“What is the name of Mr. Rattar’s head clerk?” he enquired. “An oldish, prim looking man, with side whiskers.”
“Oh, that will be Mr. Ison,” said the manageress.
“I have just remembered a bit of business I ought to have seen about tonight,” he continued. “I can’t very well call on Mr. Rattar himself at this hour, but I was thinking of looking up Mr. Ison if I could discover his whereabouts.”
“The boots will show you the way to his house,” said she, and rang the bell.
While waiting for the boots, Mr. Carrington asked another casual question or two and learned that Mr. Ison had been in the office since he was a boy. No man knew the house of Rattar throughout its two generations better than Mr. Ison, said Miss Peterkin; and she remembered afterwards that this information seemed to give Mr. Carrington peculiar satisfaction. He seemed so gratified, indeed, that she wondered a little at the time.
And then the visitor and the boots set out together for the clerk’s house, and at what hour her guest returned she was not quite sure. The boots, it seemed, had been instructed to wait up for him, but she had long gone to bed.
XXXVI
The Walking Stick
Had there been, next morning, any curious eyes to watch the conduct of the gentleman who had come to rent a sporting estate, they would probably have surmised that he had found something to please his fancy strangely, and yet that some perplexity still persisted. They would also have put him down as a much more excitable, and even demonstrative, young man than they had imagined. On a lonely stretch of shore hard by the little town he paced for nearly an hour, his face a record of the debate within, and his cane gesticulating at intervals.
Of a sudden he stopped dead and his lips moved in a murmured ejaculation, and then after standing stock still for some minutes, he murmured again:
“Ten to one on it!”
His cane had been stationary during this pause. Now he raised it once more, but this time with careful attention. It was a light bamboo with a silver head. He looked at it thoughtfully, bent it this way and that, and then drove it into the sand and pressed it down. Though to the ordinary eye a very chaste and appropriate walking stick for such a gentleman as Mr. Carrington, the result of these tests seemed to dissatisfy him. He shook his head, and then with an air of resolution set out for the town.
A little later he entered a shop where a number of walking sticks were on view and informed the proprietor that he desired to purchase something more suitable for the country than the cane he carried. In fact, his taste seemed now to run to the very opposite extreme, for the points on which he insisted were length, stiffness, and a long and if possible somewhat pointed ferule. At last he found one to his mind, left his own cane to be sent down to the hotel, and walked out with his new purchase.
His next call was at Mr. Simon Rattar’s villa. This morning he approached it without any of the curious shyness he had exhibited on the occasion of his recent visit. His advance was conducted openly up the drive and in an erect posture, and he crossed the gravel space boldly, and even jauntily, while his ring was firmness itself. Mary answered the bell, and her pleasure at seeing so soon again the sympathetic gentleman with the eyeglass was a tribute to his tact.
“Good morning, Mary,” said he, with an air that combined very happily the courtesy of a gentleman with the freedom of an old friend, “Mr. Rattar is at his office, I presume.”
She said that he was, but this time the visitor exhibited neither surprise nor disappointment.
“I thought he would be,” he confessed confidentially, “and I have come to see whether I couldn’t do something to help you to get at the bottom of these troublesome goings on. Anything fresh happened?”
“The master was out in the garden again last night, sir!” said she.
“Was he really?” cried Mr. Carrington. “By Jove, how curious! We really must look into that: in fact, I’ve got an idea I want you to help me with. By the way, it sounds an odd question to ask about Mr. Rattar, but have you ever seen any sign of a pipe or tobacco in the house?”
“Oh, never indeed!” said she. “The master has never been a smoking gentleman. Quite against smoking he’s always been, sir.”
“Ever since you have known him?”
“Oh, and before that, sir.”
“Ah!” observed Mr. Carrington in a manner that suggested nothing whatever. “Well, Mary, I want this morning to have a look round the garden.”
Her eyes opened.
“Because the master walks there at nights?”
He nodded confidentially.
“But—but if he was to know you’d been interfering, sir—I mean what he’d think was interfering, sir—”
“He shan’t know,” he assured her. “At least not if you’ll do what I tell you. I want you to go now and have a nice quiet talk with cook for half an hour—half an hour by the kitchen clock, Mary. If you don’t look out of the window, you won’t know that I’m in the garden, and then nobody can blame you whatever happens. We haven’t mentioned the word ‘garden’ between us—so you are out of it! Remember that.”
He smiled so pleasantly that Mary smiled back.
“I’ll
