_THE
EMERALD
CATHERINE THE GREAT_




_By Hilaire Belloc_




_With Illustrations by
G. K. Chesterton_




1926

Publishers

New York and London

Harper & Brothers


[Illustration: _Mr. Collop describes the Finesse Diplomatique
of Bogotar._]




TO MAURICE BARING


MY DEAR MAURICE:


This is the fourth book I have dedicated to you, and you will see why if
you read it--which no one need do.

First, emeralds are green; and, on principle, like the Green Overcoat,
it owes to you of the Green Elephant, a dedication. Next, there is
Catherine the Great. She plays no long part, but she founded the
fortunes of them all; and we are in communion in the matter of that
large and generous but regal soul; we agree that it is a pity she died
before we were born. Also, you who know all about Russia, and I who know
nothing, have, in the matter of Russia, this Monarch of all the Russias
for a link.

Lastly, you have often urged me to write a detective story, because (you
assured me) they have gigantic sales. I promised you I would, on
condition there was nothing to find out.


Here it is.


KING'S LAND,

_Whitsun_, 1926.




CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TALE-PIECE




THE EMERALD OF
CATHERINE THE GREAT




CHAPTER ONE


William Bones was a stalwart man, some thirty-five years of age, the
master of a Brig which sailed from the port of Boston in Lincolnshire
and was half his own property. He was a native of that town, his father
having been therein a pork butcher in a fair way of business, his mother
the daughter of a small farmer in the Wring Land. He traded with the
Baltic when George the Third was King--indeed, when George the Third was
still young and long before George the Third first went mad.

Among other ports, he had found profit more than once in visiting that
of the River Neva, and was acquainted with the Russian trade. The great
city of St. Petersburg, still new but already splendid, became familiar
to him; and he himself, in his humble visits to the local factors,
became a familiar figure to the Secret Police of that capital. Even his
most domestic and private actions during his dealings in this port were
registered; and, it must be added, his strong English frame and handsome
English face admired, but also duly noted and their description passed
on to the proper authorities.

On his third voyage to Russia he was honoured by the invitation of a
merchant somewhat wealthier than the common of his acquaintance and at
that table met some official of the Court, of what exact situation his
ignorance of Russian and of French forbade him to inquire. Before
returning to his native Lincolnshire, his happy spouse and his young
family, he enjoyed the singular privilege of a further unexpected
invitation from this same Court official whom he had thus chanced to
meet, and so found himself at supper in one of the smaller and more
discreet rooms of the Palace, upon its mezzanine floor, in a choice
company of both sexes.

It is characteristic of the Empress herself--a great woman!--that a
large humanity and a laudable curiosity combined rendered her
indifferent to the conventions of rank. No sooner had she heard of the
British merchant captain's cheerful and manly habit than she desired a
more exact description, upon her receiving which he was permitted an
entrance to the Presence.

He enjoyed, partly by means of an elderly female who interpreted for him
until he had improved his few words of German--the Empress's mother
tongue and most familiar idiom--no little conversation with the august
sovereign, who, when he arrived at this stage, deigned to keep him by
her alone for some while. The interview was repeated upon more than one
occasion and her Imperial Majesty was so good, upon his reluctant
leave-taking some two or three weeks after his first arrival, as to
press him with an invitation to return.

Next season, the moment the Baltic ice was melted, he did so, disposing
of a mixed cargo; and, while leisurely awaiting his return charge, was
almost daily conveyed to the Palace from his humble lodging. For four
successive seasons running this strange adventure persisted.

Meanwhile his Boston neighbours could not but remark that his home in
the British haven of which he was a native and mariner, showed a
considerable advance in prosperity. His wife was better dressed, his
growing family could boast an increasing and superior acquaintance among
children of a rank with whom they would not earlier have mixed. It was
even whispered that Bill Bones had made formidable investments in the
City of London, which he certainly had visited more than half a dozen
times during his last winter stay in England; and though his friends
very charitably agreed that the profits of the Baltic trade might be
large, and that Bill Bones might have had exceptional opportunities,
they none the less talked among themselves upon the various possible
sources of a fortune which that trade could hardly account for.

With the fifth season there came an end to what had certainly been a
remarkable series. Whatever advantages communion with a throne might
have had for William Bones, the future would no doubt show; but the
fifth season was the end. There had been farewells, and yet no loss of
the high regard in which, for some extraordinary reason, he had been
held by the Semiramis of the North. He had acquired a certain assurance
of bearing which marked his new fortunes, and indeed, in this final
scene of his presence upon the quays of St. Petersburg, he seemed by his
gait to be some one of consequence. And no wonder, for he had left the
Palace for the last time bearing secreted in the bosom of his ample coat
a jewel worthy to be a memorial of the greatest passages in any life.

It was an emerald, exceptionally large--the largest, he had been
assured, in the world--square in shape, of the purest water and set in a
delicate little gold mounting after a fashion which recalled the
ornaments of the French Court.

It speaks well for Captain Bones that on his return to Boston he handed
this jewel to his wife, who thenceforward had it fixed with a pin, to
serve the office of a brooch, and wore it upon great occasions; notably
at a dance given by the mayor of the town, to which she brought her
eldest daughter, though barely of an age for such ceremonials.

The next year William Bones let his house in Boston and abruptly
transported himself and his family to the metropolis. His neighbours
were interested to discover that before abandoning them he had purchased
not a little property in the town and had even appointed a substantial
agent to deal with his rentals. He was clearly an advancing man and
their respect for him grew profound when they learnt what figure he now
cut in a world above their own. In London he was found entertaining
largely and standing upon an equal footing with merchants of repute,
though not perhaps as yet of the first fortune. Meanwhile he had
preferred the name of Bone, in the singular, to that of his earlier
life, conceiving it to be more consonant with his present position and
his residence in Cornhill and his interests in the banking world.

His only son George, when of an age for such occupations, which was some
five years after the family had come up to London, was taken in as a
partner by Mr. Worsle the India merchant, partly, no doubt, as a
testimony of friendship to his father, but partly also because William
Bone, who would now indifferently sign himself Bone or Bohun--the
original form of the name--had put at the young fellow's disposal a very
considerable capital.

William Bohun himself died somewhat prematurely in the eighth year after
his transmigration, and his wife, who, though much desiring to cut a
proper figure in her new world, had never properly succeeded in doing
so, followed him within three months to the grave. Her younger daughters
had received an excellent education; her eldest, born in her father's
earlier days, had perhaps less refinement of accent and deportment--but
on the other hand, her solid worth and quite exceptional dowry had
procured her alliance with the heir to Sir Philip Goole, a landed
gentleman in the West of England possessed of a fine town house in
Cavendish Square, but indifferent to politics.

George de Bohun--he had at first rejected but later began to use the
prefix "de" which a friend in the Heralds' College had suggested to
him--prospered, I am glad to say, exceedingly, as the son of such a
worthy father should, and acquired the playful nickname of "The Nabob,"
which spread from the city to the more exalted circles into which he was
welcomed, west of Temple Bar. It is a sufficient indication of the
respect in which he was held when I say that he was elected to Brooks's
Club, and there, by his generous behaviour at the card table, failed not
to become a favourite with the most exalted of his contemporaries in
Whig circles.

It may or may not interest the reader to know that upon his father's
death it was discovered that the Emerald of Catherine the Great had been
made an heirloom and was devised by an explanatory letter--since the law
could not enforce such a succession--for the eldest son, or, failing
sons, the eldest daughter of the reigning de Bohun on arriving at his
twenty-first, or her eighteenth birthday, his or her parents or trustees
being its successive custodians until that date. Failing such a
personage, the jewel was to be passed to any cadet branch, the eldest in
succession. If the great line of de Bohun should fail--which Heaven
forfend!--the sacred object was to be buried with the last of that
illustrious lineage.

The legal complications to which such a disposition would give rise need
not concern us, for in fact they never arose. George de Bohun had but
one son, Richard, born in the same year that saw the death of General
Bonaparte, the famous Corsican adventurer. To this son in his old age he
conveyed the jewel with the instructions concerning it, but he had
previously got rid of its unfashionable Louis XVI mounting and had it
set again, now as a pendant, after the fashion prevalent in the first
years of Queen Victoria.

Mr. George de Bohun had acquired--perhaps from his father--an unusual
reverence for the gem which he believed, with a mystical devotion
curious in a business man, to be in some way the tutelary genius of his
House. He would frequently tell young Richard, his heir, during the
boyhood of that philanthropist, the story of how Catherine the Great
herself had given it to his own father, the grandfather of the lad, when
that powerful genius was engaged upon a secret diplomatic mission to the
Russian Court. Hence had the emerald come to be known by the title of
"The Emerald of Catherine the Great" in the private circle of the de
Bohuns--pronounced "Deboons." That it should be preserved in the family,
certainly never sold and--please God!--never lost, was a religion with
George, which grew more fanatical as he approached the tomb. He came,
perhaps from an idea inherited from his father, to regard it as a
necessary condition of their prosperity, and he imbued his son Richard
with I know not what vague fears of disaster should its possession be
abandoned or should the stone itself be mislaid.

This second in the great line, George de Bohun--pronounced Deboon--the
son of its founder, though born as long ago as 1780, lived to see the
inauguration of the Hyde Park Exhibition by Queen Victoria in 1851, and,
having refused a peerage, closed his eyes in the fine country house
known as Paulings.

This mansion was--and is--situated in Herts, at no more than twenty-five
miles from Westminster. The successful Russian merchant purchased it
upon advantageous terms from the bankrupt and disreputable Parrall
family, whose last and seventeenth representative not only proved
incapable of preserving the patrimony of his ancestors, but had joined
the Romish Church and perished miserably at Boulogne.

Richard de Bohun was of course the "Dirty Dick" of mid-Victorian
politics, and an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston. There is little to
record of him except that after doing good and lucrative work in two
administrations he also refused a peerage; in which he was wise, for
though the family fortunes had not diminished, the general increase of
wealth around him made his position less conspicuous than that of his
father had been in the City of London. Indeed, the family was now no
longer connected with trade.

He died--as he had been born--at Paulings, a country house of such
absorbing interest that I shall later be compelled to describe it in
accurate if tedious terms.

The now reigning de Bohun, called Humphrey--after an illustrious
ancestor, the Humphrey de Bohun who fought at Bannockburn under Edward
II and undoubtedly held land, through his wife, in the neighbourhood of
Boston--the son of this statesman, is the Mr. de Bohun--pronounced
Deboon--of our own day: the highly respected Home Secretary who has
already passed with such distinction through what he himself will call
the _Cursus honorum_, having been Parliamentary Secretary to Harry Gates
during all of the great Paramooka Scandal--when he was the Baby of the
House--then successively rejected by Middleham West after the Seychelles
Scandal--when Gates went to the Lords--elected after a second attempt by
Middleham East, Under-Secretary during the period of the Second General
Strike and at last, after the usual vicissitudes of public life,
occupying the exalted position which he still adorns.

His figure is familiar to the public, I fear, rather by early
photographs than by recent portraits. He is a man tall and carefully
clothed, with a rather weary expression, set on a long face, with
insufficient grey hair neatly brushed. He is of a courteous demeanour.
He is much attached to his country life at Paulings, so happily
convenient to London, and sheltered from the large growth of suburban
villas about it by a dense fringe of more or less ancient trees. He is a
widower, possessed of three motor cars, but with only a flat in town. He
has refused a baronetcy, for he has (alas!) no son, but one daughter,
now just entering her nineteenth year. The name of the charming child is
Marjorie, and it was but recently, upon her eighteenth birthday, the
15th of January, that her father somewhat solemnly presented her with
the famous heirloom.

He had used no little ceremonial, speaking a little pompously of her
dead mother--a Ginningham--of the immemorial traditions of their house,
and with curious insistence upon the supposed influence of the jewel
upon their fortunes. He smiled somewhat lugubriously as he touched that
point, but Marjorie, though not extravagantly intelligent, had brains
enough to believe in omens, mascots, talismans, and was proud, as a girl
should be at her age, to enter upon the possession of the Sacred Gem of
the de Bohuns.

Her father had discarded, for so great an occasion, the Victorian gold
setting which, he was assured by Mr. Marolovitch and other experts, was
in deplorable taste. The jewel was now set once more--by Mr.
Marolovitch--as a brooch, since a woman was to wear it. The new setting
was in platinum, designed in the finest taste of Berlin, with writhing
curves and dead square divisions of the most entrancing variety. Large
as the Emerald was, and its new Prussian setting adequately broad, yet
the whole lay easily on the palm.

If it be not blasphemy to suggest any inefficiency in our Teutonic
cousins, I should suggest that the pin was a thought too long and
capable, on careless handling, of biting the hand that fed it. But for
any such trifling defect the grey colour of the new and more expensive
mounting, resembling that of a leaded grate, and the awful severity of
its odd rectangles and unexpected heavings of its re-entrant curves,
made ample atonement. Such was the aspect of the Emerald of Catherine
the Great in the winter when it entered upon its liveliest activities.




CHAPTER TWO


About a fortnight had passed since Mr. de Bohun had given his daughter
Marjorie the family mascot. It was Friday, the 30th of January, 1930:
the weather unpleasantly cold, overcast, with a threat of snow, and the
dark already set in.

After the heavy strain of an English working week, especially in
Parliament, complete relaxation is necessary from Friday after lunch to
the Monday's return to town by the afternoon. Nor was any mansion more
fitted to recuperate the exhausted energies of statesman or politician
than Paulings.

It had been built in the classical manner some twenty years before the
decline of the Parrall fortunes, which got their worst blow after the
year 1745. It was classical and highly symmetric; its fine great doors
had been designed to stand slightly above the level of the drive and
looked upon a shallow sweep of stone stairway. Upon either side of them,
windows in the Palladian fashion, with a pediment above each, announced
the wealth within; a hanging wreath of flowers and fruit in stone went
the length of the great wall, and against the sky was a balustrade.

That was all very well for the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth
and the new wealth of the de Bohuns put on useful excrescences. There
was a bulb to the east, and yet another bulb at the end of that, where
new stables, now a garage, were added to new offices, and on the west
there had been built, a little after the Crimean War, something like
half as much again of house room, in a manner pleasingly different from
all the rest. Here a new and more convenient door gave into a large
hall, not without suits of armour purchased at considerable expense, and
giving by various doors into the larger, older, and grander rooms of the
house, into a panelled dining-room, a large drawing-room, too often
changing in style, and on the extreme west a room very rarely used save
for the reception of whatever was not wanted about the living parts of
the house, or--in theory at least--for the complete seclusion of its
master, when--in theory--his heavy responsibilities demanded heavy
concentration.

This room we must know, for it was here that blind Fate, an all-seeing
Providence, or--more probably--a lively and mischievous sprite had laid
the scene of the loss of the Emerald.

The room was not large; it was in good proportions, for it dated from a
time when we were still civilized. It was strangely apparelled. There
was a large, rather shabby desk, at which the Home Secretary was
supposed to write and where he did at least leave accumulated a few old
letters and kept them down with a paper-weight of Chinese crystal,
carefully chiselled into the form of a little god who smiled.

There were five deep chairs of the sort called lounge, upholstered in a
leather almost black. There were as many more comfortable common chairs.
There was a really good fireplace brought over from one of the old
houses in Dublin, of marble with a Bacchic frieze. There was in front of
that really good fireplace a rug made of the skin of a polar bear,
singularly fierce in its open red mouth of ferocious grin, its gleaming
teeth and staring eyes--the room was so deserted that no one had knocked
that head to pieces with his feet. It seemed almost new, fresh from the
Arctic.

There were six windows looking to the west, south, and north, and coming
down close to the floor with deep sills forming seats after the fashion
of our fathers. For the room projected out into the park upon three
sides and the western one faced a long grass path between an avenue of
trees. There were one or two tables which did nothing, after the fashion
of most tables--outside dining-rooms, and even there they do no work
which I can recommend. There was above the mantelpiece one of those
looking-glasses of the First French Empire, round, lens-like, and
diminishing the picture of all the room. It had a round, broad, gilded
rim and upon its summit an eagle of the sort that flew from the Pyramids
to Cadiz, from Cadiz to Paris, from Paris to Moscow, and from Moscow
back again.

The floor was of the sort called, I believe, in the trade, antique
Austrian parquet. That is, it consisted of some half dozen slabs of
cheap pine firmly bolted together, on the top of it a veneer of
herring-bone Baltic oak, chemically treated to simulate the age and
dignity of Schönbrunn. The thing was designed for rapid laying down and
lifting and fitted together simply upon joists with what are--again
technically--called invisible screws, but at the corners of the room the
contraption was held by certain clamps which wanted a hell of a lot of
hammering down when it was fixed. On the surface of this dignified
flooring lay, carelessly chucked about, a few Oriental rugs from
Brighton and one charming little Chinese mat from London, damnably out
of place and swearing with the rest of the room like a cat run up a tree
from a dog.

What else was there in the room? Ah, yes, there was a parrot cage, and
if you are wise, unfortunate reader, you will pay particular attention
to that parrot cage, for later on it has a speaking part.

It hung by a chain from the ceiling against the west window looking out
on the long avenue, and within it lived--not melancholy, for he was too
stupid, but in a mixture of stolid age, indifference, and
nothingness--the parrot Attaboy. Nor must I omit either the appearance
of the parrot Attaboy, but only later can I tell you how the parrot
Attaboy came by his name.

Of his lineage I know nothing, nor even of his age. He might well have
been one hundred. Certainly there was nothing young about his eyes or
gestures, and I have always heard that parrots, like family servants and
others whom the gods hate, live to a great age.

Aunt Amelia had made a pompous present of him three years before to her
beloved niece Marjorie after her beloved Marjorie had reached her
fifteenth birthday; she bestowed not only the parrot but the cage, and
simultaneously a kiss upon her niece's forehead. At first the recipient
of the fowl did not appreciate the gift. But love will grow. The
thing--by which I mean the cage and the parrot and all--was hung by a
hook--at Aunt Amelia's expense--to the roof of this room simply because
it was so little used.

It happened precisely at the opening of the flat racing season, three
years before the opening of the story which you now have the ecstatic
pleasure of reading, that young Lord Galton, Marjorie's cousin--recently
acceded to the title by the sudden and unexpected death of his father
from I know not what forms of excess--had pulled a horse.

He was one of our modern youths, loving the risks of life and living
dangerously. Therefore had he pulled a horse and the horse he had
pulled--his very own--he had named Attaboy.

It was never brought home to him, as the phrase goes; that is, everybody
knew that it was true. Attaboy was famous at Paulings--a sort of family
crime to be proud of--a word used as often as any other for the moment
at Paulings; and the poor old parrot--we have no initiative in
age--picked it up and refused to learn anything else.

In a way it was awkward. Tommy Galton would come to his uncle's house
from time to time, and when he came it was rather important to keep him
out of the West Room during daylight. For the parrot had a way of
croaking quite suddenly, in the strong colonial accent of his tribe,
"Attaboy!" at the most unexpected moments. However, the parrot Attaboy
possessed a cover of black felt carefully put over his cage at night,
and whenever it found itself in darkness it was habitually silent after
the honourable fashion of parrots--and, after all, the room was not
commonly used. There was little risk of Lord Galton's being in it save
after the black cover was over the detestable bird.

Of Attaboy the parrot--Attaboy the horse had already gone to
stud--Marjorie grew fond. For one thing, she was not unattracted by her
cousin Tom, and Attaboy made a sort of bond between them. For another,
she was at the age when women can be fond of anything, even Tommy
Galton, let alone a parrot.

So much for Attaboy and the deserted room.

It has been remarked--without payment--by more than one philosopher that
the great events of this world arrive through the action of agents who
did not intend them. And this you will find to be true of Attaboy, of
the Polar Bear, and the deserted West Room.

I think it only fair to add, since I am writing a detective story, that
when Aunt Amelia visited her brother the Home Secretary, which was, all
totted up, for something like a third of the year, she was given the
principal guest room, known in the family as Bannockburn, which lay
immediately above.

So much for Paulings and its now famous, then deserted, West Room; its
Parrot, its Polar Bear.

I return to that winter week-end, that cold January Friday and the few
gathered in the great drawing-room of Paulings round its tea table.

It was not a party: it was a family meeting of a very few people.


[Illustration: _Dear Aunt, so good, so kind, and a little deaf._]


Old Lady Bolter, a much elder sister of the Home Secretary, known among
the Great as "Aunt Amelia," we have seen was half a permanency. She had
already given them three weeks of herself a month before; and she had
now settled down to another bout. They suffered her in this fashion
often enough; but as for her, she knitted. I have read in one of those
books which are published anonymously upon the people of that world,
that she had been famous in King Edward's day for her wit. Maybe. She
would hardly be famous for it now. However, she was not nearly so blind
nor so deaf as she pretended to be. She had met most people up to the
Great War and resembled a sheep.

Victoria Mosel was there, Marjorie's friend of another generation, still
sinuously moving round and round from house to house forever. There were
two men, close relatives, cousins: an elder and a younger.

The first was the hippo-phile, the expert in things of the Turf whom you
have just heard of, young Lord Galton, the son of the Home Secretary's
first cousin, Cecily, who had brought to Algernon, first--and very
nearly last--Lord Galton, a sufficient dowry, drawn from the then ample
funds of the de Bohuns, for her father had been the younger brother of
the Home Secretary. But this first--and very nearly last--Lord Galton
indeed was dead, and so was Lady Galton his wife, and the young man, now
his own father, found his inheritance less than he might have desired.
The Galtons, wisely taking their title from their name, had not done
well since they had left Liverpool; they had left that town too early.
So here he was, a tall, dark young man, a little too solid and certain
of himself, and--unhappily--attached to racing, a pastime for which his
fortune might have been sufficient fifty years ago, but was not at all
sufficient to-day.

It was not every house in England in which Lord Galton would have been
welcomed; but family counts, and he was here, with his rather sullen
face, strong chin and fixed mouth, and sub-challenging eyes. They were
sub-challenging because of Attaboy the horse. He had not suffered as he
might have done; he went a good deal less to one or two of his better
clubs than he had done before the rumour spread, but he was still a
constant member of the Posts and gambled there assiduously and with some
success. Yet was he always embarrassed, and his embarrassment did not
help his reputation.

He sat at the tea table that afternoon, fighting the boredom of Aunt
Amelia with what was toleration if it was not courtesy, and looking at
Marjorie without admiration but perhaps with intention. Now and then he
cast a furtive sharp look, when he thought it was safe, at Victoria
Mosel. She always knew too much, and as she stood there in front of the
fire, with a sham vacant look on her shrewd face, and the eternal
cigarette hanging from her lip, he wished her farther.


[Illustration: _Mr. B. Leader, Reader in Crystallogy to the
University, reading in Crystallogy to the
University._]


The second guest at that table, next to the Home Secretary himself, was
yet another cousin, but a whole first cousin this time--the only son of
the youngest uncle of all, who had married very young and very
imprudently. Wherefore was the said cousin, William by name, unable to
go into the City, and, compelled to become a Don, had become by
profession a professor. For a first cousin he was rather absurdly older
than the head of the family. The Home Secretary, who had himself married
late, was not more than fifty-five; but the Don, William de Bohun,
Fellow of Burford and holding the Chair of Crystallography, was quite
ten years older--perhaps a little more. He had a simple pride in the
excellence of his birth, a distracted manner due to his immense
learning--not indeed in the general field of the Humanities or the Arts,
but upon the particular point of dodekahedral crystals--and even of
octohedrals he had a smattering. Such was his fame that he had been
mentioned more than once in the proceedings of learned societies abroad
and had been elected Corresponding Member to the Crystallographic
Society of Berne.

Unmarried, with a small private income, the poor nest egg of his
improvident father, amply endowed, with no pupils to speak of, and the
dodekahedral hobby, he would have been as happy as it is possible for an
atheist approaching death to be, had it not been for the existence of
that infamous charlatan, Bertram Leader, not even a Fellow of St.
Filbert's, and mere Reader to the University in Amorphic Crystallogy.

I need not insist on the gulf that separates crystallography, a true
science, from crystallogy, its base mercantile application. To the one,
as was but right, a chair was attached; a chair founded by Z. Leizler
the philanthropist, before his flight, and now occupied by the aged
figure of the de Bohun. The other was thought hardly worth a Readership
at £600 a year, and only under secret threats had that wealthy college,
St. Filbert's, been persuaded by certain City men whom B. Leader in his
turn had threatened, to cough up. It took its revenge by admitting B.
Leader to its high table, and refusing to elect him a Fellow.

He it was who, waging secret war upon university caste, dug his
revengeful fangs into the Professor's naked soul. He it was who spotted
with relentless eye all the misprints in the Professor's papers, and
denounced them as enormities of ignorance in the _British
Crystallographic Review_, with which is combined the _Crystal
Gazetteer_ and _Bulletin_. He it was who exploded de Bohun's ancient
German doctrines with the recent research of horrid Dagoes, and exposed
it to derision whenever he lectured to a class of more than a dozen; for
his department being mixed up with commerce, there was money in it, and
a few undergraduates on the scent of the same; not so the Professor's
department. Now two, now one student, sought the well of learning, and
sometimes none.

On the other hand, Professor de Bohun could--and did--nourish a burning
happiness in his heart to remember that the infamous B. Leader was of no
lineage and had no private income at all. Nay, worse; an accent--almost
a twang.

But alas! for the alloyed happiness of risen man, in whom the highest
have something in them of the ape, (Poggles _General View_, Vol. II, Ch.
XXII, p. 222). B. Leader himself nourished a secret burning joy in his
heart; for he had found out--what the great thought was peculiar to
their own circle--the dreadful story of William de Bohun and the
Mullingar Diamond.

Because he loved crystals--not because he loved wealth: because the
Mullingar Diamond was the largest of its yellow kind in the world, and
had a flaw which was confidently reported to be due--incredible!--to a
bubble, William de Bohun had, eight years before, while stopping at the
Abbey as an honoured guest, pinched the Mullingar Diamond--not for a
permanency, but to make a close examination of the incredible bubble. He
had returned it, but already his action had got known, and some people
were cold to him. The less instructed among the great whispered that he
had been a famous thief in youth; the more instructed believed that his
profound science had produced a momentary lapse. The Family knew, but
had long forgiven him; indeed, there was nothing to forgive--they said.

Let it be added that Professor de Bohun had acquired, from so much
concentrated study upon dodekahedral crystals--with fatiguing excursions
among the octohedrals--a pleasing habit of repeating a word, never less
than three times, and sometimes six or eight.

In dress the old gentleman was careless, and, though perpetually
washing, never apparently clean. However, he did shave--save for the
whiskers which were the badge of his attainments in the learned world.

There was expected a third man, as young as, or younger than, Lord
Galton, and of a very different and meaner kind, a certain Hamish
McTaggart, who had become suddenly famous within the narrow circle of
the people in the know, because the Prime Minister, upon reading an
article of his upon Protection had said--in the full hearing of the very
narrow circle--"This is the only man on Protection whom I really
understand." The article had appeared by the order of McTaggart's master
in _The Howl_, whence it may be rightly assumed that McTaggart knew no
more of economics than would a warthog of Botticelli. Hence the lucid
style which the Prime Minister had saluted with such discovering joy.

His argument had been very simple. If you prevent things coming in to
the sacred Island, Albion, the Albionese will have to make these things
for themselves, and that means more employment, doesn't it? The truth
had struck the Prime Minister with far more effect thus set down in
clean print, than when he had heard it, as he had heard it a thousand
times, from the proprietor of _The Howl_, whom he had himself so rightly
ennobled.

Therefore was Hamish McTaggart now glowing with a vivid, though, alas!
restricted fame.

He himself was getting heartily tired of it. It had halved his
income--that is, it had brought it down below five hundred pounds a
year. No one would print him except upon the subject of Protection, and
he had to write in the way that was really understood. And he was
allowed to write only in those papers peculiar to the little inner
circle with the little inner circulation corresponding--and there's no
money in that! When he wanted to write about tigers, and get his
expenses paid free to the East and a lump sum--a job he would have got
for the asking two years before, when he wrote by the thousand words, to
order, just after leaving the University--he was asked what on earth he
knew about it? Tigers! And was bundled back to Protection.

Therefore was his future black; but in the little circle he was a sort
of lion. Victoria Mosel was always talking of him; Marjorie was eager to
see him once and then to discard his company for ever; Lady Bolter, full
of the intellectual Victorian time, wanted to be able to say that she
had been in the same room with a man of whom the Prime Minister himself
had said that he was the only man whose writing he really understood.
The Home Secretary had met him once or twice in other people's houses;
Marjorie herself and her aunt were the only two for whom he was still
quite a stranger.

"What train is he coming by?" said Tommy Galton, sunk into a deep chair.

The Home Secretary looked at his watch, then at the clock, noted they
did not correspond, frowned, and said he'd be here any time.


[Illustration: _Victoria Mosel lays odds on Mr. McTaggart's
saying "Dee-Boe-Hunn."_]


"I'll give you evens," said Victoria Mosel, "that he calls you Dee Boe
Hunn."

"Done!" said Tommy Galton, putting up a finger.

"Bradburys?" said Vic, sucking a pencil. "Gimme a bit o' paper."

Tommy Galton wrote on his cuff. "That'll do," he said.

"I often wish," bleated Aunt Amelia, "that you young people could have
met John Bright. I was only in the schoolroom, of course, but my dear
father had no scruples in----"

She was not allowed to go on.

"We can't all sit here kicking our heels till he's kind enough to
parade," said Marjorie, with girlish simplicity.

"No one wants you to," said Vic, delicately tearing off the last
cigarette like a plaster, and sticking in another one. "I'm clamped
down. Me for Hamish!"

The Professor suddenly gave tongue. His exceedingly pale old eyes were
wide open, and his foolish mouth almost as wide.

"Oh, I think it'll be exceedingly interesting--exceedingly interesting,"
he quavered. "Exceedingly interesting to meet one of the new generation
of ... shall we say, ah! journalists? Yes, journalists.... Journalists."

"Yes, Bill," replied young Galton. "We'll say journalists." Marjorie
yawned and stretched.

"Well, I'm not going to wait any longer," she said, when the buzz of a
motor was heard on the gravel outside, the approach of middle-class
feet, the door solemnly thrown open as for a dancing bear, and the
unfortunate McTaggart appeared, his name preceding him.

The Home Secretary, who had preserved some of the traditions, unfolded
himself painfully from his chair and stood up, greeting McTaggart with
the wan smile of the public man.

"Good evening, Mr. de Bohun." And behold! he pronounced it Deboon. With
the business-like rapidity that became her so well, Victoria Mosel
handed a crushed ball of three one-pound notes undemonstratively to Tom
Galton, who stretched forward to take it and elaborately crossed out the
note on his cuff.

Young McTaggart stood there a moment, not daring to sit down, suffering
great torture. Nor did any of the company relieve it, though Aunt
Amelia, to do her justice, did tell him how glad they all were to see
him, much as a spokesman for the Divinities might welcome any clod.

The poor devil was out of place. He did not know why he had come; he had
come because he was pressed, because he had nothing else to do, because
he was lonely, because he had heard of Paulings and wanted to see it,
because he thought such a visit to such a house might improve his
prospects; and now that he was here, he wished it had never been built.

He was never at his ease with his social superiors. His father and
grandfather had been mere soldiers; his great-grandfather one of
Nelson's captains; _his_ father again a very small laird in
Ayrshire--but one had to go back as far as that to get to gentility. He
dressed awkwardly, and he knew it. He never seemed to know quite where
to put the hands and feet at the extremities of his uncouth frame. He
also had a rather irritating trick of never looking anybody in the face.
It was nervousness, and came of writing too much. He was, I regret to
say, terrified of women, but especially of Ladies; and he had already
spent the first hours of his exile in wondering why on earth he had
allowed himself to be over-persuaded and had come.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

So much for the tea table and those that sat round it. The Home
Secretary, damnably full of courtesy but rather silent, sat helpless;
Victoria Mosel still stood by the fire surveying them all--and
particularly McTaggart--not unsaturnine for the others, but with a
singular touch of kindness in her slits of eyes for the embarrassed boy.
Then she recovered the firm pressure of her lips, emphasised by the
drooping cigarette, and the others looked on inanely or surlily,
according as God had made them.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

If you think I am going to describe to you in any detail how they passed
their time between tea and dinner, you are mistaken. Some books are
written like that, and there is an art of making them readable. I have
it not.

To action, therefore--to the Emerald!




CHAPTER THREE


It was that same Friday night, and about 9.55 by the clock. The men had
just come in from the dining-room. They had been warned that the
housekeeper, Mrs. Bankes (fear nothing--you will never meet her again)
had commandeered the drawing-room. They were not allowed to go back
there, for even now the belated serfs were spreading, under Mrs. Bankes'
eye, large dingy cloths over the chairs and tables against the early
sweep of the morrow.

The Home Secretary had no choice but to shepherd them into the somewhat
forlorn, hardly used West Room. A good fire had been ordered. He trusted
humbly in God that the parrot Attaboy, securely covered in its black
cage cloth, could utter no unseemly Attaboy cry. If it did--well, if it
did, Tommy must laugh. After all, it was his fault if he had pulled a
horse.

The men crawled in. McTaggart, being by far the meanest, was
compelled--in an agony--to go first. Next the Professor slid; after him
with sullen assurance Tom Galton. And the great statesman filed in last,
as host and chief, and shut the door with all the discretion of the
Front Bench and fourteen years of Westminster.

Marjorie was standing on the polar-bear skin rug by the fire, near that
fierce grinning head, those ironical teeth, holding the emerald--the
brooch--in her open hand; showing it to Victoria, who peered at it
cynically enough. She had already heard the story of it--for the third
time in two weeks, and for the three hundred and fifty-first in her
life--she knew it to be false, and she dreaded to hear again the myth of
the diplomat, the old Bohunian lie. But a good heart thumped behind that
bony breast and Victoria Mosel spared the child.

With this coming in of a new audience, Marjorie summoned them at once,
and they crowded round in obedience to that summons; and once more to
the listening earth she told--in her innocence!--the largesse of
Catherine the Great to her ancestor the diplomat, in whom she firmly
believed.

Lord Galton looked at the jewel with a sort of animosity, as much as to
say, "Put on no suspicious airs with me!" McTaggart tittered at it with
a nervous smile, as though he liked it well enough, but was rather
frightened of it; the Professor glared it down with an expert's pose.
The three men stood thus, bunched round their young hostess, touching
shoulders, while Marjorie continued her story of the de Bohun mission to
the great Empress, adding sundry other details which in her judgment
gave a heightened historical value to the gem.

Then the gods struck.

What she did, or how she did it, she never remembered. She felt a sharp
shoot in her finger: she should have known it was due to the
ill-calculated length of the pin. She said to herself--but in her heart
she did not believe it--that some one had jogged her elbow. Anyhow, the
Emerald of Catherine the Great jerked out suddenly and fell from her
palm, making no noise. It must have fallen upon the bearskin at her
feet, where a standard electric light upon a little table near at hand
happened to cast a shadow. She gave a startled cry, and at once the
three men were on their knees--yes, even the old Professor--groping in
the fur.

They were longer at their groping than one might have thought. The
object was small, but not so small as all that. It was flat, heavy,
metallic: it could not have rolled. It must be within a few inches, or a
foot at the most, of the place on which its proprietress had stood.

Unfortunately she moved, and in that movement no one could remember, to
half a foot or so, exactly where it should have lain. While the three
men still groped, and the impatient Marjorie tapped with her foot in the
suspense of it, the unfortunate McTaggart cried excitedly, "I've got
it!"

Lord Galton at once jumped up, relieved; the Professor also extended
upwards--less smartly; but when they had risen McTaggart was still on
his knees. Then with his face peering into the fur of the bearskin, he
added, "No! It's a splinter of coal,"--and he threw that fragment into
the fire and continued to rummage.

The Professor and Lord Galton looked at each other. They hesitated
whether to go down again; they thought it better to leave it to
McTaggart. Poor McTaggart thus remained in the abject attitude to which
he had now been subjected for two minutes or more, becoming increasingly
convinced that something terrible had happened.... He could not conceive
why he should not put his hand upon the thing.... But it was not
there.... At last, flushed, more disordered than ever, he pressed the
fingers of his left hand upon the floor and stood upright. He was a
little blown.

"I can't find it!" he said.

"You must find it!" said Marjorie sharply. Then, remembering herself,
she looked at the two who were her equals and cousins and she said:

"_One_ of you must find it! It can't be lost! Nonsense.... Look here,
stand back!" She pushed her poor old aunt, who was peering about in a
futile fashion. She enlarged the circle, and then said again:

"Now then, you must find it! Look here, I'll find it." They went down
again reluctantly, and she herself sank suddenly to her knees and helped
the group.

But they looked in vain. They separated the hair of the rug carefully,
they lifted it up pettily, edge by edge, and looked beneath. They
pressed upon it with their palms to see whether they could not find a
lump. Then they took the poor beast up and shook him savagely. But he
yielded no emerald. It was gone.

When at last they all rose again--appalled, for the moment
silent--Marjorie was as white as the skin upon which she trod.

"It can't be lost," she said again, bitterly. "I say, it _can't_ be
lost."

But lost it was.

"Father," she said angrily. "Do come and look!"

The Home Secretary reluctantly hoisted himself from his chair with a
secret groan, shuffled up to the place, and looked down at the rug in a
refined manner.

"Look for it, father! Do look for it! Come, it can't be lost!"

Painfully but obediently the Home Secretary went down on his knees in
his turn and groped about, with far less chance than any other man would
have had, of laying his hand upon the stone. He drew blank, as the
others had, and rose with more difficulty, McTaggart helping him; he
shuffled back, and sank again into his chair.

"Well, well, well!" he said. "Well! Well!"

There were tears in Marjorie's eyes--which was a weakness in one so born
and in such a place, but she could hardly keep them back. They were
tears as much of anger as of anything else. Upon Victoria Mosel's
face--somewhat apart, and smiling awfully at the bunch of them--there
was a look you could not see through. But upon the face of each of the
three men who had been first down upon their knees--not upon the face of
the Home Secretary--was now drawn an indefinable veil, as of instinctive
protection against a censorious world.

It had dawned upon each of them, in varying degrees of rapidity, that
_he_ was possibly suspect.

It had flashed first upon the lordlet. He lived and breathed in an air
of challenge. It would not have surprised him if he had seen some day on
a glaring sky sign flaming up large over Piccadilly Circus and winking
in and out to compel the eye: "Attaboy? Who pulled Attaboy? Tommy
Galton!"

The Professor got the message to his brain about a quarter of a minute
later. He very nearly spoke--but he caught the words in time. The
Mullingar Diamond oppressed him: all the world pointed a finger at him,
and the air was full of demoniac whispers: "Mullingar! Mullingar!"

And as for the miserable McTaggart, he was already such a worm in his
own eyes among these exalted folk that he thought his poverty might
alone have him arrested that very night. It struck him with a pang that,
in his innocence, he had remained there on his knees long after the
others had risen. Then a new shaft stabbed him. Ingenuous, he had dug
his own grave! They would interpret that cry, "I've found it!" as the
sudden shock of a real discovery: for him there sounded dully all
around, "Ar-r-rest that mon!"--and he was nearly sick.

So there they stood--three men, none of whom had any idea what had
happened, and each well convinced that he was the suspect who must fight
it out sooner or later: each at the same time firmly believing that one
of the other two was the culprit. In Marjorie's pure mind there spread a
growing certitude that they were all of them guilty, all of them, and
that each of them had the emerald in his pocket--yet were there not
three emeralds but one emerald. At least, that was how it felt. But
within the soul of the Home Secretary--if I might so call it--there was
a strong sense of botheration and of wishing the beastly thing had never
happened.

Under the keen inward light of Victoria Mosel's intelligence, standing
apart, a fascinating problem was being discussed. She was delighted. It
would occupy her for days. It was just what she liked.

In all that circle of heads, showing in different degrees--Victoria's
least of all--the mood of the mind through some transfiguration of the
face, each silent for the moment, only one head stood frankly stamped
with a fierce joy. It was the head of the polar bear.

If he could have spoken he might--or he might not--have told them. It
might have amused him more to keep them in suspense. His great red
grinning open mouth and shining teeth were full of joy. His fierce glass
eyes glared upon them mischievously. It was almost worth while being
shot and skinned for such a revenge as this! _He knew where the emerald
was_.... It was in his right ear.

They had taken him and shaken him with great indignity, but they had
foolishly taken him up by the hind legs. One should never take a polar
bear up in that way, especially when it is a bear who has been a prince
in his own country of keen wind, low shining sun, and little dancing
seas against the ice. They had shaken him, but they had shaken--oh,
shame!--upside down, and the more they had shaken him, the more firmly
had they wedged the emerald in his right ear, where it so snugly lay.

He could have told them, and I have hastened to tell you. Then where,
you ask me, does the detective fun come in?

You shall see!

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

    Far in the Eastern Wing where, mured in stone
    Arrived at by a passage cold that ran
    Along the North o' the House, and barred with iron
    As to its windows: also by a door
    Which leads from the considerable room
    Wherein are great receptions held at Paulings
    [An Antrum gaunt, abandoned, having only
    Upon its walls the Oils of dead de Bohuns
    (Pronounced Deboons) and sundry dusty sofas:
    The Room grandiloquently named the Ballroom],
    There stand the Servants' Quarters. It is there,
    That, ruled by their dread Queen, the Housekeeper,
    And by her Coadjutor King, the Butler,
    The serfs Boonesque repose. The Cook, the Chauffeur,
    The Kitchen Maids, the Footmen, and the Boy:
    And Lord! how many others! These that night--
    That winter night of doom--held high discourse,
    Upon the EMERALD. Samuel had heard
    (While bearing in the tray of drinks, himself
    Arrayed in livery) how its disappearance
    Had flummoxed all the Toffs. "You bet your breeches!"
    Said he, to either sex, indifferent
    And indiscriminate. "You bet your breeches!
    Whoever's pinched it's got to cough it up!
    The Boss, he ain't Home Secretary, not
    For nothing!" and with that his tongue was still.
    Then spake young Gwendoline, the Tweeny Maid,
    "I pity Him or 'Er as 'as it!" Words
    Which, when she had them spoken, froze their souls--
    Nor none more starkly than the Second Housemaid's,
    Unless it were the Boy's--and so to Bed.




CHAPTER FOUR


The majestic poise of the Nordic blood is nowhere seen in greater
perfection than in that crown of our civilization, a modest English
Country House. Here is there no class consciousness, here is there no
class war. Each is in his or her own place, and there is peace through
order.

To consider only the servile portion of the establishment: the Butler
has his own dignity, and the various other males--upon whose titles I am
a little shaky--have theirs. So the Females of the species: the Cook
cooks; the Kitchen Attendants attend the kitchen; the Nurse nurses. So
with the external squad: the Groom grooms; the Gardener and all his
Assistants garden. With regularity and zeal the Footmen footle. The mere
Maids go maidenly about their tasks. Below these specialised
functionaries, for which Our Race is famous, comes one who may be
regarded indifferently as the foundation of the fabric or the last rung
of the ladder, and who is known as the Boy. On him the petty,
unorganised, lesser work devolves, for which his Superiors are indeed
responsible, but the mere brute labour of which is his alone.


[Illustration: _The Boy Ethelbert in Captivity._]


Thus it is the Boy who blacks the boots, fills all the coal scuttles and
carries them about, lays the fires and lights them, polishes the knives,
the silver plate--the silver itself, when there is any--and the antique
pewter; washes up the dishes of the supper below stairs, cleans the door
knobs and bell handles; pulls up the blinds; pulls back the curtains of
the ground floor. Notably it is he also who conveys to the Upper
Servants--who then shall have risen from slumber--the numbers of the
bells that have sounded. It is he who opens the windows when they should
be shut, and shuts them when they should be open--so far at least as the
early hours are concerned, for when the Great are about this function is
performed by a young man in uniform. It is the Boy who lays out the
morning post, sets the newspapers in order--therein discovering the
odds--lets out the little dog--or dogs--and after some few other
trifling tasks accomplished, brushes and carefully folds the clothes of
the male guests and lays them out where stronger and older men shall
carry them up, each parcel to its room, and for that service receive an
ultimate reward. It is the Boy who carries up the boots themselves--for
these are defiling to the fingers!--and it is the Boy--mark you: this is
essential to the tale, you must not miss it--_it is the Boy who picks up
the rugs and shakes them_, room after room, a ritual preparatory to the
settling of great clouds of dust, which, shortly after, not the Boy but
a Maid brings down to the rugs again with feathery instruments and
devastating cloths.

Hence it was that the Boy--Ethelbert by his full baptismal name, but in
the daily, Bert--before yet the wintry dawn was more than grey on that
Saturday in January, whistling gaily at his task, was holding the polar
bear up by its _forepaws_ and shaking it, as in duty bound.

His heart was gay, for he was redeemed.

Not so long since, this same Ethelbert had (alas!) in company with
youths of his own age and a little more, not yet free from the trammels
of elementary education, purloined from a shop certain fruits: two
bananas.

The Deed might have appeared upon his record at Scotland Yard and dogged
him through life, for he was already eight years of age and knew full
well the wickedness of his act. He had been spared by the noble
elasticity of the English Common Law. His sobbing widowed mother had
seen, indeed, the shadow of the police across her threshold,
and Ethelbert had stood in the Felons' Dock before the dud
parliamentary lawyer who had got the local stipendiary job. But our
Magistracy--especially that of the Stipendiary Sort--is famous
throughout the whole world for its merciful wisdom. Young Bert had
escaped imprisonment, as having been led away by his senior Charlie
Gasket, who was nearly ten.

He had, I say, been saved; but the memory of the peril had burnt into
his soul. And now, though he was nearly fifteen years of age, the
incident still stood out the sharpest of his memories. It was known to
his lord the Butler--perhaps to his Master--but to no others. He had
been taken into the Great House in spite of it all, because his father
had worked upon the estate. Therefore, I say, did Ethelbert feel himself
redeemed. But he trembled still at the apparatus of National Justice.


[Illustration: _The Boy Ethelbert untouched by
Civilisation._]


In the innocence of youth he whistled gently to himself. His other work
was done; this performed, he had but now to settle the last rug, the
Polar Bear, and then to rouse his superiors in the hierarchy below
stairs, to lay their breakfast out and to attend thereon as minister. So
shook he perfunctorily the Arctic Ursine Fleece, the Hyperborean
Candour, when he heard something fall sharply at his feet. He even
caught a flash of it as it fell. He saw it issuing from that ear of
Thule which would hear no more; he saw it sliding down the whiteness of
the hair and gleaming dully in the candlelight upon the polished wood of
the flooring.

There was no mistake. It was _IT_. It was that pledge of respect and
esteem which the ever-memorable Catherine, Empress of All the Russias,
had bestowed three lives ago upon the stalwart Bones. It was the
heirloom of that noble House of de Bohun which Ethelbert served. It was
the Stone on which he had heard all the domestics of the house inflamed
in the last hours of the previous evening.

There is an instinct planted in man by Mr. Darwin, which impels him to
pick up a thing, anything dropped. That instinct Ethelbert obeyed. The
act was half unconscious, immediate; he had slipped the Emerald into his
pocket and was already off with a candle in one hand and the other in a
side pocket, fondling the stone. He was off down the long stone corridor
which led along the north of the house towards the offices; and as he
went his mind was full of some vague intention to hand over the
treasure-trove to those in authority--in good time.

But even as he thus went up by the dim candlelight in the cold dawn,
along that prison-like perspective of iron-barred windows and whitewash,
with stone flags ringing to his feet, a vision of judgment arose within
him. His teeth chattered at the memory of the police.

Ethelbert, that product of no more than an elementary education, had
received some general outline of the world from cinemas and from police
reports, which that same education enabled him to read in the more
widely circulated Sunday papers.

He could not have told you that society was organized to the advantage
of circles to which he did not belong, and to the disadvantage of his
own; but he did know that this piece of green glass in its
leaden-coloured setting of hideous lines would sell for a sum that would
free him from servitude for ever. He also knew that to be found
possessed of it would involve a far worse servitude; a servitude not to
the Gentry but to the Force, and lasting, one way or another, the whole
of his life. He knew that such servitude was torture. The people of his
world knew all those things. Therefore did not the emerald represent to
Ethelbert immediate wealth so much as a vision of confinement alone in
a small mechanical cell; upon release, a life-long chain binding him as
an informer and spy over whom further imprisonment should hang at will;
a crushing and overwhelming tyranny; and perhaps at last a secret and
abominable death. Of all these things had young Bert's mind been full
from very early years, for all these things still haunt the distorted
fancy of the poor.

He saw himself presenting with trembling hand this Thing of Power, this
Emerald, to his Emperor the Butler; he imagined a first awful and
immediate trial at the hands of that Justiciar, and later an
overwhelming sentence from the Master himself. He heard the key turning
in the door of his room; he saw himself a gibbering prisoner therein; he
heard the voices of the Inspector and his accompanying Sergeant; he felt
the gyves upon his wrist.

All this in the few seconds between the West Room of Paulings and the
offices built out of the extreme east.

So was Ethelbert's mind made up. For his good angel, failing to
penetrate the first thick skin of stupidity and to suggest the simple
delivery of the gem to his superiors, at any rate got through the second
skin and suggested a second best.

He had the brushing of the clothes. He would put it into the pocket of
some one of the guests, and then he could breathe freely.

Which guest should it be? No one was yet astir; he was free to choose.
There was a minute or two before the clock would strike the half hour
and bid him summon the earliest riser--after himself--the kitchen-maid.
Her name, Kathleen Parkinson, I take the liberty of giving you, although
she will appear no more in these pages.

There lay the three little piles of clothes, to be carefully brushed and
folded up by himself, within the next half hour, and among them how
could a youth of romantic genius hesitate? Did not every novelette,
every Sunday paper, every cinema, point with unerring finger to the
lord? Are not lords and jewels made one for the other, like love and
laughter, or politics and stocks and shares? The lord could not but be
the recipient of the emerald, and when he should have received it, who
fitter than he to deal with such trifles? Bert could see him in his
mind's eye, and hear him in his mind's ear, strolling up to the Master
of the House and saying, in that airy accent which had always so
astonished him in the wealthy:

"Oh, I say, Humph, I found the bloody thing this morning and picked it
up--what?"

Now into which pocket of Lord Galton's quiet blue suit should it go?
Into the right-hand trousers pocket; for therein, as Bert knew by
fruitful search, his lordship carried loose change. From the waistcoat
it might fall out. In the coat pockets it might lurk for long without
being found; in Lord Galton's right-hand trousers pocket, therefore, did
the emerald go, to the full depth thereof. The garment was folded again
very neatly. And all was well.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

In the fulness of time, the sun being already risen--yes, for an hour or
more--one of those older young domestics of whom I have spoken bore up a
parcel of clothes and a can of hot water to Lord Galton's door. All the
ritual of these palaces was gone through. The socks were turned inside
out, the shirt laid out like a corpse in its shroud, the pile of brushed
and folded clothes set upon a chair, the fire lit--as though the room
were not already stifling with a hot-air machine; the window opened
wider, as though the piercing air had not already started a draught
which had fought with the hot air all night long. The under-upper
servant glided away, and Lord Galton got out of bed and shaved and
washed and dressed; considering in his mind what all others woke to
consider in that same house on that same morning, but especially the
Fated Three: the Emerald.

He looked at his watch; it was a quarter past nine. He stood gazing out
of the window at the frosty mist on the damp gaunt trees of the park,
and tried to estimate how he really stood in the minds of those about
him.

Who would believe that he knew nothing of the stone? Which of them had
heard--several of them, he knew--which of them _believed_ that story
about Attaboy? Certainly his host, almost certainly Vic--she knew
everything. He was not quite certain that she had not meant to rag him
about it in something she had said during the day before. She would not
misunderstand, but she knew about it.

Did that damned greasy fellow the journalist know? He doubted it; they
never did know the things that counted. And as for the Don, he might as
well have suspected the first imbecile in the County Asylum.

Marjorie did not know; he was pretty sure of that by her way to him. But
still ... it was known enough; it was known to two.... After all, what
was pulling a horse, and what had it to do with pinching emeralds,
anyhow? ... Yet ... yet ... he could not leave Paulings till it was
cleared up.... If the damned thing turned up in town in some receiver's
shop they might connect it with him.... He was glad he hadn't brought a
man.... No, he must stay till it was cleared up. It was a damned
nuisance. They were getting up a party on Sunday night at the Posts.
There was to be a rich young fool from Ireland whom they would all play
with. Those occasions were not so common nowadays. But he must sacrifice
it. He must stay on.

He made his decision; he slowly picked up the small change off his
dressing table and shuffled it into his trousers pocket. Then he
mechanically followed it with his hand, and found something that was not
a coin....

At first he had the grotesque idea that he was handling a pebble, though
how it could have got there he could not conceive. Then a matchbox, for
it was smooth and cold.... When he pulled it out and saw what it was,
his whole mind went through a violent shock of revulsion.

He was so sickened, strong as he was, that he had to sit down and
recover himself. And as he so sat, he fixed the dreadful thing with his
eye, holding it there between the fingers of his right hand, unmoving.

Now indeed was a resolution to be taken!

At first his mind would not work. A man possessed of a thing, no matter
what he does with it, carries his communications about with him, leaves
traces about of his possession. If he threw it out of the window, it
would be found within the radius of such a throw. There was nowhere in
the room where he would dare to hide it. If he dropped it as he went
downstairs, a servant might pass and find it within a minute, connecting
him with what was so found.

Give it back himself he dared not. That would mean, "Poor Tommy! He gave
way, but he did the honest thing in the end." He would be branded for
life. Attaboy was enough, without that.

At first the easiest course lured him; to say nothing; to keep it upon
his person until everything had blown over; then to take it up with him
to town.... Then? ... He could not help remembering how Alfred had told
him about his uncle and the cutting establishment in Amsterdam. It was
all mixed up with the committee for inquiring into the Meldon
business when there was that trouble in Parliament a few years
before.... It seemed that one could have a stone cut and get it back
unrecognisable.... Then he thrust the thought out of his mind and
shuddered a little at the danger.


[Illustration: _Lord Galton discovers the Emerald._]


But if he kept it, where should he put it? Where could he put it so as
to be certain during the night--to be _absolutely_ certain--that no one
could find it with him or near him? What if he should fall faint or ill?
What if ... No, there was only one thing to be done. He must pass it on.
No matter what tale he told--even if he told the truth--to appear with
it in his possession and to make an explanation was to damn himself
finally, and that just at the moment his half-damnation on the turf was
beginning to be forgotten.... He must pass it on.... He must pass it on.

There was one obvious repository; an aged fool of that profession whose
incompetence is stamped upon them; a native dupe. It should go into the
pocket of his distinguished cousin, the Professor; it should pass into
the unwitting possession of the expert on dodekahedral crystals. His
mind thus decided, he was half at peace.

Lord Galton went down to breakfast. He found his host already at the
table. The others came in gradually, and no one talked of the stone; nor
upon anything else to speak of--for of the stone everyone was thinking.

It was, naturally, the learned cousin, the Professor, who first put in
the word that should not have been spoken. He did it somewhere about the
jam, and when the Home Secretary was already feeling the need for a
pipe. Perhaps food had strengthened him. He piped up in his quavering
voice:

"Ah! Any news about the emerald, Humphrey? Any news this morning about
the emerald? About the emerald? ... the emerald? ... the emerald?"

There is a natural sequence in fools, as in all others of God's
creatures. Aunt Amelia came in a good second.

"Oh, yes, Humphrey," she bleated, in that woolly-mutton voice which
fitted her as does sodden mist a marshy formless hill. "Is there any
news about the emerald?"

"There is hardly likely to be, Amelia," said her brother, as tartly as
he could be got to say anything, for long years of suave politician's
make-believe had untartled his tongue.

"I thought," said Aunt Amelia in self-defense, "that some servant might
have found it and told you."

"Well, they have not," said her brother, shortly; and there was silence.

The journalist opened his mouth--which he should not have done--and
began rather too loudly, and in too high a pitch:

"What I think, you know ..." and then stopped suddenly--which put him in
no better case.

What Victoria Mosel would have said nobody knew, for she took her
breakfast in bed--always. But Marjorie had come down in the midst of
this, and spoke sharply. She had slept little and her temper was on
edge.

"Oh, that's enough about the emerald!" she said. "What's the good of
talking of it _now_?" Then she gave one sweeping look around, like a
searchlight trying to spot a boat, and betook herself to the jam.

The one who said nothing was the young racing man with the emerald in
his trousers pocket. He was not sure of it--he touched its pin point two
or three times furtively to make certain the gem had not dropped out;
and then he began, by way of clearing the air, to talk to the learned
Professor about indifferent things.

But these indifferent things had a purport in them. For first he talked
of the University, then of that degraded College, St. Filbert's, and so
worked things round to the infamous B. Leader, and that fairly started
his companion off--as Lord Galton had intended he should be started.

The old Don was still at it when they got up from the breakfast table.
He was shepherded--though he did not know that he was being
shepherded--by the younger man, out into the hall, helped into his rusty
overcoat, led out through the glass doors into the park, and there did
Lord Galton patiently listen to his academic victim for something over a
quarter of an hour, as they walked side by side up the swept gravel to
the very far end of the avenue, and then turned back again towards the
house.

Long before they thus faced about, the learned cousin's mind was a
thousand miles away from reality. The harangue which poured forth
against the infamous B. Leader needed but little sympathetic jogging--a
word here and there--from his companion. His soul was not in his body.
You might have stuck a pin into him, and he would not have felt it; and
Lord Galton, who knew men nearly as well as he knew horses--at least on
the side of their weaknesses--felt secure that the moment had come. And
as he leaned forward, sympathetically close to the left side of his
companion, he gently dropped into the loose, wrinkled side pocket of the
rusty overcoat that perilous gem, and felt as though he had cast off a
garment of lead.

The expert in dodekahedral crystals still poured out unceasingly and
shrilly his grievance, with many a "Would you believe it?" and "If you
please!" and "Then he actually wrote to the Society at Berne," and so
on; and Lord Galton, almost grateful in the new lightness of his heart,
applauded heartily and loudly marvelled that the Society at Berne did
not drum Leader out of their ranks with every mark of infamy.

"So," he thought, as they came into the house again--the quavering voice
of the Crystallographer still more emphatic within four
walls--"salvation comes with a little intelligence, a little decision,
and a little opportunity."

He helped the old fool out of his overcoat; hung it up for him on a peg,
and saw its owner go shambling off to his books.

Lord Galton was pleased with himself; he saw his way fairly straight
before him, but he would do nothing hastily ... which might flurry the
head of the house.... It would be a wise and a small risk, to bide his
time. He would bide it till the noon post had come in, until his host
had looked at his letters. Then only would he take the next step in his
programme. He sauntered out again into the Park, where he would feel the
strain of waiting less, with a walk to occupy him. He looked back over
his shoulder when he had got round towards the lodge, and saw for one
moment through the window of the library his aged relative pottering
among the shelves. He was safe till lunch. And Lord Galton, though all
alone, smiled.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

The young man walked briskly for a couple of miles, thinking clearly and
concisely. He came back to Paulings through the mill gate, up by the
stables, walking strongly and well. He knew exactly what he had to do.

He met one of the servants, and asked where Mr. de Bohun might be, and
was told he was in the garage; sought him there, and found him giving
orders about a repair, and trying--unsuccessfully--to understand whether
the proud chauffeur were lying or no.

He went straight up to his cousin, who turned round at hearing his step,
and said in a very low voice, and quickly:

"Let me see you in your study alone for a moment. It is urgent!"

And the Home Secretary, glancing up hurriedly with a half-frightened
look, said, "Yes? Certainly! Come."




CHAPTER FIVE


Lord Galton stood by the Home Secretary in his study, looked round
suddenly, and said, "May I lock the door?" locked it without leave and
then came back and began talking.

The young fellow talked as impressively as ever he had talked when he
was giving instructions to a jockey, or rather, to the go-between who
took the risk. He knew how to talk, as do most men who are successful in
giving instructions to jockeys. His sentences came, weighty, short,
decisive, and each had its effect. Men said he would have done well in
the House of Commons, but the men who have said that do not know the
House of Commons. Yes, he would have done well in the House of Commons:
not by oratory, but by what I may call the Attaboy side of his
character. He began:

"Humphrey, I'm going to tell you about the emerald. I think I know where
it is."

The Home Secretary looked up, startled; but he did not interrupt.

"I want to begin by saying that I know I am myself under suspicion."

"Oh, my dear Tommy," began his unfortunate host. But the younger man put
up a hand like a slab of stone.

"No," he said. "There's no time to be wasted, and we must have things
absolutely clear. One of us three must have got that brooch. No doubt we
are all under suspicion--but I know why I am under suspicion. People say
I pulled a horse." Again the Home Secretary would have interrupted, but
the heavy hand made an impatient gesture, and again he checked himself.
"Marjorie mayn't believe it, and of course that old fool of a Cousin
Bill hasn't heard of it; and as for that journalist fellow McTibbert, or
whatever his name is, he may or may not have; I don't care. But anyhow,
you know it. _You've_ heard all about it!"

"But, my dear Tommy," broke in the Home Secretary, lying eagerly and
almost with affection, "I don't believe it. Believe me, I don't believe
it. Do you suppose," he added with beautiful tact, "that if I believed
it I'd have you here at Paulings?"

Lord Galton just showed at the muscles of the mouth what a fool he
thought the man. He went on undisturbed.

"It's nothing to do with the value of the lie--they haven't turned me
out of the Posts, for that matter; nor warned me off. But the point is,
the story has gone the rounds. A man that would cheat would steal. Also
you know I'm on the rocks, and therefore I'm under suspicion. Now we're
all three under suspicion, as I say. That old ass, Cousin Bill, got
mixed up with the Mullingar Diamond years ago--too much of a fool to
pinch it for selling; wanted to look at it through one of his
contraptions. Anyhow, he can't keep his hands off crystals. And an
emerald's a crystal."

"Is it?" asked the Head of the Family with great interest.

"I think so--I don't know," said Galton impatiently. "Anyhow, it's a
jewel, a precious stone--what?"

"Oh, yes! It's a jewel, yes, a precious stone. Oh, yes," admitted
Humphrey de Bohun.

"Well then, so's a diamond. A man who'll take diamonds'll take
emeralds--what? ... Then there's that journalist fellow--he's under
suspicion because he's a journalist; they're all on their uppers, and
you told me yourself about the one who stole the spoons when you were at
the Board of Works."

A faint smile appeared for a moment on the face of his host. It was his
favourite funny story--all about a journalist who once stole some
government spoons. He had told it on every occasion. He told it to
journalists. But then he was never really featured by the Press.

"Now of those three," went on Lord Galton, rather more slowly, and
separating his words, "the man who has got it is our miserable old
family goat, Cousin Bill...."

The Home Secretary started.


[Illustration: _Lord Galton explains to the Home Secretary his
theory--or rather, certitude--upon the
whereabouts of the Great Emerald._]


"Yes, I know what you'll say ... he got the fright of his life over the
Mullingar Diamond. You'd say he'd never dream of doing it in the house
of the head of the family." (A dignified look passed over the features
of the Chieftain of the de Bohuns.) "Then he's such a clumsy old ass
that you can't imagine him doing it so quickly. After all, it took him
half an hour to fish the Mullingar Diamond out of an open drawer, and
even then he left things topsy-turvy. You'll say all that, and if I were
just guessing I'd half agree with you. But I'm not guessing. And I tell
you _he's got it_. I don't pretend to do any of this private detective
work, and I've never read one of their rotten mystery stories in my
life. That's how I've kept my common sense clear--men who are blown upon
need their wits about them. I know Bill's got it for a very simple
reason--_I've seen it in his hand with my own eyes_. Some one told the
old goat that the place to hide anything was where it would be most
obvious and simple. He's got it in the left-hand pocket of that damned
smelly overcoat he wears; but he's such a nervous old balmy that he
can't help fingering it the whole time; and when he thinks no one's
looking he pulls it half out and looks at it furtively out of the corner
of his eye. Dons are always as mad as hatters. He did it three separate
times while we were out walking just now. He couldn't help himself. He's
too much shut up inside his own addled head to notice other people. And
I'll tell you something else, which is also common sense. He won't take
it out of that pocket till he's left the house. An overcoat's the only
thing they don't brush or fold up, in this house; you're old-fashioned,
with these things on pegs and not on marble tables. He knows that. It'll
hang there on the peg till he goes away. That's the whole point of
leaving it in such a place.... _And it's there now_. You look for it
there, and you'll find it."

The Home Secretary put on his expression of gravity in the third
degree--the expression with which he would meet a deputation for saving
an innocent man from the gallows and gratify them with a majestic
refusal.

"What you say, Tommy," he began, slowly, "is very serious. Very serious
indeed. In my judgment ..."

"Oh, look here," said Lord Galton impatiently, "cut out all that! He's
not in the hall. He went off to the library, and when he gets there he
strikes root. There'll be no one about--they're laying the table. Come
with me, and I'll prove it."

"I hesitate ..." began the Home Secretary. His powerful young relative,
by way of reply, hooked him by the arm, unlocked the door, and marched
him straight out into the hall. The ghost of what might well have been
an ancestor--for we all have such things--must have mourned, if, as such
things do, it had taken up its kennel in a suit of armour standing by
the side of the fireplace in the hall: it would have mourned to see the
head of the de Bohuns stand by while the deed was done.

Lord Galton went smartly up to the bunch of coats, plunged his hand into
the left-hand pocket of that one wretched old garment, and turned it
sharply inside out, so that the damning evidence should fall before his
cousin's eyes. There fell out no small amount of gathered dirt, some
paper torn into minute fragments, and a stub of pencil; also a rather
repulsive handkerchief--nothing more. Nothing rang upon the hall floor.
There was no Emerald.

Lord Galton for once did a weak thing--or a superstitious one. As though
not trusting his senses, he picked the repulsive handkerchief up and
shook it. But there was no emerald. Indeed, one could see and hear by
the way it had fallen that there was no emerald within its large but
unattractive folds. He knew that well enough before he touched the
rag--but it was a forlorn hope.

It was the older man who hastily picked up these evidences, not of the
Professor's dishonour, but his own, and rapidly put them back where they
belonged; darting a glance over his left shoulder and sighing with
relief to find that there was still no one about, not the sound of a
distant footfall, not the glide of a serf. His companion's face was
darker and flushed.

"I could have sworn ..." he opened. Then he added, murmuring, "He must
have taken it away."

"I wish we hadn't ..." began the Home Secretary, and then switched off
to, "You're quite sure you saw it with your own eyes, Tommy?"

"Absolutely certain," said the young man, with a fearless steady gaze,
and proud to be telling one truth at least.

The Home Secretary held his chin in his hand, stood silent for a good
quarter of a minute, and then said something characteristic of his
profession as a statesman. He said, "Humm!"

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

What had happened?

Dear--or, if that is too familiar a term--charming reader, this is not
one of the detective stories of commerce. You shall know all about it
beforehand, as you have already known all about it, step by step. You
shall be subjected to no torture of suspense. We will leave that to the
people of our story. They were born for it.

What had happened was simple enough. The Professor had gone off to the
library. He wanted to make certain of the Society at Berne in the
_Almanac de Gotha_. With men such as he, an obsession having cropped up
has a horrid fascination for the mind and holds it. He was worrying
about the exact title: whether it was Crystallographique, or
Crystallographische, or de Crystallographic. He was determined to get it
right.

He kept on talking to himself, as was his learned habit, repeating with
a hideous smile the words, "Crystals ... ah! yes ... crystals....
Crystals, eh? Crystals ... yes.... Crystallograph ... something, eh? Now
then, it'll be among the books of reference, eh? Crystals.... Oh, what a
dirty trick that was of Leader to play!" His left hand was fumbling in
the left-hand pocket, where he always kept those indispensable
instruments of research, his large tortoise-shell spectacles. His hand
groped. He muttered the word "Berne" three times in less and less
confident tones. Then the message so tardily conveyed reached his
erudite brain. "Oh! ... I've lost my spectacles!"

He never got used to the shock of losing his spectacles, though he
suffered from it a dozen times a day. Each time he lost them it was all
up with him; each time he went through a crisis. Here he was in the
depths of the country and without eyes! There was a touch of agony in
his muttering now, as came louder the words, "My spectacles, oh, ah! my
spectacles ... now where could I ..." He bent his powerful will to the
control of his, if possible, less powerful memory; he traced events back
one after the other for a good three minutes, and then he remembered
that he had gone out in his overcoat and had left it hanging in the
hall.


[Illustration: _The Professor gave an odd little scream like a shot
rabbit._]


He shambled out and groped in the recesses of the left-hand pocket, and
there, side by side with his familiar handkerchief, the faithful
companion of many days, was the feel of the rough spectacle case; it was
all right, but also, what annoyed him a little, a pebble. It was natural
that pebbles should get into one's pockets when one was out walking in
the country; at least, he thought it was. He thought it went with those
terrible animals called cows, and all that sort of thing. But he pulled
it out mechanically, felt the prick of a pin and then gave an odd little
scream, like a shot rabbit. Next (excuse him!) he rapped out a frightful
oath. "My God!" cried the aged blasphemer. No less. But the violence of
his emotion must have shaken his standards.

He stood there, with the emerald in the palm of his right hand, staring
at it, distraught. And once more in his bewilderment he fell to
repeating the name of his Creator--upon whose existence indeed, he had
more than once learnedly discoursed, concluding upon the whole against
it.

It is said that under the strain of very severe emotion men do things
unnatural, out of themselves. And behold! Professor William de Bohun
behaved for the next half hour like a whole group of characters, any one
of whom you would have said he could not have thrown himself into for
the world. Terror inspired him, and the tragic sense of impending doom.

It must be got rid of!

He had a mad impulse to swallow it. Luckily he restrained it in time: it
was too big, its metal fastenings too angular for health; and then,
there was the pin.

After he had given up the swallowing baulk, another, far more feasible,
arose and formed itself more clearly. There appeared before his mind's
eye a young, round naïve face, fresh to the world, an awkward figure,
the whole standing out against the background of known poverty. It was
the figure of McTaggart, the journalist.

A wicked glint illumined the Professor's eye.


   "Oh! Baleful, hellish light, thus to suffuse
    The inactive optic, wontedly so dulled,
    But now with evil purpose all inflamed!"


as Milton has it in the matter of the fish-god, Dagon.

He made no excuses for himself. He recked nothing of the young man's
ruin. He plunged heartily and heavily into sin. As his colleague the
Professor of Pastoral Theology had once finely quoted in his Luther
Commemoration Lecture, "_Si peccas pecca fortiter_."

It is generally held by the more liberal school among theologians that
man acting of his own free will is not mastered by an external evil
impulse, but may well submit to it.

So it was with Cousin William on this never-to-be-forgotten occasion of
his chief downfall.

A Minor Devil happened at that moment to be wandering rather emptily
through Paulings, seeking what he might devour. He was hungry, poor
spirit; he had eaten nothing since he had left his own place at midnight
and he had got lost in the fog all morning. He had almost caught a small
housemaid, but she had slipped away through the efforts of her patron
saint, sweet Millicent, and left him perfectly ravenous. It was almost
noon and devils are not built for fasting. Judge then his joy at coming,
by pure chance, upon this evil old man. He almost jumped out of his
black fiendish skin for joy to perceive the flashing violet light which
surrounds, in the eyes of supernatural beings, the head of a wicked man.
He spotted it first from a corner of the hall where he had just come out
of a corridor. He rubbed his hands together and even flapped his clawed
wings in his excitement. He flew up to the Professor and began pouring
all sorts of excellent suggestions into his ear--his left ear.

Young McTaggart could play billiards ... the Professor had heard them
say that ... young McTaggart was probably proud of his billiards ... he
could be got to go round the table exhibiting his billiards. He would
take off his coat before exhibiting his billiards. And when the coat was
once off, and its owner's eye was concentrated on the billiard table ...
oh, then!...

The Devil, who can see through walls, gently shepherded his pupil into
the little room next the library where the overflow of books was kept.
That door, with horrid smile, the old conspirator opened; and there,
indeed, he found the youth, looking miserably enough out of the window
with his hands in his trousers pockets. He had slunk into that
inhospitable fireless den in order to be free for a while from the
terrors of high society.

"Ah, Mr. McTaggart, Mr. McTaggart, Mr. McTaggart!" carolled the
scientist--and as he said it he opened his arms wide in a most genial
gesture. "I've been looking for you everywhere!" There slyly wagging a
knotted forefinger, "And I wonder if you can guess why? Eh? Why? Guess
why!" Which words said, and smiling still broader, he repeated them once
more three times, as was his wont, and then added: "I wonder whether you
can guess why, Mr. McTaggart, whether you can guess why ... whether you
can guess why?"

The Devil was now so happy that he could hardly refrain from manifesting
himself, which would have been fatal. He whisked all round the room,
jeering at McTaggart.

Poor young Mr. McTaggart! He had been all night and all that morning a
most unhappy man. He exaggerated in his own mind the suspicions under
which he lay. He was too innocent to believe that he shared it with such
exalted beings as the lord and the Professor, of whom--though he had
never heard his name--he was assured the fame to be European, and who,
anyhow, was connected by blood with a cabinet minister.

The lad imagined himself watched by a thousand eyes. He dared not take
his leave, and yet he was in hell during those hours he passed at
Paulings. He would have been unhappy anyhow, for it was not his world;
but to be within all that set and at the same time a marked
criminal--for that is what he felt himself to be--was almost
intolerable. How he had sprung up when the learned Ancient approached
him, with those seeming kindly eyes! Ah! had McTaggart enjoyed a few
more years of human experience he would have seen in those eyes such a
mixture of cunning and evil joy as might have put him on his guard. But
no; he thought that in his loneliness he had found a friend. Who
knew?--perhaps a supporter.

The Professor's plan was simple, but McTaggart was simpler still.


[Illustration: _Sudden interest in the game of Billiards upon the
part of the Professor of Crystallography
to the University._]


"Mr. McTaggart," said the Ancient, with horrible geniality, "I hear that
you are astonishing at billiards.... Billiards, billiards, yes,
billiards.... Billiards. The Home Secretary was telling me, Humphrey, I
mean, my cousin, my cousin Humphrey ... the Home Secretary, yes ... the
Home Secretary was telling me that you were astonishing at billiards.
Now you know"--and here he went so far as to make a step sideways and
seize the young man by the arm--"it is the one thing I can watch for
hours ... billiards ... good billiards.... I have gone into the
mechanics of the thing"--he was lying freely, and gambling, rightly, on
the idea that his companion could not distinguish between
Crystallography and any other science--"and it fascinates me ...
fascinates me ... oh! fascinates me. I wonder whether--" and in a
fashion which would have been crude to any other man, but to the lonely
McTaggart was heavenly kindness, he urged with linked arm and long
sidling crablike step towards the billiard-room.

It was in the Professor's conception of things that when one is
deceiving a fellow being one must talk the whole time. He is not the
only one to suffer from that delusion.

He talked all the way to the billiard-room; he talked while McTaggart
was pulling off the cloth; he talked while McTaggart was putting on the
lights to see clearly on that dim January day; he talked while McTaggart
was chalking his cue and thoughtfully placing the three balls in
position.

The torrent of rapid words--all dealing with excellency at billiards,
all squeaky--was interrupted only at one moment. It was the moment when
McTaggart did what he had been expected to do--the moment when he took
off his coat and threw it on the leather cushions by the side of his
newly-made and slightly eccentric friend.

The sight of that coat so thrown immediately by his side, and subject to
his hand, almost choked the senile conspirator with joy. But he
recovered himself, and still poured out a torrent of repeated words as
the young fellow walked slowly round the table, getting absorbed in a
continuous break. The Professor interrupted that verbal spate only now
and then to gaze with a murderous keenness at a projected stroke and to
mutter "Marvellous!" two or three times; but all the while his heart was
failing him. It was not the only mean thing he had done in his life by a
long chalk. He had spent the whole of his life doing nothing but mean
things; but it was the first actively and perhaps dangerously wrong
thing the old booby had ever dared to do: for he did not count the
Mullingar Diamond--that was in the cause of Science, and in the cause of
Science you can do anything.

But the Devil chose his moment for him; it was a moment of silence when
young McTaggart was waiting long and breathlessly to be certain of a
stroke that would bring his break over the hundred. His back was turned
to the Professor; he was intent upon his play.

The old bony hand, with the gesture of one that takes rather than gives,
put the emerald into a side pocket of the coat, where lay he knew not
what--but in point of fact, a tobacco pouch, a pipe, a pencil, and a
piece of chocolate--of all things in the world!--no longer clean. Nor
had the Emerald ever been in such society before, from the day when it
had started life in the splendid court of Moscovy to these last evil
days of ours.

McTaggart had brought off his shot: his break was 102, and the spot and
the red lay perfect for a cannon and red in the pocket.

But you exaggerate the diplomatic value of the Professor if you think
that he had the wit to continue his stream of gabble after the deed was
done.

It was lucky for him that he was dealing with the candour of youth, or
that abrupt retreat of his from the scene of his crime would have
brought suspicion. For, his deed accomplished, he simply got up with a
jerk, dropped all attention to the play, looked at his watch, muttered
the time of day with an exclamation, and sidled out of the room, leaving
his companion marooned ... and with him, full of success, went the
Lesser Devil.

McTaggart could do without him; he went on playing for another ten
minutes or so, till the break ended, and had reached the pretty figure
of 151. Then he in turn looked at his watch in his waistcoat pocket,
found it would be time for luncheon in a few minutes, put up his cue,
and sadly resumed his coat.

Had he been of those who smoke all day he would have pulled out his
pipe, and ten to one would have found the thing lurking there next his
tobacco; but he thought of the meal coming on, and much more did he
think with dread that it would be breaking some mysterious etiquette of
country houses if he were to smoke a pipe. He would not dare to do it
till he saw some one of his betters at the same work. For the same
reason, after he had heard them going towards the dining-room and had
joined them, he was too nervous to put his hands in his pockets in a
gesture of repose. He kept them dangling in his extreme anxiety to
commit no solecism. He moved nervously about amid the sullen silence of
the rest and wondered a little why the burst of geniality upon the part
of the man of gems should have dried up so suddenly. For not a word more
did the Professor speak to him; and all through luncheon McTaggart sat
there in the same terror and the same misfortune of soul, never daring
to speak some artificial word during the rare moments when anyone broke
the silence.

They had not yet risen from table; he was still wondering what one did
at the end of luncheon in the houses of the great--at what point one got
up, whether immediately after one's host or simultaneously with one's
host; whether the women went out first, as he knew they did at dinner;
whether it was his duty to open the door for them--when Lord Galton
pulled out his pipe, filled it deliberately enough, and lit it. After
the easy manners of our happy times he slowly and with deliberation blew
a cloud of smoke across the board which wreathed itself, not
ungracefully, about the venerable head of Aunt Amelia. So natural an
action was followed by his host, who in turn thoughtfully pulled out his
own pipe and lit it, as he rose to fetch himself wine: he mixed tobacco
and wine, did Humphrey de Bohun.

"Then," thought McTaggart to himself, in an agony of desire for tobacco,
"it seems this kind of thing _can_ be done,"--and he felt for his pipe,
and pulled out his pouch.


[Illustration: _Mr. McTaggart discovers the Emerald._]


Now there happened to be in the room at that moment an Angel. He had
come to Paulings express to counteract the Devil who had been putting in
such strong work on the Professor, and the Angel saved the quill driver,
whom, for his poverty, he loved. For that innocent, finding something
that felt like his slab of chocolate in among his tobacco, and knowing
himself to be well capable of having put it there, was just about to
pull it out, and was already speculating on what sort of flavour
chocolate gave to Bondman--or Bondman to chocolate--when the Angel
seized his wrist and pinned it. He did not know the Angel was doing
this--we never know our luck--he could not have told you what happened,
except that he hesitated, and being of the opposite sex, was not lost.
But for the Angel, he would have pulled out the thing before them all,
and said, "Hallo, what's this?" and there would have been an end of
McTaggart. Instead of which the Angel, with angelic swiftness, put a
thought into his head.

"Don't pull out that lump of chocolate! It will make you look a fool.
The great don't eat chocolate, except out of large expensive wooden
boxes with Japanese pictures outside; elaborate boxes. The rich do not
carry half-broken slabs of chocolate in their pockets--still less in
their tobacco pouches!"

Therefore was it that McTaggart did not take out the lump, whatever it
was; he grasped a fingerful of tobacco and peered down with one eye into
the recesses of the pouch. When he saw what was there, his heart stopped
beating! For a moment he felt faint and giddy.... But the angel firmly
put the pouch back again, leaving the tobacco in his fingers, and with
shaking hand he filled his pipe, and with shaking hand he lit it!

What the devil?

How on earth ...?

The unfortunate boy actually examined his own mind to see whether he
could possibly have done such a thing, and then forgotten it--have done
it inadvertently. Then he thought it had fallen into his coat when
Marjorie had let it drop. Then he remembered that he had not been
wearing that coat, that he had been in evening dress. Then he thought
that the universe was made in some way that he did not understand. He
looked at his coat, and fingered it. It was all right. His mind would
not work properly again until he had satisfied himself beyond a doubt
not once, but many times. He allowed--through terror--too long a time to
pass lest he should seem in haste; strolled, looking as careless as he
could, towards the library, looked round to make sure that no one had
noticed him, leaped upstairs to his room, locked the door, took out his
pouch and that which was within. He gazed at it for something like half
a minute, putting it down on his dressing-table in the strong light to
make sure.

There was no doubt at all. Either he was mad, or that was the emerald.
He remembered some odiously vivid dreams that he had had as a child
during the air raids--but he was certain this was no dream. He was
McTaggart all right, a miserable young journalist against whom fate had
woven some hellish plot; and there was the Emerald.

Next he tortured himself as to what he should do; obviously he must keep
it upon him; he dared not secrete it anywhere. If one secretes things
one can be traced. Conscience for one moment bade him go and tell his
host, and risk all; but unfortunately the Angel had been called away at
that very moment to tackle the Devil again, who had settled in the
Vicarage; and in lack of such heavenly aid McTaggart fell, as any one of
us would have fallen. He put the emerald into the inner pocket of his
coat, pinned three pins round it carefully to make certain that it
should not escape; and then went down with leaden heart to mix with his
fellow beings and to trust to time.




CHAPTER SIX


The boy Ethelbert was suffering; not from contrition--which, I need
hardly tell one of your learning, is the pure sorrow for sin--but from
attrition--which, I need hardly tell one of your learning, is the sorrow
for sin only in so far as one considers its unpleasant consequences to
oneself.

The boy Ethelbert clearly appreciated that in attempting to save himself
from one danger he had run himself into another far greater. He had put
a valuable jewel into a nobleman's pocket and that might be, in legal
terms, for all he knew, embezzlement, malversation or even a compound
and chronic felony of _malice prepense_; perhaps a misdemeanour--with
which word he was familiar through the fate of an uncle of his called
John.

He was in great agony, was the boy Ethelbert; in agony of that sort
which youth cannot endure until it has relieved itself by communion. But
how should he speak? His duty was to his natural lord, the Butler. The
glorious, the remote Mr. Whaley: God of the Underworld. Should he
confess to the Butler? It would be madness. Yet he must speak: he must
unburden his mind.

The innocent child was not long in finding a plan. He would go to his
true superior and, naming no names, mentioning no-one-like, he would
give a nod as good as a wink to a blind horse, and them as understood
could follow if they chose, and if they asked no questions they wouldn't
be told no lies. And mum's the word. Such, in rapid succession, were the
Napoleonic thoughts of Ethelbert.

It was shortly after luncheon that he sought the room in which the
dignified O.C. of the household of Paulings was wont to repose from his
labours: and never more thoroughly than after luncheon.

Midday sleep is unknown to the young, at least after they are very, very
young. Those of young Ethelbert's age have no use for it and cannot
understand what a boon it may be to others. Foolishly, therefore, did
young Ethelbert knock at the door of the holy of holies, thereby
suddenly awakening the sacred being within, who jerked into a startled
gasp. He pulled a handkerchief from his face, thought for a moment that
the house was on fire, expected to see an angry master perhaps; was on
his feet with labouring breath, purple, expectant; when there entered
the Boy.

A fine and hearty curse greeted the youth and almost blasted him from
the room, but what he had to say was of such moment that he just stood
his ground.

"Oh, sir!" he said, "I thought I'd come and tell you..."

"Come and tell me what? You young devil!" roared Mr. Whaley with a lack
of dignity which I should have thought impossible had I not myself once
spied upon him in his more relaxed moments, when he thought that none
could observe. "I've a mind to have you larroped! Damned if I don't
larrop you myself!" He made a vicious dash at the Boy, who was only
spurred by such terror to the arresting cry of.

"Ho, sir! The Hemerald....!"

"The Emerald ..." gulped Mr. Whaley in a very changed tone. And then,
almost meekly: "Well, what about the Emerald, young Bert? What about
it?" The fierceness had gone out of him altogether; he sat down. "Anyone
been saying who took it?" For conscience that makes cowards of us all
makes us most cowardly when we are innocent--especially in a trade with
perquisites.

Ethelbert recovered some little of his composure, and there came into
his eyes a look of simple cunning.

"There's some," he said, nodding mysteriously, "what might speak if they
chose."

"Oh! Is there?" said Mr. Whaley. "Well then, speak, you little rat!"

"I didn't say it was me as knew," answered Ethelbert a little
plaintively. "But don't you think, sir, that when the clothes are
brushed and all, him as brushes finds out what's in the pockets--yes"
(mysteriously) "even in them of the 'ighest?"

"'Oo'd be fool enough to leave such a thing in their pocket?" said Mr.
Whaley contemptuously. "And 'oo do you mean by the 'ighest?"

Ethelbert nodded with a superior air.

"Ah!" he answered doggedly, "all I said was, 'there's some could speak
if they chose.' And there's things that may be left in the pockets even
of the 'ighest."

"Look 'ere, young Bert," said Mr. Whaley, rising again ponderously, and
with a new threat in his face: "I'm not going to have any of _that_."
Then shaking a considerable sausage of a forefinger at the lad, he
added, "When you say 'the 'ighest' that's enough! Don't let me 'ear you
speak again: leastways not on jewels and such like. There's only one
name that it can mean you're driving at"--and there rose up within his
mind the majesty of the master, Humphrey de Bohun.

"I'm driving at no one," said the Boy, struck suddenly again with
terror. He had not dreamed that the upper servants felt so strongly upon
the immunity of lords such as he in whose pocket the gem, to Ethelbert's
certain knowledge, reposed--for he had put it there.

"You've been a-brushing the clothes, young lad, have yer? Yes, of course
you have; that's your place; and setting 'em out as they should be set.
And you say you found something in the pocket of the 'ighest, did you?"

"I never ..." began Ethelbert, almost on the point of howling.

"You shut your dangerous young mouth," shouted Mr. Whaley. "It's talking
like that against your betters as 'as put many and many a lad in
prison."

"Oh, sir!" said the unfortunate Bert.

"Now look here, my Boy," went on Mr. Whaley, in his heaviest manner,
slowly transforming himself into the distant Superior and pronouncing
divine moral judgment and guidance, as it were, for the very young. "You
listen to me, and listen solemn. This may be a turning point in your
life, it may. Talk like this among the lower servants, let alone a
little bastard not yet sixteen, 'as been the ruin of some--aye, of many.
So I tell ye. The gaols are full of 'em. Now, you mark what I say, young
Ethelbert"--it was the first time he had ever used the entire name, but
the occasion demanded it--"one word from your lips, and you're ruined.
It's well you come to one like me, that might be your father like, and
that has a care for your future, my lad. Remember that! One word from
your lips, and you're ruined. It's not for you to be piecing this and
that together. Gentlemen 'ave got ways o' their own, and, anyhow, I'm
slow to believe you. There may be a game about all this, and, anyhow,
not a word from your lips. Mark, my lad!" he went on, his voice booming,
"ye're lost if ye speak. Have you taken that?" he ended, almost shouting
again.

"Oh, yes, sir!" said the miserable Ethelbert, trembling. "Oh, sir, I
meant no harm...."

"Well, then, you go and _do_ no harm," concluded Mr. Whaley, and waved
the infant away.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Mr. Whaley rose to his full height and girth and stretched. He looked in
a little square looking-glass, one of his necessaries of life, thought
his tie doubtful, carefully and gingerly put on a new one, worthy of the
occasion. His boots--he glanced down at them--yes, his boots would do.
His trousers were just what they should be. The fringe of hair round the
majestic dome of his head never needed attention less than now.

It was a solemn moment in history. He, George Whaley, a man of weight
and years, possessed, moreover, now of a sufficient competence, but not
undesirous of making it larger still, was in possession of the dread
secret. The head of the de Bohuns, one of His Majesty's principal
Secretaries of State, had fallen, fallen, fallen! Humphrey de Bohun had
pinched his own daughter's emerald. The Emerald of Catherine the Great.
The fortune of the de Bohuns lay concealed by his master's hand,
awaiting the receiver's gold. Oh, horror! In what embarrassment the
unfortunate man had committed the fatal act Mr. Whaley knew not: could
so good a man have been blackmailed by scoundrels? Why should he need
money--and money at such risk? Alas! who can plumb the depths of the
human heart? thought George Whaley--indeed, he almost spoke the words
aloud, so apposite did they seem, and so often had he read them in his
book of devotions. Yet was it so! And ever, in the least expected
places, thought George Whaley again, lies the solution of a mystery. He
shot his cuffs, drew himself up, coughed a little, and rehearsed the
scene.

"I beg your pardon, sir, may I have the honour of a moment's
confidential word with you?" And then another discreet cough.

Then how to put it? He thought long and deeply. He must put it with
sympathy--almost as a friend. He must not forget that he was talking to
a superior. It would need very skilful handling; but what are butlers
for if they cannot skilfully handle? It is the very core of buttling!

He had handled other situations in his other situations, had Mr. Whaley:
none quite so delicate as this, but still, some of 'em pretty delicate.
Yes; he must talk to Humphrey as a friend. Respectfully, but as a
friend: and above all firmly. It was clear that such a service would
merit some reward.

God knows, there would be no tone of menace! Oh, no! Whatever honorarium
might accrue to George Whaley as a reward for such revelation should be
the gift of a grateful heart alone: and, said Mr. George Whaley to his
own conscience, why not? He would be doing his master a very great
service. Indeed, he would be doing a double service--nay, a treble one.
For he would be rescuing the Home Secretary of England from his lower
self; that was a moral service. He would be preventing him from
inevitable discovery; that was a material service. He would be serving
him faithfully as an honest domestic should; and that was a service of
loyalty.

Was it to be wondered at (the whole scene rose vividly before his eyes
as it was to be--as it certainly would be), was it to be wondered at
that the grateful man should, on an impulse, seize the honest servitor's
hand, grasp it warmly, and then, with a catch in his voice, cry aloud,
"Whaley, you have served me well!" The rest would follow. Not less, he
took it, than five hundred pounds.

Should he go further? Should he offer his services for taking back the
gem discreetly and seeing that it should be laid, through means he could
command, upon the dressing-table of the culprit's daughter--no one
should know whence?

Time must show; the opportunity would develop; the details of the drama
would be filled in. But the main lines were clear. George Whaley would
save the head of the family of de Bohun; he would save the soul--and,
incidentally, the more earthly reputation--of the head of the family of
de Bohun. He would receive the little spontaneous, heartfelt reward due
to so honest a liegeman of the de Bohuns. Ah! Chivalry was not dead....

But nothing must be done on impulse. He glanced at his watch. It was
only just past three. He must watch the poor tortured soul until there
had developed in it, as inevitably there would through the effect of
time, a false security--a false security brought by suspicions and
counter-suspicions among the guests, who could never dream the real
truth. Upon such a mood the revelation would fall with tenfold effect.

Then, and then only--he would watch his moment--would George Whaley
unburden himself of the curse of the de Bohuns and turn that curse into
a blessing; moral to his master, and to himself material.

Such was the plan of George Whaley. Once more he recited, but in an
undertone, a whisper, the words of which could not be heard by another,
the very phrases he was to use, the gestures proper to the great moment
when it should come. So discreetly did he rehearse that young Ethelbert
without, his ear glued to the keyhole, heard nothing but a murmur of
monologue within, and feared in one wild moment that the awful
revelation about Lord Galton had driven the butler mad.




CHAPTER SEVEN


Marjorie had insisted upon seeing her father alone, and she had worked
it easily enough.

The Professor in his relief from the accursed emerald had fallen into a
sprightly mood. He had compelled young Galton to take a _second_ walk,
and therein had bored the turfist to agonies; which only shows that God
is just, and that we are punished in that by which we sinned; in
Galton's case, the avenue. During that walk the crystallographist
volubly explained his exciting experiences in the past as an amateur
detective. His large prattling mouth discoursed of marvellous
sleuth-deeds in the past. But he did not go too far. He said nothing of
emeralds. He kept the tit-bit, the great revelation, for his host--and
he knew at what time to deliver it.

As for McTaggart, there was no difficulty in getting rid of _him_. All
he desired was to be alone. He wandered off all solitary. Victoria
Mosel, left with no one but Aunt Amelia, fled; and Aunt Amelia, once in
her chair, was safe to remain there for the rest of the afternoon.
Therefore was Marjorie safe to tell her father what should be done.

Her temper was at breaking point; she was in that mood when women will
blame whatever is nearest at hand and most defenseless; and what more
admirable butt than a widowed parent?

"Papa," she said, "there's only one thing to be done. You must get a
detective! At once!"

"My dear child! My dear child!" said the shocked politician, all the
traditions of the de Bohuns rising in his blood, "a detective at
Paulings!"

"Oh, stuff and nonsense!" said the dutiful daughter. "I'm sick of all
that. Considering the kind of people you _do_ have in Paulings--gaol
birds like Tommy, and that damned old fool Cousin Bill, who steals
diamonds ..."

"Hush! My dear, hush!" begged the appalled and terrified Home Secretary.
He had noticed an open door, and hurriedly shut it. "Besides which,
apart from being overheard, really, one must not say such things!"

"Say what?" retorted Marjorie sharply. "Oh, papa, for Heaven's sake
don't talk any more nonsense, but do get that detective!"

"I can hardly telephone on such a thing as that," hesitated the poor man
weakly. "Everything I say over the telephone is known at the exchange.
And we know what happened that time when they were paid by _The Howl_.
As for letting one of the servants do it ..."

"Oh! Good heavens, papa!" said Marjorie. "Isn't there a car? Go up in
the car! Tell Morden all about it."

"Morden can hold his tongue," mused de Bohun thoughtfully.

"Of course he can!" snapped Marjorie.

"But ..." hesitated her father, again, "I don't see how ... what with
the guests ... and I wouldn't have them suspect for worlds...."

And as he said this he saw out of the corner of his eye his two cousins
coming back towards the house, close at hand; the elder one was
gesticulating in fine fury in his new-found happiness, and the other
paced sombrely fierce at the end of his torture. Before they could open
the front door ...

"Oh, damn!" said Marjorie--and she nearly added "you." "I'll telephone
to you from my room. I'll give you an excuse to say the Home Office is
calling." And she flew upstairs.

She was safely at her telephone before the two cousins had passed the
front door. She gave them time to get into her father's presence, or for
her to guess, at any rate, that one of them would be in the library.
Then, with the promptitude of the young and the modern, she did the
trick. The basement had put her through, and the bell on the big desk
rang smartly. Galton and the Professor, sitting there in the room with
the Home Secretary, looked up as quickly as did their host. He was on
the receiver with a nervous rapidity; and the conversation was of a
simple sort which I almost blush to recall.

"Now, papa, just tell them you've got to go to town because there is a
hurried summons in London. Tell them you'll be back in a couple of
hours."

"Who's on?" said Lord Galton.

"Yes! Yes!" said de Bohun. "All right! Yes! The Home Office? Ah! Yes?
Tell me the details," knitting his brows a little; then turning to his
two cousins, "It seems they want me at Whitehall."

_The Telephone_: "Hurry up, papa; it's all got to be fitted in pretty
damn close, you know; they've got to get the man, and he's got to be got
here by this afternoon, and got somehow!"

_The Home Secretary_: "Ah? Yes!" Frowning, "Oh! that's serious--well!
You want me at once? All right! It's Saturday afternoon you know! Is
Morden there? Tell him I'll be up within the hour." Then he turned to
his guests. "Yes, they want me at once, it seems. Most urgent. But they
say it won't take long." He spoke into the receiver in his turn: "Do you
think I can get back here by five or a little after in the car? ...
Yes," turning round and nodding at his guests thoughtfully, "they say I
can get back by five--or a little after, in the car. What a business it
is! I have often wondered," he added sententiously as he hung up the
receiver on its hook and rang the bell to order the car--"I have often
wondered what makes men take office. It's a tradition," he sighed, "Some
one must serve the State! But it's a weary business." All this for the
benefit of his two cousins, as though they had been a public meeting.
"I'll get back at once; my man can do it in forty minutes from here if
he takes the cut by Muffler's Lane, and there's not much traffic after
the first two hours of a Saturday afternoon."

The car was round promptly enough. It was stopped within five miles for
the great man to telephone back--from a local box--to Paulings for
something he had forgotten to leave word of. But he did not telephone to
Paulings. He telephoned to the Home Office, of which he was the chief.
To such abasement do modern contrivances drive us. He called up the
invaluable Morden and discovered to his enormous relief that the
invaluable Morden, though it was a Saturday and already a quarter to
four, was working away.

Within twenty minutes more the great statesman was in his official
palace of Whitehall. Morden was there all right, as the telephone had
told him. Morden was there! Oh invaluable Morden! have you not earned
those directorships and that sinecure in the Engrossing Department? By
God! you have.

"Morden," said the Home Secretary.

"Aye, aye," answered Mr. Morden wittily.

"You know Scotland Yard?"

Morden did not turn a hair. Did he know Scotland Yard? Did he? He,
Morden of the Home Office! The man who laid the traps for the
scapegoats ... the man who worked the parks.

So young--not forty--he had already seen pass before him a long troop of
politicians, and he was ready to take any folly from them, short of
physical violence. So when he was asked whether he, the junior brain of
the Home Office, knew the place and institution called Scotland Yard, he
said that he did; and he said it as naturally as though he had been
asked for some information on Thibet.

"Now who do you think," said the Home Secretary musingly, as he rose
from his chair and paced up and down the enormous room, his brows
tortured with deep thought--"who do you think there would be--connected
with Scotland Yard, mind you!--who would undertake a private inquiry,
and be rigidly secret?"

"They are all rigidly secret," said Morden simply.

The Home Secretary wagged his long head with a weary simulation of
cunning, and a would-be sly smile illuminated--or at least undimmed--his
eye.

"That's all right for the _public_, Morden," he said. "But you'll see
what I mean in a moment. Could they find some one even _more_ rigidly
secret than the rest? Eh?"

"_I_ could," said Morden. "I can tell you his name. A man called
Brailton, close over sixty, but very good indeed. He was the man we used
when there was that trouble about the death in Lady Matcham's house just
before her administration went out of office."

"Oh, was he?" cried the Home Secretary eagerly. "Was he?" Then with
great satisfaction in his voice: "In that case he is all right. It was
certainly astonishing, the way that was kept back....You see, Morden,
it's something of the same case here. _The trouble is in my own
house_ ... _Paulings_."

For once Morden was genuinely taken aback. He was silent. "I see," he at
last murmured gravely. "_Your_ house--and the safe side?--Of course!"

"It's in my own house--and the safe side? Good God, yes!" The Home
Secretary spoke firmly. Then after a pause he added, "When they find out
who has done it ..."

"Done what?" said Morden.

"Never mind," answered his courteous chief. "You're bound to know all
about it in good time. Well, as I was saying, when they know who's done
it, it might turn out to be some one of whom not a soul in the Press
must know that he has done it. I mean, if he _has_ done it, nobody must
know that it was he who did it, outside the few who know that he _has_.
Have I made myself quite, quite clear?" he asked anxiously.

"Perfectly," said Morden.

"Now this man Brailton. When could he get down to Paulings?"

"He could come at an hour's notice," said Morden. "He got back from
Yorkshire last night, and he's got nothing on for the moment."

"Ring him up," said the Home Secretary.

It was at six removes, and took just over ten minutes. The man in the
outer room rang up the department, which told the section, which sent
for the controller, who gave the order to the third floor, which got
hold of the group, and the group had the good fortune to find Brailton
at the end of a wire. Brailton would take whatever train he was told,
and was waiting.

The Home Secretary meditated.

"I am going down by car now," he said. He looked at his watch. "It takes
well under the hour by train--it's not seventeen miles. I shall be home
by half past five, and I'll tell Marjorie. The best train is the
six-thirty from St. Pancras. It gets down in forty minutes. I'll have
him met and brought straight to Paulings. He'd be in time for dinner....
By the way," he added suddenly, as a thought struck him, "he'll be all
right, will he? Go down?"

"Perfectly," said Morden eagerly. "Perfectly."

"No one'll suspect anything?" persisted his chief anxiously.

"Oh, no, no, no!" assured Morden airily. "I know the man like an uncle.
Quiet, silver, rather too refined, silent, tall. Dresses--if
anything--a little too carefully. At Lady Matcham's he passed for a Don
working in Egypt who hadn't come to London for months. And in this last
Yorkshire case he passed as a _Times_ correspondent just back in England
from the east after some years. All you have to do is to make up good
reasons for people not having seen him before. He passes perfectly."

"The accent?" said the Home Secretary, knitting his brows again.
"Is--well--you know what I mean?"

"Oh, perfectly. It's beautiful; it's remarkably smooth--yet not
conspicuous," said Morden. Then, "You knew old Dickie Hafton?" he added
suddenly.

"Of course I knew old Dickie Hafton!" answered the indignant Home
Secretary. "He was my mother-in-law's first cousin--went to the Lords in
1895 and to the Lord in 1910. Fond o' women." And there rose before his
mental eye the image of that aged peer, thin, aquiline, too proud, too
careful of his dress, a man of exquisite voice a trifle thin in tone,
but how precise! with the old, not uncharming habit of a few French
words here and there. A public figure to the last, famous for his
activities in the evangelical world.

"Well," answered Morden, "old Brailton's the startling image of Dickie
Hafton. You'll like him. He goes down."

"All right," said the Home Secretary, hugely satisfied. "That's settled!
I'm off; I leave it to you to make arrangements. The six-thirty."

But to make his chief quite at ease, Morden whispered something in his
ear.

"Really?" said the Home Secretary, as he struggled into his coat--and he
said it very loudly, so that everyone could hear it in the next room, to
Morden's horror. "Not old Dickie's _son_? There wouldn't be time for
it!"

Morden nodded mysteriously, and whispered again: "Yes, there is! He was
only eighteen.... It was the housemaid at his grandmother's." And the
Home Secretary went out bemused and marvelling at the strange
revelations of this pur world.




CHAPTER EIGHT


Many of our most important modern inventions have been forestalled by
the Chinese, for whom we should have the greater regard in that they are
not Christians. Gunpowder, False Money, the art of Printing, Diplomacy,
Propaganda, Prison Fortunes, Taximeters and the Strike--all these are of
the extreme Orient. But what have I to do with all these? It is of the
Mariner's Compass that I sing--which also was first spotted by the
Chink.

Now of the various forms of Mariner's Compass there is one with which
some few of my readers may be acquainted. It is used in certain
scientific experiments which have nothing to do with pointing to the
North, but with the measurement of delicate electrical hints. The needle
swings on a jewelled pivot, very nicely balanced, encased in a small
round box about an inch across, covered in with glass so that no dust
can affect the very sensitive affair; and at the side there is a little
stud on a spring which you press with your finger when you want to fix
and register the pointing of the needle. So long as you press the stud
the needle stands firm. When you release the stud the needle trembles
again.

All very interesting. But what of it?

Wait a moment. Retain this clearly in your mind, and I will proceed to
the second point.

It has been remarked by the less stupid of psychologists--and that is
not saying much--that cunning and intelligence are not often combined.
Conversely, as Dr. Nancy Neerly shrewdly remarked, when her assistant at
the Hospital for Nervous Diseases, gonophed her microscope, extreme
incompetence is often accompanied by cunning. Nothing is more cunning
than your half-wit.

Getting that principle firmly into your head, you will appreciate that
when Professor de Bohun slunk out in the evening after his cousin's
departure for town, into the neighbouring suburban villas of Bakeham
(which, for one thing, fringed the Park--the de Bohuns had long ago
screened it by a dense row of quickly-growing timber--and for another,
provided the Home Secretary with a considerable part of his insufficient
income) his action was not unconnected with that upon which his mind had
been exercised for now nearly twenty-four hours.

He sought a policeman, and said with a sudden squeak which made that
high official jump:

"Oh! Can you tell me if anyone round here sells scientific instruments?
Optical instruments? Electrical instruments? ... Instruments?"

"Wot?" said the policeman.

"Let us say ... ah, for instance," went on the squeaky voice,
"clinometers.... Shall we say Clinometers? Clinometers? ... Yes!
Clinometers!"

"Pass along!" said the policeman. "Pass along!" And there was that in
his eye of a man who hesitates between a verdict of lunacy and arrest
for leg-pull.

"But, Constable ..." pleaded the unfortunate cadet of an ancient house.

"Pass on! Pass on!" boomed the tyrant, and as there was a difference of
at least three octaves between the two men's voices, the unfortunate
Professor obeyed the double bass, crossed the street at the risk of his
life, and wandered inanely past the shop windows.

But there is a Providence for such as he, as also for drunkards and
babes; and there, right before him, was an ancient bow window of
bottle-glass panes; the name of the shop in old Georgian script; the
information that it had been founded in 1805; and, behind the glass, two
telescopes, a microscope, a clock, several watches, and a sextant of
immense age.

The Professor went in.

"What I want ... ah!" he said. Then his eye fell upon the very thing he
desired. It lay there in a glass case, and the owner of the shop, no
younger than his customer, brought it out with a palsied hand.

"That's it," said the Professor, nodding genially. "That's it. That's
what I want. That's it." Slipping it into his pocket, he made for the
door, nodding good day.

"Hi! Mister! That'll be five guineas," said the ancient. Oh! vileness of
avaricious age! He had seen his client coming out by the garden gate by
the Great House, he had noted guilty haste, he had noted academic
idiocy, and he charged accordingly.

"Oh, yes! Of course ... ah! _What_! Five guineas? ... five _guineas_!
FIVE GUINEAS!"

It was a sickener. But the wages of Sin is Death. He must have it--or
something of the sort. And he must have it now, before Humphrey got
home. Sin will not wait.


[Illustration: _Deplorable moral lapse of Professor de Bohun
(pronounced Boon)._]


Believe me or not, but there was positively a flush upon the yellow
cheek of the hoary intriguer, a flush that contrasted charmingly with
his straggling white whiskers, as he parted with two half crowns and a
note. It was a severe struggle. To comfort himself he pressed the stud
again. Yes, it worked all right. He toddled back, and got in at the very
moment when his cousin's car was buzzing up the drive, back from London.

Professor de Bohun was determined to lose no time. He got rid of his
overcoat and his hat with surprising agility, and met the master of the
house at the door as though he had been in for hours.

But his was not a temperament to introduce a subject with finesse. He
went blindly at it.

"Humphrey," he said, ere ever the Home Secretary was across the step, "I
want to see you. I want to see you now ... yes, now ... rather
urgently.... I want to see you now."

The Man of Little Peace nodded wearily.

"Come along," he said.

His mind jumped back to the false scent of the morning. He suddenly
wondered whether, after all, Cousin Bill was going to confess? Galton's
statement had been clear enough. He had said in so many words that he
had _seen_ an emerald in the Professor's hand. And the head of the
family would have believed anything, almost of the Professor in the way
of such follies since the great Mullingar affair.

"What is it, Bill?" he said, as he shut the door of his study.

"Ah!" said the Ancient, almost archly. "What do you think? The
E-M-E-R-A-L-D! Eh? Eh?"

He searched in his pocket. Humphrey de Bohun looked to see the jewel
appear. Not at all. What appeared was a little round brass box, glass
cased, and in it a trembling needle, that shook and shivered like a
gossamer in a breeze.

"Now, my dear Humphrey," said the Professor, "let us take two chairs;
yes ... two chairs ... two chairs. Ah! yes, two chairs." They took two
chairs. "And let me pull up this little table...." He had become almost
businesslike, not to say sprightly, in concentrating upon what he was
about to do.

"Now, then; here we are, we two on these two chairs as it were, are we
not? Yes! And here you see this little instrument, do you not? Yes! And
do you know what it does ... what it is? What it is ...? It's a
talcometer."

"A what?" said the Home Secretary.

"A talcometer," said Professor de Bohun, lying freely, and puffing
slightly after the effort. "Now, Humphrey, I want you to watch
something. To watch something, eh! Ah! yes. You have, I take it--ah!--or
Marjorie has, or some one has a jewel--sure to have one. A diamond, say.
Any stone--crystal. A stone, at any rate...."

"I don't know," began Humphrey de Bohun, wondering what was to be. "Will
this do?" he asked, leaning over towards his writing table and pulling
off it the little crystal Chinese god which was used to weight down the
papers which he had abandoned there so many days.

Anything would do for the deceitful pedant. He nodded cheerfully.


[Illustration: _Professor de Bohun explains to the head of the
family his theory--or rather, certitude--upon
the whereabouts of the Great Emerald._]


"Yes," he said, "so long as it's crystal. Anything crystal. Crystal."
Then he added, "Now, Humphrey, watch. Here," holding the little round
brass disk with its trembling needle, "I have our talcometer. Now here,"
moving the Chinese god into line with the axis round which the tiny
filament of metal trembled, "here we have this talcometer, _and_ the
crystal. Eh! _And_ the crystal.... Now watch, Humphrey!"

Holding the little round brass case with his left finger and thumb, he
gradually with his right hand approached the heathenish idol, sliding
the False God slowly along the polished table-top towards the
instrument. It came closer and closer. It was at 9 inches, 6 inches, 3
inches, ... but there was as yet no apparent effect, when, suddenly,
with the Pot-bellied Dwarf Deity at about 2 inches off, or a little
less, the needle behaved like a pointer: it stood immovable, held
rigidly by some strange force. The stud, dear friends, but how could
Humphrey de Bohun know that?

"There! You see that? See that? See that?" squeaked the Professor
triumphantly. "Now I want you to test it for yourself. Move the little
devil away! Move it yourself! Humphrey, move it yourself!"

Humphrey de Bohun very slowly pushed back the crystal, and almost
immediately the needle trembled again.

"There!" said the Professor in happy confidence, leaning back. "There!
What did I tell you?"

"Well, what of it, Bill?" said the harassed master.

"What of it?" answered his cousin. "The Emerald. Ah! the Emerald!" and
he rubbed his hands together.

"I don't understand a word you're saying," said poor Humphrey.

The Professor leaned forward and tapped his cousin twice upon the
shoulder with that knotted forefinger.

"That instrument," he said, as solemnly as such a voice can say
anything, "tells a crystal close at hand. According to the cube of the
distance. I have to use it perpetually. Very well known. German, you
know--wonderful people, the Germans. It was Meitz's idea," he went on,
adding verisimilitude by the effective use of detail. "But _he_ couldn't
have done it without Speitzer. Often like that in research work. Any
doubt about a crystal's character. Even amorphous--put that thing close
enough, and it points at once. Now do you see? Eh! Now do you see?"

"Not exactly," said Humphrey de Bohun.

"Why, it's plain enough! I hadn't thought of it. It suddenly occurred to
me. It suddenly came to me while you were off to London. Here I had what
could solve all our troubles. I put it first here, then there.
Everywhere I could. Went on for an hour--all over the room! All over the
rug where it dropped. Then one of your guests came in. I didn't want to
be seen at it. I was putting it back into my pocket when my hand came
close by the side of his coat. Bless my heart! It pointed!"

He leant forward again and tapped his cousin more solemnly still, this
time on the chest. "Mark my words! That young man's got it!"

"Which young man?" said Humphrey, remembering what counter accusation
the Professor would naturally make, and thinking at once of Galton.

"That young writing fellow," said Cousin Bill. "That newspaper chap
McTaggart. McTaggart, McTaggart, McTaggart, McTaggart, McTaggart."

Humphrey de Bohun hesitated. "My dear Bill," he said, "you never know.
He might have had something else in his pocket--also crystal, or--I
don't know ... something."

The Professor wagged his head with all the dignity of a goat.

"Won't work, Humphrey!" he said. "Won't work! One can always tell the
size by the distance. It wasn't some ring or small thing of that kind.
Besides which, he wouldn't have such a small thing of his own in his
pocket. No, the Emerald's there all right. And I'll tell you something
that makes me surer still. I took occasion to brush up against
him--there was a hard slab in that pocket, Humphrey. In that pocket. A
small, hard slab! Slab! ... Hard slab! ..."

An awful task arose in the conscience of Humphrey de Bohun. He must play
the spy again. He must mistrust yet another guest.

But wait! Should he tell the great detective when he arrived? No. It
would be only fair to seek the young man first and warn him. But he
hesitated and he put it off. He would wait till dinner time, or nearly
dinner, when the poor fellow was changing. He would make it quite clear
that there would be no consequences--only, he must confess and restore.
Then he suddenly thought of what would happen if he drew blank, as he
had in the case of the strange being before him. But he was in some
agony.




CHAPTER NINE


The Home Secretary was in his study before a pleasing fire. The
Professor had left him. His daughter was with him. There was no one else
in the room. He had asked her to come down a little earlier that he
might explain things to her. There was yet a quarter of an hour before
they need dress for dinner, and the dread stranger from the Yard might
be with them at any moment. He had warned each of his guests that a
distinguished diplomat had asked to run down to see him at short notice.
The F.O. had sent him on to the Home Office. The matter concerned both
departments. The distinguished diplomat would dine. They must excuse his
retirement with that official, later in the evening, to discuss high
affairs of State.

Such was the fairy tale Humphrey de Bohun had pitched; he hoped it had
gone down. And now he was alone again to discuss the matter with his
only confidant, his daughter.

"Marjorie," he said, "that man Brailton was to come by the six-thirty.
It must be late. I have told them to show him in here at once. It is
exceedingly important you should know all about it, and that nobody else
should. We must hear from him, very briefly, some essential points: for
instance, his assumed name."

"He's all right, papa?" asked Marjorie anxiously.

"Perfectly, my dear, perfectly. Morden assures me ... in fact, Morden
told me that he is actually ..." and then checked himself. He was still
Victorian, was poor Humphrey de Bohun. He didn't like to talk to the
bastards of his own class, and to a daughter at that. "At any rate he's
all right. Elderly, distinguished--what they call cavalier, I'm told,
yes, cavalier.... I've already told Aunt Amelia and Tommy that he's a
diplomat--a fellow I've got to see after dinner.... It's all exact.
Which room did you say?"

"Senlac, papa. Crécy's being repapered."

The Home Secretary nodded solemnly.

"Senlac will do all right. But you must remember, my dear, that this
Mr.--ah!--_Brailton_, that is the name, _Brailton_, is somewhat advanced
in years--and ... and ... I needn't insist ... but a refined man and on
his _father's_ side, of good blood! He will be sensitive."

There was a silence--but not for long. The door was solemnly flung open
with a majesty worthy of the occasion, and the Master of the
Ceremonies--if I may so call him--George Whaley announced in a
controlled but oily voice:

"Mr. Collop!"

Collop? Collop? What was this? The disguise for Brailton?

The father rose to his feet, somewhat painfully, the daughter looked
round. And behold! a man sturdy, broad-shouldered, short, clad, not in
some soft clinging stuff, but in stout Scotch tweed, which--as to his
upper part--was a roomy coat with poachers' pockets, and--as to his
lower--plus-fours. His stockings were thick and ribbed, as fashion in a
certain world demanded at that moment; but his boots were of that
unmistakable sort provided by the Government of the King for his police.
The hair was short, coarse, and thick; the face broad and determined;
the eyes straightforward, grey and far too bold. What the mouth might
really be like only its Creator knew, for it was thatched by a moustache
so bristling, curt, aggressive and sprouting-out that the eye of the
onlooker was fascinated and could not note the ugly lips below.

"Evenin'!" said the Apparition in a powerful voice of low pitch; and as
he said it he bobbed the head and shoulders of him towards the man
who--for a year or two--controlled the peace--and police--of England.

"Evenin', ma'am," added the Apparition with the same jerk of the head
and shoulders towards the Lady of the House. "Cold evenin'? Good fire, I
see!" he added with a charming familiarity. "Pleasant thing evenin's the
likes o' this, a good fire is."

And as he thus delivered himself with all the natural grace and charm of
long experience, his two staggered victims waited for their breaths.

There was but one reply, and the Home Secretary made it pompously and, I
am afraid, a little distantly.

"Good evening, Mr....?"

"Collop," said the stranger, decisively.

"Collop. Ah, yes, Collop. I should have remembered. Mr. Collop, my
dear," he said, bending his head towards his daughter, who stared
astonished and had not yet recovered herself. "Collop. Yes. Mr.
Collop.... Mr. Collop. I understand fully. We are to call you Mr.
Collop."

"Rather!" said that solid individual. "That's my name _here_," and he
winked. "What my name may be elsewhere we both know, eh?" and he winked
again.


[Illustration: _Sudden Entry of Mr. Collop._]


"Ah, Mr. Collop--it is to be Mister, is it not?"

"Yes, Mister," answered the gentleman solemnly, "not Miss nor Master.
Who ye're kidding?" He did not say it insolently. He knew his place. He
knew he was talking to the Home Secretary. He said, "Who ye're kidding?"
by way of a respectful jest.

"Mr. Collop.... Yes.... Mr. Collop...." stuttered the Home Secretary
like a man half stunned. "We expected ... ah! ... you will pardon
me? ... a Mr. _Brailton_; yes, a Mr. _Brailton_.... Eh? Shall
I ... ah! ... if by any accident there should be a mistake?"

"There's no mistake," said the genial Collop, "old Brailton 'twas to be!
You're right there, mister! But he was that sick he asked me to run
down. ''Tis only a suburb job,' says he. So here I am!"

The Home Secretary whispered to his daughter in an agony: "Can't we stop
it? Shall we telephone?"

"Too late now--before dressing," said the despairing girl. "I'll tell
you when I hear."

Her father knew she was right. They must make the best of it. "Put
dinner on in twenty minutes," he whispered to her in an aside; then
aloud to his guest, "What ... ah ... what shall we ... to put it
plainly, Mr. Collop, what shall we say you are?"

"Ah, I've got that all fixed," said Mr. Collop, his voice bravely riding
the air. "Old Brailton told me what he was and I'm that. I'm a diplomat,
I am. Tokio the last four years."

The call on Marjorie's intelligence woke her to action.

"It won't do," she said sharply.

"Why not? Eh?" said Mr. Collop, with less ceremony than might have been
expected from so recent an acquaintance.

"Because," replied the young lady, a little acidly, "one of our guests,
Miss Victoria Mosel, has just come back from Japan. She was there in
September staying with our Ambassadress at Tokio."

"Ah!" said Mr. Collop. "That makes it awkward like."

"I think," began the Home Secretary timidly ... but the stronger will
prevailed.

"Make it Bogotar?" was Mr. Collop's suggestion.

Time, which destroys love itself, and brings mighty states to ruin, the
implacable master of ephemeral man, caught the unfortunate father and
daughter in his iron grip. There was not a moment to spare. And it was
as Mr. Collop, just back from his long but patriotic exile in "Bogotar,"
that the welcome stranger was led out and ritually introduced to the
guests in the next room. There is no need to introduce a guest at such
an hour, but this guest! Oh, yes!

As the master of the house and his daughter were making that
introduction their cup of agony was full.

What made it worse was that McTaggart, being less of a man of the world,
as the saying goes, than the rest of the prisoners, was quite openly
startled, and instead of looking at Mr. Collop's determined face, his
eyes at once fell to the plus-fours, and he said to himself, as his eyes
fell lower still, "Thank God, he hasn't put on those brown boots with
funny little tabs to them! But really! For a detective...." Then he
looked up at the face--and he, of Fleet Street, knew his man.

Lord Galton stared at the Apparition. He could make neither head nor
tail of it. He was not of the Horse Pulling, privileged world. Then he
remembered that your professional politicians had to herd with all
manner of cattle and he shrugged his mental shoulders so violently that
his physical shoulders perceptibly heaved. He turned his back upon the
company and examined a picture until the nervous strain was over.

Victoria Mosel was vastly pleased. It was as good as the Zoo--and she
loved the Zoo. She promised herself an unholy feast and whispered to
Marjorie to put her next the Diplomat at dinner. She was not a woman of
gesture, or of external expression; but she very nearly clapped her
hands for joy. She had seen some funny things in the diplomatic service
in the time of her teeth, which were no longer short, but the like of
this she had never seen; and she thought, as many a contemporary has
thought since Queen Victoria's death, "We're getting on!"

Then she began to speculate within her own clear mind as to how this
monster had got into the diplomatic service at all. But she remembered
certain odd accidents during the war and other people than he who had
suddenly popped up in embassies at the F.O.--quite out of nature; and
just as she had all but clapped her hands, so she now all but whistled.
However, she in fact did neither. Only she looked upon Mr. Collop with a
happy, happy face, and felt that here, at last, was not a wasted day.

The Professor was vastly interested. He said "Bogotar" three times,
beamed, nodded, and then for a fourth time he said "Bogotar"
lingeringly, as though he loved it, and then whispered again, "Ah, yes,
of course. Bogotar." And put his head a little on one side and left it
there.

As for Aunt Amelia, her failing eyes did not distinguish the Apparition,
but her ears distinguished the accent, and the type of English; and she
marvelled feebly that things had changed so much since the days of the
Great Lord Salisbury and Peace with Honour. But of one thing she was
sure. That if the type of man used for delicate missions abroad might
have changed, the policy of Britain was still secure in the hands of
whomever the Secretary for Foreign Affairs might choose to entrust with
that mighty task; and Bogotar (she imagined) was the capital of Ormuzd
and of Ind; barbaric, splendid, and in fee to the British Crown.

"Ah! Shall I show you to your room--eh?" said the Home Secretary
courteously, putting an end to what could not be prolonged. "Ah, let me
show you to your room."

He went so far as to take the terrible thing by the elbow and actually
conduct it out; ... after an interval sufficient, but not too long,
McTaggart followed. He would again be alone. He could not bear to remain
with the rich longer than he was compelled, and now that there was a
detective in the house he would be discovered. Well, let it be so; let
the end come soon.

Now there stood, awaiting McTaggart in the hall, that Devil and that
Angel who had been off duty for a few hours, and were now back again,
fresh and keen, and bickering, as is the wont of such opposed beings of
the other world.

The Angel, seeing his human friend and ward, made him a suggestion at
once:

"You ass!" he blew into McTaggart's ear. "Put it in the Rozzer's
pocket." The Devil began to object violently.

"You shut up!" said the Angel, turning to him annoyed. "I'll come back
and talk to you about it later!" Then he turned again to McTaggart, and
pumped brilliant thoughts into his same ear with such violence that the
young man's soul was all irradiated and full and he suddenly thought
himself a genius. Such is the vanity of man! So little do we recognise
inspiration from on high!

"It's as easy," prompted the Angel, "as falling off a log. All you've
got to do is to say you've met him, and tell him who you are. He'll know
you're from the Press--you look like it--and he'll think he's met you.
_Then_ slip it into his pocket, bully boy! Slip it into his pocket!"

And all the time McTaggart was saying within his own soul: "That's a
brilliant idea! Now I don't suppose anyone else would have an idea like
that! But, there! I'm always getting good ideas at the right time!"

He stalked his host and Collop round the top of the stairs and down the
long passage above.

He saw the door open; he heard the Home Secretary say cheerfully,
"There's a bath through that door. Have you got everything you want? I
hope they've unpacked your things?"

He heard the cheerful voice of Collop reply: "Right-o! Everything in the
garden's lovely!"

He saw the Home Secretary go off with a very changed expression in the
gloom of the passage. He flattened himself in a deep doorway, a little
angry that he should be playing the spy--but necessity drove him. He
waited till he had heard his host go down the stairs; then he knocked at
the detective's bedroom door. Full of angelic inspiration--which human
pride mistook for genius--he entered in.

"Mr. Collop," he said without hesitation, "you know me? Hamish
McTaggart--the Daily Sun? ... You'll excuse me for not using your real
name?" And he smiled.

"Why, Mr. McTaggart, I've heard of you often enough. Where did we meet?
And as for the real name"--he winked--"less said the better! I'm in the
Foreign Office just now. I'm from Bogotar ... How come? When did we
meet?"

"In the Savoy bar," hushed the Angel hurriedly into McTaggart's ear.

"In the Savoy bar," said McTaggart, aloud.

"Not during the Bullingdon case?" said the delighted but indiscreet Mr.
so-called Collop, stretching out both his hands.

"Wink!" pumped the Angel; and Hamish McTaggart winked--for the first
time in his life.

It was a clumsy wink, rather like that of the hippopotamus when he comes
out of the water, in which element the huge pachyderm so serenely
sleeps. But it was good enough for the Secret Service.

"Ah! Mr. McTaggart, Mr. McTaggart!" said Collop, shaking both the
journalist's hands up and down like pump handles. "Well met! Now then,
you'll make a feature of this in the paper, won't you?"

"I'm not here for that," said McTaggart modestly. "I'm only a guest; but
of course I can see that _The Howl_ ..."

"Ah! That's the style, laddie! You'll do!" said the Man of Mystery,
bringing down a palm like a Westphalian ham on the wincing shoulder of
the youth. "A few kind words on the discreet agent, eh? The Bosses'll
note 'em down!" He dived into a pocket. "I've got a flask here!" he
said, and winked in his turn. "What I call my good old prohibition!
We'll drink to it, eh? To think of meeting the likes of you in a 'ouse
like this!"

This last remark wounded McTaggart's pride; but the Angel stood by him,
and they that have angels at their side are firm.

Mr. Collop's dress clothes lay beautifully aligned upon a couch, a shirt
by the side of them; but the owner's brow clouded as he said:

"Where the devil did I put that flask? Curse them slaveys! I do 'ate
'avin' things done for me on these toff jobs!" He buried his head in the
large kit-bag which he had been assured was the proper receptacle or
container to bring to the Palaces of the Rich.

And even as he therein delved and groped, with head hidden in the
kit-bag, the Angel brought it off!

"Attaboy!" urged the Angel to Hamish. "Slip it into the tail-coat
pocket! QUICK!"

And before you could have breathed a silent prayer the Emerald was in
the tail-coat pocket of Mr. Collop's evening tail coat, lying there on
the couch all innocent.

Up came Mr. Collop's head out of the kit-bag, very red and puffy.

"I thought as much, my 'earty," he said. "Dirty tykes! ... There it
was...." And he brought out a gigantic flask holding perhaps a quart of
the detestable beverage. The bottom of it was a silver cup fitted to the
glass, and inscribed, "In grateful memory of the Bullingdon Burglary,
August, 1928" and with the initials B.F. Mr. Collop solemnly half filled
the receptacle, smelt it with delicate _bonhomie_, and handed it to his
guest, who sipped it with the resolution in which a man must face
whatever torture has to be endured.

"Thank you," said Mr. McTaggart, gasping, from his flayed throat.

"Cheerio!" said the Collop man, and he tossed off all that
remained--enough, you would have thought, to have felled an elephant in
stupor!--down his own more acclimatized gullet. Then he brought out a
large tongue, licked his lips, and smacked them.

"Ah, that's something like!" he said. He put the flask and the silver
cup belonging to it down on his table with a happy grunt.

"Well, boy, I've got to dress," he said. "So long! We meet again in the
Khyber Pass, _i.e._, at his Nobship's groaning board!" And he laughed
heartily at his own wit.

McTaggart remembered something essential. "I say, they mustn't know that
I know you!"

"No fear!" said the redoubtable Collop, winking again. "I don't give you
away, nor myself away, nor no one away." He had already taken off his
tweed coat and waistcoat. "You run off and dress, laddie ... You keep
mum. Same here!" And he dug a podgy finger into McTaggart's staggering
chest. And they parted.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

From her room, interrupting the induing of those three pieces which
formed all her raiment, shaking shorn hair, Marjorie telephoned in a
fever regardless. "The Home Office.... Yes, the Home Office ... No
reply? Oh! Nonsense! ... What, our line gone wrong? D'you mean to say we
can't get London? ... Oh! hell!"

She banged down the receiver ... There's a schlemozzle! Telephone broken
down! Saturday night--the Monster in the Home! And no redress, no aid.

Had she had tears she would have wept. What would come of all this?




CHAPTER TEN


Mr. Collop came out, dressed, he was surprised to find his host waiting
for him, not to say waylaying him, in the passage outside.

"I thought ..." began the politician nervously--"I thought I ought to
have a word with you, Mr. Collop, before we ..."

"That's right!" roared Mr. Collop. "That's my style too. Always think of
everything!"

"Not so loud! Not so loud!" implored his agonized host. He took the
detective aside into yet another room with yet another fire. It looked
like some little nursery or schoolroom, and Mr. Collop, used as he was
to the houses of the great, marvelled at so many rooms, so many
fires ... an empty room all ready, and with so many pictures in it,
though on a bedroom floor.

"Mr. Collop," said the Home Secretary hurriedly when he had shut the
door, "I thought I ought to tell you privately, and alone, before we go
down to dinner what the circumstances are. The jewel was dropped by my
daughter--last night after dinner. My three guests went down on the
floor at once to look for it--it was upon the polar-bear rug which you
will see in the West Room later. We shall go there together after all
have retired. When they got up it had not been found ... they _said_ it
had not been found ... they _all_ said it had not been found.... There
is suspicion naturally, Mr. Collop.... You understand me?"

"There's always suspicion when vallybles are missing," said Mr. Collop,
after some thought.

"Yes, Mr. Collop, exactly! Precisely!" said the Home Secretary. "But of
course, you know, I must be told when you come to any clue.... I blame
no one. I suspect no one.... But the emerald is missing. And what's
more," he added with the firmness of a newly stuffed pillow, "I shall
not spare the culprit."

"No, of course not," said Mr. Collop sympathetically. "I'll get it for
you, never fear."

His manner, though hearty, was respectful enough in such privacy, for he
knew that though his promotion depended principally upon permanent
officials, a good word from one of the fleeting politicians was not
without its value at the Home Office. Therefore did he forbear to lay a
hand upon the Home Secretary's shoulder; and therefore--still more--did
he forbear to slap it as nature would have seemed to demand.

"Thank you, Mr. Collop," said the Home Secretary gratefully, as though
he had been given a considerable sum of money. "I trust you. I trust you
implicitly."

"You may trust me _im_plicitly and _ex_plicitly," declared Mr. Collop in
solemn religious tones.

"Thank you, oh! Ah! Thank you! Thank you again! Thank you most warmly!"
said his host more and more nervously. "Really you know, we must not be
seen together. Pray take your time, Mr. Collop; the ladies are always
late coming down."

"Ah, that's their sort, ain't it? Girls are the devil nowadays, aren't
they?" said Mr. Collop in his friendliest tones; and with that farewell
in his ears the master of the house slipped out.

The Home Secretary's next action was to go straight to McTaggart's room.
It was an act of decision and initiative that you would hardly have
expected in so well-bred a man. But suffering is a powerful tonic. He
knew what he was after. He had to speak. He would come boldly, directly
and simply. He would tell the young man of what he was accused, and ask
him straightforwardly and at once to clear himself--or at any rate to
say "yes" or "no." He knocked on the door; he went in; and he began
thus:

"Ah, Mr. McTaggart! Mr. McTaggart! I'm afraid I am interrupting you in
your dressing. It is really very rude of me! I wish ... But the fact
is ... It's rather important.... I want to put it to you as clearly as I
can, and you'll understand me when I say that time presses after a
fashion ... so to speak...."

McTaggart was at the last stage when the male brushes the hair before he
puts on the coat; all the rest of the detestable ritual was
accomplished, including the sacrosanct tie. He stood gaping with his
round face, a brush in either hand. Then he said:

"Yes, certainly, sir, if you please." He rapidly brushed his disordered
hair into a shape yet more disordered, struggled into his coat, and
then, with an odd reminiscence of manner elsewhere, said, "Won't you sit
down," feeling that he was a temporary host, as it were, a host within
his host's house; a nest of Chinese boxes.

"Thank you," said the Home Secretary. "Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you." And he sank his long, lean and therefore gentlemanly body
into the only armchair. He crossed his long, lean and therefore
gentlemanly legs, poised his two hands together like a steep Norwegian
roof, and said:

"Mr. McTaggart, you will think it very odd of me, this invasion of
your ... er, your, ah ... privacy? Yes, your privacy, er! If I may say so.
But there is something very important I must say to you before we go
down to dinner."

"Yes, sir," said McTaggart, still expectant, as he slowly filled his
pockets with the various things which journalists carry about with them,
even among the great, and which destroy the shape of their clothes.

"Mr. McTaggart ..." began the Home Secretary desperately, now leaning
forward with his elbow on his knee and his forehead in his hand. "What I
have to say is not very easy, but it is best to get these difficult
things over at once. Don't you think so?"

"Yes, certainly," said McTaggart.

"I mean," said the Home Secretary, "it would be a great pity to waste a
moment in beating about the bush. There's no sense in mere verbiage and
slow approach to the essentials. Moreover, my time is short: I mean our
time is short.... I mean there's not much time before dinner, and to
tell the truth, that's why I came in here, so apparently suddenly....
What was I saying?"

Then, looking up and leaning back again in the chair: "But we need not
go into all that. As I say, the great thing is to come to the point at
once, isn't it?"

McTaggart was tired of standing up. He sat down in another chair, and
said "Yes," with a look of expectancy not quite unmixed with approaching
boredom.

"Well, Mr. McTaggart," went on the great statesman at last desperately,
like a man who has determined to take a plunge. "You will excuse my
being quite blunt and straightforward, won't you?"

"Of course," said McTaggart.

"I mean, we have already agreed that wasting time in preliminaries over
a matter of this kind ..."

"But a matter of _what_ kind?" said McTaggart, now roused--though his
guilty soul told him well what was coming.

"Well, the fact is, Mr. McTaggart," said the Home Secretary, suddenly
uncoiling himself and straightening out the joints until he stood up
above the younger man--he felt it gave him a kind of moral advantage,
and he needed it--"the fact is, it's only fair to tell you ... only the
difficulty is how to put it. But one must be straightforward, mustn't
one?"

And once more Mr. McTaggart said "Yes." But certain ancient traditions
of the middle class were stirring in his blood and he very nearly added,
"You doddering old fool."

"Why then, Mr. McTaggart, to put it quite plainly, ... well, now,
perhaps I ought to say this first. You know my cousin William? The
Professor?"

"Yes," said Mr. McTaggart, for the sixth time and with a touch of
savagery in his voice, "I do. I have been in this house with him for
over twenty-four hours."

"He tells me, Mr. McTaggart," began the Home Secretary seriously and
half an octave lower--"mind you, I don't say I believe it!"

"No?" said McTaggart, "Well, go on."

"He tells me he has proof, scientific proof-- Mind you, I don't say I
believe him! I'm only saying what he said."

"Yes," said McTaggart, for the seventh time, and with more patience.

"Scientific proof, I say--not personal, you understand. No personal
insinuation whatever--only _scientific_ proof that the emerald is or
was--shall I say, has been, upon your--damn it all!--_person_."

McTaggart started up. The issue was joined. He behaved very well.

"Mr. de Bohun," he said, in a slow but frank and straightforward way,
"you are not bound to believe me. But not only have I not the emerald,
but I will not even take the trouble to swear I have not got it. _I have
not got the Emerald_. Is that clear?"

"Yes," said his unfortunate host. With a world of apology in his voice
and stretching forth a deprecating hand! "Oh, yes, Mr. McTaggart! Yes,
quite clear!"

"Not only have I _not_ got the emerald," McTaggart went on with
painfully clear diction, "but I know who has."

"Oh! Lord," thought the Home Secretary, "another of 'em!" Then he said
aloud: "Ah? Oh! most _interesting_! Who?"

The other phrases he had heard during the last twenty-four hours crowded
upon him, and he felt slightly faint.

"Yes," said McTaggart, continuing in a virile intonation, "I know who
has it. _Mr. Collop has it_!"

"What?" shouted the Home Secretary, startled into a lucid interval of
terseness. "Think what you are saying, young man! Collop! He wasn't in
the house when it was lost! He's only just come."

"That's true," hesitated the journalist, slowly turning over in his own
mind how he should get out of this mess. "But I tell you what, I tell
you he's got it.... It's only an instinct," he added with sudden
humility. "I have these odd feelings sometimes--and they are usually
right. My mother was a Highland woman, and I am the seventh son of a
seventh son. I don't pretend to any proof. All I say is"--more
firmly--"Mr. Collop has got the emerald." He gathered confidence. He
struck his left open palm with his right fist and said: "Mr. de Bohun,
Mr. Collop has got the emerald ... and as for me, you may go through my
pockets, here and now, you may have me searched, here and now if you
will, and all my clothes and all the drawers in the room and every
corner in the room, and anything else you will. And what's more," he
said, as he saw still further weakness in that weak old face, "I mean to
stay in this house till the emerald appears. I owe that to my honour."

"Oh, Mr. McTaggart," said the Home Secretary imploringly, and even as he
spoke, he heard steps on the stairs and knew that they must be going
down, "don't misunderstand me! I am not accusing you! I wouldn't accuse
you for a moment! I am only saying ... I am only repeating to you what
was told to me. Indeed, I should be treating you very ill had I not done
so. Don't you agree?" and he actually seized the young man's hand.

McTaggart accepted the gesture.

"I am grateful, sir," he said simply. "I quite understand that a man in
my position would be naturally suspected."


[Illustration: _Mr. McTaggart explains to the Great Statesman
his theory--or rather, certitude--upon the
whereabouts of the Great Emerald._]


"Don't say that, Mr. McTaggart"--all the gentleman in him arising to
patronize poverty--"don't say that!"

"I say I can understand that a man in my position should be suspected.
But you will see; mark my words, you will see after no long space of
time that I was right. I have an instinct in such things."

"But damn it all! Mr. McTaggart! Collop? Damn it all, think!"

"No," said Mr. McTaggart, moving towards the door, "I tell you I am
sure, for I had it in a dream." And he and his bewildered host went
downstairs.

The Home Secretary, as he moved by the young man's side towards the big
drawing-room where they were all to assemble, felt in his mind something
like a kaleidoscope or like the music in the drunken scene of "The
Master Singer," or like a Wiggle-Woggle or like the Witching Waves....
Galton had seen Cousin William with the emerald. He had seen it with his
own eyes--or else he lied. Cousin William had worked an infallible
scientific test, and the Emerald had certainly been on McTaggart or else
_he_ lied. And yet McTaggart had not got it--or else _he_ lied. The Home
Secretary's powerful mind kept on returning to the central point, "How
the hell could they _all_ have it, and least of all how could Collop
have it? That _must_ be nonsense! ... Anyhow, Collop was there, that was
a relief. It was his business to find out." Had Mr. de Bohun been in the
habit of prayer he would have prayed fervently that Collop would track
down the real man.

But side by side with that relief rose an immense wave of apprehension,
for he remembered what manner of deep-sea beast Collop was, and he
sickened at the coming ordeal of the dinner.

Nor was he wrong.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

In the hall the Devil and the Angel were having a most furious row.

"What I want to bring home to you," said the Devil, pressing a red-hot
forefinger upon a smoking palm, "is that you've intruded. You've done
something I only had the right to do. It was my place to suggest
McTaggart passing the Emerald on!"

"It was nothing of the sort," said the Angel angrily. "You're like all
devils; you won't listen to reason." Then he began to count off on the
larger feathers of his wing. "Firstly, it's up to me to protect the
young man. _Secondly_, it does no sort of harm if the 'tec finds that
stone; why, it's all the better for him! It relieves a lot of honest and
dishonest men from suspicion. Thirdly"-- Here he hesitated, as
theologians often do upon thirdly, thinking what he could scrape up. But
the Devil interrupted him.

"Never mind your 'thirdly.' It's a dirty trick, slipping jewels into
people's pockets! And dirty tricks are my stunts, not yours. Wasn't it
me," he added with a rising grievance in his voice, "that made the old
Don stick it into his pocket to begin with?"

Then the Angel played the trick which I am sorry to say is always being
played upon poor devils: he played the trick of the superior person.

"Well," he said, "you may be right. I can't bother about it. I've got
something else to do, and you can go back to hell."

The Devil, stung beyond endurance, grappled and closed. They wrestled
magnificently and it was fifty-fifty--as it always is with devils and
angels in this world--when the Angel began to get the worst of it. The
Devil, though shorter, was in far better training--humanity had seen to
that--and he was pressing the Angel down, when the Angel, without
scruple, began to increase his size and strength prodigiously, till he
towered above the poor Devil like a giant and half broke his back.

"You're cheating!" gasped the Devil. "You're working a miracle!"

"Anything's fair with devils!" said that most unjust Angel.

With which words he transferred himself into the sixth dimension, and
the Devil, snubbed, angered, disappointed, impotent to revenge himself,
burning to be eased by some ill deed, flew through the night to the
Duchess's--it was only four miles--and inspired her with the odious
thought that she should start yet another league for bothering the
poor. After such beastly solace he went back for the moment to his own
place.




CHAPTER ELEVEN


During dinner Mr. Collop was not silent. In vain did the Home Secretary
indicate to his servant by a grimace that Mr. Collop's wine should be
spared. Mr. Collop had all the assurance of his breeding, and when he
wanted more wine he asked for it. It added, if that were possible, to
his remarkable courage.

That night was forever memorable to all those present for the
instructive lecture which he delivered upon the habits of the people of
Bogotar. They all inwardly suffered, or chuckled, as their temperaments
demanded. Vic ignored Marjorie's eyes and shamefully stayed on at table
as late as possible to carry the torture forward.

The men did not stop long over their wine--for by that name I deign to
call the beverage. The evening passed as on a rack for most, while Mr.
Collop roared busily of Bogotar, with many a droll tale and many a
gesture of large effect to underline it. Once more Vic stuck it out. She
was in heaven. She egged the Startler on. She asked question after
question on the famous oil-town of the Pearson Contracts. She even asked
about the women's love affairs and the British prospectors'
entanglements in that ill-known resort.

The Master of the House had to force the situation.

"I am going to ask you," said the Home Secretary, rather pompously, "to
excuse me for the rest of the evening. I have to talk of very important
matters with Mr. Collop. We shall be closeted together, I fear, till the
small hours of the morning; and I beg that you will not think me
discourteous."

The only one of the clot to whom this public speech could possibly be
addressed--all the rest were of the Family--was the lately unfortunate,
but now radiant, McTaggart. But it is a politician's habit to be pompous
whenever he gets the least excuse, and McTaggart was the excuse.

"On official business connected with the ... ah, with the ... well ...
it would not be to the public interest to say precisely."

McTaggart looked very carefully from under his eyelashes at his nearest
neighbour; Victoria Mosel darted a corner look at Galton, and Galton
grimly smiled at Marjorie. Aunt Amelia did not hear properly. Only the
Professor rose to the occasion, carolling:

"Certainly, Humphrey, certainly. By all means, Humphrey, by all means."
Then he squeezed his bony hands together, as though he had made a joke.

The women dropped out of the room. Marjorie waited above with her door
ajar till she should know the way was clear. Then she was to come down.

"Shall we go into my study?" said the Home Secretary to his latest
guest, when the women had gone.

"Thank you, I would not give ye that trouble, I wouldn't," said Mr.
Collop heartily. "I'd as soon talk 'ere. I think better like in large
rooms." And as he said that, the three men went out--perforce. But
Galton went not to bet but to the small smoking-room, and Victoria Mosel
did the same. Collop filled himself a whiskey and soda. And without
giving his employer time to open the ball, he entered on the plan
engendered by his mighty brain.

As he began to speak, Marjorie, following the sound of voices, slipped
in. Mr. Collop stared at her, said "'Ullo?" but returned to his
business.

"First of all," he said, with a good gulp at the spirits, "ye want a
plan made of this here West Room, as ye call it. Now mark me," he
insisted, as the Home Secretary half opened his never-quite-shut mouth,
"that plan'll 'ave to be in not less than five colours--and I'll tell
you for why. In a case of this kind, you 'ave got to distinguish between
materials. Remember what ye're looking for! Ye're looking for a object
that might be called transparent in a manner o' speaking."

"Mr. Collop," broke in the Home Secretary desperately, "how long will it
take to make such a plan?"

"If there's a harchitect 'andy, it needn't take three days. I've 'ad
dozens. And next," said Mr. Collop, as loudly as before, "we 'ave to
'ave measurements. We don't need regular surveys and we don't need to
fill the garden wi' standards nor flags, but just measurements."

"And how long will these take?" asked the Home Secretary, a fabulous sum
mounting up before his eyes, and the impossibility of keeping his guests
forever.

"You will observe," said Mr. Collop, clearing his throat as for a
speech, and addressing the lady--"you will observe, Miss, that what two
men can do in one time, four men can do in arf the time, and eight
men--why, eight men in a quarter of the time. And sixteen men," he
continued, turning to her progenitor, "they'd take arf as much again.
While they're making the plan in one room, if you 'ave enough men with
chains in the grounds. Then there's the probing."

"The what?" asked de Bohun.

"The probing," answered his guest briefly. "That's a longer job,
'specially as I noticed that there's stone floors about. Now 'ere's
another matter. Look at this carpet. That's Aubusson, that is. Ah, I
notice everything! Aubusson--that's what it is."

"Mr. Collop," broke in Marjorie, in her suffering....

"Now, Miss," said Mr. Collop with command, "don't you interrupt me. Let
me put the necessaries before you. When you get all this done, sir, what
are you to do, then? What are you to do next? Why, I'll tell you. You'll
have all the shutters shut: I noticed you 'ad shutters: and those
curtains pulled. Then you'll put what they call Marlin's New Irridiant
up. That's the light we work by. And I'll tell you for why. You 'ave
plain electrics in the room and they casts shadows. Don't they, Miss?"
he appealed to his hostess. But before she could agree, he went on, like
a mighty river in flood:

"Now, casting shadows, you might miss a small object. That's how objects
do get missed. You've got to think of these things. Artificial light
that is distributed high and in the corners...."

The Home Secretary could bear no more. "Yes, yes, yes," he said. "Where
does one get the stuff?"

"You'll see!" said Mr. Collop tartly, but with pardonable pride. "It's
expensive, mind you," he added honestly. "But you got to do this job
well or not at all."

"But, Mr. Collop," said poor Marjorie, who could hardly bear another
moment, "before all this expense couldn't we ..."

"No, Miss," said the redoubtable Collop, shaking his head firmly. "Not
to be thought on! I wouldn't undertake the responsibility, I wouldn't.
And mind you, this ain't the first job of the sort I've tackled; not by
thousands it ain't." (An exaggeration--due, I am afraid, to the
whiskey.) "I wouldn't undertake the responsibility! I'll put no man
under a cloud till I've made certain that it's not lost and hiding of
its own. If it's not found, why then it'll be time to begin."

It was Marjorie who found the decision to break off the battle. She got
up suddenly.

"Good night, Mr. Collop," she said. "I understand all about it now. We
leave it to you."

"Thanks, Miss," said Mr. Collop. "That's the right spirit! You leave it
to the perfessional man, and you'll never regret it! Is it good night to
you, sir?" he added in a voice as loud as ever, stretching out a firm
hand and seizing that of the Home Secretary. He crushed it in an iron
grip, so that the poor old gentleman winced with pain.

"No, Mr. Collop! ... No, pray ... I must see you again in a moment,
indeed I must ... but will you excuse me a moment?" He rose. "My
daughter and I must have a private word together I think...."

"It's my place to retire, my lord," said Mr. Collop all in the grand
manner, weak in the distinctions. "I'll be in the library, and when you
want me, why, come and cop me," and out he went.

Without a moment's warning, Marjorie threw herself upon a sofa, crossed
her arms upon the back of it, and began crying and sobbing in a storm.
Her father was enormously distressed.

"There, there, my dear," he said, "you are quite overwrought; you are
tired. Get to bed. It can't be helped. We must go through with it."

"Oh, papa," she sobbed, "it's intolerable. I can't help thinking! Just
think what they'll all think!"

"Yes, my dear; I was thinking that they would be thinking what you say
they will be thinking. I'm afraid some of them must have been thinking
already."

"Perhaps," moaned poor Marjorie, half consoled by the relief of tears,
"that b-b-b-loody b-b-beast will find the b-b-b-b-b-bloody thing after
all."

"Yes, my dear, yes. I hope he will. I'm sure he will. I am indeed!"

She dried her eyes, sighed wearily, kissed her father good night, and
went off to bed. It was nearly one o'clock. The poor man, as he heard
her step go slowly up the great stairs, retained his daughter's
despairing voice vividly in his ears. It reminded him of his
wife's--only the vocabulary had somewhat changed since the days when
Queen Victoria gave so admirable an example to the ladies of the land.

     *     *     *     *     *      *     *

He rose wearily, feeling fevered, and the worry on him increasingly
intolerable. He stepped out into the hall; it was still fully lit. He
rang, and when the servant came he asked him whether the offices were
shut up. He was told that all had gone to bed but the man who had come
at his summons. He bade him go in his turn, and put out all the lights.
Then he himself switched out the bulbs in the hall and stared at the
great window beside the door. It was singularly light outside, and the
air was oppressive within. Cold as was the weather, he needed to feel
the open. He thrust up the sash and drank in the rush of freezing air.

The moon must have just risen, but a slight mist was ascending. Half an
hour's light fall of snow had again marked off the lawn, but evidently
hours before, since the paths were swept round the house and along up
the avenue to the left. He shut down the sash again, a little refreshed,
but still most ill at ease.

With a sigh he turned towards the door of the library, within which
room, alone, crouched the nightmare policeman. He forced himself in, and
found the fellow there.

"We must go into the West Room, Mr. Collop," he said. "My daughter has
gone to bed; the house is all shut up, and we can discuss matters
undisturbed. It is in the West Room that the thing happened. Come."




CHAPTER TWELVE


In the West Room the Home Secretary opened fire on his guest.

"All these schemes of yours, Mr. Collop," he said firmly, "you must
discard. Time is essential. I ask you for some immediate action. This
very night. Mr. Collop, I beg you to proceed."

Mr. Collop needed no further invitation. Proceeding was his passion--I
might almost say, his vice.

"Got to be done express?" he asked. "Right-o! Now I'll tell ye my way. I
divide it," he continued, roaring powerfully, "into three heads." Then,
much more loudly, "Head number one."

"Pray, pray, Mr. Collop," agonised the Home Secretary, with outstretched
hands. "A little lower, please! We must not be overheard!"

"I'll tell you my express method--since ye want it express," said Mr.
Collop, speaking now no louder than your ordinary street orator,
railways guard or the cabinet minister at election. "First, to establish
what I call negative evidence. This term," he added sententiously, "I
will make clear in a moment. Two"--he ticked them off on his podgy
fingers--"what I call the search, comparable to the experiment conducted
by men of science; with no hypothetic bless you, none at all! Just
random like. Now then, in the midst of that we shall find a clue. What
then? Then number three. The hypothetic is formed, modified, readjusted,
co-ordinated, and leads infallibly to the inevitable conclusion."

He coughed and spat in the fire. It was perhaps the thirty-seventh time
in the last ten years that he had recited that piece. It had been
written out for him by his nephew, who, he was proud to say, attended
lectures at Manchester University, and he had it typewritten on a now
rather dirty sheet of paper which he carried about with him all over
England.

"So what do we do now?" he continued heartily. "Why, we begin by
establishing our negative evidence. Chrm! Chrm! And how do we do that?
Why, we make sure that it is not in this room."

"But how can one make sure of that?" said the Home Secretary, puzzled.

"Why, plain and straightforward, sir. I 'ave brought down my men and my
apparatus. We'll want the floor taken up. But that won't take long."

"What?" said the Home Secretary, in alarm.

"The floor, sir. The floor," said Mr. Collop magisterially. "And I say
again, it won't take long. My men will prise it up before you can say
'Sir Garnet'! And afore we do that another set of 'em will cut the
furniture open to see if it's not in the cracks. Then I have got two
with the new white light."

"What?" said the Home Secretary again.

"Why, this new dazzle I told you on," said Mr. Collop proudly.

"But my dear sir, my dear sir, when you say your men, what do you mean?"

"My men, Mr. Dee Boe Hun? Why, them men I ordered to come and 'elp me
with this job. They're at the Lion now, waiting."

And without asking his host's leave, he sat down squarely at the little
table by the telephone and rang up the Lion. When he had given his
message, he waited, head in air, hands clasped behind his back, a
monument of Induction and Deduction.

"Do I understand you to say," groaned Mr. de Bohun miserably, "that you
mean to pull up the floor to-night?"

"That's it," nodded Mr. Collop. "That's right. And open the furniture.
Only just enough to see it's not in any of the cracks. Then," he added,
looking critically at the fine Empire looking-glass upon the wall, "we
must have things down, of course. You never know what may lie concealed
lurking behind."

"Really, Mr. Collop, really," groaned the Home Secretary, clasping and
unclasping his hands, "I should think that ..."

"Job must be done thorough," frowned Mr. Collop, wagging his head. "I'd
never undertake the responsibility of searching individuals till I'd
made sure 'twasn't in the room where 'twas lost."

Even as he spoke there came an honest bang upon the outer door; shortly
after another, still more honest, upon the door of the room, and the
shuffling of many feet. Once more dispensing with the formality of
consulting his host, the great Collop unbolted the door, and with a
Napoleonic gesture introduced his merry men.

They were a sight, they were! Six of them seemed to have been chosen
rather for strength than for intellectual power. Two staggered under an
enormous iron tripod with heaven knows what contraption poised on its
summit, and a cylinder of gas. Three more bore with them sundry
instruments. And of all this little army Mr. Collop, with fine decision,
took immediate charge.

"Now, then, lads!" he said; "hearty! The job's got to be done quick. All
the rugs first, please. You two with the light, stand off! Stand on the
window-sill. Then you won't be in the way." So they did, the marks of
their heavy boots contrasting finely with the delicate woodwork of that
Jane Austen room.

"Rugs all rolled?" said Mr. Collop. "Yes! That's right! Shake 'em first,
yes! That's right! Pile 'em up on that other window. Now then, tables
out of it! Smart!"

He opened the door, and behold! half a dozen willing pairs of hands
pushed the small table, the middle table, the big desk, the little
table, and the what-not, one after the other, vigorously into the
hall--and the door was shut again.

"Now, me boys! up with the Austrians!"

His heart was in his work, and he inspired his command as all great
leaders can. The sundry instruments so useful in work of this kind did
their rapid work, lifting one large square after another, while the
owner of the same danced with astonishing agility from spot to spot,
remaining at last on one isolated island, which he was courteously
bidden to abandon; taking refuge then upon the remaining low
window-sill, while the five large lounge chairs in the room were laid
carefully on their backs across the joists as the work proceeded.

"That's the style!" said Mr. Collop, cheerfully. "Pile 'em up, lads!
Pile 'em up!"

And those sham-ancient polished parquet squares, their very base modern
pitch pine reverse pitifully exposed--but, as Mr. Collop proudly pointed
out, not one of them broken--were carefully laid against the wall,
nicely missing the Cox and the Morland, but threatening in some degree,
should they shift or slip, the large picture of Paulings in the early
eighteenth century, which was the place's pride--and so it ought to be!
Paulings belonged to gentlemen then. Two of them were to be seen riding
horses which had done nothing but eat for years and yet walked on their
hind legs. They were followed by four dogs....

But to my tale....

The two citizens with the tripod set it down between the old dusty
joists upon which the floor boards had rested, and of a sudden a most
abominable glare, like the white heat from molten iron, shot in a shaft
upon a corner in the uncovered lower flooring. It was brilliant beyond
the dreams of avarice. It revealed like remorse. Mr. Collop with an
agility surprising in a man of his build, leaped down that little
distance, and kept on shouting directions.

"That's right now! Sweep it along! Sweep it along! Sweep it along!" The
blinding shaft of light slowly traversed the edges of the shallow void
from end to end, from left to right. "Now back again!" said Mr. Collop.
"Now back again!"

The intense beam travelled back in another band, slightly nearer, from
right to left; and all the while the detective followed with keen eyes
every patch which it successively illuminated.

It was not a long process. Three or four minutes at the most. And while
it continued, the Home Secretary, perched in security on his
window-sill, was interested in spite of himself: new science is always a
toy.... And that was how they searched for the jewels in the flooring of
the West Room.

Mr. Collop's hand went up, and the blinding shaft of light disappeared
as suddenly as it had come.

"That'll do, lads!" he said. "We know one thing now, any'ow. It didn't
get down through the flooring; that's certain. Now then, if you please,
we'll open the furniture."

Mr. de Bohun did not please.

"Surely, surely it can be spared," he begged. "It's Victorian."

"Now, sir," protested Collop firmly, "I'll be responsible for nothing
unless I'm pursuing my own method."

The Home Secretary sighed and surrendered. With deft fingers two of the
three extras began picking out the stitching of the chairs after every
loose cushion had been lifted, shaken, and put aside.

It was beautiful to see such expert work; at least, it was beautiful in
Mr. Collop's eyes; but the Home Secretary almost shed tears. Those
chairs were his father's! The Great Peal, the immortal Benjamin Israel,
had graced them. And again--who was going to pay for all this? All the
edges of the leather stood out; the secret places were revealed. There
was no emerald.

Mr. Collop beamed with satisfaction.

"That, sir," he said triumphantly, "is the end of what we've called our
_Negative_ process. Hey! Number One!" And he ticked off on his thumb, as
he had done before.

"We are now assured," he boomed, tucking his thumbs into the armholes of
his waistcoat, "that wherever the Em'rald may be, it's not in this room.
Stay a moment! I'd forgotten! The pictures down, please!"

Again the owner gave tongue. "Do you _really_ think, Mr. Collop ..."

"Yes, I do," answered Mr. Collop with decision. "Come. Smartly, lads!"

No harm was done to the pictures; they knew their work. The Cox was
lifted down and now leaned at a secure angle. The Morland turned its
back canvas to the ceiling, pushed on a capsized armchair. I wish I
could say as much for the Napoleonic looking-glass.

It was just too high for one of the men's hands; he slipped, and down it
came: an omen of ill-fortune, smashed upon the floor--round gilded
frame, Eagle of the Legions, and all.

"Well, well!" said Mr. Collop cheerfully. "No battle without losses, ye
know--hey?"

"I really think...." urged the Home Secretary, with something as near
anger as his temperament allowed.

"Never you fuss, sir," thrust in Mr. Collop genially. "It's all right
now. We've proved our point. That's the 'sential. I say again, the
Negative part is accomplished," and he smiled upon his chief with all
the satisfaction of genius. "The em'rald's not in this room where it was
lost. That's a cert. What's the conclusion? Why, sir, the conclusion is
that it's _somewhere else_. And when I say somewhere else, what do I
mean?"

"You mean...." began the Home Secretary nervously, stepping down
gingerly from his perch and trying to make his way across the
joists--"you mean that you must now consider which, if any, of my
guests ..."

Again Mr. Collop's hand went up.

"Now, sir; pardon me! That's not the scientific spirit. I shall send
these men back to the Lion, with your leave"--it was the first time he
had asked it, and it was granted with enthusiasm--"and then I shall ask
you, sir, to give me details, and I shall make notes. After that we'll
sleep on it.... Before you go, men, get the Austrians down again. Hammer
the clamps down: hammer 'em down good and strong at the corners; whang
'em in! You know how these Austrians buckle! We'll 'ave everything right
again in a jiffy"--to his host--"and then we'll sleep sound on it. Like
'Ogs."

With clamouring echo which shook those ancient walls, square after
square of Austrian antique was thrown back into its place; with
Cyclopean noise the clamps were driven into their former holes, and the
shattering bangs of the heavy iron hammers sounded like thunder through
the silent night. Twenty yards away, in the small smoking-room, Victoria
Mosel and Tommy Galton had remained to exchange a few insults after the
others had gone off to bed. They started at the unusual din; she very
slightly, he with a jerk.

"What are they doing?" said he suspiciously.

"Making your scaffold," shot Vic decidedly: then, more doubtfully. "It's
a damned shame! For I don't suppose you did take it after all, Tommy?
Eh?"

"If I thought there was room on you for that bloody stone," began Tommy
viciously....

"Oh, search me!" said Vic, without sincerity.

"No, but, Vic, what _are_ they doing?"

"Shifting the scenery, Tommy. Summoning the dead. Christ knows!" She
yawned, to the peril of her agglutinative cigarette, but it held nobly.
"It can't go on forever. I'm going to bed. By the time they've stopped
I'll be asleep. So long! I'll come and look you up at Wormwood Scrubbs,
never fear!" And the Virgin departed.

"Not while you're still in Holloway," fired the puller of horses after
her as he got up in his turn, and went out to get his candle for bed.

A few moments later, when the Master of the House peeped out into the
hall, he found all dark and deserted. He was pleased to think that his
guests had suspected nothing.

When everything was accomplished, and the little army of Scotland Yard
men had fallen back upon its billets at the Lion (Humphrey de Bohun
himself let them out at the front door, on tiptoe and with agonised
whispers entreating caution. He himself had locked and bolted these
doors); when, I say, all this affair was over Mr. Collop, first making
quite sure that his seat was secure, took out a notebook, shot a blot of
ink on to the re-established polar bear, and gave tongue.

"Now, sir, fire away!"

"What do you want me to do?" said de Bohun doubtfully.

"Why, just give me details of what those coves 've been doing of," said
Mr. Collop, relapsing into the vernacular.

"You mean my guests?" said the Home Secretary rather stiffly.

"That's right," said Mr. Collop cheerfully, "the toffs."

"Well, really.... I haven't played the spy on my guests, Mr. Collop."

"Oh, I'm looking after that," said Mr. Collop with another of his
healthy winks. "Now, just you tell me all they did. I've got my first
notes here. These three men what I've just met at dinner--and one of
them's young McTaggart--I know 'im--they went down on their knees and
they looked for it in that rug. Well and good. Then they got up, and
they all swore they hadn't got it."

"McTaggart was the last," said de Bohun, defending the interests of the
family.

"Ar? ... I didn't know that!" mused the modern Napoleon deeply. And he
noted it down. "Well, what next?"

"Why, to tell you the truth--the full truth, and I beg you to keep it
private--my cousin, Lord Galton, has told me that he has seen the
emerald--seen it with his own eyes--in the Professor's hands."

"Ar!" said Mr. Collop again. "That's important, that is!" and down it
went. "Saw it with 'is own eyes: where and 'ow?"

"Wait a moment, Mr. Collop, wait a moment. Not long after, the Professor
told me he had infallible scientific proof that it was in McTaggart's
pocket. He showed me the very instrument wherewith he had been able to
discover its presence through the thickness of the coat."

"That's important too!" murmured Mr. Collop, intelligently noting it
down. "An' what does McTaggart say?"

"McTaggart ..." The Home Secretary was about to blurt out the truth and
tell him what McTaggart had singularly announced. But he checked
himself. To insult his last remaining prop would be fatal. "Oh,
McTaggart?" he evaded. "Why, McTaggart said he hadn't got it."

"Ar! just so. 'E did, did 'e? Now, that's _very_ important," affirmed
Mr. Collop, and he noted that down also.

"Now here," he continued, slipping an elastic band over the notebook and
putting it back into his pocket--"here, Mr. Dee Boe Hun, we 'ave got
three 'ypothetics." He again began ticking them off on the thumb and
fingers of the left hand. "First 'ypothetic: Lord Galton stole the
em'rald. Second 'ypothetic: Old Giglamps stole the em'rald ...
Tortoise-shell specs, I mean: the schoolmaster," and he winked again.
"Third 'ypothetic: McTaggart stole the em'rald. Now these three
'ypothetics," he went on, "lead to three totally different conclusions.
Each of 'em has its conjunctions and conjugations. Mr. Dee Boe Hun," he
concluded, rising and assuming hieratic tones, "I shall not sleep
to-night." (There is many a true word spoken in lying.) "I shall bend
all the energies of me mind in the ensuing hours of darkness, and on the
morrow you shall 'ave my conclusions.... I'll trouble you, sir, to leave
me a syphon and a drop o' something. Helps me to concentrate."

"I'm afraid," said the Home Secretary, "the servants will have cleared
the drinks away from the library, and they have all gone to bed." Then,
terrified lest the lack of sustenance should imperil victory, he added
hurriedly: "Don't move! Pray don't move! I think I know where to find
it."

He was away some time, going on tiptoe in the offices. When he returned
it was with an unopened bottle of whiskey, a syphon and a glass. "I'm
afraid I have no corkscrew," he apologised.

"I 'ave," said the imperturbable Collop, who had sat royally in his
chair to receive this tribute. He pulled out the cork, smelt the brand,
approved of it, poured himself out a dope and a most miserable little
splash from the syphon.

"Here's luck!" he said. "Cheerio! Now you leave me _to_ it!"

And de Bohun left him to it, ardently praying with what was left of his
childhood's faith to a God in whom he still vaguely believed, that never
again in the remaining years of his declining life should he be
compelled to harbour under the roof of Paulings any unit from the mighty
Secret Service which he commanded, and inwardly deciding that he would
relinquish that command for India, Paris, South Africa--nay, New
Zealand--anything rather than bear such a burden again.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN


It is a fascinating occupation to watch a powerful human brain at work
upon some great problems--the face alive with mind, the tension of the
muscles, the frowning eyes; and to feel behind it all that driving,
compelling power of the intelligence wherein man is God-like.

But no one would have seen this sight in the case of Mr. Collop had he
remained. What he would have seen was a hand pouring out whiskey for
itself over and over again and adding smaller and smaller splashes of
soda; and at last an obese body attempting sleep in the lounge chair
which it filled.

He had comfortably made up his mind. He was going to stay in the West
Room and sleep as he could, leaving his bed untouched by way of giving
the impression of a long night's intellectual wrestling. Next morning he
would take every one of the three in turn, tell each separately that he
was from the Yard, tax them brutally with the theft, and terrify and
bully the culprit, whichever of the three it might turn out to be, into
confession. So decided, he chose a good chair among the mutilated
victims, wheeled it close to the electric switches by the fire, settled
himself down, turned off the light and shut his eyes for sleep.

Now it is paradoxically true of the substantial more than it is of the
insufficient, that they must shift and turn to find that posture in
which their persons can best repose, especially in chairs. Nor could Mr.
Collop at once and easily fall into the arms of Morpheus. He shifted and
turned, and wedged in and re-wedged in and out, and moved again and
replaced those various muscles and anatomical names of which escape
me--or rather I never knew them, though the things themselves I know
well enough--when all of a sudden he gave a loud and piercing cry and
leapt up broad awake. Something had stuck into him--something abominably
sharp. His reaction had been instantaneous. He struck a match. He
switched on the light.

He groped in the offending tail-coat pocket and--not the first to do
so!--stared at what he found in his hand--the emerald! Its brooch
setting was unclasped, the wicked steel pin of it was pointing at a
challenging angle in the air. He glared viciously at the offending point
which had wounded his innocent person; then his eyebrows relaxed into a
stupefied stare at the stone itself.

"Great God!" he said three times, "Great God! Great God!"


[Illustration: _Birds of the Empire.
I.--The Parrot Attaboy, in action._]


There is a current impression, taken I think from the great spate of
detective stories upon which we are all fed, that your professional
detective has no brains whatsoever and would be no match for the sloth
of the Andes, or the sluggish waddle-duck of Australian and Imperial
fame. It is an error. They are men as we are and their intelligences,
such as they are, work more or less under the spur of prospective
advantage. Within three minutes Mr. Collop had grasped the fact that
fame, security, promotion, a permanent, good, appreciated, livelihood
lay in his outstretched palm. Had he not found the emerald? _How_ he had
found it, why it was there at all, he knew not. But he had quickly seen
how its possession might be used.

"There you are, you great blighter," he murmured, addressing the
charming gem. "Damn your green eyes! I'll make you work, I will!
William, my boy, here's something that's got to be thought out!"

For the first time for many months, Mr. Collop thought, really thought;
"concentrated" as he would have put it.

He would have done it better perhaps if he had not been so full of
whiskey. But shock is a powerful stimulus. And he was already
three-quarters sober and coming to conclusions.

For a long time the effect of this unusual exercise was a blank and a
confusion of mind; then there broke in upon the silence a sound which
startled him horribly. A voice, somewhat muffled, uncertain, had spoken
in that silence where none but him could be. He had heard it! Or was he
mad?

"Attaboy!"

Was it a divine command? Had some dear wraith of the dead--his sainted
mother perhaps, who could tell--come to comfort him in this dread hour
of his fate? All was dead still. His hand trembled a little as he pulled
out his watch. It was a quarter past two, and the silence was enormous.

Most awfully it came again.

"Attaboy!"

He hardly dared to look around. Look round he did and there he saw what
he had not before grasped--that the dome of black cloth, suspended,
covered a cage; thence it was that once again, but this time in a
failing, drowsy manner, came the unearthly summons:

"Attaboy!"

A revelation burst upon his mind. It was a revelation indeed! The whole
scheme blazed suddenly before him.

He walked boldly to the cage, took off the cover and saw what may very
properly be called the blinking bird, for the sudden light had dazzled
it.

"Attaboy!" croaked the parrot again in a rather peevish fashion.

"I'll Attaboy you!" hissed Mr. Collop through his teeth.

He made his preparations to capture that innocent accomplice; his scheme
was now fully developed.

He had heard that this kind of fowl was of a very fierce and dangerous
sort; but the plan must be pursued at all risks. He took his
handkerchief from his pocket--a large bandanna of the noblest--and with
a decision worthy of a better cause, whipped it round the gaudy coloured
neck after the fashion of a cravat. A muffled protest proceeded from
that insulted organ.

"You wait!" muttered Mr. Collop vindictively, as though the poor bird
were his enemy. He looked about him. There was a large square of black
cloth on his host's writing-table. With that he made a second deadener,
hoodlike, entirely covering the animal's head, and tied it securely on;
all that now penetrated from within was a faint, varying sound which one
had to be in the closest neighbourhood to hear. Next he cut off a piece
of tape from the coil neatly disposed by the side of the official
papers, and bound the fierce talons securely. Then with infinite
precaution he slipped off the chain from its ring, and held the exotic
biped firmly in both hands.

The clipped wings fluttered a little, but they were contained by strong
hands. Mr. Collop made for the window. He laid his living parcel down,
where it struggled in vain; opened the shutters with infinite
precautions for avoiding sound--above, Aunt Amelia, happily deaf, was
deep in slumber; pulled up the sash so slowly that it seemed an age;
went back on tiptoe, extinguished the light and--a stroke of
genius--went noisily upstairs, bearing the parrot, to give full warning
to anyone who might be still awake that he had gone to bed, after all.
He tumbled his bed about. He returned.

He came down gingerly in shoeless feet, and stepped out into the night.

The stillness was awful, but all propitious to his plan. The thin snow
lay even and spotless on the grass on either side of the avenue. The
nearer trees were clear in the half light. The gravel walk, though well
swept and clear of snow, leaving no trace of his passage, was bitterly
cold to his thinly clad feet--for his socks were of silk, I am glad to
say.

There was a wintry mist and beyond it the white suffused radiance of the
moon.

He looked up cautiously. There was not a chink of light in any window.
All slept, and the Holy One presided in the heavens above, beyond the
fog in her blurred aureole of light. It was the hour for great deeds.
And a great deed was done.

Mr. Collop, with infinite precautions, lifted up his captive and planted
its two talons firmly upon the snow to the side of the swept alleyway
and pointing at a small, most aged and somewhat stunted oak about thirty
yards ahead of him on the edge of the swept path. He himself kept
crouching on the swept gravel and holding poor Attaboy to the side above
the snow. Then, still creeping noiselessly along, he planted the bird's
claws down again about six inches further. And so on, hop by hop.

It was merciful in Providence to have spared that tropical exile any too
sensitive nerves in its claws; but it protested. It thought the march an
indignity, and it was abominably cold. The parrot squirmed. The parrot
resisted. But the parrot was for it.

Six inches by six inches the double imprint of the claws appeared in a
lengthening chain upon the thin snow until they had come to within ten
feet of the oak. Then did Mr. Collop most cautiously rise from his stoop
and, taking the bird under his left arm and standing upon tiptoe,
stretch his right hand up to a small hollow in the stump of a branch
that had decayed long ago: he felt its concavity. It would do. He
carefully felt for the emerald in (now) his waistcoat pocket. It was
safe. He turned back swiftly towards the great dark house in the
moonlight.

The thing was accomplished.

As stealthily as he had come, but far more rapidly, thanking Heaven that
still no light showed through any cranny of the mansion, he loped back,
shut the window down again with infinite precautions and even then
dreaded a slight sound, put his dumb confederate back, released it of
its bandages, slipped on the cover of the cage, and crept up to bed.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

So true it is that once in every man's life comes an opportunity and
that in every man some talent, however unsuspected, lurks.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Sunday morning had dawned brilliant, had grown in splendour. The mist
had gone. A low but clear and even glorious sun flashed heaven athwart
the snowy levels and transfigured the winter sky.

The Home Secretary came down to breakfast late, and no wonder! Marjorie
came down to breakfast late, and no wonder! Tommy and Vic came down
late, and no wonder! The Professor and Aunt Amelia had met at the table
before anyone else was about. If she expected a flirtation, she was
disappointed. If he expected a quiet reading of the Sunday newspaper, he
was more bitterly disappointed still. The advent of the late comers was
a relief.

Last of all drifted in, heavy-eyed but big with mastery achieved, the
Collop.

At that breakfast very little was said. McTaggart was getting used to
the rich. He lit a pipe. But he stood mum.

Victoria Mosel and Tom Galton met in Marking Room.

"Vic," said Tommy Galton, "who do you think has got it?" He lounged back
in the absurdly low, fat chair, letting himself go all loose, as is the
habit of your hard-riding man--especially those who pull horses--and
looking down at her calves after the admirable breeding of our day.

"You haven't, anyhow, Tommy!" lisped Victoria Mosel, in spite of the
hanging cigarette. "I've got that much!"

"Thank God for that! Spread it!" said Galton.

"Thank me, too," said Vic.

"All right. Thank _you_, too. Damn you! Who's got it?"

Victoria Mosel turned round, spat the fragment of the cigarette into the
fire, and lit another one.

"I'm thinking," she said.

"The natural thing," said Galton, shutting his eyes, "would be that
putrid fellah McTaggart: the journalist fellah!"

"_He_ hasn't got it," said Vic decidedly. "And he's not so putrid,
either. Nothin' like as putrid as you are!"

"That's neither here nor there. He's putrid, all right. Shall I tell you
who's got it?"

"You don't know," said Vic. "Lie away."

"Old Footle's got it," said Tommy, with decision. "Cousin Bill. It may
be sewn into his sagging skin: but he's got it."

Victoria Mosel looked at him curiously through her half-closed
buttonhole eyes.

"Go on!" she said.

"I saw him take it," said Galton. "I saw him with my own eyes."

"And you told the chief, I suppose?" said Vic, with a sneer.

"Yes, I told him," answered Tommy determinedly.

"More fool you!" said Vic, sighing. "He hasn't. Old Bill hasn't got it,
Tommy.... I've been watching you all since Collop came under this
accursed roof. The Don's not oppressed. It's not with _him_. _He_ hasn't
got it."

"Well, then, who _has_, Vic? Damn it, who _has_?" savagely.

Then did Victoria Mosel open her eyes wide, as wide as cigar-shaped eyes
can open, and look at the questioner; next she folded her lids into a
most natural slit of repose, and turned her gaze to the ceiling, saying:

"Look here, Tommy, I've told you already that _you_ haven't got it, and
that ought to be enough for you. _You_ ought to be grateful. In fact,
you _were_ grateful just now. Only gratitude's short-lived."

"I believe you've got the stinking brooch, Vic," said her cousin (by
marriage) surlily.

"You said that before--and I said, search me! I wish to Christ I had,"
said Vic. "I'd hand it on through Baba to the van Burens next time
Archie went to Amsterdam. They'd know what to do with it! I should get
it back in four pieces. They'd keep the fifth--but I'd net a bellyful!"

The young man got up from his lounge and stood surlily with his hands in
his pockets.

"It's got to be found!" he said.

"It'll be found all right," assured Vic deliberately. "And who'll be
relieved then, my boy?" And she dug a lean elbow with maidenly modesty
under his fifth rib.

"Go to hell!" shouted the goaded Tommy. He intended to convey, after his
fashion, that the conversation was closed.

He sauntered out of the room and Victoria Mosel, who always liked a warm
chair in winter, sank back into the seat he had abandoned. She lit her
third cigarette, the fifteenth of that morning, and shut her eyes to
think over the matter fully. She had been up late the night before and
Sunday morning is a good time for repose. She fell into a lounging
little self-sufficient sleep, and snored in a gentle fashion, not
unmusical ... dear Victoria!

And that was the end of the judgment passed by one select--and
small--section of the governing classes upon a problem so closely
concerning them all.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

But the moment of revelation had come. Mr. Collop dared not stay, lest
sure steps should obliterate the unwilling traces of Attaboy across the
snow.

"None of 'em going to church, I hopes?" said he to his host after
breakfast.

"Surely! Surely some one," was all the Victorian could say.

"Well," brutally, "none of 'em can. They've all got to be here together.
We want every witness, sir; every one.... _I've found the emerald_!"

"What? Eh! What!" staggered Humphrey de Bohun.

"_I've found the emerald_!" repeated the policeman enormously. "...
Leastways, I've found where it is."

"What am I to do?" begged the statesman, all of a flutter. "What are
your plans? It's urgent! Innocent men must be cleared!"

"Orl in good time!" pronounced the majestic Collop. "Orl in good time!
First tell 'em there's no church this morning. Go and tell 'em that.
Soak into 'em all. I've got to 'ave my witnesses--and you'll be glad,
too, when it's over."

In his heart the Victorian relic, bleeding though he was from such a
manner, felt that he would.... Anything to get it over!

"I've got a word to say to you, Sir Humphrey"--it was no longer "My
lord"--"afore we summons 'em, and then you shall see what you shall see.
Meanwhile, you go and tell 'em to stand by. I'll bide 'ere."

And he bided, while the far wealthier and therefore greater man trotted
round on his errand.

"I'm sorry," he said to each couple, as he ferreted it out, "but I must
ask you not to go out. _The emerald's found_; at least ... you'll see.
Only wait where you are just a moment. I'll send for you all."

He repeated that phrase three times and fixed them to their stations;
then he ran back to the deliverer.

He found the deliverer at the door of the West Room.

"Come in here, Mr. Dee Boe Hun," he said. "Look round, Sir
Humphrey--what do you perceive?"

"Nothing," said the Home Secretary. Then he found the manhood to add,
"Hurry up!"

"Ar! 'Urry up, is it?" said the masterful policeman deliberately. "Now
there's a little point to be settled first." He compressed his lips, as
though for a reprimand to an inferior. "The first thing that's got to be
proved--and that's simple--is, was there a winder left open here the
night o' the great disaster?"

"You mean on Friday night? The day before yesterday? The night the jewel
was dropped?"

"Yep!" answered Mr. Collop. "I do."

"A window?" repeated the statesman, remembering the shutters, the
curtains, the fire, all the scene.

"A winder was left open," insisted bovinely Mr. Collop. "I'll lay to
that. And if you'll settle that p'int you'll see 'ow the rest'll follow.
I tell you I 'ave me clue; it's more than a clue; it's a find. Ye'll
see!"

The mechanism of a great house (delightful thought!) involves a
hierarchy. The Home Secretary rang, and asked for the butler. An
underling sought Mr. George Whaley, and Mr. George Whaley arrived. There
was that in his eye which might have alarmed or warned the Head of the
de Bohuns; but the Head of the de Bohuns was passing weary in the head
just now, and he noted nothing.

"Oh!" he said, "I wanted you, Whaley ... to ask you--er--whether ...
yes, to ask you who it is who does the room here in the early morning?
Who, for instance, would be in the room here, say, well, before anybody
else?"

George Whaley coughed discreetly.

"By rights, sir," he said, "it ought to be Annie. But it is possible, of
course, that the Boy----"

"Ah! yes," said the Home Secretary. "The Boy. Of course!" He had vaguely
heard that the Boy was the servant of the servants of the gods. "Well
then, you think it would be the Boy? Send me the Boy!"

"Very good, sir," said George Whaley. But as there had been that in his
eyes, so there was now that in his more manly gesture, as he turned
round to pass majestically through the door, which might have warned
once more, his master that he, George Whaley, had acquired new powers.
There was a sense of approaching equality with the Great in George
Whaley's waddle as he went through the door. From the mere dependent he
was attaining the higher and political rank of blackmailer. But all
these indications fell without effect upon the jaded de Bohun.

The Boy appeared. He stood at attention, after a fashion he had seen at
the pictures. He stared with gooseberry eyes at his employer. The head
of the de Bohuns was kind to him.

"Look here, boy," he said. "Look here. I've got to ask you something.
Did you open a window in this room, or leave it open, or find it open,
yesterday, Saturday morning--eh? Were you here before anybody else--eh?
You understand what I mean. Did you open a window, or any window, or
find one open--eh?"

The boy Ethelbert, standing as stiff as a poker and on the verge of
tears, gave tongue.

"I ain't done nuthin'!" he said. "Don't yer say I took that em'ral'! I
never did! I never set eyes on it. Don't you say that. It ain't true. I
knows no more about it than the child unborn, what's in the Good Book."

The Head of the House was annoyed.

"Who's saying you did, you little fool? All I want to know is, whether
the window was open?"

"I never touched it!" complained the youth more loudly still, and
stiffer than ever, but with tears already gathering in his eyes. "I
never did! So 'elp me Gawd! I couldn't tell it from a chunk o' cheese. I
don't know what it looks like. I wish I may die. I wish I may drop down
dead 'ere an' now!"

Collop, the policeman, took charge.

"Look 'ere, me lad," he said in the fine bullying voice of his noble
trade, "none o' that! Did yer leave the window open, or 'ave yer seen it
open?"

"Oo're you?" perked Ethelbert, stunned to boldness by terror, though
still at attention. "Mr. de Bones 'e's my master; not you!" Then turning
to that master, he continued, "I tell you, sir, straight honest from the
shoulder, I'm a British lad, I am, so help me Gawd as made me own sweet
self and little apples, I swear I never seen the thing."

"Look here, child," said Mr. de Bohun in a final sort of fashion, "was
there a window open or was there not?"

"No, sir, there was nawt."

"Why the hell couldn't you say that before?" muttered the politician.
"You're sure there was not?" he added. "Was there a catch undone?"

"Never mind about the catch," broke in Collop. "Time'll show that
doesn't matter."

"There wasn't a window open, sir, at all, till I opened one, sir," said
the Boy, "to let in Gawd's fresh air--which is orders."

"Oh, you _did_ open one then?" said his master.

"Yes, sir!" said Ethelbert, still at attention.

"Ah! _Now_ we're getting on!" said Collop. "That's what I always said. A
winder was opened! Eh? A winder was opened! Now you mark me," he went
on, turning to his host and tapping the palm of his round left hand with
the stubby forefinger of his right. "That's another clue. A winder was
open."

"Don't you dare say I touched it!" from the distraught Ethelbert.

"You shut yer mouth, boy," answered Collop without courtesy. "Tell him
to shut his mouth, sir--tell him plain. He's distracting me."

"But there's some on us," went on Ethelbert desperately, refusing to
shut that mouth, "as might speak if we knew...."

"Ah, now," said de Bohun eagerly. "Do you hear that, Mr. Collop? Do you
hear that? The Boy may reveal ..."

Collop stepped in between. "Pay no attention, Mr. Dee Boe Hun. I got my
clue, and we mustn't 'ave no cross scents. You take me?"

"Well," said his host, legitimately nettled, "I don't see any harm in
getting whatever evidence we can."

"Ah, and you're right there," said young Ethelbert, still at attention.
"And what's that sime hevidence, eh? That's what I say, sir.
Hevidence--as clear as daylight, from them as knows. There's some as
could speak if they would, and some as knows what others doesn't know.
It isn't always them as needs things most as pinches 'em. And maybe,
times, it's them as needs 'em least as pinches 'em!" He lowered his
voice and mysteriously added, "The 'ighest!"

"Look here, Boy," said de Bohun, fatigued with such recitals: "if you've
got anything to say, say it. Mr. Collop and I are pressed."

"What I've got to say," answered Ethelbert, with a solemnity beyond his
years, "is plain enough, I tike it. 'Oo's to blame? Mum's the word. But
there's some in this house that's 'igher than others. And 'oo's the
'ighest? A lord, I tike it?"

"Do you mean Lord Galton, child?" said the peer's cousin, sharply. "Are
you saying Lord Galton took the Emerald?"

"I've named no names," said Ethelbert, trembling between fear and
importance. "But this I do say, and it is ..."

"Have you any evidence against Lord Galton?"

"Now, Mr. Dee Boe Hun," urged Mr. Collop with decisive hands. "Now,
please don't let's 'ave a cross scent."

The Home Secretary waved him aside. The family was concerned.

"What have you got against--or about--Lord Galton? Say what you have to
say, and let's have it over."

"What I've got to say," said the Boy, "is what is but my plain duty to
say. I names no names. I asks no questions and I don't get told no
lies!"

"Upon my word!" cried his master angrily, almost moved to action. The
boy Ethelbert at the end of so long a tension gave a loud cry of terror
and suddenly whipped round and fled through the open door.

They were disconcerted.

"Well, Mr. Collop," said Mr. de Bohun on the child's vanishing, "that's
another complication. It's Lord Galton now!" and he sank into a chair.
Things were becoming too much for him.

"Don't you believe 'im," said Mr. Collop firmly. "What I say is, no
cross scents. What do 'ounds do when they find a cross scent?"

Mr. de Bohun would have been only too happy to tell him, but he had
never hunted.

"Why, they miss the right one. That's wot they do. And do they catch the
fox? No. A thousand times, no! Now," said he, again tapping that palm of
his with that forefinger of his. "You mark! Forget all about Lord
Galton. It's servant's romancing. I told you I already 'ad one clue. And
'ere I've gone and got _another_ clue! An' they both fit in.... And
now," he added peculiarly, gazing out of the window as though he would
admire the wintry morning with its clear scintillating skies, "I'd have
you note another clue. Look there," he said--and with the gesture of
Hannibal pointing out the plains of Italy, Mr. Collop extended his left
arm and directed his somewhat too thick forefinger towards the avenue
and the sheets of snow on either side of the great gravel walk. "What
have we there?" he said.

De Bohun, weary after his sleepless night, had to get up again from his
chair and look where he was bidden. "I ... I don't see anything, Mr.
Collop," he said.

"No," said Mr. Collop indulgently. "You wouldn't. It wants a trained
eye. Now, you'll excuse me, sir, but if you 'ad been in the Yard as I
'ave, and as long as I 'ave, you'd see something. It's only a fine
indication, like, but your mind would leap to it. At least mine 'as. Do
you notice any marks on that snow?"

Mr. de Bohun honestly said he could not--nor could any man have seen any
from where he stood.

"I certainly see no footprints," he said.

"Footprints o' wot?" answered Mr. Collop. "Footprints o' 'uman beings?
Man and woman? Leastways boots? Nah!" and he shook his head. "You
want ... you want your eyes better skinned than that in our trade, if
you'll excuse me saying it. Shall I _tell_ you what's there? I can see
it."

His host was justly irritated. "Well, I can't," he exploded. "What _is_
there?"

Mr. Collop leant over, made a shell of his hand and whispered in a voice
to wake the dead:

"Footprints of a fowl! Leastways," he added hurriedly, "not a domestic
fowl, I mean. But a bird. A bird's been there!" he added, nodding
solemnly.

"Well, what of it?" said the last of the de Bohuns, still more
irritated.

"Ah! You'll see!" said Mr. Collop, in a tone of great equality.

He stepped back, pulled his waistcoat down over his paunch, passed his
hand cavalierly over his abominable moustache, and gave an order--as
though he were master--for he now felt himself securely in the saddle.

"Summon 'em here," he said, with a large wave of his right hand, "summon
'em all. It's accomplished!"

"Summon who?"

"Me feller guests," said Mr. Collop. "They shall witness the
_daynoumong_ and their souls shall be eased."

"Mr. Collop," said the harassed Home Secretary, "what need is there for
this?"

"Witnesses! Mr. Dee Boe Hun!" royally. "Record! You'll be astonished."

"Very well, Mr. Collop, if you require them."

He made a gesture as though again to ring; then thought better of it and
went out himself, looking at his watch as he moved to the door. He had
seen no one go out. It was not yet half past ten o'clock: no one would
yet have started for church. He remembered with pleasure that for once
in her life Victoria Mosel had come to breakfast. He ferreted them all
out, McTaggart cowering as usual--and very sad--in the old smoking-room;
Galton and Vic, whom he surprised in the very act of repeating the word
"putrid," he found in the library, already stale with smoke; Aunt Amelia
he dragged out, almost by force, from the corner of the little
morning-room where she was sitting, half somnolent, like the good mutton
she was, her knitting laid aside on the Holy Day and wondering by the
clock whether it was time for her to put on her bonnet (help!) for
church. The Professor he had the good luck to catch at the very last
moment as he was making for the glass doors of the hall, all ready
muffled up for a walk. As for Marjorie, he had to go and find her in her
room where she was desperately locked in, miserable.

"Mr. Collop has got something to tell us, my dear. Won't you come down?"

"Blast him!" came in tearful, broken tones from within.

"No, my dear, but please do come down. He really wants us all."

"I don't believe it's any use--no use at all, the rotter!" broke out
that tearful voice.

"Marjorie, dear, please come."

"Very well"--with a grunt from within--"but it's no use!"

So the shepherd got his flock together. He was in a strange mood that
the occasion was ceremonial, and he felt a fool. He almost counted heads
as he roped in his little herd. They were all there. They filtered into
the West Room, expecting little, and annoyed in their various ways;
Marjorie hideous with recent tears, Aunt Amelia almost baa-a-ing, the
Professor inept, McTaggart desperately out of place, the puller of
horses more sullen than ever, and ah! the triumphant Victoria Mosel,
cool as the woodland goddess of old songs--but smoking.


[Illustration: _Birds of the Empire.
II.--The Parrot Attaboy, out of action._]


They stood huddled in the West Room under that Sunday morning light,
looking on the ravaged furniture, the staring pink circle where the now
demolished glass had saved the paper from fading, the Parrot's cage--but
gazing above all on the immortal Collop and awaiting his great news.

In that solemn and expectant silence--the chimes for church were
ringing--the parrot sneezed three times, with a grievance, and very
hoarsely muttered "Attaboy!" and shivered. It had a cold in the head.

Nor did Lord Galton wince--though that parrot had suddenly revealed to
him a world of things about his cousin's conversations when his back was
turned.




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


Mr. Collop was standing dramatically in the midst of that large
apartment, a squat tower of triumphant modesty and unassailable success.

"I asked His Honour, Mr. Dee Boe Hun, to bring you all in," he said, as
though they were a school, "so's ye might see how things like this are
_done_. It's the end of what's been troubling you all; what's been
biting you! Oh! I know your distress," he added kindly, fixing Galton
with his eye first, then the Professor. "But first and to start with, I
'ave a confession to make, I 'ave. Ye thought me His Majesty's
representative in Bogotar, just returned." He smiled genially. "Ar! ye
thought that, and nat'rally enough. Well, now, I'm free to tell ye the
truth. An' in _my_ trade," he went on, crossing his arms boldly, "that's
not too often, Gawd helping us! Now 'oo am I? I'm from the Yard. In
plain English, I'm what they call a detective. Now don't start!" he
added, releasing his left hand and holding it up. Nor had any of them
started, least of all Aunt Amelia, who had not clearly heard the last
words. "There's no 'arm done, there's none o' you to blame. There's none
o' you suspect. You'll none o' you have the darbies on," he added, with
kindly jocularity. "Oo's done it?"

"I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure ..." began the Professor with ready
tongue.

"You'll excuse _me_, Professor," said Mr. Collop with dignity, "but I
must continue. Ah! 'oo's done it, I arsk? The question we 'ave all on us
been asking. And now"--with mysterious dignity--"ye shall see. If any
of ye is for wrapping up before ye go out of doors say so. It's only a
little turn."

No one was for wrapping up before going out of doors. They were getting
intrigued.

"Foller me," said Mr. Collop after the fashion of the great leaders of
mankind. He threw open the window towards the avenue and heavily
straddled himself out. The Professor's long legs followed; young Lord
Galton, a good deal bored, with his hands in his pockets, took it at a
stride; Marjorie's short skirts negotiated it; McTaggart tried to jump
it, hit his head on the sash, rubbed it, and then more sensibly walked
across. As for Vic, she put a bony hand upon the sill and vaulted
lightly over. Poor Aunt Amelia stood looking after them in vain, like
the women of Ithaca when first the king sailed away to the gathering of
the chiefs and of whom it is written:


   "This is the hall where all the women spinning
    Sang of the Kings who sailed away to Troy."


She could not vault; she could not even stride. Lastly, the Home
Secretary himself hooked a lean shank over and stood with the shivering
group. Outside they all came on to the swept gravel of the avenue, with
its row of bare trees and its border of broad snow on either side. Mr.
Collop with a gesture still more majestic than any he had yet assumed,
pointed with iron hand and arm at the light snow which covered the grass
upon the right. There, sure enough, was the mark of a bird's claw. And
side by side with it, the other triple mark of the bird's other claw.

"A bird 'ops," pontificated Mr. Collop, significantly. "'E don't
run--'cept ostriches and such like. 'E 'ops. Foller me!"

His left hand slightly clenched, with his right he pointed down
continuously to the border of the snow, whence, at short intervals,
those two triple marks appeared and reappeared.

"Mark you," said Mr. Collop, facing the group--the now half-frozen
group. "I said, a bird 'ops. What 'opped 'ere? A bird!"

They approached the fatal tree.

"And 'ere," said Mr. Collop in the tone of a guide conducting a party of
tourists, "our marks are lost. And for why? 'E takes the air! Whither
will 'e take the air? Put ye'self in his place. Whither would a bird
take the air from hence, seeing what fatal burden 'e bore in 'is beak?"
He half waved, half pointed, with his left hand at the hollow-branched
stump just higher than their heads and some ten feet away. "Foller me,"
he said again.

They followed him--but not to the point of going on the snow, which Mr.
Collop did with great courage and resolution. He stood on tiptoe by the
trunk and stretched his clenched left hand upward, groped with it hidden
to the wrist in the hollow of the rotten branch, lifted it out again
high between them and the frosty January sky. There held between the
thumb and forefinger, unmistakable, recovered, was the Emerald.

"What did I tell yer?" he waved triumphantly in that keen air, "Brains,
gentlemen ... ladies _and_ gentlemen, I mean.... Brains! Induction." And
he calmly slipped the gem into his pocket.

Had they been in a warm room they would have applauded: it was so
exactly like the best tricks. But they were cold. They huddled back. It
was only twenty or thirty yards; they would be in the warmth again in a
moment.

I know very well that there ought to have been a shock of surprise. A
cheer. Excitement. What you will. But, Lord! it was so cold!

One by one they clambered, straddled, strode, vaulted, crawled and
shambled over the low window ledge and back into the room. Mr. Collop
came last, and slammed the window down behind him: and Aunt Amelia
welcomed them as might the old nurse of Ulysses when he returned at last
from so much wandering. As the warm air revived them they began to feel
him, very rightly, a hero.

"Now," said he, "shall I show ye all 'ow these things are done? Step by
step, unbeknownst to others? Ah! It's worth knowing! Look 'ere," and he
began, their interest rising as their blood began to move again: "You
mayn't see it, but I see it, here on this parky floor." He stooped down
and tapped it with his finger. "Little marks. Little marks."

There were no little marks--but no matter. He had done his best to
suggest them. The Professor greatly helped them by his folly.

"Yes! I see! Oh! Yes! Most interesting! I see them now!"

"And where does they lead? Why, to the winder. Then what did I say to
myself? I ses, 'A bird! A daw!' And mark you, gentlemen--ladies and
gentlemen, I mean--I didn't come to that blindly, either. For you'll
pardon me, but I know what you'd all said."

The guests looked--or at least, most of them did--at their host. But he
was modestly regarding the carpet.

"I know as 'ow you 'ad, all or most of you, felt suspected like and
might well enough think you could each o' ye be certain which o' ye it
was. And ye were wrong," he continued, wagging his head solemnly. "Orl
wrong! It was but an innocent bird. Or a thievish bird. Any'ow--a bird.
That's what it was--a bird. When I 'eard of your confusion from our good
host here"--and again Mr. de Bohun looked anyhow--"I says to meself,
'They're innocent, they are!' That was my first clue. Orl innocent," he
emphasized cheerily, nodding in a nice heartening way to McTaggart, the
Professor and young Galton, the last of whom said, almost audibly, to
Vic, "The stinker!" and to whom Vic whispered back, "Well, he found it,
anyhow!"

"Orl innocent," went on Mr. Collop. "Orl as white as the driven snow.
And 'oo set things right and proved you so? Why, yours truly.... First,
arter I'd thought 'ard orl night, I looks by the first white o' morning
at the parky--and sure enough I sees them faint prints on the wax, like:
an' them near the winder. What are the birds as thieves? Why, daws! Now,
ladies and gentlemen, daws 'as claws; talons, ye may call 'em, of a
'ighly partic'lar kind. It's our business in my trade to know orl we
can--and I can tell a daw's claws from any other claws, or paws ... any
other in the wide world.

"So wot does I do? In this same early morning, afore any one of ye were
up--at any rate, afore any of yer had showed themselves, I was out
trailing. Sure enough, there I found where the bird had gone, for I
marked his prints on the snow. When I found where the bird 'ad 'opped
to, I follered to where he'd sat on the air. When I found where he'd
taken the air, what does I do? Did I say to myself, ''E 'as flown far,
far away; give up the search, William Collop? You are proven right, but
the hem'rald will not be seen again by mortal eye.' Did I despair thus?
No, not I! I thinks to myself, knowing the habits of birds better than
most--we 'ave to know such things in our trade--he 'as put it near by,
so's to be able to come and gloat on it. They love to go and gloat on
what they 'ave taken, do daws. Then I noted that rotten stump o' branch
just convenient to the bird where he took the air, and I says
'Yureeker,' which is, being interpreted, 'Found.' But I didn't touch
that bole; no, I trusted to my induction. I was as sure it was there as
though I'd seen it, and I wanted to lead up to it step by step so's ye
might be witness to the discovery. Weren't I right?

"That's why I asked you all to be brought 'ere. That's why I took you
all out and made the thing clear to you before your own eyes; William
Collop said he'd find the hem'rald where his induction told him it would
be. And there he found it!"

His face was irradiated with no common glory.

"An' now," he said, at the end of this harangue, and plunging his hand
into his coat pocket to fish out the gem, "now I restore it--'Ullo!" he
frowned; the groping of his hand in his pocket looked like some small
animal fighting in a bag. "'Ullo!" he repeated and still he groped.
"'Ullo--'ullo! Wot's this!" His face grew black. He eyed successively
with some disfavour the Professor, McTaggart and Galton. "You were all
close together," he said suspiciously, "as we came through that winder!"
Then suddenly, "Ah! 'ere it is! Smother me if it 'adn't gone through a
hole in the lining. That's my missus, that is. She's that careless." And
turning the receptacle inside out he gingerly picked the jewel from the
tear between the sateen, with threads still attached to its setting.

"There now! Wot was I saying? I restore it to its rightful owner!" And
with a bow, unlike that of Lord Chesterfield's dancing master, he handed
it to Marjorie.

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Collop, thank you!" said Marjorie. "Thank you a
thousand times. I don't know how to thank you!"

"It's really very remarkable, Mr. Collop, very remarkable indeed. Very
remarkable," said the Home Secretary. He went so far as to wring his
subordinate by the hand. "We are infinitely obliged to you."

The guilty three were less enthusiastic; but they murmured as though
they would be polite--though Galton's murmur, overheard by Vic, was, "I
believe he pinched it himself!" And Vic answered in a second whisper,
"Fat-head!"--a chosen epithet delivered with such real contempt in the
slit of a dark eye as made the poor horse-puller wince.

Then Aunt Amelia bleated:

"I don't quite understand. _Who_ does Mr. Collop say stole the emerald?"

"Amelia! Amelia!" protested her brother severely.

"But I want to know," began poor Aunt Amelia pathetically. "I didn't
hear properly. I want to know who it is has been found to have stolen
the ..."

Her brother interrupted desperately.

"I'm so sorry," he cried, turning to the others, but directing his
remarks particularly and courteously to McTaggart, as the stranger. "You
must excuse my sister. She does not always hear."

"I must thank you myself, personally and warmly, Mr. Collop," said
Marjorie, the ancient courtesy of the Bohuns strong in her veins. "We'd
all got lousy with worry, and you've hit the cocoanut."

"Thank you, Miss, I'm sure," said Mr. Collop, bowing again in the manner
aforesaid.

And they all drew apart to various rooms, but Victoria Mosel, lingering
for a moment, whispered in Mr. Collop's ear, "I saw it in your hand
_before_ the tree!" The detective started. "For Gawd's sake!" he pleaded
under his breath.

"All right, I don't give people away." She nodded reassuringly and
slipped away.... Hence for so many years the devoted service of Mr.
Collop whenever Victoria cared to summon him.

The Home Secretary had detained McTaggart, catching his arm as he turned
to go, and had said, "Wait a moment, Mr. McTaggart, wait a moment. Mr.
Collop, I think it is only just to say in your presence that I had
repeated to this young gentleman--not my suspicions--they were not my
suspicions--but what I had been told were the suspicions of others."

Mr. Collop bowed again in the aforesaid manner.

"Mr. McTaggart," the Home Secretary continued, "I'm going to ask Mr.
Collop to let us have a few words together alone. Mr. Collop, where may
I see you in five minutes?"

"Where you will," said Mr. Collop with chivalry. "I'll be looking at the
old paintings in the 'all. The ancestors, I've seen them in the ball
room already," he added, nor was there any irony in his innocent soul.

When he had shut the door behind him, the poor old Home Secretary put an
almost fatherly hand on McTaggart's shoulder.

"My dear young sir," he said, "what can I do? How can I apologise? It is
not enough to ask you to forgive me. May I ask to communicate with you
when we reach town?"

The mind of McTaggart was not alert, but even he foresaw the
possibilities. Politicians have not very great power nowadays save in
patronage; that they still do retain; of public money there are some odd
millions every year at the disposal of the politicians. It is only fair
to say that most of them are content with moderate pickings for
themselves and their connections.

Therefore did McTaggart answer with a natural prescience of coming
advantage. "It is very good of you, sir. May I call at the Home Office?"

"Yes, yes. Shall we say Thursday at noon?" De Bohun marked it in a
little pocket book and then joined Collop in the hall, as McTaggart
walked off.

"Mr. Collop," he said, "won't you come back and talk to me a moment in
private?"

They returned together. And exactly the same scene was rehearsed, except
that he dared not put a hand on the shoulder of such a being as Collop.

"Mr. Collop," he said, "you know that the Department of which I am the
head is proud of you."

"Thank you, sir," said Mr. Collop sedately. "Thank you very much." He
then added: "I have only done my duty...." But I am glad to say that he
did not add "as a man is bound to do," for if he had done that de Bohun,
whose nerves were already on edge, might have had a fit. However, he
meant something of that kind. So let it be credited to him.

"Mr. Collop," went on the Home Secretary, "when I go to the office
to-morrow, Monday, I hope you will allow me to make a particular point
of seeing you. Men of your kind must not be wasted."

"Thank you, sir," said Collop again, in a tone which showed a full sense
of his worth. "I shall always be at your orders."

And so, you will say, the great thing ended.

Wrong again.

De Bohun had sunk back into his chair, now at last at rest. There were
still inexplicable things drifting through his mind. He had vague
memories of Galton accusing his cousin the Professor, and the Professor
accusing McTaggart, and McTaggart spotting Collop; of himself accusing
McTaggart; of the boy Ethelbert accusing Galton. He even had confused
recollections of their actually swearing to things they had seen which
they could not have seen. But he sighed with deep content at the
solution of it all, and he thought of his daughter's relief. He decided
to worry himself with contradictions no more. The emerald had been
found; a bird had taken it, and no one was to blame. That man Collop had
genius.... Marjorie would be in a better temper now. He shut his tired
eyes. He was on the point of falling into a short sleep after so much
strain when there was a knock at the door, and he saw as he opened his
eyes again, not too pleased at being wakened, the august, the discreet,
the considerable figure of George Whaley.




CHAPTER SIXTEEN


"I beg your pardon, sir! May I have the honour of a moment's confidential
word with you?"

The refined, the courteous phrase, was followed by a discreet cough. The
cough was a trifle mechanical, the words a little too rapidly spoken, as
is (alas!) the common fate of words learned by heart for a set piece,
whether by front benchers or perjuring policemen. What followed was
marred by the same slight defect, but it was at least clear. It rattled
out--to quote a noble simile from the _Wallet of Kai Lung_--"like a
stream of pearls dropped into a bowl of jade."

"There has come to my knowledge sir which would grieve my 'eart to
distraction and breaking were it not overcome by the more powerful
emotion of gratitude for so many happy years passed under this 'ere roof
at Paulings I mean this roof at Paulings and formerly when we had a town
house if I may make so bold in one hundred and twelve Curzon Street
Mayfair moved by this my 'eart would not let me keep silent. Oh! sir. I
know the dread secret and if I come to speak of it it is from loyal
affection and no other cause and here and now I put at your service as
in duty bound all that has come" ... here Mr. Whaley suddenly clasped a
fat right hand against his chest: He ought to have done it at the word
"heart," but the brakes had slipped and he had run past the station ...
"all that has come to the knowledge of these poor humble ears of mine
which would rather have been closed in death than have suffered the
agony of them fatal news but told it shall not be to other human soul
nor yet only to you for the respect I bear to that 'igh name of Deeboon
which saving your honour sir ..."

Humphrey de Bohun put his lean hands on his lean knees, sat up, and
stared at this high-geared human gramophone on speed.

"What on earth ..." he began. "Look here, Whaley, have you been
drinking? ... Now, mark me, Whaley!" Humphrey de Bohun could speak with
astonishing decision when he felt quite secure that the person spoken to
was unable to answer back. "I've always made one absolute rule in this
house. Any servant of mine who is found the worse for liquor--I don't
care _where_," and he swept his feeble head down to the southwest, "I
don't care _how_"--he swept it again--"I don't ... damn it, I don't even
care on _what_! leaves me there and then!" He leaned back again,
somewhat exhausted.

"You wound me, sir," said George Whaley with dignity. "Ah, sir! you
wound me! Indeed you do!"

"Wound your what?" said the Home Secretary, without sufficient
consideration.

"My honour, sir," said George Whaley. "And a loyal heart."

This time he remembered the connection of the word "heart" with the
appropriate gesture, and he planked his hand on his merrythought with
the noise of a distant 9.2.

The Home Secretary remembered the lessons of his youth, the high
traditions of the de Bohuns.

"I owe you an apology, Whaley," he said, in the appropriate
faded-earnest manner. "But the truth is, I can't pretend to follow what
you were saying. I don't suggest that you spoke too quickly.... I was in
a reverie when you came in. The fault is mine. Proceed."

And in his turn George Whaley proceeded--but the chain was broken; he
was thrown back upon impromptu too; and a native terseness, not to say
inhibition of speech, returned to him.

"Well, sir," and he coughed, "I'm afraid it's rather a delicate matter,"
and he looked at the nails of his fingers. "Perhaps I ought to plunge
_in medias res_." He sighed. "I've 'eard it's usually the wiser plan in
cases like these."

He stood for some fifteen seconds, his bold head with its fringe of grey
hair slightly on one side, and gazing at the exalted culprit with
infinite compassion. Then did George Whaley begin to shake that head,
and there escaped him words unusual to his daily life, but native to his
reading of fiction and to his experience on the stage.

"Ah me! Ah me!" he said.

"Look here, Whaley," said his master smartly. "What's the matter? Are
you ill? Are you mad? Have you"--in a softer voice--"have you perhaps
suffered some sudden bereavement?"

"Only the bereavement of a loyal heart deceived, bewildered," moaned
George Whaley, quoting textually from _The Waifs of the Whirlwind_. He
linked his hands before his ample waistcoat and hung his saddened head.


[Illustration: _The Home Secretary's Butler taking the
liberty to observe: "Thou art
the man."_]


"Upon my word!" cried Humphrey de Bohun, moved to unexpected energy by
an intolerable boredom, "this kind of thing's got to stop. Speak out,
man, and don't make a fool of yourself!" He pulled out his watch. "I've
not got all the time there is! Hurry up, now! Surely you can speak
plainly!"

"I can," said George Whaley, in tones of gloom, and moved by a mighty
resolution. He was standing upright now; he fixed his employer with a
steady glance, and each hand was half clenched at his side. "The
emerald, sir!"

And he waited for his effect.

"Oh, damn the emerald!" shouted Humphrey de Bohun. "If you think this is
the time, after all these two days ..."

"It is the time," said George Whaley firmly, with a reminiscence of the
worthy mother who had brought him up in the Countess of Huntingdon's
connection and under all the discipline of the Jacobean Scriptures.
"Yea, now is the acceptable time."

"By God!" shouted the now inflamed minister, "this has got to stop! I'll
have you certified! I'll ... I'll ..."

But he got the thing full in the face. In a key nearly an octave lower
than that he had been using for the purposes of the great interview,
George Whaley stretched out a rigid solemn arm towards his master and
spoke the words of doom.

"I know all... Thou art the man! It is you, sir, that have on you the
lost emerald!"

Let me not do Humphrey de Bohun injustice. He had never yet in his life
taken an initiative. He had never tackled any one of the human species.
But there is a god latent in us all, and his name is Pan.

"The emerald!" he shrieked. "Blackmail, eh, you damned lousy son of
a ----!" He sprang at the astonished servitor, seized him round the
neck--a dangerous gambit between elderly men, for it leads to strokes on
both sides--shook him madly from side to side, then dug his right hand
into his collar behind, swerved him round, and gave him one of those
enormous kicks which form epochs in the history of Britain. Savagely did
the unrestrained elder statesman, all the repressed manhood of half a
century bursting forth, plant his foot upon what should properly be
called the person of his unfortunate dependant and with a second gesture
sent him sprawling through the open door into the hall.

"The emerald!" he kept on shouting, as George Whaley, groaning, pulled
himself up miserably, like a wounded sea lion. "When the hell am I to
hear the last of the emerald ... you and your emerald! ... all of you
and your emeralds! ... I wish to God! ..." A blasphemy was almost on his
lips; he had almost said that he wished the emerald had been strangled
at birth, and by such a phrase would he have forfeited the luck of the
Boneses.

"Get out!" he continued, in a somewhat milder because exhausted tone, as
the ill-treated Good Samaritan hobbled towards the door which led to the
offices, rubbing the affected portions of his frame. "Out! Out! Out!
Never let me see your face again!"

And they parted to meet no more. The conclusion of their mutual
relations was concluded by correspondence.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

It is not with impunity that men between fifty and sixty, especially if
they have lived under constant self-repression--which doesn't apply to
colonels--let their angry passions rise. The Home Secretary was badly
blown. He felt groggy. His exertion was already beginning to make him a
little stiff. He halted towards the dining-room and groped for a pint of
champagne which he knew to stand by. He pulled the cork with his last
strength. He took a mighty draught. He felt better. He took another.
Then he saw the world sanely, and he saw it whole--such is the power of
the god. There was hardly a drain left. He glanced over his shoulder,
found himself alone, put the neck of the bottle to his lips and sucked
it down.

"Ah!" said the arbiter of Wormwood Scrubbs and Lord of Pentonville.
"That's better."

He felt almost genial--normal, anyhow, at last. Even a trifle
super-normal. With sprightlier step he regained that comfortable chair
wherein he had been relaxing his overstrained mind when George Whaley
had so imprudently intruded.

It was not once in a blue moon that Humphrey de Bohun thought tobacco a
boon, but the occasion called for it. For the matter of that, it was not
once in a blue moon that he drank more than half a glass of wine at a
sitting--let alone of a Sunday morning during church time--and bubbling
wine in plenty leads to smoking: hence the fortunes made by Greeks and
Egyptians in their sales of hay cigarettes to the young bloods. Humphrey
de Bohun groped in his daughter's open box for a cigarette, tapped it,
with a surprisingly modern gesture, on his thumbnail, and as he lit it
sank back into the chair he had left and wondered whether indeed he had
reached repose.

Was there anyone left, he thought drowsily, who could come with yet
another story of the blasted gem? He was already half asleep, but there
passed before his drooping eyes what seemed a regiment: Galton had been
sure of it--he had seen it, seen it on Bill; Bill had been sure of
it--he had tested it, tested it on McTaggart; McTaggart had been sure of
it--he had got it by second sight, and was absolutely certain of Collop;
and Collop--oh well! God bless Collop! For after all he had _produced_
it--snatched from the talons of a fowl. The elderly gentleman's head
drooped and nodded; the cigarette fell from his lax fingers; it set fire
to the Aubusson carpet, which smouldered in faint wreaths, but did no
harm, and soon went out. Thus did the adventure of the Emerald of
Catherine the Great end, as all things end, in smoke.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Far, far, in the less pretentious but roomy apartments of the East Wing,
George Whaley, suffering untold things, sought for and found the Boy,
the culprit, Ethelbert.

They met in the passage that leads from the servants' hall to the Yard;
but when I say met, I rather mean that their visages encountered the one
the other at the turn of a corner separated by a space of some five
yards.

The countenance of George Whaley at that moment was not one to inspire
confidence in the young. There was blood on his cheek-bone. His collar
was torn, and all adrift upon the starboard side; his tie was under his
ear; there was a gaping tear in his coat.

"Ow! You young dose of poison!" bawled the injured man, as he lunged
forward upon his prey, and with a loud cry Ethelbert fled. He fled
through the open door into the coal yard, George Whaley limping after.
There stood against the wall of the yard, leaning to its summit, a crazy
old ladder. The light boy Ethelbert nipped up it, and at its foot stood
the unhappy and ponderous victim of his misleading confidences, shaking
an impotent fist.


[Illustration: _Dialogue between the Boy Ethelbert and his
fallen superior._]


Security lent courage to the youth.

"You look hot," he said kindly.

"You come down!" hissed Whaley, clenching his teeth, "and I'll flay you
alive--slowly--inch by inch!"

"Sounds good," grinned Ethelbert; with thoughtful prevision he kicked
the ladder down. Its rotten wood smashed into a dozen pieces as it fell,
and the youth was delighted to note that a flying fragment had caught
his superior a fine smack on the side of the jaw.

For to him that hath, more shall be added.

Ethelbert feared not the future; his judgment told him, not insecurely,
that the butler's powers were at an end.

"Been havin' a scrap?" continued Ethelbert, by way of making
conversation. "'Ow's the other man?"

George Whaley's cup was full. "Come down," he groaned stupidly. "Come
down!"

"Me come down?" answered his former subaltern with an air. "Why, what
can you be thinking of? It's only just over church time yet. You can
hear the sweet bells ringing--'ark!" and he lifted an ecstatic
forefinger with heavenward-lifted eyes.

The butler put his hand upon the old red brick wall. His adventures were
beginning to tell upon him. He felt sick.

"It's all along o' you!" he said thickly, spat, to see whether his lungs
were injured, was pleased to find they were not; then, still suffering,
repeated, "It's all along o' you! What," he added in a higher key of
tragic indignation, "what the burning hell did yer mean by telling me
the boss had pinched the emerald?"

"_I_ tell you the boss had pinched the emerald?" sneered Ethelbert from
his high place. "Oh, chase me, Ananias!"

"Yes, yer did!" came again from the uplifted purple face. "Yer told me
with yer own lips that you knew yerself it was in the 'ands of the
'ighest."

"I never! You dare say I did!" cried the indignant whelp. "Liar! What I
may have _thought_ was that his lordship ..."

"His lordship?" groaned the suffering man, a light breaking in upon him.

"Yes, mubbe! Don't you dare go to say as I said so. Otherwise I'll have
the lor on yer! So mind your fat feet! I'll be treading on 'em. I never
said nuffing. I didn't. 'Sides which, it's all one now. The emerald's
been found."

"Found?" gasped Whaley with a stare.

"Yes, found," nodded Ethelbert, from his dominion of vantage loftily.

"Then ..." groaned his unfortunate elder, "I'm done!"

"That's true, anyways! Congrats!"

Whaley had already picked up half a brick, but his tormenter had seen
the gesture, and had dropped on the far side of the wall to the high
bank below, and was off to rejoin his quarters. He knew that the mighty
had fallen and would trouble him no more.

So ends the saga.




TALE-PIECE


It was the custom of our grandfathers and grandmothers--when they had
any of them been fool enough to write a novel--to wind it up with a
description of what the various characters in the beastly thing were
doing at the moment when the book appeared--that is, supposedly, in a
future some little while after the closing of the tale.

Those of you who still read the novels of my own youth--and I for one
read no others--will remember that they are invariably concerned with a
well-to-do young woman of exquisite beauty who marries a manly young
fellow of her own status, after various ups and downs. Then the book
goes on to tell you that they have twenty-six boys and girls with long
curly hair, all gold. And then the band plays.

It is not easy for me to give you an appendix of this kind, because I
have always thought it prudent to throw my own novels into the future,
lest I should be sent to gaol for insulting the rich. Moreover, even if
I did describe the final fate of my characters, I cannot make it a very
pleasant one without treason to the realities of human life and the
flattering of fools: and rather than flatter fools let me be torn to
pieces by wild horses after the fashion of the Merovingian queens.

However, I propose to give you some idea of how the various people you
have come across in these pages continued their not too significant
lives.

When Marjorie had divorced Galton--having got married to him by way of
preliminary--she was herself divorced by Pemberton--who had no further
use for Lady Meinz--and then married--only last year--an extraordinarily
fleshy man called (at the moment) Henry Munster. They are still
happy--at least, she is. The child of the first union--if I may so
describe it--is a girl; so that's the end of the Galton peerage.

Aunt Amelia is dead: and high time.

Her brother, the former Home Secretary, has in the interval developed
astonishing talents which have fitted him for the Colonial Office, the
India Office, and the Treasury, in rapid succession--and would doubtless
have fitted him for the Foreign Office but for the determined opposition
of the permanent officials. During the four years in which it had been
arranged to let the other batch of professional politicians have a suck
at the salaries, he acted as President (at £2,500) of the Commission
for the Second Reduction of Wages, wrote a book of reminiscences
(£3,000 Gubbins & Gubbins 42_s._). He was badly stoned during the
progress of the fifth General Strike--some call it the seventh, but I
follow the usual numeration. He had been taken by the mob for Henry
Gaston, a man nearly forty years younger and twenty times as able--which
only shows how important it is to educate the poor, and also, by the
way, how important it is not to print in the papers pictures of people
taken hundreds of years before the date of their appearance.


[Illustration: _Last portrait of Professor de Bohun, a sketch
reproduced in the "Figures Modernes"
of Berne (Switzerland)._]


William de Bohun is still Professor of Crystallography in the
University, where he has still further attained a European reputation.
He is now mentioned not only in Swiss papers, but occasionally in German
ones. He is not more than seventy-nine, and there is every chance of his
retaining the position for a few more years. He has not made it up with
the reader in Crystallogy, Mr. Bertran Leader.

I am sorry to say that these two distinguished men actually had a fight
in the main street of their academic town, their weapons being
umbrellas. Nor would the victory of the younger champion, Mr. B. Leader,
have been for a moment doubtful had it not been that the umbrella of the
elder, Professor de Bohun, was suddenly blown open by a gust of wind,
affording him a sure and certain shield against the frenzied blows of
his opponent.

McTaggart has gone under for good. It seems shameful, considering the
excellent position on the British Intelligence into which he had been
put on a weekly contract at fifteen pounds by the influence of the Home
Secretary, who thought some reparation due to him, and still more by the
influence of Victoria Mosel, who had squeezed Lord Bernstein's hand. On
the other hand it hurts nobody but himself. He is still unmarried.

George Whaley, with his accumulated savings, purchased immediately upon
his leaving the service of Humphrey de Bohun, the good will of the Bohun
Arms, which I need hardly tell you does not belong to the family, but to
a limited company. The pub stands at the gate of the park. Therein he
regales the countryside with comic stories of his former employers; the
rich middle-class motorists with scandal of the Great; the upper classes
who deign to halt there on their way north in their superb cars with
obsequience and silence, at a profit of about 30_s._ the bunch. He has
done very well indeed, because it is a convenient lunching place for
people motoring out from London to the north. His son is in this year's
Oxford eight, but his daughter, I very much regret to say, has
published, a book of verse--in Chelsea!

Ethelbert, a bright lad of nineteen, ordered by his master into the
special constabulary during the third General Strike--I use the
conventional numeration--was so unfortunate as to crack smartly upon the
head a high dignitary of the Church of England, and was thereupon put in
prison at the instance of Lady Sophia--the eminent cleric's wife--who
would take no denial. Upon release, the General Strike being still in
progress--it was the first of the really _long_ General Strikes, as you
will remember, he joined the regular police force, which is ever ready
to welcome men of varied experience and initiative. But he never
developed the intelligence required for the _agent provocateur_, in
which capacity such members of the service as have had personal
experience of the cells are commonly employed. He is now past thirty and
doing clerical work in the Lost Property Department.

What else remains? The horse, Attaboy, is dead, worn out in faithful
labours at the stud. He was the sire of Get-On out of Get-Out. Get-Out,
I need hardly tell you, was the sire of Success by Morning Star. Success
was the sire of Repetition by Raseuse; and that is how Tabouche won the
Oaks. I always did say the little filly would do well, for I have
followed the strain--as, long ago, the form--of Attaboy, who now sleeps
with his fathers--I means, sires, let alone dams.


[Illustration: _Controversy conducted with umbrellas between a
Professor (of Crystallography) and a Reader
(in Crystallogy) to the University._]


As for the parrot, whom I may call the second Attaboy, he is still the
cherished, the beloved, of that constant heart, Marjorie; Mrs. Munster,
_née_ de Bohun, sometime Lady Galton, as also Mrs. Pemberton--yes,
Pemberton. So far as I can remember, she is nothing else--so far. Such a
charming woman! Touching upon the lovely confines of middle age with
large bulges under rather weary eyes. But her father provides
handsomely.

As for that father, the head of the family, Humphrey de
Bohun--pronounced Deboon--he looks no older. It would be odd if he
could. He feels no older--that would be impossible. But he is inclined
to colds in the head. He now tells the same story over and over again,
the story of the Emerald. And it always ends, "Now guess who it was?"
They do not murder him, they give it up; and he dodders out, "Why! It
was a jackdaw!"

Victoria Mosel has, since the date of the great discovery of the
Emerald, spent week-ends at Basingthorpe, Prawley, Hammerton, Gainger,
Bifford, then again at Hammerton, then again at Gainger, after that at
Little Wackham. Then at Bifford again, then at Gainger, and, of course,
at Prawley. She also stayed at the Breitzes' place in Silesia for three
months, where she shot the bailiff's dog--by accident. May I tell you
that she has spent six weeks in every year on the Riviera? Can I deny
that, at this very moment of writing, she is stopping at Hammerton,
having passed the last week-end at Gainger and purposing to go on to
Bifford?

The years leave no mark upon her temporal frame, for the skin was ever
tight upon her bones. But she knows that she is getting on--and not in
the City sense of that term either. She already envisages the tomb. I am
fond of her. I think she will save her soul.

One great asset which endears her to the rich of her circle. Sir William
Collop is always ready and even eager to come at her bidding to any
country house, and there she puts him through his paces, to the enormous
joy of the assembled hosts and guests. But she is a good girl--I use the
word of a woman now nearing sixty--and she does him no harm. Only, she
_does_ make him dance. And why _not_?

After dinner, in the palaces of the rich, Sir William Collop is
compelled to tell quaint stories of the other rich over whom his
position in Scotland Yard gives him insight. Nor is he unwilling. They
all call him a good fellow, by which they mean that his accent is as
thick as cheese. He will be Collop till he dies. His original name is
drowned ten fathoms deep; he is just coming into his pension, and he is
an O. B. E. of the third crop.

And the emerald? Ah, my friends! My brothers! I will tell you what
happened to the emerald!

When Mrs. Pemberton, formerly Lady Galton, then Mrs. Munster[1] _née_
de Bohun, was making the straddle between the Pemberton and the Munster
connections--what we call joining the slats--she needed five hundred
pounds. It sounds ridiculous. But she did. One often does. She had
outrun the constable. She did not want to bother her father, and for the
very good reason that he had just got damnably knocked in the Hungarian
Phosphates on the erroneous advice of that silly man Mowlem. Well, she
had taken the emerald to the man who, Vic had told her, was the best
expert in London--Mr. Marlovitch, Junior--and (behold!) he had proved to
her by infallible tests that it was _paste_. What is more, he had given
her proof out of learned books that no emerald of such size ever had
existed, or could exist.

The Bohuns had patriotism in their blood. Marjorie gave the famous
trinket to the State--let me say to England!--under very easy conditions
which earned her, I am glad to say, the entry of her daughter into
Parliament. These conditions were modest: the emerald was to be
permanently exhibited, in a very large case all by itself, in the
British Museum, with a tablet engraved at the expense of England--I mean
the State--describing it as the largest Emerald in the world--which it
would have been if it had been an emerald--and assuring the honest
public that it had been given by Catherine the Great to that member of
the ancient family of de Bohuns who had served the interests of the
State--or rather, let me say, of England--at the Court of All the
Russias, in those days when the Semiramis of the North was the
admiration of Europe.

"What!" you'll exclaim (it's just like you!), "would that regal woman,
that generous if somewhat demanding lady, that broad German strong in
her nobility, that Monarch of the Snows, Empress of all the Russias,
have fallen to deceiving handsome Bill Bones with a piece of paste?"

Not a bit of it. You little understood the nature of those who serve
power. She had given her emerald--and an emerald it was--to a man in
whom she had the fullest confidence; she had given it him with the order
to bestow it at once upon the English captain. But her messenger had
preferred his own interest and had substituted that larger and false one
round which all this dance has been led.

And, as the Prime Minister said of his colleague on the front bench who
got into trouble over the insurance shares, who shall blame him?

Not I.


[Footnote 1: Oh! Yes! I know all about it. She would have gone on
calling herself Lady Galton from husband (save the mark!) to husband.
No, child! It's already getting doubtful. In the future time of which I
write it was unknown.]




THE END