“I suppose there can be no doubt that this is Captain Culvers’s writing?” said Clive, turning to Lord Culvers.
Lord Culvers vouched for the genuineness of the signatures.
“And not a doubt, sooner or later,” he added, “I shall have to discharge these and considerably heavier liabilities for my nephew.”
It was scarcely the time for parleying and bargaining; it seemed the wiser course to cut short delay and write a cheque at once for the amount.
“Now for your story,” said Clive, impatiently interrupting the man’s profuse and somewhat servile thanks.
The story was simple enough, and was given in one sentence:
“I was in the room when Captain Culvers took the brooch out of his pocket, and gave it to Marie Schira, after a theatrical supper which the Captain gave in the Rue Vervien.”
“Ah‑h!”
And Lord Culvers’s face expressed great amazement.
“Was anyone else present?” asked Clive, thinking it might be as well to get the man’s words verified.
“Only my chum, George Johnson, sir, who’ll vouch for the truth of what I say. Marie went into raptures over the brooch, and asked the Captain where he had got such a pretty thing from. The Captain, half laughing, said that he had found it on the floor of a carriage, with its pin broken as she saw it. Upon which Marie laughed, and said whoever had dropped it would never see it again.”
“On the floor of a carriage!” repeated Lord Culvers. “That may have been on his way back to Glynde Lodge after Ida left him.”
“Marie was deeply in debt,” Skinner went on, willing to tell any amount of secrets now that it had been made “worth his while” to do so. “I suspect that she herself removed the stones from the brooch, and disposed of them as best she could.”
The explanation seemed feasible enough. It made plain to Clive that the name of Culvers so often on poor Marie’s lips represented to her mind Sefton, not Sefton’s uncle.
Lord Culvers, in great agitation, paced the room.
“I couldn’t have believed it of Sefton—no, not if anyone had sworn it!” he exclaimed. “One’s own flesh and blood! After this, what may we not expect to hear?”
“So ends the episode of the diamond brooch,” said Clive, bitterly, with an irritating recollection of the manner in which his father’s sagacity had been led astray on the matter.
Then he turned to Skinner.
“You can go,” he said, a little sharply. “Of course, we shall take care, one way or another, to get your statements verified.”
But how much of verification either he or Lord Culvers judged necessary, may be gathered from the fact that, as the door closed on the man, they exclaimed simultaneously, as with one voice:
“Police enquiry on this matter must be stopped at once.”
Personally, it would not have troubled Clive one jot to have seen Sefton Culvers pilloried before the world, if only the man himself could have been detached from the name he bore. That name, however, at all costs had to be kept untarnished.
XVII
When the English mail came in that day, it brought with it for Clive the letter over which Juliet had spent so many hours.
He read it aloud to Lord Culvers from its first to its last word. It commenced with an earnest—one might almost say a heartbroken—entreaty that Clive would use his utmost endeavour to persuade Lord Culvers to call in the aid of the police, and to move heaven and earth to discover her darling sister. Her lips, unsealed now by terror as to what might be that sister’s fate, told fully and freely the story of her own conjectures and fears, and then went on to explain the part she had already played in the matter.
“My impression, at first,” she wrote, “was, that Ida and Sefton had had some desperate quarrel on their way to the churchyard, and that Ida had made the visit to mother’s grave an excuse for escaping from him. I fancied that she had gone to the house of some people whom she had met in Florence, and whose exact address I did not know. I thought that possibly she was corresponding—circuitously, not giving her address—with Sefton, trying to make him come to terms—that is to say, trying to make him consent to her living apart from him, provided she handed over to him a large portion of her fortune. I fancied she would not write to father, for fear he should interfere, and insist on her giving in; but I expected a line from her at any moment, telling me what part I was to take in the matter. When none came, I concluded that she was afraid to write for fear Peggy or father might get hold of her letter, and so trace her out. Then there occurred to me a safe way in which we might carry on our correspondence—a way, indeed, which we had planned together in the old days, when we found out how fond Peggy was of peeping into our letters. You know our dear old Goody lives in a cottage overgrown with a big yellow rose. She hates Peggy like poison, and would lay down her life for Ida and me. More than once we have had our letters addressed to us at the cottage under cover to Goody.
“When Ida went off to Biarritz two years ago, we agreed on a signal that would tell her when we were at Dering, and she could write to me at Goody’s cottage. It was that I should seal a letter or newspaper wrapper, or, in fact, anything I liked to send, with our grandmother’s seal. That seal I always keep in my writing-desk and carry about with me. It is an amethyst, cut with a rose surrounded with the motto: ‘
