Money attracts money. Graham Bendix had inherited it, he made it, and inevitably he married it too. The orphaned daughter of a Liverpool shipowner she was, with not far off half-a-million in her own right to bring to Bendix, who needed it not at all. But the money was incidental, for he needed her if not her fortune, and would have married her just as inevitably (said his friends) if she had had not a farthing.
She was so exactly his type. A tall, rather serious-minded, highly-cultured girl, not so young that her character had not had time to form (she was twenty-five when Bendix married her, three years ago), she was the ideal wife for him. A bit of a Puritan, perhaps, in some ways, but Bendix himself was ready enough to be a Puritan by then if Joan Cullompton was.
For in spite of the way he developed later Bendix had sown as a youth a few wild oats in the normal way. Stage-doors, that is to say, had not been entirely strange to him. His name had been mentioned in connection with that of more than one frail and fluffy lady. He had managed, in short, to amuse himself, discreetly but by no means clandestinely, in the usual manner of young men with too much money and too few years. But all that, again in the ordinary way, had stopped with his marriage.
He was openly devoted to his wife and did not care who knew it, while she too, if a trifle less obviously, was equally said to wear her heart on her sleeve. To make no bones about it, the Bendixes had apparently succeeded in achieving that eighth wonder of the modern world, a happy marriage.
And into the middle of it there dropped, like a clap of thunder, the box of chocolates.
“After depositing the box of chocolates with the porter,” Moresby continued, shuffling his papers to find the right one, “Mr. Bendix followed Sir Eustace into the lounge, where he was reading the Morning Post.”
Roger nodded approval. There was no other paper that Sir Eustace could possibly have been reading but the Morning Post.
Bendix himself proceeded to study The Daily Telegraph. He was rather at a loose end that morning. There were no board meetings for him, and none of the businesses in which he was interested called him out into the rain of a typical November day. He spent the rest of the morning in an aimless way, read the daily papers, glanced through the weeklies, and played a hundred up at billiards with another member equally idle. At about half-past twelve he went back to lunch to his house in Eaton Square, taking the chocolates with him.
Mrs. Bendix had given orders that she would not be in to lunch that day, but her appointment had been cancelled and she too was lunching at home. Bendix gave her the box of chocolates after the meal as they were sitting over their coffee in the drawing-room, explaining how they had come into his possession. Mrs. Bendix laughingly teased him about his meanness in not buying her a box, but approved the make and was interested to try the firm’s new variety. Joan Bendix was not so serious-minded as not to have a healthy feminine interest in good chocolates.
Their appearance, however, did not seem to impress her very much.
“Kümmel, Kirsch, Maraschino,” she said, delving with her fingers among the silver-wrappered sweets, each bearing the name of its filling in neat blue lettering. “Nothing else, apparently. I don’t see anything new here, Graham. They’ve just taken those three kinds out of their ordinary liqueur-chocolates.”
“Oh?” said Bendix, who was not particularly interested in chocolates. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters much. All liqueur-chocolates taste the same to me.”
“Yes, and they’ve even packed them in their usual liqueur-chocolate box,” complained his wife, examining the lid.
“They’re only a sample,” Bendix pointed out. “They may not have got the right boxes ready yet.”
“I don’t believe there’s the slightest difference,” Mrs. Bendix pronounced, unwrapping a Kümmel. She held the box out to her husband. “Have one?”
He shook his head. “No, thank you, dear. You know I never eat the things.”
“Well, you’ve got to have one of these, as a penance for not buying me a proper box. Catch!” She threw him one. As he caught it she made a wry face. “Oh! I was wrong. These are different. They’re twenty times as strong.”
“Well, they can bear at least that,” Bendix smiled, thinking of the usual anaemic sweetmeat sold under the name of chocolate-liqueur.
He put the one she had given him in his mouth and bit it up; a burning taste, not intolerable but far too pronounced to be pleasant, followed the release of the liquid. “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “I should think they are strong. I believe they’ve filled them with neat alcohol.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t do that, surely,” said his wife, unwrapping another. “But they are very strong. It must be the new mixture. Really, they almost burn. I’m not sure whether I like them or not. And that Kirsch one tasted far too strongly of almonds. This may be better. You try a Maraschino too.”
To humour her he swallowed another, and disliked it still more. “Funny,” he
