Part 6

“Arling Lodge? Dr Ellerslie’s? You don’t mean to say, sir----”

“That is for you to satisfy yourself. Dr Ellerslie is a widower with no children. Marie Severe was drugged by phronolal on some flowers which she was given. Phronolal is a new anæsthetic which is practically unknown outside medical circles. She was carried into the garden of Arling Lodge and into the house. The bunch of flowers was thrown down temporarily inside the wall, probably while the door was relocked. The girl’s hair caught on a raspberry cane six yards from the back door along the path leading there. Ellerslie had previously sent away the two people who look after the place--a housekeeper and her husband who sees to the garden. That letter, by the way, was associable with phronolal. Now you have all that I know, Inspector, and I hope to goodness that I am clear of it.”

“But, good heavens, Mr Carrados, this is really terrible!” protested Beedel, moved to emotion in spite of his rich experience of questionable humanity. “A man in his position! Is he a maniac?”

“I don’t know. To tell you frankly, Inspector, I haven’t gone an inch further than I was compelled to go in order to be sure. Make use of the information as you like, but I don’t want to have anything more to do with the case. It isn’t a pleasant thing to have pulled down a man like Ellerslie--a callous, exacting machine in the operating-room, one hears, but a man who was doing fine work--saving useful lives every day. I’m sick of it, Beedel, that’s all.”

“I understand, sir. Still, there’s the other side, isn’t there, after all? Of course I’ll keep your name out of it as you wish, but I shall be given a good deal of credit that I oughtn’t to accept. If you don’t do anything for a few weeks the papers are always more complimentary when you do do it.”

“I’m afraid that you will have to put up with that,” replied Carrados drily.

There was an acquiescent laugh from the other end and a reference to the speaker’s indebtedness. Then: “Well, I’ll get the necessary authority and go down at once, sir.”

“Yes. Good-bye,” said Carrados. He hung up the receiver with the only satisfaction that he had experienced since he had fixed on Ellerslie--satisfaction to have done with it. The thing was unpalatable enough in itself, and to add another element of distaste, through one or two circumstances that had come his way in the past, he had an actual regard for the surgeon whom some called brutal, but who was universally admitted to be splendidly efficient. It would have been a much more congenial business to the blind man to clear him than to implicate. He betook himself to a tray of Sicilian coins of the autonomous period to get the taste out of his mouth and swore that he would not read a word of any stage of the proceedings.

“A Mr Severe wishes to see you, sir.”

So it happened that about an hour after he had definitely shelved his interest in the case Max Carrados was again drawn into its complications. Had Severe been merely a well-to-do suppliant, perhaps ... but the blind man had enough of the vagabond spirit to ensure his sympathy towards one whom he knew, on the contrary, to be extremely ill-to-do. In a flash of imagination he saw the outcast walking from Red Lion Street to Richmond, and, denied admission, from Richmond back to Red Lion Street again, because he hadn’t sixpence to squander, the man who always bought a little toy....

“It is nearly seven, isn’t it, Parkinson? Mr Severe will stay and dine with me,” were almost the first words the visitor heard.

“Very well, sir.”

“I? Dine?” interposed Severe quickly. “No, no. I really----”

“If you will be so good as to keep me company,” said Carrados with suave determination. Parkinson retired, knowing that the thing was settled. “I am quite alone, Mr Severe, and my selfishness takes that form. If a man calls on me about breakfast-time he must stay to breakfast, at lunch-time to lunch, and so on.”

“Your friends, doubtless,” suggested Severe with latent bitterness.

“Well, I am inclined to describe anyone who will lighten my darkness for an hour as a friend. You would yourself in the circumstances, you know.” And then, quite unconsciously, under this treatment the years of degradation suddenly slipped from Severe and he found himself accepting the invitation in the conventional phrases and talking to his host just as though they were two men of the same world in the old times. Guessing what had brought him, and knowing that it mattered little or nothing then, Carrados kept his guest clear of the subject of the disappearance until they were alone again after dinner. Then, to be denied no longer, Severe tackled it with a blunt inquiry:

“Scotland Yard has been consulting you about Marie, Mr Carrados?”

“Surely that is not in the papers?”

“I don’t know,” replied Severe, “but they aren’t my authority. Among the people I have mostly to do with many shrewd bits of information circulate that never get into the Press. Sometimes they are mere bead-work, of course, but quite often they have ground. Just at present I am something of a celebrity in my usual haunts--I am ‘Jones’ in town, by the way, but my identity has come out--and everything to do with the notorious Severe affair comes round to me. I hear that Inspector Beedel, who has the case in hand, has just been to see you. Your co-operation is inferred.”

“And if so?” queried Carrados.

“If so,” continued his visitor, “I have a word to say. Beedel got it into his thick, unimaginative skull that I must be the kidnapper because, on the orthodox ‘motive’ lines, he couldn’t fix on anyone else. As a matter of fact, Mr Carrados, I have rather too much affection for my little daughter to have taken her out of a comfortable home. My unfortunate wife may have her faults--I don’t mind admitting that she has--serious faults and a great many of them, but she would at least give Marie decent surroundings. When I heard of the child’s disappearance--it was in the early evening papers the next morning--I was distracted. I dreaded every edition to see a placard announcing that the body had been found and to read the usual horrible details of insane or bestial outrage. I searched my pockets and found a shilling and a few coppers. Without any clear idea of what I expected to do, I tore off to the station and spent my money on a third single to Swanstead.”

“Oh,” interposed Carrados, “the 1.17 arrival?”

Severe laughed contemptuously.

“The station porter, you mean?” he said. “Yes; that bright youth merely predated his experience by twenty-four hours when he saw that there was bunce in it a few days later. Oh, I dare say he really thought it then. As for me, before I had got to Swanstead I had realised my mistake. What could I do in any case? Nothing that the least efficient local bobby could not do much better. Least of all did I wish to meet Ida--Mrs Severe. No; I walked out of the station, turned to the right instead of the left and padded back to town.”

“And you have come now, a fortnight or more after, to tell me this, Mr Severe?”

“Well, I have come to have small hopes of Beedel. At first I didn’t care two straws what they thought, expecting every hour to hear the worst. But that may not have happened. Two weeks have passed without anything being found, so that the child may be alive somewhere. If you are taking it up there is a chance--provided only that you don’t let them obsess you with the idea that I have had anything to do with it.”

“I don’t imagine that you have had anything to do with it, Mr Severe, and I believe that Marie is still alive.”

“Thank God for that,” said Severe with sudden intensity. “I am very, very glad to hear you express that opinion, Mr Carrados. I don’t suppose that I shall see much of the girl as time goes on or that she will be taught to regard the Fifth Commandment very seriously. All the same, the relief of hearing that makes me your debtor for ever.... Anxious as I am, I will be content with that. I won’t worry you for your clues or your ideas ... but I will tell you one thing. It may amuse you. _My_ notion, a few days ago, of what might have happened----”

“Yes?” encouraged his host.

“It shows you the wild ideas one gets in such circumstances. My former wife is, if I may be permitted to say so, the most amiable and devoted creature in the world. Subject to that, I will readily concede that a more self-opinionated, credulous, dogmatically wrong-headed and crank-ridden woman does not exist. There isn’t a silly fad that she hasn’t taken up--and what’s more tragic, absolutely believed in for the time--from ozonised milk to rhythmic yawning. Some time ago she was swept into Christian Science. An atrocious harpy called Julp--a professional ‘healer’--fastened on her and has dominated her ever since. Well, fantastic as it seems now, I was actually prepared to believe that Marie had been ill and under their really sincere but grotesque ‘healing’ had died. Then to hide the failure of their creed or because they got panic-stricken----”

Then Carrados interrupted, an incivility he rarely committed.

“Yes, yes, I see,” he said quickly. “But your daughter never is ill?”

“Never ill? Marie? Oh, isn’t she! In the past six months I’ve----”

“But Mrs Severe deliberately said--her words--that Marie ‘does not know what illness means.’”

“That’s their jargon. They hold that illness does not exist and so it has no meaning. But I should describe Marie as a delicate child on the whole--bilious attacks and so on.”

“Christian Scientists ... gastric trouble ... Prescott Ellerslie? Good heavens! This comes of half doing a thing,” muttered Carrados.

“Nothing wrong, I hope?” ventured the visitor.

“Wait.” Severe wondered what the deuce turn the business was taking, but there being no incentive to do anything else, he waited. Coffee, rather more fragrant than that purveyed at the nocturnal stall, and fat Egyptian cigarettes of a subtle aroma somehow failed nevertheless to make the time pass quickly. Yet five minutes would have covered Carrados’s absence.

“Nothing wrong, but an unfortunate oversight,” he remarked when he returned. “I was too late to catch Beedel, so we must try to mend matters at the other end if we can. I shall have to ask you to go with me. I have ordered the car and I can tell you how we stand on the way.”

“I shall be glad if you can make any use of me,” said Severe.

“I hope that I may. And as for anything being wrong,” added Carrados with deliberation, “so far as Marie is concerned I think we may find that the one thing necessary for her future welfare has been achieved.”

“That’s all I ask,” said Severe.

“But it isn’t all that I ask,” retorted the blind man almost sharply.

This time there was nothing clandestine about the visit to Arling Avenue. On the contrary, the pace they kept up made it necessary that the horn should give pretty continuous notice of their presence. If it was a race, however, they had the satisfaction of being successful: the manner--more suggestive of the trained nurse than the domestic servant--of the maid who came to the door of Arling Lodge made it clear to Carrados, apart from any other indication, that the catastrophe of Beedel’s arrival had not yet been launched. When the young person at the door began conscientiously, but with obvious inexperience, to prevaricate with the truth, the caller merely accepted her statements and wrote a few words on his card.

“When Dr Ellerslie does return, will you please give him this at once?” he said. “I will wait.”

It is to be inferred that the great specialist’s return had been providentially timed, for Carrados was scarcely seated when Prescott Ellerslie hurried into the room with the visiting-card in his hand.

“Mr Carrados?” he postulated. “Will you please explain this rather unusually worded request for an interview?”

“Certainly I will,” replied Carrados. “The wording is prompted by the necessity of compelling your immediate attention. The interview is the outcome of my desire to be of use to you.”

“Thank you,” said Ellerslie with non-committal courtesy. “And the occasion?”

“The occasion is the impending visit of Inspector Beedel from Scotland Yard, not, this time, to look out of your landing window, but to demand the surrender of the missing Marie Severe and, if you deny any knowledge of her, armed with authority to search your house.”

“Oh,” replied the doctor with astonishing composure. “And if the situation develops on the lines which you have so pointedly indicated, how do you propose to help me?”

“That depends a little on your explanation of the circumstances.”

“Surely between Mr Carrados and Scotland Yard there is nothing that remains to be explained!”

“Mr Carrados can only speak for himself,” replied the blind man with unmoved good humour. “And in his case there are several things to be explained. There is probably not a great deal of time before the Inspector’s arrival, but there may be enough if you are disposed----”

“Very well,” acquiesced Ellerslie. “You are quite right in assuming Marie Severe to be in this house. I had her brought here ... out of revenge, to redress an old and very grievous injury. Perhaps you had guessed that?”

“Not in those terms,” said Carrados mildly.

“Yet so it was. Ten years ago a very sweet and precious little child, my only daughter, was wantonly done to death by an ignorant and credulous woman who had charge of her, in the tenets of her faith. It is called Christian Science. The opportunity was put before me and to-day I stand convicted of having outraged every social and legal form by snatching Marie Severe from just that same fate.”

Carrados nodded gravely.

“Yes,” he assented. “That is the thing I missed.”

“I used to see her on her way to school, whenever I was here,” went on the doctor wistfully, “and soon I came to watch for her and to know the times at which she ought to pass. She was of all living creatures the gayest and the most vivid, glowing and vibrant with the compelling joy of life, a little being of wonderful grace, delicacy and charm. She had, I found when I came to know her somewhat, that distinction of manner which one is prone to associate unreasonably only with the children of the great and wealthy--a young nobility. In much she reminded me constantly of my own lost child; in other ways she attracted me by her diversity. Such, Mr Carrados, was the nature of my interest in Marie Severe.

“I don’t know the Severes and I have never even spoken to the mother. I believe that she has only lived here about a year, and in any case I have no concern in the social life of Swanstead. But a few months ago my worthy old housekeeper struck up an acquaintance with one of Mrs Severe’s servants, a staid, middle-aged person who had gone into the family as Marie’s nurse. The friendship begun down our respective gardens--they adjoin--developed to the stage of these two dames taking tea occasionally with one another. My Mrs Glass is a garrulous old woman. Hitherto my difficulty had often been to keep her quiet. Now I let her talk and deftly steered the conversation. I learned that my neighbours were Christian Scientists and had a so-called ‘healer’ living with them. The information struck me with a sudden dread.

“‘I suppose they are never ill, then?’ I inquired carelessly.

“Mrs Severe had not been ill since she had embraced Christian Science, and Miss Julp was described in a phrase obviously of her own importing as being ‘all selvage.’ The servants were allowed to see a doctor if they wished, although they were strongly pressed to have done with such ‘trickery’ in dispelling a mere ‘illusion.’

“‘And isn’t there a child?’ I asked.

“Marie, it appeared, had from time to time suffered from the ‘illusion’ that she had not felt well--had suffered pain. Under Miss Julp’s spiritual treatment the ‘hallucination’ had been dispelled. Mrs Glass had laughed, looked very knowing and then given her friend away in her appreciation of the joke. The faithful nurse had accepted the situation and as soon as her mistress’s back was turned had doctored Marie according to her own simple notions. Under this double influence the child had always picked up again, but the two women had ominously speculated what would happen if she fell ‘really ill.’ I led her on to details of the sicknesses--their symptoms, frequency and so on. It was a congenial topic between the motherly old creature and the nurse and I could not have had a better medium. I learned a good deal from her chatter. It did not reassure me.

“From that time, without allowing my interest to appear, I sought better opportunities to see the child. I inspired Mrs Glass to suggest to the nurse that Miss Marie might come and explore the garden here--it is a large and tangled place, such as an adventuring child would love to roam in, and this one, as I found, was passionately fond of flowers and growing things and birds and little animals. I got a pair of tame squirrels and turned them loose here. You can guess her enchantment when she discovered them. I went out with nuts for her to give them and we were friends at once. All the time I was examining her without her knowledge. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to her that I might be a doctor. The result practically confirmed the growing suspicion that everything I had heard pointed to. And the tragic irony of the situation was that it had been appendicitis that my child--_my_ child--had perished from!”

“Oh, so this was appendicitis, then?”

“Yes. It was appendicitis of that insidious and misleading type to which children are particularly liable. These apparently negligible turns at intervals of weeks were really inflammation of the appendix and the condition was inevitably passing into one of general suppurative peritonitis. Very soon there would come another ‘illusion’ according to the mother and Miss Julp, another ‘bilious turn’ according to the nurse, similar to those already experienced, but apparently more obstinate. The Christian Scientists would argue with it, Hannah would surreptitiously dose it. This time, however, it would hang on. Still there would be no really very alarming symptoms to wring the natural affection of the mother, nothing severe enough to drive the nurse into mutiny. The pulse running at about 140 would be the last thing they would notice.”

“And then?” Ellerslie was pacing the room in savage indignation, but Carrados had Beedel’s impending visit continually before him.

“Then she would be dead. Quite suddenly and unceremoniously this fair young life, which in ten minutes I could render immune from this danger for all the future, would go clean out--extinguished to demonstrate that appendicitis does not exist and that Mind is All in All. If my diagnosis was correct there could be no appeal, no shockful realisation of the true position to give the mother a chance. It would be inevitable, but it would be quite unlooked for.

“What was I to do, should you say, Mr Carrados, in this emergency? I had dealt with these fanatics before and I knew that if I took so unusual a course as to go to Mrs Severe I should at the best be met by polite incredulity and a text from Mrs Mary Baker Eddy’s immortal work. And by doing that I should have made any other line of action risky, if not impossible. You, I believe, are a humane man. What was I to do?”

“What you did do,” said his visitor, “was about the most dangerous thing that a doctor could be mixed up in.”

“Oh no,” replied Ellerslie, “he does a much more dangerous thing whenever he operates on a septiferous subject, whenever he enters a fever-stricken house. To career and reputation, you would say; but, believe me, Mr Carrados, life is quite as important as livelihood, and every doctor does that sort of thing every day. Well, like many very ordinary men whom you may meet, I am something of a maniac and something of a mystic. Incredible as it will doubtless seem to the world to-morrow, I found that, at the risk of my professional career, at the risk, possibly, of a criminal conviction, the greatest thing that I should ever do would be to save this one exquisite young life. Elsewhere other men just as good could take my place, but here it was I and I alone.”

“Well, you did it?” prompted Carrados. “I must remind you that the time presses and I want to know the facts.”

“Yes, I did it. I won’t delay with the precautions I had taken in securing the child or with the scheme that I had worked out for returning her. I believed that I had a very good chance of coming through undiscovered and I infer that I have to thank you that I did not. Marie has not the slightest idea where she is and when I go into the room I am sufficiently disguised. She thinks that she has had an accident.”

“Of course you must have had assistance?”

“I have had the devoted help of an assistant and two nurses, but the whole responsibility is mine. I managed to send off Mrs Glass and her husband for a holiday so as to keep them out of it. That was after I had decided upon the operation. To justify what I was about to do there had to be no mistake about the necessity. I contrived a final test.

“Less than three weeks ago I saw Hannah and the little girl come to the house one afternoon. Shortly afterwards Mrs Glass knocked at my door. Could she ask Hannah to tea and, as Mrs Severe and her friend were being out until late, might Miss Marie also stay? There was, as she knew, no need for her to ask me, but my housekeeper is primitive in her ideas of duty. Of course I readily assented, but I suggested that Marie should have tea with me; and so it was arranged.

“Before tea she amused herself about the garden. I told her to gather me a bunch of flowers and when she came in with them I noticed that she had scratched her arm with a thorn. I hurried through the meal, for I had then determined what to do. When we had finished, without ringing the bell, I gave her a chair in front of the fire and sat down opposite her. There was a true story about a clever goose that I had promised her.

“‘But you are going to sleep, Marie,’ I said, looking at her fixedly. ‘It is the heat of the fire.’

“‘I think I must be,’ she admitted drowsily. ‘Oh, how silly. I can scarcely keep my eyes open.’

“‘You are going to sleep,’ I repeated. ‘You are very, very tired.’ I raised my hand and moved it slowly before her face. ‘You can hardly see my hand now. Your eyes are closed. When I stop speaking you will be asleep.’ I dropped my hand and she was fast asleep.

“I had made my arrangements and had everything ready. From her arm, where the puncture of the needle was masked by the scratch, I secured a few drops of blood. Then I applied a simple styptic to the place and verified by a more leisurely examination some of the symptoms I had already looked for. When I woke her, a few minutes later, she had no inkling of what had passed.

“‘Why,’ I was saying as she awakened, ‘I don’t believe that you have heard a word about old Solomon!’

“I applied the various laboratory tests to the blood which I had obtained without delay. The result, taken in conjunction with the other symptoms, was conclusive. I was resolved upon my course from that moment. The operation itself was simple and completely successful. The condition demonstrated the pressing necessity for what I did. Marie Severe will probably outlive her mother now--especially if the lady remains faithful to Christian Science. As for the sequel ... I am sorry, but I don’t regret.”

* * * * *

“A surprise, eh, Inspector?”

Inspector Beedel, accompanied by Mrs Severe and--if the comparative degree may be used to indicate her relative importance--even more accompanied by Miss Julp, had arrived at Arling Lodge and been given immediate admission. It was Carrados who thus greeted him.