I had known her when she was a little thing in short skirts, and I remember still the spindle legs which she then exhibited. That rather intimate reminiscence constituted my passport to her very dingy house in Hill Street, where, of a June afternoon, she was inquiring what the world was coming to.
In London, anything that has not occurred every day since the memory of man runs not to the contrary is always unusual, unless it happens to be most so. The remark of the duchess was, therefore, in accordance with precedent. But in this instance it was justified.
The death of Ferrol—Lord Henry Grafton Ferrol—was, when you got at the facts, not merely unusual and most unusual, but altogether extraordinary. It was the curious circumstance that his engagement should have been broken one day and he should have been killed the next which astounded the duchess and, for that matter, the rest of us who were with her. But that circumstance, however astounding, was tame beside the surprises which followed.
With Ferrol I had had a slight acquaintance, one which had begun in Hill Street and had continued—of all places in the world—in the British Museum. Incidentally, I was also acquainted with Miss Rivers. Like the duchess, she, too, was a New Yorker, a millionairess to boot, and a tip top sample of what our commerce in beauty can exhibit. Joined to her looks and her dollars she had an air of dauntlessness which, to me, was very fetching, but which, in London, I had heard catalogued as “so American,” a phrase which, being interpreted, means, I believe, very vulgar.
Of the breaking of her engagement to Lord Ferrol I was aware, but not of the reason. On that subject no one in Hill Street could, I found, enlighten me. It was known merely that the day previous the girl had gone to Paris. But with conjectures I was presently supplied.
Into the room there had erupted a compatriot, Lady Silverstairs, a delightful little woman, who knew pretty much all that was going and a good deal that was not. She, too, had heard of Ferrol’s death and also of the broken engagement. Concerning the latter, Lady Massingbird was at the moment holding forth.
“It must be, don’t you think?” she indulgently put it, “that either she found out something awful about him or else that he found out something still more awful about her?”
“May not the discoveries have been mutual?” Lady Silverstairs suggested.
“Yes,” said the duchess; “but, then, you see even that does not explain how he got strangled.”
The word seemed to stir my delightful compatriot voluptuously. “Strangled?” she repeated. “I thought it was a rupture of a—of a thingumagig.”
“Oh, no,” Yorke consolingly corrected. “Howdy do? No. Ferrol’s man ran out and saw Simpson in a hansom. Simpson, you know, is the chap who looks after—what? Yes, physician in ordinary. Well, from what I heard this afternoon at the Bachelors’, Simpson said that it was due to compression of the carotid artery.”
“Where is that?” asked the Lady Agatha, who, with affected precipitance, added, “Don’t tell me, though, if—if—”
“Oh, no,” Yorke reassuringly answered, fumbling as he spoke at his neck, “it is here.”
“But who did it? They don’t suspect Miss Rivers, do they? Or did he do it himself?”
“No one knows who did it. But, of course he did not do it. Simpson, don’t you see, says that that isn’t possible. I dare say—”
Yorke proceeded to lose himself in amiable hypotheses. But presently whipped in by the duchess, he got back again to what he had heard. What he had heard was to this effect:
Ferrol, the evening previous, on returning to chambers which he occupied at the corner of Piccadilly and St. James Street, had dismissed his man for the night. This servant, who had been with him forever, had then gone to his quarters below stairs, and had remained there until the next morning, when, in fetching up Ferrol’s breakfast, he found him flat on the floor, the mouth and eyes wide open. Then Simpson had been called in and he, deciding that it was a case for the police, had notified Scotland Yard. The latter had been stumped at once. In the dead man’s chambers nothing relative to the crime or to the presence of a criminal had been found, though, from the housekeeper, a hint had been pulled. This woman, the night previous, had been to a music hall. She had returned about one o’clock. In proceeding to her room, which was at the top of the house, she had, in passing Ferrol’s door, noticed that it was open. Then, on reaching the floor above she had heard a lady going down. She had not seen her. She had but heard the rustle of her skirt.
Yes, but whose skirt? Murder is painful, but a skirt is demulcent. Whose skirt was it? The question, ping-ponged over the tea things, finally lost itself among them. No one knew anything about Ferrol’s clandestine affairs; but then, of a man’s surreptitious amours, no one does know anything unless they get in the papers, where they are so generally befuddled that the culprit himself would not recognize them.
Then, too, it may be that Ferrol was hardly the kind of a chap to go in for the illicit. To me he had represented a reunion of attributes which I have never found out of England, and not often there—that of smartness and scholarship combined. He knew the world, possibly the devil, but certainly the literature of India which he read, not in the
