“Oh, I remember,” she laughed. “It was Irons, of course. He is a great nuisance, he is so stupidly persistent. For some weeks now he has been coming time after time, trying to persuade me to engage him. Once when we were all out he had actually got into the garden and was on the point of beginning work when I returned. He said he saw the milkmen and the grocers leaving samples at the door so he thought that he would too!”
“A practical jester evidently. Is Mr Irons a local character?”
“He said that he knew the ground and the conditions round about here better than anyone else in Groat’s Heath,” she replied. “Modesty is not among Mr Irons’s handicaps. He said that he——How curious!”
“What is, Mrs Bellmark?”
“I never connected the two men before, but he said that he had been gardener at Fountain Court for seven years.”
“Another family retainer who is evidently attached to the soil.”
“At all events they have not prospered equally, for while Mr Johns seems able to take a nice house, poor Irons is willing to work for half-a-crown a day, and I am told that all the other men charge four shillings.”
They had paced the boundaries of the kitchen garden, and as there was nothing more to be shown Elsie Bellmark led the way back to the drawing-room. Parkinson was still engrossed in his book, the only change being that his back was now turned towards the high paling of clinker-built oak that separated the two gardens.
“I will speak to my man,” said Carrados, turning aside.
“He hurried down and is looking through the fence, sir,” reported the watcher.
“That will do then. You can return to the car.”
“I wonder if you would allow me to send you a small hawthorn-tree?” inquired Carrados among his felicitations over the teacups five minutes later. “I think it ought to be in every garden.”
“Thank you—but is it worth while?” replied Mrs Bellmark, with a touch of restraint. As far as mere words went she had been willing to ignore the menace of the future, but in the circumstances the offer seemed singularly inept and she began to suspect that outside his peculiar gifts the wonderful Mr Carrados might be a little bit obtuse after all.
“Yes; I think it is,” he replied, with quiet assurance.
“In spite of——?”
“I am not forgetting that unless your husband is prepared on Monday next to invest one thousand pounds you contemplate leaving here.”
“Then I do not understand it, Mr Carrados.”
“And I am unable to explain as yet. But I brought you a note from Louis Carlyle, Mrs Bellmark. You only glanced at it. Will you do me the favour of reading me the last paragraph?”
She picked up the letter from the table where it lay and complied with cheerful good-humour.
“There is some suggestion that you want me to accede to,” she guessed cunningly when she had read the last few words.
“There are some three suggestions which I hope you will accede to,” he replied. “In the first place I want you to write to Mr Johns next door—let him get the letter to-night—inquiring whether he is still disposed to take this house.”
“I had thought of doing that shortly.”
“Then that is all right. Besides, he will ultimately decline.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed—it would be difficult to say whether with relief or disappointment—“do you think so? Then why——”
“To keep him quiet in the meantime. Next I should like you to send a little note to Mr Irons—your maid could deliver it also to-night, I dare say?”
“Irons! Irons the gardener?”
“Yes,” apologetically. “Only a line or two, you know. Just saying that, after all, if he cares to come on Monday you can find him a few days’ work.”
“But in any circumstances I don’t want him.”
“No; I can quite believe that you could do better. Still, it doesn’t matter, as he won’t come, Mrs Bellmark; not for half-a-crown a day, believe me. But the thought will tend to make Mr Irons less restive also. Lastly, will you persuade your husband not to decline his firm’s offer until Monday?”
“Very well, Mr Carrados,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “You are Uncle Louis’s friend and therefore our friend. I will do what you ask.”
“Thank you,” said Carrados. “I shall endeavour not to disappoint you.”
“I shall not be disappointed because I have not dared to hope. And I have nothing to expect because I am still completely in the dark.”
“I have been there for nearly twenty years, Mrs Bellmark.”
“Oh, I am sorry!” she cried impulsively.
“So am I—occasionally,” he replied. “Good-bye, Mrs Bellmark. You will hear from me shortly, I hope. About the hawthorn, you know.”
It was, indeed, in something less than forty-eight hours that she heard from him again. When Bellmark returned to his toy villa early on Saturday afternoon Elsie met him almost at the gate with a telegram in her hand.
“I really think, Roy, that everyone we have to do with here goes mad,” she exclaimed, in tragi-humorous despair. “First it was Mr Johns or Jones—if he is Johns or Jones—and then Irons who wanted to work here for half of what he could get at heaps of places about, and now just look at this wire that came from Mr Carrados half-an-hour ago.”
This was the message that he read:
Please procure sardine tin opener mariner’s compass and bottle of champagne. Shall arrive 6.45 bringing Crataegus Coccinea.—Carrados.
“Could anything be more absurd?” she demanded.
“Sounds as though it was in code,” speculated her husband. “Who’s the foreign gentleman he’s bringing?”
“Oh, that’s a kind of special hawthorn—I looked it up. But a bottle of champagne, and a compass, and a sardine tin opener! What possible connexion is there between them?”
“A very resourceful man might uncork a bottle of champagne with a sardine tin opener,” he suggested.
“And find his way home afterwards by means of a mariner’s compass?” she retorted. “No, Roy dear, you are not a sleuth-hound. We had better have our lunch.”
They lunched, but if the subject of Carrados had been tabooed the meal would have been a silent one.
“I have a compass on an old watch-chain somewhere,” volunteered Bellmark.
“And I have a tin opener
