ERNEST BRAMAH Ultimate Collection: 20+ Novels & Short Stories in One Volume. Bramah Ernest

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