“I am in excellent health, I am obliged to you, sir.”
“That’s good. Been doing any photography lately?”
“A certain amount, sir. But merely of a pictorial description, if I may venture to call it so. Criminological material, sir, has been distressingly deficient of late.”
“Perhaps Mr. Murbles has brought us something,” suggested Wimsey.
“No,” said Mr. Murbles, holding the Cockburn ’80 beneath his nostrils and gently agitating the glass to release the ethers, “no, I can’t say I have, precisely. I will not disguise that I have come in the hope of deriving benefit from your trained habits of observation and deduction, but I fear—that is, I trust—in fact, I am confident—that nothing of an undesirable nature is involved. The fact is,” he went on, as the door closed upon the retreating Bunter, “a curious question has arisen with regard to the sad death of General Fentiman at the Bellona Club, to which, I understand, you were a witness.”
“If you understand that, Murbles,” said his lordship, cryptically, “you understand a damn sight more than I do. I did not witness the death—I witnessed the discovery of the death—which is a very different thing, by a long chalk.”
“By how long a chalk?” asked Mr. Murbles, eagerly. “That is just what I am trying to find out.”
“That’s very inquisitive of you,” said Wimsey. “I think perhaps it would be better …” he lifted his glass and tilted it thoughtfully, watching the wine coil down in thin flower-petallings from rim to stem … “if you were to tell me exactly what you want to know … and why. After all … I’m a member of the Club … family associations chiefly, I suppose … but there it is.”
Mr. Murbles looked up sharply, but Wimsey’s attention seemed focused upon the port.
“Quite so,” said the solicitor. “Very well. The facts of the matter are these. General Fentiman had, as you know, a sister Felicity, twelve years younger than himself. She was very beautiful and very willful as a girl, and ought to have made a very fine match, but for the fact that the Fentimans, though extremely well-descended, were anything but well-off. As usual at that period, all the money there was went to educating the boy, buying him a commission in a crack regiment and supporting him there in the style which was considered indispensable for a Fentiman. Consequently there was nothing left to furnish a marriage-portion for Felicity, and that was rather disastrous for a young woman sixty years ago.
“Well, Felicity got tired of being dragged through the social round in her darned muslins and gloves that had been to the cleaners—and she had the spirit to resent her mother’s perpetual strategies in the matchmaking line. There was a dreadful, decrepit old viscount, eaten up with diseases and dissipations, who would have been delighted to totter to the altar with a handsome young creature of eighteen, and I am sorry to say that the girl’s father and mother did everything they could to force her into accepting this disgraceful proposal. In fact, the engagement was announced and the wedding-day fixed, when, to the extreme horror of her family, Felicity calmly informed them one morning that she had gone out before breakfast and actually got married, in the most indecent secrecy and haste, to a middle-aged man called Dormer, very honest and abundantly wealthy, and—horrid to relate—a prosperous manufacturer. Buttons, in fact—made of papier-mâché or something, with a patent indestructible shank—were the revolting antecedents to which this headstrong young Victorian had allied herself.
“Naturally there was a terrible scandal, and the parents did their best—seeing that Felicity was a minor—to get the marriage annulled. However, Felicity checkmated their plans pretty effectually by escaping from her bedroom—I fear, indeed, that she actually climbed down a tree in the back-garden, crinoline and all—and running away with her husband. After which, seeing that the worst had happened—indeed, Dormer, a man of prompt action, lost no time in putting his bride in the family way—the old people put the best face they could on it in the grand Victorian manner. That is, they gave their consent to the marriage, forwarded their daughter’s belongings to her new home in Manchester, and forbade her to darken their doors again.”
“Highly proper,” murmured Wimsey. “I’m determined never to be a parent. Modern manners and the breakup of the fine old traditions have simply ruined the business. I shall devote my life and fortune to the endowment of research on the best method of producin’ human beings decorously and unobtrusively from eggs. All parental responsibility to devolve upon the incubator.”
“I hope not,” said Mr. Murbles. “My own profession is largely supported by domestic entanglements. To proceed. Young Arthur Fentiman seems to have shared the family views. He was disgusted at having a brother-in-law in buttons, and the jests of his messmates did nothing to sweeten his feelings toward his sister. He became impenetrably military and professional, crusted over before his time, and refused to acknowledge the existence of anybody called Dormer. Mind you, the old boy was a fine soldier, and absolutely wrapped up in his Army associations. In due course he married—not well, for he had not the means to entitle himself to a noble wife, and he would not demean himself by marrying money, like the unspeakable Felicity. He married a suitable gentlewoman with a few thousand pounds. She died (largely, I believe, owing to the military regularity with which her husband ordained that she should perform her maternal functions), leaving a numerous but feeble family of children. Of these, the only one to attain maturity was the father of the two Fentimans you know—Major Robert and Captain George Fentiman.”
“I don’t know Robert very well,” interjected Wimsey. “I’ve met him. Frightfully hearty and all that—regular army type.”
“Yes, he’s of the old Fentiman stock. Poor George inherited a weakly strain from his grandmother, I’m afraid.”
“Well, nervous, anyhow,” said Wimsey, who knew better than the old solicitor the kind of mental and physical strain George Fentiman had undergone. The War pressed hardly upon
