The leader-writers on the popular journals took up the idea. They depicted the whole scene as vividly as if it had been shown to them in a charmed sleep. They gushed as they described the beauty of the wife; they wept as they told of her intemperate habits. The husband they painted in the darkest dyes of iniquity. A man who had battened on his wife’s earnings—a poor creature—a led captain—idle, luxurious, intemperate, since it was doubtless his example which had taught that glorious creature to drink. They painted, in a blaze of lurid light, the scene of the murder. The husband’s midnight return from haunts of vice—the wife’s recriminations—her natural outbreak of jealousy—hot words on both sides. The husband brutalised by drink, stung to fury by the wife’s well-merited reproaches, snatches the dagger from the table where he had lately flung it after a desultory half-hour of labour, and plunges the blade into his wife’s bosom. The leader writer saw the whole thing as in a picture. The public read, and at street corners and on the roofs of omnibuses the public talk for the next three weeks was of Jack Chicot’s crime, and the miserable stupidity of the police in not being able to find him.
Between eight and nine o’clock on the night after La Chicot’s funeral an elderly man called upon Mr. Mosheh, a diamond merchant in a small way, who lived in one of the streets near Brunswick Square. The gentleman was respectably clad in a long overcoat, and wore a grey beard which had been allowed to grow with a luxuriance that entirely concealed the lower part of his face. Under his soft felt hat he wore a black velvet skull cap, below which there appeared no vestige of hair; whereby it might be inferred that the velvet cap was intended to hide the baldness of the skull it covered. Under the rim of the cap, which was drawn low upon the brow, appeared a pair of shaggy grey eyebrows, shadowing prominent eyes. Mr. Mosheh came out of his dining room, whence the savoury odour of fish fried in purest olive oil followed him like a kind of incense, and found the stranger waiting for him in the front room, which was half parlour, half office.
The diamond merchant had a sharp eye for character, and he saw at a glance that his visitor belonged to the hawk rather than to the pigeon family.
“Wants to do me if he can,” he said to himself.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, with oily affability.
“You buy diamonds, I want to sell some; and as I sell them under the pressure of peculiar circumstances I am prepared to let you have them a bargain,” said the stranger, with a tone at once friendly and businesslike.
“I don’t believe in bargains. I’ll give you a fair price for a good article, if you came by the things honestly,” replied Mr. Mosheh, with a suspicious look. “I am not a receiver of stolen goods. You have come to the wrong shop for that.”
“If I’d thought you were I shouldn’t have come here,” said the grey-bearded old man. “I want to deal with a gentleman. I am a gentleman myself, though a decayed one. I have not come on my own business, but on that of a friend, a man you know by name and repute as well as you know the Prince of Wales—a man carrying on one of the most successful businesses in London. I’m not going to tell you his name. I only give you the facts. My friend has bills coming due tomorrow. If they are dishonoured he must be in the Gazette next week. In his difficulty he went to his wife, and made a clean breast of it. She behaved as a good woman ought, put her arms round his neck and told him not to be downhearted, and then ran for her jewel-case, and gave him her diamonds.”
“Let us have a look at these said diamonds,” replied Mr. Mosheh, without vouchsafing any praise of the wife’s devotion.
The man took out a small parcel, and unfolded it. There, on a sheet of cotton wool, reposed the gems, five-and-thirty large white stones, the smallest of them as big as a pea.
“Why, they’re unset!” exclaimed the diamond merchant. “How’s that?”
“My friend is a proud man. He didn’t want his wife’s jewels to be recognised.”
“So he broke up the setting? Your friend was a fool, sir. What do these stones belong to?” speculated Mr. Mosheh, touching the gems lightly with the tip of his fleshy forefinger, and arranging them in a circle. “A collet necklace, evidently, and a very fine collet necklace it must have been. You friend was an idiot to destroy it.”
“I believe it was a necklace,” assented the visitor. “My friend celebrated his silver wedding last year, and the diamonds were a gift to his wife on that occasion.”
The room was dimly lighted with a single candle which the servant had set down upon the centre table when she admitted the stranger.
Mr. Mosheh drew down a movable gutta percha gas tube, and lighted an office lamp, which stood beside his desk. By this light he examined the jewels. Not content with the closest inspection, he took a little file from his waistcoat pocket, and drew it across the face of one of the stones.
“Your friend is doubly a fool, if he isn’t a knave,” said Mr. Mosheh. “These stones are sham.”
There came a look so ghastly over the face of the grey-bearded man that the aspect of death itself could hardly have been more awful.
“It’s a lie!” he gasped.
“You are an impudent rascal, sir, to bring me such trumpery, and a blatant ass for thinking you could palm your paste
