cartridges.
“When you get back, throw out the old ones and reload with these to
oblige me,” he said. “Don’t forget.”
“Right,” assented Tulloch, examining them with interest; “but they look
just like mine. What are they?--something new?”
“Not at all; but we know that they are charged and you can rely on them
going off if they are fired.”
“What a chap you are,” declared Tulloch with something of the admiring
pity that summed up the general attitude towards Max Carrados. “Well,
for that matter, I must be going off myself, old man. I’m hoping for a
letter about that little job and if it comes I want to answer it
to-night. You’ve given me a fine time and we’ve had a great talk.”
“I’m glad we met. And if you go away suddenly don’t leave it to chance
the next time you are back.” He did not seek to detain his guest, for he
knew that Tulloch was building somewhat on the South American
appointment. “Shall Harris run you home?”
“Not a bit of it. I’ll enjoy a walk to the station, and these Tubes of
yours’ll land me within me loose-box by eleven. It’s a fine place, this
London, after all.”
They had reached the front door, opened it and were standing for a
moment looking towards the yellow cloud that arched the west end of the
city like the mirage of a dawn.
“Well, good-bye, old man,” said Tulloch heartily, and they shook hands.
At the touch an extraordinary impulse swept over Carrados to drag his
friend back into the house, to implore him to remain the night at all
events, or to do something to upset the arranged order of things for the
next few hours. With the cessation of physical contact the vehemence of
the possession dwindled away, but the experience, short as it was, left
him white and shaken. He could not trust himself to speak; he waved his
hand and, turning quickly, went back to the room where they had sat
together to analyse the situation and to determine how to act. Presently
he rang for his man.
“Some notes were taken after that little touch in Holborn this
afternoon, Parkinson,” he said. “Have you the address of the leading
motor-bus driver among them?”
“The London General, sir?”
“Yes; the man who was the first to stop.”
Parkinson produced his memorandum book and referred to the latest of its
entries.
“He gave his private residence as 14 Cogg’s Lane, Brentford, sir.”
“Brentford! That is fortunate. I am going to see him to-night if
possible. You will come with me, Parkinson. Tell Harris to get out the
car that is the most convenient. What is the time?”
“Ten-seventeen, sir.”
“We will start in fifteen minutes. In the meanwhile just reach me down
that large book labelled ‘Xavier’ from the top shelf there.”
“Yes, sir. Very well, sir. I will convey your instructions to Harris,
sir.”
It was perhaps rather late for a casual evening call, but
not, apparently, too late for Cogg’s Lane, Brentford. Mr
Fitzwilliam--Parkinson had infused a faint note of protest into his
voice when he mentioned the bus-driver’s name--Mr Fitzwilliam was out,
but Mrs Fitzwilliam received the visitor with conspicuous felicity and
explained the circumstances. Fitzwilliam was of a genial, even playful,
disposition, but he had come home brooding and depressed. Mrs
Fitzwilliam had not taken any notice of it--she put it down to his
feet--but by cajolery and innuendo she had persuaded him to go to the
picture palace to be cheered up, and as it was now on the turn of eleven
he might be expected back at any moment. In the meantime the lady had a
favourite niece who was suffering--as the doctor himself confessed--from
a very severe and unusual form of adenoids. Carrados disclosed the fact
that the subject of adenoids was one that interested him deeply. He
knew, indeed, of a case that was thought by the patient’s parents to be
something out of the way, but even it, he admitted, was commonplace by
the side of the favourite niece. The minutes winged.
“That’s Fred,” said Mrs Fitzwilliam as the iron gate beyond the little
plot of beaten earth that had once been a garden gave its individual
note. “Seems strange that they should be so ignorant at a hospital,
doesn’t it?”
“Hallo, what now?” demanded Mr Fitzwilliam, entering.
Mrs Fitzwilliam made a sufficient introduction and waited for the
interest to develop. So far the point of Carrados’s visit had not
appeared.
“I believe that you know something about motors?” inquired the blind
man.
“Well, what if I do?” retorted the bus-driver. His attitude was
protective rather than intentionally offensive.
“If you do, I should be glad if you would look at the engine of my car.
It got shaken, I fancy, in a slight accident that we had in Holborn this
afternoon.”
“Oh!” The driver looked hard at Mr Carrados, but failed to get behind an
expression of mild urbanity. “Why didn’t you say so at first?” he
grumbled. “All right; I’ll trot round with you. Shan’t be long, missis.”
He led the way out and closed the door behind them, not ceasing to
regard his visitor with a distrustful curiosity. At the gate he stopped,
having by that time brought his mind round to the requirements of the
situation, and faced Carrados.
“Look here,” he said, “what’s up? You don’t want me to look at no
bloomin’ engine, you know. I don’t half like the whole bally business,
let me tell you. What’s the gaime?”
“It’s a very simple game for you if you play it straightforwardly,”
answered Carrados. “I want to know just how much you had to do with
saving that man’s life in Holborn to-day.”
Fitzwilliam instinctively fell back a step and his gaze on Carrados
quickened in its tensity.
“What d’yer mean?” he demanded with a quality of apprehension in his
voice.
“That is complicating the game,” replied Carrados mildly. “You know
exactly what I mean.”
“And what if I do?” demanded the driver. “What have you got to do with
it, may I ask?”
“That is very reasonable. I happened to be in the car following you. We
were scraped, but I am not making any claim for paint whatever happened.
I am satisfied that you did very well indeed in the circumstances, and
if a letter to your people--I know one of the directors--saying as much
would be of any use to you----”
“Now we’re getting on, sir,” was the mollified admission. “You mustn’t
mind a bit of freshness, so to speak. You took me by surprise, that’s
what it was, and I’ve been wound up ever since that happened.” He
hesitated, and then flung out the question almost with a passionate
directness: “What was it, sir; in God’s name, what was it?”
“What was it?” repeated the blind man’s level voice persuasively.
“It wasn’t me. I couldn’t have done nothing. I didn’t see the man, not
in time to have an earthly. Then we stopped. Good Gawd, I’ve never felt
a stop like that before. It was as though a rubber band had tightened
and pulled us up against ten yards squoze into one, so that you didn’t
hardly know it. I hadn’t nothing to do with it. Not a brake was on, and
the throttle open and the engine running. There we were. And me half
silly.”
“You did very well,” said Carrados soothingly.
“I did nothing. If it had been left to me there’d have been a inquest.
You seem to have noticed something, sir. How do you work it out?”
Carrados parried the question with a disingenuous allusion to the laws
of chance. He had not yet worked it out, but he was not disposed to lay
his astonishing conclusions, so far as they went, before the
bus-driver’s crude discrimination. He had learned what he wanted. With a
liberal acknowledgment of the service and a reiteration of his promise
to write, he bade Mr Fitzwilliam good-night and returned to his waiting
car.
“Back home, Harris,” he directed. He had gone out with some intention of
including Hapsburg Square in his peregrination. He was now assured that
his anxiety was groundless.
But the next morning all his confidence was shattered in a moment. It
was his custom before and during breakfast to read by touch the headings
of the various items in the newspapers and to mark for Greatorex’s later
reading such paragraphs as claimed his interest. Generally he could,
with some inconvenience, distinguish even the ordinary type by the same
faculty, but sometimes the inequality of pressure made this a laborious
process. There was no difficulty about the larger types, however, and
with a terrible misgiving finger-tip and brain had at once grasped the
significance of a prominent heading:
FATAL GAS EXPLOSION
HAPSBURG SQUARE BOARDING-HOUSE IN FLAMES
“Are you there, Parkinson?” he asked.
Parkinson could scarcely believe his well-ordered ears. Not since the
early days of his affliction had Carrados found it necessary to ask such
a question.
“Yes, sir, I’m here,” he almost stammered in reply. “I hope you are not
unwell, sir?”
“I’m all right, thanks,” responded his master dryly--unable even then
not to discover some amusement in having for once scared Parkinson out
of his irreproachable decorum. “I was mentally elsewhere. I want you to
read me this paragraph.”
“The one about Dr Tulloch, sir?” The name had caught the man’s eye at
once. “Dear, dear me, sir.”
“Yes; go on,” said Carrados, with his nearest approach to impatience.
“‘During the early hours of this morning,’” read Parkinson, “‘52
Hapsburg Square was the scene of a gas explosion which was unhappily
attended by loss of life. Shortly after midnight the neighbourhood was
alarmed by the noise of a considerable explosion which appeared to blow
out the window and front wall of one of the upper bedrooms, but as the
part in question was almost immediately involved in flames it is
uncertain what really happened. The residents of the house, which is a
boarding establishment carried on by Miss Vole (a relative, we are
informed, of Archdeacon Vole of Worpsley), were quickly made aware of
their danger and escaped. The engines arrived within a few minutes of
the alarm and soon averted any danger of the fire spreading. When it was
possible to penetrate into the upper part of the house it was discovered
that the occupant of the bedroom where the explosion took place, a Dr
Tulloch who had only recently returned to this country from India, had
perished. Owing to the charred state of the body it is impossible to
judge how he died, but in all probability he was mercifully killed or at
least rendered unconscious by the force of the explosion.’ That is all,
sir.”
“I ought to have kept him,” muttered Carrados reproachfully. “I ought to
have insisted. The thing has been full of mistakes.” He could discover
very little further interest in his breakfast and turned to the other
papers for possible enlargement of the details. “We shall have to go
down,” he remarked casually. “Say in half-an-hour. Tell Harris.”
“Very well, sir.”
Greatorex, just arrived for the day, and diffusing an atmosphere of easy
competence and inoffensively general familiarity, put his head in at the
door.
“Morning, sir,” he nodded. “Tulloch’s here and wants to see you. Came in
with me. Hullo, Parkinson, seen a ghost?”
“He hasn’t yet,” volunteered his master. “But we both expect to. Yes,
send him in here. Only one mistake the more, you see,” he added to his
servant. “And one the less,” he added to himself.
“I might just as well have stayed, you know,” was Tulloch’s greeting. He
included the still qualmish Parkinson in his genial domination of the
room, and going across to his friend he dropped a weighty hand upon his
shoulder.
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth than in your philosophy,
Horatio,’” he barbarously misquoted with significance. “There, you see,
Wynn, I can apply Shakespeare to the situation as well as you.”
“Quite so,” assented Carrados. “In the meanwhile will you have some
breakfast?”
“It’s what I came in the hopes of,” admitted the doctor. “That and being
burned out of hearth and home. I thought that I might as well quarter
myself on you for a couple of days. You’ve seen the papers?”
His friend indicated the still open sheet.
“Ah, that one. _The Morning Reporter_ gave me a better obituary. I often
had a sort of morbid fancy to know what they’d say about me afterwards.
It seemed unattainable, but, like most things, it’s a sad disappointment
when it comes. Six lines is the longest, Wynn, and they’ve got me degree
wrong.”
“Whose was the body?” asked Carrados.
Gravity descended upon Tulloch at the question. He looked round to make
sure that Parkinson had left the room.
“No one will ever know, I’m hoping,” he replied. “He was charred beyond
recognition. But you know, Wynn, and I know and we can hold our
tongues.”
“The Indian avenger, of course?”
“Yes. I went round there early this morning expecting nothing and found
the place a wreck. One can only guess now what happened, but the
gas-bracket is just beneath that trap-door I told you of and there’s a
light kept burning in the passage outside. One of the half-pay men
brought me a nasty wavy dagger that had been picked up in the road. ‘One
of your Indian curiosities, I suppose, Dr Tulloch?’ he remarked. I let
it pass at that, for I was becoming cautious among so much devilment.
‘I’m afraid that there’s nothing else of yours left,’ he went on, ‘and
there wouldn’t have been this if it hadn’t been blown through the
window.’ He was quite right. I haven’t a thing left in the world but
this now celebrated Norfolk suit that I stand up in, and, as matters
are, I’m jolly well glad you didn’t give me time to change yesterday.”
“Ah,” assented Carrados thoughtfully. “Still the Norfolk suit, of
course. Tell me, Jim--you had it in India?”
“To be sure I had. It was new then. You know, one doesn’t always go
about there in white drill and a cork helmet, as your artists here seem
to imagine. It’s cold sometimes, I can tell you. This coat is warm; I
got very fond of it. You can’t understand one getting fond of a mere
suit, you with your fifty changes of fine raiment.”
“Of course I can. I have a favourite jacket that I would not part from
for rubies, and it’s considerably more of an antique than yours. That’s
still a serviceable suit, Jim. Come and let me have a look at it.”
“What d’ye mean?” said Tulloch, complying half reluctantly. “You’re
making fun of me little suit and it’s the only thing in the world that
stands between me and the entire.”
“Come here,” repeated Carrados. “I am not in the least guying. I’m far
too serious. I am more serious, I think, than I have ever been in my
life before.” He placed the wondering doctor before him and proceeded to
run a light hand about the details of his garments, turning him round
until the process was complete. “You wore these clothes when the native
you call Calico came to you that night?”
“It’s more than likely. The nights were cold.”
Carrados seemed strangely moved. He got up, walked to the window, as his
custom was, for enlightenment, and then, after wandering about the room,
touching here and there an object indecisively, he unlocked a cabinet
and slid out a tray of silver coins.
“You’ve never seen these, have you?” he asked with scanty interest.
“No, what are they?” responded Tulloch, looking on.
“Pagan art at its highest. The worship of the strong and beautiful.”
“Worth a bit?” suggested Tulloch knowingly.
“Not what they cost.” Carrados shot back the tray and paced the room
again. “You haven’t told me yet how you were preserved.”
“How----?”
“Last night. You know that you escaped death again.”
“I suppose I did. Yes.... And do you know why I have been hesitating to
tell you?”
“Why?”
“Because you won’t believe me.”
Carrados permitted himself to smile a shade.
“Try,” he said laconically.
“Well, of course, I quite intended to.... The sober truth is, Wynn, that
I forgot the address and could not get there. It was the silliest and
the simplest thing in the world. I walked to the station here, booked
for Russell Square and took a train. When I got out there I started off
and then suddenly pulled up. Where was I going? My mind, I found, on
that one point had developed a perfect blank. All the facts had
vanished. Drum my encephalon how I might, I could not recall Miss Vole,
52, or Hapsburg Square. Mark you, it wasn’t loss of memory in the
ordinary sense. I remembered everything else; I knew who I was and what
I wanted well enough. Of course the first thing I did was to turn out my
pockets. I had letters, certainly, but none to that address and nothing
else to help me. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘it’s a silly game, but I’ll walk
round till I find it.’ Had again! I walked for half-an-hour, but I saw
nothing the faintest degree familiar. Then I saw ‘London Directory Taken
Here’ in a pub. window. ‘Good,’ I thought. ‘When I see the name it will
all come back again.’ I went in, had something and looked through the
‘Streets’ section from beginning to end.” He shook his head shrewdly.
“It didn’t work.”
“Did it occur to you to ring me up? You’d given me the address.”
“It did; and then I thought, ‘No, it’s midnight now’--it was by
then--‘and he may have turned in early and be asleep.’ Well, things had
got to such a pass that it seemed the simplest move to walk into the
first moderate hotel I came to, pay for my bed and tell them to wake me
at six, and that’s what I did. Now what do you make of that?”
“That depends,” replied Carrados slowly. “The scientist would perhaps
hint at a telepathic premonition operating subconsciously through
receptive nerve centres. The sceptic would call it a lucky coincidence.
The Catholic--the devout Catholic--would claim another miracle.”
“Oh, come now!” protested Tulloch.
“Yes, come now,” struck in Carrados, rising with decision and moving
towards the door. “Come to my room and then you shall judge for
yourself. It’s too much for any one man to contemplate alone. Come on.”
He walked quickly across the hall to his study, dismissing Greatorex
elsewhere with a word, and motioned the mystified doctor to a chair.
Then he locked the door and sat down himself.
“I want you to carry your mind back to that night in your tent when the
native Khaligar, towards whom you had done an imperishable service,
presented himself before you. By the inexorable ruling of his class he
was your bondsman in service until he had repaid you in kind. This, Jim,
you failed to understand as it stood vitally to him, for the whole
world, two pantheons and perhaps ten thousand years formed a great gulf
between your mind and his. You would not be repaid, and yet he wished to
die.”
The doctor nodded. “I dare say it comes to that,” he said.
“He could not die with this debt undischarged. And so, in the obscurity
of your tent, beneath your unsuspecting eyes, this conjurer did, as he
was satisfied, requite you. You thought you saw him wrap the relic in
its covering. You did not. You thought he put it back among his dress.
He did not. Instead, he slipped it dexterously between the lining and
the cloth of your own coat at the thick part of a band. You had seen him
do much cleverer things even in the open sunlight.”
“You don’t say,” exclaimed Tulloch, springing to his feet, “that even
now--”
“Wait!” cried the blind man warningly. “Don’t seek it yet. You have to
face a more stupendous problem first.”
“What is that?”
“Three times at least your life has been--as we may say--miraculously
preserved. It was not your doing, your expertness, my friend.... What is
this sacred relic that once was in its jewelled shrine on the high altar
of the great cathedral at Goa, that opulent archbishopric of the East to
which Catholic Portugal in the sixteenth century sent all that was most
effective of treasure, brain and muscle to conquer the body and soul of
India?”
“You suggested that it might be the original relic to which Valasquez
had referred.”
“Not now; only that the natives may have thought so. What would be more
natural than that an ignorant despoiler should assume the thing which he
found the most closely guarded and the most richly casketed to be the
object for which he himself would have the deepest veneration?”
“Then I don’t follow you,” said Tulloch.
“Because I have the advantage of having turned to the local and
historical records bearing on the circumstances since you first started
me,” Carrados replied. “For instance, in the year 1582 Akbar, who was a
philosopher and a humorist as well as a model ruler, sent an invitation
to the ‘wise men among the Franks’ at Goa to journey to Agra, there to
meet in public controversy before him a picked band of Mohammedan mullas
and prove the superiority of their faith. The challenge was accepted.
Abu-l-Fazl records the curious business and adds a very significant
detail. These Catholic priests, to cut the matter short in the spirit of
the age, offered to walk through a fiery furnace in the defence of their
belief. It came to nothing, because the other side backed out, but the
challenge is suggestive because, however fond the priesthood of those
times was of putting other people to the ordeal of fire and water, its
members were singularly modest about submitting to such tests
themselves. What mystery was there here, Tulloch? What had those priests
of Goa that made them so self-confident?”
“This relic, you suggest?”
“Yes, I do. But, now, what is that relic? A monkey’s or an ape-god’s
tooth, an iron-stained belemnite, the fragment of a pagan idol--you and
I can smile at that. We are Christians. No matter how unorthodox, no
matter how non-committal our attitude may have grown, there is upon us
the unconscious and hereditary influence of century after century of
blind and implicit faith. To you and to me, no less than to every member
of the more credent Church of Rome, to everyone who has listened to the
story as a little child, it is only conceivable that if miraculous
virtues reside in anything inanimate it must pre-eminently be in the
close accessories of that great world’s tragedy, when, as even secular
and unfriendly historians have been driven to admit, something out of
the order of nature did shake the heavens.”
“But this,” articulated Tulloch with dry throat, leaning instinctively
forward from the pressure of his coat, “this--what is it, then?”
“You described it as looking like a nail,” responded Carrados. “It is a
nail. Rusty, you said, and it could not well be otherwise than red with
rust. And old. Nearly nineteen hundred years old; quite, perhaps.”
Tulloch came unsteadily to his feet and slowly slipping off his coat he
put it gently away on a table apart from where they sat.
“Is it possible?” he asked in an awestruck whisper. “Wynn, is it--is it
really possible?”
“It is not only possible,” he heard the blind man’s more composed voice
replying, “but in one aspect it is even very natural. Physically, we are
dealing with an historical fact. Somewhere on the face of the earth
these things must be enduring; scattered, buried, lost perhaps, but
still existent. And among the thousands of relics that the different
churches have made claim to it would be remarkable indeed if some at
least were not authentic. That is the material aspect.”
“Yes,” assented Tulloch anxiously, “yes; that is simple, natural. But
the other side, Carrados--the things that we know have happened--what of
that?”
“That,” replied Carrados, “is for each man to judge according to his
light.”
“But you?” persisted Tulloch. “Are you convinced?”
“I am offered a solution that explains everything when no other theory
will,” replied the blind man evasively. Then on the top of Tulloch’s
unsatisfied “Ah!” he added: “But there is something else that confronts
you. What are you going to do?” and his face was towards the table
across the room.
“Have you thought of that?”
“It has occurred to me. I wondered how you would act.”
It was some time before either spoke again. Then Tulloch broke the
silence.
“You can lend me some things?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Then I will decide,” he announced with resolution. “Whatever we may
think, whatever might be urged, I cannot touch this thing; I dare not
even look on it. It has become too solemn, too awful, in my mind, to be
seen by any man again. To display it, to submit it to the test of what
would be called ‘scientific proof,’ to have it photographed and ‘written
up’--impossible, incredible! On the other hand, to keep it safely to
myself--no, I cannot do that either. You feel that with me?”
The blind man nodded.