Max Carrados, Ernest Bramah [children's books read aloud .TXT] 📗

occasional click of a horse’s shoe on stone and the rattle of a head-stall chain through the manger ring told them that they were in the chaff-pen at the back of the stable.

Carrados stretched out his hand and touched the wall with a single finger.

“We need go no farther,” he remarked, and as they resumed their way across the field he took out a handkerchief to wipe the taste of whitewash off his tongue.

Madeline had spoken of the gradual decay of High Barn, but Carrados was hardly prepared for the poverty-stricken desolation which Parkinson described as they approached the homestead on the following afternoon. He had purposely selected a way that took them across many of young Whitmarsh’s ill-stocked fields, fields in which sedge and charlock wrote an indictment of neglected drains and half-hearted tillage. On the land, the gates and hedges had been broken and unkempt; the buildings, as they passed through the farmyard, were empty and showed here and there a skeletonry of bare rafters to the sky.

“Starved,” commented the blind man, as he read the signs. “The thirsty owner and the hungry land: they couldn’t both be fed.”

Although it was afternoon the bolts and locks of the front door had to be unfastened in answer to their knock. When at last the door was opened a shrivelled little old woman, rather wicked-looking in a comic way, and rather begrimed, stood there.

“Mr Frank Whitmarsh?” she replied to Carrados’s polite inquiry; “oh yes, he lives here. Frank,” she called down the passage, “you’re wanted.”

“What is it, mother?” responded a man’s full, strong voice rather lazily.

“Come and see!” and the old creature ogled Carrados with her beady eyes as though the situation constituted an excellent joke between them.

There was the sound of a chair being moved and at the end of the passage a tall man appeared in his shirt sleeves.

“I am a stranger to you,” explained Carrados, “but I am staying at the Bridge Inn and I heard of your wonderful escape on Thursday. I was so interested that I have taken the liberty of coming across to congratulate you on it.”

“Oh, come in, come in,” said Whitmarsh. “Yes ... it was a sort of miracle, wasn’t it?”

He led the way back into the room he had come from, half kitchen, half parlour. It at least had the virtue of an air of rude comfort, and some of the pewter and china that ornamented its mantelpiece and dresser would have rejoiced a collector’s heart.

“You find us a bit rough,” apologized the young man, with something of contempt towards his surroundings. “We weren’t expecting visitors.”

“And I was hesitating to come because I thought that you would be surrounded by your friends.”

This very ordinary remark seemed to afford Mrs Whitmarsh unbounded entertainment and for quite a number of seconds she was convulsed with silent amusement at the idea.

“Shut up, mother,” said her dutiful son. “Don’t take any notice of her,” he remarked to his visitors, “she often goes on like that. The fact is,” he added, “we Whitmarshes aren’t popular in these parts. Of course that doesn’t trouble me; I’ve seen too much of things. And, taken as a boiling, the Whitmarshes deserve it.”

“Ah, wait till you touch the coal, my boy, then you’ll see,” put in the old lady, with malicious triumph.

“I reckon we’ll show them then, eh, mother?” he responded bumptiously. “Perhaps you’ve heard of that, Mr——?”

“Carrados—Wynn Carrados. This is my man, Parkinson. I have to be attended because my sight has failed me. Yes, I had heard something about coal. Providence seems to be on your side just now, Mr Whitmarsh. May I offer you a cigarette?”

“Thanks, I don’t mind for once in a way.”

“They’re Turkish; quite innocuous, I believe.”

“Oh, it isn’t that. I can smoke cutty with any man, I reckon, but the paper affects my lips. I make my own and use a sort of paper with an end that doesn’t stick.”

“The paper is certainly a drawback sometimes,” agreed Carrados. “I’ve found that. Might I try one of yours?”

They exchanged cigarettes and Whitmarsh returned to the subject of the tragedy.

“This has made a bit of a stir, I can tell you,” he remarked, with complacency.

“I am sure it would. Well, it was the chief topic of conversation when I was in London.”

“Is that a fact?” Avowedly indifferent to the opinion of his neighbours, even Whitmarsh was not proof against the pronouncement of the metropolis. “What do they say about it up there?”

“I should be inclined to think that the interest centres round the explanation you will give at the inquest of the cause of the quarrel.”

“There! What did I tell you?” exclaimed Mrs Whitmarsh.

“Be quiet, mother. That’s easily answered, Mr Carrados. There was a bit of duck shooting that lay between our two places. But perhaps you saw that in the papers?”

“Yes,” admitted Carrados, “I saw that. Frankly, the reason seemed inadequate to so deadly a climax.”

“What did I say?” demanded the irrepressible dame. “They won’t believe it.”

The young man cast a wrathful look in his mother’s direction and turned again to the visitor.

“That’s because you don’t know Uncle William. Any reason was good enough for him to quarrel over. Here, let me give you an instance. When I went in on Thursday he was smoking a pipe. Well, after a bit I took out a cigarette and lit it. I’m damned if he didn’t turn round and start on me for that. How does that strike you for one of your own family, Mr Carrados?”

“Unreasonable, I am bound to admit. I am afraid that I should have been inclined to argue the point. What did you do, Mr Whitmarsh?”

“I hadn’t gone there to quarrel,” replied the young man, half sulky at the recollection. “It was his house. I threw it into the fireplace.”

“Very obliging,” said Carrados. “But, if I may say so, it isn’t so much a matter of speculation why he should shoot you as why he should shoot himself.”

“The gentleman seems friendly. Better ask his advice, Frank,” put in the old woman in a penetrating whisper.

“Stow it, mother!” said Whitmarsh sharply. “Are you crazy? Her idea of a coroner’s inquest,” he explained to Carrados, with easy contempt, “is that I am being tried for murder. As a matter of fact, Uncle William was a very passionate man, and, like many of that kind, he frequently went beyond himself. I don’t doubt that he was sure he’d killed me, for he was a good shot and the force of the blow sent me backwards. He was a very proud man too, in a way—wouldn’t stand correction or any kind of authority, and when he realized what he’d done and saw in a flash that he would be tried and hanged for it, suicide seemed the easiest way out of his difficulties, I suppose.”

“Yes; that sounds reasonable enough,” admitted Carrados.

“Then you don’t think there will be any trouble, sir?” insinuated Mrs Whitmarsh anxiously.

Frank had already professed his indifference to local opinion, but Carrados was conscious that both of them hung rather breathlessly on to his reply.

“Why, no,” he declared weightily. “I should see no reason for anticipating any. Unless,” he added thoughtfully, “some clever lawyer was instructed to insist that there must be more in the dispute than appears on the surface.”

“Oh, them lawyers, them lawyers!” moaned the old lady in a panic. “They can make you say anything.”

“They can’t make me say anything.” A cunning look came into his complacent face. “And, besides, who’s going to engage a lawyer?”

“The family of the deceased gentleman might wish to do so.”

“Both of the sons are abroad and could not be back in time.”

“But is there not a daughter here? I understood so.”

Whitmarsh gave a short, unpleasant laugh and turned to look at his mother.

“Madeline won’t. You may bet your bottom tikkie it’s the last thing she would want.”

The little old creature gazed admiringly at her big showy son and responded with an appreciative grimace that made her look more humorously rat-like than ever.

“He! he! Missie won’t,” she tittered. “That would never do. He! he!” Wink succeeded nod and meaning smile until she relapsed into a state of quietness; and Parkinson, who had been fascinated by her contortions, was unable to decide whether she was still laughing or had gone to sleep.

Carrados stayed a few more minutes and before they left he asked to see the watch.

“A unique memento, Mr Whitmarsh,” he remarked, examining it. “I should think this would become a family heirloom.”

“It’s no good for anything else,” said Whitmarsh practically. “A famous time-keeper it was, too.”

“The fingers are both gone.”

“Yes; the glass was broken, of course, and they must have caught in the cloth of my pocket and ripped off.”

“They naturally would; it was ten minutes past nine when the shot was fired.”

The young man thought and then nodded.

“About that,” he agreed.

“Nearer than ‘about,’ if your watch was correct. Very interesting, Mr Whitmarsh. I am glad to have seen the watch that saved your life.”

Instead of returning to the inn Carrados directed Parkinson to take the road to Barony. Madeline was at home, and from the sound of voices it appeared that she had other visitors, but she came out to Carrados at once, and at his request took him into the empty dining-room while Parkinson stayed in the hall.

“Yes?” she said eagerly.

“I have come to tell you that I must throw up my brief,” he said. “There is nothing more to be done and I return to town to-night.”

“Oh!” she stammered helplessly. “I thought—I thought——”

“Your cousin did not abstract the revolver when he was here on Thursday, Miss Whitmarsh. He did not at his leisure fire a bullet into his own watch to make it appear, later in the day, as if he had been attacked. He did not reload the cartridge with a blank charge. He did not deliberately shoot your father and then fire off the blank cartridge. He was attacked and the newspaper version is substantially correct. The whole fabric so delicately suggested by inference and innuendo falls to pieces.”

“Then you desert me, Mr Carrados?” she said, in a low, bitter voice.

“I have seen the watch—the watch that saved Whitmarsh’s life,” he continued, unmoved. “It would save it again if necessary. It indicates ten minutes past nine—the time to a minute at which it is agreed the shot was fired. By what prescience was he to know at what exact minute his opportunity would occur?”

“When I saw the watch on Thursday night the fingers were not there.”

“They are not, but the shaft remains. It is of an old-fashioned pattern and it will only take the fingers in one position. That position indicates ten minutes past nine.”

“Surely it would have been an easy matter to have altered that afterwards?”

“In this case fate has been curiously systematic, Miss Whitmarsh. The bullet that shattered the works has so locked the action that it will not move a fraction this way or that.”

“There is something more than this—something that I do not understand,” she persisted. “I think I have a right to know.”

“Since you insist, there is. There is the wad of the blank cartridge that you fired in the outbuilding.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, in the moment of startled undefence, “how do you—how can you——”

“You must leave the conjurer his few tricks for effect. Of course you naturally would fire it where the precious pellet could not get lost—the paper you steamed off the cigarette that Whitmarsh threw into the empty fire-grate; and of course the place must be some distance from the house or even that slight report might occasion remark.”

“Yes,” she confessed, in a sudden abandonment to weary indifference, “it has been useless. I was a fool to set my cleverness against yours. Now, I suppose, Mr Carrados, you will have to hand me over to justice?

“Well; why don’t you say something?” she demanded impatiently, as he offered no comment.

“People frequently put me in this embarrassing position,” he explained diffidently, “and throw the responsibility on me. Now a number of years ago a large and stately building was set up in London and it was beautifully called ‘The Royal Palace of Justice.’ That was its official name and that was what it was to be; but very soon people got into the way of calling it the Law Courts, and to-day, if you asked a Londoner to direct you to the Palace of Justice he would undoubtedly set you down as a religious maniac. You see my difficulty?”

“It is very strange,” she said, intent upon her own reflections, “but I do not feel a bit ashamed to you of what I have done. I do not even feel afraid to tell you all about it, although of some of that I must certainly be ashamed. Why is it?”

“Because I am blind?”

“Oh no,” she replied very positively.

Carrados smiled at her decision but he did not seek to explain that when he could no longer see the faces of men the power was gradually given to him of looking into their hearts, to which some in their turn—strong, free spirits—instinctively responded.

“There is such a