Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah (best e book reader android .TXT) 📖

“Dear Mr Carrados,—Some time after you had left me that Sunday afternoon, a man came in the dark to the door and asked for me. I did not see his face for he kept in the shade, but his figure was not very unlike that of your servant Parkinson. A packet was put into my hands and he was gone without a word. From this I imagine that perhaps you did not leave quite as soon as you had intended.

“Thank you very much indeed for the letters. I was glad to have the miserable things, to drop them into the fire, and to see them pass utterly out of my own and everybody else’s life. I wonder who else in the world would have done so much for a forlorn creature who just flashed across a few days of his busy life? and then I wonder who else could.

“But there is something else for which I thank you now far, far more, and that is for saving me from the blindness of my own passionate folly. When I look back on the abyss of meanness, treachery and guilt into which I would have wilfully cast myself, and been condemned to live in all my life, I can scarcely trust myself to write.

“I will not say that I do not suffer now. I think I shall for many years to come, but all the bitterness and I think all the hardness have been drawn out.

“You will see that I am writing from Liverpool. I have taken a second-class passage to Canada and we sail to-night. Willie, who returned to Barony last week, has lent me all the money I shall need until I find work. Do not be apprehensive. It is not with the vague uncertainty of an indifferent typist or a downtrodden governess that I go, but as an efficient domestic servant—a capable cook, housemaid or ‘general,’ as need be. It sounds rather incredible at first, does it not, but such things happen, and I shall get on very well.

“Good-bye, Mr Carrados; I shall remember you very often and very gratefully.

“Madeline Whitmarsh.

“P.S.—Yes, there is friendship at first sight.”

Carrados had rung up Mr Carlyle soon after the inquiry agent had reached his office in Bampton Street on a certain morning in April. Mr Carlyle’s face at once assumed its most amiable expression as he recognized his friend’s voice.

“Yes, Max,” he replied, in answer to the call, “I am here and at the top of form, thanks. Glad to know that you are back from Trescoe. Is there—anything?”

“I have a couple of men coming in this evening whom you might like to meet,” explained Carrados. “Manoel the Zambesia explorer is one and the other an East-End slum doctor who has seen a few things. Do you care to come round to dinner?”

“Delighted,” warbled Mr Carlyle, without a moment’s consideration. “Charmed. Your usual hour, Max?” Then the smiling complacence of his face suddenly changed and the wire conveyed an exclamation of annoyance. “I am really very sorry, Max, but I have just remembered that I have an engagement. I fear that I must deny myself after all.”

“Is it important?”

“No,” admitted Mr Carlyle. “Strictly speaking, it is not in the least important; this is why I feel compelled to keep it. It is only to dine with my niece. They have just got into an absurd doll’s house of a villa at Groat’s Heath and I had promised to go there this evening.”

“Are they particular to a day?”

There was a moment’s hesitation before Mr Carlyle replied.

“I am afraid so, now it is fixed,” he said. “To you, Max, it will be ridiculous or incomprehensible that a third to dinner—and he only a middle-aged uncle—should make a straw of difference. But I know that in their bijou way it will be a little domestic event to Elsie—an added anxiety in giving the butcher an order, an extra course for dinner, perhaps; a careful drilling of the one diminutive maid-servant, and she is such a charming little woman—eh? Who, Max? No! No! I did not say the maid-servant; if I did it is the fault of this telephone. Elsie is such a delightful little creature that, upon my soul, it would be too bad to fail her now.”

“Of course it would, you old humbug,” agreed Carrados, with sympathetic laughter in his voice. “Well, come to-morrow instead. I shall be alone.”

“Oh, besides, there is a special reason for going, which for the moment I forgot,” explained Mr Carlyle, after accepting the invitation. “Elsie wishes for my advice with regard to her next-door neighbour. He is an elderly man of retiring disposition and he makes a practice of throwing kidneys over into her garden.”

“Kittens! Throwing kittens?”

“No, no, Max. Kidneys. Stewed k-i-d-n-e-y-s. It is a little difficult to explain plausibly over a badly vibrating telephone, I admit, but that is what Elsie’s letter assured me, and she adds that she is in despair.”

“At all events it makes the lady quite independent of the butcher, Louis!”

“I have no further particulars, Max. It may be a solitary diurnal offering, or the sky may at times appear to rain kidneys. If it is a mania the symptoms may even have become more pronounced and the man is possibly showering beef-steaks across by this time. I will make full inquiry and let you know.”

“Do,” assented Carrados, in the same light-hearted spirit. “Mrs Nickleby’s neighbourly admirer expressed his feelings by throwing cucumbers, you remember, but this man puts him completely in the shade.”

It had not got beyond the proportions of a jest to either of them when they rang off—one of those whimsical occurrences in real life that sound so fantastic in outline. Carrados did not give the matter another thought until the next evening when his friend’s arrival revived the subject.

“And the gentleman next door?” he inquired among his greetings. “Did the customary offering arrive while you were there?”

“No,” admitted Mr Carlyle, beaming pleasantly upon all the familiar appointments of the room, “it did not, Max. In fact, so diffident has the mysterious philanthropist become, that no one at Fountain Cottage has been able to catch sight of him lately, although I am told that Scamp—Elsie’s terrier—betrays a very self-conscious guilt and suspiciously muddy paws every morning.”

“Fountain Cottage?”

“That is the name of the toy villa.”

“Yes, but Fountain something, Groat’s Heath—Fountain Court: wasn’t that where Metrobe——?”

“Yes, yes, to be sure, Max. Metrobe the traveller, the writer and scientist——”

“Scientist!”

“Well, he took up spiritualism or something, didn’t he? At any rate, he lived at Fountain Court, an old red-brick house in a large neglected garden there, until his death a couple of years ago. Then, as Groat’s Heath had suddenly become a popular suburb with a