“Well, one evening he and this play-actress were giving a party, and they were playing baccarat. There was a Portuguese count there—a very dark man from the Legation, Philbrick said. The game rapidly became a personal contest between these two. Philbrick won over and over again until the Count had no more money left and had signed many I.O.U.s. Finally, very late in the night, he took from the Countess’s hand—she was sitting beside him with haggard eyes watching him play—an enormous emerald. As big as a golf ball, Philbrick said.
“ ‘This has been an heirloom of my family since the first Crusade,’ said the Portuguese Count. ‘It is the one thing which I had hoped to leave to my poor, poor little son.’ And he tossed it on to the table.
“ ‘I will wager against it my new four-funnel, turbine-driven liner called The Queen of Arcady,’ said Philbrick.
“ ‘That’s not enough,’ said the Portuguese Countess.
“ ‘And my steam-yacht Swallow and four tugs and a coaling-barge,’ said Philbrick. All the party rose to applaud his reckless bid.
“The hand was played. Philbrick had won. With a low bow he returned the emerald to the Portuguese Countess. ‘For your son!’ he said. Again the guests applauded, but the Portuguese Count was livid with rage. ‘You have insulted my honour,’ he said. ‘In Portugal we have only one way of dealing with such an occurrence.’
“There and then they went out into Hyde Park, which was quite close. They faced each other and fired: it was just dawn. At the feet of the Achilles statue Philbrick shot the Portuguese Count dead. They left him with his smoking revolver in his hand. The Portuguese Countess kissed Philbrick’s hand as she entered her car. ‘No one will ever know,’ she said. ‘It will be taken for suicide. It is a secret between us.’
“But Philbrick was a changed man. The actress was driven from his house. He fell into a melancholy and paced up and down his deserted home at night, overpowered by his sense of guilt. The Portuguese Countess rang him up, but he told her it was the wrong number. Finally he went to a priest and confessed. He was told that for three years he must give up his house and wealth and live among the lowest of the low. That,” said Mr. Prendergast simply, “is why he is here. Wasn’t that the story he told you?”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Paul.
“Not the shade of a likeness,” said Grimes. “He told me all about himself one evening at Mrs. Roberts’. It was like this:
“Mr. Philbrick, senior, was a slightly eccentric sort of a cove. He made a big pile out of diamond mines while he was quite young and settled in the country and devoted his declining years to literature. He had two kids: Philbrick and a daughter called Gracie. From the start Philbrick was the apple of the old chap’s eye, while he couldn’t stick Miss Gracie at any price. Philbrick could spout Shakespeare and Hamlet and things by the yard before Gracie could read ‘The cat sat on the mat.’ When he was eight he had a sonnet printed in the local paper. After that Gracie wasn’t in it anywhere. She lived with the servants like Cinderella, Philbrick said, while he, sensible little beggar, had the best of everything and quoted classics and flowery language to the old boy upstairs. After he left Cambridge he settled down in London and wrote away like blazes. The old man just loved that; he had all Philbrick’s books bound in blue leather and put in a separate bookcase with a bust of Philbrick on top. Poor old Gracie found things a bit thin, so she ran off with a young chap in the motor trade who didn’t know one end of a book from the other, or of a car for that matter, as it turned out. When the old boy popped off he left Philbrick everything, except a few books to Gracie. The young man had only married her because he thought the old boy was bound to leave her something, so he hopped it. That didn’t worry Philbrick. He lived for his art, he said. He just moved into a bigger house and went on writing away fifteen to the dozen. Gracie tried to get some money out of him more than once, but he was so busy writing books, he couldn’t bother about her. At last she became a cook in a house at Southgate. Next year she died. That didn’t worry Philbrick at first. Then after a week or so he noticed an odd thing. There was always a smell of cooking all over the house, in his study, in his bedroom, everywhere. He had an architect in who said he couldn’t notice any smell, and rebuilt the kitchen and put in all sorts of ventilators. Still, the smell got worse. It used to hang about his clothes so that he didn’t dare go out, a horrible fatty smell. He tried going abroad, but the whole of Paris reeked of English cooking. That was bad enough, but after a time plates began rattling round his bed when he tried to sleep at nights and behind his chair as he wrote his books. He used to wake up in the night and hear the frizzling of fried fish and the singing of kettles. Then he knew what it was: it was Gracie haunting him. He went to the Society for Psychical Research, and they got through a conversation to Gracie. He asked how he could make reparation. She said that he must live among servants for a year and write a book about them that would improve their lot. He tried to go the whole hog at first and started as chef, but of course that wasn’t really in his line, and the family he
