Comedy at Fountain Cottage
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 tube railway, a land company acquired the estate, the house was razed to the ground and in a twinkling a colony of Noah’s ark villas took its place. There is Metrobe Road here, and Court Crescent there, and Mansion Drive and what not, and Elsie’s little place perpetuates another landmark.”
“I have Metrobe’s last book there,” said Carrados, nodding towards a point on his shelves. “In fact he sent me a copy. ‘The Flame beyond the Dome’ it is called—the queerest farrago of balderdash and metaphysics imaginable. But what about the neighbour, Louis? Did you settle what we might almost term ‘his hash’?”
“Oh, he is mad, of course. I advised her to make as little fuss about it as possible, seeing that the man lives next door and might become objectionable, but I framed a note for her to send which will probably have a good effect.”
“Is he mad, Louis?”
“Well, I don’t say that he is strictly a lunatic, but there is obviously a screw loose somewhere. He may carry indiscriminate benevolence towards Yorkshire terriers to irrational lengths. Or he may be a food specialist with a grievance. In effect he is mad on at least that one point. How else are we to account for the circumstances?”
“I was wondering,” replied Carrados thoughtfully.
“You suggest that he really may have a sane object?”
“I suggest it—for the sake of argument. If he has a sane object, what is it?”
“That I leave to you, Max,” retorted Mr Carlyle conclusively. “If he has a sane object, pray what is it?”
“For the sake of the argument I will tell you that in half-a-dozen words, Louis,” replied Carrados, with good-humoured tolerance. “If he is not mad in the sense which you have defined, the answer stares us in the face. His object is precisely that which he is achieving.”
Mr Carlyle looked inquiringly into the placid, unemotional face of his blind friend, as if to read there whether, incredible as it might seem, Max should be taking the thing seriously after all.
“And what is that?” he asked cautiously.
“In
