But, when at last the opportunity arrived, the duchess rather took the wind out of my sails by announcing her son’s engagement to Miss Rivers and declining to discuss the death of Ferrol any more.
Fortunately, or, more exactly, as luck would have it, unfortunately for me, Lady Silverstairs was less reluctant. Sometime later I found myself next to her at dinner. During the initial courses I unfolded the beauties of my hypothesis which, in the interim, I had had the leisure to elaborate and to which she was good enough to listen. But when I got into occultism and pictured Anagarika floating over the seas, filtering into Ferrol’s rooms and finishing him there, she smiled, providing as she did so, glimpses of teeth perfect enough to make a saint envious, not of her husband, but, on the contrary, of any remplaçant the poor devil might have.
“Perhaps you don’t believe in yogis,” I remarked, in answer to that smile.
“I believe that two and two make four,” the delightful woman replied. “I believe that if one yogi could do all that, it would not require more than a rabble of them to take British rule by the ear and conduct it out of India. Did that ever occur to you? No. Did it?”
“It occurs to me,” I answered, “that argument is agreeable, but futile, with a woman who talks like Solomon and looks like a seraph. But,” I added, “if my explanation explains nothing, Ferrol must have killed himself. In which case, whose was the skirt?”
Lady Silverstairs nibbled at a strawberry and shook her pretty head. “Ferrol did not kill himself,” she presently announced. “The skirt, I am told, belonged to a woman who was in his rooms that night.”
“A demirep?”
“Oh, dear me, no. A woman like the rest of us.”
“But,” I objected, “surely it is not supposed that a woman of that kind would act like a wildcat? Such things are not done in Mayfair.”
Again there were glimpses of those teeth. But this time my delightful compatriot laughed.
“What isn’t done?” she asked. “Or, rather, tell me what is not done? Half the peerage is on the way to the divorce court and the other half ought to be.”
To this I hastened to agree. “Of course, there are everywhere—breaches of decorum, shall I say? But between bagatelles of that kind, and doing people up, there is a margin, don’t you think?”
But here Lady Silverstairs’ attention was claimed by a neighbor. When at last she got back at me it was with the same angelic smile.
“From what I hear,” she resumed, “I fancy that the woman in the case had expected to be Lady Ferrol. I fancy, too, that she first frightened Miss Rivers into breaking the engagement and then, disappointed in an effort to get Ferrol to renew an anterior pledge, lost her temper and he his life. That is the idea, though as yet the proofs are not in. But meanwhile—entre nous n’est ce-pas?—the lady is under surveillance. Tomorrow, the day after, tonight, it may be, she will be arrested and we will all assist at the trial.”
“How disgusting!” I exclaimed.
“Why disgusting? Don’t you care for trials?”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” I answered. “But all this eliminates my hypotheses, exiles the occult and dismisses the picturesque. It is that which is disgusting. But permit me. You forget, do you not, that Miss Rivers gave as her reason for breaking the engagement that Ferrol saw things and—”
“Precisely,” my fair compatriot interrupted. “And so does she. And knows a good one, too, when she is about it. She did not dillydally much, now, did she, about snapping Nevis up?”
“After all,” I rejoined, “it is nobody’s business but her own why she broke with Ferrol. But if she invented that beautiful story about Anagarika she has an imagination to beat the band. Though, on the other hand,” I added, “Ferrol, on receipt of some letter from Benares, may have told her what those chaps out there are able to do, and what he advanced theoretically she may have accepted as fact.”
“Oh, as for that, she is great at accepting. It has been one man after the other ever since she got here. But, now that you remind me, that is pretty much the idea that they have at Sandringham.”
“Well, then,” I replied, “if that is the inside of it I do wish you would tell the duchess. It would seem to her so unusual.”
“But I have told her.”
“And what did she say?”
“Nothing. She had heard it before and looked upon it as the most natural in the world.”
“There is nothing commonplace about her, is there?” I exclaimed.
But immediately there was a move. Our hostess was rising. As I got from my chair I was conscious of a sense of loss. Under the table Anagarika lay, pitched there by inside information. In lieu of the splendid possibilities he had evoked I had an inkling of a stupid crime. The exchange was not compensatory. I regarded it as a swindle—as worse yet, a nameless shame.
“Blind obedience and the truth. That’s what I want from you. Nothing else.”
Mr. Beamish, as he spoke, glared imperially. There are men whom it is more agreeable to avoid than to meet. Mr. Beamish had succeeded in becoming one of them. He was fat, and quite as fascinating as vulgarity and a French tailor could make him. What a French tailor can accomplish in that line exceeds the powers of prose. Yet, though fat, he was forceful,
