Max Carrados

“Yes, I suppose it was,” she admitted. “The next thing we knew of him was that he had taken the other house as soon as it was finished.”

“Then he would scarcely require this?”

“I am afraid not.” It was obvious that the situation was not disposed of. “But he seems to have so little furniture there and to live so solitarily,” she explained, “that we have even wondered whether he might not be there merely as a sort of caretaker.”

“And you have never heard where he came from or who he is?”

“Only what the milkman told my servant – our chief source of local information, Mr Carrados. He declares that the man used to be the butler at a large house that stood here formerly, Fountain Court, and that his name is neither Johns nor Jones. But very likely it is all a mistake.”

“If not, he is certainly attached to the soil,” was her visitor’s rejoinder. “And, apropos of that, will you show me over your garden before I go, Mrs Bellmark?”

“With pleasure,” she assented, rising also. “I will ring now and then I can offer you tea when we have been round. That is, if you – ?”

“Thank you, I do,” he replied. “And would you allow my man to go through into the garden – in case I require him?”

“Oh, certainly. You must tell me just what you want without thinking it necessary to ask permission, Mr Carrados,” she said, with a pretty air of protection. “Shall Amy take a message?”

He acquiesced and turned to the servant who had appeared in response to the bell.

“Will you go to the car and tell my man – Parkinson – that I require him here. Say that he can bring his book; he will understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

They stepped out through the French window and sauntered across the lawn. Before they had reached the other side Parkinson reported himself.

“You had better stay here,” said his master, indicating the sward generally. “Mrs Bellmark will allow you to bring out a chair from the drawing-room.”

“Thank you, sir; there is a rustic seat already provided,” replied Parkinson.

He sat down with his back to the houses and opened the book that he had brought. Let in among its pages was an ingeniously contrived mirror.

When their promenade again brought them near the rustic seat Carrados dropped a few steps behind.

“He is watching you from one of the upper rooms, sir,” fell from Parkinson’s lips as he sat there without raising his eyes from the page before him.

The blind man caught up to his hostess again.

“You intended this lawn for croquet?” he asked.

“No; not specially. It is too small, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. I think it is in about the proportion of four by five all right. Given that, size does not really matter for an unsophisticated game.”

To settle the point he began to pace the plot of ground, across and then lengthways. Next, apparently dissatisfied with this rough measurement, he applied himself to marking it off more exactly by means of his walking-stick. Elsie Bellmark was by no means dull but the action sprang so naturally from the conversation that it did not occur to her to look for any deeper motive.

“He has got a pair of field-glasses and is now at the window,” communicated Parkinson.

“I am going out of sight,” was the equally quiet response. “If he becomes more anxious tell me afterwards.”

“It is quite all right,” he reported, returning to Mrs Bellmark with the satisfaction of bringing agreeable news. “It should make a splendid little ground, but you may have to level up a few dips after the earth has set.”

A chance reference to the kitchen garden by the visitor took them to a more distant corner of the enclosure where the rear of Fountain Cottage cut off the view from the next house windows.

“We decided on this part for vegetables because it does not really belong to the garden proper,” she explained. “When they build farther on this side we shall have to give it up very soon. And it would be a pity if it was all in flowers.”

With the admirable spirit of the ordinary Englishwoman, she spoke of the future as if there was no cloud to obscure its prosperous course. She had frankly declared their position to her uncle’s best friend because in the circumstances it had seemed to be the simplest and most straightforward thing to do; beyond that, there was no need to whine about it.

“It is a large garden,” remarked Carrados. “And you really do all the work of it yourselves?”

“Yes; I think that is half the fun of a garden. Roy is out here early and late and he does all the hard work. But how did you know? Did uncle tell you?”

“No; you told me yourself.”

“I? Really?”

“Indirectly. You were scorning the proffered services of a horticultural mercenary at the moment of my arrival.”

“Oh, I remember,” she laughed. “It was Irons, of course. He is a great nuisance, he is so stupidly persistent. For some weeks now he has been coming time after time, trying to persuade me to engage him. Once when we were all out he had actually got into the garden and was on the point of beginning work when I returned. He said he saw the milkmen and the grocers leaving samples at the door so he thought that he would too!”

“A practical jester evidently. Is Mr Irons a local character?”

“He said that he knew the ground and the conditions round about here better than anyone else in Groat’s Heath,” she replied. “Modesty is not among Mr Irons’s handicaps. He said that he – How curious!”

“What is, Mrs Bellmark?”

“I never connected the two men before, but he said that he had been gardener at Fountain Court for seven years.”

“Another family retainer who is evidently attached to the soil.”

“At all events they have not prospered equally, for while Mr Johns seems able to take a nice house, poor Irons is willing to work for half-a-crown a day, and I am told that all the other men charge four shillings.”

They had paced the boundaries of the kitchen garden, and as there was nothing more to be shown Elsie Bellmark led the way back to the drawing-room. Parkinson was still engrossed in his book, the only change being that his back was now turned towards the high paling of clinker-built oak that separated the two gardens.

“I will speak to my man,” said Carrados, turning aside.

“He hurried down and is looking through the fence, sir,” reported the watcher.

“That will do then. You can return to the car.”

“I wonder if you would allow me to send you a small hawthorn-tree?” inquired Carrados among his felicitations over the teacups five minutes later. “I think it ought to be in every garden.”

“Thank you – but is it worth while?” replied Mrs Bellmark, with a touch of restraint. As far as mere words went she had been willing to ignore the menace of the future, but in the circumstances the offer seemed singularly inept and she began to suspect that outside his peculiar gifts the wonderful Mr Carrados might be a little bit obtuse after all.

“Yes; I think it is,” he replied, with quiet assurance.

“In spite of – ?”

“I am not forgetting that unless your husband is prepared on Monday next to invest one thousand pounds you contemplate leaving here.”

“Then I do not understand it, Mr Carrados.”

“And I am unable to explain as yet. But I brought you a note from Louis Carlyle, Mrs Bellmark. You only glanced at it. Will you do me the favour of reading me the last paragraph?”

She picked up the letter from the table where it lay and complied with cheerful good-humour.

“There is some suggestion that you want me to accede to,” she guessed cunningly when she had read the last few words.

“There are some three suggestions which I hope you will accede to,” he replied. “In the first place I want you to write to Mr Johns next door – let him get the letter to-night – inquiring whether he is still disposed to take this house.”

“I had thought of doing that shortly.”

“Then that is all right. Besides, he will ultimately decline.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed – it would be difficult to say whether with relief or disappointment – “do you think so? Then why – ”

“To keep him quiet in the meantime. Next I should like you to send a little note to Mr Irons – your maid could deliver it also to-night, I dare say?”

“Irons! Irons the gardener?”

“Yes,” apologetically. “Only a line or two, you know. Just saying that, after all, if he cares to come on Monday you can find him a few days’ work.”

“But in any circumstances I don’t want him.”

“No; I can quite believe that you could do better. Still, it doesn’t matter, as he won’t come, Mrs Bellmark; not for half-a-crown a day, believe me. But the thought will tend to make Mr Irons less restive also. Lastly, will you persuade your husband not to decline his firm’s offer until Monday?”

“Very well, Mr Carrados,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “You are Uncle Louis’s friend and therefore our friend. I will do what you ask.”

“Thank you,” said Carrados. “I shall endeavour not to disappoint you.”

“I shall not be disappointed because I have not dared to hope. And I have nothing to expect because I am still completely in the dark.”

“I have been there for nearly twenty years, Mrs Bellmark.”

“Oh, I am sorry!” she cried impulsively.

“So am I – occasionally,” he replied. “Good-bye, Mrs Bellmark. You will hear from me shortly, I hope. About the hawthorn, you know.”

It was, indeed, in something less than forty-eight hours that she heard from him again. When Bellmark returned to his toy villa early on Saturday afternoon Elsie met him almost at the gate with a telegram in her hand.

“I really think, Roy, that everyone we have to do with here goes mad,” she exclaimed, in tragi-humorous despair. “First it was Mr Johns or Jones – if he is Johns or Jones – and then Irons who wanted to work here for half of what he could get at heaps of places about, and now just look at this wire that came from Mr Carrados half-an-hour ago.”

This was the message that he read:

Please procure sardine tin opener mariner’s compass and bottle of champagne. Shall arrive 6.45 bringing Crataegus Coccinea.– Carrados.

“Could anything be more absurd?” she demanded.

“Sounds as though it was in code,” speculated her husband. “Who’s the foreign gentleman he’s bringing?”

“Oh, that’s a kind of special hawthorn – I looked it up. But a bottle of champagne, and a compass, and a sardine tin opener! What possible connexion is there between them?”

“A very resourceful man might uncork a bottle of champagne with a sardine tin opener,” he suggested.

“And find his way home afterwards by means of a mariner’s compass?” she retorted. “No, Roy dear, you are not a sleuth-hound. We had better have our lunch.”

They lunched, but if the subject of Carrados had been tabooed the meal would have been a silent one.

“I have a compass on an old watch-chain somewhere,” volunteered Bellmark.

“And I have a tin opener in the form of a bull’s head,” contributed Elsie.

“But we have no champagne, I suppose?”

“How could we have, Roy? We never have had any. Shall you mind going down to the shops for a bottle?”

“You really think that we ought?”

“Of course we must, Roy. We don’t know what mightn’t happen if we didn’t. Uncle Louis said that they once failed to stop a jewel robbery because the jeweller neglected to wipe his shoes on the shop doormat, as Mr Carrados had told him to do. Suppose Johns is a desperate anarchist and he succeeded in blowing up Buckingham Palace because we – ”

“All right. A small bottle, eh?”

“No. A large one. Quite a large one. Don’t you see how exciting it is becoming?”

“If you are excited already you don’t need much champagne,” argued her husband.

Nevertheless he strolled down to the leading wine-shop after lunch and returned with his purchase modestly draped in the light summer overcoat that he carried on his arm. Elsie Bellmark, who had quite abandoned her previous unconcern, in the conviction that “something was going to happen,” spent the longest afternoon that she could remember, and even Bellmark, in spite of his continual adjurations to her to “look at the matter logically,” smoked five cigarettes in place of his usual Saturday afternoon pipe and neglected to do any gardening.

At exactly six-forty-five a motor car was heard approaching. Elsie made a desperate rally to become the self-possessed hostess again. Bellmark was favourably impressed by such marked punctuality. Then a Regent Street delivery van bowled past their window and Elsie almost wept.

The suspense was not long, however. Less than five minutes later another vehicle raised the dust of the quiet suburban road, and this time a private car stopped at their gate.

“Can you see any policemen inside?” whispered Elsie.

Parkinson got down and opening the door took out a small tree which he carried up to the porch and there deposited. Carrados followed.

“At all events there isn’t much wrong,” said Bellmark. “He’s smiling all the time.”

“No, it isn’t really a smile,” explained Elsie; “it’s his normal expression.”

She went out into the hall just as the front door was opened.

“It is the ‘Scarlet-fruited thorn’ of North America,” Bellmark heard the visitor remarking. “Both the flowers and the berries are wonderfully good. Do you think that you would permit me to choose the spot for it, Mrs Bellmark?”

Bellmark joined them in the hall and was introduced.

“We mustn’t waste any time,” he suggested. “There is very little light left.”

“True,” agreed Carrados. “And Coccinea requires deep digging.”

They walked through the house, and turning to the right passed into the region of the vegetable garden. Carrados and Elsie led the way, the blind man carrying the tree, while Bellmark went to his outhouse for the required tools.

“We will direct our operations from here,” said Carrados, when they were half-way along the walk. “You told me of a thin iron pipe that you had traced to somewhere in the middle of the garden. We must locate the end of it exactly.”

“My rosary!” sighed Elsie, with premonition of disaster, when she had determined the spot as exactly as she could. “Oh, Mr Carrados!”

“I am sorry, but it might be worse,” said Carrados inflexibly. “We only require to find the elbow-joint. Mr Bellmark will investigate with as little disturbance as possible.”

For five minutes Bellmark made trials with a pointed iron. Then he cleared away the soil of a small circle and at about a foot deep exposed a broken inch pipe.

“The fountain,” announced Carrados, when he had examined it. “You have the compass, Mr Bellmark?”

“Rather a small one,” admitted Bellmark.

“Never mind, you are a mathematician. I want you to strike a line due east.”

The reel and cord came into play and an adjustment was finally made from the broken pipe to a position across the vegetable garden.

“Now a point nine yards, nine feet and nine inches along it.”

“My onion bed!” cried Elsie tragically.

“Yes; it is really serious this time,” agreed Carrados. “I want a hole a yard across, digging here. May we proceed?”

Elsie remembered the words of her uncle’s letter – or what she imagined to be his letter – and possibly the preamble of selecting the spot had impressed her.

“Yes, I suppose so. Unless,” she added hopefully, “the turnip bed will do instead? They are not sown yet.”

“I am afraid that nowhere else in the garden will do,” replied Carrados.

Bellmark delineated the space and began to dig. After clearing to about a foot deep he paused.

“About deep enough, Mr Carrados?” he inquired.

“Oh, dear no,” replied the blind man.

“I am two feet down,” presently reported the digger.

“Deeper!” was the uncompromising response.

Another six inches were added and Bellmark stopped to rest.

“A little more and it won’t matter which way up we plant Coccinea,” he remarked.

“That is the depth we are aiming for,” replied Carrados.

Elsie and her husband exchanged glances. Then Bellmark drove his spade through another layer of earth.

“Three feet,” he announced, when he had cleared it.

Carrados advanced to the very edge of the opening.

“I think that if you would loosen another six inches with the fork we might consider the ground prepared,” he decided.

Bellmark changed his tools and began to break up the soil. Presently the steel prongs grated on some obstruction.

“Gently,” directed the blind watcher. “I think you will find a half-pound cocoa tin at the end of your fork.”

“Well, how on earth you spotted that – !” was wrung from Bellmark admiringly, as he cleared away the encrusting earth. “But I believe you are about right.” He threw up the object to his wife, who was risking a catastrophe in her eagerness to miss no detail. “Anything in it besides soil, Elsie?”

“She cannot open it yet,” remarked Carrados. “It is soldered down.”

“Oh, I say,” protested Bellmark.

“It is perfectly correct, Roy. The lid is soldered on.”

They looked at each other in varying degrees of wonder and speculation. Only Carrados seemed quite untouched.

“Now we may as well replace the earth,” he remarked.

“Fill it all up again?” asked Bellmark.

“Yes; we have provided a thoroughly disintegrated subsoil. That is the great thing. A depth of six inches is sufficient merely for the roots.”

There was only one remark passed during the operation.

“I think I should plant the tree just over where the tin was,” Carrados suggested. “You might like to mark the exact spot.” And there the hawthorn was placed.

Bellmark, usually the most careful and methodical of men, left the tools where they were, in spite of a threatening shower. Strangely silent, Elsie led the way back to the house and taking the men into the drawing-room switched on the light.

“I think you have a tin opener, Mrs Bellmark?”

Elsie, who had been waiting for him to speak, almost jumped at the simple inquiry. Then she went into the next room and returned with the bull-headed utensil.

“Here it is,” she said, in a voice that would have amused her at any other time.

“Mr Bellmark will perhaps disclose our find.”

Bellmark put the soily tin down on Elsie’s best table-cover without eliciting a word of reproach, grasped it firmly with his left hand, and worked the opener round the top.

“Only paper!” he exclaimed, and without touching the contents he passed the tin into Carrados’s hands.

The blind man dexterously twirled out a little roll that crinkled pleasantly to the ear, and began counting the leaves with a steady finger.

“They’re bank-notes!” whispered Elsie in an awestruck voice. She caught sight of a further detail. “Bank-notes for a hundred pounds each. And there are dozens of them!”

“Fifty, there should be,” dropped Carrados between his figures. “Twenty-five, twenty-six – ”

“Good God,” murmured Bellmark; “that’s five thousand pounds!”

“Fifty,” concluded Carrados, straightening the edges of the sheaf. “It is always satisfactory to find that one’s calculations are exact.” He detached the upper ten notes and held them out. “Mrs Bellmark, will you accept one thousand pounds as a full legal discharge of any claim that you may have on this property?”

“Me – I?” she stammered. “But I have no right to any in any circumstances. It has nothing to do with us.”

“You have an unassailable moral right to a fair proportion, because without you the real owners would never have seen a penny of it. As regards your legal right” – he took out the thin pocket-book and extracting a business-looking paper spread it open on the table before them – “here is a document that concedes it. ‘In consideration of the valuable services rendered by Elsie Bellmark, etc., etc., in causing to be discovered and voluntarily surrendering the sum of five thousand pounds deposited and not relinquished by Alexis Metrobe, late of, etc., etc., deceased, Messrs Binstead & Polegate, solicitors, of 77a Bedford Row, acting on behalf of the administrator and next-of-kin of the said etc., etc., do hereby’ – well, that’s what they do. Signed, witnessed and stamped at Somerset House.”

“I suppose I shall wake presently,” said Elsie dreamily.

“It was for this moment that I ventured to suggest the third requirement necessary to bring our enterprise to a successful end,” said Carrados.

“Oh, how thoughtful of you!” cried Elsie. “Roy, the champagne.”

Five minutes later Carrados was explaining to a small but enthralled audience.

“The late Alexis Metrobe was a man of peculiar character. After seeing a good deal of the world and being many things, he finally embraced spiritualism, and in common with some of its most pronounced adherents he thenceforward abandoned what we should call ‘the common-sense view.’

“A few years ago, by the collation of the Book of Revelations, a set of Zadkiel’s Almanacs, and the complete works of Mrs Mary Baker Eddy, Metrobe discovered that the end of the world would take place on the tenth of October 1910. It therefore became a matter of urgent importance in his mind to ensure pecuniary provision for himself for the time after the catastrophe had taken place.”

“I don’t understand,” interrupted Elsie. “Did he expect to survive it?”

“You cannot understand, Mrs Bellmark, because it is fundamentally incomprehensible. We can only accept the fact by the light of cases which occasionally obtain prominence. Metrobe did not expect to survive, but he was firmly convinced that the currency of this world would be equally useful in the spirit-land into which he expected to pass. This view was encouraged by a lady medium at whose feet he sat. She kindly offered to transmit to his banking account in the Hereafter, without making any charge whatever, any sum that he cared to put into her hands for the purpose. Metrobe accepted the idea but not the offer. His plan was to deposit a considerable amount in a spot of which he alone had knowledge, so that he could come and help himself to it as required.”

“But if the world had come to an end – ?”

“Only the material world, you must understand, Mrs Bellmark. The spirit world, its exact impalpable counterpart, would continue as before and Metrobe’s hoard would be spiritually intact and available. That is the prologue.

“About a month ago there appeared a certain advertisement in a good many papers. I noticed it at the time and three days ago I had only to refer to my files to put my hand on it at once. It reads:

“‘Alexis Metrobe. Any servant or personal attendant of the late Alexis Metrobe of Fountain Court, Groat’s Heath, possessing special knowledge of his habits and movements may hear of something advantageous on applying to Binstead & Polegate, 77a Bedford Row, W.C.’

“The solicitors had, in fact, discovered that five thousand pounds’ worth of securities had been realized early in 1910. They readily ascertained that Metrobe had drawn that amount in gold out of his bank immediately after, and there the trace ended. He died six months later. There was no hoard of gold and not a shred of paper to show where it had gone, yet Metrobe lived very simply within his income. The house had meanwhile been demolished but there was no hint or whisper of any lucky find.

“Two inquirers presented themselves at 77a Bedford Row. They were informed of the circumstances and offered a reward, varying according to the results, for information that would lead to the recovery of the money. They are both described as thoughtful, slow-spoken men. Each heard the story, shook his head, and departed. The first caller proved to be John Foster, the ex-butler. On the following day Mr Irons, formerly gardener at the Court, was the applicant.

“I must now divert your attention into a side track. In the summer of 1910 Metrobe published a curious work entitled ‘The Flame beyond the Dome.’ In the main it is an eschatological treatise, but at the end he tacked on an epilogue, which he called ‘The Fable of the Chameleon.’ It is even more curious than the rest and with reason, for under the guise of a speculative essay he gives a cryptic account of the circumstances of the five thousand pounds and, what is more important, details the exact particulars of its disposal. His reason for so doing is characteristic of the man. He was conscious by experience that he possessed an utterly treacherous memory, and having had occasion to move the treasure from one spot to another he feared that when the time came his bemuddled shade would be unable to locate it. For future reference, therefore, he embodied the details in his book, and to make sure that plenty of copies should be in existence he circulated it by the only means in his power – in other words, he gave a volume to everyone he knew and to a good many people whom he didn’t.