Part 18

“Point of five,” said Carrados.

“Good.”

“In spades. Quint major in spades also, tierce to the knave in clubs, fourteen aces”--_i.e._ four aces; “fourteen” in the language of piquet as they score that number. He did not wait for his opponent to assent to each count, knowing, after the point had passed, that the other calls were good against anything that could possibly be held. “Five, twenty, twenty-three, ninety-seven.” Having reached thirty before his opponent scored, and without a card having so far been played, his score automatically advanced by sixty. That is the “repique.”

“By Jove!” exclaimed Crediton, “that’s the first time I’ve ever known Aurelius repiqued.”

“Oh, it has happened,” retorted Spinola almost testily.

The play of the hand was bound to go in Carrados’s favour--he held eight certain tricks. He won “the cards” with two tricks to spare and the round closed at 119--5.

“You look like being delighted again, Mr Spinola,” remarked Crediton a little cruelly.

“Suppose you make yourself useful by dealing for me,” interposed Carrados. “Of course,” he reminded his host, “it does not do for me to handle any cards but my own.”

“I had not thought of that,” replied Spinola, looking at him shrewdly. “If you had no conscience you would be a dangerous opponent, Mr Carrados.”

“The same might be said of any man,” was the reply. “That is why it is so satisfactory to play an automaton.”

“Oh, Aurelius has no conscience, you know,” chimed in Crediton sapiently. “Mr Spinola couldn’t find room for it among the wheels.”

The second hand was not eventful. Each player had to be content to make about the “average” which Crediton had ingenuously discovered. It raised the scores to 33--130. Two hands followed in the same prudent spirit; the fifth--Carrados’s “elder”--found the position 169--67.

“Only two this time,” remarked Carrados, taking in.

“Jupiter!” murmured Crediton. It is unusual for the senior hand to leave even one of the five cards to which he is entitled. It indicated an unusually strong hand. The automaton evidently thought so too. It availed itself of all the six alternative cards and, as the play disclosed, completely cut up its own hand to save the repique by beating Carrados on the point. It won the point, to find that its opponent only held a low quart, a tierce and three kings. As a result Carrados won “the cards” and the score stood 199--79. The discard was, in fact, an experiment in bluff. Carrados _might_ have held a quint and fourteen kings for all the opposing hand disclosed.

“What on earth did you do that for?” demanded Copling. He himself always played an eminently straightforward game--and generally lost.

“I’ll bet I know,” put in Crediton. “You are getting rather close, Mr Spinola--the last hand and you need twenty-one to save the rubicon.” The “rubicon” means that instead of the loser’s score being deducted from the winner’s in arriving at the latter’s total, it is _added_ to it--a possible difference of nearly 200 points.

“We shall see; we shall see,” muttered Spinola with a little less than his usual suavity.

Whatever concern he had, however, was groundless, for the game ended tamely enough. Carrados ought to have won the point and divided tricks, leaving his opponent a minor quart and a solitary trio--about 15 on the hand. By a careless discard he threw away both chances and the final score stood at 205--112. Copling, who had come to regard his friend’s play as rather excellent, was silent. Crediton almost shrieked his disapproval and seizing the cards demonstrated to his heart’s content.

“Ninety-three and the hundred for the game--twenty-four pounds and one half-crown,” said the loser, counting out notes and coin to the amount. “It has been an experience for both of us--Aurelius and myself.”

“And certainly for me,” added Carrados.

“Look here,” interposed Crediton, “Aurelius seems off his play. If you don’t mind taking my paper, Mr Spinola, I should like another go.”

“As you please,” assented the old man. “Your undertaking is, of course----” The gesture suggested “quite equal to that of the cashier of the Bank of England.” The venerable person had, in fact, regained his lofty pecuniary indifference. “The same point?”

“Right-o,” cheerfully assented the youth.

“I will go and think over my shortcomings,” said Carrados.

He started to cross the room to a seat and ran into a couch. With a gasp Copling hastened to his assistance. Then he found his arm detained and heard the whisper.

“Sit down with me.”

Across the room the play had begun again and with a little care they could converse without the possibility of a word being overheard.

“What is it?” asked Sir Fergus.

“The golden one will win. It is only when the cards are not exposed that you play on equal terms.”

“But I won?”

“Because it is well to lose sometimes and, by choice, when the stake is low. That witless youth will have to pay for both of us.”

“But how--how on earth do you suggest that it is done?”

“Look round cautiously. What eyes overlook Crediton’s hand as he sits there?”

“What eyes? Good gracious! is there anything in that?”

“What is it?”

“There is a trophy of Japanese arms high up on the wall. An iron mask surmounts it. It has glass eyes. I have never seen anything like that before.”

“Any others round the walls?”

“There is a stuffed tiger’s head on our right and a puma’s or something of that sort on the left.”

“In case a suspicious player asks to have the places changed or holds his cards awkwardly. Working the automaton from other positions is probably also arranged for.”

“But how can a knowledge of the opponent’s cards affect the automaton? The dials----”

“The dials are all bunkum. While you were playing I took the liberty of altering them and for a whole hand the dials indicated that you must inevitably be holding eight clubs and four spades. All the time you were leading out hearts and diamonds and the automaton serenely followed suit. The only effective machinery is that indicating the display of cards on the shield and controlling the hands, and that is worked by a keyboard and electric current from the room below. The watcher behind the mask telephones the opposing hand, the discard and the take-in. The automaton’s hand has already been indicated below. You see the enormous advantage the hidden player has? When he is the minor hand he knows everything that is to be known before he discards. When he is the elder he knows almost everything. By concentrating on one detail he can practically always balk the pique, the repique and the kapot, if it is necessary to play for safety. You remember what Crediton said--that he had never known Aurelius repiqued before. The leisurely manipulation of the dials gives plenty of time. An even ordinary player in that position can do the rest.”

Copling scarcely knew whether to believe or not. It sounded plausible, but it reflected monstrously.

“You speak of a telephone,” he said. “How can you definitely say that such a thing is being used? You have never been in the room before and we’ve scarcely been here an hour. It--it may be awfully serious, you know.”

Carrados smiled.

“Can you hear the kitchen door being opened at this moment or detect the exact aroma of our host’s mocha?” he demanded.

“Not in the least,” admitted Copling.

“Then of course it is hopeless to expect you to pick up the whisper of a man behind a mask a score of feet away. How fearfully in the dark you seeing folk must be!”

“Can you possibly do that?” Even as he was speaking the door opened and a servant entered, bringing coffee and an assortment of viands sufficiently exotic to maintain the rather Oriental nature of entertainment.

“Stroll across and see how the game is going,” suggested Carrados. “Have a look at Crediton’s discard and then come back.”

Sir Fergus did not quite follow the purpose, but he nodded and proceeded to comply with his usual amiable spirit.

“It stands at 137 to 75 against Crediton and they are playing the last hand. Our young friend looks like losing thirty or forty pounds.”

“And his discard?”

“Oh--seven and nine of clubs and the knave of hearts.”

Carrados held out a slip of paper on which he had already pencilled a few words. The baronet took it, looked and whistled softly. He had read: “Clubs, seven, nine. Hearts, knave.”

“Conjuring?” he interrogated.

“Quite as simple--listening.”

“I suppose I must accept it. What staggers me is that you can pick out a whisper when the room is full of other louder sounds. Now if there had been absolute stillness----”

“Merely use. There’s nothing more in it than in seeing a mouse and a mountain, or a candle and the sun, at the same time. Well, what are we going to do about it?”

Copling began to look acutely unhappy.

“I suppose we must do something,” he ruminated, “but I must say that I wish we needn’t. I mean, I wish we hadn’t dropped on this. You know, Carrados, whatever is going on, Spinola is no charlatan. He does understand mathematics.”

“That makes him all the more dangerous. But I should like to produce more definite proof before we do anything.... Does he ever leave us in the room?”

“I have never known it. No, he hovers round his Aurelius.”

“Never mind. Ah, the game is finished.”

The game was finished and it needed no inquiry to learn how it had gone. Mr Crediton was handing the venerable Spinola a memorandum of indebtedness. His words and attitude did not convey the impression of a graceful loser.

“I wish you two men would give me the tip for beating this purgatorial image,” he grumbled as they came up. “I thought that he’d struck a losing line after your experience and this is the result.” He indicated the spectacle of their amiable host folding up his I.O.U. preparatory to dropping it carelessly into a letter-rack, and shrugged his shoulders with keen disgust.

“I’ll tell you if you like,” suggested Sir Fergus. “Hold the better cards.”

“And play them better,” added Carrados. “Good heavens!”

A very untoward thing had happened. They had all been standing together round the table, Spinola purring appreciatively, Crediton fuming his ill-restrained annoyance, and the other two mildly satirical at his expense. Carrados held a cup of coffee in his hand. He reached towards the table with it, seemed to imagine that he was a full foot nearer than he was, and before anyone had divined his mistake, cup, saucer and the entire contents had dropped neatly upon Mr Spinola’s startled feet, saturating his lower extremities to the skin.

“Good heavens! What on earth have I done?”

Crediton shrieked out his ill-humour in gratified amusement; Sir Fergus 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.