MAX CARRADOS MYSTERIES - Complete Series in One Volume. Bramah Ernest

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,