reddened deeply with embarrassment at his friend’s mishap. Victim and
culprit stood the ordeal best.
“My unfortunate defect!” murmured Carrados with feeling. “How ever can
I----”
“I who have eyes ought to have looked after my guest better,” replied
Spinola with antique courtliness. He reduced Crediton with a glance of
quiet dignity and declined Carrados’s handkerchief with a reassuring
touch on the blind man’s arm. “No, no, my dear sir, if you will excuse
me for a few minutes. It is really nothing, really nothing, I do assure
you.”
He withdrew from the room to change. Copling began to prepare a
reassuring phrase to meet Carrados’s self-reproaches when they should
break forth again. But the blind man’s tone had altered; he was no
longer apologetic.
“Play them better,” he repeated to Crediton, as if there had been no
interruption, “and play under conditions that are equal. For instance,
it might be worth while making sure that a Japanese mask does not
conceal a pair of human eyes. If I were a loser I should be inclined to
have a look.”
Not until then did it occur to Sir Fergus that his friend’s clumsiness
had been a calculated ruse to force Spinola to withdraw for a few
minutes. Later on he might be able to admire the simple ingenuity of the
trick, but at that moment he almost hated Carrados for the cool
effrontery with which he had duped all their feelings.
No such subtleties, however, concerned Crediton. He stared at the blind
man, followed the indication of his gesture and all at once grasped the
significance of the hint.
“By George, I shouldn’t wonder if you aren’t right!” he exclaimed.
“There are one or two things----” Without further consideration he
rushed a table against the wall, swung up a chair on to it, and mounting
the structure began to wrench the details of the trophy from side to
side and up and down in his excited efforts to displace them.
“Hurry up,” urged Copling, more nervous than excited. “He won’t be
long.”
“Hurry up?” Crediton paused, panting from his furious efforts, and found
time to look down upon his accomplices. “I don’t think that it’s for us
to concern ourselves, by George!” he retorted. “Spinola had better hurry
up and bolt for it, I should say. There’s light behind here--a hole
through the wall. I believe the place is a regular swindling hell.”
His eyes went to the group of weapons again and the sight gave him a new
idea.
“Aha, what price this?” he cried, and pulling a short sword out of its
sheath he drove it in between mask and wall and levered the shell away,
nails and all. “By God, if the eyes aren’t a pair of opera-glasses! And
there’s a regular paraphernalia here----”
“So,” interrupted a quiet voice behind them, “you have been too clever
for an old man, Mr Carrados?”
Spinola had returned unheard and was regarding the work of detection
with the utmost benignness. Copling looked and felt ridiculously guilty;
the blind man betrayed no emotion at all and both were momentarily
silent. It fell to Crediton to voice retort.
“My I.O.U., if you don’t mind, Mr Spinola,” he demanded, tumbling down
from his perch and holding out an insistent hand.
“With great pleasure,” replied Spinola, picking it out from the contents
of the letter-rack. “Also,” he continued, referring to the contents of
his pocket-book, while his guest tore up the memorandum into very small
pieces and strewed them about the carpet, “also the sum of fifty-seven
pounds, thirteen shillings which I feel myself compelled to return to
you in spite of your invariable grace in losing. I have already rung;
you will find the front door waiting open for you, Mr Crediton.”
“‘Compelled’ is good,” sneered Crediton. “You will probably find a train
waiting for you at Charing Cross, Mr Spinola. I advise you to catch it
before the police arrive.” He nodded to the other two men and departed,
to spread the astounding news in the most interested quarters.
Spinola continued to beam irrepressible benevolence.
“You are equally censorious, if more polite than Mr Crediton in
expressing it, eh, my dear young friends?” he said.
“I thought that you were a genuine mathematician--I vouched for it,”
replied Sir Fergus with more regret than anything else. “And the extent
of your achievement has been to contrive a vulgar imposture--in the
guise of an ingenious inventor to swindle society by a sham automaton
that doesn’t even work.”
“You thought that--you still think that?”
“What else is there to think? We have seen with our own eyes.”
“And”--turning to his other guest--“Mr Carrados, who does not see?”
“I am waiting to hear,” replied the blind man.
“But you, Sir Fergus, you who are also--in an elementary way--a
mathematician, and one with whom I have conversed freely, you regard me
as a common swindler and think that this--this tawdry piece of
buffoonery that is only designed to appeal to the vapid craze for
novelty of your foolish friends--this is, as you say, the extent of my
achievement?”
Copling gave a warning cry and sprang forward, but it was too late to
avert what he saw coming. In his petulant annoyance at the comparison
Spinola had laid an emphasising hand upon Aurelius and half
unconsciously had given the figure a contemptuous push. It swayed,
seemed to poise for a second, and then toppling irretrievably forward
crashed to the floor with an impact that snapped the golden head from
off its shoulders and shook the room and the very house itself.
“There, there,” muttered the old man, as though he was doing no more
than regretting a broken tea-cup; “let it lie, let it lie. We have
finished our work together, Aurelius and I. Now let the whole world----”
It would have been too much to expect the remainder of the mysterious
household, whoever its members were, to ignore the tempestuous course of
events taking place within their midst. The door was opened suddenly and
a young lady, with consternation charged on every feature of her
attractive face, burst into the room. For the moment her eyes took in
only two figures of the curious group--the aged Spinola and his fallen
handiwork.
“Granda!” she cried, “whatever’s happened? What is it all? Oh, are you
hurt?”
“It is nothing, nothing at all; a mere contretemps of no importance,” he
reassured her quickly. Then, with a recurrence of his most grandiloquent
manner, he recalled her to the situation. “Mercia, our guests--Sir
Fergus Copling, Mr Carrados. Sir Fergus, Mr Carrados--Miss Dugard.”
“Then it _is_ Mercia!” articulated the bewildered baronet. “Mercia, you
here! What does it mean? What are you doing?”
“What are you doing, Sir Fergus?” retorted the girl in cold reproach.
“Is this the way you generally keep your promises? Gambling!”
“Well, really,” stammered the abashed gentleman, “I--I only----”
“Sir Fergus only played a game for a mere nominal stake, to demonstrate
the working to his friend,” interposed Spinola with a shrewd glance--a
curious blend of serpentine innocence and dove-like cunning--at the
estranged young people.
“And won,” added Sir Fergus _sotto voce_, as if that fact condoned his
offence.
“Won indeed!” flashed out Miss Dugard. “Of course you won--I let you. Do
you think that we wished to take money from you now?”
“You--_you_ let me!” muttered Sir Fergus helplessly. “Good heavens!”
“I am grateful that your consideration also extends to your friend’s
friend,” put in Carrados pleasantly.
Miss Dugard smiled darkly at the suavely-given thrust and showed her
pretty little teeth almost as though she would like to use them.
“There, there, that will do, my child,” said the old man indulgently.
“Sir Fergus and Mr Carrados are entitled to an explanation and they
shall have it. The moment is opportune; the work of a lifetime is
complete. You have seen, Sir Fergus, the sums that Aurelius--assisted,
as we will now admit, by a little external manipulation--has gathered
into our domestic exchequer. Where have they gone, these hundreds and
thousands that you may estimate? In lavish living and a costly
establishment? Observe this very ordinary apartment--the best the house
possesses. Recall the grounds through which you entered. Sum up the
simple hospitality of which you have partaken. In expensive personal
tastes and habits? I assure you, Sir Fergus, that I am a man of the most
frugal life; my granddaughter inherits the propensity. In what, then? In
advancing science, in benefitting humanity, in furthering human
progress. I am going to prove to you that I have perfected one of the
greatest mechanical inventions of all ages, and I ask you to credit the
plain statement that all my private fortune and all the winnings that
you have seen upon this table--with the exception of a bare margin for
the necessities of life--have been spent in perfecting it.”
He paused with a senile air of triumph and seemed to challenge comment.
“But surely,” ventured Copling, “surely on the strength of this you
would have had no difficulty in obtaining direct financial support.
Well, I myself----”
Spinola smiled a peculiar smile, shaking his head sagely.
“Take care, my generous young friend, take care. You may not quite
comprehend what you are saying.”
“Why?”
Still swayed by his own gentle amusement, the old man crossed the room
to a desk, selected a letter from a bulky pile and handed it to his
guest without a word.
Copling glanced at the heading and signature, then read the contents and
frowned annoyance.
“This is from my secretary,” he commented lamely.
“That is what a secretary is for, is it not--to save his employer
trouble?” insinuated Spinola. “He took me for a crank or a
begging-letter impostor, of course.” Then came the pathetic whisper.
“They _all_ took me for that.”
Sir Fergus folded the letter and handed it back again.
“I am very sorry,” he said simply.
“It was natural, perhaps. Still, something had to be done. My work was
all arrested. I could no longer pay my two skilled mechanics. Time was
pressing. I am a very old man--I am more than a hundred years old----”
The girl shot a sudden, half-frightened, pleading glance at her lover,
then at Mr Carrados. It checked the exclamation that would have come
from Copling; the blind man passed the monstrous claim without betraying
astonishment.
“--a very old man and my work was yet incomplete. So I contrived
Aurelius. I could, of course, have perfected a model that would have
done all that has been claimed for this--mere child’s play to me--but
what would have been the good? Such a mechanical player would have lost
as often as he would have won. Hence our little subterfuge, a means
amply justified by so glorious an end.”
He was smiling happily--the weeks of elaborate deception were, at the
worst, an innocent ruse to him--and concluded with an emphasising nod to
each in turn, to Mercia, who regarded him with implicit faith and
veneration, to Copling, who at that moment surely had ample
justification for declaring to himself that he was dashed if he knew
what to think, and to Carrados, whose sightless look agreed to
everything and gave nothing in reply. Then the old man stood up and
produced his keys.
“Come, my friends,” he continued; “the moment has arrived. I am going to
show you now what no other eye has yet been privileged to see. My
mechanics worked on the parts under my instruction, but in ignorance of
the end. Even Mercia--a good girl, a very clever girl--has never yet
passed this door.” He had led them through the house and brought them to
a brick-built, windowless shed, isolated in the garden at the back. “I
little thought that the first demonstration----But things have fallen
so, things have fallen, and one never knows. Perhaps it is for the
best.” An iron door had yielded to his patent key. He entered, turned on
a bunch of electric lights and stood aside. “Behold!”
The room was a workshop, fitted with the highly finished devices of
metal-working and littered with the scraps and débris of their use. In
the middle stood a more elaborate contrivance--the finished product of
brass and steel--a cube scarcely larger than a packing-case, but
seemingly filled with wheels and rods, relay upon relay, and row after
row, all giving the impression of exquisite precision in workmanship and
astonishing intricacy of detail.
“Why, it’s a calculating machine,” exclaimed Sir Fergus, going forward
with immense interest.
“It is an analytical engine, or, to use the more common term, a
calculating machine, as you say,” assented the inventor. “I need hardly
remind you, of course, that one does not spend a lifetime and a fortune
in contriving a machine to do single calculations, however involved, but
for the more useful and practical purpose of working out involved series
with absolute precision. Still, for the purpose of a trial demonstration
we will begin with an ordinary proposition, if you, Sir Fergus, will
kindly set one. My engine now is constructed to work to fifty places of
figures and twelve orders of difference.”
“If you have accomplished that,” remarked Copling, accepting the pencil
and the slip of paper offered him, “you have surpassed the dreams of
Babbage, Mr Spinola.”
There was a sudden gasp from Mercia, but it passed unheeded in the keen
excitement of the great occasion. Spinola received the paper with its
row of signs and figures and turned to operate his engine. He paused to
look back gleefully.
“So you never guessed, Sir Fergus?” he chuckled cunningly. “We kept the
secret well, but it doesn’t matter now. _I am Charles Babbage!_”
The noise of wheel and connecting-rod cut off the chance of a reply,
even if anyone had been prepared to make one. But no one, in that
bewildering moment, was.
“The solution,” announced Spinola with a flourish, and he passed a
little slip of metal stamped with a row of figures into Sir Fergus’s
hand. Then, with a curious indifference to their verdict, he turned away
from the group and applied himself to the machine again.
“What is it? Is it not correct?” demanded Mercia in an agonised whisper.
She had not looked at the solution, but at her lover’s face, and her
hand suddenly gripped his arm.
“It is incomprehensible,” replied Sir Fergus, dropping his voice so that
the old man could not overhear. “It isn’t a matter of right or wrong--it
is a mere farrago of nonsense.”
“But harmless nonsense--quite harmless,” interposed Carrados softly from
behind them. “Come, we can safely leave him here; you will always be
able to leave him safely here. Help Miss Dugard out, Copling. It is
better, believe me, to leave him now.”
Spinola did not turn. He was bending over the machine to which he had
given life, brain and fortune, touching its wheels and sliding rods with
loving fingers. They passed silently from his presence and crept back to
the deserted salon, where the deposed head of Aurelius leered cynically
at them from the floor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII
The Kingsmouth Spy Case
“Not guilty, my lord!” There was a general laugh in the lounge of the
Rose and Plumes, the comfortable old Cliffhurst hotel that upheld the
ancient traditions unaffected by the flaunting rivalry of Grand or
Metropole. The jest hidden in the retort was a small one, but it was at
the expense of a pompous, pretentious bore, and the speaker was a
congenial wag who had contrived in the course of a few weeks to win a
facile popularity on all sides.
Across the room one of the later arrivals--“the blind gentleman,” as he
was sympathetically alluded to, for few had occasion to learn his
name--turned slightly towards the direction of the voice and added a
pleasantly appreciative smile to the common tribute. Then his attention
again settled on the writing-table at which he sat, and for the next few
minutes his pencil travelled smoothly, with an occasional pause for
consideration, over the block of telegraphic forms that he had picked
out. At the end of ten minutes he rang for a waiter and directed that
his own man should be sent to him.
“Here are three telegrams to go off, Parkinson,” he said in the suave,
agreeable voice that scarcely ever varied, no matter what the occasion
might be. “You will take them yourself at once. After that I shall not
require you again to-night.”
The attendant thanked him and withdrew. The blind man closed his
letter-case, retired from the writing-table to the obscurity of a
sequestered corner and sat unnoticed with his sightless eyes, that
always seemed to be quietly smiling, looking placidly into illimitable
space as he visualised the scene before him, and the laughter, the
conversation and the occasional whisper went on unchecked around.
* * * * *
Max Carrados had journeyed down to Cliffhurst a few days previously,
good-naturedly, but without any enthusiasm. Indeed it had needed all Mr
Carlyle’s persuasive eloquence to move him.
“The Home Office, Max,” urged the inquiry agent, “one of the premier
departments of the State! Consider the distinction! Surely you will not
refuse a commission of that nature direct from the Government?”
Carrados, looking a little deeper than a Melton overcoat and a glossy
silk hat, had once declared his friend to be the most incurably romantic
of idealists. He now took a malicious pleasure in reducing the situation
to its crudest terms.
“Why can’t the local police arrest a solitary inoffensive German spy
themselves?” he inquired.
“To tell the truth, Max, I believe that there are two or three fingers
in that pie at the present moment,” replied Mr Carlyle confidentially.
“It doesn’t concern the Home Office alone. And after that Guitry Bay
fiasco and the unmerciful chaffing that we got in the German
papers--with rather a nasty rap or two over the knuckles from the
_Kölnische Zeitung_--both Whitehall and Downing Street are in a blue
funk lest they should do the wrong thing, either let the man slip away
with the papers or arrest him without them.”
“Contingencies with which I am sure you could grapple successfully,
Louis.”
Mr Carlyle’s bland complacency did not suggest that he, at any rate, had
any doubt on that score.
“But, you know, Max, I am pledged to carry through the Vandeeming affair
here in town. And--um--well, the Secretary did make a point of you being
the man they relied on.”
“Oh! someone there must read the papers, Louis. But I wonder ... why
they did not communicate with me direct.”
Mr Carlyle contrived to look extremely ingenuous. Even he occasionally
forgot that looks went for nothing with Carrados.
“I imagine that they thought that a friendly intermediary--or something
of that sort.”
“Possibly Inspector Beedel hinted to the Commissioner that you would
have more influence with me than a whole Government Department?” smiled
Carrados. “And so you have, Louis; so you have. If it’s your ambition to
get the Government on your books you can tell your clients that I’ll
take on their job!”
“By Jupiter, Max, you are a good fellow if ever there was one!”
exclaimed Mr Carlyle with gentlemanly emotion. “But I owe too much to
you already.”
“This won’t make it any more, then. I have another reason, quite
different, for going.”
“Of course you have,” assented the visitor heartily. “You are not one to
talk about patriotism, and all that, but you can’t hoodwink me with your
dilettantish pose, Max, and I know that deep down in your nature there
is a passionate devotion to your country----”
“Thank you, Louis,” interrupted Carrados. “It is very nice to learn
that. But I am really going to Kingsmouth because there’s a man there--a
curate--who has the second best private collection in Europe of
autonomous coins of Thessaly.”
For a few seconds Mr Carlyle looked his unutterable feelings. When he
did speak it was with crushing deliberation.
“‘Mrs Carrados,’ I shall say--if ever there is a Mrs Carrados, Max--‘Mrs
Carrados, two things are necessary for your domestic happiness. In the
first place, pack up your husband’s tetradrachms in a brown-paper parcel
and send them with your compliments to the British Museum. In the
second, at the earliest possible opportunity, exact from him an oath
that he will never touch another Greek coin as long as you both live.’”
“If ever there is a Mrs Carrados,” was the quick retort, “I shall
probably be independent of the consolation of Greek coins as, also,
Louis, of the distraction of criminal investigation. In the meantime,
what are you going to tell me about this case?”
Mr Carlyle at once became alert. He would have become absolutely
professional had not Carrados tactfully obtruded the cigar-box. The
digression, and the pleasant aroma that followed it, brought him back
again to the merely human.
“It began, like a good many other cases, with an anonymous letter.” He
took a slip of paper from his pocket-book and handed it to Carrados.
“Here is a copy.”
“A copy!” The blind man ran his finger lightly along the lines and read
aloud what he found there:
“A friend warns you that an attempt is being successfully made on
behalf of another Power to obtain naval information of vital
importance. You have a traitor within your gates.”
Then he crumpled up the paper and dropped it half-contemptuously into
the waste-paper basket. “A copy is no use to us, Louis,” he remarked.
“Indeed it is worse than useless; it is misleading.”
“That is all they had here. The original was addressed to the
Admiral-Superintendent at the Kingsmouth Dockyard. This was sent up with
the report. But I am assured that the other contained no clue to the
writer’s identity.”
“Not even a watermark, ‘Jones, stationer, High Street, Kingsmouth’!”
said Carrados dryly. “Really, Louis! Every piece of paper contains at
least four palpable clues.”
“And what are they, pray?”
“A smell, a taste, an appearance and a texture. This one, in addition,
bears ink, and with it all the characteristics of an individual
handwriting.”
“In capitals, Max,” Mr Carlyle reminded him. “Our anonymous friend is up
to that.”
“Yes; I wonder who first started that venerable illusion.”
“Illusion?”
“Certainly an illusion. Capitals, or ‘printed handwriting’ as one sees
them called, are just as idiomorphic as a cursive form.”
“But much less available for comparison. How are you going to obtain a
specimen of anyone’s printed handwriting for comparison?”
Carrados reflected silently for a moment.
“I think I should ask anyone I suspected to do one for me,” he replied.
Carlyle resisted the temptation to laugh outright, but mordacity lurked
in his voice.
“And you imagine that the writer of this, who evidently has good reason
for anonymity, will be simple enough to comply?”
“I think so; if I ask him nicely.”
“Look here, Max, I will bet you a box of any cigars you care to
name----”
“Yes, Louis?”
Mr Carlyle had hesitated. He was recalling one or two things from the
past, and on those occasions his friend’s unemotional face had looked
just as devoid of guile as it did now.
“No, Max, I won’t bet this time, but I should like to send across a
small box of Monterey Coronas for Parkinson to pack among your things.
Well, so much for the letter.”
“Not quite all,” interposed Carrados. “I must have the original.”
The visitor made a note in his pocket diary.
“It shall be sent to you at once. I stipulated an absolutely free hand
for you. Oh, I took a tolerably high tone! I can assure you, Max. You
will find everything at Kingsmouth very pleasant, and there, of course,
you will learn all the details. Here they don’t seem to know very much.
I was not informed whether the Dockyard authorities had already had
their suspicions aroused or whether the letter was the first hint. At
all events they acted with tolerable promptness. The letter, you will
see, is undated, but it was delivered on the seventeenth--last Thursday.
On Friday they put their hands on a man in the construction
department--a fellow called Brown. He made no fight of it when he was
cornered, but although he owned up to the charge of betraying
information, there was one important link that he could not supply and
one that he would not. He could not tell them who the spy collecting the
information was, because there was an intermediary; and he would not
betray the intermediary on any terms. And, by gad! I for one can’t help
respecting the beggar for that remnant of loyalty.”
“A woman?” suggested Carrados.