Rochester, whom the mummery perhaps perplexed, motioned.
“It was in this room, shortly before dinner. She had just entered the house. I was standing where you are seated. She came in, looked at me, gasped, half circled, crumpled. I sent for a physician—not hers, for the life of me I could not remember his name—but for anyone. In relatively no time an imbecile named Folsom appeared. He said it might be her heart.”
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Jones, who, however indifferent to the lady, was a human being and found but that.
“But,” Rochester continued, “Folsom said that as he had not previously attended her he would have to notify the authorities. That is why I telephoned. I suppose the coroner may be here at any moment.”
Jones sat up.
“Phil, you have my deepest sympathy. If there were words of consolation, I would express them. There are none.”
As Jones spoke, he considered the picture—Nina Rochester strolling in and falling dead. It was as extraordinary as his own fiction, which, however, is not saying much.
“But,” he added, “don’t you see, there will have to be a postmortem?”
Bleakly Rochester nodded.
“That is why I asked you to come. I may need bail.”
Jones blinked. Bail! Was there anything behind all this, he wondered?
“Let me ask you,” he said, “did Mrs. Rochester complain at all?”
“Of her heart?” Rochester “Oh, constantly.”
As he spoke, he stood up and turned a switch. Abruptly the somber room was brilliant, and Jones saw that his friend had gone dead-white.
But the answer satisfied him. He was about to say as much when a servant appeared announcing the coroner and the coroner’s physician. Presently the two entered, one thin and vicious as a snake, the other fat, with a fabulous nose.
“Mr. Rochester?” the thin man began, addressing Jones. He waved at his companion. “Dr. Mordecai.”
The novelist got up.
“My name is Ten Eyck Jones.”
“The writer?” the coroner threw out. “I have been reading one of your stories.”
“You must have been very idle,” Jones negligently replied. Indicating his friend, he added: “This is Mr. Rochester.”
Already, and with but a glance, the coroner had taken the latter in. Already, the house, the appointments, the relaxing atmosphere of wealth had impressed him. Usually in a case that promised to be sensational—and this case certainly was promising—hot and heavy he went at it; but at the moment the ambient influences restrained. There was time enough, he thought, and he patted his chin.
“Dr. Folsom reports—”
“Quite so,” Rochester interrupted. “When he was here, I was too overcome to be entirely coherent. It is very natural that he should have reported a death to which Dr. Barker, my wife’s physician, whose name at the time I could not get, would have certified readily. Dr. Barker knew that Mrs. Rochester’s heart was weak. He had warned her about it. None the less, latterly she had been working practically night and day for a relief fund. It was too much for her. She overdid it. Probably you have charities of your own, Mr. Coroner. In that case, and in her name, I shall be glad to give you a thousand dollars for them.”
Instantly, but in French, Jones intervened.
“Don’t be a fool!”
The coroner’s eyes had narrowed.
“Is that a bribe, sir?”
Quite as quickly Rochester took it up.
“You probably think that I don’t want an autopsy; and if so, you are right. I would like to spare the feelings of my dead wife’s family as much as possible. At the same time, if you have so much as the shadow of the peradventure of a doubt, then, if only for my own sake, I must insist on a postmortem.”
The coroner, swallowing something that did not taste like a thousand dollars, shifted.
“Let me see the body,” he said.
“This way,” Rochester replied.
II
The next moment Jones was alone. Professionally, if metaphorically, he cocked an eye. There was something queer here, something behind the scenes. What was it?
For a year and a day he had seen little of Rochester, who, for a while, had been visiting in Massachusetts. From there he had written to Jones, among other things, about a Puritan girl whom he said he was to marry. Subsequently he had shown up in town, but as one does when one has been hit, hard hit, hit on the head. He had become moody, remote, inaccessible.
Afterward, without further allusion to the Puritan maiden, Rochester’s marriage to Nina Varian had occurred. Whether it had been a success, no one save himself and his bride could have told; and now her heart had interfered. Suddenly it had stopped, and, discarding her flesh like a raiment, she had gone—in a jiffy, like that!
It was certainly odd, Jones reflected, and the oddity of it was heightened by Rochester’s demeanor, in which there was no sign of grief, or of anything, except perhaps of funk—the funk of a man too trained to betray it. Only in his curious pallor and in his equally curious bribe had it been revealed.
In an effort to clarify the situation Jones once more felt for his cigarette-case. Remembering that it had slipped from him, he bent over and groped behind the table-cover that reached nearly to the floor.
But now he had it—or no, he had something else. He drew it out and found himself looking at a six-shooter, which among the costly futilities of the room was incongruous as a pike in a tank of goldfish. Unsummoned, an empty remark of Rochester’s returned to him, charged now with significance:
“I was standing where you are seated.”
Strangling an oath, he threw the pistol back under the table, and, fumbling again, discovered the case. Then, straightening, he opened the case, took a cigarette, and was looking for a match when the three men reappeared.
“You tell me this lady was interested in some charity?” the coroner was saying.
Rochester nodded.
“Yes, and that reminds me—”
He pressed a button, sat down at the table opposite Jones, got a checkbook from a drawer, and
