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

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