“All right, all right,” cried Peter, who had been staring at his friend, transfixed with astonishment. “Don’t get worked up. I believe you. Spare me. I’m only a brother. All brothers are fools. All lovers are lunatics—Shakespeare says so. Do you want Mary, old man? You surprise me, but I believe brothers always are surprised. Bless you, dear children!”
“Damn it all, Wimsey,” said Parker, very angry, “you’ve no right to talk like that. I only said how greatly I admired your sister—everyone must admire such pluck and staunchness. You needn’t be insulting. I know she’s Lady Mary Wimsey and damnably rich, and I’m only a common police official with nothing a year and a pension to look forward to, but there’s no need to sneer about it.”
“I’m not sneering,” retorted Peter indignantly. “I can’t imagine why anybody should want to marry my sister, but you’re a friend of mine and a damn good sort, and you’ve my good word for what it’s worth. Besides—dash it all, man!—to put it on the lowest grounds, do look what it might have been! A Socialist Conchy of neither bowels nor breeding, or a card-sharping dark horse with a mysterious past! Mother and Jerry must have got to the point when they’d welcome a decent, God-fearing plumber, let alone a policeman. Only thing I’m afraid of is that Mary, havin’ such beastly bad taste in blokes, won’t know how to appreciate a really decent fellow like you, old son.”
Mr. Parker begged his friend’s pardon for his unworthy suspicions, and they sat a little time in silence. Parker sipped his port, and saw unimaginable visions warmly glowing in its rosy depths. Wimsey pulled out his pocketbook, and began idly turning over its contents, throwing old letters into the fire, unfolding and refolding memoranda, and reviewing a miscellaneous series of other people’s visiting-cards. He came at length to the slip of blotting-paper from the study at Riddlesdale, to whose fragmentary markings he had since given scarcely a thought.
Presently Mr. Parker, finishing his port and recalling his mind with an effort, remembered that he had been meaning to tell Peter something before the name of Lady Mary had driven all other thoughts out of his head. He turned to his host, open-mouthed for speech, but his remark never got beyond a preliminary click like that of a clock about to strike, for, even as he turned, Lord Peter brought his fist down on the little table with a bang that made the decanters ring, and cried out in the loud voice of complete and sudden enlightenment:
“Manon Lescaut!”
“Eh?” said Mr. Parker.
“Boil my brains!” said Lord Peter. “Boil ’em and mash ’em and serve ’em up with butter as a dish of turnips, for it’s damn well all they’re fit for! Look at me!” (Mr. Parker scarcely needed this exhortation.) “Here we’ve been worryin’ over Jerry, an’ worryin’ over Mary, an’ huntin’ for Goyleses an’ Grimethorpes and God knows who—and all the time I’d got this little bit of paper tucked away in my pocket. The blot upon the paper’s rim a blotted paper was to him, and it was nothing more. But Manon, Manon! Charles, if I’d had the grey matter of a woodlouse that book ought to have told me the whole story. And think what we’d have been saved!”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so excited,” said Parker. “I’m sure it’s perfectly splendid for you to see your way so clearly, but I never read Manon Lescaut, and you haven’t shown me the blotting-paper, and I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’ve discovered.”
Lord Peter passed the relic over without comment.
“I observe,” said Parker, “that the paper is rather crumpled and dirty, and smells powerfully of tobacco and Russian leather, and deduce that you have been keeping it in your pocketbook.”
“No!” said Wimsey incredulously. “And when you actually saw me take it out! Holmes, how do you do it?”
“At one corner,” pursued Parker, “I see two blots, one rather larger than the other. I think someone must have shaken a pen there. Is there anything sinister about the blot?”
“I haven’t noticed anything.”
“Some way below the blots the Duke has signed his name two or three times—or, rather, his title. The inference is that his letters were not to intimates.”
“The inference is justifiable, I fancy.”
“Colonel Marchbanks has a neat signature.”
“He can hardly mean mischief,” said Peter. “He signs his name like an honest man! Proceed.”
“There’s a sprawly message about five something of fine something. Do you see anything occult there?”
“The number five may have a cabalistic meaning, but I admit I don’t know what it is. There are five senses, five fingers, five great Chinese precepts, five books of Moses, to say nothing of the mysterious entities hymned in the Dilly Song—‘Five are the flamboys under the pole.’ I must admit that I have always panted to know what the five flamboys were. But, not knowing, I get no help from it in this case.”
“Well, that’s all, except a fragment consisting of ‘oe’ on one line, and ‘is fou—’ below it.”
“What do you make of that?”
“ ‘Is found,’ I suppose.”
“Do you?”
“That seems the simplest interpretation. Or possibly ‘his foul’—there seems to have been a sudden rush of ink to the pen just there. Do you think it is ‘his foul’? Was the Duke writing about Cathcart’s foul play? Is that what you mean?”
“No, I don’t make that of it. Besides, I don’t think it’s Jerry’s writing.”
“Whose is it?”
“I don’t know, but I can guess.”
“And it leads somewhere?”
“It tells the whole story.”
“Oh, cough it up, Wimsey. Even Dr. Watson would lose patience.”
“Tut, tut! Try the line above.”
“Well, there’s only ‘oe.’ ”
“Yes, well?”
“Well, I don’t know. Poet, poem, manoeuvre, Loeb edition, Citroen—it might be anything.”
“Dunno about that. There aren’t lashings of English words with ‘oe’ in them—and it’s written so close it almost looks like a diphthong at that.”
“Perhaps
