditions he can the more easily obliterate his own traces if he trespasses there at nights.”

“Well, upon my word, that’s drawing a bow at a venture, Max. If it isn’t burglary, what motive could the man have for any such nocturnal perambulation?”

An expression of suave mischief came into Carrados’s usually imperturbable face.

“Many imaginable motives surely, Louis. You are a man of the world. Why not to meet a charming little woman – ”

“No, by gad!” exclaimed the scandalized uncle warmly; “I decline to consider the remotest possibility of that explanation. Elsie – ”

“Certainly not,” interposed Carrados, smothering his quiet laughter. “The maid-servant, of course.”

Mr Carlyle reined in his indignation and recovered himself with his usual adroitness.

“But, you know, that is an atrocious libel, Max,” he added. “I never said such a thing. However, is it probable?”

“No,” admitted Carrados. “I don’t think that in the circumstances it is at all probable.”

“Then where are we, Max?”

“A little further than we were at the beginning. Very little… Are you willing to give me a roving commission to investigate?”

“Of course, Max, of course,” assented Mr Carlyle heartily. “I – well, as far as I was concerned, I regarded the matter as settled.”

Carrados turned to his desk and the ghost of a smile might possibly have lurked about his face. He produced some stationery and indicated it to his visitor.

“You don’t mind giving me a line of introduction to your niece?”

“Pleasure,” murmured Carlyle, taking up a pen. “What shall I say?”

Carrados took the inquiry in its most literal sense and for reply he dictated the following letter: —

“‘My dear Elsie,’ —

“If that is the way you usually address her,” he parenthesized.

“Quite so,” acquiesced Mr Carlyle, writing.

“‘The bearer of this is Mr Carrados, of whom I have spoken to you.’

“You have spoken of me to her, I trust, Louis?” he put in.

“I believe that I have casually referred to you,” admitted the writer.

“I felt sure you would have done. It makes the rest easier.

“‘He is not in the least mad although he frequently does things which to the uninitiated appear more or less eccentric at the moment. I think that you would be quite safe in complying with any suggestion he may make.

“‘Your affectionate uncle,

“‘Louis Carlyle.’”

He accepted the envelope and put it away in a pocket-book that always seemed extraordinarily thin for the amount of papers it contained.

“I may call there to-morrow,” he added.

Neither again referred to the subject during the evening, but when Parkinson came to the library a couple of hours after midnight to know whether he would be required again, he found his master rather deeply immersed in a book and a gap on the shelf where “The Flame beyond the Dome” had formerly stood.

It is not impossible that Mr Carlyle supplemented his brief note of introduction with a more detailed communication that reached his niece by the ordinary postal service at an earlier hour than the other. At all events, when Mr Carrados presented himself at the toy villa on the following afternoon he found Elsie Bellmark suspiciously disposed to accept him and his rather gratuitous intervention among her suburban troubles as a matter of course.

When the car drew up at the bright green wooden gate of Fountain Cottage another visitor, apparently a good-class working man, was standing on the path of the trim front garden, lingering over a reluctant departure. Carrados took sufficient time in alighting to allow the man to pass through the gate before he himself entered. The last exchange of sentences reached his ear.

“I’m sure, marm, you won’t find anyone to do the work at less.”

“I can quite believe that,” replied a very fair young lady who stood nearer the house, “but, you see, we do all the gardening ourselves, thank you.”

Carrados made himself known and was taken into the daintily pretty drawing-room that opened on to the lawn behind the house.

“I do not need to ask if you are Mrs Bellmark,” he had declared.

“I have Uncle Louis’s voice?” she divined readily.

“The niece of his voice, so to speak,” he admitted. “Voices mean a great deal to me, Mrs Bellmark.”

“In recognizing and identifying people?” she suggested.

“Oh, very much more than that. In recognizing and identifying their moods – their thoughts even. There are subtle lines of trouble and the deep rings of anxious care quite as patent to the ear as to the sharpest eye sometimes.”

Elsie Bellmark shot a glance of curiously interested speculation to the face that, in spite of its frank, open bearing, revealed so marvellously little itself.

“If I had any dreadful secret, I think that I should be a little afraid to talk to you, Mr Carrados,” she said, with a half-nervous laugh.

“Then please do not have any dreadful secret,” he replied, with quite youthful gallantry. “I more than suspect that Louis has given you a very transpontine idea of my tastes. I do not spend all my time tracking murderers to their lairs, Mrs Bellmark, and I have never yet engaged in a hand-to-hand encounter with a band of cut-throats.”

“He told us,” she declared, the recital lifting her voice into a tone that Carrados vowed to himself was wonderfully thrilling, “about this: He said that you were once in a sort of lonely underground cellar near the river with two desperate men whom you could send to penal servitude. The police, who were to have been there at a certain time, had not arrived, and you were alone. The men had heard that you were blind but they could hardly believe it. They were discussing in whispers which could not be overheard what would be the best thing to do, and they had just agreed that if you really were blind they would risk the attempt to murder you. Then, Louis said, at that very moment you took a pair of scissors from your pocket, and coolly asking them why they did not have a lamp down there, you actually snuffed the candle that stood on the table before you. Is that true?”

Carrados’s mind leapt vividly back to the most desperate moment of his existence, but his smile was gently deprecating as he replied:

“I seem to recognize the touch of truth in the inclination to do anything rather than fight,” he confessed. “But, although he never suspects it, Louis really sees life through rose-coloured opera glasses. Take the case of your quite commonplace neighbour – ”

“That is really what you came about?” she interposed shrewdly.

“Frankly, it is,” he replied. “I am more attracted by a turn of the odd and grotesque than by the most elaborate tragedy. The fantastic conceit of throwing stewed kidneys over into a neighbour’s garden irresistibly appealed to me. Louis, as I was saying, regards the man in the romantic light of a humanitarian monomaniac or a demented food reformer. I take a more subdued view and I think that his action, when rightly understood, will prove to be something quite obviously natural.”

“Of course it is very ridiculous, but all the same it has been desperately annoying,” she confessed. “Still, it scarcely matters now. I am only sorry that it should have been the cause of wasting your valuable time, Mr Carrados.”

“My valuable time,” he replied, “only seems valuable to me when I am, as you would say, wasting it. But is the incident closed? Louis told me that he had drafted you a letter of remonstrance. May I ask if it has been effective?”

Instead of replying at once she got up and walked to the long French window and looked out over the garden where the fruit-trees that had been spared from the older cultivation were rejoicing the eye with the promise of their pink and white profusion.

“I did not send it,” she said slowly, turning to her visitor again. “There is something that I did not tell Uncle Louis, because it would only have distressed him without doing any good. We may be leaving here very soon.”

“Just when you had begun to get it well in hand?” he said, in some surprise.

“It is a pity, is it not, but one cannot foresee these things. There is no reason why you should not know the cause, since you have interested yourself so far, Mr Carrados. In fact,” she added, smiling away the seriousness of the manner into which she had fallen, “I am not at all sure that you do not know already.”

He shook his head and disclaimed any such prescience.

“At all events you recognized that I was not exactly light-hearted,” she insisted. “Oh, you did not say that I had dark rings under my eyes, I know, but the cap fitted excellently… It has to do with my husband’s business. He is with a firm of architects. It was a little venturesome taking this house – we had been in apartments for two years – but Roy was doing so well with his people and I was so enthusiastic for a garden that we did – scarcely two months ago. Everything seemed quite assured. Then came this thunderbolt. The partners – it is only a small firm, Mr Carrados – required a little more capital in the business. Someone whom they know is willing to put in two thousand pounds, but he stipulates for a post with them as well. He, like my husband, is a draughtsman. There is no need for the services of both and so – ”

“Is it settled?”

“In effect, it is. They are as nice as can be about it but that does not alter the facts. They declare that they would rather have Roy than the new man and they have definitely offered to retain him if he can bring in even one thousand pounds. I suppose they have some sort of compunction about turning him adrift, for they have asked him to think it over and let them know on Monday. Of course, that is the end of it. It may be – I don’t know – I don’t like to think, how long before Roy gets another position equally good. We must endeavour to get this house off our hands and creep back to our three rooms. It is … luck.”

Carrados had been listening to her wonderfully musical voice as another man might have been drawn irresistibly to watch the piquant charm of her delicate face.

“Yes,” he assented, almost to himself, “it is that strange, inexplicable grouping of men and things that, under one name or another, we all confess … just luck.”

“Of course you will not mention this to Uncle Louis yet, Mr Carrados?”

“If you do not wish it, certainly not.”

“I am sure that it would distress him. He is so soft-hearted, so kind, in everything. Do you know, I found out that he had had an invitation to dine somewhere and meet some quite important people on Tuesday. Yet he came here instead, although most other men would have cried off, just because he knew that we small people would have been disappointed.”

“Well, you can’t expect me to see any self-denial in that,” exclaimed Carrados. “Why, I was one of them myself.”

Elsie Bellmark laughed outright at the expressive disgust of his tone.

“I had no idea of that,” she said. “Then there is another reason. Uncle is not very well off, yet if he knew how Roy was situated he would make an effort to arrange matters. He would, I am sure, even borrow himself in order to lend us the money. That is a thing Roy and I are quite agreed on. We will go back; we will go under, if it is to be; but we will not borrow money, not even from Uncle Louis.”

Once, subsequently, Carrados suddenly asked Mr Carlyle whether he had ever heard a woman’s voice roll like a celestial kettle-drum. The professional gentleman was vastly amused by the comparison, but he admitted that he had not.

“So that, you see,” concluded Mrs Bellmark, “there is really nothing to be done.”

“Oh, quite so; I am sure that you are right,” assented her visitor readily. “But in the meanwhile I do not see why the annoyance of your next-door neighbour should be permitted to go on.”

“Of course: I have not told you that, and I could not explain it to uncle,” she said. “I am anxious not to do anything to put him out because I have a hope – rather a faint one, certainly – that the man may be willing to take over this house.”

It would be incorrect to say that Carrados pricked up his ears – if that curious phenomenon has any physical manifestation – for the sympathetic expression of his face did not vary a fraction. But into his mind there came a gleam such as might inspire a patient digger who sees the first speck of gold that justifies his faith in an unlikely claim.

“Oh,” he said, quite conversationally, “is there a chance of that?”

“He undoubtedly did want it. It is very curious in a way. A few weeks ago, before we were really settled, he came one afternoon, saying he had heard that this house was to be let. Of course I told him that he was too late, that we had already taken it for three years.”

“You were the first tenants?”

“Yes. The house was scarcely ready when we signed the agreement. Then this Mr Johns, or Jones – I am not sure which he said – went on in a rather extraordinary way to persuade me to sublet it to him. He said that the house was dear and I could get plenty, more convenient, at less rent, and it was unhealthy, and the drains were bad, and that we should be pestered by tramps and it was just the sort of house that burglars picked on, only he had taken a sort of fancy to it and he would give me a fifty-pound premium for the term.”

“Did he explain the motive for this rather eccentric partiality?”

“I don’t imagine that he did. He repeated several times that he was a queer old fellow with his whims and fancies and that they often cost him dear.”

“I think we all know that sort of old fellow,” said Carrados. “It must have been rather entertaining for you, Mrs Bellmark.”